Researchers at MIT have developed a noninvasive medical monitoring device powerful enough to detect single cells within blood vessels, yet small enough to wear like a wristwatch. One important aspect of this wearable device is that it can enable continuous monitoring of circulating cells in the human body.

The technology was presented online on March 3 by the journal npj Biosensing and is forthcoming in the journal’s print version.

The device — named CircTrek — was developed by researchers in the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek research group, led by Deblina Sarkar, assistant professor at MIT and AT&T Career Development Chair at the MIT Media Lab. This technology could greatly facilitate early diagnosis of disease, detection of disease relapse, assessment of infection risk, and determination of whether a disease treatment is working, among other medical processes.

Whereas traditional blood tests are like a snapshot of a patient’s condition, CircTrek was designed to present real-time assessment, referred to in the npj Biosensing paper as having been “an unmet goal to date.” A different technology that offers monitoring of cells in the bloodstream with some continuity, in vivo flow cytometry, “requires a room-sized microscope, and patients need to be there for a long time,” says Kyuho Jang, a PhD student in Sarkar’s lab.

CircTrek, on the other hand, which is equipped with an onboard Wi-Fi module, could even monitor a patient’s circulating cells at home and send that information to the patient’s doctor or care team.

“CircTrek offers a path to harnessing previously inaccessible information, enabling timely treatments, and supporting accurate clinical decisions with real-time data,” says Sarkar. “Existing technologies provide monitoring that is not continuous, which can lead to missing critical treatment windows. We overcome this challenge with CircTrek.”

The device works by directing a focused laser beam to stimulate cells beneath the skin that have been fluorescently labeled. Such labeling can be accomplished with a number of methods, including applying antibody-based fluorescent dyes to the cells of interest or genetically modifying such cells so that they express fluorescent proteins.

For example, a patient receiving CAR T cell therapy, in which immune cells are collected and modified in a lab to fight cancer (or, experimentally, to combat HIV or Covid-19), could have those cells labeled at the same time with fluorescent dyes or genetic modification so the cells express fluorescent proteins. Importantly, cells of interest can also be labeled with in vivo labeling methods approved in humans. Once the cells are labeled and circulating in the bloodstream, CircTrek is designed to apply laser pulses to enhance and detect the cells’ fluorescent signal while an arrangement of filters minimizes low-frequency noise such as heartbeats.

“We optimized the optomechanical parts to reduce noise significantly and only capture the signal from the fluorescent cells,” says Jang.

Detecting the labeled CAR T cells, CircTrek could assess whether the cell therapy treatment is working. As an example, persistence of the CAR T cells in the blood after treatment is associated with better outcomes in patients with B-cell lymphoma.

To keep CircTrek small and wearable, the researchers were able to miniaturize the components of the device, such as the circuit that drives the high-intensity laser source and keeps the power level of the laser stable to avoid false readings.

The sensor that detects the fluorescent signals of the labeled cells is also minute, and yet it is capable of detecting a quantity of light equivalent to a single photon, Jang says.

The device’s subcircuits, including the laser driver and the noise filters, were custom-designed to fit on a circuit board measuring just 42 mm by 35 mm, allowing CircTrek to be approximately the same size as a smartwatch.

CircTrek was tested on an in vitro configuration that simulated blood flow beneath human skin, and its single-cell detection capabilities were verified through manual counting with a high-resolution confocal microscope. For the in vitro testing, a fluorescent dye called Cyanine5.5 was employed. That particular dye was selected because it reaches peak activation at wavelengths within skin tissue’s optical window, or the range of wavelengths that can penetrate the skin with minimal scattering.

The safety of the device, particularly the temperature increase on experimental skin tissue caused by the laser, was also investigated. An increase of 1.51 degrees Celsius at the skin surface was determined to be well below heating that would damage tissue, with enough of a margin that even increasing the device’s area of detection, and its power, in order to ensure the observation of at least one blood vessel could be safely permitted.

While clinical translation of CircTrek will require further steps, Jang says its parameters can be modified to broaden its potential, so that doctors could be provided with critical information on nearly any patient.

Nearly 150 years ago, scientists began to imagine how information might flow through the brain based on the shapes of neurons they had seen under the microscopes of the time. With today’s imaging technologies, scientists can zoom in much further, seeing the tiny synapses through which neurons communicate with one another, and even the molecules the cells use to relay their messages. These inside views can spark new ideas about how healthy brains work and reveal important changes that contribute to disease.

This sharper view of biology is not just about the advances that have made microscopes more powerful than ever before. Using methodology developed in the lab of MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research investigator Edward Boyden, researchers around the world are imaging samples that have been swollen to as much as 20 times their original size so their finest features can be seen more clearly.

“It’s a very different way to do microscopy,” says Boyden, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and biological engineering, and a member of the Yang Tan Collective at MIT. “In contrast to the last 300 years of bioimaging, where you use a lens to magnify an image of light from an object, we physically magnify objects themselves.” Once a tissue is expanded, Boyden says, researchers can see more even with widely available, conventional microscopy hardware.

Boyden’s team introduced this approach, which they named expansion microscopy (ExM), in 2015. Since then, they have been refining the method and adding to its capabilities, while researchers at MIT and beyond deploy it to learn about life on the smallest of scales.

“It’s spreading very rapidly throughout biology and medicine,” Boyden says. “It’s being applied to kidney disease, the fruit fly brain, plant seeds, the microbiome, Alzheimer’s disease, viruses, and more.”

Origins of ExM 

To develop expansion microscopy, Boyden and his team turned to hydrogel, a material with remarkable water-absorbing properties that had already been put to practical use; it’s layered inside disposable diapers to keep babies dry. Boyden’s lab hypothesized that hydrogels could retain their structure while they absorbed hundreds of times their original weight in water, expanding the space between their chemical components as they swell.

After some experimentation, Boyden’s team settled on four key steps to enlarging tissue samples for better imaging. First, the tissue must be infused with a hydrogel. Components of the tissue, biomolecules, are anchored to the gel’s web-like matrix, linking them directly to the molecules that make up the gel. Then the tissue is chemically softened and water is added. As the hydrogel absorbs the water, it swells and the tissue expands, growing evenly so the relative positions of its components are preserved.

Boyden and graduate students Fei Chen and Paul Tillberg’s first report on expansion microscopy was published in the journal Science in 2015. In it, the team demonstrated that by spreading apart molecules that had been crowded inside cells, features that would have blurred together under a standard light microscope became separate and distinct. Light microscopes can discriminate between objects that are separated by about 300 nanometers — a limit imposed by the laws of physics. With expansion microscopy, Boyden’s group reported an effective resolution of about 70 nanometers, for a fourfold expansion.

Boyden says this is a level of clarity that biologists need. “Biology is fundamentally, in the end, a nanoscale science,” he says. “Biomolecules are nanoscale, and the interactions between biomolecules are over nanoscale distances. Many of the most important problems in biology and medicine involve nanoscale questions.” Several kinds of sophisticated microscopes, each with their own advantages and disadvantages, can bring this kind of detail to light. But those methods are costly and require specialized skills, making them inaccessible for most researchers. “Expansion microscopy democratizes nanoimaging,” Boyden says. “Now, anybody can go look at the building blocks of life and how they relate to each other.”

Empowering scientists

Since Boyden’s team introduced expansion microscopy in 2015, research groups around the world have published hundreds of papers reporting on discoveries they have made using expansion microscopy. For neuroscientists, the technique has lit up the intricacies of elaborate neural circuits, exposed how particular proteins organize themselves at and across synapses to facilitate communication between neurons, and uncovered changes associated with aging and disease.

It has been equally empowering for studies beyond the brain. Sabrina Absalon uses expansion microscopy every week in her lab at Indiana University School of Medicine to study the malaria parasite, a single-celled organism packed with specialized structures that enable it to infect and live inside its hosts. The parasite is so small, most of those structures can’t be seen with ordinary light microscopy. “So as a cell biologist, I’m losing the biggest tool to infer protein function, organelle architecture, morphology, linked to function, and all those things — which is my eye,” she says. With expansion, she can not only see the organelles inside a malaria parasite, she can watch them assemble and follow what happens to them when the parasite divides. Understanding those processes, she says, could help drug developers find new ways to interfere with the parasite’s life cycle.

Absalon adds that the accessibility of expansion microscopy is particularly important in the field of parasitology, where a lot of research is happening in parts of the world where resources are limited. Workshops and training programs in Africa, South America, and Asia are ensuring the technology reaches scientists whose communities are directly impacted by malaria and other parasites. “Now they can get super-resolution imaging without very fancy equipment,” Absalon says.

Always improving

Since 2015, Boyden’s interdisciplinary lab group has found a variety of creative ways to improve expansion microscopy and use it in new ways. Their standard technique today enables better labeling, bigger expansion factors, and higher-resolution imaging. Cellular features less than 20 nanometers from one another can now be separated enough to appear distinct under a light microscope.

They’ve also adapted their protocols to work with a range of important sample types, from entire roundworms (popular among neuroscientists, developmental biologists, and other researchers) to clinical samples. In the latter regard, they’ve shown that expansion can help reveal subtle signs of disease, which could enable earlier or less-costly diagnoses.

Originally, the group optimized its protocol for visualizing proteins inside cells, by labeling proteins of interest and anchoring them to the hydrogel prior to expansion. With a new way of processing samples, users can now re-stain their expanded samples with new labels for multiple rounds of imaging, so they can pinpoint the positions of dozens of different proteins in the same tissue. That means researchers can visualize how molecules are organized with respect to one another and how they might interact, or survey large sets of proteins to see, for example, what changes with disease.

But better views of proteins were just the beginning for expansion microscopy. “We want to see everything,” Boyden says. “We’d love to see every biomolecule there is, with precision down to atomic scale.” They’re not there yet — but with new probes and modified procedures, it’s now possible to see not just proteins, but also RNA and lipids in expanded tissue samples.

Labeling lipids, including those that form the membranes surrounding cells, means researchers can now see clear outlines of cells in expanded tissues. With the enhanced resolution afforded by expansion, even the slender projections of neurons can be traced through an image. Typically, researchers have relied on electron microscopy, which generates exquisitely detailed pictures but requires expensive equipment, to map the brain’s circuitry. “Now, you can get images that look a lot like electron microscopy images, but on regular old light microscopes — the kind that everybody has access to,” Boyden says.

Boyden says expansion can be powerful in combination with other cutting-edge tools. When expanded samples are used with an ultra-fast imaging method developed by Eric Betzig, an HHMI investigator at the University of California at Berkeley, called lattice light-sheet microscopy, the entire brain of a fruit fly can be imaged at high resolution in just a few days.

And when RNA molecules are anchored within a hydrogel network and then sequenced in place, scientists can see exactly where inside cells the instructions for building specific proteins are positioned, which Boyden’s team demonstrated in a collaboration with Harvard University geneticist George Church and then-MIT-professor Aviv Regev. “Expansion basically upgrades many other technologies’ resolutions,” Boyden says. “You’re doing mass-spec imaging, X-ray imaging, or Raman imaging? Expansion just improved your instrument.”

Expanding possibilities

Ten years past the first demonstration of expansion microscopy’s power, Boyden and his team are committed to continuing to make expansion microscopy more powerful. “We want to optimize it for different kinds of problems, and making technologies faster, better, and cheaper is always important,” he says. But the future of expansion microscopy will be propelled by innovators outside the Boyden lab, too. “Expansion is not only easy to do, it’s easy to modify — so lots of other people are improving expansion in collaboration with us, or even on their own,” Boyden says.

Boyden points to a group led by Silvio Rizzoli at the University Medical Center Göttingen in Germany that, collaborating with Boyden, has adapted the expansion protocol to discern the physical shapes of proteins. At the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, researchers led by Jae-Byum Chang, a former postdoc in Boyden’s group, have worked out how to expand entire bodies of mouse embryos and young zebra fish, collaborating with Boyden to set the stage for examining developmental processes and long-distance neural connections with a new level of detail. And mapping connections within the brain’s dense neural circuits could become easier with light-microscopy based connectomics, an approach developed by Johann Danzl and colleagues at the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria that takes advantage of both the high resolution and molecular information that expansion microscopy can reveal.

“The beauty of expansion is that it lets you see a biological system down to its smallest building blocks,” Boyden says.

His team is intent on pushing the method to its physical limits, and anticipates new opportunities for discovery as they do. “If you can map the brain or any biological system at the level of individual molecules, you might be able to see how they all work together as a network — how life really operates,” he says.

Interesting research: “Guillotine: Hypervisors for Isolating Malicious AIs.”

Abstract:As AI models become more embedded in critical sectors like finance, healthcare, and the military, their inscrutable behavior poses ever-greater risks to society. To mitigate this risk, we propose Guillotine, a hypervisor architecture for sandboxing powerful AI models—models that, by accident or malice, can generate existential threats to humanity. Although Guillotine borrows some well-known virtualization techniques, Guillotine must also introduce fundamentally new isolation mechanisms to handle the unique threat model posed by existential-risk AIs. For example, a rogue AI may try to introspect upon hypervisor software or the underlying hardware substrate to enable later subversion of that control plane; thus, a Guillotine hypervisor requires careful co-design of the hypervisor software and the CPUs, RAM, NIC, and storage devices that support the hypervisor software, to thwart side channel leakage and more generally eliminate mechanisms for AI to exploit reflection-based vulnerabilities. Beyond such isolation at the software, network, and microarchitectural layers, a Guillotine hypervisor must also provide physical fail-safes more commonly associated with nuclear power plants, avionic platforms, and other types of mission critical systems. Physical fail-safes, e.g., involving electromechanical disconnection of network cables, or the flooding of a datacenter which holds a rogue AI, provide defense in depth if software, network, and microarchitectural isolation is compromised and a rogue AI must be temporarily shut down or permanently destroyed. ...

MIT engineers have developed a technique to grow and peel ultrathin “skins” of electronic material. The method could pave the way for new classes of electronic devices, such as ultrathin wearable sensors, flexible transistors and computing elements, and highly sensitive and compact imaging devices. 

As a demonstration, the team fabricated a thin membrane of pyroelectric material — a class of heat-sensing material that produces an electric current in response to changes in temperature. The thinner the pyroelectric material, the better it is at sensing subtle thermal variations.

With their new method, the team fabricated the thinnest pyroelectric membrane yet, measuring 10 nanometers thick, and demonstrated that the film is highly sensitive to heat and radiation across the far-infrared spectrum.

The newly developed film could enable lighter, more portable, and highly accurate far-infrared (IR) sensing devices, with potential applications for night-vision eyewear and autonomous driving in foggy conditions. Current state-of-the-art far-IR sensors require bulky cooling elements. In contrast, the new pyroelectric thin film requires no cooling and is sensitive to much smaller changes in temperature. The researchers are exploring ways to incorporate the film into lighter, higher-precision night-vision glasses.

“This film considerably reduces weight and cost, making it lightweight, portable, and easier to integrate,” Xinyuan Zhang, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). “For example, it could be directly worn on glasses.”

The heat-sensing film could also have applications in environmental and biological sensing, as well as imaging of astrophysical phenomena that emit far-infrared radiation.

What’s more, the new lift-off technique is generalizable beyond pyroelectric materials. The researchers plan to apply the method to make other ultrathin, high-performance semiconducting films.

Their results are reported today in a paper appearing in the journal Nature. The study’s MIT co-authors are first author Xinyuan Zhang, Sangho Lee, Min-Kyu Song, Haihui Lan, Jun Min Suh, Jung-El Ryu, Yanjie Shao, Xudong Zheng, Ne Myo Han, and Jeehwan Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering and of materials science and engineering, along with researchers at the University Wisconsin at Madison led by Professor Chang-Beom Eom and authors from multiple other institutions.

Chemical peel

Kim’s group at MIT is finding new ways to make smaller, thinner, and more flexible electronics. They envision that such ultrathin computing “skins” can be incorporated into everything from smart contact lenses and wearable sensing fabrics to stretchy solar cells and bendable displays. To realize such devices, Kim and his colleagues have been experimenting with methods to grow, peel, and stack semiconducting elements, to fabricate ultrathin, multifunctional electronic thin-film membranes.

One method that Kim has pioneered is “remote epitaxy” — a technique where semiconducting materials are grown on a single-crystalline substrate, with an ultrathin layer of graphene in between. The substrate’s crystal structure serves as a scaffold along which the new material can grow. The graphene acts as a nonstick layer, similar to Teflon, making it easy for researchers to peel off the new film and transfer it onto flexible and stacked electronic devices. After peeling off the new film, the underlying substrate can be reused to make additional thin films.

Kim has applied remote epitaxy to fabricate thin films with various characteristics. In trying different combinations of semiconducting elements, the researchers happened to notice that a certain pyroelectric material, called PMN-PT, did not require an intermediate layer assist in order to separate from its substrate. Just by growing PMN-PT directly on a single-crystalline substrate, the researchers could then remove the grown film, with no rips or tears to its delicate lattice.

“It worked surprisingly well,” Zhang says. “We found the peeled film is atomically smooth.”

Lattice lift-off

In their new study, the MIT and UW Madison researchers took a closer look at the process and discovered that the key to the material’s easy-peel property was lead. As part of its chemical structure, the team, along with colleagues at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, discovered that the pyroelectric film contains an orderly arrangement of lead atoms that have a large “electron affinity,” meaning that lead attracts electrons and prevents the charge carriers from traveling and connecting to another materials such as an underlying substrate. The lead acts as tiny nonstick units, allowing the material as a whole to peel away, perfectly intact.

The team ran with the realization and fabricated multiple ultrathin films of PMN-PT, each about 10 nanometers thin. They peeled off pyroelectric films and transfered them onto a small chip to form an array of 100 ultrathin heat-sensing pixels, each about 60 square microns (about .006 square centimeters). They exposed the films to ever-slighter changes in temperature and found the pixels were highly sensitive to small changes across the far-infrared spectrum.

The sensitivity of the pyroelectric array is comparable to that of state-of-the-art night-vision devices. These devices are currently based on photodetector materials, in which a change in temperature induces the material’s electrons to jump in energy and briefly cross an energy “band gap,” before settling back into their ground state. This electron jump serves as an electrical signal of the temperature change. However, this signal can be affected by noise in the environment, and to prevent such effects, photodetectors have to also include cooling devices that bring the instruments down to liquid nitrogen temperatures.

Current night-vision goggles and scopes are heavy and bulky. With the group’s new pyroelectric-based approach, NVDs could have the same sensitivity without the cooling weight.

The researchers also found that the films were sensitive beyond the range of current night-vision devices and could respond to wavelengths across the entire infrared spectrum. This suggests that the films could be incorporated into small, lightweight, and portable devices for various applications that require different infrared regions. For instance, when integrated into autonomous vehicle platforms, the films could enable cars to “see” pedestrians and vehicles in complete darkness or in foggy and rainy conditions. 

The film could also be used in gas sensors for real-time and on-site environmental monitoring, helping detect pollutants. In electronics, they could monitor heat changes in semiconductor chips to catch early signs of malfunctioning elements.

The team says the new lift-off method can be generalized to materials that may not themselves contain lead. In those cases, the researchers suspect that they can infuse Teflon-like lead atoms into the underlying substrate to induce a similar peel-off effect. For now, the team is actively working toward incorporating the pyroelectric films into a functional night-vision system.

“We envision that our ultrathin films could be made into high-performance night-vision goggles, considering its broad-spectrum infrared sensitivity at room-temperature, which allows for a lightweight design without a cooling system,” Zhang says. “To turn this into a night-vision system, a functional device array should be integrated with readout circuitry. Furthermore, testing in varied environmental conditions is essential for practical applications.”

This work was supported by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

When chemists design new chemical reactions, one useful piece of information involves the reaction’s transition state — the point of no return from which a reaction must proceed.

This information allows chemists to try to produce the right conditions that will allow the desired reaction to occur. However, current methods for predicting the transition state and the path that a chemical reaction will take are complicated and require a huge amount of computational power.

MIT researchers have now developed a machine-learning model that can make these predictions in less than a second, with high accuracy. Their model could make it easier for chemists to design chemical reactions that could generate a variety of useful compounds, such as pharmaceuticals or fuels.

“We’d like to be able to ultimately design processes to take abundant natural resources and turn them into molecules that we need, such as materials and therapeutic drugs. Computational chemistry is really important for figuring out how to design more sustainable processes to get us from reactants to products,” says Heather Kulik, the Lammot du Pont Professor of Chemical Engineering, a professor of chemistry, and the senior author of the new study.

Former MIT graduate student Chenru Duan PhD ’22, who is now at Deep Principle; former Georgia Tech graduate student Guan-Horng Liu, who is now at Meta; and Cornell University graduate student Yuanqi Du are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Machine Intelligence.

Better estimates

For any given chemical reaction to occur, it must go through a transition state, which takes place when it reaches the energy threshold needed for the reaction to proceed. These transition states are so fleeting that they’re nearly impossible to observe experimentally.

As an alternative, researchers can calculate the structures of transition states using techniques based on quantum chemistry. However, that process requires a great deal of computing power and can take hours or days to calculate a single transition state.

“Ideally, we’d like to be able to use computational chemistry to design more sustainable processes, but this computation in itself is a huge use of energy and resources in finding these transition states,” Kulik says.

In 2023, Kulik, Duan, and others reported on a machine-learning strategy that they developed to predict the transition states of reactions. This strategy is faster than using quantum chemistry techniques, but still slower than what would be ideal because it requires the model to generate about 40 structures, then run those predictions through a “confidence model” to predict which states were most likely to occur.

One reason why that model needs to be run so many times is that it uses randomly generated guesses for the starting point of the transition state structure, then performs dozens of calculations until it reaches its final, best guess. These randomly generated starting points may be very far from the actual transition state, which is why so many steps are needed.

The researchers’ new model, React-OT, described in the Nature Machine Intelligence paper, uses a different strategy. In this work, the researchers trained their model to begin from an estimate of the transition state generated by linear interpolation — a technique that estimates each atom’s position by moving it halfway between its position in the reactants and in the products, in three-dimensional space.

“A linear guess is a good starting point for approximating where that transition state will end up,” Kulik says. “What the model’s doing is starting from a much better initial guess than just a completely random guess, as in the prior work.”

Because of this, it takes the model fewer steps and less time to generate a prediction. In the new study, the researchers showed that their model could make predictions with only about five steps, taking about 0.4 seconds. These predictions don’t need to be fed through a confidence model, and they are about 25 percent more accurate than the predictions generated by the previous model.

“That really makes React-OT a practical model that we can directly integrate to the existing computational workflow in high-throughput screening to generate optimal transition state structures,” Duan says.

“A wide array of chemistry”

To create React-OT, the researchers trained it on the same dataset that they used to train their older model. These data contain structures of reactants, products, and transition states, calculated using quantum chemistry methods, for 9,000 different chemical reactions, mostly involving small organic or inorganic molecules.

Once trained, the model performed well on other reactions from this set, which had been held out of the training data. It also performed well on other types of reactions that it hadn’t been trained on, and could make accurate predictions involving reactions with larger reactants, which often have side chains that aren’t directly involved in the reaction.

“This is important because there are a lot of polymerization reactions where you have a big macromolecule, but the reaction is occurring in just one part. Having a model that generalizes across different system sizes means that it can tackle a wide array of chemistry,” Kulik says.

The researchers are now working on training the model so that it can predict transition states for reactions between molecules that include additional elements, including sulfur, phosphorus, chlorine, silicon, and lithium.

“To quickly predict transition state structures is key to all chemical understanding,” says Markus Reiher, a professor of theoretical chemistry at ETH Zurich, who was not involved in the study. “The new approach presented in the paper could very much accelerate our search and optimization processes, bringing us faster to our final result. As a consequence, also less energy will be consumed in these high-performance computing campaigns. Any progress that accelerates this optimization benefits all sorts of computational chemical research.”

The MIT team hopes that other scientists will make use of their approach in designing their own reactions, and have created an app for that purpose.

“Whenever you have a reactant and product, you can put them into the model and it will generate the transition state, from which you can estimate the energy barrier of your intended reaction, and see how likely it is to occur,” Duan says.

The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Department of Defense Basic Research Office, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

The billionaire funded an XPrize for carbon removal. But he won't be at the ceremony announcing the winner Wednesday.

Work already had begun on Empire Wind, a 54-turbine project that could generate enough electricity to power 500,000 homes.

The move reflects President Donald Trump's effort to root out climate-related offices from the government.

A cap-and-trade program by the world's fifth-largest carbon emitter could encourage other developing nations to take climate action.

John Kleinheinz, a Republican donor and investment banker, took over the $30 billion project as the Trump administration clawed back Biden-era railway grants.

But the state argues more transparency about planet-warming emissions is needed so investors and consumers can "make prudent financial decisions."

The retirement fund has $26.5 billion in climate-related index funds, green bonds and investments that target renewable energy.

AtmosZero's electric boiler will shave off about 9 percent of its carbon emissions, says New Belgium Brewing.

The pontiff pointed to a 2007 meeting of bishops in Aparecida, Brazil, as the moment of his ecological awakening. He died Monday at the age of 88.

Sales growth for battery-powered two- and three-wheelers is finally giving the sector some momentum.

In metamaterials design, the name of the game has long been “stronger is better.”

Metamaterials are synthetic materials with microscopic structures that give the overall material exceptional properties. A huge focus has been in designing metamaterials that are stronger and stiffer than their conventional counterparts. But there’s a trade-off: The stiffer a material, the less flexible it is.

MIT engineers have now found a way to fabricate a metamaterial that is both strong and stretchy. The base material is typically highly rigid and brittle, but it is printed in precise, intricate patterns that form a structure that is both strong and flexible.

The key to the new material’s dual properties is a combination of stiff microscopic struts and a softer woven architecture. This microscopic “double network,” which is printed using a plexiglass-like polymer, produced a material that could stretch over four times its size without fully breaking. In comparison, the polymer in other forms has little to no stretch and shatters easily once cracked.

The researchers say the new double-network design can be applied to other materials, for instance to fabricate stretchy ceramics, glass, and metals. Such tough yet bendy materials could be made into tear-resistant textiles, flexible semiconductors, electronic chip packaging, and durable yet compliant scaffolds on which to grow cells for tissue repair.

“We are opening up this new territory for metamaterials,” says Carlos Portela, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Associate Professor at MIT. “You could print a double-network metal or ceramic, and you could get a lot of these benefits, in that it would take more energy to break them, and they would be significantly more stretchable.”

Portela and his colleagues report their findings today in the journal Nature Materials. His MIT co-authors include first author James Utama Surjadi as well as Bastien Aymon and Molly Carton.

Inspired gel

Along with other research groups, Portela and his colleagues have typically designed metamaterials by printing or nanofabricating microscopic lattices using conventional polymers similar to plexiglass and ceramic. The specific pattern, or architecture, that they print can impart exceptional strength and impact resistance to the resulting metamaterial.

Several years ago, Portela was curious whether a metamaterial could be made from an inherently stiff material, but be patterned in a way that would turn it into a much softer, stretchier version.

“We realized that the field of metamaterials has not really tried to make an impact in the soft matter realm,” he says. “So far, we’ve all been looking for the stiffest and strongest materials possible.”

Instead, he looked for a way to synthesize softer, stretchier metamaterials. Rather than printing microscopic struts and trusses, similar to those of conventional lattice-based metamaterials, he and his team made an architecture of interwoven springs, or coils. They found that, while the material they used was itself stiff like plexiglass, the resulting woven metamaterial was soft and springy, like rubber.

“They were stretchy, but too soft and compliant,” Portela recalls.

In looking for ways to bulk up their softer metamaterial, the team found inspiration in an entirely different material: hydrogel. Hydrogels are soft, stretchy, Jell-O-like materials that are composed of mostly water and a bit of polymer structure. Researchers including groups at MIT have devised ways to make hydrogels that are both soft and stretchy, and also tough. They do so by combining polymer networks with very different properties, such as a network of molecules that is naturally stiff,  which gets chemically cross-linked with another molecular network that is inherently soft. Portela and his colleagues wondered whether such a double-network design could be adapted to metamaterials.

“That was our ‘aha’ moment,” Portela says. “We thought: Can we get inspiration from these hydrogels to create a metamaterial with similar stiff and stretchy properties?”

Strut and weave

For their new study, the team fabricated a metamaterial by combining two microscopic architectures. The first is a rigid, grid-like scaffold of struts and trusses. The second is a pattern of coils that weave around each strut and truss. Both networks are made from the same acrylic plastic and are printed in one go, using a high-precision, laser-based printing technique called two-photon lithography.

The researchers printed samples of the new double-network-inspired metamaterial, each measuring in size from several square microns to several square millimeters. They put the material through a series of stress tests, in which they attached either end of the sample to a specialized nanomechanical press and measured the force it took to pull the material apart. They also recorded high-resolution videos to observe the locations and ways in which the material stretched and tore as it was pulled apart.

They found their new double-network design was able stretch three times its own length, which also happened to be 10 times farther compared to a conventional lattice-patterned metamaterial printed with the same acrylic plastic. Portela says the new material’s stretchy resistance comes from the interactions between the material’s rigid struts and the messier, coiled weave as the material is stressed and pulled.

“Think of this woven network as a mess of spaghetti tangled around a lattice. As we break the monolithic lattice network, those broken parts come along for the ride, and now all this spaghetti gets entangled with the lattice pieces,” Portela explains. “That promotes more entanglement between woven fibers, which means you have more friction and more energy dissipation.”

In other words, the softer structure wound throughout the material’s rigid lattice takes on more stress thanks to multiple knots or entanglements promoted by the cracked struts. As this stress spreads unevenly through the material, an initial crack is unlikely to go straight through and quickly tear the material. What’s more, the team found that if they introduced strategic holes, or “defects,” in the metamaterial, they could further dissipate any stress that the material undergoes, making it even stretchier and more resistant to tearing apart.

“You might think this makes the material worse,” says study co-author Surjadi. “But we saw once we started adding defects, we doubled the amount of stretch we were able to do, and tripled the amount of energy that we dissipated. That gives us a material that’s both stiff and tough, which is usually a contradiction.”

The team has developed a computational framework that can help engineers estimate how a metamaterial will perform given the pattern of its stiff and stretchy networks. They envision such a blueprint will be useful in designing tear-proof textiles and fabrics.

“We also want to try this approach on more brittle materials, to give them multifunctionality,” Portela says. “So far we’ve talked of mechanical properties, but what if we could also make them conductive, or responsive to temperature? For that, the two networks could be made from different polymers, that respond to temperature in different ways, so that a fabric can open its pores or become more compliant when it’s warm and can be more rigid when it’s cold. That’s something we can explore now.”

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the MIT MechE MathWorks Seed Fund. This work was performed, in part, through the use of MIT.nano’s facilities.

This is the first part of a three-part series about age verification in the European Union. In this blog post, we give an overview of the political debate around age verification and explore the age verification proposal introduced by the European Commission, based on digital identities. Part two takes a closer look at the European Commission’s age verification app, and part three explores measures to keep all users safe that do not require age checks. 

As governments across the world pass laws to “keep children safe online,” more times than not, notions of safety rest on the ability of platforms, websites, and online entities being able to discern users by age. This legislative trend has also arrived in the European Union, where online child safety is becoming one of the issues that will define European tech policy for years to come. 

Like many policymakers elsewhere, European regulators are increasingly focused on a range of online harms they believe are associated with online platforms, such as compulsive design and the effects of social media consumption on children’s and teenagers’ mental health. Many of these concerns lack robust scientific evidence; studies have drawn a far more complex and nuanced picture about how social media and young people’s mental health interact. Still, calls for mandatory age verification have become as ubiquitous as they have become trendy. Heads of state in France and Denmark have recently called for banning under 15 year olds from social media Europe-wide, while Germany, Greece and Spain are working on their own age verification pilots. 

EFF has been fighting age verification mandates because they undermine the free expression rights of adults and young people alike, create new barriers to internet access, and put at risk all internet users’ privacy, anonymity, and security. We do not think that requiring service providers to verify users’ age is the right approach to protecting people online. 

Policy makers frame age verification as a necessary tool to prevent children from accessing content deemed unsuitable, to be able to design online services appropriate for children and teenagers, and to enable minors to participate online in age appropriate ways. Rarely is it acknowledged that age verification undermines the privacy and free expression rights of all users, routinely blocks access to resources that can be life saving, and undermines the development of media literacy. Rare, too, are critical conversations about the specific rights of young users: The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child clearly expresses that minors have rights to freedom of expression and access to information online, as well as the right to privacy. These rights are reflected in the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, which establishes the rights to privacy, data protection and free expression for all European citizens, including children. These rights would be steamrolled by age verification requirements. And rarer still are policy discussions of ways to improve these rights for young people.

Implicitly Mandatory Age Verification

Currently, there is no legal obligation to verify users’ age in the EU. However, different European legal acts that recently entered into force or are being discussed implicitly require providers to know users’ ages or suggest age assessments as a measure to mitigate risks for minors online. At EFF, we consider these proposals akin to mandates because there is often no alternative method to comply except to introduce age verification. 

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), in practice, providers will often need to implement some form of age verification or age assurance (depending on the type of service and risks involved): Article 8 stipulates that the processing of personal data of children under the age of 16 requires parental consent. Thus, service providers are implicitly required to make reasonable efforts to assess users’ ages – although the law doesn’t specify what “reasonable efforts” entails. 

Another example is the child safety article (Article 28) of the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s recently adopted new legal framework for online platforms. It requires online platforms to take appropriate and proportionate measures to ensure a high level of safety, privacy and security of minors on their services. The article also prohibits targeting minors with personalized ads. The DSA acknowledges that there is an inherent tension between ensuring a minor’s privacy, and taking measures to protect minors specifically, but it's presently unclear which measures providers must take to comply with these obligations. Recital 71 of the DSA states that service providers should not be incentivized to collect the age of their users, and Article 28(3) makes a point of not requiring service providers to collect and process additional data to assess whether a user is underage. The European Commission is currently working on guidelines for the implementation of Article 28 and may come up with criteria for what they believe would be effective and privacy-preserving age verification. 

The DSA does explicitly name age verification as one measure the largest platforms – so called Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) that have more than 45 million monthly users in the EU – can choose to mitigate systemic risks related to their services. Those risks, while poorly defined, include negative impacts on the protection of minors and users’ physical and mental wellbeing. While this is also not an explicit obligation, the European Commission seems to expect adult content platforms to adopt age verification to comply with their risk mitigation obligations under the DSA. 

Adding another layer of complexity, age verification is a major element of the dangerous European Commission proposal to fight child sexual abuse material through mandatory scanning of private and encrypted communication. While the negotiations of this bill have largely stalled, the Commission’s original proposal puts an obligation on app stores and interpersonal communication services (think messaging apps or email) to implement age verification. While the European Parliament has followed the advice of civil society organizations and experts and has rejected the notion of mandatory age verification in its position on the proposal, the Council, the institution representing member states, is still considering mandatory age verification. 

Digital Identities and Age Verification 

Leaving aside the various policy work streams that implicitly or explicitly consider whether age verification should be introduced across the EU, the European Commission seems to have decided on the how: Digital identities.

In 2024, the EU adopted the updated version of the so-called eIDAS Regulation, which sets out a legal framework for digital identities and authentication in Europe. Member States are now working on national identity wallets, with the goal of rolling out digital identities across the EU by 2026.

Despite the imminent roll out of digital identities in 2026, which could facilitate age verification, the European Commission clearly felt pressure to act sooner than that. That’s why, in the fall of 2024, the Commission published a tender for a “mini-ID wallet”, offering four million euros in exchange for the development of an “age verification solution” by the second quarter of 2025 to appease Member States anxious to introduce age verification today. 

Favoring digital identities for age verification follows an overarching trend to push obligations to conduct age assessments continuously further down in the stack – from apps to app stores to operating service providers. Dealing with age verification at the app store, device, or operating system level is also a demand long made by providers of social media and dating apps seeking to avoid liability for insufficient age verification. Embedding age verification at the device level will make it more ubiquitous and harder to avoid. This is a dangerous direction; digital identity systems raise serious concerns about privacy and equity.

This approach will likely also lead to mission creep: While the Commission limits its tender to age verification for 18+ services (specifically adult content websites), it is made abundantly clear that once available, age verification could be extended to “allow age-appropriate access whatever the age-restriction (13 or over, 16 or over, 65 or over, under 18 etc)”. Extending age verification is even more likely when digital identity wallets don’t come in the shape of an app, but are baked into operating systems. 

In the next post of this series, we will be taking a closer look at the age verification app the European Commission has been working on.

Amama has lived in a rural region of northern Ghana all her life. In 2022, she went into labor with her first child. Women in the region traditionally give birth at home with the help of a local birthing attendant, but Amama experienced last-minute complications, and the decision was made to go to a hospital. Unfortunately, there were no ambulances in the community and the nearest hospital was 30 minutes away, so Amama was forced to take a motorcycle taxi, leaving her husband and caregiver behind.

Amama spent the next 30 minutes traveling over bumpy dirt roads to get to the hospital. She was in pain and afraid. When she arrived, she learned her child had not survived.

Unfortunately, Amama’s story is not unique. Around the world, more than 700 women die every day due to preventable pregnancy and childbirth complications. A lack of transportation to hospitals contributes to those deaths.

Moving Health was founded by MIT students to give people like Amama a safer way to get to the hospital. The company, which was started as part of a class at MIT D-Lab, works with local communities in rural Ghana to offer a network of motorized tricycle ambulances to communities that lack emergency transportation options.

The locally made ambulances are designed for the challenging terrain of rural Ghana, equipped with medical supplies, and have space for caregivers and family members.

“We’re providing the first rural-focused emergency transportation network,” says Moving Health CEO and co-founder Emily Young ’18. “We’re trying to provide emergency transportation coverage for less cost and with a vehicle tailored to local needs. When we first started, a report estimated there were 55 ambulances in the country of over 30 million people. Now, there is more coverage, but still the last mile areas of the country do not have access to reliable emergency transportation.”

Today, Moving Health’s ambulances and emergency transportation network cover more than 100,000 people in northern Ghana who previously lacked reliable medical transportation.

One of those people is Amama. During her most recent pregnancy, she was able to take a Moving Health ambulance to the hospital. This time, she traveled in a sanitary environment equipped with medical supplies and surrounded by loved ones. When she arrived, she gave birth to healthy twins.

From class project to company

Young and Sade Nabahe ’17, SM ’21 met while taking Course 2.722J (D-Lab: Design), which challenges students to think like engineering consultants on international projects. Their group worked on ways to transport pregnant women in remote areas of Tanzania to hospitals more safely and quickly. Young credits D-Lab instructor Matt McCambridge with helping students explore the project outside of class. Fellow Moving Health co-founder Eva Boal ’18 joined the effort the following year.

The early idea was to build a trailer that could attach to any motorcycle and be used to transport women. Following the early class projects, the students received funding from MIT’s PKG Center and the MIT Undergraduate Giving Campaign, which they used to travel to Tanzania in the following year’s Independent Activities Period (IAP). That’s when they built their first prototype in the field.

The founders realized they needed to better understand the problem from the perspective of locals and interviewed over 250 pregnant women, clinicians, motorcycle drivers, and birth attendants.

“We wanted to make sure the community was leading the charge to design what this solution should be. We had to learn more from the community about why emergency transportation doesn’t work in these areas,” Young says. “We ended up redesigning our vehicle completely.”

Following their graduation from MIT in 2018, the founders bought one-way tickets to Tanzania and deployed a new prototype. A big part of their plans was creating a product that could be manufactured by the community to support the local economy.

Nabahe and Boal left the company in 2020, but word spread of Moving Health’s mission, and Young received messages from organizations in about 15 different countries interested in expanding the company’s trials.

Young found the most alignment in Ghana, where she met two local engineers, Ambra Jiberu and Sufiyanu Imoro, who were building cars from scratch and inventing innovative agricultural technologies. With these two engineers joining the team, she was confident they had the team to build a solution in Ghana.

Taking what they’d learned in Tanzania, the new team set up hundreds of interviews and focus groups to understand the Ghanaian health system. The team redesigned their product to be a fully motorized tricycle based on the most common mode of transportation in northern Ghana. Today Moving Health focuses solely on Ghana, with local manufacturing and day-to-day operations led by Country Director and CTO Isaac Quansah.

Moving Health is focused on building a holistic emergency transportation network. To do this, Moving Health’s team sets up community-run dispatch systems, which involves organizing emergency phone numbers, training community health workers, dispatchers, and drivers, and integrating all of that within the existing health care system. The company also conducts educational campaigns in the communities it serves.

Moving Health officially launched its ambulances in 2023. The ambulance has an enclosed space for patients, family members, and medical providers and includes a removable stretcher along with supplies like first aid equipment, oxygen, IVs, and more. It costs about one-tenth the price of a traditional ambulance.

“We’ve built a really cool, small-volume manufacturing facility, led by our local engineering team, that has incredible quality,” Young says. “We also have an apprenticeship program that our two lead engineers run that allows young people to learn more hard skills. We want to make sure we’re providing economic opportunities in these communities. It’s very much a Ghanaian-made solution.”

Unlike the national ambulances, Moving Health’s ambulances are stationed in rural communities, at community health centers, to enable faster response times.

“When the ambulances are stationed in these people’s communities, at their local health centers, it makes all the difference,” Young says. “We’re trying to create an emergency transportation solution that is not only geared toward rural areas, but also focused on pregnancy and prioritizing women’s voices about what actually works in these areas.”

A lifeline for mothers

When Young first got to Ghana, she met Sahada, a local woman who shared the story of her first birth at the age of 18. Sahada had intended to give birth in her community with the help of a local birthing attendant, but she began experiencing so much pain during labor the attendant advised her to go to the nearest hospital. With no ambulances or vehicles in town, Sahada’s husband called a motorcycle driver, who took her alone on the three-hour drive to the nearest hospital.

“It was rainy, extremely muddy, and she was in a lot of pain,” Young recounts. “She was already really worried for her baby, and then the bike slips and they crash. They get back on, covered in mud, she has no idea if the baby survived, and finally gets to the maternity ward.”

Sahada was able to give birth to a healthy baby boy, but her story stuck with Young.

“The experience was extremely traumatic, and what’s really crazy is that counts as a successful birth statistic,” Young says. “We hear that kind of story a lot.”

This year, Moving Health plans to expand into a new region of northern Ghana. The team is also exploring other ways their network can provide health care to rural regions. But no matter how the company evolves, the team remain grateful to have seen their D-Lab project turn into such an impactful solution.

“Our long-term vision is to prove that this can work on a national level and supplement the existing health system,” Young says. “Then we’re excited to explore mobile health care outreach and other transportation solutions. We’ve always been focused on maternal health, but we’re staying cognizant of other community ideas that might be able to help improve health care more broadly.”

MIT researchers have created a periodic table that shows how more than 20 classical machine-learning algorithms are connected. The new framework sheds light on how scientists could fuse strategies from different methods to improve existing AI models or come up with new ones.

For instance, the researchers used their framework to combine elements of two different algorithms to create a new image-classification algorithm that performed 8 percent better than current state-of-the-art approaches.

The periodic table stems from one key idea: All these algorithms learn a specific kind of relationship between data points. While each algorithm may accomplish that in a slightly different way, the core mathematics behind each approach is the same.

Building on these insights, the researchers identified a unifying equation that underlies many classical AI algorithms. They used that equation to reframe popular methods and arrange them into a table, categorizing each based on the approximate relationships it learns.

Just like the periodic table of chemical elements, which initially contained blank squares that were later filled in by scientists, the periodic table of machine learning also has empty spaces. These spaces predict where algorithms should exist, but which haven’t been discovered yet.

The table gives researchers a toolkit to design new algorithms without the need to rediscover ideas from prior approaches, says Shaden Alshammari, an MIT graduate student and lead author of a paper on this new framework.

“It’s not just a metaphor,” adds Alshammari. “We’re starting to see machine learning as a system with structure that is a space we can explore rather than just guess our way through.”

She is joined on the paper by John Hershey, a researcher at Google AI Perception; Axel Feldmann, an MIT graduate student; William Freeman, the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and senior author Mark Hamilton, an MIT graduate student and senior engineering manager at Microsoft. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.

An accidental equation

The researchers didn’t set out to create a periodic table of machine learning.

After joining the Freeman Lab, Alshammari began studying clustering, a machine-learning technique that classifies images by learning to organize similar images into nearby clusters.

She realized the clustering algorithm she was studying was similar to another classical machine-learning algorithm, called contrastive learning, and began digging deeper into the mathematics. Alshammari found that these two disparate algorithms could be reframed using the same underlying equation.

“We almost got to this unifying equation by accident. Once Shaden discovered that it connects two methods, we just started dreaming up new methods to bring into this framework. Almost every single one we tried could be added in,” Hamilton says.

The framework they created, information contrastive learning (I-Con), shows how a variety of algorithms can be viewed through the lens of this unifying equation. It includes everything from classification algorithms that can detect spam to the deep learning algorithms that power LLMs.

The equation describes how such algorithms find connections between real data points and then approximate those connections internally.

Each algorithm aims to minimize the amount of deviation between the connections it learns to approximate and the real connections in its training data.

They decided to organize I-Con into a periodic table to categorize algorithms based on how points are connected in real datasets and the primary ways algorithms can approximate those connections.

“The work went gradually, but once we had identified the general structure of this equation, it was easier to add more methods to our framework,” Alshammari says.

A tool for discovery

As they arranged the table, the researchers began to see gaps where algorithms could exist, but which hadn’t been invented yet.

The researchers filled in one gap by borrowing ideas from a machine-learning technique called contrastive learning and applying them to image clustering. This resulted in a new algorithm that could classify unlabeled images 8 percent better than another state-of-the-art approach.

They also used I-Con to show how a data debiasing technique developed for contrastive learning could be used to boost the accuracy of clustering algorithms.

In addition, the flexible periodic table allows researchers to add new rows and columns to represent additional types of datapoint connections.

Ultimately, having I-Con as a guide could help machine learning scientists think outside the box, encouraging them to combine ideas in ways they wouldn’t necessarily have thought of otherwise, says Hamilton.

“We’ve shown that just one very elegant equation, rooted in the science of information, gives you rich algorithms spanning 100 years of research in machine learning. This opens up many new avenues for discovery,” he adds.

“Perhaps the most challenging aspect of being a machine-learning researcher these days is the seemingly unlimited number of papers that appear each year. In this context, papers that unify and connect existing algorithms are of great importance, yet they are extremely rare. I-Con provides an excellent example of such a unifying approach and will hopefully inspire others to apply a similar approach to other domains of machine learning,” says Yair Weiss, a professor in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who was not involved in this research.

This research was funded, in part, by the Air Force Artificial Intelligence Accelerator, the National Science Foundation AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, and Quanta Computer.

We've seen plenty of bad tech bills in recent years, often cloaked in vague language about "online safety." But Florida’s SB 868 doesn’t even pretend to be subtle: the state wants a backdoor into encrypted platforms if minors use them, and for law enforcement to have easy access to your messages.

This bill should set off serious alarm bells for anyone who cares about digital rights, secure communication, or simply the ability to message someone privately without the government listening. Florida lawmakers aren’t just chipping away at digital privacy—they're aiming a wrecking ball straight at it.

TAKE ACTION

SB 868 is a blatant attack on encrypted communication. Since we last wrote about the bill, the situation has gotten worse. The bill and its House companion have both sailed through their committees and are headed to a full vote. That means, if passed, SB 868 would:

• Force social media platforms to decrypt teens’ private messages, breaking end-to-end encryption
• Ban “disappearing” messages, a common privacy feature that helps users—especially teens—control their digital footprint
• Allow unrestricted parental access to private messages, overriding Florida’s own two-party consent laws for surveillance
• Likely pressure platforms to remove encryption for all minors, which also puts everyone they talk to at risk

In short: if your kid loses their right to encrypted communication, so does everyone they talk to. 

There Is No Safe Backdoor

If this all sounds impossible to do safely, that’s because it is. There’s no way to create a “just for law enforcement” access point into encrypted messages. Every backdoor is a vulnerability. It's only a matter of time before someone else—whether a hacker, abuser, or foreign government—finds it. Massive breaches like Salt Typhoon have already proven that surveillance tools don’t stay in the right hands for long. Encryption either protects everyone—or it protects no one. We must protect it.

Encryption Matters—Especially for Teens

Encryption isn’t optional in today’s internet—it’s essential. It protects your banking info, your health data, your personal chats, and yes, your kids' safety online. 

SB 868 pretends to “protect children,” but does the opposite. Teens often need encrypted messaging to talk to trusted adults, friends, and family—sometimes in high-stakes situations like abuse, mental health crises, or discrimination. Stripping away those safeguards makes them more vulnerable, not less.

Investigators already have powerful tools to pursue serious crimes, including the ability to access device-level data and rely on user reports. In fact, studies show user reporting is more effective at catching online abuse than mass surveillance. So why push a bill that makes everyone less safe, weakens encryption, and invites lawsuits? That’s a question we all deserve an answer to.

It’s Time to Speak Up

Florida’s SB 868 isn’t just a bad bill—it’s a dangerous blueprint for mass surveillance. Tell Florida Legislators: SB 868 is unsafe, unworkable, and unacceptable.

If you live in Florida, contact your lawmakers and demand they reject this attack on encryption. 

TAKE ACTION

If you're outside the state, you can still speak out—public pressure matters, and the more people who call out how egregious this bill is, the harder it becomes for lawmakers to quietly push it forward. Make sure you follow us on social media to track the bills’ progress and help amplify the message.

Privacy is worth fighting for. Let’s stop SB 868 before it becomes law.