In Huế, rainfall reached a record 42 inches in 24 hours by late Monday, according to the national weather agency.

The gift to the Center for Disaster Philanthropy comes as the U.S. pulls back federal support for communities after emergencies.

"We're chasing the snow," said Canadian freestyle skier Marion Thénault.

As batteries have gotten cheaper and more powerful, they have enabled the electrification of everything from vehicles to lawn equipment, power tools, and scooters. But electrifying homes has been a slower process. That’s because switching from gas appliances often requires ripping out drywall, running new wires, and upgrading the electrical box.

Now the startup Copper, founded by Sam Calisch SM ’14, PhD ’19, has developed a battery-equipped kitchen range that can plug into a standard 120-volt wall outlet. The induction range features a lithium iron phosphate battery that charges when energy is cheapest and cleanest, then delivers power when you’re ready to cook.

“We’re making ‘going electric’ like an appliance swap instead of a construction project,” says Calisch. “If you have a gas stove today, there is almost certainly an outlet within reach because the stove has an oven light, clock, or electric igniters. That’s big if you’re in a single-family home, but in apartments it’s an existential factor. Rewiring a 100-unit apartment building is such an expensive proposition that basically no one’s doing it.”

Copper has shipped about 1,000 of its battery-powered ranges to date, often to developers and owners of large apartment complexes. The company also has an agreement with the New York City Housing Authority for at least 10,000 units.

Once installed, the ranges can contribute to a distributed, cleaner, and more resilient energy network. In fact, Copper recently piloted a program in California to offer cheap, clean power to the grid from its home batteries when it would otherwise need to fire up a gas-powered plant to meet spiking electricity demand.

“After these appliances are installed, they become a grid asset,” Calisch says. “We can manage the fleet of batteries to help provide firm power and help grids deliver more clean electricity. We use that revenue, in turn, to further drive down the cost of electrification.”

Finding a mission

Calisch has been working on climate technologies his entire career. It all started at the clean technology incubator Otherlab that was founded by Saul Griffith SM ’01, PhD ’04.

“That’s where I caught the bug for technology and product development for climate impact,” Calisch says. “But I realized I needed to up my game, so I went to grad school in [MIT Professor] Neil Gershenfeld’s lab, the Center for Bits and Atoms. I got to dabble in software engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mathematical modeling, all with the lens of building and iterating quickly.”

Calisch stayed at MIT for his PhD, where he worked on approaches in manufacturing that used fewer materials and less energy. After finishing his PhD in 2019, Calisch helped start a nonprofit called Rewiring America focused on advocating for electrification. Through that work, he collaborated with U.S. Senate offices on the Inflation Reduction Act.

The cost of lithium ion batteries has decreased by about 97 percent since their commercial debut in 1991. As more products have gone electric, the manufacturing process for everything from phones to drones, robots, and electric vehicles has converged around an electric tech stack of batteries, electric motors, power electronics, and chips. The countries that master the electric tech stack will be at a distinct manufacturing advantage.

Calisch started Copper to boost the supply chain for batteries while contributing to the electrification movement.

“Appliances can help deploy batteries, and batteries help deploy appliances,” Calisch says. “Appliances can also drive down the installed cost of batteries.”

The company is starting with the kitchen range because its peak power draw is among the highest in the home. Flattening that peak brings big benefits. Ranges are also meaningful: It’s where people gather around and cook each night. People take pride in their kitchen ranges more than, say, a water heater.

Copper’s 30-inch induction range heats up more quickly and reaches more precise temperatures than its gas counterpart. Installing it is as easy as swapping a fridge or dishwasher. Thanks to its 5-kilowatt-hour battery, the range even works when the power goes out.

“Batteries have become 10 times cheaper and are now both affordable and create tangible improvements in quality of life,” Calisch says. “It’s a new notion of climate impact that isn’t about turning down thermostats and suffering for the planet, it’s about adopting new technologies that are better.”

Scaling impact

Calisch says there’s no way for the U.S. to maintain resilient energy systems in the future without a lot of batteries. Because of power transmission and regulatory limitations, those batteries can’t all be located out on the grid.

“We see an analog to the internet,” Calisch says. “In order to deliver millions of times more information across the internet, we didn’t add millions of times more wires. We added local storage and caching across the network. That’s what increased throughput. We’re doing the same thing for the electric grid.”

This summer, Copper raised $28 million to scale its production to meet growing demand for its battery equipped appliances. Copper is also working to license its technology to other appliance manufacturers to help speed the electric transition.

“These electric technologies have the potential to improve people’s lives and, as a byproduct, take us off of fossil fuels,” Calisch says. “We’re in the business of identifying points of friction for that transition. We are not an appliance company; we’re an energy company.”

Looking back, Calisch credits MIT with equipping him with the knowledge needed to run a technical business.

“My time at MIT gave me hands-on experience with a variety of engineering systems,” Calisch. “I can talk to our embedded engineering team or electrical engineering team or mechanical engineering team and understand what they’re saying. That’s been enormously useful for running a company.”

He adds: “I also developed an expansive view of infrastructure at MIT, which has been instrumental in launching Copper and thinking about the electrical grid not just as wires on the street, but all of the loads in our buildings. It’s about making homes not just consumers of electricity, but participants in this broader network.”

The U.S. opioid crisis has varied in severity across the country, leading to extended debate about how and why it has spread.

Now, a study co-authored by MIT economists sheds new light on these dynamics, examining the role that geography has played in the crisis. The results show how state-level policies inadvertently contributed to the rise of opioid addiction, and how addiction itself is a central driver of the long-term problem.

The research analyzes data about people who moved within the U.S., as a way of addressing a leading question about the crisis: How much of the problem is attributable to local factors, and to what extent do people have individual characteristics making them prone to opioid problems?

“We find a very large role for place-based factors, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t person-based factors as well,” says MIT economist Amy Finkelstein, co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s findings. “As is usual, it’s rare to find an extreme answer, either one or the other.”

In scrutinizing the role of geography, the scholars developed new insights about the spread of the crisis in relation to the dynamics of addiction. The study concludes that laws restricting pain clinics, or “pill mills,” where opioids were often prescribed, reduced risky opioid use by 5 percent over the 2006-2019 study period. Due to the path of addiction, enacting those laws near the onset of the crisis, in the 1990s, could have reduced risky use by 30 percent over that same time.

“What we do find is that pill mill laws really matter,” says MIT PhD student Dean Li, a co-author of the paper. “The striking thing is that they mattered a lot, and a lot of the effect was through transitions into opioid addiction.”

The paper, “What Drives Risky Prescription Opioid Use: Evidence from Migration,” appears in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The authors are Finkelstein, who is the John and Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics; Matthew Gentzkow, a professor of economics at Stanford University; and Li, a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Economics.

The opioid crisis, as the scholars note in the paper, is one of the biggest U.S. health problems in recent memory. As of 2017, there were more than twice as many U.S. deaths from opioids as from homicide. There were also at least 10 times as many opioid deaths compared to the number of deaths from cocaine during the 1980s-era crack epidemic in the U.S.

Many accounts and analyses of the crisis have converged on the increase in medically prescribed opioids starting in the 1990s as a crucial part of the problem; this was in turn a function of aggressive marketing by pharmaceutical companies, among other things. But explanations of the crisis beyond that have tended to fracture. Some analyses emphasize the personal characteristics of those who fall into opioid use, such as a past history of substance use, mental health conditions, age, and more. Other analyses focus on place-based factors, including the propensity of area medical providers to prescribe opioids.

To conduct the study, the scholars examined data on prescription opioid use from adults in the Social Security Disability Insurance program from 2006 to 2019, covering about 3 million cases in all. They defined “risky” use as an average daily morphine-equivalent dose of more than 120 milligrams, which has been shown to increase drug dependence.

By studying people who move, the scholars were developing a kind of natural experiment — Finkelstein has also used this same method to examine questions about disparities in health care costs and longevity across the U.S. In this case, in focusing on the opioid consumption patterns of the same people as they lived in different places, the scholars can disentangle the extent to which place-based and personal factors drive usage.

Overall, the study found a somewhat greater role for place-based factors than for personal characteristics in accounting for the drivers of risky opioid use. To see the magnitude of place-based effects, consider someone moving to a state with a 3.5 percentage point higher rate of risky use — akin to moving from the state with the 10th lowest rate of risky use to the state with the 10th highest rate. On average, that person’s probability of risky opioid use would increase by a full percentage point in the first year, then by 0.3 percentage points in each subsequent year.

Some of the study’s key findings involve the precise mechanisms at work beneath these top-line numbers.

In the research, the scholars examine what they call the “addiction channel,” in which opioid users fall into addiction, and the “availability channel,” in which the already-addicted find ways to sustain their use. Over the 2006-2019 period, they find, people falling into addiction through new prescriptions had an impact on overall opioid uptake that was 2.5 times as large as that of existing users getting continued access to prescribed opiods.

When people who are not already risky users of opioids move to places with higher rates of risky opioid use, Finkelstein observes, “One thing you can see very clearly in the data is that in the addiction channel, there’s no immediate change in behavior, but gradually as they’re in this new place you see an increase in risky opioid use.”

She adds: “This is consistent with a model where people move to a new place, have a back problem or car accident and go to a hospital, and if the doctor is more likely to prescribe opioids, there’s more of a risk they’re going to become addicted.”

By contrast, Finkelstein says, “If we look at people who are already risky users of opioids and they move to a new place with higher rates of risky opioid use, you see there’s an immediate increase in their opioid use, which suggests it’s just more available. And then you also see the gradual increase indicating more addiction.”

By looking at state-level policies, the researchers found this trend to be particularly pronounced in over a dozen states that lagged in enacting restrictions on pain clinics, or “pill mills,” where providers had more latitude to prescribe opioids.

In this way the research does not just evaluate the impact of place versus personal characteristics; it quantifies the problem of addiction as an additional dimension of the issue. While many analyses have sought to explain why people first use opioids, the current study reinforces the importance of preventing the onset of addiction, especially because addicted users may later seek out nonprescription opioids, exacerbating the problem even further.

“The persistence of addiction is a huge problem,” Li says. “Even after the role of prescription opioids has subsided, the opioid crisis persists. And we think this is related to the persistence of addiction. Once you have this set in, it’s so much harder to change, compared to stopping the onset of addiction in the first place.”

Research support was provided by the National Institute on Aging, the Social Security Administration, and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Researchers from the MIT Media Lab have developed an antenna — about the size of a fine grain of sand — that can be injected into the body to wirelessly power deep-tissue medical implants, such as pacemakers in cardiac patients and neuromodulators in people suffering from epilepsy or Parkinson’s disease.

“This is the next major step in miniaturizing deep-tissue implants,” says Baju Joy, a PhD student in the Media Lab’s Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek research group. “It enables battery-free implants that can be placed with a needle, instead of major surgery.”

A paper detailing this work was published in the October issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. Joy is joined on the paper by lead author Yubin Cai, PhD student at the Media Lab; Benoît X. E. Desbiolles and Viktor Schell, former MIT postdocs; Shubham Yadav, an MIT PhD student in media arts and sciences; David C. Bono, an instructor in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering; and senior author Deblina Sarkar, the AT&T Career Development Associate Professor at the Media Lab and head of the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek group.

Deep-tissue implants are currently powered either with a several-centimeters-long battery that is surgically implanted in the body, requiring periodic replacement, or with a surgically placed magnetic coil, also of a centimeter-scale size, that can harvest power wirelessly. The coil method functions only at high frequencies, which can cause tissue heating, limiting how much power can be safely delivered to the implant when miniaturized to sub-millimeter sizes.

“After that limit, you start damaging the cells,” says Joy.

As is stated in the team’s IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation paper, “developing an antenna at ultra-small dimensions (less then 500 micrometers) which can operate efficiently in the low-frequency band is challenging.”

The 200-micrometer antenna — developed through research led by Sarkar — operates at low frequencies (109 kHz) thanks to a novel technology in which a magnetostrictive film, which deforms when a magnetic field is applied, is laminated with a piezoelectric film, which converts deformation to electric charge. When an alternating magnetic field is applied, magnetic domains within the magnetostrictive film contort it in the same way that a piece of fabric interwoven with pieces of metal would contort if subjected to a strong magnet. The mechanical strain in the magnetostrictive layer causes the piezoelectric layer to generate electric charges across electrodes placed above and below.

“We are leveraging this mechanical vibration to convert the magnetic field to an electric field,” Joy says.

Sarkar says the newly developed antenna delivers four to five orders of magnitude more power than implantable antennas of similar size that rely on metallic coils and operate in the GHz frequency range.

“Our technology has the potential to introduce a new avenue for minimally invasive bioelectric devices that can operate wirelessly deep within the human body,” she says.

The magnetic field that activates the antenna is provided by a device similar to a rechargeable wireless cell phone charger, and is small enough to be applied to the skin as a stick-on patch or slipped into a pocket close to the skin surface.

Because the antenna is fabricated with the same technology as a microchip, it can be easily integrated with already-existing microelectronics.

“These electronics and electrodes can be easily made to be much smaller than the antenna itself, and they would be integrated with the antenna during nanofabrication,” Joy says, adding that the researchers’ work leverages 50 years of research and development applied to making transistors and other electronics smaller and smaller. “The other components can be tiny, and the entire system can be placed with a needle injection.”

Manufacture of the antennas could be easily scaled up, the researchers say, and multiple antennas and implants could be injected to treat large areas of the body.

Another possible application of this antenna, in addition to pacemaking and neuromodulation, is glucose sensing in the body. Circuits with an optical sensor for detecting glucose already exist, but the process would benefit greatly with a wireless power supply that can be non-invasively integrated inside of the body.

“That’s just one example,” Joy says. “We can leverage all these other techniques that are also developed using the same fabrication methods, and then just integrate them easily to the antenna.”

Around 80 percent of global energy production today comes from the combustion of fossil fuels. Combustion, or the process of converting stored chemical energy into thermal energy through burning, is vital for a variety of common activities including electricity generation, transportation, and domestic uses like heating and cooking — but it also yields a host of environmental consequences, contributing to air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Sili Deng, the Doherty Chair in Ocean Utilization and associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, is leading research to drive the transition from the heavy dependence on fossil fuels to renewable energy with storage.

“I was first introduced to flame synthesis in my junior year in college,” Deng says. “I realized you can actually burn things to make things, [and] that was really fascinating.”

Deng says she ultimately picked combustion as a focus of her work because she likes the intellectual challenge the concept offers. “In combustion you have chemistry, and you have fluid mechanics. Each subject is very rich in science. This also has very strong engineering implications and applications.”

Deng’s research group targets three areas: building up fundamental knowledge on combustion processes and emissions; developing alternative fuels and metal combustion to replace fossil fuels; and synthesizing flame-based materials for catalysis and energy storage, which can bring down the cost of manufacturing battery materials.

One focus of the team has been on low-cost, low-emission manufacturing of cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries play an increasingly critical role in transportation electrification (e.g., batteries for electric vehicles) and grid energy storage for electricity that is generated from renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Deng’s team has developed a technology they call flame-assisted spray pyrolysis, or FASP, which can help reduce the high manufacturing costs associated with cathode materials.

FASP is based on flame synthesis, a technology that dates back nearly 3,000 years. In ancient China, this was the primary way black ink materials were made. “[People burned] vegetables or woods, such that afterwards they can collect the solidified smoke,” Deng explains. “For our battery applications, we can try to fit in the same formula, but of course with new tweaks.”

The team is also interested in developing alternative fuels, including looking at the use of metals like aluminum to power rockets. “We’re interested in utilizing aluminum as a fuel for civil applications,” Deng says, because aluminum is abundant in the earth, cheap, and it’s available globally. “What we are trying to do is to understand [aluminum combustion] and be able to tailor its ignition and propagation properties.”

Among other accolades, Deng is a 2025 recipient of the Hiroshi Tsuji Early Career Researcher Award from the Combustion Institute, an award that recognizes excellence in fundamental or applied combustion science research.

There are no tricks in EFF's EFFector newsletter, just treats to keep you up-to-date on the latest in the fight for digital privacy and free expression. 

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In most states, schools are required to screen students as they enter kindergarten — a process that is meant to identify students who may need extra help learning to read. However, a new study by MIT researchers suggests that these screenings may not be working as intended in all schools.

The researchers’ survey of about 250 teachers found that many felt they did not receive adequate training to perform the tests, and about half reported that they were not confident that children who need extra instruction in reading end up receiving it.

When performed successfully, these screens can be essential tools to make sure children get the extra help they need to learn to read. However, the new findings suggest that many school districts may need to tweak how they implement the screenings and analyze the results, the researchers say.

“This result demonstrates the need to have a systematic approach for how the basic science on how children learn to read is translated into educational opportunity,” says John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Gabrieli is the senior author of the new open-access study, which appears today in Annals of Dyslexia. Ola Ozernov-Palchik, an MIT research scientist who is also a research assistant professor at Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development, is the lead author of the study.

Boosting literacy

Over the past 20 years, national reading proficiency scores in the United States have trended up, but only slightly. In 2022, 33 percent of fourth-graders achieved reading proficiency, compared to 29 percent in 1992, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading report card. (The highest level achieved in the past 20 years was 37 percent, in 2017.)

In hopes of boosting those rates, most states have passed laws requiring students to be screened for potential reading struggles early in elementary school. In most cases, the screenings are required two or three times per year, in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade.

These tests are designed to identify students who have difficulty with skills such as identifying letters and the sounds they make, blending sounds to make words, and recognizing words that rhyme. Students with low scores in these measures can then be offered extra interventions designed to help them catch up.

“The indicators of future reading disability or dyslexia are present as early as within the first few months of kindergarten,” Ozernov-Palchik says. “And there’s also an overwhelming body of evidence showing that interventions are most effective in the earliest grades.”

In the new study, the researchers wanted to evaluate how effectively these screenings are being implemented in schools. With help from the National Center for Improving Literacy, they posted on social media sites seeking classroom teachers and reading specialists who are responsible for administering literacy screening tests.

The survey respondents came from 39 states and represented public and private schools, located in urban, suburban, and rural areas. The researchers asked those teachers dozens of questions about their experience with the literacy screenings, including questions about their training, the testing process itself, and the results of the screenings.

One of the significant challenges reported by the respondents was a lack of training. About 75 percent reported that they received fewer than three hours of training on how to perform the screens, and 44 percent received no training at all or less than an hour of training.

“Under ideal conditions, there is an expert who trains the educators, they provide practice opportunities, they provide feedback, and they observe the educators administer the assessment,” Ozernov-Palchik says. “None of this was done in many of the cases.”

Instead, many educators reported that they spent their own time figuring out how to give the evaluations, sometimes working with colleagues. And, new hires who arrived at a school after the initial training was given were often left on their own to figure it out.

Another major challenge was suboptimal conditions for administering the tests. About 80 percent of teachers reported interruptions during the screenings, and 40 percent had to do the screens in noisy locations such as a school hallway. More than half of the teachers also reported technical difficulties in administering the tests, and that rate was higher among teachers who worked at schools with a higher percentage of students from low socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds.

Teachers also reported difficulties when it came to evaluating students categorized as English language learners (ELL). Many teachers relayed that they hadn’t been trained on how to distinguish students who were having trouble reading from those who struggled on the tests because they didn’t speak English well.

“The study reveals that there’s a lot of difficulty understanding how to handle English language learners in the context of screening,” Ozernov-Palchik says. “Overall, those kids tend to be either over-identified or under-identified as needing help, but they’re not getting the support that they need.”

Unrealized potential

Most concerning, the researchers say, is that in many schools, the results of the screening tests are not being used to get students the extra help that they need. Only 44 percent of the teachers surveyed said that their schools had a formal process for creating intervention plans for students after the screening was performed.

“Even though most educators said they believe that screening is important to do, they’re not feeling that it has the potential to drive change the way that it’s currently implemented,” Ozernov-Palchik says.

In the study, the researchers recommended several steps that state legislatures or individual school districts can take to make the screening process run more smoothly and successfully.

“Implementation is the key here,” Ozernov-Palchik says. “Teachers need more support and professional development. There needs to be systematic support as they administer the screening. They need to have designated spaces for screening, and explicit instruction in how to handle children who are English language learners.”

The researchers also recommend that school districts train an individual to take charge of interpreting the screening results and analyzing the data, to make sure that the screenings are leading to improved success in reading.

In addition to advocating for those changes, the researchers are also working on a technology platform that uses artificial intelligence to provide more individualized instruction in reading, which could help students receive help in the areas where they struggle the most.

The research was funded by Schmidt Futures, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for the Reach Every Reader project, and the Halis Family Foundation.

Signal has just rolled out its quantum-safe cryptographic implementation.

Ars Technica has a really good article with details:

Ultimately, the architects settled on a creative solution. Rather than bolt KEM onto the existing double ratchet, they allowed it to remain more or less the same as it had been. Then they used the new quantum-safe ratchet to implement a parallel secure messaging system.

Now, when the protocol encrypts a message, it sources encryption keys from both the classic Double Ratchet and the new ratchet. It then mixes the two keys together (using a cryptographic key derivation function) to get a new encryption key that has all of the security of the classical Double Ratchet but now has quantum security, too...

The president's unflinching commitment to fossil fuels will be tested when he meets Thursday with China's leader, Xi Jinping, who has created a clean energy powerhouse.

A new analysis found that unusually warm ocean waters boosted the storm's rapid intensification — twice.

A judge sided with environmentalists who accused the state of slow-walking implementation of a sweeping 2019 climate law.

The legal challenge accused the manufacturer of Clif Zbars of misleading consumers by touting a climate certification awarded by a private business.

At a special meeting Wednesday, California Air Resources Board staff will consider making it more expensive to release greenhouse gases.

The loss of tax incentives likely will lead to a short-term dip. But the industry is expected to rebound by 2030.

The money will upgrade coastal protection facilities for the Port of Tokyo and enhance flood resilience.

King Ridge Capital Advisors is already managing the world’s first-ever cat-bond ETF for Brookmont Capital Management.

Water levels in Huế’s Perfume River had risen to 15 feet Tuesday and were waist-deep in the UNESCO-listed former imperial capital.

Parenthood and climate change are related not just because of fears for a child's well-being, but also by concern for the planet's well-being.