When airborne embers land on plant-based garden mulches like pine bark, straw or wood chips, they ignite quickly and risk spreading fire.

Reporting requirements begin this month for about 300 to 400 firms with annual Scope 1, or direct, emissions of at least 100,000 metric tons.

Slower growth in energy storage capacity, coupled with natural gas shortages linked to the war, will leave India heavily reliant on coal and hydropower, as well as less predictable wind generation.

Last week, I listened to a fascinating talk by K. Melton on cognitive security, cognitive hacking, and reality pentesting. The slides from the talk are here, but—even better—Menton has a long essay laying out the basic concepts and ideas.

The whole thing is important and well worth reading, and I hesitate to excerpt. Here’s a taste:

The NeuroCompiler is where raw sensory data gets interpreted before you’re consciously aware of it. It decides what things mean, and it does this fast, automatic, and mostly invisible. It’s also where the majority of cognitive exploits actually land, right in this sweet spot between perception and conscious thought...

Designers, makers, and others often use 3D printing to rapidly prototype a range of functional objects, from movie props to medical devices. Accurate print previews are essential so users know a fabricated object will perform as expected.

But previews generated by most 3D-printing software focus on function rather than aesthetics. A printed object may end up with a different color, texture, or shading than the user expected, resulting in multiple reprints that waste time, effort, and material.

To help users envision how a fabricated object will look, researchers from MIT and elsewhere developed an easy-to-use preview tool that puts appearance first.

Users upload a screenshot of the object from their 3D-printing software, along with a single image of the print material. From these inputs, the system automatically generates a rendering of how the fabricated object is likely to look.

The artificial intelligence-powered system, called VisiPrint, is designed to work with a range of 3D-printing software and can handle any material example. It considers not only the color of the material, but also gloss, translucency, and how nuances of the fabrication process affect the object’s appearance.

Such aesthetics-focused previews could be especially useful in areas like dentistry, by helping clinicians ensure temporary crowns and bridges match the appearance of a patient’s teeth, or in architecture, to aid designers in assessing the visual impact of models.

“3D printing can be a very wasteful process. Some studies estimate that as much as a third of the material used goes straight to the landfill, often from prototypes the user ends of discarding. To make 3D printing more sustainable, we want to reduce the number of tries it takes to get the prototype you want. The user shouldn’t have to try out every printing material they have before they settle on a design,” says Maxine Perroni-Scharf, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on VisiPrint.

She is joined on the paper by Faraz Faruqi, a fellow EECS graduate student; Raul Hernandez, an MIT undergraduate; SooYeon Ahn, a graduate student at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology; Szymon Rusinkiewicz, a professor of computer science at Princeton University; William Freeman, the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of EECS at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and senior author Stefanie Mueller, an associate professor of EECS and Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and a member of CSAIL. The research will be presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Accurate aesthetics

The researchers focused on fused deposition modeling (FDM), the most common type of 3D printing. In FDM, print material filament is melted and then squirted through a nozzle to fabricate an object one layer at a time.

Generating accurate aesthetic previews is challenging because the melting and extrusion process can change the appearance of a material, as can the height of each deposited layer and the path the nozzle follows during fabrication.

VisiPrint uses two AI models that work together to overcome those challenges.

The VisiPrint preview is based on two inputs: a screenshot of the digital design from a user’s 3D-printing software (called “slicer” software), and an image of the print material, which can be taken from an online source or captured from a printed sample.

From these inputs, a computer vision model extracts features from the material sample that are important for the object’s appearance.

It feeds those features to a generative AI model that computes the geometry and structure of the object, while incorporating the so-called “slicing” pattern the nozzle will follow as it extrudes each layer.

The key to the researchers’ approach is a special conditioning method. This involves carefully adjusting the inner workings of the model to guide it, so it follows the slicing pattern and obeys the constraints of the 3D-printing process.

Their conditioning method utilizes a depth map that preserves the shape and shading of the object, along with a map of the edges that reflects the internal contours and structural boundaries.

“If you don’t have the right balance of these two things, you could use up with bad geometry or an incorrect slicing pattern. We had to be careful to combine them in the right way,” Perroni-Scharf says.

A user-focused system

The team also produced an easy-to-use interface where one can upload the required images and evaluate the preview.

The VisiPrint interface enables more advanced makers to adjust multiple settings, such as the influence of certain colors on the final appearance.

In the end, the aesthetic preview is intended to complement the functional preview generated by slicer software, since VisiPrint does not estimate printability, mechanical feasibility, or likelihood of failure.

To evaluate VisiPrint, the researchers conducted a user study that asked participants to compare the system to other approaches. Nearly all participants said it provided better overall appearance as well as more textural similarity with printed objects.

In addition, the VisiPrint preview process took about a minute on average, which was more than twice as fast as any competing method.

“VisiPrint really shined when compared to other AI interfaces. If you give a more general AI model the same screenshots, it might randomly change the shape or use the wrong slicing pattern because it had no direct conditioning,” she says.

In the future, the researchers want to address artifacts that can occur when model previews have extremely fine details. They also want to add features that allow users to optimize parts of the printing process beyond color of the material.

“It is important to think about the way that we fabricate objects. We need to continue striving to develop methods that reduce waste. To that end, this marriage of AI with the physical making process is an exciting area of future work,” Perroni-Scharf says.

“‘What you see is what you get’ has been the main thing that made desktop publishing ‘happen’ in the 1980s, as it allowed users to get what they wanted at first try. It is time to get WYSIWYG for 3D printing as well. VisiPrint is a great step in this direction,” says Patrick Baudisch, a professor of computer science at the Hasso Plattner Institute, who was not involved with this work.

This research was funded, in part, by an MIT Morningside Academy for Design Fellowship and an MIT MathWorks Fellowship.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 01 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02597-x

Food loss and waste (FLW) is often attributed to technoeconomic inefficiencies of food systems. However, using a mechanistic analysis framework, we show that food surplus and misconsumption accounted for 11% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in 2021, exceeding FLW-associated emissions that are driven by technoeconomic constraints.

This March on The Curiosity Desk, GBH’s daily science show with host Edgar B. Herwick III, MIT scientists dropped by to address the questions: “How close are we to observing the dark universe?” (Thursday, March 12 episode) and “Is Earth prepared for asteroids?” (Thursday, March 26 episode).

Up first, Prof. Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science, and Prof. Salvatore Vitale joined the host live in studio to talk about the science behind the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and how LIGO has provided the ability to observe the universe in ways that have never been done before.

In addition to learning something new, Mavalvala explained how experimenting delivers an added piece of excitement: “pushing the technology, the precision of the instrument, requires you to be very inventive. There’s almost nothing in these experiments that you can go buy off a shelf. Everything you’re designing, everything is from scratch. You’re meeting very stringent requirements.”

Herwick likened how they might tweak or tinker with the experiment to souping up a car engine, and the LIGO scientists nodded – adding that in the most complex experiments, each bite-sized part on its own works well, and it’s the interfaces between them that scientists must get right.

While there, the two long-time colleagues also took a detour to explain how in physics experimentalists benefit from the work of theorists and vice versa. Mavalvala, whose work focuses on building the world’s most precise instruments to study physical phenomena, described the synergy between ideas that come from theory (work that Vitale does) and how you measure. (No, they assure Herwick, they don’t get into a lot of fights.)

In fact, it’s fantastic to have people from both worlds at MIT, said Vitale.  Mavalvala agreed. “One of the things that’s really important about theory in science is that ultimately, in physics especially, it’s a bunch of math. And the important thing that you have to ask is, ‘does nature really behave that way?’ And how do you answer that question? You have to go out and measure. You have to go observe nature,” said Mavalvala.

As scientists fine-tune the gravitational wave detectors, they will inform what data are collected, what astrophysical objects they might find or hope to find – and the search for certain fainter, farther away, or more exotic objects can inform what enhancements they prioritize.

But what if I’m not interested in any of that, asked Herwick? Why should I care? 

“To me, it falls in the category of for the betterment of humankind. You never know what is going to be useful. A lot of fundamental research was very far at the beginning from what turned out to be fundamental applications,” said Vitale, adding, “What they do on the instrument side has already now very important applications.”

Mavalvala was unequivocal, underscoring how pursuing curiosity is put to good use:

“When you’re making instruments that achieve that kind of precision, you’re inventing new technologies. [With LIGO] We’ve invented vibration isolation technologies to keep our mirrors really still. We’ve invented lasers that are quieter than any that were ever made before. We’ve invented photonic techniques that are allowing us to make applications even to far off things like quantum computing. 

“So, this is one of the beauties of fundamental discovery science. A, you’ll discover something. But B you’ll be doing two things: you’ll be inventing the technologies of the future, and you’ll be training the generations of scientists who may go off to do completely different things, but this is what inspires them.”

Watch the full conversation below and on YouTube:

 

Planetary defense

Turning to objects beyond Earth – specifically, asteroids – Associate Professor Julien de Wit, along with research scientists Artem Burdanov and Saverio Cambioni, joined Herwick at the Curiosity Desk later in the month. They talked about their ongoing research to identify smaller asteroids (about the size of a school bus) using the James Webb Space Telescope and why planetary defense goes beyond thinking about the massive asteroids featured in movies like Armageddon. Notably, a lot of technology on earth depends on satellites, and asteroids pose the biggest threat to satellites.    

“Dinosaurs didn’t need to care about an asteroid hitting the moon. Humanity a century ago didn’t care. Now, if [an asteroid] hits the moon, a lot of debris will be expelled and all those particles – big and small – they will affect the fleet of satellites around Earth. That’s a big potential problem, so we need to take that into account in our future,” said Burdanov.

There’s also a potential upside to being better able to detect and potentially “capture” asteroids, explained de Wit, all of it benefitted by new instruments. “It’s really an asteroid revolution going on… Our situational awareness of what’s out there is really about to change dramatically.”

He explains that one dream is to mine asteroids themselves for material to build or power next generation technologies or stations in space. “The way to reliably move into space is to use resources from space. We can’t just move stuff to build a full city. We use stuff from space.”

Echoing the sentiments expressed earlier in the month by MIT’s dean of science, the trio of asteroid explorers also described how the pursuits of planetary scientists can lead to unexpected rewards along the way. “We are swimming in an era that is data rich, and so what we do in our group and at MIT is mine that data to reveal the universe like never before,” says de Wit. “Revealing new populations of asteroids, new populations of planets, and making sense of our universe like we have never done.”

Watch the full conversation below and on the GBH YouTube channel: 

Tune in to the Curiosity Desk some Thursdays to hear from MIT researchers as they visit Herwick and the production team. 

Billions of years ago, simple organic molecules drifted across Earth's primordial landscape — nothing more than basic chemical compounds. But as natural forces shaped the planet over hundreds of millions of years, these molecules began to interact and bond in increasingly complex ways. Along the way, something spectacular emerged: life.

“Life is, to some degree, magical,” says computational biologist Sergei Kotelnikov. Simple organic compounds congregate into polymers, which assemble into living cells and ultimately organisms — the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

“You can write formulas on how a molecule behaves,” he says, referring to the world of quantum mechanics. “But yet somehow, a few orders of magnitude above, on a bigger scale, it gives rise to such a mystery.”

Kotelnikov builds models to analyze and predict the structure of these biomolecules, particularly proteins, the fundamental building blocks of every organism. This year, he joined MIT as part of the School of Science Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellowship to work with the Keating Lab, where researchers focus on protein structure, function, and interaction. Using machine learning, his goal is to develop new methods in protein modeling with potential applications that span from medicine to agriculture.

A hunger for problems to solve

Kotelnikov grew up in Abakan, Russia, a small city sitting right in the center of Eurasia. As a child, one of his favorite pastimes was playing with Lego bricks.

“It encouraged me to build new things, rather than just following instructions,” he says. “You can do anything.”

Kotelnikov’s father, whose background lies in engineering and economics, would often challenge him with math problems.

“Your brain — you can feel some kind of expansion of understanding how things work, and that’s a very satisfactory feeling,” Kotelnikov says.

This itch to solve problems led him to join science Olympiad competitions, and later, a science-focused public boarding school located near the Russian Academy of Sciences, from which he often encountered scientists.

“It was like a candy shop,” he recalls, describing the period as a life-changing experience.

In 2012, Kotelnikov began his bachelor of science in physics and applied mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology — considered one of the leading STEM universities in Russia, and globally — and continued there for his master’s degree. It was there that biology came into the picture.

During a course on statistical physics, Kotelnikov was first introduced to the idea of the “emergence of complexity.” He became fascinated by this “mysterious and attractive manifestation of biology … this evolution that sharpens the physical phenomenon” to create, drive, and shape life as we know it today. By the time he completed his master’s degree, he realized he had only scratched surface of the field of computational biology.

In 2018, he began his PhD at Stony Brook University in New York and began working with Dima Kozakov, who is recognized as one of the world’s leaders in predicting protein interactions and complex structures.

Studying the architecture of life  

Proteins act like the bricks that construct an organism, underpinning almost every cellular process from tissue repair to hormone production. Like pieces of a Lego tower, their structures and interactions determine the functions that they carry out in a body.

However, diseases arise when they’re folded, curled, twisted, or connected in unusual ways. To develop medical interventions, scientists break down the tower and examine each individual piece to find the culprit and correct their shape and pairing. With limited experimental data on protein structures and interactions currently available, simulations developed by computational biologists like Kotelnikov provide crucial insight that inform fundamental understanding and applications like drug discovery.

With the guidance of Kozakov at Stony Brook’s Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology, Kotelnikov carried over his understanding of physics to create modeling methods that are more effective, efficient, reliable, and generalizable. Among them, he developed a new way of predicting the protein complex structures mediated by proteolysis-targeting chimeras, or PROTACs, a new class of molecules that can trigger the breakdown of specific proteins previously considered undruggable, such as those found in cancer.

PROTACs have been challenging to model, in part because they are composed of proteins that don’t naturally interact with each other, and because the linker that connects them is flexible. Imagine trying to guess the overall shape of a bendy Lego piece attached to two other pieces of different irregular, unmatched shapes. To efficiently find all possible configurations, Kotelnikov’s method conceptually cuts the linker into two halves and models each separately, then reformulates the problem and calculates it using a powerful algorithm called Fast Fourier Transform.

“It’s kind of like applied math judo that you sometimes need to do in order to make certain intractable computations tractable,” he says.

Kotelnikov’s state-of-the-art methods have been instrumental to his team’s top performance in numerous international challenges including the Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP) competition — the same contest in which the Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold system for protein 3D structure prediction was presented.

Physics and machine learning

At MIT, Kotelnikov is working with Amy Keating, the Jay A. Stein (1968) Professor of Biology, biology department head, and professor of biological engineering, to study protein structure, function, and interactions.  

A recognized leader in the field, Keating employs both computational and experimental methods to study proteins, their interactions, as well as how this can impact disease. By infusing physics with machine learning, Kotelnikov’s goal is to advance modeling methods that can vastly inform applications such as cancer immunology and crop protection.

“Kotelnikov stands to gain a lot from working closely with wet lab researchers who are doing the experiments that will complement and test his predictions, and my lab will benefit from his experience developing and applying advanced computational analyses,” says Keating.

Kotelnikov is also planning to work with professors Tommi Jaakkola and Tess Smidt in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science to explore a field called geometric deep learning. In particular, he aims to integrate physical and geometric knowledge about biomolecules into neural network architectures and learning procedures. This approach can significantly reduce the amount of data needed for learning, and improve the generalizability of resulting models.

Beyond the two departments, Kotelnikov is also excited to see how the diversity and interdisciplinary mix of MIT’s community will help him come up with ideas.

“When you’re building a model, you’re entering this imaginary world of assumptions and simplifications and it might feel challenging because of this disconnect with reality,” Kotelnikov says. “Being able to efficiently communicate with experimentalists is of high value.”

Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT, has been appointed director of the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN). Palacios assumed the role on Feb. 4, and will continue to serve as the director of the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL).

Founded in 2002, ISN is a U.S. Army-sponsored University Affiliated Research Center focused on advancing fundamental science and engineering to enable next-generation capabilities for protection, survivability, sensing, and system performance. ISN brings together researchers from across MIT to address challenges at the intersection of materials, devices, and systems. In collaboration with industry, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the U.S. Army, and other U.S. military services, ISN works to transition promising technologies for both commercial and defense applications.

As director, Palacios will oversee ISN’s research portfolio, facilities, and strategic partnerships, working closely with the ISN leadership team, MIT administration, U.S. Army, and other research sponsors to guide the institute’s next phase of research and collaboration.

“Tomás Palacios brings exceptional energy, vision, and leadership to the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies,” says Ian A. Waitz, MIT’s vice president for research, who announced the appointment in a recent letter. “As director of Microsystems Technology Laboratories, he has demonstrated a rare ability to build strong research communities and partnerships across academia, industry, and government. I am confident he will guide ISN’s next phase with momentum, scientific excellence, and a deep sense of service to MIT and the nation.”

Palacios brings deep leadership experience within MIT and across national research collaborations. As director of MTL, he leads one of MIT’s flagship interdisciplinary research laboratories supporting work in micro- and nano-scale materials, devices, and systems. He is a member of the MIT.nano Leadership Council and, since 2023, has served as associate director of the multi-university SUPeRior Energy-efficient Materials and dEvices (SUPREME) Center, a Semiconductor Research Corp. JUMP 2.0 program focused on next-generation energy-efficient semiconductor technologies. Palacios is also the co-founder of several technology companies, including Vertical Semiconductor, Finwave Semiconductor, and CDimension, Inc.

“MIT’s motto, ‘mens et manus’ — ‘mind and hand’ — reminds us that fundamental research and real-world impact must go hand-in-hand,” says Palacios. “At ISN, our mission is to help protect and empower those who defend our nation. That responsibility demands urgency, creativity, and deep collaboration. I look forward to building on ISN’s strong partnership with the U.S. Army, industry, and colleagues across MIT to push the frontiers of nanotechnology and translate discovery into meaningful impact at the speed of relevance.”

Palacios is internationally recognized for his work on wide-bandgap semiconductors, nanoelectronics, and advanced electronic materials. An IEEE Fellow, his research spans fundamental device physics through system-level integration, with applications in high-power and high-frequency electronics, sensing, and energy systems. He is widely recognized for his research contributions, as well as for his leadership in education and mentoring.

Palacios succeeds John Joannopoulos, who served as ISN director from 2006 until his death in August 2025. During his nearly two decades of ISN leadership, Joannopoulos strengthened ISN’s interdisciplinary culture, devoting significant effort to fostering collaborations among ISN-funded principal investigators, building partnerships that extend across MIT and beyond to the Army research community. Joannopoulos, an extraordinary researcher and a generous mentor, was also a co-founder of companies such as WiTricity and OmniGuide, helping to translate many of ISN’s foundational scientific discoveries into commercial technologies. Raúl Radovitzky, ISN’s associate director, served as interim director during the search for a new director, providing continuity to ISN’s research programs, facilities, and partnerships.

“It is an honor to serve as director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at such an important moment in time,” says Palacios. “ISN has built an extraordinary foundation of interdisciplinary excellence under Professor John Joannopoulos’ leadership and, more recently, Prof. Radovitzky’s. I look forward to working with the ISN community to advance breakthrough research at the intersection of materials, devices, and systems — research that not only strengthens national security, but also translates into technologies that benefit society more broadly.” 

What if a technology could reanimate parts of the body that have lost their connection to the brain — like a bladder that can no longer empty due to a spinal cord injury, or intestines that can’t push food forward due to Crohn’s disease? What if this technology could also send sensations such as hunger or touch back to the brain?

New MIT research offers a glimpse into this future. In an open-access study published today in Nature Communications, the researchers introduce a novel myoneural actuator (MNA) that reprograms living muscles into fatigue-resistant, computer-controlled motors that can be implanted inside the body to restore movement in organs.

“We’ve built an interface that leverages natural pathways used by the nervous system so that we can seamlessly control organs in the body, while also enabling the transmission of sensory feedback to the brain,” says Hugh Herr, senior author of the study, a professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab, co-director of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics, and an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. The study was co-led by Herr’s postdoc Guillermo Herrera-Arcos and former postdoc Hyungeun Song.

By repurposing existing muscle in the body, the researchers have developed the first “living” implant that uses rewired sensory nerves to revive paralyzed organs — which may present a new genre of medicine, where a person’s own tissue becomes the hardware.

Rewiring the brain-body interface

Many scientists have toiled to restore function in paralyzed organs, but it’s extremely challenging to design a technology that both communicates with the nervous system and doesn't fatigue over time. Some have tried to insert miniaturized actuators — small machines that can power bionic limbs — into the body. However, Herrera-Arcos says, “it’s hard to make actuators at the centimeter level, and they aren’t very efficient.” Others have focused on creating muscle tissue in the lab, but building muscles cell by cell is time-intensive and far from ready for human use.

Herr’s team tried something different.

“We engineered existing muscles to become an actuator, or motor, that reinstates motion in organs,” says Song.

To do this, the researchers had to navigate the delicate dynamics within the nervous system. The actuator would have to interface with the nervous system to work properly, but it must also somehow evade the brain’s control. “You don’t want the brain to consciously control the muscle actuator because you want the actuator to automatically control an organ, like the heart,” explains Herrera-Arcos. Establishing a computer-controlled muscle to move organs could ensure automatic function and also bypass damaged brain pathways.

Incorporating motor neurons into the actuator may help generate movement, but these neurons are directly controlled by the brain. “Sensory neurons, however, are wired to receive, not to command,” explains Song. “We thought we could leverage this dynamic and reroute motor signals through sensory fibers, making a computer — rather than the brain — the muscle’s new command center.”

To achieve this, sensory nerves would need to fuse fluidly with muscle, and scientists had not yet determined if this was possible. Remarkably, when the team replaced motor nerves in rodent muscle with sensory ones, “the sensory nerves re-innervated the muscles and formed functional synapses. It’s a tremendous discovery,” says Herrera-Arcos.

Sensory neurons not only enabled the use of a digital controller, but also helped curb muscle fatigue — increasing fatigue resistance in rodent muscle by 260 percent compared to native muscles. That’s because muscle fatigue depends largely on the diameter of the axons, or cable-like projections that innervate muscles. Motor neuron axons vary greatly in size, and when a motor nerve is electrically stimulated, the largest axons fire first — exhausting the muscle quickly. However, sensory axons are all nearly the same size, so the signal is broadcast more evenly across muscle fibers, avoiding fatigue, explains Herrera-Arcos.

Designing a biohybrid system

They combined all of these elements into a fatigue-resistant biohybrid motor called a myoneural actuator (MNA). By wrapping their actuator around a paralyzed intestine in a rodent, the researchers reinstated the organ’s squeezing motion. They also successfully controlled rodent calf muscles in an experiment designed to mimic residual muscle in human lower-limb amputations. Importantly, the MNA system transmitted sensory signals to the brain. “This suggests that our technology could seamlessly link organs to the brain. For example, we might be able to make a paralyzed stomach relay hunger,” explains Song.

Bringing their MNA to clinic will require further testing in larger animal models, and eventually, humans. But if it passes the regulatory gauntlet, their system could pave a smoother and safer path toward reviving static organs. Implanting MNAs would require a surgery that is already commonplace in clinic, the researchers say, and their system might be simpler and safer to implement than mechanical devices or organ transplants that introduce foreign material into the body.

The team is hopeful that their new technology could improve the lives of millions living with organ dysfunctions. “Today’s solutions are mostly synthetic: pacemakers and other mechanical assist devices. A living muscle actuator implanted alongside a weakened organ would be part of the body itself. That is a category of medicine different from anything seen in clinic,” explains Herrera-Arcos.

Song says that skin is of special interest. “Hypothetically, we could wrap MNAs around skin grafts to relay tactile feedback, such as strain or tension, which is currently missing for users of prostheses.” Their technology could even augment virtual reality systems, too. “The idea is that, if we couple the MNA system to skin and muscles, a person could feel what their virtual avatar is touching even though their real body isn’t moving,” says Song.

“Our research is on the brink of giving new life to various parts and extensions of the body,” adds Herrera-Arcos. “It’s exciting to think that our system could enhance human potential in ways that once only belonged to the realm of science fiction.”

This research was funded, in part, by the Yang Tan Collective at MIT, K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics at MIT, Nakos Family Bionics Research Fund at MIT, and the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Foundation.

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard have won the 2026 Turing Award for inventing quantum cryptography.

I am incredibly pleased to see them get this recognition. I have always thought the technology to be fantastic, even though I think it’s largely unnecessary. I wrote up my thoughts back in 2008, in an <a href+https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2008/10/quantum_cryptography.html”>essay titled “Quantum Cryptography: As Awesome As It Is Pointless.”

Back then, I wrote:

While I like the science of quantum cryptography—my undergraduate degree was in physics—I don’t see any commercial value in it. I don’t believe it solves any security problem that needs solving. I don’t believe that it’s worth paying for, and I can’t imagine anyone but a few technophiles buying and deploying it. Systems that use it don’t magically become unbreakable, because the quantum part doesn’t address the weak points of the system...

Dozens of startups working on data centers, mining and pharmaceuticals are hanging on Elon Musk's long-stalled megarocket.

Nations in Europe and Asia are delaying coal phase-outs and lifting restrictions. The resurgence could be long-term, analysts say.

The Trump administration takes aim at a 2024 lawsuit that seeks to force fossil fuel companies to pay the costs of addressing climate change

By threatening to create a public utility, city officials helped steer Tucson Electric Power toward an agreement where it would spend $56 million over 25 years on climate action.

The EU Commission letter reflects growing fears that the Iran war is sparking an all-out global economic crisis.

Producers of fuel made from agricultural products argue they should have a greater role in the EU’s clean fuel plans.

The European Commission plans to scrap the invalidation of certain permits in its Market Stability Reserve while leaving the volume thresholds and the absorption rate intact.

One option under discussion at the state-controlled bank is to extend loan maturities, allowing farmers to defer part of their payments to the end of existing contracts.

Dozens of people have died from extreme weather in the country so far this year.