Jayanta Bhattacharya, President Donald Trump's nominee to be director of the National Institutes of Health, speaks at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on Capitol Hill on March 5, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

This report was updated at 7:59 p.m. EDT.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate confirmed President Donald Trump’s nominees to lead the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.

Senators voted 53-47 along party lines Tuesday evening to confirm Jayanta Bhattacharya as director of the NIH before voting 56-44 to approve Martin Makary as FDA commissioner.

Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois as well as Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire were the only three members of their party to vote for Makary.

Shaheen said during an interview Wednesday that while she has reservations about how the Trump administration might try to change access to medication abortion, she felt Makary was qualified to lead the FDA.

“Well, I’m very concerned about what this administration might do about mifepristone,” Shaheen said. “But, I thought it was important to have someone in that role who has the scientific background and ability to run the agency.”

Hassan declined to answer questions about her vote when asked about it Wednesday afternoon by States Newsroom. Her office declined to send a written statement from the senator, offering only a response from a spokesperson. 

“The opioid epidemic has devasted communities across New Hampshire, and the FDA has made mistakes over the years that fueled this epidemic,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “Senator Hassan voted for Dr. Makary as Commissioner of the FDA following his clear commitment to ensuring that the agency learns from its past mistakes and acts aggressively to tackle this crisis.”

Senate confirmation came just weeks after the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, or HELP, Committee voted to advance Makary and Bhattacharya.

Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., voted in committee to send Makary’s nomination to the floor, but switched to opposing his confirmation on Tuesday.

Hickenlooper said during a brief interview with States Newsroom on Wednesday that he ultimately couldn’t support Makary over his comments about medication abortion. But he said nothing significant happened between his yes vote in committee and his no vote on the floor.

“I agonized over it. I could have easily gone back and voted yes,” Hickenlooper said. “You know, at some point when I see him, I’ll apologize and say, ‘You know, that was a hard vote for me. But I really wish you would have been more demonstrative about specifically mifepristone, because I think that’s a big issue that the FDA is going to take on.’”

Hickenlooper said he spoke with his staff and his wife over Makary’s comments about access to medication abortion before he cast his no vote on the Senate floor.

“I realized that he serves at the pleasure of the president, so what the president says he’s probably going to have to do,” Hickenlooper said. “But for me, I just became more and more uncomfortable that he wouldn’t make a few statements to say that, you know, this is not something that is a medical reinterpretation for political purposes. He should have said something.”

Abortion pill

Makary will have considerable authority at the FDA to determine if access to medication abortion remains as it is now, if the agency changes prescribing guidelines, or even pulls its approval.

During his confirmation hearing in early March, Makary testified he hadn’t yet decided how he would approach that aspect of the job.

“I have no preconceived plans on mifepristone policy except to take a solid, hard look at the data and to meet with the professional career scientists who have reviewed the data at the FDA,” Makary said at the time.

Medication abortion is a two-drug regimen consisting of mifepristone and misoprostol that accounts for about 63% of all pregnancy terminations within the United States, according to research from the Guttmacher Institute.

The FDA originally approved mifepristone in 2000 and changed its prescribing guidelines in 2016 and 2021. It is currently approved for use up to 10 weeks gestation and can be prescribed via telehealth and shipped to patients.

Sixteen major medical organizations — including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Medical Association and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine — affirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court last year that mifepristone is safe and effective.

“The scientific evidence is overwhelming: major adverse events occur in less than 0.32% of patients,” the medical organizations wrote in a 45-page brief. “The risk of death is almost non-existent.”

Goals for NIH

Bhattacharya testified during his confirmation hearing that he has five goals for the NIH, including focusing the agency’s research on chronic diseases and funding the “most innovative biomedical research agenda possible.”

“The NIH is the crown jewel of American biomedical sciences, with a long and illustrious history of supporting breakthroughs in biology and medicine,” Bhattacharya said at the time. “I have the utmost respect for the NIH scientists and staff over the decades who have contributed to this success.”

But, he said, “American biomedical sciences are at a crossroads” following the coronavirus pandemic.

Bhattacharya said during his hearing he would ensure NIH’s scientific research is replicable, that it has a culture that respects “free speech in science and scientific dissent” and that it regulates “risky research that has the possibility of causing a pandemic.”

“While the vast majority of biomedical research poses no risk of harm to research subjects or the public, the NIH must ensure that it never supports work that might cause harm.”

Max Glass-Hui uses an electronic communication device, picking words that the device then speaks to his mother, Tiffany Glass. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Max Glass-Hui is an energetic 14-year-old who romps through the modest home on Madison’s West Side where he lives with his mother.

Born with Down syndrome and diagnosed as autistic, Max can read words and understand what’s spoken to him, but he doesn’t talk. Instead, he communicates with an electronic device about the size of an iPad, pressing words that the machine then speaks on his behalf. “Good-bye,” he tells his mother through the machine one recent morning, as she sits with him in his bedroom.

Tiffany Glass smiles affably, acknowledges her son’s assertion of independence, and steps out of the room.

Their interaction isn’t so different from those any number of parents and children have every day. For this parent and this child, however, it might have seemed unimaginable a generation ago.

Not so long ago, a child like Max was likely to spend his life inside the walls of an institution. Changes in social attitudes, medical ethics, and state and federal policy have made it possible for him to grow up and thrive at home.

One of those policies, says Tiffany Glass, is Medicaid — and without it, she believes Max’s life would have been much worse.

“His medical problems would not have been treated as effectively,” she says. “His quality of life would have been absolutely terrible. He would have been much more excluded from our community than he is now.”

Medicaid is the state-federal health insurance plan launched in the 1960s to provide health care for people living in poverty. In Wisconsin, it’s  best known as BadgerCare Plus, which covers primary health care and hospital care for people living below the federal poverty guideline. But Medicaid touches hundreds of thousands of other Wisconsin residents as well.

More than half of Wisconsin’s nursing home residents are covered by Medicaid after spending down most of their other personal savings and assets. Other Medicaid programs provide long-term skilled care to people living in their own homes or in the community — people who are frail and elderly, but also people living with disabilities.

“I’m not sure people are aware of the lifeline Medicaid is to so many people,” says Kim Marheine, state ombudsman for the Wisconsin Board on Aging and Long Term Care. “Without Medicaid some of these people have no place to go for services.”

Congress is currently rewriting the federal budget in ways that patients, families, health care providers and advocates fear will upend the program dramatically, ending coverage for millions who have few or no alternatives.

Washington budget battle

The Republican majority in the U.S. House wants to find $4.5 trillion in federal funds to pay for renewing tax cuts enacted in 2017 during President Donald Trump’s first term. On Feb. 25, the House, voting along party lines, cleared the way for a budget resolution that carves $880 billion over 10 years from programs under the purview of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The text of the bill doesn’t doesn’t specify where those cuts come from — a point Republicans have emphasized to rebut claims that the vote was an attack on people’s health care. Nevertheless, Medicaid “is expected to bear much of the cuts,” according to KFF, a nonpartisan, nonprofit health news and research organization.

“What is in the jurisdiction of that committee? Well, the largest dollar amount is Medicaid,” said U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) at a press conference in Madison Feb. 19. Advocates dismiss Republican denials, treating Medicaid cuts as a foregone conclusion and holding GOP lawmakers responsible.

“The draconian cuts to Medicaid that every single Wisconsin Republican voted for are an absolute wrecking ball,” says Joe Zepecki of Protect Our Care, a national advocacy group for the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid. In that wrecking ball’s path, he says, are the state budget, tens of thousands of Wisconsin businesses that bill Medicaid, and more than a million state residents whose health care Medicaid covers.

Medicaid is funded jointly by federal and state governments. Federal law guarantees that the U.S. will pay at least half of the program’s cost, with the state paying for the rest. Wisconsin has a 60% federal contribution; the remaining 40% comes out of the state budget.

For fiscal year 2023, Wisconsin’s Medicaid expenditures totaled $12.5 billion, according to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission, a Congressional agency. The federal government paid just under $8.2 billion of that; Wisconsin paid the remainder, about $4.4 billion.

A Medicaid reduction on the scale that the budget resolution requires “will leave enormous shortfalls for the state heading into the next two years, all so Trump and his MAGA majorities can deliver another tax cut to huge corporations and CEOs like Elon Musk,” Zepecki says. “The federal money disappearing doesn’t mean the needs disappear, which is likely to force everyone else to pay even higher costs for their own health care.”

1 in 5 Wisconsin residents

According to the January 2025 enrollment numbers from the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS), about 1.3 million Wisconsin residents rely on Medicaid for day-to-day health care, long-term care or both — more than 1 out of 5 state residents.

They include more than 900,000 Wisconsinites who are enrolled in BadgerCare Plus. The health insurance plan for people up to age 65 covers doctor’s office visits, preventive care, surgery, hospital stays including childbirth, and other day-to-day health care needs for families living below the federal poverty guidelines. Children are covered in families with incomes up to 300% of the federal guideline; BadgerCare covers one-third of Wisconsin’s children.

Medicaid also covers alcoholism treatment, substance abuse treatment and other forms of care for mental health. “Medicaid is one of the largest payers of mental health care in the state,” says Tamara Jackson, policy analyst for the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities. It is the major funder of county mental health services, whether provided directly by a county agency or in partnership with a community agency, according to the Wiscons Counties Association.

Covering mental health is more than simply covering the cost of medications that may be prescribed. “Depression and anxiety medications are most effective in combination with the use of counseling services,” says Sheng Lee Yang, an Appleton clinical social worker. But if patients prescribed a medication aren’t able to get counseling as well, “their symptoms are only being treated at a 50% rate. That’s not real effective.”

Medicaid is part of health care all across Wisconsin. A study from Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families released in January found that residents of rural counties in the U.S. are more likely to rely on Medicaid for their health coverage than urban residents. In 27 northern and central Wisconsin rural counties, the share of children on Medicaid is higher than the state average, the study found.

Medicaid’s reach doesn’t stop there, however. Through nearly 20 different programs, Medicaid covers the health care of more than 260,000 additional Wisconsin residents.

For about 10,800 frail, elderly people who could not otherwise afford nursing home care, Medicaid pays the cost — about 60% of the state’s nursing home population.

Medicaid has also expanded beyond primary health care or nursing home care. Programs launched over the last several decades now allow eligible people who need long-term care to get the same services through Medicaid at home or in the community that they would receive in a nursing home.

To join those programs states apply to the federal government with proposals that would waive standard Medicaid rules. The idea is that if someone who needs long-term care can remain at home or in another homelike setting, the overall cost of care will be far lower than in a nursing home, stretching the Medicaid dollar farther.

More than 43,000 frail elderly or disabled adults in Wisconsin receive long-term care at home or in the community — in assisted living, for instance — under Medicaid waivers. Family Care began piloting in individual Wisconsin counties about 25 years ago as a nursing home alternative. It has since gone statewide, joined by allied programs that allow people to customize their care plans.

For elderly relatives who needed the intensive level of care offered by a nursing home, Family Care “gave them a tremendous alternative to skilled nursing care,” says Janet Zander, the advocacy and public policy coordinator for the Greater Wisconsin Agency on Aging Resources.

“A lot of work Wisconsin has been doing, and other states as well, has been shifting how we provide care to people’s homes,” says Jackson.

Care at home instead of an institution

Beth Barton’s daughter, Maggie, was born 25 years ago with cerebral palsy. She doesn’t talk and is not able to move about on her own, and for her whole life she’s needed complex medical care, Barton says.

One of Medicaid’s earliest waiver programs is named for Katie Beckett, a child from Iowa whose story led the Reagan administration in the 1980s to authorize long-term health care at home for children with disabilities instead of only in a hospital or nursing home. In Wisconsin, there are about 13,500 children enrolled in the state’s Katie Beckett waiver program.

When Maggie was a child, the Katie Beckett waiver enabled the Barton family to care for her at home. The family’s health care comes through the company plan where Beth Barton’s husband works. Medicaid served as a secondary insurer for Maggie, covering insurance copayments and for her care that the family insurance didn’t pay for.

Growing up, Maggie was able to attend Lakeland School, a public Walworth County school for children with disabilities. School “was difficult” her mother says, but it also provided rewarding interaction for her daughter. The school’s therapeutic pool became part of Maggie’s daily routine, where “she could be free,” Barton says, able to enjoy sensory experiences outside her wheelchair.

After Maggie turned 18, she was enrolled in IRIS — a Medicaid-funded long-term care program. While Family Care works though contracts with managed care providers, IRIS, a more recent variation, allows people to make their own arrangements for services, including home health care and personal care.

IRIS Medicaid funding helps pay for a social worker who visits four times a year and respite care when Barton can’t be at home. It also covers home modifications, such as an accessibility ramp.

Without the support Medicaid has provided throughout Maggie’s life, Barton believes her daughter might well have ended up in an institution. She’s not optimistic about that option.

“Her unique needs are best met one-one,” Barton says. “If we didn’t have private duty nursing, if we didn’t have Medicaid to meet those needs, I honestly don’t think she’d be with us.”

Children’s long-term support

Another Medicaid waiver covers certain purchases children with disabilities need as they grow up.

Danielle Bauer’s 3-year-old son, Henry, was born with Down syndrome and has also been diagnosed with autism. The family lives in Wausau, and Wisconsin’s Children’s Long-term Support waiver helped cover the cost of a sensory chair that offers Henry “a quiet retreat to prevent meltdowns,” Bauer says. The family also got coverage for a specialized high chair that will grow with him as he gets older.

“It has made a huge difference in his quality of life,” Bauer says of her son. “He is capable of so much more, but without these supports, families don’t have resources to help kids like him.”

Until Jessica Seawright’s son was born nine years ago, she and her husband had no inkling their child would have a disability, let alone a serious one. Because of a chromosome abnormality, he has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair.

“We didn’t have anything show up in terms of prenatal testing,” Seawright says. “This came out of the blue.”

The Children’s Long-term Support waiver helped the family purchase a wheel-chair van to transport their son. It also helped cover the cost of widening a doorway in their home on the South Side of Milwaukee so he can get into the bathroom using his chair.

Seawright is a social worker and therapist. Her employer provides the family’s primary insurance, with the couple paying about $300 a month toward the premium as well as covering their own medical and dental copayments.

The Katie Beckett waiver has made it possible for Medicaid, through BadgerCare, to pick up her son’s medical costs, Seawright says. He often has to go to the emergency room and has other complex medical needs. He has recurring seizures, and he has trouble swallowing and needs a gastric tube. He’s been prescribed various medications and formula supplements as well.

Without that support, she says it’s likely that the family would burn through the $5,000 annual cap on their out-of-pocket health care costs.

“We would be making really tough choices — what can we afford out of pocket each year? It would be a question of how often we pay for foot braces when he outgrows them,” Seaward says — along with the medications, supplements and formula he needs.

“It’s not that we don’t want to pay for our fair share, but with the cost of his care it’s not possible to keep up with,” she says.

Moving past ‘a dark part of our history’

Tiffany Glass is a University of Wisconsin research scientist, studying why children with Down syndrome often have trouble eating, drinking and swallowing. She was in the process of deciding what direction she wanted her research career to take when her son Max was born; his diagnosis pointed the way.

“Up until the mid-1980s in the United states, a lot of children with Down syndrome and other disabilities were institutionalized, because their communities didn’t have the resources to accommodate them,” Glass says.  

UW medical ethicist Dr. Norman Fost wrote in a 2020 journal article that as recently as the late 1970s it wasn’t unheard of for parents to allow newborns with Down syndrome to die without medical intervention.  

“It’s a really dark part of our history,” Glass says.

Medicaid changed that for Max — supporting him for his medical care, communication (it has paid in the past for an electronic tablet that speaks for him), and activities of daily living.

“He needs help with all of those things,” Glass says. “It adds up to needing skilled care 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For his whole life he’s required that type of care, and he probably always will.”

In addition to providing resources for Max’s care at home, Medicaid has also enabled Glass to pursue her scientific calling. Without it, her research career might have stopped before it started, she says.

Regular child care centers are unlikely to take someone whose disabilities are as severe as his, she has found, but the children’s long-term support waiver has covered the cost of respite care.

“That has allowed me to work outside the home for a decade as a research scientist,” says Glass. “If Medicaid hadn’t been there, I probably would not have been able to develop my research career. I would have had to stay home — to the detriment of scientific research.”

Now, however, she and countless others who have come to rely on the program — adults and children, people with disabilities and caregivers for elderly relatives — have grown anxious about whether they will still be able to count on the care that Medicaid has made possible.  

“Those arrangements are still very fragile,” Glass says. “We’re all very worried that if funding for Medicaid is reduced or eliminated, that could have really terrible implications for our families.”

This story is Part One in a series. 

This report was updated to correct the spelling of Max’s last name. 

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There’s a lot of untapped potential in our homes and vehicles that could be harnessed to reinforce local power grids and make them more resilient to unforeseen outages, a new study shows.

In response to a cyber attack or natural disaster, a backup network of decentralized devices — such as residential solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps, and water heaters — could restore electricity or relieve stress on the grid, MIT engineers say.

Such devices are “grid-edge” resources found close to the consumer rather than near central power plants, substations, or transmission lines. Grid-edge devices can independently generate, store, or tune their consumption of power. In their study, the research team shows how such devices could one day be called upon to either pump power into the grid, or rebalance it by dialing down or delaying their power use.

In a paper appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the engineers present a blueprint for how grid-edge devices could reinforce the power grid through a “local electricity market.” Owners of grid-edge devices could subscribe to a regional market and essentially loan out their device to be part of a microgrid or a local network of on-call energy resources.

In the event that the main power grid is compromised, an algorithm developed by the researchers would kick in for each local electricity market, to quickly determine which devices in the network are trustworthy. The algorithm would then identify the combination of trustworthy devices that would most effectively mitigate the power failure, by either pumping power into the grid or reducing the power they draw from it, by an amount that the algorithm would calculate and communicate to the relevant subscribers. The subscribers could then be compensated through the market, depending on their participation.

The team illustrated this new framework through a number of grid attack scenarios, in which they considered failures at different levels of a power grid, from various sources such as a cyber attack or a natural disaster. Applying their algorithm, they showed that various networks of grid-edge devices were able to dissolve the various attacks.

The results demonstrate that grid-edge devices such as rooftop solar panels, EV chargers, batteries, and smart thermostats (for HVAC devices or heat pumps) could be tapped to stabilize the power grid in the event of an attack.

“All these small devices can do their little bit in terms of adjusting their consumption,” says study co-author Anu Annaswamy, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “If we can harness our smart dishwashers, rooftop panels, and EVs, and put our combined shoulders to the wheel, we can really have a resilient grid.”

The study’s MIT co-authors include lead author Vineet Nair and John Williams, along with collaborators from multiple institutions including the Indian Institute of Technology, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and elsewhere.

Power boost

The team’s study is an extension of their broader work in adaptive control theory and designing systems to automatically adapt to changing conditions. Annaswamy, who leads the Active-Adaptive Control Laboratory at MIT, explores ways to boost the reliability of renewable energy sources such as solar power.

“These renewables come with a strong temporal signature, in that we know for sure the sun will set every day, so the solar power will go away,” Annaswamy says. “How do you make up for the shortfall?”

The researchers found the answer could lie in the many grid-edge devices that consumers are increasingly installing in their own homes.

“There are lots of distributed energy resources that are coming up now, closer to the customer rather than near large power plants, and it’s mainly because of individual efforts to decarbonize,” Nair says. “So you have all this capability at the grid edge. Surely we should be able to put them to good use.”

While considering ways to deal with drops in energy from the normal operation of renewable sources, the team also began to look into other causes of power dips, such as from cyber attacks. They wondered, in these malicious instances, whether and how the same grid-edge devices could step in to stabilize the grid following an unforeseen, targeted attack.

Attack mode

In their new work, Annaswamy, Nair, and their colleagues developed a framework for incorporating grid-edge devices, and in particular, internet-of-things (IoT) devices, in a way that would support the larger grid in the event of an attack or disruption. IoT devices are physical objects that contain sensors and software that connect to the internet.

For their new framework, named EUREICA (Efficient, Ultra-REsilient, IoT-Coordinated Assets), the researchers start with the assumption that one day, most grid-edge devices will also be IoT devices, enabling rooftop panels, EV chargers, and smart thermostats to wirelessly connect to a larger network of similarly independent and distributed devices. 

The team envisions that for a given region, such as a community of 1,000 homes, there exists a certain number of IoT devices that could potentially be enlisted in the region’s local network, or microgrid. Such a network would be managed by an operator, who would be able to communicate with operators of other nearby microgrids.

If the main power grid is compromised or attacked, operators would run the researchers’ decision-making algorithm to determine trustworthy devices within the network that can pitch in to help mitigate the attack.

The team tested the algorithm on a number of scenarios, such as a cyber attack in which all smart thermostats made by a certain manufacturer are hacked to raise their setpoints simultaneously to a degree that dramatically alters a region’s energy load and destabilizes the grid. The researchers also considered attacks and weather events that would shut off the transmission of energy at various levels and nodes throughout a power grid.

“In our attacks we consider between 5 and 40 percent of the power being lost. We assume some nodes are attacked, and some are still available and have some IoT resources, whether a battery with energy available or an EV or HVAC device that’s controllable,” Nair explains. “So, our algorithm decides which of those houses can step in to either provide extra power generation to inject into the grid or reduce their demand to meet the shortfall.”

In every scenario that they tested, the team found that the algorithm was able to successfully restabilize the grid and mitigate the attack or power failure. They acknowledge that to put in place such a network of grid-edge devices will require buy-in from customers, policymakers, and local officials, as well as innovations such as advanced power inverters that enable EVs to inject power back into the grid.

“This is just the first of many steps that have to happen in quick succession for this idea of local electricity markets to be implemented and expanded upon,” Annaswamy says. “But we believe it’s a good start.”

This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy and the MIT Energy Initiative.

© Credit: Courtesy of the researchers

Car design is an iterative and proprietary process. Carmakers can spend several years on the design phase for a car, tweaking 3D forms in simulations before building out the most promising designs for physical testing. The details and specs of these tests, including the aerodynamics of a given car design, are typically not made public. Significant advances in performance, such as in fuel efficiency or electric vehicle range, can therefore be slow and siloed from company to company.

MIT engineers say that the search for better car designs can speed up exponentially with the use of generative artificial intelligence tools that can plow through huge amounts of data in seconds and find connections to generate a novel design. While such AI tools exist, the data they would need to learn from have not been available, at least in any sort of accessible, centralized form.

But now, the engineers have made just such a dataset available to the public for the first time. Dubbed DrivAerNet++, the dataset encompasses more than 8,000 car designs, which the engineers generated based on the most common types of cars in the world today. Each design is represented in 3D form and includes information on the car’s aerodynamics — the way air would flow around a given design, based on simulations of fluid dynamics that the group carried out for each design.

Each of the dataset’s 8,000 designs is available in several representations, such as mesh, point cloud, or a simple list of the design’s parameters and dimensions. As such, the dataset can be used by different AI models that are tuned to process data in a particular modality.

DrivAerNet++ is the largest open-source dataset for car aerodynamics that has been developed to date. The engineers envision it being used as an extensive library of realistic car designs, with detailed aerodynamics data that can be used to quickly train any AI model. These models can then just as quickly generate novel designs that could potentially lead to more fuel-efficient cars and electric vehicles with longer range, in a fraction of the time that it takes the automotive industry today.

“This dataset lays the foundation for the next generation of AI applications in engineering, promoting efficient design processes, cutting R&D costs, and driving advancements toward a more sustainable automotive future,” says Mohamed Elrefaie, a mechanical engineering graduate student at MIT.

Elrefaie and his colleagues will present a paper detailing the new dataset, and AI methods that could be applied to it, at the NeurIPS conference in December. His co-authors are Faez Ahmed, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, along with Angela Dai, associate professor of computer science at the Technical University of Munich, and Florin Marar of BETA CAE Systems.

Filling the data gap

Ahmed leads the Design Computation and Digital Engineering Lab (DeCoDE) at MIT, where his group explores ways in which AI and machine-learning tools can be used to enhance the design of complex engineering systems and products, including car technology.

“Often when designing a car, the forward process is so expensive that manufacturers can only tweak a car a little bit from one version to the next,” Ahmed says. “But if you have larger datasets where you know the performance of each design, now you can train machine-learning models to iterate fast so you are more likely to get a better design.”

And speed, particularly for advancing car technology, is particularly pressing now.

“This is the best time for accelerating car innovations, as automobiles are one of the largest polluters in the world, and the faster we can shave off that contribution, the more we can help the climate,” Elrefaie says.

In looking at the process of new car design, the researchers found that, while there are AI models that could crank through many car designs to generate optimal designs, the car data that is actually available is limited. Some researchers had previously assembled small datasets of simulated car designs, while car manufacturers rarely release the specs of the actual designs they explore, test, and ultimately manufacture.

The team sought to fill the data gap, particularly with respect to a car’s aerodynamics, which plays a key role in setting the range of an electric vehicle, and the fuel efficiency of an internal combustion engine. The challenge, they realized, was in assembling a dataset of thousands of car designs, each of which is physically accurate in their function and form, without the benefit of physically testing and measuring their performance.

To build a dataset of car designs with physically accurate representations of their aerodynamics, the researchers started with several baseline 3D models that were provided by Audi and BMW in 2014. These models represent three major categories of passenger cars: fastback (sedans with a sloped back end), notchback (sedans or coupes with a slight dip in their rear profile) and estateback (such as station wagons with more blunt, flat backs). The baseline models are thought to bridge the gap between simple designs and more complicated proprietary designs, and have been used by other groups as a starting point for exploring new car designs.

Library of cars

In their new study, the team applied a morphing operation to each of the baseline car models. This operation systematically made a slight change to each of 26 parameters in a given car design, such as its length, underbody features, windshield slope, and wheel tread, which it then labeled as a distinct car design, which was then added to the growing dataset. Meanwhile, the team ran an optimization algorithm to ensure that each new design was indeed distinct, and not a copy of an already-generated design. They then translated each 3D design into different modalities, such that a given design can be represented as a mesh, a point cloud, or a list of dimensions and specs.

The researchers also ran complex, computational fluid dynamics simulations to calculate how air would flow around each generated car design. In the end, this effort produced more than 8,000 distinct, physically accurate 3D car forms, encompassing the most common types of passenger cars on the road today.

To produce this comprehensive dataset, the researchers spent over 3 million CPU hours using the MIT SuperCloud, and generated 39 terabytes of data. (For comparison, it’s estimated that the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress would amount to about 10 terabytes of data.)

The engineers say that researchers can now use the dataset to train a particular AI model. For instance, an AI model could be trained on a part of the dataset to learn car configurations that have certain desirable aerodynamics. Within seconds, the model could then generate a new car design with optimized aerodynamics, based on what it has learned from the dataset’s thousands of physically accurate designs.

The researchers say the dataset could also be used for the inverse goal. For instance, after training an AI model on the dataset, designers could feed the model a specific car design and have it quickly estimate the design’s aerodynamics, which can then be used to compute the car’s potential fuel efficiency or electric range — all without carrying out expensive building and testing of a physical car.

“What this dataset allows you to do is train generative AI models to do things in seconds rather than hours,” Ahmed says. “These models can help lower fuel consumption for internal combustion vehicles and increase the range of electric cars — ultimately paving the way for more sustainable, environmentally friendly vehicles.”

“The dataset is very comprehensive and consists of a diverse set of modalities that are valuable to understand both styling and performance,” says Yanxia Zhang, a senior machine learning research scientist at Toyota Research Institute, who was not involved in the study.

This work was supported, in part, by the German Academic Exchange Service and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

© Credit: Courtesy of Mohamed Elrefaie

As a major contributor to global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, the transportation sector has immense potential to advance decarbonization. However, a zero-emissions global supply chain requires re-imagining reliance on a heavy-duty trucking industry that emits 810,000 tons of CO₂, or 6 percent of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions, and consumes 29 billion gallons of diesel annually in the U.S. alone.

A new study by MIT researchers, presented at the recent American Society of Mechanical Engineers 2024 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, quantifies the impact of a zero-emission truck’s design range on its energy storage requirements and operational revenue. The multivariable model outlined in the paper allows fleet owners and operators to better understand the design choices that impact the economic feasibility of battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell heavy-duty trucks for commercial application, equipping stakeholders to make informed fleet transition decisions.

“The whole issue [of decarbonizing trucking] is like a very big, messy pie. One of the things we can do, from an academic standpoint, is quantify some of those pieces of pie with modeling, based on information and experience we’ve learned from industry stakeholders,” says ZhiYi Liang, PhD student on the renewable hydrogen team at the MIT K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research Center (GEAR) and lead author of the study. Co-authored by Bryony DuPont, visiting scholar at GEAR, and Amos Winter, the Germeshausen Professor in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, the paper elucidates operational and socioeconomic factors that need to be considered in efforts to decarbonize heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs).

Operational and infrastructure challenges

The team’s model shows that a technical challenge lies in the amount of energy that needs to be stored on the truck to meet the range and towing performance needs of commercial trucking applications. Due to the high energy density and low cost of diesel, existing diesel drivetrains remain more competitive than alternative lithium battery-electric vehicle (Li-BEV) and hydrogen fuel-cell-electric vehicle (H2 FCEV) drivetrains. Although Li-BEV drivetrains have the highest energy efficiency of all three, they are limited to short-to-medium range routes (under 500 miles) with low freight capacity, due to the weight and volume of the onboard energy storage needed. In addition, the authors note that existing electric grid infrastructure will need significant upgrades to support large-scale deployment of Li-BEV HDVs.

While the hydrogen-powered drivetrain has a significant weight advantage that enables higher cargo capacity and routes over 750 miles, the current state of hydrogen fuel networks limits economic viability, especially once operational cost and projected revenue are taken into account. Deployment will most likely require government intervention in the form of incentives and subsidies to reduce the price of hydrogen by more than half, as well as continued investment by corporations to ensure a stable supply. Also, as H2-FCEVs are still a relatively new technology, the ongoing design of conformal onboard hydrogen storage systems — one of which is the subject of Liang’s PhD — is crucial to successful adoption into the HDV market.

The current efficiency of diesel systems is a result of technological developments and manufacturing processes established over many decades, a precedent that suggests similar strides can be made with alternative drivetrains. However, interactions with fleet owners, automotive manufacturers, and refueling network providers reveal another major hurdle in the way that each “slice of the pie” is interrelated — issues must be addressed simultaneously because of how they affect each other, from renewable fuel infrastructure to technological readiness and capital cost of new fleets, among other considerations. And first steps into an uncertain future, where no one sector is fully in control of potential outcomes, is inherently risky. 

“Besides infrastructure limitations, we only have prototypes [of alternative HDVs] for fleet operator use, so the cost of procuring them is high, which means there isn’t demand for automakers to build manufacturing lines up to a scale that would make them economical to produce,” says Liang, describing just one step of a vicious cycle that is difficult to disrupt, especially for industry stakeholders trying to be competitive in a free market. 

Quantifying a path to feasibility

“Folks in the industry know that some kind of energy transition needs to happen, but they may not necessarily know for certain what the most viable path forward is,” says Liang. Although there is no singular avenue to zero emissions, the new model provides a way to further quantify and assess at least one slice of pie to aid decision-making.

Other MIT-led efforts aimed at helping industry stakeholders navigate decarbonization include an interactive mapping tool developed by Danika MacDonell, Impact Fellow at the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC); alongside Florian Allroggen, executive director of MITs Zero Impact Aviation Alliance; and undergraduate researchers Micah Borrero, Helena De Figueiredo Valente, and Brooke Bao. The MCSC’s Geospatial Decision Support Tool supports strategic decision-making for fleet operators by allowing them to visualize regional freight flow densities, costs, emissions, planned and available infrastructure, and relevant regulations and incentives by region.

While current limitations reveal the need for joint problem-solving across sectors, the authors believe that stakeholders are motivated and ready to tackle climate problems together. Once-competing businesses already appear to be embracing a culture shift toward collaboration, with the recent agreement between General Motors and Hyundai to explore “future collaboration across key strategic areas,” including clean energy. 

Liang believes that transitioning the transportation sector to zero emissions is just one part of an “energy revolution” that will require all sectors to work together, because “everything is connected. In order for the whole thing to make sense, we need to consider ourselves part of that pie, and the entire system needs to change,” says Liang. “You can’t make a revolution succeed by yourself.” 

The authors acknowledge the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium for connecting them with industry members in the HDV ecosystem; and the MIT K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research Center and MIT Morningside Academy for Design for financial support.

© Photo: Bob Adams/Flickr

Emergence of Ethanol as a Key Enabler of the Transition to Low-Carbon Fuels

The U.S. clean energy transition requires a transition to both carbon-free electricity and clean fuels. Ethanol has been the leader in the move to low-carbon fuels, as long-standing attempts to develop other advanced low-carbon liquid fuels (cellulosic biofuels, algae derived fuels, e-fuels, etc.) have not succeeded in achieving scalable production at an acceptable cost.

Since 2005, the overall carbon intensity (CI) a of ethanol has decreased by 23%. Ethanol’s CI today is 53.6 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per megajoule of ethanol produced (gCO2e/MJ), 42% lower than unblended gasoline. This has enabled blends of ethanol and gasoline to reduce on-road vehicle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by over 544 million tons of CO2.

This reality leads the EFI Foundation (EFIF) to present in this report a strategic roadmap to further decarbonize the U.S. ethanol industry through a portfolio of actions that can help it reach a goal of net-zero carbon intensity by midcentury, and several additional options that can achieve net-negative carbon intensity. The strategic roadmap will enable ethanol to play a central role in decarbonizing the transportation sector, which accounted for 29% of total U.S. GHG emissions in 2021.

Continued decarbonization of ethanol, combined with higher blend levels, can complement the shift to electrification of light-duty vehicles—both battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs)—in achieving further reductions in 2030 and beyond. Conversion of ethanol into aviation fuel will allow blends of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) at a significant scale. Further decarbonization of the U.S. ethanol industry also will strengthen its contribution to the U.S. economy, particularly to the rural economy.

In 2023, the United States produced 15.6 billion gallons of ethanol, making it the world’s leading producer and exporter of ethanol, responsible for producing over half of the global supply. The ethanol industry accounted for 28% of farm GDP, contributing $57 billion to total U.S. GDP in 2022. The ethanol industry supports more than 420,000 jobs.

Corn production for ethanol is a high value-added proposition—ethanol producers use about 30% to 40% of the U.S. corn crop, spending $38 billion, but require only about 1.5% of total U.S. farmland (an estimated 13.9 million acres). Since 2001, the U.S. food crops industry overall has maintained relatively consistent land use for planting while yields have continued to increase, indicating that corn is not in direct competition for acreage with other food crops. This report does not assume any increase in corn planting for ethanol production.

The post A Strategic Roadmap for Decarbonizing the U.S. Ethanol Industry appeared first on Growth Energy.

Charging stations for electric vehicles are essential for cleaning up the transportation sector. A new study by MIT researchers suggests they’re good for business, too.

The study found that, in California, opening a charging station boosted annual spending at each nearby business by an average of about $1,500 in 2019 and about $400 between January 2021 and June 2023. The spending bump amounts to thousands of extra dollars annually for nearby businesses, with the increase particularly pronounced for businesses in underresourced areas.

The study’s authors hope the research paints a more holistic picture of the benefits of EV charging stations, beyond environmental factors.

“These increases are equal to a significant chunk of the cost of installing an EV charger, and I hope this study sheds light on these economic benefits,” says lead author Yunhan Zheng MCP ’21, SM ’21, PhD ’24, a postdoc at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART). “The findings could also diversify the income stream for charger providers and site hosts, and lead to more informed business models for EV charging stations.”

Zheng’s co-authors on the paper, which was published today in Nature Communications, are David Keith, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Jinhua Zhao, an MIT professor of cities and transportation; and alumni Shenhao Wang MCP ’17, SM ’17, PhD ’20 and Mi Diao MCP ’06, PhD ’10.

Understanding the EV effect

Increasing the number of electric vehicle charging stations is seen as a key prerequisite for the transition to a cleaner, electrified transportation sector. As such, the 2021 U.S. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act committed $7.5 billion to build a national network of public electric vehicle chargers across the U.S.

But a large amount of private investment will also be needed to make charging stations ubiquitous.

“The U.S. is investing a lot in EV chargers and really encouraging EV adoption, but many EV charging providers can’t make enough money at this stage, and getting to profitability is a major challenge,” Zheng says.

EV advocates have long argued that the presence of charging stations brings economic benefits to surrounding communities, but Zheng says previous studies on their impact relied on surveys or were small-scale. Her team of collaborators wanted to make advocates’ claims more empirical.

For their study, the researchers collected data from over 4,000 charging stations in California and 140,000 businesses, relying on anonymized credit and debit card transactions to measure changes in consumer spending. The researchers used data from 2019 through June of 2023, skipping the year 2020 to minimize the impact of the pandemic.

To judge whether charging stations caused customer spending increases, the researchers compared data from businesses within 500 meters of new charging stations before and after their installation. They also analyzed transactions from similar businesses in the same time frame that weren’t near charging stations.

Supercharging nearby businesses

The researchers found that installing a charging station boosted annual spending at nearby establishments by an average of 1.4 percent in 2019 and 0.8 percent from January 2021 to June 2023.

While that might sound like a small amount per business, it amounts to thousands of dollars in overall consumer spending increases. Specifically, those percentages translate to almost $23,000 in cumulative spending increases in 2019 and about $3,400 per year from 2021 through June 2023.

Zheng says the decline in spending increases over the two time periods might be due to a saturation of EV chargers, leading to lower utilization, as well as an overall decrease in spending per business after the Covid-19 pandemic and a reduced number of businesses served by each EV charging station in the second period. Despite this decline, the annual impact of a charging station on all its surrounding businesses would still cover approximately 11.2 percent of the average infrastructure and installation cost of a standard charging station.

Through both time frames, the spending increases were highest for businesses within about a football field’s distance from the new stations. They were also significant for businesses in disadvantaged and low-income areas, as designated by California and the Justice40 Initiative.

“The positive impacts of EV charging stations on businesses are not constrained solely to some high-income neighborhoods,” Wang says. “It highlights the importance for policymakers to develop EV charging stations in marginalized areas, because they not only foster a cleaner environment, but also serve as a catalyst for enhancing economic vitality.”

Zheng believes the findings hold a lesson for charging station developers seeking to improve the profitability of their projects.

“The joint gas station and convenience store business model could also be adopted to EV charging stations,” Zheng says. “Traditionally, many gas stations are affiliated with retail store chains, which enables owners to both sell fuel and attract customers to diversify their revenue stream. EV charging providers could consider a similar approach to internalize the positive impact of EV charging stations.”

Zheng also says the findings could support the creation of new funding models for charging stations, such as multiple businesses sharing the costs of construction so they can all benefit from the added spending.

Those changes could accelerate the creation of charging networks, but Zheng cautions that further research is needed to understand how much the study’s findings can be extrapolated to other areas. She encourages other researchers to study the economic effects of charging stations and hopes future research includes states beyond California and even other countries.

“A huge number of studies have focused on retail sales effects from traditional transportation infrastructure, such as rail and subway stations, bus stops, and street configurations,” Zhao says. “This research provides evidence for an important, emerging piece of transportation infrastructure and shows a consistently positive effect on local businesses, paving the way for future research in this area.”

The research was supported, in part, by the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) and the Singapore National Research Foundation. Diao was partially supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China.

© Image: iStock

Although critical to the nation’s food security, farm work is potentially hazardous, farmworkers receive lower wages when compared with nonsupervisory workers outside agriculture, and many hired farm workers lack legal work authorization and access to basic public services. For the United States to remain competitive as a producer of fruit, vegetables, and other labor-intensive commodities both private and government institutions will need to accelerate adaptation to a changing landscape of farm labor.

An upcoming conference on farm labor seeks to strengthen ongoing farm labor research by convening and developing a network of researchers and stakeholders. The Changing Landscape of Farm Labor Conditions in the United States: What the Future Holds and How to Prepare for It conference will take place September 17 to 19, 2024, in Santa Cruz, California.

The conference is presented by the USDA Economic Research Service and Farm Foundation. It will cover four key themes: trends in the farm labor force, including worker migration and the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program; labor costs, farm worker conditions, and workforce development.

Visit https://farmfoundation.swoogo.com/farmlabor for more information and to register.

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