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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A machine mimic

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

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

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

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

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

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

Construction on day one

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICE Has Issued Many Unlawful Subpoenas

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

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

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

Private Pushback from Meta and Reddit

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

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

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

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

A Tech Company Model for Public Resistance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Building up the next class”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re-orienting orientation 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One gene at a time

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connecting TgPRO to chronic infection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This time, we're covering EFF's new report on mobile ad libraries and chatting with EFF Executive Director Nicole Ozer about how digital rights have become fundamental to our lives. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice:

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It turns out the best way to teach students how DNA works may be to start at the end. 

That’s the idea behind a hands-on curriculum from the MIT Edgerton Center: Teach proteins first so that students understand what the DNA will be making, then start at the top. 

Manipulable molecular biology sets developed over some 25 years by Kathy Vandiver, Edgerton’s life science project leader as well as director of community outreach education and engagement in the MIT Department of Biological Engineering, have scaled all the way from a gallery-classroom at the MIT Museum to every biology classroom in Worcester Public Schools in Massachusetts.

From one classroom to an entire district

Worcester is the second-largest district in the commonwealth, and its connection to the MIT Edgerton Center traces back to one high school teacher’s transformative learning experience. David Mangus first encountered the hands-on molecular biology sets at a Massachusetts Association of Science Teachers (MAST) conference, where he participated in an MIT workshop and explored the materials firsthand. Later, when he became science curriculum specialist for Worcester Public Schools, he recognized their potential to advance high-quality science education across the district, and he was in a position to implement the curriculum at scale.

Thanks to a grant from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, Worcester has been able to procure 55 class sets of MIT-developed DNA, RNA, protein, and tRNA modeling sets, along with instructional booklets and a districtwide professional development program. Every biology teacher participated in a thorough training workshop, so they could experience the joy of hands-on learning themselves and feel fully confident delivering the material in their classrooms.

The commitment in Worcester to training and equipping all of its biology teachers solved the problem that had previously limited the curriculum’s reach. Earlier outreach efforts with other school districts had shown the promise of the sets, but couldn’t scale because teachers were being trained one at a time. Worcester is rewriting the playbook with a cohort of teachers ready to use this hands-on learning approach districtwide, year after year.

The big idea: Teach proteins first

Vandiver is determined to reach more classrooms with her hard-earned insight: flip the script, and teach proteins before DNA.

Every biology student learns the central dogma of biology: DNA makes RNA, RNA makes proteins. But according to Vandiver, who holds a PhD in cellular biology, it’s also one of the most consistently misunderstood sequences in secondary education. It’s not a problem of students’ aptitude, but rather the order in which concepts are introduced. Vandiver likens walking a class through molecular biology without first explaining what a protein is to handing them blueprints for a building they’ve never seen. Most students memorize the steps without ever grasping what proteins are, or why they’re important.

Vandiver’s approach reverses the sequence. Working in pairs, students begin by building and understanding protein structure. They snap together what proteins are made of, learning what they look like and how they function. Only after creating proteins do they revisit the DNA-to-RNA-to-protein pathway, using genes that code for the very protein structures they built earlier. Then, concepts like amino acid order and protein function click into place. Students recognize the endpoint and experience a real “aha” moment, realizing, “Here’s our old friend, the channel protein!”

A growing body of research indicates that active learning experiences are more memorable to students. What the hands build, the mind retains. This curriculum represents a pivot from memorization toward constructing understanding, and toward learning experiences that are more memorable and enjoyable. In other words, these sets create learning that sticks.

Proteins’ Cinderella story

If DNA and its instantly recognizable double helix is a cultural icon, proteins are the stagehands behind the scenes. They build tissue, transport oxygen, fight infection, and carry out nearly everything the body does. Still, in most classrooms, proteins are only introduced after students memorize information about DNA and RNA. Vandiver’s curriculum is a Cinderella story for proteins. It takes the molecule that does all the work but rarely gets the spotlight, and finally makes it the star.

Beyond the fact that proteins come third chronologically in the DNA-to-RNA-to-protein sequence, there was also a practical reason they had been left in the shadows. Walk into any biology classroom, and you’ll find a model of DNA. What you won’t find is a good model of proteins. If there is a good protein model, it’s almost certainly not one that students can manipulate, take apart, and rebuild. That gap is exactly what Vandiver set out to fix.

Over 25 years, beginning when she was still a middle school biology teacher, she prototyped, tested, and ultimately redesigned DNA models from scratch. To create the novel protein models, the pieces that until then simply did not exist, Vandiver collaborated with her husband, Professor J. Kim Vandiver, Forbes Director of the MIT Edgerton Center.

The design of the pieces themselves is part of the learning. Color coding activates schemas of understanding that students already carry. For instance, yellow subunits are hydrophobic, evoking substances like oil or salad dressing. The pieces are tactile and modular, snapping together with a satisfying “click” that reinforces the logic that students will remember. 

Roots at the MIT Museum, branches across America

This approach to biology was refined over years at the MIT Museum. In 2005, Vandiver worked alongside museum staff to create a public space where visitors could learn how cells work, and which could double as a classroom for teaching those same ideas. The result was a gallery, “Learning Lab: The Cell,” funded by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, which supported both the space and the workshops held there.

It was around this time that Amanda Gruhl Mayer ’99, PhD ’08, who had specialized in genetic toxicology, joined the effort, collaborating on the workshops, and leading the graphic design of supplemental learning materials. Now, she contributes to the research behind the curriculum’s newer, more advanced lesson plans.

The space was a hit. Together, Vandiver and Gruhl Mayer taught more than 1,000 students over several years, welcoming them by the busload from across Massachusetts and beyond. The audience spanned middle and high school and included AP biology classes. But it didn’t stop there. Teams of nurses, biotechnology company executives, and even a class of federal judges came through as well. Judges, as it happens, need to understand DNA for forensic reasons.

That wide range of learners taught the team all about how to best convey this information to broad audiences. They discovered that the curriculum works best when students work in pairs with a molecular build set. Vandiver also created a participatory demonstration in which students take on roles and act out some of the more complex cellular processes with their own hands. They animate what the models are doing while the teacher acts as coach and explainer. Afterward, the group discusses the process together, layering in scientific language. Vandiver emphasizes how these resources free the teacher “to uncouple the overwhelming biology vocabulary from the conceptual story and provide an overview of the process.”

More than 1,000 students, one busload at a time, is a success story, but also hints at a constraint. The learning was impactful and memorable, but the outreach couldn’t grow fast enough. That’s what makes Worcester, and its entire district of teachers trained at once, such a significant step.

A Teacher of the Year reacts

The MIT team has traveled across the country delivering training on these materials, including a recent trip to Rapid City, South Dakota. In attendance was the district’s Teacher of the Year for 2025, Ross Hunter. He was the kind of participant whose enthusiasm drew in those around him, and his reflection captured a larger trend across education:

“This MIT hands-on solution does an amazing job of providing an understanding of protein synthesis … An additional value of these models is that they are not technology-based. In the next several years in education, we are certainly going to see the pendulum swing back toward a classroom with less technology … The tide is certainly turning, and MIT’s DNA and protein modeling kits can help.”

It’s a philosophy of learning older than any screen, and one Vandiver likes to express with the words of Confucius: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” 

What's next: Going national

This philosophy, as applied to molecular biology, is about to reach its widest audience yet. This October, the Edgerton Center will feature its molecular biology sets at the National Association of Biology Teachers Conference in Dallas. One of the premier gatherings for biology educators in the country, it’s a chance to put the proteins-first approach directly into the hands of teachers who could use it most.

In the end, the curriculum’s strength comes down to three key reversals. It makes proteins, not DNA, the star of the story: a Cinderella molecule finally stepping into the light. It trades screens and memorization for models students can hold, because hands-on learning sticks. And it flips the sequence of teaching itself, starting at the finish line so that the journey there makes sense. Teach it in that order, put it in their hands, and molecular biology transforms from something that students memorize into something that they understand.

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MIT researchers have overcome a major challenge holding back the real-world deployment of microwave quantum technologies for advanced signal processing and secure communications.

The team developed a scalable platform that generates pairs of highly correlated radio frequency waves, without the need for bulky and expensive cooling equipment. In quantum technologies, these linked radio waves can be used for noise-resilient communication or high-precision radar and sensing. However, they’re usually only generated in research labs, under extremely cold conditions.

The MIT researchers fabricated a small, electronic device that can generate the same type of highly correlated signals at room temperature. 

The device incorporates a magnetic film, which interacts with microwave energy inside a metal cavity to split an incoming signal into two linked output signals. The researchers used the device to demonstrate secure communications by encoding information in a signal that could only be recovered using its partner signal.

“We’ve shown how the quantum properties of magnets can be leveraged to realize new communication and detection technologies. I hope our demonstration of this platform will enable further development of room-temperature quantum simulators, which have huge potential to enable many future discoveries,” says Qiuyuan Wang, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on this technique.

Wang is joined on the paper by Aravind Karthigeyan, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Chung-Tao Chou, an MIT postdoc; and senior author Luqiao Liu, an associate professor in EECS and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. The research appears today in Nature Electronics.

Synchronized signals

Microwave photons are fundamental particles that form the signals used for wireless communication and sensing. 

Scientists can split one microwave photon into two tightly correlated photons using a device called a Josephson junction, which is an element of a superconducting circuit. These linked microwave photons can be used in applications like secure communications or high-performance radar systems that can detect extremely faint signals.

To enable secure communications using these correlated signals, engineers could design electronic devices that encode data in one signal by altering the signal’s properties, such that the information could only be decoded at the other end of the transmission using the matching signal. But to operate effectively, superconducting circuits must be kept at temperatures below 273 degrees Celsius, usually inside a bulky, expensive, and energy-intensive cryostat machine.

While pursuing a different line of research, the scientists in Liu’s group realized they could generate the same highly correlated microwave signals using magnets instead of cryogenically cooled superconducting circuits.

By putting a magnetic film into a microwave resonator, which is a metal cavity that traps electromagnetic energy, they could split one incoming microwave photon into a pair of perfectly synchronized signals with distinct frequencies, at room temperature.

“On its own, each signal looks random, but their phase relationship remains strongly correlated,” Wang explains.

Their device relies on magnons, which are tiny packets of magnetic energy. Typically, pumping microwave photons into a magnetic system generates a pair of correlated magnons with the same frequency. 

Even though both magnons are correlated, because they have the same frequency, scientists can’t separate them. They would need to separate the magnons to use one signal for transmission and the other for detection in secure communications.

A hybrid system

By coupling a magnetic film with a microwave resonator and carefully controlling the energy they pump into the device, the researchers could form hybrid magnon-photon waves. These hybrid waves output a pair of synchronized signals with distinct microwave frequencies.

The signals remain strongly correlated, but since the frequencies are always different and random, an attacker can’t recover the information encoded in one signal without having the matching one to use as a key.

The researchers demonstrated this by encoding a small image in the frequency of one microwave signal. They successfully decoded the signal and extracted the image using its partner.

“Magnonic systems exhibit a remarkably rich range of nonlinear dynamics, but these nonlinearities have not yet been harnessed for practical applications as extensively as those in nonlinear optics and other dynamical systems. In this work, we address one important challenge: the spectral overlap between a pair of ‘twin’ magnons generated by the same pump photon. By using the level repulsion arising from coupling between magnons and microwave photons, we were able to separate the two magnons in frequency,” says Liu. “We believe this demonstration could provide a foundation for technologies such as quantum radar, secure communications, and quantum-limited sensing, all of which rely on correlated — and ultimately entangled — microwave sources.”

This hybrid magnon-microwave system could also be used in noise-resilient communication by enabling the receiver to decode a message that has been garbled by random data that interfere with the transmission.

Correlated microwave signals are also a key element of a quantum simulator, which is a device that can emulate the complex behavior and interactions of subatomic particles that classical computers can’t handle. Scientists are developing quantum simulators to discover new drugs and materials. 

By generating correlated signals at room temperature, this new technique can improve the scalability and reduce the costs of quantum simulation. In the future, the researchers want to develop a scalable architecture for their platform, moving it one step closer to real-world deployment. They also want to explore additional applications for the process and use their platform to study the underlying physics of correlated microwave signals. 

“The creation of a non-degenerate parametric magnon-polariton platform marks an important milestone for cavity magnonics, extending the field beyond coherent microwave generation to the production of multichannel correlated microwave photons,” says Can-Ming Hu, a distinguished profess or physics and astronomy at the University of Manitoba in Canada, who was not involved with this paper. “This breakthrough will broadly impact secure microwave communications, hardware random number generation, correlation-based signal processing, and intelligent microwave sensing — all operating within the classical regime at room temperature. Looking ahead, this platform could well be remembered as the starting point for realizing quantum-inspired microwave sensing and communication technologies based on nonlinear cavity magnonics.”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Immune cells that are engineered to attack cancer cells, known as CAR-T cells, are used to treat some types of blood cancer. However, only about 5 percent of hospitals in the United States have the ability to generate and deliver CAR-T cells to patients. For many patients, this means the cells need to be frozen and shipped long-distance.

To help make this type of therapy accessible to more people, researchers at MIT have developed a new way to protect the cells from damage that can occur when they are frozen for storage and shipment. Their technique significantly reduces the use of a chemical preservative that is now used to protect the cells, which should make it easier for more hospitals to provide this treatment option to patients.

Instead of treating the cells with a cryoprotective chemical that has to be removed before treatment, the researchers were able to preserve them using a nontoxic antifreeze sugar.

“With this approach, you could theoretically just thaw the cells and then inject them, without any extra processing steps. We think that could allow a lot more cancer treatment centers to be able to give CAR-T cell therapy,” says Ana Jaklenec, a principal investigator in MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and one of the lead authors of the study, which appears this week in Trends in Biotechnology.

In the study, the researchers showed that cells preserved using this process had higher survival rates and could be successfully used to treat lymphoma and glioblastoma in mice.

Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, is also a senior author of the paper. MIT postdocs Amy Lee and Khanh Tran are the paper’s lead authors.

Preserving cells

To make CAR-T cells, doctors isolate T cells from patient blood samples. These cells are then engineered to express a protein called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR), which can be designed to target specific proteins found on cancer cells.

Then, the cells spend several weeks proliferating until there are enough to transfuse back into the patient. A small number of hospitals are equipped to generate and administer these cells, but most CAR-T cells are generated at centralized lab facilities. Once ready, these cells are frozen and shipped to a hospital or cancer treatment center.

To protect the cells from ice crystals that can damage their membranes, the cells are treated with a chemical called dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), which prevents ice crystal formation. This compound must be removed before the cells are transfused, but most hospitals don’t have the expertise to do this, which limits their ability to provide CAR-T cell treatment.

The process of removing DMSO can also harm cells, reducing the number of CAR-T cells that are viable and effective. In the new study, the MIT team wanted to find a way to reduce or eliminate DMSO from the process, which could make it easier for these cells to reach more patients.

“We looked at this cell-manufacturing process to see if there are ways to improve it, to increase the efficacy and hopefully eventually get to the point where these cells can be easily distributed to treatment centers,” Jaklenec says. “Our goal was to eliminate adding this chemical and really focus on safe excipients like sugars.”

The researchers employed two sugars that scientists have previously used to help cells survive cold temperatures. These sugars — trehalose and sucrose — help cells to naturally combat cold by protecting proteins from denaturation and preventing the formation of ice crystals. This antifreeze mechanism is found in many Arctic organisms, such as North American wood frogs, and helps them to survive extreme subzero temperatures. 

To get sugar molecules into the cells, the researchers used a technique called electroporation. By applying a small electrical current to the cells, they can briefly create holes in the cell membrane, allowing large molecules such as sugars to pass through. They found that they still needed to add a small amount of DMSO, but not enough that it had to be removed later. 

“We believe that our cryopreservation strategy can truly improve the cell therapeutic accessibility because with our strategy, you don’t need to remove the cryoprotectants. You could use the cells upon thawing,” Lee says.

More effective therapy

The researchers tested this technique on CAR-T cells as well as mesenchymal stem cells, which can differentiate into many other cell types and hold potential for use in regenerative medicine. For both types of cells, a higher percentage of the cells survived the freezing and thawing process when sugars were used as the main cryoprotectant instead of DMSO. 

They also used thawed CAR-T cells to treat non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and glioblastoma, in mouse models. Mice treated with CAR-T cells preserved using the new strategy had higher survival rates than mice treated with cells preserved using the conventional DMSO approach.

“Preservation methods for living biotherapeutics have seen limited innovation, remain poorly characterized at scale, and often compromise cell viability and function after thawing,” Tran says. “We believe that our findings underscore the importance of thorough characterization and optimization of every stage of cell therapy manufacturing, which could have dramatic impacts on treatment efficacy.”

The researchers now hope to work with hospitals to explore whether their new technique could be easily integrated into the process of producing and thawing CAR-T cells.

“If that’s successful from a cell viability and functionality standpoint, perhaps we will do a small trial with patients,” Jaklenec says.

Vijay G. Sankaran, a professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, who was not involved in the study, says he is excited by the potential applications of the research. 

“As a pediatric hematologist and oncologist, many of the cell therapies we use, including CAR-T cells and blood stem cells, require us to collect and freeze a substantial number of cells, so that enough healthy cells are available after thawing for when patients need treatment. This work suggests an innovative approach that could help more cells survive the freezing and thawing process, potentially making these powerful therapies more reliable and effective. Of course, further work will be needed to validate these results in settings where this approach can be clinically applied,” Sankaran says.

This work was supported by postdoctoral fellowships from the Ludwig Center at MIT’s Koch Institute and the Convergence Scholars Program at the MIT Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine.