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.

Recognizing the Worst in Government Transparency 

The Foilies were written by EFF's Beryl Lipton, Dave Maass and Aaron Mackey and MuckRock's  Dillon Bergin, Kelly Kauffman and Anna Massoglia. 

For the last six years, a class of journalism students at the University of Nevada, Reno, has kicked off each semester by filing their first Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The assignment: Request copies of complaints sent to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) about their favorite TV show, a local radio station, or a major broadcast event, such as the Grammys or the Super Bowl halftime show. The students are learning that the federal government and every state have laws establishing the public's right to request and receive public records. It's a bedrock principle of democracy: If a government belongs to the people, so do its documents. 

In the past, the FCC always provided records within a few weeks, if not days. But that changed in September when students requested consumer complaints filed against NPR and PBS stations to see if there was absolutely anything at all to merit defunding public media. Seven months later — crickets. 

Now the students are learning to persevere even when public officials demonstrate an utter disdain for transparency. And The Foilies are here for it. 

Established in 2015, The Foilies are an annual project by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and MuckRock to recognize the agencies, officials and contractors that thwart the public's right to know. We give out these tongue-in-cheek "awards" during Sunshine Week (March 15-21), a collective effort by media and advocacy organizations to highlight the importance of open government.  

This year, we've got a few "winners" whose behavior defies belief. 

But it's not all negative. Those same Reno students are also assigned to file public records requests for restaurant health inspections. This semester, the records started to show up in their inboxes within 20 minutes. 

If every agency followed Northern Nevada Public Health's example, we could sunset this Sunshine Week project. 

Quick links:

• The Love Letters Award - Gov. Greg Abbott
• The Surcharge, Eh? Award - Vancouver, B.C.
• The Shady Screenshot Award - Department of Homeland Security
• The Discardment of Government Efficiency Award - DOGE
• The Secret Eyes in the Sky Award - Chula Vista Police Department, Calif.
• The City of Darkness Award - Richmond, Va.
• The Flock You Awards - Multiple Winners
• The Database Deletion Award - Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, formerly of Opexus

The Love Letters Award - Gov. Greg Abbott 

Last spring, the office of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott withheld communications between himself and one of the state’s most powerful business figures, Elon Musk. The office claimed that the communications were exempt from public records law because they would reveal confidential legal and policy discussions, including how the state entices private companies to do business in Texas, or “intimate and embarrassing” information.

The claims were unelaborated boilerplate language based on exemptions in Texas’ public records law. But if you’re wondering what "intimate" and “embarrassing” exchanges Abbott and Elon Musk shared over email, you may be waiting a while. 

Last fall, the Office of the Texas Attorney General ordered Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office to release nearly 1,400 pages of communications between Abbott and Musk. About 1,200 of those pages were fully redacted–just sheets of gray obscuration. The records that were released don’t reveal much more than an invitation to a happy hour or a reminder of the next SpaceX launch.

The Surcharge, Eh? Award - Vancouver, B.C. 

Vancouver residents must now pay twice for public records. Despite taxes already funding the creation and storage of government records, the City Council approved charging people $10 Canadian (about $7.33 in the United States) every time they ask for “non-personal” public records.

Officials claim the fee is necessary to deter misuse and cover some administrative costs. The only people abusing anything, however, are the officials who imposed this tax on the public. The message Vancouver is sending is as crisp as a newly minted $10 note: Secrecy is a higher priority than public accountability.

The Shady Screenshot Award - Department of Homeland Security 

The Department of Homeland Security’s banner year of lawlessness included backsliding on its transparency obligations.

In response to a request from the nonprofit American Oversight, DHS stated that it was no longer automatically archiving text messages sent between officials. The department clarified that it had a new, and much worse, records retention policy. Instead of archiving officials’ text messages as the agency had done before, DHS now asks officials to take screenshots of any text messages conducting government business on their work phones. 

It’s hard to see the change as anything more than a giant middle finger to the public, especially because the Federal Records Act requires agencies to retain all records officials create while conducting their public duties, regardless of format. We won’t hold our breath waiting on DHS officials to dutifully press the volume and power button on their phones to record every text message they send and receive. 

The Discardment of Government Efficiency Award - DOGE 

As the Trump administration took over last year, there was a looming threat over government transparency: the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE. 

Billionaire Elon Musk, soon to be the de facto leader of DOGE, proudly claimed “there should be no need for FOIA requests” and “all government data should be default public for maximum transparency.” What quickly became apparent was there may be no need for FOIA requests, because there may be no FOIA officers to fulfill those requests.

DOGE quickly went to work slashing through the federal government, including seizing control of the U.S. Institute of Peace. Part of the takeover included restricting access to the agency’s FOIA system and firing the employees responsible for fulfilling FOIA requests, according to a letter sent to Bloomberg reporter Jason Leopold. Meanwhile, when CNN filed a FOIA request with the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for information about Musk and DOGE's security clearance, they were told: "Good luck with that," because the FOIA officers had been fired. 

DOGE also argued that its own records are exempt from FOIA under the Presidential Records Act, meaning records cannot be accessed until five years after President Donald Trump is out of office. 

While DOGE “doesn’t exist” anymore according to the OPM, there remains a lasting dark mark on the state of FOIA and records management. 

The Secret Eyes in the Sky Award - Chula Vista Police Department, Calif.

In 2021, Arturo Castañares at La Prensa San Diego filed a request with the Chula Vista Police Department for copies of videos taken by drones responding to 911 calls as part of the city's "drone as first responder" program. One of the goals was to evaluate the technology’s efficacy and risks to civil liberties. 

The city worked overtime to maintain the secrecy of the footage at the same time officials publicly touted the drones as a revolution in policing. That’s some impressive trust-us-but-don’t-verify chutzpah.

The city argued that every second of every video recorded by its drones was categorically off limits because they were law enforcement investigative records. They even got a trial court to initially buy the argument.

But an appellate court ruled that the investigatory records exemption is more limited, shielding only drone footage that is part of a criminal investigation or evidence of a suspected crime. Footage of wildfires, car wrecks, wild animal sightings and the like are not criminal investigations and must be disclosed.

The California Supreme Court rejected both of CVPD's appeals and a trial court bench slapped the city for inaccurate and incomplete court filings. In the end, the city had to shell out north of $400,000 to its outside lawyers, and then paid Castañares’ lawyers more than $500,000 when he prevailed. 

So what were Chula Vista police hiding? A bunch of routine service calls, such as unverified reports of a vehicle fire and a vehicle collision.

Now, according to La Prensa's reporting, officials are trying to raid a public safety fund created by voters to reimburse the city for the cost of its ill-advised secrecy. 

The City of Darkness Award - Richmond, Va. 

Richmond’s creation of a new FOIA Library may seem like a step toward transparency, but there are questions about the city’s commitment after it left the same officials subject to records requests in charge of curating which records might be released.

Faced with a plan to post all of the city’s eligible public records released under Virginia’s “sunshine” law, the Richmond City Council instead opted to go with the mayor’s alternative proposal. That plan lets the mayor’s administration — the same one that might be the subject of those records — decide what’s worth posting to the library.

Instead of providing access to all public records that the city released under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, the library will only contain a subset that officials believe meet certain criteria, including records that the administration deems "relevant" to city business or that would aid "accountability.” The city cites concerns that "transparency without context" might be too confusing for the average citizen. Forgive us for having more faith in Richmond residents than its leaders do.

The city’s secrecy shenanigans extend beyond the FOIA library.

In an ongoing legal battle, attorneys representing Richmond asked a judge to prohibit former city FOIA officer Connie Clay from filing FOIA requests seeking information about her firing, and sought a gag order to prevent her from talking about the case. Clay alleges she was fired for insisting the city comply with public records law, describing what she calls a “chaotic and mismanaged” and illegal FOIA request process. Rather than agree to a $250,000 settlement, Richmond has spent more than $633,000 in taxpayer funds on legal costs. The trial and the FOIA library launch are both slated for the summer of 2026. 

The Flock You Awards - Multiple Winners

If you live in one of the 5,000 cities where surveillance vendor Flock Safety claims to have established relationships with local cops, you may have noticed the sudden installation of little black cameras on poles by the side of the road or at intersections. These are automated license plate readers (ALPRs), which document every vehicle that passes within view, including the license plate, color, make, model and other distinguishing characteristics. The images are fed to Flock's servers, and the company encourages police to share the images collected locally with law enforcement throughout the country. Each year, law enforcement agencies across the country conduct tens of millions of searches of each other's databases. 

In 2025, journalists and privacy advocates started filing public records requests with agencies to get spreadsheets called a "Network Audit," which shows every search, including who ran it and why. Accessing these audits uncovered abuse of the system including: investigating a woman who received an abortion, targeting immigrants, surveilling protesters, and running racist searches targeting Roma people. 

In response, some cities have terminated their contracts with Flock Safety. Other law enforcement agencies, and Flock itself, have gone a different direction: 

Taunton Police Department, Mass.: The police department told the ACLU of Massachusetts to cough up $1.8 million if the organization wanted its network audit logs–the highest public records fee we documented this year. The civil liberties group filed requests with agencies throughout the state for the audits, and most agencies handed over the spreadsheets for free and with little fanfare. Taunton, however, said it would take 20,000 hours to process the request, at $86.57 an hour. 

Orange County Sheriff's Department, Calif.: The Orange County Sheriff gave a number of reasons it wouldn't release the network audit logs in response to a public records request. The most inane (and misspelled one): It would "disincentive law enforcement from conducting such research." Aren't cops the ones who say if you’re not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide? Well, well, well, how the tables have turned.

Flock Safety: The company responded to criticisms of its ALPR network by sending legal threats aimed at trying to silence its critics. First, the company used a bogus trademark claim to threaten DeFlock.me–a crowdsourced map of ALPR. (EFF represented its creator.) Then it hired a company to try to get the hosts of HaveIBeenFlocked.com, which hosts an interface for searching these network audits, to remove the site from the internet. 

The Database Deletion Award - Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, formerly of Opexus

Brothers Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter are accused of essentially hitting delete on government data, destroying access to information contained in millions of records. 

The government hired a federal contractor called Opexus, which hosts data and provides services to dozens of federal agencies. The company employed the Akhter siblings, though in February 2025, Opexus learned about the brothers’ previous convictions for wire fraud and obstructing justice. Soon after, the company fired the pair. But, according to prosecutors, the two decided to double down on being wildly unsuited for administrative access to government records systems. 

The Akhters immediately turned around and retaliated “by accessing computers without authorization, issuing commands to prevent others from modifying the databases before deletion, deleting databases, stealing information, and destroying evidence of their unlawful activities," according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The two have been accused of deleting 96 government databases, many of which contained FOIA records and sensitive investigative files. Their indictment alleges that a minute later, one brother queried an artificial intelligence tool for “how to clear system logs following the deletion of databases.” The brothers are also charged with stealing government records and conspiracy to commit computer fraud. 

The Brothers Akhter allegedly took mere moments to destroy untold amounts of information that belonged to the public. Though they could face decades in prison, the public may never know the extent of the damage.

Want more FOIA horror stories? Check out The Foilies archives!

Amid the hum of milking equipment and the shuffle of cow hooves, PhD student Audrey Parker and her collaborators pull a wagon through a dusty path of a dairy barn, measuring an invisible greenhouse gas drifting through the air. Most engineering students wouldn’t expect their graduate research to take them to a dairy farm, but for Parker, this is where some of the most impactful climate solutions are hiding in plain sight.

The scene was part of the civil and environmental engineering student’s PhD work exploring advanced yet practical technologies to mitigate methane emissions. Such emissions are much more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. Dairy farms are a major source of methane, and Parker’s wagon carried sensors to measure methane concentrations.

Now in her fourth year in the lab of Professor Desirée Plata, Parker looks forward to visiting such farms. When she’s not taking measurements, she can look across the rolling fields and think of home.

Parker grew up in Boise, Idaho. Her childhood was filled with backpacking trips, skiing, horseback riding, and otherwise enjoying what her natural surroundings had to offer.

“Growing up, we were always outside,” she says. “I knew how to cast a fly rod before I knew how to ride a bike.”

That experience motivated Parker to pursue studies related to preserving the environment she loved. She attended Boise State University as an undergraduate, where she studied sustainable materials development under the mentorship of Assistant Dean Paul Davis. In the summer before her senior year, she was accepted to the MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP), which equips students for graduate school by bringing them to MIT to conduct cutting-edge research. That’s where she began working with Plata, MIT’s Distinguished Climate and Energy Professor.

“They do a great job bringing in people of different backgrounds,” Parker says. “It wasn’t until I started working with Desirée that I started applying materials science as a tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That was a profound insight.”

Parker graduated Boise State University as a Top Ten Scholar, the highest academic honor granted to graduating seniors, before driving across the country to begin her studies at MIT. She decided to devote her PhD to exploring methane mitigation strategies, building on her experience from MSRP.

Her focus is on methane emissions from two sources: air being vented from coal mines, and dairy farms. Those two areas alone account for a large portion of human-driven methane emissions. Both sources are dilute compared to the average oil or gas well, which makes the methane challenging to capture and convert into less environmentally harmful molecules.

Parker also wanted to work with community members in the field during her PhD to ensure whatever technical solutions she developed are practical enough to implement at scale.

“Desirée’s approach is to make sure industry is aware of affordable and sustainable ways to remove methane from their operations, while also incorporating the nuanced expertise stakeholders offer,” Parker says. “I appreciate that she is focused on not just doing work for the chapter of a PhD thesis, but also making our work lead to real-world change.”

Parker’s research explores both quantifying methane at emission sources and designing technologies that could be used to convert methane into carbon dioxide, a molecule with significantly less climate warming potential.

“Methane naturally converts into carbon dioxide over the course of about 12 years in the atmosphere,” Parker explains. “The technology we work on simply speeds up this natural process to achieve near-term climate benefits.”

The main technology Parker studies is a catalyst made from zeolites, an abundant and inexpensive mineral with complex internal structures like honeycombs. Parker dopes the zeolites with copper and explores ways to apply external heat to facilitate complete methane conversion.

Parker and her collaborators assess the durability of the material and its performance under different conditions. Recognizing that real-world deployment environments can often be difficult to replicate in lab, they test catalyst performance in operating dairy farms. In a 2025 paper, she analyzed the use of thermal energy to sustain methane combustion in catalyst materials, detailing when the approach actually brings net-climate benefits.

“If your methane concentrations are low and you’re having to provide so much energy into your system, you could become climate-harmful, but there’s also a context where it’s beneficial,” Parker explains. “Understanding where that trade-off occurs is critical to making sure your mitigation technologies are having the benefits you’re anticipating.”

That kind of systems-level thinking is necessary to understand the long-term impacts of interconnected climate systems.

“It lays a framework that other people can use for their mitigation technologies,” Parker says. “There are trade-offs with every technology, and being transparent about that is important. I think as academics it’s easy to get tunnel vision based on our research. There’s such limited funding for mitigation technologies overall and so making sure those few funding dollars are allocated appropriately is critical for achieving our climate goals.”

Some of Parker’s research findings have informed the design of a pilot-scale methane mitigation system in a coal mine, although she hasn’t gotten a chance to visit it just yet.

Outside of her research, Parker co-chairs the MIT Congressional Visit Days, a program run by the Science Policy Initiative that sends MIT students to Washington to meet with lawmakers and advocate for science-based policies.

“On-the-Hill advocacy teaches you about the policy landscape in unparalleled ways,” Parker says. “Those conversations you have with lawmakers can drive transformational change to bridge the gap between science and policy. It is our job as scientists to communicate our findings clearly so policymakers can design regulations that enable effective solutions.”

This spring, Parker is also leading a workshop for the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium around financing the voluntary carbon market. Here, she plans to leverage industry insights to catalyze private capital at the scale needed to meet our climate goals.

Parker also still gets plenty of outdoor time, hiking outside Boston and skiing a bit, though she says the New England ski mountains don’t compare to those out west.

Parker, who expects to complete her PhD next year, says it’s gratifying to be able to devote her research to protecting the environment she loves so much.

“For me it’s about preserving the world I grew up in,” Parker says. “Especially in Idaho, where communities are experiencing more frequent wildfires and more intense droughts. As a child, the natural world provided so much wonder. Today, that same sense of wonder is what drives me to protect it.”

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

• I’m giving the Ross Anderson Lecture at the University of Cambridge’s Churchill College at 5:30 PM GMT on Thursday, March 19, 2026.
• I’m speaking at RSAC 2026 in San Francisco, California, USA, on Wednesday, March 25, 2026.
• I’m part of an event on “Canada and AI Sovereignty,” hosted by the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, which will be held online via Zoom at 4:00 PM ET on Monday, March 30, 2026.
• I’m speaking at DemocracyXChange 2026...

Vineyard Wind and Revolution Wind, the nation's largest wind projects, are generating power off the New England coast.

Some good news: squid stocks seem to be recovering in the waters off the Falkland Islands.

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.

The Financial Times has placed MIT Sloan School of Management at the top of its recently released 2026 Global MBA Ranking. It is the school’s first time gaining the No. 1 spot in the list.

In its announcement of the rankings, the publication noted MIT’s school of management tops the list “at a time of sharpening focus from students on the importance of technology, including artificial intelligence, as they prepare for disruptions in the workplace.”

Global education editor Andrew Jack said in the Financial Times News Briefing podcast that MIT is “very much at the center of the tech revolution that we are seeing.” He added, “there’s no question that we’re talking more and more about artificial intelligence and expertise around some of the technical skills related and notably how you might apply AI in the workplace. That certainly reflects both its technical and engineering computer science skills historically. And [MIT Sloan] is doing a lot with those other departments in the university. So I think that says something very much about how the wider job market and the aspirations of students are evolving.”

“MIT Sloan operates at the intersection of management and technology,” says Richard Locke, the John C Head III Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management. “Our students and alumni are employing artificial intelligence to solve complex problems in the world and across industries. At MIT Sloan, we focus on doing that work in a way that centers human capabilities, ensuring artificial intelligence extends what humans can do to improve organizations and the world.”

To determine its rankings, the Financial Times considers 21 criteria. Eight of those — accounting for 56 percent of the ranking’s weight — are determined by surveying alumni three years after they have completed their MBA program. School data are used for 34 percent percent of the rank. The remaining 10 percent measures how often full-time faculty publish in top journals.

MIT Sloan ranked fourth for its alumni network, which measures how effectively alumni support one another through career advice, internships, job opportunities, and recruiting efforts. 

“This ranking underscores the strength of our global alumni community,” says Kathy Hawkes, senior associate dean of external engagement. “'Sloanies Helping Sloanies' isn’t just a phrase — it’s a lived experience. Our 31,000 alumni actively open doors, share expertise, and invest in each other’s success.”

MIT researchers have discovered that two common genetic mutations that cause Rett syndrome each set off a molecular chain of events that compromises the structural integrity of developing brain blood vessels, making them leaky. The study traces the problem to overexpression of a particular microRNA (miRNA-126-3p), and shows that tamping down the miRNA’s levels helps to rescue the vascular defect.

Rett syndrome is a severe developmental disorder affecting both the brain and body. It is caused by various mutations in the widely expressed MECP2 gene, but the first symptoms don’t become apparent until affected children (mostly girls) reach 2-3 years of age. Because that’s a critical time in development for the brain’s blood vessels, neuroscientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT embarked on a study to model how two common but distinct MeCP2 mutations may affect vascular development and contribute to the disease’s profound neurological pathology.

To conduct the research published recently in Molecular Psychiatry, lead author Tatsuya Osaki and senior author Mriganka Sur developed advanced human tissue cultures to model vessel development, with and without the MeCP2 mutations. The cultures not only enabled them to model and closely observe how the mutations affected the vessels, but also allowed them to molecularly dissect the problems they observed and then to test an intervention that helped.

“A role for microRNAs in Rett syndrome has been shown, but now demonstrating that miRNA-126-3p is actually downstream of MeCP2 and directly implicated in the endothelial cell dysfunction is an important piece of the Rett syndrome puzzle,” says Sur, the Newton Professor of Neuroscience in the Picower Institute and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Building vessels and spotting leaks

Building on years of tissue engineering experience, including time as a postdoc in the lab of co-author and MIT mechanical engineering and biological engineering Professor Roger D. Kamm, Osaki built “3-dimensional microvascular networks” using human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) donated by patients with Rett syndrome. The donated cells were induced to become stem cells, and then endothelial cells (the backbone of blood vessels). Embedded in a gel and mixed with fibroblast cells, the endothelial cells self-assembled into networks of tubes, which Osaki then hooked up to microfluidics to provide circulation.

One set of the cultures harbored the mutation R306C. Osaki created a control microvasculature that was genetically identical except that it did not have the mutation. Another set of the cultures had the R168X mutation. And again, Osaki paired that with control culture that was identical except for the mutation using CRISPR.

The research team chose these two mutations because they are each relatively common but affect the MeCP2 gene differently, Sur says. The finding that each of these distinct Rett-causing mutations ultimately led to upregulating miRNA-126-3p and undermining blood vessel integrity suggests that vascular problems are indeed a central feature of the disease.

“There is something common across these mutations,” Sur says.

In particular, lab tests showed that the vessels harboring either mutation showed reduced expression of a protein called ZO-1, which is critical for ensuring that the junctions among endothelial cells in blood vessels form a tight seal (like the grout in a tile floor). ZO-1 also didn’t localize to those junctions as well. Sure enough, further tests showed that the Rett-mutation vessel cultures were relatively leaky compared to the controls.

Similar deficiencies were evident in another cell culture the team created, in which they added astrocyte cells to even more closely simulate the blood-brain-barrier (BBB), which tightly regulates what can go in or out of blood vessels and into the brain. BBB problems are widely suspected of contributing to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and ALS and frontotemporal dementia.

To gain some insight into how the vascular problems might undermine neural function in Rett syndrome, the researchers exposed neurons to medium from their Rett vasculature cultures. Those nerve cells showed reduced electrical activity, a possible sign that secretions from the Rett endothelial cells disrupted the neurons.

Catching a culprit

Generally speaking, the role of MeCP2 is to repress the expression of other genes. The scientists’ expectation, therefore, was that when MeCP2 is compromised by mutations the result would be overexpression of many genes. Yet ZO-1 was downregulated. Something had to account for that and miRNAs were a suspect, Osaki says, because they function as regulators of gene expression.

“That’s why we hypothesized that we should have some mediator between the MeCP2 mutation and ZO-1 downregulation and the BBB permeability increase,” Osaki says. “We focused on the microRNAs.”

Indeed, by profiling miRNAs in the Rett cultures and the controls, the scientists found that miRNA-126-3p was overexpressed. And by sequencing RNA, the team identified more molecular pathways needed to support vascular integrity that were dysregulated in the Rett cultures.

While the sequencing and profile associated miRNA-126-3p upregulation with the altered molecular chain of events, Osaki and Sur sought more definitive proof. To obtain it, they treated the Rett-mutation cultures with an “antisense” — a molecule that reduces miRNA-126-3p levels. Doing that resulted in an increase in ZO-1 expression and a partial restoration of endothelial cell barrier function — meaning less leakiness — in the vessel cultures. Knocking down the miRNA’s expression also restored the molecular pathways the scientists were tracking to more healthy states.

It turns out that there is a drug that inhibits miR-126 called miRisten that is undergoing clinical testing for leukemia. Osaki and Sur say they are planning on administering it to mice modeling Rett syndrome to see if it helps them.

In addition to Osaki, Sur, and Kamm, the paper’s co-authors are Zhengpeng Wan, Koji Haratani, Ylliah Jin, Marco Campisi, and David Barbie.

Funding for the study came from sources including the National Institutes of Health, a MURI grant, The Freedom Together Foundation, and the Simons Center for the Social Brain.

EFF is filing against the Consumer Product Safety Council (CPSC) to ensure that the public has full access to the laws that govern us.

Our client Public.Resource.Org (Public Resource), a tiny non-profit founded by open records advocate Carl Malamud, has a mission that’s both simple and powerful: to make government information more accessible. Public Resource acquires and makes available online a wide variety of public documents such as tax filings, government-produced videos, and federal rules about safety and product designs. Those rules are initially created through private standards organizations and later incorporated into federal law. Such documents are often difficult to access otherwise, meaning the public cannot read, share, or comment on them. 

Working with Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, Public Resource has been submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to the CPSC requesting copies of the legally binding safety codes for children’s products—an area of law of intense interest to child safety advocates and consumer advocates, not to mention the families who use those products. But CPSC says it can’t release the codes, because the private association that coordinated their initial development insists that it retains copyright in them even after they have been adopted into law. That’s like saying a lobbyist who drafted a new tax law gets to control who reads it or shares it, even after it becomes a legal mandate.

Faced with similar claims, some courts, including the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, have held that the safety codes lose copyright protection when they are incorporated into law. Others, like the D.C. Circuit (in a case EFF defended on Public Resource’s behalf), have held that even if the standards lose copyright once they are incorporated into law, making them fully accessible and usable online is a lawful fair use. 

Now EFF has teamed up with the Cyberlaw Clinic to continue the fight. We’re asking a court to rule that copyright is no barrier to accessing and sharing the rules that are supposed to ensure the safety of our built environment and the products we use every day. With the rule of law under assault around the nation, it is more important than ever to defend our ability to read and speak the law, without restrictions.

Geothermal energy, a clean, continuous energy source accessible in many locations, has been slow to catch on. Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Romans made extensive use of geothermal energy — heat from the Earth — including at the spa complex at present-day Bath, England. Electricity was first produced from geothermal sources in the early 1900s in Italy. In the United States, the Geysers geothermal field in California began generating electricity at scale in 1960, and routinely produces more than 725 megawatts of baseload power today. 

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), geothermal energy still supplies less than 1 percent of global electricity demand, although countries like Kenya (more than 40 percent of electricity generation) and Iceland (nearly 30 percent of electricity and 90 percent of the heating) have seen widespread adoption.

In recent years, technological advances, an influx of private capital, and shifting energy and environmental policies have driven renewed interest in expanding development of geothermal energy. If project costs continue to decline, the IEA predicts that geothermal energy could meet 15 percent of the growth in global electricity demand between 2024 and 2050. Many countries, including the United States, Indonesia, New Zealand, and Turkey, are prioritizing an expansion of geothermal energy as part of their broader energy strategies.

Achieving large-scale electricity generation from geothermal sources will depend on a significant expansion of so-called next-generation geothermal. This refers to tapping heat from source rocks at temperatures of 100 degrees Celsius to more than 400 C, often at depths of several kilometers below the surface. Last month, U.S. Congressional Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) and Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV) introduced bipartisan legislation to promote research, testing, and development of one type of next-generation geothermal energy known as superhot rock.

Geothermal energy at MIT

Through its leadership in producing the influential 2006 “The Future of Geothermal Energy” report led by former MIT professor Jeff Tester, MIT and the predecessor of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) played an important role in national geothermal strategy two decades ago. In 2008, researchers at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) invented millimeter-wave drilling with support from one of the first MITEI seed innovation grants. The technology, which could be particularly useful for geothermal installations in superhot and deep rock, is being commercialized by MIT spinout Quaise Energy.

MITEI is sponsoring next-generation geothermal projects through its Future Energy Systems Center. A project led by MITEI Research Scientist Pablo Duenas-Martinez focuses on the techno-economics of electricity generation from a geothermal plant co-located with a data center, a timely topic given the proliferation of data center power purchase agreements for electricity generated by geothermal energy. MITEI’s March 4 Spring Symposium focused on next-geothermal energy for the generation of firm power, and many of the leading exploration, drilling, reservoir development, and advanced technology companies working in this area sent panelists and speakers. On March 5, MITEI collaborated with the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) to co-host the GeoTech Summit, which explored accelerating technology development for and investment in next-generation geothermal.

To prepare for the recent symposium, MITEI organized a geothermal bootcamp during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) that introduced more than 40 members of the MIT community to geothermal basics, key technologies, and related MIT research. Carolyn Ruppel, MITEI’s deputy director of science and technology and the organizer of the IAP bootcamp and Spring Symposium, says, “MITEI’s member companies, which represent leading voices on energy, power generation, infrastructure, heavy industry, and digital technology, are increasingly approaching us about their interest in next-generation geothermal. There is also good momentum building across MIT, ranging from projects at the Earth Resources Laboratory to the millimeter-wave testbed being developed by PSFC and its MIT collaborators, individual projects in academic departments, and of course the work MITEI has been funding.”

Geothermal basics

Temperatures a few tens of meters below the ground are typically stable year-round. In some locations, these temperatures are warmer than the surface in winter and cooler in summer, making it possible to use geothermal heat pumps to moderate temperatures in buildings throughout the year. Overlooking the Charles River, Boston University’s 19-story Center for Computing and Data Science meets an estimated 90 percent of its heating and cooling needs using this kind of geothermal system. At the scale of large institutions or whole towns, thermal networks, district heating, and other approaches can efficiently supply heat from shallow geothermal sources without producing greenhouse gas emissions.

Tapping hotter and usually deeper geothermal sources could generate large amounts of electricity for decades at a single site. Next-generation geothermal is the term applied to these higher-temperature systems developed using enhanced, advanced, and superhot technologies. Enhanced geothermal refers to circulating fluids through engineered fracture systems in deep, dry rock with relatively low native permeability. Advanced geothermal adopts a closed loop approach, in which a working fluid is heated by circulating it through pipes embedded in the subsurface. Superhot geothermal, which is in its infancy, will likely use enhanced geothermal technology to circulate supercritical water through rock at almost 400 C.   

Next-generation geothermal

Drill deep enough and higher-temperature resources are nearly ubiquitous beneath the continents, but early-stage development must focus on the most promising sites, where the methods and technologies to routinely reach these hotter rocks can be tested and refined. Locations like Iceland and the southwestern U.S. state of Nevada, where tectonic plates are separating or the Earth’s outer layer is thinning, have hotter temperatures closer to the surface than areas like the northeastern United States, where the Earth’s crust is old, thick, and cooler. Even in the southwestern United States, though, reaching the high temperatures required for generating electricity via geothermal systems will require routinely drilling to depths of greater than 4 kilometers in crystalline rock. This is significantly more challenging than drilling in the sedimentary basins that host most of the world’s oil and gas reserves. 

For a location to be suitable for a next-generation geothermal installation requires not only heat, but also a fluid (usually water) to carry the heat. Water circulated through the rock formation to extract heat can be present naturally or brought from elsewhere and injected into the reservoir. This type of system also requires connected permeability such as an engineered fracture network oriented to prevent significant fluid losses and to channel fluid toward the extraction well. Closed-loop (advanced) systems replace the freely circulating water with a working fluid that has favorable thermal characteristics and that is confined in piping.

Various geophysical methods are used to find sites with sufficient heat within a few kilometers of the surface, a prerequisite for their development as next-generation geothermal installations. Apart from direct measurements of temperatures in test boreholes, electrical resistivity and magnetotelluric surveys are among the most useful for inferring subsurface temperature regimes. Both techniques infer the electrical conductivity structure beneath the ground, permitting the identification of relatively warmer and more permeable rocks.

Drilling is often the most time-consuming and expensive part of preparing a site for a geothermal plant. This is particularly true for next-generation geothermal, where the targets can be deep, or the system design may require large-scale horizontal drilling. Over the past few years, numerous innovations have increased drilling rates and attainable depths and temperatures and also lowered costs. Nonetheless, even with high-quality geophysical surveys, “you may spend $10 million on an exploratory well and find no heat,” says Andrew Inglis, the geothermal channel venture builder at MIT Proto Ventures. 

Superhot geothermal, a next-generation geothermal approach that is advancing rapidly, presents special challenges. The metal drilling tools, the rocks in the formation, and circulating fluids all behave differently at temperatures of several hundred degrees, and standard practices, materials, and sensors must be significantly modified to tolerate the tough conditions. Once temperatures exceed 374 C in a borehole even ~1 km deep, water reaches a supercritical state. This presents substantial advantages for extracting heat from the formation, but introduces the specter of rapid metal corrosion and precipitation of salts and silica that can quickly foul a borehole. Researchers are investigating substitution of supercritical carbon dioxide for water as a working fluid for superhot geothermal.

MIT innovations advancing next-generation geothermal

The millimeter-wave drilling technology invented at PSFC and being commercialized by Quaise Energy is the highest-profile next-generation geothermal innovation to emerge from MIT so far. Millimeter-wave technology uses microwave energy to vaporize rock and could prove to be several times faster than conventional drilling. PSFC and a multidisciplinary MIT team are devising a dedicated laboratory to study how millimeter-wave drilling interacts with crystalline rock at realistic pressure and temperature conditions, and to test improvements to the existing technology. Steve Wukitch, interim director and principal research scientist at PSFC, notes that “the facility we are building at MIT will allow us to test samples 500 times larger than is currently possible. This is an important step for investigating technologies that could unlock superhot geothermal energy."

MIT Proto Ventures, which focuses on creating startups based on technology invented at MIT, currently hosts a dedicated geothermal energy channel led by Inglis. Since arriving at MIT in late 2024, Inglis has identified inventions and research that could advance next-generation geothermal from disciplines as disparate as mechanical and materials engineering, earth sciences, and chemistry. Examples of technologies originating with MIT researchers include sensors that measure micro-cracking in high-temperature rock, advanced metal alloys that could handle superhot fluids at a fraction of the cost of titanium, and anti-fouling coatings to protect pipes from the caustic geofluids common in hot, deep systems.

MITEI Spring Symposium

At the recent MITEI Spring Symposium, these MIT innovators introduced their technology to MITEI member companies in a session led by Inglis. Wukitch, who moderated a panel on advanced drilling, described the planned millimeter-wave testbed, and Duenas-Martinez led a panel on power generation and storage. Terra Rogers, director for superhot rock geothermal energy at the CATF and the organizer of the joint CATF-MITEI GeoTech Summit on March 5, led a discussion of international and U.S. policies and the regulatory environment for expansion of next-generation geothermal. 

Poster presenters included MIT graduate students and researchers, MIT’s D-Lab, and the Geo@MIT geothermal-focused MIT student group, which was recognized with a 2024 bonus award by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Geothermal Technologies Office in the nationwide EnergyTech University Prize competition.  

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