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 is a problem:

Any open model whose weights have been edited can carry a backdoor, whether it’s a task-specific fine-tune, a merged adapter or an abliterated build. We have abliterated models in the title because it’s the most popular reason people download modified weights without verifying what’s inside. Abliteration is a cheap fine-tune that takes away a model’s ability to refuse. You find the direction in the weights that carries “no” and subtract it. The model then answers things a safety-tuned version would turn down. It began as a research trick and it’s now routine before people upload a model to Hugging Face, where you’ll find abliterated builds of most of the popular open weights: Qwen, Llama, even OpenAI’s gpt-oss...

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 16 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02792-w

In a year containing summits from the three United Nations environmental frameworks, we consider how cooperation across the Conferences of the Parties (COPs) can facilitate implementation and impact. Co-timed with the start of the biodiversity COP, we highlight the reciprocal relationship between climate change and biodiversity.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 16 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02778-8

This year, all three major Rio Conventions — on biodiversity, climate and desertification — convene their respective Conference of the Parties (COP). In advance of the biodiversity COP17, Astrid Schomaker, the executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, discusses the irrefutable need to integrate biodiversity conservation into broader environmental action to ensure local and global security and prosperity in a rapidly changing world.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 16 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02775-x

Climate change will further increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Subjective experience and attribution of extreme weather events to climate change, rather than objective exposure alone, are associated with greater climate-relevant attention and choices. Political affiliation influences attention and behaviour irrespective of subjective attribution and objective exposure.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 16 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02765-z

Mechanisms behind climate decision-making remain unclear. This study shows that political affiliation and subjective attribution shape attention allocation and climate-related choices, with subjective attribution moderating the effects of political affiliation and objective weather exposure.

Barry Steinhardt, a lifelong privacy champion and an early leader in the battle for digital civil liberties who served as EFF’s president in 1998-99, died last week at age 73. 

A Connecticut native, Steinhardt led the Vermont and Pennsylvania affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union before becoming associate director of the national ACLU. There, he helped spearhead the fight to overturn much of the Communications Decency Act, resulting in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Reno v. ACLU ruling in 1997. 

When the internet was still young, Steinhardt became one of the first attorneys to specialize in the intersection of technology and privacy. In early 1998 he took a leave of absence from the ACLU to become EFF’s president, and then returned to the ACLU in 1999. 

In 2002 he founded the ACLU’s Program on Technology and Liberty. After retiring from the ACLU, he continued on as a senior advisor to London-based Privacy International. 

Steinhardt chaired the 2003 Computer Freedom and Privacy Conference and served on a wide variety of significant panels and boards, including the Department of Transportation’s Negotiated Rule Making on national driver’s license standards, the Advisory Committee to the US Census, and the Blue Ribbon Panel on Genetics of the National Conference of State Legislatures. He also was selected to be a member of the US delegation to the G-8 Government and Private Sector Tokyo conference on Cyber Crime and served as an advisor to the Czech Helsinki Committee.  

“Barry led many critical technology and civil liberties fights and was an important mentor to me and others in the field,” said EFF Executive Director Nicole Ozer. “Barry’s influential work across strategy to defend and advance privacy rights and safeguard people against surveillance has made its mark on the law and policy of our digital world and protected the rights and safety of people across the United States and around the world.”   

No one should have to choose between speaking freely and protecting their immigration status. Yet that’s precisely the choice the Trump administration’s mass surveillance of online speech forces on noncitizens living in the U.S.   

Last fall, we sued on behalf of three major labor unions to stop this surveillance program. And just this month, we won our first major ruling: A federal district court denied the government’s motion to dismiss our lawsuit. This means the case can move forward—a win for free speech and a critical step in protecting our First Amendment rights online. We’ve already explained why this is a big deal for our clients, so let's take a closer look at the court’s reasoning.  

Our Lawsuit 

 Since taking power, the Trump administration has used AI and other automated tools to broadly surveil the social media and online speech of visa and green card holders, with the goal of identifying and punishing people who express views it opposes. The government is targeting a broad range of views, including criticism of the Trump administration; support for Palestine or criticism of Israel; “rationalizing or making light of” Charlie Kirk’s murder; and anything nebulously “hostile” to American culture, founding principles, “traditional American views,” or “our way of life.”  

It has paired that surveillance with a public intimidation campaign. High-ranking officials have explicitly threatened to punish noncitizens for their online speech, then followed through with a series of terrifying viewpoint-driven enforcement actions. This has led to a significant chilling effect on speech, not just for noncitizens, but also for their families, coworkers, and friends. 

In response, three major labor unions—the United Auto Workers (UAW), the Communications Workers of America (CWA), and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—sued the Departments of State and Homeland Security alleging that this viewpoint-based surveillance program violates the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).  The unions are represented by EFF, Muslim Advocates (MA), and the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic (MFIA). 

The government moved to dismiss our lawsuit, arguing first that federal immigration law prevents federal district courts from hearing the case, and second, that the unions don’t have “standing” to sue. Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York rejected both arguments and allowed the case to proceed. At this stage in the litigation, the court accepted all of the facts in our complaint as true and analyzed the law based on those facts. We will now prove these facts as the case proceeds. 

Federal Immigration Law Doesn’t Block Our Lawsuit 

 The government first argued that the court had no power to hear our case at all. It pointed to three provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that restrict when federal courts can review immigration matters. The district court disagreed and rejected each provision in turn. 

The first provision, 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(9), is often called the “zipper clause.” It bars federal courts from hearing challenges that arise from efforts to deport someone, except through review of an individual’s final removal order. The government claimed the zipper clause applies here because our lawsuit is really an effort to stop it from initiating adverse immigration actions. 

 The district court wholly rejected this argument. Relying on the Second Circuit’s decision in Ozturk v. Hyde, it held that the zipper clause bars only challenges to a particular individual’s removal proceedings, not a lawsuit like ours that challenges the constitutionality of the surveillance program itself. That the surveillance program might affect someone’s immigration proceeding down the line doesn’t turn our lawsuit into a removal challenge. 

 The court similarly rejected the government’s argument that § 1252(g) and § 1252(f)(1) prevent federal courts from hearing this case. Our suit, the court explained, “challenges the constitutionality of a government policy that is collateral to any active removal proceedings,” so § 1252(g) doesn’t apply. And § 1252(f)(1) only limits what kind of relief a court can give. So while the court may not be able to stop a particular person’s removal proceedings, it can still block “an unlawful surveillance program that suppresses free speech.” 

 The Unions Have Standing to Sue 

 To sue in federal court, a plaintiff must show that it has “standing” to bring its claims. This requires a plaintiff to show an “injury in fact” that is, among other things, “concrete.” That’s often a high bar in surveillance cases, where plaintiffs can’t easily see what the government is doing behind the scenes. And the Supreme Court has held that a person’s mere subjective fear of surveillance is too speculative to confer standing.  

Even so, our plaintiffs cleared the bar. The court held that the unions alleged concrete injuries, including a chill on members’ speech that is objectively reasonable, not just subjectively felt. It found that the unions had established standing in two ways: “organizational standing,” based on the unions’ own injuries, and “associational standing,” based on injuries the unions’ members have suffered. 

Organizational Standing 

The court first held that our plaintiffs had successfully alleged an injury to the unions themselves (injury was the only aspect of organizational standing the government disputed). The surveillance program has harmed the unions’ ability to carry out their core responsibilities, including “organizing their members and advocating for the unions’ goals.” The court made two key points: 

1. Unions Are Injured When Members Go Silent 

As we explained in our complaint, the surveillance program has caused members to step back from union leadership roles; stop participating in union activities online and in person; remove their names from union webpages; and avoid filling out bargaining surveys. Members who might otherwise spread the unions’ message and raise awareness of union issues are staying quiet, hampering the unions’ ability to organize. The court said this amounts to a concrete injury for purposes of standing. 

2. Surveillance Doesn’t Need to Target Pro-Union Speech  

 The court also rejected the government’s claim that members’ retreat from union activities was “essentially an overreaction,” because the surveillance doesn't target pro-union views. The court said this misunderstands the issue: “the question is whether the Government’s conduct would deter a person of ordinary firmness from engaging in protected activity, not whether the specific expression a member forgoes is itself among the viewpoints the Government disfavors.” 

Here, the surveillance program monitors noncitizens’ online activity indiscriminately, and members “cannot reliably predict which of their activities will be captured” and attributed to a disfavored viewpoint. What’s more, the court noted, the unions’ organizing often happens alongside the very advocacy the government is alleged to target, “including pro-Palestine and anti-ICE activism on college campuses.” That makes members’ retreat from union activity a foreseeable consequence of the program. 

Associational Standing  

 The court also held that the unions established associational standing to sue on behalf of their members. Of the three requirements for associational standing, the government challenged only two. It argued that members lacked sufficiently concrete injuries to sue in their own right, and that the claims aren’t “germane” to the unions’ purpose. 

The court disagreed and found associational standing for every claim but one: members’ right to receive information. That claim survives anyway, because the unions’ organizational standing covers it. Along the way, the court made several important rulings. 

 1. The Ongoing Surveillance Is a Present Injury 

 As a threshold matter, the government argued that our case is a “pre-enforcement challenge,” meaning we sued before the government actually punished anyone. That would trigger a different test, and the government argued we failed it because we hadn’t alleged a sufficiently imminent threat of prosecution. 

The court disagreed, explaining that “Plaintiffs’ allegations are of an ongoing surveillance program that is actively chilling the speech of their members and otherwise causing harm.” That chilling effect is a First Amendment injury even if there isn’t a direct prohibition on speech. And when government conduct is actively chilling speech right now, a challenge to it isn’t pre-enforcement. 

 2. Surveillance + Public Threats Reasonably Chills Speech 

 The court rejected the government’s argument that we alleged only a generalized, subjective, speculative fear of surveillance, explaining that “the chilling effect” of the program can “itself be an injury when the plaintiffs are surveilled.” Here, plaintiffs have alleged that their members are under active surveillance, which has had objective chilling effects on their speech. And the government is targeting certain disfavored viewpoints, making it “viewpoint discrimination” that is “presumptively unconstitutional.” 

The chill is also objectively reasonable, the court held, because the government has extensively publicized the surveillance program through public statements and social media posts, making clear that noncitizens who post disfavored views will be targeted for removal. Notably, the court agreed with us that the “threat of adverse immigration consequences, under a government whose harsh immigration crackdowns has been heavily publicized and reported on, is certainly enough to deter a person of ordinary firmness from the exercise of First Amendment rights.” This is a concrete injury sufficient for standing. 

3. Demanding Social Media Handles Also Causes Harm 

Under the surveillance program, applicants for certain immigration benefits must disclose all social media handles they have used during the preceding five years and, in some instances, maintain public social media accounts. The district court held that this too amounts to a First Amendment injury, undermining the rights to anonymity and freedom of association.  

The judge pointed to one CWA member we identified, a lawful permanent resident with a pending naturalization application who is subject to the five-year disclosure requirement. The member has deleted one social media account, set another to private, and removed past posts expressing disfavored views. These allegations, the court said, show an actual and objectively reasonable injury due to the government’s surveillance program.

4. General, Public Threats Can Still Be Coercive 

We also argued that the Trump administration is waging a campaign of coercive threats to suppress disfavored speech, which the First Amendment prohibits. The court agreed that this campaign can be an actionable injury of its own. 

Notably, the court held that it didn’t matter that the government’s statements were not specifically targeted at certain individuals, and were instead made on social media or to the public. In this case, the court explained, “the number, severity, and high-profile examples of action upon those threats are such that a reasonable person would perceive the communication as coercive.” 

That means it’s reasonable that the unions’ members “would, and did, limit their public speech on disfavored viewpoints” in response. That the threats were made to the general public “does not diminish this injury,” as the very purpose of the challenged surveillance program is to intimidate noncitizens into silence.  

5. Free Speech is Central to Union Functioning 

The court also found that the unions met the second prong of associational standing. It held that the unions’ interests in protecting their members’ rights to speak freely, organize, and advocate, are “germane” to the unions’ missions. The court put it plainly:

The freedom of Plaintiffs’ members to speak, associate, and appear publicly is not incidental to union work, but rather is the mechanism through which unions recruit, organize, communicate, and bargain. A program alleged to silence members and drive them from the unions’ rolls therefore strikes at the unions’ representational function itself.

Next Steps 

When the government surveils what people post online and threatens to punish them for their viewpoints, the result is exactly what our clients have experienced. Members have deleted their accounts, scrubbed posts, and withdrawn from union activities. 

The government must now answer our complaint and we will move forward with the discovery process, in which we anticipate getting more information from the government about its surveillance program. We look forward to continuing to prove our case. 

With rising temperatures, the buttressing ice shelves at the edges the Antarctic ice sheet are melting and calving off at record rates, leaving behind sheer cliffs of solid ice. The stability of these exposed ice cliffs could influence how Antarctica further breaks apart and contributes to sea level rise around the world. 

Scientists have assumed that an ice cliff’s stability depends on its height: Ice cliffs that are taller than 100 meters — about the height of the Statue of Liberty — should collapse under their own weight. And once a cliff sloughs off, it should expose even taller, inland cliffs that collapse in turn. At least, that’s been the idea.

But researchers at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have found that the stability of an ice cliff depends on more than its height. And even when a cliff topples, it doesn’t necessarily set off a runaway collapse. 

In a study appearing today in Science, the team presents an analysis of over 15,000 ice cliffs in Antarctica that were monitored by satellites over a four-year period. They observed how the ice cliffs and the larger ice sheet evolved over time, and found that those ice cliffs that collapsed did so at a much faster rate than scientists had predicted. But these collapsing cliffs also quickly stabilized, instead of continuing to erode the larger ice sheet. 

“We found that when the cliffs were retreating, they were doing so faster than what has been modeled, which would mean more ice loss and higher contributions of sea level rise,” says study author Caroline Needell, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. “But because we found that the retreat was short-lived, and all the glaciers eventually stabilized, that would suggest that things won’t be so bad. We don’t see this runaway effect.”

The study’s co-authors are Catherine Walker, assistant scientist at WHOI, and Jeremy Bassis, associate professor at the University of Michigan.

Ice height

In glacial science, ice cliff collapse is described by a process known as marine ice cliff instability (MICI), which assumes that if an ice cliff exceeds a critical height, it will collapse. If then a taller cliff is exposed, it too should collapse, triggering a cascade of instabilities that shrink and erode the ice sheet over time. 

In previous studies, scientists have characterized MICI mainly by modeling the physical properties of ice, scaling these relationships up to the size of an ice cliff and combining these predictions with a few observations of actual ice cliffs in Antarctica. Through these efforts, scientists had determined that ice cliffs become unstable and collapse when they are taller about 100 meters.  

“Predictive ice-sheet models that have been used so far to represent ice cliff instability just take into account cliff height,” Needell notes. “That’s the only variable that matters. And once the cliff height reaches the critical threshold, usually 100 meters, it should initiate this runaway effect of ice sheet retreat.”

But she and her colleagues wondered: How tall do ice cliffs really get? And when they collapse, do they really set off a runaway retreat? 

To answer these questions, they looked to data collected by NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) — a satellite that passes over the Earth’s polar regions and uses a laser altimeter to measure the height of ice sheets, glaciers, sea ice, and the level of the ocean in and around Antarctica. 

The team collected the satellite’s data from 2019 to 2023, which included measurements every three months of over 15,000 ice cliffs. From this dataset, they observed that the average ice cliff was about 30 meters tall — much shorter than the proposed critical height. But they did see a few rare ice cliffs that exceeded 100 meters. 

They also looked for other features that might influence a cliff’s stability. Interestingly, they found that ice cliffs that more or less stayed in place over time also had thicker mélange — a term for the slushy mix of broken icebergs and sea ice that gathers at the front of an ice cliff. 

“We measured mélange height and found taller cliffs have thicker mélange, which could be a built-in stabilizing effect,” Needell explains.

The satellite data also showed that the height of the surrounding water can stabilize a cliff: The deeper the water, the more it can buoy and push back against the cliff, keeping it from collapsing. 

Glacial speed bump

“After we did that global analysis, we thought, ok, let’s zoom in on the tallest cliffs and see how they’re behaving,” Needell says.

The team focused in on four regions around the Antarctic ice sheet where the satellite captured the tallest ice cliffs, each about 100 meters tall, with one that was 127 meters tall. They compiled measurements of these four cliffs and how they evolved every three months, over four years. 

From these measurements, they saw that indeed, the tallest cliffs collapsed, and the ice sheet in those regions retreated, at a surprisingly faster rate than MICI models had predicted. 

“But that retreat was short-lived,” Needell notes. 

After that, the ice spread back out toward the ocean.

“It’s this rapid retreat, punctuated by periods of stabilization,” Needell says. “That was puzzling to us. Then, we thought: We need to look at all the things that affect cliff height.”

The first thing they considered was the topography of the land underneath the ice. If that topography is relatively flat, then the slope of the overlying ice sheet reflects that actual height of the ice itself. But if there’s a bump or rise in the land, the ice sitting directly over that bump is in fact shorter than it appears. The topography then could act as a literal speed bump, thinning the overlying ice, and making it less likely to collapse. 

When the researchers checked topographic measurements of Antarctic, they found that indeed, ice cliffs stabilized around regions where the land happened to rise up. 

They also found that the taller a cliff is, the faster they “thin out” — as they collapse, once tall cliffs settle into shorter, more stable cliffs that prevents further collapse. 

“Now we know what to look for,” Needell says. “We really need to know the bed topography, and we need to know the ice thinning rate, in order to get ice cliff instability right, because this value really matters in the context of projecting sea level rise.” 

This research was supported, in part, by NASA, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the DOMINOS project, a component of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration.

Matthew Green has a new site that tries to estimate the number of cryptanalyst-hours that have been spent analyzing different public-key algorithms:

Abstract: We estimate how much public cryptanalysis each public-key assumption has received, using the literature itself as the instrument. From roughly sixteen thousand candidate papers we classify cryptanalytic work on ECDLP, structured and plain lattices, syndrome decoding and their comparators, then convert papers into estimated research-allocation years through a person-level author map. These publication-based estimates may substantially overstate actual time spent. Lattices have overtaken elliptic curves in this cumulative measure only recently; we express that history as inference budgets under stated productivity assumptions. The study was conducted by AI models: Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5.5 built the pipeline, ran the analysis and wrote this page, with contributions from GPT-6 Astra. Matthew Green set the questions, made the key methodological decisions and oversaw the work...

Around the world, many people report distrusting their government. In some places, such as Latin America, North America, and Africa, trust in government has declined in recent decades. How can governments rebuild this trust?

New research from the MIT Governance Lab and the behavioral science research organization Busara examines how government partnerships with trusted private organizations can shape public trust in government. In Kenya, county governments have worked with a telecommunications company to develop an online public service portal. A survey of people in and around the capital city of Nairobi found that highlighting the role of the company increased people’s willingness to use the portal, but hurt their trust in government. 

The results of this work, published in the September issue of the journal Government Information Quarterly, can help researchers understand how government digitization projects and relationships with technology companies affect public trust.

Trust in government and online public services

Studies have suggested that without public trust in government, people are less likely to follow rules and laws, and governments have a harder time solving problems that require public cooperation. Research has linked low levels of trust to people not paying taxes, lower voter turnout, lower Covid-19 vaccination rates, and higher Covid-19 infection rates.

In Kenya, a 2023 survey found that only 43 percent of people trusted the government. Corruption, poor service delivery, and flawed elections have likely hurt public trust. The Kenyan government is also a pioneer in digital technology for governance. Mobile money is widely used, and a centralized service delivery platform called eCitizen has made thousands of digitized services available to citizens. Such digital services can allow governments to serve people more efficiently and, if executed well, can build trust in government competency.

Does who gets credit for making a digital tool impact people’s trust?

Recently, Kenya’s 47 county governments partnered with Safaricom, a highly trusted telecommunications company, to create an online portal called My County Hub. The portal aims to allow people to request government emergency services, pay for business permits and parking, receive information from the government, and more.

In the new study, researchers told the more than 11,000 online survey participants how they could access My County Hub and some of the services it would offer. Some people were told the county government and Safaricom were both responsible for the portal, while others were told the government alone or the company alone was responsible. The survey also asked people about their trust in the county government before and after they received this information. The researchers hypothesized that people who were told the partnership was a public-private collaboration would have more trust at the end of the survey, with people’s trust in Safaricom transferring to the government partner.

Overall, people expressed more trust in government after being told about My County Hub, suggesting that digitization itself could be tied to increasing trust. However, trust did not seem to transfer from Safaricom to the government: people who were told about the partnership did not come to trust the government more than those who were told that the government alone was responsible. Trust sometimes transfers in settings where people don’t have strong beliefs about the untrusted group. But people tend to have strong beliefs about government, which could make it harder to sway their opinions.

Crediting the company could hurt people’s relationship with government

People who were told Safaricom alone was responsible for the portal expressed a greater willingness to use the portal and more interest in learning more about it. But relative to people who were told the government alone made the portal, the people in the Safaricom group had lower levels of trust in government afterwards. This could be because people viewed Safaricom as doing the work of the government, which could lower their faith in the government’s competency. 

The results suggest that while emphasizing the role companies play in developing digital services could encourage people to use these services in the short term, it could also erode people’s confidence in the government in the long term. People with higher trust in government were also more willing to use My County Hub in the future, so long-term trust in government could be important for service provision.

The researchers also noticed that people told about the partnership did see their trust in government increase if they had high levels of trust in the government and Safaricom at the start of the survey. And the decreased trust in government in the Safaricom group was driven by people who trusted Safaricom but distrusted the government at the start. 

These findings are in line with prior research showing that preexisting trust levels influence how trust changes during digitization efforts. In the future, research on people who distrust the government could look at other strategies for building trust through digital services.

The study’s authors include Lily L. Tsai, Ford Professor of Political Science and the director and founder of the MIT Governance Lab, and MIT Governance Lab Research Director Lula Chen.

As artificial intelligence use becomes more widespread, scholars are working to understand its effects on the people who use it. MIT Professor Eric So offers one of the most complete syntheses yet, in his new book, “The Collision: What AI Does to Us,” published this month by W.W. Norton. Recognizing that AI offers opportunities to complete work faster, and in some cases has been turned into useful domain-specific tools, So nonetheless looks at the costs of relying on it too broadly. He contends that heavy use of AI can lead to a kind of cognitive atrophy, in which people fail to develop and retain essential thinking skills. In general, he says, evidence shows that our ability to learn gets dramatically better when we wrestle with material, work through initial failures, keep iterating, and in the process acquire better thinking skills while retaining more knowledge. 

These conclusions are drawn from recent research by So and others, in academia and industry, including analysis from AI firms themselves, such as an Anthropic study showing that about half of queries from college students were low-effort queries for simple answers. So also weaves personal reflections into his narrative — having long studied financial markets and behavior, he is familiar with analyzing how new tools and information affect our decisions. MIT News talked to So, who is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Global Economics and Behavioral Science in the MIT Sloan School of Management, about the book. 

Q: What prompted you to write “The Collision”?   

A: I wrote this book in response to patterns I was seeing in myself and other individuals. I open the book with this story where I was instinctively reaching for AI to help me think through problems I normally would have handled myself. A colleague had reached out for assistance and I had essentially taken her question and written half a sentence, then said, “ChatGPT, help me finish this professionally.” I made a few light edits and sent it off. And I sat back and really felt incredibly concerned about how I had removed my own thinking from the process.

I have found students are outsourcing their thinking to AI, rather than thinking through things themselves, turning to it to answer homework that would normally help them build mastery in a subject. We need to start understanding what this technology is doing to us and how it interacts with human cognition and our psychology, and give people some practical insights. 

Q: Part of that means understanding the incentives people have to use AI, or how the allure of AI takes hold, even when there are long-term costs, in your view. 

A: There are converging factors drawing us to AI. For example we have a real biological instinct to conserve our mental energy, and socially, we face situations where AI is used by other people to race ahead, and it rachets up the pressure on everyone else to use AI. Combine that with the problems detecting AI use in a practical way, and all these factors create what I call “AI gravity,” this constant pull to use AI. It’s not simply a matter of telling people to think for themselves. At this moment we’re in, AI is colliding with society.

Q: So we need to look at these systemic factors, not just individual decisions, when it comes to AI use, like businesses urging employees to use it. 

A: Many organizations are not just suggesting use of AI: It is now the basis of your evaluation, meaning if you want a bonus or promotion, it is incumbent upon you to use these tools. I think a subtle process is taking hold in academia, where people say, “My future employer will want me to use AI, so I’d better start using it now.” But the problem is that as you start to use AI now, we’re losing touch with the practices and capabilities we’re seeking to build, and in turn that makes us more dependent on using AI in the future, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Q: What is AI doing to our minds? 

A: AI is not just changing what we can do, it’s changing who we are as thinkers. AI removes a lot of the friction necessary to build foundational mastery. It is causing many people to lose their capacity for pushing through problems. AI offers instant relief, and we become accustomed to that. Many people are turning to it as an access point for information, so it’s affecting our ability to remember. Also, AI is changing our interpersonal relationships. A key point in the book is that these models are simultaneously sycophantic, meaning they want to make us happy because that’s how they drive engagement and get positive feedback, but they are also really persuasive. We lose the ability to connect with other people because we’re so accustomed to this frictionless environment where the models always agree with us.

Q: Your book emphasizes the value of “productive struggle.” You write, “Struggle doesn’t mean you’re suffering.” Instead, we get a handle on things by struggling to learn them. 

A: We need to recast how we think about struggle, as something that is formative rather than a problem to be solved. I draw a lot of parallels in the book between some of the societal changes that occurred post-industrialization, when suddenly people no longer needed to be physically active to be economically productive. We saw more people suddenly develop physical exercise as something we do intentionally, that required reframing of what physical struggle meant. And I think we need that sort of shift about what we think about cognitive struggle. 

Q: Given all this, what can we do to maintain some reasonable level of cognitive effort today?

A: At the personal level, I emphasize four principles for navigating this age of AI. One is embracing the struggle, as we’ve talked about. The second rule is: Value who you are without AI. I’ve seen so many presentations over the last couple of years where someone has put together this very polished-looking presentation with Claude, but when they present it, it’s clear they didn’t put in the work necessary to understand the material. The formative struggle creates what I refer to as an “inseparable task bundle,” since making the slides allows me to engage in substantive discussion. In the absence of valuing who you are without AI, we get the product, but not the ability to capitalize on it.

The third rule is about reinvesting your cognitive surplus. There are a lot of tasks for which AI can save you time — rote activities — but it matters what you do with those time savings. If you’re just funneling the same energy into the same tasks, you’re missing out on the potential transformational benefits of AI. The most innovative changes are not the ones that simply allow us to automate, but stretch the capabilities of  humanity in a productive way and build expertise. Or, people can channel that freed-up time to focus on family, learn a new language, cultivate skills. 

The last rule is about using AI as your cognitive trainer. AI is this dual force, where it is very bad for thinking if you use it as an answer machine, but can be great for learning if you use it as a tutor. AI can be tailored to you. However, it requires that you seek out the friction of having a tutor, relative to having an answer machine. And that requires motivation. 

This is a very challenging moment, and the problem is one we need to take seriously. 

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 15 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02757-z

A distributional analysis of European Union climate policy pathways traces the costs of reducing carbon dioxide emissions to the level of households based on their spending and income patterns. We find that different equity considerations, including income inequality and within-group impact divergence, can shape optimal climate policy design with carbon prices, transfers, standards and subsidies.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 15 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02782-y

Marine radar signal propagation is highly sensitive to fine-scale vertical changes in water vapour. Now research shows that long-term increases in sea surface temperatures are strengthening the frequency and intensity of the features that allow radar signals to travel further than expected.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 15 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02774-y

Atmospheric ducts are waveguides that affect electromagnetic propagation in the atmosphere, affecting radar and other technologies. Here the authors show that warming intensifies such ducting over mid- to low-latitude oceans.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 15 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02781-z

The role of wind in ecosystem water use efficiency remains unclear. The authors show that water use efficiency declines with increasing wind speed, driven mainly by increases in evapotranspiration and secondarily by reductions in gross primary productivity.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 15 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02763-1

Clean hydrogen is widely proposed for hard-to-abate sector decarbonization, but its limited supply requires prioritizing sectors with the highest value. This study evaluates ten sectors and identifies key no-regret uses, while highlighting the need for specific demand-side policies.

Today, EFF joined the ACLU of Wisconsin in filing a petition to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, asking it to rule that the state’s constitution requires a warrant for retrospective searches of ALPR databases used by law enforcement in four cities: Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, and Green Bay. We represent a religious organization, the Wisconsin Council of Churches, as well as an individual pastor in Green Bay.

As the petition explains:

Right now, Automated License Plate Readers (“ALPRs”) are recording the movements of vast numbers of Wisconsin drivers as they seek medical care, attend 12-step recovery meetings, attend religious services, participate in protests, attend political meetings, and engage in many other private, sensitive activities. Law enforcement entities throughout Wisconsin collect, store, share, and aggregate this ALPR data. Then they search it, retrospectively tracking the movements of individuals and entire communities in ways that would have been prohibitively costly, if not outright impossible, before the advent of ALPR technology.

We all deserve to be free of warrantless mass surveillance. We all deserve to live in a country where surveillance vendors cannot help police upend our system of individualized suspicion. Religious organizations and officials like our clients have a heightened interest in protecting their location privacy because of the range of expressive associations their work entails, including facilitating gatherings for religious worship, as well as offering pastoral care, confidential counseling, and community support. Likewise, the people who visit houses of worship have a strong right to privacy against police monitoring of when they pray, seek addiction counseling, or attend a domestic violence survivor meeting.

This is our second lawsuit challenging warrantless ALPR searches, following SIREN v. San Jose. Earlier this month, a federal court in Oklahoma became the first to rule that ALPRs are a “type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” and suppress evidence from a warrantless ALPR search. We hope the Wisconsin Supreme Court will agree.

Read the Wisconsin Supreme Court petition

Read the press release

Related Cases: Wisconsin Council of Churches v. Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha & Green Bay

EFF legal intern Gabrielle Ladun was the principal author of this post. 

The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) has published a summary of findings from its audit of the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) facial recognition technology. While the detailed findings are classified, the summary states that the OIG’s audit uncovered a “significant weakness” in the technology’s ability to protect the privacy of passenger data. This has massive privacy implications for the millions of passengers who travel and don’t opt out of the TSA’s biometric surveillance technology verification process. 

TSA uses facial comparison technology for identity verification of airline passengers. A camera takes a photo of passengers to verify that their provided identification matches their live photo. Although TSA states that it is “committed to protecting traveler privacy,” the audit highlights that this has not been the case.  

The OIG found that TSA’s Credential Authentication Technology 2’s (CAT-2) vendor “was able to access and extract sensitive passenger information, including driver’s license and passport images, during system troubleshooting and enhancements, without TSA’s knowledge.”  

The OIG further admonished the agency:  

TSA lacked clear policies, did not track when this data was extracted, could not verify that extracted information was properly deleted, and did not notify passengers when their biometric and biographic information may have been stored. As a result, although passenger information was generally protected during routine operations, weaknesses in vendor oversight created a risk that sensitive personal information could be retained or exposed. 

We hope the TSA will fix these issues. The OIG summary states: 

We issued one finding and three recommendations to strengthen controls, improve oversight, and ensure transparency and the proper handling of passenger data. TSA concurred with all three recommendations. Two recommendations are open and resolved, and one remains open and unresolved. 

Why EFF Opposes the Government’s Use of Facial Recognition Technology 

EFF has a long history of opposing governmental use of facial recognition technology. As the OIG’s audit underscores, this technology presents privacy risks associated with unsecured data, unauthorized access, and data breaches. The government’s use of this technology also creates a mass surveillance system and facilitates the creation of warrantless biometric records for unconsenting parties.  

The biometric data captured by this technology is not without errors. There have been multiple instances of law enforcement agencies using facial recognition technology to misidentify and arrest innocent individuals.  

Reminder: Opting Out of TSA Photos Is Possible 

Given that facial recognition technology is prone to mistakes, combined with the OIG’s audit revealing significant privacy weaknesses, it is imperative that travelers remember that opting out is possible. TSA’s own website emphasizes that travelers who wish to decline to have their photo taken for facial comparison can do so without any delay, disruption, or recourse.  

Considering the data protection weaknesses exposed by the OIG’s audit, EFF will continue to oppose this governmental system of mass surveillance and spread awareness to ensure that no one is forced to relinquish their biometric data without consent. 

More than 100 people filled the MIT Chapel on Sept. 24 to pay tribute to Assistant Professor Thomas Rose, the MIT archaeometallurgist who died last month following a bicycle crash in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Faculty, students, and staff affiliated with the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) and the Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE), along with family and friends, gathered for a memorial service where colleagues spoke about the 37-year-old, who joined the DMSE faculty in January and had just started building a research program at MIT. They remembered him as a brilliant researcher and generous colleague with an extraordinary breadth of expertise and eclectic passions ranging from rowing to archery. 

A portrait of Rose sat on an easel next to the chapel’s flower-covered altar. A cellist played as guests entered and took their seats.

Chaplain to the Institute Thea Keith-Lucas opened the service by reflecting on the loss felt across MIT. 

“We honor the unique gifts that he brought to this world. We honor the ways that he was growing, and the possibilities that were cut short. We honor the small, unseen moments of courage and connection that create a life,” she said.

Finding a unicorn

To give a sense of what Rose meant to DMSE, department head Polina Anikeeva briefly explained archaeometallurgy — the study of how ancient societies produced and used metals — and its development at MIT, beginning in the 1960s. The field flourished after the establishment of CMRAE in the 1970s, but over the following decades it began to contract in the United States, and MIT had difficulty finding people with an increasingly rare set of skills. 

“We were looking for a unicorn. We were looking for two decades,” Anikeeva said. When Anikeeva and other DMSE faculty reviewed Rose’s resume in 2025, they were impressed by his unique training in geoscience, metallurgy, and archaeology and met him soon after. “We saw a brilliant, creative colleague — unassuming, intellectually fearless, adaptable, resourceful, and eagerly looking into the future.”

Mike Tarkanian, senior lecturer in DMSE and associate director for CMRAE, described the Zoom interview with Rose that kicked off the faculty search. Rose spoke fluently about his work, interests, and research vision — without the slides or notes that candidates typically rely on.

“I hung on every word — but it was so unusual and so risky that I wasn’t sure how it would be received,” Tarkanian said. “As soon as the call ended, my phone rang and it was a colleague who was also on the Zoom and he said, ‘That’s our guy. That has to be our guy.’”

Anikeeva also spoke of the enthusiasm he brought with him every day at MIT, noting his “almost childlike curiosity and his enormous positivity.”

“There were no obstacles, only opportunities and possibilities.”

To honor Rose and carry forward the work he had begun at MIT, Anikeeva said DMSE would launch the Thomas Rose Fellowship for Excellence in Archaeometallurgy, dedicated to supporting the most promising young scholars at the PhD and postdoctoral levels, “so that we can continue this field for the world and for the U.S. and for the memory of Thomas.”

A generous spirit

Speakers also remembered Rose’s kindness, generosity, and empathy toward everyone around him. Tarkanian stressed Rose’s commitment to community and helping others, noting his contributions to research tools used by archaeologists worldwide. He gave an example from Rose’s undergraduate years in his native Germany, when he gave tutorials for first-year archaeological science students who were struggling with chemistry and math. A former student told Tarkanian that an email Rose sent inviting students to the tutorial ended with, “I guess I’ll be more nervous than you folks tomorrow.”

“This was the Thomas we only started to get to know,” Tarkanian said, “someone who offered his expertise to others in need without question, while being thoughtful enough to worry out loud that he might be the nervous one and, by doing so, putting others at ease.”

DMSE Assistant Professor Tania Lopez-Silva, who started at MIT six months before Rose, recalled his patience and understanding. When she arranged a lunch with him, he said he would eat anything but mushrooms and eggplant.

“Somehow I misunderstood him, and I chose the place that probably has the most mushroom and eggplant options possible,” Lopez-Silva said. “He said that he still wanted to try the place, and he would find something to eat. That was Thomas — kind, patient, open-minded, and always willing to make the best of things.”

That quality came through in a story by another DMSE faculty member, Assistant Professor Thomas J. Wallin, who recalled a photo Rose had sent him of the apartment he had found overlooking the Charles River. Wallin was impressed, but Rose said with characteristic directness that it was quite small, but “very long and narrow” — which turned out to be a good thing. 

“He explained that because it was narrow, he could stand at the edge of his balcony and shoot at his archery target through his hallway, past his kitchen, at his door, and it would be the proper distance,” Wallin said, drawing chuckles in the chapel. “I don’t think that’s a request many Boston realtors get, but that was Thomas.”

Rose’s connections also extended beyond DMSE. Katya Tiukhtikova, joined by fellow MIT Archery Club member Kiarra Ning, remembered how Rose treated others. 

“He only focused on the good in people, and gave everyone a chance to show the best parts of themselves,” Tiukhtikova said.

She also recalled the contagious excitement Rose brought to archery practice, saying he “always brightened the days of everyone who was lucky enough to share the archery range with him.”

Tarkanian ended his remarks with a reflection on academic life and the importance of generosity and humility alongside brilliance and achievement.

“If part of Thomas’s legacy here at MIT is that we become a little more generous with our time, a little more humble about our accomplishments, and a little more deliberate about building communities in which other people can thrive and grow, that would be a legacy worthy of him.”