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.

2025 was a stellar year for EFF’s award-winning podcast, “How to Fix the Internet,” as our sixth season focused on the tools and technology of freedom. 

It seems like everywhere we turn we see dystopian stories about technology’s impact on our lives and our futures—from tracking-based surveillance capitalism, to street level government surveillance, to the dominance of a few large platforms choking innovation, to the growing efforts by authoritarian governments to control what we see and say—the landscape can feel bleak. Exposing and articulating these problems is important, but so is envisioning and then building solutions. That’s where our podcast comes in. 

EFF's How to Fix the Internet podcast offers a better way forward. Through curious conversations with some of the leading minds in law and technology, EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn and Activism Director Jason Kelley explore creative solutions to some of today’s biggest tech challenges. Our sixth season, which ran from May through September, featured: 

• 2025-htfi-kate-b-episode-art.png “Digital Autonomy for Bodily Autonomy” – We all leave digital trails as we navigate the internet—records of what we searched for, what we bought, who we talked to, where we went or want to go in the real world—and those trails usually are owned by the big corporations behind the platforms we use. But what if we valued our digital autonomy the way that we do our bodily autonomy? Digital Defense Fund Director Kate Bertash joined Cindy and Jason to discuss how creativity and community can align to center people in the digital world and make us freer both online and offline. 
• 2025-htfi-molly-episode.png “Love the Internet Before You Hate On It” – There’s a weird belief out there that tech critics hate technology. But do movie critics hate movies? Do food critics hate food? No! The most effective, insightful critics do what they do because they love something so deeply that they want to see it made even better. Molly White—a researcher, software engineer, and writer who focuses on the cryptocurrency industry, blockchains, web3, and other tech joined Cindy and Jason to discuss working toward a human-centered internet that gives everyone a sense of control and interaction; open to all in the way that Wikipedia was (and still is) for her and so many others: not just as a static knowledge resource, but as something in which we can all participate. 
• 2025-htfi-isabela-episode.png “Why Three is Tor's Magic Number” – Many in Silicon Valley, and in U.S. business at large, seem to believe innovation springs only from competition, a race to build the next big thing first, cheaper, better, best. But what if collaboration and community breeds innovation just as well as adversarial competition? Tor Project Executive Director Isabela Fernandes joined Cindy and Jason to discuss the importance of not just accepting technology as it’s given to us, but collaboratively breaking it, tinkering with it, and rebuilding it together until it becomes the technology that we really need to make our world a better place. 
• 2025-htfi-harlo-episode.png “Securing Journalism on the ‘Data-Greedy’ Internet” – Public-interest journalism speaks truth to power, so protecting press freedom is part of protecting democracy. But what does it take to digitally secure journalists’ work in an environment where critics, hackers, oppressive regimes, and others seem to have the free press in their crosshairs? Freedom of the Press Foundation Digital Security Director Harlo Holmes joined Cindy and Jason to discuss the tools and techniques that help journalists protect themselves and their sources while keeping the world informed. 
• 2025-htfi-deirdre-episode.png “Cryptography Makes a Post-Quantum Leap” – The cryptography that protects our privacy and security online relies on the fact that even the strongest computers will take essentially forever to do certain tasks, like factoring prime numbers and finding discrete logarithms which are important for RSA encryption, Diffie-Hellman key exchanges, and elliptic curve encryption. But what happens when those problems—and the cryptography they underpin—are no longer infeasible for computers to solve? Will our online defenses collapse? Research and applied cryptographer Deirdre Connolly joined Cindy and Jason to discuss not only how post-quantum cryptography can shore up those existing walls but also help us find entirely new methods of protecting our information. 
• 2025-htfi-helen-episode.png “Finding the Joy in Digital Security” – Many people approach digital security training with furrowed brows, as an obstacle to overcome. But what if learning to keep your tech safe and secure was consistently playful and fun? People react better to learning and retain more knowledge when they're having a good time. It doesn’t mean the topic isn’t serious—it’s just about intentionally approaching a serious topic with joy. East Africa digital security trainer Helen Andromedon joined Cindy and Jason to discuss making digital security less complicated, more relevant, and more joyful to real users, and encouraging all women and girls to take online safety into their own hands so that they can feel fully present and invested in the digital world. 
• 2025-htfi-kara-episode.png “Smashing the Tech Oligarchy” – Many of the internet’s thorniest problems can be attributed to the concentration of power in a few corporate hands: the surveillance capitalism that makes it profitable to invade our privacy, the lack of algorithmic transparency that turns artificial intelligence and other tech into impenetrable black boxes, the rent-seeking behavior that seeks to monopolize and mega-monetize an existing market instead of creating new products or markets, and much more. Tech journalist and critic Kara Swisher joined Cindy and Jason to discuss regulation that can keep people safe online without stifling innovation, creating an internet that’s transparent and beneficial for all, not just a collection of fiefdoms run by a handful of homogenous oligarchs. 
• 2025-htfi-arvind-episode.jpg “Separating AI Hope from AI Hype” – If you believe the hype, artificial intelligence will soon take all our jobs, or solve all our problems, or destroy all boundaries between reality and lies, or help us live forever, or take over the world and exterminate humanity. That’s a pretty wide spectrum, and leaves a lot of people very confused about what exactly AI can and can’t do. Princeton Professor and “AI Snake Oil” publisher Arvind Narayanan joined Cindy and Jason to discuss how we get to a world in which AI can improve aspects of our lives from education to transportation—if we make some system improvements first—and how AI will likely work in ways that we barely notice but that help us grow and thrive. 
• 2025-htfi-neuro-episode.jpg “Protecting Privacy in Your Brain” – Rapidly advancing "neurotechnology" could offer new ways for people with brain trauma or degenerative diseases to communicate, as the New York Times reported this month, but it also could open the door to abusing the privacy of the most personal data of all: our thoughts. Worse yet, it could allow manipulating how people perceive and process reality, as well as their responses to it—a Pandora’s box of epic proportions. Neuroscientist Rafael Yuste and human rights lawyer Jared Genser, co-founders of The Neurorights Foundation, joined Cindy and Jason to discuss how technology is advancing our understanding of what it means to be human, and the solid legal guardrails they're building to protect the privacy of the mind. 
• 2025-htfi-brewster-episode.jpg “Building and Preserving the Library of Everything” – Access to knowledge not only creates an informed populace that democracy requires but also gives people the tools they need to thrive. And the internet has radically expanded access to knowledge in ways that earlier generations could only have dreamed of—so long as that knowledge is allowed to flow freely. Internet Archive founder and digital librarian Brewster Kahle joined Cindy and Jason to discuss how the free flow of knowledge makes all of us more free.

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.

Earlier this year, both chambers of Congress passed the TAKE IT DOWN Act. This bill, while well-intentioned, gives powerful people a new legal tool to force online platforms to remove lawful speech that they simply don't like. 

The bill, sponsored by Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL), sought to speed up the removal of troubling online content: non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII). The spread of NCII is a serious problem, as is digitally altered NCII, sometimes called “deepfakes.” That’s why 48 states have specific laws criminalizing the distribution of NCII, in addition to the long-existing defamation, harassment, and extortion statutes—all of which can be brought to bear against those who abuse NCII. Congress can and should protect victims of NCII by enforcing and improving these laws. 

Unfortunately, TAKE IT DOWN takes another approach: it creates an unneeded notice-and-takedown system that threatens free expression, user privacy, and due process, without meaningfully addressing the problem it seeks to solve. 

While Congress was still debating the bill, EFF, along with the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), Authors Guild, Demand Progress Action, Fight for the Future, Freedom of the Press Foundation, New America’s Open Technology Institute, Public Knowledge, Restore The Fourth, SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change, TechFreedom, and Woodhull Freedom Foundation, sent a letter to the Senate outlining our concerns with the proposal. 

First, TAKE IT DOWN’s removal provision applies to a much broader category of content—potentially any images involving intimate or sexual content—than the narrower NCII definitions found elsewhere in the law. We worry that bad-faith actors will use the law’s expansive definition to remove lawful speech that is not NCII and may not even contain sexual content. 

Worse, the law contains no protections against frivolous or bad-faith takedown requests. Lawful content—including satire, journalism, and political speech—could be wrongly censored. The law requires that apps and websites remove content within 48 hours or face significant legal risks. That ultra-tight deadline means that small apps or websites will have to comply so quickly to avoid legal risk, that they won’t be able to investigate or verify claims. 

Finally, there are no legal protections for providers when they believe a takedown request was sent in bad faith to target lawful speech. TAKE IT DOWN is a one-way censorship ratchet, and its fast timeline discourages providers from standing up for their users’ free speech rights. 

This new law could lead to the use of automated filters that tend to flag legal content, from commentary to news reporting. Communications providers that offer users end-to-end encrypted messaging, meanwhile, may be served with notices they simply cannot comply with, given the fact that these providers can’t view the contents of messages on their platforms. Platforms could respond by abandoning encryption entirely in order to be able to monitor content, turning private conversations into surveilled spaces.

We asked for several changes to protect legitimate speech that is not NCII, and to include common-sense safeguards for encryption. Thousands of EFF members joined us by writing similar messages to their Senators and Representatives. That resulted in several attempts to offer common-sense amendments during the Committee process. 

However, Congress passed the bill without those needed changes, and it was signed into law in May 2025. The main takedown provisions of the bill will take effect in 2026. We’ll be pushing online platforms to be transparent about the content they take down because of this law, and will be on the watch for takedowns that overreach and censor lawful speech. 

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2025.

This is pretty scary:

Urban VPN Proxy targets conversations across ten AI platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok (xAI), Meta AI.

For each platform, the extension includes a dedicated “executor” script designed to intercept and capture conversations. The harvesting is enabled by default through hardcoded flags in the extension’s configuration.

There is no user-facing toggle to disable this. The only way to stop the data collection is to uninstall the extension entirely.

[…]

The data collection operates independently of the VPN functionality. Whether the VPN is connected or not, the harvesting runs continuously in the background...

States with booming data center construction are seeing spikes in new power needs. Much of it is being met by coal and solar.

Technology firms and their trade groups may not be doing enough to sway an increasingly skeptical public as electricity prices climb.

The year featured unprecedented assaults on state climate action. Democrats also think it showed them a path back to power.

A yearlong assault on federal science programs taught researchers they can't always count on Washington to be a reliable partner.

Nearly $2.8 billion is set for state projects ranging from hybrid ferries to bicycle rebates.

Proposed data centers in the state would require huge amounts of power while likely bringing few long-term jobs.

Campers will start arriving in May, bunking on higher ground than the area where fast-rising waters swept away two cabins this year.

A reliance on Europe’s ERA5 runs counter to Beijing’s push for security and technological independence.

When customers choose earlier delivery dates, the system shifts from optimized routing to getting the package out fastest.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 24 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02532-6

Heatwave attribution in seconds

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 24 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02530-8

Foraging constrained by heat and dark

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 24 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02529-1

Rising lake and reservoir emissions

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 24 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02531-7

Inequalities in resilience and preparedness

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 24 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02508-6

Whether erosion is accelerating or decelerating along Arctic rivers has been unclear, but each trend has distinct implications for the vast amount of carbon stored in permanently frozen soils. Now, research demonstrates that warming air temperatures are driving divergent outcomes for Arctic rivers, causing some to erode their banks more rapidly while others slow down.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 24 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02525-5

Climate change drives displacement and migration across the Americas, particularly exposing Latin American and Caribbean children to compounded health risks. We explore these health impacts, identify gaps in related US healthcare and health policy, and propose recommendations for how they can respond.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 24 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02512-w

Whether rivers are speeding up or slowing down in a warming Arctic is unclear, but has implications for carbon cycling and infrastructure. This study finds divergent behaviour in migration rates for rivers in discontinuous versus continuous permafrost, driven by changes in permafrost thaw and river ice.