After extensive modifications over the past seven years, the Gulfstream IV (G-IV) aircraft operated and maintained by MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Tactical Defense Systems Group and Flight Test Facility (FTF) recently flew home from Canada. 

Transforming the standard business jet into a highly specialized research platform — which will support the U.S. Air Force's Air Vehicle Survivability Evaluation (AVSE) program for decades to come — represented the largest and most complex airborne test bed modernization in Lincoln Laboratory history. The Tactical Defense Systems Group, assisted by the FTF, coordinated the effort with the Toronto-based aerospace company Field Aviation.

"Our team made hundreds of trips to Canada and dedicated countless weekends to keep the project moving along," says David Culbertson, FTF manager. "Seeing the aircraft finally return to the laboratory invoked a sense of pride and satisfaction."

An airborne testing infrastructure

For more than 40 years, the Tactical Defense Systems Group has supported the AVSE program, leveraging airborne test beds to assess how U.S. aircraft and space assets fare against current and emerging threats. The group had been conducting airborne testing for the AVSE program with a modified Gulfstream II (G-II) since the early 1990s. In 2013, they began a series of studies to replace the G-II because parts availability issues were looming. These studies concluded that the G-IV was the best option, given its performance and capabilities, including its respectively higher altitude and longer range; long-term sustainability; and cost. The laboratory purchased the G-IV in 2015.

To avoid repeatedly reopening the costly Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) certification process over the planned operational lifetime of the G-IV (25 to 30 years), the group decided to complete all anticipated aircraft modifications at once, rather than in phases. Following a competitive bidding process, the laboratory selected Field Aviation to perform the modifications. Field Aviation had modified the G-II, in addition to other laboratory aircraft. In December 2018, FTF pilots flew the G-IV to Toronto, where it was expected to remain for approximately three to four years.

However, Covid-19 pandemic-related disruptions and contractor management shifts extended this timeline. To help bring the aircraft home, the laboratory stepped in to oversee aircraft modifications, maintenance, and reassembly. Laboratory engineers, mechanics, pilots, program managers, and legal teams worked together to secure Canadian work permits and maintain a continuous onsite presence. Senior aircraft mechanic Craig Rowe served as lead crew chief, traveling monthly with team members to Canada; for his efforts, he was recognized with a 2026 MIT Excellence Award for Outstanding Contributor. 

A structural overhaul

To modify the aircraft, mechanics removed, tracked, and ultimately reinstalled more than 2,000 components. The revamped G-IV incorporated 12 major modifications that required sweeping structural changes.

For example, on the wings, mechanics installed four pylons for carrying external sensor pods weighing anywhere from 200 to more than 1,000 pounds. The wings had to be structurally fortified to withstand the added weight, stress, and aerodynamic loads that would be experienced during flight. They added a fifth sensor pylon, capable of holding up to 2,000 pounds and accommodating systems nearly 19 feet long, to the forward lower fuselage. Development of the pylons spanned nearly five years because of intensive reverse engineering, including purchasing and disassembling a wing from a scrapped G-IV to measure the internal structural components. Installation took almost two years because access to the inner wing structure was limited to small panels normally used for inspections.

Mechanics modified the roof and lower fuselage to create flat surfaces to allow rapid mounting of external antennas and sensor systems without repeated incursions into the aircraft's pressurized fuselage. They extended the aircraft's nose and tail with standardized sensor-mounting interfaces to enable rapid placement of sensors for both forward- and aft-facing test scenarios. The six-foot nose extension required completely gutting the cockpit so the internal structure could be reinforced to bear the weight of the mounting interface and test systems.

In the interior, the team installed 14 equipment racks; workstations for six onboard operators; fiber-optic, Ethernet, and coaxial cables; liquid- and air-cooling systems; and dedicated power-distribution infrastructure separated from the baseline aircraft for safety reasons.

The remodel also required developing a means to generate sufficient electrical power to operate the test systems in flight while meeting FAA fire-containment standards. The aircraft’s original auxiliary power unit (APU) — normally intended to assist only with engine startup — was far too small for the mission requirements and could not operate airborne. Field Aviation engineers designed an entirely new fireproof titanium enclosure to house a larger APU capable of producing nearly double the original electrical output up to the 45,000-foot G-IV altitude ceiling. The laboratory's Engineering Division ran simulations to validate that the APU inlet airflow would allow for maximum APU power output throughout the flight duration.

Steps toward mission qualification 

After reassembling the G-IV, FTF mechanics conducted hundreds of operational checks to ensure every aircraft system disturbed during the modification worked properly and to validate aircraft safety and readiness to resume flight operations. The aircraft completed multiple post-modification flights without a single maintenance write-up.

"It's extremely rare for a heavily modified aircraft of this complexity to have no write-ups," says program manager Paul Mancini from the Tactical Defense Systems Group. "That's a testament to the quality of work of the FTF mechanics who put the airplane back together and the Field Aviation engineers who completed the modifications."

Since the G-IV returned home this spring, test pilots have been evaluating its airworthiness — i.e., in-flight safety and functionality. The Tactical Defense Systems Group expects approximately another 18 months to complete flight testing, mission systems modification, test systems installation, and FAA certification before the aircraft becomes fully mission-qualified to operationally support the AVSE program.

The history of technology is rife with copyright panics.  In the 1980s, major rightsholders ran to Congress and the courts, claiming that videotape recorders (VTR) were “to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Then, the Supreme Court declined to embrace the hype, noting that the VTR was capable of all kinds of non-infringing uses, like time-shifting and cautioning courts to avoid rewriting copyright law in response to new technologies. We believe that courts now should be similarly wary about the hype surrounding AI.

Hollywood’s hyperbole has echoed that of composer John Phillip Sousa, who claimed in 1906 that the player piano and the gramophone would destroy music composition; portrait artists who feared the camera would replace the paintbrush. None of these things happened. Cameras, for example, sparked a resurgence of portraiture and, by making it possible for more people to create images, led to unexpected developments—like the rise of photojournalism.

New markets, new ideas, and new creators are actually what copyright is supposed to promote, not restrict. Using copyright to lock in existing gatekeepers and massive rightsholders’ profits helps neither the public nor individual artists.

Generative AI has sparked the latest wave of anxiety and with it a massive wave of litigation. In multiple cases around the U.S. and the world, rightsholders are asking courts to do precisely what the Supreme Court warned against: dramatically expand copyright protections based in substantial part on hyperbole and speculation. They should decline to do so.

Copyright owners claim that unless courts abandon 300-year-old copyright principles—and give rightsholders the power to control non-infringing works created by others—an imagined flood of AI-generated works will devastate creative markets. Under this “market dilution” theory, building generative AI tools cannot be fair use because those tools might be encourage the proliferation of competing works.

As EFF has explained to the courts in multiple amicus briefs in Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC and In re Mosaic LLM Litigation, that’s not how copyright works. In fact, accepting this theory would undermine copyright’s constitutional purpose: promoting the creation of expressive works for the public’s benefit. Because copyright law is designed to encourage others to build freely on existing works, it punishes infringement, not competition. The “market dilution” theory would eviscerate not only the fair use doctrine, but also other limits on copyright that work specifically to prevent rightsholders from unfairly suppressing competition by claiming broad ownership over tropes, genres, styles, and so on. In other words, publishers would wield unchecked veto power over any expression that might conceivably compete with a work they own.

The result? Art doesn’t get created, ideas are never expressed, and we’re all worse off. Copyright shouldn’t be a tool to silence future creative competitors—whether or not they use AI in their work.

And the plaintiffs in these cases get at least two other things wrong. First, research shows that large generative AI models are unlikely to produce infringing works because the more data on which a model is trained, the less any individual training example matters to any particular output.

Second, AI tools aren’t necessarily displacing human creativity. To take a just a few examples:

• Boston-based artist Nettrice Gaskins uses AI to create Afro-futurist art, including a portrait of Octavia Butler displayed at the San Francisco Airport

• Indian artists Prateek Arora and Varun Gupta use generative AI to reimagine Western science fiction.

• Philadelphia-based artist Alex Smith uses generative AI to reimagine Afrofuturism with queer, plus-sized Black superheroes.

• Ana Miljački, a professor of architecture at MIT, used generative AI to create a “non-liner documentary” film on Yugoslav World War II memorials and the values they embodied.

• A research-creation project used AI generated visual art to both amplify the voices of activists in the Iran Woman Life Freedom Movement and evaluate AI’s role in sociopolitical advocacy through art.

• AI company Bronze works with musicians like Disclosure and Jai Paul to create songs that never sound the same when played back twice, challenging audience conceptions of what music could be.

It is not the place of courts to say these people are not artists or that AI cannot augment human creativity in a positive way.

Given this range of experimentation, courts should be reluctant to decide in advance what tools do and do not foster “human creativity.” Like the VTR, large language models are general purpose tools, used by humans to do a broad variety of things far beyond generating lyrics. The effects of this particular technological innovation will doubtless be far-reaching, disruptive, and potentially harmful for some—but distorting copyright law is not the way to address those harms.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth formally welcomed the undergraduate Class of 2030 to campus on Sunday, noting that the Institute quickly “feels like home” to new students. 

The annual event, officially called the President’s Convocation for First-Years and Families, is held at the Johnson Ice Rink on campus on the weekend most new undergraduates arrive on campus. 

The Class of 2030 consists of more than 1,100 first-year undergraduates from all over the map, representing a broad variety of academic interests and backgrounds. Yet even for such a wide-ranging group, Kornbluth observed, “It is very, very common for new students to say that in coming to MIT, they have finally found their place. They have finally found their people. And it feels like home.”

Kornbluth’s remarks outlined some of the binding forces that connect students, through the shared culture of inquiry and discovery at MIT.

“I was struck right away by the wall-to-wall enthusiasm for fundamental science, what we like to think of as curiosity on a mission,” Kornbluth said. “Every day here, hundreds of people are pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.” 

This month alone, she noted, “astronomers here just discovered an entirely new type of astrophysical object, a black hole star. … And then, two days later, an MIT research team discovered that a drug that blocks a certain enzyme can reduce the risk of developing lung cancer.” 

Kornbluth added: “And that’s just a regular [occurrence] here. As you’ll see, the discoveries just keep on coming in everything, from climate science to computer science, nuclear science to neuroscience, from chemistry to quantum.” 

Secondly, Kornbluth said, people in the MIT community are frequently motivated by a desire to have an impact through their work.

“We’re also driven to make a positive difference in the world,” she told the audience of more than 2,000, which frequently applauded at key junctures. 

A third common feature of campus life, Kornbluth told the crowd, is the “spirit of entrepreneurship” on campus, generally defined as a propensity to take action. 

“Now, I don’t mean that everybody has to start a company, though a lot of people do,” Kornbluth said. “But at MIT, when we talk about entrepreneurship, we also mean the broad spirit of, do something, try something, with your whole heart … and let the doing teach you how to make a difference.” 

Kornbluth also made a series of remarks about AI, noting that MIT has “deep ties” to the development of the technology and that AI tools are expanding and accelerating work in many fields of research. 

That said, she added, “As educators, it is our challenge to derive AI’s benefits and counteract its harms.” And she called a recent report MIT has issued about AI and education “a powerful reminder that MIT was founded to help human beings develop their own powers of discovery, problem-solving, and invention. That is still and will always be our essential work. It is the experience you all came here for.”

All told, Kornbluth said, “We’re so glad and so grateful that you chose to bring your talent, your energy, your curiosity, and your creativity to MIT. And we’re thrilled to be starting this new year with all of you.” 

Kornbluth then introduced the audience to other campus administration leaders who were sitting onstage for her remarks: Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, and Vice Chancellor for Graduate and Undergraduate Education David L. Darmofal. 

Attendees also heard remarks from two faculty members who are also alumni, per convocation tradition. 

Anna Huang SM ’08, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor in both the Music and Theater Arts program and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, discussed her work as well as the student experience on campus. 

Huang studies human-computer interactions and develops human-AI collaborations in music making, and urged the students to follow their interests — which, in Huang’s case, are quite broad. She spent years working at Google and is also a composer herself.

“You’re going to discover so much here at MIT,” Huang said. “I discover something new every day.” 

She urged students to participate in campus activities and to pursue programs such as MISTI, the global experiences program at MIT that enables internships, study abroad, and more. Huang also emphasized that MIT is a collaborative, interdisciplinary place where students can thrive by working with others. 

“MIT is a very, very supportive environment,” Huang added. “And we value the perspective and the combinations of unique interests you bring.” 

Huang was followed at the podium by Desirée Plata PhD ’09, associate dean of engineering, School of Engineering Distinguished Climate and Energy Professor, and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, who urged the students to cultivate an ethos of optimism about their studies and ability to improve the world. 

Plata’s wide-ranging work applies chemical engineering to climate issues — for instance, as she noted, by working to replicate methane-capture processes observed in nature onto new technologies that could be located in mines. Deploying such techniques to reduce the presence of greenhouse gases could help slow the worldwide rise of temperatures. 

“Modulating the warming rate of the planet is admittedly ambitious,” Plata said. “But it’s not impossible. At least not from a thermodynamic perspective. And that’s just the kind of problem we like to solve.” 

Plata also encouraged students to cultivate a feeling of open-minded optimism about their own pursuits.

“When I walk onto MIT’s campus each morning, I take a deep breath. I feel that same sense of possibility that I felt the [first] time I set foot here,” Plata said. “A high privilege of my life is being able to engage some of the most talented minds of our time. To engage all of you. To help develop your respective paths. And enjoy the amplifying impact you’re going to go on and have in this world.”

After Plata spoke, Kornbluth, who is from a musical family and enjoys singing, joined the campus a capella group The Chorallaries onstage for a spirited rendition of the songs “Arise All Ye of MIT” and “Take Me Back to Tech.” And with that, students filed out of the rink, ready to explore their new home. 

The MIT Quantum Initiative (QMIT) has launched a new postdoctoral fellowship program to accelerate interdisciplinary quantum research and develop the next generation of scientific leaders working at the frontiers of quantum science and technology.

Supported by a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the program reflects QMIT’s vision of expanding the boundaries of quantum science by encouraging researchers to connect quantum approaches with other disciplines and emerging applications. 

As opportunities in quantum research expand, investing in outstanding early-career researchers has never been more important. These fellowships are designed to help cultivate the next generation of quantum leaders, providing the resources and collaborative environment needed to advance transformative research at MIT.

“Quantum science and technology is in a period of extraordinary opportunity, opening new pathways to solving problems across computation, materials, sensing, and communication. Programs like this help MIT attract outstanding researchers whose ideas will shape the future of the field,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT provost and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. 

Launched in December 2025 as an MIT strategic initiative, QMIT brings together researchers from across the Institute to accelerate quantum discovery and apply quantum advances to some of society’s most consequential scientific, technological, industrial, and national security challenges. 

“Quantum science is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary,” says Danna Freedman, the Frederick George Keyes Professor of Chemistry and faculty director of QMIT. “Some of the most exciting breakthroughs will come from researchers who combine deep expertise in quantum with new perspectives from other fields. This fellowship is designed to create exactly those kinds of opportunities.”

The QMIT Fellowship is intentionally designed to foster an interdisciplinary research community. Eligible applicants are outstanding quantum researchers working in a range of fields across physics, chemistry and materials science, and fundamental aspects of biological and Earth sciences. The program specifically seeks researchers whose work combines deep expertise in quantum science with a willingness to explore new intellectual frontiers.

One example of the interdisciplinary vision behind the program is the possibility of applying quantum systems to better understand biological processes, bringing together expertise in atomic physics, quantum algorithms, and biology. The fellows will be embedded across the research areas that define QMIT, including quantum computing, quantum sensing and precision measurement, quantum materials, quantum simulation, and quantum networks. Their research may also explore emerging interdisciplinary approaches that combine artificial intelligence and quantum science.

Fellows supported through the program will join MIT’s extensive quantum ecosystem, working alongside researchers across the Institute, including those affiliated with the Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Department of Physics, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms, and numerous interdisciplinary research centers and laboratories.

Beyond supporting individual research projects, the fellowship program is intended to strengthen the broader quantum community at MIT by fostering collaboration, mentorship, and intellectual exchange across disciplines.

“Quantum research, in the next few years and across a wide range of domains, is going to make the impossible possible,” says Ian Waitz, MIT’s vice president for research and the head of QMIT. “The QMIT fellowship program is an investment in outstanding postdoctoral scholars who will help bring tremendous new quantum capabilities to unforeseen, creative, and transformative applications in science and technology.”

The inaugural QMIT Fellows will begin their appointments during the 2026 academic year. QMIT expects to open applications for a new cohort in fall 2026 as it continues building a community of researchers working across disciplines to advance the future of quantum science.

Doxxing, also known as the deliberate sharing of personal information to harass or endanger someone, is a tricky thing to protect against. It often happens by some ill-intentioned person accessing publicly available information, then sharing that information more widely in the hopes it will intimidate their target or worse. 

This guide is a followup from a previous post that describes a methodology for you to clean up your digital footprint and get a firm entry into the art of open source intelligence. There's a slight bit of repetition here, but with a slant towards using those now-familiar tools and methods toward what to do in the context of incident response. The best thing you can do is familiarize yourself with this post and its tactics before something happens, then return back to it for reference when needed.

Incident Log

An incident log is a way to keep track of suspicious or harmful activity online. It doesn't need to be beautiful or complex, just a place where you can quickly note details around the different things you're seeing online. Noting times, places, people, and the general nature of what you see ought to be enough. In the event that law enforcement gets involved, this sort of record will be helpful. 

The process of finding and noting hateful incidents online can be incredibly stressful, so now is a good time to revisit the team roles you might have already thought of in the previous blog post. If you haven't yet done that, here's a brief refresher:

Assign Team Roles

Remember, privacy–and responding to doxxing–is a team sport. Knowing who you trust is as important as identifying threat actors. Having trusted people ready to assist is invaluable in this type of situation. Refer them to this blog post or specific recommendations in it. If you've already plotted out a list of designated team roles, now is the time to remind everyone of their responsibilities. That might look like monitoring the hate forums where activity happens, keeping track of events in the incident log, setting up web alerts, locking down your social media accounts, or contacting law enforcement to reduce the likelihood of SWATing (a type of attack where bad actors call the police on their target, hoping to incite violence or disruption of peace by bringing law enforcement to their door).

Monitoring Hate Forums

So often the victims of doxxing and harassment campaigns are positioned that way because of bias or bigotry. If you're a part of a community who is the target of such abuse, you are likely already aware of the places where such bigots gather and the language they use. Safely and privately accessing those sites to check for organizing against you or those in your community is a crucial step to take. Take great care to do so privately. We recommend you use the Tor browser for such information-gathering missions. It’s also advisable that you don’t engage with anyone in those places.

Again, this step can be particularly stressful; asking a friend for help is a good idea, or you can thoughtfully apply some of the advice from the next section to automate the process.

Set Up Search Alerts

Google alerts is a free service that Google offers to alert you when a particular keyword—like your name—is freshly indexed by their search engine. Doxxing efforts done by anonymous trolls may not trigger an alert, but if you're the target of smear campaigns in the media, or the victim of abuse by very prominent media figures, those things are more likely to appear. Updates can come pretty frequently, so we advise leaving the monitoring of these alerts to a person that you trust.

For a more sophisticated approach, you could use a tool like Open Measures to automate the task of tracking coordinated campaigns. It's important to note that this type of tool is more likely to miss nuanced language or oblique references to you and your community.

Hardening Your Public Facing Accounts

For accounts that you can't or don't want to shut down, at the very least you must review the privacy and security settings on them and consider raising that bar. If two-factor authentication isn't already on, now is the time to do so. For social media accounts, consider switching the account to "private," where users have to request to have access to your page. For peace of mind, especially on accounts that you have to keep using, consider muting certain terms and blocking accounts so that you're less likely to encounter stressful content when on the app. Every app's options are different for this sort of thing, so be prepared to spend a few minutes figuring out what the menu is like and where the options are.

Shut Down Affected Accounts

If a particular account is being targeted with hate, or signs are pointing to an account of yours being the source of information people are using against you, shutting down that account may be the best decision for now. Depending on the app, account deletion may be temporary and you may be able to recover the account after you've done so and things have cooled off.

Revisit Your Data Broker Removal Strategies

Although this is more of a doxxing preventative measure, it's a good idea to get on top of removing the information that's available about you via data brokers. In case you're unaware, the data broker industry is an unregulated viper’s nest of privacy threats, often contributing to or directly supplying the sources of information that are used in doxxing campaigns. Although there are plenty of services that offer to file data broker opt-out requests on your behalf, a recent study revealed that doing it DIY is still more effective than relying on these paid services. That said, a paid service may still be worth its money if you'd rather have someone else take care of it.

Revisit Public Records

As covered in the previous blog post, your information may be made available through public records that you have little to no control over. You may be able to limit the convenience of that information being available by requesting to have it taken down from sites that republish it. Check through voter records, business registration records, court and property records, and the like. If you aren't able to limit that information from appearing on such mirroring sites, at least gaining awareness of where they are and the specific contours of what they contain will help you strategize against the harms they may cause.

Consider Contacting Law Enforcement

For many, talking to law enforcement will only make things worse. On the other hand, SWATing is a tactic often used in these types of coordinated attacks. If you think that's a possible outcome in your situation, it could be a good idea to get ahead of it and contact law enforcement to let them know what you're dealing with. It's in their best interest to be aware of fraudulent calls, and will make them less likely to show up at your door with guns drawn.

Revisit PACE Documents, Enact Those Steps

If you're involved in any kind of activism or community organizing you may be familiar with PACE documentation. It’s an acronym for coming up with contingency plan reactions if unwanted things come up: Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Escape/Emergency. Think of it like a panic button, a routine checklist of things to do if shit hits the fan. Maybe it involves some of the recommendations from this blog post. The point is to have something readymade, and some thoughts and strategies prepared, if the doxxing escalates to increased levels of harm and danger.

This is another step that's best done in a community with trusted people. The point is to keep your community organizing or community work moving, but with special contingency measures enacted to keep you and everyone else safe while remaining aware of this incident. This step is highly personalized and relies on a bit of prep work having already been done.

Put A Lock on Your Bank Accounts and Cell Subscriptions

One of the tactics those who are doxxing you might use is trying to get into your social media or other accounts through “SIM swapping,” an attack where they contact your cellular provider pretending to be you in order to hijack your phone number. They can then use that number and pivot to stealing other accounts you authenticate yourself to with your phone. Likewise, those targeting you might try to steal access to or disrupt your bank accounts through similar techniques. 

Get ahead of them by placing security passwords or pin codes on these highly sensitive accounts, if your bank or cellular provider provides this extra security measure. Most cell providers offer some sort of SIM swapping prevention method, but they all use different names for this feature, so be sure to look up the process in your provider’s documentation (here are guides for the major U.S. providers: Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile).

Regulate Your Nervous System

It’s an understatement to say that being doxxed is scary and potentially very dysregulating. You're much more likely to make safe, smart decisions if you are able to maintain a sense of control around your mental state. Recognizing that capability, as well as having a strategy to keep calm in the face of a crisis is just as important as having good digital security hygiene. Do what you need to do, be it involving the help of friends, taking a break, or whatever else, to stay afloat during this process. 

Flexibility and Resiliency

The reality is that the more you experience cultural marginalization, the higher the chances are that adversarial actors will resort to such tactics as doxxing and coordinated harassment campaigns. The fervor of those adversaries is often stoked by hateful public figures and politicians. And the plausible deniability of public records can limit the recourse you have to stop them. We hope that after reading this and the previous post, we’ve also brought to surface the idea that you can have great control over your digital footprint. Even more, that you can continue to share information online without unnecessarily compromising your safety and security. 

Until we have digital privacy protections for everyone, it’s up to us to take matters into our own hands. Privacy, security, and dignity online are achievable. If you follow this guide, the previous one, and stay clued into the strategies laid out on Surveillance Self-Defense, you're well on your way.

When exploring solar system bodies for signs of past or present life, scientists have mainly focused on planets that have (or had) a liquid surface similar to Earth’s. However, mounting evidence suggests that the ingredients for life may exist in a very different environment: the highly acidic clouds that blanket Venus.

Those clouds are made up of about 98 percent sulfuric acid, which scientists had believed to be too acidic for complex biological molecules to survive. But in a new study, MIT researchers have shown that short peptides can not only remain stable in these extremely acidic conditions, they can also fold into shapes that may allow them to have biological functions.

“If peptides find their way to that cloud layer of concentrated sulfuric acid, they will stay and be stably preserved in that cloud of droplets. And once these macromolecules have a defined three-dimensional structure, they can potentially have a function,” says Mei Hong, an MIT professor of chemistry and one of the senior authors of the new study.

The findings suggest that scientists should not rule out planets that don’t resemble Earth in their search for life, says Sara Seager, the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and a professor in the departments of Physics and of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

“We really don’t know the full extent of what planet archetypes are out there. We’re seeking exoplanets that might be a true Earth twin, but what if they’re all Venuses? Our findings definitely open up a whole range of possibilities,” says Seager, another senior author of the study. She will be joining the University of Toronto faculty in September.

Janusz Petkowski, a research assistant professor at Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, is also a senior author of the paper, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Jia Yi Zhang, an MIT graduate student, is the paper’s lead author, and former MIT postdoc Aurelio Dregni is also an author. 

Surviving harsh conditions

While Venus’s surface is too hot to be hospitable to life, its cloud layer, which extends from 30 to 40 miles above the planet’s surface, features milder temperatures suitable for life. The clouds are made from droplets of sulfuric acid, which can dissolve metals and destroys most biological molecules on Earth.

Meteorites that contain peptide building blocks regularly enter Venus’s atmosphere, raising the possibility that those peptides could serve as building blocks for simple life forms — if they could survive the clouds’ corrosive environment.

In 2020, Seager’s lab began a series of studies looking at whether different types of biological molecules could persist under those highly acidic conditions. In their initial experiments, working with MIT’s Department of Chemistry Instrumentation Facility (DCIF), they used nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy — which measures the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei within molecules — to analyze the structures of a variety of molecules in a solution of nearly pure sulfuric acid. 

Those studies showed that nucleic acids, the building blocks of DNA, could remain intact under highly acidic conditions, as could lipids and amino acids. The next step was to figure out if peptides — short strings of amino acids — could persist, and more importantly, whether they could then fold into shapes that might give them biological functions.

For that challenging task, researchers at DCIF suggested that Seager join forces with Hong, an NMR expert who has an advanced 800-megahertz solution NMR spectrometer in her lab. 

To their surprise, the researchers found that the peptides they studied remained stable for many weeks. They believe this is a result of the lack of water in such highly acidic solutions. At 98 percent sulfuric acid, there are very few water molecules, which means that hydrolysis, the chemical reaction that breaks peptide bonds in acid, can’t happen.

“Without water, an acid that you would consider a harsh solvent suddenly is not as menacing as one might think,” Hong says.

After confirming that the peptides remained intact, the researchers began to explore their structures. One of the peptides that the researchers analyzed, a molecule known as HHQ, is a synthetic seven-amino-acid peptide that Hong had previously studied for its role in forming catalytic amyloid fibrils. 

In water, this peptide forms flat beta sheets that eventually form long fibrils. However, in concentrated sulfuric acid, the researchers found that it takes on an entirely different shape — a loop shaped like the Greek letter omega. Such so-called omega loops are occasionally found in some naturally occurring proteins, where they form links between other structural motifs such as sheets or helices.

The other two peptides that the researchers analyzed were a longer variation of HHQ, called HHQ13, and a completely different peptide called K7, which contains seven amino acids. These peptides also formed omega loops in sulfuric acid.

The researchers believe that molecules of sulfuric acid act as a scaffold for the loops, sliding into the center of each loop and holding it in that shape. 

“What hadn’t been known is that peptides can survive so well and have specific three-dimensional shapes in an acidic environment,” Hong says.

Structure and function

In naturally occurring proteins in aqueous solution, omega loops are thought to play a role in protein folding and molecular recognition. Whether they could have other biological functions is not known. However, the fact that peptides can form well-defined, folded structures in acidic environments is an important step in showing that peptides may be able to perform biological functions in such environments.

“Life needs to have specially shaped proteins so that they have a specific target they can latch onto and perform their function. Before this, people thought that peptides couldn’t survive in sulfuric acid, so showing peptides are not only stable, but also fold, is a really big deal,” says Seager, who is leading the Morning Star Missions to Venus.

Adriaan Bax, chief of the Section on Biophysical NMR at the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, described the results as “important and unexpected.”

“The observation that these peptides retain a substantial degree of conformational order in concentrated sulfuric acid raises the prospect that folded oligopeptide/protein structures can exist in such environments, potentially supporting the possibility of life in atmospheric conditions that are very different from Earth,” says Bax, who was not involved in the research.

Seager now hopes to pursue additional studies of a molecule called peptide nucleic acid (PNA) — an artificially synthesized molecule that is similar to DNA but with the sugar-phosphate backbone replaced by a peptide backbone. Her lab has previously shown that this molecule, which doesn’t naturally exist on Earth but could offer a potential alternative to DNA, is stable as a single strand in highly acidic environments. She now hopes to study the stability of double-stranded PNA.

The researchers also hope to analyze longer peptides to see if they also take on omega loop shapes, or other structures, in highly concentrated sulfuric acid.

The research was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the NOMIS Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. 

Sai Ravela, principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), works with a team of researchers, local partners, and community collaborators to develop game-based computer models to help local communities find solutions to their unique geographical and environmental challenges.

Ravela came to MIT as a postdoc in 2002. Prior to that, he had been working on robotics and computer vision, but he was excited by the idea of studying the climate system and wanted to work in the field of sustainability. “Suddenly, overnight, I became a climate person,” Ravela says.

His project, funded by a 2025 Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) India Grant, explores how agricultural decision-making occurs under climate stress. Using localized climate projections and a participatory approach, the project aims to help communities discover ways to improve their collective agricultural resilience.

EAPS postdoc Anamitra Saha is a key contributor on the grant, working with Ravela and local collaborators to combine downscaled climate modeling, participatory decision-making, and community-based adaptation planning. Other team members include Myisha Ahmad (Carthago Consultancy), Jayanta Basu (University of Calcutta), Anusree Ghosh (Bangladesh Open University), Showmitra Sarkar (Khulna University of Engineering and Technology), and Bivuti Sikder (Dhaka University). 

In a process known as downscaling, researchers take large-scale climate projections and turn them into highly detailed local projections. From these hazard maps, Ravela and Saha can estimate the risk of extreme weather phenomena such as flooding, drought, heat waves, and salinity-related stress. 

“We kind of simulate what the outcome could be in that region,” Ravela explains. “Would it improve agricultural productivity? Would it reduce agricultural productivity? Would it change certain land use patterns? Would the land be less livable, more livable?” 

The team combines surveys, scientific models, and local knowledge to build an impact graph that allows them to explore what might happen to a region during simulated weather events.

Although Ravela knew hazard maps could be useful, he was troubled by how rarely they reached the people whose lives were most affected by the risks they described. “We had clients like insurance companies,” he says. “But I never saw it reach people in a way that made a difference in their lives. And that really bothered me.”

To address this gap, he began thinking about how to help communities engage with hazard maps directly and take part in the decision-making process. In conversations that informed the game’s development, Ravela heard people whose livelihoods are vulnerable to climate events voice immediate concerns about what would happen if a future season failed: “If I don’t plant next season — if I can’t — what would I do?” Ravela wanted to help people think instead about possible choices, different paths, and their respective risks.

When he asked himself what circumstances allow someone to think about risk, the answer began to take shape. “Well, roll a die. Toss a coin,” he thought. “And where do you do these things? In a game.”

How it works

The process the collaborating team developed takes place in three stages. The first is a “snakes and ladders” game, played with physical game pieces and tokens. The second is a mixed game that still uses the gameboard, but a computer generates events and manages portfolios, allowing the system to calculate risk percentages. Once players become comfortable with the mixed game, the final stage, developed by Ravela, abandons the board game and moves fully into a more detailed computer simulation that can be played on a cellphone app.

“We tried this in different stages in three places,” says Ravela. Two villages, Bally Island and Joygopalpur, are in India's Sundarbans region. The third is a village in Bangladesh just across the border. In each location, the work depends on collaboration with local residents, community organizers, and regional partners who help shape the game around local land, water, livelihood, and governance conditions. During development, informal community-engagement sessions helped the team refine and adapt the game. Those interactions also led to intriguing observations that are now helping the team formulate hypotheses for future formal research.

The three villages lie in a coastal region that faces numerous extreme weather events threatening water availability and agricultural productivity. As riverbeds rise from sediment accumulation over time and the land sinks from groundwater extraction, saltwater can more easily intrude into groundwater aquifers, while freshwater drainage, recharge, and flushing become increasingly difficult, intensifying waterlogging and drought. 

“There’s a vicious cycle that’s happening with salinization of the soil,” Ravela explains. 

One visible result is that Boro rice leaves now often begin browning far too early in the season, as salinity and water stress damage crops before they can mature. This cycle occurs in many coastal communities, suggesting to Ravela that the outcomes of the J-WAFS project could have applications around the world.

That broader potential comes from what the game is able to reveal. Instead of treating potential interventions — such as embankments, canals, recharge, crops, fisheries, and energy — as separate choices, the simulation lets players see how each intervention affects the coupled system of land, water, salinity, and livelihoods. When players test different options, simply raising embankments often proves less effective than expected, because it does not break the underlying cycle that causes the land to flood. 

More-integrated strategies — combining mangrove restoration, canal excavation, groundwater recharge, diversified agriculture and fisheries, better water management, and merging solar panels into farming with agrivoltaics or aquavoltaics — can generate better long-term returns while also making the landscape more resilient.

The game also creates space to consider dramatic alternatives to embankment-based protection, including seasonal migration, livelihood shifts, and other difficult choices. These possibilities can be explored safely inside the game, even when they would be almost unimaginable to raise in real life. In this way, difficult questions that might otherwise be avoided can be explored, rather than ignored. And if the game reveals that a difficult choice could lead to better long-term outcomes, that result is not a prescription, but a basis for informed conversation between the community, government, and other decision-makers.

Competition or cooperation?

To make the game effective at developing strategies, Ravela’s team had to understand how many people should play at one time. Too few players may not generate enough diversity of ideas, while too many can slow the process significantly. During game development, groups of roughly ten to twelve people seemed especially workable: large enough to support active interaction, but small enough for practical discussion and learning. 

“Once it crosses a dozen people,” Ravela explains, “it becomes very, very viable as a way to solve problems.”

The games have sparked interest and generated new strategies. People are often excited by the prospect of playing, and repeated play reveals different kinds of expertise. Some participants become especially engaged strategy-explorers; others contribute through discussion, critique, memory, and local knowledge. Together, the process helps identify players who are especially adept at thinking across different dimensions of the problem.

Ravela emphasizes the social aspect of the games as central to their efficacy. “Even though the game is on a phone,” he says, “players are within each other’s reach.” An emcee or facilitator encourages players to engage with one another by asking them to explain their gameplay, discuss their reasoning, and learn from one another’s choices.

While competition is not an explicit feature of the game, there can be zero-sum outcomes. One household’s decision about land, water, drainage, or energy may improve its own outcome while making conditions worse for others. Initially, players may aim for individual success. As they explore longer simulated time horizons, they often shift toward cooperative strategies. 

After each game, the research team and local facilitators lead an educational session where people can learn from each other’s strategies. At first, players often attempt to copy the previous winner’s gameplay — usually, making as much money as possible and saving it in case of disaster. But some disasters are too large for one person to handle alone. 

“That strategy is only optimal up to a certain horizon,” Ravela explains, “because when everyone replicates that strategy, the community doesn’t necessarily thrive.”

As players recognize this, they begin to evolve collective modes of behavior, such as creating a common insurance pool where everyone contributes money to a disaster relief fund. Through multiple iterations of the game, players often appeared to converge on cooperative solutions. 

“The community in this way, playing a game against nature, simulated nature, comes upon solutions that work for them,” says Ravela. “We would love to formally explore this in the future,” Ravela adds.

Why the game works

Ravela’s team sees three advantages to game-based decision-making. First, the game brings new perspectives to the table that formal decision-making often misses. Many communities have strong hierarchies that can discourage women or less powerful community members from participating openly. The game allows people to offer insight without necessarily violating cultural norms. One recurring impression was that women — often responsible for managing family affairs — diversified their portfolios earlier, while men more often concentrated on a single livelihood strategy. The observation was striking enough that the team hopes to test and quantify it formally in future studies.

Second, in the game, all players begin on a level playing field, regardless of status, gender, or wealth. “It democratizes the process,” explains Ravela. In the simulation, a wealthy, influential community figure has no intrinsic advantage over a seamstress. The game reduces natural biases by giving everyone’s ideas a chance to be tested under the same conditions.

Third, because the game is a simulation, people can explore choices that might be too risky, too expensive, or too socially difficult to consider in real life. People may not want to discuss a large aquifer management system, a new land-use arrangement, or a difficult livelihood transition if the real-world implications feel too overwhelming. But inside the game, they can test possibilities without immediate consequence. “So, what, you lose? You start again,” says Ravela.

This is where the game becomes more than a communication tool. It turns uncertainty into a shared decision space. Players can test interventions, observe trade-offs, compare outcomes, and discover strategies before real disasters force those choices upon them. The game shifts the conversation from avoiding risk to reasoning about it, and from fatalistic thinking to collective agency.

Ravela and his collaborators also see the games as a way to address roadblocks in policy implementation by allowing community members to own the solutions they discover. Traditionally, donors may give money to a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that has proposed a project, and the NGO then distributes resources in the community. But it is not always obvious what has actually been implemented, or whether the community has had meaningful ownership of the decision. “In seeking solutions to problems, often the difficulty is developing the policy that provides metrics for the effectiveness of those solutions,” Ravela says. “Games enable people to quickly see the policy space, rather than approaching problems only reactively.”

When people test policies in the game, see how they work, and revise them through repeated play and refinement, they can begin to propose those policies themselves. The result is not simply a technical recommendation from outside experts, but a community-informed basis for action.

What's next?

The broader project, developed with collaborators and community partners in India and Bangladesh, has attracted interest in Bangladesh and Thailand, where similar game-based coastal agricultural resilience projects are being explored. Some customization is necessary to adjust the game to local conditions, but the simulations are highly adaptable. Between 75 and 80 percent of the game can remain the same across locations, while the rest can be tuned to local geography, livelihoods, hazards, and governance structures. Although each place brings its own challenges, “the way land and water and people interact is very similar,” says Ravela.

Building on insights from these game-development and informal community-engagement sessions, Ravela hopes the project can eventually expand to other locations, including members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and some places in Latin America. But he emphasizes the importance of establishing longitudinal outcomes before scaling. “The critical question is, does it answer real problems?” he says.

Future formal research will test these emerging hypotheses prospectively and longitudinally. The resulting evidence will help determine whether, where, and how to scale the approach.

If computationally assisted decision-making proves useful over time, the impact could spread far beyond the initial development locations. But the work is not only about finding an optimal solution. It is also about helping people work with one another. As Ravela puts it, “the process really is about helping the people work with each other as much as it is about finding an optimal solution, because part of finding the optimal solution is finding people to work with each other.”

Doxxing is the deliberate disclosure of personal information in order to bully, harass, intimidate, or instigate a chain of harms against someone. It's a tricky thing to protect against when the jerk doing it is often able to use legal and accessible means to do so. The odds are stacked against everyday internet folk when there's little to no comprehensive data privacy legislation keeping us safe. The responsibility is on each of us to protect ourselves, but the good news is that there's a lot you can do to reduce your digital footprint and take control of your data.

This post is part one of a two-part series discussing safety and response to doxxing. This first part focuses on prevention and ways to reduce your overall footprint. The second focuses on incident response, as in, steps to take if you're in the midst of being doxxed. There will be some crossover and redundancy between these two posts, so it's worth reading each and gaining familiarity with the steps well ahead of time.

OSINT

Open source intelligence (OSINT) is a broad term within information security. It focuses on the tools and means available to us for investigation and information retrieval. OSINT sits at the heart of doxxing campaigns but is also an important part of the process of preventing them. Typically it is a way of describing a methodology of piecing together scraps of information to form a dossier on a subject.

There are fancy multipurpose tools (like Maltego or Lampyre) that combine many datapoints into accessible graphs and datasets. As helpful as they can be for traditional penetration tests or corporate OSINT campaigns, they’re best used for investigations focused on organizations, mapping together details like employee email charts, LinkedIn profiles, and company network maps. They may not fit the needs of everyday people or liberation movement workers. Instead, we recommend referring to different OSINT resource lists that index together a bunch of different tools, then using those resources to create a list for yourself of which tools may be most helpful. 

Many, if not all, of the resources we cover below will be referenced in those guides, and themselves fall under the OSINT category. It’s important to note that the tools we reference in this particular blog post are only relevant at the time of publishing. The bigger ideas have a much longer shelf life than various tech tools. That said, in no particular order:

Breach Databases

When a company gets hacked and their customer data is leaked, that information often ends up in “breach databases,” that is, troves of peoples' data available for sale and reuse in illegal trades online. Because of the sensitivity of that type of information, it can potentially be used in doxxing campaigns. Some resources, like haveibeenpwned, note pieces of vulnerable identifying information in those databases and make it easy for people to see if their information is included. Others, like DeHashed, offer a similar sort of tracking, but for a fee. 

You may not have control over a company's digital security that could put your own data at risk, but you can gain insight into whether your information is already out there. This gives you the opportunity to control the accuracy of that data (such as changing your email address or phone number). Doing so is extremely inconvenient, but unfortunately, it may be the only agency you have when another’s company’s digital insecurity puts your own safety at risk.

Open Records

Public records (such as voter records, property records, business registration, medical licensing information, and more) present a dilemma. It is in the public interest for there to be levels of transparency on such information. On the other hand, making such personally-identifiable information accessible to those with ill-intent can lead to serious consequences. 

Instead of requiring a formal request through the courts, mirroring sites make this information easy to find online. Such sites often have forms where you can request your information be taken down. This doesn’t necessarily remove the records from existing, but it does remove a layer of convenience in accessing them.

Some states have programs called “Address Confidentiality Programs” that offer people the right to supplant address information with proxy addresses, keeping public records open but that specific piece of information potentially hidden.

Social Media

Going through and tightening the security and privacy settings of your various social media accounts is always a good idea, but it’s especially important if you are in the process of minimizing your digital footprint. Consider turning your discoverability to “private” or “hidden” (verbiage and details depend on the app) so that only users vetted by you are able to see your account.

To get a quick overview of the various accounts you have registered online, especially if you've been online for a long time, use a username search engine like What's My Name or Namechk to see where your usernames have been registered. They may not be entirely accurate, but they are effective and quick. These tools are also helpful if you are at risk of being impersonated online and want to get an overview of where that may be taking place.

Data Brokers and Removals

Data brokers are craven, pernicious companies that present an existential risk to everyone in the digital age. Until that industry is no more, it's up to us to protect ourselves and the ways that it endangers us by selling personal, sensitive information. The most effective way to get your information removed from their stores is to file requests manually. Yael Grauer's BADBOOL project compiles and prioritizes the worst offenders in this industry and the means you can use to request data removals from them. This process can be grueling and time-consuming, so it may be worth investing in a service that automates the process. Though they've been found to be less effective than the DIY approach, there are some services that have stood out amongst the others in terms of efficacy when tested by third-party reviewers. If you’re a resident of California, you can more easily opt out through the new and exciting DROP tool.

Reverse Image Searching and FR Services

Services like PimEyes and Lenso have jumped on the profit-driven opportunity to create facial recognition as a service. They contribute to law enforcement investigations and predictive policing systems, as well as providing commercial services to abusers and stalkers. The gist of their service: upload a picture of someone (in this case, yourself) and it will use facial recognition technology to determine where else online that person has appeared. If your image is being shared online without your consent, this service will find out. 

Willfully participating in these services does mean having your image mapped, scanned, and stored by their systems. But if you believe you're under the type of targeted harassment that includes your image being shared online against your will, it may be worth that tradeoff.

Extra Monitoring, Automated

This section is less about data minimization, and more about laying extra protections down in the event that doxxing or other coordinated harassment seems imminent. If you're in the Google ecosystem of products, consider enrolling in their Advanced Protection Program, which offers a number of different features to keep you and your account safe. 

If you're the focus of coordinated attacks that span from online communities to media outlets participating in the harassment, a service like Open Measures is worth looking into. It tracks, maps, and analyzes the spread of hateful information online. They provide free access to their open-source API, so with some technical fancy-footwork, you can automate this process.

Get Others Involved

Coordinated harassment is often a process of daisy-chaining targets and tactics together until there’s a meaningful process of harm being inflicted. This means that people in your community are also at risk. As we always say, privacy is a team sport. Get others involved in the process; there’s strength in numbers. 

A great way to do this is think of the activities you and your group are up to. What roles do individual members take on? Figure out a way to tack on some of the responsibilities you’re coming up with here onto those team members. Find ways to talk about it and share strategies, preferably using secure technology like Signal. You can coordinate together which tasks each person could take on, perhaps pulled from this blog post.

It's a Process; Keep Yourself Apace for the Marathon, Not the Race

The process of data minimization and reclaiming agency over your digital footprint can be grueling and stressful. Don't underestimate the toll it can take on your mental health. Take breaks, employ the help of friends, and take the time to make sure you're first addressing the parts that are most relevant to your threat model. It may feel like there’s nothing to be done about protecting your digital privacy, but that’s just a symptom of surveillance capitalism’s psychological effect on its victims. There’s much you can do to stay safe, to protect yourself and others. Refer to this post and to the Surveillance Self-Defense project. 

It sure seems like it.

The stores confirmed to be affected include Fort Irwin, Calif.; F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo.; Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; Naval Station Newport, R.I.; Columbus Air Force Base, Miss.; and Travis Air Force Base, Calif., according to announcements made online by each installation.

Naval Air Station Lemoore, Calif., also experienced an outage, according to M. Elizabeth, writer of the Substack newsletter Signal and Silence.

Each service declined to answer questions about how many bases are affected by the outages, referring all questions to the Defense Department. Pentagon officials did not respond to questions...

Regulating commercial location tracking has reached a turning point. Last year, we published our rubric for what comprehensive and protective location privacy laws should look like, outlining the baseline standards states should meet to shield individuals from pervasive location surveillance. Since then, state lawmakers across the country have begun responding to calls like these, with Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, and Virginia enacting new consumer privacy restraints on an industry that profits off our physical movements.

Yet, even as these states move the ball forward to restrict location tracking, most of their laws leave significant gaps that still must be filled. Other states – and Congress – need to get into the game, too, and ensure protection of everyone.

Why Location Privacy Is Important

Imagine spending a couple of hours in a coffee shop, a friend's house, or a healthcare clinic, only to discover yourself under police investigation because your cell phone’s location data exposed your presence there.

This is the reality of geofence warrants for location data, the controversial surveillance technique recently scrutinized by the U.S. Supreme Court in Chatrie v. United States. Through geofencing, tech companies and law enforcement can map everyone who was present within a specific area over a certain window of time, inverting standard constitutional protections by turning every innocent bystander into a potential suspect. While the Supreme Court's ruling in Chatrie established that accessing location data via geofencing constitutes a Fourth Amendment search requiring constitutional protections, law enforcement demands via these warrants are only part of the problem. That same geolocation tracking is used by commercial data brokers operating in a largely unregulated market. These brokers regularly harvest, aggregate, and sell physical location data to anyone with a credit card (including government agencies, which are among their regular clients). Especially for individuals seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care, attending a protest, or visiting an immigration law clinic, this pervasive commercial location surveillance represents an immediate threat.

In Part 1 of this series, we urged lawmakers to protect people from the growing harms of location tracking tools across all areas of public life. The real-world consequences of this unregulated market impact us all. An anti-LGBTQ+ advocacy group spent millions of dollars buying app location data to track priests across multiple dioceses and used app-harvested location data to “out” a priest after purchasing his Grindr location signals. Privacy advocates posing as private investigators gained access to Locate X, a location-tracking tool developed by Babel Street, and demonstrated how the tool tracked a device traveling from Alabama, where abortion is banned, to an abortion clinic in Florida, where access is less restricted. Data brokers like Near Intelligence have sold precise location data of reproductive health clinic visitors directly to political groups. Location data has been used to locate U.S. military personnel in war zones. Law enforcement and private entities have also weaponized location tracking directly against political protesters: surveillance contractors and authorities have utilized location data derived from real-time bidding ad networks to track individuals attending demonstrations.

The unregulated sharing of location data has created an ever-larger funnel for data brokers to capture and monetize our movements. For example, a recent EFF investigation identified several advertising Software Development Kits (SDKs) in Android apps that by default collect and share users' location data whenever app-level location permissions are granted. These advertising libraries automatically feed users' location data into ad systems that location data brokers have used to track people. Because defaults direct real-world outcomes, app developers who fail to carefully scrutinize the third-party SDKs they use, and disable unnecessary data collection, could inadvertently expose their users’ movements to commercial data brokers.

State Legislative Progress

Last year, we outlined six essential core principles that any meaningful location privacy law must contain:

• Strong definitions,
• Clear rules,
• Affirmation that all precise geolocation data is sensitive,
• Empowerment of consumers through a strong private right of action,
• Prohibition of “pay-for-privacy” schemes, and
• Transparency through clear privacy policies.

While the bills we highlighted from California, Illinois, and Massachusetts are yet to pass into law, a new wave of state location privacy legislation has taken effect across Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, and Virginia.

These five laws represent progress, and share two strong features.  First, all five of these states ban the sale of precise geolocation data. This will remove a strong incentive to collect and store this information in the first place. Other types of privacy laws have likewise banned the sale of sensitive types of data, like the Illinois Biometric Privacy Act (BIPA), which bans the sale of biometric information such as face scans.

Second, all five states broadly define the protected data to include all kinds of locations across the board within a particular distance of a person or their device, rather than protecting just narrowly-defined “sensitive” locations. This all-locations protection sets these laws apart from California’s A.B. 45 of 2025, for example, which only restricts location tracking within 1,850 feet of a family planning center. Protecting location data only near specific locations (like health care facilities) is insufficient: if an individual travels across state lines for care, a data broker can still track their route right up to the boundary of a protected zone and pick it up immediately upon departure, making it easy to infer their destination.

These five laws vary regarding whether, on top of the ban on sale, they require consent and/or minimization for other kinds of processing of precise geolocation data. Maryland’s Online Data Privacy Act (MODPA) requires strict minimization. Specifically, a data controller cannot collect, use, store, or disclose a consumer’s precise geolocation data (or other sensitive data) unless doing so is “strictly necessary to provide or maintain a specific product or service requested by [that] consumer.” Minimization is an important privacy protection because it imposes a duty where it belongs: on the company processing a person’s data. Maryland requires doubly strong minimization. First, the data processing must be “strictly necessary,” and not just “necessary,” or even worse, “reasonably necessary.” Second, the necessity of data processing must be tied to what the particular consumer requested, and not to what a generic customer might hypothetically have thought was reasonable, or the company’s own purposes, or whatever the company buried in its own long-winded legalese.

Connecticut requires both strong consent and weak minimization. Specifically, it forbids a data controller from collecting, using, storing, or disclosing a consumer’s precise geolocation data (among other sensitive data) “without first obtaining [that] consumer’s consent”. Connecticut has a strong definition of consent: “a clear affirmative act signifying freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous agreement,” which is absent from “agreement obtained through the use of dark patterns.” On top of this strong consent, Connecticut also requires a weak form of minimization: the data processing must be “reasonably necessary in relation to the purposes for which such sensitive data are processed”. But this does not weaken Connecticut’s strong consent rule.

New Jersey requires consent to collect, use, store, or disclose a person’s precise geolocation data (and other sensitive data).

Virginia protects location data with both minimization and consent, but only for one kind of people (known children) and only for one kind of data processing (collection). Under Virginia’s minimization rule, a data controller cannot collect such data from such people unless doing so “is reasonably necessary for the controller to provide an online service,” and in such cases, “only … for the time necessary” to do so. This would be a much stronger rule if the authors struck the modifier “reasonably” before the word “necessary,” or better yet, substituted the modifier “strictly.”

Beyond its ban on sale, Oregon does not limit the processing of precise geolocation data.

Gaps in Current Legislation

While these enacted bills mark steps in the right direction, major loopholes remain that leave users vulnerable.

The Enforcement Void: Why Every Law Needs a Private Right of Action

A privacy law without a Private Right of Action is a law "without teeth”.

None of these five state statutes expressly empower consumers to directly sue companies that violate their location privacy rights. Relying exclusively on state Attorneys General or specialized regulatory agencies creates a critical bottleneck, since no regulatory agency possesses the staffing or budget required to investigate every data privacy violation. Additionally, government enforcement priorities shift across administrations, leaving enforcement vulnerable to political pressures and corporate lobbying.

The best way to ensure effective enforcement is a free-standing, explicit Private Right of Action written directly into the privacy statute. Some legislative privacy proposals instead attempt to provide remedies by piggybacking on state laws against unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices (UDAP). But this is often hit-or-miss depending on each state’s specific UDAP law, including who must have what kind of injury to have standing to bring a private action, and the scope of remedies. For instance, while Maryland’s MODPA provides that a violation of the statute constitutes a banned UDAP, it appears that the new law’s enforcement mechanics were drafted in a way that provides only government enforcement through the Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division, rather than granting consumers a private right of action.

Any a private right of action should come complete with statutory liquidated damages to remedy non-economic harm, and prohibitions against mandatory arbitration. This ensures that compliance isn't optional. Until corporate bad actors face direct accountability from the very people whose personal location data they unlawfully exploit, state privacy laws will rely on overworked regulators to police an industry that profits off our every move.

The "Pay-for-Privacy" Trap

Privacy is a fundamental right, not a luxury tier. So EFF opposes pay-for-privacy schemes, in which companies charge a higher price to people who exercise their privacy rights. To prevent these schemes, data privacy legislation must prohibit companies from retaliating against consumers who exercise their statutory privacy rights, including by charging a higher price. For example, if a statute bars a company from processing a person’s data absent their consent, and that person withholds consent, the statute must bar the company from responding by charging a higher price.

Unfortunately, all three of these states that require consent to process precise geolocation information (Connecticut, New Jersey, and Virginia) have only weakly limited pay-for-privacy schemes. While all three prohibit discrimination against customers who withhold consent, all three also have a wide loophole: for discount programs. To make matters worse, none of these three states prevent the discount programs from selling customer data to third parties. But people should not have to surrender their data privacy to join a discount club for regular customers. Thus, the far better approach is to eschew this loophole, as in the ban on pay-for-privacy in last year’s location data privacy bills in Illinois and Massachusetts.

These exceptions allow companies to charge higher prices or downgrade service quality for users who exercise their privacy rights. In practice, this converts privacy into a privilege for those who can afford it, forcing economically vulnerable communities to trade away their sensitive location movements in exchange for essential discounts or services.

Dark Patterns

Any law that requires consent also needs to ban company techniques that subvert consent. These are often called dark patterns, predatory design, and manipulative user interface (UI/UX) practices.

Connecticut’s definition of “consent” excludes “dark patterns,” as noted above. That state defines dark patterns as “a user interface designed or manipulated with the substantial effect of subverting or impairing user autonomy, decision-making, or choice,” including any practice that the FTC refers to as a dark pattern. Other consent-based privacy rules must do so, too.

Conclusion

The recent wave of state legislation demonstrates that momentum is building against location surveillance. However, state leaders must go further.

To build privacy protections that withstand corporate workaround attempts, future bills must apply to all locations universally, give individuals the legal standing to enforce their own rights in court, and fully prohibit pay-for-privacy. Until comprehensive data privacy legislation with real teeth is enacted nationwide, users can consult EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense Guide to learn practical steps for reducing location tracking on their personal devices.

This post is adapted from a video recorded by EFF and the Trevor Project. Head over to our TikTok or Instagram to watch! 

EFF answers all the queer digital rights questions you submit to us through our LGBT Q&A. You asked us: What’s one thing I can do today to improve my safety and security online as an LGBTQ+ person? 

And for this question, we’ve brought in our friends from the Trevor Project to answer together:

Hi, I’m Tommy from the Trevor Project! The Trevor Project’s mission is to end suicide among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ+) young people. Our vision is to create a world where all LGBTQ+ young people see a bright future for themselves.

EFF and the Trevor Project know that digital security and online safety can feel overwhelming, especially because we all have different levels of concern for different parts of our online lives. Some might be focused on the dangers of doxxing, another might only want to ensure they're not outed. And queer people can be particularly vulnerable to these kinds of online threats. 

This might seem like a big task, but the one way you can do today to protect yourself is to revise the information you’ve shared with services and platforms to ensure you’re as in control of your information and data as possible:

Protect Your Personal Information

Be cautious about sharing sensitive details like your full name, address, school, phone number, and personal photos as it might expose identifying information you want to keep private. Consider using an avatar as your profile picture to avoid sharing your personal photos if that makes you more comfortable. Keep it lowkey when talking about work stuff or sharing details about where you’re studying.

If you do share personal photos, don’t accompany them with information that identifies your location or frequent whereabouts, and make sure EXIF data in photos is turned off (which could inadvertently include your location); the easiest way to do this is to take a screenshot of the photo and share that instead. Don’t post pictures with obvious spots in the background, like your front door or porch. 

Understand the Importance of Login Information

When you create an account on websites and platforms, you can often use your phone number or a third party account, such as Facebook, Google, or Apple. These external accounts might share data with the apps you're logging into, but they can be helpful if you struggle with managing a lot of logins. Deciding if that trade-off is worth it is up to you but, when you can, use strong, unique passwords for your accounts, and be sure to enable two-factor authentication when offered. 

Review Permissions with Social Media Apps

Review which apps have access to things like your location and camera roll, and possibly change those permissions in line with what information you would like to keep private. Location is particularly important. For example, some apps might need some location information to function. But you can typically at least deny access to your device's "precise location" or enter in a city or zip code manually.

Consider What You Share When Speaking with Others Online

It’s important to be mindful of what you share with others when you post online or speak with people. Avoid disclosing sensitive information like financial details, and trust your gut if something feels off. It’s also useful to review your profile’s privacy settings and information now and again to make sure you’re still comfortable sharing what you’ve listed there.

Good privacy decisions begin with proper knowledge about your situation and a community-oriented approach. To dig in deeper, read EFF’s blog post on Building a Community Privacy Plan and the Trevor Project’s Guide to Online Safety for LGBTQ+ Young People.

Someone hid AI instructions into a legal filing.

Alternate link.

It all started with some exasperated emails. Back in 2009, a group of researchers began venting their frustration with the programming languages designed to help scientists and other researchers perform complex mathematical operations and statistical simulations without learning how to code. These programming languages were rigid and slow. If scientists built something that really worked, they’d need to rewrite the entire program in another language just to run it more quickly.

The emails turned into a research project at MIT with the mission of building an easy-to-use, high-performance programming language called Julia, which is designed for scientific research, data analysis, and modeling complex systems such as jet engines, drugs, financial markets, and robots, to name a few examples.

That research project turned into a lab at MIT, and the lab turned into the company JuliaHub. Along the way, Julia gained a loyal following among scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and others. Today, the free and open-source language counts more than 1 million users, including people working in thousands of companies and universities around the world.

It is only a slight exaggeration to say Julia has been used to model everything under the sun, from the behavior of tiny atoms to semiconductors, neural networks, race cars, and airplanes. It has also been used to study much beyond the sun, with astronomers using Julia for imaging black holes.

Julia’s secret sauce is in the way it compiles code depending on the type of data being used. Such “just-in-time compilation” makes Julia faster and more flexible than other numerical programming languages.

“Scientists and engineers are not programmers. Building scientific applications with multidisciplinary teams of scientists, engineers, and programmers is challenging,” JuliaHub co-founder and CEO Viral Shah says. “We asked: What if you could equip the scientists and engineers with a programming language that allowed them to express their ideas at a high level and also get great software performance?”

Making programming easy for non-programmers has been a north star for JuliaHub’s founders, who include Julia co-creators Shah, MIT professor of mathematics Alan Edelman, Jeff Bezanson SM ’12, PhD ’15, and former MIT research scientist Stefan Karpinski.

In April, JuliaHub’s team took another big step in that direction with the launch of Dyad 3.0, the latest version of its AI platform to help engineering teams accelerate the development of complex physical systems like rockets, heat pumps, and satellites. Engineers are already using Dyad to direct autonomous AI agents as they work through physics simulations, safety analyses, quality controls, and more.

“With Dyad 3.0, you can upload data and design documents and the system will design an entire aircraft for you,” Shah says. “Working with customers like Boeing, we are building agentic hardware design capabilities for engineers. Simplistically, you want to say, ‘Okay computer, build me a plane’; upload the design documents; and have the system account for all the physics, compile all the code, verify everything, and build the entire design agentically.”

Humble beginnings

After discussing the need for better programming languages for scientists and other researchers, Julia’s co-creators started the Julia Lab around 2009. The Julia Lab remains active in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

The core idea was to create a high-performance platform that would excel at engineering, scientific, and mathematics applications. Shah says before Julia, scientists and engineers would either have to hire someone to build software for them or accept the slow performance of the few programming languages designed for them.

“We wanted to create something as easy to use as Python or MATLAB but as fast as the C programming language,” Shah says. “We built Julia for ourselves.”

Edelman says at first, the researchers didn’t think anyone would want their creation.

“We figured it would take 10 years before anyone was interested, but we said, ‘Patience is a virtue, so let’s do it,’” Edelman recalls.

The MIT researchers announced Julia with a blog post in 2012. They quickly realized many other researchers shared their frustration.

“When we first started, we were targeting interactive research workflows, but increasingly people are using it for everything,” Bezanson says. “Now we’re moving the whole stack of the language onto smaller, embedded devices as we evolve with our users.”

Since those early days, Edelman has taught a class on Julia with students from nearly every department at MIT. Today, he often learns students are already using Julia when they enroll in the class for applications as wide ranging as robotics, astronomy, physics simulations, and finance.

“Researchers come up to me and say, ‘I tell my supervisor I’m using Julia because it’s fast, but don’t tell them I’m using Julia because it’s really fun,’” Edelman says. “The key thing is Julia’s abstractions. A lot of times a coding language forces you to solve the one problem you’re thinking about. Julia’s language makes it so you’re solving not only the problem you’re thinking about, but other people’s problems around the world too. It encourages you to solve problems more generally.”

As Julia gained popularity, researchers around the world started asking the Julia team for support. By 2015, the demand became strong enough that they decided to start JuliaHub and help users through the company full-time. They received support from the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation and others at MIT to get the company off the ground.

JuliaHub’s work has evolved from simply helping users to advancing the language more generally. That’s powered an impressive list of creations from Julia’s loyal users. Julia has been used to simulate computer circuits, detect health disparities, model global climates and oceans, analyze brain activity, and more. 

After someone built a pharmaceutical modeling platform in Julia, it was used to accelerate development of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine. In another case, researchers used Julia to create a program for avoiding aircraft collisions. They found it ran about 50 times faster than an earlier version built on Python. Engineers at Meta used Julia to develop a better audio codec for WhatsApp’s 4 billion users.

“Over the years we’ve seen industrial, government, and academic users doing all kinds of interesting things with the Julia language,” Edelman says. “It’s honestly surprised us in many ways, the wide-ranging things people are using it for.”

Autonomous design

JuliaHub launched Dyad 1.0 in June of 2025 as a research agent to accelerate programming and Dyad 2.0 in December. The founders believe Dyad 3.0 represents a new level of ability and autonomy for designing complex systems.

“One important thing about Dyad is that it is a physics compiler and hence enforces physical laws,” Shah explains. “General AI systems often solve physical problems in ways that violate physical laws. When using the Dyad agent, it will detect such violations and guide the agent in the direction of the physically correct solution. We expect it will decrease design times in product engineering by orders of magnitude, leading to months of work being accomplished in hours.”

One way Edelman sees the impact of Julia is through his class. One student recently used Dyad to model how robots move around in space. Another used it to build a rocket engine.

“At the end he said, ‘I couldn’t believe how easy that was — I just got a rocket engine!’” Edelman recalls.

Ugh:

A tractor-trailer rollover sent a truckload of squid spilling into a Rhode Island roadway, leaving a stench as they sat in the road for hours in the summer heat. Local authorities have dubbed it the “Squidpocalypse of ’26.”

That would be twenty tons of squid.

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.

This past spring, MIT physics graduate student Manu Srivastava opened an email from a group of high school students in India he had never met.

They were hoping to enter Beamline for Schools, an international competition that gives secondary school students the chance to design and carry out experiments using particle accelerator beams. And they were looking for a mentor.

Srivastava, who studies quantum gravity as a PhD student in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics – a Leinweber Institute, with Professor Hong Liu, gets other requests to mentor students, often through companies charging families for access to scientists or students at prestigious universities. He usually declines, but this message came directly from the students.

“I've also cold-emailed a lot in my early career, and it usually never works,” he says. “But this email seemed very genuine. They wanted to do something nice and they just needed some guidance.”

Many months and many more emails and calls later, the students secured a place with Srivastava to attend CERN, in Geneva, where they spent two weeks turning their proposed idea into a real experiment. 

Finding an experiment worth doing

Calling themselves Team attoPION, the students are one of five teams selected in the 13th annual Beamline for Schools competition from a record 712 teams representing 89 countries and more than 4,500 students. The six high schoolers met through a combination of science competitions and mutual friends, and attend four schools in four cities across India.

When they first met with Srivastava, the students already had several experimental ideas. His role, he says, was to help determine which directions were practical and scientifically interesting.

They settled on measuring pion charge exchange. Pions are short-lived subatomic particles that can carry positive, negative, or neutral charge. In the process the students want to study, a positively charged pion interacts with a neutron in a target material, producing a neutral pion and a positively charged proton. The team wants to characterize how often that reaction occurs.

Srivastava suspected such a measurement could have relevance to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, a major international experiment designed to study neutrinos.

Dave Newbold, a co-spokesperson for DUNE, says understanding how pions interact with matter helps researchers quantify uncertainties in DUNE’s measurements. In particular, pion interactions can affect estimates of a neutrino’s flavor and energy, which researchers need to measure accurately to determine whether they have observed something new.

And although Beamline for Schools has an educational mission, Newbold says the students aren't simply reproducing a classroom demonstration. “The proposal is real experimental particle physics!” he notes.

If successful, Newbold believes the work could improve scientists' understanding of this particular interaction and potentially lead to a publishable result. Similar “test beam” experiments remain important tools in particle physics: DUNE's detector designs were themselves demonstrated using the (albeit much larger) ProtoDUNE experiments at CERN.

“This [proposal] stands out because of the work the students have put into motivating their measurement, and demonstrating that the experiment is feasible,” Newbold says. “It's certainly at a level far above anything I was thinking about at high school.”

Learning to navigate uncertainty

At CERN, the students worked hands-on with detectors and data-acquisition systems, collected and analyze data, and attended talks by CERN scientists.

In advance of the trip, the team worked with Berare Göktürk, one of the support scientists for Beamline for Schools. In their preparation sessions for the experiment, they realized that the charge-exchange process they hope to observe is extremely rare, forcing them to think through how they might reliably detect it.

With just a few months months to prepare and only 12 days of test-beam time, Göktürk cautioned that producing a result useful to a much larger experiment would be an ambitious outcome.

“We prepare in the best way possible, but we also stay humble and we are aware of the limitations we have,” she says. Her priority is for the students to “understand the journey of a scientist” as they encounter technical problems and work together to solve them.

For Srivastava, mentoring an experiment has also taken him well outside his own specialty. A theoretical physicist, he credits MIT's culture with encouraging him to follow questions beyond the boundaries of his research, including by attending seminars, colloquia, and research meetings across physics.

The experience has been personally meaningful for Srivastava, who grew up in India and sees the mentorship as a way to encourage young people there to pursue fundamental science. 

“I didn't even know what CERN was in high school,” he says. “But these students, they are just that good. They deserve all the credit.”

Although Jacob Becraft had two swings and two misses when he first tried to become an entrepreneur as a graduate student, the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program allowed him to keep at it. This especially benefited cancer patients, as Becraft went on to co-found Strand Therapeutics: a $550-million firm whose programmable mRNA drug has shrunk tumors in patients who had exhausted all other treatment options.

Stories like Becraft’s took center stage at the recent 10-year anniversary celebration of the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program, where student founders, alumni, mentors, and university leaders gathered to reflect on a decade of empowering student entrepreneurs. Speaking at the event, Becraft referred to Strand as "our third swing at the plate," explaining that the Sandbox model gave him "the freedom and ability to fail fast" — letting previous venture ideas "blow up in our faces" before moving on.

For Strand, Becraft says, MIT Sandbox helped him and his co-founder, Tasuku Kitada, to "get out, do some travel, some market research, meet with experts in the field, meet with mentors who could help us build the company — and eventually find investors who were going to back this big vision to transform medicine."

MIT Sandbox was launched in 2016 by Ian Waitz, then-dean of the School of Engineering and now MIT's vice president for research, to lower the barrier for students to try entrepreneurship. The concept of a new program focused on student-led entrepreneurship was developed in consultation with internal MIT leaders and supporters of MIT, including Alan Spoon, a life member emeritus of the MIT Corporation. From its inception, MIT Sandbox has been open to all MIT students, from undergraduates to PhD students. Teams are awarded between $500 and $5,000 to begin their process, and they are matched with two mentors and connected with other expert advisors. 

As they make progress, students can go before the program’s funding board to ask for up to $25,000. Supported entirely by alumni, corporate sponsors, entrepreneurs, and investors, the program has grown to include about 350 teams each semester, some of which are new and some continuing their participation according to their own timelines.

Anantha P. Chandrakasan, MIT provost, explained in the program's decade-in-review report: "Since its inception 10 years ago, MIT Sandbox has been a defining part of MIT's innovation ecosystem, ensuring that every student with the curiosity to explore entrepreneurship has the resources, mentorship, and community to take their first steps."

MIT Sandbox is a "home," where students can "explore, seriously test assumptions, talk to customers, build prototypes, fail, pivot, learn, and grow," says Jinane Abounadi, founding executive director of Sandbox. "And they can do that with a lot of support — and I don't just mean financial support. I mean a lot of support from a lot of people."

For Samuel Udotong, co-founder and CTO of Fireflies.ai, early funding was the difference between an idea and a company. "I think largely because we had gotten a little bit of Sandbox funding, we were actually able to take the risk to move out to San Francisco and try to build the company," he says. "But it would have been really a money barrier if we hadn't gotten the initial $5,000 from Sandbox."

Startup investor and advisor Sophie V. Vandebroek says, "MIT has extraordinary students from around the globe as well as faculty who are top experts in their fields. What’s often lacking," she says, "is confidence. That is where Sandbox plays a vital role. Sandbox enables every individual student to believe that they can be an entrepreneur."

At the anniversary celebration, Fred Parietti, co-founder and CEO of Multiply Labs, recounted how his early product prototypes were developed on his kitchen table and had to be moved regularly according to the dictates of his grad school housemates. Those prototypes wouldn't have been built at all, he said, without MIT Sandbox.

The first funding he received was minimal, "but it wasn't zero, and zero represented my resources as a student. That belief in us and the possibility to build a prototype were game-changers," Parietti said.

Multiply Labs, with 60-plus employees, has raised $36 million and develops robotics technology to manufacture biological drugs safely and economically. The firm supplies pharmaceutical customers including AstraZeneca and Kyverna Therapeutics, whose chief medical and development officer, Naji Gehchan, is an MIT Sandbox mentor.

That same willingness to back an unconventional approach helped AeroShield get off the ground. "One of the things that enables me to stand here today is that Sandbox created a safe environment where it was encouraged to look at this problem backwards, rather than from the nanostructure up," says Elise Strobach, CEO and founder of AeroShield.

The anniversary celebration speakers also included Ross Finman, CEO and founder of Augmodo; Laureen Meroueh, CEO and founder of Hertha Metals; and Daris Bunadar, chief scientist at Lightmatter. All were working on their PhDs when they started exploring commercial applications of their research. All recognize the critical role that MIT Sandbox, in addition to other programs — such as the MIT I-Corps Program, the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS), and the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program — played in their development as entrepreneurs. These programs offered the space to explore the possibility of not only founding a deep tech company, but also taking on an executive role as their ventures raised venture capital and grew into substantial companies. Today they all have big ambitions for the growth and impact of their companies — ambitions that are made possible only thanks to innovative technologies and an entrepreneurial drive. 

Over its decade of existence, MIT Sandbox has supported over 4,000 teams, representing 8,000 participants associated with a wide range of industries and nonprofit endeavors. It has disbursed more than $11 million in non-dilutive funding, meaning the program takes no stake in the resulting ventures. MIT Sandbox has been involved in the creation of 475 companies in more than 30 countries, and companies that were started in the program have raised $8.7 billion in venture funding.

MIT Sandbox collaborates with other programs across MIT — including the Martin Trust Center, VMS, Kuo Sharp Center, MITdesignX, the PKG Center for Social Impact, the MIT Climate Project, I-Corps, and others — and its teams have excelled in innovation accelerators and competitions. Nine out of 10 winners of MIT's $100K Entrepreneurship Competition have been MIT Sandbox participants.

Apart from the program's impressive results, MIT Sandbox aims to first and foremost serve as a great educational tool, developing the innovators themselves.

"From an educator's perspective, this is just another incredible way to teach," said Abounadi at the anniversary celebration. "MIT Sandbox is a place where students can start seeing themselves as people who can create a meaningful impact in the world," she said, "and that is really what innovation and entrepreneurship are all about."

Paula T. Hammond, School of Engineering dean and Institute Professor, echoed the same sentiments: "What I find most compelling, year after year, is not only what students build, but how they change. They gain confidence, learn to refine before they scale, and begin to see themselves as people who can create meaningful impact, strengthening not only their own trajectories, but the broader MIT community."

This essay was written with Kasra Rafi, and originally appeared in The Guardian.

Earlier this month, about 40 top mathematicians gathered at OpenAI’s offices to discuss the future of their profession. The meeting was off-the-record, but if recent articles by mathematicians are any guide, it was mostly pretty glum. People fear for their jobs, their careers and the work they love.

We think the contrary view is more likely, at least in the short-term. AI models are nowhere near as capable as experienced academic mathematicians.

This isn’t to say that AIs aren’t producing stunning mathematical results at the level of PhD researchers. In mid-May, OpenAI ...

Growing up in Waverly, Tennessee, Gage Coon spent much of his childhood outside. His family had everything from chickens to horses and even an emu named Big Bird. Coon and his cousins would explore the woods surrounding their home, and his father, a mechanic, taught him how to build and repair things around the house. His mother, a secretary at the local high school’s vocational school who loves gardening and birdwatching, encouraged him to experience as much of the world around him as he could.

That hands-on upbringing, which taught Coon to appreciate the natural world and the processes that sustain it, continues to influence how he approaches science today.

Now entering his third year as a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Coon studies some of the smallest organisms on Earth: microbes. His research focuses on how microorganisms cycle carbon and sulfur through the environment and how to leverage those processes to help address climate change. Though he studies organisms too small to see with the naked eye, the experimental nature of his work — whether in the lab or on a research vessel in the open ocean — is especially satisfying.

“I think I enjoy that physicality of seeing what I’m working with, seeing its change, and being able to touch it,” Coon says.

Coon did not initially set out to study microbiology. His interest in science began with chemistry. A high school chemistry teacher and a summer program introduced him to the subject. But later, at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, he joined a lab focused on microbial biogeochemistry and was delighted to find a field that brought together the different areas that interested him: chemistry, the environment, and the larger climate processes shaping our Earth.

The transition from rural Tennessee to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and MIT has been a significant one. As a first-generation student, he did not learn about PhD programs until several years into college.

Once he discovered academic research, however, Coon was drawn to the possibility of spending his career learning.

“I discovered this world of academia, and so I was really excited when I learned about it,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, constant learning. That is exactly what I want to do forever.’”

Coon began studying the microbes that drive carbon and sulfur cycling in marine sediments as an undergraduate, eventually joining research cruises to investigate these processes firsthand.

His first research cruise, in 2022 after his second year of college, took him to the Atlantic continental slope to study methane seeps and how microbes prevent this methane from escaping to our atmosphere. For Coon, experiencing the ocean up close changed the way he understood the microscopic organisms he was studying.

“It is very powerful seeing yourself in the middle of the ocean, with a whole other world of complex life beneath you,” he says.

At MIT, working with his advisor Tanja Bosak, a professor of geobiology, Coon has continued studying microbial carbon and sulfur cycling, but with a greater emphasis on the applications. One of his major projects explores how microbes could be used to reduce methane emissions from wastewater treatment.

When wastewater is treated, microbes break down organic material in large tanks called anaerobic digesters. One of the final products of this process is the powerful greenhouse gas methane. However, Coon and his colleagues found a way to change what the microbes produce by adding gypsum, a waste product that is created from fertilizer manufacturing

The system uses the added gypsum to turn the methane into carbonate, which can be used to make cement, agriculture, and pharmaceuticals. The process also produces elemental sulfur, necessary for global fertilizer production, which is currently sources from oil and gas refinement. The approach effectively turns two waste products, sewage and waste gypsum, into useful materials while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

For Coon, the possibility of creating a system that is both environmentally beneficial and economically useful is central to the project. Now that the laboratory experiments have ended, the researchers are looking toward conducting pilot-scale testing. Coon and his advisors have been communicating with companies interested in adapting the system to larger facilities, and hope the technology can eventually move beyond the laboratory.

“If enough small places start doing their pilot-scale studies, then hopefully you could convince some place like Boston or another big city to do this and really make a contribution to our global goal to decrease emissions on the gigaton scale,” he says.

The wastewater project is only one part of Coon’s PhD research. He also studies geological processes that could produce molecular hydrogen, a potential carbon-free energy source. His work examines how iron-rich rocks break down and generate hydrogen underground. He is continuing his thesis work by focusing on microbial competition for acetate, and what this means for global methane emissions from coastal wetlands. This work could improve future climate predictions and support engineered mitigation efforts to decrease emissions from these wetlands. 

Across these projects, Coon is interested in the connection between the microscopic and the massive. But Coon’s PhD has also given him an opportunity to think about science beyond his own research.

One of the parts of graduate school he has enjoyed most is mentoring younger researchers. He has worked with a handful of students through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and from Tufts University, teaching them laboratory techniques and experimental geobiology.

Outside the lab, Coon maintains some of the same connection to the natural world that characterized his childhood in Tennessee. He spends time hiking to explore local geology, playing bluegrass guitar, and speed-solving Rubik’s Cubes. 

Looking ahead, Coon sees himself continuing in academia, working in government, or helping to bring environmental technologies into practice.

What matters most, he says, is continuing to produce knowledge that can help people understand and potentially improve the world around them.

“I do think, no matter what,” he says, “I’ll be somewhere thinking about how microscopic life connects to the global ecosystem and carbon emissions.”

EFF, Access Now, and Data Privacy Brasil are putting forward recommendations to strengthen robust privacy and data protection safeguards in the context of Brazil's elections. The recommendations stress the close relationship between violations of personal data protection and challenges to the integrity of electoral processes. They underscore how privacy and data protection guarantees are a crucial tool for curbing the targeted spread of false or manipulative content and other problematic strategies used by political actors that are amplified by digital technologies such as artificial intelligence systems. 

The recommendations are part of a broader regional initiative and build on the legal and institutional safeguards already in place in Brazil. They seek to promote greater coordination among oversight institutions, civil society, and digital platforms, and encourage the solid implementation of privacy and data protection guarantees as drivers of electoral integrity. Read the full document below. 

The Link Between the Integrity of the Electoral Process and Privacy 

Protecting the integrity of the electoral process in the face of internet and social media use is a challenge that many policymakers are addressing or are willing to address. Online, content that can affect the integrity of the electoral process is increasingly personalized. This phenomenon is so concerning that it has been identified as one of the main global short- and medium-term risks. 

In an era of generative AI, the economic cost and technical difficulty of producing and spreading false or synthetic content to deceive, manipulate, or simulate authenticity have been considerably reduced. That intensifies concern over the integrity of the electoral process. Meanwhile, online privacy and personal data protection remain unfinished business in Latin America. 

There is an intrinsic connection between the ability to collect and process large amounts of personal data and the way false or manipulative content is created and distributed—on social media and messaging apps in particular, and on the internet in general. For this reason, applying strict laws and policies on personal data protection and privacy makes it possible to reduce the impact of false or manipulative content. This is especially important in electoral contexts, where such content affects and impoverishes public debate, directly affecting political and electoral rights and the integrity of the electoral process. 

This phenomenon predates the emergence of the internet. However, the rise of new technologies accelerates the generation and spread of false and manipulative content. This is supported by the very economic model that sustains the platforms, amplifying its effectiveness and reach. On the one hand, social media platforms have content recommendation algorithms that use personal data to generate profiles to which they can then serve targeted advertising content, including explicitly political propaganda. This technique is known as "microtargeting." 

Political microtargeting seeks to have a direct or indirect impact on democracy. It is used to persuade voters, to encourage or discourage turnout at the polls, or to raise funds using information that is deliberately taken out of context, inaccurate, or erroneous. 

The control exercised by these companies raises serious concerns about people's rights. By having access to massive amounts of personal information, these companies have the ability to shape the content that users see and interact with. This happens through the construction of profiles that can reveal habits, social relationships, political preferences, and opinions, to mention a few examples. Personal data is the fuel that amplifies risks to the integrity of the electoral process. That’s true whether it’s provided by the users themselves or generated by the platforms from their interactions online. 

For disinformation actors, access to sophisticated tools—such as those used to create "deepfakes" through generative AI, or "bots" programmed to spread content and seek to manipulate public opinion—boosts the effectiveness of this microtargeting in terms of quality and scalability, making it harder to detect as false or manipulative content. AI-generated avatars and synthetic characters that simulate voters, influencers, hosts, commentators, or community leaders can produce footage that appears spontaneous, fabricate the voices of artificial political actors, and make it harder for users to identify if a given public statement was created or mediated by technology. 

In this context, paid promotion with nanotargeting seeks to reach increasingly specific profiles with customized content, and AI-based tools are used to assess and map its impact on social networks. Drawing on the personal data of groups of voters, profiles of "synthetic voters" are created to test messages or strategies in search of the most efficient way to influence real voters. 

This rapid expansion of AI systems and hyper-personalization with data can lead to a problem of "epistemic erosion" for democratic societies, as pointed out by the UN's Independent Scientific Panel on AI Governance in 2026. 

At Access Now, Data Privacy Brasil, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we point to the enforcement of personal data protection laws and public privacy policies as an efficient mechanism for improving the quality of our democracies and reducing the manipulation of public discourse in digital environments and its impact in electoral contexts. Measures to broaden access to information for electoral decision-making, and to ensure transparency about campaigns' and political parties' use of digital technologies built on the massive processing of personal data, also play a relevant role in guaranteeing the integrity of the electoral process. 

Recommendations for Safeguarding the Integrity of Electoral Processes in Brazil in the Face of New Technologies 

Concern about the effects of spreading false, manipulative, or deliberately decontextualized content is particularly heightened in electoral contexts. From Argentina to Mexico, many countries in Latin America, including Brazil, are holding or will hold significant electoral processes in the coming period. 

Providing the public with quality information from a range of sources is an essential element for the exercise of political rights. In order to safeguard the electoral process, these countries must enforce their privacy and personal data protection laws through their competent authorities, in coordination with their judiciaries and electoral courts. 

Access Now, Data Privacy Brasil, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation propose the following recommendations to protect the integrity of the electoral process by guaranteeing privacy and data protection during electoral contexts: 

1. Strengthen personal data protection guarantees and policies as a key element for the integrity of the electoral process, in particular the principles of necessity, purpose, and proportionality:

• Prohibit the processing of sensitive personal data (such as philosophical beliefs and the labeling of ideological leanings), including inferred data, that reveals or could reveal people's political preferences for the purpose of targeting political content. In electoral contexts, the processing of sensitive personal data is only legitimate when the person has given their consent in advance, explicitly, and with strictly limited and clearly disclosed purposes of use and transfer. 
• Processing must be carried out only on personal data that is strictly necessary for the purpose being pursued. 
• Prohibit adding users to instant messaging groups for political outreach purposes, except in exceptional cases involving lists of political party members or where prior and informed consent has been given by the data subject. 
• Free, specific, and informed consent means that the person is able to make a real choice, set apart from other choices, and does not run any risk of deception, intimidation, coercion, denial of access to products or services, or other significant negative consequences if they do not give their consent. 

2. Political parties, federations, and coalitions must improve the information made available to the general public about their personal data processing activities in electoral contexts, including: 

• The personal data processing policy adopted, in compliance with data protection legislation and electoral legislation, including the measures adopted to prevent breaches of the general protection principles, to record personal data processing operations, to obtain consent appropriately, and to ensure technical and administrative security in data processing; 
• Communication channels where the data subject can obtain information about the processing of their personal data, exercise the rights provided by law, and request to opt out of receiving electronic and instant messages. 
• Information about the profiling they carry out for electoral purposes and about the procurement and use of data-based digital technologies in this context, including for purposes of paid promotion, microtargeting, network analysis, and prediction of voters' reactions or behavior. 

3. Strengthen cooperation mechanisms between the National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) and the Superior Electoral Court in order to: 

• Improve communication channels and strengthen joint initiatives to oversee compliance with data protection guarantees in the electoral context, with the publication of periodic enforcement reports. 
• Identify and dismantle coordinated strategies that compromise the integrity of the electoral process and carry out online activities that pretend to be "organic" and citizen-based when they are in fact funded or coordinated by a party, government, or company, such as bot farms, fake personal accounts managed by a single entity, AI avatars and synthetic characters that simulate real voters in order to manipulate public opinion, among others. 
• Within the scope of their powers, require the preparation and publication of a data protection impact assessment in cases involving the use of sensitive personal data or emerging technologies for voter profiling. 

4. Authorities, political parties, communicators, and social media platforms must ensure, as far as possible, that the population has access to adequate and relevant information for electoral decision-making. 

• Political parties, electoral authorities, and data protection authorities must allocate a percentage of their communications budget to warning about the consequences of microtargeting in electoral contexts; and about the use of AI avatars or synthetic voters to simulate support, rejection, outrage, or spontaneous political mobilization. 
• Strengthen alliances with fact-checkers and other relevant communicators, such as civil society organizations, influencers, and others, to identify campaigns that compromise the integrity of the electoral process and to inform the public about such alliances through different channels, including official government channels.
• Systematize the electoral proposals developed by candidates and their electoral platforms according to thematic areas to facilitate comparison between political parties. 
• Agree on strategies between authorities and online platform companies, including social media platforms and chatbots, at the start of electoral periods, so that priority is given to content developed by electoral authorities. 
• Every body, protocol, or policy created that involves authorities or public entities must be communicated in accordance with proactive transparency standards. 

5. Platforms must disable microtargeting tools for political and electoral content during previously established periods. 

6. Authorities, technical actors, academics, civil society, and/or social media platforms must collaborate in creating an algorithmic impact analysis lab that makes it possible to oversee compliance with these recommendations. 

• Produce reports on the results achieved, in particular those that document the existence of microtargeting, the use of personal data for targeting, and exposure to varied content in electoral contexts. 
• Establish strict cybersecurity protocols so that the labs prevent access to real users' private information. 

7. The authorities responsible for overseeing personal data protection and electoral matters must have sufficient functional, economic, and technical autonomy and independence to guarantee the proper exercise of their powers. 

A protein’s function is determined by its structure, and structure — the way a protein folds — is determined by its sequence of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. 

Many methods for designing novel proteins, including examples that could bind to a disease-causing molecule in our cells, involve a two-step process: The structure comes first, and then a machine-learning framework generates a repertoire of sequences that could potentially adopt that structure. 

In nature, many different amino acid sequences can fold into the same structure. At the same time, one amino acid sequence can potentially adopt different structures depending on the protein’s flexibility or a functional trigger. Therefore, when researchers use artificial intelligence to design new proteins, the challenge is to guide AI to “see” that there are many potentially useful answers — that many sequences can adopt the same fold

“For years, the field has measured success by asking whether a model can reproduce the protein sequence that evolution happened to select — our work shows that this isn’t the best metric for protein design,” says Amy E. Keating, Department of Biology head, Jay A. Stein (1968) Professor of Biology, professor of biological engineering, and senior author of a paper recently published in PNAS. 

PottsMPNN, a new machine-learning framework developed in the Department of Biology, incorporates the physical principles that govern protein structure and stability, improving sequence generation and the ability to predict how mutations will affect a protein’s stability. In other words, the model has a better understanding of the sequence-energy landscape, meaning the relationship between the identity of each amino acid and the stability of the protein.

Adding this framework to a protein design pipeline will allow researchers to design structurally feasible proteins with sequences that don’t resemble those of any native protein. 

“If we’re thinking about a completely novel, designed structure, there would be no native sequence to compare it to,” says graduate student and lead author Foster Birnbaum. “What we actually care about is how likely the generated sequences are to fold into the desired structures, how well the model understands the sequence-energy landscape, and how well it can predict the effect of mutations on the stability of the protein.” 

Beyond the noise 

In the same way that AI has recently powered some dramatic social changes, so too has machine learning impacted the pace and breadth of fundamental biological research. Only recently has it become possible to reliably use a computational model to generate a protein structure or sequence. Perhaps the most widely used model today, however, was released in 2022. 

“For a field that’s moving as fast as machine learning in biology, that model has not been surpassed — we’ve been trying to understand why that is, and what it is about that model that makes it so useful,” Birnbaum says. 

Birnbaum was first interested in strategic applications of something researchers call “noise,” or adding variations to a protein structure during training. Noise decreases the tendency of the model to overly mimic native sequences, increasing the diversity of structures for which it’s able to generate sequences.

PottsMPNN also uses a pairwise distribution to capture interactions between amino acids. The ability to account for the physical interactions between all 20 possible sequence options at a pair of positions in the protein is a key reason that PottsMPNN more accurately models the sequence-energy landscape than other methods. 

Finally, Birnbaum says, they introduced sets of evolutionarily related sequences into training the PottsMPNN framework to teach the model how different sequences can adopt the same folded structure.

Birnbaum acknowledges that in trying to shift away from adhering to native sequences, incorporating evolutionary information is, in some ways, still a reliance on them. But PottsMPNN succeeded in demonstrating that as the model depends less and less on native sequences, structural compatibility and energy prediction, including for novel proteins, improve. 

Protein design in the age of AI

“Once we can design any protein we want, that enables us to do a potentially scary amount of biological engineering,” Birnbaum says. “It’s a difficult task, but I’m really optimistic about this century’s progress in biology.”

Birnbaum hopes that the model could be further improved and fine-tuned for a specific task, which has in the past led to better predictions, for example, on the outcome or consequence of a particular mutation. 

Ultimately, according to Keating, “Our methods move the field toward designing useful new-to-nature proteins for diverse applications while providing a stronger foundation for future advances.”