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.

Yesterday, along with the ACLU, EFF filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit court of appeals in United States v. Spurlock, a case involving a “tower dump” warrant. These overbroad warrants require cellular providers to turn over location data about every phone in a given area at a given time. This is the first such case to be heard by a federal appeals court since the US Supreme Court ruled this summer that highly similar “geofence” warrants are searches under the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.

Spurlock involves an investigation into two murder victims discovered on the side of a rural California highway. Police also found a car belonging to one of the victims several miles away on the same highway. They quickly sought a tower dump warrant for an area covering this stretch of road, which eventually revealed location data on nearly 1,700 unique phones. Faced with a motion to suppress, the district court relied on a Fifth Circuit court of appeals decision about geofence warrants to hold that tower dumps are similarly categorically unconstitutional “general warrants” that violate the Fourth Amendment. However, the court refused to suppress evidence on the basis of the “good faith doctrine.”

Our amicus brief on appeal makes several key arguments.

First, we point out that the Supreme Court’s decision in the geofence case Chatrie v. United States this summer only strengthens the arguments that tower dumps are unconstitutional general warrants. Tower dumps are a somewhat older technique than geofence warrants, but they are both “reverse location searches,” in which police “tap into an all-encompassing database, allowing them to undertake nearly perfect, retrospective surveillance of countless persons and places.” This is the sort of untargeted “general warrant” the framers of the Fourth Amendment wanted to prevent. As we write in the brief, “Searching all people in an area without probable cause to believe they were all involved in the criminal activity under investigation reproduces the evils of general warrants and is not constitutionally permitted.” It’s this rule of law that prevents police from searching the houses of a hundred, or even a thousand people in the vicinity of a crime.

Second, we note that even if high courts continue to allow tower dump and geofence warrants in any cases, core Fourth Amendment law requires strict limits to protect the privacy of innocent bystanders, including limits on the scope and duration of the warrants, as well notice to affected individuals and after-the-fact deletion and minimization of irrelevant data.

Finally, we argue that the Fourth Amendment requires the court to set aside the good faith doctrine in cases like these and actually decide the constitutional issue. Too often courts pass the buck in cases involving novel surveillance techniques, leading to situations where police can continue using the technique for years or even decades without a definitive ruling.

Whether they call it AI summaries, knowledge panels, or AMP, Google takes actions that are less about functionality and more about locking you into its own ecosystem. Knowing that makes it possible for all of us to choose better services than Google's, defeating their anticompetitive goal. In this case, as it is so often, knowledge is power.  

In the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and getting online involved your computer making eldritch shrieking, Google was a website that took whatever you typed in and gave you a list of links that best matched what you were searching for. As it's grown beyond that, however, the core function of Google Search has moved from giving you the best answer to your query to a number of other things, most of them about making money for Google. 

This is obviously not a new observation. It's at the core of what EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow named "enshittification." But it's important to remember that whatever shiny new name or technology is wrapped around these tools, it's not about the wrapping, it's about the monetization. 

In the case of Google Search, the company has a history of rolling out new "features" that are less helpful to the searcher and more designed to keep you and your data within the Google ecosystem. One easy example of enshittification is putting sponsored links and ads at the top of search results, forcing you to scroll down past a bunch of not relevant links to get to your answers. Or, in some cases, accidentally clicking on sponsored links that might be designed to give you the opposite information of what you're looking for or for a competitor to the product you intended to buy.  

The other clumsy version of this is Google's self-preferencing, where Google's own services—say YouTube if you're looking for a video—are weighted so that they appear at the top of a search over a competitor's. Similar to this was Google's push for websites, particularly news ones, to be made available via what it called "Accelerated Mobile Pages" or AMP, which in theory stripped out features that might make loading a page on mobile too slow, but also handed over control of how webpages looked on mobile to Google and turned mobile links, often by default, into Google links.  

But the other way that Google has historically kept your—and your valuable eyeballs—on its website has been to just obviate the need to even click on a link and leave Google at all. The first version of this was what Google calls "knowledge panels." These are snippets of information shown on the results page of a search that purport to answer your question. Knowledge panels predate the AI push and haven't always been what you could call accurate.  

Knowledge panels are extremely similar to the AI summaries we now see at the top of Google Search results, except that instead of pulling quotes from specific linked sources, it's the AI doing the summarizing, though also sometimes with links. They are basically the same thing, mostly changed only in branding, because AI is now the cool kid on the block. The goal is essentially the same—it's less about providing you with the best answer to your query and more about making you think it's unnecessary to click a link and leave Google's ecosystem. And, more importantly, it keeps you on Google's pages longer to read the content. More time on the page is more time exposed to ads and sponsored links and more money for Google.  

The biggest irony here is that it didn’t even work. People choosing to use “AI mode”—and possibly made accustomed to getting information as text instead of links through the knowledge panels and the AI summaries at the top—has caused “lower monetization” via ads. Ads, remember, are Google’s main source of revenue. Like newspapers before them, Google is finding that counting on a monopoly on ad space maybe isn’t the most sound strategy in a shifting technological landscape. And to get out of the hole it has made for itself, it is lighting cash on fire to try to get back on top. Perhaps they should consider pivoting to video.  

Every time you see a feature like this, no matter what it is called or what "new" technology they claim fuels it, remember that it is Google's monetary incentives that drive the decisions and not necessarily the tech itself. And you can always choose to ignore it, scroll past, disable it, or even go to another service entirely.  

MIT researchers will lead a four-year, up to $38 million project, funded by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), aimed at developing a noninvasive, wearable patch that continually monitors biomarkers of heart disease and sepsis.

The project is called PYTHIA, which stands for “predictive platform for physiological and therapeutic health intervention and adaptive management.”

According to the project plan, the patch, which will capture clinical-grade health information in real time, will be powered by heat from the patient’s body. It could provide essential information to help clinicians diagnose heart failure and sepsis early, before the diseases have caused irreversible damage. 

The researchers believe the minimally invasive device could also track the progress of a patient’s recovery after they are discharged from the hospital, and assist clinicians in developing more effective therapeutic approaches.

Catching common killers

Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the U.S., while sepsis kills at least 350,000 U.S. adults each year and is the leading cause of death in hospitals, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We targeted these diseases because they are very lethal, but we also see opportunities for detecting biomarkers related to heart disease and sepsis to offer a solution that could really help improve diagnosis and treatment,” says principal investigator Ahmad Bahai, a professor of the practice in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT.

Bahai will be joined on the project by MIT researchers Joel Voldman, the William R. Brody Professor of EECS; Tim Swager, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry; Hadley Sikes, the Willard Henry Dow Professor in Chemical Engineering; and Colin Stultz, the Nina T. and Robert H. Rubin Professor of EECS; with additional clinical and industry collaborators.

“We have created an ecosystem of R&D, with MIT at the center of it, to facilitate not only leading-edge research, but also a path toward translation into a device that can be used in the clinic,” Bahai says. “Our goal with this project is to impact the future of personalized health care.”

PYTHIA grew out of the MIT Program for Health Sciences and Semiconductors (HS+S), which Bahai co-founded when he joined MIT three years ago. The program focuses on leveraging advances in semiconductor technology and nanotechnology to invent new, transformative approaches to diagnostics, therapeutics, and drug discovery.

Inspired by his previous successful work on continuous glucose monitors, Bahai conducts research on a wide range of technologies including electrochemical devices, optics, magnetics, and ultrasonics in his “Waves, Bites, and Molecules” lab. His group’s goal is to offer clinical-grade wearable devices that track biomarkers continuously to enable real-time intervention techniques.

The glucose monitor research inspired Bahai and his colleagues to consider other biomarkers they could monitor in real-time using semiconductor technology, which led to the launch of PYTHIA.

The chip-based, wearable patch will monitor heart failure and sepsis biomarkers in interstitial fluid, which is the fluid under the skin. The biomarkers, molecules in blood plasma that are related to the onset of these diseases, are hard to detect because they exist in very low concentrations.

To measure the biomarkers in detail, the system will execute a chemical reaction that binds certain chemicals with the biomarker molecules in the interstitial fluid, making them easier to identify. The advanced microelectronics in the patch will conduct measurements, capturing biomarker data with enough sensitivity for clinical applications. 

Since the device will conduct measurements continuously, amassing a huge amount of data, PYTHIA will incorporate on-chip AI models to translate raw data into useful information for clinicians.

“This is kind of like having the patient give a blood test every 15 minutes or so, but it happens automatically. That is the power of this technology,” Bahai says.

From here, the team will start developing and testing electronic components for the tiny, low-power chip. Then they plan to advance the wearable device through pre-clinical and clinical trials, to the point that it can be commercially scaled and manufactured, Bahai says.

“This project has real potential to improve health care because, in addition to leveraging MIT’s leading-edge science and technology, we are also teaming up with clinical and industrial collaborators with direct experience of the practical constraints, the regulatory environment, and the clinical need,” he says. “The impact of this research could be huge.”

PYTHIA is funded through the ARPA-H Delphi Program led by Program Manager Leonard Tender. Delphi research teams apply a microelectronics design strategy to biosensing in an effort to develop devices that can safely, securely, and continuously monitor the body’s internal health signals. 

The project described here is supported by ARPA-H under agreement number AY2AX000243. The content of this announcement does not necessarily represent the official views of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.

The MIT Combat Robotics Club (CRC) uses the tagline “build, battle, destroy, repeat,” which is a pretty spot-on description for a club that embraces learning opportunities through destruction. 

“We make fighting robots,” explains Ryan Duarte, the 2025-26 CRC captain and current captain of a sub team for CRC’s ARES robot. “We try and make something indestructible to kill someone else's creation [that] they've tried to make indestructible … and they're trying to kill ours. In other competitions, the winner is who scores more points. You can tell at the end of a match by looking at [the robots] who the winner is.” 

The club, which was founded in 2001 and is housed in the MIT Edgerton Center, was rebooted in 2023 with new members and designs. CRC sub teams compete in the National Havoc Robot League (NHRL) Professional Robot Fighting League. Competitions are hosted approximately every two months, including “house battles” on campus for the MIT community and local teams. Fans of the hit show “BattleBots” might remember some of CRC’s past robots, including Uppercut, SawBlaze, the Dentist, and Overhaul.

ARES, named for the Greek god of war, competes in the 30-pound weight class (other NHRL categories include the 3lb and 12lb weight classes). The robot combines a “Beater Bar,” or vertical spinner, with a compact, dual redundant poly-v belt brushless weapon power system on a high-performance brushless four-wheel drive with lightweight aluminum, titanium, and ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene chassis. 

Abi Dixon, 2026-27 CRC captain, says the fighting machine was created from “from steel, titanium, aluminum, and passion.” The robot was a top seed going into last winter’s 2025 NHRL World Championships, but failed to emerge victorious. “Our two losses with ARES were against two opponents which shared a similar weapon type which our underdeveloped armor couldn't withstand,” says Duarte. The team saw the losses as an opportunity to make improvements. 

 “A unique thing about our outlook for these competitions is that no matter how poorly a match goes on our end, afterwards the dominant emotion is still pride,” says Dixon. 

“Being in this community and on this team has changed me,” she says, because “how can you put so much energy, so much love, so much blood, sweat, and tears into a machine and then be totally OK with putting it inside the cage and it exploding, and then literally picking up your pride off the floor, smushing it all back together, and getting back in there? You grow an understanding of finding the wins, even when things look like a complete loss.”

ARES, captained by Duarte, along with fellow Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) undergraduates Henry Dang, Kendall Binkley, and Liam Gault, has been undergoing improvements. The team took second place at an April competition and third in October. CRC is simultaneously upgrading ARES and another robot, KRATOS, while continuing progress toward a next generation of robots. 

At MIT, the CRC is open to everyone regardless of year, major, or prior experience. It is entirely student-run, self-taught, and highly collaborative. Participants engineer tough, reliable, performant systems and have an opportunity to learn a variety of skills, from computer-aided design and finite element analysis to CNC machining and welding. 

“Before MIT, I never had the opportunity to independently say, ‘I'm going to make this,’ and complete everything in the engineering process from start to finish. CRC embodies that vision, and solidified my desire to become an engineer,” says Eleni Morales, CRC team member, 2025-26 co-manufacturing chair, and undergraduate in MechE.

CRC welcomed 54 new members this fall semester. As an onboarding exercise, the new members are building 1-pound, or “ant weight,” combat robots in teams of three students. 

“We remain committed to making the team accessible for students with all levels of technical experience (including none!) through a structured onboarding process that prioritizes each and every member feeling as though they have technical ownership over a part of their sub team’s robot,” says Dixon.

The team will host their third annual MIT Combat Robotics House Battle on Nov. 14 at the new Met Warehouse. 

Global development and prosperity have become increasingly dependent on minerals and metals. This growing dependence has drawn attention to the mining industry and underscored national economic and security vulnerabilities across supply chains. As demand for these materials rises, the challenge for expanding capacity will be to develop scalable pathways to produce, use, and steward them. 

In this interview, Professor Elsa Olivetti, co-director of the MIT Minerals Stewardship Consortium, discusses how collaboration can strengthen mineral and metal supply chains and focus research on practical impact.

Q. In its first decades, MIT had a Department of Mining and Metallurgy. In recent years, we’ve seen increasing interest in mining and minerals at MIT. What explains this resurgence?

A: Six of MIT’s first 14 graduates in 1868 earned degrees in geology and mining. In 1889, one of those graduates, Robert Hallowell Richards, was the MIT professor who explicitly linked metallurgy to mining engineering within Course III [Materials Science and Engineering]. MIT shaped its curriculum to meet the nation’s increasing need for advanced materials for railroads, industrial machinery, and electrification.

It feels very similar to our time. We’ve all heard about the growing demand for minerals to support the energy transition, defense applications, data centers, and global economic development. That includes tiny amounts of gallium for defense radar systems and vast quantities of steel, aluminum, and copper for the grid. But each element and supply chain has its own “personality.” For example, gallium is a by-product of the process to make aluminum, so increasing its supply requires coordination beyond mining.

Mining and mineral processing are environmentally intensive — and becoming more so. It's harder to obtain newly mined minerals, even from places where mining already occurs. Ore bodies are deeper, lower-grade, and more often located in socially and environmentally sensitive regions. Mine projects face shifting water availability, extreme climate events, the concerns of nearby communities, fluctuating mining costs, and advancing digital technologies that change how ore is monitored, extracted, and processed over a mine’s life.

And that explains why we are seeing a renewed focus on mining and minerals at MIT. To meet this moment and serve the nation, not only do we need advances in science and engineering for extraction, but also innovations in the markets and governance to incentivize developers and communities to engage continuously and transparently. Our campus is compelled by mining’s broad, systems-level impact on people, the complex science, and the entrepreneurial opportunity. 

Q. President [Sally] Kornbluth has called curiosity-driven science our “intellectual rocket fuel.” What does fundamental research contribute to solving the challenges of mining and critical minerals? 

A: What’s exciting to me is that these challenges call for fundamental research across MIT. 

As an example, rare-earth elements have very similar chemical properties, making them difficult to separate from each other for the different end use applications we depend on. Researchers are exploring engineered microbes that can bind one metal selectively and withstand harsh conditions. This work draws on basic advances in producing engineered proteins and computational models that predict how metals bind. Other teams are investigating electrochemical approaches to extraction, studying how ions behave in ore minerals including oxides and sulfides to improve separation.

We also need contributions from different disciplines. Researchers in earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences are partnering with colleagues in aeronautics and astronautics to advance remote sensing of changes in land use. Experts in automation and control are developing ways to keep sensitive separation processes within narrow temperature ranges, while mechanical engineers study fluid dynamics relevant to deep-sea mining. Some minerals are essential but traded in small volumes, raising distinct economic questions. Urban planners examine how community knowledge can inform more equitable and resilient decisions.

And we have to move ideas from the lab to the field. MIT’s Office of the Vice President for Energy and Climate, the MIT Energy Initiative, and other programs are seeding early-stage work. Some projects have attracted follow-on support, including the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, to advance technologies toward pilot testing. MIT startups Lithios and RockZero are pursuing lithium extraction from brines and hard rock, respectively. SiTration, Nth Cycle, and Found Industries are pioneering metal recovery from mining and industrial waste. These examples show how basic discoveries can lead to technologies and policy impact — and how challenges in the field can prompt new research questions.

Q. We see regular calls from the government and others to re-shore the production and refinement of critical minerals and rare-earth elements. What is the role MIT can play, and where do you see opportunities for collaboration?

A: Building domestic and allied capacity is more than just opening mines. Extraction, separation, refining, and manufacturing are technically demanding, and the economics are challenging. Trade restrictions can disrupt supply at any point along the supply chain. A domestic magnet industry, for example, needs reliable access to separated rare earth oxides. Otherwise, we replace a dependence on imported magnets with a dependence on imported materials. There must be capability across the entire supply chain to establish resilience, and it needs to be done responsibly and with a robust workforce. This will take collaboration across industry, government, and research institutions.

MIT can play a strong role as a convener, particularly among industry partners. 

In September 2025, we launched the MIT Minerals Stewardship Consortium (MSC) with three inaugural members — BHP, Vale, and Rio Tinto — which MIT Sloan Professor Chris Knittel and I lead. All of this came together when staff from MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program came to me and said, "We've been having conversations with companies, and they're describing similar needs. Is there an opportunity to have them work together with MIT?" The MSC is a platform to gather stakeholders from across the supply chain with specific aims, such as identifying barriers to technology adoption, to curate research questions and collaborative next steps.

The consortium brings together faculty expertise in operations, urban planning, aerospace engineering, materials science, and economics. Through the MSC and other campus efforts, MIT connects industry, government, startups, and researchers to identify shared priorities and move research toward practical impact.

The U.S. administration and other governments are mobilizing capital, driving regulation, and building international and corporate alliances to strengthen critical mineral supply chains. Through the MSC and engagement across campus, MIT can bring together stakeholders to identify priorities, coordinate efforts, and ensure we help build competitive, resilient supply chains.

The U.S. Postal Service used social media surveillance to monitor and report on protests across the political spectrum, government records show.

The records, disclosed to EFF and other requesters suing the postal service under the Freedom of Information Act, show that the agency’s internet Covert Operations Program, or iCOP, routinely sifted through social media posts organizing and discussing protests with little records of any oversight or legal justification.

EFF filed suit in 2021 after Yahoo News disclosed the program’s existence and how the agency used it to monitor First Amendment protected activities. After years of delays and technical failures that led the agency to lose access to a trove of emails discussing the program, the postal service disclosed records to EFF and several other requesters this year.

The Postal Service used iCOP to surveil First Amendment activities

The disclosures include a series of bulletins created from iCOP, which show that the postal service used the program in 2020 and 2021 to monitor and circulate information about a wide range of planned protests. They included a planned “Million MAGA March,” a guns rights advocacy event and counter-protest in Virginia, a nationwide Save the Post Office Saturday protest, and planned protests in front of then-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s home in Washington, D.C.

Many of the bulletins provide dry descriptions of the events being planned and reference public discussions or events on major social media services. Others seem to imply or anticipate that the protests would turn violent.

For example, in discussing planned national and international protests scheduled for March 20, 2021, the bulletin references potential violence in light of “online inflammatory material.” Yet the bulletin acknowledges that the agency has “no intelligence to suggest specific threats.” This bulletin was described by Yahoo News when it disclosed iCOP’s existence.

Another bulletin discussing an ongoing Black Lives Matter protests in response to police shooting and killing people styles itself as a “National Civil Unrest Update.” The bulletins also recount and monitor threats sent to then-Postmaster DeJoy.

The Postal Service also disclosed three email chains to EFF that, while heavily redacted, show how the agency queried iCOP and disseminated what it found (Read the emails here, here, and here). The government agreed to release the email messages as part of settling EFF’s FOIA suit this fall. To EFF’s knowledge, they are the only existing materials that reflect how the agency queried iCOP.

Postal Service renames iCOP and loses access to records about it

According to the agency, after Yahoo News disclosed the program in 2021, the postal service renamed it and publicly said that it had stopped issuing bulletins. But the documents do not say that the agency’s social media surveillance stopped.

At the same time, EFF and several other FOIA requesters sought records detailing how the agency used iCOP and what rules the postal service had for using the program and distributing information it gained from surveilling social media. EFF spent years pushing the agency to disclose email communications about the program, which the agency had stored on an external hard drive. Amid these negotiations, someone dropped the hard drive, rendering it inoperable, agency officials said. By the time that happened, the agency had already deleted the underlying email messages pursuant to the agency’s retention schedule.

Minimal records disclosed about internal limits on surveillance programs

EFF’s FOIA request sought internal rules, guidance, and training that would show what safeguard the Postal Service imposed to protect First Amendment rights. The agency disclosed very few documents in response to this part of EFF’s request.

For example, a series of slides give an overview of the program, but do not explain how officials used iCOP. The closest thing to internal guideline that the agency disclosed were talking points the Chief Postal Inspector authored in response to questions about iCOP.

The inspector wrote that, “In reviewing social media postings to gather information we did not single out any particular group and did not base what was reviewed on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, or a person’s exercise of First Amendment freedoms.” The statement echoes language in the bulletin stating that its purpose is not to infringe on First Amendment rights; Other parts of the talking points characterize the surveillance as providing officials with situational awareness.

The postal inspector’s talking points go on to say that “the recent attention on iCOP has highlighted opportunities for improvement, including enhanced executive oversight. We have stopped the distribution of the bulletins like the one you have seen in the media reports.”

Setting aside that it’s unclear whether internal oversight occurred or resulted in any changes, the claim that iCOP did not infringe on First Amendment rights rings hollow. As the records disclosed show, surveilling and reporting on social media users’ efforts to organize rallies and protests was a feature of iCOP.

But more fundamentally, the claims by Postal Service officials fail to recognize that surveillance directly chills First Amendment rights. Further, the government can misuse the information it obtained as part of its social media surveillance to harass or retaliate against those exercising their constitutional rights.

Although EFF’s case seeking records about iCOP has ended, we will continue to bring more transparency to the government’s use of social media surveillance and look for ways to challenge the practice, especially when people are caught in the dragnet for exercising the First Amendment rights.

Related Cases: EFF v. USPS - Social media monitoring (iCOP)

Endometriosis affects more than 265 million women worldwide — 1 out of every 10 women of reproductive age, according to the United Nations — yet it remains one of the most misunderstood, under-researched, and chronically stigmatized conditions in modern medicine. 

A new documentary, “End of the Cycle,” presented by The Endometriosis Collective, is changing that conversation about this painful disease, one powerful story at a time.

Directed by Sammy Jaye and Soraya Simi, the film weaves together intimate personal narratives, cutting-edge science, historical revelations, and cultural commentary to challenge decades of misconceptions. The result is both deeply personal and urgently scientific, sending out a clarion call for research investment, medical accountability, and systemic change.

The film features a talented ensemble of women living with endometriosis — comedian Amy Schumer, U.S. Olympian Brittany Brown, actress Janel Parrish, actress and musician Fọlákẹ́ Olówòfóyèkù, dancer Julianne Hough, and influencer and filmmaker Sammy Jaye Lang. When asked to describe endometriosis in three words, their responses cut to the heart of the condition: “agony, isolation, harmful.”

The film also profiles 20th century icon Marilyn Monroe, who struggled with endometriosis until her death in 1962 at age 36.

But “End of the Cycle” goes beyond depicting suffering; it also depicts action, resilience, and hope. Alongside patient stories, the film features leading researchers and clinicians, including MIT Professor Linda Griffith, director of the Center for Gynepathology Research at MIT. Griffith brings both her pioneering scientific expertise and her personal journey living with endometriosis — a perspective that has shaped her life’s work.

“There’s a fair degree of consensus about the definition of endometriosis,” Griffith explains in the film, “but we need to understand the basic process of how normal tissue is regulated so that we can understand the diseased tissue better. That’s my goal.”

Today, her research at MIT is pioneering new approaches to understanding and treating endometriosis. “Only by working together across all our disciplines and putting all our talents in all the different places they are needed, we will find answers, treatments, cures, and even prevention,” Griffith says.

On Sept. 30, more than 250 members of the MIT community gathered alongside industry partners, clinicians, patient advocates, and endometriosis researchers to mark Menstruation Science Day at MIT, centered around a screening of “End of the Cycle.” The event brought together students, faculty, donors, entrepreneurs, and leaders in women’s health for a single purpose: to challenge misconceptions about endometriosis and to catalyze the next wave of research, innovation, and care.

Griffith moderated an expert panel that followed. The panelists — Sammy Jaye Lang, filmmaker with the Endometriosis Collective; Steve Palmer, senior communications associate at Baylor College of Medicine; Eliezer Calo, associate professor of biology at MIT; Stephanie Morris, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Newton-Wellesley Hospital; and Aleshia Carlsen-Bryan, associate director of prehealth advising at MIT Health — offered multiple perspectives on where women’s health innovation stands and what it will take to accelerate progress.

Video by Sammy Jaye and Soraya Simi | 1 hour, 21 minutes

Running a modern research laboratory requires more than maintaining sophisticated instruments. Researchers need to complete training, obtain access, schedule and operate equipment, navigate billing, and more. For large, shared facilities, coordinating these activities across hundreds of instruments and thousands of users can be a significant undertaking. As research becomes increasingly interdisciplinary, another challenge is emerging: finding the right capability in the first place.

Addressing these challenges was a central theme of the 2026 NEMO User Meeting, hosted by MIT.nano Oct. 5–6. The meeting brought together 65 representatives from 25 laboratories and organizations, including facility directors, laboratory managers, technical staff, software developers, industry representatives, and government researchers. Sponsored by the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) hub, the meeting focused on sharing approaches to lab management and building connections among facilities.

At the center of the meeting was the NanoFab Equipment Management and Operations (NEMO) system, an open-source platform that provides tools for managing shared research facilities while allowing individual laboratories to adapt the system to their own needs. The meeting highlighted an important characteristic of the NEMO community: The same platform can serve a very diverse set of facilities, and while the scale or the scientific missions of the facilities may differ, their core operational challenges are often remarkably similar. 

For Anna Osherov, associate director of Characterization.nano and organizer of the meeting, the collaborative model is one of the most compelling aspects of NEMO.

“Open source changes the way we think about technology development,” she says. “We can build on what others have already developed, contribute improvements back to the community, and collectively create a platform that is more capable than what any one facility could develop on its own.”

NEMO was originally released as open-source software by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2018. Its community edition (NEMO-CE), launched in 2023, allows facilities to develop and share extensions to the platform. At the October meeting, participants from organizations including MIT; Stanford, Columbia, and Princeton universities; the University of Pennsylvania; NIST; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and Atlantis Labs presented tools to address challenges ranging from chemical management and user administration to equipment status, training, and workflow automation.

The range of presentations illustrated how differently configured facilities are adapting a common platform to their own needs. Stanford, for example, presented real-time displays for equipment status and reservations, while Columbia shared its experience migrating to NEMO and extending the system for billing and facility workflows. Princeton demonstrated automated process charts for monitoring tool performance, and the University of Pennsylvania presented approaches to chemical management.

Overall, the projects demonstrated the premise behind the NEMO community: a solution developed to address a problem at one facility can become a resource for others.

“Together we can do way more than any one of us individually can,” said Vladimir Bulović, director of MIT.nano, during his opening remarks. “NEMO is the platform that gave us, finally, a streamlined way to do so.”

From individual facilities to a connected research ecosystem

As the NEMO community grows, another opportunity emerges. Universities and research organizations operate specialized facilities, each with unique equipment, expertise, and capabilities. But researchers cannot use a capability they are unaware of or cannot easily find.

This is particularly important for microelectronics R&D, where progress often depends on moving quickly between specialized capabilities. A researcher may need fabrication at one facility, advanced characterization at another, specialized microscopy somewhere else, and a process or analysis capability available at only a handful of institutions.

Finding those capabilities, and knowing where and when they can be accessed, can itself become a bottleneck.Traditionally, networks of facilities have relied on static webpages or databases to describe available resources. But as facilities evolve, this information can quickly become outdated.

At the meeting, MIT.nano presented Hydra, a new open-source platform being developed with support from NEMC as a key component of the NEMC Technical Concierge, a program that aims to help researchers identify and access specialized capabilities across a network of facilities. Hydra is designed to connect multiple NEMO installations and draw information directly from the systems that facilities already use, rather than requiring someone to manually update a separate database. The result is a compilation built from the ground truths of actively-used facility management systems. “Hydra does not replace any lab management system,” Osherov explained. “It connects, synchronizes, and keeps data up to date across all connected systems in real time.”

In this model, NEMO provides the operational source of information within an individual facility, while Hydra makes that information discoverable across facilities.

For a researcher, that could mean finding a specialized capability without first needing to know which laboratory might have the relevant equipment. 

“The focus is to make the distributed infrastructure supporting research more discoverable and usable,” Osherov said.

Building infrastructure that can change

The approach reflects a broader philosophy: Research infrastructure needs to evolve as research itself changes. “We need to build a flexible research space and a community-oriented space so that people feel empowered to go to it, use it, and then redefine it as the years progress, adapting it to the needs of the next generation of researchers,” said Bulović.

That flexibility applies to operational systems as well as physical laboratories. New instruments and research methods emerge, user communities change, and facilities develop new requirements. An open-source platform allows individual facilities to respond to those changes while providing a mechanism for improvements to be shared.

At MIT.nano alone, NEMO supports more than 1,600 active researchers using more than 200 tools, with approximately 160,000 hours of tool usage each year. For Jorg Scholvin, associate director of Fab.nano, operating at that scale makes the efficiency of everyday processes, and the ability to adapt and change quickly, important.

“A small improvement in an administrative workflow can be multiplied across thousands of users and tens of thousands of equipment interactions,” he said.

The NEMO wave

The sense of community and positive outlook for the future of shared facilities was apparent throughout the two-day meeting. Closing discussions looked ahead to the role of data integration, automation, and artificial intelligence in lab operations.

“The community is taking on a life of its own,” said Mathieu Rampant, CEO and co-founder of Atlantis Labs, describing a model in which facility managers can share ideas and solve problems together. “It’s more sustainable,” he added as he talked about having to do less as the NEMO-CE manager because the facilities managers are talking to each other — sharing ideas and solving problems as a network: “the NEMO wave,” Samantha Roberts, director of the City University of New York nanofabrication facility, called it. “Everyone is invested in it and cares about it. It takes a lot of effort to change your lab management system and if we keep this going, we can build out something that’s really cool and that works.”

For Osherov, the purpose remains straightforward.

“Ultimately, this is about enabling research. The better we can manage the operational side of our facilities, the more effectively we can make our instruments, expertise, and capabilities available to the research community.”

In microelectronics, where innovation increasingly depends on access to specialized and distributed capabilities, that availability matters. The ability to find the right capability at the right facility, using information drawn directly from actively used systems, can help researchers move more quickly from an idea to an experiment to real-world application and impact.

The government’s surveillance powers grew rapidly after Sept. 11, 2001, some in public view and some in secret. EFF suspected but couldn’t prove that the National Security Agency was spying on Americans' communications. The New York Times sat on a story about it for over a year, finally publishing it in December 2005. Then, in January 2006, a retired AT&T technician named Mark Klein walked into EFF's office with a manila folder of documents that blew the story wide open. 

Welcome to the third episode of “Privacy’s Defenders,” a podcast about the people – lawyers, journalists, hackers, and others – who’ve fought to secure your digital liberties since before most people even knew what the internet was.

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(You can also find this episode on YouTube.)

In this episode, former EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn talks with former EFF lawyer Kevin Bankston, who was at his desk drafting a lawsuit against AT&T when Klein showed up. Less than two weeks later, EFF sued the phone company on behalf of its own customers in Hepting v. AT&T. Cindy speaks again with now-retired Justice Department lawyer Tony Coppolino, who asked for the opportunity to defend the case. He called EFF with a warning after Klein’s documents were filed in court: If they were classified, EFF would be in big trouble. You’ll also hear from Klein himself, and from Carolyn Jewel, a romance novelist and AT&T customer who became the lead plaintiff in EFF's related case against the NSA. 

It's the story of a secret room in a San Francisco phone company building, a heroic whistleblower, and the people who refused to let mass surveillance stay hidden. 

The “Privacy’s Defenders” podcast is a follow-up to Cindy’s book, “Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance,” bringing to life pivotal moments in the voices of those who fought for your rights. Sales of “Privacy’s Defender” benefit EFF, so pick up your copy today!  

Joanne Elgart Jennings co-produced and created this podcast.   

Jarrod Sport co-produced, mixed, and mastered it.   

Corinne Ruff is our story editor. 

We had additional help from Rachel Estabrook and Alison Broverman. 

The original music was composed and performed by Nat Keefe of Hot Buttered Rum with Ben Andrews on the fiddle. 

In both a 2021 essay and my 2022 book, A Hacker’s Mind, I talk about AIs finding vulnerabilities and exploits—hacking—the legal system.

Here’s some demonstrations of this from Germany:

Legal systems encode the foundations of social order in natural language. Similar to computer systems, the written law can contain vulnerabilities that invite exploitation.1 Courts absorb most exploits through interpretation, and such vulnerabilities rarely surface in the first place. With highly capable AI systems enabling the discovery of vulnerabilities at unprecedented scale, we believe the latter could change...

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 03 November 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02779-7

By integrating climate risk into health planning, Brazil is redesigning healthcare to withstand floods, heatwaves and other climate shocks.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 03 November 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02787-7

Baseline construction shapes estimates of mitigation cost, ambition and progress, while no-policy counterfactuals could vary with choices about policy, technology and development. Rather than relying on one constructed baseline, assessments and related conclusions should be compared across plausible baselines.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 03 November 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02776-w

The global temperature change that happens after emissions cease is expected to be close to zero. Here the authors use model simulations to show that this zero emissions commitment depends on the warming level at which emissions cease and might be positive for higher warming.

MIT was founded on the idea that people learn best by doing. For nearly 25 years, the Lemelson-MIT Program in the MIT School of Engineering has carried that idea into K–12 classrooms across the country, helping teachers guide students as they find real problems and invent solutions to them. 

Now the program is expanding that work into connected pathways that follow students from the early grades through college.

This month, Lemelson-MIT awarded multiyear Invention Education Pathways grants and stipends to 19 schools, districts, and colleges across three regions: Northern California, Tennessee, and Massachusetts/Connecticut. The partners include elementary, middle, and high schools, as well as a community college and two state universities, together forming routes for students to experience invention at every stage of their education.

The initiative arrives as MIT President Sally Kornbluth has launched MIT for America, a strategic effort to widen access to quality STEM education nationwide, from kindergarten to community college. One of its three focus areas, Design, Make and Innovate, aims to give students more chances to build, test, and prototype their way toward solutions, and to support teachers in bringing hands-on work into their classrooms. Invention education does exactly that.

Learning the way inventors work

In invention education, students work in teams to identify problems that matter to them and their communities, then develop prototypes of original solutions. Along the way, they apply knowledge from multiple disciplines and develop both technical skills and durable human skills such as empathy, collaboration, and communication. They also gain confidence in their own abilities.

“Understanding user needs is critical in product design,” says Michael Cima, faculty director of the Lemelson-MIT Program and a professor of materials science and engineering. “It’s the foundation everything else is built on. Invention education builds that understanding early, teaching students to ask whom they’re designing for and what is truly needed before they ever build a prototype.”

Rather than offering a one-time project or an after-school club, the pathways approach aims to give students repeated, connected invention experiences as they advance. Lemelson-MIT staff will work alongside educators in each region to assess, design, and implement learning experiences that help students apply scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) knowledge to real-world problems. Schools and colleges can adopt Lemelson-MIT curriculum resources selectively to jump-start or strengthen their offerings.

“We have learned that invention education can benefit all students, especially when students can experience learning through the invention process across multiple grade levels,” says Stephanie Couch, executive director of the Lemelson-MIT Program. “Our goal is to create opportunities for learning through invention education during the regular school day, beginning in the early grades and continuing into adulthood.”

Every student an inventor

The three regions were chosen through a nationwide search for schools and districts committed to building strong invention pathways from kindergarten through college and to increasing the number of inventors from diverse backgrounds.

That commitment rests on a simple observation from Lemelson-MIT’s work: Given the chance to invent, students of every background surprise themselves, and their teachers, with what they can do. The program’s experience, case studies, and published research show that invention education helps students, especially those underrepresented in STEM, see themselves as capable STEM learners and inventors. Students in the program’s flagship high school initiative, InvenTeams, have earned 24 U.S. patents.

The benefits extend into the workforce. “Employers benefit from graduates that have the types of capabilities they need, but have trouble finding,” Couch says. “Invention education connects students’ knowledge and passions with the technical and durable human skills employers are looking for.”

Participating institutions

• Northern California: California State University at Stanislaus; Columbia College; Columbia Union School District; Denair Unified School District; Folsom Cordova Unified School District; Stockton Unified School District; and Visions in Education University Prep Early College Academy
• Tennessee: Apison Elementary School; Battle Academy; Hixson Middle School; Normal Park Museum Magnet School; and Red Bank elementary, middle, and high schools
• Massachusetts and Connecticut: Berlin High School; Cambridge Rindge and Latin School; New Covenant School; Watertown High School; and Westfield State University

Looking ahead

Over the next three years, the Lemelson-MIT Program will work closely with educators in all three regions toward a shared goal: making invention education a regular part of the school day, rather than an occasional enrichment activity. 

Lemelson-MIT hopes that what these partners learn together will help show how invention pathways can take root in schools and colleges across the country.

Vera Grbic, communications officer at the Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office (IDHR), is an expert at creating clear, informative collateral. Whether she is improving the IDHR website to help people more easily find the support or resources they need or using newsletters and annual reports to explain IDHR's work and the policies that guide it, Grbic believes it is vital for members of the MIT community to know where to turn and what resources are available to them. 

Grbic earned a BA in communications, with a minor in English literature, from the University of Ottawa, and an MA in communications from Carleton University. Both institutions are in Canada's capital city of Ottawa.  

Before joining MIT in 2021, Grbic worked in a mix of federal government, nonprofit, and research organizations. After graduate school, she worked as a freelance journalist, during which she developed a skill she still relies on today: collaborating with subject-matter experts to ensure that creative communications are grounded in fact. As a senior communications officer for the National Research Council of Canada, she worked with engineers and scientists in areas such as artificial intelligence, climate research, aerospace, and physiology. She elevated their research and innovations to key audiences and helped create new partnership opportunities. In this role, she translated complex information into engaging communications that furthered the organization's goals. Grbic describes this work as the "through-line" connecting her previous experience to what she does today at MIT. 

IDHR addresses concerns related to discrimination, discriminatory harassment, and sexual misconduct by providing education, individualized supportive measures, information about available resources, and complaint resolution pathways that include both restorative and investigative processes. Grbic develops IDHR’s annual communications strategy and has spearheaded several key initiatives, including a website and annual report redesign and the launch of IDHR’s Data Dashboard. She collaborates with colleagues across MIT to gather content ideas for newsletters, data and stories for annual reports, and feedback on communications materials. She often partners with IDHR's prevention education and outreach team, which delivers training to the community. 

Grbic notes that being a communications professional means constantly learning, whether that entails researching a new topic, finding creative ways to tell a story, or meeting subject-matter experts who broaden her perspective. Accuracy is at the core of her approach. While she strives to find creative ways to explain policies and complex processes in ways that are accessible to everyone, collaboration and fact-checking are intrinsic to her work. Given the wide range of responsibilities within communications, Grbic is a jack-of-all-trades. Her experience includes creative communications, social media management, long-form storytelling, event production, report writing, video production, and website management.  

In addition to her communications responsibilities, Grbic co-organizes the annual Change-Maker Awards, which honor members of the MIT community who work diligently to prevent sexual misconduct and combat harassment. She takes great pride in helping lead an event that recognizes individuals who are making a meaningful difference in building a safer culture at MIT. Grbic describes the award winners as “true inspirations.” 

Grbic recognizes that nothing is done in a vacuum. She values the input of her team members and colleagues across MIT and is proud to incorporate their feedback into her content. Because no two projects are exactly alike, she enjoys the creativity and variety that her work offers. 

Soundbytes 

Q: What are your favorite projects that you have worked on? 

A: I was part of a team that helped develop and launch the most recent sexual misconduct surveys for students and employees. I also strategized a campaign to clarify IDHR services, which included whole-scale website improvement: rewriting many sections, adjusting navigation, improving visual design, and publishing a short video explaining our process. There was also a poster campaign about the services we offer the community. MIT is awash with important storytelling, so getting that messaging to people who need it is vital. These projects brought me pride because taking the time to understand a community's experiences can have a meaningful impact. 

Q: How would you describe the MIT community? 

A: Smart, in a well-rounded way. Everyone is an incredibly hard worker and thinks in deep, research- and experience-backed ways on how to solve complex projects.  

As an employee who has worked with students on Institute-wide initiatives, committees, and awards, I have seen how much they care about making the world a better place. The staff and faculty are gracious and bring a strong work ethic to everything they do in support of the MIT community. 

Q: Are you involved in any areas of the Institute that are not directly related to your job? 

A: I recently started participating in the MIT Women’s League, which I am excited to explore. When I was pregnant, I took prenatal classes at MIT, including a yoga class where I met people I am still in touch with years later. I also played in a volleyball league at the recreation facilities, which made me see the facilities from a different angle.  

I’ve attended many free conferences and events hosted by MIT clubs and schools. For example, a children’s clothing swap has been organized for years, which also provides an opportunity to connect with other families in the community. I also prioritize keeping up with current topics and have attended two AI conferences organized by the Institute.  

While these opportunities may feel secondary to the workplace, they are important. I’m glad I am in a space that helps feed my physical health and has opportunities for broader learning. 

Millions of people rely on the cloud every day, yet researchers working to secure and improve the cloud are often locked out of the technology it runs on. Jeffery Lim is trying to change that.

One such technology, single-root input/output virtualization (SR-IOV), lets major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services boost the performance of their systems. Cloud providers combine SR-IOV with custom hardware and software to deliver faster cloud services than traditional setups allow.

Lim is a computer engineer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. While pursuing his master's degree, he noticed that academic research proposing smarter or safer cloud infrastructure did not account for SR-IOV. Very few open-source hardware platforms existed that would let researchers work directly with SR-IOV as they developed new software or models to improve the cloud.

So, Lim filled that gap with his master's thesis, building a hardware platform compatible with SR-IOV that captures key features of the infrastructure used by cloud providers. The result is a research and development platform that allows researchers to build, test, and evaluate realistic cloud designs.

"As a society, everyone uses the cloud now," Lim says. "I hope that people will use this platform to build systems more akin to how cloud providers operate, and, more broadly, that researchers everywhere can take advantage of SR-IOV for the performance benefits it offers."

Lim presented a paper at the IEEE High-Performance Extreme Computing Conference in September, and he plans to release this work open source. In recognition of the hardware's potential impact, the Boston University College of Engineering awarded Lim its 2026 Master's Societal Impact Award.

Winding path to cybersecurity

Growing up, Lim was fascinated with building computers. That fascination set him on a winding path to the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group at Lincoln Laboratory.

After studying electrical and computer engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he spent several years in industry working on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) — integrated circuits that can be repeatedly reprogrammed for different functions. This background led to his 2018 hire at the laboratory, where he developed FPGAs for small radars that detect the breathing of humans trapped in rubble and for large radars that track satellites and orbital debris from atop Millstone Hill. He next turned to investigating radiation-induced faults in integrated circuits aboard space platforms and ways to protect the chips.

This focus on safeguarding hardware turned his attention to cybersecurity, an area he had long found interest in but never fully explored. So, Lim transferred to his current group in 2022 to pursue this interest.

"I don't think there's another place in the world where I could say, 'Hey, I want to try something new,' and actually have that opportunity," Lim says. "Lincoln Laboratory does that really well, giving people the chance to transition into a different field of engineering or area of expertise."

To deepen his expertise, he applied and was accepted in 2024 to the Lincoln Scholars Program, which allows technical staff to pursue full-time graduate studies at the master's or doctoral level. Scholars remain employed and apply their academic work to national security needs.

As he pursued his master's degree at Boston University, Lim worked closely with his Lincoln Laboratory mentor Benjamin Nahill, who helped Lim keep his research tied to the laboratory's mission and provided a sounding board for ideas. "I'd call him my rubber ducky," Lim says, a nod to the classic software engineering practice of "rubber duck debugging" — reasoning things out through speaking aloud to a rubber duck.

"We talked about his thesis concept for quite a while, but the implementation suddenly became real toward the end," says Nahill. "He transformed what began as an idea for a research tool to an incredibly performant implementation. Having worked with Jeffery on projects in our group, I shouldn't have been surprised, but it was most impressive."

Missing piece for cloud research

When most people say "the cloud," they mean cloud services provided by companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Virtualization is the invisible process that makes those services possible. Users uploading photos or streaming movies are interacting with virtual machines, running on servers in data centers.

In the past decade, SR-IOV has changed the way traditional virtualization works. Traditionally, a software component known as the hypervisor acts as a middleman between the virtual machines and the server's physical hardware. Its main role is to distribute computing resources as needed, and provide functions (such as networking) to the virtual machines.

In contrast, SR-IOV enables virtual machines to access a dedicated slice of the hardware device, reducing the hypervisor overhead. This capability is often found on specialized devices called Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs). Major cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services’ Nitro System and Microsoft’s Azure Accelerated Networking, use SmartNICs with SR-IOV to provide high-speed networking to many virtual machines.

"This was the missing research capability that I set out to build: an open-source SmartNIC platform compatible with SR-IOV," Lim says. Because SmartNICs can be built on FPGAs, Lim had a familiar starting point. In fact, he found a couple of platforms that supported SR-IOV; however, they lacked features that would make them practical tools for researchers to utilize. He spent a couple of months building those required components.

The first component is a switching fabric. Often, cloud customers' applications or programs may be split across multiple virtual machines, which may be distributed across multiple servers. Therefore, the cloud system needs a way to determine whether a piece of data needs to stay local or leave the server. Lim's switching fabric handles that traffic-directing job.

The second component is a network function engine. This small, specialized processor is built to run security rules, like firewalls, that keep one customer's data safely separated from another's. To build it, Lim used Extended Berkeley Packet Filter, a system that allows custom code to inspect network traffic, approving or blocking data as needed. Rather than starting from scratch, he adapted the design from doctoral research conducted by Zaid Tahir, who studied under their shared advisor, Professor Martin Herbordt of Boston University.

Herbordt described Lim's efforts as "combining vision with heroic system-building, single-handedly putting together the hardware and software necessary to prove the concept."

"I'm very much a hands-on hardware guy, so, yes, I ended up building two servers at home to test my designs," Lim says. He also used the Mass Open Cloud’s Open Cloud Testbed, a test bed meant for testing cloud platforms, to gather metrics and validate his system.

Impact beyond the platform

Throughout the project, Lim maintained focus on applicability and transparency. "My biggest worry was, is this going to be relevant? Is this something that can actually be utilized?" Lim reflects.  

Earning the Societal Impact Award points to yes. The award recognizes projects that address pressing global challenges through innovative applications of technology. Lim's platform opens the door to evaluating a cloud trust model that remains largely opaque, even as many sectors of society, from health care to banking, increasingly rely on it.

"Right now, we have limited visibility into how major cloud providers implement and evolve their infrastructure," Lim says. "If researchers can catch up to how the modern cloud operates, they might develop new approaches that improve security or performance."

As part of his role as a Lincoln Scholar, Lim is also exploring how his work connects to Lincoln Laboratory's national security mission. He sees several potential avenues.

One program in his group is evaluating cyber-hardening techniques for hypervisors, as the cloud takes on an expanding role in defense systems. "Introducing Lim's SR-IOV-compatible platform to this work would help bring our research closer to how cloud environments operate, demonstrating the impact of our techniques in realistic environments," says Nathan Burow, the program's principal investigator. Another program is examining what it takes to stand up high-performance data centers, work that could draw directly on Lim's research into the technologies SR-IOV requires.

Or his path may lead to something new. The laboratory allocates internal technical investment funding — supported by the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Development — for staff-proposed projects addressing emerging needs. Lim is considering a proposal to bring SR-IOV to the embedded-systems level, say, to drones or satellites.

"We saw how cloud providers moved from traditional virtualization to SR-IOV to maximize performance while maintaining isolation," he says. "I wonder if we can do the same at the embedded level, where power and compute constraints are even tighter. I'd love to complete that transition. I learned a lot from the cloud. Now, can we apply those lessons somewhere else?"

Utilizing waste carbon at scale, assessing public trust in artificial intelligence and data centers, and building a quantum toolkit for critical applications were among the topics energy experts explored at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI)’s annual research conference on Sept. 22-23.

The complexity of the energy transition demands “a truly interdisciplinary and international approach,” said Paula Hammond, Institute Professor and dean of the MIT School of Engineering, kicking off the conference, which was themed “Transitioning energy at a pivotal moment.” 

More than 200 people attended Energizing@MIT: MITEI’s Annual Research Conference in person and online, including faculty, scientists, and researchers; representatives of global energy firms; nonprofit organizations; and academic institutions.

With the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence and data centers, the challenge of the energy transition grows ever greater, requiring “researchers who can pursue fundamental questions about materials, chemistry, and energy systems … engineers who can design new technologies and determine how they might function at scale … and experts in economics, policy, human behavior, and sociology who can help us understand how those technologies will interact with communities and with the world around us,” said Hammond. 

From keynote speakers to panelists, seed grant innovators to startup entrepreneurs, the conference featured exemplars in all these categories.

Deploying today’s technologies

Eric Toone, chief technical officer and managing partner at Breakthrough Energy, set the tone for day one with a keynote address that was clear-eyed in his assessment. “If energy is prosperity,” he told the audience, “at least today, prosperity is emissions.” Yet, Toone was optimistic when he heralded examples of Breakthrough Energy-funded ventures, from iron-air batteries to vacuum-insulated glass windows, which can reduce the carbon costs of energy. 

“We can absolutely develop new technologies that provide the exact same service, but at zero carbon,” he said.

The conference made Toone’s claim tangible as it spanned the full arc of decarbonization — from deploying what we know today to uncovering what may be possible tomorrow. 

There are “projects that are actually being developed, companies that are putting steel in the ground now, electrons onto the grid to deliver capacity now, or in the very, very near term,” said John Parsons, deputy director for research at the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. Parsons moderated a panel on the revival of nuclear fission power. 

Highlights included Crane Clean Energy Center’s restoration of the Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear plant, set to restart in mid-2027; work by Électricité de France (EDF) to extend and modernize France’s 57-reactor nuclear fleet, adapting plants to climate impacts; and GE Vernova’s development of mature light-water reactor technology, with a new plant under construction in Ontario.

Carbon utilization offers another path to mitigating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. “The land and ocean are passively taking up almost 50 percent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions,” said Carolyn Ruppel, MITEI’s deputy director for science and technology, who moderated the panel. “The idea is to find uses for some of the rest of it.” The session showcased research exploring a host of technologies for making products with captured CO2.

Nicola Ferralis, a research scientist in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), highlighted the importance of large-scale uses for carbon waste, such as structural carbon for vehicles and buildings. “We need to find applications that are actually able to match the supply by mass,” he said. 

Admir Masic, an associate professor in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and DMSE, described self-heating concrete panels used in real-world conditions in Sapporo, Japan, as well as new concrete materials that can store energy.

“The pace of the transition to a renewable-energy economy will strongly rely on the availability of scalable, bulk energy-storage solutions,” said Masic.

Kripa K. Varanasi, a professor in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, is working on ways to make technologies such as emissions-plume capture at power plants economically viable. 

In a panel devoted to startups with links to MITEI or MITEI member companies, speakers described moving novel energy technologies from research to commercialization: Alfredo Rivela of Adaion has developed an AI tool for electrical utilities that optimizes their use of the grid; Eddie Obropta of Raptor Maps trains drones to inspect solar farms; Michele Guarnieri’s HiBot has created a robot that detects issues in power lines; and Michael Wang of Lithios is conducting field pilots that use electrochemistry to separate lithium from low-grade brines.

Successful ventures, the speakers agreed, begin with a clear customer problem that can be validated by industry users and that offers a path to scaled deployment. For industry users, “innovation is not a corporate virtue,” said Steve Hellman, managing partner at Alliance Partners. “It’s an existential requirement.”

Early-stage research and basic science

The conference also offered a bounty of promising early research on technologies and approaches for cutting carbon emissions. A panel on MITEI’s Seed Innovation Fund Program projects introduced MIT scientists who are separating and recycling rare earth elements; designing algorithms to decide which power plants should run to meet electricity demand; and modeling the impacts on human and natural systems of development and decarbonization.

A poster session revealed the next generation of energy researchers in such fields as chemistry, architecture, aeronautics and astronautics, and computer science. Graduate students are developing a wide array of technologies for carbon mitigation and new energy systems, such as a steam electrolysis process for hydrogen production; models of end-to-end decarbonization in buildings; and designs for hydrogen- and methane-fueled aircraft.

The conference highlighted the importance of fundamental science in feeding the pipeline of new energy technologies. Wednesday’s keynote speaker, Danna Freedman, the F. G. Keyes Professor of Chemistry at MIT and inaugural director of Quantum@MIT, traced scientists’ evolving capacity to harness quantum computing as a tool for solving a range of problems, including those in energy.

“What we want to do at Q-MIT is solve the hard problem, and the hard problem isn’t developing these ridiculously intricate and beautiful quantum tools,” said Freedman. “It is connecting the quantum tools with the applications that will change the world.”

A companion panel explored one such application: quantum sensing, which leverages fundamental physics to capture a nanoscale view of materials and their properties. For instance, Lukasz Zielinski, scientific advisor to the Integrated Sensing and Measurement Program at SLB, uses a lidar camera with single-photon detectors to identify methane plumes. Moderator Paola Cappellaro, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, described her work using diamond-based sensors for detecting tiny magnetic fields from battery current, potentially helping measure battery conditions without disturbing the battery electrically. Such quantum sensors, Cappellaro said, can be “practical and impactful.” 

Data centers and public trust

One critical challenge facing energy researchers and industry emerged in sessions throughout the two days: the explosive growth of AI and the energy-hungry data centers that fuel this technology. As Deepjyoti Deka, a MITEI principal research scientist, put it, “the big test for AI right now is whether AI can reduce energy usage, improve efficiency, as well as bring in innovation faster than the rate at which it is going to consume electricity to get trained and deployed.” 

“New ‘hyperscale’ facilities built for artificial intelligence can use more power than entire cities,” said Steve Clemmer, director of energy research in the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, sharing a recent analysis of data center proliferation. With new facilities being 10 to even 10,000 times larger than data centers built just a decade ago, he said, wholesale electricity costs will rise, and “increased reliance on fossil fuels will result in tens of billions of dollars in health damages, and trillions in climate damages.” He noted that decision-makers can mitigate these harmful impacts through clean energy development, strong ratepayer protections, and other safeguards.

Given mounting opposition to data centers, Kathryn Kline Tyndall, associate director of energy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, recommended that industry proponents provide early, accessible information about power, water, quality-of-life, land-use, environmental, and economic impacts, tailored to each community in which they hope to set up shop.

Larry Susskind, the Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, recommended that developers go further, and demonstrate credible benefits to communities. To achieve this, Susskind suggests a facilitated negotiation process between developers and local groups whose object is a community benefits agreement — a deal that might involve altering the data center design, and providing workforce development, infrastructure investment, and clean energy partnerships.

Ultimately, developers must accept that they can’t rush community acceptance; they have to earn it by giving residents a meaningful role in shaping projects and sharing their benefits. 

“You’re going to have to proceed at the speed of trust,” said Susskind.

On November 11, Lina Attalah, founder and editor-in-chief of the independent Egyptian news outlet Mada Masr, will face trial for the second time in just two weeks. This time, she faces charges of spreading false news, an accusation that has become one of the Egyptian government's most frequently used tools for prosecuting journalists. 

The trial follows a conviction on October 27, when Attalah was found guilty of managing an unlicensed news website. The Mada Masr team had repeatedly applied for a license, but their attempts went unacknowledged. The proceedings took place in a single hearing, which Mada Masr states included serious violations of her right to a fair trial. She was sentenced to the maximum fine of 3 million Egyptian pounds (approximately 55,000 USD), forcibly removed from the courtroom, and held for seven hours until the fine was paid. The court also ordered Mada Masr's closure and the confiscation of all equipment belonging to the organization. 

The current wave of repression has also targeted Matsada2sh, a fact-checking and open-source intelligence initiative. Its entire six-person newsroom was violently arrested, illegally detained, and interrogated under torture before being charged with terrorism-related offenses and spreading false news. The team remains in pretrial detention. 

According to CPJ, at least 25 other journalists are currently incarcerated in Egypt. 

Governments seeking to control the flow of information increasingly rely on a combination of legal harassment, financial pressure, criminal prosecution, and restrictions on the infrastructure that makes independent publishing possible. Egypt's media licensing regime is a particularly troubling example. Requiring news organizations to obtain government authorization to operate creates an obvious mechanism for restricting who gets to publish and whose voices are allowed to reach the public.  

The charge of spreading false news is similarly dangerous. Governments around the world have increasingly invoked the language of misinformation to justify restrictions on speech, often without meaningful safeguards against political abuse, as we laid out in our recent submission to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Governments should never be the arbiters of which reporting is permissible, particularly when that reporting concerns their own conduct. 

Why Mada Masr matters 

Founded in 2013, Mada Masr has spent more than a decade doing the kind of journalism that authoritarian governments find most threatening: documenting abuses, amplifying marginalized voices, and reporting on issues that powerful institutions would prefer remain hidden. 

Its reporting has given torture survivors and the families of political prisoners a platform. It has opened space for debate about reproductive rights. It has brought frontline reporting from Sudan and Gaza, and stood alongside refugees facing xenophobic attacks and security crackdowns. 

Emerging as a digital-first publication, in a media environment where traditional outlets were increasingly constrained, being purely digital allowed Mada Masr’s founders to build an independent publication outside the structures of legacy media.  

At a time when only 43% of Egyptians had access to the internet, going fully digital meant taking a big risk, but it was one that has been rewarding: Despite being blocked by the Egyptian government since 2017, Mada Masr has continued to reach Egyptian and global audiences, and Attalah has received numerous accolades, including the Knight International Journalism Award, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and a spot in TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people (2020). 

Mada Masr has also consistently engaged with technology and advocated for a free and independent internet for the global majority. It has covered dozens of hot-button tech stories in recent years, from Egypt’s Cybercrime Bill and Israel’s use of AI weaponry in Gaza, to stories about the “privacy chaos” caused by biometrics to more personal essays about the importance of the internet and tech. In August, they launched an open call for proposals on original critical reporting on artificial intelligence. 

Mada Masr may be thoroughly Egyptian, but it doesn’t belong just to Egypt. Its team has made into a publication that represents the kind of independent, local, grounded journalism that international audiences need, particularly at a time when international reporting on state repression is lacking. They built on-the-ground networks to center local voices in Sudan (publishing in both English and Arabic on the conflict) and Gaza out of a sense of cross-border responsibility and solidarity. 

This is precisely why its potential closure should concern everyone who cares about a free press. The ability to publish independently, investigate powerful institutions, and to share information without government interference is fundamental to the exercise of free expression.  

From solidarity to action 

The international community has repeatedly expressed concern about restrictions on press and internet freedom in Egypt. More than 100 organizations have now joined statements of solidarity with Mada Masr, and with Matsada2sh.  

These expressions of support matter, particularly when journalists are increasingly isolated and under threat—but solidarity must also translate into sustained political and institutional pressure. 

The international governments and institutions that maintain relationships with Egypt—including those in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—should make clear that the prosecution of journalists and the forced closure of independent media outlets are unacceptable.  

The cases against Lina Attalah, Mada Masr, and Matsada2sh must be dropped. The journalists who remain in detention must be released. And Egypt's licensing regime, with its profound chilling effects on access to information and independent knowledge production, must be brought to an end. 

There is a particular urgency to defending independent media at a moment when governments are finding ever more ways to restrict the circulation of information. Whether through internet shutdowns, platform restrictions, surveillance, or the criminalization of reporting, the result is often the same: fewer opportunities for people to understand what is happening around them, to challenge official narratives, and to hold power accountable. 

We cannot allow the closure of one of Egypt's most important independent newsrooms and the prosecution of its editor-in-chief to become another routine episode in the global erosion of press freedom. Nor should we wait until the last independent journalists have been silenced before recognizing what has been lost. 

To learn more about Lina Attalah in her own reads, you can read our Speaking Freely interview from January 2026. 

  

A comment:

3% of ‘critical’ software security bugs, in all of recorded history, have been found in the last month. This is on pace to find another ~100,000 bugs this year alone, adding ~26% more vulnerabilities to the all time total Do you realize how fucking insane that is?

Yes. It is a new world out there.