The Net-Zero Banking Alliance suffered a blow as its biggest members walked out after President Donald Trump's reelection.

MIT chemists have designed a new type of fluorescent molecule that they hope could be used for applications such as generating clearer images of tumors.

The new dye is based on a borenium ion — a positively charged form of boron that can emit light in the red to near-infrared range. Until recently, these ions have been too unstable to be used for imaging or other biomedical applications.

In a study appearing today in Nature Chemistry, the researchers showed that they could stabilize borenium ions by attaching them to a ligand. This approach allowed them to create borenium-containing films, powders, and crystals, all of which emit and absorb light in the red and near-infrared range.

That is important because near-IR light is easier to see when imaging structures deep within tissues, which could allow for clearer images of tumors and other structures in the body.

“One of the reasons why we focus on red to near-IR is because those types of dyes penetrate the body and tissue much better than light in the UV and visible range. Stability and brightness of those red dyes are the challenges that we tried to overcome in this study,” says Robert Gilliard, the Novartis Professor of Chemistry at MIT and the senior author of the study.

MIT research scientist Chun-Lin Deng is the lead author of the paper. Other authors include Bi Youan (Eric) Tra PhD ’25, former visiting graduate student Xibao Zhang, and graduate student Chonghe Zhang.

Stabilized borenium

Most fluorescent imaging relies on dyes that emit blue or green light. Those imaging agents work well in cells, but they are not as useful in tissue because low levels of blue and green fluorescence produced by the body interfere with the signal. Blue and green light also scatters in tissue, limiting how deeply it can penetrate.

Imaging agents that emit red fluorescence can produce clearer images, but most red dyes are inherently unstable and don’t produce a bright signal, because of their low quantum yields (the ratio of fluorescent photons emitted per photon of light is absorbed). For many red dyes, the quantum yield is only about 1 percent.

Among the molecules that can emit near-infrared light are borenium cations —positively charged ions containing an atom of boron attached to three other atoms.

When these molecules were first discovered in the mid-1980s, they were considered “laboratory curiosities,” Gilliard says. These molecules were so unstable that they had to be handled in a sealed container called a glovebox to protect them from exposure to air, which can lead them to break down.

Later, chemists realized they could make these ions more stable by attaching them to molecules called ligands. Working with these more stable ions, Gillliard’s lab discovered in 2019 that they had some unusual properties: Namely, they could respond to changes in temperature by emitting different colors of light.

However, at that point, “there was a substantial problem in that they were still too reactive to be handled in open air,” Gilliard says.

His lab began working on new ways to further stabilize them using ligands known as carbodicarbenes (CDCs), which they reported in a 2022 study. Due to this stabilization, the compounds can now be studied and handled without using a glovebox. They are also resistant to being broken down by light, unlike many previous borenium-based compounds.

In the new study, Gilliard began experimenting with the anions (negatively charged ions) that are a part of the CDC-borenium compounds. Interactions between these anions and the borenium cation generate a phenomenon known as exciton coupling, the researchers discovered. This coupling, they found, shifted the molecules’ emission and absorption properties toward the infrared end of the color spectrum. These molecules also generated a high quantum yield, allowing them to shine more brightly.

“Not only are we in the correct region, but the efficiency of the molecules is also very suitable,” Gilliard says. “We’re up to percentages in the thirties for the quantum yields in the red region, which is considered to be high for that region of the electromagnetic spectrum.”

Potential applications

The researchers also showed that they could convert their borenium-containing compounds into several different states, including solid crystals, films, powders, and colloidal suspensions.

For biomedical imaging, Gilliard envisions that these borenium-containing materials could be encapsulated in polymers, allowing them to be injected into the body to use as an imaging dye. As a first step, his lab plans to work with researchers in the chemistry department at MIT and at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to explore the potential of imaging these materials within cells.

Because of their temperature responsiveness, these materials could also be deployed as temperature sensors, for example, to monitor whether drugs or vaccines have been exposed to temperatures that are too high or low during shipping.

“For any type of application where temperature tracking is important, these types of ‘molecular thermometers’ can be very useful,” Gilliard says.

If incorporated into thin films, these molecules could also be useful as organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), particularly in new types of materials such as flexible screens, Gilliard says.

“The very high quantum yields achieved in the near-IR, combined with the excellent environmental stability, make this class of compounds extremely interesting for biological applications,” says Frieder Jaekle, a professor of chemistry at Rutgers University, who was not involved in the study. “Besides the obvious utility in bioimaging, the strong and tunable near-IR emission also makes these new fluorophores very appealing as smart materials for anticounterfeiting, sensors, switches, and advanced optoelectronic devices.”

In addition to exploring possible applications for these dyes, the researchers are now working on extending their color emission further into the near-infrared region, which they hope to achieve by incorporating additional boron atoms. Those extra boron atoms could make the molecules less stable, so the researchers are also working on new types of carbodicarbenes to help stabilize them.

The research was funded by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Article. Report.

For patients with inflammatory bowel disease, antibiotics can be a double-edged sword. The broad-spectrum drugs often prescribed for gut flare-ups can kill helpful microbes alongside harmful ones, sometimes worsening symptoms over time. When fighting gut inflammation, you don’t always want to bring a sledgehammer to a knife fight.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and McMaster University have identified a new compound that takes a more targeted approach. The molecule, called enterololin, suppresses a group of bacteria linked to Crohn’s disease flare-ups while leaving the rest of the microbiome largely intact. Using a generative AI model, the team mapped how the compound works, a process that usually takes years but was accelerated here to just months.

“This discovery speaks to a central challenge in antibiotic development,” says Jon Stokes, senior author of a new paper on the work, assistant professor of biochemistry and biomedical sciences at McMaster, and research affiliate at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health. “The problem isn’t finding molecules that kill bacteria in a dish — we’ve been able to do that for a long time. A major hurdle is figuring out what those molecules actually do inside bacteria. Without that detailed understanding, you can’t develop these early-stage antibiotics into safe and effective therapies for patients.”

Enterololin is a stride toward precision antibiotics: treatments designed to knock out only the bacteria causing trouble. In mouse models of Crohn’s-like inflammation, the drug zeroed in on Escherichia coli, a gut-dwelling bacterium that can worsen flares, while leaving most other microbial residents untouched. Mice given enterololin recovered faster and maintained a healthier microbiome than those treated with vancomycin, a common antibiotic.

Pinning down a drug’s mechanism of action, the molecular target it binds inside bacterial cells, normally requires years of painstaking experiments. Stokes’ lab discovered enterololin using a high-throughput screening approach, but determining its target would have been the bottleneck. Here, the team turned to DiffDock, a generative AI model developed at CSAIL by MIT PhD student Gabriele Corso and MIT Professor Regina Barzilay.

DiffDock was designed to predict how small molecules fit into the binding pockets of proteins, a notoriously difficult problem in structural biology. Traditional docking algorithms search through possible orientations using scoring rules, often producing noisy results. DiffDock instead frames docking as a probabilistic reasoning problem: a diffusion model iteratively refines guesses until it converges on the most likely binding mode.

“In just a couple of minutes, the model predicted that enterololin binds to a protein complex called LolCDE, which is essential for transporting lipoproteins in certain bacteria,” says Barzilay, who also co-leads the Jameel Clinic. “That was a very concrete lead — one that could guide experiments, rather than replace them.”

Stokes’ group then put that prediction to the test. Using DiffDock predictions as an experimental GPS, they first evolved enterololin-resistant mutants of E. coli in the lab, which revealed that changes in the mutant’s DNA mapped to lolCDE, precisely where DiffDock had predicted enterololin to bind. They also performed RNA sequencing to see which bacterial genes switched on or off when exposed to the drug, as well as used CRISPR to selectively knock down expression of the expected target. These laboratory experiments all revealed disruptions in pathways tied to lipoprotein transport, exactly what DiffDock had predicted.

“When you see the computational model and the wet-lab data pointing to the same mechanism, that’s when you start to believe you’ve figured something out,” says Stokes.

For Barzilay, the project highlights a shift in how AI is used in the life sciences. “A lot of AI use in drug discovery has been about searching chemical space, identifying new molecules that might be active,” she says. “What we’re showing here is that AI can also provide mechanistic explanations, which are critical for moving a molecule through the development pipeline.”

That distinction matters because mechanism-of-action studies are often a major rate-limiting step in drug development. Traditional approaches can take 18 months to two years, or more, and cost millions of dollars. In this case, the MIT–McMaster team cut the timeline to about six months, at a fraction of the cost.

Enterololin is still in the early stages of development, but translation is already underway. Stokes’ spinout company, Stoked Bio, has licensed the compound and is optimizing its properties for potential human use. Early work is also exploring derivatives of the molecule against other resistant pathogens, such as Klebsiella pneumoniae. If all goes well, clinical trials could begin within the next few years.

The researchers also see broader implications. Narrow-spectrum antibiotics have long been sought as a way to treat infections without collateral damage to the microbiome, but they have been difficult to discover and validate. AI tools like DiffDock could make that process more practical, rapidly enabling a new generation of targeted antimicrobials.

For patients with Crohn’s and other inflammatory bowel conditions, the prospect of a drug that reduces symptoms without destabilizing the microbiome could mean a meaningful improvement in quality of life. And in the bigger picture, precision antibiotics may help tackle the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance.

“What excites me is not just this compound, but the idea that we can start thinking about the mechanism of action elucidation as something we can do more quickly, with the right combination of AI, human intuition, and laboratory experiments,” says Stokes. “That has the potential to change how we approach drug discovery for many diseases, not just Crohn’s.”

“One of the greatest challenges to our health is the increase of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria that evade even our best antibiotics,” adds Yves Brun, professor at the University of Montreal and distinguished professor emeritus at Indiana University Bloomington, who wasn’t involved in the paper. “AI is becoming an important tool in our fight against these bacteria. This study uses a powerful and elegant combination of AI methods to determine the mechanism of action of a new antibiotic candidate, an important step in its potential development as a therapeutic.”

Corso, Barzilay, and Stokes wrote the paper with McMaster researchers Denise B. Catacutan, Vian Tran, Jeremie Alexander, Yeganeh Yousefi, Megan Tu, Stewart McLellan, and Dominique Tertigas, and professors ​​Jakob Magolan, Michael Surette, Eric Brown, and Brian Coombes. Their research was supported, in part, by the Weston Family Foundation; the David Braley Centre for Antibiotic Discovery; the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; M. and M. Heersink; Canadian Institutes for Health Research; Ontario Graduate Scholarship Award; the Jameel Clinic; and the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency Discovery of Medical Countermeasures Against New and Emerging Threats program.

The researchers posted sequencing data in public repositories and released the DiffDock-L code openly on GitHub.

At EFF, we believe that tech rights are worker’s rights. Since the pandemic, workers of all kinds have been subjected to increasingly invasive forms of bossware. These are the “algorithmic management” tools that surveil workers on and off the job, often running on devices that (nominally) belong to workers, hijacking our phones and laptops. On the job, digital technology can become both a system of ubiquitous surveillance and a means of total control.

Enter the EU’s Platform Work Directive (PWD). The PWD was finalized in 2024, and every EU member state will have to implement (“transpose”) it by 2026. The PWD contains far-reaching measures to protect workers from abuse, wage theft, and other unfair working conditions.

But the PWD isn’t self-enforcing! Over the decades that EFF has fought for user rights, we’ve proved that having a legal right on paper isn’t the same as having that right in the real world. And workers are rarely positioned to take on their bosses in court or at a regulatory body. To do that, they need advocates.

That’s where unions come in. Unions are well-positioned to defend their members – and all workers (EFF employees are proudly organized under the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers).

The European Trade Union Confederation has just published “Negotiating the Algorithm,” a visionary – but detailed and down-to-earth – manual for unions seeking to leverage the PWD to protect and advance workers’ interests in Europe.

The report notes the alarming growth of algorithmic management, with 79% of European firms employing some form of bossware. Report author Ben Wray enumerates many of the harms of algorithmic management, such as “algorithmic wage discrimination,” where each worker is offered a different payscale based on surveillance data that is used to infer how economically desperate they are.

Algorithmic management tools can also be used for wage theft, for example, by systematically undercounting the distances traveled by delivery drivers or riders. These tools can also subject workers to danger by penalizing workers who deviate from prescribed tasks (for example, when riders are downranked for taking an alternate route to avoid a traffic accident).

Gig workers live under the constant threat of being “deactivated” (kicked off the app) and feel pressure to do unpaid work for clients who can threaten their livelihoods with one-star reviews. Workers also face automated de-activation: a whole host of “anti-fraud” tripwires can see workers de-activated without appeal. These risks do not befall all workers equally: Black and brown workers face a disproportionate risk of de-activation when they fail facial recognition checks meant to prevent workers from sharing an account (facial recognition systems make more errors when dealing with darker skin tones).

Algorithmic management is typically accompanied by a raft of cost-cutting measures, and workers under algorithmic management often find that their employer’s human resources department has been replaced with chatbots, web-forms, and seemingly unattended email boxes. When algorithmic management goes wrong, workers struggle to reach a human being who can hear their appeal.

For these reasons and more, the ETUC believes that unions need to invest in technical capacity to protect workers’ interests in the age of algorithmic management.

The report sets out many technological activities that unions can get involved with. At the most basic level, unions can invest in developing analytical capabilities, so that when they request logs from algorithmic management systems as part of a labor dispute, they can independently analyze those files.

But that’s just table-stakes. Unions should also consider investing in “counter apps” that help workers. There are workers that act as an external check on employers’ automation, like the UberCheats app, which double-checked the mileage that Uber drivers were paid for. There are apps that enable gig workers to collectively refuse lowball offers, raising the prevailing wage for all the workers in a region, such as the Brazilian StopClub app. Indonesian gig riders have a wide range of “tuyul” apps that let them modify the functionality of their dispatch apps. We love this kind of “adversarial interoperability.” Any time the users of technology get to decide how it works, we celebrate. And in the US, this sort of tech-enabled collective action by workers is likely to be shielded from antitrust liability even if the workers involved are classified as independent contractors.

Developing in-house tech teams also gives unions the know-how to develop the tools for organizers and workers to coordinate their efforts to protect workers. The report acknowledges that this is a lot of tech work to ask individual unions to fund, and it moots the possibility of unions forming cooperative ventures to do this work for the unions in the co-op. At EFF, we regularly hear from skilled people who want to become public interest technologists, and we bet there’d be plenty of people who’d jump at the chance to do this work.

The new Platform Work Directive gives workers and their representatives the right to challenge automated decision-making, to peer inside the algorithms used to dispatch and pay workers, to speak to a responsible human about disputes, and to have their privacy and other fundamental rights protected on the job. It represents a big step forward for workers’ rights in the digital age.

But as the European Trade Union Confederation’s report reminds us, these rights are only as good as workers’ ability to claim them. After 35 years of standing up for people’s digital rights, we couldn’t agree more.

In research shared with Wired this week, security researchers detailed a series of vulnerabilities and design flaws with Life360’s Tile Bluetooth trackers that make it easy for stalkers and the company itself to track the location of Tile devices.

Tile trackers are small Bluetooth trackers, similar to Apple’s Airtags, but they work on their own network, not Apple’s. We’ve been raising concerns about these types of trackers since they were first introduced and provide guidance for finding them if you think someone is using them to track you without your knowledge.

EFF has worked on improving the Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers standard that Apple, Google, and Samsung use, and these companies have at least made incremental improvements. But Tile has done little to mitigate the concerns we’ve raised around stalkers using their devices to track people.

One of the core fundamentals of that standard is that Bluetooth trackers should rotate their MAC address, making them harder for a third-party to track, and that they should encrypt information sent. According to the researchers, Tile does neither.

This has a direct impact on the privacy of legitimate users and opens the device up to potentially even more dangerous stalking. Tile devices do have a rotating ID, but since the MAC address is static and unencrypted, anyone in the vicinity could pick up and track that Bluetooth device.

Other Bluetooth trackers don’t broadcast their MAC address, and instead use only a rotating ID, which makes it much harder for someone to record and track the movement of that tag. Apple, Google, and Samsung also all use end-to-end encryption when data about the location is sent to the companies’ servers, meaning the companies themselves cannot access that information.

In its privacy policy, Life360 states that, “You are the only one with the ability to see your Tile location and your device location.” But if the information from a tracker is sent to and stored by Tile in cleartext (i.e. unencrypted text) as the researchers believe, then the company itself can see the location of the tags and their owners, turning them from single item trackers into surveillance tools.

There are also issues with the “anti-theft mode” that Tile offers. The anti-theft setting hides the tracker from Tile’s “Scan and Secure” detection feature, so it can’t be easily found using the app. Ostensibly this is a feature meant to make it harder for a thief to just use the app to locate a tracker. In exchange for enabling the anti-theft feature, a user has to submit a photo ID and agree to pay a $1 million fine if they’re convicted of misusing the tracker.

But that’s only helpful if the stalker gets caught, which is a lot less likely when the person being tracked can’t use the anti-stalking protection feature in the app to find the tracker following them. As we’ve said before, it is impossible to make an anti-theft device that secretly notifies only the owner without also making a perfect tool for stalking.

Life360, the company that owns Tile, told Wired it “made a number of improvements” after the researchers reported them, but did not detail what those improvements are.

Many of these issues would be mitigated by doing what their competition is already doing: encrypting the broadcasts from its Bluetooth trackers and randomizing MAC addresses. Every company involved in the location tracker industry business has the responsibility to create a safeguard for people, not just for their lost keys.

A San Francisco supervisor has proposed that police and other city agencies should have no financial consequences for breaking a landmark surveillance oversight law. In 2019, organizations from across the city worked together to help pass that law, which required law enforcement to get the approval of democratically elected officials before they bought and used new spying technologies. Bit by bit, the San Francisco Police Department and the Board of Supervisors have weakened that law—but one important feature of the law remained: if city officials are caught breaking this law, residents can sue to enforce it, and if they prevail they are entitled to attorney fees. 

Now Supervisor Matt Dorsey believes that this important accountability feature is “incentivizing baseless but costly lawsuits that have already squandered hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars over bogus alleged violations of a law that has been an onerous mess since it was first enacted.” 

Between 2010 and 2023, San Francisco had to spend roughly $70 million to settle civil suits brought against the SFPD for alleged misconduct ranging from shooting city residents to wrongfully firing whistleblowers. This is not “squandered” money; it is compensating people for injury. We are all governed by laws and are all expected to act accordingly—police are not exempt from consequences for using their power wrongfully. In the 21st century, this accountability must extend to using powerful surveillance technology responsibly. 

The ability to sue a police department when they violate the law is called a “private right of action” and it is absolutely essential to enforcing the law. Government officials tasked with making other government officials turn square corners will rarely have sufficient resources to do the job alone, and often they will not want to blow the whistle on peers. But city residents empowered to bring a private right of action typically cannot do the job alone, either—they need a lawyer to represent them. So private rights of action provide for an attorney fee award to people who win these cases. This is a routine part of scores of public interest laws involving civil rights, labor safeguards, environmental protection, and more.

Without an enforcement mechanism to hold police accountable, many will just ignore the law. They’ve done it before. AB 481 is a California state law that requires police to get elected official approval before attempting to acquire military equipment, including drones. The SFPD knowingly ignored this law. If it had an enforcement mechanism, more police would follow the rules. 

President Trump recently included San Francisco in a list of cities he would like the military to occupy. Law enforcement agencies across the country, either willingly or by compulsion, have been collaborating with federal agencies operating at the behest of the White House. So it would be best for cities to keep their co-optable surveillance infrastructure small, transparent, and accountable. With authoritarianism looming, now is not the time to make police less hard to control—especially considering SFPD has already disclosed surveillance data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in violation of California state law.  

We’re calling on the Board of Supervisors to reject Supervisor Dorsey’s proposal. If police want to avoid being sued and forced to pay the prevailing party’s attorney fees, they should avoid breaking the laws that govern police surveillance in the city.

Related Cases: Williams v. San Francisco

The partially built wind farm in the Atlantic is delivering power from 17 turbines to Massachusetts.

The Trump administration canceled infrastructure law funding for 10 hubs that aimed to suck carbon dioxide from the skies.

The agency is working to extend by six years a deadline to phase out hydrofluorocarbons.

U.S. consumers raced to buy electric vehicles before a $7,500 tax credit expired on Sept. 30.

Electric vehicles are key to Colorado’s climate targets. Gov. Jared Polis (D) told potential EV buyers: "Get out there right now."

Kemi Badenoch promises to ditch the U.K.’s flagship climate law if her party gets back into government.

The Tropical Forest Forever Facility, which would pay countries to protect forest, is lagging in efforts to reach its $125 billion goal.

The pension fund says it plans at least $35 billion in impact investments in total, including for climate solutions and addressing biodiversity.

Even in Europe, environmental, social and governance investments have encountered headwinds.

This is the tenth and final installment in a blog series documenting EFF's findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here. 

When we launched Stop Censoring Abortion, our goals were to understand how social media platforms were silencing abortion-related content, gather data and lift up stories of censorship, and hold social media companies accountable for the harm they have caused to the reproductive rights movement.

Thanks to nearly 100 submissions from educators, advocates, clinics, researchers, and individuals around the world, we confirmed what many already suspected: this speech is being removed, restricted, and silenced by platforms at an alarming rate. Together, our findings paint a clear picture of censorship in action: platforms’ moderation systems are not only broken, but are actively harming those seeking and sharing vital reproductive health information.

Here are the key lessons from this campaign: what we uncovered, how platforms can do better, and why pushing back against this censorship matters more now than ever.

Lessons Learned

Across our submissions, we saw systemic over-enforcement, vague and convoluted policies, arbitrary takedowns, sudden account bans, and ignored appeals. And in almost every case we reviewed, the posts and accounts in question did not violate any of the platform’s stated rules.

The most common reason Meta gave for removing abortion-related content was that it violated policies on Restricted Goods and Services, which prohibit any “attempts to buy, sell, trade, donate, gift or ask for pharmaceutical drugs.” But most of the content submitted simply provided factual, educational information that clearly did not violate those rules. As we saw in the M+A Hotline’s case, this kind of misclassification deprives patients, advocates, and researchers of reliable information, and chills those trying to provide accurate and life-saving reproductive health resources.

In one submission, we even saw posts sharing educational abortion resources get flagged under the “Dangerous Organizations and Individuals” policy, a rule intended to prevent terrorism and criminal activity. We’ve seen this policy cause problems in the past, but in the reproductive health space, treating legal and accurate information as violent or unlawful only adds needless stigma and confusion.

Meta’s convoluted advertising policies add another layer of harm. There are specific, additional rules users must navigate to post paid content about abortion. While many of these rules still contain exceptions for purely educational content, Meta is vague about how and when those exceptions apply. And ads that seem like they should have been allowed were frequently flagged under rules about “prescription drugs” or “social issues.” This patchwork of unclear policies forces users to second-guess what content they can post or promote for fear of losing access to their networks.

In another troubling trend, many of our submitters reported experiencing shadowbanning and de-ranking, where posts weren’t removed but were instead quietly suppressed by the algorithm. This kind of suppression leaves advocates without any notice, explanation, or recourse—and severely limits their ability to reach people who need the information most.  

Many users also faced sudden account bans without warning or clear justification. Though Meta’s policies dictate that an account should only be disabled or removed after “repeated” violations, organizations like Women Help Women received no warning before seeing their critical connections cut off overnight.

Finally, we learned that Meta’s enforcement outcomes were deeply inconsistent. Users often had their appeals denied and accounts suspended until someone with insider access to Meta could intervene. For example, the Red River’s Women’s Clinic, RISE at Emory, and Aid Access each had their accounts restored only after press attention or personal contacts stepped in. This reliance on backchannels underscores the inequity in Meta’s moderation processes: without connections, users are left unfairly silenced.

It’s Not Just Meta

Most of our submissions detailed suppression that took place on one of Meta’s platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Threads), so we decided to focus our analysis on Meta’s moderation policies and practices. But we should note that this problem is by no means confined to Meta.

On LinkedIn, for example, Stephanie Tillman told us about how she had her entire account permanently taken down, with nothing more than a vague notice that she had violated LinkedIn’s User Agreement. When Stephanie reached out to ask what violation she committed, LinkedIn responded that “due to our Privacy Policy we are unable to release our findings,” leaving her with no clarity or recourse. Stephanie suspects that the ban was related to her work with Repro TLC, an advocacy and clinical health care organization, and/or her posts relating to her personal business, Feminist Midwife LLC. But LinkedIn’s opaque enforcement meant she had no way to confirm these suspicions, and no path to restoring her account.

Screenshot submitted by Stephanie Tillman to EFF (with personal information redacted by EFF)

And over on Tiktok, Brenna Miller, a creator who works in health care and frequently posts about abortion, posted a video of her “unboxing” an abortion pill care package from Carafem. Though Brenna’s video was factual and straightforward, TikTok removed it, saying that she had violated TikTok’s Community Guidelines.

Screenshot submitted by Brenna Miller to EFF

Brenna appealed the removal successfully at first, but a few weeks later the video was permanently deleted—this time, without any explanation or chance to appeal again.

Brenna’s far from the only one experiencing censorship on TikTok. Even Jessica Valenti, award-winning writer, activist, and author of the Abortion Every Day newsletter, recently had a video taken down from TikTok for violating its community guidelines, with no further explanation. The video she posted was about the Trump administration calling IUDs and the Pill ‘abortifacients.’ Jessica wrote:

Which rule did I break? Well, they didn’t say: but I wasn’t trying to sell anything, the video didn’t feature nudity, and I didn’t publish any violence. By process of elimination, that means the video was likely taken down as "misinformation." Which is…ironic.

These are not isolated incidents. In the Center for Intimacy Justice’s survey of reproductive rights advocates, health organizations, sex educators, and businesses, 63% reported having content removed on Meta platforms, 55% reported the same on TikTok, and 66% reported having ads rejected from Google platforms (including YouTube). Clearly, censorship of abortion-related content is a systemic problem across platforms.

How Platforms Can Do Better on Abortion-Related Speech

Based on our findings, we're calling on platforms to take these concrete steps to improve moderation of abortion-related speech:

• Publish clear policies. Users should not have to guess whether their speech is allowed or not.
• Enforce rules consistently. If a post does not violate a written standard, it should not be removed.
• Provide real transparency. Enforcement decisions must come with clear, detailed explanations and meaningful opportunities to appeal.
• Guarantee functional appeals. Users must be able to challenge wrongful takedowns without relying on insider contacts.
• Expand human review. Reproductive rights is a nuanced issue and can be too complex to be left entirely to error-prone automated moderation systems.

Practical Tips for Users

Don’t get it twisted: Users should not have to worry about their posts being deleted or their accounts getting banned when they share factual information that doesn’t violate platform policies. The onus is on platforms to get it together and uphold their commitments to users. But while platforms continue to fail, we’ve provided some practical tips to reduce the risk of takedowns, including:

• Consider limiting commonly flagged words and images. Posts with pill images or certain keyword combinations (like “abortion,” “pill,” and “mail”) were often flagged.
• Be as clear as possible. Vague phrases like “we can help you get what you need” might look like drug sales to an algorithm.
• Be careful with links. Direct links to pill providers were often flagged. Spell out the links instead.
• Expect stricter rules for ads. Boosted posts face harsher scrutiny than regular posts.
• Appeal wrongful enforcement decisions. Requesting an appeal might get you a human moderator or, even better, review from Meta’s independent Oversight Board.
• Document everything and back up your content. Screenshot all communications and enforcement decisions so you can share them with the press or advocacy groups, and export your data regularly in case your account vanishes overnight.

Keep Fighting

Abortion information saves lives, and social media is the primary—and sometimes only—way for advocates and providers to get accurate information out to the masses. But now we have evidence that this censorship is widespread, unjustified, and harming communities who need access to this information most.

Platforms must be held accountable for these harms, and advocates must continue to speak out. The more we push back—through campaigns, reporting, policy advocacy, and user action—the harder it will be for platforms to look away.

So keep speaking out, and keep demanding accountability. Platforms need to know we're paying attention—and we won't stop fighting until everyone can share information about abortion freely, safely, and without fear of being silenced.

This is the tenth and final post in our blog series documenting the findings from our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. Read more at https://www.eff.org/pages/stop-censoring-abortion.  

Affected by unjust censorship? Share your story using the hashtag #StopCensoringAbortion. Amplify censored posts and accounts, share screenshots of removals and platform messages—together, we can demonstrate how these policies harm real people. 

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright ’85 visited MIT on Monday, meeting Institute leaders, discussing energy innovation at a campus forum, viewing poster presentations from researchers supported through the MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance, and watching energy research demos in the lab where he used to work as a student. 

“I’ve always been in energy because I think it’s just far and away the world’s most important industry,” Wright said at the forum, which included a panel discussion with business leaders and a fireside chat with MIT Professor Ernest Moniz, who was the U.S. secretary of energy from 2013 to 2017. Wright added: “Not only is it by far the world’s most important industry, because it enables all the others, but it’s also a booming time right now. … It is an awesomely exciting time to be in energy.”

Wright was greeted on campus by MIT President Sally Kornbluth, who also gave introductory remarks at the forum, held in MIT’s Samberg Center. While the Institute has added many research facilities and buildings since Wright was a student, Kornbluth observed, the core MIT ethos remains the same.

“MIT is still MIT,” Kornbluth said. “It’s a community that rewards merit, boldness, and scientific rigor. And it’s a magnet for people with a drive to solve hard problems that matter in the real world, an enthusiasm for working with industry, and an ethic of national service.”

When it comes to energy research, Kornbluth added, “MIT is developing transformational approaches to make American energy more secure, reliable, affordable, and clean — which in turn will strengthen both U.S. competitiveness and national security.”

At the event, Wright, the 17th U.S. secretary of energy, engaged in a fireside chat with Moniz, the 13th U.S. secretary of energy, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems Post-Tenure, a special advisor to the MIT president, and the founding director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). Wright began his remarks by reflecting on Kornbluth’s description of the Institute.

“Merit, boldness, and scientific rigor,” Wright said. “That is MIT … to me. That hit me hard when I got here, and frankly, it’s a good part of the reason my life has gone the way it’s gone.”

On energy topics, Wright emphasized the need for continued innovation in energy across a range of technologies, including fusion, geothermal, and more, while advocating for the benefits of vigorous market-based progress. Before becoming secretary of energy, Wright most recently served as founder and CEO of Liberty Energy. He also was the founder of Pinnacle Technologies, among other enterprises. Wright was confirmed as secretary by the U.S. Senate in February.

Asked to name promising areas of technological development, Wright focused on three particular areas of interest. Citing artificial intelligence, he noted that the interest in it was “overwhelming,” with many possible applications. Regarding fusion energy, Wright said, “We are going to see meaningful breakthroughs.” And quantum computing, he added, was going to be a “game-changer” as well.

Wright also emphasized the value of federal support for fundamental research, including projects in the national laboratories the Department of Energy oversees.

“The 17 national labs we have in this country are absolute jewels. They are gems of this country,” Wright said. He later noted, “There are things, like this foundational research, that are just an essential part of our country and an essential part of our future.”

Moniz asked Wright a range of questions in the fireside chat, while adding his own perspective at times about the many issues connected to energy abundance globally.

“Climate, energy, security, equity, affordability, have to be recognized as one conversation, and not separate conversations,” Moniz said. “That’s what’s at stake in my view.”

Wright’s appearance was part of the Energy Freedom Tour developed by the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), in coordination with the Hamm Institute for American Energy at Oklahoma State University. Later stops are planned for Stanford University and Texas A&M University.

Ann Bluntzer Pullin, executive director of the Hamm Institute, gave remarks at the forum as well, noting the importance of making students aware of the energy industry and helping to “get them excited about the impact this career can make.” She also praised MIT’s advances in the field, adding, “This is where so many ideas were born and executed that have allowed America to really thrive in this energy abundance in our country that we have [had] for so long.”

The forum also featured remarks from Roger Martella, chief corporate officer, chief sustainability officer, and head of government affairs at GE Vernova. In March, MIT and GE Vernova announced a new five-year joint program, the MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance, featuring research projects, education programs, and career opportunities for MIT students.

“That’s what we’re about, electrification as the lifeblood of prosperity,” Martella said, describing GE Vernova’s work. “When we’re here at MIT we feel like we’re living history every moment when we’re walking down the halls, because no institution has [contributed] to innovation and technology more, doing it every single day to advance prosperity for all people around the world.”

A panel discussion at the forum featured Wright speaking along with three MIT alumni who are active in the energy business: Carlos Araque ’01, SM ’02, CEO of Quaise Energy, a leading-edge firm in geothermal energy solutions; Bob Mumgaard SM ’15, PhD ’15, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a leading fusion energy firm and an MIT spinout; and Milo Werner SM ’07, MBA ’07, a general partner at DCVC and expert in energy and climate investments. The panel was moderated by Chris Barnard, president of the ACC.

Mumgaard noted that Commonwealth Fusion Systems launched in 2018 with “an explicit mission, working with MIT still today, of putting fusion onto an industrial trajectory,” although there is “plenty left to do, still, at that intersection of science, technology, innovation, and business.”

Araque said he believes geothermal is “metric-by-metric” more powerful and profitable than many other forms of energy. “This is not a stop-gap,” he added. Quaise is currently developing its first power-plant-scale facility in the U.S.

Werner noted that the process of useful innovation only begins in the lab; making an advance commercially viable is the critical next step. The biggest impact “is not in the breakthrough,” she said. “It’s not in the discovery that you make in the lab. It’s actually once you’ve built a billion of them. That’s when you actually change the world.”

After the forum, Wright took a tour of multiple research centers on the MIT campus, including the MIT.nano facility, guided by Vladimir Bulović, faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology.

At MIT.nano, Bulović showed Wright the Titan Krios G3i, a nearly room-size electron microscope that enables researchers to take a high-resolution look at the structure of tiny particles, with a variety of research applications. The tour also viewed one of MIT.nano’s cleanrooms, a shared fabrication facility used by both MIT researchers and users outside of MIT, including many in industry.

On a different note, in an MIT.nano hallway, Bulović showed Wright the One.MIT mosaics, which contain the names of all MIT students and employees past and present — well over 300,000 in all. First etched on a 6-inch wafer, the mosaics are a visual demonstration of the power of nanotechnology — and a searchable display, so Bulović located Wright’s name, which is printed near the chin of one of the figures on the MIT seal.

The tour ended in the basement of Building 10, in what is now the refurbished Grainger Energy Machine Facility, where Wright used to conduct research. After earning his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, Wright entered into graduate studies at MIT before leaving, as he recounted at the forum, to pursue business opportunities.

At the lab, Wright met with David Perreault, the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering; and Steven Leeb, the Emanuel Landsman Professor, a specialist in power systems. A half-dozen MIT graduate students gave Wright demos of their research projects, all involving energy-generation innovations. Wright readily engaged with all the graduate students about the technologies and the parameters of the devices, and asked the students about their own careers.

Wright was accompanied on the lab tour by MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, himself an expert in developing energy-efficient systems. Chandrakasan delivered closing remarks at the forum in the Samberg Center, noting MIT’s “strong partnership with the Department of Energy” and its “long and proud history of engaging industry.”

As such, Chandrakasan said, MIT has a “role as a resource in service of the nation, so please don’t hesitate to call on us.”

Last year, MIT physicists reported in the journal Nature that electrons can become fractions of themselves in graphene, an atomically thin form of carbon. This exotic electronic state, called the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect (FQAHE), could enable more robust forms of quantum computing.

Now two young MIT-affiliated physicists involved in the discovery of FQAHE have been named the 2025 recipients of the McMillan Award from the University of Illinois for their work. Jiaqi Cai and Zhengguang Lu won the award “for the discovery of fractional anomalous quantum hall physics in 2D moiré materials.”

Cai is currently a Pappalardo Fellow at MIT working with Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics, and collaborating with several other labs at MIT including Long Ju, the Lawrence and Sarah W. Biedenharn Career Development Associate Professor in the MIT Department of Physics. He discovered FQAHE while working in the laboratory of Professor Xiaodong Xu at the University of Washington.

Lu discovered FQAHE while working as a postdoc Ju's lab and has since become an assistant professor at Florida State University.

The two independent discoveries were made in the same year.
 
“The McMillan award is the highest honor that a young condensed matter physicist can receive,” says Ju. “My colleagues and I in the Condensed Matter Experiment and the Condensed Matter Theory Group are very proud of Zhengguang and Jiaqi.” 

Ju and Jarillo-Herrero are both also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory. 

In addition to a monetary prize and a plaque, Lu and Cai will give a colloquium on their work at the University of Illinois this fall.

The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship announced that Ana Bakshi has been named its new executive director. Bakshi stepped into the role at the start of the fall semester and will collaborate closely with the managing director, Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice Bill Aulet, to elevate the center to higher levels.

“Ana is uniquely qualified for this role. She brings a deep and highly decorated background in entrepreneurship education at the highest levels, along with exceptional leadership and execution skills,” says Aulet. “Since I first met her 12 years ago, I have been extraordinarily impressed with her commitment to create the highest-quality centers and institutes for entrepreneurs, first at King’s College London and then at Oxford University. This ideal skill set is compounded by her experience in leading high-growth companies, most recently as the chief operation officer in an award-winning AI startup. I’m honored and thrilled to welcome her to MIT — her knowledge and energy will greatly elevate our community, and the field as a whole.”

A rapidly changing environment creates imperative for raising the bar for entrepreneurship education

The need to raise the bar for innovation-driven entrepreneurship education is both timely and urgent. The rate of change is getting faster and faster every day, especially with artificial intelligence, and is generating new problems that need to be solved, as well as exacerbating existing problems in climate, health care, manufacturing, future of work, education, and economic stratification, to name but a few. The world needs more entrepreneurs and better entrepreneurs.

Bakshi joins the Trust Center at an exciting time in its history. MIT is at the forefront of helping to develop people and systems that can turn challenges into opportunities using an entrepreneurial mindset, skill set, and way of operating. Bakshi’s deep experience and success will be key to unlocking this opportunity. “I am truly honored to join the Trust Center at such a pivotal moment,” Bakshi says. “In an era defined by both extraordinary challenges and extraordinary possibilities, the future will be built by those bold enough to try, and MIT will be at the forefront of this.”

Translating academic research into real-world impact

Bakshi has a decade of experience building two world-class entrepreneurship centers from the ground up. She served as the founding director at King’s College and then at Oxford. In this role, she was responsible for all aspects of these centers, including fundraising.

While at Oxford, she authored a data-driven approach to determining efficacy of outcomes for their programs, as evidenced by a 61-page study, “Universities: Drivers of Prosperity and Economic Recovery.”

As the director of the Oxford Foundry (Oxford’s cross-university entrepreneurship center), Bakshi focused on investing in ambitious founders and talent. The center was backed by global entrepreneurial leaders such as the founders of LinkedIn and Twitter, with corporate partnerships including Santander and EY, and investment funds including Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE). As of 2021, the startups supported by the Foundry and King’s College have raised over $500 million and have created nearly 3,000 jobs, spanning diverse industries including health tech, climate tech, cybersecurity, fintech, and deep tech spinouts focusing on world-class science.

In addition, she built the highly successful and economically sustainable Entrepreneurship School, Oxford’s first digital online learning platform.

Bakshi comes to MIT after having worked in the private sector as the chief operating officer (COO) in a rapidly growing artificial intelligence startup for almost two years, Quench.ai, with offices in London and New York City. She was the first C-suite employee at Quench.ai, serving as COO and now senior advisor, helping companies unlock value from their knowledge through AI.

Right place, right time, right person moving at the speed of MIT AI

Since its inception, then turbocharged in the 1940s with the creation and operation of the RadLab, and continuing to this day, entrepreneurship is at the core of MIT’s identity and mission.   

"MIT has been a leader in entrepreneurship for decades. It’s now the third leg of the school, alongside teaching and research,” says Mark Gorenberg ’76, chair of the MIT Corporation. “I’m excited to have such a transformative leader as Ana join the Trust Center team, and I look forward to the impact she will have on the students and the wider academic community at MIT as we enter an exciting new phase in company building, driven by the accelerated use of AI and emerging technologies."

“In a time where we are rethinking management education, entrepreneurship as an interdisciplinary field to create impact is even more important to our future. To have such an experienced and accomplished leader in academia and the startup world, especially in AI, reinforces our commitment to be a global leader in this field,” says Richard M. Locke, John C Head III Dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

“MIT is a unique hub of research, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and that special mix creates massive positive impact that ripples around the world,” says Frederic Kerrest, MIT Sloan MBA ’09, co-founder of Okta, and member of the MIT Corporation. “In a rapidly changing, AI-driven world, Ana has the skills and experience to further accelerate MIT’s global leadership in entrepreneurship education to ensure that our students launch and scale the next generation of groundbreaking, innovation-driven startups.”

Prior to her time at Oxford and King’s College, Bakshi served as an elected councilor representing 6,000-plus constituents, held roles in international nongovernmental organizations, and led product execution strategy at MAHI, an award-winning family-led craft sauce startup, available in thousands of major retailers across the U.K. Bakshi sits on the advisory council for conservation charity Save the Elephants, leveraging AI-driven and scientific approaches to reduce human-wildlife conflict and protect elephant populations. Her work and impact have been featured across FT, Forbes, BBC, The Times, and The Hill. Bakshi was twice honored as a Top 50 Woman in Tech (U.K.), most recently in 2025.

“As AI changes how we learn, how we build, and how we scale, my focus will be on helping MIT expand its support for phenomenal talent — students and faculty — with the skills, ecosystem, and backing to turn knowledge into impact,” Bakshi says.

35 years of impact to date

The Trust Center was founded in 1990 by the late Professor Edward Roberts and serves all MIT students across all schools and all disciplines. It supports 60-plus courses and extensive extracurricular programming, including the delta v academic accelerator. Much of the work of the center is generated through the Disciplined Entrepreneurship methodology, which offers a proven approach to create new ventures. Over a thousand schools and other organizations across the world use Disciplined Entrepreneurship books and resources to teach entrepreneurship. 

Now, with AI-powered tools like Orbit and JetPack, the Trust Center is changing the way that entrepreneurship is taught and practiced. Its mission is to produce the next generation of innovation-driven entrepreneurs while advancing the field more broadly to make it both rigorous and practical. This approach of leveraging proven evidence-based methodology, emerging technology, the ingenuity of MIT students, and responding to industry shifts is similar to how MIT established the field of chemical engineering in the 1890s. The desired result in both cases was to create a comprehensive, integrated, scalable, rigorous, and practical curriculum to create a new workforce to address the nation’s and world’s greatest challenges.