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.

Apple just released a system called “Reference Image.” It can verify the image is exactly as taken by an iPhone—new models only—without tying it to a specific iPhone or photographer. It can also verify that multiple images came from the same iPhone.

Other industry solutions require a photographer or institution to vouch for an image using their own credentials. We are concerned this puts some photographers, such as those operating in conflict zones, in a difficult position; it should not be necessary to forgo anonymity in order to prove image authenticity. We built Apple Reference Image to avoid using an explicit, public credential for photographers, and to avoid even implicit public association between different photos taken by the same sensor. The final reference image is instead signed by Apple’s signing service, after validation by PCC. That signature is backed by Apple’s strongest technical guarantees...

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) could fly deep into the heart of a raging wildfire, avoiding sudden flare-ups and dodging falling tree branches to gather critical information for rescuers. But in this dangerous situation, the UAV could easily be damaged or destroyed by falling debris.

The UAV — and the rescuers who rely on it — would benefit from a new, autonomous navigation system that is guaranteed to avoid collisions, even in completely unfamiliar surroundings. 

Developed by MIT researchers, this method plans a flight path for a UAV that eludes unknown obstacles that may move in unpredictable ways. It charts an efficient course through an unmapped environment that is mathematically proven to be safe from collisions.

Many popular navigation systems can only offer formal safety guarantees when the environment is static, or when the obstacles are known in advance.

By enabling the UAV to avoid moving obstacles while it is discovering its environment, this trajectory planner, which the researchers call “SANDO” (for “Safe AutoNomous trajectory planning for Dynamic unknOwn environments”) could be especially useful for applications like search and rescue missions into collapsed buildings, mine explorations through networks of hidden tunnels, or package delivery across a crowded neighborhood.

“In the hardest possible environment, where the UAV has no map of the area and there are unknown obstacles moving around, we established a mathematical guarantee of safety. The only thing the planner needs to know is the top speed the obstacles could reach. Given that, you could use it in any environment, without a map, and you know the UAV is not going to crash into anything,” says Kota Kondo SM ’23, PhD ’26, who recently earned his doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics at MIT and is lead author of a paper on this new system.

He is joined on the paper by Jesús Tordesillas PhD ’22, an assistant professor at Comillas Pontifical University in Madrid; MIT graduate students Juan Rached, Lili Sun, and Yixuan Jia; and senior author Jonathan P. How, a Ford Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Aerospace Controls Laboratory (ACL) at MIT. The research appears in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

Safety first

Trajectory planners use images and data from a UAV’s onboard cameras and sensors to chart a flight path that reaches the vehicle’s goal. 

Most existing planners are either designed for unknown static environments, where the obstacles don’t move, or they loosely avoid dynamic obstacles without providing a formal guarantee that the robot won’t crash. 

Formal safety guarantees are important in high-stakes situations, such as if a UAV were delivering medical supplies to the site of a remote natural disaster. But trying to compute every possible crash in a dynamic environment would take too long for real-world deployments.

“In an unknown dynamic environment, you don’t have many assumptions to rely on. In those types of environments, researchers haven’t yet been able to mathematically guarantee that a trajectory is safe,” Kondo explains.

The MIT researchers used a rigorous mathematical approach to develop SANDO, their safe trajectory planner. They theoretically proved the algorithm always computes trajectories which are guaranteed to avoid collisions with moving obstacles in unknown environments.

SANDO starts by mapping out a safety corridor through the robot’s environment. This corridor is a series of connected regions of 3D space the robot can travel through, which are guaranteed not to contain any obstacles. 

But unlike other systems, SANDO creates a time-sensitive safety corridor that considers the possible future movements of dynamic obstacles. It employs a special module that detects, groups, and monitors dynamic obstacles to estimate where they will move next.

While the system doesn’t know exactly where an obstacle will move in the future, it uses that obstacle’s maximum velocity to compute how far it could possibly go in a certain timespan. It puts a sphere around the obstacle that captures the farthest distance it could travel in all directions.

SANDO builds the safety corridor around these spheres to ensure the UAV will not collide with a moving object.

“In the real world, obstacles are going to move, so the safety corridor you create at one point won’t be useful as things move into the corridor. But because we consider this time component, we can now guarantee safety into the future,” Kondo says.

The system uses a heat-map based planner to identify “hot” regions of the environment with many obstacles and guides the UAV away from these dangerous areas. This helps the robot chart a more efficient course around danger zones.

Fast reactions

Once it has established a collision-free safety corridor, SANDO optimizes the trajectory within that corridor to find the fastest path to reach the goal. 

As the robot travels, SANDO adjusts the safety corridor and reformulates the trajectory to ensure the robot’s path remains collision-free until it reaches its goal. 

The researchers employed a few tricks to make the optimization easier to solve so the UAV can rapidly recalculate trajectories using its onboard computer, quickly reacting to sudden changes.

“The most difficult part of developing SANDO was the math,” Kondo says. “When you try to guarantee safety, you need to be rigorous and ensure your theory covers every possible case, even edge cases. Once we had that mathematical guarantee, it was very easy to fly the UAVs.”

In simulations, SANDO reached the robot’s goal faster than several state-of-the-art systems while completely avoiding collisions in all environments. 

SANDO also avoided all dynamic obstacles in 12 test flights with a real UAV, using the robot’s onboard computer and sensors to rapidly replan safe trajectories. 

In the future, researchers could make SANDO more computationally efficient and combine the system with machine-learning models that allow the user to give instructions to a robot using plain language.

A central challenge in autonomous flight is that a path that is safe when it is planned may become unsafe as the environment changes. SANDO addresses this challenge with time-varying safe flight corridors and hard-constrained trajectory optimization that supports frequent onboard replanning. Its combination of spatiotemporal planning, formal safety analysis, and hardware validation provides a practical approach to autonomous flight in complex dynamic environments,” says Fei Gao, an associate professor at Zhejiang University in China, who was not involved with this research.

This research is funded, in part, by the Defense Science and Technology Agency of Singapore.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 07 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02768-w

Climate change is already causing widespread losses and damages, and these impacts will intensify as human and natural systems exceed their capacity to adapt. Recent research allows us to understand if and how countries are prioritizing this issue in national policies.

As artificial intelligence transforms industries and national security, understanding the latest hardware capabilities is important for maintainind technological advantage.

AI accelerators — specialized systems designed to speed up capabilities such as neural networks, deep learning, and machine learning — have been a major area of development for nearly a decade. Since 2018, team from the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center (LLSC) has been conducting the Lincoln AI Computing Survey (LAICS, pronounced "lace"). Six papers later, LAICS continues to summarize current commercial AI accelerators and compare their peak performance and peak power.

"About eight years ago, we saw a sharp rise in the number of research AI accelerators described in research papers and commercial accelerators being announced, and we started to get questions about them from government sponsors of the laboratory's work. That was motivation enough to start the survey," says Albert Reuther, a staff member at the LLSC, which operates and optimizes the high-performance computing systems used by thousands of laboratory research staff.

Although AI accelerators are frequently used for processes such as machine learning, they also can enable other parallel applications, such as modeling the functions of molecules and speeding up simulations of fluid dynamics — processes that are very computationally expensive.

AI accelerator technology can come in a number of forms: central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and dataflow accelerators. Each type of accelerator has slightly different capabilities. CPUs can be used for general-purpose computing, while ASICs can perform only very specific tasks. Dataflow accelerators, FPGAs, and GPUs are more flexible and can be configured for a variety of workloads. Efficiency and performance vary across the different types of accelerators depending on how they are designed. The goal of LAICS is to survey the technologies currently on the market and compare them to find the best accelerators for certain needs.

Led by Reuther, the LAICS team includes LLSC members Michael Jones, Peter Michaleas, Jeremy Kepner, and Vijay Gadepally. The team also collaborates with researchers across Lincoln Laboratory, including in the Advanced Technology Division and Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance and Tactical Systems Division, to learn how accelerators support research and development for their missions.

The first paper in their series studied 57 accelerators, while the latest one looked at more than 120 accelerators. The main metrics the team uses to compare accelerators are the peak performance and power; then they sort accelerators by whether they're on a chip, card, or system. All the data in the papers are drawn from public sources, which can be challenging because some companies prefer to keep their performance and power data private. To keep up to date on the latest in the field, Reuther runs daily news and citation searches that report new technical press articles, company announcements, and industry presentations.

"It continues to surprise me how each year another five to 10 startups get funded and announced, and then release new AI accelerators," Reuther says. "One might think that the landscape is saturated enough, but then another batch of innovative accelerators is introduced."

In addition to summarizing the performance versus peak power of the current accelerators, each paper explores a new aspect of the field. For example, the paper published in 2022 investigated sources of performance increases, finding that they stem from smaller, denser transistor designs and the use of lower numerical precision (i.e., calculating fewer significant digits). The latest paper examined different architectural choices available, analyzing how the addition of certain components, such as more cores per processor or parallel performance, would change the system.

Reuther plans to continue the survey for the foreseeable future, stating that, in just the past few months, six new startups have announced their first AI accelerators.

"AI and the hardware it runs on are such hot topics, and it is important for Lincoln Laboratory to be an unbiased technical advisor for choosing and pursuing the right technologies," Reuther says. "Our AI accelerator surveys have helped many sponsors and government colleagues gain a better understanding of the AI accelerator landscape and make better research and acquisition decisions about them. This survey has also been very valuable to determine which GPUs we should consider for upcoming LLSC system purchases so it not only benefits our sponsors and mission programs, but also benefits all LLSC users."

The full set of papers and the accompanying datasets can be found here.

Chris Bourg, who has served as director of the MIT Libraries since 2015, has been named vice provost and Barbara K. Ostrom (1978) Director of the Libraries, MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan announced today.

“The title ‘vice provost’ signals the enduring importance of the MIT Libraries in the digital age,” said Chandrakasan. “While the ways in which the libraries meet the needs of our community might change as technology changes, their mission of protecting access to knowledge and information is as vital as ever.”

Thanks to a generous gift from Barbara K. Ostrom ’78, SM ’78, the position of the director of the libraries now has an endowment to help fund it in perpetuity. Bourg noted that the gift is especially meaningful for her, due to the sense of service she shares with Ostrom: they both completed Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) during their time as undergraduates — Bourg at Duke University and Ostrom at MIT — before going on to active military service.

“Barbara’s gift is an incredible acknowledgment of the progress the entire MIT Libraries staff has made toward our vision,” said Bourg, who noted that Ostrom had also supported an MIT Libraries initiative to highlight MIT’s women faculty by acquiring, preserving, and making accessible their personal archives. “Her generosity advances the libraries’ ability to support teaching, learning, and community-building at MIT well into the future.”

During her tenure, Bourg has emphasized digital access to content, a more open and equitable scholarly publishing landscape, and expanded support for data-intensive and computational research. She has helped both the libraries and the Institute adapt to AI-driven changes: she co-chaired the Working Group on Scholarly Content and Generative AI, charged with helping the MIT community navigate the legal, technical, and ethical issues involved when scholarly content is used to develop and train generative AI models. And she was a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training, which issued its final report in August.

Promoting open scholarship has been a longstanding focus of Bourg’s career. In 2018, the libraries launched the Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship, with Bourg serving as founding director. She co-chaired the 2017 MIT Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research; its recommendations led to the creation of the MIT Prize for Open Data, co-sponsored by the School of Science, and the development of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts. Guided by the framework, MIT became one of the first major U.S. institutions to cancel a journals contract with Elsevier in 2020, standing by its open scholarship principles while saving the Institute millions of dollars.

Bourg co-chaired the 2016 Ad Hoc Task Force on the Future of Libraries and has guided the MIT Libraries toward the vision laid out by the task force report. Under her leadership, the libraries completed a major renovation of Hayden Library and the Building 14 Courtyard and launched MIT Reads, an Institute-wide reading and discussion program designed to foster empathy and belonging within the MIT community.

Prior to joining MIT, Bourg worked for 12 years in the Stanford University Libraries. Before Stanford, she spent 10 years as an active-duty U.S. Army officer, including three years on the faculty at the United States Military Academy at West Point. She received a BA from Duke, an MA from the University of Maryland, and an MA and PhD in sociology from Stanford. 

Bourg is a member of the board of the Center for Open Science, the external advisory board of the Stanford Data Science Institute’s Center for Open and Reproducible Science, and the board of Annual Reviews, a premier publisher of open review journals in 51 disciplines. She also currently serves on the national academies of Science and Engineering, and the Medicine Corrections and Retractions Committee, tasked with upgrading the scientific record.

MIT is launching a new strategic initiative today: MIT for America, which seeks to strengthen STEM education nationally, at many levels of learning. 

Addressing a critical national need, the initiative ranges across STEM fields and will engage students from kindergarten through community college, preparing them to live and work in a world increasingly shaped by science and technology. MIT for America’s programs will develop new opportunities for student achievement in mathematics, hands-on design and fabrication, and constructive engagement with artificial intelligence. 

President Sally Kornbluth made the announcement today in a letter to the Institute community.

“A natural extension of the Institute’s long record of national service, MIT for America is grounded in our deep belief in potential over pedigree, of the transformative power of learning by doing and in the open sharing of knowledge,” Kornbluth wrote.

The initiative represents an Institute-wide effort to address the national challenge of improving STEM education and helping it adapt to shifting societal needs. MIT for America will leverage the Institute’s longstanding strengths to develop new programs and expand existing projects, while amplifying MIT’s impact on national education.

MIT for America’s faculty leaders emphasize that the initiative will support programs that can be scaled up and that provide direct, face-to-face guidance for learners and educators. 

“The goal is to provide programs that are both scalable and high-touch, and make an impact across the country,” says Professor Eric Klopfer, a faculty co-director of MIT for America and director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and the Education Arcade at MIT. “All our programs take advantage of things we are well-positioned to do at MIT, and can be distributed around the country. That’s our guiding light.” 

Cynthia Breazeal, faculty co-director of MIT for America, professor of media arts and sciences, and the Benesse Professor of Research in Education, says the initiative “is about bringing high-quality access to STEM and AI education, from kindergarten to community college, across the United States. We live in an innovation-driven world, and it’s important to have an education that gives you access to it, whether that’s so you can be a fully engaged citizen or have the opportunity for economic mobility.”

Breazeal adds: “Talent is everywhere. We think opportunity should be, too.” 

The initiative is addressing large-scale needs in STEM education. Only 29 percent of U.S. students in grades 9-12 build circuits, and only 6 percent of students enroll in computer science classes, even though about 60 percent of high schools offer such courses. MIT for America intends to substantially help communities across the country build the bandwidth needed to further develop STEM knowledge and workplace skills. 

“This effort is about really rolling up sleeves and getting out there and engaging communities, and helping to build capacity across the United States,” Breazeal adds.

MIT for America features programs addressing three high-priority areas:

Mathematical thinking and problem solving: Work here builds on an existing program, the MIT for America Calculus Project, launched a year ago, in which MIT students and alumni volunteer to help provide calculus tutoring to students in school districts across the country. 

Living, learning, and working with AI: This area addresses multiple issues revolving around AI, including teacher education that helps instructors integrate AI into classroom learning in productive ways, and programs that enhance AI skills and STEM education in technical-vocational schools and community colleges. The MIT RAISE program (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education) is a leader in this domain. 

Designing, making, and innovating: MIT for America plans to build out programs that encourage hands-on learning, design work, use of fab labs and makerspaces, and experiential learning, sometimes deploying tools such as national design challenges. 

“Across the U.S., we want to unlock opportunities and experiences where students are,” says Claudia Urrea, head of MIT for America and head of the MIT pK-12 Initiative. “We want to find people who have not had the opportunity to discover their talent.”

In the first case, the MIT for America Calculus Project provides a ready model of outreach with growth potential. About half of U.S. school districts offer calculus, but many of those districts may be under-resourced. The MIT for America Calculus Project has been growing in partnership with an increasing number of school districts, while MIT undergraduates and alumni have enjoyed participating in the program.  

“People have been really excited about the MIT for America Calculus Project, seeing both the impact that it has, and its model, which I think has resonated,” Klopfer says. “That’s really representative of what other programs could look like.”

In the second topic area, MIT for America can leverage burgeoning efforts such as MIT RAISE. The program helps educate teachers and engage students about implementing AI in ways that can complement the developing skills of students, enabling them to use AI in productive ways.

“RAISE is about providing materials and training for teachers that helps them have conversations and productive activities around AI,” Klopfer says. “It’s about understanding how AI works and discussing what the values are in your school. It has to be active, involving the students. If you try to force things, about AI one way or the other, that will fail.”

In an outgrowth of RAISE, MIT also launched a related program, Pathways for AI Training and Hiring (PATH), on Oct. 1. Starting with a partnership with Georgia State University, PATH aims to bring AI training to two-year and four-year colleges, to help students gain AI skills useful for workplaces. 

“RAISE has had a lot of success with scaling already,” Breazeal says, noting that about 1 million students were involved with RAISE’s Day of AI event earlier this year. “At MIT, we want to empower youth voices to shape the future. It’s an excellent example of our ability to do that.”

And in the third topic area, MIT for America can help produce substantial growth in programs aimed at hands-on learning. That may include more projects such as MIT’s Regenerative Futures Challenge, a global program stemming from MIT’s pK-12 Initiative, which give students the opportunity to create climate and sustainability solutions. Additionally, the Fab Foundation, which grew out of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms Fab Lab program, offers tools and curriculum to learners at 300 fab labs across the U.S.

“It’s about coming together in places where there are people who can work together, mentor each other, and learn by example,” Klopfer says. “That’s the kind of thing we want to be creating at scale. We want to build on that.”

All told, MIT for America represents a vigorous all-campus effort to enhance education through sustained outreach and knowledge-sharing. At MIT, partners in creating the initiative include the MIT Media Lab; MIT RAISE; the MIT pK-12 Initiative; the Office of the Vice President for Resource Development; and the Office of Innovation and Strategy.

The leaders of MIT for America presented an overview of the program in September at MIT’s Alumni Leadership Conference, and they say alumni activity around the new initiative will be another key to its success. 

“We really appreciate the support and engagement of our alumni,” Breazeal says. “We know they care about K-12 education and access to community colleges.” More broadly, she adds, “We do think this message will resonate with people all across the country.”

“I look forward to watching these programs flourish, evolve, and grow,” Kornbluth wrote to the community. 

404Media is reporting (alternate link) that a cyber-weapons arms manufacturer is exploiting a vulnerability in iOS to bypass its automatic reboot security feature. This is the feature that automatically puts an iPhone into a more secure state if it hasn’t been used for 72 hours.

The new technology to get around inactivity reboot was developed by Magnet Forensics, the company behind GrayKey, a popular tool sold to law enforcement agencies that allows them to unlock and access data stored in iPhones and Android smartphones. Magnet has developed a new device called GrayKey Preserve and a feature for its regular GrayKey devices called Evidence Preservation Mode, according to the video...

Like Earth, most planetary bodies circle their star in stable, detached orbits. These companionable systems can suddenly change when a planet comes too close to its star. In such a close encounter, a star can pull the planet in and swallow it whole. 

Across the galaxy, astronomers have seen plenty of stable, detached planetary systems. They have also observed a handful of stars quickly engulfing their planet. Now, for the first time, scientists have spotted a system that is striking a curious balance between the two extremes. And it’s revealing a new way that stars can interact with planetary companions. 

In a paper appearing today in Nature Astronomy, scientists at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a star leisurely snacking on a closely orbiting brown dwarf — a planet-like object that is more massive than a planet yet not quite as big as a star. 

The new system, named ZTF J0440+2325, is within the Milky Way galaxy, roughly 300 light years from Earth, and represents the first observation of a low-mass object that is slowly and steadily consuming material from another low-mass object. 

The rate at which the star is feeding from the brown dwarf suggests that this slow stellar cannibalism could carry on for hundreds of thousands, or even billions of years.

“When we think of stars interacting with planets or brown dwarfs, the picture is always that the star eventually swallows the other thing,” says Kevin Burdge, assistant professor of physics at MIT. “This is what will happen to the Earth when the sun becomes a red giant. But here, we’ve found an alternative: Instead of swallowing the thing up, the star can gradually eat it, for billions of years.”

The study’s MIT co-authors include Aaron Householder, Kaitlyn Shin, Saul Rappaport, Joheen Chakraborty, and Emma Chickles, along with collaborators from Caltech, the University of Hawaii, the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and the Universidad de La Laguna in Spain, and the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

A “weird triangle”

The new system was spotted initially by the Zwicky Transient Facility. The ZTF uses a camera as part of a telescope at the Palomar Observatory, in California, to scan the sky for rapid changes in brightness, which could signal the presence of a supernova, a gamma-ray burst, or colliding neutron stars. 

Several years ago, Burdge was looking through ZTF data when he noticed a strange light curve, or pattern in brightness. Light curves for supernova resemble a bell curve, signaling the gradual brightening and then fading of a star as it bursts. But what Burdge picked out looked more like a triangle, that didn’t appear once, but again and again.

“I remember first looking at this and thinking: Stars don’t make triangular waveforms like this,” he recalls. 

At the time, he and his colleagues were focused on a different signal, which they identified as a “black widow binary” — a system in which an extremely dense, spinning neutron star is slowly consuming a much smaller companion star, similar to how its arachnid namesake plays with its prey. 

Burdge wondered whether the triangle signal might also be from a black widow. But the light from the signal was puzzling. In black widow binaries, the light appears to wobble, as a result of a very light, low-mass object, such as a small companion star, whipping around a much heavier object, such as a neutron star. 

“We weren’t seeing that whipping back and forth here,” Burdge says. “It didn’t make any sense. We couldn’t explain what this was.” 

But they had a hunch: Could the signal be coming not from a wobbly, David-and-Goliath system, but from a more balanced pair of objects, each with a similarly low mass? 

“If you have less mass in the system overall, things can gently orbit each other without whipping back and forth,” Burdge says. “That was the idea. But we never had any proof. And this weird triangle just sat for years.”

A slow and steady fireball

Recently, Burdge and Householder, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, decided to revisit the triangle mystery. From the original ZTF signal, they determined the location of its source to be within the Milky Way galaxy, around 300 light years from Earth. They focused multiple telescopes on the source, named ZTF J0440+2325. From these observations, they measured various properties of the source, including its wobble. Compared to black widows and other similar binaries, the wobbling from ZTF J0440+2325 was much smaller — but not insignificant. 

“That was the real clincher for this system,” Householder says. “When we measured that wobble, we found we were not seeing a black widow. This was a low-mass star that’s orbited by a brown dwarf. The wobble was too small in amplitude to be anything else.”

They determined that the star and the brown dwarf are extremely close, with the brown dwarf circling the star every 87 minutes, in an orbit that could fit within the diameter of the sun. Both objects are small by stellar standards. The star is around 85 times as massive as Jupiter, while the brown dwarf is around 25 times as massive. 

With two low-mass objects circling at such close range, the scientists wondered if one object could be pulling material from the other. Such a process, known as accretion, is most often seen around objects that are extremely massive, though small in actual size, such as black holes and neutron stars. When a black hole accretes, or draws material from a much smaller nearby object, it pulls the matter around it in a disk.

“The difference here is: The thing absorbing matter is not a tiny black hole but a star, which is relatively big in size,” Burdge explains. “So matter just pummels directly onto the surface, at very high speeds, like an asteroid hitting the moon.”

The team carried out simulations of possible accretion in ZTF J0440+2325. Taking into account the properties of the star and the brown dwarf, they simulated particles of matter on the brown dwarf, and how these particles should behave within the system over time, according to the laws of physics and equations of motion. 

“When we track those test particles, we see they indeed fall right onto the surface of the star,” Householder says. “This is the first time we’ve caught a low-mass star actively accreting from another low-mass object.”

What’s more, the team calculated that the brown dwarf must be feeding material to its star at a rate of about 1/100,000 of an Earth’s mass each year. That’s about 40 million dump trucks’ worth of material, or roughly 1.3 trillion one-pound burritos every second. While that may seem like a lot of matter to be losing, it is in fact a very small fraction of the brown dwarf. This rate, the researchers estimate, is actually quite slow and steady. Given the size of the system, they say the star could continue leisurely snacking on the brown dwarf, for billions of years. 

This slow accretion, they say, would resemble a steady stream from the brown dwarf, onto the star. The researchers realized that if they were to view the system from afar, the brightness from the system would chart as a triangle, as the brown dwarf and its stream of matter circles its star. 

“It’s like you’ve got this continuous fireball onto one of the objects, and as one orbits the other, that hotspot comes in and out of view, and the peak of the triangle signal is when you’re looking right at the fireball,” Burdge explains. 

With the mystery of the triangle light curve solved, the team hopes to spot similar slow-feeding systems nearby. 

“It’s inspiring a lot of new searches on our part,” Householder says. “I think we’re going to learn a lot about a different kind of way that planets and brown dwarfs interact with their host stars.”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

This one is from 1809, written by Napoleon’s nephew.

The EU is recommending import controls to combat unregulated squid fishing in the Southwest Atlantic. I’m not optimistic.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

MIT formally dedicated its newly transformed Met Warehouse (Building W41) on Wednesday, in an energetic evening ceremony heralding the start of a new era for the practice of design on campus. 

The ceremony highlighted “the essential vision of the Met: connecting people, disciplines, and ideas, and inviting everyone to see where those connections might be,” said Mark Gorenberg ’76, chair of the MIT Corporation, during introductory remarks.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth called the new building “a testament to the transformative power of design, which has been central to MIT from the very beginning.” She also heralded the building as a cornerstone of MIT’s “magnetic new West Campus district for art and design,” which includes the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building (W18) and the MIT Theater Arts building (W97). 

Hashim Sarkis, dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, delivered keynote remarks at the event, linking together many themes of the evening and recounting the project’s development in the late 2010s.

In envisioning moving into the Met Warehouse, Sarkis said, the “building spoke to us. It offered us possibilities that we could clearly envision both outside and inside the thick brick walls. … It helped us imagine how we can live and work together as a campus and as a school. Over the months of discussions among the faculty and students across the school, it became clear that it was an idea whose time had come.”

Many members of the MIT Corporation were in attendance for the event, held in the Met Warehouse’s Sidara Auditorium. The ceremony was also an occasion for giving thanks to those who made the new Met Warehouse possible: campus leaders, donors, faculty, architects and designers, contractors and specialized builders, and many others who worked on the remarkable structure in different ways. 

“The list, I promise you, runs longer than the credits at the end of “The Odyssey,” and what an odyssey this has been,” Sarkis quipped. 

From fortress to workshop

The Met Warehouse was originally constructed from 1884 to 1923, as a massive private storage facility with 2-foot thick brick walls, a corner turret, slit-like windows, and other features making it look like a fortress. About 500 feet long, with five stories, the building was long an imposing local curiosity.

MIT acquired the Met Warehouse in the 1970s and in the 2010s began exploring possible new uses for it. By 2018, the idea of making it the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning had gained enough traction to move forward. 

The high-profile firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro won the competition to become the project architects, and created a variety of solutions to bring natural light into the warehouse and revamp its interior. With permission from the Cambridge Historical Commission, the designers replaced four segments of brick wall on the building’s north side with top-to-bottom glass sheets, which along with skylights bring in abundant light.

At the same time, the architects — led by Elizabeth Diller and Benjamin Gilmartin, who were at the dedication last night — overhauled the building’s interior, while working within many of its structural features. The refurbished Met Warehouse now features double-height design studios, an auditorium, a large entrance lobby, a ground-floor café, offices, and many flexible, reconfigurable classroom spaces designed to help faculty and students collaborate on an immense array of projects. 

The Met Warehouse also features building-long open corridors on all five floors and a central staircase connecting all of them, as elements designed to enhance circulation and connectivity within the building.

In her remarks, Kornbluth heralded the Met Warehouse’s educational potential, noting the challenges artificial intelligence presents for education, as highlighted in an MIT-wide report released in August. 

That report, she outlined, emphasized that education comes from “helping students to value the process of learning as a ‘productive struggle’ and from engaging them in ‘human settings where they … learn how to work with others, communicate their ideas, receive criticism constructively, build confidence, develop judgment, and act as members of a community.’”

With that in mind, Kornbluth said, “that sounds exactly like the kind of hands-on, in-person, collaborative problem-solving the new Met was made for. … This community is not only ready to withstand the educational challenges of AI … it’s also primed to help the rest of MIT meet the moment. And that is very good news for us all!”

Diller also addressed the audience, highlighting some of the key design challenges involved in the project and thanking many of those who worked on it, including Leers Weinzapfel Associates, the project’s associate architects, and Shawmut Design and Construction. The Met Warehouse, she emphasized, is meant to be used in many ways in the future, and was designed with enough flexibility so that it can continue to evolve. 

“This building should remain a work in progress,” Diller said, adding that she would continue to regard it as “definitively unfinished.” 

Professors John Ochsendorf, Caroline Jones, and Lawrence Vale — MIT faculty who are all associate deans in the School of Architecture and Planning — also spoke at the ceremony, outlining the implications of the building for the school’s many forms of research and collaborative work. 

“It’s working,” Ochsendorf said, now that the building is inhabited on an everyday basis by students, faculty, and staff. 

Giving more thanks

As with almost any large, long-term project, credit can be spread in many directions, and the speakers at the dedication ceremony gave ample thanks to those involved — and to the important supporters of the project. 

“Hashim Sarkis has been its greatest champion,” Kornbluth said. “His leadership and imagination shaped not only this building, but the ambitious future it makes possible for the school.” She also thanked MIT President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif, a project supporter during his tenure, “for your foresight, your perseverance, and your insistence that the music, theater, and design communities at MIT deserve facilities worthy of the quality of their world-class work.”

For his part, Sarkis also gave credit to former MIT Corporation Chair Robert Millard ’73, saying, “Without Bob and his wife Bethany, this building would not be here today.” Gorenberg, in his remarks, also made a point of thanking the City of Cambridge for its extensive cooperation with MIT on the project. 

Gorenberg also expressed his deep “gratitude to the Morningside Foundation,” the philanthropic arm of the T.H. Chan family. He cited the “extraordinary generosity” of the founding gift, from family members Gerald and Beryl Chan and Ronnie and Barbara Chan, establishing the Morningside Academy for Design (MAD), a major interdisciplinary center at MIT located in the Met Warehouse. 

Speaking of Gerald L. Chan, Gorenberg added, “We cherish his wisdom and belief in MIT as a leading institution that can do good for the world.”

In a statement sent to MIT News, Chan said: “In this day and age when disciplinary boundaries are ever dissolving, it is important to have initiatives that tie all departments of the Institute together so that students can be facilitated to have broad exposures. Design provides such a possibility, and MAD is the venue.”

Sidara (formerly the Dar Group), a global collaborative of specialist design, engineering, and consulting firms owned by Maha and Talal Shair, supported the establishment of two central public spaces in the building, the Sidara Auditorium, and the Sidara Gallery, on the ground floor. 

“At Sidara, we share MIT’s commitment to improving lives, solving critical challenges, and making room for cultures to shine,” Talal Shair said in a statement to MIT News. “We feel a profound resonance with SA+P across all three dimensions — so it was only fitting that we would support the transformation of the MET into a hub for education, research, and innovation. We trust the Sidara Auditorium and the Sidara Gallery will serve as spaces for idea exchange, inspiring future generations to think broadly and act boldly.”

The LUMA Foundation, a Zurich-based nonprofit founded by Maja Hoffmann in 2004 to support artistic production and the organization behind LUMA Arles, an interdisciplinary creative campus in southern France, also gave an establishing gift for the MIT LUMA Lab, based in the Met Warehouse, for projects combining art, science, technology, conservation, and design. 

“LUMA Foundation has always been grounded in the belief that meaningful change begins by creating the field and conditions for people, disciplines, and forms of knowledge to encounter one another freely, critically, and with mutual respect,” Hoffmann said in a statement for MIT News. “The MET gives this principle a remarkable new context. To see faculty, students, researchers, artists, designers, scientists, and technologists connected through the MIT-LUMA Lab working alongside one another is a powerful expression of what such a place can enable. I am excited and proud to be contributing to this journey and be part of the MIT community and its future.”

Referencing MIT’s motto, “mens et manus,” which is Latin for “mind and hand,” Gorenberg wrapped up the dedication ceremony last night with an additional thought: “This is ‘mens et manus’ at its finest.” 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Investment Management Company (MITIMCo) announced today that MIT’s unitized pool of endowment and other MIT funds generated an investment return of 10.3 percent during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2026, as measured using valuations received within one month of fiscal year end. At the end of the fiscal year, MIT’s endowment funds totaled $29.2 billion, excluding pledges. Over the 10 years ending June 30, 2026, MIT generated an annualized return of 11.7 percent.

The endowment is the bedrock of MIT’s finances, made possible by gifts from alumni and friends for more than a century. The use of the endowment is governed by a state law that requires MIT to maintain each endowed gift as a permanent fund, preserve its purchasing power, and spend it as directed by its original donor. Most of the endowment’s funds are restricted and must be used for a specific purpose. MIT uses the bulk of the income these endowed gifts generate to support financial aid, research, and education.

The endowment supports about half of undergraduate tuition, helping to enable the Institute’s need-blind and full-need undergraduate admissions policy, which ensures that an MIT education is accessible to the most talented students in the nation and the world regardless of their financial resources. 

In fiscal 2026, MIT enhanced undergraduate financial aid, ensuring that all students from families with incomes below $200,000 and typical assets have tuition fully covered by scholarships, and that families with incomes below $100,000 and typical assets owe nothing toward their students’ MIT education. Eighty-eight percent of the Class of 2026 graduated with no debt. With our investments in financial aid, parents of MIT undergraduates receiving financial aid now pay on average 10 percent less on a real basis than at the end of the Great Recession.

MIT Student Financial Services works closely with all families of undergraduates who need financial aid to make MIT affordable for them. In 2025-26, the average need-based MIT undergraduate scholarship was $66,155. Fifty-eight percent of MIT undergraduates received need-based financial aid, and 44 percent of MIT undergraduate students received scholarship funding from MIT and other sources sufficient to cover the total cost of tuition.

MIT’s endowment enables it to do more cutting-edge research. Fueled by funding from the endowment, the Institute more than matches the amount of campus-based research funded by the U.S. government and other sponsors — expanding its beneficial impact without asking more from taxpayers. 

MITIMCo is a unit of MIT, created to manage and oversee the investment of the Institute’s endowment, retirement, and operating funds.

MIT’s Report of the Treasurer for fiscal year 2026, which details the Institute’s annual financial performance, was made available publicly today.

As far back as she can remember, Cathy Wu ’12, MNG ’13 wanted to find ways to solve problems to improve people’s lives. Her parents were Taiwanese immigrants, and her father had a long commute to his job, which took him away from the family. On a tight budget, the rest of the family often stayed home on a street that was too busy for playing outdoors. Wu and her siblings ended up playing a lot of computer games. 

Wu says her desire to make the world a better place, her dad’s daily battle against traffic, and the games she played, like “SimCity,” were the seeds of her motivation to design safe, efficient transportation systems. 

Wu is an associate professor in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. Her research focuses on using machine learning and reinforcement learning (RL) to advance reliable strategies for improving a range of complex systems, including transportation.

“Designing transportation systems consists of modeling and analyzing dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of variants, which means that an evidence-driven approach to designing those systems is simply not within reach of today’s tools,” Wu says. “This is the role that RL plays. If successful, it would free transportation researchers and enable their practitioner partners to design the systems they want.”

Wu credits her older sister with instilling in her the desire to improve people’s lives, and Wu’s interest in transportation fits neatly into that ideal.

“I like transportation because it connects everyone. We all use it, we all experience it, we all have issues with it. So, at some level, we’re all interested in the system being better,” she says.

Wu got interested in applying artificial intelligence to transportation while earning her undergraduate degree at MIT, after attending a lecture on autonomous vehicles by the late professor Seth Teller. The lecture, which Teller gave during an Independent Activities Period robotics competition (that Wu actually won), was the event that honed her particular approach to transportation research, Wu says. She began working with Teller, and when he stopped concentrating on autonomous vehicles, he encouraged Wu to transfer to Professor Daniela Rus, who had done research on robotaxis.

“I’m very grateful to the people who helped me explore those interests and helped me become the person I am now,” she says, specifically naming Teller, Rus, and “my friends at Dropbox,” who invited her to do a second internship focused on transportation issues.

After her master’s degree at MIT, Wu went on to earn her PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. During that time, she observed that transportation researchers were spending years developing optimization methods to model and analyze a single new variant of a system. Her approach as a computer scientist working to develop RL and optimization methodologies to address transportation challenges held the promise of exponentially improved efficiency.

In 2018, Wu’s last year of her PhD at UC Berkeley, she successfully applied RL to a traffic problem: automatically analyzing the potential traffic flow impact of autonomous vehicles in a range of different traffic networks. The research went viral.

While this could have been a “the rest is history” moment for Wu, RL turned out to be a flighty friend. Wu worked on RL theory in a postdoc at Microsoft and came back to MIT as faculty drawn, she says, by the sustainability focus of CEE, and IDSS’s emphasis on infusing data science into other disciplines.

Yet over the next two years, Wu’s further attempts to apply RL to traffic problems failed.

“That was stressful,” Wu says, “it was unclear whether the problem was me (the advisor), my students, the traffic domain, or RL itself.”

Still, the earlier research was a proof-of-concept demonstration that RL could be applied to transportation systems.

And in 2022, she and her students identified that RL algorithms are so sensitive that an algorithm that works on one problem may not on even a closely related one. A key result, which Wu says she is proudest of “because it was like the light at the end of a long tunnel of negative results,” came in 2023. She and her team of researchers devised a way to work around the sensitivity of RL. The team found that while RL may not train well on 90 percent of a group of problems, it can train quite well on 10 percent. And by training RL models on those problems that solve and generalize well, the resultant models collectively perform well on a set of related problems, even those that would not have been solved through direct training. The researchers designed an algorithm to determine which problems to use RL to train, and that algorithm improved training efficiency by up to 30 times, meaning that what would normally have required 100 training models may only require three models.

“This work gave me back the confidence that reinforcement learning can play an important role in solving hard optimization problems, including in transportation,” Wu says. “Now, a good chunk of my group works on the topic of contextual RL, which is the setting where RL seeks to solve a space of related problems.”

Wu’s more recent research applies RL to solve a hard transportation optimization problem with important policy implications: the work shows that eco-driving measures in which vehicle speeds are intelligently controlled to reduce excessive stopping and starting could reduce vehicle emissions by between 11 and 22 percent. The system provides evidence that policies instituting such measures could significantly improve system efficiency, and is “a demonstration that RL can be used to inform transportation policy on problems of practical importance,” Wu says.

“I am a big fan of evidence-based policy and believe it’s the basis for a thriving democratic society, yet our societal systems are so complex,” Wu says. “People can bicker forever about what’s better or worse, but I do believe that there are questions we bicker about that can be analyzed systematically using data and have objective answers. A large part of the reason I am in academia is to better understand how technology can support democratic societal decision-making.”

Wu says that much of the work she and her team have done over the last several years has produced algorithms “to streamline the development of solvers for hard optimization problems, whether they are related to transportation or to other systems, such as logistics, supply chains, manufacturing, and resource allocation.

“This alludes to my preferred style of work,” Wu says, “which is called use-inspired basic research,” explaining that such research addresses a practical problem, developing fundamental knowledge that often translates to other practical problems. Her students start by probing consequential problems ranging from safety to congestion to accessibility, identifying where existing methods fall short, and allowing the problems themselves to shape the direction of the research.

At the same time, Wu’s desire to help others on a more personal level plays out in her teaching.

“I love working with students, both in the classroom and research mentoring,” she says. “It makes my day when I am able to teach someone something — when I see that light bulb go on in a student.”

In addition to earning academic honors, including a 2023 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award, Wu has also been formally celebrated for her teaching and mentoring, including with the Ole Madsen Mentoring Award in 2025.

What does she tell students confronting extremely complicated problems?

“Be patient. Start small. Societal impact is a lifelong endeavor, not something to be accomplished in a few years,” Wu says. “It will take years to really understand what’s going on and where the real problems are. In the meantime, try to be helpful. Be curious. Ask many questions.”

There has been a raft of site-blocking bills in the latest Congress, and the latest is called the “Deterring Extraterritorial Foreign Exploitation of Networks Damaging Intellectual Property” aka the “DEFEND IP Act.” The problem is that instead of “defending IP,” this bill will incentivize censorship, overblocking, and bad faith attempts to block access to a website. DEFEND IP Act, and all of these site-blocking proposals, threaten the open web. 

We keep seeing attempts to pass site-blocking legislation–from SOPA/PIPA in 2012 to Block BEARD, FADPA, and ACPA this year. Every one of them has at its core the rotten idea that enforcing copyrights requires building a censorship machine for websites into the architecture of the internet. This is, of course, a disaster for a free and open web. There is no way to create a mechanism for blocking access to an entire website that does not invite both deliberate abuse and lots of collateral harm to free and lawful speech.

DEFEND IP deputizes every service provider into a copyright cop, so long as a rightsholder has accused a website of copyright infringement. Let’s be clear: this isn’t about removing access to an infringing work–that already exists via the DMCA. This isn’t about getting damages from the website or the uploader. It is about making an entire website inaccessible for everyone trying to visit it.

DEFEND IP lets any rightsholder go to a court and get an order requiring service providers to block access to an entire website after alleging copyright infringement. What DEFEND IP does not have is any deterrent for someone seeking to block a website in bad faith. There are no punishments for getting a website blocked for protected speech. There are no meaningful remedies for those whose speech is vanished from the internet due to an entire website being disappeared. It creates a one-stop shop for getting an entire website–again, not an instance of infringement but an entire site hosting all sorts of user content–removed. But for those whose business, speech, or access to information is affected, there is no easy way to get the site restored.

DEFEND IP scales up the extraordinary legal structures that already exist for copyright enforcement. In doing so, it likewise scales up the problems those regimes pose to protected speech. 

We see this with DMCA takedowns all the time. We see it with bad faith takedowns used to silence criticism or commentary. We see it with the voluntary use of copyright filters by sites like YouTube, where seconds of sound matching seconds of sound in another video can prevent an entire work from reaching its audience. In these existing systems, there are at least some mechanisms of challenge available to the targeted creator. DEFEND IP has none. Instead, site owners, users, or readers will have to find a lawyer and go to court and hope to challenge the order, a slow, expensive, and daunting process

Those existing systems are already frustrating for the targeted creators and users, but under DEFEND IP a whole class of people doing protected speech will find themselves deplatformed because of the actions of others

This bill is not a defense of creativity or creators. It is a way to reshape the internet by building a vast new infrastructure of censorship. Congress should put aside DEFEND IP and the failed idea of site-blocking laws, for good. 

Congress is taking another run at site-blocking, a deeply flawed concept that would undermine basic internet infrastructure. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has introduced the American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA), H.R. 10364, a bill that would give copyright owners a new legal tool to block Americans’ access to foreign websites accused of copyright infringement. 

The basic idea is all too familiar, and it’s still dangerous. A copyright owner first asks a court to label a foreign website a “foreign piracy site.” Once that happens, the copyright owner could seek orders requiring internet service providers, DNS providers, and—new and explicit in this bill—VPN providers to take “commercially reasonable steps” to stop their users in the United States from accessing those sites. The decision to label a website as a “foreign piracy site” can happen without the accused site even showing up in court to defend itself. 

ACPA Goes Further Than Other Site-Blocking Proposals 

In some ways, the ACPA is even worse than a site-blocking legislation introduced last year, the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA), which EFF also opposed. That bill at least excluded companies that provide only VPN services, as well as providers that offer DNS resolution exclusively through encrypted DNS protocols. The ACPA drops those protections. In fact, the bill explicitly includes VPNs among the service providers that can be ordered to block access to a website. 

The bill also broadens the definition of a “piracy site.” Last year’s site blocking bill covered sites with “no commercially significant purpose or use” other than infringement. ACPA changes that to sites with “only limited commercially significant purpose or use” beyond infringement. In other words, under ACPA, even a website with legitimate commerce going on could still be labeled a “foreign piracy site” and ultimately blocked for all Americans. 

Better Process Still Doesn’t Fix The Problem 

The ACPA includes some procedural protections, such as requiring service providers that could be subject to a blocking order to receive legal notice and an opportunity to respond. The bill also requires courts to consider the potential harm to other websites and internet users before ordering intermediaries to block websites. It further requires the copyright owner to post a bond, in an amount determined by the court, sufficient to cover the costs and damages incurred by any service provider found to have been wrongfully enjoined. The bill also provides a mechanism for operators or users of third-party online services affected by erroneous blocking to seek compensation after the fact in certain circumstances. Finally, a site operator can ask a court to rescind its designation as a “foreign piracy site.”

These safeguards are significant and positive changes, but they don’t solve the basic, and severe, due process problem. The initial decision to label a website a “foreign piracy site” can still be made without the site operator appearing to defend itself. The court can appoint a “special master,” which is an independent expert who helps the judge evaluate evidence, to review the copyright owner’s case—but that step is not required. In any case, a special master  is not a lawyer who actually represents the accused website, nor the users whose access to information and speech may be affected. 

We know what site-blocking looks like when it’s put into practice. Supporters of site-blocking like to point to its use in other countries. But what we’re seeing in other countries is serious collateral damage to lawful websites. In Italy, 510 benign, non-streaming websites, including a Catholic convent and a telehealth platform, were blocked by the country’s “Piracy Shield” program. In Spain, a site-blocking system blocked more than 550,000 domains during soccer broadcasts, including sites belonging to Greenpeace and Harvard University.

Congress Should Reject Site-Blocking Proposals

More than a decade ago, Congress abandoned SOPA and PIPA after internet users pushed back against site-blocking and other threats to the open internet. We shouldn't start building that infrastructure now.

ACPA adds some safeguards, but those don’t fundamentally change what Congress is being asked to create: a system for blocking Americans’ access to entire websites at the request of copyright owners. By explicitly bringing VPNs into that system, the bill also reaches into basic tools that people use to access the internet safely and privately. Adding somewhat better procedures to a bad idea doesn’t turn it into a good idea.

Despite the “dot-com crash” in 2000, the tech industry remained an attractive career destination for many who believed technology represented the future. The digital age — defined by global connectivity and computers — had firmly taken hold, and over time, the tech industry emerged as a dominant force in the labor market. High-paying jobs for engineers, designers, and professionals across a wide range of fields became increasingly common. 

MIT PhD student JS Tan SM ’22 was among those who, upon graduating from Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design in 2015, joined the tech industry. 

“A lot of us had this idea that technology, and in particular the technologies related to the internet, had the potential for bringing about a more progressive version of the world,” Tan says. 

Google echoed this ethos to its employees with its once-famous motto, “don’t be evil,” as their informal corporate philosophy and code of conduct guideline. They’ve since dropped the tagline.

But in time, particularly with the start of the first Trump administration, some tech industry employees found themselves questioning if their employers were really intent on supporting policies to support a more democratic world. According to Tan, their willingness to publicly oppose their employers’ actions — at first successfully — is currently experiencing an anti-worker backlash. 

Now, Tan and his former tech industry colleague Clarissa Redwine have published a book on the rise and fall of the tech worker labor movement. “Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World’s Most Powerful Industry” (Haymarket Books, 2026) chronicles how tech workers organized themselves, the effective strategies they used, and the effect the movement had on Silicon Valley labor politics over the past decade.

Documenting a movement from within

In 2017, Tan was working for Microsoft and Redwine for Kickstarter, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending entry into the United States for nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries for 90 days, and suspending Syrian refugees from entering the country indefinitely. 

“As a whole, I think the tech sector really pushed back against this,” says Tan. “[OpenAI co-founder] Sam Altman participated in protests of this ban at the airport. In fact, the day before he joined these protests, he wrote in his blog that the tech industry needed to take a stand against the Trump administration, and particularly its immigration policies.” 

Altman’s Jan. 28, 2017, blog post read, in part, “Tech companies go to extraordinary lengths to recruit and retain employees; those employees have a lot of leverage. If employees push companies to do something, I believe they’ll have to. At a minimum, companies should take a public stance. But talking is only somewhat effective, and employees should push their companies to figure out what actions they can take.”

Tan says Altman’s words inspired tech workers across the industry to publicly voice their opposition and “push for the values they believed in.” For the next several years, workers staged walkouts and protested their employers’ contracts with U.S. military and immigration enforcement agencies, as well as workplace policies they considered sexist. 

“That was a time in which a lot of tech workers felt that their companies were walking back the values that they had initially promised,” says Tan.

Their objections initially met with some success. In 2018, following protests by Google employees, the company decided not to renew its contract for Project Maven, a Pentagon initiative using artificial intelligence to analyze drone surveillance footage. Nearly 4,000 employees signed an open letter to their CEO stating, “Google should not be in the business of war.”

Fast forward eight years. Earlier this year, more than 600 employees signed an open letter urging Google’s CEO to reject classified AI work with the Pentagon, citing concerns about potential uses including lethal autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. 

“The way Google responded to them this time was to say, basically, ‘Too bad, we’re committed to working with the Pentagon,’” says Tan. “So, there is this kind of shift as to how Google is positioning itself politically, as well as to their employees.”

What happened to the tech industry employee leverage? 

Tan’s book outlines several events that he argues have negatively impacted their formerly strong influence. First, following interest rate hikes in 2022, the tech industry lost hundreds of billions in market valuation and set out to cut costs, the most significant of them being the expensive salaries of their employees. In other words, the labor market soured on tech workers, giving employers opportunity to wrest back control, Tan suggests. 

Second, he points to the drastic effect of agentic AI coding systems on the nature of their work, arguing that these tools have deskilled workers and made everyone much more worried about job security.  

“Tech workers had to face these shocks on their own. With a union or some ability to coordinate across workers and bargain as a group, they might’ve had more power to actually push back,” says Tan.  

Documenting the past to support the future

Tan enrolled at MIT in 2020, earning a master’s degree at the MIT Media Lab. He is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning with a focus on the political economy of the tech sector.

At various points in their careers, Tan and his co-author had been involved with organizing in the tech sector. Redwine was a prominent organizer in the union drive at Kickstarter. She was fired from the company in 2019; Redwine said her dismissal was retaliation for her organizing activity, while Kickstarter denied that claim. One reason Tan and Redwine wrote this book is because they saw that the bandwidth for labor organizing among tech workers had hit a new low. 

“Tech workers want to have a say over the way their technologies are designed,” says Tan. “They want to be able to push for the right guardrails around technologies that they’re building. We wanted to use this book as an opportunity to analyze why it was that, within eight years, the tech worker movement had sort of fallen into this state of paralysis.”

They began writing the book in 2024, reliving the highs and lows of the past decade. This is Tan’s first book. He says writing it was an “exhilarating experience” and one that he profoundly enjoyed.

“It’s why, in part, I’m drawn to academia. To a large extent, I believe in the power of research and of writing. To have the opportunity to do this about a subject that I care deeply about has been an amazing experience.”

A book launch and discussion about “Against Tech Oligarchy,” co-hosted by the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, will take place on Oct. 26.

Judge Allows Social Media Surveillance Lawsuit Against Trump Administration to Move Forward

NEW YORK — A lawsuit filed by three labor unions against the Departments of State and Homeland Security for their viewpoint-based surveillance and suppression of protected expression online can move forward, a federal judge ruled yesterday.

On October 1, 2026, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York rejected the government’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The case was filed in October 2025 on behalf of the United Automobile Workers (UAW), Communications Workers of America (CWA), and American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Muslim Advocates (MA), and the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic (MFIA) represent the labor unions.

This decision is a victory: The Court held that claims that the government’s social media surveillance program is harming the unions’ members, as well as hampering the ability of the unions to associate with their members and potential members, can move forward.

The Court ruled that: "This threat of adverse immigration consequences, under a government whose harsh immigration crackdowns has been heavily publicized and reported on, is certainly enough to 'deter a person of ordinary firmness from the exercise of First Amendment rights.' It is objectively reasonable that noncitizens would limit their expression of disfavored viewpoints under the [Challenged Surveillance Program] given the credible threat of adverse immigration action from the Government."

"The freedom of Plaintiffs' members to speak, associate, and appear publicly is not incidental to union work, but rather is the mechanism through which unions recruit, organize, communicate, and bargain," the Court further explained. "A program alleged to silence members and drive them from the unions' rolls therefore strikes at the unions' representational function itself, which is the 'grounds that bring [their] membership together.'"

Since taking power, the Trump administration has created a mass surveillance program to monitor constitutionally protected speech by noncitizens lawfully present in the U.S. Using AI and other automated technologies, the program surveils the social media accounts of visa and green card holders with the goal of identifying and punishing those who express viewpoints the government disfavors. The surveillance program has been paired with a public intimidation campaign—silencing not just noncitizens with immigration status, but also the families, coworkers, and friends with whom their lives are integrated.

In October 2025, UAW, CWA, and AFT sued the Departments of State and Homeland Security, alleging that this viewpoint-based surveillance program violates the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act.

"No one should have to fear government surveillance or retaliation against their immigration status for expressing their views or participating in their union. We're pleased the Court has allowed this challenge to move forward and will continue fighting to protect the rights of everyone to speak, organize, and advocate without fear," said UAW President Shawn Fain.

"This is a victory for working people, for the labor movement, and for our democracy," said CWA President Claude Cummings Jr. "Our very freedom is under attack by the Trump administration's online surveillance program, and today's decision is a critical first step toward affirming our freedom to speak, to protest, to organize without fear of government retaliation. These essential freedoms underpin our union rights to join together and fight to improve our working conditions. CWA is a fighting union, and our members remain ready to stand together to protect our rights and our freedoms."

"Today’s decision is a critical step toward vindicating our Constitutional right to freedom of speech and rejecting the Trump Administration’s cynical attempts to criminalize and punish those who disagree with them," said AFT President Randi Weingarten. "Government surveillance to monitor the 'opposition' is a tool of dictators that erodes the democratic principles this country was founded on. We will continue to remain vigilant in defending our 250-year-old rights—not just for our members, but for all Americans."

"Our plaintiff-unions have members that have wholly changed the way they interact with social media—including limiting their engagement with union content—because of the government's social media surveillance program," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lisa Femia. "Many have stopped posting online together, and have even stopped engaging in offline activities, for fear of being scrutinized or targeted related to immigration benefits. We are pleased that the Court has agreed to let the case proceed, and allow unions and their members to seek justice for infringement of their rights."

"Today’s ruling is an important step forward in holding the government accountable for its ever-expansive online surveillance program that silenced non-citizens, stoking fear that exercise of their protected First Amendment rights could result in unfavorable treatment on their immigration applications or worse." said Sadaf Hasan, Staff Attorney at Muslim Advocates. "We will keep fighting until all non-citizens are able to freely associate, organize, and speak out without the looming threat of visa revocation and immigration enforcement simply because the government dislikes their views."

"Defendants' attempt to evade accountability on specious jurisdictional grounds was rightly rejected by the Court," said Nick Jones, a student in the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic. "We are excited to see the case now proceed to the merits, where we expect to prevail as well.”

For the ruling: https://www.eff.org/document/uaw-v-dos-opinion-order-denying-motion-dismiss

For more about the litigation: https://eff.org/cases/united-auto-workers-v-us-department-state

Contacts:
Electronic Frontier Foundation: press@eff.org
Muslim Advocates: melissa@muslimadvocates.org

St. Lucie County in Florida discovered (alt link) a dozen Flock cameras whose ownership it can’t identify, and that the county government had not permitted.

I am reminded of the decade-old story of StingRay cell phone surveillance devices in Washington, DC, whose operators were also unknown.

My guess is that in the StingRay case, the devices were operated by foreign actors. This Flock case is more likely some local government entity that didn’t bother getting approval. Were I a foreign actor, I would rather hack the existing Flock network—like Israel ...

On the first day of class 16.445J/STS.468J (Entrepreneurship in Aerospace and Mobility Systems), David Mindell, MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics (AeroAstro) and the Frances and David Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing, asked his students to take a look at an image of a textbook. The cover featured a bright and inspiring collage of rockets, planets, and all manner of futuristic air- and spacecraft. The title: “Entrepreneurship in Aerospace: A Guide for Founders and Investors.”

“This is the most up-to-date guide on the topic,” Mindell said, describing the book’s treatment of the concepts and procedures involved in innovating in aerospace, an industry experiencing a renaissance of entrepreneurship led by venture-backed startups and rapid innovation, and one that, whether or not we realize it, we all depend on every day. 

Konark Chopra, a graduate student in MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations Program, raised his hand. “Sounds great — how can we get a copy?”

“It doesn’t exist,” replied Mindell. “You’re going to write it this semester.”

After conducting over 50 interviews with founders, operators, engineers, and investors across the aerospace industry, the class pulled it off. The 100-page industry report, titled “Entrepreneurship in Aerospace,” provides comprehensive insight into what it actually takes to build an aerospace venture today, and makes predictions about what is needed in the near future.

The challenge to produce the report was inspired by the bestselling guide “Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup,” by Bill Aulet, professor of the practice in the MIT Sloan School of Management and managing director of the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship. Originally published in 2013, the book provides an outline for entrepreneurs in any industry to cultivate skills for success. “Entrepreneurship in Aerospace” builds on Aulet’s framework to provide an industry-specific guide. “Aerospace is its own special industry with a unique set of constraints and aspirations,” says Mindell.

“Putting together this report let the students learn what they won’t get from a regular class about aerospace entrepreneurship,” he says. “This is the view of the industry from the young people building its future. I’m incredibly proud of what they’ve accomplished.”

Betting on the known unknowns

During spring 2026, while the class was in session, major developments were shaping the aerospace sector, from NASA’s Artemis II mission to SpaceX’s launch of what would become the largest initial public offering in history. “The entire industry landscape shifted like crazy during the semester,” says Mindell, as just one of the reasons that the report was especially timely. 

The report argues that the volume of capital, talent, and policy attention directed toward aerospace is “structurally different from any prior point in the industry’s history,” creating a pivotal moment for the next generation of entrepreneurs and investors.

The report further outlines five predictions about the new space economy: terrestrial infrastructure for compute, manufacturing, and energy will move off-world; autonomous systems, robots, and humans will continue to work together, but with humans in a supervisory capacity; venture capital investment will run ahead of economic justifications; government investment will become the fastest way for young companies to fundraise; and that we are years away from a global regulatory framework for space companies to operate within. Each prediction, or “bet,” includes a section on “where serious people disagree,” laying out relevant counterarguments to their conclusions.

As a guide, the report also translates its findings into practical tools, including a diagnostic for determining how many independent breakthroughs a company needs to succeed. “One of my favorite tools from the report is the miracle count,” says Chopra. “If your company needs one breakthrough to work, that’s a venture bet. If it needs three, that’s a research project pretending to be a startup.”

The report’s findings were informed both by existing research and by interviews with current aerospace professionals. Students were graded, in part, on how many people they spoke with. Their interviews focused on what excites people about the industry, reasons for their optimism (or pessimism), and how people are working within their organizations to address the challenges they see. 

The experience also allowed the students to expand their professional networks, practicing a core entrepreneurial skill while gaining insider perspectives.

“We sought out people from different corners of aerospace and were always asking, ‘Who else should we talk to?’” says Nicole Lee, a graduate student in AeroAstro. “Not only was I able to reconnect with people in my own network, but I got to introduce classmates to those contacts, and then benefit from the networks they brought in, too. That exchange was a big part of what made the interview process, and the class, so special.”

Engineers as entrepreneurs

The report’s authors — 16 classmates from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Wellesley College — bring a range of academic backgrounds and career ambitions to the project, using those different perspectives to connect the realities of aerospace engineering with the economic forces impacting the industry. Their research interests and experiences range from spacecraft propulsion and human spaceflight to investment banking and military operations. Collectively, they have worked across organizations like NASA, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, and a range of startups.

“What I’ll remember most is the team,” says Chopra. “Everyone showed up with their own wisdom and a willingness to challenge each other, learn from each other, and simply have fun. Those are the teams we hope to keep building with.” 

For Lee, those industry experiences support the report’s predictions about where the field itself is headed. “Entrepreneurship in space is going to involve a much broader group of founders, engineers, researchers, policymakers, and operators,” says Lee. “Everyone working in space can take something away from understanding the entrepreneurial mindset and the cultural shift we’re seeing in commercial space. A much wider range of people will be shaping entrepreneurship in the future. I think that shift has already started with us.”

Mindell sees value in that entrepreneurial mindset, regardless of whether the students go on to found companies of their own. “I don’t know if every student in this class is going to found their own company, and I don’t expect them to, but I do expect them to drive their own careers forward,” he says. “And I think for the moment we’re at, providing that opportunity is the best thing MIT can be doing for our students.”

For Chopra, who has had his sights set on founding an aerospace company for as long as he can remember, the findings from the report are immediately applicable. “The heart of a business, a sustainable business, is the demand. What do the customers want? Sure, I could build cool technology, but if we don’t have anyone buying it, it’s a project, not a company.”

Now armed with a clear and evidence-backed picture of the landscape, Chopra wants the report to generate even more activity across the industry. “If our industry report inspires one person to go out and found a company, or invest in a company, or even think about entrepreneurship in aerospace, it’s a pretty big win.”