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 Pride, we’re answering all your digital rights questions in season two of our initiative, LGBT Q&A. 

You Asked: Is there a way for me to wipe data about me online that could point to my queer identity?

EFF’s Answer: You cannot protect everything all the time, but there are ways to wipe information about yourself online. 

Most information available about you online will typically be found in two places:

1. The site where you voluntarily posted the data, such as your pictures and videos on social media, comments in user reviews and forums, and even classified postings for items you’ve sold.
2. A data broker. These companies collect personal information, repackage it, and sell it to the highest bidders. This information often includes your address, phone number, details about your family members, and more. 

So you might not want this information out there, especially if it points to your queer identity. 

The best time to take steps to protect yourself is before anything bad happens, because once this information is in the hands of bad actors you have fewer options.

To see what information people might find about you online, you can look for it for yourself. This is as simple as opening up a search engine and entering your name, nickname, handle, avatar and seeing what comes up. It can also be worth searching for your address, phone number, and email addresses to check what's out there.

Do this in a private browsing window or a separate browser than the one you normally use to ensure you’re not logged into any accounts that might skew the results, like a Google account. 

It’s also best to try to make a lot of your information hard to find in the first place—and we’ve got you covered on how to do this. 

1. Establish a strong security baseline: use unique passwords (a password manager helps simplify this) and set up two-factor authentication for your online accounts to add an extra layer of protection when logging into your accounts.
2. Add our install-and-forget tracker blocking tool, Privacy Badger, which lets you browse in peace and stops the sorts of web trackers that compile information about your habits for advertising purposes and for data brokers.
3. Remove your advertising ID on your phone to help prevent some tracking there, too (directions for Android or iPhone). This way less information about you is available for purchase, making it harder for corporations to profit from your online activities.
4. Ask data brokers to delete your personal data. You might spend the time doing it yourself. If you’re in California, you can use the Privacy Protection Agency’s tool for this. You also might use professional services like EasyOptOuts and Optery to help minimize the information available about you online from data brokers and similar sources.
5. You can remove yourself from Google results by heading to the “Results about you” page, then entering your information. Once set up, you’ll get notifications if some new types of information about you appear in Google Search. Just remember that this will not remove the information from the internet, it just won’t show up in Google’s search.

You also should consider auditing your digital footprint on public-facing social media and forums. Different people have different tolerance for risk when it comes to announcing who we are and what we are doing in these online spaces. You can make a list of every social media or forum account you’ve had over the years, and review the public-facing content about you, including your name, contact information like email addresses or phone numbers, and pictures that might show your home or workplace. You can also review the account settings to ensure you’re comfortable with the privacy options and that you’ve got strong login credentials.

For more in depth advice check out our Surveillance Self Defense guide on managing your digital footprint.

X Corp. should not be able to escape privacy compliance because it changed its name. 

On May 15, X Corp. filed a petition before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to set aside or modify an order issued in 2022 requiring the company to report regularly to the FTC for its violations of user data. The order or “consent decree” is a result of misleading the platforms’ 140 million users by using private information given to secure accounts, like phone numbers and email addresses, for targeted advertising. It also fined the company $150 million for the infraction. As part of an open comments period, EFF and allies including Demand Progress Education Fund (DPEF), National Consumers League (NCL) and Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) call on the FTC to reject this petition.

The 2022 order was a renewal of an order stemming from a previous violation. Back in 2011, Twitter (now X) reached a settlement with the FTC after the regulator found Twitter had failed to secure users’ personal information, resulting in exposure of that data to hackers. The settlement banned the company from misrepresenting its data protection measures, required it to set up safeguards on user data, and regularly report its security posture for twenty years. The renewal updated the expiration of X’s obligations to 2042, but if the FTC accepts X's petition, it would end much sooner.

In arguing to set aside the order, X remarks that since the order in 2011 it has “built an entirely new privacy and information security program staffed by new personnel operating under new leadership with a … philosophy grounded on the importance of privacy and information security.” 

These sweeping assurances that corporate restructuring led to a fundamental change in X’s policy and practices around user data should be met with a healthy dose of skepticism, given evidence to the contrary. For example, the company’s quiet rollout integrated its AI model Grok with the platform in 2024, trained (without meaningful consent) on X user data. The company was also subject to a massive data breach in 2025. Even if a rotation of leadership led to prioritizing privacy and information security, our letter highlights that this would not be sufficient grounds to remove the order, “because the FTC orders bind the corporate entity. Those obligations do not dissolve when the employees who negotiated or administered it depart.”

X argues that its entry into the AI space should be reason not to continue the oversight, claiming that “terminating the Order is critical to advancing American leadership in artificial intelligence.” Here again, broad-stroke claims that the guardrails in place “[diverts] engineering resources from innovation to compliance paperwork” ignores the dangers that AI introduces to user data. Far from being a reason to waive the order, clever attacks on models trained on user data has the ability to supercharge the types of secondary use violations that led to the 2022 order renewal. After all, an entire art has been developed around engineering LLM prompts to reveal the data a model was originally trained on.

Our response to X’s petition debunks many claims the company uses in its arguments. For example, there’s little evidence the order placed an undue financial burden on X. In our letter, we note that the compliance cost is merely “a rounding error against the $200 billion valuation of X Corp. following the xAI merger.”

Strong safeguards on our information require eagle-eyed oversight when that data is abused and misused for profiteering ventures. X’s actions not only showed us this in the past, but continue to do so in the present day. We and our civil society partners urge the FTC to take the clear, sensible path and reject X’s petition.

Interesting paper: “Cybersecurity Mission Creep.”

Abstract: Cybersecurity is experiencing mission creep. Policymakers are casting more and more problems as issues of cybersecurity. So reframed, wildly different policy issues, from misinformation, to child social media safety laws, to antitrust regulations, to alleged journalist misconduct, to anti-sex trafficking statutes become what this Article calls “cybersecuritized.” Before this reframing, these issues present as important but not existential. But once cybersecuritization positions the issues as threats intensified by their technological nature, they gain access to the politics and law of urgency and exceptionalism and invite troubling governance responses...

Mandatory hydration breaks are forcing soccer to rethink its traditions as climate change pushes temperatures higher.

The justices gave big business key victories this term. Next comes a showdown that could reshape climate lawsuits nationwide.

We compared today’s weather with July 4, 1776. (You won’t be surprised.)

The legislation is expected to head soon to Gov. Josh Stein, who has called for the end of all tax incentives for the energy-guzzling facilities.

The Democrat will face a GOP challenger in November who says a case that has arrived at the Supreme Court could threaten the state's energy industry.

The case comes as the Republican attorney general has made fighting high insurance prices a feature of his campaign for governor.

Under the much-contested bill, fossil fuel companies would pay $50 billion toward climate change adaptation projects.

The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism gives the European Commission the right to temporarily shield foreign goods from the border levy if “serious and unforeseen circumstances” dangerously affects the EU market.

Medics and hospital administrators know that fighting deadly heat is becoming their new normal.

Deaths attributable to high temperatures reached 1,028 in Spain last month, the highest for June since records started in 2015, according to a research center.

Without federal support for curiosity-driven research, the innovation and talent pipeline that has helped ensure our nation’s prosperity and safety could run dry, warned President Sally Kornbluth during a Washington Post Live event. 

During "The Next Generation," a panel discussion moderated by Washington Post reporter Zachary Goldfarb at The Washington Post’s “Building America Summit,” Kornbluth and Arizona State University (ASU) President Michael Crow joined forces for a spirited discussion on the importance of curiosity-driven research, examining how universities are preparing the next generation of scientists to lead in America’s rapidly changing technological landscape. 

“Many of the things we have in our everyday lives, whether they be medical advances, technological advances, a lot of these things came from 30, 40, 50 years of scientists just trying to figure out how things work,” emphasized Kornbluth.

Kornbluth pointed to MIT’s curriculum that focuses on teaching foundational skills that can be applied to a myriad of technological advances, skills that will be indispensable to leading in an AI-enabled world.

“I do not think that any of our traditional subjects are now outmoded [by AI]. It’s how you approach them,” said Kornbluth. “In our new curriculum, not only are we leaning into basic STEM fields. We really feel we have to resurrect some of the old, moral and civic and ethical educational goals much more strongly because we want all these kids that are learning to be leading-edge technologists, to come at it from a moral, civic and ethical perspective.”

Artificial intelligence

Key to Kornbluth’s mission is maintaining a human-centric approach to AI. Inspired by MIT’s motto, “mens et manus” (mind and hand), she shared: “We really want students to be able to use physical AI. We want our students to still be able to build things, but use AI as an augmentation tool.”

Kornbluth expressed the importance of teaching interested faculty and students how to best use AI as a tool and her commitment to uplifting student collaboration. 

“We’re putting a big emphasis on things like teamwork. So, [students] need to be able to use these tools and come together towards goals, because you could imagine a situation that AI becomes your buddy instead of your study group. We don’t really want that to happen,” said Kornbluth. 

Using AI effectively requires writing strong prompts. Kornbluth discussed how foundational knowledge in fields like math, physics, biology and chemistry, along with teaching students how to write and communicate clearly and effectively, enables students to use AI responsibly when it comes to applying these new technologies to scientific research.

Students need to be able “to take that knowledge and think about how they can use AI to the greatest good and also learn to write the right prompts,” said Kornbluth. 

Kornbluth noted the MIT Sloan School of Management’s unique role in AI exploration. “It’s because the students are all coming with business experience and the demand out there in the field for them to have really strong AI knowledge is very high,” she said. 

The impact of frozen funds

Federal funding fuels curiosity-driven research—the groundwork of medical, technological and countless scientific breakthroughs.

“It is very difficult to make a groundbreaking discovery that’s going to revolutionize human life because you want to do that. You really have to be figuring out how things work and traditionally that sort of research in this country has been funded by the government because it does not have an immediate return,” said Kornbluth.

Discussing issues with federal funding, Kornbluth said that although money has been appropriated for universities, it has not been released to them by and large.

“We’re really trying to figure out what the funding stream is going to be going forward,” said Kornbluth. 

When asked about the consequences of these frozen funds, Kornbluth pointed to the long timeline required to develop life-saving treatments. 

As one example, Kornbluth pointed to diabetes treatments. 

“[Treatments] started with injections of insulin saving people and now it’s automated pumps and CGMs [Continuous Glucose Monitors],” said Kornbluth. “The next phase is going to be an actual functional cure, which is stem cell implantation—masking the cells so they’re not rejected by the immune system. But it takes a lot of basic work to be able to get there.”

“That [diabetes] is just one area. You can extrapolate that to cancer therapy,” said Kornbluth. 

Investment in basic research can advance treatments such as immunotherapy. 

“Immunotherapy is just in its infancy—it doesn’t work in every possible kind of cancer at this point. But all of the modifications that are being done now in basic science laboratories through to pharmaceutical companies and biotech are making it more and more broadly applicable so that pancreatic cancer is not absolutely a death sentence now,” Kornbluth emphasized.

National impact

Beyond research and AI, the president concluded by highlighting the strength of MIT’s student body, programs, and spinouts. 

Kornbluth underscored the value of an MIT education for students and the greater economy. 

Twenty percent of MIT’s class of 2029 were first-generation students. Education“is the best pathway to economic mobility,” said Kornbluth. 

She continued: “MIT has spun out north of 30,000 companies. The economic impact of MIT on this country is equivalent to the 14th largest GDP in the world. We are having a huge impact on the economy and we’re producing the next generation of talent.”

Though MIT is highly selective, Kornbluth noted it is financially accessible through its free tuition program for students with parental incomes under $200,000. She further highlighted MIT for America, an initiative expanding access to calculus, a required course for institutions such as MIT, in under-resourced high schools nationwide.

Kornbluth and Crow concluded the panel by highlighting how their respective universities learn from one another.

“What we [ASU] learn from MIT is, where’s the edge of technology,” said Crow. “We learn how master technologists, and master scientists work in small groups.” For ASU, which has a student population of over 150,000, “ it’s instructive to learn and then operate at a different scale and in a different way. There’s a lot of back and forth,” he said.

Kornbluth expressed her hope for MIT to continue its longstanding tradition of research and education in service of the nation’s next 250 years.

“As a smaller private institution, we’re putting a much stronger footprint in how we can impact people well beyond the MIT walls,” said Kornbluth, “as well as having a scientific impact on society through our discoveries.” 

After more than 10 years at the helm of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), Boleslaw “Bolek” Wyslouch will step down to continue research in nuclear physics as director of the Bates Research and Engineering Center, a subgroup of LNS.

“LNS scientists, including Bolek himself, are world leaders in particle and nuclear physics,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. “Bolek has ensured that LNS has flourished during his time as director, supporting our teams’ critical large-scale, international, collaborative research.”

The largest university-based program of its kind in the country, LNS was established in 1946 to provide support for basic research in the fields of nuclear and high-energy physics. Wyslouch has served as LNS director since 2015.

Since Bolek’s appointment as LNS director in 2015, he has helped significantly increase the Laboratory’s research volume. This growth reflects expansion across many areas of nuclear and particle physics, with LNS supporting several new faculty members. His vision was instrumental in bringing low-energy nuclear physics into the laboratory as a major new research area, the only subfield of nuclear physics in which the laboratory had not previously engaged.

“The leadership to inspire this capacity growth brought in young and vibrant faculty research groups, which helped lead to the expansion in LNS research volume,” says Rick Peterson, executive director of the lab. “Further, this new technical expertise facilitated new partnerships across the national laboratories, enabling LNS to develop and build a presence at all U.S.-based nuclear physics labs.” Most recently, LNS is engaged in an effort to compete for bids to the Department of Energy’s Genesis mission, a potential source of funding in the AI era. 

During his tenure, LNS saw the successful bid for the National Science Foundation-funded AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, led by LNS scientists and supporting more than 25 physics and AI senior researchers at MIT and Harvard, Northeastern, and Tufts universities. Last year, the Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP), part of LNS, also received a $20 million donation from the Leinweber Foundation to create a Leinweber Institute within CTP.

“Perhaps most importantly, Bolek led LNS toward a culture where each individual is valued for their own contributions, regardless of their status within a lab group,” says Peterson, adding that he developed new pathways for postdoc support and sponsored other community-building activities. 

At Bates, Bolek has led and overseen a wide range of complex engineering and scientific projects. These include the development of advanced particle detectors for major international research facilities such as CERN, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Jefferson Lab. Under his leadership, the laboratory established collaborations with industry partners on innovative technologies, including next-generation batteries, advanced accelerator systems, and medical applications of nuclear science. Through these efforts, the laboratory is helping advance both fundamental research and the development of technologies with broad scientific and societal impact.

In his own research, Wyslouch is one of the founders and leaders of the relativistic heavy ion program in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva.

Wyslouch studies the interactions between subatomic particles by looking at the very energetic collisions of heavy ions. The earliest runs of the LHC showed that hot plasma strongly suppressed production of high-energy jets, redistributing the jet energy among slow particles. Wyslouch’s CMS group further discovered surprisingly strong collective effects in ion-ion collisions, as well as in proton-proton and proton-ion collisions.

Before joining CMS, Wyslouch conducted high-energy and nuclear experiments at CERN and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider facility, and took a leadership role at Brookhaven in creating PHOBOS, a project designed to create and study a quark-gluon plasma.

After completing his undergraduate work in physics at the University of Warsaw, Poland, in 1981, Wyslouch began his association with MIT as a doctoral student, earning a PhD in physics in 1987. After postdoctoral appointments at LNS and CERN, he joined the MIT faculty in the Department of Physics in 1991. He has also served as the head of the Nuclear and Particle Physics Division of the Department of Physics since 2013. 

Wyslouch was recognized for his contribution to education at MIT with a 2004 William W. Buechner Teaching Prize. He was elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013, and as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024.

Papa Johns is spying on people’s buying activities to predict when they are low on food:

The pizza chain recently tapped NBCUniversal, Instacart and the dentsu-owned media agency Carat for help reaching consumers when they’re low on groceries—and thus more likely to be swayed by a mouth-watering ad. The idea is to reach hungry consumers by “knowing what is in their fridge without being too creepy,” said Carrie Drinkwater, chief investment officer at Carat.

To achieve that goal, NBCU and Instacart created a custom audience of shoppers who regularly purchase grocery staples on Instacart, such as eggs, milk, meat and produce. Based on that data, Papa Johns can determine which days of the week certain consumers are likely to run out of groceries and serve them an ad on NBCU streaming content accordingly. The brand served custom creatives to consumers based on their food preferences—such as whether they buy meat regularly—with QR codes and calls to action such as, “Light on groceries?” or “Empty fridge?”...

Extreme temperatures threaten to strain the grid as data centers are increasing energy demand. What could go wrong?

After pushing to ax climate guidance for judges, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird will join the foundation backing the federal judiciary's research arm.

Executives insist billions of dollars in new gas plants won't inhibit efforts to hit 2050 climate goals. Others are less sure.