The state Department of Environmental Protection's potential amendments come amid pressure from coastal mayors and industry groups.

The Paris landmark’s highest level shuts as France swelters.

It hasn’t snowed in Nepal’s Upper Mustang for nearly three years, a dire blow for those living and farming in high-altitude villages.

Marine Le Pen accused the government of forcing ordinary people to suffer the heat.

As a heat wave hits much of Europe, including the Vatican, the continental bishops conferences of the Global South penned a first-ever joint ecological appeal.

The cryptography that protects our privacy and security online relies on the fact that even the strongest computers will take essentially forever to do certain tasks, like factoring prime numbers and finding discrete logarithms which are important for RSA encryption, Diffie-Hellman key exchanges, and elliptic curve encryption. But what happens when those problems – and the cryptography they underpin – are no longer infeasible for computers to solve? Will our online defenses collapse? 

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(You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive and on YouTube.) 

Not if Deirdre Connolly can help it. As a cutting-edge thinker in post-quantum cryptography, Connolly is making sure that the next giant leap forward in computing – quantum machines that use principles of subatomic mechanics to ignore some constraints of classical mathematics and solve complex problems much faster – don’t reduce our digital walls to rubble. Connolly joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss not only how post-quantum cryptography can shore up those existing walls but also help us find entirely new methods of protecting our information. 

In this episode you’ll learn about: 

• Why we’re not yet sure exactly what quantum computing can do yet, and that’s exactly why we need to think about post-quantum cryptography now 
• What a “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” attack is, and what’s happening today to defend against it
• How cryptographic collaboration, competition, and community are key to exploring a variety of paths to post-quantum resilience
• Why preparing for post-quantum cryptography is and isn’t like fixing the Y2K bug
• How the best impact that end users can hope for from post-quantum cryptography is no visible impact at all
• Don’t worry—you won’t have to know, or learn, any math for this episode!  

Deidre Connolly is a research and applied cryptographer at Sandbox AQ with particular expertise in post-quantum encryption. She also co-hosts the “Security Cryptography Whatever” podcast about modern computer security and cryptography, with a focus on engineering and real-world experiences. Earlier, she was an engineer at the Zcash Foundation – a nonprofit that builds financial privacy infrastructure for the public good – as well as at Brightcove, Akamai, and HubSpot. 

Resources: 

• A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: “Looking back at the Snowden revelations” by Matthew Green (Sept. 24, 2019)
• The National Security Agency’s PRISM program
• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Information Technology Laboratory Computer Security Resource Center’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Project
• NIST Information Technology Laboratory Computer Security Research Center Glossary
• Deirdre Connolly’s YouTube channel 

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Transcript

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: I only got into cryptography and especially post quantum quickly after that. further into my professional life. I was a software engineer for a whil,e and the Snowden leaks happened, and phone records get leaked. All of Verizon's phone records get leaked. and then Prism and more leaks and more leaks. And as an engineer first, I felt like everything that I was building and we were building and telling people to use was vulnerable.
I wanted to learn more about how to do things securely. I went further and further and further down the rabbit hole of cryptography. And then, I think I saw a talk which was basically like, oh, elliptic curves are vulnerable to a quantum attack. And I was like, well, I, I really like these things. They're very elegant mathematical objects, it's very beautiful. I was sad that they were fundamentally broken, and, I think it was, Dan Bernstein who was like, well, there's this new thing that uses elliptic curves, but is supposed to be post quantum secure.
But the math is very difficult and no one understands it. I was like, well, I want to understand it if it preserves my beautiful elliptic curves. That's how I just went, just running, screaming downhill into post quantum cryptography.

CINDY COHN: That's Deirdre Connolly talking about how her love of beautiful math and her anger at the Snowden revelations about how the government was undermining security, led her to the world of post-quantum cryptography.
I'm Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

JASON KELLEY: And I'm Jason Kelley, EFF's activism director. You're listening to How to Fix the Internet.

CINDY COHN: On this show we talk to tech leaders, policy-makers, thinkers, artists and engineers about what the future could look like if we get things right online.

JASON KELLEY: Our guest today is at the forefront of the future of digital security. And just a heads up that this is one of the more technical episodes that we've recorded -- you'll hear quite a bit of cryptography jargon, so we've written up some of the terms that come up in the show notes, so take a look there if you hear a term you don't recognize.

CINDY COHN: Deidre Connolly is a research engineer and applied cryptographer at Sandbox AQ, with a particular expertise in post-quantum encryption. She also co-hosts the Security, Cryptography, Whatever podcast, so she's something of a cryptography influencer too. When we asked our tech team here at EFF who we should be speaking with on this episode about quantum cryptography and quantum computers more generally, everyone agreed that Deirdre was the person. So we're very glad to have you here. Welcome, Deirdre.

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: Thank you very much for having me. Hi.

CINDY COHN: Now we obviously work with a lot of technologists here and, and certainly personally cryptography is near and dear to my heart, but we are not technologists, neither Jason nor I. So can you just give us a baseline of what post-quantum cryptography is and why people are talking about it?

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: Sure. So a lot of the cryptography that we have deployed in the real world relies on a lot of math and security assumptions on that math based on things like abstract groups, Diffie-Hellman, elliptic curves, finite fields, and factoring prime numbers such as, uh, systems like RSA.
All of these, constructions and problems, mathematical problems, have served us very well in the last 40-ish years of cryptography. They've let us build very useful, efficient, small cryptography that we've deployed in the real world. It turns out that they are all also vulnerable in the same way to advanced cryptographic attacks that are only possible and only efficient when run on a quantum computer, and this is a class of computation, a whole new class of computation versus digital computers, which is the main computing paradigm that we've been used to for the last 75 years plus.
Quantum computers allow these new classes of attacks, especially, variants of Shore's algorithm – named Dr. Peter Shore – that basically when run on a sufficiently large, cryptographically relevant quantum computer, makes all of the asymmetric cryptography based on these problems that we've deployed very, very vulnerable.
So post-quantum cryptography is trying to take that class of attack into consideration and building cryptography to both replace what we've already deployed and make it resilient to this kind of attack, and trying to see what else we can do with these fundamentally different mathematical and cryptographic assumptions when building cryptography.

CINDY COHN: So we've kind of, we've secured our stuff behind a whole lot of walls, and we're slowly building a bulldozer. This is a particular piece of the world where the speed at which computers can do things has been part of our protection, and so we have to rethink that.

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: Yeah, quantum computing is a fundamentally new paradigm of how we process data that promises to have very interesting, uh, and like, applications beyond what we can envision right now. Like things like protein folding, chemical analysis, nuclear simulation, and cryptanalysts, or very strong attacks against cryptography.
But it is a field where it's such a fundamentally new computational paradigm that we don't even know what its applications fully would be yet, because like we didn't fully know what we were doing with digital computers in the forties and fifties. Like they were big calculators at one time.

JASON KELLEY: When it was suggested that we talk to you about this. I admit that I have not heard much about this field, and I realized quickly when looking into it that there's sort of a ton of hype around quantum computing and post-quantum cryptography and that kind of hype can make it hard to know whether or not something is like actually going to be a big thing or, whether this is something that's becoming like an investment cycle, like a lot of things do. And one of the things that quickly came up as an actual, like real danger is what's called sort of “save now decrypt later.”

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: Oh yeah.

JASON KELLEY: Right? We have all these messages, for example, that have been encrypted with current encryption methods. And if someone holds onto those, they can decrypt them using quantum computers in the future. How serious is that danger?

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: It’s definitely a concern and it's the number one driver I would say to post-quantum crypto adoption in broad industry right now is mitigating the threat of a Store Now/Decrypt Later attack, also known as Harvest Now/Decrypt Later, a bunch of names that all mean the same thing.
And fundamentally, it's, uh, especially if you're doing any kind of key agreement over a public channel, and doing key agreement over a public channel is part of the whole purpose of like, you want to be able to talk to someone who you've never really, touched base with before, and you all kind of know, some public parameters that even your adversary knows and based on just the fact that you can send messages to each other and some public parameters, and some secret values that only you know, and only the other party knows you can establish a shared secret, and then you can start encrypting traffic between you to communicate. And this is what you do in your web browser when you have an HTTPS connection, that's over TLS.
This is what you do with Signal or WhatsApp or any, or, you know, Facebook Messenger with the encrypted communications. They're using Diffie-Helman as part of the protocol to set up a shared secret, and then you use that to encrypt their message bodies that you're sending back and forth between you.
But if you can just store all those communications over that public channel, and the adversary knows the public parameters 'cause they're freely published, that's part of Kerckhoff’s Principle about good cryptography - the only thing that the adversary shouldn't know about your crypto system is the secret key values that you're actually using. It should be secure against an adversary that knows everything that you know, except the secret key material.
And you can just record all those public messages and all the public key exchange messages, and you just store them in a big database somewhere. And then when you have your large cryptographically relevant quantum computer, you can rifle through your files and say, hmm, let's point it at this.
And that's the threat that's live now to the stuff that we have already deployed and the stuff that we're continuing to do communications on now that is protected by elliptic curve Diffie Hellman, or Finite Field Diffie Hellman, or RSA. They can just record that and just theoretically point an attack at it at a later date when that attack comes online.
So like in TLS, there's a lot of browsers and servers and infrastructure providers that have updated to post-quantum resilient solutions for TLS. So they're using a combination of the classic elliptic curve, Diffie Hellman and a post-quantum KEM, uh, called ML Kem that was standardized by the United States based on a public design that's been, you know, a multi international collaboration to help do this design.
I think that's been deployed in Chrome, and I think it's deployed by CloudFlare and it's getting deployed – I think it's now become the default option in the latest version of Open SSL. And a lot of other open source projects, so that's TLS similar, approaches are being adopted in open SSH, the most popular SSH implementation in the world. Signal, the service has updated their key exchange to also include a post quantum KEM and their updated key establishments. So when you start a new conversation with someone or reset a conversation with someone that is the latest version of Signal is now protected against that sort of attack.
That is definitely happening and it's happening the most rapidly because of that Store now/Decrypt later attack, which is considered live. Everything that we're doing now can just be recorded and then later when the attack comes online, they can attack us retroactively. So that's definitely a big driver of things changing in the wild right now.

JASON KELLEY: Okay. I'm going to throw out two parallels for my very limited knowledge to make sure I understand. This reminds me a little bit of sort of the work that had to be done before Y2K in, in the sense of like, now people think nothing went wrong and nothing was ever gonna go wrong, but all of us working anywhere near the field know actually it took a ton of work to make sure that nothing blew up or stopped working.
And the other is that in, I think it was 1998, EFF was involved in something we called Deep Crack, where we made, that's a, I'm realizing now that's a terrible name. But anyway, the DES cracker, um, we basically wanted to show that DES was capable of being cracked, right? And that this was a - correct me if I'm wrong - it was some sort of cryptographic standard that the government was using and people wanted to show that it wasn't sufficient.

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: Yes - I think it was the first digital encryption standard. And then after its vulnerability was shown, they, they tripled it up to, to make it useful. And that's why Triple DES is still used in a lot of places and is actually considered okay. And then later came the advanced encryption standard, AES, which we prefer today.

JASON KELLEY: Okay, so we've learned the lesson, or we are learning the lesson, it sounds like.

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: Uh huh.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, I think that that's, that's right. I mean, EFF built the DES cracker because in the nineties the government was insisting that something that everybody knew was really, really insecure and was going to only get worse as computers got stronger and, and strong computers got in more people's hands, um, to basically show that the emperor had no clothes, um, that this wasn't very good.
And I think with the NIST standards and what's happening with post-quantum is really, you know, the hopeful version is we learned that lesson and we're not seeing government trying to pretend like there isn't a risk in order to preserve old standards, but instead leading the way with new ones. Is that fair?

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: That is very fair. NIST ran this post-quantum competition almost over 10 years, and it had over 80 submissions in the first round from all over the world, from industry, academia, and a mix of everything in between, and then it narrowed it down to. the three that are, they're not all out yet, but there's the key agreement, one called ML Kem, and three signatures. And there's a mix of cryptographic problems that they're based on, but there were multiple rounds, lots of feedback, lots of things got broken.
This competition has absolutely led the way for the world of getting ready for post-quantum cryptography. There are some competitions that have happened in Korea, and I think there's some work happening in China for their, you know, for their area.
There are other open standards and there are standards happening in other standards bodies, but the NIST competition has led the way, and it, because it's all open and all these standards are open and all of the work and the cryptanalysis that has gone in for the whole stretch. It's all been public and all these standards and drafts and analysis and attacks have been public. It's able to benefit everyone in the world.

CINDY COHN: I got started in the crypto wars in the nineties where the government was kind of the problem and they still are. And I do wanna ask you about whether you're seeing any role of the kinda national social security, FBI infrastructure, which has traditionally tried to put a thumb on the scales and make things less secure so that they could have access, if you're seeing any of that there.
But on the NIST side, I think this provides a nice counter example of how government can help facilitate building a better world sometimes, as opposed to being the thing we have to drag kicking and screaming into it.
But let me circle around to the question I embedded in that, which is, you know, one of the problems that that, that we know happened in the nineties around DES, and then of course some of the Snowden revelations indicated some mucking about in security as well behind the scenes by the NSA. Are you seeing anything like that and, and what should we be on the lookout for?

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: Not in the PQC stuff. Uh, there, like there have been a lot of people that were paying very close attention to what these independent teams were proposing and then what was getting turned into a standard or a proposed standard and every little change, because I, I was closely following the key establishment stuff.
Um, every little change people were trying to be like, did you tweak? Why did you tweak that? Did, like, is there a good reason? And like, running down basically all of those things. And like including trying to get into the nitty gritty of like. Okay. We think this is approximately these many bits of security using these parameter and like talking about, I dunno, 123 versus 128 bits and like really paying attention to all of that stuff.
And I don't think there was any evidence of anything like that. And, and for, for plus or minus, because there were. I don't remember which crypto scheme it was, but it, there was definitely an improvement from, I think some of the folks at NSA very quietly back in the day to, I think it was the S boxes, and I don't remember if it was DES or AES or whatever it was.
But people didn't understand at the time because it was related to advanced, uh, I think it was a differential crypto analysis attacks that folks inside there knew about, and people in outside academia didn't quite know about yet. And then after the fact they were like, oh, they've made this better. Um, we're not, we're not even seeing any evidence of anything of that character either.
It's just sort of like, it's very open letting, like if everything's proceeding well and the products are going well of these post-quantum standards, like, you know, leave it alone. And so everything looks good. And like, especially for NSA, uh, national Security Systems in the, in the United States, they have updated their own targets to migrate to post-quantum, and they are relying fully on the highest security level of these new standards.
So like they are eating their own dog food. They're protecting the highest classified systems and saying these need to be fully migrated to fully post quantum key agreement. Uh, and I think signatures at different times, but there has to be by like 2035. So if they were doing anything to kind of twiddle with those standards, they'd be, you know, hurting themselves and shooting themselves in the foot.

CINDY COHN: Well fingers crossed.

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: Yes.

CINDY COHN: Because I wanna build a better internet and a better. Internet means that they aren't secretly messing around with our security. And so this is, you know, cautiously good news.

JASON KELLEY: Let's take a quick moment to thank our sponsor.
“How to Fix the Internet” is supported by The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology. Enriching people’s lives through a keener appreciation of our increasingly technological world and portraying the complex humanity of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.
We also want to thank EFF members and donors. EFF has been fighting for digital rights for 35 years, and that fight is bigger than ever, so please, if you like what we do, go to eff.org/pod to donate. Also, we’d love for you to join us at this year’s EFF awards, where we celebrate the people working towards the better digital future that we all care so much about. Those are coming up on September 12th in San Francisco. You can find more information about that at eff.org/awards.
We also wanted to share that our friend Cory Doctorow has a new podcast. Listen to this.  [Who Broke the Internet trailer]

JASON KELLEY: And now, back to our conversation with Deirdre Connolly.

CINDY COHN: I think the thing that's fascinating about this is kind of seeing this cat and mouse game about the ability to break codes, and the ability to build codes and systems that are resistant to the breaking, kind of playing out here in the context of building better computers for everyone.
And I think it's really fascinating and I think it also for people I. You know, this is a pretty technical conversation, um, even, you know, uh, for our audience. But this is the stuff that goes on under the hood of how we keep journalists safe, how we keep activists safe, how we keep us all safe, whether it's our bank accounts or our, you know, people are talking about mobile IDs now and other, you know, all sorts of sensitive documents that are going to not be in physical form anymore, but are gonna be in digital form.
And unless we get this lock part right, we're really creating problems for people. And you know, what I really appreciate about you and the other people kind of in the midst of this fight is it's very unsung, right? It's kind of under the radar for the rest of us, but yet it's the, it's the ground that we need to stand on to, to be safe moving forward.

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: Yeah, and there's a lot of assumptions, uh, that even the low level theoretical cryptographers and the people implementing their, their stuff into software and the stuff, the people trying to deploy, that there's a, a lot of assumptions that have been baked into what we've built that to a degree don't quite fit in some of the, the things we've been able to build in a post-quantum secure way, or the way we think it's a post-quantum secure way.
Um, we're gonna need to change some stuff and we think we know how to change some stuff to make it work. but we are hoping that we don't accidentally introduce any vulnerabilities or gaps.
We're trying, but also we're not a hundred percent sure that we're not missing something, 'cause these things are new. And so we're trying, and we're also trying to make sure we don't break things as we change them because we're trying to change them to be post quantum resilient. But you know, once you change something, if there's a possibility, you, you just didn't understand it completely. And you don't wanna break something that was working well in one direction because you wanna improve it in another direction.

CINDY COHN: And that's why I think it's important to continue to have a robust community of people who are the breakers, right? Who are, are hackers, who are, who are attacking. And that is a, you know, that's a mindset, right? That's a way of thinking about stuff that is important to protect and nurture, um, because, you know, there's an old quote from Bruce Schneider: Anyone can build a crypto system that they themselves cannot break. Right? It takes a community of people trying to really pound away at something to figure out where the holes are.
And you know, a lot of the work that EFF does around coders rights and other kinds of things is to make sure that there's space for that. and I think it's gonna be as needed in a quantum world as it was in a kind of classical computer world.

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: Absolutely. I'm confident that we will learn a lot more from the breakers about this new cryptography because, like, we've tried to be robust through this, you know, NIST competition, and a lot of those, the things that we learn apply to other constructions as they come out. but like there's a whole area of people who are going to be encountering this kind of newish cryptography for the first time, and they kind of look at it and they're like. Oh, uh, I, I think I might be able to do something interesting with this, and we're, we'll all learn more and we'll try to patch and update as quickly as possible

JASON KELLEY: And this is why we have competitions to figure out what the best options are and why some people might favor one algorithm over another for different, different processes and things like that.

DEIDRE CONNOLLY: And that's why we're probably gonna have a lot of different flavors of post-quantum cryptography getting deployed in the world because it's not just, ah, you know, I don't love NIST. I'm gonna do my own thing in my own country over here. Or, or have different requirements. There is that at play, but also you're trying to not put all your eggs in one basket as well.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, so we want a menu of things so that people can really pick, from, you know, vetted, but different strategies. So I wanna ask the kind of core question for the podcast, which is, um, what does it look like if we get this right, if we get quantum computing and, you know, post-quantum crypto, right?
How does the world look different? Or does it just look the same? How, what, what does it look like if we do this well?

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: Hopefully to a person just using their phone or using their computer to talk to somebody on the other side of the world, hopefully they don't notice. Hopefully to them, if they're, you know, deploying a website and they're like, ah, I need to get a Let’s Encrypt certificate or whatever.
Hopefully Let's Encrypt just, you know, insert bot just kind of does everything right by default and they don't have to worry about it.
Um, for the builders, it should be, we have a good recommended menu of cryptography that you can use when you're deploying TLS, when you're deploying SSH, uh, when you're building cryptographic applications, especially.
So like if you are building something in Go or Java or you know, whatever it might be, the crypto library in your language will have the updated recommended signature algorithm or key agreement algorithm and be, like, this is how we, you know, they have code snippets to say like, this is how you should use it, and they will deprecate the older stuff.
And, like, unfortunately there's gonna be a long time where there's gonna be a mix of the new post-quantum stuff that we know how to use and know how to deploy and protect. The most important, you know, stuff like to mitigate Store now/Decrypt later and, you know, get those signatures with the most important, uh, protected stuff.
Uh, get those done. But there's a lot of stuff that we're not really clear about. How we wanna do it yet, and kind of going back to one of the things you mentioned earlier, uh, comparing this to Y2K, there was a lot of work that went into mitigating Y2K before, during, immediately after.
Unfortunately, the comparison to the post quantum migration kind of falls down because after Y2K, if you hadn't fixed something, it would break. And you would notice in usually an obvious way, and then you could go find it. You, you fix the most important stuff that, you know, if it broke, like you would lose billions of dollars or, you know, whatever. You'd have an outage.
For cryptography, especially the stuff that's a little bit fancier. Um, you might not know it's broken because the adversary is not gonna, it's not gonna blow up.
And you have to, you know, reboot a server or patch something and then, you know, redeploy. If it's gonna fail, it's gonna fail quietly. And so we're trying to kind of find these things, or at least make the kind of longer tail of stuff, uh, find fixes for that upfront, you know, so that at least the option is available.
But for a regular person, hopefully they shouldn't notice. So everyone's trying really hard to make it so that the best security, in terms of the cryptography is deployed with, without downgrading your experience. We're gonna keep trying to do that.
I don't wanna build crap and say “Go use it.” I want you to be able to just go about your life and use a tool that's supposed to be useful and helpful. And it's not accidentally leaking all your data to some third party service or just leaving a hole on your network for any, any actor who notices to walk through and you know, all that sort of stuff.
So whether it's like implementing things securely in software, or it's cryptography or you know, post-quantum weirdness, like for me, I just wanna build good stuff for people, that's not crap.

JASON KELLEY: Everyone listening to this agrees with you. We don't want to build crap. We want to build some beautiful things. Let's go out there and do it.

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: Cool.

JASON KELLEY: Thank you so much, Deirdre.

DEIRDRE CONNOLLY: Thank you!

CINDY COHN: Thank you Deirdre. We really appreciate you coming and explaining all of this to, you know, uh, the lawyer and activist at EFF.

JASON KELLEY: Well, I think that was probably the most technical conversation we've had, but I followed along pretty well and I feel like at first I was very nervous based on the, save and decrypt concerns. But after we talked to Deirdre, I feel like the people working on this. Just like for Y2K are pretty much gonna keep us out of hot water. And I learned a lot more than I did know before we started the conversation. What about you, Cindy?

CINDY COHN: I learned a lot as well. I mean, cryptography and, attacks on security is always, you know, it's a process, and it's a process by which we do the best we can, and then, then we also do the best we can to rip it apart and find all the holes, and then we, we iterate forward. And it's nice to hear that that model is still the model, even as we get into something like quantum computers, which, um, frankly are still hard to conceptualize.
But I agree. I think that what the good news outta this interview is I feel like there's a lot of pieces in place to try to do this right, to have this tremendous shift in computing that we don't know when it's coming, but I think that the research indicates that it SI coming, be something that we can handle, um, rather than something that overwhelms us.
And I think that's really,it's good to hear that good people are trying to do the right thing here since it's not inevitable.

JASON KELLEY: Yeah, and it is nice when someone's sort of best vision for what the future looks like is hopefully your life. You will have no impacts from this because everything will be taken care of. That's always good.
I mean, it sounds like, you know, the main thing for EFF is, as you said, we have to make sure that security engineers, hackers have the resources that they need to protect us from these kinds of threats and, and other kinds of threats obviously.
But, you know, that's part of EFF's job, like you mentioned. Our job is to make sure that there are people able to do this work and be protected while doing it so that when the. Solutions do come about. You know, they work and they're implemented and the average person doesn't have to know anything and isn't vulnerable.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, I also think that, um, I appreciated her vision that this is a, you know, the future's gonna be not just one. Size fits all solution, but a menu of things that take into account, you know, both what works better in terms of, you know, bandwidth and compute time, but also what you know, what people actually need.
And I think that's a piece that's kind of built into the way that this is happening that's also really hopeful. In the past and, and I was around when EFF built the DES cracker, um, you know, we had a government that was saying, you know, you know, everything's fine, everything's fine when everybody knew that things weren't fine.
So it's also really hopeful that that's not the position that NIST is taking now, and that's not the position that people who may not even pick the NIST standards but pick other standards are really thinking through.

JASON KELLEY: Yeah, it's very helpful and positive and nice to hear when something has improved for the better. Right? And that's what happened here. We had this, this different attitude from, you know, government at large in the past and it's changed and that's partly thanks to EFF, which is amazing.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, I think that's right. And, um, you know, we'll see going forward, you know, the governments change and they go through different things, but this is, this is a hopeful moment and we're gonna push on through to this future.
I think there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of worry about quantum computers and what they're gonna do in the world, and it's nice to have a little vision of, not only can we get it right, but there are forces in place that are getting it right. And of course it does my heart so, so good that, you know, someone like Deirdre was inspired by Snowden and dove deep and figured out how to be one of the people who was building the better world. We've talked to so many people like that, and this is a particular, you know, little geeky corner of the world. But, you know, those are our people and that makes me really happy.

JASON KELLEY: Thanks for joining us for this episode of How to Fix the Internet.
If you have feedback or suggestions, we'd love to hear from you. Visit EFF dot org slash podcast and click on listener feedback. While you're there, you can become a member, donate, maybe even pick up some merch and just see what's happening in digital rights this week and every week.
Our theme music is by Nat Keefe of BeatMower with Reed Mathis
How to Fix the Internet is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's program in public understanding of science and technology.
We’ll see you next time.
I’m Jason Kelley…

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Being placed in foster care is a necessary intervention for some children. But many advocates worry that kids can languish in foster care too long, with harmful effects for children who are temporarily unattached from a permanent family.

A new study co-authored by an MIT economist shows that an innovative Chilean program providing legal aid to children shortens the length of foster-care stays, returning them to families faster. In the process, it improves long-term social outcomes for kids and even reduces government spending on the foster care system.

“It was amazingly successful because the program got kids out of foster care about 30 percent faster,” says Joseph Doyle, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who helped lead the research. “Because foster care is expensive, that paid for the program by itself about four times over. If you improve the case management of kids in foster care, you can improve a child’s well-being and save money.”

The paper, “Effects of Enhanced Legal Aid in Child Welfare: Evidence from a Randomized Trial of Mi Abogado,” is published in the American Economic Review.

The authors are Ryan Cooper, a professor and director of government innovation at the University of Chicago; Doyle, who is the Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management at MIT Sloan; and Andrés P. Hojman, a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

Rigorous design

To conduct the study, the scholars examined the Chilean government’s new program “Mi Abogado” — meaning, “My Lawyer” — which provided enhanced legal support to children in foster care, as well as access to psychologists and social workers. Legal advocates in the program were given a reduced caseload, for one thing, to help them focus further on each individual case.

Chile introduced Mi Abogado in 2017, with a feature that made it ripe for careful study: The program randomizes most of the participants selected, as part of how it was rolled out. From the pool of children in the foster care system, randomly being part of the program makes it easier to identify its causal impact on later outcomes.

“Very few foster-care redesigns are evaluated in such a rigorous way, and we need more of this innovative approach to policy improvement,” Doyle notes.

The experiment included 1,781 children who were in Chile’s foster care program in 2019, with 581 selected for the Mi Abogado services; it tracked their trajectories over more than two years. Almost all the participants were in group foster-care homes.

In addition to reduced time spent in foster care, the Chilean data showed that children in the Mi Abogado program had a subsequent 30 percent reduction in terms of contact with the criminal justice system and a 5 percent increase in school attendance, compared to children in foster care who did not participate in the program.

“They were getting involved with crime less and attending school more,” Doyle says.

As powerful as the results appear, Doyle acknowledges that he would like to be able to analyze further which elements of the Mi Abogado program had the biggest impact — legal help, counseling and therapy, or other factors.

“We would like to see more about what exactly they are doing for children to speed their exit from care,” Doyle says. “Is it mostly about therapy? Is it working with judges and cutting through red tape? We think the lawyer is a very important part. But the results suggest it is not just the lawyer that improves outcomes.”

More programs in other places?

The current paper is one of many studies Doyle has developed during his career that relate to foster care and related issues. In another forthcoming paper, Doyle and some co-authors find that about 5 percent of U.S. children spend some time in foster care — a number that appears to be fairly common internationally, too.

“People don’t appreciate how common child protective services and foster care are,” Doyle says. Moreover, he adds, “Children involved in these systems are particularly vulnerable.”

With a variety of U.S. jurisdictions running their own foster-care systems, Doyle notes that many people have the opportunity to usefully learn about the Mi Abogado program and consider if its principles might be worth testing. And while that requires some political will, Doyle expresses optimism that policymakers might be open to new ideas.

“It’s not really a partisan issue,” Doyle says. “Most people want to help protect kids, and, if an intervention is needed for kids, have an interest in making the intervention run well.”

After all, he notes, the impact of the Mi Abogado program appears to be both substantial and lasting, making it an interesting example to consider.

“Here we have a case where the child outcomes are improved and the government saved money,” Doyle observes. “I’d like to see more experimentation with programs like this in other places.”

Support for the research was provided in part by the MIT Sloan Latin America Office. Chile’s Studies Department of the Ministry of Education made data available from the education system.

Inspired by the “Harry Potter” stories and the Disney Channel show “Wizards of Waverly Place,” 7-year-old Sabrina Corsetti emphatically declared to her parents one afternoon that she was, in fact, a wizard.

“My dad turned to me and said that, if I really wanted to be a wizard, then I should become a physicist. Physicists are the real wizards of the world,” she recalls.

That conversation stuck with Corsetti throughout her childhood, all the way up to her decision to double-major in physics and math in college, which set her on a path to MIT, where she is now a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

While her work may not involve incantations or magic wands, Corsetti’s research centers on an area that often produces astonishing results: integrated photonics. A relatively young field, integrated photonics involves building computer chips that route light instead of electricity, enabling compact and scalable solutions for applications ranging from communications to sensing.

Corsetti and her collaborators in the Photonics and Electronics Research Group, led by Professor Jelena Notaros, develop chip-sized devices which enable innovative applications that push the boundaries of what is possible in optics.

For instance, Corsetti and the team developed a chip-based 3D printer, small enough to sit in the palm of one’s hand, that emits a reconfigurable beam of light into resin to create solid shapes. Such a device could someday enable a user to rapidly fabricate customized, low-cost objects on the go.

She also contributed to creating a miniature “tractor beam” that uses a beam of light to capture and manipulate biological particles using a chip. This could help biologists study DNA or investigate the mechanisms of disease without contaminating tissue samples.

More recently, Corsetti has been working on a project in collaboration with MIT Lincoln Laboratory, focused on trapped-ion quantum computing, which involves the manipulation of ions to store and process quantum information.

“Our team has a strong focus on designing devices and systems that interact with the environment. The opportunity to join a new research group, led by a supportive and engaged advisor, that works on projects with a lot of real-world impacts, is primarily what drew me to MIT,” Corsetti says.

Embracing challenges

Years before she set foot in a research lab, Corsetti was a science- and math-focused kid growing up with her parents and younger brother in the suburbs of Chicago, where her family operates a structural steelwork company.

Throughout her childhood, her teachers fostered her love of learning, from her early years in the Frankfort 157-C school district through her time at the Lincoln-Way East High School.

She enjoyed working on science experiments outside the classroom and relished the chance to tackle complex conundrums during independent study projects curated by her teachers (like calculating the math behind the Brachistochrone Curve, or the shortest path between two points, which was famously solved by Isaac Newton).

Corsetti decided to double-major in physics and math at the University of Michigan after graduating from high school a year early.

“When I went to the University of Michigan, I couldn’t wait to get started. I enrolled in the toughest math and physics track right off the bat,” she recalls.

But Corsetti soon found that she had bitten off a bit more than she could chew. A lot of her tough undergraduate courses assumed students had prior knowledge from AP physics and math classes, which Corsetti hadn’t taken because she graduated early.

She met with professors, attended office hours, and tried to pick up the lessons she had missed, but felt so discouraged she contemplated switching majors. Before she made the switch, Corsetti decided to try working in a physics lab to see if she liked a day in the life of a researcher.

After joining Professor Wolfgang Lorenzon’s lab at Michigan, Corsetti spent hours working with grad students and postdocs on a hands-on project to build cells that would hold liquid hydrogen for a particle physics experiment.

As they collaborated for hours at a time to roll material into tubes, she peppered the older students with questions about their experiences in the field.

“Being in the lab made me fall in love with physics. I really enjoyed that environment, working with my hands, and working with people as part of a bigger team,” she says.

Her affinity for hands-on lab work was amplified a few years later when she met Professor Tom Schwarz, her research advisor for the rest of her time at Michigan.

Following a chance conversation with Schwarz, she applied to a research abroad program at CERN in Switzerland, where she was mentored by Siyuan Sun. There, she had the opportunity to join thousands of physicists and engineers on the ATLAS project, writing code and optimizing circuits for new particle-detector technologies.

“That was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. After I came back to Michigan, I was ready to spend my career focusing on research,” she says.

Hooked on photonics

Corsetti began applying to graduate schools but decided to shift focus from the more theoretical particle physics to electrical engineering, with an interest in conducting hands-on chip-design and testing research.

She applied to MIT with a focus on standard electronic-chip design, so it came as a surprise when Notaros reached out to her to schedule a Zoom call. At the time, Corsetti was completely unfamiliar with integrated photonics. However, after one conversation with the new professor, she was hooked.

“Jelena has an infectious enthusiasm for integrated photonics,” she recalls. “After those initial conversations, I took a leap of faith.”

Corsetti joined Notaros’ team as it was just getting started. Closely mentored by a senior student, Milica Notaros, she and her cohort grew immersed in integrated photonics.

Over the years, she’s particularly enjoyed the collaborative and close-knit nature of the lab and how the work involves so many different aspects of the experimental process, from design to simulation to analysis to hardware testing.

“An exciting challenge that we’re always running up against is new chip-fabrication requirements. There is a lot of back-and-forth between new application areas that demand new fabrication technologies, followed by improved fabrication technologies motivating additional application areas. That cycle is constantly pushing the field forward,” she says.

Corsetti plans to stay at the cutting edge of the field after graduation as an integrated-photonics researcher in industry or at a national lab. She would like to focus on trapped-ion quantum computing, which scientists are rapidly scaling up toward commercially viable systems, or other high-performance computing applications.

“You really need accelerated computing for any modern research area. It would be exciting and rewarding to contribute to high-performance computing that can enable a lot of other interesting research areas,” she says.

Paying it forward

In addition to making an impact with research, Corsetti is focused on making a personal impact in the lives of others. Through her involvement in MIT Graduate Hillel, she joined the Jewish Big Brothers Big Sisters of Boston, where she volunteers for the friend-to-friend program.

Participating in the program, which pairs adults who have disabilities with friends in the community for fun activities like watching movies or painting has been an especially uplifting and gratifying experience for Corsetti.

She’s also enjoyed the opportunity to support, mentor, and bond with her fellow MIT EECS students, drawing on the advice she’s received throughout her own academic journey.

“Don’t trust feelings of imposter syndrome,” she advises others. “Keep moving forward, ask for feedback and help, and be confident that you will reach a point where you can make meaningful contributions to a team.”

Outside the lab, she enjoys playing classical music on the clarinet (her favorite piece is Leonard Bernstein’s famous overture to “Candide”), reading, and caring for a family of fish in her aquarium.

We're wishing EFF a happy birthday on July 10! Since 1990, EFF's lawyers, activists, analysts, and technologists have used everything in their toolkit to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world. They've seen it all and in this special edition of our EFFecting Change livestream series, leading experts at EFF will explore what's next for technology users.

EFFecting Change Livestream Series:
EFF Turns 35!
Thursday, July 10th
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Pacific - Check Local Time
This event is LIVE and FREE!

Join EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, EFF Legislative Director Lee Tien, EFF Director of Cybersecurity Eva Galperin, and Professor / EFF Board Member Yoshi Kohno for this live Q&A. Learn what they have seen and how we can fuel the fight for privacy, free expression, and a future where digital freedoms are protected for everyone. 

We hope you and your friends can join us live! Be sure to spread the word, and share our past livestreams. Please note that all events will be recorded for later viewing on our YouTube page.

Want to make sure you don’t miss our next livestream? Here’s a link to sign up for updates about this series:eff.org/ECUpdates.

Evan Kharasch, professor of anesthesiology and vice chair for innovation at Duke University, has developed two approaches that may aid in fentanyl addiction recovery. After attending MIT’s Substance Use Disorders (SUD) Ventures Bootcamp, he’s committed to bringing them to market.

Illicit fentanyl addiction is still a national emergency in the United States, fueled by years of opioid misuse. As opioid prescriptions fell by 50 percent over 15 years, many turned to street drugs. Among those drugs, fentanyl stands out for its potency — just 2 milligrams can be fatal — and its low production cost. Often mixed with other drugs, it contributed to a large portion of over 80,000 overdose deaths in 2024. It has been particularly challenging to treat with currently available medications for opioid use disorder.  

​​As an anesthesiologist, Kharasch is highly experienced with opioids, including methadone, one of only three drugs approved in the United States for treating opioid use disorder. Methadone is a key option for managing fentanyl use. It’s employed to transition patients off fentanyl and to support ongoing maintenance, but access is limited, with only 20 percent of eligible patients receiving it. Initiating and adjusting methadone treatment can take weeks due to its clinical characteristics, often causing withdrawal and requiring longer hospital stays. Maintenance demands daily visits to one of just over 2,000 clinics, disrupting work or study and leading most patients to drop out after a few months.

To tackle these challenges, Kharasch developed two novel methadone formulations: one for faster absorption to cut initiation time from weeks to days — or even hours — and one to slow elimination, thereby potentially requiring only weekly, rather than daily, dosing. As a clinician, scientist, and entrepreneur, he sees the science as demanding, but bringing these treatments to patients presents an even greater challenge. Kharasch learned about the SUD Ventures Bootcamp, part of MIT Open Learning, as a recipient of research funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). He decided to apply to bridge the gap in his expertise and was selected to attend as a fellow.

Each year, the SUD Ventures Bootcamp unites innovators — including scientists, entrepreneurs, and medical professionals — to develop bold, cross-disciplinary solutions to substance use disorders. Through online learning and an intensive one-week in-person bootcamp, teams tackle challenges in different “high priority” areas. Guided by experts in science, entrepreneurship, and policy, they build and pitch ventures aimed at real-world impact. Beyond the multidisciplinary curriculum, the program connects people deeply committed to this space and equipped to drive progress.

Throughout the program, Kharasch’s concepts were validated by the invited industry experts, who highlighted the potential impact of a longer-acting methadone formulation, particularly in correctional settings. Encouragement from MIT professors, coaches, and peers energized Kharasch to fully pursue commercialization. He has already begun securing intellectual property rights, validating the regulatory pathway through the U.S Food and Drug Administration, and gathering market and patient feedback.

The SUD Ventures Bootcamp, he says, both activated and validated his passion for bringing these innovations to patients. “After many years of basic, translational and clinical research on methadone all — supported by NIDA — I experienced that a ha moment of recognizing a potential opportunity to apply the findings to benefit patients at scale,” Kharasch says. “The NIDA-sponsored participation in the MIT SUD Ventures Bootcamp was the critical catalyst which ignited the inspiration and commitment to pursue commercializing our research findings into better treatments for opioid use disorder.”

As next steps, Kharasch is seeking an experienced co-founder and finalizing IP protections. He remains engaged with the SUD Ventures network as mentors, industry experts, and peers offer help with advancing this needed solution to market. For example, the program's mentor, Nat Sims, the Newbower/Eitan Endowed Chair in Biomedical Technology Innovation at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and a fellow anesthesiologist, has helped Kharasch arrange technology validation conversations within the MGH ecosystem and the drug development community.

“Evan’s collaboration with the MGH ecosystem can help define an optimum process for commercializing these innovations — identifying who would benefit, how they would benefit, and who is willing to pilot the product once it’s available,” says Sims.

Kharasch has also presented his project in the program’s webinar series. Looking ahead, Kharasch hopes to involve MIT Sloan School of Management students in advancing his project through health care entrepreneurship classes, continuing the momentum that began with the SUD Ventures Bootcamp.

The program and its research are supported by the NIDA of the National Institutes of Health. Cynthia Breazeal, a professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab and dean for digital learning at MIT Open Learning, serves as the principal investigator on the grant.

Gitanjali Rao, a rising junior at MIT majoring in biological engineering, has been named the first-ever recipient of the Stephen Hawking Junior Medal for Science Communication. This award, presented by the Starmus Festival, is a new category of the already prestigious award created by the late theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author Stephen Hawking and the Starmus Festival.

“I spend a lot of time in labs,” says Rao, highlighting her Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program project in the Langer Lab. Along with her curiosity to explore, she also has a passion for helping others understand what happens inside the lab. “We very rarely discuss why science communication is important,” she says. “Stephen Hawking was incredible at that.”

Rao is the inventor of Epione, a device for early diagnosis of prescription opioid addiction, and Kindly, an anti-cyber-bullying service powered by AI and natural language processing. Kindly is now a United Nations Children's Fund “Digital Public Good” service and is accessible worldwide. These efforts, among others, brought her to the attention of the Starmus team.

The award ceremony was held last April at the Kennedy Center in Washington, where Rao gave a speech and met acclaimed scientists, artists, and musicians. “It was one for the books,” she says. “I met Brian May from Queen — he's a physicist.” Rao is also a musician in her own right — she plays bass guitar and piano, and she's been learning to DJ at MIT. “Starmus” is a portmanteau of “stars” and “music.”

Originally from Denver, Colorado, Rao attended a STEM-focused school before MIT. Looking ahead, she's open to graduate school, and dreams of launching a biotech startup when the right idea comes.

The medal comes with an internship opportunity that Rao hopes to use for fieldwork or experience in the pharmaceutical industry. She’s already secured a summer internship at Moderna, and is considering spending Independent Activities Period abroad. “Hopefully, I'll have a better idea in the next few months.”
 

The International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia holds up a mirror to the industry — not only reflecting current priorities and preoccupations, but also projecting an agenda for what might be possible. 

Curated by Carlo Ratti, MIT professor of practice of urban technologies and planning, this year’s exhibition (“Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective”) proposes a “Circular Economy Manifesto” with the goal to support the “development and production of projects that utilize natural, artificial, and collective intelligence to combat the climate crisis.” 

Designers and architects will quickly recognize the paradox of this year’s theme. Global architecture festivals have historically had a high carbon footprint, using vast amounts of energy, resources, and materials to build and transport temporary structures that are later discarded. This year’s unprecedented emphasis on waste elimination and carbon neutrality challenges participants to reframe apparent limitations into creative constraints. In this way, the Biennale acts as a microcosm of current planetary conditions — a staging ground to envision and practice adaptive strategies.

VAMO (Vegetal, Animal, Mineral, Other)

When Ratti approached John Ochsendorf, MIT professor and founding director of MIT Morningside Academy of Design (MAD), with the invitation to interpret the theme of circularity, the project became the premise for a convergence of ideas, tools, and know-how from multiple teams at MIT and the wider MIT community. 

The Digital Structures research group, directed by Professor Caitlin Mueller, applied expertise in designing efficient structures of tension and compression. The Circular Engineering for Architecture research group, led by MIT alumna Catherine De Wolf at ETH Zurich, explored how digital technologies and traditional woodworking techniques could make optimal use of reclaimed timber. Early-stage startups — including companies launched by the venture accelerator MITdesignX — contributed innovative materials harnessing natural byproducts from vegetal, animal, mineral, and other sources. 

The result is VAMO (Vegetal, Animal, Mineral, Other), an ultra-lightweight, biodegradable, and transportable canopy designed to circle around a brick column in the Corderie of the Venice Arsenale — a historic space originally used to manufacture ropes for the city’s naval fleet. 

“This year’s Biennale marks a new radicalism in approaches to architecture,” says Ochsendorf. “It’s no longer sufficient to propose an exciting idea or present a stylish installation. The conversation on material reuse must have relevance beyond the exhibition space, and we’re seeing a hunger among students and emerging practices to have a tangible impact. VAMO isn’t just a temporary shelter for new thinking. It’s a material and structural prototype that will evolve into multiple different forms after the Biennale.”

Tension and compression

The choice to build the support structure from reclaimed timber and hemp rope called for a highly efficient design to maximize the inherent potential of comparatively humble materials. Working purely in tension (the spliced cable net) or compression (the oblique timber rings), the structure appears to float — yet is capable of supporting substantial loads across large distances. The canopy weighs less than 200 kilograms and covers over 6 meters in diameter, highlighting the incredible lightness that equilibrium forms can achieve. VAMO simultaneously showcases a series of sustainable claddings and finishes made from surprising upcycled materials — from coconut husks, spent coffee grounds, and pineapple peel to wool, glass, and scraps of leather. 

The Digital Structures research group led the design of structural geometries conditioned by materiality and gravity. “We knew we wanted to make a very large canopy,” says Mueller. “We wanted it to have anticlastic curvature suggestive of naturalistic forms. We wanted it to tilt up to one side to welcome people walking from the central corridor into the space. However, these effects are almost impossible to achieve with today's computational tools that are mostly focused on drawing rigid materials.”

In response, the team applied two custom digital tools, Ariadne and Theseus, developed in-house to enable a process of inverse form-finding: a way of discovering forms that achieve the experiential qualities of an architectural project based on the mechanical properties of the materials. These tools allowed the team to model three-dimensional design concepts and automatically adjust geometries to ensure that all elements were held in pure tension or compression.

“Using digital tools enhances our creativity by allowing us to choose between multiple different options and short-circuit a process that would have otherwise taken months,” says Mueller. “However, our process is also generative of conceptual thinking that extends beyond the tool — we’re constantly thinking about the natural and historic precedents that demonstrate the potential of these equilibrium structures.”

Digital efficiency and human creativity 

Lightweight enough to be carried as standard luggage, the hemp rope structure was spliced by hand and transported from Massachusetts to Venice. Meanwhile, the heavier timber structure was constructed in Zurich, where it could be transported by train — thereby significantly reducing the project’s overall carbon footprint. 

The wooden rings were fabricated using salvaged beams and boards from two temporary buildings in Switzerland — the Huber and Music Pavilions — following a pedagogical approach that De Wolf has developed for the Digital Creativity for Circular Construction course at ETH Zurich. Each year, her students are tasked with disassembling a building due for demolition and using the materials to design a new structure. In the case of VAMO, the goal was to upcycle the wood while avoiding the use of chemicals, high-energy methods, or non-biodegradable components (such as metal screws or plastics). 

“Our process embraces all three types of intelligence celebrated by the exhibition,” says De Wolf. “The natural intelligence of the materials selected for the structure and cladding; the artificial intelligence of digital tools empowering us to upcycle, design, and fabricate with these natural materials; and the crucial collective intelligence that unlocks possibilities of newly developed reused materials, made possible by the contributions of many hands and minds.”

For De Wolf, true creativity in digital design and construction requires a context-sensitive approach to identifying when and how such tools are best applied in relation to hands-on craftsmanship. 

Through a process of collective evaluation, it was decided that the 20-foot lower ring would be assembled with eight scarf joints using wedges and wooden pegs, thereby removing the need for metal screws. The scarf joints were crafted through five-axis CNC milling; the smaller, dual-jointed upper ring was shaped and assembled by hand by Nicolas Petit-Barreau, founder of the Swiss woodwork company Anku, who applied his expertise in designing and building yurts, domes, and furniture to the VAMO project. 

“While digital tools suited the repetitive joints of the lower ring, the upper ring’s two unique joints were more efficiently crafted by hand,” says Petit-Barreau. “When it comes to designing for circularity, we can learn a lot from time-honored building traditions. These methods were refined long before we had access to energy-intensive technologies — they also allow for the level of subtlety and responsiveness necessary when adapting to the irregularities of reused wood.”

A material palette for circularity

The structural system of a building is often the most energy-intensive; an impact dramatically mitigated by the collaborative design and fabrication process developed by MIT Digital Structures and ETH Circular Engineering for Architecture. The structure also serves to showcase panels made of biodegradable and low-energy materials — many of which were advanced through ventures supported by MITdesignX, a program dedicated to design innovation and entrepreneurship at MAD. 

“In recent years, several MITdesignX teams have proposed ideas for new sustainable materials that might at first seem far-fetched,” says Gilad Rosenzweig, executive director of MITdesignX. “For instance, using spent coffee grounds to create a leather-like material (Cortado), or creating compostable acoustic panels from coconut husks and reclaimed wool (Kokus). This reflects a major cultural shift in the architecture profession toward rethinking the way we build, but it’s not enough just to have an inventive idea. To achieve impact — to convert invention into innovation — teams have to prove that their concept is cost-effective, viable as a business, and scalable.”

Aligned with the ethos of MAD, MITdesignX assesses profit and productivity in terms of environmental and social sustainability. In addition to presenting the work of R&D teams involved in MITdesignX, VAMO also exhibits materials produced by collaborating teams at University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design, Politecnico di Milano, and other partners, such as Manteco. 

The result is a composite structure that encapsulates multiple life spans within a diverse material palette of waste materials from vegetal, animal, and mineral forms. Panels of Ananasse, a material made from pineapple peels developed by Vérabuccia, preserve the fruit’s natural texture as a surface pattern, while rehub repurposes fragments of multicolored Murano glass into a flexible terrazzo-like material; COBI creates breathable shingles from coarse wool and beeswax, and DumoLab produces fuel-free 3D-printable wood panels. 

A purpose beyond permanence 

Adriana Giorgis, a designer and teaching fellow in architecture at MIT, played a crucial role in bringing the parts of the project together. Her research explores the diverse network of factors that influence whether a building stands the test of time, and her insights helped to shape the collective understanding of long-term design thinking.

“As a point of connection between all the teams, helping to guide the design as well as serving as a project manager, I had the chance to see how my research applied at each level of the project,” Giorgis reflects. “Braiding these different strands of thinking and ultimately helping to install the canopy on site brought forth a stronger idea about what it really means for a structure to have longevity. VAMO isn’t limited to its current form — it’s a way of carrying forward a powerful idea into contemporary and future practice.”

What’s next for VAMO? Neither the attempt at architectural permanence associated with built projects, nor the relegation to waste common to temporary installations. After the Biennale, VAMO will be disassembled, possibly reused for further exhibitions, and finally relocated to a natural reserve in Switzerland, where the parts will be researched as they biodegrade. In this way, the lifespan of the project is extended beyond its initial purpose for human habitation and architectural experimentation, revealing the gradual material transformations constantly taking place in our built environment.

To quote Carlo Ratti’s Circular Economy Manifesto, the “lasting legacy” of VAMO is to “harness nature’s intelligence, where nothing is wasted.” Through a regenerative symbiosis of natural, artificial, and collective intelligence, could architectural thinking and practice expand to planetary proportions?

The Substance Use Disorders Ventures Bootcamp ignites innovators like Evan Kharasch to turn research breakthroughs into treatments for substance use disorder.

Often when we listen to music, we just instinctually enjoy it. Sometimes, though, it’s worth dissecting a song or other composition to figure out how it’s built.

Take the 1953 jazz standard “Satin Doll,” written by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, whose subtle structure rewards a close listening. As it happens, MIT Professor Emeritus Samuel Jay Keyser, a distinguished linguist and an avid trombonist on the side, has given the song careful scrutiny.

To Keyser, “Satin Doll” is a glittering example of what he calls the “same/except” construction in art. A basic rhyme, like “rent” and “tent,” is another example of this construction, given the shared rhyming sound and the different starting consonants.

In “Satin Doll,” Keyser observes, both the music and words feature a “same/except” structure. For instance, the rhythm of the first two bars of “Satin Doll” is the same as the second two bars, but the pitch goes up a step in bars three and four. An intricate pattern of this prevails throughout the entire body of “Satin Doll,” which Keyser calls “a musical rhyme scheme.”

When lyricist Johnny Mercer wrote words for “Satin Doll,” he matched the musical rhyme scheme. One lyric for the first four bars is, “Cigarette holder / which wigs me / Over her shoulder / she digs me.” Other verses follow the same pattern.

“Both the lyrics and the melody have the same rhyme scheme in their separate mediums, words and music, namely, A-B-A-B,” says Keyser. “That’s how you write lyrics. If you understand the musical rhyme scheme, and write lyrics to match that, you are introducing a whole new level of repetition, one that enhances the experience.”

Now, Keyser has a new book out about repetition in art and its cognitive impact on us, scrutinizing “Satin Doll” along with many other works of music, poetry, painting, and photography. The volume, “Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts,” is published by the MIT Press. The title is partly a play on Keyser’s name.

Inspired by the Margulis experiment

The genesis of “Play It Again, Sam” dates back several years, when Keyser encountered an experiment conducted by musicologist Elizabeth Margulis, described in her 2014 book, “On Repeat.” Margulis found that when she altered modern atonal compositions to add repetition to them, audiences ranging from ordinary listeners to music theorists preferred these edited versions to the original works.

“The Margulis experiment really caused the ideas to materialize,” Keyser says. He then examined repetition across art forms that featured research on associated cognitive activity, especially music, poetry, and the visual arts. For instance, the brain has distinct locations dedicated to the recognition of faces, places, and bodies. Keyser suggests this is why, prior to the advent of modernism, painting was overwhelmingly mimetic.

Ideally, he suggests, it will be possible to more comprehensively study how our brains process art — to see if encountering repetition triggers an endorphin release, say. For now, Keyser postulates that repetition involves what he calls the 4 Ps: priming, parallelism, prediction, and pleasure. Essentially, hearing or seeing a motif sets the stage for it to be repeated, providing audiences with satisfaction when they discover the repetition.

With remarkable range, Keyser vigorously analyzes how artists deploy repetition and have thought about it, from “Beowulf” to Leonard Bernstein, from Gustave Caillebotte to Italo Calvino. Some artworks do deploy identical repetition of elements, such as the Homeric epics; others use the “same/except” technique.

Keyser is deeply interested in visual art displaying the “same/except” concept, such as Andy Warhol’s famous “Campbell Soup Cans” painting. It features four rows of eight soup cans, which are all the same — except for the kind of soup on each can.

“Discovering this ‘same/except’ repetition in a work of art brings pleasure,” Keyser says.

But why is this? Multiple experimental studies, Keyser notes, suggest that repeated exposure of a subject to an image — such as an infant’s exposure to its mother’s face — helps create a bond of affection. This is the “mere exposure” phenomenon, posited by social psychologist Robert Zajonc, who as Keyser notes in the book, studied in detail “the repetition of an arbitrary stimulus and the mild affection that people eventually have for it.”

This tendency also helps explain why product manufacturers create ads with just the name of their products in ads: Seen often enough, the viewer bonds with the name. However the mechanism connecting repetition with pleasure works, and whatever its original function, Keyser argues that many artists have successfully tapped into it, grasping that audiences like repetition in poetry, painting, and music.

A shadow dog in Albuquerque

In the book, Keyser’s emphasis on repetition generates some distinctive interpretive positions. In one chapter, he digs into Lee Friendlander’s well-known photo, “Albuquerque, New Mexico,” a street scene with a jumble of signs, wires, and buildings, often interpreted in symbolic terms: It’s the American West frontier being submerged under postwar concrete and commerce.

Keyser, however, has a really different view of the Friendlander photo. There is a dog sitting near the middle of it; to the right is the shadow of a street sign. Keyser believes the shadow resembles the dog, and thinks it creates playful repetition in the photo.

“This particular photograph is really two photographs that rhyme,” Keyser says.“They’re the same, except one is the dog and one is the shadow. And that’s why that photograph is pleasurable, because you see that, even if you may not be fully aware of it. Sensing repetition in a work of art brings pleasure.”

“Play It Again, Sam” has received praise from arts practitioners, among others. George Darrah, principal drummer and arranger of the Boston Pops Orchestra, has called the book “extraordinary” in its “demonstration of the ways that poetry, music, painting, and photography engender pleasure in their audiences by exploiting the ability of the brain to detect repetition.” He adds that “Keyser has an uncanny ability to simplify complex ideas so that difficult material is easily understandable.”

In certain ways “Play It Again, Sam” contains the classic intellectual outlook of an MIT linguist. For decades, MIT-linked linguistics research has identified the universal structures of human language, revealing important similarities despite the seemingly wild variation of global languages. And here too, Keyser finds patterns that help organize an apparently boundless world of art. “Play It Again, Sam” is a hunt for structure.

Asked about this, Keyser acknowledges the influence of his longtime field on his current intellectual explorations, while noting that his insights about art are part of a greater investigation into our works and minds.

“I’m bringing a linguistic habit of mind to art,” Keyser says. “But I’m also pointing an analytical lens in the direction of natural predilections of the brain. The idea is to investigate how our aesthetic sense depends on the way the mind works. I’m trying to show how art can exploit the brain’s capacity to produce pleasure from non-art related functions.”

Using an inexpensive electrode coated with DNA, MIT researchers have designed disposable diagnostics that could be adapted to detect a variety of diseases, including cancer or infectious diseases such as influenza and HIV.

These electrochemical sensors make use of a DNA-chopping enzyme found in the CRISPR gene-editing system. When a target such as a cancerous gene is detected by the enzyme, it begins shearing DNA from the electrode nonspecifically, like a lawnmower cutting grass, altering the electrical signal produced.

One of the main limitations of this type of sensing technology is that the DNA that coats the electrode breaks down quickly, so the sensors can’t be stored for very long and their storage conditions must be tightly controlled, limiting where they can be used. In a new study, MIT researchers stabilized the DNA with a polymer coating, allowing the sensors to be stored for up to two months, even at high temperatures. After storage, the sensors were able to detect a prostate cancer gene that is often used to diagnose the disease.

The DNA-based sensors, which cost only about 50 cents to make, could offer a cheaper way to diagnose many diseases in low-resource regions, says Ariel Furst, the Paul M. Cook Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the study.

“Our focus is on diagnostics that many people have limited access to, and our goal is to create a point-of-use sensor. People wouldn’t even need to be in a clinic to use it. You could do it at home,” Furst says.

MIT graduate student Xingcheng Zhou is the lead author of the paper, published June 30 in the journal ACS Sensors. Other authors of the paper are MIT undergraduate Jessica Slaughter, Smah Riki ’24, and graduate student Chao Chi Kuo.

An inexpensive sensor

Electrochemical sensors work by measuring changes in the flow of an electric current when a target molecule interacts with an enzyme. This is the same technology that glucose meters use to detect concentrations of glucose in a blood sample.

The electrochemical sensors developed in Furst’s lab consist of DNA adhered to an inexpensive gold leaf electrode, which is laminated onto a sheet of plastic. The DNA is attached to the electrode using a sulfur-containing molecule known as a thiol.

In a 2021 study, Furst’s lab showed that they could use these sensors to detect genetic material from HIV and human papillomavirus (HPV). The sensors detect their targets using a guide RNA strand, which can be designed to bind to nearly any DNA or RNA sequence. The guide RNA is linked to an enzyme called Cas12, which cleaves DNA nonspecifically when it is turned on and is in the same family of proteins as the Cas9 enzyme used for CRISPR genome editing.

If the target is present, it binds to the guide RNA and activates Cas12, which then cuts the DNA adhered to the electrode. That alters the current produced by the electrode, which can be measured using a potentiostat (the same technology used in handheld glucose meters).

“If Cas12 is on, it’s like a lawnmower that cuts off all the DNA on your electrode, and that turns off your signal,” Furst says.

In previous versions of the device, the DNA had to be added to the electrode just before it was used, because DNA doesn’t remain stable for very long. In the new study, the researchers found that they could increase the stability of the DNA by coating it with a polymer called polyvinyl alcohol (PVA).

This polymer, which costs less than 1 cent per coating, acts like a tarp that protects the DNA below it. Once deposited onto the electrode, the polymer dries to form a protective thin film.

“Once it’s dried, it seems to make a very strong barrier against the main things that can harm DNA, such as reactive oxygen species that can either damage the DNA itself or break the thiol bond with the gold and strip your DNA off the electrode,” Furst says.

Successful detection

The researchers showed that this coating could protect DNA on the sensors for at least two months, and it could also withstand temperatures up to about 150 degrees Fahrenheit. After two months, they rinsed off the polymer and demonstrated that the sensors could still detect PCA3, a prostate cancer gene that can be found in urine.

This type of test could be used with a variety of samples, including urine, saliva, or nasal swabs. The researchers hope to use this approach to develop cheaper diagnostics for infectious diseases, such as HPV or HIV, that could be used in a doctor’s office or at home. This approach could also be used to develop tests for emerging infectious diseases, the researchers say.

A group of researchers from Furst’s lab was recently accepted into delta v, MIT’s student venture accelerator, where they hope to launch a startup to further develop this technology. Now that the researchers can create tests with a much longer shelf-life, they hope to begin shipping them to locations where they could be tested with patient samples.

“Our goal is to continue to test with patient samples against different diseases in real world environments,” Furst says. “Our limitation before was that we had to make the sensors on site, but now that we can protect them, we can ship them. We don’t have to use refrigeration. That allows us to access a lot more rugged or non-ideal environments for testing.”

The research was funded, in part, by the MIT Research Support Committee and a MathWorks Fellowship.

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