"It came to my attention because I noticed they were arresting people for fixing their car," the president said Monday.

California's biggest oil producer is getting into new lines of business: carbon capture and storage and data centers.

The powerful center-right group’s position will set the tone in Parliament as lawmakers debate the future of the ETS.

Some countries desperately want to gut the Emissions Trading System, others are determined to protect it. Ireland has its work cut out.

Athens is paying subsidies to fishermen to try to contain the proliferation of the marine pest.

But the 2028 deadline leaves manufacturers little time to scale up electric two-wheeler lineups, dealerships and charging networks at once.

This Pride, we’re answering all your digital rights questions in season two of our initiative, LGBT Q&A. 

You Asked: I live in the UK, and we have age verification now on a bunch of websites (including Reddit) and now on iPhones. Can you explain what sort of data companies are actually collecting when they check for age and whether there are any real threats to my safety? 

EFF’s Answer: Age verification is a process where a website or service checks your age to determine whether a user is over a certain age, in the UK this age is 18. 

As of July 2025, all platforms in the UK that host content considered by the UK government and the country’s telecommunications regulator Ofcom to be harmful are legally obligated to check that their users are over the age of 18. If not, users cannot access the content. 

There are various privacy implications for data sharing with age verification. Unfortunately, because services may use different methods to verify users’ ages, you’ll usually have to do a little digging to learn how each provider you have verifies their users, and consider what information might be harmful to your personal safety: 

• The data itself: What info does each method require users to disclose?
• Access: Who can see the data during the course of the verification process? Does anything other than the age result leave your phone or device? Is the provider told your date of birth, or just if you’re over 18? Which third party services see the information you send?
• Retention: Who will hold onto that data after the verification process, and for how long? Sometimes it’s deleted immediately. Sometimes it hangs around forever, waiting for a data breach.
• Audits: How sure are we that the provider’s stated claims around data access and retention will happen in practice? For example, are there external audits confirming that data is not accidentally leaked to another site along the way? Ideally these will be in-depth, security-focused audits by specialized auditors like NCC Group or Trail of Bits, instead of audits that merely certify adherence to standards. 
• Visibility: Who will be aware that you’re attempting to verify your age, and will a third party provider know which platform you’re trying to verify for? Will they hang onto that data to build a profile of you?

Last year, Ofcom outlined a number of methods for online services and platforms to check users' ages. Let's look at some methods in more detail. 

Facial Age Estimation 

First up we have facial age estimation, where you show your face via photo or video, and a technology provided by a company like Yoti or Persona analyses it to estimate your age. Most of these third-party verification services upload your photo to their servers during this process. Yoti claims that “as soon as an age has been estimated, the facial image is immediately and permanently deleted.” 

You might not want to use facial age estimation if you’re worried about a current picture of your face accidentally leaking—for example, if elements in the background of your selfie might reveal your current location. Some services like k-ID and Private ID will analyse your face directly on the device, so only the age result will leave your phone. 

If you do choose (or are forced to) use the face check system, be sure to snap your selfie without anything in the background that you'd be concerned with identifying your location or embarrassing you, in case the image leaks. 

Photo-ID Matching

Photo-ID matching checks whether your photo matches a document that confirms your identity, such as a driving license or passport. This is usually considered the most sensitive, since your ID has quite a bit of information on you. For example, if you upload an image of a document that shows your face and age, and an image of yourself at the same time, these are compared to confirm they match. Like with facial age estimation services, you’ll usually be sent to a third-party provider, such as Yoti or Incode. You’d hope that they’d delete the data immediately, but that’s not always the case. Incode for example doesn’t automatically delete the data you give it once the process is complete; though if you’re reaching them through TikTok, TikTok does claim to “start the process to delete the information you submitted,” which should include telling Incode to delete your data once the process is done. 

If you want to be sure, you can ask Incode to delete that data yourself. But you’re relying on a service you don’t generally have a choice about doing the right thing, and we’ve already seen how that can fail. A previous system that Discord used to verify age had you send a picture to their general help forum, where all of the IDs sat around forever, until they got exposed in a massive data breach. Discord no longer uses that system to verify users’ ages. So, it might be fine, but unless you look into the exact company and all their practices, it’s hard to know. You can check out EFF’s guide for a few of the major platforms. 

Open Banking

Next is open banking, where you give permission for the age-check service to securely access information from your bank about whether you are over 18. The age-check service then confirms this with the online service. The user's full date of birth is not shared. Credit card age checks are also used for pornography services, where you provide your credit card details and a payment processor checks if the card is valid. As you must be over 18 to obtain a credit card in the UK, this shows you are over 18 and can therefore access a service.

Email Verification 

Email-based age estimation is also quite prevalent, where users provide an email address, and a third party technology analyses other online services where it has been used—such as banking or utility providers—to estimate your age. That third party will aggregate some data on you in the process, but the only new information they’ll find out is that you want to verify your age using a particular email address.  

Mobile Operator Checks

Mobile network operator age checks give your permission for an age-check service to confirm whether or not your mobile phone number has age filters applied to it. If there are no restrictions, this confirms you are over 18. 

There is no perfect, privacy protecting verification service

Unfortunately, none of these verification options are perfect in terms of protecting information, especially when this is compounded by the additional risks that LGBTQ+ people face with data sharing. The data can reveal someone’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status that can be used by employers, governments, family members, scammers, or bad actors to inflict harassment, discrimination, arrest, or violence. 

There is still no widely available way to verify age online without compromising privacy—but even if there were, broad restrictions on social media will inevitably limit access to lawful speech, and valuable online communities, and arts and culture. These are just a few of the reasons that EFF is against age-gating mandates and is working to stop and overturn them in the UK and around the world.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 30 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02687-w

The ocean absorbs a vast amount of carbon dioxide, mitigating climate change. The projected decrease in this absorption is often attributed to a global-warming-induced slowdown in circulation, but analysis using a mechanistic carbon decomposition and attribution framework reveals that the carbon cycle response depends on the emissions trajectory — with warming dominating under low-emission, high-mitigation scenarios.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 30 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02674-1

Understanding the socioeconomic impact of climate change at fine scale is essential for promoting real-world actions. Here I look back at a 2018 paper that disaggregated the global economic damages from climate change and discuss how high granularity analyses advance climate impact research and policy progress.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 30 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02675-0

The scale of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) could determine the extent of co-emitted air pollutants in net-zero scenarios and potential health impacts. By linking a series of models and datasets, researchers find that low-CDR pathways lead to a more equitable distribution of health benefits across the USA.

The Antarctic ozone hole was discovered in 1985, when scientists observed a severe depletion in the Earth’s protective layer of stratospheric ozone. Industrial chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), then widely used as refrigerants, propellants, foam-blowing agents, and solvents, were at the root of the ozone depletion. After concerted global effort to phase out the use of CFCs, ozone today is recovering, especially in the Antarctic. 

The discovery of the ozone hole was possible thanks, in part, to the measurement tools that were available at the time. Advances in those tools, along with satellites and other monitoring technologies, have since allowed scientists to track ozone’s recovery. 

But what if today’s tech was available much earlier? Would scientists have been able to spot even earlier signs of human-induced ozone depletion? And if so, when would those first signs have popped up, and where? 

MIT scientists now have some answers. The team, led by atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon, has carried out a thought experiment in which they consider a hypothetical world where today’s atmospheric monitoring capabilities were available throughout the last century. In this scenario, they simulated the atmosphere’s chemistry through history and discovered not only when the earliest sign of ozone depletion would have been detectable, but also where, and why. 

In a study appearing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists suggest that the first signs of ozone depletion appeared as early as 1957 — about 30 years before the ozone hole was discovered. And, this first signal of ozone loss popped up not in the Antarctic, but in the upper stratosphere of the tropics. What’s more, the cause of this early depletion was not due to CFCs, but to another industrial chemical: carbon tetrachloride. 

“What we’ve learned from textbooks is that CFCs result in ozone depletion,” says the study’s first author, Jian Guan, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “It turns out there was another compound that caused ozone depletion much earlier than CFCs. This was a big surprise.”

For Solomon, who was an early pioneer in the study of ozone’s effects on the atmosphere, and who was the first to show that CFCs were the main agent eroding Antarctic ozone, the new results were a complete shock. 

“The fact that ozone depletion would have happened as early as the late 1950s, which is much earlier than I would have thought, just absolutely blew my mind,” says Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and Chemistry at MIT. “This study shows it’s really important to keep monitoring so that we can fully understand how the atmosphere responds and recovers.”

The study’s MIT co-authors include Peidong Wang, Yaowei Li, and Kane Stone; along with Benjamin Santer of the University of East Anglia; Qiang Fu of the University of Washington; Rolando Garcia, Douglas Kinnison, and Jun Zhang of the National Center for Atmospheric Research; Jean-Francois Lamarque of Climate Modeling and Analysis LLC; and Gabriel Chiodo of the Spanish National Research Council. 

Chlorine connection

Ozone is a highly reactive molecule, made from three oxygen atoms, that exists naturally in the upper layers of the atmosphere. In the stratosphere, ozone acts as a shield, absorbing the sun’s rays and reducing the harmful ultraviolet radiation that can reach the Earth’s surface. 

In the late 1980s, after scientists first observed signs of ozone depletion in the Antarctic, Solomon led expeditions to the region to measure the stratosphere’s composition. Those measurements confirmed that ozone’s agent of destruction was CFCs — the chemicals which were used globally in refrigeration, air conditioning, and aerosol propellants, among other uses. 

Specifically, Solomon measured higher-than-expected levels of chlorine dioxide in the Antarctic stratosphere. The presence of this molecule, in the same place where ozone depletion was observed, had only one chemical explanation: Ozone was being broken apart by rogue atoms of chlorine. At the time, chlorine-heavy CFCs were in wide use, and MIT chemist Mario Molina proposed that if CFCs drifted up to the stratosphere, photons from the sun could break apart the molecules and release atoms of chlorine, which would then be free to break apart ozone’s oxygen atoms. 

Molina’s work, and Solomon’s measurements, were key in showing that CFCs could deplete ozone — a discovery that earned Molina a share of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Soon after, nearly every country in the world signed the Montreal Protocol, which ultimately led to the successful phase-out of CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances. In recent years, as a result of that global cooperation, scientists have observed initial signs of ozone recovery.

“We know what we have now, and ozone is starting to recover,” Solomon says. “But no one has ever really documented where and when and why the first ozone depletion would have happened.”

Signal over noise

For their new study, Solomon, Guan, and their colleagues took a “what-if” approach, posing the question: What if the past had the monitoring capabilities of the present? When would we have been able to detect the earliest sign of human-induced ozone depletion? 

Today’s monitoring tools are sensitive to a certain signal to noise, meaning they can identify patterns of ozone loss that are more likely a “signal” of human-induced depletion (such as from CFCs), versus ozone loss that is due to “noise,” such as random fluctuations from weather and natural phenomena. 

With this in mind, the team looked to reproduce the chemistry of the atmosphere over the last century to see whether they could see a signal over the noise, based on the sensitivity of today’s monitoring tools. 

The team used 16 different model runs, each of which simulates varying conditions and dynamics of the atmosphere at various latitudes and altitudes, as well as the concentrations and interactions of ozone and other molecules. Ozone is affected by not only human-caused chemicals but also natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions and El Niño weather patterns. Each model run simulates ozone’s response to these natural phenomena, which the team combined to establish a range of “noise,” or ozone depletion that likely is due to natural variability.

They added to each model the various industrial chemicals that were known to have been produced at various times over the last century. 

“Year by year, we have estimates from industry of how much of these chemicals were made and sold globally, and the emissions of all these chemicals, which the models include,” Solomon explains. “And in the case of carbon tetrachloride, the really cool thing is, we also have ice core data.”

Ice cores are drilled-out cylinders of deeply buried ice, that had formed in the Antarctic and Arctic from the falling and layering of snow over hundreds of years. Ice cores contain the remnants of snow, as well as whatever trace chemicals in the atmosphere the snow originally fell through. Scientists can therefore use ice cores to estimate the composition of the atmosphere through history. 

“We actually see in the ice cores that carbon tetrachloride starts increasing already by the 1940s,” Solomon notes. 

The team incorporated industrial and ice core data into their models, then looked to see whether a signal of human-induced ozone loss stood out from the noise of natural fluctuations. Their analysis revealed that a signal did appear, as early as 1957. Not only did they see when the signal appeared, but also where: in the tropics, rather than the Antarctic. 

The researchers say that human-induced ozone loss was likely occurring globally, but was easier to spot in the tropical upper stratosphere, since that is the region where the range of natural fluctuations is the smallest, and therefore where a signal can stand out better.

Finally, the analysis indicated that carbon tetrachloride, and not CFCs, was the cause of the earliest ozone depletion. 

“That’s the only ozone-depleting substance that was increasing that early,” Solomon says. “We started using carbon tetrachloride in the 1930s as a dry-cleaning agent, and as a degreasing solvent. We didn’t start using CFCs until quite a bit later.”

Carbon tetrachloride has since been phased out of use in most of the world, initially due to its health concerns; the chemical can cause nervous system disorders with prolonged exposure and is a suspected carcinogen. Since the Montreal Protocol began to tightly limit its use in the 1990s, the molecule’s concentrations in the atmosphere have been on a decline. Still, Solomon says the new study highlights the need for vigilance in monitoring carbon tetrachloride, CFCs, and other ozone-depleting substances that may have been phased out but can still linger for decades.

“We’ve gone through a big effort to get rid of these chemicals,” Solomon says. “Don’t we have an obligation to keep monitoring to make sure the atmosphere responds the way we think it should?”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the European Commission.

The MIT Music Technology and Computation (MTC) Graduate Program — launched in fall 2024 as a collaboration between the Music and Theater Arts Section in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), and the School of Engineering (SoE) — presented its inaugural MIT Music Technology Research Showcase on May 13. The event played to a standing room-only house in the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building’s Thomas Tull Concert Hall and featured diverse and captivating research presentations and music performances.

The celebratory occasion featured MTC’s first five enrollees (all of whom were previously MIT undergraduates), alongside several PhD students and faculty. Each scholar presented inspiring exemplars of artful engineering that reflected the broader and burgeoning music technology scene at MIT. 

The 90-minute event exhibited a broad array of research projects, including a real-time visualization of what an AI co-improvising agent is about to play on a piano; a sound-art installation based on noisy network communication; a hip-hop dance circle where music is generated from dancing; and the use of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals to identify the musical tunes that our brains are imagining.

“A new space for exploration and insights” 

An interplay of technical presentation with live performance, the showcase began with remarks from SHASS Dean and professor of philosophy Agustín Rayo, SOE Dean and professor of chemical engineering Paula Hammond, and MTC Director and professor of the practice of music Eran Egozy.

Rayo began, “The goal of this program is simple — for MIT to lead the world in music technology theory and application,” adding “it’s not just about making music with technology; it’s also about working across disciplines to help better shape the future of expression in an AI-driven world, all while reflecting MIT at its best.” 

Rayo noted the graduate program was made possible in part by the opening of the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building in 2025, which provided new classrooms, studios, rehearsal spaces, and a dedicated music technology lab. He also credited the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing for its support for the graduate program. 

Hammond followed: “As those in this room already know, music and engineering share some common roots. Both rely on mathematical precision and are informed by defined structures, rhythms, and frequencies. Both demand hard work and technical know-how, paired with inspiration and imagination, to create something entirely new. Given those congruities, it’s no surprise that so many faculty, students, and staff members across MIT are also accomplished musicians and artists.”  

She continued, “Our music program is a gem. Only at MIT could we bring the top technologists and the top musicians together to create unique opportunities for collaboration. Here we have brought together faculty and students who identify strongly with both music and engineering to form a new space for exploration and insights. It’s a strong example of the collaborative culture that defines the Institute.”  

Egozy called the event a “harmonious hybrid of concert and symposium,” and recollected, “it’s a little mind-boggling to see what our students have achieved in just one short and fast-paced year. While we originally debated the trade-offs between a one-year and a two-year master’s program, I think this cohort really showed us that we can make huge strides in learning and research abilities in a concentrated period of time.” 

Student research on display

One of those students is Claire Southard ’25, SM ’26, who developed a machine-learning model used to identify musical notes hidden in EEG signals.  

Southard explains, “every year, musicians are diagnosed with movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and dystonia, or experience injuries that prevent them from controlling their hands and bodies in the ways required to play their instruments. Because of this, too many musicians are forced to stop doing what they love. My work explores one strategy to help such musicians perform again by translating the music they’re trying to play directly from their brain activity — bypassing the need for motor control altogether. To do this, I trained machine-learning models to predict the music a person is imagining from their brain activity measured using EEG, and many of the predicted pieces were found to be recognizable representations of what the user imagined. By designing a system that allows musicians to create music regardless of their physical abilities, I hope this work helps bring a more accessible future for music performance closer to reality.”  

Before joining MTC, Southard was initially unaware of the breadth, scope, and magnitude of what the program could offer for further pursuing and realizing her interests. “The MIT Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program taught me so much about the possibilities at the intersection of STEM and the arts," she says. "When I first started the program, I honestly wasn’t sure what counted as ‘music technology.’ Through classes, research, and conversations with faculty, guest speakers, and peers, I learned the field was far broader and more fascinating than I could have previously imagined.”  

She continues, “coming from a background in neuro- and computer science, many of my undergraduate projects happened entirely on devices. But this program allowed me to encounter more hands-on experiences, from conducting audio recordings to building electronic musical instruments from scratch.” 

Another MTC graduate, and student speaker at the 2026 SHASS Advanced Degree Ceremony, Mariano Salcedo ’25, SM ’26, presented a custom web application allowing anyone to create unique emergent visuals that are driven by real-time streaming music. To accomplish this effect, Salcedo built algorithms that leverage the complex visual behavior of self-organized systems as the means toward an aesthetically synergetic end.  

In his Advanced Degree Ceremony oration, Salcedo expressed his gratitude and admiration for the passionate people that he’s met not only in MTC, but at MIT overall. In an appropriately compassionate mode, he empathetically opined, “I think what times like this call from us is to lead the way in human and humane-centered technology, which means we don’t only just ask what we can build, but we also ask who is it going to affect, who is not going to affect? Who does it benefit?”  

Music technology thriving at MIT

Associate Professor Anna Huang SM ’08 of MTA and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS, through SCC), a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, and one of the world’s leading researchers in collaborative human-AI music-making, echoed both Southard and Salcedo’s sentiments through her keynote presentation, “In Search of Resonance in Human-AI Interaction.” A compelling and intimately conversational address, her speech emphasized the importance of centering the human musician in all that is done relating to AI, while also making efforts to include all musics of the world in its discourse at every opportunity. 

With many of her family members in the audience, Huang reflected, “I have the privilege of being in both MIT Music and EECS — an interdisciplinary, shared space. What does it mean to build music technology in this context? We’re surrounded by extremely talented musicians, so we take this co-design approach: We work with these musicians, we go into the studio, and every week we try something. And the technology grows with the creative process. We’re always trying to push both of these forward, and it’s always on the edge. It’s very, very rewarding. It’s where I feel most at home.”   

Huang also explained how this practice sets the stage for a new Studies in Music Technology subject that she will be co-teaching in the fall with recently appointed Professor of Theater Arts Grisha Coleman. Class 21M.369/569 (Tuning Attention: Creative Practices in Movement, Sound, and AI) proposes that the study of sound and movement practices can inform how we build and envision computational systems, focusing particularly on our relationship to AIs. It will introduce students to a range of musical practices in improvisation and somatics by way of motion-capture technologies, critical interaction design, generative modeling, and algorithms for interpretability and learning through human feedback. 

All considered, the future of the MIT Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program is bright. Egozy says MTC admitted 10 master’s students for the 2026-27 academic year from over 100 applicants. Unlike this year’s class, next year’s students will not only include recent MIT undergraduate alumni, but also new faces to campus. 

“Widening the pool to graduates of other schools and institutions will bring an extraordinary wealth of perspectives and experiences to the program. Additionally, all three shared faculty between MTA and EECS — including Mark Rau, Paris Smaragdis SM ’97, PhD ’01, and Huang — are inviting new Music Technology PhD students to their labs by way of EECS,” Egozy says. 

Embodying its mission, MTC is proving to be a vibrant, multidisciplinary program that attracts many kinds of students with a variety of career objectives from wide-ranging backgrounds. 

“Despite their diversity, our students all possess a central commonality,” Egozy says, “not just a shared love for music, but also a deep desire to augment that passion by way of technology in a very warmhearted, humanitarian way.” 

List of projects

Rachel Loh, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Visualizing the Internal State of Music Models for Live Human-AI Improvisation” 

Noble Harasha, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Modeling Subjectivity and Collective Sensory Perception as Noisy, Analog Communication in Feedback-Driven Networks” 

Z Chen, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Generative Music as a Catalyst for Social Choreography” 

Nithya Shikarpur: “The Moving Drone: A Live Improvisation in the Context of Hindustani Music with the Human Voice, Generative models, and Loops”

Mariano Salcedo, Alex Rigopulos (1992) Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Neural Cellular Automata for Interactive Music Visualization”

Claire Southard, John Piscitello Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Neural Decoding of Imagined Music”

Stephen Brade, Suwan Kim, Valerie Chen: “Whale, Cello (there?): A Musical Dialog between Cello and a Real-time Diffusion Model Trained on Whale Songs” 

Whitney Henry and Harikesh Wong have been named 2026 Pew Scholars in the Biomedical Sciences. The Pew Charitable Trusts announced the 21-member class of early-career researchers, which includes the two MIT scientists as well as two alumni, on June 16. Each scholar will receive four years of funding to pursue cutting-edge research into human health and disease. Xin Gu PhD ’22 of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Christina Tringides ’15 of Rice University were also selected as scholars.

Henry, the Robert A. Swanson (1969) Career Development Professor of Life Sciences and a faculty member at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, will use the Pew scholarship to examine how a stress-induced cell death program called ferroptosis contributes to injury and regeneration in the liver. Wong, assistant professor of biology at MIT and core member at the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard, will use his award to investigate how groups of immune cells reach a “communal decision” about whether to tolerate or attack a particular target.

Whitney Henry

Henry’s research centers on ferroptosis — an iron-dependent form of regulated cell death — and its role in shaping cell fate and tissue remodeling. Her lab investigates why some cells can withstand stress while others cross the threshold for ferroptosis, focusing on the molecular, metabolic, and tissue-level cues that shape ferroptosis vulnerability. The work draws on chemical biology, metabolomics, functional genomics, and in vivo models. By defining the mechanisms that govern ferroptosis susceptibility, Henry’s group aims not only to identify novel therapies that target the most dangerous subpopulations of cancer cells, those that are highly metastatic and resistant to conventional treatment, but also to advance understanding of diseases in which ferroptosis drives tissue injury, fibrosis, or impaired repair. 

Harikesh Wong

Wong investigates how groups of cells organize into networks that collectively process information and control immune responses within tissues. These networks must continually balance the body’s need to protect itself against pathogens and tumors with the need to preserve healthy tissue function. Combining the tools of immunology with high-resolution fluorescence microscopy, computational modeling, and gene manipulation, his lab seeks to map, model, and manipulate the cell-cell interactions that govern these decisions within intact tissues, revealing how subtle changes in multicellular organization and communication can shift immune responses toward pathogen clearance and tolerance, or toward autoimmunity, chronic inflammation, and cancer.

Pew scholars are chosen from applicants nominated by leading academic institutions across the United States. This year’s class of 21 was selected from 211 nominees. The incoming scholars join a legacy of more than 1,000 scientists supported by the program since 1985. During their time as scholars, they will meet annually with fellow Pew-funded scientists to build connections across a wide variety of disciplines.

“Scientific discovery is moving at a rapid pace, and now more than ever we need curious and creative researchers leading the charge,” says Lee Niswander, a 1995 Pew scholar and chair of the program’s national advisory committee. “These new biomedical scholars are prepared to meet that challenge, and I look forward to watching their research unfold.”

The Illinois legislature recently passed House Bill 5511, which imposes a sweeping, device-level age-gating framework across nearly all internet-enabled hardware, operating systems, and online services. This well-intentioned but deeply flawed piece of legislation will harm young people who rely on the internet to access essential information and find community. That’s why we’re urging the Illinois governor to veto the measure. 

Under this new regime, digital platforms are forced to collect and share users' ages to platforms and websites. It also strips away basic, everyday features like personalized content feeds and overnight notifications for young people unless they can secure "verifiable parental consent."

H.B. 5511 is a massive privacy and free speech nightmare. That’s why we sent a letter to formally urge Governor J.B. Pritzker to veto the bill.

Much of H.B. 5511 is modeled after controversial legislation passed in California (A.B. 1043) and New York’s Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) for Kids Act, both of which have already drawn immense blowback from open-source communities, privacy advocates, and tech stakeholders. For Illinois to copy this suspect age-bracketing regime before either law has even gone into effect, been tested in court, or proven functional is premature, economically risky, and legally wasteful.

H.B. 5511 is a massive privacy and free speech nightmare. That’s why we sent a letter to formally urge Governor J.B. Pritzker to veto the bill. Far from protecting children, the bill will effectively dismantle online anonymity, jeopardize data security, and severely restrict access to constitutionally protected speech for young people and adults alike. Finally, these schemes cut off vital lifelines for vulnerable youth in non-traditional families and pose an existential threat to the open-source ecosystem that underpins the modern internet.

For a deeper look at the constitutional, policy, and technological concerns with H.B. 5511, you can read our full letter here. 

In the early months of a PhD program, everything can feel urgent. Ideas move quickly, expectations feel high, and timelines, especially initial deadlines, may become heavy.  In those moments, Professor Anantha P. Chandrakasan is there for his students, armed with steady mentorship and clear guidance to help them regain perspective and move forward with confidence.

Appointed provost of MIT in 2025, Chandrakasan is a pioneering researcher in low-power electronics, integrated circuits, and energy-efficient system design within MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His work has shaped how modern devices — from mobile systems to large-scale computing platforms — manage energy consumption and performance. Spanning circuits and systems for sensing, communication, and machine learning, his research focuses on pushing the limits of efficiency. Students note that his scholarship is defined by rigor, precision, and a forward-thinking approach, and that the same principles carry through to his mentorship.

One of the 18 faculty members within the 2025–27 Committed to Caring cohort, Chandrakasan is recognized for a style that meets students not just at the level of their research, but at the level of their experience. His guidance works to ground students, balancing ambition with steadiness, and precision with perspective. Across his lab and the broader MIT community, he has become known for a simple but clear pattern: When pressure rises, he is there to help.

Interrupting the pressure cycle

One student recalls their first semester at the Institute as a blur of excitement, but also of mounting stress. Given the opportunity to contribute to a conference-bound project, they pushed hard to meet a January submission deadline. 

“I poured myself into the work, but as the deadline approached, it became clear that the project was taking longer than expected,” remembers the student. “I began to … worry that I might not finish in time.”

When Chandrakasan noticed, his response was not to continue with the current unsustainable pace of research, but to recalibrate it — adding both perspective and a support structure to help ground the work.

He connected the student with a more senior lab member, creating a steady channel for both technical troubleshooting and day-to-day guidance. “This not only helped me overcome research challenges, but also created a natural environment for me to engage in discussions and build relationships with lab members,” the student reflected. 

Within Chandrakasan’s research group, mentorship is never confined to one-on-one advising. He actively builds structures that allow students to learn from one another, pairing newer members with more experienced researchers and encouraging organic collaboration across projects.

These connections serve a dual purpose. They accelerate technical growth, but they also reduce the isolation that can accompany early-stage research. By embedding students within a broader support network, he ensures that they are never navigating unfamiliar challenges entirely on their own. 

One nominator describes this emphasis on camaraderie as a defining feature of the lab: an environment where independence is cultivated, but never at the expense of connection.

Redefining what counts

In addition to creating this support structure, Chandrakasan also reframed the overwhelmed student’s situation. Rather than treating the conference deadline as definitive, he reminded the student that one missed milestone would not determine the trajectory of their PhD, or of their career as a whole. “His thoughtful words and calm demeanor helped me regain my balance, both emotionally and academically,” noted the student. 

It was a small shift in framing, but a consequential one. The pressure that had once felt absolute became part of a much larger perspective. Armed with that reassurance, the student recovered footing and ultimately completed the submission. 

While this particular story of looming deadlines and stress is one student’s experience, it is a relatable one for graduate students. Within academic spaces, it is easy for tangible milestones — papers, conferences, and results — to become the primary measure of progress. Chandrakasan does not dismiss their importance, but he does encourage a broader view.

“There will always be another opportunity,” he tells students. This principle serves as a consistent baseline for how to engage with the work. The goal is not to remove challenges, but to ensure that the work can endure through them. 

Chandrakasan’s advising philosophy centers on calibration: of expectations, goals, and how students interact with their academic work. “My technical advising is direct, because I believe clarity is a form of care,” shares Chandrakasan. In his eyes, precise feedback is one of the most meaningful forms of support a mentor can offer.

While his style is often candid, it is never harsh — honest feedback is softened by sincerity. Students describe an approach that is highly attuned to the individual, with Chandrakasan compromising, showing empathy, and adapting his teaching style to fit their needs. When asked, Chandrakasan shares that his advising technique is “always personal … focused on drawing out each student’s strengths, rather than imposing a single template of success.”

Students are encouraged to arrive at their own conclusions, with Chandrakasan shifting the focus from short-term fixes to long-term capability. “I help in creating space for students to think deeply, develop their own perspectives, and arrive at their own solutions,” he explains. This strategy “builds both independence and confidence.” 

His mentorship extends beyond immediate outcomes. It shapes how students come to understand their own potential, how they navigate difficulty, and how they, in turn, show up for others. In a field driven by innovation and speed, Chandrakasan’s approach offers something grounding: a model of mentorship where rigor and care are not competing priorities, but mutually reinforcing ones.

Reflecting on their time in Chandrakasan’s lab, his student shared that “I learned that real mentorship is not just about solving problems — it’s about understanding the person behind them.”

“Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics,” by MIT Architecture alumnus and researcher Alexandros Haridis, on view at the MIT Keller Gallery through June 30, examines 20th- and 21st-century efforts to transform computing into a medium for creative production and aesthetic judgment in architecture and the applied arts. Drawing on philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and design computation, the exhibition translates algorithms, theories, and machine-learning systems into physical installations and interactive visualizations.

Q: What inspired “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics,” and what questions does it explore?

A: The conceptual origins of “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” emerged from three intersecting lines of research.

First, while completing my PhD in design and computation in the MIT Department of Architecture around 2022, I observed in real time how advances in data-driven machine learning — systems such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion — were rapidly entering public discussions about creativity, aesthetic judgment, design, and even high-profile art auctions.

At the same time, my own research was already focused on aesthetic judgment and evaluation, and it became increasingly clear to me that many of the questions presented publicly as “new” in relation to AI actually have a much longer history across the 20th century. For example, in the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, a foundational event for the field of AI, creation and evaluation processes were identified as one of seven key dimensions of human intelligence that future AI research should address.

Second, the exhibition was influenced by research in design computation and shape grammars that investigates relationships between human insight and computation through rule-based methods, rather than purely data-driven learning. More recent interpretative studies of aesthetic theories — drawing from figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oscar Wilde, and even John von Neumann — have been especially important to me. These studies examine whether theories of aesthetic value and comparison articulated in philosophical and literary texts may reveal possibilities or limitations in contemporary models of digital computation and AI in architecture and design.

Finally, the exhibition was motivated by the use of design, fabrication, and data visualization as methods for interpreting mathematical concepts, algorithms, and “black box” machine-learning systems. Across disciplines, researchers increasingly use reconstruction and visualization techniques to make computational systems more tangible and interpretable — from neural network visualization in computer science to software reconstruction and digital fabrication in architecture and curatorial practice.

Q: How do you translate research on computation and aesthetics into an exhibition?

A: The approach of the exhibition is to ask what exactly in a particular research paper or book captures its most salient idea, and then use design to interpret that idea in a visual, spatial, and experiential format. Drawing on design techniques such as software reconstruction, physical making, and data visualization, the exhibition takes written sources that are dense with algorithmic ideas, abstract concepts, and mathematical formulas, and translates them into stories in space that include interaction, material form, and digital visualization.

The exhibition itself is organized around five thematic areas: Aesthetic Measure, Aesthetic Guidelines, Algorithmic Aesthetics, Aesthetic Appropriation, and Aesthetic Novelty. Each theme functions as a selective “window” into a distinct computational approach to aesthetic judgment drawn from a specific publication — a book or research paper. The titles of these themes are derived from concepts central to each publication. For example, “measure” refers to mathematician George Birkhoff’s work in the 1930s to quantify aesthetic value mathematically, while “novelty” examines how the machine learning system AICAN judges generated images according to a theory in cognitive aesthetics that balances familiarity and deviation from known artistic styles.

Across all five cases, the key insight is that design itself can function as a method of interpretative translation — a way of making visible, tangible, and experiential what traditional academic scholarship in technical domains typically communicates only through words and word-like representational devices, such as scientific diagrams and tables.

Q: What questions are you hoping to explore next?

A: “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” is conceived both as a research exhibition and as an ongoing platform for investigating how computational systems participate in processes of aesthetic judgment, generation, and transformation across architecture and the applied arts.

One of the central questions of the exhibition — and one that researchers across architecture, design, and engineering are increasingly focusing on — is computational evaluation beyond purely performative or functional requirements. This applies to many different design spaces, whether buildings, structural forms, or everyday products. The exhibition’s case studies suggest that many of these questions long predate current interest in computing and AI, and have been approached through a range of computational and theoretical models of evaluation since at least the early 20th century.

At the same time, I’m increasingly interested in how these ideas can move into broader applications related to the built environment. In particular, I am interested in how research connected to “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” can help designers and engineers better understand how computation — whether rule-based or data-driven — can inform us about what contributes positively to human experience in relation to the spaces and objects people inhabit and use.

Finally, a direction I continue to explore is the methodological role of design itself as an interpretative device. Through software reconstruction, visualization, and physical making, the exhibition uses design to translate opaque computational systems into more legible, tangible, and experiential artifacts. More broadly, this opens questions not only about mechanizing “beauty” or “taste” (the traditional preoccupation of aesthetic formalism in the 20th century), but also about how traditional forms of research scholarship and communication may evolve through spatial, visual, and public-facing formats.

You have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in Chatrie v. United States.  

The case involved geofence warrants, a form of dragnet surveillance police have used to vacuum up location data from electronic devices of people who happen to be in the vicinity of a crime. EFF had joined the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Virginia, and the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law in filing an amicus brief in the case. 

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The decision in Chatrie is important: It is the first digital surveillance decision by the Court since its landmark 2018 ruling Carpenter v. United States, which involved prolonged tracking of people’s movements using cell phone location data. The new case expands that ruling by confirming that even shorter-term surveillance of location data can constitute a search because it can still reveal “private matters,” including “a wealth of detail about a person’s familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.”  

The case is also important because the Court also recognized the records generated by the apps on a user’s phone—records we necessarily share with third-party tech company—are a user’s “own” and require Fourth Amendment protection. This is true, regardless of whether those records are “emails, documents, photographs, [ ] calendars” or location data. This will likely have broad implications for data generated by other apps on our phones, even if we click “agree” to sharing that data with third-party tech companies.  

Geofence warrants don’t name a suspect or a specific individual or device the way typical warrants do. Instead, they compel companies—almost always Google—to provide information on every electronic device in a given area during a given time period. This creates a high risk of suspicion falling on innocent people and can reveal sensitive and private information about where individuals have traveled in the past. 

Geofence warrants are the digital equivalent of police going person to person, home to home, without suspicion that any device holder has a connection to a crime. This turns innocent bystanders into suspects, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  

In Chatrie, a 2019 geofence warrant compelled Google to search the accounts of all its hundreds of millions of users to see if any one of them was within a radius police drew around a Northern Virginia crime scene. This area amounted to several football fields in size and encompassed numerous homes, businesses, and a church. 

A federal district court in Virginia in 2022 held that the geofence warrant plainly violated  the Fourth Amendment. If the police want to get information on every device in the area, they must also establish probable cause to search every person in the area, the court said. The judge noted the government lacked particularized probable cause as to every individual within the geofence, which swept up innocent people and covered over 70,000 square meters in a busy area. 

The decision set an important precedent in finding the warrant overbroad and unconstitutional and was later followed by a 2024 federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling holding that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” However, the Chatrie lower court allowed the government to use the evidence it obtained because it relied on the warrant in “good faith.” A much divided en banc panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 2025 affirmed this “good faith” finding in the lower court’s opinion. 

Google in 2023 announced changes to how it stores location data, with the effect of eventually making it impossible for the company to respond to geofence warrants. Since July 2025, mass geofence searches of Google users’ location data have not been possible.  

However, Google is not the only company collecting location data, nor the only way for police to access mass amounts of data on people with no connection to a crime. As we’ve written about extensively, data brokers collect and aggregate location data from many different apps on our phones and provide that data to police. And police can use “cell tower dump” warrants to get access to data on everyone within range of specific cell towers. Suspicionless searches like these drag a net through vast swaths of information in hopes of identifying previously unknown suspects—ensnaring innocent bystanders along the way. 

Chatrie could have wide-ranging implications beyond location data as well. The Supreme Court affirmed that app data is subject to the Fourth Amendment, because users “reasonably view” it as their own and reasonably expect it “to be shielded from the ‘inquisitive eyes’ of the government.” Justice Gorsuch, in an opinion concurring in the judgment, called location data a user’s “personal property,” no different from myriad other “effects” explicitly protected by the text of the Fourth Amendment.  As the Court concluded, “the point of carrying smartphones is to use is to use what is on them,” so the Fourth Amendment has to protect more than just location data generated by the act of carrying the phone itself. 

The Court ultimately did not decide whether the particular warrant at issue in Chatrie was “reasonable” or whether the “good faith” doctrine applied. The case now heads back to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to address these questions.  

But regardless of how the Fourth Circuit rules on remand, this Chatrie opinion will shape how lower courts address police access to location and other data going forward. We look forward to citing Chatrie to press future courts to recognize broad Fourth Amendment protections for user data.

Interesting research on a new class of weak RSA keys: keys with lots of zeros. It turns out that these keys are out in the wild.

The badkeys project is an open-source service that checks public keys for known vulnerabilities. While developing this tool, Hanno collected a massive number of real-world keys from public sources, including Certificate Transparency logs, internet-wide TLS and SSH scans, PGP keys, and many others. By searching this dataset for unexpectedly sparse RSA moduli, we uncovered a large number of keys in the wild with the patterns in Figure 1...

The ordinary graphite in pencil lead is proving to be surprisingly multifaceted at the microscale. 

In a study appearing today in the journal Nature, MIT researchers report that a certain microscopic structure found in natural graphite can host multiple superconducting states. Superconductivity is an electronic state of matter in which electrons pair up and glide through a material with zero resistance. 

While there are thousands of materials that are known to be superconductors, it is rare for one material to host multiple forms of superconductivity. 

The researchers discovered the multiple superconducting states in atomically thin exfoliations of graphite, known as graphene. Specifically, graphene is a single-atom-thin sheet of carbon atoms arranged precisely in a microscopic lattice. The team made its discoveries in samples of rhombohedral graphene, which is a natural structure within graphite consisting of a stack of four or five graphene layers. 

Interestingly, the researchers found that several of the new superconducting states in rhombohedral graphene are able to persist in the presence of a magnetic field, which normally kills superconductivity. 

And in a further surprise, these superconducting states even get stronger when exposed to a magnetic field. 

Overall, the findings reveal a new family of unconventional superconducting states in one seemingly simple material. 

“People might assume that this is a simple, boring carbon material,” says Long Ju, the Lawrence C. and Sarah W. Biedenharn Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. “But we can control this material by tuning certain experimental ‘knobs,’ such as electrical voltages. This is how a simple physical material can exhibit so many different superconducting properties.” 

It’s still unclear exactly how each of the multiple superconducting states arise, or how they are able to persist under a magnetic field, when normally superconductivity should fade.

“From a fundamental physics point of view, it’s very exotic that a magnetic field doesn’t kill superconductivity, and instead it boosts it,” Ju says. “We have provided a lot of experimental results and provided the nutrition that people can absorb to try to think about what’s going on here.” 

The study’s MIT co-authors include co-first authors Junseok Seo and Shenyong Ye, together with Tonghang Han, Zhenghan Wu, Wei Xu, Jixiang Yang, Emily Aitken, Prayoga Liong, Phatthanon Pattanakanvijit, Zach Hadjri, and Mingda Li. External collaborators are co-first author Armel Cotten and members of Dominik Zumbuhl’s group at the University of Basel in Switzerland, plus others at Florida State University, the University of Florida, Gainesville, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan. 

Natural steps

Graphene and other atomically thin, two-dimensional materials can exhibit unexpected electronic, magnetic, thermal, and physical properties. And when two or more sheets of graphene are stacked and twisted at precise orientations, the “magic-angle” structure can suddenly host weird and exotic phenomena. 

Ju’s group has been probing the exceptional properties of graphene. But rather than artificially stacking and twisting layers, they have looked for interesting behavior in naturally occurring graphene structures. In recent years, they have unearthed surprising electronic properties in rhombohedral graphene. This particular configuration consists of graphene layers stacked on top of each other, each one slightly offset from the last, similar to the steps in a staircase. 

Rhombohedral graphene can be found naturally in ordinary graphite. But to find it first requires exfoliating a block of graphite (usually with Scotch tape), then searching the exfoliated sample for the telltale staircase-like pattern, which researchers can then isolate for further experimentation. 

Using this approach, Ju and his colleagues have been able to isolate and probe samples of four- and five-layer rhombohedral graphene. They have so far discovered that the structure can host a rare, “chiral” form of superconductivity, as well as fractional electron charge, among other behavior. 

In the flow

For their new study, the team took a slightly different approach in studying rhombohedral graphene. Previously, they electrically “doped” their samples, progressively adding electrons as they passed a separate electric current into the material. They then measured the voltage, or essentially the force that pushes the current through the material, and looked for instances when the voltage dropped to zero, indicating that the current was passing through without resistance.

In this way, the team has observed superconductivity when adding electrons to rhombohedral graphene. So they wondered: What might happen if they did the opposite, and took electrons away? 

In their new study, the team looked for signs of superconductivity as they carefully removed electrons from rhombohedral graphene, progressively lowering the material’s electron density, as they applied a separate, external electric current to measure the electrical resistance. In these experiments, they also applied external magnetic field along directions parallel and perpendicular to the graphene plane. These experiments were carried out in collaboration with Zumbuhl’s group in Switzerland, who provided access to a laboratory setup in which graphene samples could be exposed to high magnetic fields and ultracold temperatures. 

In these experiments, the researchers found that at certain electron densities, four different superconducting states emerged. What’s more, three of the states persisted in the presence of a relatively high magnetic field. 

Normally, magnets destroy superconductivity by severing the bond between the paired electrons gliding through the material. 

But in Ju’s experiments, the team observed three superconducting states that survived in a magnetic field up to around 9 tesla, which is about 180,000 times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field. In these instances, the magnetic field they applied was in a parallel orientation with respect to the plane of the material. When they switched the magnetic field to a perpendicular orientation, they discovered another surprise: At a certain electron density, superconductivity not only persisted, but increased. The material was able to continue superconducting, at higher temperatures than predicted. 

Every superconducting material has a critical temperature below which electrons can conduct without resistance, and above which superconductivity cannot persist. But the team found that, at a certain electron density, and in the presence of a perpendicular magnetic field, superconductivity in rhombohedral graphene was able to survive beyond the material’s critical temperature that corresponds to zero magnetic field. 

“The superconductivity actually is enhanced, as in, the transition temperature goes from 55 millikelvin to probably 90 millikelvin,” Ju explains. “At the same time, the material can take another 50 or 60 percent extra current before superconductivity gets destroyed. And that is very unusual.”

The researchers are unsure of what microscopic behavior is enabling multiple and unconventional superconducting states, though they propose one idea. Conventional superconductivity emerges when electrons pair up. These “Cooper pairs” consist of electrons with opposite spin, and it’s thought that a magnetic field can pull the spins out of their opposite configurations, and as a result, break up superconductivity. 

Instead, the team proposes that perhaps in rhombohedral graphene, and at certain electron densities, electrons can pair up with aligned spins. Any magnetic field would still pull on the spins, but in the same direction, preserving their alignment, and their superconductivity. 

The researchers acknowledge that the idea needs much more investigation, both experimentally and theoretically. For now, they see the results as a demonstration of what new and exotic phenomena can emerge in a seemingly simple material, with the right measurements and controls. 

“We can control the simplest chemical and structural material— crystalline carbon— as part of the fun,” says lead author Junseok Seo, who is a graduate student in Ju’s group. “We’re not only dealing with what nature gives us, but we’re applying additional controls to change it to something that nature does not give us, but that can exist in the same material.”

This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Office of Naval Research. Device fabrication was carried out, in part, at MIT.nano.

We’ve taken one small step towards robot police officers: a drone capable of disarming a suspect:

In a June 22 video posted on the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office’s Instagram page, an officer wearing goggles can be seen operating a drone to retrieve a knife from an armed suspect hiding inside a cluttered house. “After not responding to negotiators, a drone was deployed inside the residence,” the post says. “Drone pilots located the suspect hiding in a corner of a garage” and then used a high-powered magnet attached to the drone to grab the knife out of the suspect’s hand. In the video ­ which is soundtracked by the “Mission: Impossible” theme song—the intercepted knife can be seen spinning around in the air as the drone carries it back to the deputies...