The AI Security Institute has a new report of AI systems engaging in “unsanctioned behavior”—what I have been calling “genie behavior—while being tested on their cybersecurity capabilities.

The incident stemmed from a single evaluation where agents were given a task of solving a cyber security challenge. We ran this challenge 122 times across several models. Our investigation found that in 10 of those runs, an AI agent took autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet, targeting real people and organisations. In total, we catalogued 19 such actions. Almost all of this behaviour (17 actions) came from a single model, Anthropic’s Mythos 5, with 2 actions involving OpenAI’s GPT-5.6-Sol with cyber classifiers (mechanisms to prevent misuse) disabled. In the most serious case, an agent tried to insert malicious code into an open-source project. In an attempt to get the code approved, the agent engaged in social engineering—creating fake online identities and using them to pressure the project’s maintainer to approve the code. A human maintainer caught and refused to approve the malicious code...

Brazil's new internet intermediary liability regime is underway. The implementation of changes established by the Supreme Court includes notice and takedown mechanisms and duty of care obligations. Caution is crucial as these measures can create problematic incentives for enforcement overreach and over censorship of protected speech.  

The court in June issued a new decision clarifying elements of its 2025 finding that the previous liability regime was partially unconstitutional. The government also published in late May two presidential decrees that detail how the new rules apply. 

Under the new regime, social media platforms and other internet applications that curate or interfere with posts can be held liable for third-party content if they don’t remove it after being notified by the user seeking take down unless there's a reasonable doubt that the content is unlawful. For certain specific cases, like crimes against honor (e.g. defamation), platform liability still depends on failing to comply with a judicial order.  

For some serious crimes, like human trafficking and crimes against women, applications have a duty of care to remove related content immediately and can be held liable when systemically failing to do so. The precise limits of what constitutes a systemic failure are still unclear. There are also stricter rules for paid ads, boosted content, and bots. 

The previous regime, set by Article 19 of the law known as the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet (“Marco Civil da Internet” in Portuguese), sought to protect freedom of expression online by holding internet application providers liable for user content if they failed to comply with a judicial order to remove it. There were specific, limited exceptions to this rule, like the unauthorized disclosure of nude or private sexual images. This was meant to prevent providers from over-removal of user content to avoid legal action. Yet, the court found that this provision failed to sufficiently safeguard democracy and fundamental rights. 

We outlined the thorny context leading to this shift in Brazil’s intermediary liability rules, including Big Tech’s alignment with the far right and hurdles to approve platform regulation in Congress, through a proper legislative process. 

Brazil’s shift is part of broader discussions and changes in response to growing concerns over online harms and digital platforms’ abuses. However, responses focused on platforms’ liability of user-generated content carry important traps and risks—from entrenching dominant platforms’ power over the information flow to escalating arbitrary online surveillance and censorship. The path ahead must prevent this to the extent possible, and the new presidential decrees provide a mixed contribution towards this task. 

New Decrees: Strengths and Flaws  

The government published two decrees regulating the new regime set by the Supreme Court. One introduces changes to its previous regulation, the Decree 8.771/2016, detailing elements of the decision, including additional duties that the court only briefly addressed (Decree 12.975). The other regulates measures to tackle violence against women online (Decree 12.976). 

The Supreme Court's decision didn't establish guidelines to protect users' due process rights when facing content take down and removal demands. Instead, it relies on providers to self regulate, which could lead to over censorship.  

The decrees’ provisions on user notification systems are helpful in this sense. They stipulate that providers must inform users (both the notifier and the content author) about the decision to remove or keep the content up, why, and the means to appeal. The guidance makes explicit that a platform may reconsider and reinstate content after an appeal and must explain its reasons to the party requesting removal and content author. The decrees also address concerns with the weaponization of notification systems, establishing that internet applications must adopt measures to prevent abuses. 

Decree 12.795 reinforces that applications can keep content up after notification when there’s reasonable doubt that the post is unlawful, stating that the analysis should consider the context of the publications, freedom of religion and belief, and any informational, educational, or critical, satirical, or parodic purpose with the aim of ensuring freedom of expression. With these guidelines, it aims to mirror the Digital Services Act's "notice-and-action" approach. Moreover, for sexual related, intimate content, platforms will provide a specific and easily accessible notice channel where victims or their representatives can follow the case. 

One of the most concerning provisions requires applications to proactively report content related to criminal conduct on their platforms to government authorities. Applications must send the post along with information that can identify the user. The Ministry of Justice will regulate this provision, something the Supreme Court didn't touch on in its decision. While it seems to apply just to those providers already required to comply with new content-related obligations (exempting email and videoconference providers, for example), it takes a disastrous step beyond. It’s not only about preventing the spread of unlawful content online; it gets platforms to police and report users to authorities by handing identification information apparently without a court order. 

Decree 12.795 also details the definition of messaging applications that are exempt from notice and duty of care obligations. It excludes features for public dissemination of content and open groups so that the exemption doesn't apply. It's still unclear what exactly open groups mean. Especially regarding end-to-end encrypted applications, it's crucial that duties to monitor and take down don't affect conversations that are under this security architecture. Perhaps more troubling, the Supreme Court stated in its clarification ruling that a judicial order can determine email, voice and video conference, and messaging providers to take down content of private communications. Any measure must respect privacy and free expression safeguards and refrain from undermining end-to-end encryption. 

Furthermore, decree 12.976 importantly addresses the protection of women online, but it contains a broad definition of online violence against women that will guide how platforms handle takedown notices they receive. This definition involves "any act, conduct, or omission that causes (...) psychological, political, or economic suffering (…) in any aspect of their lives, committed, instigated, facilitated, or aggravated, in whole or in part, by the use of digital technologies." Its breadth could unfortunately result in censoring legitimate criticism and other protected speech, which platforms and authorities must avoid. 

The decrees also establish powers to the Brazilian Data Protection Agency (ANPD) to oversee and regulate the new regime. Among controversies, the decrees give ANPD the power to apply penalties for breaches of content-related obligations. These obligations go beyond agency competencies set in the Data Protection Law and the Law 15.211/2025, focused on the online protection of children and adolescents. They are also not clearly covered by Article 12 of Marco Civil as it stipulates administrative penalties for violations of its data privacy provisions.  

We appreciate that ANPD has been open to civil society's demands and concerns. While it’s crucial that the agency conducts its oversight role preserving a proportionality commitment and keeping solid participation channels, sanction powers must be prescribed by law. 

Alerts for the Path Ahead 

It’s true that there are critical platform accountability problems we must address, especially regarding the big players. And yes, platforms should align their policies and practices with human rights standards, including by dealing diligently with the dissemination of unlawful, toxic content. But accountability efforts should look at platforms’ systems and processes and promote measures to put checks on the power of tech giants, instead of having a prevalent focus on policing and reporting user behavior.  

Key digital competition measures to regulate gatekeeper platforms are under discussion in bill 4675/2025, but the proposal is pending in Congress with no clear timeline for approval.  

One important measure is to ensure accountability of take-down requests, including by the government. The Supreme Court’s decision stipulated that internet applications should publish transparency reports of the removal notices they receive. Government institutions should follow suit by periodically disclosing aggregate data of their own requests to online platforms, covering various types of user data and demands for content and account restrictions. Back in 2016, Marco Civil’s regulation decree established that all federal bodies must annually publish statistical reports on their requests of subscriber data to providers. To the best of our knowledge, federal bodies generally fail to meet this provision. ANPD can play a crucial role in stepping up transparency in the implementation of the new rules. 

Ultimately, platform accountability under the new liability regime hinges on how accountable its application will be by platforms and state institutions, and on the regime's commitment to protecting fundamental rights, including freedom of expression and privacy.  

  

 

Ammonia is one of the most important chemicals produced in the world, ranking second only to sulfuric acid in the total volume produced each year. It is used mostly to make fertilizer, which is essential to feeding the world’s population. Yet its production accounts for up to 2 percent of the world’s energy consumption and about 1.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, so the search has been underway for ways to produce ammonia more sustainably.

The traditional way of making ammonia, in use for more than a century and accounting for the vast majority of production, is the Haber-Bosch process, which relies on fossil fuels to provide the needed heat. Hydrogen used in the process is also largely produced from fossil fuels.

There is another way, using electrochemistry instead of heat and pressure, but so far this method has not been anywhere near economically competitive at the scales needed.

Now, researchers at MIT have developed a way to predict which materials could be most promising as catalysts in electrochemical ammonia production. Catalysts help drive chemical reactions, and their properties determine how efficiently those reactions proceed. Rather than using trial and error to test each possible combination out of the millions of possible alloys — which can take years — the new approach could greatly speed up the search for materials that could make this low-emissions method competitive with the Haber-Bosch process. 

“Our approach identifies the key physical properties that drive catalytic activity in ammonia production,” says Bilge Yildiz, the Breen M. Kerr Professor in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). The results can guide the search for new and more effective catalyst compounds.

The open-access findings were published Aug. 11 in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal EES Catalysis, in a paper by Yildiz and doctoral students Constantine Athanitis of DMSE and Filip Grajkowski of the Department of Chemistry. 

The challenge of greener ammonia

As the world’s population grows, Athanitis says, “we’re just going to need more and more food, and the only reason why we’re able to sustain so many people is because of fertilizer.” But more than 90 percent of the ammonia needed for fertilizer is still made by that energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process, which “has been hyper-optimized since it first came out more than a century ago,” he says.

“If we’re trying to keep in line with society’s sustainability and energy targets and climate change targets, we really need to come up with another alternative,” he explains. The world currently uses about 200 million metric tons of ammonia each year, “so ideally we want to be able to find a way to produce the same amount of ammonia, or even more, but in a more energy-efficient way and also with lower CO2 emissions,” he says.

Using electricity to produce ammonia is not a new idea. “It’s really just the electrochemical reaction between proton-electron pairs and nitrogen gas. And these technologies exist,” he says. The approach uses the same basic principles as electrolyzers, which use electricity to drive chemical reactions in devices.

But while the process works, it’s not efficient enough for industrial-scale production. “Production rates and yields are still too low,” Athanitis says. “Even though a technology might be better for the world or for the climate, companies and capitalism won’t really allow it unless it’s cost competitive.”

How to make it more competitive? The key ingredient in the electrochemical process is a metallic catalyst, whose properties govern the reaction that takes place on its surface. “If we can somehow find a catalyst that reduces the energy needed and is more selective for ammonia production,” Athanitis says, “then we could essentially hit the jackpot.” A more selective catalyst would produce more ammonia while reducing unwanted side reactions.

Finding better catalysts

But finding that ideal catalyst is not simply a matter of identifying one perfect material. Different materials can improve different parts of the reaction, and researchers are seeking combinations that can make ammonia production efficient, affordable, and practical at large scale.

“Metal nitride compounds make an ideal material system for this reaction and for identifying the electronic, chemical, and structural properties that determine reactivity in nitrogen reduction and ammonia electrosynthesis,” Yildiz says. 

Transition metals could form promising nitride alloys for this purpose, and historically, “materials research has been pretty much trial and error,” Athanitis says.

The usual process is to take some existing material and “tweak it in some way,” he says. “It’s all somewhat guided by scientific and chemical intuition.” 

Now, increasingly, computational tools are being used to model the physical interactions and predict outcomes. A method called density functional theory uses quantum mechanics to simulate the properties and behavior of materials, allowing researchers to predict how different atomic arrangements may perform before making them in the lab. Rather than searching randomly through every possible alloy combination, Yildiz says, “we first assessed what microscopic properties of the material make them tick for nitrogen reduction.” 

For ammonia-producing catalysts, “we’re looking at transition metal nitrides,” Athanitis says, because they have been found to be effective in these electrochemical nitrogen reactions. They are especially effective because “the nitrogen inherent to the catalyst itself becomes part of the reaction.”

This produces a series of chemical steps in which one step provides part of the energy needed to drive the next, reducing the amount of input energy needed. This helps solve one of the major bottlenecks in the nitrogen reduction reaction: the high energy required to break the strong bonds in nitrogen molecules, he says.

But the process is far from perfect, Athanitis says. It is “still limited by certain steps throughout the reaction pathway, including nitrogen dissociation and hydrogen transfer.” The study attempted to identify those bottlenecks and, with the help of machine learning, determine which alloys of these metals might overcome them.

With that understanding, “it can give us insights and open up potential strategies for how we can tune these materials to create next-generation better nitride catalysts,” Athanitis says.

Pushing past theory

The approach is “exciting work” that could help develop a foundation for designing new catalysts for ammonia production, says Dane Morgan, a professor of engineering at the University of Wisconsin who was not involved in this study.

“This work helps clarify how fundamental electronic properties of a material relate to its role as a catalyst in making ammonia,” Morgan says. “Such understanding can help guide researchers in designing new catalysts, both through better qualitative understanding and by accelerating computational screening.” 

So far, the study is purely theoretical: The researchers have used computer models to identify promising alloys, but those materials still need to be made and tested. Morgan notes that “translating these calculations into practical catalysts will require many additional steps, so meaningful real-world impact is likely still some distance away.”

The next step will be to build a working reaction cell, a laboratory device that uses the catalyst to produce ammonia and test its performance under real operating conditions. “For this to really make an impact in society, we need to bring it to the experimental lab,” Athanitis says.

“There have always been pushes at the frontiers of what’s possible,” he adds. “We like to think we’ve pushed the boundary of candidate materials here beyond what was thought of before, and hopefully we’re almost there. But even if we’re not almost there, we’re still pushing in the right direction.”

OpenAI presented details of its AI’s model’s cyberattack on Hugging Face at Black Hat last week. Simon Willison details the timeline. It’s really interesting to read through—and really impressive cyberoffense work.

“EPA is trying to have their cake and eat it, too,” said one environmental lawyer.

The long-delayed standards will require about 2 million homes in high-risk areas to reduce flammable material within 5 feet of structures.

A former chief financial officer is asking a judge to declare that Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski were sources for a damaging post last year by Loomer.

State government will buy solar power generated on reclaimed coal mine land.

Traditional air-conditioning units didn’t become standard in the U.S. until the 1950s, but the swamp cooler endures.

Global warming is the main driver of this year’s marine heat waves, with knock-on effects for ecosystems and extreme weather.

The ultra-low emission zone charges drivers to bring older vehicles with more polluting engines into the city.

Experts have said increasingly intense rainfall, sand mining, upstream deforestation and wetland loss are making floods more unpredictable and destructive.

A usage policy for Flock license plate reader cameras tells police not to talk about the cameras:

When cops use Flock to arrest someone in Wapello County, Iowa, they don’t want them to know. A usage policy for the automated license plate reader cameras in the county tells police, in no uncertain terms, to keep them a secret: “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE,” the policy document reads. “DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.”

This reminds me of IMSI-catchers (Stingray was the most popular) a couple of decades ago. Police would go to even more extremes to hide their usage...

Anyone who’s ever wrestled with a claw machine at an arcade can appreciate the difficulty in pulling and pushing on joysticks, in just the right way, to get a mechanical arm to scoop up that one special toy. Coordinating the joysticks and connecting their movement to the claw’s motion is a type of “mental mapping” that is not immediately intuitive. (And it’s what arcade owners depend on to bring players back, again and again). 

In fact, the mechanics of a claw machine are broadly similar to driving an excavator: An operator uses joysticks to control the digger’s boom, arm, and bucket, and the direction of its cab. But an excavator’s maneuvers are far more complex than anything an arcade claw can do. Operators must learn more complicated mental maps to direct a digger to move rocks, grade soil, clear debris, and dig foundations, among other essential on-site jobs. Indeed, it can often take years for operators to build up expertise in maneuvering the heavy machines.

MIT engineers are looking to shorten the learning curve for excavator operators with a new training interface. Instead of using joysticks, the team has designed a more intuitive controller, which itself resembles a miniature excavator’s arm and bucket. Trainees grasp the device and use their arm and hand to make it move the way an excavator does. A digital excavator projected on an immersive six-screen display mirrors the trainee’s movements in a virtual environment.

“This is a more intuitive way to command the machine,” says Hermano Krebs, principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “With this new interface, we can eliminate a lot of the mental maps that an operator would need to build in order to operate an excavator.” 

Krebs sees the interface as a faster way to train excavator operators, as well as a new way to physically operate the machines, both on-site and remotely. 

“Instead of having joysticks, you might have this miniature arm on the side, where the operator would place their own arm, kind of like an exoskeleton, which would allow them to operate the excavator in the cab,” Krebs says. “If work has to be done in a difficult or unsafe environment, you could have an operator sitting off-site in a trailer and using this arm to remotely tele-operate the excavator.”

The team reports its open-access results this week in the Journal of Computing and Civil Engineering. MIT co-authors include Moises Alencastre-Miranda, Joao Buzzatto, and Eran Beeri Bamani, along with collaborators from Sumitomo Heavy Industries, an industrial machinery manufacturer based in Japan. 

A machine mimic

At MIT, Krebs’ group works on human-robot interactions, with a longtime focus on physical rehabilitation. Through this work, the team has accumulated knowledge about the ways in which humans control their limbs and how they can most intuitively interact with machines. 

In 2018, Krebs struck up a collaboration with researchers at Sumitomo Heavy Industries, who were looking for a faster way to train excavator operators. They noted that in Japan, the population of heavy machinery operators is aging rapidly; training their replacements takes time. 

Operators typically learn by driving actual excavators on a controlled driving course. As they operate the machine, novices must learn to relate the actions of the excavator’s joysticks with the movements of the arm, bucket, and cab. Coordinating these actions to carry out actual tasks adds another level of complexity that can take months to years to master. 

The team reasoned that if they could eliminate the need for this mental map, they might significantly shorten the training process. To do so, they looked for a more natural way to control the machine, as an alternative to the traditional joysticks. They soon landed on the mechanical arm design, reasoning that the physical resemblance to the digger’s own arm and bucket could enable operators to mimic and control the excavator’s movements directly, without much mental translation. 

Over the next few years, the researchers worked to build the mechanical arm, along with the software to pair its movements with a virtual simulation of an excavator. The combination of the mechanical arm and the virtual simulator constitutes a new training and control platform for digger operators, which the team has named the “World-Space Interface.”

“‘World-space’ refers to everything in the world that is outside of yourself, or in this case, outside of the excavator’s cab,” Krebs explains. “Normally, operators have to build a mental map of how to manipulate things in the world-space. But now, we can just mime picking up rocks or dirt, and the computer will do that translation to the world-space for us.”

Construction on day one

For their new study, the team ran training experiments with volunteers who used the World-Space Interface (WSI) as well as a more traditional, joystick-based excavator simulator. The researchers developed virtual simulations of 15 realistic excavation environments, including construction sites, highways, forest roads, riverbanks, mining areas, and urban and rural settings. Each virtual environment was associated with various excavation tasks, such as scooping and dumping sand or gravel, digging and grading trenches, clearing debris from roads, removing tree branches from water edges, and breaking up rocks. 

The team designed the experiment to resemble the tasks that an operator typically performs during a weeklong excavator driving course. For one hour each day for seven days, volunteers — both expert and novice — operated the WSI and the joystick counterpart, training on tasks with increasing difficulty. 

The researchers then compared the volunteers’ performance before and after the training period. For the joystick simulator, they found that novices were consistently worse than experts, though they did improve over the training period. In comparison, the team found that with the new World-Space Interface, novices were just as good as experts from the start. 

“In this case, joysticks are a non-intuitive way to control and coordinate the machine,” says study co-author and MIT postdoc Joao Buzzatto. “This is the first interface that does not require me to command the excavator with joysticks.”

The team is now working to add haptics, or feeling to the WSI’s physical arm. The idea is that, as an operator uses the arm to mime an action such as picking up a pile of rocks, the arm will generate a force in response, as if the operator can feel the heaviness of the rocks, as confirmation that the excavator is indeed picking them up. 

“Haptics would make this an even more intuitive system,” says co-author and visiting engineer Solmon Jeong.

The team says the new training interface can be a more natural alternative to excavator simulators that the construction industry is currently exploring. Companies such as Caterpillar, Hyundai, and Komatsu are developing virtual simulators, both to help train operators before they go on-site, and to one day remotely control excavators from a distance. However, these simulators are largely based on traditional joystick controllers that still take time to learn. 

If the team’s new arm-and-bucket controller were incorporated, as an appendage in an excavator cab, or in a virtual, teleoperational simulator, the researchers envision that even first-time operators could get to work, from day one. 

This research was supported, in part, by Sumitomo Heavy Industries.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 20 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02725-7

The ‘double materiality’ framework helps guide financial policymakers in assessing the risks of climate change, but masks complex interactions within the financial system. I argue that effective policy requires more clarity on the underlying relationships and the links to specific mandates of different financial policymakers.

In a handful of known cases, large social media companies have privately pushed back against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) subpoenas when the agency tried to unmask anonymous users who tracked immigration activities or criticized the government.

As ICE engages in a pattern of illegal and chilling investigations, any resistance is welcome. But social media companies can do more. When companies receive these unlawful subpoenas, they should be clear with the public that they will not hand over the data unless a court compels them to do so. In addition, companies themselves can take the government to court to challenge these unlawful subpoenas on behalf of their users.

ICE has sent hundreds of subpoenas to large technology companies like Google, Meta, and Reddit.

Publicly challenging these unlawful subpoenas in court has the dual purpose of protecting individual users who may lack the resources or know-how to challenge a subpoena on their own, while also discouraging ICE from issuing similarly unlawful subpoenas in the future.

Companies have a responsibility to protect the privacy of their users. That responsibility does not end simply because companies wish to avoid the ire of this administration—which has sought to chill other powerful institutions like news outlets, law firms, universities, and non-profits.

ICE Has Issued Many Unlawful Subpoenas

ICE has sent hundreds of subpoenas to large technology companies like Google, Meta, and Reddit seeking basic subscriber information like name, email address, IP address, and session times.

Some of these subpoenas have targeted people who engaged in protected activity—like tracking immigration actions, criticizing the government, or attending a protest. People have a First Amendment right to document law enforcement activities and criticize the government online, without retaliatory government investigations. This right has become more important as immigration agents have engaged in invasive, unconstitutional, and sometimes violent conduct.

In a handful of cases, users themselves have successfully pushed back. After receiving notice of these subpoenas, users have challenged them in court, relying on pro-bono lawyers from groups like the ACLU or Civil Liberties Defense Center. Companies have been largely absent from these court proceedings.

Private Pushback from Meta and Reddit

While not appearing in court, companies like Meta and Reddit have sometimes pushed back behind the scenes.

For example, on September 11, 2025, ICE sent administrative subpoenas to Meta seeking to unmask users who ran Instagram and Facebook accounts that tracked immigration activity in Pennsylvania. On September 19, 2025, Meta’s Law Enforcement Response Team told ICE that the agency did not have the “statutory authorization” to seek the records. It asked for more detail about the investigation and said “Meta will take no further action with respect to this summons until it receives this information.” Later, Meta informed ICE that it planned to notify the users about the subpoenas, since no gag order had been obtained. The government disclosed this information in one of EFF’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against ICE and other agencies.

On October 3, 2025, Meta notified the user about the subpoena. Despite its private pushback, Meta told the users it would comply with the subpoenas unless they mounted a court challenge within 10 days—which they did with the help of the ACLU. Ultimately, ICE withdrew the subpoenas when it became likely that ICE would lose the case in court.

In another example, Reddit documented its pushback in a transparency report released a few months ago. Reddit reported that in the second half of 2025, the company received three Department of Homeland Security (DHS) subpoenas seeking account information from 11 users who posted content critical of ICE. In the report, the company stated that “Reddit objected to these legal demands because the users appeared to be engaged in protected activity under the First Amendment, and law enforcement withdrew their requests.” The company reported that most other DHS subpoenas it received appeared to be routine.

A Tech Company Model for Public Resistance

EFF’s demand that technology companies do more to protect their users is not unprecedented. Twitter (now X) did so successfully in the first Trump administration.

On April 6 2017, Twitter went to court to challenge a DHS subpoena that sought to unmask a Twitter account named “@ALT_USCIS,” which frequently criticized the administration’s immigration policies. Twitter challenged the subpoena on both statutory and First Amendment grounds. A day later, DHS withdrew the subpoena and Twitter dismissed the case. The incident led to an inspector general investigation, which criticized a tactic that DHS is still engaged in.

In other circumstances, companies have also gone to court to protect their users and shield themselves from burdensome legal process. In 2013, Microsoft challenged a search warrant for the content of emails stored on servers outside the United States. In 2015, Apple challenged a court order to break the security of its iPhone during an investigation into the San Bernardino shootings. And in 2007, Yahoo challenged the constitutionality of government requests at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“I think that a game can be made about anything,” says Kayode Dada, a rising senior majoring in mechanical engineering. “But to make a good game,” he adds, “it takes a lot of time and effort and thinking about it.”

Dada has been thinking about games seriously since he was a teenager, but he took an interest in them much earlier. Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, he and his brother would play card games, board games, and video games for hours. His face lights up as he recalls some of his favorites, including “Dungeons and Dragons,” “Catan,” “Yu-Gi-Oh!,” and “Risk.” During the Covid-19 pandemic, his family developed a nightly ritual. “For weeks and weeks, every single night we’d play a full game of ‘Monopoly.’ It was crazy!” he recalls.

Even as a kid, Dada wondered about the mechanics and decisions that went into the games he played, but it wasn’t until high school that he tried his hand at game design. He created his first game by constructing dice with different sides using arts and crafts materials. From there, the ideas kept coming. He figures during those years he designed about 25 games; he made nine of them and gave them to friends for their birthdays. 

Much of his application to MIT revolved around board game design, too. At first, he didn’t believe MIT would accept him because he didn’t “do any real tech stuff,” Dada says. But reading the MIT Admissions blogs changed that — particularly a post by a computer science major who wrote that she had no coding experience before coming to MIT. 

“That gave me motivation and hope that I could apply with a bunch of cardboard games, and I got in,” he says. “It was really cool to see, through the eyes of current students, that they are not all super-duper geniuses in an unattainable sense. They’re real.”

Now, Dada has created his biggest and most ambitious game yet: a trading-card game for 1,100 incoming first-year students during MIT Orientation in late August.

“Building up the next class”

Since he’s been at MIT, Dada has thrown himself into in a number of extracurricular activities and had less time to devote to game design; he’s now an MIT Admissions blogger himself, an orientation captain, a leader in MIT Cru (a campus Christian group), a drummer in the MIT Live student music group, and a DJ on WMBR 88.1 FM (his show, “Midwest Pizzeria,” features Midwest emo math rock).

For Dada, blogging and serving as an orientation captain are meaningful ways that he can help build community and increase awareness about the plethora of opportunities for students. He recalls one post he wrote about being a Christian at MIT that really struck a chord with readers. 

“I got a lot of emails from either students interested in the club or parents and high school counselors saying, ‘Thank you for posting this — I had no idea,’” he says. He also hears from a lot of students who don’t think they have what it takes to get into MIT. “I tell them, ‘I think you should still apply … and regardless if you get into MIT or not, you’re going to do amazing things.’”

This summer will be his third MIT Orientation. He loves it. 

“It’s a lot of fun to talk to students, hear what they are interested in, and then be like, ‘Oh, you should definitely go check out this thing. I’ll connect you to this person that you should talk to,” he says. 

In a fun twist of fate, some of the orientation leaders he works with read his blogs as prospective students. And he has met some of his best friends through orientation: “[They] are as interested as I am in helping out the people coming in … giving it back to MIT and contributing towards building up the next class.” 

Re-orienting orientation 

Last year, Dada’s interest in game design intersected with his role at MIT Orientation. The staff had been brainstorming games to try to keep the new students engaged between events, and Dada offered to create a trading-card game that would also serve as an ice-breaker. His game, “Campus Trade,” capitalized on the fact that the students are divided into 12 groups designated by a different color. Each student would start with 12 trading cards the color of their group, and by the end of the week they had to collect one card from every other group — in other words, 12 different colors.

The game was a hit. “They got so invested immediately, and we couldn’t get them to stop playing and go back inside to the next meeting,” Dada says. 

Nonetheless, he made some key observations watching them play — including the fact that many of the students would just trade cards and walk away, without talking much.

He decided to redesign “Campus Trade” and connected with Cassandra Lee, a research designer in the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Constructive Communication, whose interests include the connection between games and social interaction. Under her supervision, he spent his junior year doing an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program project through the realtalk@MIT program, which supports students who design and organize their own creative community infrastructure. 

After months of prototyping, interviewing students, testing, and iterating, Dada is ready to roll out the game. This year’s “Campus Trade” cards are bigger — tarot-sized — and feature current MIT students’ artwork on one side, depicting a person, place, or thing from campus. On the other side there’s an icebreaker question. The game is designed in such a way that there are multiple ways to win, to encourage collaboration.

Working on “Campus Trade” with Dada was a “sincerely rewarding collaboration,” Lee says. “Community development work really requires a student who understands and is willing to fight for the value of people, stories, and being in community. Consistently throughout this project, it was clear that Kayode is more than capable of balancing his own spirit with the grueling organizing work that makes a project like ‘Campus Trade’ possible.”

Ultimately, Dada hopes to pursue a career in game design after he graduates. He thinks about games a lot, lying awake at night, or even in church. 

“Before, I didn’t really believe I could do it,” he says, “but now that I have this project under my belt, some real experience working on a game on a large scale, I definitely have a lot of ideas.” 

He figures he’ll either apply for a job at a game design company like Wizards of the Coast, or maybe even start his own company and “just see how it goes.”

And why not? After all, he took a chance when he decided to apply to MIT — and that turned out to be exactly the right move.

Toxoplasma gondii, or Toxoplasma, is a parasite that infects hundreds of millions of people around the world. Although cases are often mild, it can cause severe symptoms in in people with weakened immune systems, and in developing fetuses. It can also persist for years by forming long-lived cysts in tissues, allowing infection to become chronic.

During chronic infection, hundreds of Toxoplasma parasites can pack into a tissue cyst inside a brain or muscle cell. That crowded life carries a cost: Nutrients become harder to obtain, waste accumulates, and energy-producing reactions can become damaging. 

How Toxoplasma reshapes its metabolism to keep growing under such strained conditions has been unclear. But a new study from the lab of MIT Associate Professor Sebastian Lourido, a member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, identifies a parasite-specific protein that helps coordinate this response. The protein, named TgPRO, allows Toxoplasma to manage oxidative stress — the buildup of reactive oxygen molecules that can damage cells — by controlling genes involved in energy production and iron use.

The open-access findings, published on Aug. 11 in the journal Cell, reveal the first dedicated regulator of metabolic gene expression identified in apicomplexans, the group of parasites that includes Toxoplasma and the organisms that cause malaria. The study, led by co-first authors and Lourido lab affiliates Christopher Giuliano PhD ’26, a recent graduate student in biology, and Chinmay Kalluraya, a current graduate student in biology, reveals a previously unknown way that parasites regulate metabolism. The findings also point to a possible therapeutic strategy: Inhibiting pathways controlled by TgPRO could make Toxoplasma more vulnerable to antiparasitic drugs that induce oxidative stress, though this approach remains to be tested.

One gene at a time

To discover the genes that support Toxoplasma’s ability to live in crowded cells, the researchers used a genome-wide CRISPR screen to compare Toxoplasma growing at low and high densities. The screen tests the effects of turning off genes one by one at both population densities in order to determine which genes are essential specifically in crowded conditions. It highlighted pathways that make or recycle NAD and NADP, molecules important for energy production and defending against oxidative damage. It also pointed to TgPRO, a previously unstudied protein that was especially important when parasites became crowded.

“A genome-wide screen was a powerful way to ask how crowding affects parasite fitness,” Kalluraya says. “TgPRO emerged as very important at high density. Because almost nothing was known about it, we wanted to understand what it was doing.”

Parasites lacking functional TgPRO accumulated more reactive oxygen molecules and struggled to compete at high density. Experiments showed that the loss of TgPRO disrupted the mitochondrion — the structure that supplies much of a cell’s energy — and changed how parasites processed glucose and other nutrients. Providing additional iron or restoring an important chemical balance inside the mitochondrion improved parasite growth, connecting TgPRO’s effects to iron-dependent energy metabolism.

The team then traced the response to a molecular mechanism. TgPRO is an RNA-binding protein, meaning it attaches to the molecular messages (RNAs) that cells use to make proteins. The researchers found that it binds and stabilizes a select set of messages involved in nutrient use, mitochondrial activity, and the assembly of iron-sulfur clusters, small structures that many enzymes need to function. The experiments connected the original observation — that some parasites faltered only when crowded — to a precise interaction between a regulatory protein and its RNA targets.

“One of the really nice elements of the story is our ability to connect it all the way through — from the original observation and genome-wide screen to the metabolic consequences and the direct interaction between TgPRO and its target RNAs,” Lourido says.

The researchers found that lowering oxygen levels also reduced oxidative stress and partially restored the growth of parasites without TgPRO. Toxoplasma is commonly grown in laboratories at atmospheric oxygen levels, which are considerably higher than those found in most animal tissues. The result suggests that oxygen conditions can strongly shape parasite metabolism, and the researchers caution others studying Toxoplasma to take this into consideration.

Connecting TgPRO to chronic infection

After testing the role of TgPRO in artificially crowded settings, the team also tested whether TgPRO matters during chronic infection, when Toxoplasma forms cysts in the brain. Mice infected with parasites lacking functional TgPRO developed smaller brain cysts, suggesting TgPRO supports parasite growth in the naturally dense environment of a chronic-stage cyst.

“The chronic stage is still somewhat elusive,” Giuliano says. “Showing that TgPRO affects cyst growth suggests that these same metabolic changes are needed in the brain and gives us clues about how the parasites persist there for months or years.”

TgPRO bears little resemblance to the proteins that regulate similar metabolic programs in mammals, yeast, and bacteria, yet it controls many of the same kinds of genes that these organisms adjust when cells face oxidative stress or changing nutrient conditions. This is an example of convergent evolution: Distantly related organisms evolved different molecular machinery to solve a similar biological problem.

That convergence suggests that coordinating these metabolic pathways may be a fundamental requirement for cells adapting to stress.

Altogether, the study establishes a new paradigm for how apicomplexan parasites regulate their metabolism, and advances the foundation for investigating how Toxoplasma persists inside its hosts.

This work was supported by National Institutes of Health grants and by a Burroughs Wellcome Fund grant awarded to S.L. M.A.S is funded by an Early Career Award from the Wellcome Trust. C.R.H. is funded by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society. J.K. is supported through funding by a generous donor advised by CARIGEST SA and acquired by D.S.-F.

Creating innovations that can succeed in both emerging markets and in developed, higher-income markets requires a targeted, thoughtful design process. In a new book, Amos Winter, the Germeshausen Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and a pioneer in engineering design, and coauthor Vijay Govindarajan, a leading voice in strategy and innovation, present a framework for creating innovations that scale across borders, industries, and income levels.

“Emerging markets are growing at about twice the rate as the U.S. and Europe,” Winter says. “If you’re a multinational company that really wants to maximize your growth rate, it’s not going to be in wealthy markets, it has to be in emerging markets.”

He adds that this is particularly true for legacy companies that have successfully sold products in wealthy markets. 

“You can’t just simply take what you sold in the U.S. and Europe and then try to sell it in a place like India; it’s probably going to be too expensive [or not meet consumer needs],” he says. “We offer guidance on how to leverage what was done before without trying to just copy and paste.”

In their book, “Global by Design: How to Create Innovations That Scale, Travel, and Transform” (Harvard Business Review Press), Winter and Govindarajan present three phases, aiming to guide readers though stages of the innovation process, from identifying opportunities to designing solutions to scaling locally and globally. The authors move beyond theory and provide a practical, disciplined approach to spotting problems, leveraging innovation, and building high-value, low-cost solutions with global appeal.

“The book is aimed at how to approach solving problems that are historically unsolved,” explains Winter. “It talks about how to look at those problems with fresh eyes, how to really distill what are the unique requirements that must be satisfied, which often differ from the requirements in wealthy countries, and figure out how to create not just low-cost solutions, but really high-value solutions.” 

One class of problems Winter points out are issues in the developing world, where people face needs for water, health care, and energy. 

“Even though we have solutions to these problems in wealthy countries, they just haven’t mapped over, often because the solutions are too expensive or they’re not robust enough, leading these problems to persist for generations unsolved,” he says.  

Beyond emerging markets, globally minded solutions can also resonate with more resource-constrained consumers and create upsell opportunities for wealthy consumers. The book also gives guidance about how to not cannibalize existing efforts with product differentiation in different segments.

The authors use five case studies from Winter’s research group, along with industry examples. One case study discusses a product going into production that may reshape agricultural practices in major markets and varying climates throughout the world. 

“We created new drip irrigation emitter technology that cuts pumping power in half, reduces the price of solar-powered irrigation by about 40 percent, requires less than half the plastic to make, and is an industry leader in clog prevention,” Winter explains. 

The emitters will enable the growth of water-saving, renewable-powered irrigation in low-resource, water-stressed markets and offer a valuable alternative to farmers in wealthy countries. The technology is currently being commercialized by Toro and is expected to go on sale in early 2027. 

“It is truly a global product that is a better mousetrap, as it meets or exceeds the performance of any other product on the market in every category,” he says. 

The research behind the drip emitter technology was recently presented in separate journal articles in Nature Communications and Water.

Winter is also director of the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Center, where research focuses on solving technical challenges in low-resource communities. Some of his team’s other notable solutions have been in water purification, agricultural equipment, and assistive technology. 

He says he hopes this book broadens design thinking and provides tool sets for innovators to solve meaningful, multifaceted, global problems. 

“We want readers to walk away from 'Global by Design' inspired to create solutions that are financially viable and create positive social impact. Furthermore, we want them to feel empowered, seeing how they can apply their unique experience, perspectives, knowledge, and resources to make meaningful change in the world.”

Your location isn't just a pin on a map—it can expose some of the most intimate details about your life. The value of this information to advertisers and others has turned the location data business into a multi-billion dollar industry. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're covering a new EFF report on how ad libraries encourage apps to leak user location data—potentially without app developers themselves even realizing it.

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For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This issue covers what recently announced Flock reforms actually do, privacy-invasive legislation advancing in the Senate, and an EFF investigation into mobile ad software.

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