The General Assembly is considering a bill that would cut energy efficiency spending and use cap-and-trade cash to lower household electricity costs.

The South Texas city approved spending on new wells with a water emergency looming after years of industrial growth and drought.

The funding announcement shows President Donald Trump delivering for Central Valley farmers — but not as much as they wanted.

Gov. Kathy Hochul says she will release the specifics of what she wants to alter in the sweeping emissions reduction law.

Their message to the governor: We’re ready to settle.

The state says Attyx gained hundreds of millions of dollars through an “illegal scheme” to convince homeowners to install rooftop solar.

The EU executive is expected to present a revision of the Emissions Trading System around July.

Warming winters make conditions less predictable for those who fish, hunt and recreate on frozen lakes, rivers and coastal waters.

Because of a forecasted heat wave in the Phoenix area, at least 10 MLB Cactus League games are moving to 6 p.m. local time.

One of the symptoms of schizophrenia is difficulty incorporating new information about the world. This can lead people with schizophrenia to struggle with making decisions and, eventually, to lose touch with reality.

MIT neuroscientists have now identified a gene mutation that appears to give rise to this type of difficulty. In a study of mice, the researchers found that the mutated gene impairs the function of a brain circuit that is responsible for updating beliefs based on new input.

This mutation, in a gene called grin2a, was originally identified in a large-scale screen of patients with schizophrenia. The new study suggests that drugs targeting this brain circuit could help with some of the cognitive impairments seen in people with schizophrenia.

“If this circuit doesn’t work well, you cannot quickly integrate information,” says Guoping Feng, the James W. and Patricia T. Poitras Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, a member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and the associate director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. “We are quite confident this circuit is one of the mechanisms that contributes to the cognitive impairment that is a major part of the pathology of schizophrenia.”

Feng and Michael Halassa, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and director of translational research at Tufts University School of Medicine, are the senior authors of the new study, which appears today in Nature Neuroscience. Tingting Zhou, a research scientist at the McGovern Institute, and Yi-Yun Ho, a former MIT postdoc, are the lead authors of the paper.

Adapting to new information

Schizophrenia is known to have a strong genetic component. For the general population, the risk of developing the disease is about 1 percent, but that goes up to 10 percent for those who have a parent or sibling with the disease, and 50 percent for people who have an identical twin with the disease.

Researchers at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute have identified more than 100 gene variants linked to schizophrenia, using genome-wide association studies. However, many of those variants are located in non-coding regions of the genome, making it difficult to figure out how they might influence development of the disease.

More recently, researchers at the Stanley Center used a different strategy, known as whole-exome sequencing, to reveal gene mutations linked to schizophrenia. This technique sequences only the protein-coding regions of the genome, so it can reveal mutations that are located in known genes.

Using this approach on about 25,000 sequences from people with schizophrenia and 100,000 sequences from control subjects, the researchers identified 10 genes in which mutations significantly increase the risk of developing schizophrenia.

In the new Nature Neuroscience study, Feng and his students created a mouse model with a mutation in one of those genes, grin2a. This gene encodes a protein that forms part of the NMDA receptor — a receptor that is activated by the neurotransmitter glutamate and is often found on the surface of neurons.

Zhou then investigated whether these mice displayed any of the characteristic behaviors seen in people with schizophrenia. These individuals show many complex symptoms, including psychoses such as hallucinations and delusions (loss of contact with reality). Those are difficult to study in mice, but it is possible to study related symptoms such as difficulty in interpreting new sensory input.

Over the past two decades, schizophrenia researchers have hypothesized that psychosis may stem from an impaired ability to update beliefs based on new information.

“Our brain can form a prior belief of reality, and when sensory input comes into the brain, a neurotypical brain can use this new input to update the prior belief. This allows us to generate a new belief that’s close to what the reality is,” Zhou says. “What happens in schizophrenia patients is that they weigh too heavily on the prior belief. They don’t use as much current input to update what they believed before, so the new belief is detached from reality.”

To study this, Zhou designed an experiment that required mice to choose between two levers to press to earn a food reward. One lever was low-reward — mice had to push it six times to get one drop of milk. A high-reward lever dispensed three drops per push.

At the beginning of the study, all of the mice learned to prefer the high-reward lever. However, as the experiment went on, the number of presses required to dispense the higher reward gradually went up, while there were no changes to the low-reward lever.

As the effort required went up, healthy mice start to switch back and forth between the two levers. Once they had to press the high-reward lever around 18 times for three drops of milk, making the effort per drop about the same for each lever, they eventually switched permanently to the low-reward lever. However, mice with a mutation in grin2a showed a different behavior pattern. They spent more time switching back and forth between the two levers, and they made the switch to the low-reward side much later.

“We find that neurotypical animals make adaptive decisions in this changing environment,” Zhou says. “They can switch from the high-reward side to the low-reward side around the equal value point, while for the animals with the mutation, the switch happens much later. Their adaptive decision-making is much slower compared to the wild-type animals.”

An impaired circuit

Using functional ultrasound imaging and electrical recordings, the researchers found that the brain region affected most by the grin2a mutation was the mediodorsal thalamus. This part of the brain connects with the prefrontal cortex to form a thalamocortical circuit that is responsible for regulating cognitive functions such as executive control and decision-making.

The researchers found that neuronal activity in the mediodorsal thalamus appears to keep track of the changes in value of the two reward options. Additionally, the mice showed different patterns of neural activity depending on which state they were — either an exploratory state or committed to one side.

The researchers also showed that they could use optogenetics to reverse the behavioral symptoms of the mice with mutated grin2a. They engineered the neurons of the mediodorsal thalamus so that they could be activated by light, and when these neurons were activated, the mice began behaving similarly to mice without the grin2a mutation.

While only a very small percentage of schizophrenia patients have mutations in the grin2a gene, it’s possible that this circuit dysfunction is a converging mechanism of cognitive impairment for a subset of schizophrenia patients with different causes.

Targeting this circuit could offer a way to overcome some of the cognitive impairments seen in people with schizophrenia, the researchers say. To do that, they are now working on identifying targets within the circuit that could be potentially druggable.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health, the Poitras Center for Psychiatric Disorders Research at MIT, the Yang Tan Collective at MIT, the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics at MIT, the Stelling Family Research Fund at MIT, the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, and the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.

Thermal batteries can efficiently store energy as heat. But building them requires a carefully designed system with materials that can withstand cycles of extremely high temperatures, without succumbing to problems like corrosion, thermal expansion, and structural fatigue.

Many thermal battery systems move high-temperature gas or molten salt around through metal pipes. Fourth Power, founded by MIT Professor Asegun Henry, is turning these materials inside out, using molten metal to transport the heat, which is stored in carbon bricks.

“The idea was, instead of making the system from metal, let’s move liquid metals,” says Henry SM ’06, PhD ’09.

Henry’s approach earned him a Guinness World Record for the hottest liquid pump back in 2017 — important because when you double the absolute temperature of a material, to the point where it glows white-hot, the amount of light it emits doesn’t just double, it increases 16 times (or to the fourth power).

The company is harvesting all that light with thermophotovoltaic cells, which work like solar cells to convert light into electricity. Henry and his collaborators broke another record when they demonstrated a thermophotovoltaic cell that could convert light to electricity with an efficiency above 40 percent.

Fourth Power is working to use those record-breaking innovations to provide energy for power grids, power producers, and technology companies building power-hungry infrastructure like data centers. Henry says the batteries can provide anywhere from 10 to over 100 hours of electricity at a storage cost that is significantly cheaper than lithium-ion batteries at grid scale. The company is currently cycling each section of its system through relevant operating temperatures — which are nearly half as hot as the sun — and plans to have a fully integrated demonstration unit operating later this year.

“Explaining why our system is such a huge improvement over everything else centers around power density,” explains Henry, who serves as Fourth Power’s chief technologist. “We realized if you push the temperature higher, you will transfer heat at a higher rate and shrink the system. Then everything gets cheaper. That’s why we pursue such high temperatures at Fourth Power. We operate our thermal battery between 1,900 and 2,400 degrees Celsius, which allows us to save a tremendous amount on the balance of system costs.”

A career in heat

Henry earned his master’s and PhD degrees from MIT before working in faculty positions at Georgia Tech and MIT. As a professor at both schools, his research has focused on thermal transport, storage, renewable energy, and other technologies that could lead to improvements in sustainability and decarbonization. Today, he is the George N. Hatsopoulos Professor in Thermodynamics in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Heat transfer systems are usually made out of metals like iron and nickel. Generally, the higher temperature you want to reach, the more expensive the metal. Henry noticed ceramics can get much hotter than metals, but they’re not used nearly as often. He started asking why.

“The answer is often pretty straightforward: You can’t weld ceramics,” Henry says. “Ceramics aren’t ductile. They generally fail in a catastrophically brittle way, and that’s not how we like large systems to behave. But I couldn’t find many problems beyond that.”

After receiving funding from the Department of Energy and the MIT Energy Initiative, Henry spent years developing a pump made from ceramics and graphite (which is similar to a ceramic). In 2017, his pump set the record for the highest recorded operating temperature for a liquid pump, at 1,200 Celsius. The pump used white-hot liquid tin as a fuel. He chose tin because it doesn’t react with carbon, eliminating corrosion. It also has a relatively low melting point and high boiling point, which keeps it liquid in a large temperature range.

The challenge then became designing the system.

“Typically, a mechanical engineer would come up with a design and say, ‘Give me the best materials to do this,’” Henry says. “We flipped the problem, so we were saying, ‘We know what materials will work, now we need to figure out how to make a system out of it.’”

In 2023, Henry met Arvin Ganesan, who had previously led global energy work at Apple. At first, Ganesan wasn’t interested in joining a startup — he had two young kids and wanted to prioritize his family — but he was intrigued by the potential of the technology. At their first meeting, the two connected over shared values and fatherhood, as Henry surprised Ganesan by bringing his own young children.

“I had a sense this technology had the promise to tackle the twin crises of affordability and climate change at the same time,” says Ganesan, who is now Fourth Power’s CEO. “As energy demand becomes more pronounced, we either need to deploy harder and deeper tech, which is also important, or improve existing tech. Fourth Power is trying to simplify the physics and thermodynamic principles to deliver an approach that has been very well-studied for a very long time.”

The system Fourth Power designed takes in excess electricity from sources like the grid and uses it to heat a series of 6-foot-long, 20-inch thick graphite bricks until they reach about 2,400 Celsius. At that point the system is considered fully charged.

When the customer wants the electricity back, the bricks are used to heat up liquid tin, which flows through a series of graphite pipes, pumps, and flow meters to thermophotovoltaic cells, which turn the light from the glowing hot infrastructure back into electricity.

“You can basically dip the cells into the light and get power, or you can pull them back out and shut it off,” Henry explains. “The liquid metal starts at 2,400 Celsius and then cools as it’s going through the system because it’s giving a bunch of its energy to the photovoltaic, and then it circulates back through the graphite blocks, which act as a furnace, to retrieve more heat.”

From concept to company

Later this year, Fourth Power plans to turn on a 1-megawatt-hour system in its new headquarters in Bedford, Massachusetts. A full-scale system would offer 25 megawatts of power and 250 megawatt hours of storage and take up about half a football field.

“Most technologies you’ll see in storage are around 10 megawatts an acre or less,” Henry explains. “Fourth Power is more like 100 megawatts per acre. It’s very power-dense.”

The power and storage units of Fourth Power’s system are modular, which will allow customers to start with a smaller system and add storage units to extend storage length later. The company expects to lose about 1 percent of total heat stored per day.

“Customers can buy one storage and one power module, and that’s a 10-hour battery,” Henry explains. “But if they want one power module and two storage modules, that’s a 20-hour battery. Customers can mix and match, which is really advantageous for utilities as renewables scale and storage needs change.”

Down the line, the system could also be run as a power plant, converting fuel into electricity or using fuel to charge its batteries during stretches with little wind or sun. It could also be used to provide industrial heat.

But for now, Fourth Power is focused on the battery application.

“Utilities need something cheap and they need something reliable,” Henry says. “The only technology that has managed to reach at least one of those requirements is lithium ion. But the world is waiting for something that’s much cheaper than lithium ion and just as reliable, if not better. That’s what we’re focused on demonstrating to the world.”

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 18 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02601-4

Antarctic sea ice declined sharply between 2015 and 2017, and this study uses ocean observations and atmospheric data to determine contributing factors. The authors show that thinning of Winter Water in the previous decade, followed by strong winds, brought warm deep water into contact with sea ice.

Professor John Ochsendorf, a member of the MIT faculty since 2002, is taking on a new role in support of the research efforts of faculty and students in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P). At the start of this year, Ochsendorf was appointed to lead an initiative strengthening research strategy, support, and funding across the school.

“John is a bridge-builder by instinct and practice, and we look forward to the bridges he will build between our school and industry, our school and MIT, and between research and pedagogy in our school,” says SA+P Dean Hashim Sarkis. The appointment comes as sponsored research across SA+P continues to grow, expanding opportunities for graduate research assistantships and interdisciplinary collaboration across MIT.

Ochsendorf is the Class of 1942 Professor with dual appointments in the departments of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering in the MIT School of Engineering. At the center of his work is a deep commitment to students and education through research and making. For example, in close collaboration with students and alumni, he has contributed to projects ranging from the Sean Collier Memorial on campus to a recent Martin Puryear sculpture at Storm King Art Center. Since 2022, Ochsendorf has served as the founding director of the MIT Morningside Academy for Design, where he helped establish new models for design research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and student engagement across the Institute.

Ochsendorf describes the new role as both a “challenge and an opportunity” to support the considerable and increasingly broad portfolio of research across SA+P.

“We want to understand the current landscape of our research funding and identify the challenges and inefficiencies impacting faculty,” he notes. “The ultimate goal is to grow our research capacity for a world that needs the best ideas from MIT.”

The effort is consistent with SA+P’s history of pioneering research and pedagogic exploration. The Department of Architecture was among the first in the United States to establish doctoral programs within a school of architecture, including PhDs in history, theory, and criticism and in building technology. The Department of Urban Studies and Planning is home to the largest urban planning faculty in the country and maintains a variety of research labs, while Media Arts and Sciences and the Media Lab has a broad and deep research culture. Each of the school’s departments enjoys the advantage of operating within the context of MIT’s culture of innovation and interdisciplinary study. As new faculty hires have been increasingly research-driven, the time for developing and supporting robust research portfolios is now. 

Ochsendorf and his students’ research have bridged the spectrum from humanistic research supported by organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to more scientific research supported by the National Science Foundation. In his new role, he will build on that experience to work with faculty and Institute partners to strengthen grant development, clarify research priorities, and expand research capacity across SA+P.

“I’ve always loved being at MIT because of the team spirit here,” says Ochsendorf. “We’re a place where we try to support each other, and it’s because of this environment that I am excited about this new role.”

The United States and China “are the two largest emitters of carbon in the world,” said Nicholas Burns, former U.S. ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, at a recent MIT seminar. “We need to work with each other for the good of both of our countries.” 

During the MITEI Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition presentation, Burns gave insight into the evolving state of U.S.-China relations, its implications for the global order, and its impact on global efforts to advance the energy transition and address climate change.

“We are the two largest global economies,” said Burns, who is now the Goodman Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Relations at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “These are the only two countries that affect everybody else in the international system because of our weight.”

The relationship between the United States and China can be summarized in three words, according to Burns: competitive, tough, and adversarial — a description that rings true on both sides. He listed four primary areas for this competition: military, technology, trade and economics, and values.

Burns described the especially complicated area of trade and economics. “We both want to be number one. Neither of us — to be honest — is willing to be number two,” said Burns. Outside of North America, China is the United States’ largest trade partner. Outright trade wars — like those in April and October 2025 — create friction. “At one point, you’ll remember, 145 percent tariffs by the United States, and 125 percent by China on the United States. That just grinds a relationship. Those level of tariffs, had they been sustained, would have meant zero trade between the two countries.”

The energy field can be significantly impacted by this area of competition, Burns added. China is dominant in the production and processing of rare earth elements, many of which are critical to products like lithium batteries, solar panels, and electric vehicles. In 2024 and 2025, the United States was not the only country to place tariffs on these products; India, Turkey, South Africa, Mexico, Canada, the EU, and others followed suit. “I think the Trump administration is right, as President Biden was, to try to diversify sources on rare earths,” Burns said.

Burns also noted with interest the dichotomy in the Chinese energy sector between their lead on clean energy technology and their continual use of coal, standing out as an inconsistency in China’s efforts. Burns believes that climate change could be a key area of cooperation between China and the United States, emphasizing the importance of the United States’ participation, both technologically and diplomatically.

Burns also described the significant technological competition between the United States and China — an area of central importance. Throughout his presentation, Burns was quick to praise the emphasis that China puts on education and academic achievement, particularly in STEM fields. Pulling from a recent article in The Economist, he compared the 36 percent of Chinese first-year university students majoring in STEM fields to the 5 percent of American first-year students in STEM. “Think about the volume of graduates and the disparity between our country and China,” he said. “Then think about the percentage of those graduates who go into science and technology.”

Currently, areas like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and biotechnology are taking center stage in technological innovation. “The Chinese are very skilled in terms of industrial processes and doctrine of adapting quickly,” said Burns. He explained that holding a competitive edge lies not only in who is first on the market, but who adopts the technology first, and who is able to unite that technological progress with policy.

“This is the most important relationship that we have in the world,” said Burns. He believes that the true test is whether the United States and China can manage competition so that interests are protected, while avoiding the use of the massive destructive power both countries possess. “We’ve got to normalize the communication and engagement to prevent the worst from happening,” said Burns.

“We’re at a stage of human history where we’re all linked together, and the fate of everybody in this room and all of our countries is linked together by these huge transnational challenges,” said Burns. “We’ve got to learn to compete and yet live in peace with each other in the process.”

This speaker series highlights energy experts and leaders at the forefront of the scientific, technological, and policy solutions needed to transform our energy systems. Visit MITEI’s Events page for more information on this and additional events.

The early years of faculty members’ careers are a formative and exciting time in which to establish a firm footing that helps determine the trajectory of researchers’ studies. This includes building a research team, which demands innovative ideas and direction, creative collaborators, and reliable resources. 

For a group of MIT faculty working with and on artificial intelligence, early engagement with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab through projects has played an important role helping to promote ambitious lines of inquiry and shaping prolific research groups.

Building momentum

“The MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab has been hugely important for my success, especially when I was starting out,” says Jacob Andreas — associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and a researcher with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab — who studies natural language processing (NLP). Shortly after joining MIT, Andreas jump-started his first major project through the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, working on language representation and structured data augmentation methods for low-resource languages. “It really was the thing that let me launch my lab and start recruiting students.” 

Andreas notes that this occurred during a “pivotal moment” when the field of NLP was undergoing significant shifts to understand language models — a task that required significantly more compute, which was available through the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. “I feel like the kind of the work that we did under that [first] project, and in collaboration with all of our people on the IBM side, was pretty helpful in figuring out just how to navigate that transition.” Further, the Andreas group was able to pursue multi-year projects on pre-training, reinforcement learning, and calibration for trustworthy responses, thanks to the computing resources and expertise within the MIT-IBM community.

For several other faculty members, timely participation with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab proved to be highly advantageous as well. “Having both intellectual support and also being able to leverage some of the computational resources that are within MIT-IBM, that’s been completely transformative and incredibly important for my research program,” says Yoon Kim — associate professor in EECS, CSAIL, and a researcher with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab — who has also seen his research field alter trajectory. Before joining MIT, Kim met his future collaborators during an MIT-IBM postdoctoral position, where he pursued neuro-symbolic model development; now, Kim’s team develops methods to improve large language model (LLM) capabilities and efficiency. 

One factor he points to that led to his group’s success is a seamless research process with intellectual partners. This has allowed his MIT-IBM team to apply for a project, experiment at scale, identify bottlenecks, validate techniques, and adapt as necessary to develop cutting-edge methods for potential inclusion in real-world applications. “This is an impetus for new ideas, and that’s, I think, what’s unique about this relationship,” says Kim.

Merging expertise

The nature of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab is that it not only brings together researchers in the AI realm to accelerate research, but also blends work across disciplines. Lab researcher and MIT associate professor in EECS and CSAIL Justin Solomon describes his research group as growing up with the lab, and the collaboration as being “crucial … from its beginning until now.” Solomon’s research team focuses on theoretically oriented, geometric problems as they pertain to computer graphics, vision, and machine learning. 

Solomon credits the MIT-IBM collaboration with expanding his skill set as well as applications of his group’s work — a sentiment that’s also shared by lab researchers Chuchu Fan, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, and Faez Ahmed, associate professor of mechanical engineering. “They [IBM] are able to translate some of these really messy problems from engineering into the sort of mathematical assets that our team can work on, and close the loop,” says Solomon. This, for Solomon, includes fusing distinct AI models that were trained on different datasets for separate tasks. “I think these are all really exciting spaces,” he says.

“I think these early-career projects [with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab] largely shaped my own research agenda,” says Fan, whose research intersects robotics, control theory, and safety-critical systems. Like Kim, Solomon, and Andreas, Fan and Ahmed began projects through the collaboration the first year they were able to at MIT. Constraints and optimization govern the problems that Fan and Ahmed address, and so require deep domain knowledge outside of AI. 

Working with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab enabled Fan’s group to combine formal methods with natural language processing, which she says, allowed the team to go from developing autoregressive task and motion planning for robots to creating LLM-based agents for travel planning, decision-making, and verification. “That work was the first exploration of using an LLM to translate any free-form natural language into some specification that robot can understand, can execute. That’s something that I’m very proud of, and very difficult at the time,” says Fan. Further, through joint investigation, her team has been able to improve LLM reasoning­ — work that “would be impossible without the IBM support,” she says.   

Through the lab, Faez Ahmed’s collaboration facilitated the development of machine-learning methods to accelerate discovery and design within complex mechanical systems. Their Linkages work, for instance, employs “generative optimization” to solve engineering problems in a way that is both data-driven and has precision; more recently, they’re applying multi-modal data and LLMs to computer-aided design. Ahmed states that AI is frequently applied to problems that are already solvable, but could benefit from increased speed or efficiency; however, challenges — like mechanical linkages that were deemed “almost unsolvable” — are now within reach. “I do think that is definitely the hallmark [of our MIT-IBM team],” says Ahmed, praising the achievements of his MIT-IBM group, which is co-lead by Akash Srivastava and Dan Gutfreund of IBM.

What began as initial collaborations for each MIT faculty member has evolved into a lasting intellectual relationship, where both parties are “excited about the science,” and “student-driven,” Ahmed adds. Taken together, the experiences of Jacob Andreas, Yoon Kim, Justin Solomon, Chuchu Fan, and Faez Ahmed speak to the impact that a durable, hands-on, academia-industry relationship can have on establishing research groups and ambitious scientific exploration.

When patients undergo general anesthesia, doctors can choose among several drugs. Although each of these drugs acts on neurons in different ways, they all lead to the same result: a disruption of the brain’s balance between stability and excitability, according to a new MIT study.

This disruption causes neural activity to become increasingly unstable, until the brain loses consciousness, the researchers found. The discovery of this common mechanism could make it easier to develop new technologies for monitoring patients while they are undergoing anesthesia.

“What’s exciting about that is the possibility of a universal anesthesia-delivery system that can measure this one signal and tell how unconscious you are, regardless of which drugs they’re using in the operating room,” says Earl Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience and a member of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

Miller, Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience Emery Brown, and their colleagues are now working on an automated control system for delivery of anesthesia drugs, which would measure the brain’s stability using EEG and then automatically adjust the drug dose. This could help doctors ensure that patients stay unconscious throughout surgery without becoming too deeply unconscious, which can have negative side effects following the procedure.

Miller and Ila Fiete, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, the director of the K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience Center (ICoN), and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, are the senior authors of the new study, which appears today in Cell Reports. MIT graduate student Adam Eisen is the paper’s lead author.

Destabilizing the brain

Exactly how anesthesia drugs cause the brain to lose consciousness has been a longstanding question in neuroscience. In 2024, a study from Miller’s and Fiete’s labs suggested that for propofol, the answer is that anesthesia works by disrupting the balance between stability and excitability in the brain.

When someone is awake, their brain is able to maintain this delicate balance, responding to sensory information or other input and then returning to a stable baseline.

“The nervous system has to operate on a knife’s edge in this narrow range of excitability,” Miller says. “It has to be excitable enough so different parts can influence one another, but if it gets too excited it goes off into chaotic activity.”

In that 2024 study, the researchers found that propofol knocks the brain out of this state, known as “dynamic stability.” As doses of the drug increased, the brain took longer and longer to return to its baseline state after responding to new input. This effect became increasingly pronounced until consciousness was lost.

For that study, the researchers devised a computational model that analyzes neural activity recorded from the brain. This technique allowed them to determine how the brain responds to perturbations such as an auditory tone or other sensory input, and how long it takes to return to its baseline stability.

In their new study, the researchers used the same technique to measure how the brain responds to not only propofol but two additional anesthesia drugs — ketamine and dexmedetomidine. Animals were given one of the three drugs while their brain activity was analyzed, including their response to auditory tones.

This study showed that the same destabilization induced by propofol also appears during administration of the other two drugs. This “universal signature” appears even though the three drugs have different molecular mechanisms: propofol binds to GABA receptors, inhibiting neurons that have those receptors; dexmedetomidine blocks the release of norepinephrine; and ketamine blocks NMDA receptors, suppressing neurons with those receptors.

Each of these pathways, the researchers hypothesize, affect the brain’s balance of stability and excitability in different ways, and each leads to an overall destabilization of this balance.

“All three of these drugs appear to do the exact same thing,” Miller says. “In fact, you could look at the destabilization measure we use and you can’t tell which drug is being applied.”

The researchers now plan to further investigate how each of these drugs may give rise to the same patterns of brain destabilization.

“The molecular mechanisms of ketamine and dexmedetomidine are a bit more involved than propofol mechanisms,” Eisen says. “A future direction is to do a meaningful model of what the biophysical effects of those are and see how that could lead to destabilization.”

Monitoring anesthesia

Now that the researchers have shown that three different anesthesia drugs produce similar destabilization patterns in the brain, they believe that measuring those patterns could offer a valuable way to monitor patients during anesthesia. While anesthesia is overall a very safe procedure, it does carry some risks, especially for very young children and for people over 65.

For adults suffering from dementia, anesthesia can make the condition worse, and it can also exacerbate neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression. These risks are higher if patients go into a deeper state of unconsciousness known as burst suppression.

To help reduce those risks, Miller and Brown, who is also an anesthesiologist at MGH, are developing a prototype device that can measure patients’ EEG readings while under anesthesia and adjust their dose accordingly. Currently, doctors monitor patients’ heart rate, blood pressure, and other vital signs during surgery, but these don’t give as accurate a reading of how deeply the patient is unconscious.

“If you can limit people’s exposure to anesthesia, if you give just enough and no more, you can reduce risks across the board,” Miller says.

Working with researchers at Brown University, the MIT team is now planning to run a small clinical trial of their monitoring device with patients undergoing surgery.

The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Simons Center for the Social Brain, the Freedom Together Foundation, the Picower Institute, the National Science Foundation Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain, the McGovern Institute, and the National Institutes of Health.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright threatened to quit the International Energy Agency about 10 days before the U.S.-Israel war on Iran plunged the world into energy volatility.

The surprise decision comes as the president’s nominee for Homeland Security secretary faces a confirmation hearing Wednesday.

The nonprofit manager of the National Center for Atmospheric Research is suing over what it called a "campaign of retribution" against Gov. Jared Polis.

A looming water shortage in Corpus Christi could disrupt life for residents and refineries, but the state’s Republican governor says Texans will be protected.