Osama Khalid was just twelve years old when he began contributing to Wikipedia Arabic. In the height of the blogging era, he became a prolific blogger, publishing writings on his home country of Saudi Arabia, meetups he attended, and his opinions and observations about open source technology and freedom of expression. He advocated for internet freedom, contributed time and translations to various projects—including EFF’s HTTPS Everywhere—and was a thoughtful presence at the conferences he attended around the world…all while training to become a pediatrician.

In July of 2020, he was detained amid a wave of arbitrary arrests carried out by the Saudi authorities during the Covid-19 lockdown and initially given a five-year prison sentence. That sentence was later increased on appeal to 32 years, then reduced in 2023 to 25 years, and again to 14 years this past September. In a joint letter that we signed on to in April, the Saudi human rights organization ALQST, which has been leading the campaign for Osama’s release, wrote: “The huge discrepancy between sentences handed down at different stages in the case underscores the arbitrary manner in which sentencing is carried out in the Saudi judicial system.”

So, what was his “crime”? Sharing information online that conflicted with official narratives. Osama’s Wikipedia contributions included pages on critical human rights issues in Saudi Arabia, including the treatment of women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul (herself an EFF client) and Saudi Arabia’s infamous al-Ha’ir prison. His blog, which has since been taken offline, included articles such as one criticizing government plans for the surveillance of encrypted platforms.

Over the years, we’ve campaigned for the release of a number of individuals imprisoned for their speech. Our contributions to the campaigns of Ola Bini, the Swedish software developer who has been targeted by the government of Ecuador for the past seven years, and Alaa Abd El Fattah, have had real impact. These cases are reminders that attacks on free expression are rarely confined to borders: governments around the world continue to use vague cybercrime laws, national security claims, and politically motivated prosecutions to silence critics, technologists, journalists, and activists.

Supporting these two—and others we’ve highlighted in our Offline project—has never been about defending only individuals. It has also been about defending the principle that writing code, sharing ideas, criticizing governments, and organizing online should not be treated as crimes. Public pressure, international solidarity, legal advocacy, and sustained campaigning can shift the political cost of repression—and, in some cases, help secure meaningful protections for those targeted.

That’s why we’re highlighting Osama’s case and will continue to work with partners including ALQST to advocate for his release. Osama Khalid, like so many human rights defenders, journalists, and internet users detained by the Saudi government, deserves to be free.

Internet shutdowns are devastating for human rights. When people are disconnected from the internet and digital services, it impacts all aspects of their life—from accessing essential information, to seeking medical care, or communicating with loved ones, both in that country and externally. But on January 8th, 2026, the government of Iran shut down internet communications for the entire country as a rebellion threatened to topple the authoritarian government. The government then proceeded to execute as many as 656 dissidents over the next 3 months, though the actual number could be much higher. Which is part of the point: shutdowns often precede government acts of violence. 

Iran’s shutdown was hardly an isolated incident. Earlier this month, the U.S. military invaded Venezuela and kidnapped the Venezuelan president shortly after US cyber forces shut down all internet access and power grids for the capital city of Caracas. India routinely shuts off internet access in the Kashmir region, and Syria shut down internet communications as many as 73 times, most recently in 2025. Even the UK recently had a localized temporary internet shutdown. At the time of this writing there are 14 ongoing internet shutdowns worldwide.  

Government shutdowns aren’t the only reason an entire region or country might lose internet access. Hurricanes, earthquakes, and wildfires can take out internet connections in many regions of the world, and will only increase as climate change ramps up. They can completely disable the communications infrastructure relied upon by victims, their families, first responders, and disaster relief efforts. Having an alternate way to communicate in such times can save lives.  

One way to limit the impact of such shutdowns is to prepare in advance by setting up systems and structure for circumvention and resiliency. 

To keep people connected during internet shutdowns and blackouts, communication networks must be operational before and after the disaster or shutdown. To be effective, they must be widespread so that people can get access to them reliably, and they must be usable by a majority of the community. And any viable solution must be accessible and sustainable on a community level, not just to people with vast financial resources or technical knowledge. You shouldn’t have to be a tech wizard to be able to communicate with your neighbors!

Radios

There are many ways for a community to build their own disaster resilient communications. Radios, for example, are cheap, decentralized, and resilient. Many people with moderate technical skill have set up Meshtastic repeaters. Meshtastic is a way to use a common unlicensed radio spectrum and a technology called LoRA to have peer-to-peer decentralized communications with people in your neighborhood or city. When you buy a Meshtastic device (cheap ones cost around $20) you can link it to your phone and send text messages to people in your area without ever touching the telephone network or the internet. Messages are delivered directly from person to person over public radio waves.

There is also amateur radio, also known as ham radio, which has been used in disaster communications for decades. Ham radio requires a license, but allows you to communicate farther than Meshtastic, using repeaters or even bouncing signals off the stratosphere to talk to people on the other side of the planet or even on the International Space Station. It is even possible to access the internet over ham radio. 

Peer-to-peer messaging apps 

Another option for internet communication during a shutdown is peer-to-peer messaging apps. One such project,called Briar, uses the Bluetooth functionality on phones to route messages from device to device until they reach their destination, even in instances where there is no internet. However, Briar faces the same problems many mesh projects do: almost nobody has the app installed and it’s difficult to use. If a mesh chat app isn’t already widely installed before an internet shutdown, it’s going to be even harder to get people to install it en masse once the shutdown starts. 

A similar effort called bitchat has recently gained some attention. Bitchat is a peer-to-peer chat system that routes over Nostr, Tor, and Bluetooth. It is unfortunately tainted in many people’s eyes by being a project by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, but it is open source and runs on both Android and iOS. It was used with some success in Iran during the latest internet shutdown. 

Another option is Delta Chat, which uses PGP for encryption and email for routing, while still being much simpler to use than either technology. Delta Chat is highly regarded in Iran for its ability to route a message through even the tiniest sliver of email access.

Satellite internet 

Satellite internet is an internet connection that uses a connection to a satellite dish to reach the internet, such as Starlink. Since there are no wires and no physical connection to infrastructure, satellite internet is harder to shut down. Satellite internet has therefore been used in many cases to circumvent internet shutdowns, with people sharing bandwidth with their neighbors. Satellites are harder for governments to shut down unilaterally.  Unfortunately when the satellites are owned by tech oligarchs, such as Starlink (owned by Elon Musk), or by allied governments, the owners of those satellites may willingly shut down the network anyway. 

Dreaming of a better future

Ultimately an app that is already widely being used would be the best option for shutdown resistant communication. Imagine if WhatsApp or Signal could fall back to mesh networking over bluetooth or wifi. Even better, imagine if our phones all had LoRA built in so we could have more effective mesh networks! What if our phones all had a connection to a satellite constellation run by an international coalition of hackers? We can dream of a better world and we can build it. 

We can’t rely on tech oligarchs to save us, especially when these same companies and governments are the ones to sever our access to the internet and telecommunications. This is why it's important to set up communication mechanisms before a disaster happens. 

As hackers, it's important for us to build these tools and infrastructure of decentralized communication, to help people learn how to use them, and to set up networks before disaster strikes. Get together with others in your city and start setting up resilient off-grid networks and building community now. 

Before you download or use any of the tools mentioned in this guide check with a lawyer in your jurisdiction or country and make sure you understand what legal risks you might be taking on. 

A previous version of this article appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of 2600 magazine. 

This is the worst Linux vulnerability in years.

TL;DR

• copy.fail is a Linux kernel local privilege escalation, not a browser or clipboard attack. Disclosed by Theori on 29 April 2026 with a working PoC.
• It abuses the kernel crypto API (AF_ALG sockets) plus splice() to write four bytes at a time straight into the page cache of a file the attacker does not own.
• The exploit works unmodified across Ubuntu, RHEL, Debian, SUSE, Amazon Linux, Fedora and most others. No race condition, no per-distro offsets.
• The file on disk is never modified. AIDE, Tripwire and checksum-based monitoring see nothing. ...

Cameron Hamilton was acting agency chief last year until he was fired amid clashes with Kristi Noem.

Analysts say private companies have an opportunity to insure against flood damage following recommendations to narrow the National Flood Insurance Program.

The fight could result in requirements for government officials to consider greenhouse gas emissions when approving fossil fuel projects.

Developers could start building "non-emitting" components ahead of air permitting under Administrator Lee Zeldin's proposal.

The U.K. launched its own carbon market following Brexit, which has traded at a discount to the EU equivalent.

A total of 50 countries had record solar imports from China in March, with Nigeria recording a 519 percent surge from February and notable spikes in Malaysia, Ethiopia, and Kenya.

In recent years, illegal gold mining, logging and drug trafficking have spread deeper into remote rainforest regions in countries including Brazil, Peru, Colombia and Ecuador.

The South American country is grappling with fuel shortages and a presidential decree that ended long-standing fuel subsidies, effectively doubling the cost of gasoline.

Using a new technique that can create vacancies at any site across a material and then shrink it to about 1/2,000 of its original volume, MIT researchers have designed nanotechnology devices that could be used for optical computing and other applications involving the manipulation of visible light.

The new fabrication technique, known as “implosion carving,” allows researchers to imprint features throughout a hydrogel using photopatterning. If patterned with a resolution of about 800 nanometers, these features can then be shrunk to less than 100 nanometers. 

Because that resolution is smaller than the wavelength of light, the devices can bend light in specific ways that allow them to perform optical computations.

“In order to enable nanophotonic applications in visible light, we need to make nanostructures with feature sizes with a resolution less than 100 nanometers. Only in that way can we precisely create the structure that can manipulate visible light,” says Quansan Yang, a former MIT postdoc, now an assistant professor at the University of Washington, and one of the lead authors of the new study.

In their paper, the researchers demonstrated a photonic device that can perform a simple digit-classification task, but future versions could be used for high-speed imaging and information processing, they say.

Gaojie Yang, a former MIT postdoc, is the co-lead author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Photonics. The paper’s senior authors are Peter So, director of the MIT Laser Biomedical Research Center (LBCR) and an MIT professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering, and Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT and a professor of biological engineering, media arts and sciences, and brain and cognitive sciences. Boyden is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, the Yang Tan Collective, and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Nanoscale feature sizes

Photonic devices, which transmit and manipulate light, hold potential for use as optical computer chips that could offer an energy-efficient alternative to semiconductor chips. However, existing techniques for creating 3D photonic devices haven’t yet achieved the 100-nanometer resolution that is needed to channel visible light, which has wavelengths between 380 and 750 nanometers.

Using an additive manufacturing technique called two-photon lithography, researchers can use light to create 3D nanoscale features, but with a resolution larger than 100 nanometers. Another technique, known as electron-beam lithography, can be used to etch smaller-resolution features onto a silicon chip, but it doesn’t generate 3D structures. 

To make 3D devices with the necessary feature size, the researchers extended the concept of “implosion fabrication,” which Boyden’s lab developed in 2018, to create a new variant called “implosion carving.” In implosion carving, a laser creates vacancies — tiny voids where the hydrogel material has been removed — at precisely targeted locations. These vacancies exhibit different optical properties than the surrounding hydrogel. The hydrogel is then shrunk to bring the patterned features down to the nanoscale.

The carving process begins with immersing the hydrogel in a photosensitizing dye. Then, the researchers use a laser to excite the photosensitizer at specific places in the gel, which in turn generates reactive oxygen species that cut the bonds holding the hydrogel together. This creates a vacancy in that spot.

Once the desired vacancy pattern has been carved into the hydrogel, the researchers shrink it using a two-step process. First, they soak it in a solution containing ions, which causes it to shrink about tenfold in each dimension. To shrink it a little more, and to remove the watery solution, the hydrogel then undergoes a process called supercritical drying, which can remove liquid from a gel without damaging it.

At the end of the process, the hydrogel has been shrunk more than tenfold in each dimension, leading to a 2,000-fold reduction in volume. 

Computing with light

To demonstrate the versatility of this technique, the researchers used it to create several 3D shapes, including a helix and a structure inspired by a butterfly wing. Some of these structures are too thin, and have too high an aspect ratio, to be stably created using conventional two-photon lithography.

The researchers also created a device that could perform a simple calculation known as digit classification, a task that is traditionally used to test the performance of neural networks. During this task, the device was presented with a digit, such as 1 or 5, and had to light up a specific location to indicate which number was detected.

To achieve this, the researchers patterned vacancies throughout the device so that it would act like a neural network. The pattern of vacancies would diffract input light as it passed through many layers of patterned hydrogel, so that the output light was determined by the shape of the digit that was entered into the system.

“This is a purely optical system that effectively performs optical computing,” So says. 

“One of the very attractive features of this technology is that you can manipulate the property of the material at every tiny location,” says Dushan Wadduwage, an assistant professor at Old Dominion University and former MIT postdoc, who is also an author of the paper. “You have millions of different locations that you need to decide the property of, and that turns into a really interesting design problem where we can use deep-learning algorithms to find designs over these millions of parameters and come up with parts that go into optical systems in new ways.”

The researchers now plan to use the same principles to build optical devices that could classify cells based on their state as they flow through a microfluidic device. This could help identify rare cells such as circulating tumor cells in a blood sample, they say. 

This approach could also enable the creation of high-throughput imaging techniques for applications such as analyzing tissue samples from biopsies or surgical specimens. And, if adapted to work with other materials such as hydrophobic polymers, it could also be used to create channels within 3D nanofluidic devices. 

Other authors of the paper include Gaojie Yang, Takahiro Nambara, Hiroyuki Kusaka, Yuichiro Kunai, Alex Matlock, Corban Swain, Brett Pryor, Yannick Salamin, Daniel Oran, Hasindu Kariyawasam, Ramith Hettiarachchi, and Marin Soljacic. 

The research was funded, in part, by the MIT-Fujikura Partnership Fund, the U.S. Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT, Lisa Yang and Y. Eva Tan, John Doerr, the Open Philanthropy Project, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Quantum computers could someday solve pressing problems that are too convoluted for classical computers, such as modeling complex molecular interactions to streamline drug discovery and materials development. 

But to build a superconducting quantum computer that is large and resilient enough for real-world applications, scientists must precisely engineer thousands of quantum circuits so they perform operations with the lowest possible error rate.

To help scientists design more predictable circuits, researchers from MIT and Lincoln Laboratory developed a technique to measure a property that can unexpectedly cause a superconducting quantum circuit to deviate from its expected behavior. Their analysis revealed the source of these distortions, known as second-order harmonic corrections, leading to underperforming circuit architectures.

The MIT researchers fabricated a device to detect second-order harmonic corrections, identify their origin, and precisely measure their strength. This technique could help scientists deliberately design quantum circuits that can counteract the effects of these deviations.

This is especially important in larger and more complicated quantum circuits, where the negative impact of second-order harmonic corrections can be amplified. 

“As we make our quantum computers bigger and we want to have more precise control over the parameters of these devices, identifying and measuring these effects is going to be important for us to have a precise understanding of how these systems are constructed. It is always important to keep diving down into the circuit to see if there is an effect you didn’t expect, which impacts how your device is performing,” says Max Hays, a research scientist in the Engineering Quantum Systems (EQuS) group of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and co-lead author of a paper on this research.

Hays is joined on the paper by co-lead author Junghyun Kim, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student in the EQuS group; senior author William D. Oliver, the Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor of EECS and professor of physics, leader of the EQuS group, director of the Center for Quantum Engineering, and associate director of RLE; as well as others at MIT and Lincoln Laboratory. The research appears today in Nature Physics.

A pair-wise problem

In a quantum computer that utilizes superconducting circuits, which is one of many potential computing platforms, Josephson junctions are critical elements that enable the transfer and manipulation of information. These devices utilize two superconducting wires that are brought very close together, with a nanometer-scale barrier between them. Like a traditional circuit, the electric charge in Josephson junctions is carried by electrons. 

But in a superconducting circuit, charge-carrying electrons pair up, forming what are called Cooper pairs. These Cooper pairs can “quantum tunnel” through the barrier between the two wires, transporting current from one wire to the other.

Cooper pairs can usually only tunnel one pair at a time, which is a key property that makes quantum computation possible. 

“If you try to force more Cooper pairs through, it just doesn’t work. This non-linear effect is extremely important for all our circuits. If we didn’t have that effect, then we wouldn’t be able to control or manipulate any quantum information that we store in these circuits,” Hays explains.

But sometimes, Cooper pairs can unexpectedly squeeze through the barrier two at a time, an effect that is known as a second-order harmonic correction. This effect limits the performance of a quantum circuit that has been configured to only allow single-pair tunneling.

“If two Cooper pairs tunnel at the same time, then the assumption we used to build our circuit doesn’t apply anymore. We need to fix the circuit so it can handle that,” Kim says.

But before they can fix the circuit, scientists need to know the source and strength of these distortions.

To obtain this information, the MIT researchers fabricated a quantum circuit so it would be very sensitive to these effects. Essentially, the device is designed to suppress the quantum tunneling process of single Cooper pairs, while allowing the two-pair tunneling process to continue. 

In this way, they can detect the presence of second-order harmonic corrections and precisely measure their strength. 

Straight to the source

They can also use this circuit to pinpoint the source of these harmonics, which helps researchers identify the best way to correct for them. 

There are two potential sources of second-order harmonics — one source is intrinsic to the dynamics of the Josephson junction and the other is caused by the wires connecting the junction to other circuit elements. 

While prior research had indicated the second-order harmonics could be due to the dynamics of the junction, the MIT researchers found that additional inductance — the tendency to oppose changes in the flow of electric current —from wires in the circuit was the actual source in their devices. 

“This is important because, if we know where the second-order harmonic correction is coming from, we can predict how strong it is likely to be, and use that information to engineer more predictable circuits that will hopefully perform better,” Hays says.

In the future, the researchers want to design experiments that more accurately predict how a device will perform when second-order harmonic corrections occur. They also want to study other sources of second-order harmonic corrections and whether those sources could have negative impacts on a circuit under different fabrication conditions.

This work is funded, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage, the U.S. Air Force, the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies, and the Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program at MIT. 

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 12 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02582-4

Multinational investment is vital for African growth, yet it drives higher rates of forest loss than local industry. Researchers now suggest that home-country laws should hold global firms accountable for their environmental footprint abroad.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 12 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02637-6

Developing countries are faced with trade-offs where multinational corporations could help local economic growth, but also cause more environmental damage than domestic counterparts. This research confirms such negative effects and discusses how better governance could reduce detrimental outcomes.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 12 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02638-5

The authors use 34 years of seed harvest data from Poland, covering over 40,000 observations and five common species, to understand the impacts of climate change on tree fecundity. They show reduced fecundity across all species, with hotter summers as the dominant driver.

Despite regional variability in climate, electricity sources, congestion, and the wide variation in individual driving patterns, electric vehicles generate less greenhouse gas emissions and do not cost more than comparable gas-powered vehicles for drivers and vehicle fleet owners in most parts of the United States, according to a new study by MIT researchers.

The team’s approach captures many key factors that contribute to regional and individual differences in the life-cycle emissions and ownership cost of electric vehicles, including meteorological data, the distance and duration of trips, and fuel prices.

To paint a fuller picture of emissions and costs than was previously available, the researchers sourced data from thousands of U.S. zip codes and drilled down to the level of individual drivers within those locations. Their study considers time-averaged fuel prices so as not to be overly influenced by fluctuations in prices at any one point in time. They finalized their analysis at the end of 2024 and early 2025.

Their results indicate that a person’s driving behaviors can matter as much as regional factors like the local electricity mix when it comes to the emissions savings of an electric vehicle, compared to a similar gas-powered vehicle. In most locations, a battery-electric vehicle reduces emissions between 40 and 60 percent, with larger impacts in urban areas. 

They also found that colder climates do not reduce overall emission benefits as much as some media reports assume.

The researchers utilized this detailed analysis to update a public tool they previously developed, carboncounter.com, which enables individuals to compare the life-cycle emissions and total ownership costs of nearly any car on the market. A new version of carboncounter.com is also being released today.

“There are a lot of statements being thrown around, like that electric vehicles don’t reduce emissions very much in cool climates, and we wanted to analyze these factors systematically and evaluate these statements against one another simultaneously. Rather than simply asking, ‘Are EVs better?’, this paper helps answer ‘better for whom, and under what conditions?’” says Marco Miotti PhD ’20, a senior researcher at ETH Zurich who completed this research while a graduate student in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) at MIT. 

He is joined on the paper by senior author Jessika Trancik, a professor in IDSS. The research appears today in Environmental Research Letters.

A holistic approach

Many prior studies that compare emissions and costs of electric vehicles (EVs) to combustion-engine vehicles cover a few factors, like the amount of renewable energy in the grid and how gas prices impact affordability, Miotti says.

“To our knowledge, there have been few efforts so far that bring all these factors together. But if someone wants to buy a car and have a better understanding of the factors that affect emissions and costs, this holistic approach is important,” he adds.

The researchers focused on two types of EVs: battery-electric vehicles, which only operate on electricity, and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, which also have a combustion engine that works in tandem with the battery to optimize fuel savings.

The team expanded and improved a set of previously developed vehicle cost and emissions models to incorporate a wider variety of factors and data types.

For instance, they refined an existing model that estimates energy use and gas mileage so it could capture more nuances of local climate variability. 

“But the real effort was not just in extending these different models, but in bringing together all these different data and making them work with the models in a consistent manner,” Miotti says.

The team sourced data on a wide variety of factors for each U.S. zip code, such as typical drive cycles, the amount of traffic, local gas and electricity prices, makeup of the regional electricity mix, meteorological profiles, and more. They used statistical approaches to amalgamate different types of data. 

For example, the team used a probabilistic matching technique to combine data on how often people drive, which was drawn from nationwide travel surveys, with more detailed GPS data that includes factors like drivers’ acceleration patterns and the distance they usually drive on each day of the week.

The researchers designed their analysis to focus on the spatial picture of emissions and costs, based on U.S. zip codes, while simultaneously considering the impact of the size and features of each specific vehicle model.

“At the end of the day, it’s the vehicle and fleet owners who make decisions about vehicle purchases. So, we wanted to make sure to consider their wide-ranging individual perspectives rather than simply performing a region-by-region comparison,” says Trancik.

Lower emissions, comparable costs

In the end, their modeling framework revealed that all factors they analyzed matter about equally in determining emissions-reduction potential of EVs compared to internal combustion vehicles. 

EVs reduce emissions the most in areas with a cleaner electricity mix, denser traffic, higher annual travel distances, and a mild climate, in decreasing order of importance. In each area, emission reductions increase for drivers who drive more often, drive larger vehicles, and are more frequently stuck in traffic. 

In a colder area like North Dakota, fuel economy of battery-electric vehicles might be reduced by as much as 50 percent on a particularly frigid night, but the effect on annual emission benefits is minimal. 

“We even did a sensitivity study to see if the range is reduced in very cold climates, and we found that, even in the most unfavorable conditions, EVs still reduce emissions by a substantial amount,” Miotti says.

On the cost side, the models show that, in most places across the U.S., EVs are competitive with comparable combustion-engine vehicles in terms of lifetime ownership cost, even without clean vehicle tax credits. And in areas where electricity is relatively affordable, battery-electric vehicles tend to cost less than their plug-in hybrid or combustion-engine counterparts.

In the future, the researchers want to expand this analysis to include a temporal dimension, so the framework also considers how changes in vehicle, fuel, and electricity prices affect emissions and costs over time. 

“While we found that the electricity mix is a big driver of the spatial variation in emissions savings of EVs, the electricity grid is decarbonizing everywhere. As that happens, emissions savings across space will become more homogenous for EVs, but the differences across one driver to another will remain,” Miotti says.

They could also use the framework to explore regions outside the United States or incorporate data on hybrid-electric vehicles that cannot be plugged in.

This work was funded, in part, by the MIT Martin Family Society of Fellows for Sustainability.

A crepe cake.

That’s how Camille Cunin describes the polymer-metal “sandwiches” that became a highlight of her doctoral thesis at MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). Over close to five years, these composites were a key component of her research on bioelectronics — devices designed to interface with the human body.

Cunin completed her PhD in February — she’ll attend commencement in May — but traces her interest in bioelectronics to a formative summer internship at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston in 2019. There, she saw a patient with Parkinson’s disease struggle to swallow a tethered “capsule” intended to function as an exploratory gut probe. The device failed, and the gap between lab-based design and real life became all too apparent.

The incident validated the career path Cunin had already begun to pursue: to make usable products that have a positive impact on people’s lives. It’s a purpose that hasn’t gone unnoticed. “Some might be happy with a sketch of a concept and no actual demonstration, but Camille has a remarkable ability in that she wants to do materials science that can translate to real-world applications,” says her advisor, Aristide Gumyusenge.

Building blocks

The daughter of a psychologist and an engineer, Cunin grew up in Paris, encouraged by her parents to be curious about the world around her. LEGO blocks featured prominently in her childhood. When her father found some old lights in a box in the attic, 9-year-old Camille strung them to decorate her LEGO castle by creating a circuit, complete with a fuse.

Strong grades earned her a spot in France’s elite post-secondary preparatory classes for admission to the country’s prestigious grandes écoles. The intensive and competitive prep classes, however, left Cunin with a sour aftertaste — “for a while I hated science, because the environment was too competitive for me,” she says — and a bit rudderless in engineering school.

It was the research internship thousands of miles from home, at MGH — part of her master’s in engineering at École Centrale de Marseille in France — that rebooted her love of science. The open-ended nature of research appealed to her curiosity and helped her regain confidence in solving problems. She was delighted to be accepted at MIT DMSE for her doctoral studies. “In Boston, I thrived in collaborative environments, and it felt like anything was possible,” she says.

Stretching possibilities

Before starting at MIT, Cunin had a wealth of interdisciplinary experience, from internships and her graduate studies. Unsure about how to slot it all together, she was looking for an advisor at a time when Gumyusenge, Henry L. Doherty Career Development Professor in Ocean Utilization and assistant professor of materials science and engineering, was himself just establishing his lab at DMSE.

When Gumyusenge shared plans to work on projects to turn biological signals into electronic data, Cunin was excited to build on her prior research in biomedical devices. “Here was a chance to fine-tune the materials and to optimize the performance of bioelectronic devices. I really felt I could leverage my strengths in Aristide’s lab,” she remembers.

Gumyusenge proved a great fit, supporting Cunin’s broad research ambitions while helping her shape and integrate them into a coherent doctoral project. She tackled everything from developing and characterizing new materials to fabricating transistors and learning surgery to test the devices in animal models. The final dissertation focused on organic transistors, which boost body signals for easier detection in soft electronics.

Biological signals, like those from nerves in the body, are weak, and transistors amplify them so they can be measured. The challenge with developing bioelectronic devices is that traditional components are hard and rigid, while the human body is not. Devices must perform as needed and be soft and flexible to avoid irritating human tissue.

Another complication: Biological processes involve charged ions moving through fluids, while electronics rely on electrons moving through materials. Before transistors can amplify signals, they first have to convert biological signals into electronic ones for circuits to pick up.

Cunin’s transistor design needed to solve two major challenges: first, to facilitate the movement of electrons and ions in the “channel,” the hub of all signal activity, in soft, hydrated environments; and second, to be pliable enough to conform to the human body.

It was no easy task.

Elegant simplicity

Gumyusenge’s lab typically uses chemistry to modify material behavior, but Cunin took a different tack. Since polymers are soft, and metals are good conductors, she looked to the classic French pastry mille-feuille, which inspired the layered design: thin metal sheets sandwiched between layers of porous elastomer. The metal stretches with the elastomer and forms microcracks. Charges get trapped in the cracks but can still flow through the stack, while the elastomer’s strong adhesion keeps the layers together.

Her approach won Cunin high marks from her advisor. “Camille was working on a complex problem, but she found a way to simplify it with a straightforward approach,” Gumyusenge says.

Of course, even an elegant solution needs test drives. “The more crystalline the polymers are, the better the charges percolate and travel in the material,” Cunin points out, referring to how ordered the semiconducting polymers in the transistor channel are. But if they’re packed too tightly, ions don’t move freely, and the transistor channel can’t switch properly. The arrangement of the spaghetti-like polymer chains controls this balance, so Cunin studied the composites’ structure to optimize both ionic and electronic performance.

Professor Polina Anikeeva, who co-advised Cunin with Gumyusenge and calls her “unstoppable,” says her innovation in the lab was remarkable — but not surprising.

“She didn’t have to be pushed into trying something new,” says Anikeeva, head of DMSE. “I would have higher and higher expectations, and she would consistently meet those higher and higher expectations.”

That drive continues in industry. Cunin now works at the Cambridge-based neurotechnology startup Axoft — just minutes from her former lab at MIT — researching soft electrodes that can be implanted in the brain. The electrodes detect electrical signals that can shed light on the brain’s many functions. “By understanding the brain better, we can eventually develop therapies and treatments that improve patient outcomes,” Cunin says.

Creative outlets

During her time at MIT, Cunin also made time for activities outside the lab, driven by the same curiosity that fueled her research. Committed to sharing her love of materials science and engineering, she was a leading member of the Polymer Graduate Student Association and organized several editions of MIT Polymer Day, a one-day symposium connecting students, faculty, and industry to showcase cutting-edge polymer research.

She also pursued creative outlets. After learning to use 3D graphics software Blender, Cunin illustrated some of the journal covers featuring her work.

She is also a diehard salsa fan and teaches the dance style a couple of times a week. Salsa’s social and collaborative forms appeal to Cunin, who enjoys sharing her passion, experimenting with choreography, and helping fellow dancers improve. “Salsa is fast — I love the mental challenge it brings. I also like that it exposes you to different aspects of the community; it pushes you out of your bubble,” she says.

Gumyusenge appreciates that Cunin made time for other pursuits throughout the grueling demands of a doctoral degree. “She’d work 14 hours a day in the lab, but also go do some hiking and take a break. I love that — it’s something that other PhD students seem to forget sometimes,” he says.

That balance reflects her determination and resolve. “Camille has never been shy about facing challenging research problems,” he says. “She had a research vision and was dedicated to learning the lessons she needed to get it all done. I learned to not get in her way because when Camille told you she would learn how to do something, she would.”

The president nominated the man he fired as leader of the nation's disaster agency a year ago.

Last year, the Canadian government pushed Bill C-2, which would erode Canadian digital rights in the name of “border security.” The bill was so bad it didn’t even make it to committee because of the backlash from the privacy community. Now, the spring’s worst sequel, Bill C-22, aka The Lawful Access Act, is trying it again.

As with most sequels, Bill C-22 makes some tweaks to problematic elements, but largely retains the same problems. The bill forces digital services, which could include telecoms, messaging apps, and more, to record and retain metadata for a full year, and expands information sharing with foreign governments, including the United States. Metadata can reveal a lot about who you communicate with, where you go, and when you do so. Expanding the collection of metadata would require companies to store even more information about their users than they already do, providing an incentive for bad actors to access that information. 

Worst of all, Bill C-22 erodes the privacy of millions by providing a mechanism for the Minister of Public Safety to demand companies create a backdoor to their services to provide law enforcement access to data, as long as these mandates don’t introduce a “systemic vulnerability.” These widespread surveillance backdoors would likely facilitate even more data breaches than we see already. The bill also bans companies from even revealing the existence of these orders publicly.

The definitions of both “systemic vulnerabilities” and “encryption” are not clear enough in C-22, leaving wiggle room for the government to demand that companies circumvent encryption. And the overbroad definitions in the bill can include apps as well as operating systems. Canadian officials have made it clear they believe it’s possible to add surveillance without introducing systemic vulnerabilities, which is just not true. Surveillance of encrypted communications is fundamentally a systemic vulnerability.

This resembles what happened in the UK last year, when the government demanded that Apple implement this type of backdoor into its optional Advanced Data Protection feature, which then forced Apple to revoke the feature for its UK users instead of complying with the request. To this day, UK users still do not have access to this powerful, privacy-protective feature that provides stronger protections for data stored in iCloud. Both Meta and Apple are concerned that C-22 would give the Canadian governments similar powers, and both companies have come out against the bill. The U.S. House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees also sent a joint letter to Canada’s Minister of Public Safety highlighting the concern around backdoors into encrypted systems.

The dangers of these sorts of backdoors are not theoretical. In 2024, the Salt Typhoon hack took advantage of a system built by Internet Service Providers to give law enforcement access to user data. When you build these systems, hackers will come.

Canadians deserve strong privacy protections, transparency into how companies handle user data, and clear safeguards around encrypted data. Bill C-22 provides none of that, instead reaching further into the digital pockets of tech companies to build broad lawful access mechanisms.

Further reading

• Full text of C-22
• Canadian Civil Liberties Association statement and letter
• Open Media blog on C-22
• EFF’s blog on bill C-2