Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT and a Nobel laureate, died July 11 at the age of 86.

Tonegawa was a renowned molecular biologist who wielded his keen insight in a variety of fields, including immunology and neuroscience. In the early 1980s, Tonegawa discovered how the immune system generates its incredible diversity of antibodies — a breakthrough that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1987.

Following that landmark achievement, he turned his attention to neuroscience, where his work has helped to reveal how the brain stores memories as traces called “engrams.”

An MIT faculty member for more than 40 years, Tonegawa also served as the founding director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and director of the RIKEN Brain Science Institute of Japan, and was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

“Few scientists have reshaped our understanding of biology as profoundly as Susumu Tonegawa,” says Myriam Heiman, director of the Picower Institute. “His intellectual fearlessness, extraordinary creativity, and relentless pursuit of fundamental questions opened entirely new frontiers in both immunology and neuroscience. His influence on science and on the people who had the privilege of working alongside him is immeasurable.” 

Drawn to molecular biology

Born in Nagoya, Japan, Tonegawa spent his early years moving between rural towns, due to his father’s job as an engineer for a textile company. When it was time for him to go to high school, his parents sent him to a school in Tokyo, where he became interested in chemistry.

He was admitted to the University of Kyoto to study chemistry, and while there, he was drawn to the nascent field of molecular biology. He began his graduate studies at the Institute for Virus Research at the University of Kyoto, but after only a couple of months, his advisor, Professor Itaru Watanabe, suggested that he apply to a school in the United States, which had more advanced molecular biology programs.

Tonegawa took that advice and was accepted at the University of California at San Diego, where he studied how a virus called phage lambda controls gene transcription. After earning his PhD in 1968, he went on to a postdoc in a lab at the Salk Institute.

In that lab, Tonegawa began studying gene expression of a virus known as SV40. However, his U.S. visa was set to expire at the end of 1970, so he soon headed for a position at the newly established Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland. 

At the time, Tonegawa had little background in immunology, but he soon became fascinated by the 100-year-old question of “antibody diversity” — how the body’s immune system is able to generate hundreds of millions of antibodies from a relatively small set of genes. (The entire human genome contains about 20,000 genes.) That antibody diversity is what allows the immune system to recognize so many pathogens, including those it has never seen before.

With colleagues in Basel, Tonegawa discovered that each antibody protein is not encoded by its own gene — instead, genes for different components of the antibody can be randomly recombined to generate limitless combinations.

In 1987, Tonegawa was a solo recipient of the Nobel Prize for discovering that process, known as V(D)J gene rearrangement. In announcing the award, the Nobel committee noted that Tonegawa’s discoveries “explain the genetic background allowing the enormous richness of variation amongst antibodies. Beyond deeper knowledge of the basic structure of the immune system these discoveries will have importance in improving immunological therapy of different kinds, such as for instance the enforcement of vaccinations and inhibition of reactions during transplantation.”

From antibodies to engrams

In the early 1980s, after his groundbreaking antibody discoveries, Tonegawa began to feel the urge to turn to new research directions. He also wanted to return to the United States, so in 1981, he accepted the offer of a professorship at MIT’s Center for Cancer Research (today known as the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research). There, he began working on T cells and contributed to scientists’ understanding of how T cells are able to generate a large diversity of T-cell receptors.

While at the CCR, he also began to study questions in neuroscience. As he told an interviewer from the Picower Institute in 2022, he was always in search of new scientific endeavors to keep him interested in his work.

“When I decided to become a scientist, my criteria of what to do was whether the scientific problem I got to solve was interesting or not. Whether I’m curious our not. I didn’t think about other things like, Could it be too risky? Can I really develop my career by venturing into the field I am not familiar with? That never occurred to me. I just followed my curiosity and instinct,” Tonegawa said in an interview published in the summer 2022 Picower Institute newsletter.

In 1994, he was chosen as the founding director for MIT’s Center for Learning and Memory, which became the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory in 2002. Tonegawa continued to serve as the center’s director until the end of 2006. 

Professor Li-Huei Tsai, who succeeded Tonegawa as the Picower Institute’s director, calls working alongside Tonegawa “one of the greatest honors of my career.”

“His passion, boundless energy, and unwavering pursuit of the fundamental mechanisms underlying memory were contagious, inspiring generations of neuroscientists to join and advance the field. Today, we lost a giant. His scientific legacy will continue to shape neuroscience for years to come, and he will be deeply missed by all of us,” she says.

Over the past two decades, Tonegawa’s lab has made significant discoveries in the field of memory research. In 2013, he and his colleagues reported that they had identified “engrams” in the brain’s hippocampus. These engrams consist of episodic memories — memories of experiences — that are stored in specific groups of hippocampal cells. Engrams encode elements including objects, space, and time, linked to a specific experience.

At that time, the researchers also found that it was possible to implant “false memories” in mice by using optogenetics to reactivate an existing engram while the animals formed a new memory. This prompted the mice to associate a new location with the memory of an event that had actually happened in a different location.

Later work from Tonegawa’s lab showed that engrams extend beyond the hippocampus and are stored across a widely distributed complex that spans many brain circuits. More recently, he had been working on engrams of “knowledge memory” to decipher the fundamental mechanism of abstract memory. His recent work also delved into how the emotional associations of memories are encoded, and how the brain maintains a timeline of chronological events.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Tonegawa received many other awards, including the Albert and Mary Lasker Award for Basic Research in 1987, the Bristol-Myers Award for Distinguished Achievement in Cancer Research in 1986, and the David M. Bonner Lifetime Achievement Award from the University of California at San Diego in 2010. He was also known for training many scientists who are now leaders in the field of neuroscience.

Tonegawa was a longtime fan of the Boston Red Sox, and in May 2004, he had the opportunity to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at Fenway Park, as part of the team’s tribute to the Boston area’s scientific and medical communities.

He is survived by his wife, Mayumi Tonegawa ’92, two children, Hidde Tonegawa ’09 and Hanna Tonegawa, and two grandchildren. He was predeceased by a son, Satto Tonegawa. 

Following a private funeral, his ashes will be buried in Kyoto, Japan.

The effort to age gate the internet is back in Washington—and now it has a new name. Recently passed by the House of Representatives, the KIDS Act is a sprawling package of proposals to control what we can see and say online. Supporters claim the KIDS Act is needed to protect minors online. But if lawmakers really want to make the internet safer, why are they encouraging more surveillance instead of protecting our privacy? We dive into this question with our EFFector newsletter.

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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 a victory for location privacy in the Supreme Court, disturbing developments in the militarization of domestic drones, and a controversial Congressional bill to control what we can see and say online.

Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This time, we're chatting with EFF Senior Policy Analyst Joe Mullin on what would happen to the open internet if the KIDS Act becomes law. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice:

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Concrete is the most widely used building material on Earth, and producing it is one of the largest single sources of carbon emissions. One promising way to reduce its environmental footprint is to 3D-print concrete, laying it down bead by bead like a giant icing-piping robot. This process eliminates the labor-intensive formwork of pouring it into molds, and places the material only where a structure needs it.

But many of the most efficient designs created by computers are impossible for today’s printers to build. Engineers use a technique called topology optimization to find the strongest structure that uses the least amount of material. But those mathematically ideal designs, with their intricate, spider-web shapes, don’t account for the physical limitations of large-scale concrete printers with their thick nozzles, limited turning, and need to print in one continuous motion.

Now a team of MIT researchers has developed a way to close that gap. Their framework, described in a new article in Additive Manufacturing, bakes a printer’s real fabrication limits directly into the optimization, so the design that comes out is one a machine can build and print with little or no manual redesign. They demonstrated it by designing, printing, and load-testing a 2.3-meter concrete bridge and found that today’s printing hardware, not the concrete itself, limits how light a structure can be.

“We were finding a lot of cracks you can fall through when it comes to translating these super-optimal designs into manufacturable designs,” says co-first author Hajin Kim-Tackowiak PhD ’26, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE). “Those cracks were like chasms.”

Designing for what can be built

To pin down the constraints, the team worked with the people who run the large-scale printing machines at Autodesk’s facility in Boston.

“They pointed at some of our sharp angles, and they went, 'I don't feel safe printing something like that,'” Kim-Tackowiak recalls.

Those conversations surfaced three key limitations: how thick each printed bead must be, how sharply the nozzle can turn, and the need to print in a single continuous line. The researchers translated each constraint directly into the mathematical rules of their framework.

Existing 3D-printed structures are typically produced with older methods that optimize the shape first, and then require “a massive amount of post-processing,” taking days to run, Kim-Tackowiak explains. By contrast, the team’s framework generated fully printable designs in about two minutes on a laptop. When the team needed to slightly reduce the bridge’s size on the day of printing, they simply reran the optimization and had an updated design five to 10 minutes later. 

“Reaching that speed at all is recent,” says co-first author Zane Schemmer, a PhD student in CEE. The math the method relies on, mixed-integer optimization, was long considered too hard to use. “You go back five, 10 years ago, the solver we used, even three years ago, could not solve these problems,” he says. “This field has been avoided, because everyone thinks that’s not an avenue we can go down. But with new algorithms and resources, it’s becoming a way we can start to frame problems.”

A bridge reveals the real limitation

To validate the framework, the researchers went back to Autodesk’s facility to print a 2.3-meter-long concrete bridge.

“The bridge took about 30 minutes to make and was built from off-the-shelf mortar,” says senior author Josephine Carstensen, the Gilbert W. Winslow (1937) Career Development Professor in Civil Engineering.

In testing, the roughly 900-pound structure held more than 2,000 pounds spread across it with virtually no measurable bending, closely matching the team’s simulations.

But the test also revealed the study’s biggest surprise. “What we found was our result was super over-engineered,” Kim-Tackowiak says. “From zero to 200,000 pounds, your design is entirely driven by these 'can I build it or not' constraints. And then, after 200,000 pounds, you can start to think about the physics.” In other words, the limits of current printing technology, not the strength of concrete, were dictating how efficient the structure could be.

A roadmap for better printers

Because the framework finds the mathematically best possible design, the researchers could measure exactly how much each hardware limitation costs in material.

“With mixed-integer optimization, we can find the global optimum, the best solution there is, as opposed to just a good solution,” Carstensen says. “Because we know we’re finding the best solution out there, we can also quantify: If we had a machine that could do other things, what would that mean for how much material we’re using?”

The single biggest lever was the width of the printed bead. The bridge used a 4 centimeter bead. The analysis showed a machine that was able to lay a 1cm bead could cut material use by as much as 76 percent while staying “well within safety margins,” Carstensen says. The result surprised her. “I thought the continuous path would be the problem, the one that had the highest effect,” she says. “But it wasn’t. It was the bead width.”

The result is a roadmap for printer-makers showing that modest hardware improvements could unlock large gains in efficiency and cut concrete’s carbon footprint.

Part of what made the bridge possible is that every piece is in compression. “With concrete, it’s really good when you push on it, really bad when you pull on it,” Schemmer says. “We're able to guarantee that every piece of concrete that you see is in compression, there’s no part that’s being pulled on.”

The savings come not only from using less material, but from skipping molds entirely, an advantage that grows for one-off shapes. Carstensen sees early promise in disaster relief, “You can quickly put up new infrastructure without needing to make formwork.”

The bridge’s compression-only nature showed itself dramatically after testing. It had held more than 2,000 pounds without budging, but when a worker lifted one corner a few inches to sweep beneath it, it broke. The failure wasn’t a design flaw so much as a demonstration of the principle behind it: Concrete is weak when pulled, and the lift put parts of the bridge in tension they were never meant to carry. “It’s optimal in one way, but it’s definitely not optimal in every way,” Kim-Tackowiak says.

That points to the team’s next step of reinforced concrete. “We know a pure concrete structure is not necessarily going to be the most optimal thing, so we’re moving it more into the world we live in today, which is reinforced concrete,” Kim-Tackowiak says, “though working out how to feed rebar into a printed concrete structure,” she adds, “is proving its own challenge.”

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and supported by the MIT Center for Advanced Production Technologies. Joining Kim-Tackowiak, Schemmer, and Carstensen on the paper are co-authors Pittipat Wongsittikan, a PhD student in the MIT Building Technology Architecture program, and Jackson Jewett MEng ’18, PhD ’25, a former MIT postdoc.

It’s a fact of life that the electrical activity of neurons will vary during repetitions of the same task, even when the ultimate outcome is the same. A new study shows that a lot of ongoing fluctuations in the brain’s activity could be explained by the influence local electric fields exerted on the neurons, a phenomenon called “ephaptic coupling.” The finding, published in Cerebral Cortex, adds to evidence that the brain’s electric fields act as important control signals for underlying brain function.

“The brain is a rollicking sea of electrical influences,” says study co-author Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor of Neuroscience in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “But the traditional view of brain function focuses only on the spiking and synaptic connections among individual neurons. Now, there is growing evidence for electric field effects. For instance, in this study we show that neural variability is explained by how ephaptic effects are influencing neural activity.”

In 2022 and 2023, Miller and fellow author Dimitris Pinotsis, associate professor at City St George’s, University of London, published several studies showing that local electric fields in the brain’s cortex not only reflected the information neurons were processing better than any individual neuron did, but also that the fields actively helped to organize the underlying neural spiking that executes that processing. Like an orchestra conductor, the electric waves can conduct crowds of neurons so that they are “playing the same tune.” They further theorize that fields physically exert influence on the structure of the brain via cytoelectric coupling, in which the fields alter the cytoskeleton of neurons, optimizing them to oscillate in synchrony.

Because electric fields can be manipulated, Miller and Pinotsis argue in the new study that understanding how they influence momentary brain function could open the door to therapeutic interventions designed to improve it when it is faltering in disease. It would be difficult to adjust every neural connection, but ephaptic coupling suggests that intervening at the level of electric fields could accomplish that therapeutic end, the researchers say.

“Properly devised electric field manipulations could help patients rewire faulty circuits,” Pinotsis and Miller wrote.

In the duo’s prior studies, they analyzed signals averaged over time, documenting that in general, even though local (or “mesoscale”) electric fields in the cortex arise from the electrical activity of individual neurons, the field ultimately represents and coordinates their function. Think of it this way: Neurons are like individual citizens, and the electric fields are their government. Once the citizens establish a government with their individual votes, they are then subject to and unified by the laws the government creates and enforces. 

In the new study, the team asked whether mesoscale electric fields not only provide this ephaptic influence overall during working memory tasks, but also trial by trial. After all, that’s closer to the timescale of actual brain operations that matter both for healthy function and in disease. 

So the scientists looked anew at the data they recorded as animals played a simple video game. The animals were shown a dot in one of six positions around a screen. After the dot disappeared, the animals had to hold its former position in memory because to succeed in the game and earn a reward, they had to glance when cued to indicate the direction where the dot had appeared. Meanwhile, the scientists recorded neural electrical spiking and more collective local field potentials. Using that information, they calculated the local prevailing electric field at each moment.

In their statistical analysis of the data, they made several findings. One, as expected, was that neural activity varied sometimes quite widely trial by trial during the task. Another, using a mathematical technique called Granger Causality, showed that the direction of influence between the electric field and the neural activity was strongly in favor of the field. In other words, in the coupling between the two, the fields were dominant.

“We found that electric fields that emerge from neural activity, captured with LFPs [local field potentials], turn around and influence this activity in a top-down fashion (ephaptic coupling),” the researchers wrote.

Moreover, the team’s modeling and calculations showed that the strength of the ephaptic coupling between the field and the neural activity was proportional to the variations in the LFP power — another sign that the fields influenced the neural activity.

“The larger the variability, the more evident the top-down organizing effects,” the researchers wrote. “The emerging picture is that electric fields serve as control parameters.”

The U.K. Medical Council, the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Freedom Together Foundation, and the Picower Institute funded the study.

A high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet, also called a ketogenic diet, can help some people lose weight by forcing their bodies to burn fat for fuel instead of sugar. 

In recent years, scientists have been exploring how this type of diet might affect other aspects of health and disease, including cancer. While some research has shown that the diet may protect against the development of colon cancer, a new study by MIT researchers suggests that in the small intestine, a ketogenic diet may increase the risk of cancer.

“Ketogenic diets have distinct effects on different tissues even within the gastrointestinal tract. I think the message here is that we need to be very careful in generalizing the effects that these diets can have, because what might be beneficial for one tissue may be detrimental for another tissue,” says Omer Yilmaz, director of the MIT Stem Cell Initiative, an associate professor of biology at MIT, and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Yilmaz is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature. MIT postdocs Jessica Shay and Fangtao Chi are the lead authors of the paper. Researchers from the labs of Alex K. Shalek, director of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and Matthew Vander Heiden, director of the Koch Institute, also contributed to the study.

Diet and cancer

Ketogenic diets, originally developed in the 1920s as a way to treat epilepsy, have been adapted in the past few decades as a strategy to lose weight or increase lifespan. The diet comprises a high percentage of fat, low percentage of carbohydrates, and normal or reduced amounts of protein.

This type of diet forces the body to burn fatty acids for energy in place of carbohydrates such as glucose. Burning these lipids produces ketone bodies — primarily β-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) and acetoacetate — as byproducts of fatty acid metabolism. These ketone bodies are also generated when people fast or follow very low-calorie diets, which force the body to burn its own fatty stores.

A 2022 Nature study suggested that ketogenic diets have a protective effect against colon cancer and that BHB — the most abundant ketone body — is responsible for this effect. In the new Nature study, the MIT team wanted to explore whether ketogenic diets might have a similar protective effect in the small intestine.

The researchers fed mice who were genetically predisposed to developing intestinal cancer either a ketogenic diet, a control diet, or a high fat/high calorie diet. They found that mice on a ketogenic diet were more likely to develop tumors of the small intestine than those on a control diet. While they did not become obese, mice on the ketogenic diet developed tumors at rates similar to or even higher than those of mice on an obesogenic high fat/high calorie diet. 

Additional studies revealed that ketone bodies did not play a role in tumor development. Instead, tumor growth was driven by how intestinal cells burn dietary fat for energy — a metabolic pathway called fatty acid oxidation. This pathway activates a family of proteins called PPARs, which signal stem cells to multiply more rapidly, increasing the chance that some become cancerous. 

This stem cell proliferation can be beneficial in certain situations, such as when the intestinal lining needs to be repaired after illness or injury. However, too much proliferation can tip cells toward becoming cancerous. 

“Having more stem cells means that when you injure the small intestine, it can repair itself better, but the downside is that having more active stem cells can lead to tumor formation,” Yilmaz says.

Opposite effects

Surprisingly, the same ketogenic diet that promoted tumors in the small intestine had the opposite effect in the colon. The researchers found, similar to the earlier Nature study back in 2022, that a ketogenic diet suppressed the development of colon tumors. However, the new findings suggest that ketone bodies are not responsible for this protective effect.

“Given how much attention has been paid to ketone bodies like BHB, both as a commercial health trend and in recent high-profile studies suggesting BHB suppresses colon cancer, we fully expected them to be the direct drivers. Instead, our experiments in genetically engineered mice revealed that these molecules are essentially metabolic bystanders. The real surprise is that tumor acceleration is driven entirely by how stem cells process and burn the heavy influx of dietary fat itself,” Yilmaz says.

The researchers now hope to further study why ketogenic diets have such different effects in the colon and the small intestine. As ketogenic diets continue to gain popularity, understanding these tissue-specific effects will be critical for guiding their use, the researchers say.

“The deeper question is why the same diet has opposite consequences in two adjacent parts of the gut. That is what we are working to understand next,” Chi says.

The findings carry practical implications. Because the diet’s effects — both the tumor acceleration in the small intestine and the protection in the colon — are driven entirely by fat metabolism rather than the ketones themselves, commercial ketone supplements or drinks would not be expected to mimic either the risks or the benefits discovered in this study. This may be especially relevant given that small intestinal tumors have been rising in incidence in recent decades, with the greatest impact on patients with inherited conditions that predispose them to intestinal cancer, such as familial adenomatous polyposis.

The research was funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health, a Pew-Stewart Trust scholar award, the Kathy and Curt Marble cancer research award, a Koch Institute-Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Bridge project grant, the American Federation for Aging Research, the MIT Stem Cell Initiative, a Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, and the Koch Institute Support (core) grant from the National Cancer Institute.

Amazing:

Researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, however, managed to create a new type of pixel that can simultaneously do both. This hypercharged pixel, called a Fourier pixel, can generate and sense arbitrary light fields and tap into a pixel’s full potential for carrying information by manipulating light’s intensity, oscillation phases, and polarization. The team reported its findings in a paper published yesterday in Nature.

We are one step closer to 1984 technology:

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment...

Justice Elena Kagan's foreword to a judicial reference manual has triggered calls for her to bow out of an upcoming Supreme Court case.

Companies peddling smoke-spotting cameras, firefighting drones and forest-clearing robots are taking their pitch from California to the Capitol.

The National Academies report has been the subject of intense scrutiny by energy industry allies ahead of its release.

The rapid growth could prompt countries like the U.S. to enact new barriers to development, according to a new report.

Artificial intelligence models sort through huge amounts of satellite data to help detect leaks.

Widespread adoption of the fuel in shipping could lead to a substantial reduction in global emissions.

The sustained demand reflects a global search for alternative energy sources that has been hastened by the energy-supply crunch arising from the Middle East war.

The deal will create one of Europe's biggest integrated direct air capture companies.

Heavy monsoon rains also triggered landslides that blocked several roads and damaged homes in the Gilgit-Baltistan region.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 15 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02709-7

The authors demonstrate asymmetrical impacts of forest gain and loss on evapotranspiration and precipitation: gain increases the processes more than loss reduces them. They highlight a need to better consider hydrological asymmetry in climate models and in planning of forest-based climate solutions.

One of the best bulwarks against monopoly is interoperability—that is making a new product or service work with an existing product or service. Interoperability allows users, and not the manufacturers of their devices or largest player in a market, to decide what application best serves them. Unsurprisingly, companies like Apple have worked hard to resist interoperability requirements. 

On July 8, the General Court of the  European Union (General Court) ruled against Apple in several cases the company brought against the European Commission (joint cases), affirming the company’s obligations under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Apple argued in the cases that it should be exempted from the law’s requirements especially with regards to interoperability on multiple grounds. We applaud the General Court’s  decision, and congratulate the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) as well as others who intervened in support of the Commission against Apple's attempt to shirk off its responsibilities, thus ensuring fair competition in European markets.

A Positive Development for Europeans

This is a clear and substantive win for developers and users in Europe. The stranglehold Apple exerts over its ‘walled garden’ is injurious for developers, users, and researchers alike. By confirming Apple’s obligations under the DMA, the General Court has ensured that developers will be given more choice on where they can publish their apps, and users will have more options to obtain apps which, for whatever reason, Apple dislikes. And researchers will have less roadblocks and hurdles to overcome in their studies of Apple’s OSes, particularly iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS.

Apple argues that the interoperability requirements will force it to lower the security standards that have led Apple products’ users to trust their devices. While this self-serving logic is not entirely without merit, it is far from the inevitable outcome. Especially with regards to the App Store, users can be given clear, informed choice when leaving the Apple ecosystem to obtain apps elsewhere. While we urge European courts to take Apple’s security concerns seriously, we’ve previously noted that this should not be used as a smokescreen to protect anticompetitive behavior.

Interoperability and security are not inherently at odds. When interoperable functionality is worked into the security model of a platform from the ground-up, a proper balance can be struck between two forces that are often falsely framed as naturally conflicting. While Apple OS platforms have not been built this way from the get-go, it is still possible, but takes more time to get it right. Here, the devil is in the implementation details.

Apple’s Case Arguments and the Court’s Rebuttal

Under the DMA, designation as a ‘gatekeeper’ is reserved for the biggest of Big Tech, companies that provide services deemed essential for businesses to reach end users. Apple is one of only seven companies that meet this designation, along with Alphabet, Amazon, Booking, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft. In its case, Apple argued that Article 6(7) of the DMA, specifying interoperability requirements for gatekeepers aimed at restoring fair competition, is unlawful in light of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (specifically the right to property), and as such its designation as a gatekeeper subject to the requirements is unlawful and should be annulled as a result. In its ruling, the General Court rejected the argument as Article 6(7) does not form the legal basis of the designation.

Apple separately argues that the App Store fails to meet the requirements defining a core platform service (CPS), since the various stores (across iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS) do not constitute a single platform. A company’s gatekeeper status relies on it providing a CPS that is an important gateway for business users to reach end users. Here, the implications of the argument are clear: remove service designation as CPSes, remove the gatekeeper status. The court rejected the argument on the basis that “irrespective of the device on which it was available, each of the App Stores was used for the same purpose, namely to intermediate between end users and business users in the distribution of applications and in-app digital content.”

Finally, the court rejected as inadmissible Apple’s argument that iMessage should not be classified as a number-independent interpersonal communication service (NIICS) constituting a CPS. This decision rested on the fact that the “classification does not, by itself, produce binding legal effects that bring about a change in Apple’s legal position” since iMessage was not listed as an “important gateway” in the designation decision and therefore was not subject to the DMA obligations.

In ruling against Apple in favor of the European Commission, the General Court has set an important precedent in ensuring competitive fairness and openness in the digital marketplace. The landmark effects of the DMA will serve to benefit all Europeans in the choice and freedom it affords them. Despite Big Tech’s legal challenges, these decisions build a strong foundation for a better digital future—a lesson which other regions should learn from and take note.

Systems using artificial intelligence to enhance forecasting, planning, and decision-making in businesses have been proliferating in recent years, but in many cases, they lack the detailed, specific information about the organization itself, limiting the usefulness of those tools. 

Devavrat Shah, a principal investigator at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), faculty member with the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and member of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), has been focused on how to design methods that can handle second-by-second decision-making using limited computational resources. 

“In a sense, with a small amount of resource, you have to do a lot of heavy lifting,” he says. As a researcher, “my interest is in the ability to develop methods that can extract information from data at scale in as effective a manner as possible.”

The Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor has been teaching at MIT since 2005. 

In 2019, he also co-founded a spinoff company called Ikigai Labs. Ikigai built a foundation model for tabular, time series data based on years of research in Shah’s lab, which was patented and licensed by MIT to the company. This model can take input from enterprise data from varied sources, continuously and at scale, so that it learns as it goes along by testing its predictions against real outcomes.

Shah explains that the system is an extension of the kind of graphical models that are used, for example, by GPS devices to convert a sparse amount of data received from satellites into an accurate model of a position on the Earth’s surface, or by communication system like that in a digital watch that communicates at high speed in an energy-efficient manner. 

“My interest was: How does one design such graphical models for generic, tabular data?” he says.

While most AI models have been taught using text and images, this system takes tabular data as its input — structured data such as the familiar kind of row-and-column format used in spreadsheets. And then it provides the kind of real-time planning, on a vastly larger scale. 

The idea for Ikigai was to provide forecasting and decision-making technology for large businesses, such as consumer goods manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies.

Shah gives the example of how a consumer electronics company might use this system. 

“Let’s say you’re making headphones and all sorts of different things. And each of the products that you manufacture has lots of small pieces that come from different parts of the world. And once the device is sold, it needs to be supported and maintained. And you have to come up with new versions of the product, you have to market them, you have to price them … So the questions you would typically ask would be: If I were to sell these next quarter or next year, how many will be sold in different places, and what would happen to demand if I change the price, or if I introduce promotion?”

He adds that all of these processes are interdependent, and at every stage of the processes decisions have to be made that have implications over time. “At some level,” he says, “digitizing these processes and being able to do predictions and constantly optimize is what leads to ultimately better business operations.”

Ikigai was recently acquired by the international firm Celonis, where Shah is now chief scientist in addition to his roles at MIT. Ultimately, he hopes the model he developed for Ikigai will help Celonis deliver tools that can integrate with a company’s own data and business processes in order to provide real-world analyses that can help make forecasts, plans, and decisions.

Shah adds that Celonis has specialized in digitizing and automating operations for more than 1,400 large companies around the world. Now that these systems are fully digitized, they provide a platform for Ikigai’s software to take the next step, reading the data from these digitized systems in order to provide detailed models to allow simulation of different options, predict optimum strategies, and forecast the results of a given set of decisions. 

“Once the digital layer of these processes exists and this information layer exists,” Shah says, “now, on top of it, we can put the Ikigai stack to enable decision-making at a much larger scale than otherwise.”

While so many companies are working on various aspects of AI, “we are very much focused on part of the domain that the rest of the world is not paying attention to,” which is the area of structured or time-domain data. By starting from such data, he says, it provides a very cost-effective version of AI. 

“A narrower focus comes with sharper technology,” he says, “but it’s broad enough that it’s very valuable.”

Shah adds, “The recent buzzword that’s become pertinent in the modern AI popular press is a ‘world model.’ In a sense, this is trying to build the enterprise process world model, so to speak.”

In an increasingly crowded, for-profit landscape for scholarly research, the health of a publishing program is often measured by the influence of its publications. This year, three MIT Press journals demonstrated their stature by earning the highest impact factors in their disciplines.

Computational Linguistics ranked first in the Linguistics category, International Security led the International Relations category, and The Review of Economics and Statistics topped the Social Sciences, Mathematical Models category in Clarivate’s 2026 journal impact factor rankings.

For the MIT Press, this achievement highlights the distinctive strength of its journals program. Although relatively small compared to other commercial and university press publishers, MIT Press journals consistently publish widely cited scholarship across a broad range of disciplines, from social science and the humanities to neuroscience and artificial intelligence. 

Clarivate’s impact factors capture the previous year’s scholarly citation activity, but the influence of MIT Press journals often extends well beyond academia. In recent months, International Security articles have been cited by Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The Conversation, CBC, and Brookings. The journal has also published research with significant real-world policy relevance, including a widely discussed article by MIT political scientist Caitlin Talmadge that anticipated how a limited strike on Iran could escalate into attempts to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, triggering a broader military and economic crisis. 

“I am proud and humbled that International Security has had the number one impact factor in International Relations for two years running,” says Jacqueline Hazelton, editor of International Security. “Thanks are due to our generous reviewers, our brilliant authors, our talented editors who handle the often-thankless work of copy editing and production, and, of course, our readers. We plan to continue leading the field in IR/security studies with rigorous scholarship that challenges the conventional wisdom, identifies new threats and opportunities, engages with policy and theory, and illuminates history.”

The MIT Press journals team is small, with under 10 people working across production, sales, and marketing; but that small team collaborates with the editorial staff of 50 disparate journals to publish around 2,500 articles annually. “Some of the joy I take in editing International Security stems from working with the people at MIT Press,” Hazelton adds. “They are helpful and patient. They know what to do, and they do it.”

“The journals division at MIT Press has undergone significant change over the past decade — from business model upheaval and rapid technological advances to the ongoing challenge of competing with commercial publishers many times our size,” says Nick Lindsay, director of journals and institutional partnerships at the MIT Press. “Through it all, the journals group has adapted and evolved to meet those challenges and remains a home for experimentation and fair and equitable publishing.”

The MIT Press’ reputation for influential publishing has attracted many prestigious partners to its journals program, including Harvard University, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the University of California at Berkeley. Amid this growth and development, the program continues to launch and support new journals in emerging and interdisciplinary fields while upholding the high editorial and publishing standards that have made it what it is today.

“Computational Linguistics has long stood for depth and rigor, and in a field that moves remarkably fast, our aspiration is for it to remain a home for work that lasts — scholarship the community can keep building on for years to come,” says Wei Lu, editor of Computational Linguistics. “We are very proud of this result, which reflects both the strength of the work our authors publish and the care our reviewers and editors bring to the journal. We are grateful to MIT Press for being such a steadfast partner.”

This strong performance extended well beyond the press’ three top-ranked publications. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics was ranked 2nd in the Linguistics Category out of 312 journals; Global Environmental Politics was 2nd in the International Relations category out of 173 journals; and The Review of Economics and Statistics was 17th in the Economics category among 626 journals. Other highlights include Harvard Data Science Review ranking 7th in Statistics and Probability; European Societies ranking No. 13 in Sociology; and Neurobiology of Language ranking No. 13 in Psychology, Experimental.

Overall, 13 MIT Press journals earned impact factors that place them in the top quartile of their area of publishing, including: 

• Computational Linguistics 
• European Societies
• Evolutionary Computation 
• Global Environmental Politics
• Harvard Data Science Review
• International Security
• Journal of Cold War Studies
• The Journal of Interdisciplinary History
• Linguistic Inquiry
• Neurobiology of Language
• Quantitative Science Studies
• The Review of Economics and Statistics
• Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Together, these rankings point to the strong reputation that the MIT Press has built for its journals portfolio, a relatively small program that shapes conversations across the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields.

This year the state of New York had the dubious honor of being the first to pass a controversial provision to mandate all 3D printers come with surveillance and censorship. That means not only is there a ticking clock to protect every artist, researcher, engineer, and hobbyist in the state, but there is a real risk of other states thoughtlessly following suit—prior to the New York rules even taking effect.

We, along with many other experts, already warned about this bill buried in the state’s crowded budget process. Hundreds of our supporters and 3D printing enthusiasts in New York reached out to their representatives hoping to kill this farcical bill. While there were some welcome amendments in response to the outcry, Albany passed it anyway.

It might be well-intentioned, but bills like these sell a fantasy that can only have an untold negative impact on the privacy, free expression, and consumer rights of anyone using these general purpose devices. Behind the banner of reducing gun violence, which is nearly always committed with commercial firearms, New York lawmakers have passed draconian legislation that will let manufacturers lock in users and collect their data.

Now that the bill has passed and been signed by Governor Hochul, let’s look at two important ways the final legislation changed since we last wrote about it, and why states like California shouldn’t make the same mistake.

Reduced Risk for Lawful File Sharing 

The New York bill includes language that criminalizes access to firearm print files, a proposal correctly dropped by states like Colorado due to First Amendment concerns. While this made it through to the passed legislation, a few wins were still gained.

Originally the legislation threatened felony charges for the storing and sharing of files, potentially impacting researchers, artists, and journalists with no intention of printing a firearm component. These charges were downgraded to a Class A misdemeanor.

Two provisions criminalized file sharing. The first of the two provisions criminalizing this file sharing, which pertains to the sale or distribution of files in the state, gained an important exception for when a sender has a reasonable belief that the recipient won’t illegally print these components. However the second provision, pertaining to criminalizing file possession, complicates this. Under 2.12 of the subpart, people who possess the file with intent to share the files do not clearly get this same reasonable belief exception.

In other words, if you share one of these files the actual sharing is covered by the exception, but the law makes it ambiguous whether possessing those same files is covered when you intend to share them.

While this exception could have created some breathing room for researchers and journalists operating in good faith, this slapdash bill language leaves plenty of ambiguity and potential speech-chilling effects. However, these changes do offer a modicum of harm reduction in this unconstitutional law.

Saving Face by Preserving Online Sale

Originally the bill had a strange requirement for all 3D printers and Computer Numerical Control, or CNC, machines to be sold and delivered face-to-face, with no exception. That would have meant a major barrier to access, particularly for people in agricultural and rural areas of the state who uniquely benefit from in-home fabrication and repair. It also would have meant a major inconvenience for businesses using these devices. For everyone though, it meant fewer retailers to choose from and facing more stigma for using these devices. 

Fortunately this was dropped from the bill entirely. 

Next Step: We Find Out What Was Actually Passed

In addition to being buried in the complicated legislative process of the NY budget and avoiding proper scrutiny, this bill also kicked the can down the road in determining what exactly is being mandated. In many respects, legislators passed a vibe. We’ll see how the actual law be developed over the next year by a working group with no mandated transparency to the public. Further, they have no obligation to ensure consumer safeguards in developing this state-mandated censorware.

We are still concerned by the possibility of a biased working group acting in the interest of manufacturers or facing pressure to accept consumer harms in the standards they produce. Our remaining hope is this working group convened by the Department of State and the state university system is composed of actual experts who are aware of how unfeasible and harmful this mandate is, and prevent it from being realized.

The Fight Continues

New York is the first to go down this path of state-mandated censorship and surveillance software on 3D printers, but it’s far from the only one to entertain it. It is now more urgent that we fiercely oppose this trend in other states, like California,  as they attempt to join the bandwagon—before even seeing the real-world impacts. 

Take action

Don’t Let California Repeat NY’s Mistake

We cannot allow this to be the foundation for future restrictions on speech and design, or serve as a playbook for the state and corporations to wrest control over our tools.