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.

An expensive mistake:

Someone jumped at the opportunity to steal $4.4 million in crypto assets after South Korea’s National Tax Service exposed publicly the mnemonic recovery phrase of a seized cryptocurrency wallet.

The funds were stored in a Ledger cold wallet seized in law enforcement raids at 124 high-value tax evaders that resulted in confiscating digital assets worth 8.1 billion won (currently approximately $5.6 million).

When announcing the success of the operation, the agency released photos of a Ledger device, a popular hardware wallet for crypto storage and management...

Zora Neale Hurston remains one of America’s best-known authors. Charles Henry Turner developed landmark studies about the behavior of bees and spiders. Brian Wilson founded the Beach Boys. George Nissen invented the trampoline. What do they all have in common?

Well, for one thing, they were all innovative Americans — creators and discoverers, producing work no one anticipated. For another, they are all now celebrated as such, in verse, by Joshua Bennett.

That’s right. Bennett — an MIT professor, lauded poet, and literary scholar — is marking the 250th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. with a book-length work of poetry about the country and some of its distinctive figures. In fact, 50 of them: Bennett has written a substantial work featuring remarkable people or inventions from each of the 50 states, meditating on their place in cultural fabric of the U.S.

“There’s so much to be said for a country where you and I are possible, and the things we do are possible,” Bennett says.

The book, “We (The People of the United States),” is published today by Penguin Books. Bennett is a professor and the Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT.

Bennett’s new work has some prominent Americans in it, but is no gauzy listing of familiar icons. Many of the 50 people in his book overcame hardship, poverty, rejection, or discrimination; some have already been rescued from obscurity, but others have not received proper acclaim. Few of them had a straightforward, simple connection with their times.

“It’s about feeling that you have a life in this country which is undeniably complex, but also has this remarkable beauty to it,” Bennett says of the work. “A beauty you helped to create, and that no one can take away from you.”

The figures that Bennett writes about are sources of fascination, and inspiration, demonstrating the kinds of lives it is possible to invent in the U.S.

“We’re in a moment that calls for compelling, historically grounded stories about what America is, what it has been, and what it can be,” Bennett adds. “Can we build a life-affirming vision for the future and those who will inherit it? I’m trying to. I work on it every day.”

Taking flight

“We (The People of the United States)” is inspired, in part, by Virgil’s “Georgics,” pastoral poems by the great Roman poet. Bennett encountered them while a PhD student in literature at Princeton University.

“The poet Susan Stewart, my professor at Princeton, introduced me to Virgil’s Georgics,” Bennett says. “I eventually started to think: What would it look like for me to cover Virgil?” Adding to his interest in the concept, one of his favorite poets, Gwendolyn Brooks, had spent time recasting Virgil’s ancient epic, “The Aeneid,” for her Pulitzer Prize-winning work, “Annie Allen.” She also translated the original work from Latin as a teenager. Moreover, Bennett’s writing has long engaged with the subject of people working the land in America.

“I decided to start writing all these poems about agriculture,” Bennett says. “But then I thought, this would be interesting as an epic poem about America.” As he launched the project, its focus shifted some more: “I started to think about the book as an ode to invention.”

Soon Bennett had worked out the structure. An opening section of the work is about his own family background, becoming a father, and the process of building a life here in Massachusetts.

“Where does my influence, my aspiration, end and the child begin?” Bennett writes in one poem. That section prefigures further themes in the collection about the domestic environments many of its figures emerged from. For the rest of the work, with one innovator or innovation for each of the 50 states, Bennett adopted a regular writing schedule, producing at least one new poem per week until he was finished. 

Hurston, one of several famous authors and artists featured in the book, represents Florida. From Ohio, entomologist Charles Henry Turner was the first Black person to receive a PhD from the University of Chicago, in 1907, before conducting a wide range of studies about the cognition and behavior of spiders and bees, among other things.

George Nissen, alternately, was a University of Iowa gymnast who built the first trampoline in the 1930s in his home state — something Bennett calls a “magical device” that brings to life “the scene in your mind of the leap/and of the leap itself, where you are airborne, illuminated/quickly immortal.” Whether these innovations appear through rigorous academic exploration or became mass-market goods that produce flights of fancy, Bennett has a keen eye for people who break new ground and fire our own feelings of wonder.

“We actually are all bound up in it together,” Bennett says. “These different figures, from various fields, eras, and lifelong pursuits are in here together precisely because they helped weave the story of this country together. It’s a story that is still unfolding.”

Bennett is straightforward about the struggles many of his subjects faced. His choice to represent North Carolina is the poet George Moses Horton, an enslaved man who not only learned to read and write in the early 1800s — the state later made that illegal for enslaved persons, in 1830 — but made money selling poems to University of North Carolina students. Indeed, Horton’s work was published in the 1820s. Bennett writes that Horton’s public performance of his poetry was “an ancient art revived in the flesh of a prodigy in chains.”

Bennett’s unblinking regard for historical reality is a motif throughout the work. “To me it’s not only about exploring a history that a reader might feel connected to or want to learn more about,” he says. “It’s about honoring those who lived that history, who helped make some of the most beautiful parts of the present possible, through an engagement with the substance of their lives.”

Just my imagination

Many figures in “We (The People of the United States)” are artists, but of many forms. From watching VH1 as a child, Bennett got into the Beach Boys, and he devotes the California entry in the poem to them. Or as Bennett puts it, he was “newly initiated into a sound/I do not understand until I am old enough to be nostalgic/for windswept locales, and singular moments in time/I never lived through.”

Bennett was learning about the Beach Boys while growing up in Yonkers, New York, far from any California beaches. But then, Brian Wilson wasn’t a surfer either — he grew up in an industrial suburb of Los Angeles. Imagination was the coin of the realm for Wilson, something Bennett understood when Beach Boys songs would veer off in unexpected directions.

“I’ve always been drawn to moments of great surprise, or revelation, in the works of art I love,” Bennett says. “Which is part of why I’ve dedicated my life to poetry. You think one thing is happening in a poem, and suddenly that shock comes, that unexpected turn, or volta. Brian Wilson always had a great understanding of that. It works in pop music. Surprise, sometimes, is a shift in register that takes you higher.”

Various poems in the collection have down-to-earth origins. Bennett remembers his father often fixing things in the family home, from toys to the boiler, saying, “Pass me the Phillips-head,” when he needed a screwdriver. Thus Oregon appears in the book: Portland is where the Phillips-head screwdriver was invented.

In conversation, Bennett notes the hopeful disposition of his father, who after living through Jim Crow and serving in the Vietnam War, worked 10-hour shifts at the U.S. Postal Service to support his family. Even with all the difficulty he experienced in his life, Bennett’s father always encouraged his son to pursue his dreams.

“I’m grateful that I inherited a profound sense of belonging, and dignity, from my parents,” Bennett says. “There was always this feeling that we were part of a much larger story, and that we had a responsibility to tell the truth about the world as we knew it.”

And that’s really what Bennett’s new book is about.

“We can reckon with our history in its fullness and work, tirelessly, toward a world that’s worthy of the most vulnerable among us,” Bennett says. “Like Toni Morrison, we can ‘dream the world as it ought to be.’ And then make it real. That’s my vision.”

Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper. 

That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive—the world’s largest digital library—has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s. The Archive’s mission is to preserve the web and make it accessible to the public. To that end, the organization operates the Wayback Machine, which now contains more than one trillion archived web pages and is used daily by journalists, researchers, and courts.

But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web’s traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists have relied on for decades. Other newspapers, including The Guardian, seem to be following suit. 

For nearly three decades, historians, journalists, and the public have relied on the Internet Archive to preserve news sites as they appeared online. Those archived pages are often the only reliable record of how stories were originally published. In many cases, articles get edited, changed, or removed—sometimes openly, sometimes not. The Internet Archive often becomes the only source for seeing those changes. When major publishers block the Archive’s crawlers, that historical record starts to disappear.

The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several—including the Times—are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There’s a strong case that such training is fair use. 

Whatever the outcome of those lawsuits, blocking nonprofit archivists is the wrong response. Organizations like the Internet Archive are not building commercial AI systems. They are preserving a record of our history. Turning off that preservation in an effort to control AI access could essentially torch decades of historical documentation over a fight that libraries like the Archive didn’t start, and didn’t ask for. 

If publishers shut the Archive out, they aren’t just limiting bots. They’re erasing the historical record. 

Archiving and Search Are Legal 

Making material searchable is a well-established fair use. Courts have long recognized it’s often impossible to build a searchable index without making copies of the underlying material. That’s why when Google copied entire books in order to make a searchable database, courts rightly recognized it as a clear fair use. The copying served a transformative purpose: enabling discovery, research, and new insights about creative works. 

The Internet Archive operates on the same principle. Just as physical libraries preserve newspapers for future readers, the Archive preserves the web’s historical record. Researchers and journalists rely on it every day. According to Archive staff, Wikipedia alone links to more than 2.6 million news articles preserved at the Archive, spanning 249 languages. And that’s only one example. Countless bloggers, researchers, and reporters depend on the Archive as a stable, authoritative record of what was published online.

The same legal principles that protect search engines must also protect archives and libraries. Even if courts place limits on AI training, the law protecting search and web archiving is already well established.

The Internet Archive has preserved the web’s historical record for nearly thirty years. If major publishers begin blocking that mission, future researchers may find that huge portions of that historical record have simply vanished. There are real disputes over AI training that must be resolved in courts. But sacrificing the public record to fight those battles would be a profound, and possibly irreversible, mistake. 

Biodegradable plastics could help alleviate the plastic waste crisis that is polluting the environment and harming our health. But how long plastics take to degrade and how environmental bacteria work together to break them down is still largely unknown.

Understanding how plastics are broken down by microbes could help scientists create more sustainable materials and even new microbial recycling systems that convert plastic waste into useful materials.

Now MIT researchers have taken an important first step toward understanding how bacteria work together to break down plastic. In a new paper, the researchers uncovered the role of individual ocean bacteria in the breakdown of a widely used biodegradable plastic. They also showed the complementary processes microbes use to fully consume the plastic, with one microbe cleaving the plastic into its component chemicals and others consuming each chemical.

The researchers say it’s one of the first studies illuminating specific bacterial species’ role in the breakdown of plastic and indicates the speed of plastic degradation can vary widely depending on a few key factors.

“There is a lot of ambiguity about how long these materials actually exist in the environment,” says lead author Marc Foster, a PhD student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. “This shows plastic biodegradation is highly dependent on the microbial community where the plastic ends up. It’s also dependent on the plastics — the chemistry of the polymer and how they’re made as a product. It’s important to understand these processes because we’re trying to constrain the environmental lifetime of these materials.”

Joining Foster on the paper are MIT PhD candidate Philip Wasson; former MIT postdoc Andreas Sichert; MIT undergraduate Deborah Madden; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute researchers Matthew Hayden and Adam Subhas; Chong Becker and Sebastian Gross of the international chemical and plastic company BASF; Otto Cordero, an MIT associate professor of civil and environmental engineering; Darcy McRose, MIT’s Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Professor; and Desirée Plata, MIT’s School of Engineering Distinguished Climate and Energy Professor. The paper appears in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Uncovering collaboration

Scientists hope biodegradable plastic can be used to address the mountains of plastic waste piling up in our oceans and landfills.

“More than half of produced plastic is either sent to landfills or directly released into the environment,” Foster says. “But without knowing the specifics of different degradation processes, we won’t be able to accurately predict the lifetime of these materials and better control that degradation.”

To date, many studies into the biodegradation of plastics have focused on single microbial organisms, but Foster says that’s not representative of how most plastics are broken down in the environment.

“It’s really rare for a single bacterium to carry out the full degradation process because it requires a significant metabolic burden to carry all of the enzymatic functions to depolymerize the polymer and then use those chemical subunits as a carbon and energy source,” Foster says.

Other studies have sought to capture the molecular footprints of groups of bacteria as they degrade plastic, which gives a snapshot of the species involved without uncovering the mechanisms of action.

For this study, the researchers wanted to uncover the roles of specific bacterial species as they fully degraded plastic. They started with a type of biodegradable plastic known as an aromatic aliphatic co-polyester. Such plastic is used in shopping bags and food packaging. It’s also often laid across the soil of farms to prevent weeds and retain moisture.

To begin the study, researchers at BASF, which produces that type of plastic, first placed samples of the product into different depths of the Mediterranean Sea to let bacteria grow as a thin biofilm around the plastic. The company then shipped the samples to researchers at MIT, who isolated as many species of bacteria as possible from the samples. The researchers mixed those isolates and identified 30 bacterial species that continued to grow in abundance on the plastic.

Using carbon dioxide as a measure of plastic degradation, the researchers isolated each bacterium and found one, Pseudomonas pachastrellae, that could depolymerize the plastic compounds, breaking them into the three chemical components of the plastic: terephthalic acid, sebacic acid, and butanediol.

But that bacterium couldn’t consume all three components on its own. One by one, the researchers exposed each bacterium to each chemical, finding no bacteria that could consume all three, although they did find some species that could consume one or two chemicals on their own.

Finally, the researchers selected five bacterial species based on their complementary breakdown abilities and showed the small group exhibited the same ability to fully degrade the plastic as the 30-member bacteria community.

“I was able to minimize the degradation process to this simplistic set of specific metabolic functions,” Foster says. “And then when I took out one bacterium, the mineralization dropped, which indicated the organism was controlling the degradation of the polymer. Then when I had each one of the bacteria alone in a culture, none of them could reach the same degradation as all five together, indicating there was this complementary function required. It worked much better than I thought it would.”

The researchers also found the five-member bacteria community couldn’t mineralize a different plastic, showing groups of bacteria may only be able to mineralize specific plastics.

“It highlights that the microbes living where this plastic ends up are going to dictate the plastic’s lifetime,” Foster says.

Faster plastic degradation

Foster notes the bacteria in his study are likely specific to the Mediterranean Sea. The study also only involved bacteria that could survive in his lab environment. Still, Foster says it’s one of the first papers that identifies the roles of bacteria in consuming plastic.

“Most studies wouldn’t be able to identify the specific bacteria that’s controlling each complementary mineralization process,” Foster says. “Here we can say this bacteria controls degradation, these bacteria handle mineralization, and then we show the function of each bacteria and show that together, they can remove the entire polymer.”

Foster says the work is an important first step toward creating microbial systems that are better at breaking down plastic or converting it into something useful. In follow-up work for his PhD, he is exploring what makes successful bacterial pairs for faster plastic consumption and how enzymes dock on plastic particles to initiate and continue degradation.

The work was supported by the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium and BASF SE. Partial support was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

Traders are placing wagers on the likelihood of disasters, activists being jailed and oil depots exploding.

An appeal would have jeopardized permitting reform negotiations on Capitol Hill.

The fight demonstrates the data center industry's enduring political power, even as much of the public sours on the energy-hungry facilities.

Garden supplies, birthday balloons and semiconductors could get hit by price inflation or shortages.

Environmental groups have argued that EPA's endangerment finding repeal undercuts federal lawsuits against state action on climate change.

President Donald Trump picked Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin to replace Kristi Noem as secretary.

The Democratic governor said she’d been pushing a recently dated memo about the potential costs of her own proposed carbon pricing program “for years.”

This technology “is offering some pretty exciting opportunities to tackle questions we’ve been stuck on for a while,” said a professor who specializes in environmental data science.

The endorsed Ecological and Environmental Code consolidates a raft of previous legislation, including on air quality, low-carbon development and penalties for corporate polluters.

The retreat of glaciers in Europe has vast implications for drinking water, power generation, agriculture, infrastructure, recreational activities and more.

I’m skeptical about—and not qualified to review—this new result in factorization with a quantum computer, but if it’s true it’s a theoretical improvement in the speed of factoring large numbers with a quantum computer.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 16 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02581-5

We combined electric vehicle simulation and battery degradation models with high-resolution downscaled climate data for 300 global cities. Climate change was predicted to reduce battery lifetime by 8% on average for batteries manufactured between 2010 and 2018 versus 3% for batteries produced after 2019. Thus, technological advances in electric vehicle battery manufacturing demonstrate important climate adaptation co-benefits.

Diagnosing some diseases could be as easy as breathing into a tube. MIT engineers have developed a test to detect disease-related compounds in a patient’s breath. The new test could provide a faster way to diagnose pneumonia and other lung conditions. Rather than sit for a chest X-ray or wait hours for a lab result, a patient may one day take a breath test and get a diagnosis within minutes.

The new breath test is a portable, chip-scale sensor that traps and detects synthetic compounds, or “biomarkers,” of disease, which are initially attached to inhalable nanoparticles. The biomarkers serve as tiny tags that can only be unlocked and detached from the nanoparticle by a very particular key, such as a disease-related enzyme.

The idea is that a person would first breathe in the nanoparticles, similar to inhaling asthma medicine. If the person is healthy, the nanoparticles would eventually circulate out of the body intact. If a disease such as pneumonia is present, however, enzymes produced as a result of the infection would snip off the nanoparticles’ biomarkers. These untethered biomarkers would be exhaled and measured, confirming the presence of the disease.

Until now, detecting such exhaled biomarkers required laboratory-grade instruments that are not available in most doctor’s offices. The MIT team has now shown they can detect exhaled biomarkers of pneumonia at extremely low concentrations using the new portable, chip-scale breath test, which they’ve dubbed “PlasmoSniff.”

They plan to incorporate the new sensor into a handheld instrument that could be used in clinical or at-home settings to quickly diagnose pneumonia and other diseases.

“In practice, we envision that a patient would inhale nanoparticles and, within about 10 minutes, exhale a synthetic biomarker that reports on lung status,” says Aditya Garg, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Our new PlasmoSniff technology would enable detection of these exhaled biomarkers within minutes at the point of care.”

Garg is the first author of a study that details the team’s new sensor design. The study appears online in the journal Nano Letters. MIT co-authors include Marissa Morales, Aashini Shah, Daniel Kim, Ming Lei, Jia Dong, Seleem Badawy, Sahil Patel, Sangeeta Bhatia, and Loza Tadesse.

Tailored tags

PlasmoSniff is a project led by Loza Tadesse, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. Tadesse’s group builds diagnostic devices that can be used directly in doctor’s office and other point-of-care settings. Her work specializes in spectroscopy, using light to identify key fingerprints in a chemical or molecule.

Several years ago, Tadesse teamed up with Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Bhatia’s group focuses in part on developing nanoparticle sensors — tiny particles that can be tagged with a synthetic biomarker. Bhatia can tailor these biomarkers to cleave from their nanoparticle only in the presence of specific “protease” enzymes that are produced by certain diseases.

In work that was reported in 2020, Bhatia’s group demonstrated they could detect cleaved biomarkers of pneumonia from the breath of infected mice. The biomarkers were exhaled at extremely low concentrations, of about 10 parts per billion. Nevertheless, the researchers were able to detect the compounds using mass spectrometry — a technology that is highly sensitive but requires bulky and expensive instrumentation that is not widely available in clinical settings.

“We thought, ‘How can we achieve that same sensitivity, in a way that’s accessible, at the point of need, and in a chip format that can be scalable in terms of cost?’” Tadesse says. 

A fingerprint trap

For their new study, Tadesse’s group looked to design a sensitive, portable breath test to quickly detect Bhatia’s biomarkers. Their new design centers on “plasmonics” — the study and manipulation of light and how it interacts with matter at the nanoscale.

The researchers noted that molecules exhibit characteristic vibrational modes, corresponding to the motions of atoms within their chemical bonds. These vibrations can be detected using Raman spectroscopy, an optical technique in which molecules are illuminated with light. A small fraction of the scattered light shifts in energy due to interactions with a molecule’s vibrations. By measuring these energy shifts, researchers can identify molecules based on their distinctive vibrational fingerprints.

To detect Bhatia’s biomarkers, however, they would need to isolate the comparatively few molecules from the dense cloud of many other exhaled molecules. They would also need to boost the biomarker’s vibrational signal, as the Raman-scattered light by an individual molecule is inherently extremely small.

“This is a needle-in-a-haystack problem,” Tadesse says. “Our method detects that needle that would otherwise be embedded in the noise.”

The team’s new sensor is designed to trap target biomarkers and boost their vibrational signal. The core of the sensor is made from a thin gold film, above which the researchers suspended a layer of gold nanoparticles. The gold nanoparticles are coated with a porous silica shell, generating a 5-nanometer-wide gap between the gold nanoparticles and the gold film. The silica is modified to strongly bond with molecules of water. The hydrogen in water can in turn bond with the target biomarkers. If any biomarkers pass through the sensor’s gap, they stick to the water molecules like Velcro.

The sensor’s gap is engineered to strongly amplify light due to plasmonic resonance, where electrons in the nearby gold structures collectively oscillate in response to incoming light, concentrating the electromagnetic field into the gap. Biomarkers trapped in these gaps experience a greatly enhanced electromagnetic field, which amplifies their Raman scattering signal. The researchers can then measure the Raman scattered light, and compare the pattern to the biomarker’s known “fingerprint,” to confirm its presence.

The team worked with Daniel Kim, a graduate student in Bhatia’s lab, and tested the sensor’s performance on samples of lung fluid that they obtained from healthy mice. They spiked these samples with biomarkers of pneumonia that Bhatia’s group previously designed. They then placed the spiked fluid in a vial and heated it to evaporate the fluid, to simulate exhaled breath. They placed the new sensor on the underside of the vial’s cap and used a Raman spectrometer to measure the scattered light as the fluid vapor passed through the sensor.

Through these experiments, they showed the sensor quickly detected biomarkers of pneumonia at extremely low, clinically relevant concentrations.

“Our next goal is to have a breath collection system, like a mask you can breathe into,” Garg says. “A patient would first use something like an asthma inhaler to inhale the nanoparticles. They could then breathe through the mask sensor for five minutes. We could then integrate a handheld Raman spectrometer to detect whatever biomarker is breathed out, within minutes.”

Breath tests for disease, sometimes referred to as disease breathalyzers, are an emerging technology. Most designs are still in the experimental stage, and take different approaches to detect various conditions such as certain cancers, intestinal infections, and viruses such as Covid-19. The MIT team notes that its design can be used to detect diseases beyond pneumonia, as well as biomarkers that are not related to disease, as long as the biomarker of interest has a known vibrational “fingerprint.”

“It’s not just limited to these biomarkers or even diagnostic applications,” Tadesse says. “It can sniff out industrial chemicals or airborne pollutants as well. If a molecule can form hydrogen bonds with water, we can use its vibrational fingerprint to detect it. It’s a pretty universal platform.”

This work was supported, in part, by funding from Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving). Several characterization and fabrication steps were conducted at MIT.nano.

Recognizing the Worst in Government Transparency 

The Foilies were written by EFF's Beryl Lipton, Dave Maass and Aaron Mackey and MuckRock's  Dillon Bergin, Kelly Kauffman and Anna Massoglia. 

For the last six years, a class of journalism students at the University of Nevada, Reno, has kicked off each semester by filing their first Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The assignment: Request copies of complaints sent to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about their favorite TV show, a local radio station, or a major broadcast event, such as the Grammys or the Super Bowl halftime show. The students are learning that the federal government and every state have laws establishing the public's right to request and receive public records. It's a bedrock principle of democracy: If a government belongs to the people, so do its documents. 

In the past, the FCC always provided records within a few weeks, if not days. But that changed in September when students requested consumer complaints filed against NPR and PBS stations to see if there was absolutely anything at all to merit defunding public media. Seven months later — crickets. 

Now the students are learning to persevere even when public officials demonstrate an utter disdain for transparency. And The Foilies are here for it. 

Established in 2015, The Foilies are an annual project by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock to recognize the agencies, officials and contractors that thwart the public's right to know. We give out these tongue-in-cheek "awards" during Sunshine Week (March 15-21), a collective effort by media and advocacy organizations to highlight the importance of open government.  

This year, we've got a few "winners" whose behavior defies belief. 

But it's not all negative. Those same Reno students are also assigned to file public records requests for restaurant health inspections. This semester, the records started to show up in their inboxes within 20 minutes. 

If every agency followed Northern Nevada Public Health's example, we could sunset this Sunshine Week project. 

Quick links:

• The Love Letters Award - Gov. Greg Abbott
• The Surcharge, Eh? Award - Vancouver, B.C.
• The Shady Screenshot Award - Department of Homeland Security
• The Discardment of Government Efficiency Award - DOGE
• The Secret Eyes in the Sky Award - Chula Vista Police Department, Calif.
• The City of Darkness Award - Richmond, Va.
• The Flock You Awards - Multiple Winners
• The Database Deletion Award - Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, formerly of Opexus

The Love Letters Award - Gov. Greg Abbott 

Last spring, the office of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott withheld communications between himself and one of the state’s most powerful business figures, Elon Musk. The office claimed that the communications were exempt from public records law because they would reveal confidential legal and policy discussions, including how the state entices private companies to do business in Texas, or “intimate and embarrassing” information.

The claims were unelaborated boilerplate language based on exemptions in Texas’ public records law. But if you’re wondering what "intimate" and “embarrassing” exchanges Abbott and Elon Musk shared over email, you may be waiting a while. 

Last fall, the Office of the Texas Attorney General ordered Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office to release nearly 1,400 pages of communications between Abbott and Musk. About 1,200 of those pages were fully redacted–just sheets of gray obscuration. The records that were released don’t reveal much more than an invitation to a happy hour or a reminder of the next SpaceX launch.

The Surcharge, Eh? Award - Vancouver, B.C. 

Vancouver residents must now pay twice for public records. Despite taxes already funding the creation and storage of government records, the City Council approved charging people $10 Canadian (about $7.33 in the United States) every time they ask for “non-personal” public records.

Officials claim the fee is necessary to deter misuse and cover some administrative costs. The only people abusing anything, however, are the officials who imposed this tax on the public. The message Vancouver is sending is as crisp as a newly minted $10 note: Secrecy is a higher priority than public accountability.

The Shady Screenshot Award - Department of Homeland Security 

The Department of Homeland Security’s banner year of lawlessness included backsliding on its transparency obligations.

In response to a request from the nonprofit American Oversight, DHS stated that it was no longer automatically archiving text messages sent between officials. The department clarified that it had a new, and much worse, records retention policy. Instead of archiving officials’ text messages as the agency had done before, DHS now asks officials to take screenshots of any text messages conducting government business on their work phones. 

It’s hard to see the change as anything more than a giant middle finger to the public, especially because the Federal Records Act requires agencies to retain all records officials create while conducting their public duties, regardless of format. We won’t hold our breath waiting on DHS officials to dutifully press the volume and power button on their phones to record every text message they send and receive. 

The Discardment of Government Efficiency Award - DOGE 

As the Trump administration took over last year, there was a looming threat over government transparency: the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE. 

Billionaire Elon Musk, soon to be the de facto leader of DOGE, proudly claimed “there should be no need for FOIA requests” and “all government data should be default public for maximum transparency.” What quickly became apparent was there may be no need for FOIA requests, because there may be no FOIA officers to fulfill those requests.

DOGE quickly went to work slashing through the federal government, including seizing control of the U.S. Institute of Peace. Part of the takeover included restricting access to the agency’s FOIA system and firing the employees responsible for fulfilling FOIA requests, according to a letter sent to Bloomberg reporter Jason Leopold. Meanwhile, when CNN filed a FOIA request with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for information about Musk and DOGE's security clearance, they were told: "Good luck with that," because the FOIA officers had been fired. 

DOGE also argued that its own records are exempt from FOIA under the Presidential Records Act, meaning records cannot be accessed until five years after President Donald Trump is out of office. 

While DOGE “doesn’t exist” anymore according to the OPM, there remains a lasting dark mark on the state of FOIA and records management. 

The Secret Eyes in the Sky Award - Chula Vista Police Department, Calif.

In 2021, Arturo Castañares at La Prensa San Diego filed a request with the Chula Vista Police Department for copies of videos taken by drones responding to 911 calls as part of the city's "drone as first responder" program. One of the goals was to evaluate the technology’s efficacy and risks to civil liberties. 

The city worked overtime to maintain the secrecy of the footage at the same time officials publicly touted the drones as a revolution in policing. That’s some impressive trust-us-but-don’t-verify chutzpah.

The city argued that every second of every video recorded by its drones was categorically off limits because they were law enforcement investigative records. They even got a trial court to initially buy the argument.

But an appellate court ruled that the investigatory records exemption is more limited, shielding only drone footage that is part of a criminal investigation or evidence of a suspected crime. Footage of wildfires, car wrecks, wild animal sightings and the like are not criminal investigations and must be disclosed.

The California Supreme Court rejected both of CVPD's appeals and a trial court bench slapped the city for inaccurate and incomplete court filings. In the end, the city had to shell out north of $400,000 to its outside lawyers, and then paid Castañares’ lawyers more than $500,000 when he prevailed. 

So what were Chula Vista police hiding? A bunch of routine service calls, such as unverified reports of a vehicle fire and a vehicle collision.

Now, according to La Prensa's reporting, officials are trying to raid a public safety fund created by voters to reimburse the city for the cost of its ill-advised secrecy. 

The City of Darkness Award - Richmond, Va. 

Richmond’s creation of a new FOIA Library may seem like a step toward transparency, but there are questions about the city’s commitment after it left the same officials subject to records requests in charge of curating which records might be released.

Faced with a plan to post all of the city’s eligible public records released under Virginia’s “sunshine” law, the Richmond City Council instead opted to go with the mayor’s alternative proposal. That plan lets the mayor’s administration — the same one that might be the subject of those records — decide what’s worth posting to the library.

Instead of providing access to all public records that the city released under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, the library will only contain a subset that officials believe meet certain criteria, including records that the administration deems "relevant" to city business or that would aid "accountability.” The city cites concerns that "transparency without context" might be too confusing for the average citizen. Forgive us for having more faith in Richmond residents than its leaders do.

The city’s secrecy shenanigans extend beyond the FOIA library.

In an ongoing legal battle, attorneys representing Richmond asked a judge to prohibit former city FOIA officer Connie Clay from filing FOIA requests seeking information about her firing, and sought a gag order to prevent her from talking about the case. Clay alleges she was fired for insisting the city comply with public records law, describing what she calls a “chaotic and mismanaged” and illegal FOIA request process. Rather than agree to a $250,000 settlement, Richmond has spent more than $633,000 in taxpayer funds on legal costs. The trial and the FOIA library launch are both slated for the summer of 2026. 

The Flock You Awards - Multiple Winners

If you live in one of the 5,000 cities where surveillance vendor Flock Safety claims to have established relationships with local cops, you may have noticed the sudden installation of little black cameras on poles by the side of the road or at intersections. These are automated license plate readers (ALPRs), which document every vehicle that passes within view, including the license plate, color, make, model and other distinguishing characteristics. The images are fed to Flock's servers, and the company encourages police to share the images collected locally with law enforcement throughout the country. Each year, law enforcement agencies across the country conduct tens of millions of searches of each other's databases. 

In 2025, journalists and privacy advocates started filing public records requests with agencies to get spreadsheets called a "Network Audit," which shows every search, including who ran it and why. Accessing these audits uncovered abuse of the system including: investigating a woman who received an abortion, targeting immigrants, surveilling protesters, and running racist searches targeting Roma people. 

In response, some cities have terminated their contracts with Flock Safety. Other law enforcement agencies, and Flock itself, have gone a different direction: 

Taunton Police Department, Mass.: The police department told the ACLU of Massachusetts to cough up $1.8 million if the organization wanted its network audit logs–the highest public records fee we documented this year. The civil liberties group filed requests with agencies throughout the state for the audits, and most agencies handed over the spreadsheets for free and with little fanfare. Taunton, however, said it would take 20,000 hours to process the request, at $86.57 an hour. 

Orange County Sheriff's Department, Calif.: The Orange County Sheriff gave a number of reasons it wouldn't release the network audit logs in response to a public records request. The most inane (and misspelled one): It would "disincentive law enforcement from conducting such research." Aren't cops the ones who say if you’re not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide? Well, well, well, how the tables have turned.

Flock Safety: The company responded to criticisms of its ALPR network by sending legal threats aimed at trying to silence its critics. First, the company used a bogus trademark claim to threaten DeFlock.me–a crowdsourced map of ALPR. (EFF represented its creator.) Then it hired a company to try to get the hosts of HaveIBeenFlocked.com, which hosts an interface for searching these network audits, to remove the site from the internet. 

The Database Deletion Award - Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, formerly of Opexus

Brothers Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter are accused of essentially hitting delete on government data, destroying access to information contained in millions of records. 

The government hired a federal contractor called Opexus, which hosts data and provides services to dozens of federal agencies. The company employed the Akhter siblings, though in February 2025, Opexus learned about the brothers’ previous convictions for wire fraud and obstructing justice. Soon after, the company fired the pair. But, according to prosecutors, the two decided to double down on being wildly unsuited for administrative access to government records systems. 

The Akhters immediately turned around and retaliated “by accessing computers without authorization, issuing commands to prevent others from modifying the databases before deletion, deleting databases, stealing information, and destroying evidence of their unlawful activities," according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The two have been accused of deleting 96 government databases, many of which contained FOIA records and sensitive investigative files. Their indictment alleges that a minute later, one brother queried an artificial intelligence tool for “how to clear system logs following the deletion of databases.” The brothers are also charged with stealing government records and conspiracy to commit computer fraud. 

The Brothers Akhter allegedly took mere moments to destroy untold amounts of information that belonged to the public. Though they could face decades in prison, the public may never know the extent of the damage.

Want more FOIA horror stories? Check out The Foilies archives!

Amid the hum of milking equipment and the shuffle of cow hooves, PhD student Audrey Parker and her collaborators pull a wagon through a dusty path of a dairy barn, measuring an invisible greenhouse gas drifting through the air. Most engineering students wouldn’t expect their graduate research to take them to a dairy farm, but for Parker, this is where some of the most impactful climate solutions are hiding in plain sight.

The scene was part of the civil and environmental engineering student’s PhD work exploring advanced yet practical technologies to mitigate methane emissions. Such emissions are much more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Dairy farms are a major source of methane, and Parker’s wagon carried sensors to measure methane concentrations.

Now in her fourth year in the lab of Professor Desirée Plata, Parker looks forward to visiting such farms. When she’s not taking measurements, she can look across the rolling fields and think of home.

Parker grew up in Boise, Idaho. Her childhood was filled with backpacking trips, skiing, horseback riding, and otherwise enjoying what her natural surroundings had to offer.

“Growing up, we were always outside,” she says. “I knew how to cast a fly rod before I knew how to ride a bike.”

That experience motivated Parker to pursue studies related to preserving the environment she loved. She attended Boise State University as an undergraduate, where she studied sustainable materials development under the mentorship of Assistant Dean Paul Davis. In the summer before her senior year, she was accepted to the MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP), which equips students for graduate school by bringing them to MIT to conduct cutting-edge research. That’s where she began working with Plata, MIT’s Distinguished Climate and Energy Professor.

“They do a great job bringing in people of different backgrounds,” Parker says. “It wasn’t until I started working with Desirée that I started applying materials science as a tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That was a profound insight.”

Parker graduated Boise State University as a Top Ten Scholar, the highest academic honor granted to graduating seniors, before driving across the country to begin her studies at MIT. She decided to devote her PhD to exploring methane mitigation strategies, building on her experience from MSRP.

Her focus is on methane emissions from two sources: air being vented from coal mines, and dairy farms. Those two areas alone account for a large portion of human-driven methane emissions. Both sources are dilute compared to the average oil or gas well, which makes the methane challenging to capture and convert into less environmentally harmful molecules.

Parker also wanted to work with community members in the field during her PhD to ensure whatever technical solutions she developed are practical enough to implement at scale.

“Desirée’s approach is to make sure industry is aware of affordable and sustainable ways to remove methane from their operations, while also incorporating the nuanced expertise stakeholders offer,” Parker says. “I appreciate that she is focused on not just doing work for the chapter of a PhD thesis, but also making our work lead to real-world change.”

Parker’s research explores both quantifying methane at emission sources and designing technologies that could be used to convert methane into carbon dioxide, a molecule with significantly less climate warming potential.

“Methane naturally converts into carbon dioxide over the course of about 12 years in the atmosphere,” Parker explains. “The technology we work on simply speeds up this natural process to achieve near-term climate benefits.”

The main technology Parker studies is a catalyst made from zeolites, an abundant and inexpensive mineral with complex internal structures like honeycombs. Parker dopes the zeolites with copper and explores ways to apply external heat to facilitate complete methane conversion.

Parker and her collaborators assess the durability of the material and its performance under different conditions. Recognizing that real-world deployment environments can often be difficult to replicate in lab, they test catalyst performance in operating dairy farms. In a 2025 paper, she analyzed the use of thermal energy to sustain methane combustion in catalyst materials, detailing when the approach actually brings net-climate benefits.

“If your methane concentrations are low and you’re having to provide so much energy into your system, you could become climate-harmful, but there’s also a context where it’s beneficial,” Parker explains. “Understanding where that trade-off occurs is critical to making sure your mitigation technologies are having the benefits you’re anticipating.”

That kind of systems-level thinking is necessary to understand the long-term impacts of interconnected climate systems.

“It lays a framework that other people can use for their mitigation technologies,” Parker says. “There are trade-offs with every technology, and being transparent about that is important. I think as academics it’s easy to get tunnel vision based on our research. There’s such limited funding for mitigation technologies overall and so making sure those few funding dollars are allocated appropriately is critical for achieving our climate goals.”

Some of Parker’s research findings have informed the design of a pilot-scale methane mitigation system in a coal mine, although she hasn’t gotten a chance to visit it just yet.

Outside of her research, Parker co-chairs the MIT Congressional Visit Days, a program run by the Science Policy Initiative that sends MIT students to Washington to meet with lawmakers and advocate for science-based policies.

“On-the-Hill advocacy teaches you about the policy landscape in unparalleled ways,” Parker says. “Those conversations you have with lawmakers can drive transformational change to bridge the gap between science and policy. It is our job as scientists to communicate our findings clearly so policymakers can design regulations that enable effective solutions.”

This spring, Parker is also leading a workshop for the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium around financing the voluntary carbon market. Here, she plans to leverage industry insights to catalyze private capital at the scale needed to meet our climate goals.

Parker also still gets plenty of outdoor time, hiking outside Boston and skiing a bit, though she says the New England ski mountains don’t compare to those out west.

Parker, who expects to complete her PhD next year, says it’s gratifying to be able to devote her research to protecting the environment she loves so much.

“For me it’s about preserving the world I grew up in,” Parker says. “Especially in Idaho, where communities are experiencing more frequent wildfires and more intense droughts. As a child, the natural world provided so much wonder. Today, that same sense of wonder is what drives me to protect it.”