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.

Last week, the House voted on the KIDS Act, a disjointed package of legislation that seeks to control Americans’ web browsing and private messaging. The package combines a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), with several other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. Different parts of the bill pressure online services to impose different age-gating schemes, using different standards. EFF opposed this bill, along with many of our members and supporters.

Take action

Tell Congress: no internet age-gates

The bill passed the House, 267-117. It now heads to the Senate, where its fate remains uncertain. But this fight is not over. Even if you took our earlier action to contact the House, we need you to reach out to your Senators today. 

The KIDS Act Will Lead to Mandatory Age Checks 

Many of the bills in the KIDS Act share the same premise: that children and teenagers should have different experiences online than adults. In practice, that requires websites and apps to determine who is under 18—and who isn’t. That’s where the problems with the KIDS Act start. 

EFF certainly supports giving all users better privacy and safety tools online. But those protections should not, and do not need to, come at the expense of privacy or free expression. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the tradeoff the KIDS Act makes.

There is no way to determine a user’s age online that is both privacy protective and accurate. Some age verification processes may rely on collecting government-issued ID, while others may use biometric scans. Others will use algorithms to guess a user’s age based on facial images or online behavior. But no matter the method, every system demands users hand over sensitive personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity. And then, once that valuable data is collected, it can be leaked, hacked, or misused. In fact, we’ve already seen several breaches of age verification providers.

The Bill Still Regulates Online Speech

The revised KOSA language within the KIDS Act still pressures companies to police lawful speech online. Platforms must “establish, implement, maintain, and enforce” policies that address content like gambling or the use of alcohol or cannabis. This encourages platforms to broadly restrict speech on these topics, which could include a teen seeking advice on a parent’s gambling problem or searching for substance abuse recovery resources. When platforms are required to create and enforce content moderation policies that regulators can sue them over, they will often err on the side of deleting speech. 

Protect Privacy For Everyone

There is a better way to protect young people online. Instead of encouraging a complicated system of age checks, more monitoring, and more restrictions on access to information, Congress could finally pass a strong, comprehensive privacy law that benefits all users. A great place to start would be to ban behavioral advertising that tracks us across the web—again, for users of all ages. 

We urge the Senate to oppose the KIDS Act and instead focus on a strong, bipartisan privacy package for all users. 

Take action

Tell the senate to reject the kids act

Users are always seeking more control over their social networking experience to make it better, whether to improve privacy or enhance flexibility. Interoperability between social networking platforms like Facebook and TikTok has so many benefits that solve those issues.  

Say you’re on multiple platforms because you have friends you follow on different networks, but you’ve decided to choose one platform with better privacy practices. With interoperability, you could switch and still interact with friends who remain on larger platforms. It could also enable independent apps with better privacy controls and more user choice. These are the untapped possibilities that could benefit users in the European Union under the 2022 Digital Markets Act (DMA).  

Yet, the European Commission, in its first review of the DMA, announced in April it had decided not to extend the DMA’s interoperability mandate to social networking and didn’t give a deadline or a timeline for enforcing that part of the Act. The Commission said “there is no clear demand” from users and businesses for social networking interoperability and, in any case, it’s too technically complex at the moment. Meanwhile, the Big Tech platforms that have been slow-walking interoperability over the last two years, erecting a myriad of hurdles for users seeking more freedom to choose other platforms, get a pass.

This is a huge disappointment and a missed opportunity by the Commission. Interoperability dismantles one of the biggest barriers faced by users who want to leave the tech giants’ platforms: the choice between changing to a platform you prefer or staying behind on a platform where all your friends, communities, and customers are.

The DMA, which went into force in 2024, aims to foster more choices for European Union users and encourage competition and innovation by forcing so-called gatekeeper platforms like Meta, Apple, and Google, to open their ecosystems to competitors. The regulation does a great deal to foster the integration of competing services and devices with the ecosystems of very large online platforms that act as gatekeepers. It even requires interoperability for messaging services, despite the significant technical and privacy challenges involved.

So, it’s odd that the Commission is using complexity as a shield against taking on social networking interoperability. The internet already runs on complex interoperable systems. Approaches like ActivityPub, the decentralized networking protocol behind the “Fediverse,” which gave rise to decentralized networks like Mastodon, already exist. The DMA shouldn’t mandate a specific protocol, but it can require meaningful interoperability outcomes.

The argument that there’s no real demand for social networking interoperability also falls flat. Users want the ability to move across platforms, choose the content they’d like to see from platforms, and not be tied down to a single platform. But there’s no way to get there—the platforms are doing little to open their social networking ecosystems. And now you have the DMA’s enforcer saying it’s not going to make them change. Demand for alternatives won’t materialize at scale until users see real progress towards interoperability, something the Commission has the power to do.

Having decided there’s little demand and too much complexity to proceed with mandating social networking interoperability, the Commission said it “will continue to monitor and assess how these services evolve.” This wait-and-see-posture only hurts users and strengthens and further entrenches Big Tech incumbents.

The DMA is supposed to center on the rights of technology users and be the pathway to an internet experience where you decide which software runs on your devices, where it’s easy to find the best products and services, and where you can leave a platform for a better one without forfeiting your social relationships.

Meanwhile, Big Tech is also resisting the DMA’s openness requirements. For example, Apple is supposed to be opening up iOS devices to rival app stores. Yet, the smartphone giant’s plan for opening its App Store levies junk fees and onerous conditions on app makers and is effectively impossible for any competitor to use.

It’s not just Apple pushing back against DMA enforcement. Meta's response is a “pay for privacy “system, in which users who do not consent to Meta’s surveillance will have to pay to use the service, or be blocked from it. Whether their plan complies with the DMA remains under review.

Nowhere in the DMA does it say social networking companies get to install a toll booth for users seeking to benefit from privacy rights the regulation grants them. The future EU Digital Fairness Act is another opportunity to protect users from such practices by declaring them unfair.

The Commission has responded to these developments with investigations, preliminary rulings, and fines. Meanwhile, users are missing out on greater choice and flexibility in how they communicate and connect online.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because of the way they are trained, large language models capture only a slice of human language. They’re trained on the written word, from textbooks to social media posts, and our speech as captured in movies and on television. These models have minimal access to the unscripted conversations we have face to face or voice to voice. This is the vast majority of speech, and a vital component of human culture.

There’s a risk to this. The increased use of large language models means we humans will encounter much more AI-generated text. We humans, in turn, will begin to adopt the linguistic patterns and behaviors of these models. This will affect not just how we communicate with one another, but also how we ...

Tech companies face a fundamental choice with no winning answer for keeping data centers cool.

The office that produces the National Climate Assessment has been reconstituted, after the administration gutted it last year.

The depletion of Lake Mead and Lake Powell is just one result of intense drought that has damaged crops and spread wildfires.

They don't always have access to the same safety net as farmers of traditional commodity crops such as corn and soybeans when extreme weather hits, experts say.

Cumulative monsoon rainfall across India was 38 percent below normal this year through July 1, according to the India Meteorological Department.

The tech firm entered a 10-year agreement with Singapore-based carbon developer Thryve.Earth to purchase credits generated from an agroforestry project on the island of Sulawesi.

In southern China's Guangxi region, severe flooding inundated cities and stranded residents after heavier-than-expected rainfall from a tropical storm.

Google owes its existence to the open web, but today, its technological “innovations” have much to do with locking users into a “walled garden.” The latest of these is “reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification,” an experimental initiative that will let companies block users if they are running independent, "de-googled" versions of Android. These “indie Android” versions are favored by people who want to protect their privacy and their attention by blocking trackers and ads. Worse, this is just the latest in a line of similarly user-hostile measures. 

Long before “agentic AI,” we had the idea that software would act as your agent on the internet. That's why the old-fashioned technical term for a browser is a “user agent.” Your browser acts on your behalf to retrieve information and then show it to you, in the format you choose. It's your agent. 

This is a powerful and profound idea. It is because browsers are our “agents” that we expect them to accept our directives, say, by blocking pop-ups, or by turning off autoplay sound, or by blocking commercial surveillance trackers. 

Your browser does all that because your browser works for you. The reason your browser can work for you is that the web is an open, standardized technology. In theory, anyone who follows the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can make a browser, and that web browser can connect to any web server. Browsers and servers are interoperable. It's the same force that means you can put anyone's gas in your gas-tank, or anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, or anyone's milk on your cereal. 

But what if manufacturers could dictate those choices to you? What if your light socket refused to use a lightbulb unless it was officially blessed by the socket's manufacturer? What if your dishwasher refused to wash your dishes unless you bought them from one of the manufacturer's “dish partners?” What if your toaster refused to toast “unauthorized bread?” 

It's hard to see how a company could win its market with this strategy. After all, if the dishes are really better than the competition's, you'd buy them voluntarily, without any need for law or technology to force the matter. The only reason to make a dishwasher that refuses a rival's dishes is if the manufacturer's own dishes are ugly, expensive, and/or badly made. 

But once a company owns the market—once they've achieved dominance by buying out their rivals; by bribing potential competitors to stay out of their lane; and by engaging in deceptive conduct to trap key suppliers and customers—they can cement their dominance by blocking interoperability, keeping out rival dishes, milk, gas, lightbulbs, shoelaces and bread, capturing their whole market and squeezing it. 

That's what Google has done, and that's what Google wants to do more of Google's commercial behavior has been so unethical, deceptive and abusive that the company just lost three federal antitrust cases. This thrice-convicted monopolist paid Apple—more than $20b/year— to stay out of the search market: It cheated app vendors, ripping them off with sky-high junk fees and onerous conditions that raised prices while lowering the share of your spending that went to the companies whose products you were paying for. It cheated advertisers, rigging the ad market to gouge businesses on ad prices and underinvesting to fight rampant ad-fraud, sucking hundreds of billions out of the productive economy for overpriced ads that no one saw. 

Google wasn't always this way. The “don't be evil” company owes its very existence to the open web ecosystem. When the company started to index the web in 1998, it was playing on an open field, where any web server could talk to any “user agent,” even one whose user was a startup like Google, that was making a copy of every page on the server. 

For years, Google thrived on the open web, and built open technologies. Android—the mobile operating system that Google bought in 2005 —was presented as an “open” alternative to existing mobile offerings, and as the mobile market collapsed into two companies—Google and Apple—Google always presented Android as the open alternative to Apple's “walled garden.” But there were always ways in which Google's “open” Android wasn't exactly open. The company engaged in illegal “tying” arrangements that forced hardware vendors and carriers to lock out versions of Android that were created by Google's competitors. 

In other words, even though Google offered a mobile platform that was (mostly) technically open, it found other ways to try to choke off the market oxygen for alternative Android versions that tried to capitalize on that technical openness. 

But life finds a way. The existence of an open, modifiable, tinkerer-friendly mobile operating system meant Android hackers could create alternatives to Google's (de facto) walled garden, which thrived in the cracks in that garden wall. Operating systems like CalyxOS, PureOS and Graphene offered a more private, more secure Android experience, one that was largely “de-Googled,” blocking Google's relentless acquisition of your private data. 

And Google's data-hunger is relentless. Android exfiltrates a chunk of your personal and behavioral data every five minutes. The “resting heartbeat” of Android surveillance pulses and pulses, irrespective of whether you're using your device, and the instant you unlock your screen, that heartbeat quickens, sending even more data to the company. All that data has proven irresistible to authoritarian governments. Donald Trump's enforcers have seized on Google data as a vital source of information about the identity of protesters and the location of migrants hunted by ICE. 

So there are plenty of reasons why users would seek out these de-Googled alternatives to Android, finding them in spite of Google's efforts to block access to competing technologies. The worse it got, the better those alternatives looked. 

Perhaps this explains Google's years-long effort to increase the technical barriers to using modified versions of Android, beefing these up to match the commercial restrictions that stand in the way of a de-Googled existence. 

Back in 2023, Google floated the idea of “Web Environment Integrity” (WEI), a set of modifications to web standards that would force your computer to disclose its operating environment to the web servers it connected to, even if you objected to this disclosure. 

WEI was a form of “remote attestation.” That's when your device uses a sub-processor (sometimes called a “Technical Protection Module” or “TPM”) or a walled off part of its main processor (sometimes called a “secure enclave”) to produce a cryptographically signed description of your device and its configuration: which hardware, software, plug-ins, and settings you're running. 

When you connect to a server, it demands that your device send this “attestation” before it handles your request. If your device won't provide this data, or if the server doesn't like (or recognize) your device and its details, it can refuse to deal with you. And because the attestation is prepared by a TPM or a secure enclave that you can't modify or override, you don't get to decide which facts about your device it's allowed to see. 

Practically speaking, this means that remote attestation lets a server refuse to deal with you until you turn off your ad-blocker and your tracker-blocker. It means that the server can discriminate against users who block auto-play sound and video, who block pop-ups, who put the tab in the background when it's playing a mandatory pre-roll ad. 

WEI was especially disturbing in light of Google's plan to kill ad-blockers and privacy blockers through updates to Chrome, an effort that continues to this day. 

These blockers are an important part of the dynamic between web publishers and their users. In the real world, when you get an offer, you can make a counter-offer. That's all an ad-blocker is: a way for users to respond to a server whose opening bid is, “How about you give me all your data and let me take over your computer in exchange for showing you this page?” with “How about 'Nah?'”

We didn't get rid of pop-up ads by making them illegal, or by boycotting advertisers who used them. We got rid of pop-up ads when web users installed pop-up blockers, which made pop-up ads pointless. Take away our ability to block obnoxious digital content and you guarantee that we will be flooded with it. 

These kinds of modifications aren't just used to block ads—they're also key to accessibility. People who have photosensitive epilepsy or suffer from low-contrast vision problems use add-ons to reformat pages so they can safely and legibly access them. 

WEI's creators said they were only trying to put the web on a level playing field with apps, which routinely disclose facts about your device to the companies whose servers you connect to, without asking you, and even if you don’t want them to. Apps are a source of bottomless enshittification, not least because (unlike the web), they enjoy special, dangerous legal protections that make it very legally risky to modify them. WEI wasn't an effort to level the playing field between apps and the web—it was a race to the bottom, an attempt to make the web as enshittification-friendly as apps. 

Public outrage to WEI killed the project, but Google's commitment to augmenting its illegal commercial lockdown efforts with technical lockdowns never ended. Now, Google has rolled out an experimental “reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification” that uses an app, your camera, and your device's TPM or secure enclave to produce an attestation about your Android device. 

This will make it much easier for the apps and other services you interact with to block your device if you run an Android alternative, or if you install a mod that overrides the actions of Google's stock Android. 

This is a terrible idea—it's every bit as bad as WEI was. In an age in which Big Tech is ever-more tied to authoritarian governments, redesigning our devices to tell strangers things we don't want them to know isn't just shortsighted, it's inexcusable. 

 

 

With Boston serving as a host city for the FIFA World Cup, the whole Bay State has soccer fever, including Henry Wang. As a child growing up in Dallas, sports were everything to him. Today, Wang is working on research that could impact some of the biggest sporting events in the world, including future World Cups.

The first such event that made a big impression on Wang involved a different form of football.

“The first ever sports game I remember watching was Super Bowl XLII in 2008,” he says. “I was really drawn to the competition, and the way it was presented. It’s this whole big spectacle.”

Wang, a fourth-year PhD candidate in social and engineering systems within MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, studies how data and technology can improve the way sports are played, analyzed, and refereed. Working in the MIT Sports Lab in collaboration with FIFA, he develops systems with the goals of helping referees make faster, more accurate decisions and expanding access to performance analytics across the globe.

Now in the final stretch of his doctoral program and preparing to defend his thesis at the end of this year, Wang has spent nearly a decade at MIT. After earning his undergraduate degree in 2023 with a double major in computer science, economics, and data science and business analytics, he transitioned directly into graduate school. Sports have been a constant throughout that journey.

A competitive swimmer since age 7, Wang says athletics shaped both his identity and his community.

“Athletic competition was always a really big part of my life,” he says. “It’s kind of how I made a lot of friends, around the pool, and now at school, or in the lab and office.”

Ironically, swimming entered his life not because of a burning passion for sports, but because of a doctor’s recommendation.

“I don’t really come from a huge sports family,” Wang says. When he was diagnosed with asthma as a child, his pediatrician suggested swimming to strengthen his lungs. 

His parents, both scientific researchers in radiology and medical physics, supported his growing passion. That support eventually led Wang to MIT, where he served as captain of the men’s swimming and diving team. In tandem, he continued pursuing research opportunities that merged his technical interests with his love of sports.

His first sports analytics project began with a cold email.

As a first-year student, Wang reached out to MIT Sloan School of Management Senior Lecturer Ben Shields to see if he could assist Shields with his research on sports strategy and analytics. Shields later connected Wang with a coach he knew who was interested in analyzing the two-point conversion strategy for MIT’s football team.

The project revealed that MIT could benefit from attempting two-point conversions much more frequently. The experience opened the door to the MIT Sports Lab, where Wang found mentors including Lecturer Christina Chase, Professor Anette “Peko” Hosoi, and former research scientist Ferran Vidal-Codina.

His research now focuses on two central questions: How can technology democratize access to sports data, and how can it help officials make better decisions?

Wang works with FIFA Innovation, the group within soccer’s global governing body that leads the development and testing of match technology used on the field. His research explores automatic event detection and officiating technologies designed to assist referees without disrupting the fan experience.

In one recent project, Wang helped develop a semi-automated system that uses players’ skeletal data and ball tracking to determine which player last touched the ball before it goes out of bounds. The research prototype aims to assist goal kick and corner kick decisions while minimizing interruptions to the game.

For Wang, success means that referees find the tools helpful, and fans barely notice it at all.

“A ball goes out of bounds, and we can immediately tell the referee it’s a corner kick,” he says. “The fans don’t even notice it.”

Alongside his doctoral research, Wang has gained experience across professional sports, spending two years with the Boston Red Sox’s baseball sciences team before accepting a role as a senior data scientist in basketball research and development with the Philadelphia 76ers, where he will continue working after graduation.

Despite his demanding schedule, he says the work rarely feels like work.

“I enjoy it so much,” he says. “I really don’t know what else I would be doing.”

Outside the lab, sports continue to anchor his life. Swimming at MIT provided structure and community during challenging moments.

“MIT can be pretty hard,” Wang says. “Having a consistent 5-to-7 o’clock swim practice every day definitely helped a lot.”

For Wang, sports have always been more than competition. They have shaped his friendships, inspired his research, and guided his career trajectory.

Now, as he works to build technologies that could change how billions of people experience the world’s most popular games, he is still driven by the same sense of love he felt watching sports as a child.

“I want every kid who plays sports to have the best experience possible, because I know how meaningful that can be toward someone’s life journey,” Wang says.

Last May, EFF reported that a sheriff’s office in Texas searched data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion. ALPRs are promoted as tools for keeping communities safe by finding missing persons and locating stolen vehicles, but this case showed how ALPRS can be weaponized to investigate people’s private healthcare decisions. And these aren’t the only tools in the surveillance arsenal: others include location tracking tools like Locate X, which can show a person’s visit to an abortion clinic, or search histories which might be used as evidence of a person’s interest in obtaining abortion pills. Taken together, these tools create a dangerous surveillance pipeline that threatens everyone’s health privacy. 

Too often, though, the public is unaware of the threat, and one nonprofit is working to change that. Following EFF and 404 Media’s report on Texas’s use of Flock cameras, eye-catching billboards popped up in Houston, warning drivers that if they’re pregnant, the state of Texas could be tracking them.  

Photo provided by Mayday Health

These billboards came from Mayday Health, a nonprofit dedicated to sharing information about abortion pills, birth control, and gender-affirming care. We spoke with Leo Raisner, Executive Director of Mayday Health, about the billboards to learn more about the campaign and organization and to discuss how surveillance affects reproductive freedom. 

***

THOMAS: Why did Mayday Health start this campaign in Texas?  

RAISNER: Well, we read the incredible reporting coming from EFF about Texas's surveillance. We want Texans to know their rights, to know their options, and to know that there are organizations and people who have their back. So we decided to put up a few billboards around the Houston area to remind people that they still have options.  

Digital advertising in the space, as I know you're well aware of, faces enormous platform restrictions from Meta and Google, whereas billboards reach people in the physical world without algorithmic gatekeeping and without requiring anyone to search for information. So at the very least, if a driver's passing by the billboard, we’re spreading information that they should be careful that they might be surveilled, and also there are different options. There's a website where they can come learn more about those options. 

THOMAS: And how have the billboards been received so far? Have you heard anything from folks in the Houston area yet?    

RAISNER: Yeah, we've heard some messages of support on social media DMs. We're just thrilled about how many drivers these messages are going to reach. They'll be up for 4 weeks, and are expected to hit over 1,000,000 drivers during that 4-week campaign period.    

THOMAS: Are there other ways that Mayday Health has seen surveillance systems impact people seeking healthcare?  

RAISNER: You know, we go all over the country and talk to folks who are seeking reproductive healthcare options in states where clinics are banned, and we direct folks to our website where they can learn more about abortion pills. We make privacy very central to how we operate. Privacy is not just an afterthought for us. When people arrive at our website, we direct them to the Digital Defense Fund, which offers people privacy and security resources as they're navigating reproductive healthcare in states where they might be being surveilled. We don't collect cookies, we don't collect identifying information from visitors to our site. We want people to know their options, and we don't have any interest in knowing who they are.  

THOMAS: Why do you think the work of the digital rights movement is so important to the work of the reproductive health rights and justice movement?  

RAISNER: I mean, those two movements are inextricably linked. The anti-abortion movement is using every tool in their toolbox to prevent people from getting the healthcare access they need, whether that's surveilling people online or closing down brick-and-mortar clinics, but we encourage people to visit Mayday Health and learn that they still have options no matter where they live.  

THOMAS: Is there anything else that you would like the readers of our blog to know about Mayday Health?    

RAISNER: I'd love for people to know that abortion pills are FDA approved. They're safe, they're effective, and they're available through the mail. 

*** 

EFF has said it time and time again – surveillance and reproductive freedom cannot coexist. Whether the tracking occurs over the internet or through license plate reader systems with over 83,000 cameras, it is an invasion of privacy. Protecting our digital privacy is more critical now than ever. Help EFF fight back against this digital dragnet and protect reproductive freedom for all by making a donation. 

Ana Miljački looks back at her nearly 20 years teaching in the MIT Department of Architecture and says that one thing was perfectly clear to her on arrival: the caliber of her students.

“I appreciated immediately that these were students comfortable being at the edge of the discipline, eager to push and transform it,” says Miljački. “They didn’t necessarily seek the spotlight, but understood the value of participating in important transformations.”

Transformations are forthcoming for Miljački, the Francis White Davis Professor of Architecture: She became head of the Department of Architecture for the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) on July 1, and the architecture department itself will move to the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse (the Met) in late summer. 

Miljački takes the reins from Nicholas de Monchaux, the Weber-Shaughness Professor, who helped significantly advance the department’s commitment to studio-based research and impact, particularly around climate resilience and sustainability. He also helped catalyze and deepen the ongoing exchange between MIT and Tuskegee University rooted in the legacy of Robert R. Taylor.

In announcing Miljački’s new role, SA+P Dean Hashim Sarkis noted that Miljački has directed two of the department’s specialized graduate degree programs: the Master of Science in Architecture Studies program (2023-25) and the Master of Architecture program (2016-20), and played a central role in shaping the department’s academic and pedagogical culture.

“Ana has led many of the department’s academic programs with dedication, advancing experimentation in pedagogy, encouraging critical thinking, and linking research and learning in a manner that is distinctly MIT,” says Sarkis. “She teaches history, theory, and design, and her work is internationally recognized for its contributions to architectural discourse, pedagogy, and institutional critique. I look forward to seeing her bring this vision to the department as a whole.”

Building a career at MIT

Having taught at Columbia University, City College in New York, and Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Miljački quickly recognized the value of being at MIT as a young faculty member. She found generous support for her research — humanities-driven historical scholarship, criticism, and her curatorial work. 

“When junior faculty are supported to produce their own work, they also support students who are helping them,” says Miljački. “That is not something I had encountered until coming to MIT. The way the Institute has historically treated young faculty is unmatched by any other institution.”

She launched a distinguished career as a scholar and curator examining the organization, politics, authorship, and cultural production of architecture from Cold War-era Eastern Europe to contemporary architectural practice. In 2014, she co-curated the U.S. Pavillion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, which featured the exhibition “OfficeUS.” 

In 2018, Miljački founded the Critical Broadcasting Lab at MIT, with a goal to cultivate tools necessary for critical practice, including the capacity to grapple with complexity, nuance, and politics of architectural production. Intervening in the world but operating from within the protections of academic life, its broadcasting and curatorial work remains insulated from special interests and its members retain the freedom to speak critically. The lab has made important contributions to São Paulo and Seoul biennials, as well as to the Great Repair exhibition in Berlin. It mounted a solo exhibition and an accompanying discussion at the Museum of Yugoslavia in Serbia in 2025. 

Last year, Miljački co-curated, with Nicholas de Monchaux and Calvin Zhong, work from the Department of Architecture that examines diverse responses to the global climate crisis. The exhibition — The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology — was one of the collateral events of the Venice Biennale’s 19th International Architecture Exhibition. The vibrant presentation of MIT Architecture’s work in progress highlighted both the direct and circuitous narratives that link all of the department’s research and production to our contemporary climate crisis and possible responses to it.

Criticism as a core element of education

“I Would Prefer Not To” is Miljački’s podcast, conceived and produced by the Critical Broadcasting Lab in collaboration with the Architectural League of New York, and currently in its fifth season. The series sheds light on an unexamined part of architecture: why an architect turns down a commission. For Miljački, the podcast and all of her work as a critic and curator are forms of exhibition-making. Last year, her podcast won the Architecture in Media Award from the American Institute of Architects.

Students, says Miljački, are the reason she gets up every day. Even with her new responsibilities as department head, she will continue to teach class 4.210 (Positions: Cultivating Critical Practice), the History, Theory, and Criticism course required for incoming MArch students. The course, which transforms every year to include the most urgent topics of the moment, explores the recent past of architectural discourse, enables students to locate their own concerns, and is oriented toward the future. She sees the course as less of an opportunity to deliver a fixed body of knowledge and more as a process of shaping how students engage with ideas and one another. The class “intellectually socializes” incoming students, creating a shared framework that allows them to become meaningful interlocutors for each other over time. 

“We have to think critically about this present that we occupy: how we got here. What it means to practice architecture today. How might we do it differently?” she says. “Sometimes we forget that we make the reality. It matters to what end we do it, how we understand the context in which we operate, and how it has already shaped us.”

A 19th century warehouse for the 21st century

Adding a new dimension to her tenure as department head is that, in August, the Department of Architecture moves into its new home — the Met (W41). Faculty and students have for generations worked on Building 7’s fourth floor, which skirts around the building’s dome. The fragmented space is not optimal for building community and spontaneously sharing work designed in the various studios. The Met will provide a unified home for MIT Architecture — and for most of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning — where the disciplines and their research on the built environment may overlap.

“I think it’s a really exciting moment to transform physically where we are and how we relate to one another,” says Miljački. “I have brilliant colleagues in the department, but we’ve been spending too much time circling around the dome looking for each other. The new building provides a place for us to gather, to see each other’s work, and thus truly conduct our research and teaching in each other’s presence.

“Also, importantly, we will be in a building that is a great example of adaptive reuse by the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Reusing, recycling, and maintaining the existing architectural stock is what we need to figure out how to do well in the field of architecture right now. To be able to didactically read this building every day will be very important. Our move will literally help guide us in teaching and learning while it also signals both internally and externally our commitment to this necessary shift in the discipline.”

Histories and timelines

Miljački sees the project of an architectural school as a collective cultivation of utopia. Over the years and in various leadership roles at MIT, she has forged how she thinks of leadership itself. 

“I now think that leadership importantly involves narrating stories in which we can all recognize ourselves,” she says. “For me, it may be primarily about fostering a sense of collective purpose in the face of an unacceptable status quo.

“Recently, I’ve been describing the school as a series of material, human, and other timelines, all unfolding at different speeds and tangling together to consequentially meet and materialize in the aging walls that surround us, in our care and labor protocols, in our pedagogies, collective and individual political investments, joys and heartaches. Cycles of global catastrophes and major weather events that arrive in the form of black and red clouds we all breathe in, connect us back to more- and less-recent forms of extraction here and elsewhere on the planet. Architectural fashions, and sometimes technical expertise, travel the same channels by which political action spreads. And importantly, learning and enabling of all sorts of action happen in many more ways that are not codified than those that are. Every school is its own version of this mesh of timelines, people, and things. I am humbled daily to take part in the MIT version of it, and to now take the helm on behalf of this collective.”

Some people find it useful to talk through their problems — but language isn’t necessary for logical reasoning, cognitive neuroscientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research say. 

In research published this week in the journal PNAS, researchers led by MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences Evelina Fedorenko have shown that people can perform well on tasks that require logical reasoning even if their language abilities are severely impaired. What’s more, brain imaging shows that language-processing parts of the brain are not called on for logical reasoning.

Philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists have debated the relationship between language and thought for thousands of years, with many arguing that we use language to think. There are good reasons to suspect a close relationship between logic and language, acknowledges Hope Kean, a postdoc and former K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center graduate fellow in Fedorenko’s lab. “Abstract thinking has properties that look a lot like language,” Kean says, pointing to structural similarities. “You can decompose a thought into subcomponents, like little atoms of logical propositions, and you can combine them in a hierarchical manner to make more complex structured rules, very akin to language.”

But she and Fedorenko, who is also a McGovern Institute investigator, suspected that while we largely depend on language to communicate about logical reasoning — from presenting a problem to explaining how we have arrived at conclusions — the brain might use a separate system for the reasoning itself. 

“There are aspects of thinking that seem to go beyond some of the limitations of language,” Kean explains. Logical reasoning demands precision that language often lacks. And language is linear, progressing one word at a time, whereas evaluating available information to reach logical conclusions can require thinking in less linear ways.

Logical reasoning

These observations left Kean curious about how the brain handles logical reasoning. It’s a particularly difficult question to answer scientifically, because it’s hard to take language out of the equation when working with human study participants. But Fedorenko’s team did just that by collaborating with Rosemary Varley, a neuroscientist at University College London who studies acquired language disorders, and her team.

Together, the scientists worked with two patients who had experienced stroke that damaged language-processing parts of their brains, leaving them with severe impairments in both understanding and producing language. They designed language-free logic games in which participants were asked to infer relationships between sets of numbers. Given two lists, they had to figure out the hidden rule that turned one list into the other, such as reversing the digits or removing numbers above a certain value. Once they thought they’d discovered the rule, they had to apply it to new examples. In a second game, participants were presented a set of geometric patterns and asked to identify another pattern to complete the matrix.

As participants solved increasingly difficult puzzles, it became clear that people don’t need language for this kind of reasoning. Patients with language impairments solved the problems as well as a control group, and were even able to communicate the rules they inferred using gestures, or with a sketch. “It really upends a theory that says that symbolic rule induction is not possible without linguistic capacities,” says Kean.

Alongside this part of the study, Kean and colleagues also used functional brain imaging to study what happens in the brains of healthy adults when they are engaged in logical reasoning. Participants in this part of the study visited MIT for a series of MRI scans, which captured images of their brain activity during an array of tasks. In addition to completing different kinds of logic games inside the scanner, participants were asked to engage in tasks designed to map the language-processing parts of their brain. Another set of tasks was used to map each person’s so-called “multiple demand network” — a distributed brain system that supports complex problem-solving.

These neurotypical participants completed logic games similar to those used with the language-impaired patients. They were also presented with problems that required syllogistic reasoning, using “if-then” statements such as “if the ball is red, then it is big. The ball is red. Is the ball big?” The team varied the difficulty of the logic puzzles so they could see which brain areas became more active when the need for logical reasoning intensified. Likewise, they looked for changes in brain activity when participants had to infer a hidden rule, versus simply applying a rule they’d been given.

Here, too, a separation between language and logic was clear: The MRI scans showed the brain’s language system is not engaged for either inductive reasoning (when participants identified hidden rules) or deductive reasoning (when they assessed the validity of syllogistic conclusions). Surprisingly, the multiple demand network, which many scientists had suspected was important for logical reasoning, was engaged during inductive reasoning, but didn’t seem to get involved in deductive reasoning — a finding Kean is building on in her ongoing work.

For Fedorenko and Kean, the findings are strong support for a separation of logic and language in the brain. They add to previous findings from Fedorenko’s lab showing that other types of thinking, such as object categorization and social reasoning, also do not rely on language.

Acquired language impairments and AI

The researchers say these findings have important implications for how we think about acquired language impairments, or aphasia. Specialists who work with people with aphasia have long recognized that loss of language does not mean loss of intelligence. People with aphasia can continue to enjoy playing chess, solving sudoku puzzles, or being in charge of the family’s finances. But it is common for others to confuse their communicative difficulties with thinking difficulties.

“This research adds to a growing body of work establishing that even severely aphasic individuals can preserve their ability for abstract logical thought — a defining feature of our species,” Fedorenko says. “We should continue to educate the public that linguistic difficulties — in aphasia, but also in those with developmental language conditions, such as stuttering, or those who do not speak English natively — are not indicative of how smart or capable someone is.”

There could be implications for artificial intelligence, too. Large language models like ChatGPT and Claude are trained entirely on text and use text as their output — yet they convincingly simulate some kinds of human reasoning. Exploring the differences between these models and the human brain, where language and abstract logical thought are distinct, might offer useful insights to inform future models, Kean says.

When it comes to understanding how the human brain reasons, Kean calls this a new frontier in the geography of thought — and she says it’s one she is eager to explore.

From the basement of MIT’s Building 35 to Monterrey, Mexico, and now beyond. That is the journey of FrED, a low-cost desktop fiber (Fr) extrusion (E) device (D), designed and assembled by students in an educational factory at MIT.

That factory is transforming how manufacturing is taught — replacing textbook learning with hands-on experience in a space where tinkering is encouraged and information flows continuously. Through a collaboration between MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey (Tec) managed by MIT.nano, FrED has been refined across dozens of graduate theses and undergraduate research stays. It is used to study manufacturing systems in academic and professional courses, and at FrED factories, first established at MIT and now at Tec’s campuses in Monterrey and Mexico City.

“What does it mean to bring the factory to the learner?” asked Brian W. Anthony, MIT.nano associate director and principal research scientist in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) at the second annual FrED summit in Mexico City. “We have FrED as a process that manufactures a fiber, and we also have the FrED factory that’s an education and practice factory where we are manufacturing a real product. It’s not just a learning factory where we tear apart the product when we’re done. We really ship FrEDs to our online learners, to educators at MIT and Tec, and soon, to new partners around the world.”

Designed from the start for multi-node community scaling, FrED and the FrED factory have created a thriving, collaborative ecosystem for current and future manufacturing engineers. The next step is to expand that ecosystem globally. Announced at the FrED summit by Tec professor Pedro Ponce Cruz, a new FrED factory at Tec’s Saltillo campus will be opening in the next academic year. After that, the team plans to expand to other campuses across the United States and Mexico.

“Together, we are helping build a global engineering talent pipeline,” says Adriana Vargas Martinez, executive director of research strategy at Tec. “Through the FrED and FrED factory initiative, nearly 500 students have already been trained in advanced manufacturing automation, moving from Tec classrooms into research laboratories and collaborative projects with MIT.” 

Discussing FrED and FrED factory’s research impact, she notes 25 publications and seven papers in development. “International mobility has also been an important dimension of this partnership,” she says.

A shift toward modern manufacturing deep-tech themes

FrED’s expansion comes at a time when manufacturing at MIT and across industry is shifting toward smart manufacturing, or Industry 4.0, integrating automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. One of MIT’s strategic priorities, the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM), is working to support new manufacturing research, development of new courses and workforce training, and building of shared facilities to pilot production lines and immersive manufacturing experiences. FrED and the FrED factory are already designed to support these efforts, and at an international scale.

“FrED and the FrED factory is really, I think, solving at least one problem: how we give real, physically meaningful physical context and production-level data, production-level problems in an academic environment that is directly transferable to the knowledge that you need on the factory floor,” says Anthony. It’s difficult to get data out of a real factory, he adds; what FrED offers is physical context crossed with data science, providing an open platform and open data for learning and experimenting.

FrED naturally generates the multi-modal data required for digital twins, analytics, and AI-driven process improvement, turning abstract AI/manufacturing integration into hands-on practice. The next set of research objectives in the FrED factory will focus on developing a realistic and interactive digital twin of the factory, immersive technology for collaborative learning, integrating agentic controllers. They will include new downstream manufacturing processes and machines that take as input the fiber from FrED — all to enhance smart manufacturing education.

These goals will be worked on by MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey students as part of a FrED factory research stay. This program brings Tec undergraduates to MIT to work side-by-side with MIT students — not observing, but fully integrated into the research team. The students then take what they’ve learned back to Mexico, to enhance FrED factories at their home institution. 

“Beyond the technical side, FrED gave me memories, friendships, and a lot more confidence in myself than I knew I had,” says Naomi Najera, a Tec undergraduate student who completed a research stay at MIT in 2025. “It also gave me a space where I could make mistakes and learn from them. And also to realize how much I can achieve with my team. That human side of this project really changed my whole experience.”

A recent result from this exchange, announced June 23 by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), a paper entitled “Hands-On Predictive Maintenance Kit for Manufacturing Education: An Accessible Experiential Learning Approach,” written by Tec and MIT students, received the 2026 ASEE Manufacturing Division Best Paper Award.

Shifting classroom learning to factory operations

At MIT’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, passersby can look down into the Building 35 basement windows to see a constant flow of activity, materials, and knowledge in the MIT FrED factory. In Mexico, seven cohorts of students over four years each designed a custom version of FrED and built and operated an automated FrED factory production line. Indeed, FrED has restructured how Tec teaches mechatronics and manufacturing systems. “This collaboration integrates research directly into education,” says Vargas Martinez, “combining learning factories and our manufacturing environments with student-centered research.”

The Tec students’ enthusiasm has led to the launch of an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program-like curriculum (FRAME: Factory-based Research for All in Mechatronics Education) in Mexico, where first-year undergraduates are working alongside graduate level students in the FrED factory. 

“Joining FrED as a first-semester university student has been an amazing opportunity for me to get hands-on experience in real-world projects in areas such as coding, manufacturing, and robotics,” says Katherine Lucia McLean. “It’s helped me grow a lot as an engineering student.”

The FrED factory model forces real leadership behaviors: coordinating multi-station systems, managing bottlenecks, building maintenance logic into the student experience, enforcing quality measurement, and iterating system design year after year. As each class graduates and a new one begins, knowledge is transferred, some of it lost, most of it built upon. In this way, FrED never becomes outdated, as each cohort is reimagining manufacturing technologies and systems for a smarter, more productive factory.

FrED and the FrED factory have momentum. Anthony taught the global capstone course at the Monterrey campus last year, and will expand to teach at all five international Tec campuses in 2027. The FrED Factory Conference will take place at MIT in 2027.

Hydrogels are squishy, bio-friendly materials that are made mostly of water and a bit of polymer. The Jell-O-like substance is available in the form of medical patches, sprays, and glues, and can be stuck to the skin or implanted in the body to dress wounds, affix implants, and encapsulate and release medicine over time. 

For all their sticky, stretchy, and protective properties, hydrogels lack one key trait: breathability. If worn for too long, a bandage or patch can trap moisture and sweat, which can irritate tissues and reduce the effectiveness of any device that a hydrogel adheres.  

Now MIT engineers have come up with a recipe for a hydrogel that is both hydrated and aerated, or permeable to air. The new material is just as soft, stretchy, and robust as conventional hydrogels, but a network of tiny tunnels running through the gel allows air to pass through. 

The aerated hydrogel can be worn for longer periods of time compared to conventional hydrogels, without causing skin irritation. It can also reduce sweat buildup, even during exercise. In experiments, volunteers wore wireless heart monitors that were attached to their chest with the new breathable hydrogel. After working out regularly for 10 days, the volunteers showed no signs of skin irritation, and the heart monitors maintained clear readings.  

The results, which are reported today in the journal Nature, may enable longer-lasting hydrogel products, such as breathable bandages and dressings, cosmetic face masks, and contact lenses, along with better-performing health monitors and implants. 

“Water and oxygen are both essential for life,” says Xuanhe Zhao, the Uncas (1923) and Helen Whitaker Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and a professor of civil and environmental engineering, and medical engineering and science. “Now that we’ve added air to hydrogels, people can find broad applications.”

Zhao’s MIT co-authors on the study include Xiao-Yun Yan, Shucong Li, Won Jun Song, Runze Li, Bastien Aymon, Jingjing Wu, Gengxi Lu, Jiayi Liu, Shu Wang, Eric Lu, Hyunhee Lee, James Zhang, Casey O’Brien, and Zachary Smith, along with collaborators from multiple other institutions.

Breathing through Jello

Water makes up about 90 percent of a typical hydrogel. The rest of the material consists of polymers. When mixed with water in a chemical process known as “cross-linking,” the polymers settle into a sort of scaffold that holds the water in place, forming a gel that’s both squishy and stretchy. But because hydrogel’s composition is mainly water, it’s inherently challenging for any air to make its way through the material effectively. 

“In general, water is not breathable,” co-lead author Xiao-Yun Yan says. “Hydrogel is 80 to 90 percent water, similar to Jell-O. And you cannot breathe through Jell-O.”

Other groups have tried to design air-permeable hydrogels, mainly taking one of two approaches. The first has been to essentially puncture microscopic holes throughout the gel. Such designs are breathable, but only in air. When they are placed in liquid, the holes quickly clog up. 

Researchers have also tried mixing hydrogel with certain polymers, such as silicone, that naturally allow air through. But this approach requires adding a large amount of polymers to the hydrogel in order to create enough permeable space for air to move through the entire gel. These hydrogels end up having a greater balance of polymer to water, making them less hydrated in general. 

Zhao, who has been a leader in the development and application of hydrogels, looked to make a hydrogel that lets air through without losing its water-heavy makeup. 

“We want to have lots of tiny channels to let air through, while also maintaining lots of water in the gel,” Zhao says. “This was a significant challenge, and something that people thought was impossible to do.”

Highways for air

After several years of investigation, the team hit on an ideal recipe for a breathable hydrogel that minimizes the non-water ingredients needed to let air through. In their new study, they report that the key to the recipe is “phase separation.” A common example of this process is the interaction between oil and water. The difference in the two liquids’ phases cause them to instantly separate. When the two are mixed, oil and water glom to their own kind, while avoiding the other. 

Zhao and his colleagues took advantage of viscoelastic phase separation in concocting a breathable hydrogel. For their new design, they mixed their conventional hydrogel recipe with a very small amount of silica aerogel particles, which are essentially “solid-form” air bubbles. 

“They are like boba beads,” Yan offers. “The particles are made of silica, which is hydrophobic, meaning that water does not want to leak through them, so they are very stable in water.” 

And as it turns out, the particles are similar to oil when mixed with water. The researchers found that when they mixed just a small amount of the particles with a solution of the water-heavy hydrogel, the water molecules glommed together, essentially finding each other faster than the less abundant silica particles. This effect of viscoelastic phase separation created large pockets of water and squeezed the silica particles into skinny, interconnected tunnels. The team observed that after a few hours, this effect formed a network of thin and sturdy, silica-skinned tunnels through which air could flow.

“It’s as if the particles formed a network of connected tunnels, like air-permeable highways within the hydrated hydrogel,” says co-lead author Shucong Li. 

Once they confirmed that the network had formed, the team cross-linked the mixture, essentially freezing the gel, and its breathable network, in place. They then tested the gel’s breathability and mechanical performance over multiple experiments, including one in which they asked several volunteers to wear the gel, attached to a wireless electrocardiogram (ECG) monitor, while exercising for 20 minutes. The volunteers also wore monitors with conventional, commercial hydrogel adhesives.

Throughout the workouts, the researchers observed that the breathable hydrogel maintained a strong ECG signal, in contrast to the conventional gel which exhibited significant signal fluctuations.The researchers observed similar results in an experiment with several volunteers who wore the breathable hydrogel and ECG monitor over 10 days. 

“We reliably saw that after 10 days, the quality of the ECG signal is still pretty good, and after you take off the monitor, there were no noticeable blisters or redness on the skin,” Li says. “This indicates healthy skin conditions.”

The team also exercised the gel itself, putting it through 10,000 cycles of stretching and compression. After these tests, they found the gel still retained the network of air channels, maintaining its breathability. 

“After 10,000 cycles, there was less than a 5 percent drop in oxygen permeability,” Li says. “That matters, because even with your heartbeat, your chest continuously undergoes small strains. So we have to make sure this gel is durable for such daily activity.”

Zhao says the new study provides a novel approach for others to fabricate breathable and multifunctional hydrogels, using the concept of visoelastic phase separation as a guide. 

“We’ve discovered that this process can create these air-permeable hydrogels, and we demonstrate one application,” he says. “But we think there can be very broad applications. This is a technology platform.”

This work was carried out in part through the use of MIT.nano’s facilities. This work was supported in part by the MIT Hatsopoulos Faculty Fellowship, the Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professorship, a HEALS seed grant, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs.

In 2024, a U.S. government official warned that Russia could be developing a new satellite designed to carry nuclear weapons into space. The statement followed the launch of a suspicious Russian satellite into low-Earth orbit in 2022, just a few weeks before the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

A nuclear detonation in low-Earth orbit — the region about 100 miles to 1,200 miles above Earth’s surface — would release trillions of highly energetic electrons that would destroy many of the satellites in space, disrupting telecommunications networks, GPS, space-based internet, and more.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the placement of nuclear weapons in space, but there’s currently no way to verify satellites don’t contain nuclear weapons. In fact, no verification methods have even been proposed in unclassified, peer-reviewed literature.

Now, MIT Professor Areg Danagoulian is proposing a way to determine if a satellite orbiting Earth contains a nuclear weapon. In a new paper published in Nature, Danagoulian describes his idea for a satellite-based sensor system that could orbit close by a suspect satellite and detect neutrons generated by high-energy protons colliding with radioactive material.

In the paper, Danagoulian calculates that a sensor system the size of a large encyclopedia could detect a nuclear weapon with 99 percent accuracy if it orbited within 4,000 meters of the suspect satellite for about a week. He also estimates that the detection time could be cut to a matter of hours if multiple satellite sensors were used or the sensor satellite was able to get within 1,000 meters of the suspect satellite.

“If we eventually have some verification mechanisms for the Outer Space Treaty, that will put pressure on countries to respect the treaty or disclose what they are doing, because they know if they try to violate it, we will find out,” Danagoulian says. “I very much hope this will turn into a real system, or proof-of-concept system, but the goal right now is to get national labs to use this work for their own research, and to get policymakers to seriously consider this technology as a potential part of national technical means.”

Protecting space

In 1962, the U.S. detonated a 1.4-megaton thermonuclear warhead in space, which unintentionally destroyed many of the early satellites of the era. The blast released enormous volumes of highly energized electrons, and many became trapped in Earth’s magnetic field, where they damage any electronics in their path.

“When you have a nuclear detonation in outer space, basically the whole body of the bomb becomes ionized, and nearly every single electron in the weapon’s mass becomes free,” Danagoulian explains. “It gets injected into what’s called the inner Van Allen radiation belt. Once there, the electrons start hitting everything flying through those belts, causing ionization, radiation damage, and more. As you go further out into space, you create these thick belts around Earth populated by highly energetic protons and electrons.”

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty declared space the “province of all mankind” and banned nuclear weapons in space, among other safeguards. It has since been signed by 118 countries including the U.S., China, and Russia.

Monitoring compliance with the treaty has taken on increased urgency since Russia’s 2022 launch of a suspicious satellite, Cosmos2553, which Russia claims is used for surveillance and sensing. However, U.S. authorities believe it may carry components of a nuclear device undergoing testing, with the possible future goal of fielding an actual nuclear anti-satellite weapon. The detonation of a nuclear weapon at that orbit could destroy many of the U.S. reconnaissance satellites, international communication satellite platforms, as well as the Starlink satellites.

“The Russians launched this satellite in a very strange and unusual orbit because it goes through the most hostile environment possible around the planet,” Danagoulian explains. “No one puts satellites there because it’s highly radioactive. Why would you put a satellite in that orbit? Well, that location is likely the best point for trapping electrons if you were to detonate a thermonuclear weapon.”

Danagoulian notes most research on nuclear detection is highly classified, making it hard to know how much progress has been made in national labs. But he wanted to show that scientifically proving the presence of a nuclear weapon in space is possible.

Particle bombardment

The approach Danagoulian developed centers on a reaction known as spallation, caused by highly energetic protons in radioactive environments.

“When an energetic proton slams into elements with a high atomic number, like uranium and plutonium, each proton may knock out something like 40 neutrons,” he explains. “That’s a ridiculously large number. We’re talking about millions of protons per second per square centimeter, with many of them generating 40 neutrons. The question is can you detect some of those neutrons?”

Normal satellites wouldn’t emit nearly as many neutrons, but there are still naturally occurring protons, neutrons, and electrons in the atmosphere, especially in low-Earth orbit. Danagoulian’s concept uses two panels made up of pixels of neutron sensors known as scintillators that interact with radiation and emit light. The panels are sandwiched between synthetic crystal diamond detectors that allow the system to distinguish between neutrons coming from radioactive materials and natural protons and electrons. The two-panel construction then can be used to estimate the direction of the neutron, allowing it to differentiate between natural atmospheric neutrons and those coming from a suspected satellite. 

“Most neutron detectors are very sensitive to protons, so you have to come up with some smart ways to reject protons but keep neutrons,” Danagoulian says. “You also have to tell the difference between naturally occurring neutrons and neutron spallation from the satellite.”

He believes the system, placed inside of an inspector satellite, would be strong enough to survive the harsh environment of low-Earth orbit while also being fast enough to process the protons, electrons, and neutrons that bombard it.

Danagoulian’s calculations on how long the detector satellite would have to be near the suspect satellite give him confidence in the feasibility of the system. If a detector satellite were able to get within 1,000 meters of the suspect satellite, it could accurately detect nuclear weapons in about one hour. That would amount to a single flyby.

Danagoulian calls the paper a feasibility study of the concept.

“I say in the paper this isn’t a completely proven system,” he says. “The purpose of the paper is to show the scientific community that it’s scientifically possible to do this. But there are many more practical considerations to be made to actually build these detectors.”

Danagoulian hopes the study will stimulate further research and development. He is also working with researchers in MIT’s Center for Nuclear Security and Policy (CNSP) to understand the policy landscape around this issue.

If a version of his system is eventually developed, Danagoulian believes it could encourage the nonproliferation that has helped preserve satellites so far. He notes that while adversarial countries are naturally suspicious of each other’s claims, scientific evidence would strengthen trust.

“You can fake intelligence,” he says, “but you can’t fake physics.”

The work was supported, in part, by the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Carnegie Foundation, and Longview Philanthropy.

Last week, national security agencies from the Five Eyes—that’s the rich, English-language-speaking countries club—jointly released a statement warning of the increasing cyber risks of AI models: in particular, their ability to autonomously hack into systems and networks. The statement was more measured than some of the breathless headlines about it, and the advice they gave is pretty much the standard advice everyone gives—albeit with newfound urgency.

Internet risks are nothing new, and cyberattacks—both large and small—have been a significant issue since long before the current crop of generative AI models...