Each year, more than 1,500 researchers rely on over 200 tools and instruments at MIT.nano to pursue experiments that span MIT’s disciplines, collectively generating 160,000 hours of work across 88,000 instances of tool use. Behind this activity is an operational framework that must discretely coordinate access, maintain fairness, and keep research moving without friction.

Managing such a dynamic environment requires more than a scheduling calendar. An automated reservation system serves as the connective tissue of the facility, balancing demand across diverse user needs while supporting the practical realities of a shared lab space. Researchers arrive at MIT.nano with different workflows, safety requirements, and administrative needs, yet the system must present a seamless experience. Integration with MIT’s broader digital infrastructure, from onboarding and authentication to safety training and billing, ensures that access is both efficient and compliant, reducing barriers so researchers can focus on their work.

A system for the modern era

Over the past three years, during a period of rapid growth in both equipment and facility usage, MIT.nano undertook a transition to a new platform designed to scale with demand while maintaining operational continuity. The effort reflects an ongoing commitment to evolving infrastructure that supports the pace, complexity, and collaborative spirit of modern research.

The importance of robust laboratory management systems has long been recognized at MIT. For decades, researchers in the Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) and the Materials Research Laboratory relied on the CORAL lab management platform to reserve and manage shared instrumentation. Jointly developed by MIT and Stanford University and introduced in 2003, CORAL represented a significant advance over the text-based system it replaced. But by the time MIT.nano adopted CORAL in 2018, active development had slowed, and the platform was beginning to show its age, most visibly through the absence of modern web and mobile interfaces expected by today’s users.

To address these limitations, MIT.nano has transitioned to NEMO, an open-source laboratory management system originally developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NEMO centralizes scheduling, communication, and operational logistics into a single platform that manages tool reservations and user access while supporting facility growth. Its modular architecture and plugin framework allow for extensive customization, enabling the system to evolve alongside the needs of a large, shared research environment.

“Over time, NEMO was replicating core functionalities of CORAL while introducing new features that CORAL simply could not support,” explains Thomas Lohman, senior software and systems manager at MTL and a long-time contributor to CORAL’s development. “The question became whether to continue patching the old system or adopt this new platform that already had a lot of the features we use daily, as well as an active community continually improving it.”

For MIT.nano leadership, modernization was about more than replacing an aging tool. “We needed a system that centralizes everything a facility user depends on — policies, tool documentation, training workflows, and communications — within a user-friendly, mobile-accessible environment,” says Anna Osherov, associate director for Characterization.nano, who led the evaluation and transition effort. “Just as important was making sure the platform enhances the experience for both users and staff.”

Collaborating at MIT and with shared access facilities

MIT.nano collaborated closely with Mathieu Rampant, NEMO project lead and CEO of Atlantis Labs, to adopt the community edition of NEMO, an extended version enriched by contributions from a growing global user base. The open-source model ensures that improvements developed at MIT.nano benefit the broader research community, reinforcing a shared ecosystem of innovation. “The NEMO community is expanding rapidly, and many new features originate directly from facility users and administrators,” says Rampant. “That collaborative model allows improvements to propagate quickly while giving institutions a sense of ownership in the platform’s evolution.”

NEMO introduces modern features long requested by MIT.nano researchers, including mobile access, improved transparency, and streamlined workflows. Facility users can now monitor their own tool usage and consumables, customize notifications, register for training, join real-time equipment waitlists, report issues, and communicate with staff, all through a unified dashboard. What was once distributed across multiple systems is now centralized, reducing friction in day-to-day lab operations.

Launching a new platform at the scale of MIT.nano required careful planning and sustained collaboration. The system needed to support multiple facility types, integrate with existing MIT infrastructure, and accommodate a diverse set of instrumentation workflows. “Features that work well in a typical characterization lab can quickly become a burden in a more chemically active environment like the cleanroom,” explains Jorg Scholvin, associate director of Fab.nano. “Relying on researchers to log in using personal devices and Duo authentication, for example, would be impractical in that setting.”

To address these challenges, MIT.nano collaborated with MIT Information Systems and Technology Associate Vice President Olu Brown and Senior Director for Infrastructure Operations Marco Gomes and their teams to streamline integration between MIT systems and NEMO for cleanroom users. “The availability of modern APIs allowed us to connect very different systems efficiently and deliver a convenient, seamless, and productive experience in the lab,” says Scholvin.

The result is a platform that now processes thousands of reservations, communications, and operational actions daily. “We truly value the partnership with MIT.nano and appreciate the collaboration throughout this effort,” says Gomes. “It’s been a great example of teams working together to deliver something meaningful for the research community.”

As one of the largest shared-access facilities deploying NEMO, MIT.nano has played a central role in advancing the platform’s capabilities, both by helping shape its development and by demonstrating a model that is scalable and effective for other facilities and research centers nationwide. Enhancements first created to meet MIT.nano’s needs are now leveraged by other facilities adopting NEMO across the globe. 

In 1985, the Innovative Design Fund placed an ad in Scientific American offering up to $10,000 to support clever prototypes for clothing, home decor, and textiles. William Freeman PhD ’92, then an electrical engineer at Polaroid and now an MIT professor, saw it and submitted a novel idea: a three-sided zipper. Instead of fastening pants, it’d be like a switch that seamlessly flips chairs, tents, and purses between soft and rigid states, making them easier to pack and put together.

Freeman’s blueprint was much like a regular zipper, except triangular. On each side, he nailed a belt to connect narrow wooden “teeth” together. A slider wrapping around the device could be moved up to fasten the three strips into place, straightening them into a triangular tube. His proposal was rejected, but Freeman patented his prototype and stored it in his garage in the hopes it might come in handy one day.

Nearly 40 years later, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers wanted to revive the project to create items with “tunable stiffness.” Prior attempts to adjust that weren’t easily reversible or required manual assembly, so CSAIL built an automated design tool and adaptable fastener called the “Y-zipper.” The scientists’ software program helps users customize three-sided zippers, which it then builds on its own in a 3D printer using plastics. These devices can be attached or embedded into camping equipment, medical gear, robots, and art installations for more convenient assembly.

“A regular zipper is great for closing up flat objects, like a jacket, but Freeman ideated something more dynamic. Using current fabrication technology, his mechanism can transform more complex items,” says MIT postdoc and CSAIL researcher Jiaji Li, who is a lead author on an open-access paper presenting the project. “We’ve developed a process that builds objects you can rapidly shift from flexible to rigid, and you can be confident they’ll work in the real world.”

Why zippers?

Users can customize how the fasteners look when they’re zipped up in CSAIL’s software program; they can select the length of each strip, as well as the direction and angle at which they’ll bend. They can also choose from one of four motion “primitives” to select how the zipper will appear when it’s zipped up: straight, bent (similar to an arch), coiled (resembling a spring), or twisted (looks like screws).

The Y-zipper that results will appear to “shape-shift” in the real world. When unzipped, it can look like a squid with three sprawling tentacles, and when you close it up, it becomes a more compact structure (like a rod, for instance). This flexibility could be useful when you’re traveling — take pitching a tent, for example. The process can take up to six minutes to do alone, but with the Y-zipper’s help, it can be done in one minute and 20 seconds. You simply attach each arm to a side of the tent, supporting the structure from the top so that the zipper seemingly pops the canopy into place. 

This seamless transition could also unlock more flexible wearables, often useful in medical scenarios. The team wrapped the Y-zipper around a wrist cast, so that a user could loosen it during the day, and zip it up at night to prevent further injuries. In turn, a seemingly stiff device can be made more comfortable, adjusting to a patient’s needs.

The system can also aid users in crafting technology that moves at the push of a button. One can attach a motor to the Y-zipper after fabrication to automate the zipping process, which helps build things like an adaptive robotic quadruped. The robot could potentially change the size of its legs, tightening up into taller limbs and unzipping when it needs to be lower to the ground. Eventually, such rapid adjustments could help the robot explore the uneven terrain of places like canyons or forests. Actuated Y-zippers can also build dynamic art installations — for example, the team created a long, winding flower that “bloomed” thanks to a static motor zipping up the device.

Mastering the material

While Li and his colleagues saw the creative potential of the Y-zipper, it wasn’t yet clear how durable it would be. Could they sustain daily use?

The team ran a series of stress tests to find out. First, they evaluated the strength and flexibility of polylactic acid (PLA) and thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), two plastics commonly used in 3D printing. Using a machine that bent the Y-zippers down, they found that PLA could handle heavier loads, while TPU was more pliable.

In another experiment, CSAIL researchers used an actuator to continuously open and close the Y-zipper to see how long it’d take to snap. Some 18,000 cycles of zipping and unzipping later, they finally broke. Y-zipper’s secret to durability, according to 3D simulations: its elastic structure, which helps distribute the stress of heavy loads.

Despite these findings, Li envisions an even more durable three-sided zipper using stronger materials, like metal. They may also make the zippers bigger for larger-scale projects, but that’s not yet possible with their current 3D printing platform.

Jiaji also notes that some applications remain unexplored, like space exploration, wherein Y-zipper’s tentacles could be built into a spacecraft to grab nearby rock samples. Likewise, the zippers could be embedded into structures that can be assembled rapidly, helping relief workers quickly set up shelters or medical tents during natural disasters and rescues.

“Reimagining an everyday zipper to tackle 3D morphological transitions is a brilliant approach to dynamic assembly,” says Zhejiang University assistant professor Guanyun Wang, who wasn’t involved in the paper. “More importantly, it effectively bridges the gap between soft and rigid states, offering a highly scalable and innovative fabrication approach that will greatly benefit the future design of embodied intelligence.”

Li and Freeman wrote the paper with Tianjin University PhD student Xiang Chang and MIT CSAIL colleagues: PhD student Maxine Perroni-Scharf; undergraduate Dingning Cao; recent visiting researchers Mingming Li (Zhejiang University), Jeremy Mrzyglocki (Technical University of Munich), and Takumi Yamamoto (Keio University); and MIT Associate Professor Stefanie Mueller, who is a CSAIL principal investigator and senior author on the work. Their research was supported, in part, by a postdoctoral research fellowship from Zhejiang University and the MIT-GIST Program.

The researchers’ work was presented at the ACM’s ​​Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in April.

Digital Fairness in the EU

The next few years will be decisive for EU digital policymaking. With major laws like the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, and the AI Act now in place, the EU is entering an enforcement era that will show whether these rules are rights-respecting or drift toward overreach and corporate control. With the proposed EU’s Digital Fairness Act (DFA), the Commission is now turning to increasingly visible risks for users, such as dark patterns and exploitative personalization. Its “Digital Fairness Fitness Check” makes clear that existing consumer rules need updating to reflect how digital markets operate today. 

But not all proposed solutions point in the right direction. Regulators are already flirting with measures that rely on expanded surveillance, such as age verification mandates—surface-level fixes that risk undermining fundamental rights while offering little more than a false sense of protection. 

For EFF, digital fairness means addressing the root causes of harm, not requiring platforms to exert more control over their users. It means safeguarding privacy, freedom of expression, and the rights of users and developers.

If the DFA is to make a real difference, it must tackle structural imbalances. Lawmakers should focus on two interlocking principles. First, prioritize privacy. Reforms should address harms driven by surveillance-based business models, alongside deceptive design practices that impair informed choices. Second, strengthen user sovereignty, which is also a necessary precondition for European digital sovereignty more broadly. Strengthening user sovereignty means taking measures that address user lock-in, coercive contract terms, and manipulative defaults that limit users’ ability to freely choose how they use digital products and services.

Together, these principles would support the EU’s objectives of consistent consumer protection, fair markets, and a more coherent legal framework. If implemented properly, the EU could address power imbalances and build trust in Europe’s digital economy. 

Ban Dark Patterns  

Dark patterns are practices that impair users’ ability to make informed and autonomous decisions. Many companies deploy these tactics through interface design to steer choices and influence behavior. Their impact goes beyond poor consumer decisions. Dark patterns push users to share personal data they would not otherwise disclose and undermine autonomy by making alternatives harder to access. 

The DFA should address this by clearly prohibiting misleading interfaces that distort user choice in commercial contexts. While the Digital Services Act introduced a definition, it only partially bans such practices and leaves gaps across existing consumer law rules. The DFA should close these gaps by, at the very least, introducing explicit prohibitions and clearer enforcement rules, without resorting to design mandates. 

Tackle Commercial Surveillance 

At the core of digital unfairness lies the pervasive collection and use of personal data. Surveillance and profiling drive many of the harms regulators are trying to address, from dark patterns to exploitative personalization. The DFA should tackle these incentives directly by reducing reliance on surveillance-based business models. These practices are fundamentally incompatible with privacy and fairness, and they distort digital markets by rewarding data exploitation rather than quality of service. At a minimum, the DFA should address unfair profiling and surveillance advertising by strengthening privacy rights and banning pay-for-privacy schemes. Users should not have to trade their data or pay extra to avoid being tracked. Accordingly, the DFA should support the recognition of automated privacy signals by web browsers and mobile operating systems, which give users a better way to reject tracking and exercise their rights. Practices that override such signals through banners or interface design should be considered unfair. 

Addressing surveillance and profiling also protects children, since many online harms are tied to the collection and exploitation of their data. Systems that serve ads or curate content often rely on intrusive profiling practices, raising concerns about privacy and fairness, particularly when applied to minors. Rather than turning to invasive age verification, the focus should be on limiting data use by default.

Strengthen User Sovereignty  

There is a major gap in how EU law addresses user autonomy in digital markets: Many digital products and services still restrict what people can do with what they pay for through opaque or one-sided licensing terms, technical protection measures, and remote controls. These mechanisms increasingly limit lawful use, modification, or access after purchase, allowing providers to revoke access, disable functionalities, or degrade performance over time. In practice, this turns ownership into a conditional rental.  

Consumers must be able to use and resell digital goods without hidden limitations and with clear licensing terms. Too often, technical and contractual lock-ins, including remote lockouts and unilateral restrictions on functionality, erode that control. Recent legal reforms show that progress is possible. Rules such as those under the Digital Markets Act have begun to curb technical and contractual barriers and promote user choice. However, many restrictions persist.

The DFA must address these practices by targeting unfair post-sale restrictions and strengthening users’ ability to control and switch services. This means setting clear limits on unfair terms and misleading practices, alongside robust transparency on how digital services function over time. It should also strengthen interoperability and support user control, allowing people to access third-party applications and to let trusted applications act on their behalf, reducing lock-in and expanding meaningful choice in how users interact with digital services. 

The EPA administrator once touted the importance of climate adaptation programs. Now that he's in charge, he's taking a different approach.

The Virginia utility also expressed optimism about battery storage and nuclear power.

Chief Executive Greg Abel said "we'll find a better path" if states impose expensive climate requirements on utilities owned by Berkshire.

A New Jersey lawmaker wants voters to approve $5 billion in borrowing for climate resilience. But he worries if there's political support.

The countries also agreed to continue discussing alternative proposals and entertain new ones.

Heat waves are forecast to persist for longer than usual in densely populated states of western and eastern India, the country’s weather forecaster said.

Extensive groundwater pumping and urban development have dramatically shrunk the aquifer, meaning that Mexican capital has been sinking for more than a century.

The transition to cleaner power for the towers that provide cellphone service is driven by cost pressures and climate goals.

Polymarket is a platform where people can bet on real-world events, political and otherwise. Leaving the ethical considerations of this aside (for one, it facilitates assassination), one of the issues with making this work is the verification of these real-world events. Polymarket gamblers have threatened a journalist because his story was being used to verify an event. And now, gamblers are taking hair dryers to weather sensors to rig weather bets.

There’s also insider trading: a lot of it.

Gene expression is controlled, in part, by the interactions between genes and regulatory elements located along the genome. Those interactions depend on the ability of chromatin — a mix of DNA and proteins — to move around within a crowded space.

In a new study, MIT researchers have measured chromatin movement at timescales ranging from hundreds of microseconds to hours, allowing them to rigorously quantify those dynamics for the first time.

Their analysis revealed that chromatin can exist in two different categories: In one, chromatin moves in a constrained way that allows it to primarily contact only neighboring regions of the genome; in the other, chromatin moves more freely and contacts regions that are farther away, but only over longer timescales.

The findings offer insight into how gene expression is regulated, as well as how chromatin segments come together for other processes such as DNA repair, the researchers say.

“Because we were able to look at chromatin dynamics for the first time at these very fast timescales, and also for the first time across the full dynamic range, we were able to observe chromatin motion over a range that just wasn’t possible before,” says Anders Sejr Hansen, an associate professor of biological engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study, which appears today in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology.

The paper’s lead authors are MIT postdoc Matteo Mazzocca, Domenic Narducci PhD ’25, and Simon Grosse-Holz PhD ’23. Jessica Matthias, chief commercial officer of Abberior Instruments, and Tatiana Karpova, manager of the National Cancer Institute Optical Microscopy Core, are also authors of the paper.

Constrained movement

In textbooks, chromatin is often depicted as a static structure within the cell nucleus, but in reality, it is constantly moving. Those movements are necessary for genes to interact with DNA regulatory sequences such as enhancers, which can be as far as 1 million base pairs away. They also ensure that when DNA breaks occur, the two ends of DNA can encounter each other to be repaired.

“Chromatin dynamics are foundational to all processes in the nucleus, and especially processes that involve two things finding each other. That’s important in DNA repair, gene regulation, recombination, or moving a particular gene to the right compartment of the nucleus,” Hansen says.

The movement of any particular location on the genome, or locus, is constrained by the fact that DNA is a polymer. After moving in any direction, a locus will be pulled back by the DNA on either side of it.

“Chromosomes are polymers. They’re held together by many nucleotides of DNA. Being part of DNA is a little bit like running while holding hands with other people. If a hundred people are holding hands and you, in the middle of the chain, try to run in one direction, you’ll get pulled back,” Hansen says.

This type of behavior is known as subdiffusive movement. Previous studies have yielded conflicting reports on how subdiffusive chromatin is, mainly because the studies were not able to track the movement over a long enough period of time to obtain statistically robust measurements. Because the movements are so small, on the order of nanometers, data needs to be obtained over long dynamic ranges — from milliseconds to hours.

In those earlier studies, researchers used imaging techniques that can track the position of a single molecule over time by comparing images frame by frame. These are useful but can only be used over a small dynamic range because of the limitations of conventional microscopy.

To generate more statistically robust data, the MIT team used MINFLUX — a super-resolution light microscopy technique that can track the movement of tiny objects such as proteins over longer periods of time. This technique was recently developed by Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute, a Nobel laureate for his work in super resolution microscopy. In this study, the MIT team became the first to apply this technique to chromatin in living cells.

“MINFLUX allowed us to get around the limitations of conventional microscopy, letting us measure chromatin movement faster and for a longer period of time than ever before,” Narducci says. “To our knowledge, it’s the first time this technique has been used this way.”

Using MINFLUX, the researchers were able to study cells over timescales that covered four orders of magnitude — from 200 microseconds to 10 seconds. And by combining MINFLUX with two traditional imaging techniques, they could track chromatin movement over seven orders of magnitude across time, from hundreds of microseconds to several hours.

“Region of influence”

These studies, performed across several different mouse and human cell types, allowed the researchers to identify two distinct classes of chromatin dynamics. In both classes, over short and intermediate timescales (up to 200 seconds), any given locus tends to move only within about 200 nanometers. This suggests that the subdiffusive pull is stronger than had been previously thought.

“One of the main takeaways is that you have this region of influence where a genomic locus has access to other genomic loci, and this is roughly a couple hundred nanometers large,” Grosse-Holz says. “If loci are much closer together than a couple hundred nanometers, they’re effectively in contact all the time. You get a cutoff at a couple hundred nanometers where everything within that region around a given locus can see that locus, and everything outside cannot.”

This constant contact is likely beneficial for DNA repair, as the broken strands remain in close proximity to each other. The findings also suggest that for genes and regulatory elements that are within about 100,000 base pairs, they don’t need any extra help to find each other — they will do so routinely through their normal movement.

“If they are closer than 100,000 bases, and most regulatory elements are, then those elements are going to find their target gene within a few milliseconds or a few minutes,” Mazzocca says. “These are timescales that are completely consistent with transcription.”

In the other class of chromatin dynamics that the researchers identified, chromatin is able to move over a wider range, but only at longer timescales (a few minutes to hours). This class of chromatin appeared in some types of cells but not others, for reasons that are not yet understood.

“It would be reasonable to assume that the behavior would be more or less the same in all cell types, but that’s not at all what we found,” Hansen says. “It’s very different in different cell types, with no obvious way of categorizing things.”

He adds that the strength of the subdiffusive pull that the researchers found in this study can’t be explained with existing models that have been developed to study chromatin dynamics — the Rouse model and the fractal globule model. This suggests that the models may need to incorporate factors that were previously left out, such as the interactions between chromatin and the crowded nucleoplasm it sits within.

“These findings are significant for two key reasons,” says Luca Giorgetti, a group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Switzerland, who was not involved in the study. “First, they rigorously confirm longstanding but anecdotal observations that chromatin motion is strongly subdiffusive. Second, they demonstrate that this behavior is consistent across multiple cell types and persists across all measured timescales.”

The research was funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Pew-Stewart Scholar for Cancer Research Award, and the Bridge Project, a partnership between the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 04 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02616-x

Microplastics and nanoplastics are moving in the atmosphere worldwide. Now, research shows that they can interact with sunlight and influence the climate system.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 04 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02620-1

The radiative impact of microplastic and nanoplastic particles in the atmosphere is not well understood. Here the authors quantify their radiative forcing, finding that they can exceed that of black carbon regionally.

Found Industries has gone through several distinct phases in the four years since it was originally formed as Found Energy. There was the scrappy startup stage, in which the company was primarily housed in the basement of founder Peter Godart ’15, SM ’19, PhD ’21. Then there was the demonstration phase, in which the company worked to productize its technology for transforming aluminum into high-density fuel for industrial operations.

Now, after confronting supply chain vulnerabilities related to critical metals in its aluminum fuel business, the company is launching a new division, Found Metals, to extract the critical metal gallium from mineral refineries — a move that builds on its original technology while addressing a major national security need.

Gallium is a critical material in the defense, semiconductor, and energy sectors. In 2024, China produced 99 percent of the world’s primary supply — market dominance the country takes advantage of through export controls.

Godart’s company developed an electrochemical gallium extraction technology for internal use after realizing how dependent it would be on China for the catalyst material at the center of its aluminum fuel reactors. Now, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy, Found is hoping to use that technology to create a new domestic supply chain for gallium and a host of other important metals.

Found Industries is still committed to its aluminum fuel operations, now under its Found Energy division. It is already running a 100-kilowatt-class demonstration plant and is preparing for industrial pilot deployments next year. But with its expansion, which was announced April 21, the company is also working to meet the moment for critical metals production.

“Gallium is the world’s most critical metal, as it’s 99 percent controlled by China,” Godart says. “When you produce 99 percent of something, you also produce 99 percent of the tools required to extract it. We couldn’t get our hands on some of those tools, so we were forced to come up with a new technology. Now we believe we can deploy this at scale to become one the first major Western suppliers of these metals.”

From fuel to metals

Godart focused on robotics as an undergraduate in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Following graduation, he worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he explored systems for tapping into high-density fuels like aluminum on other planets.

“I had this crazy idea that you could use aluminum, which is already a common construction material for aerospace, as a fuel on other planets,” Godart says. “You don’t need most of the aluminum on a spacecraft once you land on another planet. Aluminum is around 40 times more energy-dense than lithium-ion batteries, and if you have an oxidizer, like water on an icy moon for example, then you can react that aluminum with water and extract energy as heat and hydrogen.”

Luckily for people who might spill water on aluminum while cooking, the metal is normally very stable when exposed to air. In order to tap into aluminum’s stored energy, it needs to undergo a chemical reaction. Godart began exploring catalyst materials to create that reaction at NASA. He continued that work with professor of mechanical engineering Douglas Hart when he returned to MIT in 2017, this time for applications a little closer to home.

“If we want to think about moving humanity to other planets, we have some problems to solve here first,” Godart says. “That was the impetus for me to go back to MIT to study using aluminum as a fuel for energy distribution on Earth.”

Around 70 million tons of aluminum are already transported around the globe every year. Godart says that gives aluminum an easier path to scale. During his PhD, he created a process for coating aluminum with a gallium-containing alloy to help tap into aluminum’s embodied energy.

“We found a catalyst that, when mixed with aluminum scraps, enabled aluminum to react with water very rapidly and at orders of magnitude higher power density than what had been possible before,” Godart says. “That meant you could use aluminum as a fuel and get megawatt-scale power from compact reactor systems.”

By the time he finished his PhD in 2021, Godart and his collaborators had developed a system that mixes aluminum fuel with those catalysts to continuously produce electricity at the kilowatt scale through a hydrogen fuel cell.

Godart launched Found Energy in 2022, licensing part of his research from MIT’s Technology License Office and receiving support from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service. The company received an Activate fellowship, and after quickly outgrowing Godart’s basement, moved into its current 20,000 square foot facility in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Today, Found Energy is working with industrial companies that have abundant aluminum scrap.

“When you invent a fuel, you then have to invent the engine,” Godart says. “Our engine is called a catalyzed aluminum water reactor. You feed in aluminum that’s been treated with the catalyst and water, and you get a steam-hydrogen gas mixture. We call that our power stream. We use it to cogenerate industrial heat and electricity. The reaction byproduct is a hydrated aluminum oxide that can be sold into various industries or recycled back into aluminum, which is the long-term vision.”

As Godart worked to build more of the systems, he became concerned about Found’s reliance on Chinese supply chains for its catalyst material. So, in 2024, he developed a new way to extract gallium from Bayer liquor, an industrial process stream used to produce aluminum. Traditional methods for extracting gallium rely on foreign-controlled organic chemicals or resins to bind and concentrate the gallium.

Found uses a continuous electrochemical process to recover the gallium directly from Bayer liquor and other industrial feedstocks, even at low concentrations.

“We thought of it as a way to future-proof what we were doing,” Godart says. “Necessity was the mother of invention.”

Then, toward the end of 2024, China began restricting the export of critical metals including gallium.

“We realized we had already developed a technique for producing these restricted metals that could be very quickly adapted,” Godart recalls.

Scaling for national security

On April 14, the Department of Energy’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation selected Found as part of its $5.4 million program to recover gallium from domestic feedstocks. The company plans to start extracting gallium, along with other critical metals like indium and germanium, by the end of 2027.

Meanwhile, Found is already running a 100-kilowatt-class aluminum fuel demonstration system in Charlestown and is working through a orders of several megawatts from large public companies.

“For our fuel technology, the vision is to go as big as possible,” Godart says. “We envision major power plants. Aluminum refineries today, for example, consume hundreds of megawatts of continuous thermal power. That’s what we aim to deliver.”

Godart says he spends most of his time now on gallium extraction, but both branches of the business could make supply chains more secure in the future.

“The big focus now is critical metals, because the government needs this,” Godart says. “We’re also making these metals for ourselves, so we’re vertically integrating our own supply chain, which is table stakes now for companies that deal in physical goods. You need to be able to control your inputs. By focusing on metals, it improves the likelihood of success for our aluminum fuel business.”

MIT Research Scientist Afreen Siddiqi ’99, SM ’01, PhD ’06; MIT professors Kathleen Thelen and Vinod Vaikuntanathan SM ’05, PhD ’09; as well as Kate Manne PhD ’11 are among 223 scientists, artists, and scholars awarded 2026 fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Working across 55 disciplines, the fellows were selected from almost 5,000 applicants for “prior career achievement and exceptional promise.”

Each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.” Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded nearly $450 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 fellows. This year, MIT faculty and staff were recognized in the categories of geography and environmental studies, political science, and computer science.

Afreen Siddiqi is a research scientist in the Engineering Systems Laboratory in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Her expertise is in the development of systems-theoretic analytical methods and quantitative modeling for technical systems in space and on Earth that need to operate and adapt in changing environments. Her work has focused on space exploration, satellite Earth observation for informing decisions, and critical infrastructure planning. She has served as a contributing author to the sixth assessment report of 2022 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on implications of water, energy, and food interconnections for climate change adaptation. Her work has received teaching awards and fellowships including the Amelia Earhart Fellowship, Richard D. DuPont Fellowship, and the Rene H. Miller Prize in Systems Engineering.

Kathleen Thelen is the Ford International Professor of Political Science. Her work focuses on the political economy of the rich democracies, with a current emphasis on the study of American capitalism in comparative perspective. Her most recent book, “Attention Shoppers! American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy,” was published by Princeton University Press in 2025. Her awards include the Friedrich Schiedel-Award for Politics and Technology, the Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Prize, and the Michael Endres Research Prize (2019). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.

Vinod Vaikuntanathan is the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. A principal investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, his research focuses upon the foundations of cryptography and its applications to theoretical computer science at large. He is known for his work on fully homomorphic encryption (a powerful cryptographic primitive that enables complex computations on encrypted data), as well as lattice-based cryptography (which lays down a new mathematical foundation for cryptography in the post-quantum world). His awards include the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Award, the Godel Prize, the Simons Investigator Award, the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, a Best Paper Award from CRYPTO 2024, test of time awards from IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science and CRYPTO conferences, and he was named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 2024 and an International Association for Cryptologic Research Fellow in 2026.

Kate Manne, who earned her PhD in philosophy at MIT in 2011, is now a professor at Cornell University.

“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship,” says Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “As the foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”

A dozen MIT students recently set out for Barcelona — not just to study climate resilience, but to experience it firsthand. As part of STS.S22 (How to Grow Resilient Futures: Regenerative Agriculture and Economies in Catalunya, Spain), an Independent Activities Period course taught by Kate Brown, the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science, they stepped beyond the classroom and into living systems of sustainability.

Offered as a Global Classroom through MIT International Science and Technology (MISTI), the course reimagined what learning could look like. Instead of working their way through a syllabus containing texts about sustainable farming and the power of cooperatives, Brown’s students got their hands dirty. 

In fact, quite literally: They visited local farms and slaughterhouses; prepped, cooked, and served a cooperative dinner to migrants; and constructed a working greenhouse. In the process, they built a lasting community and forged their own visions about sustainability and how they are compelled to confront climate change — as MIT students now, and eventually as alumni. 

“I wanted the students to think about alternatives to the notion of capitalist development, where the latest technology is seen as the solution to every social problem that emerges. I wanted them to see ways people are solving problems in a place like Barcelona, where communities and ecologies are centered as part of the solution,” Brown says.

Through Brown’s partnerships at the Barcelona Urban Research Institute and Research and Degrowth (R&D)  — and MISTI Spain’s infrastructure — the group of eight undergraduates and four graduate students had the opportunity to examine the historical roots of cooperative movements in the region while simultaneously experiencing today’s iteration of co-op work. 

Brown intentionally designed the three-week syllabus to push students beyond the classroom walls and get them face-to-face with local MISTI Spain collaborators from across the farming and ecology sectors. For example, the class met with Pino Delàs, a pig farmer who left the industrial system to start his own localized, cyclical operation, called Llavora, which supported community farming and generated significantly less waste. 

Rooted in community 

With more than a century of creating cooperatives — both workers and farms — Barcelona and its Catalan roots provided an ideal environment for the students to consider Brown’s questions through fieldwork rooted in community. 

Within their first week on the ground, they collaborated with volunteers at the Agora Squat. The small “pocket park” was initially slated to be developed into a luxury hotel, but a local group of 200 neighborhood residents came together to protest the plan, instead exercising their legal right to use the land, a caveat in Spanish law that allows neighbors to make a case for possessing land that isn’t being used productively. Now, the lush green square boasts a community kitchen and gardens. One night a week, volunteers provide dinner for upward of 60 recent North African migrants, using ingredients sourced from local fruiterias and shops that would have otherwise gone to waste at the close of business. 

On this particular Thursday, Brown’s students became nonprofit managers and chefs, but they also became community members themselves. In just a few hours from start to finish, the students had to source donated produce from the local vendors, come up with a recipe using what they’d gathered, and then prepare a meal in the rudimentary kitchen. “They received a lot of turnips and had to create a recipe to use them,” Brown says. In the end, a flavorful stew simmered in a massive metal pan over propane burners, brought alive with fresh chilies picked from the garden. 

“This was way outside some students’ comfort zones,” Brown says. Yet, that was exactly the point of the activity. By the end of the evening, the students discovered that sometimes the most profound educational moments take shape only after challenging the limits of learning. 

“Many of us do not consider ourselves chefs, so it was empowering to discover that, together, we had the capacity to create a nourishing meal for 70 people, with produce that would have otherwise gone to waste. This meal that we created on the spot, in combination with many of the other workshops during the program, was a strong reminder of how much agency each of us has to effect change within isolating and constraining systems, especially in community with like-minded individuals,” says Sonia Torres Rodriguez, a first-year PhD student in urban studies and planning.

Torres Rodriguez focuses her doctoral research on affordable and climate-resilient housing. She was drawn to the IAP program's exploration of innovative approaches to more equitably distributing the means of producing housing and food, and was excited to be learning in person in Spain. “Cooking together, admiring healthy regenerative soil, foraging, learning traditional methods to braid grass, installing mini solar panels, and hosting poetry circles, would have been impossible to replicate on Zoom,” she says. 

Calvin Macatantan, a senior in computer science and urban studies and planning, was initially drawn to the program because of his interest in resilient economies and how they support the communities they serve. Other than visiting family in the Philippines, he’d never left the United States before. He was especially moved by the group’s stay at La Bruguera, an eco-resort partnered with R&D that serves as a “living laboratory.” The cohort heard from local experts in regenerative agriculture, soil health, and low-tech agroforestry, alongside hands-on activities such as eco-art sessions, weaving lessons, and the rebuilding of a greenhouse. 

As part of a final project for the course, Macatantan and another student wrote and illustrated a children’s book that explains La Bruguera’s work by making the soil come to life as the main protagonist for young readers. 

Brown’s course pushed Sofia Espindola de La Mora to think more critically about everyday systems and their environmental impact. Originally from Puerto Rico, the first-year student has watched helplessly in recent years as climate change has increased the frequency and magnitude of natural disasters at home.

She came to MIT looking for answers and wanting to make a difference, and signed up for Brown’s course as part of that quest. “It was fascinating to see firsthand that the degrowth movement doesn’t mean slowing down is a bad thing, but instead that the constant striving for more is what has led us to many of the predicaments we now face as a society. It forced me to think about whether it would even be possible for me to sustain the life I have now using renewable energy,” Espindola de La Mora says. The course convinced her to focus her studies on climate system science and engineering. 

A climate context

Broadening students’ perspectives was a priority for Brown, whose research lies at the intersection of history, science, technology, and bio-politics. She’s known on campus for courses like STS.038 (Risky Business: Food Production, Environment, and Health). Her 2026 book, “Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City,” examines urban systems, including gardens. 

When Brown was designing the Global Classroom — made possible through MISTI, with additional support from the MIT Energy Initiative — she centered a value she considers imperative in any course today: addressing climate and other human-driven environmental challenges.

“I’m focused on training students to approach these problems at the local level, so they see what happens when they’re working through communities, rather than prescribing to them something to scale all over the world,” Brown says.

That localized, individualized approach helped expand on what the students initially believed was possible, and compelled them to become part of the solution through their studies and in their professional lives. 

Since their return to campus, Brown’s students have continued to lean on one another and build community, one meal at a time. Many Tuesday nights, they come together to cook dinner, Barcelona squat style. Each individual brings their ingredients, and together they create a recipe that nourishes and sustains.  

“I was losing a lot of faith in the world before this trip,” Macatantan admits. “We’re constantly surrounded by consumption and the drive to do more. This experience helped me realize that I want to do something that impacts people. For me, that will look like research. I want to become an expert in a subject and become someone who can help communicate that knowledge to people who need it.” 

“MISTI Global Classrooms like this show what happens when learning extends beyond the MIT campus,” says Alicia Goldstein Raun, associate director of MISTI and managing director of the MIT-Spain Program at the Center for International Studies. “I was excited when Professor Brown approached me to help shape this new class, knowing it would resonate with students,” says Raun. “The students tackled global challenges like climate change and explored the degrowth movement while immersing themselves in Spanish communities and culture.”

For faculty interested in designing a MISTI Global Classroom, more information can be found here.

One of the central promises of open social media services is interoperability—the idea that wherever you personally decide to post doesn’t require others to be there just to follow what you have to say. Think of it like a radio broadcast: you want to reach people and don't care where they are or what device they're using. For example, in theory, a Bluesky user can follow someone on Mastodon or Threads without having to create a Mastodon or Threads account. But these systems are still a work in progress, and you might need to tweak a few things to get it working correctly.

Right now, broadcasting your message across social platforms can be a funky experience at best, deliberately broken up by oligopolists. The idea of the open web was baked into the internet via protocols like HTML and RSS that made it easy for anyone to visit a website or follow most blogs. The fact social media isn’t similarly open reflects an intentional choice to privatize the internet. 

Bridging and managing your posts so they’re viewable outside a singular source is part of the broader philosophy of POSSE, short for Post Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere (sometimes its Post Own Site, Share Everywhere). Instead of managing several accounts across different services, you post once to one primary site (which might be your personal website, or just one social media account), then set it up so it automatically publishes everywhere else. This way, it doesn’t matter where you or your audience is, and they're not walled off by account registration requirements. 

We’ll come back around to POSSE at the end of this post, but for now, let’s assume you just want your current main open social media account to actually have a chance to reach the most people it can. 

Why Post to the Open Social Web

Because the Fediverse and ATmosphere use different protocols, we need to use a third-party tool so accounts can communicate with each other. For that, we’ll need a bridge. As the name suggests, a bridge can connect one social media account to another, so you can post once and spread your message across several places. This isn’t just some niche concept: major blogging platforms like Wordpress and Ghost integrate posting to the Fediverse.

Bridging is an important facet of POSSE, but also something more people should consider, even if they don’t run their own websites. For example, if you don’t want to create a Threads account just to interact with your one friend who uses that platform, you shouldn’t have to. The good news is, you don’t. There are several bridging services, like Fedisky, RSS Parrot, and pinhole, but Bridgy Fed is currently the simplest to use, so we’ll focus on that. 

How to Post to Bluesky from Mastodon

From your Mastodon account (or other Fediverse account, for simplicity’s sake we’ll stick to Mastodon throughout), search for the username @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy and follow that account. Once you do, the account will follow you back and you’ll be bridged and people can find you from their Bluesky account. You should also get a DM with your bridged username. If you don’t see the @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy user when you search, your Mastodon instance may be blocking the bridging tool. 

Threads users who have enabled Fediverse sharing will be able to find you with your standard Mastodon username (ie, @your_user_name@mastodon.social), but if they haven’t enabled sharing, they will not be able to see your account. While this search is still a beta feature, you might find it easier to share the full URL, which would look like this: https://www.threads.net/fediverse_profile/@your_user_name@mastodon.social

People on Bluesky can find you by: Either searching for your Mastodon username, or if that doesn’t work, @your_user_name.instance.ap.brid.gy. For example, if your username is @eff@mastodon.social, it would appear as @eff.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy.

An example of a Mastodon username from the Bluesky web client.

How to Post to Mastodon and Bluesky from Threads

Yes, Threads is technically on the Fediverse, and you can bridge your Threads account to Mastodon or Bluesky (unless you’re in Europe, where the feature is disabled), but it’s a different process than on Bluesky and Mastodon.

• Open Settings > Account > Fediverse Sharing and set the option to “On.” This will make your posts visible to Mastodon (or other Fediverse) users, and vice versa. 
• Once the Fediverse sharing is enabled, you’ll likely need to wait a week, then you can bridge to Bluesky. Search for and follow the @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy account (it may take some digging to find it, but if that doesn’t work you can try visiting the profile page directly. 

People on Mastodon (or other Fediverse accounts) and Bluesky can find you by: Mastodon users can find you at, @your_threads_username@threads.net while Bluesky users will find you at, @your_threads_username.threads.net.ap.brid.gy (seriously, that will be the username). Note that some Mastodon instances may block Threads users entirely.

An example of a Threads username from the Mastodon web client.

An example of a Threads username from the Bluesky web client.

How to Post to Mastodon and Threads from Bluesky

From your Bluesky (or other ATProto) account, search for the username, “@ap.brid.gy” and follow that account. Once you do, the account will follow you back and you’ll be bridged, so people can follow you from Mastodon or other Fediverse accounts. You should also get a DM with your bridged username.

People on Mastodon (or other Fediverse account) and Threads can find you by: Your username will appear as @your_bluesky_username@bsky.brid.gy. For example, if your Bluesky username is @eff@bsky.social, it would appear as @eff.bksy.social@bsky.brid.gy.

An example of a Bluesky username from the Mastodon web client.

How to Post Everywhere from Your Own Website

You can bridge more than social media accounts. If you have your own website, you can bridge that too (as long as it supports microformats and webmention, or an Atom or RSS feed. If you have a blog, there’s a good chance you’re already good to go). When you do so, the bridged account will either post the full text (or image) of whatever you post to your personal site, or a link to that content,  depending on how your website is set up. You’ll also probably want to log into your Bridgy user page so you can manage the account. 

Where people can find your bridged account: Usually, a user can just search for your website’s URL on their decentralized social network of choice, or enter it on the Bridgy Fed page. But if that doesn’t work, they can try @yourdomain.com@web.brid.gy from Mastodon or @yourdomain.com.web.brid.gy from Bluesky.

An example of a bridged website username in the Mastodon web client.

How Your Account Username Looks on Each Platform

You’re Bound to Run Into Some Quirks

• Sometimes messages take a little while to crossover between networks, and sometimes they don't crossover at all.
• You can’t log into a bridged account like a regular account, but Bridgy Fed does provide some tools to see incoming notifications and recent activity in case they’re not coming through properly.
• ActivityPub and ATProto don’t have the same feature set, so you will have certain capabilities for one account you might not have in another. For example, you can edit posts on Mastodon, but not on Bluesky. If you edit a post that’s bridged from Mastodon to Bluesky, the Bluesky post will not be updated. 
• Replies can sometimes get lost, especially if the person (or people) replying to you doesn’t have sharing turned on.
• Ownership of accounts can get weird. For example, if you post to your own website and use a tool like Wordpress or Ghost for federation (more info below), you don’t necessarily get access to a “normal” social media account, with a standard login and password.
• And more! This is still a work in progress that has some technical quirks, but it’s improving all the time, and it’s best to keep telling yourself that troubleshooting is part of the fun.

Other Cool Stuff You Can Do

As mentioned up top, there’s a lot more you can do, and an increasing number of tools are making this process simpler. Bridgy Fed is one way to post to more places from a single account, but it’s far from the only way to do so. Here are just a few examples.

• Micro.blog is a paid service where you can blog from your own domain name, then post automatically to Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Tumblr, Nostr, LinkedIn, Medium, Pixelfed, and Flickr.
• Ghost is a blogging and newsletter platform that offers direct integration with the Fediverse, as well as support for Bluesky. Wordpress offers the option to join the Fediverse through a community plugin. Other newsletter platforms, like Buttondown, also have plans for federation. 
• Surf.social is a landing page and social media utility where you can show off all your various accounts (Federated or not). From the reader point of view, you can follow one publications numerous types of posts in one place. For example, 404 Media’s Surf.social feed includes its YouTube feed, podcast feed, and its journalist’s social media posts.
• If you think these new handles are a bit ugly, you can use a custom domain for Bluesky or fediverse account from your website. 

Of course, there are plenty of other tools, blogging platforms, and other utilities out there to help facilitate posting and bridging accounts, with new ones coming along every day. 

With proper support, time, and effort, eventually we will all be able to seamlessly interact across platforms, take our follows and followers to other services when a platform no longer suits our needs, and interact with a variety of web content regardless of what platform hosts it. Until then, we still need to do some DIY work, support the services we want to succeed, and push for more platforms and services to support federated protocols.

Someone pleaded guilty to secretly working for a ransomware gang as he negotiated ransomware payments for clients.