As a liquid that is easily stored and transported, ammonia (NH3) is an attractive carrier for hydrogen, which is used in fuel cells, semiconductor manufacturing, chemical processing, and other applications. However, breaking ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen typically requires high temperatures, and the resulting gas mixture must undergo additional purification before the hydrogen can be used in many applications. 

MIT researchers have now developed an electrochemical approach to promote hydrogen release from ammonia while simultaneously separating and concentrating the hydrogen into a high-purity stream. Their strategy, which uses electricity to speed up the extraction, reduces the temperature and energy required to recover hydrogen from ammonia and other hydrogen carriers.

In a new study, the researchers showed that their approach can generate highly concentrated, pure streams of hydrogen.

“We have shown the ability to use electrochemistry to drive thermodynamically uphill and kinetically difficult dehydrogenation reactions,” says Yogesh Surendranath, the Donner Professor of Science and a professor of chemistry and chemical engineering. “In this case, we studied the conversion of ammonia and a liquid organic molecule because of their importance as possible hydrogen carriers for a hydrogen economy. But the concepts we learned here could in principle be translated further, and we’re actively working on translating it to other important dehydrogenation reactions.”

Surendranath is the corresponding author of the study, which appears today in Nature. MIT postdoc Rui Zeng, now a professor of materials science and engineering at Harbin Institute of Technology in Shenzhen, China, is the paper’s lead author.

Extracting hydrogen

Hydrogen is widely used in semiconductor manufacturing and chemical processing and is also an energy carrier in fuel cells that use hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity without combustion. Expanding its use, however, will require practical ways to store and distribute it.

Hydrogen gas itself is difficult to transport efficiently without compression or liquefaction. One alternative is to store hydrogen chemically in compounds that are liquids or can be readily liquefied, then release it where and when it is needed.

Ammonia is one promising hydrogen carrier because it is already produced and transported across large distances, but recovering hydrogen from ammonia remains challenging. That process, known as “cracking,” requires temperatures higher than 500 degrees Celsius to achieve high reaction rates and conversion. The hydrogen must then be separated from nitrogen and unreacted ammonia.

“We wanted to ask whether we could use electrical inputs to drive what would otherwise be an unfavorable dehydrogenation reaction, and simultaneously do it in a way that would separate the hydrogen from the hydrogen carrier, so that it would be very pure and could be used directly in a fuel cell or other application that requires a high purity hydrogen stream,” Surendranath says. 

The key element of the researchers’ new design is the coupling of a palladium-based separation membrane with a hydrogen-generating electrode through a molten hydroxide electrolyte. The separation membrane selectively transports hydrogen while preventing other components of the reaction mixture from passing through.

Using the new setup, ammonia is first dehydrogenated by a catalyst containing ruthenium and cesium. The hydrogen then reaches the separation membrane, whose opposite side is in contact with a molten hydroxide electrolyte. 

The electrochemical gradient across this membrane effectively creates a “vacuum” for hydrogen, providing a strong driving force for its transport across the membrane. It also converts the hydrogen into protons and electrons, which travel separately through the molten electrolyte and external circuit, respectively, before recombining at a second electrode to form hydrogen gas. 

Because the membrane selectively transports hydrogen, the system produces a concentrated stream of hydrogen gas without requiring a separate downstream purification process.

“Using this electrochemical process, we’re able to do this active pumping of hydrogen from a low concentration to a high concentration,” Surendranath says.

Continuously extracting hydrogen can also help drive the dehydrogenation reaction forward, especially when the presence of hydrogen inhibits the reaction. In this way, this strategy does more than separate the product: It changes the reaction environment and enables hydrogen recovery under milder conditions.

This process thus can be performed at temperatures around 200 or 300 degrees Celsius, much lower than those required for conventional ammonia cracking. Another advantage is that it creates a pure stream of hydrogen that doesn’t need to be purified later on — a step that requires additional energy.

Curtis Berlinguette, a professor of chemistry and chemical and biological engineering at the University of British Columbia, described the method as “a powerful new way” to solve the problem of obtaining a pure stream of hydrogen from ammonia and other hydrogen carriers. 

“By using electricity to pull hydrogen through the membrane as it is released, they accelerate the dehydrogenation of ammonia and liquid organic hydrogen carriers while simultaneously producing a purified hydrogen stream. This is an important advance for the energy sciences because it opens a credible pathway for transporting hydrogen in stable chemical carriers and releasing it where and when it is needed,” says Berlinguette, who was not involved in the research.

Powering transportation

In this study, the researchers showed that this approach could be used to dehydrogenate not only ammonia but also methylcyclohexane. This molecule is part of a class known as liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs), which also hold potential as an energy carrier.

The researchers envision that their new strategy could be useful for transportation applications, such as powering cars, buses, or ships, or for fabricating semiconductors or electronics. Pure hydrogen gas is used for several steps in semiconductor manufacturing, where it plays important roles in boosting manufacturing yields and reducing surface defects.

Because palladium is an expensive metal, the researchers are now working on ways to reduce the amount of palladium needed for the separation membrane. They are also working on scaling up the process, and on applying it to other dehydrogenation reactions that could be industrially useful.

The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Claude Fable 5.1 solved a 370-year-old cipher in forty-four minutes.

This tracks with what I wrote about AIs doing mathematics: It’s good at things that involve lots of searching and testing.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 09 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02738-2

How much ectothermic animals can rely on plastic adjustments in their physiology remains a central challenge when forecasting climate change impacts. Here, I look back on a 2015 paper that examined the role of physiological plasticity in thermal performance and discuss subsequent research and broader conservation implications.

EFF sued the government back in March for information about the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) model, a new Medicare program that uses AI to evaluate prior authorization requests for certain medical services. Today, we’re releasing approximately 1,000 pages of records obtained from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) through this litigation, including contracts with tech companies, internal status reports and providers’ complaints about the program. The documents (available here) show that WISeR has resulted in widespread delays and denials of care, operational chaos, and reports of patient harm.

Why We Sued for Records about WISeR

EFF filed the FOIA lawsuit to gain badly needed transparency into an experimental AI program that could jeopardize Medicare beneficiaries' access to care. In January 2026, CMS launched the WISeR model, subjecting seniors in six states to AI-driven prior authorization decisions. Medical providers must now request permission before delivering certain medical treatments if they want assurance that Medicare will cover them. Private companies contracted by CMS evaluate the requests using AI. In the absence of rigorous safeguards, AI-driven prior authorization determinations can lead to unwarranted—and even discriminatory—delays or denials of necessary medical care. 

Little is known about the AI systems that WISeR vendors are using to process prior authorization requests. Although CMS says that a qualified human clinician must review all denials, research has shown that AI-generated recommendations often influence human decisions. And the design of the WISeR program creates a financial incentive for vendors to deny care, since they are paid for averted expenditures. Just months after the program launched, medical providers reported improper denials, administrative friction, and lengthy delays that have left patients waiting in pain.

EFF’s FOIA request sought records pertaining to the CMS contracts with WISeR software vendors; any tests for accuracy, bias, or hallucinations in vendors' technology; and any audits, monitoring, or evaluation of WISeR and participating vendors.

CMS Documents Highlight Issues with the WISeR Model

CMS records obtained by EFF echo issues that medical providers, patient advocates, and lawmakers have warned about since WISeR began. This includes long wait times, rampant technical failures, inappropriate denials, and harm to patients.

Delayed Responses to Prior Authorization Requests

CMS publicly states that WISeR vendors should respond to prior authorization requests within 72 hours, but records received by EFF show widespread delays. Internal status reports from the first few months of the program show that WISeR vendors failed to respond within 72 hours for a significant number of requests. One status report cites a prior authorization request that went unanswered for 83 days ("WISeR FOIA Response - Combined Records," page 234). These delayed responses can have serious consequences for patients. Medical providers reported that WISeR has delayed medically necessary care and left patients in pain as they waited for approvals.

Timeliness data for two WISeR vendors in January 2026 show that a significant number of requests did not receive a response within 72 hours (WISeR FOIA Response - Combined Records, page 410)

Payment Methodology Provides Financial Incentive to Deny Care 

The released records confirm that WISeR’s payment methodology creates a financial incentive to deny care. Specifically, WISeR vendors are paid for requests that they deny (though not for denials reversed on appeal). This profit motive aggravates the risk that AI-assisted decision-making may unfairly deprive people of the services they need.

CMS publicly claims that it safeguards against inappropriate denials by tying vendors’ payment rates to “quality scores,” which reflect the timeliness and accuracy of vendors’ decisions. However, the recently released WISeR Data Reporting Guide shows that low quality scores reduce payments by only 5-10%.

Impact of low quality scores on payment rates described in the WISeR Data Reporting Guide (WISeR FOIA Response - Combined Records, page 99)

WISeR Vendors Have Denied Thousands of Prior Authorization Requests

Documents obtained by EFF appear to support reports that WISeR vendors may be denying claims at unusually high rates. Two companies alone denied over 20,000 prior authorization requests in the first 3 months of the program. One company, Virtix, the vendor that CMS required to submit a Corrective Action Plan, denied more requests than it approved during this time period.

Prior authorization decision data for two vendors in a March 30th, 2026 status report (WISeR FOIA Response - Combined Records, page 322)

Medical Provider Feedback Ties WISeR Delays to Patient Harm

Feedback from medical providers emphasize that WISeR delays have harmed patients. The released records include March 2026 responses to a feedback form about Innovaccer, the WISeR vendor processing requests for Ohio. Medical providers complained about a lack of communication, administrative issues, and long response times. Several responses emphasize that long response times from the WISeR vendor harmed patients ("WISeR FOIA Response - Feedback Survey Responses"):

“We have patients calling our offices crying in pain because their procedures are being delayed while awaiting approvals or guidance tied to this model. A 3–4 day delay for necessary pain procedures is already difficult for vulnerable patients, but when providers cannot obtain answers for weeks, the situation becomes unacceptable.”

“I HAVE HAD TO WATCH 3 PATIENTS CRY AT BEDSIDE FOR NOT HEARING BACK ON THEIR PRIOR AUTH FOR KYPHOPLASTY/VERTABRAL AUGMENTIATION PROCEDURE. THESE PATIENTS ARE IN DEEP PAIN.”

“I have had cases submitted and waiting over 1 1/2 months for a UTN to be generated… In the meantime patients are having to be cancelled for surgeries they need. This is not acceptable they are severely hindering patient care.”

Rushed Rollout Amidst Widespread Technical Failures 

CMS WISeR launched in January 2026, just six months after it was announced. Despite warnings from both medical providers and a vendor about insufficient preparation time, CMS chose not to delay the launch. 

Approximately a month before the launch, one of the vendors, Innovaccer, alerted CMS that it intended to go live with a version of its software that lacked full functionality and had not been fully tested. It cited several barriers to going live with full functionality, including changing requirements and expectations, unclear governance processes, and lack of time for end-to-end testing with the provider community ("WISeR FOIA Response - Combined Records,", page 216-217). Innovaccer said it would auto-affirm all prior authorization requests until it could develop full functionality and explained that “Given CMS's decision not to delay the model start date, auto-affirming is the only path available” ("WISeR FOIA Response - Combined Records," page 217).

Innovaccer had not yet finished developing or testing some features several months into the program, according to an April 2026 status report. Innovaccer was not the only vendor who faced technical challenges before and after WISeR launched. Weekly status reports and provider feedback in the released records show widespread challenges associated with WISeR’s rushed rollout (for example, "WISeR FOIA Response - Combined Records," pages 238 and 383).

A status report from April 6th, 2026 describes issues with incomplete solutions from Innovaccer (WISeR FOIA Response - Combined Records, page 200)

More Urgent Medical Services Considered for Inclusion in Future Years of WISeR Model

In its first year, the WISeR model introduced prior authorization requirements for a set of 13 medical services. The June 2025 Innovation Center Investment Plan for WISeR lists medical services that could be added to the program in future years. This planning document considers the possibility of adding services “where prior authorization would have to be done on a more urgent or emergent basis,” including air ambulance transport, cancer treatment, MRI scans, and medications without publicly available coverage criteria.

A planning document from June 2025 lists ideas for the expansion of WISeR to additional medical services (WISeR FOIA Response - Combined Records, page 22)

More Transparency is Needed About Medicare’s AI Experiment

CMS continues to produce records in response to EFF’s lawsuit. Records released thus far echo concerns that providers have raised since WISeR launched, including long delays, financial incentives to deny care, and technical problems. But important questions remain about the AI systems private companies are using to inform decisions about whether to provide people with Medicare benefits. As CMS continues to produce documents, we will continue to make them available to the public. The public deserves to know how AI is driving decisions that affect patients’ access to care.

Related Cases: EFF v. CMS

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in Lawfare.

In April, an artificial intelligence (AI) agent conducting a routine task at a company hit a snag, tried to solve it, and soon ended up deleting the company’s database along with all of its backups. In July, OpenAI asked an unreleased AI model to attempt a hacking test. Instead of staying in the isolated box the developers had put it in, the model hacked onto the open internet and into another company to steal the answers. And as reported in August, an AI agent booked someone into a full gym class by ...

Interesting research: “Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs“:

Abstract: Leading large language model providers now conceal their models’ step-by-step reasoning, or chain-of-thought, to protect intellectual property and limit information leakage. Rather than storing these traces server-side, providers return them to the client as blocks of encrypted text, which the client passes back with each subsequent request. Building on prior research, we identify an architectural vulnerability: these encrypted blocks are fully compatible and interchangeable across different sessions, users, and models within a provider’s ecosystem. We exploit this compatibility to develop a scalable decryption jailbreak. By injecting an encrypted reasoning trace from a given model into a weaker, and less safeguarded model from the same provider, we force it to decode and output the trace verbatim in plaintext, without ever jailbreaking the more capable model directly. This vulnerability enables four distinct attack vectors. First, it circumvents anti-distillation mechanisms, allowing adversaries to extract a proprietary model’s reasoning, as we demonstrate across Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Second, it allows for large-scale private data extraction. Developers frequently share session logs publicly, unaware of contents of the encrypted blocks. By decoding 315,320 reasoning blocks scraped from public repositories, we recovered 367 Personally Identifiable Information (PII) artifacts and 182 credentials. Third, it inadvertently reveals hazardous information hidden within the reasoning process, even in cases where the model’s final, visible output safely rejects a malicious request. Fourth, attackers can leverage this flaw to execute invisible prompt injections, embedding malicious payloads entirely within encrypted blocks to poison public agentic rollouts. Following responsible disclosure, we propose concrete cryptographic and system-level mitigations to secure client-side reasoning...

How will global access to food, water, and energy evolve in coming decades? A new study co-authored by MIT researchers suggests the answers could be very different depending on region, resource, and income.

Based on extensive modeling of many different resource scenarios, the study finds that in some regions, lower-income people could be spending roughly 50 percent of their income on food by the year 2050, in contrast to higher-income groups that could spent about 5 percent of income on food in the same areas. 

“For a lot of these outcomes, the lower-income groups see much worse potential insecurity,” says Jennifer Morris, a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and the MIT Energy Initiative, and co-author of a new paper detailing the findings. The results, she notes, can be evaluated by policymakers in different global regions to understand what the long-term, large-scale resource security risks may become for different parts of their populations. 

“Anything that’s taking up half of your income is potentially destabilizing for your entire life because it leaves so few resources for the other critical needs and basic life necessities,” Morris says. 

The study focuses on projecting future access to food, water, and energy, based on long-term variation across a dozen major factors influencing their availability, from economic conditions and agriculture production to trade conditions, climate, land use, and more. 

“This study shows that there is no single driver of future food, energy, and water insecurity,” says Gi Joo Kim, a research scientist at Tulane University and co-author of the paper. “Income is important, but regional conditions, land use, energy systems, water availability, and consumer behavior all shape the risks people face.” For policymakers, he adds, “This means they need to consider specific combinations of factors that create vulnerability in each region.”

The paper, “Identifying Key Uncertainties and Drivers of Future Resource Security Outcomes Through a Multisector Scenario Ensemble,” appears in the journal Earth’s Future.

In addition to Morris and Kim, the authors include Brian O’Neill, an earth scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Marshall Wise, a system engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; John Weyant, a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University; and Jonathan Lamontagne, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Tufts University. 

Filling a gap

The current study fills a gap in modeling among scientists studying issues such as long-term resource security. Given the complications of long-term analyses, many studies have used what scientists term “shared socioeconomic pathway” circumstances, a small set of senarios spanning broad global narratives about the future, rather than exploring specific outcomes such as how long-term resource access may shift in linked fashion across income groups in different regions of the world. Two years ago, the same group of authors wrote a paper calling for more socioeconomically specific scenario analysis focused on outcomes for human well-being; the current study is their effort to develop that kind of modeling. 

“For this type of study, where we’re focused on human well-being outcomes, the income piece is really important,” Morris says. 

To conduct the study, the researchers adopted an existing framework in the field, the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) version 7.1, which represents interactions between energy, economies, water, land, and climate while dividing the world into 32 regions, 235 water basins, and 384 land-use regions and making adjustments for things like estimated commodity prices over time.

The research group used 12 main variables connected to resource availability, including population, GDP, income distribution, carbon intensity, land use, agricultural trade, multiple energy consumption scenarios, multiple water-use projections, and more. They ran simulations for 3,735 different scenarios involving these factors, to better understand the range of possible resource outcomes by 2050. 

Broadly, the modeling does uncover some significant regional variations. In 2050 food security may be most acute in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, while energy security could be most acute for low-income residents in some parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. 

But within any region, there may still be substantial variation in resource security. In southern Africa, the modeling suggests that the poorest 10 percent of the population by income could be spending 49.6 percent of its income on food, compared to just 5.5 percent for the wealthiest 10 percent of the population. In West and East Africa the projected food burden for the bottom 10 percent of the population in terms of income is projected to be 48.4 percent and 42.5 percent, respectively. 

To understand the potential change this represents over time, the researchers compared the results to data from the year 2015 in the GCAM model. For the lowest-income group across western Africa in 2015, the average food burden was about 25 percent of people’s income, compared to estimates for 2050 that range from about 20 percent to 75 percent of income. In southern Africa, the lowest-income group spent about 20 percent of their income on food in 2015, but the scholars’ modeling projects an increase in food burden ranging from 25 percent to 65 percent of income. The wide variation in projected burden reflects the wide range in possible future scenarios.

When it comes to energy, variation by income is also apparent. In some parts of the Middle East, for instance, the residential energy burden in 2050 is estimated to be just 1.7 percent for the highest income bracket but 18.9 for the lowest income bracket; in Eastern Europe, the energy burden reaches 11.3 percent of income for the lowest-income bracket, while resting at under 5 percent for the highest-income bracket. 

“Regional averages can make future resource-security risks appear more manageable than they actually are,” Kim says. “This means analyses that stop at the average may miss exactly the populations most vulnerable to future change.”

Understanding the dynamics

To be sure, as the scholars emphasize, there are many uncertainties when it comes to resource access, and uncertainty is always part of modeling the global economy and resources. Still, they believe these kinds of projections can provide a more detailed outlook about social conditions in 2050 than has previously been available.

“At the very least, it’s highlighting areas of concern and showing that they differ in different parts of the world,” Morris says. “One of the outputs of this type of study is to map that out and provide that kind of insight. That can also inform the focus of further studies into specific regions and concerns.”

The researchers also believe the results will provide a new roadmap for policymakers who may be concerned about long-term resource provision across the entirety of their societies. While having new projections is valuable, modeling also helps analysts and policymakers see which factors most clearly influence future resource outcomes, as well.

“Our method was designed to identify the conditions that produce different resource security outcomes, rather than to predict one most likely future,” Kim says. 

“It’s a different approach to scenarios than we typically see,” Morris adds. “The approach and method have been appealing to people because they have a broad range of uses and applications.”

The research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy; Stanford University; and the National Research Foundation of Korea. 

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 08 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02737-3

The authors analyse the impacts of the adoption of genetically engineered crops in the USA over 40 years. They show that genetically engineered crop adoption has led to some increases in yield and reduced yield volatility, while also acting as an adaptation against climate change-driven northward shifts.

Not sure it’s practical, but it’s certainly striking.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 07 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02761-3

Author Correction: Tree species richness relates to long-term forest photosynthesis increase

Looks tasty.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

It won’t work:

My suspicion was that GPT 5.6-Cyber would succeed, but the frequency and manner of its success removed all doubt. We have to reassess sandboxing quality for capable AI agents, and in general the software stack with which they interact.

An off-the-shelf VM is not enough to contain a modern, cyber-capable AI agent. There is simply too much attack surface. Even innocuous features (like running with a display) add extra, exploitable attack surface.

Beneath the Arctic Ocean is an orchestra featuring natural and human composers, from cracking sea ice and whistling beluga whales to humming shipping-vessel engines. Researchers from MIT Lincoln Laboratory heard some of this cacophony when analyzing data from commercial off-the-shelf sensors that they integrated and deployed in 2024 during the U.S. Navy's Operation Ice Camp (OIC). This past March, during OIC 2026, the researchers returned to the Arctic with a higher-fidelity version of one of the sensors, a geophone, which detects vibrations in the sea ice.

"We're interested in things that make sound underneath the ice," says Ben Evans, a researcher in the laboratory's Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group. "For example, our OIC 2024 data contained marine-mammal songs. We need a better understanding of how such signals propagate through ice, and how to distinguish these signals from other sources."

This underwater soundscape is shifting as sheets of Arctic sea ice rapidly break and melt, opening previously impassable maritime routes for military and commercial activity. Determining the unique sound profiles, or acoustic signatures, produced by fracturing ice will enable researchers to develop predictive capabilities for building coastal community resilience, informing geopolitical strategy, and surveilling adversary Arctic activity. The Fiscal Year 2027 Administration R&D Budget Priorities and Cross-Cutting Actions calls for agencies to "prioritize research and associated research infrastructure investments that enhance America's ability to observe, understand, and predict the physical, biological, geologic, and socioeconomic processes and interacting systems of the Arctic to protect and advance American interests and ensure prosperity of America's Arctic residents," and to "invest in R&D that assures America's uncontested navigation and strategic utilization of the Arctic."

Weather woes

Evans and David Whelihan have been trekking to OIC since 2022, advancing their vision to distribute a set of low-cost sensors across the Arctic for continuous monitoring. Hosted by the Navy's Arctic Submarine Laboratory (ASL) every two years, OIC is a three-week event during which U.S. and allied military forces conduct operational readiness exercises. The temporary infrastructure ASL sets up for OIC — a drifting sheet of Arctic sea ice, atop which sits a runway and insulated tents for lodging and command and control — simultaneously enables researchers to test prototype equipment and conduct experiments in an environment otherwise inhospitable to humans. This opportunity is particularly valuable as Arctic monitoring systems are developed in support of U.S. Department of War priorities.

This year proved especially challenging, with back-to-back blizzards creating whiteout conditions. Temperatures persistently plunged to minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit, and winds blew at 25 to 30 miles per hour with 40 mph gusts. Although the team, which also included Ella Wawrzynek and Ryan Saenger, had intended on completing two stints on the ice — one to deploy the sensors and the other to retrieve them after a few weeks — the weather had other plans. Their initial trip to camp was delayed by a week as windblown snow halted all inbound and outbound flights.

While they waited in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, for the weather to clear, Whelihan was readying another technology they planned to test at OIC: a modem from industry partner Havguard, a Norwegian defense technology startup, that can communicate through ice using magnetic fields (instead of radio-frequency signals, which are rapidly diminished by seawater). However, harsh conditions inside and outside in Prudhoe Bay led to some system failures, and he flew back to the laboratory to fix them. "De-risking and operationalizing critical technology for the warfighter is an important part of what we do," Whelihan says.

After Evans, Wawrzynek, and Saenger arrived at camp on March 7, not a single flight came or left for the next five days. During a "normal" mobilization at OIC, six to nine flights per day are typical. "At times, we couldn't see participating countries' flags on poles roughly 100 feet away from the command tent," Evans says. "We had to put on hats and sometimes goggles just to go between tents, whereas at previous OIC events we walked around with long johns and pants."

The day after their arrival, they loaded their sensors onto a sled, and a field party leader (an expert in Arctic survival) driving a 4x4 vehicle with tracks towed them outside the main camp area. After deploying a quarter of the sensors they had planned, their leader received a call from camp command instructing them to return. The windblown snow was picking up, and they soon wouldn't be able to retrace their tracks back to camp.

A week later, the team had a clear day to retrieve their sensors and fly out of camp. "We laughed, because we could very easily see camp from where we had deployed the sensors," Evans adds.

Magnetic communication

As Whelihan returned to Prudhoe Bay with the fixed communications modem, another blizzard hit. Because the laboratory team had already been to camp once and other research teams needed an opportunity to go onto the ice during the next clear-weather window, the laboratory contracted with UIC Science to conduct the modem experiment. A business unit of the Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corp., UIC Science provides logistical and technical support for Arctic research based in Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska, the northernmost U.S. city. Unlike the drifting ice in the open ocean, the ice in Utqiaġvik is primarily landfast, meaning it's fastened, or anchored, to the shoreline or seafloor.

Through UIC Science, Whelihan and Wawrzynek learned how to ride snowmobiles and then drove onto a big lagoon, where they drilled a 2x3-foot hole through 3.6 feet of ice to deploy a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) carrying the Havguard communications modem. The modem is based on a magneto-inductive transmitter (positioned below the ice) and receiver (sitting atop the ice), which are housed within polycarbonate domes to protect the sensitive electronics. The duo had met with Havguard in Norway in fall 2025 to discuss plans for testing the modem in the Arctic, and Havguard in turn built a version to testing specifications. Prior to OIC, Havguard and the laboratory team deployed the modem on a large reservoir in Vermont. While not representative of Arctic sea ice over salt water, this environment allowed them to test their procedures and capabilities.

"Under the Arctic lagoon ice, we placed the ROV, which was also equipped with a Doppler velocity logger, a four-beam sonar system that measures the vehicle's speed and direction," Whelihan says. "We used those measurements as the ROV drove under the ice, plus aerial drone images, to superimpose a picture of the ROV on the site so we could track it and calculate the modem's rate of test-data transfer. We achieved through-ice communication at about 1.2 kilobytes per second on an alpha prototype system that had traveled from Boston to Alaska three times. This result is very encouraging, and the system warrants further development."

In future iterations of this setup, the data could then be relayed out of the Arctic through drones or satellites.

Community connections

While in Utqiaġvik for a week in mid-April, they participated over the weekend in the Piuraaġiaqta annual spring festival, watching a harpoon-throwing contest and proctoring a kids' snowmobile race. And with eighth graders at the local middle school, they discussed their Arctic R&D and engaged them in a game teaching sonar concepts.

"When you embrace this culture of community, you meet lots of interesting people and doors open up," Whelihan says.  

"Connecting with the Arctic community is an important aspect of our work," Evans adds. "Every time we come here, we cross paths with someone we don't expect to, learn about their work, and think about how we may be able to collaborate." For example, at OIC 2024, the laboratory team had met a professor from the University of Maryland at College Park with extensive experience collecting and analyzing cryoseismological data; they now hope to work with him to apply machine learning to discriminate between icequakes and marine mammal vocalizations.

In the lead-up to OIC 2028, the team plans to design, prototype, and test air-droppable versions of some of their sensors while continuing to partner with Havguard on the through-ice communications modem. Their next step is to optimize the modem's packaging to facilitate deployability in the Arctic and integration with the laboratory's sensor suite.

"The through-line in all this work is minimizing boots on the ice," Whelihan says. "Especially this year, we learned that the weather is in charge of our access to the Arctic. We need ways to easily get sensors where we want them and to retrieve the data they collect, even in these extremely challenging conditions."

This work is funded through the laboratory's internally administered R&D portfolio in mission-critical technology (integrated systems area) and the laboratory's Advanced Concept Committee, which funds high-risk, high-reward early-stage research addressing critical gaps in national security technology.

It’s a vulnerability that allows someone to recover the order of ballots cast, newly exploited with AI tools.

Nearly four years since the original vulnerability was disclosed, I was still able to use it to analyze voter behavior in Georgia (one of the 21 states that uses affected scanners) in the recent May 2026 primary.

Notably, I never touched a voting machine, exploited a network, examined source code, or accessed anything non-public.

After pointing a coding agent to the original vulnerability paper, I supplied it with two data sources highlighted in the paper: the early-voting list for each county, and the “CVR” (cast-vote record) file, containing every ballot and its selections (but not the voters’ names or other identifying information). The CVR file is available upon request, precisely because a public, ballot-level record is what makes election results independently verifiable...

We cannot forget that AI coding agents are not yet trustworthy:

Researchers at a stealth startup in Israel scanned 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies. Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files they found (many sites hosted both an llms.txt and an llms-full.txt file), 120 of them, each on a different site, pointed to one or more code packages or domain names that weren’t registered. To test what happens when an AI agent processes such files, the researchers registered a handful of the unclaimed names and hosted packages that caused any machine executing them to reach out to their server. Within an hour, the researchers received a phone-home response from a Fortune 500 company. Over time, they got a few dozen more, some from more Fortune 500 companies and others from startups. Their beacon also recorded the chain of parent processes that spawned each install, ultimately revealing that coding agents, including Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, and Nous Research’s Hermes, were involved. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nous Research did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication...

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey and MIT President Sally Kornbluth will kick off MIT Future Fest, a new annual festival exploring the future of science, technology, art, and design, with “The Future Begins Here” panel, a celebration of Massachusetts innovation, talent and the bold questions shaping what comes next. The event will take place on Wednesday, September 30 at 3:30 PM at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium.

Curated and produced by the MIT Museum, the inaugural MIT Future Fest will take place across MIT’s campus from September 30–October 4, 2026. Governor Healy and President Kornbluth will be joined on the opening panel by Moderna co-founder and Flagship Pioneering founder and CEO Noubar Afeyan, MIT professor and entrepreneur Sangeeta Bhatia, and Bob Mumgaard, CEO and Co-Founder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Economic Development Secretary Eric Paley will moderate the discussion, which will explore how public, private, and educational institutions can work together to sustain talent pipelines, turn discovery into impact, and build the future

“Massachusetts is where the future is being invented, and MIT Future Fest is a chance to showcase our leadership in technology and design to the world,” said Governor Maura Healey. “From AI and robotics to clean energy and life sciences, the breakthroughs happening here are changing how we live and work. As Governor, I want Massachusetts to be the place where the best minds from around the world come to study, conduct research, start companies and scale their ideas. Our administration is investing in the talent, research and partnerships that make that possible, and we’re proud to launch MIT Future Fest with MIT.”

“The breakthrough discoveries that shape modern life came from decades of scientists and creators asking fundamental questions about how the world works. MIT Future Fest celebrates that same spirit of curiosity on mission," said MIT President Sally Kornbluth. "When you bring together engineers, inventors, artists, scientists, designers and entrepreneurs, you create the conditions for truly transformative innovation. This festival is an invitation to join that conversation, with the conviction that the future isn't something that happens to us—it's something we create together."

“The Future Beings Here” is one of more than 70 public talks, tours, performances, exhibitions, installations, and open laboratories included in the five-day program. Additional festival highlights and the full programming line-up are available at mitfuturefest.org. 

The following press release was issued Sept. 1 by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

In recent years, scientists have built methods to measure a cell’s transcriptome, or all the RNA produced by a cell, to study the cell’s identity and genetic activity. However, these methods rely on killing the cell to access the bits of RNA within, and offer only a one-time snapshot. 

Now, researchers at the Broad Institute and at MIT have invented a “cellular self-reporting” approach to make living cells share their own transcriptomes, so that scientists can analyze them without killing the cells. Described in Cell, the live cell transcriptomic method relies on virus-like particles, which the cells use to package and deliver RNA to the culture medium they’re bathed in. Scientists can simply sample the medium to isolate the RNA, and do this repeatedly to reveal how gene activity in the same cell population changes as the cells mature or respond to perturbations. The researchers applied their method to a variety of cellular model systems, demonstrating its potential to help reveal how cells go awry over time in disease and how drugs affect cells. 

“Our lab focuses our time and resources on developing tools that will actually get used and make real impact on the broader field,” says study senior author Paul Blainey, who is a core member of the Broad and a professor of biological engineering at MIT. “It’s so gratifying to see a real coming to fruition of this concept, which was complete science fiction when we started. It’s a great example of the innovative impact long-term high-risk, high-reward research can have.”

A cellular special delivery

The effort to build the new method began more than a decade ago, when the Blainey lab set out to find a new way to do RNA sequencing without killing cells. “The existing methods were a bit medieval and involved stabbing cells or cutting pieces off of them,” recalls Blainey. Inspired by the performance of molecular technologies such as CRISPR-based technology and their ease of adoption, Blainey and study first author Jacob Borrajo committed to developing a molecular method, which they knew would be challenging and take time, but would also make the approach scalable and easy for other labs to perform. 

The team found inspiration in retroviruses, which over millions of years evolved the ability to package their RNA genomes in protein shells to spread from one infected cell to another. To build their method, the team engineered mammalian cells to express a retroviral structural protein that can encapsulate not only viral RNA but also a cell’s RNA. Integrated into the cell’s membrane, the viral protein is able to recruit cellular RNA, form a shell around it to create a virus-like particle, and bud off from the membrane to enter the liquid medium around the cell. The scientists then take a sample of the medium, isolate the RNA, and sequence it to get a view of the transcriptome from that cell population — all without destroying or damaging the cells.

“Compared to methods using robotics or mechanical biopsies of cells, our molecularly encoded solution could be much more broadly enabling for the average life science or biomedical lab, particularly the time dynamic questions that we hope to elucidate with this technology,” says co-first author Mohamad Najia, research fellow in the Blainey lab and the lab of George Daley at Boston Children’s Hospital. Najia and Borrajo led the work along with co-first author Anna Le, a postdoc in the Blainey lab. 

Message in a bottle

To test the method’s broad applicability, the researchers showed that it worked in immortalized human cells, in cancer cell lines, in stem cells and neuronal cells made from them, and in primary cells from human donors. They also tested a culture of two human cell types growing together, using tags on the virus-like particles so that the signals from the two cell types could be distinguished during analysis. 

In addition, cellular self-reporting is useful for studying systems with crucial three-dimensional structures that researchers would rather not disturb. The team demonstrated their method on spheroids of human endothelial cells, capturing short-term transcriptional changes after biochemically stimulating the cells. 

They also collaborated with Linda Griffith, a professor of biological and mechanical engineering at MIT, to apply their method to her lab’s organ-on-a-chip devices. These models mimic the physiology of organs and can help minimize preclinical or animal model testing, but their complexity makes retrieving cells from the devices for analysis difficult. With cellular self-reporting, the researchers monitored gene expression dynamics in endothelial cells within the devices over time, revealing changes in genes related to how tissues form vascular networks that depended upon the source of supporting fibroblasts, such as from either uterus or lung. 

The Broad team is continuing to look for new applications and biological questions to ask with their system, and are working to make the approach feasible for studying single cells. For now, they hope that scientists interested in following how cells and tissues change over time will give their method a try.

For generations, the steel mills of Southeast Chicago offered work and a way of life, experienced by tens of thousands of families. Open around the clock, three shifts per day, the vast works of U.S. Steel, Republic Steel, Inland Steel, and many others provided demanding but steady jobs, while making materials to build the country. 

Professor Christine Walley, head of the MIT Anthropology program, grew up in the area, where her father worked for Wisconsin Steel. Over time, U.S. manufacturing downsized — her father’s plant closed in 1980 — and the mills left Chicago. Walley’s 2013 book, “Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago,” chronicles the economic and psychological toll plant closures took on the area’s workers and families. The book was followed by a documentary, “Exit Zero,” directed by Chris Boebel, media development director at MIT Open Learning (and Walley’s husband).

Then Walley turned to a new effort — the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project, an online repository of objects and images, as well as new video features about the industry, labor history, and the local community. The project was  developed in collaboration with a team from the Southeast Chicago Historical Society, which in 1985 opened a museum about the steelworking life. This award-winning newer online project has been supported, in part, by MIT, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and others.

The idea is to use objects to tell stories about the area’s history. To mark Labor Day, MIT News offers this photo essay based on materials from the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project, recognizing America’s workers — and reflecting on the jobs, work, and life produced by industry and innovation. 

It’s hard to depict the vastness of Southeast Chicago’s steel manufacturing area, which stretched for miles into Northwest Indiana and included mills that employed 120,000 workers at their peak. This vintage postcard shows the industry along the Calumet River. 

MIT’s 12th president, Howard Johnson, grew up in the area during the Great Depression, where family members toiled in the mills. Johnson’s father worked for U.S. Steel for 50 years, becoming a bookkeeper and accountant, and Johnson attended Bowen High School, which is still open today.

“Families — ours and thousands like it — were the essential centers of life in the community,” Johnson writes in his memoir, published by the MIT Press.

Families have also been essential to the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project, which displays more than 1,100 items from the local historical museum’s collection: clothing, photos, scrapbooks, news clippings, recreational objects, oral history materials, and more. Walley says that anyone could take this approach, and use objects to tell stories about their own local history, work, and community life.

“People tend to experience history in their day-to-day lives not through books written by experts, but by telling stories around family objects and photos,” Walley says. “What is meaningful to us about the things we save from the past? Might these items be ‘clues’ that take us on a deeper historical journey?”

Kitty Kalwasinski Markovich (above, left) didn’t set out to become a welder — but as one, she nearly appeared the movies. Born Kazmira Kalwasinski, she immigrated with her family to Chicago from Poland in 1913, at age 10. During World War II, the steel mills sought replacements for men serving in the military, and she started welding at the South Works of U.S. Steel in Chicago. 

Warner Brothers depicted her in this photo shoot (with Florence Josephs, right), as a worker in the “Rosie the Riveter” mode, and considered making a film featuring her. Five of her brothers served in the military, and their names are seen on Markovich’s welding helmet. One of them, Frank Kalwasinski, was killed in World War II, and his sacrifice is represented by the solid star.

Although many American women returned to their former lives as homemakers at the conclusion of the war, Markovich kept working in the mills, welding for 23 years in the South Works before she retired in 1967. It’s also where she met her husband, Michael Markovich. Kitty Kalwasinski Markovich’s family donated many materials to the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project. 

This hard hat, made around 1986, was donated to the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum along with a cutting from the last beam ever produced at U.S. Steel’s once-mighty South Works, which closed in 1992, having produced steel since the 1800s. 

At its peak, South Works employed about 20,000 people. The Chicago steel mill closures, the 1970s through the 1990s, devastated employees and their families who, as Walley details in the “Exit Zero” book, identified strongly with steelworking. Her own father was a third-generation steelworker.

The online storytelling project deploys MIT scholar Sherry Turkle’s notion of “evocative objects,” those that hold great resonance and get our minds in motion. As Turkle writes, “we love the objects we think with.” 

Donated to the museum by James Stapay, this hard hat evokes the end of a long industrial era in Chicago, and is featured in “The Closing of the Mills,” one of the project’s four documentary videos created from donated objects.

Working in steel mills was not just physically demanding, but dangerous. Worker injuries and deaths were a recognized problem, especially in the early years. This is prototype safety gear from around 1911-12, from a series of photo albums donated to the Southeast Chicago Historical Society by U.S. Steel itself in the 1980s. 

U.S. Steel set up a Committee of Safety early in the 1900s, which recommended 3,000 changes to operations. However, in oral history interviews, workers often recount continuing dangers and terrible accidents in the steel mills. 

Some first-person accounts state that as late as the 1960s, workers were still not regularly wearing hard hats. Basic safety practices seemed to improve, though, after the introduction of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970. Worker safety was a long-term work in progress. 

Many of the close-knit communities formed around the mills have donated materials to the project that range far beyond the factory. For instance, family recreation was important in steelworks neighborhoods. Pictured here, in a photo donated by the Cordero family, is the “Mayas” softball team, made up of members of Southeast Chicago’s Mexican-American community, which won a 1937 community league championship.

Justino Cordero immigrated to Chicago in 1923, became a steelworker, then eventually did electrical work in the mills while opening a radio shop. Cordero, a father of three (two of his children are pictured), organized and coached youth sports teams to keep kids “out of trouble”; wrote a column for The Daily Calumet, a local newspaper; and was involved with his church, Our Lady of Guadalupe. After retirement, Cordero earned undergraduate and master’s degrees, to work with children with disabilities.

Another documentary video from the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project, “Mexican-American Journeys,” explores the long history of Mexican-American steelworkers in Chicago, in many dimensions. At least a dozen parishoners of Our Lady of Guadalupe members who had been in the U.S. military in the 1960s were killed in the Vietnam War, serving their country. 

In 1937, steelworkers went on strike in Chicago. On Memorial Day, during a peaceful protest at Republic Steel, 10 workers were killed by law enforcement officials — an event that provoked congressional hearings in Washington. The image at left is a poster made up for Local 1033, the union branch for the Republic Steel plant; at right, Local 1033 workers take a vote in later years. 

While the so-called “Memorial Day Massacre” was a landmark event in national labor history, it is remembered in more intimate ways in the local area, with many families later donating photos, news clippings, scrapbooks, and interviews about it to the Southeast Chicago Historical Society. 

And though the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project project focuses heavily on working-class employment and daily life, there are many other possibilities for U.S. community-based history, involving almost any topic. Whatever the places, objects, and stories, but the goal is the same: to keep the past alive. 

It started with a vision: Move MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) into the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse, an unoccupied, fortress-like brick building on MIT’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

After all, SA+P needed more space and new facilities. And here, visible from its old offices across the street, was an unused building the size of an airplane hangar. It could offer bigger studios, more work areas, an auditorium, and galleries for events, and become a campus-wide hub for teaching, research, and public engagement. 

“MIT thrives on this idea that we’re all connected,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of SA+P and a key proponent of the project.

But that vision required hundreds of design decisions: how to bring light into the building, create workspaces and circulation, encourage communication among the school’s populations, and more.

“The conception of the project was not like an automatic flash,” says Elizabeth Diller, founding partner at Diller Scofido + Renfro (DS+R), the architecture firm that was selected to revamp the Met Warehouse, as it’s now called.

“It was a very challenging building to work with,” says Benjamin Gilmartin, another DS+R partner. “There was a lot of innovation needed.”

Innovation is welcome at MIT, however. 

“They transformed the Met Warehouse toward the things we want, which is to do more collaborative work, and to combine instruction and research,” Sarkis says. 

Here’s how DS+R, working with MIT over several years, created the new Met Warehouse — which has a ceremonial moving-in procession on Sept. 8. 

Five buildings in one 

The Met Warehouse was built in several phases starting in 1894; by 1923 it was a five-story building with 2-foot-thick brick walls and 1,500 storage units inside. It was a fortress used for private storage, with the words “Metropolitan Storage Warehouse Fire Proof” painted on the side, visible from across the river in Boston. 

The structure was built in five segments, over time. That became crucial to its transformation. Diller and Gilmartin created a large design studio inside each of the segments. 

“When you start a project like this, there are some big moves that seem very clear and obvious,” Diller says. “There are five buildings that were built basically in succession, making for a 500-foot long building. That is just too big, so how do we break it up into neighborhoods? We decided each building itself would have a stack of floating studios in it.” 

That was essential for SA+P and the components of it that will use the building, such as the MIT Morningside Academy for Design, which was established through a $100 million gift from the Morningside Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the T.H. Chan family. This founding gift from family members Gerald and Beryl Chan and Ronnie and Barbara Chan included support for the Met Warehouse transformation. 

Each building segment features double-height, column-free studios which, thanks to virtuoso engineering, are suspended from roof trusses that bring the weight back down to the existing structure. 

Those spaces will benefit the interdisciplinary work taking place at MIT. 

“In those five spaces, we’re putting the making and the research together,” Sarkis says. “The studio and the lab will become one and the same.”

Bringing in light

For about a century, the Met Warehouse featured tiny window slits as its only apertures. That raised a question: How could natural light be brought inside? 

DS+R produced a dramatic answer, drawn from recent architectural history. Along the long north side of the Met Warehouse, adjacent to a set of railroad tracks, they carved large voids for the studios. Aligned with the studios, large segments of the brick exterior were replaced with glass facades.

This way, natural light pours into the studios and beyond, while occupants look out to a lively Cambridge cityscape.

“The process was like an extraction of the dense mass of the building to create open and light-filled space connecting all,” Diller says. 

Her aesthetic inspiration included the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, known for making bold cuts into New York City buildings in the 1970s. 

“Right from the beginning there was a nod to Gordon Matta-Clark,” Diller says, though she notes that Matta-Clark’s work consisted of building-scale interventions motivated by political and social critique. Whereas, “In our case, we use subtraction to build — to make space for new uses and to expose the anatomy of the building.” 

The living lab

To ensure the huge cuts and windows would work, MIT collaborated with DS+R, as well as Leers Weinzapfel Associates, the project’s associate architects, and Shawmut Design and Construction, to test slab cuts and window arrangements directly in the Met Warehouse itself.

“This hands-on approach allowed us to prove the design concepts through actual construction methodologies and logistics,” says Nicole Bernabei, a senior project manager for campus construction at MIT, who has worked on the Met Warehouse effort since 2018. 

Those slices into the building, needed to create the studios, revealed the Met Warehouse’s original structural features as cross-sections now appearing in walls. The designers envisioned those cuts as features to remain visible, something students can still learn from.

“For a school of architecture and planning, this approach feels especially fitting,” Bernabei says. “The building itself has become a teaching tool — a living laboratory where students, faculty, staff, and visitors experience how rigorous design thinking translates into a built reality. Every detail, from the celebrated slab edges to the transformative light, tells the story of collaboration and precision.”

And while those issues were being addressed, the architects had to grapple with, well, everything else. 

Asymmetry inside

There is another reason the architects placed the huge glass walls on the north side of the Met Warehouse. The Cambridge Historical Commission (CHC) asked MIT to keep the building’s south and east sides essentially intact. The long south facade, the one historically visible from Boston, was particularly significant.

“Changing the building’s surface there [on the north side], bringing in the large glass, wouldn’t impact the character of the building as it would on the south side,” Diller says. For that reason, in the interior, “the big spaces drift to the north.” 

The architects placed smaller spaces, like offices, on the south side. 

“The fabric of the existing Met Warehouse building, with its column grids, offered a lot of opportunities for more serialized smaller spaces where you can have seminars, faculty offices, teaching spaces, research areas, next to and in dialogue with the larger multistory spaces that we introduced,” Gilmartin says. 

So, the Met Warehouse is asymmetric inside: big studios extending from the north side, across much of the building; and smaller rooms on the south side.

It was not obvious how to bring more light into the south-side rooms, however. But an extended dialogue between DS+R, MIT, and the CHC produced an “intersect window” strategy — box frame windows sometimes intersecting with the small apertures already on the south side. The steel frames of the new windows, now at a proper height for looking out, distribute the weight of the brick and stone sills once carried by the solid brick that was removed. 

“This meeting of the old and new satisfied the Cambridge Historical Commission’s desire for a minimal touch, but also created an unexpected and delightfully playful effect on the south facade,” says Morgan Pinney MArch ’10, a senior campus planner at MIT. The project, she adds, “allowed us to step into an exceptionally collaborative working relationship with CHC staff — one MIT is very proud of and will certainly continue to build upon for years to come.”

The unusual layout grants a centrality to the studio areas while ensuring that a full range of other spaces are wrapped around them. 

“The logic of the building is that making things is in the middle,” says Sarkis, referring to the studio spaces. “This is MIT. There is making and research in the studios, with seminar rooms and offices all around.” Referring to the school motto, “mens et manus,” he adds, “That’s our culture. MIT is about mind and hand.” 

Still, Sarkis and the architects wanted another element inside, too: interior passages connecting it all.   

Extending the Infinite Corridor

MIT’s main group of buildings features the Infinite Corridor, a busy walkway spanning one-sixth of a mile indoors, linking many other spaces. MIT leaders thought the Met Warehouse could extend the concept. 

“We conceived of it as having an ‘Infinite Corridor,’” says Sarkis, who hoped the corridor would be “visible and accessible all the way through.”

Diller, the architect behind New York City’s High Line, which turned elevated railroad tracks into a wildly popular urban park, knows about getting people walking. She wanted Met Warehouse occupants to “share a circulation system.”

And so every floor of the Met Warehouse has its own “infinite” corridor. Some overlook studio space one floor down, with the cityscape beyond, echoing High Line atmospherics. The off-center circulation spine connects the large studios on the north side and the offices at the south edge of the building. Being flexible about that placement allowed the whole Met Warehouse plan to work. 

“That helps create the space for the large studios,” says John Ochsendorf, director of the MIT Morningside Academy for Design. Besides, he offers, “There’s a happy alignment between historical protection of the south facade, and where the sun is in the sky most of the year. You don’t want direct sunlight on the south side” — where glass walls would create a greenhouse effect — “and the city wanted to protect that view. The architects found this balance.”

A vertical vision

Meanwhile, the architects designed large stairs that pierce through the corridors, helping people access all floors of the building. 

“We didn’t want a layering of the building with horizontal stratification,” Gilmartin says. The stairs will provide “moments of serendipity and exchange with other people.”

The first time Gilmartin drafted stairs for the building, they were “more blade-like and expressive formally” than the final version. But MIT asked for a stripped-down sensibility, so Gilmartin made the design “almost as simple as it could be.”

The stairs still have expansive scope and meeting-place potential.

“That central spine stair is sort of a ceremonial stair,” Diller says. “To see and be seen. I think it will be lively.”

Culture change

The Met Warehouse is very different from the previous quarters of SA+P, a warren of rooms in MIT’s buildings 7 and 9. Many peer institutions have design studios that place all students in a large common space. Not MIT, which has had a different culture, with smaller, specialized design spaces.

Now, the Met Warehouse does feature larger and more visible design areas. 

“We’re trying to give the school the ability to adapt it and change it, and balance the past culture of MIT and a new culture with kinds of spaces where ideas can cross-pollinate and there’s a lot of room for large-scale experimentation,” Gilmartin says. 

Design practice is becoming bigger across MIT, and as more people connect with it, the Met Warehouse will let MIT evolve. 

Gilmartin again: “There’s just a lot of opportunity for smaller groupings of people to be organized in ways that are visible and connected to the larger spaces, but also offer the prospect of a retreat and focused work. I think it is hopefully attuned very well to MIT.” 

The shock of the rebuilt 

It’s unusual to move a major architecture school into an old building. Some of the best-known U.S. universities house their architecture schools in buildings with high-modernist stylings or postwar brutalist aesthetics, heavy on concrete, light on graceful curves. 

“Those buildings come out of the modernist tradition predicated on the shock of the new,” Gilmartin says. “There was something confrontational about those buildings in their material expression and image, and spatial ideas of openness and flexibility, which was quite different from most historic buildings. In their time, they were pretty thrilling.” 

But as the saying goes, that was then, and this is now. 

“The reality of our future is that we can’t tear everything down and build new for every generation,” Gilmartin says. The Met Warehouse “makes a claim about the future of design and what the orientation of that needs to be, in our work,” he adds. 

MIT agrees. 

“I think it sends a very good message that this vanguard school of architecture, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is moving into a historic building and adapting it for the future,” Sarkis has said. 

Along with the Morningside Foundation, another key project donor was Sidara (formerly the Dar Group), a global collaborative of specialist design, engineering, and consulting firms, owned by Maha and Talal Shair; they have supported the creation of the building’s Sidara Auditorium and Sidara Gallery space.

Adaptive re-use 

Ultimately, DS+R was ideal for the Met Warehouse project because of their experience transforming structures. Besides the High Line, they transformed a London media center built for the 2012 Olympics into the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new open storage facility, the V&A East Storehouse.

Diller suggests the key is being pragmatic.

“When you have a building that is that thick, that heavy, that present, sometimes it’s more expensive to demolish it than to invent a way of reusing it,” she says.

Besides, she adds, “Because it’s an architecture school, it’s important that the students understand adaptive reuse firsthand, as we share a planet with limited resources. It’s a good thing to repurpose buildings, to change their program, to update their innards where possible, rather than just preserving them in formaldehyde — or destroying them and taking away the character of a city.”

The Met Warehouse was old, is new again, and is ready for the MIT community to make it their own.

“Very often contemporary buildings are so sanitized and clinical, you don’t feel like you can touch anything,” Diller says. “It doesn’t feel like home. Here, we wanted students to feel uninhibited — a place that would feel like home.”

The MIT School of Architecture and Planning recognized 11 faculty members with promotions for their significant contributions to the school, effective July 1, 2026. Four faculty promotions are in the Department of Architecture, three are in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), and four are in the program in Media Arts and Sciences.

“These individuals offer the MIT community creativity, knowledge, and scholarship that is exhilarating,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “Collectively, they add considerable strength to our faculty and research capacity.” 

Department of Architecture

Xavi Aguirre has been promoted to associate professor without tenure. Aguirre is also director of DIS-ASSEMBLIES LAB, where his work focuses on learning from and designing for when architectures come apart. Through building (and unbuilding) projects, product development, and research, he considers our relationship to material and commodity circulations, both technically and culturally. Aguirre’s work has been commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Industry Opera Co., MOCA Geffen, and Dartmouth College, among others. He is the is founder/director of the design studio stock-a-studio.

Rosalyne Shieh has been promoted to associate professor without tenure. Shieh is an architect based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Her work engages places at the intersection of material culture, oral history, and postcolonial identity; architectural projects are processes for thinking-with-site, and design is the extension and invention from the ordinary. Shieh has worked for Stan Allen Architect, ARO, and Abalos & Herreros, and was formerly co-director of the collaborative practice Schaum/Shieh. She is co-author of “Blanking: An Annotated Archive of Projects and Thoughts on Architecture” (Park Books, 2025). 

Nida Sinnokrot has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Sinnokrot is an artist and educator whose work explores how various forms of power and bias are embedded in dominant narrative structures and attendant articulations of time and space. Working across film, video, photography, sculpture, installation, and agriculture, Sinnokrot seeks to expose and cannibalize — through tactile, tactical, and material acts of technical and conceptual detournement — various technologies of control that give rise to shifting social, political, and environmental instabilities. He is a co-founder of Sakiya, an international residency program and research platform in the West Bank village of Ein Qinya. His recent solo shows include “Nida Sinnokrot” at Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Cologne (2019-20) and “Expand Extract Repent Repeat” at Carlier | Gebauer in Berlin (2018-19).

Kristel Smentek has been promoted to full professor. Smentek is a historian of 18-century European art with specializations in histories of the graphic and decorative arts in their transcultural contexts, the history of collecting, and European encounters with Asia. Smentek has received fellowships and awards from a host of organizations including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In her current book project, “Disorient: Arts from China in Eighteenth-Century France,” Smentek analyzes European engagements with Asian imports in the 18th century and their impact on continental art and aesthetic theory. Smentek is also active as a curator. Most recently, she was co-curator of the exhibition “Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment,” which examined the constitutive role of works on paper in the propagation of European Enlightenment ideals and blind spots, and a contributor to and co-editor of its accompanying catalog (Harvard Art Museums, 2022).

Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Jason Jackson has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Jackson is an associate professor of political economy and director of the Political Economy Lab. His research focuses on the relationship between states and markets, particularly the role of economic ideas and moral beliefs in shaping market institutions under modern capitalism. Empirically, his work focuses on contexts ranging from the role of economic nationalism in industrial development to the rise of the digital “platform” economy and urban mobility markets in contemporary cities in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Jackson is the author of “Traders, Speculators and Captains of Industry: How Capitalist Legitimacy Shaped Foreign Investment Policy in India” (Harvard University Press, 2025) and “Constructing Economic Nationalisms in Brazil and India” (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

Justin Steil has been promoted to full professor. Steil is professor of law and urban planning and a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow. As Academic Curriculum Committee faculty chair, he leads a new faculty committee for the MIT Center for Real Estate and the Master of Science in Real Estate Development program, bringing together faculty from across the school to shape the future of the curriculum. As a lawyer, a paramedic, and an urban planner, Steil’s research focuses on spatial dimensions of inequality. Steil analyzes spatial inequality in the domains of environmental justice, housing and land use policies, and health equity, among others. Recent research focuses on the effects of neighborhoods on health, on mobility risk, and on the role of emergency medical services in advancing health equity. 

Sarah Williams has been promoted to full professor. Williams, the Norman B. (1938) and Muriel Leventhal professor of architecture and planning, is the director of the Civic Data Design Lab and director of the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. Williams combines her training in computation and design to create communication strategies that expose urban policy issues to broad audiences and create civic change, a process she calls Data Action. Williams is co-founder and developer of Envelope.city, a web-based software product that visualizes and allows users to modify zoning in New York City. In her book “Data Action: Using Data for Public Good” (The MIT Press, 2022), Williams provides a guide for working with data in more ethical and responsible ways.  

Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Fadel Adib has been promoted to full professor. Founding director of the Signal Kinetics research group, Adib holds a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He has spent his career expanding the frontiers of wireless sensing, developing technologies that locate hidden objects, navigate indoor environments, and detect contaminants in food and water. Since receiving tenure in 2022, his group has integrated generative AI with wireless vision, enabling robots to interact with objects blocked entirely from view. His spinoff, Cartesian Systems, is now deployed in more than 700 stores across 55 countries. Adib was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2024 and received the Great Arab Minds Award in Engineering and Technology in 2023.

Canan Dağdeviren has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Dağdeviren is the founder and director of the Conformable Decoders research group and has built a research program around the idea that the human body continuously produces coded physical patterns — through motion, pressure, sound, electrical activity, and biochemical change — that carefully designed materials and devices can decode to improve human health. Her group develops technologies that bend and conform to the body, including a wearable ultrasound breast patch for more frequent and accessible cancer screening, and ImPULS, an implantable piezoelectric ultrasound stimulator for deep brain stimulation. Dağdeviren also serves as faculty lead of the MIT Media Lab's WHx Women's Health Program, which this year became an official program of the MIT HEALS Initiative — a significant institutional recognition of her commitment to addressing longstanding gaps in women's health through bold, cross-disciplinary research.

Kevin Esvelt has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Esvelt, who leads the Sculpting Evolution research group, invents new ways to study and influence the evolution of ecosystems, addressing some of humanity's most difficult ecological and public health challenges with a commitment to openness and humility. His community-driven “Mice Against Ticks” project, featured in a landmark 60 Minutes segment last year, is engineering Lyme-immune mice on Nantucket, Massachusetts to stop the disease at its source. He has also emerged as one of the nation's leading voices on biosecurity, with research exposing the dangers of AI systems capable of generating biological weapons information — highlighted by The New York Times in April — and a Policy Forum piece in Science on mirror life that has advanced critical public conversations about the governance of emerging biotechnologies. His work on CRISPR gene drives, RoboPace, and “daisy drives” has reshaped global conversations about the future of evolution.

Danielle Wood has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Wood, the founding director of the Space Enabled research group, has spent her career proving that satellite technology can be a powerful instrument for justice on earth. Holding a joint appointment in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and serving as MIT's faculty lead for African and African Diaspora Studies, Wood has developed the EVDT framework — Environment-Vulnerability-Decision-Technology — a systems approach applied successfully in countries including Ghana, Angola, and Brazil. Her impact extends well beyond the MIT Media Lab: She received the 2026 Paul Gray Faculty Award for Public Service and the 2025 Letten Prize, and has served multiple times as a private sector advisor to the U.S. Delegation to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.