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.

The U.S. Postal Service used social media surveillance to monitor and report on protests across the political spectrum, government records show.

The records, disclosed to EFF and other requesters suing the postal service under the Freedom of Information Act, show that the agency’s internet Covert Operations Program, or iCOP, routinely sifted through social media posts organizing and discussing protests with little records of any oversight or legal justification.

EFF filed suit in 2021 after Yahoo News disclosed the program’s existence and how the agency used it to monitor First Amendment protected activities. After years of delays and technical failures that led the agency to lose access to a trove of emails discussing the program, the postal service disclosed records to EFF and several other requesters this year.

The Postal Service used iCOP to surveil First Amendment activities

The disclosures include a series of bulletins created from iCOP, which show that the postal service used the program in 2020 and 2021 to monitor and circulate information about a wide range of planned protests. They included a planned “Million MAGA March,” a guns rights advocacy event and counter-protest in Virginia, a nationwide Save the Post Office Saturday protest, and planned protests in front of then-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s home in Washington, D.C.

Many of the bulletins provide dry descriptions of the events being planned and reference public discussions or events on major social media services. Others seem to imply or anticipate that the protests would turn violent.

For example, in discussing planned national and international protests scheduled for March 20, 2021, the bulletin references potential violence in light of “online inflammatory material.” Yet the bulletin acknowledges that the agency has “no intelligence to suggest specific threats.” This bulletin was described by Yahoo News when it disclosed iCOP’s existence.

Another bulletin discussing an ongoing Black Lives Matter protests in response to police shooting and killing people styles itself as a “National Civil Unrest Update.” The bulletins also recount and monitor threats sent to then-Postmaster DeJoy.

The Postal Service also disclosed three email chains to EFF that, while heavily redacted, show how the agency queried iCOP and disseminated what it found (Read the emails here, here, and here). The government agreed to release the email messages as part of settling EFF’s FOIA suit this fall. To EFF’s knowledge, they are the only existing materials that reflect how the agency queried iCOP.

Postal Service renames iCOP and loses access to records about it

According to the agency, after Yahoo News disclosed the program in 2021, the postal service renamed it and publicly said that it had stopped issuing bulletins. But the documents do not say that the agency’s social media surveillance stopped.

At the same time, EFF and several other FOIA requesters sought records detailing how the agency used iCOP and what rules the postal service had for using the program and distributing information it gained from surveilling social media. EFF spent years pushing the agency to disclose email communications about the program, which the agency had stored on an external hard drive. Amid these negotiations, someone dropped the hard drive, rendering it inoperable, agency officials said. By the time that happened, the agency had already deleted the underlying email messages pursuant to the agency’s retention schedule.

Minimal records disclosed about internal limits on surveillance programs

EFF’s FOIA request sought internal rules, guidance, and training that would show what safeguard the Postal Service imposed to protect First Amendment rights. The agency disclosed very few documents in response to this part of EFF’s request.

For example, a series of slides give an overview of the program, but do not explain how officials used iCOP. The closest thing to internal guideline that the agency disclosed were talking points the Chief Postal Inspector authored in response to questions about iCOP.

The inspector wrote that, “In reviewing social media postings to gather information we did not single out any particular group and did not base what was reviewed on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, or a person’s exercise of First Amendment freedoms.” The statement echoes language in the bulletin stating that its purpose is not to infringe on First Amendment rights; Other parts of the talking points characterize the surveillance as providing officials with situational awareness.

The postal inspector’s talking points go on to say that “the recent attention on iCOP has highlighted opportunities for improvement, including enhanced executive oversight. We have stopped the distribution of the bulletins like the one you have seen in the media reports.”

Setting aside that it’s unclear whether internal oversight occurred or resulted in any changes, the claim that iCOP did not infringe on First Amendment rights rings hollow. As the records disclosed show, surveilling and reporting on social media users’ efforts to organize rallies and protests was a feature of iCOP.

But more fundamentally, the claims by Postal Service officials fail to recognize that surveillance directly chills First Amendment rights. Further, the government can misuse the information it obtained as part of its social media surveillance to harass or retaliate against those exercising their constitutional rights.

Although EFF’s case seeking records about iCOP has ended, we will continue to bring more transparency to the government’s use of social media surveillance and look for ways to challenge the practice, especially when people are caught in the dragnet for exercising the First Amendment rights.

Related Cases: EFF v. USPS - Social media monitoring (iCOP)

The government’s surveillance powers grew rapidly after Sept. 11, 2001, some in public view and some in secret. EFF suspected but couldn’t prove that the National Security Agency was spying on Americans' communications. The New York Times sat on a story about it for over a year, finally publishing it in December 2005. Then, in January 2006, a retired AT&T technician named Mark Klein walked into EFF's office with a manila folder of documents that blew the story wide open. 

Welcome to the third episode of “Privacy’s Defenders,” a podcast about the people – lawyers, journalists, hackers, and others – who’ve fought to secure your digital liberties since before most people even knew what the internet was.

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(You can also find this episode on YouTube.)

In this episode, former EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn talks with former EFF lawyer Kevin Bankston, who was at his desk drafting a lawsuit against AT&T when Klein showed up. Less than two weeks later, EFF sued the phone company on behalf of its own customers in Hepting v. AT&T. Cindy speaks again with now-retired Justice Department lawyer Tony Coppolino, who asked for the opportunity to defend the case. He called EFF with a warning after Klein’s documents were filed in court: If they were classified, EFF would be in big trouble. You’ll also hear from Klein himself, and from Carolyn Jewel, a romance novelist and AT&T customer who became the lead plaintiff in EFF's related case against the NSA. 

It's the story of a secret room in a San Francisco phone company building, a heroic whistleblower, and the people who refused to let mass surveillance stay hidden. 

The “Privacy’s Defenders” podcast is a follow-up to Cindy’s book, “Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance,” bringing to life pivotal moments in the voices of those who fought for your rights. Sales of “Privacy’s Defender” benefit EFF, so pick up your copy today!  

Joanne Elgart Jennings co-produced and created this podcast.   

Jarrod Sport co-produced, mixed, and mastered it.   

Corinne Ruff is our story editor. 

We had additional help from Rachel Estabrook and Alison Broverman. 

The original music was composed and performed by Nat Keefe of Hot Buttered Rum with Ben Andrews on the fiddle. 

In both a 2021 essay and my 2022 book, A Hacker’s Mind, I talk about AIs finding vulnerabilities and exploits—hacking—the legal system.

Here’s some demonstrations of this from Germany:

Legal systems encode the foundations of social order in natural language. Similar to computer systems, the written law can contain vulnerabilities that invite exploitation.1 Courts absorb most exploits through interpretation, and such vulnerabilities rarely surface in the first place. With highly capable AI systems enabling the discovery of vulnerabilities at unprecedented scale, we believe the latter could change...

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 03 November 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02779-7

By integrating climate risk into health planning, Brazil is redesigning healthcare to withstand floods, heatwaves and other climate shocks.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 03 November 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02787-7

Baseline construction shapes estimates of mitigation cost, ambition and progress, while no-policy counterfactuals could vary with choices about policy, technology and development. Rather than relying on one constructed baseline, assessments and related conclusions should be compared across plausible baselines.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 03 November 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02776-w

The global temperature change that happens after emissions cease is expected to be close to zero. Here the authors use model simulations to show that this zero emissions commitment depends on the warming level at which emissions cease and might be positive for higher warming.

MIT was founded on the idea that people learn best by doing. For nearly 25 years, the Lemelson-MIT Program in the MIT School of Engineering has carried that idea into K–12 classrooms across the country, helping teachers guide students as they find real problems and invent solutions to them. 

Now the program is expanding that work into connected pathways that follow students from the early grades through college.

This month, Lemelson-MIT awarded multiyear Invention Education Pathways grants and stipends to 19 schools, districts, and colleges across three regions: Northern California, Tennessee, and Massachusetts/Connecticut. The partners include elementary, middle, and high schools, as well as a community college and two state universities, together forming routes for students to experience invention at every stage of their education.

The initiative arrives as MIT President Sally Kornbluth has launched MIT for America, a strategic effort to widen access to quality STEM education nationwide, from kindergarten to community college. One of its three focus areas, Design, Make and Innovate, aims to give students more chances to build, test, and prototype their way toward solutions, and to support teachers in bringing hands-on work into their classrooms. Invention education does exactly that.

Learning the way inventors work

In invention education, students work in teams to identify problems that matter to them and their communities, then develop prototypes of original solutions. Along the way, they apply knowledge from multiple disciplines and develop both technical skills and durable human skills such as empathy, collaboration, and communication. They also gain confidence in their own abilities.

“Understanding user needs is critical in product design,” says Michael Cima, faculty director of the Lemelson-MIT Program and a professor of materials science and engineering. “It’s the foundation everything else is built on. Invention education builds that understanding early, teaching students to ask whom they’re designing for and what is truly needed before they ever build a prototype.”

Rather than offering a one-time project or an after-school club, the pathways approach aims to give students repeated, connected invention experiences as they advance. Lemelson-MIT staff will work alongside educators in each region to assess, design, and implement learning experiences that help students apply scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) knowledge to real-world problems. Schools and colleges can adopt Lemelson-MIT curriculum resources selectively to jump-start or strengthen their offerings.

“We have learned that invention education can benefit all students, especially when students can experience learning through the invention process across multiple grade levels,” says Stephanie Couch, executive director of the Lemelson-MIT Program. “Our goal is to create opportunities for learning through invention education during the regular school day, beginning in the early grades and continuing into adulthood.”

Every student an inventor

The three regions were chosen through a nationwide search for schools and districts committed to building strong invention pathways from kindergarten through college and to increasing the number of inventors from diverse backgrounds.

That commitment rests on a simple observation from Lemelson-MIT’s work: Given the chance to invent, students of every background surprise themselves, and their teachers, with what they can do. The program’s experience, case studies, and published research show that invention education helps students, especially those underrepresented in STEM, see themselves as capable STEM learners and inventors. Students in the program’s flagship high school initiative, InvenTeams, have earned 24 U.S. patents.

The benefits extend into the workforce. “Employers benefit from graduates that have the types of capabilities they need, but have trouble finding,” Couch says. “Invention education connects students’ knowledge and passions with the technical and durable human skills employers are looking for.”

Participating institutions

• Northern California: California State University at Stanislaus; Columbia College; Columbia Union School District; Denair Unified School District; Folsom Cordova Unified School District; Stockton Unified School District; and Visions in Education University Prep Early College Academy
• Tennessee: Apison Elementary School; Battle Academy; Hixson Middle School; Normal Park Museum Magnet School; and Red Bank elementary, middle, and high schools
• Massachusetts and Connecticut: Berlin High School; Cambridge Rindge and Latin School; New Covenant School; Watertown High School; and Westfield State University

Looking ahead

Over the next three years, the Lemelson-MIT Program will work closely with educators in all three regions toward a shared goal: making invention education a regular part of the school day, rather than an occasional enrichment activity. 

Lemelson-MIT hopes that what these partners learn together will help show how invention pathways can take root in schools and colleges across the country.

Vera Grbic, communications officer at the Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office (IDHR), is an expert at creating clear, informative collateral. Whether she is improving the IDHR website to help people more easily find the support or resources they need or using newsletters and annual reports to explain IDHR's work and the policies that guide it, Grbic believes it is vital for members of the MIT community to know where to turn and what resources are available to them. 

Grbic earned a BA in communications, with a minor in English literature, from the University of Ottawa, and an MA in communications from Carleton University. Both institutions are in Canada's capital city of Ottawa.  

Before joining MIT in 2021, Grbic worked in a mix of federal government, nonprofit, and research organizations. After graduate school, she worked as a freelance journalist, during which she developed a skill she still relies on today: collaborating with subject-matter experts to ensure that creative communications are grounded in fact. As a senior communications officer for the National Research Council of Canada, she worked with engineers and scientists in areas such as artificial intelligence, climate research, aerospace, and physiology. She elevated their research and innovations to key audiences and helped create new partnership opportunities. In this role, she translated complex information into engaging communications that furthered the organization's goals. Grbic describes this work as the "through-line" connecting her previous experience to what she does today at MIT. 

IDHR addresses concerns related to discrimination, discriminatory harassment, and sexual misconduct by providing education, individualized supportive measures, information about available resources, and complaint resolution pathways that include both restorative and investigative processes. Grbic develops IDHR’s annual communications strategy and has spearheaded several key initiatives, including a website and annual report redesign and the launch of IDHR’s Data Dashboard. She collaborates with colleagues across MIT to gather content ideas for newsletters, data and stories for annual reports, and feedback on communications materials. She often partners with IDHR's prevention education and outreach team, which delivers training to the community. 

Grbic notes that being a communications professional means constantly learning, whether that entails researching a new topic, finding creative ways to tell a story, or meeting subject-matter experts who broaden her perspective. Accuracy is at the core of her approach. While she strives to find creative ways to explain policies and complex processes in ways that are accessible to everyone, collaboration and fact-checking are intrinsic to her work. Given the wide range of responsibilities within communications, Grbic is a jack-of-all-trades. Her experience includes creative communications, social media management, long-form storytelling, event production, report writing, video production, and website management.  

In addition to her communications responsibilities, Grbic co-organizes the annual Change-Maker Awards, which honor members of the MIT community who work diligently to prevent sexual misconduct and combat harassment. She takes great pride in helping lead an event that recognizes individuals who are making a meaningful difference in building a safer culture at MIT. Grbic describes the award winners as “true inspirations.” 

Grbic recognizes that nothing is done in a vacuum. She values the input of her team members and colleagues across MIT and is proud to incorporate their feedback into her content. Because no two projects are exactly alike, she enjoys the creativity and variety that her work offers. 

Soundbytes 

Q: What are your favorite projects that you have worked on? 

A: I was part of a team that helped develop and launch the most recent sexual misconduct surveys for students and employees. I also strategized a campaign to clarify IDHR services, which included whole-scale website improvement: rewriting many sections, adjusting navigation, improving visual design, and publishing a short video explaining our process. There was also a poster campaign about the services we offer the community. MIT is awash with important storytelling, so getting that messaging to people who need it is vital. These projects brought me pride because taking the time to understand a community's experiences can have a meaningful impact. 

Q: How would you describe the MIT community? 

A: Smart, in a well-rounded way. Everyone is an incredibly hard worker and thinks in deep, research- and experience-backed ways on how to solve complex projects.  

As an employee who has worked with students on Institute-wide initiatives, committees, and awards, I have seen how much they care about making the world a better place. The staff and faculty are gracious and bring a strong work ethic to everything they do in support of the MIT community. 

Q: Are you involved in any areas of the Institute that are not directly related to your job? 

A: I recently started participating in the MIT Women’s League, which I am excited to explore. When I was pregnant, I took prenatal classes at MIT, including a yoga class where I met people I am still in touch with years later. I also played in a volleyball league at the recreation facilities, which made me see the facilities from a different angle.  

I’ve attended many free conferences and events hosted by MIT clubs and schools. For example, a children’s clothing swap has been organized for years, which also provides an opportunity to connect with other families in the community. I also prioritize keeping up with current topics and have attended two AI conferences organized by the Institute.  

While these opportunities may feel secondary to the workplace, they are important. I’m glad I am in a space that helps feed my physical health and has opportunities for broader learning. 

Millions of people rely on the cloud every day, yet researchers working to secure and improve the cloud are often locked out of the technology it runs on. Jeffery Lim is trying to change that.

One such technology, single-root input/output virtualization (SR-IOV), lets major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services boost the performance of their systems. Cloud providers combine SR-IOV with custom hardware and software to deliver faster cloud services than traditional setups allow.

Lim is a computer engineer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. While pursuing his master's degree, he noticed that academic research proposing smarter or safer cloud infrastructure did not account for SR-IOV. Very few open-source hardware platforms existed that would let researchers work directly with SR-IOV as they developed new software or models to improve the cloud.

So, Lim filled that gap with his master's thesis, building a hardware platform compatible with SR-IOV that captures key features of the infrastructure used by cloud providers. The result is a research and development platform that allows researchers to build, test, and evaluate realistic cloud designs.

"As a society, everyone uses the cloud now," Lim says. "I hope that people will use this platform to build systems more akin to how cloud providers operate, and, more broadly, that researchers everywhere can take advantage of SR-IOV for the performance benefits it offers."

Lim presented a paper at the IEEE High-Performance Extreme Computing Conference in September, and he plans to release this work open source. In recognition of the hardware's potential impact, the Boston University College of Engineering awarded Lim its 2026 Master's Societal Impact Award.

Winding path to cybersecurity

Growing up, Lim was fascinated with building computers. That fascination set him on a winding path to the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group at Lincoln Laboratory.

After studying electrical and computer engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he spent several years in industry working on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) — integrated circuits that can be repeatedly reprogrammed for different functions. This background led to his 2018 hire at the laboratory, where he developed FPGAs for small radars that detect the breathing of humans trapped in rubble and for large radars that track satellites and orbital debris from atop Millstone Hill. He next turned to investigating radiation-induced faults in integrated circuits aboard space platforms and ways to protect the chips.

This focus on safeguarding hardware turned his attention to cybersecurity, an area he had long found interest in but never fully explored. So, Lim transferred to his current group in 2022 to pursue this interest.

"I don't think there's another place in the world where I could say, 'Hey, I want to try something new,' and actually have that opportunity," Lim says. "Lincoln Laboratory does that really well, giving people the chance to transition into a different field of engineering or area of expertise."

To deepen his expertise, he applied and was accepted in 2024 to the Lincoln Scholars Program, which allows technical staff to pursue full-time graduate studies at the master's or doctoral level. Scholars remain employed and apply their academic work to national security needs.

As he pursued his master's degree at Boston University, Lim worked closely with his Lincoln Laboratory mentor Benjamin Nahill, who helped Lim keep his research tied to the laboratory's mission and provided a sounding board for ideas. "I'd call him my rubber ducky," Lim says, a nod to the classic software engineering practice of "rubber duck debugging" — reasoning things out through speaking aloud to a rubber duck.

"We talked about his thesis concept for quite a while, but the implementation suddenly became real toward the end," says Nahill. "He transformed what began as an idea for a research tool to an incredibly performant implementation. Having worked with Jeffery on projects in our group, I shouldn't have been surprised, but it was most impressive."

Missing piece for cloud research

When most people say "the cloud," they mean cloud services provided by companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Virtualization is the invisible process that makes those services possible. Users uploading photos or streaming movies are interacting with virtual machines, running on servers in data centers.

In the past decade, SR-IOV has changed the way traditional virtualization works. Traditionally, a software component known as the hypervisor acts as a middleman between the virtual machines and the server's physical hardware. Its main role is to distribute computing resources as needed, and provide functions (such as networking) to the virtual machines.

In contrast, SR-IOV enables virtual machines to access a dedicated slice of the hardware device, reducing the hypervisor overhead. This capability is often found on specialized devices called Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs). Major cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services’ Nitro System and Microsoft’s Azure Accelerated Networking, use SmartNICs with SR-IOV to provide high-speed networking to many virtual machines.

"This was the missing research capability that I set out to build: an open-source SmartNIC platform compatible with SR-IOV," Lim says. Because SmartNICs can be built on FPGAs, Lim had a familiar starting point. In fact, he found a couple of platforms that supported SR-IOV; however, they lacked features that would make them practical tools for researchers to utilize. He spent a couple of months building those required components.

The first component is a switching fabric. Often, cloud customers' applications or programs may be split across multiple virtual machines, which may be distributed across multiple servers. Therefore, the cloud system needs a way to determine whether a piece of data needs to stay local or leave the server. Lim's switching fabric handles that traffic-directing job.

The second component is a network function engine. This small, specialized processor is built to run security rules, like firewalls, that keep one customer's data safely separated from another's. To build it, Lim used Extended Berkeley Packet Filter, a system that allows custom code to inspect network traffic, approving or blocking data as needed. Rather than starting from scratch, he adapted the design from doctoral research conducted by Zaid Tahir, who studied under their shared advisor, Professor Martin Herbordt of Boston University.

Herbordt described Lim's efforts as "combining vision with heroic system-building, single-handedly putting together the hardware and software necessary to prove the concept."

"I'm very much a hands-on hardware guy, so, yes, I ended up building two servers at home to test my designs," Lim says. He also used the Mass Open Cloud’s Open Cloud Testbed, a test bed meant for testing cloud platforms, to gather metrics and validate his system.

Impact beyond the platform

Throughout the project, Lim maintained focus on applicability and transparency. "My biggest worry was, is this going to be relevant? Is this something that can actually be utilized?" Lim reflects.  

Earning the Societal Impact Award points to yes. The award recognizes projects that address pressing global challenges through innovative applications of technology. Lim's platform opens the door to evaluating a cloud trust model that remains largely opaque, even as many sectors of society, from health care to banking, increasingly rely on it.

"Right now, we have limited visibility into how major cloud providers implement and evolve their infrastructure," Lim says. "If researchers can catch up to how the modern cloud operates, they might develop new approaches that improve security or performance."

As part of his role as a Lincoln Scholar, Lim is also exploring how his work connects to Lincoln Laboratory's national security mission. He sees several potential avenues.

One program in his group is evaluating cyber-hardening techniques for hypervisors, as the cloud takes on an expanding role in defense systems. "Introducing Lim's SR-IOV-compatible platform to this work would help bring our research closer to how cloud environments operate, demonstrating the impact of our techniques in realistic environments," says Nathan Burow, the program's principal investigator. Another program is examining what it takes to stand up high-performance data centers, work that could draw directly on Lim's research into the technologies SR-IOV requires.

Or his path may lead to something new. The laboratory allocates internal technical investment funding — supported by the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Development — for staff-proposed projects addressing emerging needs. Lim is considering a proposal to bring SR-IOV to the embedded-systems level, say, to drones or satellites.

"We saw how cloud providers moved from traditional virtualization to SR-IOV to maximize performance while maintaining isolation," he says. "I wonder if we can do the same at the embedded level, where power and compute constraints are even tighter. I'd love to complete that transition. I learned a lot from the cloud. Now, can we apply those lessons somewhere else?"

Utilizing waste carbon at scale, assessing public trust in artificial intelligence and data centers, and building a quantum toolkit for critical applications were among the topics energy experts explored at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI)’s annual research conference on Sept. 22-23.

The complexity of the energy transition demands “a truly interdisciplinary and international approach,” said Paula Hammond, Institute Professor and dean of the MIT School of Engineering, kicking off the conference, which was themed “Transitioning energy at a pivotal moment.” 

More than 200 people attended Energizing@MIT: MITEI’s Annual Research Conference in person and online, including faculty, scientists, and researchers; representatives of global energy firms; nonprofit organizations; and academic institutions.

With the rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence and data centers, the challenge of the energy transition grows ever greater, requiring “researchers who can pursue fundamental questions about materials, chemistry, and energy systems … engineers who can design new technologies and determine how they might function at scale … and experts in economics, policy, human behavior, and sociology who can help us understand how those technologies will interact with communities and with the world around us,” said Hammond. 

From keynote speakers to panelists, seed grant innovators to startup entrepreneurs, the conference featured exemplars in all these categories.

Deploying today’s technologies

Eric Toone, chief technical officer and managing partner at Breakthrough Energy, set the tone for day one with a keynote address that was clear-eyed in his assessment. “If energy is prosperity,” he told the audience, “at least today, prosperity is emissions.” Yet, Toone was optimistic when he heralded examples of Breakthrough Energy-funded ventures, from iron-air batteries to vacuum-insulated glass windows, which can reduce the carbon costs of energy. 

“We can absolutely develop new technologies that provide the exact same service, but at zero carbon,” he said.

The conference made Toone’s claim tangible as it spanned the full arc of decarbonization — from deploying what we know today to uncovering what may be possible tomorrow. 

There are “projects that are actually being developed, companies that are putting steel in the ground now, electrons onto the grid to deliver capacity now, or in the very, very near term,” said John Parsons, deputy director for research at the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. Parsons moderated a panel on the revival of nuclear fission power. 

Highlights included Crane Clean Energy Center’s restoration of the Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear plant, set to restart in mid-2027; work by Électricité de France (EDF) to extend and modernize France’s 57-reactor nuclear fleet, adapting plants to climate impacts; and GE Vernova’s development of mature light-water reactor technology, with a new plant under construction in Ontario.

Carbon utilization offers another path to mitigating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. “The land and ocean are passively taking up almost 50 percent of anthropogenic CO2 emissions,” said Carolyn Ruppel, MITEI’s deputy director for science and technology, who moderated the panel. “The idea is to find uses for some of the rest of it.” The session showcased research exploring a host of technologies for making products with captured CO2.

Nicola Ferralis, a research scientist in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), highlighted the importance of large-scale uses for carbon waste, such as structural carbon for vehicles and buildings. “We need to find applications that are actually able to match the supply by mass,” he said. 

Admir Masic, an associate professor in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and DMSE, described self-heating concrete panels used in real-world conditions in Sapporo, Japan, as well as new concrete materials that can store energy.

“The pace of the transition to a renewable-energy economy will strongly rely on the availability of scalable, bulk energy-storage solutions,” said Masic.

Kripa K. Varanasi, a professor in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, is working on ways to make technologies such as emissions-plume capture at power plants economically viable. 

In a panel devoted to startups with links to MITEI or MITEI member companies, speakers described moving novel energy technologies from research to commercialization: Alfredo Rivela of Adaion has developed an AI tool for electrical utilities that optimizes their use of the grid; Eddie Obropta of Raptor Maps trains drones to inspect solar farms; Michele Guarnieri’s HiBot has created a robot that detects issues in power lines; and Michael Wang of Lithios is conducting field pilots that use electrochemistry to separate lithium from low-grade brines.

Successful ventures, the speakers agreed, begin with a clear customer problem that can be validated by industry users and that offers a path to scaled deployment. For industry users, “innovation is not a corporate virtue,” said Steve Hellman, managing partner at Alliance Partners. “It’s an existential requirement.”

Early-stage research and basic science

The conference also offered a bounty of promising early research on technologies and approaches for cutting carbon emissions. A panel on MITEI’s Seed Innovation Fund Program projects introduced MIT scientists who are separating and recycling rare earth elements; designing algorithms to decide which power plants should run to meet electricity demand; and modeling the impacts on human and natural systems of development and decarbonization.

A poster session revealed the next generation of energy researchers in such fields as chemistry, architecture, aeronautics and astronautics, and computer science. Graduate students are developing a wide array of technologies for carbon mitigation and new energy systems, such as a steam electrolysis process for hydrogen production; models of end-to-end decarbonization in buildings; and designs for hydrogen- and methane-fueled aircraft.

The conference highlighted the importance of fundamental science in feeding the pipeline of new energy technologies. Wednesday’s keynote speaker, Danna Freedman, the F. G. Keyes Professor of Chemistry at MIT and inaugural director of Quantum@MIT, traced scientists’ evolving capacity to harness quantum computing as a tool for solving a range of problems, including those in energy.

“What we want to do at Q-MIT is solve the hard problem, and the hard problem isn’t developing these ridiculously intricate and beautiful quantum tools,” said Freedman. “It is connecting the quantum tools with the applications that will change the world.”

A companion panel explored one such application: quantum sensing, which leverages fundamental physics to capture a nanoscale view of materials and their properties. For instance, Lukasz Zielinski, scientific advisor to the Integrated Sensing and Measurement Program at SLB, uses a lidar camera with single-photon detectors to identify methane plumes. Moderator Paola Cappellaro, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, described her work using diamond-based sensors for detecting tiny magnetic fields from battery current, potentially helping measure battery conditions without disturbing the battery electrically. Such quantum sensors, Cappellaro said, can be “practical and impactful.” 

Data centers and public trust

One critical challenge facing energy researchers and industry emerged in sessions throughout the two days: the explosive growth of AI and the energy-hungry data centers that fuel this technology. As Deepjyoti Deka, a MITEI principal research scientist, put it, “the big test for AI right now is whether AI can reduce energy usage, improve efficiency, as well as bring in innovation faster than the rate at which it is going to consume electricity to get trained and deployed.” 

“New ‘hyperscale’ facilities built for artificial intelligence can use more power than entire cities,” said Steve Clemmer, director of energy research in the Climate and Energy Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, sharing a recent analysis of data center proliferation. With new facilities being 10 to even 10,000 times larger than data centers built just a decade ago, he said, wholesale electricity costs will rise, and “increased reliance on fossil fuels will result in tens of billions of dollars in health damages, and trillions in climate damages.” He noted that decision-makers can mitigate these harmful impacts through clean energy development, strong ratepayer protections, and other safeguards.

Given mounting opposition to data centers, Kathryn Kline Tyndall, associate director of energy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, recommended that industry proponents provide early, accessible information about power, water, quality-of-life, land-use, environmental, and economic impacts, tailored to each community in which they hope to set up shop.

Larry Susskind, the Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, recommended that developers go further, and demonstrate credible benefits to communities. To achieve this, Susskind suggests a facilitated negotiation process between developers and local groups whose object is a community benefits agreement — a deal that might involve altering the data center design, and providing workforce development, infrastructure investment, and clean energy partnerships.

Ultimately, developers must accept that they can’t rush community acceptance; they have to earn it by giving residents a meaningful role in shaping projects and sharing their benefits. 

“You’re going to have to proceed at the speed of trust,” said Susskind.

On November 11, Lina Attalah, founder and editor-in-chief of the independent Egyptian news outlet Mada Masr, will face trial for the second time in just two weeks. This time, she faces charges of spreading false news, an accusation that has become one of the Egyptian government's most frequently used tools for prosecuting journalists. 

The trial follows a conviction on October 27, when Attalah was found guilty of managing an unlicensed news website. The Mada Masr team had repeatedly applied for a license, but their attempts went unacknowledged. The proceedings took place in a single hearing, which Mada Masr states included serious violations of her right to a fair trial. She was sentenced to the maximum fine of 3 million Egyptian pounds (approximately 55,000 USD), forcibly removed from the courtroom, and held for seven hours until the fine was paid. The court also ordered Mada Masr's closure and the confiscation of all equipment belonging to the organization. 

The current wave of repression has also targeted Matsada2sh, a fact-checking and open-source intelligence initiative. Its entire six-person newsroom was violently arrested, illegally detained, and interrogated under torture before being charged with terrorism-related offenses and spreading false news. The team remains in pretrial detention. 

According to CPJ, at least 25 other journalists are currently incarcerated in Egypt. 

Governments seeking to control the flow of information increasingly rely on a combination of legal harassment, financial pressure, criminal prosecution, and restrictions on the infrastructure that makes independent publishing possible. Egypt's media licensing regime is a particularly troubling example. Requiring news organizations to obtain government authorization to operate creates an obvious mechanism for restricting who gets to publish and whose voices are allowed to reach the public.  

The charge of spreading false news is similarly dangerous. Governments around the world have increasingly invoked the language of misinformation to justify restrictions on speech, often without meaningful safeguards against political abuse, as we laid out in our recent submission to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Governments should never be the arbiters of which reporting is permissible, particularly when that reporting concerns their own conduct. 

Why Mada Masr matters 

Founded in 2013, Mada Masr has spent more than a decade doing the kind of journalism that authoritarian governments find most threatening: documenting abuses, amplifying marginalized voices, and reporting on issues that powerful institutions would prefer remain hidden. 

Its reporting has given torture survivors and the families of political prisoners a platform. It has opened space for debate about reproductive rights. It has brought frontline reporting from Sudan and Gaza, and stood alongside refugees facing xenophobic attacks and security crackdowns. 

Emerging as a digital-first publication, in a media environment where traditional outlets were increasingly constrained, being purely digital allowed Mada Masr’s founders to build an independent publication outside the structures of legacy media.  

At a time when only 43% of Egyptians had access to the internet, going fully digital meant taking a big risk, but it was one that has been rewarding: Despite being blocked by the Egyptian government since 2017, Mada Masr has continued to reach Egyptian and global audiences, and Attalah has received numerous accolades, including the Knight International Journalism Award, the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and a spot in TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people (2020). 

Mada Masr has also consistently engaged with technology and advocated for a free and independent internet for the global majority. It has covered dozens of hot-button tech stories in recent years, from Egypt’s Cybercrime Bill and Israel’s use of AI weaponry in Gaza, to stories about the “privacy chaos” caused by biometrics to more personal essays about the importance of the internet and tech. In August, they launched an open call for proposals on original critical reporting on artificial intelligence. 

Mada Masr may be thoroughly Egyptian, but it doesn’t belong just to Egypt. Its team has made into a publication that represents the kind of independent, local, grounded journalism that international audiences need, particularly at a time when international reporting on state repression is lacking. They built on-the-ground networks to center local voices in Sudan (publishing in both English and Arabic on the conflict) and Gaza out of a sense of cross-border responsibility and solidarity. 

This is precisely why its potential closure should concern everyone who cares about a free press. The ability to publish independently, investigate powerful institutions, and to share information without government interference is fundamental to the exercise of free expression.  

From solidarity to action 

The international community has repeatedly expressed concern about restrictions on press and internet freedom in Egypt. More than 100 organizations have now joined statements of solidarity with Mada Masr, and with Matsada2sh.  

These expressions of support matter, particularly when journalists are increasingly isolated and under threat—but solidarity must also translate into sustained political and institutional pressure. 

The international governments and institutions that maintain relationships with Egypt—including those in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—should make clear that the prosecution of journalists and the forced closure of independent media outlets are unacceptable.  

The cases against Lina Attalah, Mada Masr, and Matsada2sh must be dropped. The journalists who remain in detention must be released. And Egypt's licensing regime, with its profound chilling effects on access to information and independent knowledge production, must be brought to an end. 

There is a particular urgency to defending independent media at a moment when governments are finding ever more ways to restrict the circulation of information. Whether through internet shutdowns, platform restrictions, surveillance, or the criminalization of reporting, the result is often the same: fewer opportunities for people to understand what is happening around them, to challenge official narratives, and to hold power accountable. 

We cannot allow the closure of one of Egypt's most important independent newsrooms and the prosecution of its editor-in-chief to become another routine episode in the global erosion of press freedom. Nor should we wait until the last independent journalists have been silenced before recognizing what has been lost. 

To learn more about Lina Attalah in her own reads, you can read our Speaking Freely interview from January 2026. 

  

A comment:

3% of ‘critical’ software security bugs, in all of recorded history, have been found in the last month. This is on pace to find another ~100,000 bugs this year alone, adding ~26% more vulnerabilities to the all time total Do you realize how fucking insane that is?

Yes. It is a new world out there.

Creating better-performing materials comes down to having more control over their structure at the smallest possible scale. One particularly effective way to accomplish that is using nanoparticles, which have highly customizable shapes and sizes and have already shown promise in applications across energy, medicine, and electronics.

But the process of turning nanoparticles into useful new materials has been hampered by the difficulty of controlling the number and direction of the links between each particle and its neighbors. Researchers have tried changing the shape of particles or precisely aligning the rigid connector chains between them, but both of those methods limit the material structures nanoparticles are able to form and are difficult to scale.

A team including researchers from MIT is taking a different approach. The researchers developed a tunable way to use super-flexible connector molecules that regulate the packing of nanoparticle networks by intentionally deforming based on their surrounding environment. In a paper published today in Nature Materials, the researchers showed how connector flexibility and electric charges can be used to tune the network’s structure, and they used the technique to create new kinds of nanoparticle-based materials.

The approach could offer a more versatile way to create high-performing materials for photonics, chemical catalysis, medicine, agriculture, and more.

“People are interested in nanoparticle superlattices because of the promise of building designer materials where you have more say in what types of structures they can actually build into,” says Rob Macfarlane, the Richard P. Simmons (1953) Professor in Metallurgy in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “This is a new approach in nanoparticle assembly that hasn’t been investigated before. It’s exciting to have a new tool that is so counterintuitive. It’s the exact opposite of what the dogma has been for 20 years: that you need to make connector ligands rigid, and any deviation causes assembly to fail. We showed if you just crank it all the way to the opposite extreme, it works just as well.”

Joining Macfarlane on the paper are MIT PhD candidate Nicholas Sbalbi; University of Delaware doctoral student Stephen Kronenberger; MIT undergraduate Hana Shinzawa; Matthew Ye PhD ’26; and former University of Delaware professor Arthi Jayaraman.

More flexible structures

A foundational truth in materials science is that a material’s structure governs its function.

“That means if you know what your building blocks are and how they’re arranged, you can explain what properties materials have,” Macfarlane says. “Controlling that is how you make materials that have new properties.”

Nanoparticles give scientists a flexible building block to make materials with desired properties, and individual nanoparticles are already used in applications as diverse as drug delivery, energy storage, computing, and sensing. But assembling them into larger structures has proven to be a challenge because of how tightly they tend to pack together.

To overcome that challenge, researchers make nanoparticles different shapes, which changes how they connect. They can also make only specific parts of the particles’ surfaces sticky so they form different patterns.

“The challenge with both of those approaches is they’re difficult to do synthetically as we make the particles,” Macfarlane explains. “The methods for defining stickiness that have been developed are always bespoke: They work for one material, at one size scale, in one condition. It’s good for studying, but you can’t do much with it.”

Both methods also require connector molecules, called ligands, at the surface of the nanoparticles to be rigid so they stay at the specific angles needed to maintain the formation researchers want, which further limits their functionality.

For their new study, the researchers wanted to turn that approach on its head.

“We thought, ‘Let’s do the exact opposite: make the bonds so flexible it doesn’t matter what direction they’re initially pointing.’ The ligands can then reorganize as the particles come together, and that reorganization itself limits how many neighbors each particle can bind,” Macfarlane says.

Macfarlane’s group has spent years creating ways to make different kinds of particles from grafts of polymers. The nanoparticles in their new system have flexible ligands with electrically charged tips, some positively charged and others negatively charged. The opposites attract, so the ligands bend to connect with opposite charges.

“The idea is, instead of defining a specific direction the bonds are going to occur in with complicated synthesis methods, we just said, ‘The bonds are going to be as flexible as they want to be, and they’ll spontaneously go to whatever valency is going to maximize bond stability,’” Macfarlane says.

In experiments led by Sbalbi, the researchers showed they could control the connections by changing the nanoparticle sizes and ligand chain lengths. They also used the technique to assemble the nanoparticles into previously unseen crystal structures.

“Without having to predesign where the particles connect or what their shapes are, we can control the number of bonds each particle has,” Macfarlane explains. “The amount of flexibility of the polymer dictates how many bonds it has. It allows us to lower the number of bonds each particle has and make lattices we have never seen before.”

A new path toward customizable materials

Macfarlane believes the system is a step toward getting custom nanoparticle-based materials out of the research lab and into the world.

“We in the nanoparticle assembly community talk about having completely independent control over what your particle is and what assembly it goes into,” Macfarlane says. “In theory, that should be the case. In reality, it absolutely has not been.”

More broadly, the researchers say their approach establishes ligand flexibility as a new path to making material structures that can be customized at scale.

“Nanoparticle superlattices offer a way to create designer materials where your building blocks have all sort sorts of unique properties,” Macfarlane says. “But just densely packing these nanoparticles together limits your applications. This offers a way to get less dense formations of nanoparticles, and that’s where a lot of the interesting applications are.”

The work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy.

Regina Barzilay, MIT’s School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of AI and Health, and James Collins, MIT’s Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science, are the recipients of the 2026 Pritzker Prize for AI in Science Research Excellence. 

The award recognizes their joint work in “pioneering AI-enabled antibiotic discovery, integrating deep learning, bioengineering, and experimental validation to identify novel antibacterial candidates against drug-resistant pathogens.” 

Established in 2024 by the University of Chicago in partnership with Caltech, the Pritzker Prize for AI in Science Research Excellence recognizes contributions that jointly advance AI and the natural sciences or engineering.

Barzilay and Collins, who are faculty co-leads of the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic) and affiliates of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the MIT School of Engineering, published their first breakthrough paper together in 2020 with then-MIT postdoc and first author Jonathan Stokes (who worked in the Collins lab from 2017 to 2021) in Cell. The paper described the first artificial intelligence-discovered antibiotic, called halicin, named for the fictional AI system HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A broad-spectrum antibiotic that was originally studied as a potential diabetes drug, halicin was identified by a deep learning model trained on 2,500 molecules. Upon testing, the research team found that halicin was able to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria (i.e., “superbugs”) such as Clostridium difficile, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. A discovery process that once took years was completed in just a few weeks. Amidst the growing alarm around the global antimicrobial resistance crisis, the results demonstrated that AI could prove to be an effective tool for rapidly identifying new and effective antibiotics.

Following halicin, Barzilay and Collins worked with Stokes (now an assistant professor at McMaster University) to use machine learning to identify abaucin in 2023, a narrow-spectrum antibiotic demonstrating effectiveness against A. baumannii, an antibiotic-resistant bacteria commonly found on hospital doorknobs and in the wounds of U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Notably, abaucin’s “narrow spectrum” efficacy against a single species of treatment-resistant bacteria is its main advantage, minimizing the likelihood of bacteria developing resistance and harming beneficial bacteria in the gut.

“Historically, antibiotic discovery has depended on laborious, trial-and-error strategies,” says Collins. “This process is slow, costly, and unpredictable, often yielding few viable antibiotic candidates. With generative AI, we're now seeing a shift from AI being used as a tool for discovery to AI being used as a design tool. This shift opens new frontiers in antibiotic discovery that could bring us the next generation of lifesaving drugs.”

In Barzilay’s view, “despite significant progress in molecular modeling, we are still in early stages of drug discovery. With AI, we can only automate parts of the pipeline, rather than totally transforming the discovery process. To make it happen, we need to work really hard to build realistic AI models of human biology.”

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 02 November 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02783-x

Responding to the increasing risks of climate change in Southeast Asia requires research and effective action that considers the unique challenges of the region. In this Viewpoint, researchers and practitioners from the region share their views on the progress made in understanding and responding to climate change.

Fish that are cultivated in pools or ponds are an increasingly important source of food around the world. Unfortunately, disease outbreaks can cause substantial losses in aquaculture. 

Fish farmers use vaccines to prevent disease outbreaks just like regular farmers, but vaccinating a fish is a lot harder than vaccinating a cow. The most effective way to vaccinate fish today uses needles, but there are several downsides to this process, both for the fish and the farmers. 

Now a team of researchers at MIT and the U.S. Department of Agriculture has developed a potentially better way to deliver vaccines. The approach uses water-resistant, food-grade microneedles that can lightly penetrate and remain attached to fish skin before decomposing. In a new paper published in ACS Nano, the researchers described their system and showed it could be used to deliver a range of cargos, such as bacterial vaccines.

“To feed the world we need more fish, which are a major source of protein and nutrition,” says Benedetto Marelli, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Aquaculture is a very effective way of producing a large amount of fish. Our approach could give farmers a more precise tool to maintain fish health. Farmers are really concerned about the health care of these fish, so providing them with better tools is really important.”

Joining Marelli on the paper are Meng Li, an MIT postdoc and first author on the paper; Jad Raad MEng ’24; Yunteng Cao PhD ’22, a postdoc at Yale University; Yue Hu, a former MIT postdoc; Colleen Wolfe MEng ’23; Doyoon Kim, a former MIT postdoc; Bradley Frank, a current MIT postdoc; and Gregory Wiens, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Center for Cool and Cold Water Aquaculture.

Better vaccine delivery

Aquaculture holds enormous potential to address food insecurity, reduce energy consumption, and decarbonize global food systems. In 2021, for the first time, farmed aquatic animals exceeded wild-caught aquatic animals in global food production by weight.

“The world’s population is going to grow by almost 2 billion people by 2050,” Marelli says. “Fish provide access to essential nutrition. They are high in protein and healthy fat, which are difficult to make, so the world is trying to produce more fish. But there are many challenges associated with fisheries.”

To prevent losses to disease, farmers use a range of automated and manual vaccination strategies, each with their own drawbacks. Some treatments can go into fish food, but those might not reach every fish. Another method is putting the treatment directly in a pool and immersing the fish in the treated water. That approach requires far higher quantities of treatment and, again, isn’t 100 percent effective.

The most effective way to vaccinate fish is with metal needles. The process requires farmers to sedate the fish, then get them out of the water and onto a conveyor belt, where workers hurry to vaccinate the fish and get them back in the water to minimize harm.

“Workers inject fish one by one,” Li explains. “It’s high intensity, there’s a risk of cross contamination of blood-borne diseases, and workers may accidentally jab themselves because they are working so quickly. So it’s labor intensive, costly, stressful for fish, and dangerous for workers.”

Marelli’s lab has been developing silk microneedles to deliver nutrients to plants for years. The silk has been classified as safe for human consumption in food coatings and can degrade in the body or in the environment over time.

A few years ago, Marelli learned about the challenges with vaccinating fish at a conference in Southeast Asia, where aquaculture is an especially important part of the aquatic food supply. His lab received support from the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) to explore adapting the silk platform he’d developed for underwater use for fish. But the early silk designs would quickly dissolve when exposed to water, releasing the vaccine immediately and failing to penetrate fish skin.

Li, a biomedical engineer, started to work on the project in Marelli’s lab beginning in 2022. In 2024, she received a fellowship from the USDA, which provided funding as well as important connections with collaborators at the agency and beyond. For example, the U.S. Geological Survey gave the researchers access to a DNA vaccine for rainbow trout.

Marelli credits Li with finding a way around silk’s tendency to soften when exposed to water. The system described in the new paper uses a thin layer of shellac, an insect-secreted resin used in food coating and pills, to make silk microneedles water-resistant by providing a moisture barrier that remains intact before fish injection.

“The material choice is critical because we’re dealing with food, even though we expect the microneedle to fall out of the fish or to be degraded in their body,” Li says. “Our criteria were safety for fish and humans alike.”

The researchers showed the microneedles can store a range of vaccines, and they demonstrated different versions of the microneedles that lasted longer in the water or diffused vaccines more quickly.

“In some cases, you may want the vaccine released within 15 minutes, but in others, the release can last 10 or even 24 hours,” Li says. “That could be better for other therapeutic uses beyond vaccines.”

The microneedles were also able to preserve half of the DNA plasmids’ structure when stored for four weeks in dry conditions.

“That stability is important, particularly for the last mile of delivery, because aquaculture is mostly done in rural areas,” Marelli says. “This allows farmers to not need to rely on the infrastructure to maintain the cold chain.”

Protecting fish

Just like terrestrial animal vaccines, fish vaccines are most effective when administered early in life before disease exposure. That means the fish that farmers want to inject are small, further complicating vaccination. The researchers believe their approach could offer a better way to vaccinate small fish, and they tested it in rainbow trout.

“In trout aquaculture, one of the biggest challenges we face is preventing disease early in a fish’s life, because traditional needle‑based vaccination just doesn’t work well until the fish reach about 30 grams, which leaves the smallest juveniles unprotected during a critical growth period,” says Wiens. “What our research shows is food‑grade silk fibroin microneedles can deliver vaccines underwater to fish as small as 1 to 2 grams. We designed these single‑use microneedles to pierce wet skin, stay attached while the fish swim, and release either bacterin or DNA vaccines in a controlled way.”

The researchers say there is still work to be done before their device can be seamlessly used at scale in fish farms. But they believe this paper is an important first step.

“We have all the components to believe this technology could be developed further,” Marelli says. “There are so many challenges with aquaculture and fish vaccination right now. We need to support farmers to operate safely, improve working conditions, protect their business, make vaccination more accessible, and improve the living conditions of farmed fish and ultimately the quality of the food we eat. This new technology could be a much more effective and safer approach.”

The work was supported, in part, by MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In courts across the country, publishers and creators are suing large AI companies for training generative AI models on copyrighted works. It’s easy to see these cases as a David-and-Goliath showdown between authors and publishers fighting for a cut of Big Tech company profits. But this fight is actually much larger. It affects billions of people who aren’t represented in the case at all, including researchers, artists, activists, journalists, people with disabilities, and anyone who accesses and shares content online.   

That’s why EFF is stepping in to defend the public’s rights in these cases. Today, EFF filed an amicus brief in In re OpenAI, explaining how the court’s ruling on fair use could impact people worldwide. If fair use gets narrowed, it will impede work that benefits the public, like medical research and investigative journalism, and even limit access to privacy protection tools.

Let’s be clear: creators and workers deserve support as AI changes their fields, and Big Tech companies must be held accountable for the harms they cause. But giving copyright holders more control over the web won’t accomplish either of these goals. If the plaintiffs prevail in these cases, courts would have to rewrite copyright law in ways that hurt everyone except powerful media and tech companies.

Rewriting Fair Use Makes Everyone Worse Off

Copyright exists for one reason: to stimulate creativity and innovation in service of the greater public good. Unfortunately, the plaintiffs in this lawsuit are arguing to limit everyone’s fair use rights, in ways that would thwart the basic purpose of copyright. The harms of shrinking fair use will go far beyond generative AI, impacting everyone.

Initial speculation that AI models would be infringement machines, churning out works highly similar to those on which they were trained, has proven unfounded. And courts have already found fair use in cases where copyrighted works were used to train generative AI models, recognizing that training uses those works for a fundamentally different purpose.

Plaintiffs in these cases argue that, even if the use is transformative, using their works to train AI is still unfair, because the AI models could generate new, non-infringing works that might compete with plaintiffs’ own works. They also argue that scraping or downloading the data without permission—or in some cases, from websites containing infringing copies—was independently infringing and/or rendered any subsequent uses of that data unfair.

These arguments would put beneficial research and reporting at risk. First, if copying without permission rules out fair use, the law will never protect transformative uses that benefit us all. Researchers, journalists, and other watchdog groups gather information the same way AI companies do—but they do it to serve the public interest, and often to hold Big Tech itself accountable. For example, journalists and nonprofit researchers have used “crawling” or “scraping” to investigate potentially anticompetitive practices by tech companies, and research misinformation and hateful content posted on X. Their data acquisition techniques are virtually identical to those used by AI giants—but they lack those companies’ deep pockets.

Requiring users to show that copyrighted material was lawfully obtained would also threaten everyday internet use. As EFF’s brief explained, that requirement would “cast legal doubt on the billions of copies we collectively make every day through routine online activities like opening emails, clicking on an embedded link, visiting websites, sharing pictures, streaming music, and watching videos. All of this activity requires intermediate copying.”

Fair use is what lets us all use the internet without being compelled to track the source of every image, video, and article that we click on, and make sure the rights are all cleared.

Additionally, while rightsholders are understandably concerned about competition from AI generated works, copyright law exists to promote new creation, not protect authors who published first. Under the plaintiffs’ theory, no one could stand upon the shoulders of giants. Copyright could prevent people from writing new books inspired by themes in a favorite novel or genre, or prevent academic researchers from publishing literature reviews that distill insights from prior research—simply because readers might prefer those new publications over those that came first.

Finally, general-purpose AI models are neither designed nor usually used to create works targeted at any particular market. These models have been used to generate new insights and tools for medicine, science, journalism, art, and accessibility. For instance, an AI-powered tool called Be My AI uses Open AI’s GPT models to provide visual descriptions for people who are blind or have low vision. Generative tools have also accelerated scientific research, and researchers have used these tools to develop new medical treatments and medications for conditions previously thought to be incurable.

Mandatory Licensing Would Entrench Big Tech

Some creators and publishers argue that AI developers should just get a license. But requiring permission for every work used would give the largest companies massive advantages over small competitors and impede academic research. As Professor Lawrence Lessig recently noted:

If all training requires a license, then none but a handful of tech giants will be able to afford the costs of training. That’s not because authors are greedy but because the copyright system is the least efficient property system known to man.

Moreover, creators are unlikely to benefit from these licensing arrangements in many cases. Media and entertainment giants have exploited the imbalance between themselves and underpaid working artists for decades. Trying to help creators by giving them more rights under copyright is, as Cory Doctorow has written, like trying to help a bullied kid by giving them more lunch money for the bully to take. Artists aren’t getting good deals from record labels or publishers now; there’s no reason to think these companies, which already own the copyrights, will treat artists more fairly once they control the data that powers AI.

The Future of AI Is Too Important to Leave to Big Content or Big Tech

AI technologies will affect all of us, and copyright law is ill-equipped to address many of these consequences. The rules governing these technologies should be rules that serve the public—not just the small number of companies that can afford to litigate copyright battles for decades, or settle for billions.

Neat video:

The sighting, announced September 2, marks the first time anyone has spotted a live bigfin squid, which belongs to the Magnapinna genus, in the northeastern Pacific Ocean.

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

Blog moderation policy.

Developers of virtual private network (VPN) apps are reporting that their products are again being pulled from Apple’s App Store in Russia. This is an unacceptable crackdown on a vital tool to protect privacy and speech online.

Why? VPNs give people a way to control their own online activities. When you visit a website through a VPN, that website only sees the VPN server's location (well, IP address) rather than your actual location. It's like sending a letter through a P.O. box so the recipient doesn't know where you really live. It can also disguise where you’re accessing information from, which can make it possible to access information banned by your government.

This is an unacceptable crackdown on a vital tool to protect privacy and speech online.

Going after tools that give people the space to communicate and access information freely is a common tactic from the totalitarian playbook. This latest demand comes after several steps the Russian government’s taken to surveil speech specifically on Apple products. In 2024, the Moscow Times reported that Russia’s state media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, went after VPN apps on the Apple App Store, after banning access to Western social media platforms and blacklisting opposition media sites. Russia then blocked Apple’s FaceTime software in 2025, according to Apple Insider.

Bloomberg also recently reported that the Russian government has added Apple and Microsoft to its state surveillance registry. This gives Roskomnadzor access to local users’ correspondence, Apple Insider reported, and puts both companies in a position to turn over customer information to the country’s security services as required.

With government control encroaching on their devices and less access to tools that give them alternate methods, people in Russia are left with shrinking options to communicate online or find information that isn’t state-sanctioned.

While Russia’s actions offer a more extreme vision of what happens when the government tries to enforce speech rules by attacking vital privacy tools, it is far from the only government doing so. Several states in the U.S., bent on making it difficult to circumvent invasive age-gating laws, have suggested banning VPNs—either to access certain content or in some cases to simply ban them outright. EFF has publicly (and loudly) criticized these proposals, because going after VPNs is a dangerous step down the road of censorship.

Attacks on speech and privacy online are deeply troubling, no matter where they happen. What those in power may see as a “loophole” in their invasive laws is actually an expression of user control. We’ll continue to speak out when we see governments going after them to take that control away.