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Wondering is a series of random questions answered by experts. The Medical School’s Aleksandra Stankovic is an aerospace psychologist and spaceflight biomedical researcher who studies how to optimize human performance and behavioral health in extreme operational environments. We asked her how a person gets ready to travel to space.

The spaceflight environment presents many challenges — technical, physical, and psychological. With more people having access to space travel today than ever before, successful and safe spaceflights require varying levels of preparation before launch day.

For government astronauts, candidates undergo a rigorous two-year initial training period before qualifying for flight assignment. This training includes learning about Space Station and flight vehicle systems, studying orbital mechanics, becoming proficient in emergency procedures (like how to handle scenarios such as fire, cabin depressurization, or medical issues), conducting flight training in T-38 jets (to build quick decision-making skills in high-performance aircraft), and developing Russian language skills (since international space missions involve collaboration among astronauts from various countries).

To prepare for the microgravity environment of space, astronauts also participate in simulations of weightlessness, including parabolic flights and training in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, a large swimming pool where astronauts practice conducting spacewalks and learn to perform tasks in their pressurized spacesuits. Astronauts complete survival training and learn to cope with extreme conditions — a crucial skill in case of an emergency landing back on Earth in the water or in very cold locations like Siberia. They are trained to operate the robotic arm that is used for tasks such as capturing cargo spacecraft.

Once they receive a flight assignment, astronauts complete an additional 18 months of mission-specific training. They simulate various mission scenarios — including launch, rendezvous, and docking — and emergency procedures. Additionally, they undergo extensive training on the scientific experiments they’ll be conducting, like how to work with equipment, collect samples, and handle data.

Since maintaining physical fitness is vital for astronauts to counteract the muscle and bone loss experienced in microgravity, they spend a lot of time preflight working out. At the same time, long-duration space missions can be mentally challenging, given the prolonged isolation, confinement, and separation from family and friends. Astronauts learn strategies to manage stress, maintain psychological well-being, and work effectively in close environments with their fellow crewmembers.

Commercial astronaut training is significantly less intensive than the training government-sponsored astronauts receive, since their missions are often of shorter duration and focus more on providing safe and enjoyable flying experiences. While commercial crews may stay in space for shorter intervals ranging from a few minutes for suborbital flight to several days or even weeks on the Space Station, government astronauts typically spend six months or more on the station. (Astronaut Frank Rubio recently set the record for longest American space mission with 371 consecutive days in space; cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who logged 437 continuous days in orbit on Russia’s Mir space station between 1994 and 1995, still holds the world record.)

Commercial astronauts often receive more generalized training that covers the basics of space travel and safety/emergency procedures. Anyone who spends prolonged periods in space will need to spend a lot of their day working out to keep their bodies in strong shape to be healthy when they return home. Everyday activities can be challenging without gravity, and sleeping can be difficult without the normal light cues from the sun that our bodies rely upon on Earth to regulate our circadian rhythms. A combination of technology and training help space travelers adapt.

As more people travel to space, on an expanding range of flight vehicles and for varying types of missions, spaceflight preparation too will undoubtedly continue to evolve. It’s an exciting time to be studying how to keep humans safe and healthy in space, and researchers like me are thrilled to be a part of enabling this next great wave of human space exploration!

— As told to Anna Lamb/Harvard Staff Writer

By combining noninvasive imaging techniques, investigators have created a comprehensive cellular atlas of a region of the human brain known as Broca’s area — an area critical for producing language.

The new technology will provide insights into the presence and spread of pathologic changes that occur in neurodegenerative illnesses — such as epilepsy, autism, and Alzheimer’s disease — as well as psychiatric illnesses.

Until now, scientific advances have not produced undistorted 3D images of cellular architecture that are needed to build accurate and detailed models. In new research published in Science Advances, a team led by investigators at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital, has overcome this challenge with detailed resolution to study brain function and health.

Using sophisticated imaging techniques — including magnetic resonance imaging, optical coherence tomography, and light-sheet fluorescence microscopy — the researchers were able to prevail over the limitations associated with any single method to create a high-resolution cell census atlas of a specific region of the human cerebral cortex, or the outer layer of the brain’s surface. The team created such an atlas for a human postmortem specimen and integrated it within a whole-brain reference atlas.

Having pulled themselves from the water 360 million years ago, amphibians are our ancient forebears, the first vertebrates to inhabit land. 

Now, this diverse group of animals faces existential threats from climate change, habitat destruction, and disease. Two Harvard-affiliated scientists from India are drawing on decades of study — and an enduring love for the natural world — to sound a call to action to protect amphibians, and in particular, frogs.

Sathyabhama Das Biju, a Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow and a professor at the University of Delhi, and his former student Sonali Garg, now a biodiversity postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, are co-authors of a sobering new study in Nature, featured on the journal’s print cover, that assesses the global status of amphibians. It is a follow-up to a 2004 study about amphibian declines.

Biju and Garg are experts in frog biology who specialize in the discovery and description of new species. Through laborious fieldwork, they have documented more than 100 new frog species across India, Sri Lanka, and other parts of the subcontinent.

According to the Nature study, which evaluated more than 8,000 amphibian species worldwide, two out of every five amphibians are now threatened with extinction. Climate change is one of the main drivers. Habitat destruction and degradation from agriculture, infrastructure, and other industries are the most common threats to these animals.

Biju and Garg are among more than 100 scientists who contributed their data and expertise to the report, which shows that nearly 41 percent of amphibian species are threatened with extinction, compared with 26.5 percent of mammals, 21.4 percent of reptiles, and 12.9 percent of birds.

Frogs, says Biju, are excellent model organisms to study evolution and biogeography because of the extreme diversity of traits they acquired over millennia. They are also very sensitive to abrupt changes in their environment, including droughts, floods, and storms, which makes them a barometer for assessing the health of an ecosystem.

“But very frankly, what drives me the most is their beauty and diversity in shapes, form, colors, as well as behaviors,” said Biju, who has dedicated 30 years to frog taxonomy across biodiversity hotspots in or near India, rising to fame through his formal description in 2003 of the Indian Purple Frog. He is known as the Frogman of India.

India is home to one of the most diverse frog populations in the world, with more than 460 documented species. Of those about 41 percent are considered threatened, according to Biju. Habitat destruction and degradation from cultivation of tea, coffee, spices, and other products pose the most danger to the animals.

As a Radcliffe Fellow, Biju is focused on “outpacing nameless extinctions” — saving frogs before they go extinct without being classified or even recognized. He is looking to understand key areas within biodiversity hotspots for effective conservation planning. He is also writing a book — filled with fieldwork photos — on amphibians of India.

“Without understanding the species themselves, and properly identifying them and their geographic distributions, no meaningful conservation planning can be undertaken,” Biju said. “Unless we know what we have, we cannot know what we need to conserve, and where we need to conserve.”

Garg remembers a time, during fieldwork in the Western Ghats mountain range, when she held a frog so small it could sit on the tip of her finger. It was a moment of striking contrast with the everyday puddle-hoppers that surrounded her in the small Indian village where she grew up. “I never thought they could be so beautiful,” she said. “There was so much to discover, and they just became a calling.”

She joined Biju’s lab at University of Delhi as a graduate student to find, identify, name, and better understand these species. She has done extensive fieldwork in India, Sri Lanka, the Western Ghats, the Himalayas, and Indo-Burma. Her research focuses on capturing the diversity of frogs in India using integrative taxonomy, or finding new ways to classify organisms, as well as elucidating their evolutionary histories. She has worked to deepen her quest by incorporating DNA sequencing and CT scanning.

Climate change is raising sea levels, creating stronger and wetter storms, melting ice sheets, and fostering conditions for more and worse wildfires. But as cities around the world warm, climate change’s complex global picture often comes down to this: Residents say they are just too hot.

Jane Gilbert, one of the nation’s first official “heat officers,” works in Miami-Dade County. She said South Florida may be suffering the effects of sea level rise and is in the crosshairs of stronger and more frequent hurricanes, but residents testifying at 2020 hearings on climate-change impacts on low-income neighborhoods repeatedly said the biggest one was the heat.

Panelists gathered at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Longfellow Hall last Friday for an event on the “Future of Cities” in a warming world said the topic is particularly relevant this year, when global temperatures soared to new records. As Gilbert spoke on the Cambridge campus on a cool fall afternoon, the heat index in Miami was 109 degrees, just the latest of more than 60 days this year that have seen heat indices higher than 105 degrees.

When an algorithm-driven microscopy technique developed in 2021 (and able to run on a fraction of the images earlier techniques required) isn’t fast enough, what do you do?

Dive DEEPer, and square it. At least, that was the solution used by Dushan Wadduwage, John Harvard Distinguished Science Fellow at the FAS Center for Advanced Imaging.

Scientists have worked for decades to image the depths of a living brain. They first tried fluorescence microscopy, a century-old technique that relies on fluorescent molecules and light. However, the wavelengths weren’t long enough and they scattered before they reached an appreciable distance.

The invention of two-photon microscopy in 1990 brought longer wavelengths of light shine onto the tissue, causing fluorescent molecules to absorb not one but two photons. The longer wavelengths used to excite the molecules scattered less and could penetrate farther.

But two-photon microscopy can typically only excite one point on the tissue at a time, which makes for a long process requiring many measurements. A faster way to image would be to illuminate multiple points at once using a wider field of view but this, too, had its drawbacks.

“If you excite multiple points at the same time, then you can’t resolve them,” Wadduwage said. “When it comes out, all the light is scattered, and you don’t know where it comes from.”

To overcome this difficulty, Wadduwage’s group began using a special type of microscopy, described in Science Advances in 2021. The team excited multiple points on the tissue in a wide-field mode, using different pre-encoded excitation patterns. This technique — called De-scattering with Excitation Patterning, or DEEP — works with the help of a computational algorithm.

“The idea is that we use multiple excitation codes, or multiple patterns to excite, and we detect multiple images,” Wadduwage said. “We can then use the information about the excitation patterns and the detected images and computationally reconstruct a clean image.”

The results are comparable in quality to images produced by point-scanning two-photon microscopy. Yet they can be produced with just hundreds of images, rather than to the hundreds of thousands typically needed for point-scanning. With the new technique, Wadduwage’s group was able to look as far as 300 microns deep into live mouse brains.

Still not good enough. Wadduwage wondered: Could DEEP produce a clear image with only tens of images?

In a recent paper published in Light: Science and Applications, he turned to machine learning to make the imaging technique even faster. He and his co-authors used AI to train a neural network-driven algorithm on multiple sets of images, eventually teaching it to reconstruct a perfectly resolved image with only 32 scattered images (rather than the 256 reported in their first paper). They named the new method DEEP-squared: Deep learning powered de-scattering with excitation patterning.

The team took images produced by typical two-photon point-scanning microscopy, providing what Wadduwage called the “ground-truth.” The DEEP microscope then used physics to make a computational model of the image formation process and put it to work simulating scattered input images. These trained their DEEP-squared AI model. Once AI produced reconstructed images that resembled Wadduwage’s ground-truth reference, the researchers used it to capture new images of blood vessels in a mouse brain.

“It is like a step-by-step process,” Wadduwage said. “In the first paper we worked on the optics side and reached a good working state, and in the second paper we worked on the algorithm side and tried to push the boundary all the way and understand the limits. We now have a better understanding that this is probably the best we can do with the current data we acquire.”

Still, Wadduwage has more ideas for boosting the capabilities of DEEP-squared, including improving instrument design to acquire data faster. He said DEEP-squared exemplifies cross-disciplinary cooperation, as will any future innovations on the technology.

“Biologists who did the animal experiments, physicists who built the optics, and computer scientists who developed the algorithms all came together to build one solution,” he said.

Evidence of the clean-energy transition abounds, with solar panels dotting rooftops, parking lots, and open spaces. In Massachusetts, future proliferation of these sunlight-soaking cells will be a high priority: About five times more solar energy will be needed to reach the state’s goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

But at what cost? Harvard Forest researchers have co-authored a landmark report detailing how many projects have required the clearing of carbon-absorbing forested areas, unnecessarily harming nature as well as undercutting environmental progress. The report, written with Mass Audubon, says stronger land-use and incentive policies would allow a smoother transition to clean energy sources without sacrificing more forests and farmlands.

“Growing Solar, Protecting Nature” was co-authored by Jonathan Thompson, research director at the Harvard Forest, a 4,000-acre natural laboratory that houses research and education in forest biology, ecology, and conservation. In their analysis, Thompson and collaborator Michelle Manion of Mass Audubon outline scenarios and recommendations for smart, sustainable solar development in Massachusetts.

“We found that we can achieve the commonwealth’s clean energy targets with very little impact on natural and working lands,” said Thompson, whose team specializes in geospatial analysis and land-use impacts to forest ecosystems. Over the past year, Thompson led the land-use and carbon modeling that portrayed different future solar impacts across the state under different scenarios. The team worked closely with Evolved Energy Research, which provided energy and economic consulting.

Since 2010, more than 500 ground-mount solar projects have been developed across the state, covering 8,000 acres, of which about 60 percent are forest acres, according to the report. This illustrates a terrible irony: Deploying solar often means cutting back on tree cover and losing the climate change mitigation it provides through pulling carbon dioxide from the air, storing the carbon, and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere.

As the authors make clear, clean energy sources aren’t enough to meet climate goals. Removing carbon from the atmosphere is just as important, and Massachusetts’ famously abundant forests are a primary means to that end. Beyond the beautiful green canopies they provide, forests are a critical, natural carbon sink, and the clean energy transition can’t happen without them.

“We need to think not only about how many acres we’re using for solar development, but also which acres are being developed,” Thompson said. “Our core forests are incredibly valuable for wildlife habitat, biodiversity, and carbon storage, and we must do everything we can to protect them from further fragmentation.”

By shifting from large, ground-mount solar to more projects on rooftops, parking lots, and already-developed lands, Massachusetts can head off further, unnecessary damage to forests and farmlands while also meeting net-zero emission goals, the report states.

State policymakers expressed support for the new report’s findings. “‘Growing Solar, Protecting Nature’ provides a clear-eyed analysis of the impacts of the commonwealth’s solar policy to date and provides a roadmap for better aligning our goals of rapidly transitioning away from fossil fuels, protecting our forests that help to draw down carbon, and protecting biodiversity,” said Massachusetts climate chief Melissa Hoffer. “The joint crises of climate and biodiversity loss require fresh thinking, and this report offers just that.”

Key policy recommendations include:

• Eliminating Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target (SMART) incentives for projects sited on core habit and critical natural landscapes while increasing incentives for solar on rooftops and developed lands.
• Investing in approaches that will reduce costs of rooftop and canopy solar projects.
• Prioritizing solar with the lowest impacts to nature.
• Supporting governmental, institutional, commercial, and industrial landowners in building solar near existing transmission infrastructure to reduce costs of energy distribution.
• Launching a statewide planning effort to integrate clean energy and transmission infrastructure into the process of land development.
• Funding permanent protection of Massachusetts’ highest-value natural and working lands.

“One of the goals of this work is to broaden how we think about the costs and benefits of the clean energy transition and what we need to fight climate change,” said Manion, Mass Audubon’s vice president for policy and advocacy. “Our results are clear: When we place real value on nature’s contribution to the fight against climate change and protection of biodiversity, the path forward with the lowest costs is the one that solves for both clean energy and nature. And it’s right in front of us.”

Quantum computers promise to reach speeds and efficiencies impossible for even the fastest supercomputers of today. Yet the technology hasn’t seen much scale-up and commercialization largely due to its inability to self-correct. Quantum computers, unlike classical ones, cannot correct errors by copying encoded data over and over. Scientists had to find another way.

Now, a new paper in Nature illustrates a Harvard quantum computing platform’s potential to solve the longstanding problem known as quantum error correction.

Leading the Harvard team is quantum optics expert Mikhail Lukin, the Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor in physics and co-director of the Harvard Quantum Initiative. The work reported in Nature was a collaboration among Harvard, MIT, and Boston-based QuEra Computing. Also involved was the group of Markus Greiner, the George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Physics.

An effort spanning the last several years, the Harvard platform is built on an array of very cold, laser-trapped rubidium atoms. Each atom acts as a bit — or a “qubit” as it’s called in the quantum world — which can perform extremely fast calculations.

The team’s chief innovation is configuring their “neutral atom array” to be able to dynamically change its layout by moving and connecting atoms — this is called “entangling” in physics parlance — mid-computation. Operations that entangle pairs of atoms, called two-qubit logic gates, are units of computing power.

Running a complicated algorithm on a quantum computer requires many gates. However, these gate operations are notoriously error-prone, and a buildup of errors renders the algorithm useless.

In the new paper, the team reports near-flawless performance of its two-qubit entangling gates with extremely low error rates. For the first time, they demonstrated the ability to entangle atoms with error rates below 0.5 percent. In terms of operation quality, this puts their technology’s performance on par with other leading types of quantum computing platforms, like superconducting qubits and trapped-ion qubits.

However, Harvard’s approach has major advantages over these competitors due to its large system sizes, efficient qubit control, and ability to dynamically reconfigure the layout of atoms.

“We’ve established that this platform has low enough physical errors that you can actually envision large-scale, error-corrected devices based on neutral atoms,” said first author Simon Evered, a Harvard Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student in Lukin’s group. “Our error rates are low enough now that if we were to group atoms together into logical qubits — where information is stored non-locally among the constituent atoms — these quantum error-corrected logical qubits could have even lower errors than the individual atoms.”

The Harvard team’s advances are reported in the same issue of Nature as other innovations led by former Harvard graduate student Jeff Thompson, now at Princeton University, and former Harvard postdoctoral fellow Manuel Endres, now at California Institute of Technology. Taken together, these advances lay the groundwork for quantum error-corrected algorithms and large-scale quantum computing. All of this means quantum computing on neutral atom arrays is showing the full breadth of its promise.

“These contributions open the door for very special opportunities in scalable quantum computing and a truly exciting time for this entire field ahead,” Lukin said.

The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Quantum Systems Accelerator Center; the Center for Ultracold Atoms; the National Science Foundation; the Army Research Office Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative; and the DARPA Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Devices program.

The COVID-19 pandemic seemed like a never-ending parade of SARS-CoV-2 variants, each equipped with new ways to evade the immune system, leaving the world bracing for what would come next.

But what if there were a way to make predictions about new viral variants before they actually emerge?

A new artificial intelligence tool named EVEscape, developed by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of Oxford, can do just that.

The tool has two elements: A model of evolutionary sequences that predicts changes that can occur to a virus, and detailed biological and structural information about the virus. Together, they allow EVEscape to make predictions about the variants most likely to occur as the virus evolves.

In a study published Wednesday in Nature, the researchers show that had it been deployed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, EVEscape would have predicted the most frequent mutations and identified the most concerning variants for SARS-CoV-2. The tool also made accurate predictions about other viruses, including HIV and influenza.

The researchers are now using EVEscape to look ahead at SARS-CoV-2 and predict future variants of concern; every two weeks, they release a ranking of new variants. Eventually, this information could help scientists develop more effective vaccines and therapies. The team is also broadening the work to include more viruses.

“We want to know if we can anticipate the variation in viruses and forecast new variants — because if we can, that’s going to be extremely important for designing vaccines and therapies,” said senior author Debora Marks, associate professor of systems biology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.

From EVE to EVEscape

The researchers first developed EVE, short for evolutionary model of variant effect, in a different context: gene mutations that cause human diseases. The core of EVE is a generative model that learns to predict the functionality of proteins based on large-scale evolutionary data across species.

In a previous study, EVE allowed researchers to discern disease-causing from benign mutations in genes implicated in     various conditions, including cancers and heart rhythm disorders.

“You can use these generative models to learn amazing things from evolutionary information — the data have hidden secrets that you can reveal,” Marks said.

As the COVID-19 pandemic hit and progressed, the world was caught off guard by SARS-CoV-2’s impressive ability to evolve. The virus kept morphing, changing its structure in ways subtle and substantial to slip past vaccines and therapies designed to defeat it.

“We underestimate the ability of things to mutate when they’re under pressure and have a large population in which to do so,” Marks said. “Viruses are flexible — it’s almost like they’ve evolved to evolve.”

Watching the pandemic unfold, Marks and her team saw an opportunity to help: They rebuilt EVE into a new tool called EVEscape for the purpose of predicting viral variants.

They took the generative model from EVE — which can predict mutations in viral proteins that won’t interfere with the virus’s function — and added biological and structural details about the virus, including information about regions most easily targeted by the immune system.

“We’re taking biological information about how the immune system works and layering it on our learnings from the broader evolutionary history of the virus,” explained co-lead author Nicole Thadani, a former research fellow in the Marks lab.

Such an approach, Marks emphasized, means that EVEscape has a flexible framework that can be easily adapted to any virus.

Turning back the clock

 In the new study, the team turned the clock back to January 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic started. Then they asked EVEscape to predict what would happen with SARS-CoV-2.

“It’s as if you have a time machine. You go back to day one, and you say, I only have that data, what am I going to say is happening?” Marks said.

EVEscape predicted which SARS-CoV-2 mutations would occur during the pandemic with accuracy similar to this of experimental approaches that test the virus’ ability to bind to antibodies made by the immune system. EVEscape outperformed experimental approaches in predicting which of those mutations would be most prevalent. More importantly, EVEscape could make its predictions more quickly and efficiently than lab-based testing since it didn’t need to wait for relevant antibodies to arise in the population and become available for testing.

Additionally, EVEscape predicted which antibody-based therapies would lose their efficacy as the pandemic progressed and the virus developed mutations to escape these treatments.

The tool was also able to sift through the tens of thousands of new SARS-CoV-2 variants produced each week and identify the ones most likely to become problematic.

“By rapidly determining the threat level of new variants, we can help inform earlier public health decisions,” said co-lead author Sarah Gurev, a graduate student in the Marks lab from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program at MIT.

In a final step, the team demonstrated that EVEscape could be generalized to other common viruses, including HIV and influenza.

Designing mutation-proof vaccines and therapies

The team is now applying EVEscape to SARS-CoV-2 in real time, using all of the information available to make predictions about how it might evolve next.

The researchers publish a biweekly ranking of new SARS-CoV-2 variants on their website and share this information with entities such as the World Health Organization. The complete code for EVEscape is also freely available online.

They are also testing EVEscape on understudied viruses such as Lassa and Nipah, two pathogens of pandemic potential for which relatively little information exists.

Such less-studied viruses can have a huge impact on human health across the globe, the researchers noted.

Another important application of EVEscape would be to evaluate vaccines and therapies against current and future viral variants. The ability to do so can help scientists design treatments that are able to withstand the escape mechanisms a virus acquires.

“Historically, vaccine and therapeutic design has been retrospective, slow, and tied to the exact sequences known about a given virus,” Thadani said.

Noor Youssef, a research fellow in the Marks lab, added, “We want to figure out how we can actually design vaccines and therapies that are future-proof.”

Additional authors: Pascal Notin, Nathan Rollins, Daniel Ritter, Chris Sander, and Yarin Gal.

Disclosures: Marks is an adviser for Dyno Therapeutics, Octant, Jura Bio, Tectonic Therapeutic, and Genentech, and is a co-founder of Seismic Therapeutic. Sander is an adviser for CytoReason Ltd.

Funding for the research was provided by the National Institutes of Health (GM141007-01A1), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GSK, the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and the Alan Turing Institute. 

The Milky Way is often depicted as a flat, spinning disk of dust, gas, and stars. But if you could zoom out and take an edge-on photo, it actually has a distinctive warp — as if you tried to twist and bend a vinyl LP.

Though scientists have long known through observational data that the Milky Way is warped and its edges are flared like a skirt, no one could explain why.

Now, Harvard astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian (CfA) have performed the first calculations that fully explain this phenomenon, with compelling evidence pointing to the Milky Way’s envelopment in an off-kilter halo of dark matter. The work also bolsters current thinking about how the galaxy evolved and may offer clues into some of the mysteries of dark matter.

The new calculations were led by Jiwon Jesse Han, a Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences student affiliated with the CfA. Published in Nature Astronomy, the work includes co-authors Charlie Conroy and Lars Hernquist, both faculty members at the CfA and in the Department of Astronomy.

Our galaxy is located inside a diffuse cloud called the stellar halo, which extends much farther out into the universe. In groundbreaking work published last year, the Harvard team deduced that the stellar halo is tilted and elliptical in shape, like a zeppelin or football.

Building on that, the team assumed the same shape for the dark matter halo, the larger entity that encompasses everything in and around the Milky Way. Dark matter makes up 80 percent of the galaxy’s mass but is invisible because it doesn’t interact with light, so the shape of that halo must be inferred. Using models to calculate the orbits of stars within a tilted, oblong dark matter halo, the team found a near-perfect match to existing observations of a warped, flared galaxy.

“A tilted dark halo is actually fairly common in simulations, but no one had explored its effect on the Milky Way,” Conroy said. “It turns out that the tilt is an elegant way to explain both the magnitude and direction of our galaxy’s wobbly disk.”

Scientists had long surmised that the Milky Way formed due to a galactic collision; the astronomers’ work further underscores that hypothesis.

“If the galaxy was just evolving on its own, it would have had this nice, spherical halo, this nice, flat disk,” Han said. “So the fact that the halo is tilted and has a football-like shape suggests that our galaxy experienced a merger event, where two galaxies collide.”

Their calculation of the dark matter halo’s probable shape may also provide clues as to the properties and particle nature of dark matter itself, which remain unsolved mysteries in physics. “The fact that the galaxy is not spherical in our data implies that there is some limit to which dark matter can interact with itself,” Han explained.

Confidence in these findings might lead to better ways to cleverly study the unobservable dark matter that makes up most of the universe. This includes new ways to pick up on kinematic signatures of dark sub-halos, which are miniature dark matter halos zipping around the galaxy.

The human brain is a tangled highway of wires emanating from nearly 100 billion neurons, all of which communicate across trillions of junctions called synapses. “Depressingly complex,” Harvard neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman calls it. The only way to understand this highway, says Lichtman, is to create a map.

Lichtman, the Jeremy R. Knowles Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, has spent several decades generating such maps, and in doing so has pioneered a field known as “connectomics.” His ultimate goal is a whole-mammalian brain map accounting for every neural connection, a so-called “connectome.”

Now, Lichtman and colleagues are embarking on a critical new step of that journey by seeking to capture synapse-level connectome data from a mouse brain at unprecedented clarity and resolution.

Lichtman and partners including Princeton University, MIT, Cambridge University and Johns Hopkins have received $30 million from the National Institutes of Health and an additional $3 million from Harvard and Princeton toward the goal of reconstructing, for the first time, all the neural wiring inside a mouse brain. They’ll prove the feat possible by first imaging a 10 cubic-millimeter region in the mouse hippocampal formation, the portion of the brain responsible for memory consolidation, spatial navigation, and other complex tasks.

Like the Human Genome Project cataloged every human gene and its unique DNA sequence, Lichtman’s connectome, which he has worked on since arriving at Harvard in 2004, would be a comprehensive diagram of every neural connection in the brain.

Comparing brain volume from worm to human

Creating a connectome of the human brain could lead to new approaches in diagnosing and treating disorders of the brain, from autism to schizophrenia. Scientists suspect these diseases are “connectopathies” — subtle miswirings that no currently available brain scans can detect.

“Connectomics is the only pathway,” said Lichtman, an affiliate of Harvard’s Center for Brain Science. “If we get to a point where doing a whole mouse brain becomes routine, you could think about doing it in say, animal models of autism. There is this level of understanding about brains that presently doesn’t exist. We know about the outward manifestations of behavior. We know about some of the molecules that are perturbed. But in between, the wiring diagrams, until now, there was no way to see them. Now, there is a way.”

The National Institutes of Health awarded new recipients of the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® Initiative, or BRAIN Initiative, funding in early September. The Harvard team is being funded through the BRAIN Initiative Connectivity Across Scales network, aimed at developing research capacity and technical capabilities for creating wiring diagrams of whole brains.

It was the perfect way to kick off her work at the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.

Elaine Buckberg, former chief economist for General Motors, drove from Michigan to her new home state of Massachusetts this summer in her EV and found one aspect of the journey particularly challenging.

“If you’re going through a part of America that doesn’t have a lot of chargers, you really need to be researching,” said Buckberg, who made the trip a second time in another EV she owns with her husband. “Is that charger going to work when we get there? What’s our fallback option? Do we need to charge sooner?”

That scarcity of public chargers, with unreliable coverage for long-distance trips, remains a major obstacle to widespread EV adoption. As head of the new Driving Toward Seamless Public EV Charging initiative, Buckberg, a new senior fellow at the Salata Institute, will lead a team of researchers from Harvard and the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research in pursuit of improvements. Key collaborators include Christopher R. Knittel, an MIT applied economics professor who also directs the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, and Harvard’s Vice President for Climate and Sustainability James H. Stock, who also directs the Salata Institute.

Buckberg previewed some of the team’s ideas for the Gazette while also offering tips for EV drivers. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

Q&A

Elaine Buckberg

GAZETTE: Why is the EV transition so important?

BUCKBERG: Transportation accounts for 28 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Light-duty vehicles, like passenger vehicles, account for 17 percent. Transitioning to EVs is tremendously important for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and continuing to drive emissions lower to ultimately net zero.

GAZETTE: How do problems with public charging hold back EV adoption?

BUCKBERG: The fact is, EVs are becoming increasingly good substitutes for internal combustion engine vehicles. They have longer ranges. Their price point has come down. They are becoming available in different shapes and sizes. But the thing that’s not getting solved is access to ubiquitous and easy charging. It’s a piece that won’t be resolved by the automakers alone.

A lot of early EV adopters have homes where they can install charging, but to actually achieve the EV transition we need two things. One, we need communities and workplaces to provide EV charging options for people who can’t plug in at home. Second, we need DC fast charging along highway corridors so every EV owner feels like they can do a road trip.

That’s important because market research shows that auto buyers buy cars for their extreme use case. Even if there are two cars in the household and they do very few road trips, they still don’t want a car that will not do that road trip.

BUCKBERG: The first project we’re looking at is real-time sharing of public charger data. So you could go on the likes of Apple or Google Maps, just like you already do when planning your trip, and find chargers along the way, know whether they’re operating, know whether there’s a queue, and know what the price is in advance.

Another thing we’re thinking about is zoning that would drive investment in community charging locations. That might include developing zoning best practices and using the resources of Harvard — like the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and Bloomberg Center for Cities — to roll these out to municipalities. For example, you need a charger for every X spaces in your parking lot if that lot is for public, employee, customer, or resident parking.

One more important consideration with EVs is maximizing climate benefits. You actually want to drive charging toward the daytime, when more renewables are involved in producing the electricity to charge vehicles, meaning lower emissions. We have to think about how electricity rate structures are designed.

GAZETTE: How did you make it work during your own cross-country trips?

BUCKBERG: It turned into my husband driving while I feverishly researched. The app native to my Chevy Bolt EV allows you to read your level of charge when you start the trip. But then it’ll say, “Stop at this charger” in some smaller town in upstate New York.

I then needed to try to find information on the internet about whether that charger was working. Does this type of charger have a website? Can I cross-reference that with another site that has user reporting on whether chargers are working or not, like Plugshare?

Do one of these sites tell me when someone last used it? If it worked during the last 12 to 24 hours, I feel pretty good. But if I can’t find a report of it working in the last few days, I’m going to be much more cautious. On our second trip, we stopped at a charger that had worked for us two weeks earlier. And this time it didn’t work.

GAZETTE: Where do you see progress on EV charging?

BUCKBERG: A consortium of seven automakers just announced a joint investment in 30,000 chargers in North America. And they want them in places with restaurants and bathrooms. Other companies are making moves to install chargers in places where it wouldn’t be so bad to charge for 20 or 30 minutes, like truck stops and the parking lots of big box stores. You could plan your lunch or errands around them.

But, despite this progress, we need the EV charging experience to get much better. We need lots of chargers at each station. We need vehicles to have built-in software that plans your route. Your EV should send you to the charger and precondition the battery without your asking. We need every EV owner to have this kind of experience. For that to happen, EV charging infrastructure needs to get much better much faster. That’s why this collaboration with MIT is really important.

COVID-19 patients are often prescribed antiviral drugs that work by reducing the number of viral particles circulating in the body. One such drug, molnupiravir, tricks the virus into generating mutations, some of which are lethal to the virus itself. The mutations eventually overwhelm and destroy the body’s SARS-CoV-2 population.

Since molnupiravir causes the virus to die by inducing mutations, some have raised concerns about the possibility of inadvertently creating new, treatment-resistant versions of the virus. Coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 are good at mutating into newer strains like Delta, Omicron, and EG.5. The idea of a drug that helps the virus mutate, even for the purpose of killing it, has some people worried.

A research team that includes Martin Nowak, Harvard professor of mathematics and biology, took a math-based dive into the question of whether molnupiravir could lead to harmful mutations of the virus that causes COVID-19. Nowak’s collaborators were Gabriela Lobinska and Yitzhak Pilpel, both of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, and their work appears this month in the journal PLOS Biology.

They conclude with potential good news: Molnupiravir appears to be “marginally evolutionarily safe.” That is, if used correctly, the treatment reduces the ability of the virus to create surviving mutants.

“We are introducing the concept of evolutionary safety — the idea that giving the drug will leave less mutants than not giving the drug,” said Nowak, who is a leading authority on the mathematics of virus dynamics.

To draw their conclusions, the team constructed a set of mathematical rules that describes the increase and decrease of viral load after infection, and they compared the total amount of original and mutant viruses produced by someone during an infection.

They found that a patient who receives the drug actually makes fewer mutants over time than a patient who does not. Using molnupiravir triggers what scientists refer to as the virus’s error threshold, or the point at which mutations make its survival impossible. Death by mutation is called lethal mutagenesis.

“We propose that, in the future, these types of drugs should be pursued, and their evolutionary safety should be carefully evaluated,” Nowak said. Molnupiravir belongs to a class of drugs called nucleoside analogs, which include drugs that treat HIV.

The researchers propose that a drug with even better ability to cause lethal mutagenesis might be more evolutionarily safe than molnupiravir is now.

Their work also finds that molnupiravir appears to be more effective for those with difficulty clearing the virus on their own. It may be less evolutionarily safe to give it to people who can clear the virus quickly. But for those healthier patients, the total number of mutants stays low in any case.

The Salata Institute Seed Grant Program, launched in April to enable new interdisciplinary research in climate and sustainability, has announced its first cohort of awards. The program will support 19 faculty members working across seven Harvard Schools with funding for projects ranging from exploring a new, algae-based building insulation material to researching the carbon footprint of AI-driven computing.

Harvard faculty members interested in applying to the program, which is supported by a gift from the Troper Wojcicki Foundation, can access the current call for proposals to learn more. The next deadline to apply is Sept. 8.

Here’s a look at the first 14 projects the program is funding, presented in alphabetical order by lead researcher’s name.

Using sensors buried in arctic ice to better predict sea-level rise
Principal investigator Carlos Argüelles-Delgado
Co-principal investigator David R. Clarke

Just how much — and how fast — sea levels will rise is one of the most pressing questions raised by climate change. Understanding the dynamics of glacial melting is crucial to producing accurate sea level forecasts, which in turn help decision-makers and stakeholders mitigate and adapt to shifting risks. The team will use readings collected over 10 years from sensors buried in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice to better understand how glacial melting will fuel sea level rise.

Insulating buildings with algae foam
Principal investigator, Martin Bechthold
Co-principal investigator Jennifer Lewis

Most homes in the U.S. are still heated and cooled with fossil fuels, contributing significantly to climate change. Thermal insulation remains the most impactful and cost-effective way to reduce buildings’ energy consumption and emissions — but insulation materials remain too carbon-intensive. Faculty from the Graduate School of Design and John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences will work to develop a proof of concept for a carbon-negative insulation material made from microalgae.

Communicating benefits of climate action
Principal investigator Joe Blatt
Co-principal investigators Mina Cikara, Dustin Tingley, and K. “Vish” Viswanath

An effective response to climate change in the U.S. will require broad support. The key to overcoming resistance to green energy and sustainability solutions may lie in communicating their benefits — from new, high-paying jobs to better public health and fewer catastrophic weather events. Faculty from the Graduate School of Education, the Departments of Government and Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the T.H. Chan School of Public Health will design and test content.

Studying electricity subsidies, consumption in developing world
Principal investigator Rema Hanna
Co-principal investigators Ben Olken, Elan Satriawan, and Sudarno Sumarto

Indonesia has made great strides in providing electricity access to its citizens, jumping from about 53 percent coverage in 2000 to nearly 100 percent today. Yet Indonesia’s grid is carbon-intensive. A team from the Kennedy School, MIT Economics, and the National Team for the Acceleration of Poverty Reduction in Indonesia will examine the relationship between electricity subsidies and consumption in Indonesia. The results may help policymakers tailor subsidy programs to reduce climate impacts in low- and middle-income countries.

Quantifying the carbon footprint of future technologies
Principal investigator Gage Hills
Co-principal investigators David Brooks and Gu-Yeon Wei

Recent estimates suggest that the information and communication technology sector drives 2.1 to 3.9 percent of global carbon emissions. That number is expected to increase as demand for computing driven by artificial intelligence, metaverse, blockchain, and Internet of Things devices accelerates. At the same time, advanced silicon technologies and beyond-silicon nanotechnologies are being explored for improving energy efficiency of computing systems. Faculty from SEAS will develop a framework to study how these future technologies impact climate change and energy efficiency.

Blending wildfire observations with numerical modeling
Principal investigator Frank Keutsch
Co-principal investigator Loretta J. Mickley

In the coming decades, wildfires in the western U.S. are projected to increase dramatically. Gaps in understanding about the links between climate change and wildfire activity present challenges for policymakers. Harvard faculty will launch a pilot study examining two critical but poorly understood dimensions of wildfire risk: the potential of plumes from the most intense blazes to penetrate into the stratosphere and the consequences to our atmosphere and regional climate. The team hopes to demonstrate a practical path to combining state-of-the-art observing systems with numerical modeling.

Recognizing Indigenous claims for environmental justice
Principal investigator Michèle Lamont

Lamont is an expert on the power of recognition — rendering others as visible and valued — in driving social and cultural change. She will expand her work to examine recognition in a global context with a special focus on claims for environmental justice by Indigenous people. Through in-depth interviews, Lamont and her team will explore the environmental and climate justice-related views of Indigenous people living in Canada and the Northern Mariana Islands of the South Pacific.

Building climate-resilient health systems
Principal investigator Megan Murray

As climate change deepens health risks worldwide, there is a need for climate-resilient health systems. This need is especially urgent in low- and middle-income countries, where rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and rising sea levels increasingly compromise air quality, water availability, and access to nutritious foods. Faculty from the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School will launch a workshop, bringing together experts from across disciplines to chart a shared research agenda focused on the role of community health workers.

Enhancing campus sustainability
Principal investigator Vijay Janapa Reddi

A project at Harvard’s Science & Engineering Complex, led by an applied-machine-learning-systems expert, will deploy tiny machine-learning sensors throughout the SEC to explore resource consumption and waste generation. It will enable real-time monitoring and analysis, fostering discussions and learning among STEM students on climate change and sustainability. The collected data will empower students to make informed choices, inspiring eco-friendly practices and potential solutions.

Rethinking window glass requirements
Principal investigator Holly Samuelson

With window glass selection in mixed climates, architects can prioritize saving heating or cooling energy. The optimal glass properties depend on not only building type and window orientation — variables already lumped together in today’s broad-brush building codes — but also properties of evolving heating systems and electricity generation. Since windows built today will be in place for decades, Samuelson, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Design, will study the potential benefits of revising glass requirements.

Who’s suffering? Studying toll on mental health.
Principal investigator Karen Thornber

In June 2022, the World Health Organization released a policy brief underscoring the lack of research on the toll of climate change on mental health, impacts that are distributed unequally. Thornber will analyze how the impacts of climate change on mental health intersect with class, race, ethnicity, gender, and other factors. Thornber will draw on case studies — from Inuit, Sámi, Indigenous Taiwanese, and Polynesian stories to bestsellers and blockbusters from Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

Decarbonizing healthcare systems
Principal investigator Stéphane Verguet

Healthcare is not only at risk from climate change, it is also a major polluter, representing 4 to 5 percent of global carbon emissions. The World Health Organization is urging countries to reduce pollution while reinforcing health systems. Since November 2021, 65 countries have committed to developing low-carbon health systems. This team will provide evidence for governments to use in equitably and efficiently decarbonizing their healthcare systems.

Calculating computing’s footprint
Principal investigator Gu-Yeon Wei
Co-principal investigator David Brooks

A commonly ignored consequence of the computer age is the carbon footprint of making and running computers. As an explosion in services relying on vast amounts of computing continues, the carbon impacts will continue to mount. SEAS researchers will launch an effort to develop a practical and accurate measure of carbon emissions associated with the fabrication and operation of computers and electronic devices.

Toward a national agroforest
Principal investigator Amy Whitesides

As carbon sinks, forests play a key role in mitigating climate change. Historically and today they are lost to urban and agricultural expansion. Agroforestry may offer means to diversify and protect lands that face encroachment and climate threats and often support lower-income communities. Whitesides of the Graduate School of Design will explore the formation of a National Agro-forest. This work will bring together landscape architects, planners, foresters, farmers, municipalities, and specialists in land management.