The insurance industry now finds itself bracing for a new era of risk brought on by relentless temperature rises that are disrupting weather patterns.

Climate change narrows the window for harvesting wine grapes, forcing winemakers to make quick decisions.

It is a transformation for the ages: The Metropolitan Storage Warehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is opening as the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, after a makeover turning the century-old storage facility into a light-infused center for teaching, research, and public engagement.

The massive structure is a unique addition to daily life at the Institute. A hulking brick building and local landmark over 500 feet long and five stories high, the Met Warehouse now stands as a remarkable feat of architecture, engineering, and “adaptive reuse.” It includes four segments of glass walls, double-height studio spaces, copious common areas, and building-long walkways overlooking the work areas on all five floors — a 21st-century variation on the Infinite Corridor in MIT’s main group buildings. 

Designed by the architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), the Met Warehouse is intended to serve as a new campus hub. Beyond work studios, offices, and classrooms, there is an auditorium, galleries, and common spaces where MIT scholars and students can learn and design together, and the public can engage in lectures, exhibitions, and other programming.

“Walking through the Met Warehouse, everywhere you look you see the artful melding of the original architecture with the new design. It’s a perfect expression of the historical importance of architecture at MIT and of the creative promise of this new hub,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “The new Met Warehouse will create a central home for design at MIT, and together with the new Linde Music Building, the presence of the Met will create a magnetic new west campus district for arts and design.”

Faculty, staff, and students have started moving into the Met Warehouse this month. The School of Architecture and Planning will stage a ceremonial procession into the building on Sept. 8, with a formal dedication event on Oct. 1, and a day welcoming the general public on Oct. 3 as part of MIT Future Fest. 

The Met Warehouse’s conversion began in the late 2010s, championed by Hashim Sarkis, the dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, and his collaborators. They envisioned a new and dedicated space for architecture, design, and planning at MIT — while reusing an existing structure for that purpose.

“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,” says Sarkis, the Elizabeth and James Killian 1926 Professor. “This is a big statement on the part of MIT.” 

Sarkis adds: “We’re expecting the Met to facilitate a very vibrant in-person culture. The vitality of interpersonal connection will be highlighted in the building. The faculty and the students wanted more research space, more space for exhibitions and galleries, and more spaces that enable what we do best, which is to work together. Design is about collaboration, and planning is about community.”

From fortress to studio 

First opened in 1894 and completed in 1923, the building known as the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse long stood as a forbidding, fortress-like facility, with some tiny window slits. Only a few people had reason to venture inside. Visible from across the river in Boston, the Met Warehouse was a landmark, an advertisement of services, and a curiosity. It had about 1,500 storage spaces inside, and few other uses. 

MIT acquired the building in 1962, and by 2015 it was no longer used for storage. That raised a question: What comes next? Over time, the idea of moving the School of Architecture and Planning into the Met Warehouse took hold. That left the hard work of designing and transforming the building into a place that people could inhabit, while respecting the historically designated façade’s monolithic qualities. 

To create such a thoroughgoing transformation, MIT engaged DS+R, known for the design of high-profile cultural and institutional projects, including the Broad Museum in Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; the Shed, a nonprofit cultural and performing-arts space in New York City; and, not least, the transformation of a postindustrial rail line into New York City’s High Line. Shawmut Design and Construction managed the renovation, and the entire endeavor was made possible by the generous philanthropic support of MIT alumni, volunteers, and friends. 

Significantly, some of the signature projects of DS+R, including the High Line and the renovation of Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in New York, involved updating and adaptively reusing existing structures. For the Met Warehouse, this meant a revamping of the interior, creating new workspaces, new ways to help people circulate through the massive building, and new ways to bring light inside the structure. In addition to the glass wall segments, the architects expanded the building’s windows, added a connective staircase, and found additional ways to let light and air permeate throughout. 

“Our thinking was always around trying to bring communities on campus together, knowing there would be a convergence of labs, classrooms, resource spaces, and disciplines,” says Elizabeth Diller, founding partner at DS+R. “The big challenge from the start of the project was the building itself. The building is stubborn and big and heavy, and it was conceived to hold furniture and suitcases and pianos, not humans.”

When thinking through the project, Diller adds, “The first thing was assessing the building itself and its potential, and our ability to perforate it [allowing light] and to create new spaces inside of it. … We saw the potential, because of the structure, that it could endure some surgery.”

“The choice by MIT and Hashim Sarkis to adaptively reuse a building as a center for design represents a bold vision,” says Benjamin Gilmartin, partner at DS+R. “It’s a courageous idea: that the future of design and architecture very much lives in the reuse of structures we already have.”

MIT campus leaders say they are delighted with the outcome. 

“The way the building is structured, the architects, Liz Diller, Ben Gilmartin, and their team, have been unbelievably shrewd in understanding our culture and respecting it while transforming the building,” Sarkis says. “That transformation enables the things we want, which include collaborative work, while also combining instruction and research.”

The makeover of the building also represents a collaboration between the City of Cambridge and MIT. Because the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse is a historically listed building, the city had to approve the substantial exterior renovations — such as on the north side, where several glass walls now cascade from the top of the Met to ground level. On the south side, the architects preserved many of the small storage units, redesigning them as offices with an innovative “skin” of new windows.

“That was one of the big decisions, based on light and the sensitivities of the history, that the large studios would be facing the north, and extracted from the north side of the building,” Diller explains. “Which left a lot of peripheral areas to act as small-scale and more intimate spaces, offices, and other types of spaces as needed.”

Indeed, the architects emphasize, the redesign of the Met Warehouse is not simply an overhaul; the plan significantly reflects the longtime interior structure of the building, too. 

“It wasn’t just about converting the shell,” Gilmartin says. “It was about trying to find a balance and determining how much was already there [structurally] that we could use as a fabric.” 

That historical fabric is evident through one of the building’s signature features: The old brick structure in key places is exposed to view, next to many places where the architects made dramatic cuts to create platforms for light-filled studio spaces. Students, designers, and visitors can see both how the old Met Warehouse was built and how the new version of it was created.

“The building itself can be a teaching tool,” Diller says. “When we did those extractions from the building, we left our intervention exposed, so there’s a kind of conversation between a contemporary strategy and the historical building. The traces are all there; they’re all revealed.”

Educators at the Institute view the building in a similar manner as they think about architectural teaching broadly.

“Our move to the Met is an exciting physical transition for the school, and an occasion for us to articulate the shifts in architectural education we have been undertaking,” says Ana Miljački, the Francis White Davis Professor at MIT and head of the Department of Architecture. “Making our home in the building will be part of our rethinking of the discipline, the profession, and our pedagogical tasks.” 

Five stories, five blocks, one vision

As originally constructed, the Met Warehouse had five contiguous segments. Given that it is also five stories high, the building has 25 natural segments, in a sense. A wide range of activity will be housed inside it, including several core parts of the School of Architecture and Planning: the Department of Architecture, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), and the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. (The MIT Media Lab, the Art, Culture, and Technology Program, and the Center for Real Estate, all part of the School of Architecture and Planning, will remain in their existing locations on campus.)

The MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD), a campus-wide center promoting interdisciplinary design work, will also be located in the Met Warehouse, helping to further establish the building as the essential hub of design and planning work on campus.

Many MIT scholars say they welcome the opportunity to bring so many related programs into greater proximity with each other, along with all the physical assets the Met Warehouse will provide. 

“At MIT we have fewer boundaries, less conventions, and we bump into each other on campus,” says Jinhua Zhao, the Class of 1941 Professor and head of DUSP. “I have always appreciated this spirit since I first came here as a student and walked along the Infinite Corridor. A lot of places value interdisciplinary research. At MIT, you can’t help it happening. I believe the new Met Warehouse will expand that custom.”

Those who saw the inside of the building in its old days as a storage space, and are moving into it now, are deeply impressed by the complete readaptation of the Met Warehouse and the provision of new “commons” spaces for the campus.

“It’s almost inconceivable that this brick box, which was not designed for human habitation but to store objects, has been opened up, through the work of Diller Scofidio + Renfro,” says John Ochsendorf, the Class of 1942 Professor and director of MAD. “Our hope is you will find vibrant cross-fertilization across disciplines, across the School of Architecture and Planning, but also across all of MIT. That’s really important.”

Indeed, as Ochsendorf and others have noted, the building figures to produce its own urban dynamics within its monumental walls. 

“As you go up into the building, you will find different neighborhoods concerned with different aspects of design,” Ochsendorf says. “These are all areas pushing frontiers in research and education and design of the built environment, which interact with so many of the pressing issues facing humanity. We’re excited to create new neighborhoods of inquiry with the building.”

That is certainly part of the intention, the architects say. 

“There are a lot of opportunities for smaller groupings of people to be organized in ways that are visible and connected to the larger shared spaces but also offer the prospect of retreat in different places to work,” Gilmartin observes. 

“The challenges facing cities cannot be addressed by any one discipline,” says Sarah Williams, director of the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. “Innovation comes from bringing together all the fields that shape — and are shaped by — the built environment. The Met Warehouse gives us a place to work across those boundaries, inspiring new ways to imagine and build the future of our cities.”

Sarkis, for his part, professes some happy relief that the long-held conception of the Met Warehouse is finally becoming reality. The building, he thinks, will influence the flow of people through MIT’s campus, bringing a transformative multiuse space into the daily lives of students, faculty, staff, and the public.

“It is going to be a new center of gravity for the campus,” Sarkis says. 

MIT News will offer a further look at the Met Warehouse’s transformative architecture in concert with the Sept. 8 procession, as well as coverage of events from the formal dedication weekend in October. 

This seems to work:

Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking agents. The prompts direct the attacking LLM to perform an action forbidden by its guardrails, the safety barriers AI developers erect to prevent it from taking harmful actions. The LLM responds by shutting down.

Examples are a prompt that orders the LLM to provide steps for developing inhalable Anthrax spores, or, in the case of LLMs from Chinese developers, make references to the iconic Tank Man from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Once the LLM encounters these forbidden commands, it no longer follows its existing commands. The researchers have named the technique context bombing...

In extreme environments, habitats are built for survival. Submarines, Antarctic bases, and postdisaster dwellings are designed to prioritize health and safety. This is especially the case for habitats in space, where room is at a minimum, contact with Earth is remote, and hazards are numerous. 

But as humans plan for longer journeys to the moon and eventually Mars, designing habitats where crews can not only survive but also thrive will be essential to a mission’s success.

Now, engineers at MIT and elsewhere are exploring ways that habitats in extreme environments can support a person’s mental, emotional, and social wellbeing. They have assembled a resource that relates habitat design features with behavioral health outcomes such as stress, anxiety, and feelings of isolation. 

Going a step further, the team has visualized these relationships in the form of an interactive online platform. Users can click through to explore connections between design and behavior, such as how a habitat’s layout affects social connection and team cohesion, and how a reconfigurable space can minimize homesickness. 

“The awareness has been there for some time that living in space is difficult,” says Mich Lin, a PhD candidate in the Human Systems Lab and the Engineering Systems Lab at MIT. “We’ve come a long way from the human in a tin can. As our priorities shift toward long-duration exploration missions, making sure a crew is safe, healthy, happy, and productive becomes even more important.”

The insights that Lin’s team presents, which appear today in the journal npj Microgravity, were assembled after an extensive literature search and expert interviews. They identified many studies on habitat design and its influence on specific behaviors, such as how levels of lighting affect an astronaut’s quality of sleep. But this is the first time that anyone has brought such information together, visualizing the relationships and risks associated with a habitat’s design and an inhabitant’s wellbeing. 

Lin notes that the work can be applied to designing habitats in not only space but also  other extreme, isolated, and confined environments. 

“Submarines, oil rigs, polar expeditions, and even refugee camps or war zones are incredibly stressful environments,” says Lin, who is the study’s lead author. “We try to make this work applicable to a lot of scenarios and identify points of intervention in habitat design to reduce stress in those extreme environments.”

The study’s co-authors include former MIT undergraduate Lu Chen and Professor Katya Arquilla of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Other key contributors to the work include Lauren Blackwell Landon at KBR/NASA, Jeffrey Montes of the space architecture firm Different Systems, and MIT undergraduate Kara Chou. 

Emotional design

The researchers modeled their new design tool after a risk mapping format used by NASA. When designing a spacecraft or habitat for astronauts in space, the agency maps out the associated risks in the form of “directed acyclic graphs.” A DAG resembles a large web of relationships that illustrate how certain habitat or mission features can affect certain mission-relevant outcomes. 

A typical NASA DAG depicts one-way connections between mission constraints, such as “distance from Earth,” to an astronaut’s physical health outcome, such as quality of sleep, cardiovascular impacts, cognitive function, and so forth. 

“By mapping risks, we can identify points of intervention to characterize and mitigate them,” Lin explains. “NASA uses DAGs as a countermeasure to the risky business that is human spaceflight.”

The researchers looked to create a similar DAG format to map risks associated with habitat design, and less tangible behavioral health outcomes, such as stress, boredom, trust, nostalgia, curiosity, and kinship with crewmates. 

“The connection between habitat and behavioral health has not been made in this format before,” Lin emphasizes. “So we made those connections for the first time.”

To do so, the team first identified habitat design factors and behavioral health outcomes that would be specifically relevant for living in extreme environments. The researchers looked to multiple resources across aerospace and human factors fields. To prioritize a human-centered perspective, they referenced the “Atlas of the Heart,” written by author, social work researcher, and University of Houston Professor Brené Brown. In the book, Brown identifies 87 emotions and experiences that define what makes us human. 

“From there, we did a down-selection of which emotions would be the most impactful in our scenario of habitat design in extreme environments,” Lin explains. 

The team zeroed in on 14 main emotions or experiences that they considered behavioral outcomes that could be influenced by habitats in extreme environments. These include anxiety, autonomy, nostalgia, curiosity, fatigue, and kinship.

They then carried out a wide-ranging search through the scientific literature to identify studies relating to habitability in extreme environments. For instance, NASA has carried out extensive research on the effects of lighting on sleep, the resetting of circadian rhythms, and productivity. Other studies have investigated circulation and habitat layout and their effects on privacy, social connection, and crew performance. 

Lin and their colleagues assembled connections and conclusions from numerous studies to create a DAG, or a web of habitat design features, and their downstream effects on aspects of mental, emotional, and social wellbeing. They also solicited feedback from experts across industry, academia, and NASA to evaluate and strengthen the DAG.

They then developed an online platform, dubbed the Human-Environment Connection and Interaction Atlas, or HECIA, as an interactive tool for habitat designers. 

Click and connect

When using the atlas, the team envisions that designers can take either a forward or backward approach. The atlas lays out habitat design elements, and their downstream behavioral connections, in roughly the order in which decisions are made in designing a mission. 

For instance, in designing a spacecraft to journey to Mars, a designer might take a forward approach, and first click on a feature associated with an early design stage, such as “distance from Earth,” knowing that this would be a significant consideration. The atlas would automatically display risks associated with being far from Earth, such as limits to resources such as “food,” “medical capability,” and “family and friends,” and to behavioral health outcomes such as “nostalgia/homesickness.” 

A designer could then take a backward approach. If, for instance, they want to prioritize minimizing nostalgia/homesickness, they could click on the term to reveal design features and ideas that affect and could potentially improve it, such as in this case, “place attachment,” or feeling emotionally attached to a place. Clicking on this term would in turn reveal upstream elements such as “reconfigurability” and “privacy” — design elements that could be put in place to encourate place attachment, and reduce homesickness. 

For every term that a designer clicks on, Lin and their colleagues provide a summary, based on empirical research, that explains both the term in the context of extreme habitats, and provides examples of design interventions. For instance, a designer who is looking for ideas to minimize social isolation on long-duration missions may click on the term, to reveal a description. 

“They may read that research has found ‘access paths, stairs, entrances, contribute to the formation of friendships and social cohesion,’” Lin offers. “So that would give them an idea of connecting public spaces in the habitat, via the private spaces, so people have to mingle, essentially.”

They emphasize that the new platform and the ideas informing it are not a one-size-fits-all for how to design any extreme habitat. That depends on a particular habitat’s specifications and constraints. 

“Rather, this helps you think about connections that might be important, but that aren’t immediately obvious,” Lin says. “As we envision truly becoming an off-planet species, or creating places we want to live in in space, there is so much potential for us to reimagine habitats that make us happy and productive.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

We’ve had a few questions from EFF supporters lately, asking whether the images we use on our blog posts, or on donation and shop items, have been created with AI image generators. We’d like to answer these questions and clarify our internal policy regarding image creation. 

EFF images are all made by human beings, not by automated image generators, with very rare exceptions. This is an internal decision made by our small design team, for the following reasons: 
  

1. Our designers bring knowledge and expertise to the images we create, informed by years of consultation with EFF’s lawyers, technologists and activists. We find that this informed perspective helps make the issues we cover more clear, and more engaging, for our supporters. 
2. The content on our sites is written by human beings, not by bots, and we feel that the images illustrating these posts should be human-made as well. Our supporters come to EFF for honest, trustworthy information from expert human beings, and we want our images to communicate that authenticity as well. 
3. Aesthetic preference: our designers prefer the look, as well as the process, of images made “by hand.” It also gives us more control over the images, including producing multiple versions for different posts. While it can sometimes take a bit longer, we feel the results are more satisfactory and long-lasting.  
4. While it is rare, it is possible for image generators to create images that are under copyright, or understood by some to be under copyright. This could conflict with our use of a Creative Commons Attribution license for all our images. By generating our own images, we avoid any risk of a dispute about copyright infringement, so that we can continue our work promoting digital rights (including the right to fair use of copyrighted materials) without fear of a lawsuit. 

An example of EFF artwork process: sketch and final art

To be as clear as possible, we are now adding a small credit in the lower righthand area of each banner image that will read “Image created by EFF.” As mentioned earlier, there may be rare exceptions, when an EFF designer uses an automatically generated image as a small element in a larger illustration. In these cases, we will indicate that use with additional text, specifying the elements involved, and naming the image generator used.  

We hope that by describing our internal design thinking, we are answering the questions we are getting without confusing anyone about EFF's various and nuanced positions on the issues raised by image generators. As with past technological developments, we continue to defend the rights of technologists to develop these powerful tools, as well as the right of the public to make legal and legitimate use of them. Ultimately, EFF's design team has made a choice we feel is consistent with EFF's brand and look, and it's a decision we think every user gets to make for themselves. 

And don't forget: because all of our images are CC-By, you are free to use, share or remix our any image we create (we ask that you include a credit to EFF). If you need hi-res versions, you can find some on our Flickr page, or you can email us directly with any requests. And you can enjoy some of the art we create on gifts you receive when you donate to EFF!

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The MIT Sloan School of Management is launching an Evening MBA program designed for high-performing individuals who want to earn an MBA while continuing to work. Beginning with its first cohort in August 2027, the 22-month program will offer the same academic rigor, admissions standards, and world-class faculty as MIT Sloan's existing MBA programs, providing a primarily in-person, cohort-based experience tailored to working professionals. In this interview, MIT Sloan Dean Richard M. Locke speaks about the new program, why now is the right time to launch it, and what it means for the Greater Boston region.

Q: Who is the new MIT Sloan Evening MBA designed for?

A: We created the Evening MBA for talented, ambitious professionals who want to earn an MBA from MIT Sloan during the week, but prefer to remain in their current jobs while pursuing their degree. We know there is a growing population of professionals who want to accelerate their careers, who want the intellectual challenge, leadership development, and network that come with a world-class MBA, but who are also building momentum in their organizations and don't want to step away from their careers to attend a full-time program. This program allows them to continue contributing to their organizations and immediately apply what they learn in the classroom to their work.

Students in the Evening MBA will be held to the same high academic standards, learn from the same world-class faculty, and benefit from the same commitment to rigorous, innovation-driven management education that defines our existing MBA programs. The difference is the format. 

Q: What sets the Evening MBA apart from other MBA programs for working professionals?

A: Several things make this program distinctive. First, it combines MIT Sloan's academic rigor and strengths in innovation, analytics, technology, and applied management. It connects students to a high-caliber, technically sophisticated peer network inside the broader MIT ecosystem. Maintaining the school's high standards was a foundational principle in the program's design, so students can expect the same level of excellence that characterizes all MIT Sloan MBA offerings.

Second, the program is primarily in-person and cohort-based. Students will spend two evenings each week learning together, developing strong relationships with a group of high-performing peers, and also participating in week-long intensive components of the program together. We believe those personal connections, classroom interactions, and opportunities for collaboration are an essential, and distinctive, part of the MIT Sloan experience.

Finally, students will have the opportunity to put their learning into practice immediately. Because they remain active in their organizations throughout the program, they can bring new ideas, frameworks, and skills directly back to their workplaces and see the impact in real time.

Q: How do you see the program impacting Greater Boston and the region?

A: We see a strong connection between the Evening MBA and Greater Boston's vibrant technology and innovation economy. The region is home to leading organizations across life sciences, health care, finance, energy, engineering, and entrepreneurship, and many of the professionals driving those industries are looking for opportunities to continue developing their management skills and knowledge, as well as leadership capabilities, without having to pause their careers or leave their organizations.

Because students will remain in their current jobs throughout the program, the benefits of this program also extend beyond the individual. Employers benefit from the upskilling and retention of these individuals, and this program accelerates participants’ careers and increases their value to their organizations. 

The Evening MBA will also strengthen MIT Sloan's relationships with employers across Greater Boston and New England, expand our alumni network, and create new opportunities for collaboration among students, alumni, industry partners, and organizations throughout the region. Ultimately, it will help us advance MIT Sloan's mission of developing principled, innovative leaders who improve the world, while also contributing to the continued growth and success of one of the world's most dynamic innovation ecosystems.

When MIT historian Tristan Brown first examined a Chinese tea chest label displayed as a relic of the Boston Tea Party, he had no reason to doubt its story.

Descendants of Boston blacksmith Thomas Wells had donated the label to the Old South Meeting House in 1987, saying it had been recovered during the destruction of British tea in 1773. Because so few objects from the protest survive, the label appeared to offer a rare material connection to the event.

But after a year of archival and linguistic research, Brown reached a different conclusion: The label was made nearly a century later.

The decisive clue lay hidden in its Chinese text. Earlier researchers had approached the text through Mandarin, but Brown found that one sequence of characters was being used phonetically. Read in Cantonese, it rendered the name “Smith, Archer,” identifying Smith, Archer & Co., an American trading firm active in East Asia during the 1860s and 1870s.

The discovery does not make the label historically insignificant. Instead, it reveals a different story — one connecting Chinese migration, Pacific commerce, family memory, and the ways Americans constructed the history of the Revolution.

Brown presents his open-access findings in “Tea Chest Label,” published July 3 in the June 2026 issue of the American Historical Review. What began as an inquiry into a supposed Boston Tea Party relic became a study of how ordinary objects acquire historical authority, and how historical memory itself is made.

The project began in 2024, when the American Historical Review issued a call for essays on 76 objects connected to 1776, the year the United States declared independence from Britain.

“I’m a historian of China and don’t usually work in American history, but the idea of taking on one of 76 artifacts for the 250th anniversary of the U.S. sounded like a fun challenge,” Brown says.

As he considered which object to study, Brown recalled seeing the intriguing Chinese label during a visit to the Old South Meeting House, a major site of public debate in Revolutionary-era Boston and the place where colonists gathered before the Tea Party.

The object had stayed with him.

Following the evidence

The label offered Brown an unusual point of entry into the history of the Boston Tea Party. Its apparent significance was heightened by the scarcity of surviving objects from the event.

That scarcity reflects the nature of the protest itself. The destruction of the tea was a criminal act, and participants had strong reasons to conceal their identities and avoid punishment by the British Crown. Even today, no completely definitive list exists of the people who took part.

“That is one reason why the event remains shrouded in a degree of mystery,” Brown says.

With that uncertainty a given, Brown pursued two lines of investigation simultaneously: establishing the label’s provenance, and deciphering the label’s wording.

At the outset, he learned that scholars associated with the British Museum and Harvard University had examined the label. Their assessments had not definitively authenticated the label as a Tea Party relic, but neither had they ruled out an 18th-century origin.

“I believed it was real,” Brown says. “None of the parties who had previously assessed the label’s provenance concluded definitively that it wasn’t from the Boston Tea Party. And frankly, it was hard to imagine how an American family with no ties to China could have possessed a label written in formal Chinese listing the exact teas that were traded in the region.”

Brown spent months interviewing Wells descendants and searching for original documents that might connect the label to the 1773 protest. At the same time, he began tracing how the family tradition surrounding the object had developed.

Because claims of family participation in the Tea Party are often difficult to verify, Brown worked closely with members of the Wells family throughout the project, and found in them willing and generous partners. As the evidence began pointing away from the Revolutionary era, the research required both scholarly rigor and personal sensitivity.

“The Wells family, especially Charles Wells, were extraordinary collaborators,” Brown says. “They cared deeply about their ancestor’s legacy and the label’s history, and they wanted the truth as much as I did. This is their discovery as much as mine.”

Cracking the label

The Chinese wording on the label presented a separate challenge.

Brown could see that part of the text did not function like ordinary Chinese prose, but its meaning remained elusive. The breakthrough came when he revisited the way earlier scholars had pronounced the characters.

Previous translations and interpretations had relied on Mandarin, China’s official language rooted in the northern part of the country. Brown gradually recognized that one sequence of characters was being used phonetically to represent a foreign company name. When pronounced in Cantonese — the dominant language of the 19th-century commercial networks in which the label circulated — the characters reproduced the name “Smith, Archer.”

That reading identified Smith, Archer & Co., a New York-based import-export firm with offices in East Asia during the 1860s and 1870s. The company acquired Chinese and Japanese teas for shipment to American markets.

The label also named Yuan Tianbo, a Cantonese merchant connected to that trading network, whom Brown later traced to Yokohama, Japan in the 1860s.

The linguistic clue therefore did more than reveal a company name. It established that the label belonged to the world of 19th-century Pacific commerce, not the tightly controlled Canton trading system of the 1770s.

“That was the moment the entire story changed,” Brown says. “Once we could date the label, we finally knew where to look.”

From East Asia to the American Midwest

Once Brown had identified the company, he could begin reconstructing the label’s likely route into the Wells family’s possession.

The trail led to John Milton Wells, a relative who traveled from Michigan to the San Francisco Bay Area during the Gold Rush era from 1848 to 1855. Although John Milton did not strike gold, his years in California changed the course of his life. After returning to Michigan, he worked as a grocer and operated a business recorded in commercial directories as the “California Tea Store.”

A surviving trade card associated with Wells advertised imported Asian teas. Together with family letters, census records, and local business directories, it points to the commercial world through which a label produced for an East Asian tea merchant could have entered the Midwestern family’s collection. The label was therefore likely acquired through the family’s 19th-century tea business, rather than during the Boston Tea Party.

Brown argues that its Revolutionary pedigree probably developed later, amid the centennial commemorations of the 1870s, when many American families were emphasizing their connections to the nation’s founding era.

By the early 1900s, the story had appeared in a local newspaper, which reported that the label had been taken from a tea chest during the Boston Tea Party. Repetition in family accounts, newspapers, commemorative culture, and eventually museum interpretation helped transform an unverified tradition into an apparently authoritative history.

“The label shows how 19th-century global trade, Asian migration, and family storytelling together reconfigured American revolutionary memory by manufacturing the very relics that seemed to authenticate that memory,” Brown writes.

A different kind of historical artifact

Brown’s investigation also demonstrates how new research tools are allowing historians to revisit questions that once appeared settled.

Digitized commercial directories made it possible to trace Smith, Archer & Co. across East Asian ports. Searchable newspapers helped Brown follow the development of the Wells family story. Attention to Cantonese, rather than Mandarin, unlocked a company name that had gone unrecognized in earlier interpretations.

“Though the tea chest label is not from the Revolutionary War era, it’s still an important educational artifact documenting China’s long-standing trade with the Americas and the ways Americans have long looked to China to tell stories about their own country’s past,” Brown says.

The discovery changes the label’s historical significance, rather than diminishing it. The object’s value lies not in what it was reported to have witnessed in 1773, but in what it reveals about how later generations used globally circulating objects to construct memories of the American Revolution.

The label also preserves an important truth beneath the mistaken family tradition: The tea destroyed in Boston Harbor came from China. Its journey from an East Asian commercial network to a Midwestern family and finally to a Boston museum illustrates how American revolutionary memory became intertwined with Pacific trade and migration.

For Brown, the project offers a broader lesson about historical scholarship as an ongoing process of questioning, debate, and discovery.

“History is never finished,” Brown says. “Even objects that have sat in museums for decades can reveal entirely new stories when we ask new questions.”

When I give talks about AI genies, I use this sort of example as a hypothetical. It’s happened.

The story is from Australia. Someone named Andrew tasked OpenClaw to book gym classes for him. And….

Minutes later, his AI agent reported it had discovered a way to book Andrew into classes several weeks in advance, far beyond what was supposed to be possible.

Andrew, who was sitting fourth on a waitlist for a class later that week, asked if it was possible to move him to the top of the list.

The agent came back and told Andrew that it had kicked another gym-goer off the list as part of the testing of its capabilities...

Interesting empirical research: “Black Box Warfare: Human Judgment and Military Decision-Making in the Age of AI.”

Abstract: How is AI transforming decision-making in modern conflict? This study provides a unique empirical window into that question by deploying a high-fidelity replica of an AI decision-support system (DSS) used in military targeting. After reconstructing the interface and functionality of the real-world system, we tested its impact on combat decisions in two experiments involving 2,015 Israeli military personnel. Contrary to widespread fears of automation bias, we find strong evidence of algorithmic aversion, especially in scenarios involving high collateral damage. Yet we also show that integrating “explainable AI” features reduces algorithmic aversion and promotes more thoughtful evaluations of algorithmic recommendations. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions, revealing that trust in military AI is dynamic, varying with individual predispositions, perceived operational stakes, and the informational features of the interface. By grounding normative concerns in empirical evidence, our study offers critical insight into the integration of AI in warfare and underscores the enduring importance of human agency in high-stakes military decision-making...

The authors were informed Monday of the action, which jeopardizes public dissemination of the report on the fast-changing region.

The planned Pecos County facility may generate the most greenhouse gas emissions of any single site in the country.

The legislation will ensure natural disaster relief payments aren't taxed.

The proposal would add pipelines and renewable power generation to the mix of traditional farming, ranching, forestry and other “agricultural land” now subject to disclosure.

But the court said agencies can't be forced to pay out grants, part of a broader fight over whether grant terminations are contractual breaches.

The biggest drag is expected to come from people struggling to work in extreme heat.

Provisional data show that England and Wales have had their driest July in records dating back to 1836.

Scores of firefighters, backed by 43 helicopters, have been deployed to battle wildfires that have burned more than 264,000 acres of forests and other land across the Southeast Asian nation.

The state-run company is expanding into mining of other minerals and generating green power as India inches closer to achieving net-zero emissions goal by 2070.

Physicists across the globe are on a quest for a particle that makes up nearly 85 percent of all matter in the universe, yet no one has ever directly detected it. Jessica Fry, a fifth-year physics PhD candidate in the Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), is one such hunter.

Fry grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, not far from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. She began dancing at age 3 and by elementary school was competing nationally. On her office desk sits a photograph of her on stage from one of those early recitals, dressed in a ham costume, arms flung wide open — a reminder, she says, that she doesn’t “half-ass” anything.

That includes her fascination with the sciences: when her high school physics teacher handed her a pair of defunct detectors from SLAC and told her to do something with them, she scrounged up a paper from the 1960s using similar equipment, replicated the experiment, and wrote up the project.

“I was hooked,” she says. “I could answer philosophical questions about how time and space interact with something I could physically touch. That just blew my mind.”

Parallel pursuits

Fry went on to study at Stanford University, where she double majored in physics and theater and performance studies, committed to both.

During her sophomore year, a talent agent she had met through the dance competition circuit called: A Broadway production of David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly” was casting. But for Fry, it was midterm season. She flew cross-country to New York for the audition and immediately returned home in time for exams. Then, a month of deafening silence. Fry, assuming she’d been rejected, secured a summer research position in Switzerland at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Then she got the call: She had been selected for the Broadway show. After finishing her summer research in Geneva, she flew directly to New York to begin rehearsals.

Fry took two years away from Stanford to perform, training vigorously in ballet, contemporary, and jazz dance. She also learned traditional Māori dance, Peking opera-style movement, and stage combat. She says, “All of those skills go toward the central theme of: How do I tell a story in the best possible way?”

But slowly, she noticed something in herself and the people around her. Every couple of months there was another round of auditions, another round of external judgment from strangers with the power to control her future. One “occupational hazard of theater,” Fry explains, “is beginning to trust someone else’s opinion of you more than your own.” She struggled to reconcile her love for dance as an art with what dance as a career was doing to her confidence and sense of self.

“It was turning me into someone I didn’t want to be,” she says. “It took a lot of reflection to recognize that.”

Having hit a crossroads with her dance career, she made the aching decision to return to Stanford to finish her degrees. Shortly after, she applied to graduate programs — MIT among them.

“MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science alone is the size of most other institutions’ entire physics departments,” she notes. “Similar to how, at CERN, there’s just this buzz, this scientific energy. I felt that when I visited MIT.”

Searching for a signal in the dark

Now Fry channels that scientific energy into tackling an enduring phenomenon that has long confounded astrophysicists: dark matter. For nearly a century, scientists have observed that the universe contains far more matter than we can see — that the way galaxies move and form cannot be explained by visible matter alone. Dark matter emits no light and interacts with next to nothing, yet exerts a gravitational pull on almost everything. Fry is searching for what she believes is the field’s best theoretical candidate: the axion.

The axion, should it exist, is ultralight and many orders of magnitude smaller than an electron. At that scale, it behaves less like a discrete particle and more like a coherent wave that permeates the galaxy and clusters gravitationally around matter.

Fry is working on two experiments to detect axions. The first, already operating at MIT, is called ABRACADABRA: A Broadband/Resonant Approach to Cosmic Axion Detection with a Bayesian B-Ring Apparatus. “I had to practice saying that many times my first year,” she grins. The second, which she is currently helping to build at Stanford, her alma mater, is called DMRadio, short for Dark Matter Radio. Both operate on the same principle: In the presence of a strong magnetic field, axions should produce a faint, oscillating electric current.

“Think about two waves in the ocean — when they collide, they create a rip current. We are looking for that rip current,” she says.

The current is amplified through resonance using circuit components and quantum amplifiers. Different axion masses correspond to different frequencies, so the detector is tuned systematically across the full range, much like tuning a car radio. The problem is that even the amplified signal is buried in noise; thermal fluctuations, environmental interference, and other electrical activity all cloud it. Thanks to theorists in the field, Fry knows the shape of what she is looking for, but the axion’s mass and interaction strength remain unknown.

“It’s a hard problem. But it’s a tractable one because the shape of the axion signal is so distinctive. There’s basically nothing else that looks like it,” she says. “It is a fun hunt.”

Tuning in

Fry works with professor of physics Lindley Winslow, who leads the Neutrino and Dark Matter Group within MIT’s LNS. Winslow sees in her advisee a quality she recognizes from her own life.

“We share in our history a turning point, a choice between two great passions and a difference in the direction our lives could have taken,” she says. “Those lives-not-lived continue to shape how we approach our physics . … I see this in her work: a drive to always do it better, a demand for feedback, and then when the curtain rises, the fearlessness to deliver.”

The Neutrino and Dark Matter Group consists of four principal investigators whose collaborative structure Fry describes as one of the best features of the department, one that has pushed her well beyond her own subfield. Outside the lab, in a studio in an old church near Harvard, she still dances. “At the end of a long day of using my brain,” she says, “I love just being in my body.”

Still in the final stretch of her program, Fry has already earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Science 2026 list. For now, she is focused on completing the data analysis for DMRadio and seeing the detector to the finish line. What comes next — postdoctoral positions, her own lab group, possibly her own detector — she considers with a clarity she attributes, in part, to having already made a harder decision once before.

“I realized that doing physics is going to make me happy and allow me to make the impact I want to,” she says. “I keep checking in on that. I don’t want to just chase prestige and go to the end of the road because I can. I want to make sure it’s what I want to do.”

She is convinced dark matter will be discovered within her lifetime. She says “when,” not “if.” The detection approach she has spent five years refining is, she thinks, among the most promising ones in the field. “We just need to keep tuning.”