Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.

MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly influences its electronic behavior, leading to more efficient control of the flow of electricity. 

The team used a novel magnetic material and an optimization process that reduces the material’s defects, which boosts the transistor’s performance.

The material’s unique magnetic properties also allow for transistors with built-in memory, which would simplify circuit design and unlock new applications for high-performance electronics.

“People have known about magnets for thousands of years, but there are very limited ways to incorporate magnetism into electronics. We have shown a new way to efficiently utilize magnetism that opens up a lot of possibilities for future applications and research,” says Chung-Tao Chou, an MIT graduate student in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Physics, and co-lead author of a paper on this advance.

Chou is joined on the paper by co-lead author Eugene Park, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Julian Klein, a DMSE research scientist; Josep Ingla-Aynes, a postdoc in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center; Jagadeesh S. Moodera, a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics; and senior authors Frances Ross, TDK Professor in DMSE; and Luqiao Liu, an associate professor in EECS, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as others at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. The paper appears today in Physical Review Letters.

Overcoming the limits

In an electronic device, silicon semiconductor transistors act like tiny light switches that turn a circuit on and off, or amplify weak signals in a communication system. They do this using a small input voltage.

But a fundamental physical limit of silicon semiconductors prevents a transistor from operating below a certain voltage, which hinders its energy efficiency.

To make more efficient electronics, researchers have spent decades working toward magnetic transistors that utilize electron spin to control the flow of electricity. Electron spin is a fundamental property that enables electrons to behave like tiny magnets.

So far, scientists have mostly been limited to using certain magnetic materials. These lack the favorable electronic properties of semiconductors, constraining device performance.

“In this work, we combine magnetism and semiconductor physics to realize useful spintronic devices,” Liu says.

The researchers replace the silicon in the surface layer of a transistor with chromium sulfur bromide, a two-dimensional material that acts as a magnetic semiconductor.

Due to the material’s structure, researchers can switch between two magnetic states very cleanly. This makes it ideal for use in a transistor that smoothly switches between “on” and “off.”

“One of the biggest challenges we faced was finding the right material. We tried many other materials that didn’t work,” Chou says.

They discovered that changing these magnetic states modifies the material’s electronic properties, enabling low-energy operation. And unlike many other 2D materials, chromium sulfur bromide remains stable in air.

To make a transistor, the researchers pattern electrodes onto a silicon substrate, then carefully align and transfer the 2D material on top. They use tape to pick up a tiny piece of material, only a few tens of nanometers thick, and place it onto the substrate.

“A lot of researchers will use solvents or glue to do the transfer, but transistors require a very clean surface. We eliminate all those risks by simplifying this step,” Chou says.

Leveraging magnetism

This lack of contamination enables their device to outperform existing magnetic transistors. Most others can only create a weak magnetic effect, changing the flow of current by a few percent or less. Their new transistor can switch or amplify the electric current by a factor of 10.

They use an external magnetic field to change the magnetic state of the material, switching the transistor using significantly less energy than would usually be required.

The material also allows them to control the magnetic states with electric current. This is important because engineers cannot apply magnetic fields to individual transistors in an electronic device. They need to control each one electrically.

The material’s magnetic properties could also enable transistors with built-in memory, simplifying the design of logic or memory circuits.

A typical memory device has a magnetic cell to store information and a transistor to read it out. Their method can combine both into one magnetic transistor.

“Now, not only are transistors turning on and off, they are also remembering information. And because we can switch the transistor with greater magnitude, the signal is much stronger so we can read out the information faster, and in a much more reliable way,” Liu says.

Building on this demonstration, the researchers plan to further study the use of electrical current to control the device. They are also working to make their method scalable so they can fabricate arrays of transistors.

This research was supported, in part, by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports. The work was partially carried out at the MIT.nano facilities.

Video from Reddit shows what could go wrong when you try to pet a—looks like a Humboldt—squid.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

Since earliest days of computer games, people have tinkered with the software to customize their own experiences or share their vision with others. From the dad who changed the game’s male protagonist to a girl so his daughter could see herself in it, to the developers who got their start in modding, games have been a medium where you don’t just consume a product, you participate and interact with culture.

For decades, that participatory experience was a key part of one of the longest-running video games still in operation: Everquest. Players had the official client, acquired lawfully from EverQuest’s developers, and modders figured out how to enable those clients to communicate with their own servers and then modify their play experience – creating new communities along the way.

Everquest’s copyright owners implicitly blessed all this. But the current owners, a private equity firm called Daybreak, want to end that independent creativity. They are using copyright claims to threaten modders who wanted to customize the EverQuest experience to suit a different playstyle, running their own servers where things worked the way they wanted. 

One project in particular is in Daybreak’s crosshairs: “The Hero’s Journey” (THJ). Daybreak claims THJ has infringed its copyrights in Everquest visuals and character, cutting into its bottom line.

Ordinarily, when a company wants to remedy some actual harm, its lawyers will start with a cease-and-desist letter and potentially pursue a settlement. But if the goal is intimidation, a rightsholder is free to go directly to federal court and file a complaint. That’s exactly what Daybreak did, using that shock-and-awe approach to cow not only The Hero’s Journey team, but unrelated modders as well.

Daybreak’s complaint seems to have dazzled the judge in the case by presenting side-by-side images of dragons and characters that look identical in the base game and when using the mod, without explaining that these images are the ones provided by EverQuest’s official client, which players have lawfully downloaded from the official source. The judge wound up short-cutting the copyright analysis and issuing a ruling that has proven devastating to the thousands of players who are part of EverQuest modding communities.

Daybreak and the developers of The Hero’s Journey are now in private arbitration, and Daybreak has wasted no time in sending that initial ruling to other modders. The order doesn’t bind anyone who’s unaffiliated with The Hero’s Journey, but it’s understandable that modders who are in it for fun and community would cave to the implied threat that they could be next.

As a result, dozens of fan servers have stopped operating. Daybreak has also persuaded the maintainers of the shared server emulation software that most fan servers rely upon, EQEmulator, to adopt terms of service that essentially ban any but the most negligible modding. The terms also provide that “your operation of an EQEmulator server is subject to Daybreak’s permission, which it may revoke for any reason or no reason at any time, without any liability to you or any other person or entity. You agree to fully and immediately comply with any demand from Daybreak to modify, restrict, or shut down any EQEmulator server.” 

This is sadly not even an uncommon story in fanspaces—from the dustup over changes to the Dungeons and Dragons open gaming license to the “guidelines” issued by CBS for Star Trek fan films, we see new generations of owners deciding to alienate their most avid fans in exchange for more control over their new property. It often seems counterintuitive—fans are creating new experiences, for free, that encourage others to get interested in the original work.

Daybreak can claim a shameful victory: it has imposed unilateral terms on the modding community that are far more restrictive than what fair use and other user rights would allow. In the process, it is alienating the very people it should want to cultivate as customers: hardcore Everquest fans. If it wants fans to continue to invest in making its games appeal to broader audiences and serve as testbeds for game development and sources of goodwill, it needs to give the game’s fans room to breathe and to play.

If you’ve been a target of Daybreak’s legal bullying, we’d love to hear from you; email us at info@eff.org.

Interviewer: Jillian York

Sami Ben Gharbia is a Tunisian human rights campaigner, blogger, writer and freedom of expression advocate. He founded Global Voices Advocacy, and is the co-founder and current publisher of the collective media organization Nawaat, which won the EFF Award in 2011. 

Jillian York: So first, what is your personal definition, or how do you conceptualize freedom of expression?

Sami Ben Gharbia: So for me, freedom of expression, it is mainly as a human. Like, I love the definition of Arab philosophers to human beings, we call it “speaking animal”. So that's the definition in logic, like the science of logic, meditated on by the Greeks, and that defines a human being as a speaking animal, which means later on. Descartes, the French philosopher, describes it like the Ergo: I think, so I am. So the act of speaking is an act of thinking, and it's what makes us human. So this is my definition that I love about freedom of expression, because it's the condition, the bottom line of our human being. 

JY: I love that. Is that something that you learned about growing up?

SBG: You mean, like, reading it or living?

JY: Yeah, how did you come to this knowledge?

SBG: I read a little bit of logics, like science of logic, and this is the definition that the Arabs give to define what is a human being; to differentiate us from, from plants or animals, or, I don't know, rocks, et cetera. So the humans are speaking, animals, 

JY: Oh, that's beautiful. 

SBG: And by speaking, it's in the Arabic definition of the word speaking, it's thinking. It's equal to thinking. 

JY: At what point, growing up, did you realize…what was the turning point for you growing up in Tunisia and realizing that protecting freedom of expression was important?

SBG: Oh, I think, I was born in 1967 and I grew up under an authoritarian regime of the “father” of this Tunisian nation, Bourghiba, the first president of Tunisia, who got us independence from France. And during the 80s, it was very hard to find even books that speak about philosophy, ideology, nationalism, Islamism, Marxism, etc. So to us, almost everything was forbidden. So you need to hide the books that you smuggle from France or from libraries from other cities, et cetera. You always hide what you are reading because you do not want to expose your identity, like you are someone who is politically engaged or an activist. So, from that point, I realized how important freedom of expression is, because if you are not allowed even to read or to buy or to exchange books that are deemed to be controversial or are so politically unacceptable under an authoritarian regime, that's where the fight for freedom of expression should be at the forefront of of any other fights. That's the fight that we need to engage in in order to secure other rights and freedoms.

JY: You speak a number of languages, at what point did you start reading and exploring other languages than the one that you grew up speaking?

SBG: Oh, I think, well, we learn Arabic, French and English in school, and like, primary school, secondary school, so these are our languages that we take from school and from our readings, etc, and interaction with other people in Tunisia. But my first experience living in a country that speaks another language that I didn't know was in Iran. So I spent, in total, one and a half years there in Iran, where I started to learn a fourth language that I really intended to use. It's not a Latin language. It is a special language, although they use almost the same letters and alphabet with some difference in pronunciation and writing, but but it was easy for an Arab speaking native Tunisian to learn Farsi due to the familiarity with the alphabets and familiarity with the pronunciation of most of the alphabet itself. So, that's the first case where I was confronted with a foreign language. It was Iran. And then during my exile in the Netherlands, I was confronted by another family of languages, which is Dutch from the family of Germanic languages, and that's the fifth language that I learned in the Netherlands. 

JY: Wow. And how do you feel that language relates to expression? For you?

SBG: I mean…language, it's another word. It's another universe. Because language carries culture, carries knowledge, carries history, customs. So it's a universe that is living. And once you learn to speak a new language, actually, you embrace another culture. You are more open in the way of understanding and accepting differences between other cultures, and I think that's how it makes your openness much more elastic. Like you accept other cultures more, other identities, and then you are not afraid anymore. You're not scared anymore from other identities, let's say, because I think the problem of civilization and crisis or conflict starts from ignorance—like we don't know the others, we don't know the language, we don't know the customs, the culture, the heritage, the history. That's why we are scared of other people. So the language is the first, let's say, window to other identity and acceptance of other people

JY: And how many languages do you speak now?

SBG: Oh, well, I don't know. Five for sure, but since I moved to exile a second time now, to Spain, I started learning Spanish, and I've been traveling a lot in Italy, started learning some some Italian, but it is confusing, because both are Latin languages, and they share a lot of words, and so it is confusing, but it is funny. I'm not that young to learn quickly, but I'm 58 years old, so it's not easy for someone my age to learn a new language quickly, especially when you are confused about languages from the same family as Latin.

JY: Oh, that's beautiful, though. I love that. All right, now I want to dig into the history of [2011 EFF Award winner] Nawaat. How did it start?

SBG: So Nawaat started as a forum, like in the early 2000s, even before the phenomena of blogs. Blogs started later on, maybe 2003-4, when they became the main tools for expression. Before that, we had forums where people debate ideas, anything. So it started as a forum, multiple forums hosted on the same domain name, which is Nawaat.org and little by little, we adopted new technology. We moved it. We migrated the database from from the forum to CMS, built a new website, and then we started building the website or the blog as a collective blog where people can express themselves freely, and in a political context where, similar to many other countries, a lot of people express themselves through online platforms because they are not allowed to express themselves freely through television or radio or newspaper or magazines in in their own country. 

So it started mainly as an exiled media. It wasn't journalistically oriented or rooted in journalism. It was more of a platform to give voices to the diaspora, mainly the exiled Tunisian diaspora living in exile in France and in England and elsewhere. So we published Human Rights Reports, released news about the situation in Tunisia. We supported the opposition in Tunisia. We produced videos to counter the propaganda machine of the former President Ben Ali, etc. So that's how it started and evolved little by little through the changing in the tech industry, from forums to blogs and then to CMS, and then later on to to adopt social media accounts and pages. So this is how it started and why we created it that like that was not my decision. It was a friend of mine, we were living in exile, and then we said, “why not start a new platform to support the opposition and this movement in Tunisia?” And that's how we did it at first, it was fun, like it was something like it was a hobby. It wasn't our work. I was working somewhere else, and he was working something else. It was our, let's say hobby or pastime. And little by little, it became our, our only job, actually.

JY: And then, okay, so let's come to 2011. I want to hear now your perspective 14 years later. What role do you really feel that the internet played in Tunisia in 2011?

SBG: Well, it was a hybrid tool for liberation, etc. We know the context of the internet freedom policy from the US we know, like the evolution of Western interference within the digital sphere to topple governments that are deemed not friendly, etc. So Tunisia was like, a friend of the West, very friendly with France and the United States and Europe. They loved the dictatorship in Tunisia, in a way, because it secured the border. It secured the country from, by then, the Islamist movement, et cetera. So the internet did play a role as a platform to spread information and to highlight the human rights abuses that are taking place in Tunisia and to counter the narrative that is being manipulated then by the government agency, state agency, public broadcast channel, television news agency, etc. 

And I think we managed it like the big impact of the internet and the blogs by then and platforms like now. We adopted English. It was the first time that the Tunisian opposition used English in its discourse, with the objective to bridge the gap between the traditional support for opposition and human rights in Tunisia that was mainly was coming from French NGOs and human rights organization towards international support, and international support that is not only coming from the traditional, usual suspects of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Freedom House, et cetera. Now we wanted to broaden the spectrum of the support and to reach researchers, to reach activists, to reach people who are writing about freedom elsewhere. So we managed to break the traditional chain of support between human rights movements or organizations and human rights activists in Tunisia, and we managed to broaden that and to reach other people, other audiences that were not really touching what was going on in Tunisia, and I think that's how the Internet helped in the field of international support to the struggle in Tunisia and within Tunisia. 

The impact was, I think, important to raise awareness about human rights abuses in the country, so people who are not really politically knowledgeable about the situation due to the censorship and due to the problem of access to information which was lacking in Tunisia, the internet helped spread the knowledge about the situation and help speed the process of the unrest, actually. So I think these are the two most important impacts within the country, to broaden the spectrum of the people who are reached and targeted by the discourse of political engagement and activism, and the second is to speed the process of consciousness and then the action in the street. So this is how I think the internet helped. That's great, but it wasn't the main tool. I mean, the main tool was really people on the ground and maybe people who didn't have access to the internet at all.

JY: That makes sense. So what about the other work that you were doing around that time with the Arabloggers meetings and Global Voices and the Arab Techies network. Tell us about that.

SBG: Okay, so my position was the founding director of Global Voices Advocacy, I was hired to found this, this arm of advocacy within Global Voices. And that gave me the opportunity to understand other spheres, linguistic spheres, cultural spheres. So it was beyond Tunisia, beyond the Arab world and the region. I was in touch with activists from all over the world. I mean by activists, I mean digital activists, bloggers that are living in Latin America or in Asia or in Eastern Europe, et cetera, because one of the projects that I worked on was Threatened Voices, which was a map of all people who were targeted because of their online activities. That gave me the opportunity to get in touch with a lot of activists.

And then we organized the first advocacy meeting. It was in Budapest, and we managed to invite like 40 or 50 activists from all over the world, from China, Hong Kong, Latin America, the Arab world, Eastern Europe, and Africa. And that broadened my understanding of the freedom of expression movement and how technology is being used to foster human rights online, and then the development of blog aggregators in the world, and mainly in the Arab world, like, each country had its own blog aggregator. That helped me understand those worlds, as did Global Voices. Because Global Voices was bridging the gap between what is being written elsewhere, through the translation effort of Global Voices to the English speaking world and vice versa, and the role played by Global Voices and Global Voices Advocacy made the space and the distance between all those blogospheres feel very diminished. We were very close to the blogosphere movement in Egypt or in Morocco or in Syria and elsewhere. 

And that's how, Alaa Abd El Fattah and Manal Bahey El-Din Hassan and myself, we started thinking about how to establish the Arab Techies collective, because the needs that we identified—there was a gap. There was a lack of communication between pure techies, people who are writing code, building software, translating tools and even online language into Arabic, and the people who are using those tools. The bloggers, freedom of expression advocates, et cetera. And because there are some needs that were not really met in terms of technology, we thought that bringing these two words together, techies and activists would help us build new tools, translate new tools, make tools available to the broader internet activists. And that's how the Arab Techies collective was born in Cairo, and then through organizing the Arabloggers meetings two times in Beirut, and then the third in Tunisia, after the revolution. 

It was a momentum for us, because it, I think it was the first time in Beirut that we brought bloggers from all Arab countries, like it was like a dream that was really unimaginable but at a certain point, but we made that happen. And then what they call the Arab revolution happened, and we lost contact with each other, because everybody was really busy with his or her own country's affairs. So Ali was really fully engaged in Egypt myself, I came back to Tunisia and was fully engaged in Tunisia, so we lost contact, because all of us were having a lot of trouble in their own country. A lot of those bloggers, like who attended the Arab bloggers meetings, few of them were arrested, few of them were killed, like Bassel was in prison, people were in exile, so we lost that connection and those conferences that brought us together, but then we've seen SMEX like filling that gap and taking over the work that started by the Arab techies and the Arab bloggers conference.

JY: We did have the fourth one in 2014 in Amman. But it was not the same. Okay, moving forward, EFF recently published this blog post reflecting on what had just happened to Nawaat, when you and I were in Beirut together a few weeks ago. Can you tell me what happened?

SBG: What happened is that they froze the work of Nawaat. Legally, although the move wasn't legal, because for us, we were respecting the law in Tunisia. But they stopped the activity of Nawaat for one month. And this is according to an article from the NGO legal framework, that the government can stop the work of an NGO if the NGO doesn't respect certain legal conditions; for them Nawaat didn't provide enough documentation that was requested by the government, which is a total lie, because we always submit all documentation on time to the government. So they stopped us from doing our job, which is what we call in Tunisia, an associated media. 

It's not a company, it's not a business. It's not a startup. It is an NGO that is managing the website and the media, and now it has other activities, like we have the online website, the main website, but we also have a festival, which is a three day festival in our headquarters. We have offline debates. We bring actors, civil society, activists, politicians, to discuss important issues in Tunisia. We have a quality print magazine that is being distributed and sold in Tunisia. We have an innovation media incubation program where we support people to build projects through journalism and technology. So we have a set of offline projects that stopped for a month, and we also stopped publishing anything on the website and all our social media accounts. And now what? It's not the only one. They also froze the work of other NGOs, like the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, which is really giving support to women in Tunisia. Also the Tunisian Forum for Social and Economic Rights, which is a very important NGO giving support to grassroots movements in Tunisia. And they stopped Aswat Nissa, another NGO that is giving support to women in Tunisia. So they targeted impactful NGOs. 

So now what? It's not an exception, and we are very grateful to the wave of support that we got from Tunisian fellow citizens, and also friendly NGOs like EFF and others who wrote about the case. So this is the context in which we are living, and we are afraid that they will go for an outright ban of the network in the future. This is the worst case scenario that we are preparing ourselves for, and we might face this fate of seeing it close its doors and stop all offline activities that are taking place in Tunisia. Of course, the website will remain. We need to find a way to keep on producing, although it will really be risky for our on-the-ground journalists and video reporters and newsroom team, but we need to find a solution to keep the website alive. As an exiled media it's a very probable scenario and approach in the future, so we might go back to our exile media model, and we will keep on fighting.

JY: Yes, of course. I'm going to ask the final question. We always ask who someone’s free speech hero is, but I’m going to frame it differently for you, because you're somebody who influenced a lot of the way that I think about these topics. And so who's someone that has inspired you or influenced your work?

SBG: Although I started before the launch of WikiLeaks, for me Julian Assange was the concretization of the radical transparency movement that we saw. And for me, he is one of the heroes that really shaped a decade of transparency journalism and impacted not only the journalism industry itself, like even the established and mainstream media, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Der Spiegel, et cetera. Wikileaks partnered with big media, but not only with big media, also with small, independent newsrooms in the Global South. So for me, Julian Assange is an icon that we shouldn't forget. And he is an inspiration in the way he uses technology to to fight against big tech and state and spy agencies and war crimes.

At least some of this is coming to light:

Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting, often without the required disclosure that these are advertisements, and allowed the hacker to take control of more than 1,000 smartphones that power the company.

The hacker, who asked for anonymity because he feared retaliation from the company, said he reported the vulnerability to Doublespeed on October 31. At the time of writing, the hacker said he still has access to the company’s backend, including the phone farm itself. ...

MIT has shared the following statement following last night’s announcements by authorities in Rhode Island and Massachusetts about the individual responsible for the murders of Professor Nuno Loureiro at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, and two students during a mass shooting at Brown University. "We are grateful to all who played a part in identifying and tracking down the suspect in the killing of Prof. Loureiro. Our community continues to mourn and remember Nuno — an incredible scientist, colleague, mentor, and friend. Our thoughts are also with the Brown University community, which suffered so much loss this week.

As the authorities work to answer remaining questions, our continuing position is to refer to the law enforcement agencies and the U.S. Attorney of Massachusetts for information.

For now, our focus is on our community, on Nuno’s family, and all those who knew him.”

Remembering Nuno

• Letter to the MIT community from President Kornbluth (Dec 19)
• MIT News Obituary (Dec. 16)
• Letter to the MIT community (Dec. 16)

 The MIT News obituary will continue to be updated with remembrances from our community members who worked alongside Nuno. In time, the many communities Nuno belonged to will create opportunities to mourn his loss and celebrate his life.This page may be updated as there is additional public information to share.

The president’s posture toward Venezuela isn’t new. He previously has said the U.S. should seize oil from Iraq and Syria.

The state's senators and representatives are urging colleagues to continue funding the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

It’s the latest effort by Republican attorneys general to thwart dozens of climate litigation cases.

The city comptroller had said the asset manager was failing on climate change and should be fired, but the pension board tabled action.

The officials warned the Government Accountability Office of no “clear, consistent, and accurate guidance.”

A group of lawmakers who represents flood-affected areas helped craft a major Federal Emergency Management Agency reform bill.

The complaint takes aim at how solar or wind projects are deemed to have started construction.

The country's pledges to cut emissions by 60 percent by 2035 from 2013 levels fall short of what’s required and “threaten our lives,” according to a summary of the complaint.

Environmentalists and data experts said India’s air quality measurement standards are looser than countries such as the United States, so moderate readings often disguise dangerous pollution levels.

The more than 250,000 refugees fled violence and instability at home in Mali.

The decision comes amid a rise in the damage done to physical assets by floods, storms and wildfires.

Students can take many possible routes through MIT’s curriculum, which can zigag through different departments, linking classes and disciplines in unexpected ways. With so many options, charting an academic path can be overwhelming, but a new tool called NerdXing is here to help.

The brainchild of senior Julianna Schneider and other students in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Undergraduate Advisory Group (UAG), NerdXing lets students search for a class and see all the other classes students have gone on to take in the past, including options that are off the beaten track.

“I hope that NerdXing will democratize course knowledge for everyone,” Schneider says. “I hope that for anyone who's a freshman and maybe hasn't picked their major yet, that they can go to NerdXing and start with a class that they would maybe never consider — and then discover that, ‘Oh wait, this is perfect for this really particular thing I want to study.’”

As a student double-majoring in artificial intelligence and decision-making and in mathematics, and doing research in the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Schneider knows the benefits of interdisciplinary studies. It’s a part of the reason why she joined the UAG, which advises the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing’s leadership as it advances education and research at the intersections between computing, engineering, the arts, and more.

Through all of her activities, Schneider seeks to make people’s lives better through technology.

“This process of finding a problem in my community and then finding the right technology to solve that — that sort of approach and that framework is what guides all the things I do,” Schneider says. “And even in robotics, the things that I care about are guided by the sort of skills that I think we need to develop to be able to have meaningful applications.”

From Albania to MIT

Before she ever touched a robot or wrote code, Schneider was an accomplished young classical pianist in Albania. When she discovered her passion for robotics at age 13, she applied some of the skills she had learned while playing piano.

“I think on some fundamental level, when I was a pianist, I thought constantly about my motor dynamics as a human being, and how I execute really complex skills but do it over and over again at the top of my ability,” Schneider says. “When it came to robotics, I was building these robotic arms that also had to operate at the top of their ability every time and do really complex tasks. It felt kind of similar to me, like a fun crossover.”

Schneider joined her high school’s robotics team as a middle schooler, and she was so immediately enamored that she ended up taking over most of the coding and building of the team’s robot. She went on to win 14 regional and national awards across the three teams she led throughout middle and high school. It was clear to her that she’d found her calling.

NerdXing wasn’t Schneider’s first experience building new technology. At just 16, she built an app meant to connect English-speaking volunteers from her international school in Tirana, Albania, to local charities that only posted jobs in Albanian. By last year, the platform, called VoluntYOU, had 18 ambassadors across four continents. It has enabled volunteers to give out more than 2,000 burritos in Reno, Nevada; register hundreds of signatures to support women’s rights legislation in Albania; and help with administering Covid-19 vaccines to more than 1,200 individuals a day in Italy.

Schneider says her experience at an international school encouraged her to recognize problems and solutions all around her.

“When I enter a new community and I can immediately be like, ‘Oh wait, if we had this tool, that would be so cool and that would help all these people,’ I think that’s just a derivative of having grown up in a place where you hear about everyone’s super different life experiences,” she says.

Schneider describes NerdXing as a continuation of many of the skills she picked up while building VoluntYOU.

“They were both motivated by seeing a challenge where I thought, ‘Wait, we have the tech skills to build that. This is something that I can envision the solution to.’ And then I wanted to actually go and make that a reality,” Schneider says.

Robotics with a positive impact

At MIT, Schneider started working in the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory of Professor Sangbae Kim, where she has now participated in three research projects, one of which she’s co-authoring a paper on. She’s part of a team that tests how robots, including the famous back-flipping mini cheetah, move, in order to see how they could complement humans in high-stakes scenarios.

Most of her work has revolved around crafting controllers, including one hybrid-learning and model-based controller that is well-suited to robots with limited onboard computing capacity. It would allow the robot to be used in regions with less access to technology.

“It’s not just doing technology for technology's sake, but because it will bridge out into the world and make a positive difference. I think legged robotics have some of the best potential to actually be a robotic partner to human beings in the scenarios that are most high-stakes,” Schneider says.

Schneider hopes to further robotic capabilities so she can find applications that will service communities around the world. One of her goals is to help create tools that allow a surgeon to operate on a patient a long distance away. 

To take a break from academics, Schneider has channeled her love of the arts into MIT’s vibrant social dancing scene. This year, she’s especially excited about country line dancing events where the music comes on and students have to guess the choreography.

“I think it's a really fun way to make friends and to connect with the community,” she says.

MIT Director of Dining Andrew Mankus has been serving the Institute community since his arrival on campus in June. He brings a wealth of energy and experience — and a problem-solver’s sensibilities — to food service at MIT. Most recently, he led dining at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which has won the top prize in student dining nine years in a row. Prior to that, Mankus worked in civic centers and large commissaries, among other dining environments. In this Q&A, Mankus speaks about what makes a standout dining environment on a college campus, his tenure so far at MIT, and some dining plans for the near future.

Q: What’s the secret sauce to success in academic dining?

A: You start with the obvious thing: The food’s got to be good. You can’t just serve pizza and chicken tenders, but you also can’t leave them out — students want and need their comfort food. 

Students also want food that’s authentic. The dining hall is like their home away from home on campus. So if you’re calling something “Northern Indian,” it can’t taste like Southern Indian, because the student from Northern India knows exactly how it’s supposed to taste. And if someone tells me it doesn’t taste like what they had at home, I need to ask, “How should it taste? Let’s talk to our chefs.” Students should see that we’re willing to do that, willing to go there for them. 

Collegiate dining is not like anything else in the food industry, because we are an integral part of the whole campus-life experience. We look at how dining can help build community around food and how to elevate cultural aspects and authenticity through food. 

Q: How do you manage authenticity at a large scale? 

A: It sounds silly, but it’s really one meal at a time. But as somebody who comes from an operations background, it’s also about standard operating procedures. We follow recipes, we know how many people are coming through the door, we know how much to prep — a whole bunch of things. You need to know how many students like certain things and how to be ready for them — so when you’re cooking things like stir fries, students can customize their own ingredients. It turns out you can cook something hot and fresh and make it authentic at the same time. 

I like to tell people I didn’t go to school for culinary. I went to school for management. So basically, I’m a professional problem-solver. I just found my passion in food service. I like to solve problems, and MIT likes to solve problems. What better place to have this skill set? 

Q: What were your first impressions of dining at MIT?

A: The thing about MIT is: The product is here. We just need to do the things we should be doing here — like integrating technology, providing service, updating meal plans, and the like — and do them better. There’s nothing Earth-shattering about it. We just need to elevate our program to new levels. 

I will say, the geography of MIT’s campus is a real challenge. Many colleges have dining programs that are built around concentrated residential housing. This lets them serve a lot of meals in fewer locations. MIT has 11 dorms spread across campus. There are six dining halls and a dozen retail locations. Students who live on the west side of campus are often on east campus, away from their dining halls and meal plans, for most of the day. It’s a complicated landscape, and none of it is easy to change. 

Q: What are your biggest lessons so far?

A: To start with: Every college student has limited time, and MIT students are certainly busy. In addition to course work, pretty much everybody is involved in an extracurricular activity or athletics for a couple of hours. 

This is where campus dining can help. When students only have a 30-minute window between classes, we need to figure out how to feed them. If we can figure this out, it’s a win — and if we can do that with their meal plan, they’ll be more likely to eat on campus.

I’m also starting to understand MIT students’ value equation. That’s always the No. 1 thing — and I’m not just talking about the price of a meal plan. Value could mean a lot of different things. It definitely could be the cash, but it could also be quality, access, nutrition, convenience, operating hours, using swipes — whatever. I want to know how to make their meal plan as valuable to them as possible. 

I don’t have the data for MIT just because I haven’t been here long enough, but it’s broadly true that college students eat a little more often than four times a day. They snack. They graze. Here, students don’t have the same options because of their schedules, the meal plans, and geography. We need to figure out where MIT students are and try to meet them there. 

Basically, I want campus dining to lead with a students-first mentality. Does this or that idea bring value? Does it contribute to campus life and the student experience? If the answer is yes, then we move on to the next step. Let’s put all the ideas on the table, and let’s be transparent and tell the students: There are going to be things we try that work, and some things we try that might not. 

Q: What’s an example of something you’ve tried since you got here? 

A: I’ll give you three. First, we started a new grab-and-go lunch program in Baker. That’s very popular. 

Second, we ran a promotion to give away MIT Dining Dollars to students on the meal plan and to students in cook-for-yourself locations. It was basically to provide more value in the meal plan and raise awareness about Dining Dollars, which students can use at any dining hall or retail location on campus and the Concord Market. When I met with students about it, they asked me: “What's the catch?” I told them, “It’s pretty simple. I want you to eat with us. I don’t want you to go across the street.” Also, it helps build morale with dining staff. People get into dining to make food for people to eat. They don’t make food so people can throw it away.

Third, we’re starting a student ambassador program. They will be an extension of our management team and will help us tell the story of campus dining through the lenses of students — how things are going on campus or in their houses. 

Q: Do you have plans for working with graduate students at MIT? 

A: This is a huge area of opportunity for dining at MIT. Graduate students are not on meal plans, because the plans don’t fit their needs, but many of them live on or near campus. What if there was some kind of pilot program that was more Dining Dollar-based, where it suits a graduate student and their family, or it doesn’t expire and can be very portable? I’m pretty sure we can come up with something that fits their needs better than grocery shopping and cooking for yourself in Cambridge. 

Q: What’s your favorite thing to cook? 

A: Lately, it’s been a chicken fricassee. It’s my wife’s father’s recipe. It’s Hungarian, like a paprikash chicken. You boil onions and water for a really long time and load it up with paprika. It takes hours to make. But when you do it right, it’s really, really good. 

This is an edited version of an article first published by the MIT Division of Student Life.

In a field defined by discovering, designing, and processing the materials that underpin modern technology, Diran Apelian ScD ’73 has a resounding message: Reuse can’t remain just the focus of a PhD thesis or a startup. It needs to be engineered from the beginning.

Apelian, a metallurgist and MIT alumnus known for his pioneering work in molten metal processing, framed his plea with a look at society’s growing needs for materials like copper, nickel, iron, and manganese — and how demand for them has surged alongside population growth over the past 150 years.

“We’re using more and more stuff — that’s the takeaway,” said Apelian, the speaker for the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE)’s Wulff Lecture on Nov. 19. “Now, where’s all this stuff coming from? It doesn’t come from Home Depot. It comes from the Earth — planet Earth — where we take the ores out of the Earth, and we have to extract them out.”

And more and more everyday goods depend on those ores, depleting the planet’s supplies while expending massive amounts of energy to do it, Apelian said. As one example, Apelian pointed out that computer chips, which incorporated 11 elements in 1980, now contain 52.

Instead of simply taking, processing, and eventually discarding materials — often after passing them through inefficient recycling systems — Apelian proposes another approach: designing materials and products so that the value inside them can be recovered.

Examples include aerospace-grade materials made from scrap aluminum alloys, optimized using AI-driven alloy blending, and shredding lithium-ion batteries to produce “black mass,” a mixture rich in cobalt, nickel, and lithium that can be refined into new cathode materials for the next generation of batteries.

“Sustainable growth, sustainability, the development of the planet Earth is a challenge,” said Apelian — one that materials scientists and engineers are in a prime position to tackle. “It’s a profound change, but it requires material issues and challenges that are also an opportunity for us.”

Reshaping materials design

The Wulff Lecture is no stranger to sustainability and climate issues — past speakers have discussed green iron and steel production and hydrogen-powered fuel cells. But what marked Apelian’s talk was a call for an overhaul of how materials are produced, used, and — crucially — used again. The key, he said, is “materials circularity,” which keeps Earth-derived minerals moving through the economy as long as possible, instead of being extracted, processed, used, and thrown away.

Apelian referenced the “materials tetrahedron,” the classic framework connecting processing, structure, properties, and performance — the foundation underlying the development of most materials around us. Highlighting what’s missing, he asked DMSE students about materials at the end of their life cycle: “You don’t really spend too much time on it, right?”

He proposed a new framework of concentric circles that reimagines the materials life cycle — from mining, extraction, processing, and design, to new phases focused on repair, reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling — “all the R’s,” he said.

One pathway to more sustainable materials use, Apelian said, is tackling post-consumer waste — the everyday products people throw away once they’re done using them.

“How can we take the waste and recover it and reuse it?” Apelian asked.

One example is aluminum scrap processing, which has seen several advances in recent years. Traditionally, end-of-life vehicles were stripped of valuable parts and fed through giant shredders; the resulting mix of metals were melted together, forfeiting much of its engineered value, and “downcycled” into cast alloys used for products like engine blocks or patio furniture.

Today, advancements in automated sensor-based sorting, machine learning and robotics, and improved melting practices mean aluminum scrap can now be directed into higher-value applications, including aerospace components and structural automotive parts — beams and supports that form a vehicle’s frame.

“So that’s the aim, that’s the motivation: creating value out of waste,” Apelian said.

He highlighted ongoing efforts to modernize scrap processing. He is a co-founder of Solvus Global Inc., which develops systems to convert metal scrap into high-value products, and Valis Insights, a Solvus spinout that uses sensor-based systems to identify and sort metal scraps with high precision.

At the University of California at Irvine — where Apelian serves as distinguished professor of materials science and engineering — his group is “studying the DNA” of mixed scrap, analyzing and testing blends to prepare them for high-value applications. He has also done significant work in lithium-ion battery recycling, including co-inventing the process, commercialized by Ascend Elements, that shreds batteries and produces as a byproduct the black mass used as feedstock for new cathode materials.

Believing in circularity

Apelian also pointed to ways of extracting value from industrial waste: recovering metals from red mud — the highly alkaline byproduct of aluminum production — and reclaiming rare-earth elements from mine tailings. And he spotlighted the work of Shaolou Wei ScD ’22, a DMSE alum joining the faculty in 2026, who has developed ways to bypass the long, energy-intensive sequences traditionally used to make many alloys — reducing energy consumption and eliminating processing steps.

Stressing that business models and policy play a critical role in enabling a circular economy, Apelian offered a scenario: “Right now, in America, when you buy a car, it’s yours. At the end of life, it’s your problem.” Owners can trade it in or sell it, but ultimately, they need to dispose of it, he said. He then mused about reversing this responsibility — requiring manufacturers to take cars back at end of life. “I’ve got to tell you, when that happens, things are going to be designed very differently.”

Audience member Evia Rodriguez, a senior in materials science and engineering, was struck by Apelian’s emphasis on circularity. She pointed to Patagonia — one of Apelian’s examples — as a company weaving circularity into its business model by encouraging customers to repair clothing instead of replacing it.

“That definitely represents an optimistic idea of what could happen,” Rodriguez said. “I tend to be more skeptical, but I like to think that we could get there someday, and that we could have all companies operating on a more sustainable front.”

First-year undergraduate Brandon Mata shared a similar outlook — balancing doubt with hope. “I think it’s easy to be pessimistic about how companies are going to act. You’re going to say people are always going to be greedy. They’re going to be selfish,” Mata said. “But regardless, I think it’s still important to have somebody like that saying, even just stating, ‘It’s important that we do this, and doing this would clearly benefit the world.’”

Yanna Tenorio, a first-year undergraduate who’s interested in the energy side of materials science, zoomed out to the overarching questions raised in the talk. “Thinking about what happens at the end of these materials’ life, how can they be reused? How can we take accountability for them?” Tenorio asked. “What I find very exciting about material science in general is how much there is to be discovered.”