In the fall of 2025, Jeff Dodge set up a six-foot folding table in the cafeteria of Cane Bay High School in Summerville, South Carolina, to conduct a taste test. When the first rush of about 150 hungry students hit, he was waiting with slow cookers filled with steaming marinara sauce and meatballs. Kids love…
In the middle of an especially warm July in 2021, a wildfire ignited in a thick forest of black spruce and peeling paper birch trees on the northern campus of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. The blaze, possibly sparked by lightning, burned across the dry carpet of feather mosses and lichen before climbing into the…
In this age of rising electricity demand, people are trying to squeeze every last bit of power out of every power plant possible. Over the past few weeks, there’s been big news about nuclear power plants trying to do just that. Constellation, the largest nuclear operator in the US, announced plans to add nearly a…
In a research station in central Panama, you can walk through a century of forest time, watching scrubby plots of adolescent trees give way to cathedral-like canopies of mature growth. Forest ecologist Daisy Dent, a senior scientist at ETH Zurich, oversees this sequence of plots across the Barro Colorado Nature Monument, some of which date…
This week, we released our 2026 version of our Climate Tech Companies to Watch list. It’s an annual project that the MIT Technology Review team puts together. Our goal is to highlight some of the promising, interesting advances and firms we think are worth paying attention to in the world of climate and energy technology. …
As sea levels rise and flood risks worsen due to global warming, WaveSave’s easy-to-erect portable dam offers a quick-response tool. People can use the dam to protect themselves and their property, and it can also store freshwater for later use. Communities in Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia have deployed it successfully. Now, the company is…
BasiGo aims to replace the tens of thousands of diesel-powered buses on sub-Saharan African roads with electric ones that generate far fewer emissions. The company’s pay-as-you-drive business model has helped make EVs more attainable and is changing the way public transport operates. In a bid to contain the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the Kenyan government…
There’s a growing need for long-duration storage to meet energy demand and balance out renewables on the grid. Energy Dome uses compressed carbon dioxide gas in its massive grid batteries, which can deliver power for up to 24 hours. As the world races to meet growing electricity demand, solar and onshore wind power have become…
Brimstone is making strides on two industrial problems, reducing the emissions from cement and providing a way to produce more critical minerals within the US. If the company can do both, with the same rocks in the same plant, it would unlock a cleaner and more efficient process for manufacturing building materials, aluminum, steel, and…
X-energy is developing small modular reactors to satisfy some of the planet’s most power-hungry users: industrial manufacturers that need high temperatures to produce billions of tons of concrete, plastics, fibers, and chemicals. Solar panels and wind turbines are great at producing electricity but what heavy industry also needs is raw heat—and lots of it. The manufacture…