Aiming to transition away from fossil fuels and avert the worst consequences of climate change, world leaders aspire to achieve net zero global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. But actions to meet such targets and minimize adverse impacts on lives, livelihoods and infrastructure are not one-size-fits-all; they will require different approaches in different places. To better understand the patchwork causes and effects of the climate crisis and elements of viable solutions to it, researchers in MIT's Living Climate Futures (LCF) initiative—20 MIT faculty and affiliates from across the Institute—collaborate with frontline communities in diverse physical and socio-economic landscapes around the world. 

Young adults growing up in the attention economy — preparing for adult life, with social media and chatbots competing for their attention — can easily fall into unhealthy relationships with digital platforms. But what if chatbots weren’t mere distractions from real life? Could they be designed humanely, as moral partners whose digital goal is to be a social guide rather than an addictive escape?

A few weeks ago, Amy Moran-Thomas and 20 students in her class 21A.311 (The Social Lives of Medical Objects) were gathered around a glucose meter, a jar of test strips, and various spare medical parts in the MIT Museum seminar room, talking about how to make them work better.
 

The class had just heard a presentation from the president of the Belize Diabetes Association in Dangriga, Norma Flores, a nurse whose hospital had recently received a huge shipment of insulin that, although durable in theory, seemed to have spoiled in a heat wave. Flores and the students discussed whether scientists could develop temperature-stable insulin and design repairable glucose meters and other technologies for hospitals worldwide.

On a sunny, warm Sunday MIT students, staff, and faculty spread out across the fields of Hannan Healthy Foods in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Some of these volunteers pluck tomatoes from their vines in a patch a few hundred feet from the cars whizzing by on Route 117. Others squat in the shade cast by the greenhouse to snip chives. Still others slice heads of Napa cabbage from their roots in a bed nearer the woods. Everything being harvested today will wind up in Harvest Boxes, which will be sold at a pop-up farm stand the next day in the lobby of the Stata Center back on the MIT campus.

In this episode Johanna and JC tackle milk’s complex microbial landscape. Milk is alive. This aliveness has long been harnessed for the preservation of milk through fermentation and cheese making, but it is also a palpable source of danger. We visit Bill Oglethorpe, owner of Kappacasein, London's last dairy, speak with historian Deborah Valenze and cultural anthropologist Heather Paxson, and discuss the pressures facing cheese makers with Bronwen and Francis Percival, authors of 'Reinventing the Wheel: milk, microbes and the fights for real cheese'.

At a time when people across the country and the globe have never seemed more polarized, it may sometimes take a different kind of perspective to bridge political divides. For Jeanette Andrews, that might require a little bit of magic—quite literally.

The interdisciplinary project, which aims to explore how climate change plays out in everyday lives by strengthening community partnerships and building bridges across STEM and SHASS disciplines, is administered through MIT Anthropology and includes more than 19 faculty and affiliates from across the Institute.