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.

Solar power may drop in places like California and southeastern China, while hydropower dries up in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and southern Africa.

State Sen. Ben Allen will face fellow Democrat Jane Kim in the November race for insurance commissioner.

The software company opposes a new regulation that would force large energy users to post financial commitments if their credit ratings are below a specified level.

Industry executives complained that the administration's frenetic approach to the war in Iran made it difficult to make long-term business decisions.

A new analysis found that U.S. counties with high flood risk lost a net 63,357 residents from mid-2024 to mid-2025.

The EU Methane Regulation will introduce new obligations in January requiring oil and gas firms to monitor, report and verify emissions of methane.

The proposed changes could see oil giants like TotalEnergies showing up in sustainable investment funds.

The pact focuses on choosing sites, clean energy, affordability and community engagement.

“Protect Our Winters,” an athlete-driven environmental group, sent a coalition to Washington to meet with lawmakers Tuesday and Wednesday.

Within the next week, Congress is preparing to vote on the KIDS Act, a sprawling package of legislation that seeks to control Americans’ web browsing and private messaging. The package includes a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, combined with a collection of other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. Instead of debating any of these proposals on their merits, lawmakers are attempting to move them all at once under an ultra-expedited process. 

The package of cobbled-together bills is a mess, with different age-gating schemes for different services, using different standards. It’s a lot of complexity, and a lot of legal risk. Faced with that, many companies will conclude that the safest option is restrictive age-checking practices across their entire platforms.

Buried inside the KIDS Act are provisions that will push online services to verify all users’ ages, require government-directed moderation policies for online speech, and even create new rules about private and encrypted communications. While supporters continue to claim this bill protects minors online, its requirements come at the expense of privacy, free expression, and the ability of people of all ages to use the internet without revealing sensitive data. 

Take action

Tell Congress to reject this age-gating bill

The KIDS Act Pressures Platforms to Check Everyone's Age

Supporters of KOSA have said the bill doesn’t require age verification. And technically, the KOSA section of the bill does say that KOSA shouldn’t be read to require age verification. 

But if you read the rest of the bill, that disclaimer starts to look hollow. 

Throughout the KOSA section of the legislation, special protections, controls, messaging settings, and parental tools are required whenever a website or app “knows or should have known” a user is a child (defined in the bill as anyone under 13) or a teen (defined as anyone between 13 and 16 years old). 

The problem is a website operator doesn’t need actual knowledge that a user is a minor to get in legal trouble. It applies when a platform “knows or should have known” a user’s age—a low, negligence-style standard of knowledge. If an online service gets it wrong, it’s going to be up to courts and regulators to decide, after the fact, if an online service “should” have known a user was 16. 

To try to avoid liability, services will have to determine which users are teenagers and which are not. Most won’t be able to simply trust their users. They’ll have to collect more information about age, before any lawsuit or government action arises. Some companies may respond by requesting driver's licenses or passports. Others will rely on age-estimation systems that attempt to guess users' ages by looking at existing activity or doing facial scans. Existing estimation systems make mistakes when estimating children’s ages correctly, which is a big problem when that is the population KOSA is trying to protect. And the systems fail more frequently for people of color, people with disabilities, and trans and nonbinary people.

The bill’s authors seem to know this is a problem. On the one hand, the new KOSA section says age verification is not required. On the other, it repeatedly imposes obligations that depend on knowing whether a user is under 17. But a disclaimer doesn’t magically eliminate legal risk, especially for smaller services and startups that can’t afford to defend lawsuits or fight regulators.  

Take action

The "KIDS Act" Is an Age Surveillance Bill

KOSA is not the only part of this package that creates age-verification pressure. The SAFE BOTS Act, like KOSA, goes back to the standard that if a service “knows or should have known” that a user is a minor it can’t offer certain chatbot features. 

The SCREEN Act requires services that host sexually explicit content to determine whether users are “more likely than not” under the relevant age limit, before allowing access to certain content. 

The consequences of this liability will not be limited to minors. If websites and apps are expected to reliably identify teenagers, adults will be asked to prove they are adults. The result is a less private internet for everyone.

The KIDS Act Pressures Platforms To Police Lawful Speech 

The new version of KOSA removes the bill’s infamous "duty of care" provision, a significant change. The revised KOSA requires covered platforms to "establish, implement, maintain, and enforce" policies and procedures addressing several categories of content and conduct. 

Some categories, such as true threats and sexual exploitation, involve unlawful activity. Others are much broader. The bill specifically requires policies addressing the "sale or use" of narcotic drugs, tobacco products, cannabis products, gambling, and alcohol. It also restricts discussions around financial fraud.

Sounds straightforward enough. Then you remember how people actually talk—online and off. Can teens discuss addiction and recovery? Can a 15-year-old post that she’s worried she has a friend who is drinking too much? Can they seek advice about a parent’s gambling problem, or get help if they or a family member have been scammed? Can they participate in harm-reduction communities or discuss substance abuse treatment? All of these young people would be engaging in lawful speech when discussing topics covered by KOSA’s enumerated harms. 

The bill does not directly ban those conversations. But it places platforms under huge pressure to create and enforce moderation policies around broad categories of lawful speech. Faced with legal risk, many services will inevitably choose to remove that speech or restrict those discussions to spaces where they know only adults can participate. We’ve seen this movie before. When legal risk goes up, platforms will take down more speech. 

The KIDS Act Regulates Private Messages, Too 

Several provisions of the bill create new rules around direct messages, disappearing or “ephemeral” messages, and AI chat services. 

The bill includes language stating that certain KOSA requirements should not be construed to override strong encryption. But the protection is incomplete. The carve-out applies to certain features and messaging controls, but doesn’t apply to KOSA’s separate requirement that platforms "address" a list of harms to minors. 

The KIDS Act never answers an obvious question: how exactly is a platform supposed to address those activities if they’re inside encrypted communications that it can’t read? That will create pressure for providers to weaken private communications or limit features on encrypted private services. 

That approach is especially troubling when it comes to ephemeral messaging. Disappearing messages are not a “loophole” or a dangerous design trick. They are a useful privacy feature that allows online conversations to function more like ordinary real-world conversations, which are not preserved forever in a permanent database.

Like many other parts of the KIDS Act, these private messaging provisions also depend on websites and apps knowing who is a minor and who is not. The result is more age checks, more restrictions, and less privacy online.

Take action

Tell congress: no online age checkpoints

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 25 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02664-3

A methodology that incorporates climate risks to health, productivity and agriculture and other sector-specific channels, as well as catastrophic, cross-boundary and missing risks, has been applied to assess climate impacts in the UK. The results show a 2% reduction in welfare, in gross domestic product-equivalent terms, up to 2030 and losses of more than 10% by 2100, under a baseline scenario.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 25 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02671-4

Climate change is driving loss of biodiversity worldwide, yet whether tropical or temperate species are more vulnerable to warming remains debated. Large-scale analyses of more than 5,100 plant and animal species show that climate change has caused more frequent local extinctions of temperate species than tropical species, overturning decades of previous studies.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 25 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02684-z

Tropical climate, including sea surface temperatures (SSTs), varies with natural cycles such as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, Indian Ocean Dipole and Atlantic Niño/Niña variability. This work shows that the SST variability weakens under future greenhouse warming, with implications for predictability.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 25 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02686-x

Changes in the ocean in response to climate change could impact its ability to function as a carbon sink. This study shows that under high emissions, circulation changes will reduce anthropogenic carbon uptake even as biological storage increases, whereas under low emissions, temperature is the key factor.

Sold to the public as a foreign surveillance tool, Section 702 is the law has let intelligence agencies spy on millions of Americans’ private conversations without a warrant. Despite years of revelations about this law's misuse, Congress has repeatedly reauthorized Section 702 without meaningful reform. Until this month, that is, when it finally lapsed in a major victory for privacy. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're covering the expiration of Section 702 and what happens next.

JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER

For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This issue covers a disastrous plan to overhaul the U.S. Copyright Office, why the UK's social media ban will cause more harm than it prevents, and a new Senate bill taking aim at government pressure to silence lawful speech online.

Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This time, we're chatting with EFF Senior Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia on what the expiration of Section 702 means for warrantless domestic spying. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice:

%3Ciframe%20height%3D%22200px%22%20width%3D%22100%25%22%20frameborder%3D%22no%22%20scrolling%3D%22no%22%20seamless%3D%22%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.simplecast.com%2Faa8b6660-bde6-466d-80e3-156cddad0e95%3Fdark%3Dfalse%22%20allow%3D%22autoplay%22%3E%3C%2Fiframe%3E Privacy info. This embed will serve content from simplecast.com

   

Want to protect your private conversations? Sign up for EFF's EFFector newsletter for updates, ways to take action, and new merch drops. You can also fuel the fight for privacy and free speech online when you support EFF today!

When an animal’s environment changes faster than the animal can adapt, its chances of survival can flat-line. The same is true for populations, and even entire species. 

Now, scientists at MIT and the University of Leicester have found that this connection between evolutionary adaptation and the pace of environmental change holds up at the global scale as well — and can determine life’s susceptibility to mass extinction. The researchers developed a theoretical model of this phenomenon, which they present in a paper appearing today in Physical Review Letters.

The team compared the model with available data from past major mass extinctions, including how fast the global environment changed at the time of each event. The model successfully predicted the severity of most mass extinctions in Earth’s history, or the fraction of life that was unable to adapt, and therefore went extinct. 

Interestingly, the researchers found that the range of adaptation rates across animal groups is broadly similar to the range of rates at which the environment can change.

“What we’re beginning to see is a certain level of organization, and ways in which life behaves that are consistent with the ways in which the environment behaves,” says study author Daniel Rothman, professor of geophysics and co-director of the Lorenz Center at MIT. “It may be that life has evolved so that its range of adaptabilities matches the range of stresses that it meets.”

Rothman’s study co-author is Sergei Petrovskii, professor of applied mathematics at the University of Leicester in England.

A catastrophizing connection

The connection between extinction and environmental change is not new. In the late 18th century, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier, who is often referred to as the founding father of paleontology, was the first to propose the concept of “catastrophism.” He had discovered fossil bones near Paris that didn’t match any animal known to exist at the time. Cuvier concluded that the bones were from a group of giant mammals that existed at one time but was no longer around. He proposed, then, that an entire species could disappear, or go extinct, likely due to a widespread catastrophe. 

“That itself was a major idea, that a species could go extinct,” Rothman says. “And he had suggested it was an environmental catastrophe that had caused it.”

The concept of catastrophism later gave way to the view that Earth’s history was shaped mainly by slow, gradual processes. But in the mid-20th century the American geologist Norman Newell revisited the problem. In seeking the cause of extinctions, he proposed what Rothman and Petrovskii call the “rate-mismatch” hypothesis, the notion that extinction occurs when the rate of environmental change is higher than the rate at which a species can evolve to adapt. 

Biologists have since observed Newell’s hypothesis play out in many cases where changes in the environment have driven the extinction of individual species. Rothman and Petrovskii wondered: Could the hypothesis also apply at the global scale?

“We know that individual species go extinct when environmental change outpaces their ability to adapt,” Rothman notes. “But it hasn’t been clear whether this same idea applies at the scale of global extinction events.”

Finding a mismatch

For their new study, the researchers looked to test the rate mismatch hypothesis at the global scale. They wanted to see whether mass extinction events in history can be explained by a mismatch between the rate of global environmental change and the rate at which life around the world can adapt. 

To do so, at least in theory, they would have to compare two sources of data: the rates at which the global environment has changed over time and the rates at which different groups of organisms adapt to environmental change. The first can be found in geological records, which scientists have used extensively to infer how the Earth’s climate changed through history. The second, however, is almost impossible to record.

“We’re talking about the rates at which organisms adapt to major environmental change at effectively geologic timescales, from thousands to millions of years,” Rothman says. “And that doesn’t lend itself to direct observation.”

In place of actual data, the researchers aimed to construct a general mathematical theory to describe the range of adaptation rates across animal groups around the world. In this context, “adaptation” refers to any change within a species, over time periods that are much longer than a generation, that enable the species to persist as its environment changes. 

It is generally understood in evolutionary theory that a species can successfully adapt only when multiple conditions are met. For instance, there needs to be variation in the population, these variations must be heritable, some variations enable an organism to adapt better than others, and the organisms that adapt better should leave more offspring. If all these conditions are met, the entire species should be able to adapt to a given environmental change. However, if any one condition fails, the population will go extinct. 

Rothman and Petrovskii recognized that in this case, a species’ probability of successfully adapting multiplies with every condition that it meets. And it turns out that this pattern can be described mathematically as a very simple, bell-shaped curve. Such a curve essentially describes what fraction of the world’s animals can adapt at given rates, from the slowest to the fastest adapters, and how this fraction changes nonlinearly with the rate of adaptation. This curve generally shows that most animal groups can adapt at intermediate rates, while fewer animal groups adapt at the slowest and fastest rates. 

After they established this general pattern of adaptation rates, the researchers looked to see how this pattern compares to recorded rates of environmental change, and how these two rates match, or don’t match, at times of mass extinction. 

To do so, they considered paleontological and geochemical data from 27 episodes over the last 450 million years where the carbon cycle experienced significant change — a measure that is generally understood to reflect global environmental change. They then compared rates of environmental change with the fraction of animal groups that went extinct during each episode — numbers that were established previously in a well-regarded study by paleobiologist John Alroy. 

In the end, Rothman and Petrovskii observed that indeed, for almost every mass extinction event in the last 450 million years, there was a mismatch in the rates at which the environment changed and at which animals could adapt; mass extinctions occurred when a significant fraction of animals could not adapt fast enough to match the changing environment. Their results confirm that the rate mismatch hypothesis applies at the global scale.

What’s more, this mismatch in rates could predict the severity of extinction events, or the fraction of animal life that went extinct given the rate at which the environment changed. 

In the case of the end-Permian extinction, it’s likely that the rapid acidification of the ocean outpaced organisms’ ability to evolve adequate protections, leading to the extinction of over 80 percent of the world’s marine species. 

The team’s work focuses on applying the new model to past extinction events. But the work could also provide a framework for understanding modern extinction risk. 

“Carbon dioxide levels in the ocean are increasing today at a rate which, when appropriately re-scaled, is similar to rates of carbon-cycle change that are just lower than those associated with major extinction events in the past,” Rothman says. “It suggests that modern environmental change may be approaching rates beyond which adaptation becomes increasingly difficult.” 

This research is supported, in part, by Schmidt Sciences, LLC; the MIT Climate Grand Challenges; the U.S. National Science Foundation; the European Space Agency; and the London Mathematical Society.

At least one malware developer is adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware, in an effort to stop automatic AI analysis.

Details:

The _index.js payload begins with a large JavaScript block comment containing fake system instructions and policy-triggering content. Because it is inside a comment, it does not affect JavaScript execution. The runtime skips it. The real malware begins after the comment with a try{eval(…)} wrapper around a large character-code array and a ROT-style substitution function.

This header appears designed for AI-mediated analysis, not for Node, Bun, or Python. It attempts to derail scanners or analyst copilots that feed the beginning of a file to a language model without clearly isolating the content as untrusted data. In weak pipelines, this can cause refusal behavior, prompt confusion, context pollution, or premature classification before the scanner reaches the actual malware...

The measure passed by both chambers this week would send billions of dollars to lower-income communities reeling from catastrophes.

Gov. Kathy Hochul has more time to make difficult decisions about reducing emissions, but the state’s energy battles are far from settled.