The number of U.S. data centers is growing, largely to power artificial intelligence programs. That has led to concern about the environmental consequences of data centers — and their impact on the energy grid itself. What will happen if scores of new data centers come online? 

A new study by MIT researchers indicates that the impact of data centers could vary significantly, depending on how their energy use is structured.

Specifically, if data centers move a significant portion of their energy consumption to non-peak hours, it might actually help lower average energy costs. The environmental impact, in terms of type of energy consumed, would differ by location, with some places likely seeing a greater buildout of renewables and others experiencing a relative increase in fossil fuel use. 

“The key with data centers is: How can we add them to the network without adding a lot to our peak usage?” says Christopher Knittel, an economist in the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a new paper detailing the study. “One way for data centers to do that — to add to average usage but not the peak usage — is if they provide some grid flexibility during those high-cost periods. And that’s what we’ve been interested in understanding.”

Specifically, the paper finds that a flexible arrangement for data-center energy consumption, compared to an inflexible one, would produce cost savings of up to 5 percent in Texas, 4 percent in the Mid-Atlantic region, and 2 percent in the western U.S. states. To achieve that, data centers would have to move more than 20 percent of their consumption — sometimes more like 50 percent — to non-peak hours. 

The paper is titled “Flexible Data Centers Reduce Power System Costs But Can Increase Emissions,” and appears today in the journal iScience. The authors are Juan Ramon L. Senga, a postdoc in MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research; Shen Wang, a postdoc in MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research; and Knittel, who is the George P. Schultz Professor at MIT Sloan and the associate dean for climate and sustainability at MIT. 

The 20 percent solution

The expansion of data centers has raised questions about additional stress for the U.S. grid, the global effects of increased fossil-fuel consumption, and the local environmental effects of data centers. The current study examines the first two of these issues. 

To conduct the research, the scholars extensively simulated scenarios in which data centers expand, using the so-called “Gen X” model of the U.S. power grid, for a year’s worth of energy use. 

The study focused on the grid systems in three areas: Texas, the Mid-Atlantic region, and the “Western Interconnect,” comprising the 11 large western states in the lower 48 states of the U.S. The researchers studied these regions because they collectively host most of the country’s data centers — about 82 percent of U.S. data centers by 2030, according to one analysis. 

A bit counterintuitively, the researchers found that adding data centers could lower energy costs in some scenarios. Typically, about 60 percent of grid expenses are fixed costs, like power lines, while about 40 percent consists of energy costs. Adding data centers to the grid could, in effect, apportion the fixed costs over a higher volume of energy use. 

“It’s really just math,” Knittel says. 

But there is a catch. Lower costs might only happen if data centers increase their average consumption faster than their peak-hours consumption, when energy is most expensive. As it happens, most data centers do have flexibility built into their energy-use patterns, since they usually run at about 80 percent capacity.

In the study’s modeling, that flexibility often consists of shifting use from early-morning and early-evening peaks, to more midday energy consumption, when the energy load is lower and solar is at full capacity. The simulations show this makes a difference.

“There are two dimensions that data centers have to make decisions about,” Knittel says. “One is how much of their load in any one time period is flexible. And two, how many hours, plus or minus, can they move that computation?”

Pretty soon, real money

Additionally, data centers have different amounts of flexibility based on the types of AI-related computation they host. Data centers being used for AI training data tend to consume energy at a steady rate, but as a result could provide more flexibility for shifting power loads compared to inference data centers, which are used more for online search queries. In the latter case, consumption is driven more by end-user Internet habits.

Overall, Knittel emphasizes, the magnitude of cost savings suggested by the study, ranging from 2 percent to 7 percent, is significant. 

“Three percent is a big number,” Knittel says. “When you’re talking about the grid, 3 percent or 6 percent doesn’t sound like a lot. But when you’re multiplying it by 100 billion dollars, it becomes real money.”

When it comes to environmental impact, the modeling finds that the projected level of data center growth by 2030 would be very significant in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. Compared to a world with no data center growth, the study finds those emissions would rise by 58 percent in Texas, 20 percent in the Mid-Atlantic region, and by 24 percent in the western U.S. That underscores the need to be strategic about data center consumption. 

But the modeling also finds that the implications of data center buildout for clean-energy use vary by region. In Texas, where 54 percent of grid power is wind energy, having more data centers with flexible patterns of energy use could reduce emissions, by increasing demand for wind energy. The study finds that in this scenario, there could be 40 percent fewer CO2 emissions. 

However, in the Mid-Atlantic region, where there is a reasonable amount of solar energy but relatively less wind power, more data centers with flexible consumption patterns could increase both renewable energy and fossil-fuel energy consumption.  Here the modeling suggests an increase in CO2 emissions system-wide of 3 percent. 

“When data centers provide some flexibility in that latter scenario, the data centers actually move hours to when sun and wind energy production is slowing, and that allows a coal plant to stay on,” Knittel observes. “So it doesn’t necessarily attract more renewable investment. It attracts more coal investment.”

“That’s why we have policy”

For any of this to happen, however, the data centers would have to implement the flexible energy-use schedules modeled in the study. And it’s not clear that companies using data centers would be motivated to do that. To Knittel, this suggests officials might have to craft regulations in this area. 

“That’s why we have policy,” Knittel says.

More specifically, he adds, there is one big policy lever officials could use to achieve this goal: offering quicker initial hookups to the grid in return for time-of-use flexibility. 

“One big concern about these data centers now is how long it takes for them to connect to the grid,” Knittel says. “One way to provide flexibility now is what’s called ‘connect and manage,’ which is, connecting you faster to the grid if you agree to provide flexibility. Tech firms would take that deal. They would rather connect a year earlier, and throttle down computation a few hours a day, than to have to wait. We do this with power plants too.”

Certainly, Knittel adds, as firms competing with each other, “Tech companies say they won’t provide flexibility alone. But if everyone in the industry has to, it’s okay.” 

The current study is the first to examine the “end-to-end” implications of the centers for costs and emissions. The results, the scholars feel, bear further evaluation — and it is a topic they are continuing to model. 

“Those are two dimensions I think we should all be considering here,” Knittel says. “The end result is really up to us, and up to policy.” 

The research received support from the Future Energy Systems Center of the MIT Energy Initiative. 

Preventing adversaries from interfering with communications is crucial to national security. Tactical satellite communications (SATCOM) focus on securing reliable communications channels against adversaries in contested environments. In support of this mission, a team from MIT Lincoln Laboratory is building a prototype antenna characterized by low size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C).

Threats in contested environments — specifically proliferated low Earth orbit (pLEO), where satellites must be as low-SWaP as possible because of the high volume of satellites present — are signal jamming and signals intelligence. Mitigating these threats through methods such as changing the shape of antenna beams in real time so that the ground user's signals can't be interfered with, and preparing for future advanced capabilities, are key to ensuring that satellites stay in communication with users on the ground.

"Looking toward the future challenges of tactical SATCOM, there is a clear need for novel approaches to radio-frequency (RF) aperture designs that are scalable and low SWaP-C without sacrificing functionality," says Michael Craton, a technical staff member in Lincoln Laboratory's Tactical Satellite Communications Group. "That is, we want to think about ways we can achieve exquisite performance using less-expensive hardware. We want to anticipate future threats and have an idea about how to deal with them before they become a problem."

One way to tackle the challenge of proliferated interference and jamming is through adaptive antenna arrays. Unlike single-element antennas, arrays are made up of multiple antennas that work together to guide and shape energy to and from the array. Adaptive arrays can change beam states quickly (a technique called adaptive beamforming) and change them in real time, depending on conditions, to prevent interference in certain directions by placing nulls, or signals that interfere with others. However, adaptive arrays have high SWaP, making them difficult to operate in SWaP-constrained environments like pLEO.  

To address this problem, the team developed the Hosted Nimble Beamforming Anti-Jam Reflectarray (HoNi BAJR), a scanning reflectarray antenna prototype with a surface made up of reflective elements that can be individually controlled. When a signal hits the surface of the reflectarray, individual elements reflect energy with some phase shift to control the beam that is formed so that it blocks interference. Because the elements are very simple, the array can be scaled and controlled easily. Reflectarrays are similar to phased arrays, which consist of multiple elements that can be electronically controlled for quick beam changes, but scanning reflectarrays reflect signals toward a separate feed antenna, which eliminates much of the design complexity in conventional antenna arrays.

Unlike phased arrays that require amplifiers for each antenna element, reflectarrays do not require amplifiers because signals are collected by the feed antenna and combined in free space; this lack of amplifiers for each element in the reflectarray lowers the SWaP required and helps with scalability, as the beamforming network does not have to be redesigned each time the size of the array is changed. A reflectarray uses much less power than a typical array, dropping the power consumption by about 95 percent.  

The prototype HoNi BAJR reflectarray was designed for communications in a pLEO constellation with wide coverage across the horizon and can cater to low-power users in the presence of proliferated jamming. The array is sized to fit on a typical small satellite platform.

The HoNi BAJR team tested the array's beamforming capabilities at the laboratory's RF Systems Testing Facility, successfully demonstrating a high scan angle, which means the array can receive signals from a wide area. Their testing also showed that there is little loss in signal when synthesizing multipeak beams, or splitting the beam, indicating that reflectarrays can get signals to multiple users without information loss. 

Suppressing interference (unwanted signals from equipment like cell phone towers or electrical devices) is also very important to ensuring the antenna works correctly. The HoNi BAJR team's work in this area is based on two programs funded through an internally administered R&D portfolio: Deployable Electronically Scanning Reflectarray (DESRa) and Phase Analog Beamforming (PhAB, which uses DESRa hardware). PhAB demonstrated that it was possible to adapt to nulls and mitigate signal jamming in real time. However, in the dynamic signal environment of HoNi BAJR, there may not be time to adapt these beams fast enough for the signal environment. The team innovated a solution: creating regions of interference suppression, instead of targeting individual points of interference, by shaping the side lobes of the beam. The technique faltered slightly in testing because of difficulty in controlling the side lobes, as they're sensitive to small signal changes. However, proper calibration (measuring effects from the instruments and the system to ensure the full signal received and transmitted by the antenna is accounted for) may help.

While key to ensuring a system works correctly, calibration is one of the biggest challenges of operating reflectarrays. Not much precedent exists for calibrating a scanning reflectarray, so the team is researching approaches. All aspects of the reflectarray (e.g., forming and shaping beams) will be improved by calibration, and full usage of the array will require a comprehensive understanding of calibration. Another major area the team is exploring is where reflectarrays can best be used.

"Designing hardware is always a challenge, but figuring out how to fit the technology into a complete and functional system that meets mission needs is the hardest part," Craton says. "We believe scanning reflectarrays have a lot of untapped potential for the missions we care about, but because they have not been used in this space before, a lot of gaps in functionality remain. We need to first build up capabilities for the things that we need to do."

Early studies show that reflectarrays can be used in situations where beams are scheduled, where there is proliferated interference in less-dynamic signal environments (or dynamic signal environments, if you can achieve good calibration), and on power-constrained platforms. Future work will focus on further exploring how reflectarrays can be used, improving calibration procedures, and refining beamforming capabilities.

“Illuminating.” “Spectacular.” “Compelling.” This is how community college students described the two days they spent at MIT.nano learning about the complex tools inside the cleanroom and building and packaging their own functional photonic chips.

“Integrated photonics is an essential part of semiconductor packaging today,” says Anu Agarwal, principal research scientist in the Materials Research Laboratory at MIT. “But there is no single, standardized university curriculum for integrated electronics-photonics packaging. We need to create educational materials to teach this subject across the talent pipeline from K-12 and beyond, which is exactly what we’re doing at the Initiative for Knowledge and Innovation in Manufacturing (IKIM) and MIT.nano.”

As leader of the Lab for Education and Application Prototypes (LEAP) facility located on MIT.nano’s fifth floor, Agarwal stresses the importance of hands-on learning when studying integrated photonics, the science of guiding and manipulating light on a semiconductor chip. Through the Northeast Consortia for Advanced Integrated Silicon Technologies (NCAIST) program, she’s bringing community and four-year college students to MIT.nano for experimental boot camps that teach how to use semiconductor tools for electronic-photonic packaging and testing.

“Having a workforce skilled in resource-efficient semiconductor manufacturing, including electronic-photonic packaging, is critical to maintain the exponential growth of the chip industry and build national security,” says Agarwal. “MIT.nano, through programs like NCAIST, are helping to train more people in STEM.”

Working closely with AIM Photonics, a U.S. Manufacturing Innovation Institute, NCAIST coordinates and accelerates the transition of technician education content and teaching methodologies from key AIM-affiliated U.S. universities to community, technical, and four-year colleges in the Northeast. Through NCAIST, in Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Bay Community College (MBCC) is paired with MIT, North Shore Community College (NSCC) with Stonehill College, and Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) with Western New England University.

“The NCAIST program offers a transformative opportunity for our community college students to experience hands-on training at MIT.nano’s LEAP facility,” says Marina Bograd, professor and chair of the engineering department at MassBay Community College. “For many of them, this is their first time stepping into a cleanroom or seeing semiconductor manufacturing up close. The experience helps open doors that might otherwise feel out of reach, builds confidence, and inspires our students to see themselves pursuing careers in emerging technologies.”

The most recent MIT.nano boot camp, held on May 20-21, expanded participation to include not only those from MBCC, but also students from NSCC, Stonehill College, and SUNY Polytechnic Institute, where NCAIST is headquartered. Twelve students spent two full days at MIT.nano operating a die saw, die bonder, wire bonder, and flip chip tool to build and test a packaged chip.

“I found the combination of hands-on activities, lectures, and informal discussion with the MIT.nano team and fellow students fostered an awesome learning environment,” says Cari Caudill, a student at NSCC. “As a mechanical engineering student, I was most interested in packaging and the machines themselves, so I loved getting direct experience with the tools and discussing with our instructors how procedural and technological development has impacted precision, efficiency, and scalability in the semiconductor industry.”

"The NCAIST boot camp was an exciting and illuminating experience!” adds MassBay Community College student Wyatt Maurer. “I really appreciated getting the chance to work with semiconductor manufacturing tools and to learn about the future of photonics from leaders in the field.”

Students attended lectures on cleanroom safety by Kristofor Payer, assistant director of operations at MIT.nano; electronic-photonic packaging by Agarwal; and photonic integrated circuit sensing by Department of Materials Science and Engineering graduate student Lizzie Gower. They were also offered virtual reality (VR) simulation exercises by Sajan Saini, the director of education at IKIM, to help build intuition about photonic devices and semiconductor packaging tools. These VR simulations serve as a foundational tool to help students visualize photonic devices and complex tool mechanics, as well as run digital process steps and deepen their technical understanding. By bridging physical fabrication with advanced simulation resources, the LEAP students are mastering highly specialized manufacturing, assembly, and testing pipelines required to build the future of electronic-photonic integration.

“The experience at this boot camp not only strengthens our student technical skills, it helps them see themselves as future contributors to a rapidly evolving field,” says Mary Beth Steigerwald, professor and engineering department chair at North Shore Community College. “It also enriches their professional portfolios and gives them a stronger, more compelling story to share during internship and transfer interviews.”

The students will use this training to secure summer internships at hard technology companies. Several have also been accepted to four-year degree programs to continue their education in the fall.

Every summer for the past 13 years, students in MIT’s club dynaMIT have taught STEM principles to Boston-area middle school students at no cost, all in an effort to inspire the next generation of innovators.

In August, dynaMIT will welcome two cohorts of budding scientists and engineers to campus. First, 40 middle schoolers in grades 6–7 will dive into hands-on STEM learning through creative activities like solar s'mores and paper rockets. The following week, another 40 students in grades 8–9 will join in, exploring innovative experiments that spark curiosity and creative problem-solving. Each day, a new topic is covered, exposing attendees to chemistry, machine learning, physics, math, biology, and earth and space science.

Several of the program's attendees have gone on to apply and be accepted to MIT, including the club’s co-director, Dominique Dang. When the Quincy, Massachusetts, native saw the club’s table at the Midway Fair, she knew she wanted to join to give back.

“I didn’t receive a lot of STEM exposure in middle school, but then I saw online about the STEM program offered by dynaMIT, and I was really interested. I had so much fun, and it introduced me to creating things, and not just reading about them in a textbook. I knew I wanted to be a scientist, but I didn’t know what type of science I wanted to study, so having dynaMIT expose me to a different STEM topic each day was a transformative experience,” says Dang, who is now studying computer science and molecular biology.

Megan Zhu, the club’s other co-director, was immediately drawn to the organization’s educational mission. A biology major with plans to pursue an MD/PhD program, Zhu is passionate about advancing science education and aspires to teach at the university level upon completing her degree.

“I happened to stop by the dynaMIT table at the club fair, and it seemed really cool. I spoke to a couple of the club leaders, and they talked about how they help support education in the Boston area. Education has always been something that I was passionate about in my hometown in Rapid City, South Dakota, and I wanted to emphasize giving back to the community,” says Zhu.

Lukeman Nouri, who grew up in Saugus, Massachusetts, attended dynaMIT as a sixth grader. “I barely knew what MIT was, or even what STEM meant, so I wasn't particularly excited to go. However, that changed after the very first day of the program! I remember extracting DNA from a strawberry, making elephant toothpaste, and gathering fingerprints from various surfaces. However, my biggest highlight was learning Scratch and creating my very first game,” says Nouri, who is majoring in computer science and engineering. “After dynaMIT, MIT became my dream college, and I spent the next six years learning more about STEM and MIT.”

Erick Liang, who grew up in Boston’s Chinatown and Roslindale neighborhoods and is now majoring in nuclear science and engineering and physics, had a similar experience after attending dynaMIT. “As a first-generation, low-income student, having a meaningful and engaging program like dynaMIT to participate in over the summer was really important for me. DynaMIT exposed me to different fields of science I had not encountered yet in elementary or middle school and helped spark my interest in STEM,” says Liang.

Zhu says this year they are adding a new activity related to climate change and clean water that they hope will create an interest in these two important areas. “This summer, one of our activities is called Sponge City. It’s about runoff water and clean, reusable water. We’ll have the students build a city that can withstand a storm. They will be given a budget and have to decide how to spend the resources after we pour water all over the tray containing their city — all in an effort to show them how important climate change and clean drinking water are.”

The club is also partnering with the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and will tour lab space and work on a fun experiment about cell heterogeneity and cancer tumor formation. Attendees will then be able to talk to scientists and ask them questions.

“I’m looking forward to giving this cohort the same great experience that I had six summers ago. DynaMIT was so much fun, and I learned so much from it that I feel a responsibility to help make it just as impactful for future students,” says Nouri.

Liang adds, “I am excited to return and help set up the plasma demo kits for the program’s physics day!”

“It’s a great full-circle moment,” says Dang. “That’s just one of the reasons why I joined the club.”

“Watching the students work on the activities is always the most rewarding part of the two weeks, and that makes the entire year of planning worth it,” says Zhu, adding, “the club is also an excellent community at MIT.”

Students interested in joining dynaMIT or volunteering for this summer’s program can find more information on the club’s website.

Imagine working at a warehouse or office sometime in the near future, and you’re asked to help a new trainee learn the basics of their job. The catch: It’s a robot. To teach them, you might want to play a game of “show and tell” — that is, physically showing how to do something a few different ways, while also explaining what you’re doing.

Let’s say you asked the robot to place some coffee on your desk without disturbing you during a Zoom call. You’ll prefer that the robot doesn’t get too close to you and the laptop so that it doesn’t interrupt your meeting. To enable this behavior, the robot should be trained with data that clearly demonstrates the full task. Computer scientists have attempted to explain manipulation tasks to robots by recording lots of physical demonstrations or writing extensive directions. But if you don’t have both, the machine is likely to misunderstand what it needs to do.

It’s laborious for humans to do all that showing and telling, so researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have automated the process of teaching a robot, while clarifying instructions automatically and using nearly five times less demonstration data. Their “Masked Inverse Reinforcement Learning” (Masked IRL) approach uses a large language model (LLM) to elaborate on ambiguous prompts based on the data collected from a user’s demo. Another LLM then narrows down which details an algorithm should incorporate into a motion plan, so that a robot can safely complete chores in homes, offices, and factories.

“Our approach could come in handy when a human interacts with a robot but doesn’t want to spell out all the details of a task,” says MIT PhD student and CSAIL researcher Minyoung Hwang, who is a lead author on a paper presenting the project. “We’re minimizing human effort by enabling machines to get to the bottom of what users really want.”

According to Hwang, Masked IRL can help robots safely maneuver in settings where there are elements a human might not describe in a prompt, but that are crucial nonetheless. For example, a machine grabbing you a snack from the kitchen may not know to avoid bumping into your laptop. Likewise, a factory robot placing items into different boxes must carefully navigate around shelves.

To learn new tasks in these situations, Masked IRL uses the robot’s sensors to capture information about its surroundings. These components also log each movement of a kinesthetic demonstration — a training approach where a human physically moves a robot to do a specific action. It’s sort of like being the machine’s physical therapist, bending joints in a particular direction to show a robot how to grab, move, and place objects.

MIT’s system then calls on an LLM to compare this sequence of motions (called a trajectory) to the shortest possible path. The model also elaborates on what might be unclear in a prompt, turning a request like “stay close” into “stay close to the surface of the table.” Using the trajectory comparison and clarified directions, the LLM begins to understand why the motions it was trained on are important to the task. 

A second LLM then evaluates details of the environment, such as the position of obstacles and the shape of the robot’s target object. During this process, it “masks” (in other words, ignores) the elements it deems irrelevant to the task at hand, scoring each one as either a “1” (important) or “0” (not so much). For example, whether or not a user was leaning on a table during a demonstration would be a “0,” making it irrelevant. Any detail considered a “1” is incorporated into the final action plan by an algorithm.

These masks gave Masked IRL a key advantage over comparable baselines in both 3D and real-world demos because it taught a robot which information to prioritize. Thanks to the researchers’ system, virtual and real robots alike were able to skillfully maneuver objects around obstacles, such as moving a coffee mug around a laptop to different spots on a table. In these tasks, Masked IRL correctly identified users’ preferences, which they didn’t explicitly state in their prompts, up to 15 percent more often than comparable baselines.

During simulation experiments, CSAIL researchers also found that Masked IRL was a fast learner. It required fewer demos to understand how to move the mug than its baselines. They also found that the robots performed better when an LLM cleared up instructions, instead of having the machine try to follow a vague request.

This more focused approach also translated well to a real robotic arm, executing prompts the system hadn’t seen during its training phase. After being trained on 50 kinesthetic demonstrations, the robot carefully moved a cup toward a human while avoiding colliding with a user’s computer — an obstacle it learned to avoid by elaborating on a more general request to “stay away.” It also wiped a table down while “staying close” to it, and handed a user a bag of chips while “staying away” from both a human and a table.

Masked IRL senses and explains what users leave unsaid, but soon, it might “see” it too. CSAIL researchers plan to make their approach more dynamic by equipping it with cameras, allowing a robot to take images of its surroundings. Then it could highlight and focus on specific elements nearby. For example, if you asked the machine to pick up a toy, it might see some bananas nearby and ignore them before handling its target object.

Hwang wrote the paper with three CSAIL colleagues: PhD student Alexandra Forsey-Smerek ’20, SM ’22; postdoc Nathaniel Dennler; and MIT Assistant Professor Andreea Bobu, who is a member of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and CSAIL. Their work was supported, in part, by the Tata Group via the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium Award, and the Department of Defense. They’ll present the project at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in June.

A database of almost a million passports from around the world was leaked online.

Note what happened. A high-value credential—a passport—was used in an ancillary low-value authentication system: ID verification for cannabis dispensaries. And it’s the low-value system that got hacked, putting the high-value credential at risk.

But how they do so varies from state to state.

Republican legislation would grant the oil and gas industry immunity from litigation that seeks compensation for the costs of climate change.

Deb Haaland, the Interior secretary under former President Joe Biden, is set to face Republican nominee Gregg Hull in November.

The Department of Energy would have to distribute funding for state energy and weatherization programs on a set timeline.

The decision fell short of requests from climate organizations who brought the lawsuit to force the company to reduce its oil and gas production.

Almost half of the 27 EU member states now support delaying the rules.

The far right’s calls for more air conditioning aren’t resonating with most voters.

The emissions quota trading on the pilot market will cover thermal power plants, steelmakers and cement producers.

Black holes are often misunderstood to be just that: dark and mysterious voids that are somehow akin to Alice in Wonderland’s mind-bending rabbit hole. 

But rather than a tunnel of nothing, a black hole is actually something — and a lot of it. The densest objects in the universe, black holes exert tremendous gravitational pull, gathering in the surrounding fabric of space and time, and generating huge disks of matter that whirl toward a black hole before falling in, past the point of no return. 

In recent years, as astronomers have been able to train more telescopes on the sky, for longer stretches of time, they have captured a surprising range of black hole behavior.

“It used to be that we didn’t have eyes on systems all the time,” says Erin Kara, an associate professor of physics at MIT. “Now we’re seeing that they can turn on and off at rates that are much faster than we ever thought possible. We see things are getting sucked in toward black holes faster than we thought, perhaps due to stars whipping around and getting trapped in a black hole’s accretion disk.”

Kara and her group in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research are at the forefront of black hole physics. She is using data from telescopes in space and on the ground to study the properties of black holes, especially supermassive black holes — the ultradense giants at the centers of galaxies. Supermassive black holes are the engines of galaxy formation. Kara, who recently earned tenure at MIT, seeks to connect the extreme physics of black holes with how galaxies such as our own Milky Way come to be.

“It’s amazing that we as humans can know anything about what’s happening billions of light years away,” Kara says. “There’s a lot of new open puzzles about supermassive black holes that I’m excited about.” 

Early impact

Kara was born and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, as the youngest of four. Her mother was a nurse, and her father a doctor, so it felt only natural for Kara to follow their lead. She set out on a premed track at Barnard College of Columbia University. As part of the program that first year, she took an introductory physics class and was instantly drawn to the subject’s concrete, fundamental descriptions of the physical world, from the quantum to cosmic scales. 

“Physics was always the class that explained things at the ground level,” Kara recalls. “And I thought, wow, this is cool. I have to keep going with this.”

In class, she kept asking questions and wanting to know more. Her professor, astronomer Reshmi Mukherjee, took note and invited Kara to join her research group as a summer intern. The team would be working on new data from a telescope that was readying for launch. That summer, in June 2008, NASA launched the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope into low-Earth orbit, with the purpose of surveying the sky for sources of gamma rays — high-energy radiation that is produced by black holes, neutron stars, and other extreme astrophysical objects. 

When the telescope started sending back data, Mukherjee assigned Kara a project: to characterize two of the telescope’s unidentified gamma-ray signals. Both signals were bright, and the question was whether they came from nearby, within the Milky Way galaxy, or much further away. If the latter was the case, it would mean the sources were possibly quasars — a type of extremely active supermassive black hole that at the time was a rarity in astronomy observations. 

Kara got to work on the data and soon confirmed that both sources were indeed quasars. 

“It was a small discovery, but it felt awesome,” Kara says. “And I love that about astronomy, that there are so many unanswered questions, and even early on in your career, you can make an impact.”

Needless to say, Kara caught the astronomy bug, and soon opted to switch from premed to physics, though the new path was not always smooth. On Barnard’s all-women’s campus, introductory classes in physics were small, and professors were encouraging and approachable. In contrast, upper-level courses were held at Columbia, where Kara was one of a much larger, co-ed cohort. 

“It’s a very unique experience to be with all women in a physics environment, and then to see how my feelings about my own abilities changed, just based on the environment,” Kara reflects. “I went to Columbia and all of a sudden felt like I couldn’t do this. All these guys were much more confident and outwardly understanding of the material. In the end, I did well there too. And that juxtaposition helped me gain confidence and know, yeah, I belong here.”

Black hole reverb

After graduating with a major in physics and a minor in art history, Kara went abroad, to the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University. She earned a scholarship there to pursue a one-year master’s degree in physics, but she ended up staying to complete a PhD on a topic that was just starting to grow roots: black hole X-ray reverberation. 

In 2009, her thesis advisor, Andy Fabian, and his team were looking through archival data from an X-ray telescope and noticed curious time delays in signals coming from around a black hole. They interpreted the signals as X-ray echoes, or reverberations. It was the first evidence of X-ray echoes around a black hole, and it helped to resolve a debate in the field over the source of the radiation. 

Her advisor determined that the reverb was a result of X-rays generated from the black hole’s corona — a crown-shaped aura of high-energy radiation immediately surrounding the black hole — that then bounced, or reverberated, off the swirling disk of gas and dust that circles a black hole, known as an accretion disk. 

“They had only found these echoes in one black hole. But the archive was full of data of these reverberation signals that no one had analyzed in this particular way,” Kara explains. “So I had my whole PhD to kind of play with this archive, and it felt very discovery-driven.”

Since that initial exploration, Kara has worked to advance the study of X-ray reverberation as a technique to map regions around black holes and other extreme astrophysical objects. 

A pivotal disruption

After earning a PhD in physics, Kara returned to the U.S. for postdoctoral work at the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She intended to work on data from a new satellite, Hitomi — a Japanese mission that would detect far-off X-rays to help scientists map the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe. After 40 days, the scientists lost control of the satellite, which ultimately began spinning uncontrollably and broke apart in orbit. Before it failed, the telescope sent back one clean signal.

“It got one really good observation, which was unlike any spectrum we had ever seen before,” Kara recalls. 

The data confirmed that the satellite’s detector — a microcalorimeter that was developed at NASA — was sound. That technology is now at the heart of Hitomi’s successor, the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, or XRISM, which has been successfully taking data since its launch in 2023. Today, Kara leads a science group as part of the XRISM mission to analyze X-ray signals from supermassive black holes. 

Back then, however, with the end of Hitomi, she had to pivot. She started working with a new group at NASA Goddard that was gearing up for the launch of another telescope — the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER. In 2017, the telescope, which was developed and built by MIT researchers, was launched and attached to the International Space Station, where it measured the timing of incoming X-rays from astrophysical sources in deep space. 

The group Kara joined was analyzing NICER data for signs of tidal disruption events, which are instances when a black hole tears apart a nearby star. This was some of her earliest work on these dynamic sources, and she has since incorporated tidal disruption events — and data from NICER — as a main research area. 

At the hub

In 2019, Kara accepted a junior faculty position in MIT’s Department of Physics — a decision that to her was a “no-brainer.” 

“X-ray astronomy has its history at MIT,” Kara says. “Bruno Rossi, Hale Bradt, George Clark, Claude Canizares — it all started here. It was always a place that felt like a hub. And that was the draw.”

Today, she and her students regularly analyze data from various satellites and telescopes such as XRISM and NICER to better understand black holes and how they grow, evolve, and affect the galaxies around them. She continues to advance X-ray reverberation mapping, which has helped scientists map the extreme regions immediately surrounding a black hole. Her group is also studying signals from other extreme X-ray sources, including tidal disruption events, quasiperiodic eruptions, and galactic black hole outbursts. 

Kara also plans to explore data from future observatories, including the Ultraviolet Transiet Astronomy Satellite (ULTRASAT), which will continuously scan the entire sky for hot, ultraviolet sources; and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a space telescope that will detect low-frequency gravitational waves from sources such as pairs of lopsided, David-and-Goliath black holes. 

And she’s also found time for a bit of black hole fun: In 2022, Kara collaborated with educators and music anthropologists at MIT to convert a black hole’s X-ray echoes to audible sound. As a musician herself — she sings and plays the violin — she was curious how a black hole’s cosmic energy might “sound.” The effect was otherworldly, to say the least. 

“One of the reasons that I love black holes is that they are very extreme, and feel very sci-fi crazy, and things don’t make sense, and physics breaks down around them. And at the same time, they’re super foundational to even why we’re here,” Kara says. “For reasons we don’t fully understand, the distribution of stars and gas and dust in a galaxy is dictated in part by the supermassive black hole at its center. Our sun is one of those stars. It’s all intertwined. And untangling some of that is what motivates me.”

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 26 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02682-1

Distinguishing leaf scorching from senescence under climate extremes

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 26 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02679-w

The 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome shows how acute thermal stress challenges prevailing assumptions about ecological resilience and adaptation. Extreme heat events are revealing physiological limits in forests that are not captured by conventional climate risk frameworks.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 26 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02681-2

Global greening has persisted under climate change, with feedbacks for Earth’s future climate. Here I look back on a critical 2016 study that resolved the patterns and drivers of global greening and consider how this work influences studies to monitor, model and manage greening.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 26 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02673-2

Mental health should not be viewed solely as a passive outcome of climate adaptation. Rather, it serves as a key determinant of cognitive capacity and shapes the effectiveness of climate adaptation. Here we call for the integration of mental health into adaptation assessments and policy implementation.

Time and time again, researchers have found numerous compromised Android devices for sale at large online retailers like Amazon. When these devices get individually reported, we have seen some noted efforts to take them down. But this is a systemic problem and Amazon and other major online retailers must make a corresponding systemic and intentional effort to stop these devices from entering people’s homes and ultimately their networks.

As a refresher: Last year, Google wrote that one major campaign, deemed BADBOX, affected 10 million uncertified devices that were running Android’s open-source software (Android Open Source Project or AOSP). These devices span from TVs and streaming devices to digital picture frames. Even now, someone can go on Amazon and Walmart and buy one of these devices. Not all of them come from Amazon and Walmart, but it’s fair to assume since they have the lion’s share of the market.

Most well-known Android-based devices don’t come with just “stock Android.” The operating system is usually Android plus additional features that the manufacturer wanted. These custom versions of Android often come with pre-installed applications that range from useful to innocuous bloatware to actual malware. Many Android OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) pre-install apps that may not be visibly represented by an icon in your list of installed apps. This obscurity makes the issue particularly hard for users to identify any potential threats.

Since the initial BADBOX analysis, there have been more reports of large campaigns and clusters of different devices participating in malicious activities that utilize people’s home networks to engage in illegal activity. Task forces in the private sector have made an effort to take down these existing Command and Control structures, but these actors may pivot and evolve to flood the market with more devices. 

Online retailers can stop this cycle. A multi-billion dollar company like Amazon should offer more resources, like their anti-fraud efforts, given that these products may have facilitated conditions for large scale attacks and illegal activity. It would also be helpful if they communicated malware-related take downs in a more visible way to consumers who are seeking very similar devices with shared characteristics.

Identifying these devices can be tricky, but it’s not impossible because they tend to follow a pattern. For example, the FBI warned consumers this year to avoid TV streaming devices that claim to provide free sports, tv shows, and movies, a common tactic used by the makers of these malware-filled Android devices that leverages people’s exhaustion from spending money on countless streaming services. We detailed what sorts of indicators to look for on a device you’ve purchased.

But it’s not just the storefronts. There are other parts of this ecosystem that need to improve too, like increased engagement in firmware transparency and the actual manufacturers of the devices themselves being held accountable for these malware laced products.

On Prime Day, we urge retailers like Amazon to better empower users with information they need to make safe and smart decisions.