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.

This essay was written with Kasra Rafi, and originally appeared in The Guardian.

Earlier this month, about 40 top mathematicians gathered at OpenAI’s offices to discuss the future of their profession. The meeting was off-the-record, but if recent articles by mathematicians are any guide, it was mostly pretty glum. People fear for their jobs, their careers and the work they love.

We think the contrary view is more likely, at least in the short-term. AI models are nowhere near as capable as experienced academic mathematicians.

This isn’t to say that AIs aren’t producing stunning mathematical results at the level of PhD researchers. In mid-May, OpenAI ...

Growing up in Waverly, Tennessee, Gage Coon spent much of his childhood outside. His family had everything from chickens to horses and even an emu named Big Bird. Coon and his cousins would explore the woods surrounding their home, and his father, a mechanic, taught him how to build and repair things around the house. His mother, a secretary at the local high school’s vocational school who loves gardening and birdwatching, encouraged him to experience as much of the world around him as he could.

That hands-on upbringing, which taught Coon to appreciate the natural world and the processes that sustain it, continues to influence how he approaches science today.

Now entering his third year as a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Coon studies some of the smallest organisms on Earth: microbes. His research focuses on how microorganisms cycle carbon and sulfur through the environment and how to leverage those processes to help address climate change. Though he studies organisms too small to see with the naked eye, the experimental nature of his work — whether in the lab or on a research vessel in the open ocean — is especially satisfying.

“I think I enjoy that physicality of seeing what I’m working with, seeing its change, and being able to touch it,” Coon says.

Coon did not initially set out to study microbiology. His interest in science began with chemistry. A high school chemistry teacher and a summer program introduced him to the subject. But later, at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, he joined a lab focused on microbial biogeochemistry and was delighted to find a field that brought together the different areas that interested him: chemistry, the environment, and the larger climate processes shaping our Earth.

The transition from rural Tennessee to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and MIT has been a significant one. As a first-generation student, he did not learn about PhD programs until several years into college.

Once he discovered academic research, however, Coon was drawn to the possibility of spending his career learning.

“I discovered this world of academia, and so I was really excited when I learned about it,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, constant learning. That is exactly what I want to do forever.’”

Coon began studying the microbes that drive carbon and sulfur cycling in marine sediments as an undergraduate, eventually joining research cruises to investigate these processes firsthand.

His first research cruise, in 2022 after his second year of college, took him to the Atlantic continental slope to study methane seeps and how microbes prevent this methane from escaping to our atmosphere. For Coon, experiencing the ocean up close changed the way he understood the microscopic organisms he was studying.

“It is very powerful seeing yourself in the middle of the ocean, with a whole other world of complex life beneath you,” he says.

At MIT, working with his advisor Tanja Bosak, a professor of geobiology, Coon has continued studying microbial carbon and sulfur cycling, but with a greater emphasis on the applications. One of his major projects explores how microbes could be used to reduce methane emissions from wastewater treatment.

When wastewater is treated, microbes break down organic material in large tanks called anaerobic digesters. One of the final products of this process is the powerful greenhouse gas methane. However, Coon and his colleagues found a way to change what the microbes produce by adding gypsum, a waste product that is created from fertilizer manufacturing

The system uses the added gypsum to turn the methane into carbonate, which can be used to make cement, agriculture, and pharmaceuticals. The process also produces elemental sulfur, necessary for global fertilizer production, which is currently sources from oil and gas refinement. The approach effectively turns two waste products, sewage and waste gypsum, into useful materials while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

For Coon, the possibility of creating a system that is both environmentally beneficial and economically useful is central to the project. Now that the laboratory experiments have ended, the researchers are looking toward conducting pilot-scale testing. Coon and his advisors have been communicating with companies interested in adapting the system to larger facilities, and hope the technology can eventually move beyond the laboratory.

“If enough small places start doing their pilot-scale studies, then hopefully you could convince some place like Boston or another big city to do this and really make a contribution to our global goal to decrease emissions on the gigaton scale,” he says.

The wastewater project is only one part of Coon’s PhD research. He also studies geological processes that could produce molecular hydrogen, a potential carbon-free energy source. His work examines how iron-rich rocks break down and generate hydrogen underground. He is continuing his thesis work by focusing on microbial competition for acetate, and what this means for global methane emissions from coastal wetlands. This work could improve future climate predictions and support engineered mitigation efforts to decrease emissions from these wetlands. 

Across these projects, Coon is interested in the connection between the microscopic and the massive. But Coon’s PhD has also given him an opportunity to think about science beyond his own research.

One of the parts of graduate school he has enjoyed most is mentoring younger researchers. He has worked with a handful of students through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and from Tufts University, teaching them laboratory techniques and experimental geobiology.

Outside the lab, Coon maintains some of the same connection to the natural world that characterized his childhood in Tennessee. He spends time hiking to explore local geology, playing bluegrass guitar, and speed-solving Rubik’s Cubes. 

Looking ahead, Coon sees himself continuing in academia, working in government, or helping to bring environmental technologies into practice.

What matters most, he says, is continuing to produce knowledge that can help people understand and potentially improve the world around them.

“I do think, no matter what,” he says, “I’ll be somewhere thinking about how microscopic life connects to the global ecosystem and carbon emissions.”

EFF, Access Now, and Data Privacy Brasil are putting forward recommendations to strengthen robust privacy and data protection safeguards in the context of Brazil's elections. The recommendations stress the close relationship between violations of personal data protection and challenges to the integrity of electoral processes. They underscore how privacy and data protection guarantees are a crucial tool for curbing the targeted spread of false or manipulative content and other problematic strategies used by political actors that are amplified by digital technologies such as artificial intelligence systems. 

The recommendations are part of a broader regional initiative and build on the legal and institutional safeguards already in place in Brazil. They seek to promote greater coordination among oversight institutions, civil society, and digital platforms, and encourage the solid implementation of privacy and data protection guarantees as drivers of electoral integrity. Read the full document below. 

The Link Between the Integrity of the Electoral Process and Privacy 

Protecting the integrity of the electoral process in the face of internet and social media use is a challenge that many policymakers are addressing or are willing to address. Online, content that can affect the integrity of the electoral process is increasingly personalized. This phenomenon is so concerning that it has been identified as one of the main global short- and medium-term risks. 

In an era of generative AI, the economic cost and technical difficulty of producing and spreading false or synthetic content to deceive, manipulate, or simulate authenticity have been considerably reduced. That intensifies concern over the integrity of the electoral process. Meanwhile, online privacy and personal data protection remain unfinished business in Latin America. 

There is an intrinsic connection between the ability to collect and process large amounts of personal data and the way false or manipulative content is created and distributed—on social media and messaging apps in particular, and on the internet in general. For this reason, applying strict laws and policies on personal data protection and privacy makes it possible to reduce the impact of false or manipulative content. This is especially important in electoral contexts, where such content affects and impoverishes public debate, directly affecting political and electoral rights and the integrity of the electoral process. 

This phenomenon predates the emergence of the internet. However, the rise of new technologies accelerates the generation and spread of false and manipulative content. This is supported by the very economic model that sustains the platforms, amplifying its effectiveness and reach. On the one hand, social media platforms have content recommendation algorithms that use personal data to generate profiles to which they can then serve targeted advertising content, including explicitly political propaganda. This technique is known as "microtargeting." 

Political microtargeting seeks to have a direct or indirect impact on democracy. It is used to persuade voters, to encourage or discourage turnout at the polls, or to raise funds using information that is deliberately taken out of context, inaccurate, or erroneous. 

The control exercised by these companies raises serious concerns about people's rights. By having access to massive amounts of personal information, these companies have the ability to shape the content that users see and interact with. This happens through the construction of profiles that can reveal habits, social relationships, political preferences, and opinions, to mention a few examples. Personal data is the fuel that amplifies risks to the integrity of the electoral process. That’s true whether it’s provided by the users themselves or generated by the platforms from their interactions online. 

For disinformation actors, access to sophisticated tools—such as those used to create "deepfakes" through generative AI, or "bots" programmed to spread content and seek to manipulate public opinion—boosts the effectiveness of this microtargeting in terms of quality and scalability, making it harder to detect as false or manipulative content. AI-generated avatars and synthetic characters that simulate voters, influencers, hosts, commentators, or community leaders can produce footage that appears spontaneous, fabricate the voices of artificial political actors, and make it harder for users to identify if a given public statement was created or mediated by technology. 

In this context, paid promotion with nanotargeting seeks to reach increasingly specific profiles with customized content, and AI-based tools are used to assess and map its impact on social networks. Drawing on the personal data of groups of voters, profiles of "synthetic voters" are created to test messages or strategies in search of the most efficient way to influence real voters. 

This rapid expansion of AI systems and hyper-personalization with data can lead to a problem of "epistemic erosion" for democratic societies, as pointed out by the UN's Independent Scientific Panel on AI Governance in 2026. 

At Access Now, Data Privacy Brasil, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we point to the enforcement of personal data protection laws and public privacy policies as an efficient mechanism for improving the quality of our democracies and reducing the manipulation of public discourse in digital environments and its impact in electoral contexts. Measures to broaden access to information for electoral decision-making, and to ensure transparency about campaigns' and political parties' use of digital technologies built on the massive processing of personal data, also play a relevant role in guaranteeing the integrity of the electoral process. 

Recommendations for Safeguarding the Integrity of Electoral Processes in Brazil in the Face of New Technologies 

Concern about the effects of spreading false, manipulative, or deliberately decontextualized content is particularly heightened in electoral contexts. From Argentina to Mexico, many countries in Latin America, including Brazil, are holding or will hold significant electoral processes in the coming period. 

Providing the public with quality information from a range of sources is an essential element for the exercise of political rights. In order to safeguard the electoral process, these countries must enforce their privacy and personal data protection laws through their competent authorities, in coordination with their judiciaries and electoral courts. 

Access Now, Data Privacy Brasil, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation propose the following recommendations to protect the integrity of the electoral process by guaranteeing privacy and data protection during electoral contexts: 

1. Strengthen personal data protection guarantees and policies as a key element for the integrity of the electoral process, in particular the principles of necessity, purpose, and proportionality:

• Prohibit the processing of sensitive personal data (such as philosophical beliefs and the labeling of ideological leanings), including inferred data, that reveals or could reveal people's political preferences for the purpose of targeting political content. In electoral contexts, the processing of sensitive personal data is only legitimate when the person has given their consent in advance, explicitly, and with strictly limited and clearly disclosed purposes of use and transfer. 
• Processing must be carried out only on personal data that is strictly necessary for the purpose being pursued. 
• Prohibit adding users to instant messaging groups for political outreach purposes, except in exceptional cases involving lists of political party members or where prior and informed consent has been given by the data subject. 
• Free, specific, and informed consent means that the person is able to make a real choice, set apart from other choices, and does not run any risk of deception, intimidation, coercion, denial of access to products or services, or other significant negative consequences if they do not give their consent. 

2. Political parties, federations, and coalitions must improve the information made available to the general public about their personal data processing activities in electoral contexts, including: 

• The personal data processing policy adopted, in compliance with data protection legislation and electoral legislation, including the measures adopted to prevent breaches of the general protection principles, to record personal data processing operations, to obtain consent appropriately, and to ensure technical and administrative security in data processing; 
• Communication channels where the data subject can obtain information about the processing of their personal data, exercise the rights provided by law, and request to opt out of receiving electronic and instant messages. 
• Information about the profiling they carry out for electoral purposes and about the procurement and use of data-based digital technologies in this context, including for purposes of paid promotion, microtargeting, network analysis, and prediction of voters' reactions or behavior. 

3. Strengthen cooperation mechanisms between the National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) and the Superior Electoral Court in order to: 

• Improve communication channels and strengthen joint initiatives to oversee compliance with data protection guarantees in the electoral context, with the publication of periodic enforcement reports. 
• Identify and dismantle coordinated strategies that compromise the integrity of the electoral process and carry out online activities that pretend to be "organic" and citizen-based when they are in fact funded or coordinated by a party, government, or company, such as bot farms, fake personal accounts managed by a single entity, AI avatars and synthetic characters that simulate real voters in order to manipulate public opinion, among others. 
• Within the scope of their powers, require the preparation and publication of a data protection impact assessment in cases involving the use of sensitive personal data or emerging technologies for voter profiling. 

4. Authorities, political parties, communicators, and social media platforms must ensure, as far as possible, that the population has access to adequate and relevant information for electoral decision-making. 

• Political parties, electoral authorities, and data protection authorities must allocate a percentage of their communications budget to warning about the consequences of microtargeting in electoral contexts; and about the use of AI avatars or synthetic voters to simulate support, rejection, outrage, or spontaneous political mobilization. 
• Strengthen alliances with fact-checkers and other relevant communicators, such as civil society organizations, influencers, and others, to identify campaigns that compromise the integrity of the electoral process and to inform the public about such alliances through different channels, including official government channels.
• Systematize the electoral proposals developed by candidates and their electoral platforms according to thematic areas to facilitate comparison between political parties. 
• Agree on strategies between authorities and online platform companies, including social media platforms and chatbots, at the start of electoral periods, so that priority is given to content developed by electoral authorities. 
• Every body, protocol, or policy created that involves authorities or public entities must be communicated in accordance with proactive transparency standards. 

5. Platforms must disable microtargeting tools for political and electoral content during previously established periods. 

6. Authorities, technical actors, academics, civil society, and/or social media platforms must collaborate in creating an algorithmic impact analysis lab that makes it possible to oversee compliance with these recommendations. 

• Produce reports on the results achieved, in particular those that document the existence of microtargeting, the use of personal data for targeting, and exposure to varied content in electoral contexts. 
• Establish strict cybersecurity protocols so that the labs prevent access to real users' private information. 

7. The authorities responsible for overseeing personal data protection and electoral matters must have sufficient functional, economic, and technical autonomy and independence to guarantee the proper exercise of their powers. 

A protein’s function is determined by its structure, and structure — the way a protein folds — is determined by its sequence of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. 

Many methods for designing novel proteins, including examples that could bind to a disease-causing molecule in our cells, involve a two-step process: The structure comes first, and then a machine-learning framework generates a repertoire of sequences that could potentially adopt that structure. 

In nature, many different amino acid sequences can fold into the same structure. At the same time, one amino acid sequence can potentially adopt different structures depending on the protein’s flexibility or a functional trigger. Therefore, when researchers use artificial intelligence to design new proteins, the challenge is to guide AI to “see” that there are many potentially useful answers — that many sequences can adopt the same fold

“For years, the field has measured success by asking whether a model can reproduce the protein sequence that evolution happened to select — our work shows that this isn’t the best metric for protein design,” says Amy E. Keating, Department of Biology head, Jay A. Stein (1968) Professor of Biology, professor of biological engineering, and senior author of a paper recently published in PNAS. 

PottsMPNN, a new machine-learning framework developed in the Department of Biology, incorporates the physical principles that govern protein structure and stability, improving sequence generation and the ability to predict how mutations will affect a protein’s stability. In other words, the model has a better understanding of the sequence-energy landscape, meaning the relationship between the identity of each amino acid and the stability of the protein.

Adding this framework to a protein design pipeline will allow researchers to design structurally feasible proteins with sequences that don’t resemble those of any native protein. 

“If we’re thinking about a completely novel, designed structure, there would be no native sequence to compare it to,” says graduate student and lead author Foster Birnbaum. “What we actually care about is how likely the generated sequences are to fold into the desired structures, how well the model understands the sequence-energy landscape, and how well it can predict the effect of mutations on the stability of the protein.” 

Beyond the noise 

In the same way that AI has recently powered some dramatic social changes, so too has machine learning impacted the pace and breadth of fundamental biological research. Only recently has it become possible to reliably use a computational model to generate a protein structure or sequence. Perhaps the most widely used model today, however, was released in 2022. 

“For a field that’s moving as fast as machine learning in biology, that model has not been surpassed — we’ve been trying to understand why that is, and what it is about that model that makes it so useful,” Birnbaum says. 

Birnbaum was first interested in strategic applications of something researchers call “noise,” or adding variations to a protein structure during training. Noise decreases the tendency of the model to overly mimic native sequences, increasing the diversity of structures for which it’s able to generate sequences.

PottsMPNN also uses a pairwise distribution to capture interactions between amino acids. The ability to account for the physical interactions between all 20 possible sequence options at a pair of positions in the protein is a key reason that PottsMPNN more accurately models the sequence-energy landscape than other methods. 

Finally, Birnbaum says, they introduced sets of evolutionarily related sequences into training the PottsMPNN framework to teach the model how different sequences can adopt the same folded structure.

Birnbaum acknowledges that in trying to shift away from adhering to native sequences, incorporating evolutionary information is, in some ways, still a reliance on them. But PottsMPNN succeeded in demonstrating that as the model depends less and less on native sequences, structural compatibility and energy prediction, including for novel proteins, improve. 

Protein design in the age of AI

“Once we can design any protein we want, that enables us to do a potentially scary amount of biological engineering,” Birnbaum says. “It’s a difficult task, but I’m really optimistic about this century’s progress in biology.”

Birnbaum hopes that the model could be further improved and fine-tuned for a specific task, which has in the past led to better predictions, for example, on the outcome or consequence of a particular mutation. 

Ultimately, according to Keating, “Our methods move the field toward designing useful new-to-nature proteins for diverse applications while providing a stronger foundation for future advances.” 

Modern processors are fast, in part, because they guess. Rather than waiting to find out which way a program will branch, a chip predicts the likely path and races ahead. When the guess is right, time is saved. When it's wrong, the work is discarded, but traces of it linger. Since the Spectre vulnerability was disclosed in 2018, attackers have known how to read those traces to pull secrets out of memory they should never see.

Chipmakers and operating system developers have spent years building defenses. A new study from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) shows that a key assumption behind many of them doesn't hold.

The defenses work by wiping or isolating the processor's prediction machinery, removing anything an attacker might have planted. The catch, as PhD student Daniël Trujillo and MIT Assistant Professor Mengjia Yan point out, is that the wipe and the moment the predictions get used can't happen at the same instant. There is always a gap — sometimes only a handful of instructions wide. Anything that runs in that gap can dirty the machinery all over again. The researchers call this class of attack "TONTOU."

Mind the gap

Their contribution is a reliable way to get code into that gap. Computers constantly pause whatever they're doing to handle interrupts: small, routine tasks triggered by timers, network traffic, and hardware. Ordinary programs can set those timers themselves. By tuning a timer with enough precision, Trujillo and Yan can make the processor take its detour at exactly the wrong moment, and the interrupt execution does the contaminating. They call the technique "interrupt injection."

The team tested four processor generations from Intel and AMD, and got mispredictions on both. On Intel chips, the attack defeated two different protections, one built in software for older parts, one built into the silicon of newer ones. Curiously, the newer protection held firm on one Intel generation and failed on another, suggesting chipmakers implement the same nominal defense in meaningfully different ways.

AMD's defense, called saferet, cleans the prediction machinery immediately before each use, leaving a vulnerable window just two instructions wide, which typically execute within tens of nanoseconds. The researchers hit it anyway, by slowing down the processor at that exact spot to make the target easier to strike.

From a bad guess to a password file

To show what this means in practice, the team built a working exploit on an AMD system running a current Linux kernel. They first stripped away a defense that scrambles where the operating system sits in memory, succeeding in all 10 tries in about nine minutes each. That helped them read protected memory at roughly five bytes per second — slow, but fast enough to locate and copy "/etc/shadow," the file storing the system's root password hash, in half their attempts.

The paper suggests cleaning the prediction machinery a second time, when the interrupt finishes. That looks workable on AMD. On Intel it may backfire: Because the attack relies on the interrupt leaving behind a consistent state rather than any particular one, the standard fix could make the attack more reliable, not less. Newer Intel chips include a dedicated instruction that appears to help.

The other option, blocking interrupts during the vulnerable window, would likely cost too much performance to be practical.

Trujillo and Yan notified AMD and Intel in early February and reached Linux kernel maintainers in March, coordinating with AMD to warn cloud providers and other downstream customers. AMD then released a patch that mitigates the attack, which can be obtained by updating your operating system. Their code is publicly available.

The research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research under an award made through the U.S. Department of War, and ACE, one of the seven centers in JUMP 2.0, a program sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It was presented at both Black Hat USA and USENIX Security this month.

OpenAI disrupted a social engineering group from Cambodia that used ChatGPT. Its scope is impressive:

The network simultaneously conducted multiple types of scams, often blending elements from different schemes. For instance, operators used dating personas to build trust before introducing fraudulent investment opportunities involving cryptocurrencies and spot gold trading. Other users engaged in lengthy romantic conversations with targets using fictitious identities, posed as representatives of online gambling platforms offering fake bonuses and winnings, or impersonated law enforcement agencies to tell targets they needed to pay fines for committing serious criminal offenses...

A new set of modular components allows users to create reconfigurable smart devices with electrical connections that keep working no matter which shape the structure forms.

This electrical modularity can enable engineers to design interactive devices that can sense which shape they have taken, without the need for external wires. For instance, the modular components, which the researchers call “bifur-circuits,” could be used to rapidly design and prototype adaptable smart devices, like assistive furniture that helps individuals change body positions while recovering from injuries or reconfigurable robotic grippers that remain electrically connected when they change shapes for different applications. 

Developed by MIT researchers, these 3D-printed building blocks, which are a type of structure known as a mechanical metamaterial, can be combined to form many more possible configurations than traditional metamaterial structures. 

In a study presenting the new system, the researchers demonstrated several interactive objects, including a chair that converts to a table with storage and can also flatten for stowing. The structure senses its configuration and sends corresponding messages to an electronic display. 

These new metamaterials could also be used to design antennas for communications and sensing that form new shapes to adjust their frequencies in changing environmental conditions, without bulky mechanical parts. 

“Metamaterials can make complex mechanical assemblies easy to manufacture just by using repeating units. Our work expands on this design space. If we think of mechanical metamaterials as building blocks, then our work is one way to take advantage of their geometry to embed intrinsic intelligence into hardware, which could open many possibilities,” says Marwa AlAlawi, a mechanical engineering graduate student and lead author of a paper on the devices.

AlAlawi is joined on the paper by co-senior authors Ticha Sethapakdi, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student at MIT; and Stefanie Mueller, an associate professor in MIT’s departments of EECS and Mechanical Engineering and leader of the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). Their co-authors include others at MIT, the University of Tokyo, and the University of Michigan. The research will be presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.

Shape-changing interactive structures

Mechanical metamaterials are programmable, three-dimensional structures of repeating units that can form complex shapes due to their geometries. When squeezed, pushed, or pulled, metamaterials can bend or twist in precise ways. 

For instance, “auxetic” metamaterials get wider when stretched, instead of narrowing.

In prior work, the MIT researchers used auxetic metamaterials to build reconfigurable antennas that formed three shapes depending on how the structure was stretched. This allowed the antenna to dynamically adjust its frequency range without complex, moving parts.

Next, the team wanted to expand the number of antenna configurations but were limited because the auxetic metamaterials could only form three fixed states.

In this work they created “bifur-circuits,” which are auxetic metamaterials that can form many more shapes based on how the modular units are connected and rotated. 

The units are also designed to be electrically modular. Due to the way conductive material is integrated into the bifur-circuits, electrical connections throughout the structure are maintained no matter how the object is rotated, pressed, or twisted to form new shapes. 

To create interactive objects with many possible configurations, bifur-circuits leverage a property known as mechanical bifurcation. 

Mechanical bifurcation is a sudden change in how a mechanism behaves when a force exerted on it passes a tipping point. For instance, when you gently bend the ends of a plastic ruler, once that force reaches a critical threshold, the ruler buckles.

In bifur-circuits, this bifurcation occurs when connected blocks are rotated in certain ways around a pivot point. The property allows connected blocks to form more stable configurations than one block could on its own.

Adding more bifur-circuits to a structure exponentially increases the number of potential configurations.

“Bifurcation allow us to significantly expand on this reconfigurability space. Just adding one extra unit gives us so many more combinations out of the same structure,” says AlAlawi.

Connecting and rotating components activates a unique circuit between adjacent units. This interactivity allows the units to communicate with one another, enabling the structure to sense its configuration.   

One of the biggest challenges the researchers faced was incorporating a conductive material that was flexible enough to bend, but still offered enough efficiency in the flow of electricity.

“The conductive material was a constraint we had to work around in the design process, and it dictated how the sensing between blocks would happen,” AlAlawi says.

Once they perfected the design, the researchers tested the durability of reconfigurable structures by compressing them more than 10,000 times. The structures showed no degradation in electrical connectivity.

The researchers also developed a user-friendly construction and simulation tool to simplify the bifur-circuit design process. The software generates instructions for a multimaterial 3D printer, which can fabricate the reconfigurable objects in one pass.

They demonstrated the versatility of bifur-circuits by fabricating a chair that can sense its geometry when its shape is changed to a tea table, as well as a shape-shifting controller that will launch one of several video games based on its configuration.

Bifur-circuits could someday be used in applications like interactive rehabilitation tools, shape-changing grippers for modular soft robots, or reconfigurable shelters that could respond to changing environmental conditions after a natural disaster.

In the future, the researchers want to explore more applications for bifur-circuits. They also want to add more interactivity into the structures and investigate additional metamaterial shapes.

“Bifur-circuits are one step toward developing mechanical building blocks with integrated intelligence. It would be interesting to build on this work and come up with building blocks that allow us to create a structure with any form or shape we want, and which are structurally stable and can be actuated,” AlAlawi says. 

This work was funded, in part, by Japan’s Science and Technology Agency and the Bahrain Crown Prince International Scholarship Program.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted unlawful investigations into dozens of individuals who have documented ICE activities in their communities, social media users who criticized the government, and international students who attended a protest.

A favored tool in these speech chilling investigations are administrative subpoenas sent to technology companies, requesting basic subscriber data about their users. For example, from 2018 to 2020, ICE sent nearly 500 administrative subpoenas to Meta, Google, and Twitter (now X), according to documents obtained by Just Futures Law. In just the second half of 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent 21 administrative subpoenas to Reddit, according to its Transparency Report.

While some subpoenas are routine, ICE has been forced to withdraw others after users challenged them in court or companies pushed back. These challenged subpoenas exceeded the agency's statutory authority and violated users' First Amendment rights.

Below is a non-comprehensive list of DHS subpoenas that we gathered going back to 2025, looking at public reporting and court cases. This is likely an undercount. The full scope is hard to pin down because these subpoenas typically only come to light when a user is given notice and challenges them in court, or when a company documents them in a transparency report (so far, only Reddit appears to break out specific numbers on DHS subpoenas). In addition, DHS has been slow to respond to our Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits seeking records that would show how many administrative subpoenas ICE has sent to social media companies since 2025.

If you know of other subpoenas that are not on this list, please reach out to info@eff.org. While the government has abused the subpoena process in other areas, particularly to hospitals, this list focuses on DHS and ICE subpoenas to technology companies for user data. 

DATE ISSUED

(and link to subpoena)

TARGETED COMPANY INDIVIDUAL USER TARGETED  OUTCOME  3/17/25 Facebook  Momodou Taal, international student who attended pro-Palestinian protest Withdrawn 3/23/25 Google  Momodou Taal, international student who attended pro-Palestinian protest Withdrawn 4/1/25 Google  Amandla Thomas-Johnson, international student who attended pro-Palestinian protest Google disclosed data to ICE on 5/8/25 9/4/25 Meta  6 accounts in Southern California that documented immigration activity, including LB_Protest, Long Beach Rapid Response Network, and Stopice.net Withdrawn after court challenge on 11/24/25 9/11/25* Meta (Instagram) Pennsylvania account called "MontCo Community Watch" that documented immigration activity Withdrawn after court challenge on 1/16/26 9/11/25* Meta (Facebook) Pennsylvania account called "MontCo Community Watch" that documented immigration activity Withdrawn after court challenge on 1/16/26 10/30/25 Google  Retired Philadelphia user who emailed criticism to U.S. prosecutor   Withdrawn after court challenge on 2/5/26 2/4/26* Google Social media user who regularly posts criticism of the President Subpoena challenged in Court 2/19/26* Reddit "Tired_Thumb," user who posted about ICE officer Withdraw after court challenge on 3/27/26; replaced with grand jury subpoena 2/27/26* X "podslurp,” who posted publicly available address information about ICE officer Withdrawn May 2026; replaced with grand jury subpoena 3/7/26 PayPal/Venmo "Voices of Racial Justice," a racial justice organization in Minnesota  PayPal/Venmo disclosed data 3/20/26 4/3/26* Google (YouTube) @TheDonLemonShow, GeorgiaFort, @DemocracyNow, and seven other accounts that reported on protest at Minnesota church Google Objected 4/7/26 4/12/26* T-Mobile Minnesota journalist Georgia Fort and others T-Mobile disclosed data on 4/12/26 First half of 2025 Reddit  Reddit account Subpoena withdrawn after questions from Reddit Second half of 2025 Reddit  11 Reddit accounts that posted content "critical of ICE actions" 3 subpoenas withdrawn after Reddit objected

* = denotes summonses issued under 19 U.S.C. 1509, an authority that has been abused in the past, according to DHS's inspector general.

Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) build a searchable map of everywhere a driver goes, fed into databases that police, ICE, and private vendors can query after the fact. Networked across a city, ALPRs are purpose-built to track everyone regardless of suspicion. ALPRs are not a surveillance tool that can be made safe with the right policy or feature update—they are irredeemably harmful.

EFF's position is that ALPR mass surveillance—the indiscriminate, continuous collection and retention of location data on every driver, regardless of suspicion—should not exist. Because it nonetheless does, EFF also urges courts and state legislatures to impose strict, enforceable restrictions, such as warrant requirements and deletion deadlines.

EFF's position is that ALPR mass surveillance—the indiscriminate, continuous collection and retention of location data on every driver, regardless of suspicion—should not exist. Because it nonetheless does, EFF also urges courts and state legislatures to impose strict, enforceable restrictions, such as warrant requirements and deletion deadlines. EFF applies every tool available to eliminate ALPR surveillance and the harm it enacts.

The Case Against ALPRs

A note about scope: This post addresses ALPR mass surveillance. It does not address the wider universe of automated traffic enforcement (ATE) such as conventional red light and speed cameras that solely ticket a specific violation, without retaining or networking data on uninvolved drivers. But lawmakers and purchasers should guard against efforts by vendors to piggyback on ATE contracts to market ALPR mass surveillance systems.

ALPRs are frequently marketed as a narrow tool for specific purposes, such as recovering stolen vehicles. But in practice, these sensors sweep up data on every driver who passes a camera, and store it in searchable databases. That indiscriminate collection and retention is precisely why ALPR-fed surveillance systems can be easily weaponized against immigrants, political dissidents, and other targeted communities as ICE and other federal agencies escalate their assault on civil liberties. There is no configuration of an ALPR network that eliminates this risk, because the risk is the mass surveillance itself, not a misuse of it.

Of course, ALPRs cause other predictable harms. Innocent drivers are recurringly arrested and menaced by police because of ALPR errors. Officers regularly abuse ALPR systems to stalk past and potential romantic partners. Creating any database of personal information—including ALPR surveillance databases—inherently creates risk of data theft and subsequent harm to data subjects. And ALPR surveillance of protests and targeting of activists chill participation in First Amendment-protected dissent. But even if these downstream harms could all be prevented (and they likely can’t), ALPRs would remain an intolerable form of mass surveillance.

Fighting on Every Front to Eliminate ALPR Surveillance

At the city level, EFF works with community members and decision makers to outright refuse ALPR purchasing. ALPRs are not inevitable. The same decision mechanisms used to facilitate runaway surveillance purchasing in U.S. localities can be turned against these systems to dismantle them.

EFF also pushes state legislatures to establish strict state-level limits on ALPR surveillance, such as data-deletion rules and use restrictions. Building such constraints into statute can mitigate the harms of existing ALPR systems.

In courts across the country, EFF files amicus briefs arguing that warrantless police searches of ALPR databases violate the Fourth Amendment. In California state court, EFF and the ACLU of Northern California are suing on behalf of two community groups, SIREN and CAIR-CA, arguing that the San Jose Police Department's practice of letting officers search stored plate data—to the tune of over 100,000 times a year—without a warrant violates the California Constitution. We’ve also sued to block California law enforcement from sharing ALPR data with federal and out-of-state agencies, in violation of a California statute.

A big part of EFF’s work is exposing the harms of ALPR surveillance. Our investigative team tirelessly collects information about how law enforcement uses ALPRs with public records requests, sues to enforce such requests, and publishes reports about them. We’ve also successfully lobbied for a State Auditor investigation of law enforcement’s use of ALPRs.

Coordinated Action Against Mass Surveillance

EFF practices integrated advocacy because all of these tools work best together. City refusals, statehouse restrictions, impact litigation, and investigative activism are different levers EFF pulls toward the same end: eliminating ALPR surveillance, and building the durable public power needed to keep it off our streets. A council vote against a Flock contract and a warrant argument in Santa Clara County Superior Court are both, at their core, the same fight: rejecting mass surveillance infrastructure outright, and using every venue available to eliminate its harmful presence and consequences.

A Colorado native who originally planned to attend college close to home, Sydney Baller decided to come to MIT for the strong academic community. She knew she had found a new home in McCormick Hall after attending its Campus Preview Weekend (CPW) events in 2023. 

McCormick Hall opened in 1963 as MIT’s first women’s residence — a move that provided women the first real opportunity to attend the Institute in significant numbers. To support continuity of the McCormick community through its first renovation in its 63-year existence, MIT has established a dedicated McCormick lounge in the Stratton Student Center (Building W20), funded efforts to maintain dorm traditions, and more.

Now a rising senior in mechanical engineering, Baller is a year-round athlete (basketball and outdoor track), crafting enthusiast, and co-president of McCormick’s student government. With construction underway to renovate the residence, Baller is taking time to help support future MIT women so they can have the same powerful residential experience she’s had.

McCormick is scheduled to open again in August 2028 — well after Baller graduates. In this interview, she describes her thoughts on the transition and how she is working to maintain a sense of community among the dorm’s residents and incoming first-year students while updates are ongoing.

Q: Why did you choose to live in McCormick? 

A: I was recruited to play basketball in college, and other schools were pressing me for a decision. MIT was like, “Well, you got in. It’s up to you what you want to do.”  

So I came to CPW to find out what the campus is like. I stayed in [co-ed] Baker with one of my teammates. It was weird for me. I could have probably adjusted to being in a living space with men, but I guess I just bristled at the concept. I grew up in a Christian household, so I was used to certain things. I shared a bathroom with my sister, not my brother. 

What really set it in stone was going to the other CPW events at McCormick. They were like — “We’re an all-women’s community. The dorm is quieter. Everyone’s super nice. We like to do crafts.” Then they showed us the craft room. A whole room dedicated to crafts? I was sold.

Q: How would you describe the community in McCormick?

A: On the day my dad helped me move in, we had three suitcases I brought from Denver. He and I sorted out my stuff, and then we went down to the laundry room. I thought I saw a big spider or something, and a girl who was standing there asked, “Are you talking about Despereaux?” I had never even talked to this girl before. Even this was a way to bond! 

There’s a lot to love. Our heads of house are amazing. After the last day of class every semester, they have a tea and churro study break. They make the churros themselves. So we just come down, drink tea, chat with our friends, and eat churros and little tea sandwiches. That’s very McCormick — a little break with some good chatting. 

The heads of house also run something called “karao-cake.” When I first heard about it, I was like — “I’ll go for the cake.” They have a karaoke machine with a bunch of microphones attached, and we all sing songs together. And if they pick a song we don’t like, we all yell “No!” Everyone's on the same page. It gives really good sisterhood vibes. 

Also, I personally loved our all-women’s gym. As someone who has been an athlete for many years, I can say: We had amazing equipment in there. I’d rather work out where I don’t have to fight for a rack. I can just go and lift and do my workout.

Overall, the McCormick community is what you make of it. You can choose to be invested and have a great time. You can also just choose for it to be the place you come back to every night. I was in the same room sophomore and junior year, and so were a lot of the girls around me. By the end of last year it was like that scene from the “Barbie” movie — when they’re all in their houses, and say “Good night, Barbie! Good night, Barbie!”

Q: How did you get involved in the renovation project? 

A: I originally joined house government to be the craft chair and athletic chair. Later, I decided to run for co-president because McCormick was my first home away from home. I had honestly planned to go to college close to home, or where my friends were going. The thought of going to another state and being on my own just seemed too out of the ordinary. When I came here, I knew one person. 

When MIT first told us the dorm was being renovated, I was pretty excited to see what they were going to do. They held all-dorm events, brought donuts, and asked us to come and talk about what we envisioned for renovation. I said I wanted the biggest craft room you can imagine, pianos in every corner, and to get rid of the study cubicles in the penthouse no one uses. We really got to dream, right? 

But then MIT announced a one-year delay in the renovation, and you have the emotions. McCormick was home — and then they say it’s going to get renovated, then they say it will be next year. When my friend and I decided to run to become co-presidents, the rest of the dorm really didn’t want to talk anymore. We started meeting with [the Division of] Student Life on Zoom, but it was hard to get resident engagement. I appreciate that we’re in the conversations. We get to hear the numbers before other people do, but that’s just information.

Q: What’s the role of house government while the residence is being renovated? 

A: We do things that keep the energy alive. McCormick is more than just a building. The housing office just told us more than 300 incoming students expressed interest in the McCormick community, even though the dorm is being renovated.

To bring momentum into the renovation, we held an end-of-semester party where we dropped nice crewnecks, got a food truck, and had popcorn, cotton candy, a DJ, games, face paint — all the stuff. We also enjoy dorm movie outings, which would be a great tradition to continue. When the Taylor Swift “Eras Tour” movie was in theaters, we all got to have the experience of going over on the T together, and then sitting together singing Taylor Swift songs. We also saw “Wicked” and “Wicked for Good.” We have chill events, too, like crochet, painting, and eating pastries. All of this is about being together. Even if we’re not sitting there having a conversation, we’re existing together. That feels like home.

I’m also trying to help people who are dealing with the transition. It can be hard. You can’t have our heads of house move with you, or the craft room. You can’t have the cute merch that one of our students designs. If someone who has been moved to Maseeh doesn’t know anyone else on their floor, they don't get to have that Barbie moment. But maybe McCormick is holding a study break where they can hang out — a throwback to the old days, where we can craft, or drink boba, or whatever. 

Q: Has the effort been worth it? 

A: It’s worth it to me because I get to keep the momentum going, but I won’t know for sure until the dorm is open again and a freshman checks into their room and experiences the community.

They took our feedback doing the donuts and stuff, and they put a lot of our ideas into the design, but now I’ve got to see the finished product. I know MIT has to balance a lot of things, so they’re not necessarily going to do everything just because we asked. 

Q: What are your goals for when the renovation’s finished? 

A: The building won’t reopen before I graduate, so I guess there’s two things.

When I graduate, I would hope to see a house government team that’s excited to continue the traditions. It’s different to be affiliated with a community than to be living in it. I would love to graduate and leave here knowing McCormick is in good hands and the momentum our generation started helped drive us through to reopening. 

And when the dorm reopens, I want to come back and get a tour. I would just love to see the excitement around being back in the dorm. I’ll buy my own plane ticket!

Under this settlement, young users will now have less access to Meta products, and a lesser ability to exercise their rights to speak, access information and art and culture, associate and form communities, and play. The settlement also embeds age assurance into every product, mandating the collection of even more personal information from users of all ages; this enshrines Meta's harmful surveillance into law, and it will compromise users' privacy and anonymity while increasing their exposure to data breaches and government data requests. And the data minimization and security measures don’t keep states from using data collected under the agreement for other law enforcement purposes – which could include things like criminal investigations of abortions or gender-affirming care. 

Earlier this month, France’s top court struck down the country’s legislation that banned social media use for people under 15 years old, which had been scheduled to take effect in January 2027. This is a welcome win for free expression, as we face a wave of countries and U.S. states seeking to pass similar laws banning young people from social media. 

In particular, the Constitutional Council’s decision focused on two components:

Infringement on Free Expression

The Council ruled that the legislation banning under-15s from social media infringed on freedom of expression and communication in a manner that is not appropriate, necessary, or proportionate, which is required by Article 34 of the French Constitution. In particular, it stressed that the ban did not distinguish between different types of online services, and ignored the circumstances of individual users, such as their exact age, level of maturity, and family situation.

The evidence is clear: these are reckless and harmful laws that negatively impact all people, not just those under 15. These measures chill all users’ exercise of the right to free speech and expression online by imposing obstacles on sites or by wrongfully blocking people’s access outright.

By forcing young people into digital isolation, these bans curtail vital access to news and resources for health and development; especially for LGBTQ+ and marginalized youth as social media can often be the only place to find community, explore their identity, or access life-saving resources. They also completely ignore the calls of young people themselves who favor digital literacy and education over surveillance and government control. 

These bans also destroy the right to online anonymity—a cornerstone of our right to free expression that in particular protects whistleblowers, journalists, activists, and immigrants.

Infringement on the Right to Private Life 

The Council’s second objection noted that the law requiring every person, even adults, to prove their age before accessing social media platforms impedes the right to private life, and thus infringes on Article 2 of the Déclaration de 1789.

The French Council gets a lot right in this decision: it highlights that bans like this impact not just young people, but everyone online. They force people of all ages to hand over government IDs, face scans, and other sensitive information into a growing surveillance ecosystem. Further, when parental consent is required, companies must collect even more verification data on the parents.

We know that when people are forced to hand over this information, age verification systems frequently misidentify or lock out people of color, people with disabilities, and trans or gender-nonconforming individuals whose IDs may not match their appearance; adding to the privacy concerns around these bans.

Next Steps 

As all bills in France are subject to scrutiny by the Constitutional Council to ensure compliance with the French Constitution, French President Emmanuel Macron has tasked Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to re-work the legislation with a goal to adopt a ‘legally robust’ version of the social media ban. 

Public policy must be effective, proportionate, and respectful of fundamental rights; and the ruling by the Constitutional Council has ramifications beyond France. It sends a message of caution to Brussels, where the EU Commission is working on an EU-wide bill on access restrictions. These legal restrictions would likely require problematic age verification of users. The prominent EU digital identity wallet and the “mini” age verification app, presented as privacy-robust options, instead raise serious privacy and security concerns.

Young people deserve better than a policy built on panic, and all internet users deserve a safe and free internet that includes measures to empower all people with the knowledge they need to navigate online spaces safely. A social media ban generates headlines, but it will not solve the problem. 

The New York Times has a long article (alt link) on surveillance systems aimed at babies. They are increasingly using AI.

Nanit and its rivals want to own 24/7 health tracking for the sub-four-foot set. And their already astonishing levels of baby data collection are just the beginning. Nanit recently raised $50 million from investors to expand its use of A.I. and use its camera to track speech and language development, motor skills and more, while extending its presence in children’s bedrooms into early adolescence.

Today, anyone with a large enough artificial intelligence model can generate millions of new material designs in minutes. Unfortunately, that hasn’t led to a huge leap in the number of new materials being used to improve the performance of products like computer chips and rockets.

One reason for the translation gap is that current models don’t reliably factor in the chemical stability of the materials they generate, and unstable materials aren’t very useful in the real world. That forces industries to allocate huge computational budgets to screening out all the unstable materials they generate, in some cases leaving behind a tiny fraction of usable options.

Now, MIT researchers have developed a framework that can be applied at the beginning of the materials generation process to vastly improve the stability rate while achieving targeted material properties. It works by ensuring every design satisfies certain key rules of chemistry relating to the electrons around the materials’ atoms before the expensive generation step begins. The researchers call their approach “crystal generator with valence-constrained design, or CrysVCD.

In a paper published today in Nature Computational Science, the researchers show how CrysVCD allowed several commonly used material models to meet those valence shell rules more often, and used it to achieve high lattice-dynamics stability — a stringent stability test — in nearly 70 percent of computational material generations. They also showed the approach could support the creation of materials with specific desired properties, like high thermal conductivity or high dielectric constant, which is important for computer chips and data centers.

A hint of how the researchers envision people using their system is in the name.

“If material-generating models are like DVDs, we are like the DVD player,” says associate professor of nuclear science and engineering Mingda Li. “You can plug this into any kind of model, not only existing diffusion models but also future models, where people can’t generate enough stable materials, and it can improve stability.”

Joining Li on the paper are Mouyang Cheng SM ’26 and Weiliang Luo, MIT doctoral students in materials science and engineering and chemistry, respectively; Hao Tang PhD ’26, a recent graduate in materials science and engineering; Bowen Yu, a senior undergraduate in physics; Yongqiang Cheng, a staff scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Weiwei Xie, an associate professor at Michigan State University; Ju Li, MIT’s Carl Richard Soderberg Professor in Power Engineering; and Heather Kulik, MIT’s Lammot du Pont Professor of Chemical Engineering.

More efficient materials

Computational approaches to materials design have been around for decades, but recent advances in artificial intelligence have increased excitement about their potential. Of particular interest are models that can start with a desired material property and work backward to deliver a material that achieves that goal.

Some of those models use an AI technique known as diffusion, which is commonly used to generate images, while others use large language models like the one powering ChatGPT and Claude, but both approaches struggle to ensure their material generations achieve chemical stability or follow fundamental principles about how chemicals interact and behave.

The solution has been to add another layer of computing on top of the generative process to filter out unstable materials.

“It’s becoming easy to generate the material structure,” Cheng says. “But the validation process, especially the part where you test the stability, has a huge computational cost. It’s something like 90 percent of the computational cost for creating usable materials, and it can take weeks or months.”

Big companies with huge computing budgets can afford to run those processes, but many small companies and research labs can’t, potentially limiting innovation in the field.

“In academia, where we have fewer resources, I think we can still achieve strong performance with smarter designs and other approaches,” Kulik explains. “Generating a model and then down-selecting for stability is inefficient. There’s a high computational cost. But if we put a language model in the beginning of the process to constrain the generation, you can significantly enhance the ratio of stable materials generated.”

The new study involved MIT researchers affiliated with the departments of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Physics, and Nuclear Science and Engineering. Together the researchers combined AI diffusion models with a language model. In the first stage of their process, the language model produces chemically valid formulas. In the second stage, the diffusion model uses that formula to generate the corresponding atomic structure of the crystal material in coordination with the underlying material generation model.

“Diffusion for typical material generation is a slow process — you can think of it like 1,000 steps to create one material,” Luo says.

“In contrast, when our model is used in the beginning, you can think of it like five steps. It allows you to screen out the unstable materials to generate higher quality materials. And it works with any models generating materials,” Tang adds.

The researchers showed their approach created more stable materials an order of magnitude more efficiently than approaches that rely on screening materials after they’re generated. When fine-tuned on stability metrics, their approach produced crystalline materials that achieved 68 percent mechanical stability and 85 percent metastability, which measures if a material stays in a stable state when undisturbed.

The researchers then used their approach to generate material candidates with high thermal conductivity and easy polarization in an electric field.

“These are materials useful for the semiconductor industry and high thermal conductivity materials relevant to data center cooling,” Ju Li says. “In principle, you could also use this to create other properties, but thermal conductivity has become really important for cooling data centers. There’s been a huge increase in energy use in that industry, and 30 percent of that energy goes to cooling. The industry needs materials with high thermal conductivity to more efficiently remove the heat.”

Democratizing material design

The new approach doesn’t work with every kind of material — it works best with solid structures with highly ordered internal arrangements. Still, the approach could be used to generate stable new crystalline materials with a host of important properties.

“We are not just generating stable materials, we’re also prioritizing performance,” Cheng says. “Any time you have two goals, achieving those goals with anything over 50 percent is hard in this field. In the past, people might have a goal for specific properties and not stability, or vice-versa, and get a single-digit percentage of materials that fit their goal.”

Ultimately the approach will enable more researchers to develop novel materials for a range of next-generation applications.

“This will save huge computation costs and time by removing downstream selection requirements,” Li says. “That will help not only large efforts that generate hundreds of millions of materials, but also smaller research groups with targeted applications.”

The work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy, a Mathworks Engineering Fellowship, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

In the 20th century, the United States built the world’s dominant manufacturing powerhouse. A thriving middle class grew, well into the 1970s. The U.S. was a beacon of democracy, defeating fascism in World War II and beating back communism and other forms of authoritarianism during the Cold War. 

To MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, there is a deep intertwining among these things. Democracy, his work has shown, helps economies grow. As the industrial economy expanded, in Britain, the U.S., and other countries in the 19th and 20th centuries, so did democratic participation, as people tried to stake out new rights, or make real the rights ascribed to them. 

“The industrial age created the tools for shared prosperity around which democracy organized,” says Acemoglu, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and Institute Professor at MIT. 

Today, though, income inequality has grown markedly in the U.S., starting around 1980. The U.S. has deindustrialized to a significant extent, offshoring production and hurting shop-floor workers and their families. As Acemoglu sees it, this economic realignment has had deep civic consequences: A stranded working class has become more alienated from the institutions and ideas traditionally buttressing democracy.

And for those around the world supporting democracy, he says, “You really need to have the working classes in your coalition for it to make any sense.”

Acemoglu explores these topics in a new book, “What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity,” published by Penguin Random House. In it, he looks broadly at the benefits of democracy, the tensions it faces in everyday life, and democracy’s trajectory in recent decades.

Broadly, Acemoglu favors rebuilding “working-class liberalism,” essentially seeking the largest coalition that favors self-government and the rule of law. “Working-class liberalism has strong communal roots, eschews social engineering, and prioritizes shared prosperity, jobs, and public services,” Acemoglu writes in the book.

After all, Acemoglu believes, democracy is the one form of rule that promotes rights and liberties, and allows the flexibility and “experimentation” we need to address all the challenges a complicated world throws at us.

“Democracy is the only way we can make progress in society,” Acemoglu says. “Trying to impose top-down solutions to all our problems will ultimately not work.” 

Along the narrow corridor

Acemoglu has long studied the relationship between economic growth, rights, and democracy. With economist Simon Johnson of MIT and political scientist James Robinson, now of the University of Chicago, Acemoglu published a landmark series of studies in the early 2000s demonstrating that economic growth is helped by the development of stable democratic institutions, including property rights. For that work, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson later shared the 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. 

Acemoglu’s 2012 bestseller “Why Nations Fail”— written before democracy’s current challenges seemed as acute — synthesized his research on these topics. His 2019 book “The Narrow Corridor,” co-authored with Robinson, casts democratic governments as essential to liberty because they protect people simultaneously from overreach by an authoritarian state, on the one hand, and from domination by other groups in society, on the other. 

However, as Acemoglu has consistently emphasized, self-governance is an ongoing effort; this machine does not run on its own. Relatedly, in the new book, Acemoglu critiques some famous attempts to formulate governance as a neat “social contract,” including Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conception of a “general will” in society. 

Those ideas helped make the case for political rights, but actual governance in a pluralistic society will always be a messy process. 

“You have to allow communities, and societies in aggregate, to build rules around shared values for anything to stick as institutions, norms, or aspirations,” Acemoglu says. “When you go down the social contractarian path, you sometimes fool yourself into thinking there are clear solutions to dilemmas that in reality don’t quite have such obvious ways of being resolved.” 

For instance, Acemoglu notes, democracy itself “is built on tolerance and acceptance of plural perspectives, but how do you deal with people who are intolerant?” In the book, he largely regards interventions to stamp out seemingly intolerant thought as being unwise and politically counterproductive.

“You’re not going to have a clear-cut solution to all cases,” he says.

The economic realignment

Even with leaders backing a pragmatic, flexible approach to self-governance, democracy faces another challenge: supporting the material welfare of citizens. And here, “What Happened to Liberal Democracy?” takes an unflinching look at the postwar economy, finding fault lines that have shaken the political order. 

The roughly three decades after World War II were fantastic for many workers in democracies, and certainly in the U.S., where middle-class incomes grew by 2.5 percent annually into the 1970s. 

There were always going to be forces pushing back on this trend, and U.S. companies started offshoring and outsourcing production work to clamp down on wage growth. But one other technological and economic trend occurred just as the middle classes of the industrial economy were reaching new heights. 

“Then computers happened,” writes Acemoglu in the book — referring to a complex set of economic and civic realignments involving technology-driven shifts in work. 

Over time, computers started replacing significant numbers of clerical office workers, shop-floor industrial workers, and other types of employees who were earning middle-class wages without holding a college degree. In recent decades, middle-class incomes have only grown by about 0.5 percent annually. 

To be sure, computers have produced plenty of benefits, and created many new forms of work. But as research shows, those jobs have tended to go mostly to college-educated employees, creating a significant split in society between well-educated, well-paid, white-collar workers, and less-educated, worse-paid workers in blue-collar and service jobs. That national share of income hauled in by the top 1 percent of earners has basically doubled in this time, from 10 percent to nearly 20 percent.

Crucially, in Acemoglu’s analysis, this material gap between more-educated and less-educated social cohorts has translated to U.S. politics, with political groupings reshuffling along educational lines, and cultural politics following suit. That’s the dynamic the U.S. faces now — even as one also accounts for the effects of social media and other polarizing features of contemporary society. 

“We now live in a less-industrial world, and we also live in an age defined by social media, much greater levels of conflict, more polarization, and now AI, and all of that complicates things,” Acemoglu says. 

Always a work in progress

This precise feature of contemporary society — deindustrialization fueling an earnings gap that has led to more political polarization — is what shapes Acemoglu’s prescription in response, the idea that “working-class liberalism” is needed to strengthen democracy. 

There are many potential ingredients in this formula, from politicians determined to reach across class lines to workers regaining the impetus to organize in their workplaces. 

“Trade union participation itself is a very important form of local governance that’s very difficult or unimaginable in an authoritarian society,” Acemoglu says, even while noting that he has not always agreed with the actions of particular unions in the past. 

Still, Acemoglu adds, “I don’t think the economic aspect is the only one, in that you cannot just gain the trust of workers by ensuring there are wage gains. That is an important step but it is not sufficient.” Voters need asurances that politicians are thinking about them, at least share their concerns, and have a grounding in similar values. More candidates today need to seek a shared language about those things.

That’s not easy in a world characterized, in part, by global migrations, increasingly diverse national populations, and economic flux. But it is possible, Acemoglu thinks. 

“There are deep dilemmas faced by liberal democracy that were sometimes going to come to boiling points, and this becomes more heightened when societies such as the U.S. and some European ones are simultaneously becoming more complex, more globalized, and more hetereogeneous,” Acemoglu says. On the other hand, he adds, “Multiracial tensions, I would say, were much worse for the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s. We made democracy work then, in the face of much more difficult race problems, so why not today?”

None of this is a straightforward task, of course. “Forging working-class liberalism is a tall order in the best of times and much more challenging in today’s polarized environment,” Acemoglu writes in the new book. Still, he adds, even in frustrating moments, the stakes are too important for people to relent.

“Democracy is a success,” Acemoglu says. “It’s easy to fall into a trap of painting the democratic project as being doomed to failure, and I want to avoid that.” He adds: “It continues to be a work in progress.” 

Iron is essential. Our cells need it to produce energy, carry oxygen throughout the body, and power countless chemical reactions that sustain life. But this metal has a dark side. When too much of it is left free inside cells, it can trigger destructive reactions that break down DNA, proteins, and even cell membranes.

Now, MIT associate professor of biology and Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research member Ankur Jain; MIT assistant professor of biology and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research member Whitney Henry; and Pushkal Sharma PhD '26 have discovered that cells rely on an unexpected protector against this threat: small molecules called polyamines.

The researchers’ detailed findings, published Aug. 14 in the journal Cell, reveal that polyamines act like storage lockers for iron, safely holding the metal in a non-reactive state until cells need it.

These findings solve a decades-old mystery about why cells maintain such extraordinarily high levels of polyamines and uncover a previously unknown defense mechanism that protects cells from toxic iron overload.

This work could also help scientists develop better cancer treatments, by allowing iron overload to trigger cancer cell death. It could also offer new clues about diseases like early-onset Parkinson’s disease, in which mutations affect polyamine levels within neurons.

The Jain Lab studies RNA, the intermediary between DNA and the tiny molecular machines called proteins that perform most of the essential tasks inside cells. The lab is particularly interested in how RNA folds, misfolds, and sometimes clumps inside cells.

Jain and Sharma first began studying polyamines because these molecules bind to RNA and help shape its structure. However, they suspected that polyamines must be playing other roles inside cells: they’re among the most abundant small molecules within cells, present at levels comparable to ATP, the molecule cells use as their energy currency.

“We’ve known that without polyamines, cells stop growing and dividing,” Jain says. “But their best-known function only requires a small fraction of the polyamine levels cells actually have.”

To uncover polyamines’ hidden function inside cells, the researchers used a large-scale genetic approach that allows them to screen the entire genome at once, rather than testing genes one-by-one, in order to find out which cellular processes are impacted when polyamine levels are changed within cells.

The screen revealed that when cells have reduced levels of polyamines, a protein called GPX4 becomes essential for survival. GPX4 is known to prevent harmful chemical reactions that damage the fatty molecules that make up cell membranes. 

The team also found that cells with lower polyamine levels have higher amounts of another protein that acts as an iron sponge and keeps the metal in a mineralized form. Together, these findings led the researchers to hypothesize that polyamines might be helping keep iron in a safe, non-reactive state within cells.

To test this idea, they developed a new fluorescent sensor that would allow them to measure chemically reactive iron inside living cells. The new sensor causes living cells to glow based on the amount of chemically reactive iron they contain, allowing researchers to track any changes under a microscope in real-time.

The team paired the new iron sensor with another sensor they had previously developed that measures polyamine levels within cells. By employing them simultaneously, they observed a striking pattern: As polyamine levels dropped within cells, the amount of chemically reactive iron went up, offering new evidence that polyamines play a key role in preventing toxic iron build up inside cells.

Beyond answering a fundamental biological question, these findings could have implications for cancer treatment. Cancer cells often rely on high polyamine levels to support their rapid growth and division. However, cancer drugs designed to lower polyamine levels to stop cell division have had limited success.

“We saw that when polyamine levels fall, cells rely on GPX4 to protect themselves from iron toxicity,” says Sharma, who is also the first author of the study. “This could mean that combining drugs that lower polyamine levels with those that block GPX4 might be more effective for killing cancer cells than targeting either pathway alone.”

The discovery may also have implications beyond cancer. Mutations in genes that help move polyamines around cells are linked to a rare form of early-onset Parkinson’s disease, and scientists have long observed unusually high levels of iron in the brains of Parkinson’s patients. 

While it is still unclear whether excess iron directly contributes to neuron death in Parkinson’s, the discovery that polyamines help buffer reactive iron inside cells offers a possible explanation for this link and opens new directions for future investigation.

In addition, the researchers expect the new iron sensor to be a valuable tool for other scientists. By allowing them to track chemically reactive iron inside living cells, it could power new discoveries in aging, cancer, and neurodegeneration.

“There are a lot of promising future directions for this work,” Jain says. “It’s exciting to think about how these tools and findings could help answer further questions about disease pathways and potentially help design better therapies.”

This work is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, Bumpus Foundation, and Pew Charitable Trusts. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

A former MIT class project is becoming an $850 million effort to manufacture a new kind of aircraft in Ohio.

Electra began as an idea for a hybrid plane that could take off from shorter runways than traditional airplanes but have more range and speed than all-electric aircraft. Now, like other great MIT projects, it’s making an impact far beyond campus.

The company’s fixed-wing aircraft is designed to make travel easier, especially for people who don’t live in the immediate vicinity of a major airport. The plane features a smaller, more efficient engine than traditional planes, along with batteries to give it added power during takeoffs and landings.

With a range of around 1,200 miles and a cruising speed of around 200 miles per hour, the plane could improve the travel experience for many kinds of trips while cutting down on fuel use. And, given the much shorter runway needs and quieter operation than traditional planes, the plane can leverage unique access points such as barges, parking lots, and soccer fields to take off and land instead of traditional airports. 

“Helping people travel between 50 and 250 miles is the sweet spot for this technology,” says Electra Director of Technology Development Chris Courtin SM ’19, PhD ’24. “This can be a better option than driving or commercial airlines for many kinds of trips. There’s a lot of people traveling in that range and a huge amount of friction in existing ground and air transport systems. This could be a big benefit to those people.”

Courtin has worked on the hybrid plane concept since its inception, first as part of a class project at MIT, then as a teacher’s assistant, and finally as part of his PhD thesis. The company was founded by another alumnus, John Langford ’79, SM ’83, SM ’85, PhD ’87, and counts two MIT professors — Mark Drela and John Hansman — as its founding technical advisors.

“The company has really benefited from a strong collaboration with MIT,” Courtin says. “One of the compelling things about MIT is it gives people space to marry the theoretical side with the practical side — to actually go build the airplane and see if people will buy it.”

Electra has already built and flown a two-seated version of its plane. Last month, the company announced an $850 million investment to scale production of its nine-passenger aircraft in Springfield and Clark County, Ohio. The investment, which is expected to create 1,975 new jobs, means Electra will be building the next chapter of aviation in the state where engine-powered human flight first began.

From concept to company

The origins of Electra date back to a 2017 project among graduate students in MIT class 16.886 (Air Transportation Systems Architecting). Electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft were garnering excitement at the time, and Courtin’s group wanted to compare that approach to alternative designs.

“It was an open-ended, project-based class where you look at developments in aerospace,” Courtin says. “My group realized short takeoff and landing aircraft had a lot of advantages over eVTOL for getting people where they wanted to go. We started exploring using the same technology — lightweight, electric motors suitable for aviation — to make a new aircraft, which we now call the ultra-short takeoff and landing aircraft.”

The idea was to use batteries and small electric motors to shorten the runway and landing space of a fixed-wing aircraft while leveraging blown wind to travel farther distances in the sky than would be possible with electric motors alone.

The concept was developed further in several senior design classes co-taught by Drela and Hansman, while Courtin served as a teacher’s assistant. In the classes, student collaborators built a subscale model of the aircraft to prove it would work, testing it in MIT’s Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel and in flight. Courtin went on to work on parts of the concept for his PhD. 

In 2019, John Langford, who had been running the aircraft company Aurora Flight Sciences, which had recently been acquired by Boeing, got involved. Electra was officially formed that year.

As a first step, Electra’s team built the EL2, a two-seated version of its aircraft. That included designing and testing the hybrid propulsion system. The EL2 completed its first test flights in 2023 and has since completed over 200 flights.

The aircraft has a gas-powered generator located in its nose and two batteries under the floor, both of which feed the propellers during takeoff and landing. When cruising, the aircraft uses the generator, which can also charge the batteries.

“The gas generator is like a traditional turbine engine used in a conventional aircraft, only instead of driving a propeller or fan it drives an electric generator,” Courtin explains. “That feeds power to the eight motors on the wing. It allows you to have a smaller and more efficient engine because you can size it for cruising, not takeoff and landing conditions.”

The eight motors create a blown lift effect that allows the aircraft to take off and land in areas about the length of a soccer field, much shorter than the runways for conventional airplanes.

For travelers, “the big benefit is you can save a lot of time,” Courtin says. “You don’t need to go to an airport, and you don’t have to go to a train station.”

Operators could also maximize existing infrastructure at airports:

“If you’re three hours away from the nearest major airport, there’s a lot of friction in that,” Courtin says. “With Electra, we could fly you to the nearest major airport, and you don’t need to use a runway, so it doesn’t add to congestion at these very low-capacity places.”

Electra’s aircraft are also more affordable than traditional aircraft and far more quiet.

“The large number of propellers means you can make them much quieter than if you only had one or two,” Courtin explains. “That’s important because helicopters are restricted from operating in places they otherwise could because of the noise.”

Scaling up

Construction on Electra’s 96-acre Ohio manufacturing facility will begin next year. The facility’s initial phase will be capable of producing 400 of its nine-seat aircraft each year. The next phase will expand capacity to around 800 aircraft per year.

Electra’s team could see their aircraft shuttling people to major airports for longer trips or ultimately eliminating the need for conventional airports entirely.

“If you don’t have an existing airport, that’s a very difficult thing to build these days,” Courtin says. “But finding a soccer field-sized area is not hard, especially with our noise reductions.”

Electra’s team is also exploring applications around military logistics, cargo transport, and humanitarian missions.

For the passenger aircraft application, Electra’s team believes that as it scales production, it will be able to make the passenger aircraft accessible to a broad swath of travelers.

“If we can keep the fixed-wing design simplicity and make this large enough, then the per-seat cost could get to a range where a lot of people would have access to this,” Courtin says. “It wouldn’t just be a luxury product, so it could help a lot of people.”

Squid have occupied New England’s maritime imagination for centuries, from fishermen’s tales of strange tentacled creatures to the widely publicized giant squid reports along North Atlantic coastlines in the 1800s. Today, we turn a curious eye toward the longfin inshore squid (Doryteuthis pealeii) — the “Boston squid” — which has long been an important part of regional commercial fisheries. These squid thrive in the emerald green depths off the coast of Massachusetts, where low visibility is characteristic of the turbid, nutrient-rich waters.

Keith Ellenbogen, MIT Sea Grant resident artist and acclaimed underwater photographer, knows these waters well. On a good day, he might have 20 feet of visibility beneath the surface. But even with the clearest conditions, these swift squid evaded Ellenbogen’s lens for months. 

In 2023, over 2.85 million pounds of longfin squid — likely over 6 million individual squid — were landed commercially in Massachusetts, with a value exceeding $2.82 million. Consistently among the top 10 species landed commercially in Massachusetts, the longfin squid shares the ranks with the iconic American lobster, Atlantic surf clam, and sea scallop, underscoring its enduring significance in the state’s seafood industry. 

In 2024, landings came in under 750,000 pounds, roughly a quarter of the previous year’s catch. Likewise, the spring 2024 trawl survey documented in the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries Annual Report recorded a historic low in longfin squid biomass, following a record high in 2023. 

But this drop, while significant, doesn’t necessarily spell trouble for the species. Longfin squid often show large fluctuations in abundance from year to year. Their short lifespan of about six to nine months, combined with their sensitivity to shifting ocean conditions, makes their population dynamics inherently unpredictable. 

Kimberly Hyde, a biological oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC), notes that NEFSC research scientists have expanded squid research over the past few years, including a two-year study on longfin squid to better understand their life history and track their maturity and readiness to spawn. Across the Northeast, scientists are also collaborating with the fishing industry through efforts including the Longfin Squid Biological Sampling Program (SQUIBS), Collaborative SQUid Size Monitoring (SQUISM), and the Squid-Squad, a highly interdisciplinary team of scientists, industry members, and managers with a common goal to improve squid science. Still, much of this cephalopod’s story remains hidden from sight. 

After years of trying to find and photograph a squid spawning aggregation, Ellenbogen chartered a vessel and worked with a network of local fishermen to locate concentrations of squid beneath the surface. In New England’s emerald-green, nutrient-rich coastal waters, visibility was limited, and although he knew he was directly above the spawning grounds, finding a cluster of eggs and squid 30 to 40 feet below the surface was far from easy.

“As I descended through the emerald-green waters of Cape Cod, I couldn’t see anything at first,” Ellenbogen recalls. “I knew I was in the right area, but the seafloor seemed empty. Then I noticed a few faint shadows moving in the distance.” 

As he swam closer, the scene slowly revealed itself. 

“First came the squid, then the egg masses, and then hundreds more animals appearing out of the green water. Suddenly I found myself surrounded by squid flashing colors, courting, competing, and spawning,” Ellenbogen says. “It felt like being in a theater, watching a carefully choreographed performance unfold all around me.”

Dozens of squid hovered intently in a circle with arms and tentacles stretching toward the focus of attention: a large pale cluster of eggs fixed to a bed of slipper shells and fingerlike seaweed. Thousands of gelatinous, translucent egg capsules swayed softly in the current. Male and female pairs broke from the outer circle with ceremonial precision, darting inward to spawn. Their alienlike bodies pulsed and flickered with waves of color, from flares of rust-red, golden yellow, and iridescent pink to flashes of lightning white. Their brief lives had culminated here in this critical moment of coordination to give rise to the next generation. 

Longfin squid live fast and die young, exhibiting incredible exponential growth throughout their lifespan of less than one year. They emerge from egg capsules as planktonic hatchlings — paralarvae — that already look like tiny 1.5 millimeter simplified versions of their adult form. 

Still small but fast-growing, juveniles feast on planktonic prey in coastal, surface waters and move deeper in the water column as they grow larger, settling on a life closer to the seafloor. As natural-born ambush and pursuit predators, they begin hunting small crustaceans and other invertebrates — including other squid — with jet propulsion and 10 grasping arms and tentacles.

Like octopuses, squid have chromatophore organs, pigmented cells controlled by nerves and muscles through their central nervous system. Contraction or dilation of these sacs results in mesmerizing iridescence and color shifts. Their color-changing behavior serves several purposes, including camouflage, courtship, and communication through ancient visual language. And to add an extra layer of curiosity, squid themselves are effectively colorblind. Their eyes are well-adapted to detect contrast, brightness, movement, and even polarization, but not to perceive hues like we do.

According to a report from the NEFSC, longfin squid can reach sexual maturity at a mantle length of just 8 centimeters. Nearing adulthood, they migrate offshore to overwinter in deeper, warmer waters along the continental shelf. At night, they form large schools grouped by body size and move upward in the water column to feed. Growth remains rapid and temperature-dependent, with males growing faster and larger than females.

Longfin squid spawn year-round with seasonal and geographic peaks. In New England waters, spawning has been reported from May to August. Egg clusters, or mops, like the one Ellenbogen photographed, act like a hub. As reported by NOAA Fisheries, female squid lay fertilized egg capsules that contain about 150 to 200 eggs each in clusters attached to the ocean bottom. They return repeatedly to deposit multiple clutches of eggs over several weeks, with a typical female laying a total of 3,000 to 6,000 eggs.

Spawning typically occurs in seasonal pulses tied to water temperature and other conditions, sometimes triggering large spawning aggregations — dense gatherings of squid depositing and fertilizing eggs. Males and females gather in the spawning grounds, and density increases until individuals are constantly interacting.

But reproductive biology and behavior are complicated for longfin squid. The NEFSC report highlights unique behavior: Females can store sperm from spawning events for later use, and eggs in the same capsule from a single female may have multiple males from multiple spawning events. 

Consort males, typically the larger males, pair up with a single female during spawning. They swim closely alongside her, often guarding her with their arms, and use their size to intimidate competition. Sneaker males, smaller unpaired squid, use stealth and speed to sneak into position with paired females. Males deposit bundles of spermatophores into the female’s mantle cavity or in a pouch located near her head. 

The competition is guided by visual and chemical signals, including pheromones indicating reproductive readiness, rapid color and pattern changes, as well as strategic arm postures and whole-body displays. A 1999 paper published by the Marine Biological Laboratory catalogued 34 visual displays involving colors, brightness, spots, stripes, iridescence, and polarization signals, as well as 17 specific positions and movements used by squid on the spawning grounds. 

Squid were seen flashing white as a signal to repel other squid. Squid displaying this component are almost always engaged in mate guarding, egg laying, or competitive confrontations. Like humans, female squid can blush, displaying a dark patch on one side of the mantle. But when a squid blushes, it functions as a repellent to courting males. And as captivating as these colorful displays can be, squid communication largely remains an encrypted secret to even the most curious scientists. 

“Keith’s rare glimpse of squid in their natural environment beautifully bridges art and science, reminding us that we still have much to learn,” says Hyde, who has centered her research at NOAA on marine ecosystems and fisheries. 

For most people, squid are known solely as seafood or as shadowy legends, chameleons of the sea. Yet each spring, beneath the cool waters of Cape Cod, millions of longfin squid gather in this remarkable reproductive event, a reminder of the rich biodiversity and productivity of Massachusetts marine ecosystems. 

MIT Sea Grant works to support sustainable fisheries and to promote environmental education and stewardship of our coastal and ocean resources. As MIT Sea Grant’s resident artist, Keith Ellenbogen is working on a long-term project to document extraordinary species and ocean events that unfold just off our coast, revealing hidden moments that few have the opportunity to witness. The longfin squid is one of our region’s most valuable marine resources, and these images help reveal one of the most extraordinary events unfolding right off our coast.

Andy Ellis has a roundup of the security vendors at Black Hat this year.

Key Takeaways: We have entered into an AI world. While nearly half of booths didn’t directly mention AI or agents in their taglines, the effects of AI are everywhere. Multiple spaces (Identity, SaaS, AppSec, Data) have almost every vendor leading with AI; existing unsolved problem areas just got worse.

At the same time, there’s a clear trichotomy in the market: tools that tell you how bad things are; tools that stop adversaries, and tools that prevent problems from occurring. While you’d suspect that the tools that fix things would dominate, the tools that merely tell you how bad things are seem to be frustratingly plentiful...