Arts & Sciences research continued to result in solutions to real-world problems in 2024–25. Highlights included faculty and students improving environmental conservation practices, training the power of artificial intelligence on stolen artifacts, and coming a step closer to understanding the potential for extraterrestrial life.
Many airlines offer passengers the chance to offset a flight’s carbon emissions by investing in forest preservation—or carbon credits—but is that really helping the planet or is it just a way for corporations to look better?
Each credit is a promise to reduce or remove carbon dioxide in one place for every ton of it pumped out in another. Done right, they have huge potential, experts say. But a study by researchers at CAS and the Clean Air Task Force has found some of these efforts might not be doing much good. Writing in the journal Earth’s Future, the researchers recommend a series of new guidelines and improvements to the carbon market system.
For the study, Lucy Hutyra, a Distinguished Professor and chair of Earth and environment, and her colleagues examined voluntary forest credit markets in North America, focusing on the standards that govern how they’re run and certified. For example, most schemes require that the carbon will be stored for a set period and will have a risk protocol to mitigate against potential threats like a forest fire.
According to Hutyra, the management of risk is one of the biggest areas for enhancement. To insure against disaster, a forest carbon credit scheme will set aside buffer zones in case the primary preservation land is damaged. Hutyra offers two easy fixes: bigger buffer zones and area-specific risk maps.
The researchers—including Rebecca Sanders-DeMott (GRS’17,’17), the Clean Air Task Force’s director of ecosystem carbon science—list four other areas for change, from better monitoring to an overhaul of the general market structure, and suggest 22 specific changes. The study recommendations also provide a useful way for companies to make sure they’re buying effective credits.
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Over 12,000 feet below the surface of the sea, in the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), million-year-old rocks cover the seafloor. These rocks may seem lifeless, but tiny sea creatures and microbes nestle on their surfaces.
These deep-sea rocks, called polymetallic nodules, don’t only host a surprising number of sea critters. A team of scientists has discovered they also produce oxygen on the seafloor.
The discovery flips conventional wisdom on its head, considering oxygen is typically created by photosynthesis, which requires the sun. “This was really weird, because no one had ever seen it before,” says Jeffrey Marlow, an assistant professor of biology and coauthor on the study, which was published in Nature Geoscience.
The research team used deep-sea chambers that land on the seafloor and enclose the seawater, sediment, polymetallic nodules, and living organisms. They then measured how oxygen levels changed in the chambers over 48 hours. If there are plentiful organisms breathing oxygen, then the levels would normally decline. But in this case, oxygen was increasing.
The team concluded that the polymetallic nodules—which are made of rare metals, including copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, and manganese—are likely triggering “seawater electrolysis” and creating enough energy to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. They named this “dark oxygen.”
Marlow and his coauthor Peter Schroedl (GRS’25,’25) use microbes found in extreme environments as templates for finding single-celled life on other planets and moons. “If photosynthesis isn’t required to make oxygen, then other planets with oceans and metal-rich rocks like these nodules could sustain a more evolved biosphere than we’ve thought possible in the past,” Marlow says
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According to the New York Times, foreign museums and private collections stash perhaps 4,000 stolen Cambodian pieces—artifacts dating back a millennium and more—purloined from temples and holy places.
When museums and collectors don’t know, or care, that they’re holding stolen art, recovery is tricky. Dealers in stolen merchandise “are doing everything they can to pass it off as legal,” says Hallie Baker (CAS’25, GRS’25), who recently graduated from the joint BA/MA in archaeology program and received a Marshall Scholarship to study in England. “So they are faking provenance histories, they’re faking documents about where it came from.”
She and Robert Murowchick, director of archaeology undergraduate studies, tapped artificial intelligence to aid human detectives hunting for plunder. They’ve created a database, the Khmer Statuary Project (KSP), that uses machine learning algorithms—trained on images from archives, art catalogs, museum databases, and private collections—to automate the identification of potentially stolen Cambodian statues.
For now, the KSP is a work in progress and not quite ready for use by governments, institutions, or the public. Murowchick, who’s also a CAS lecturer of archaeology, is now seeking additional, crowdsourced photos for the database, to continually train the algorithm and improve its accuracy. Eventually, the tool could have a broad reach.
“Looting is not just happening in Cambodia,” says Baker, just the sixth Marshall Scholar in BU history. “It’s happening around the world. And so this same solution can be applied to other regions.”
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