Several U.S. states are pushing to ban young people from social media entirely. This marks the latest wave of censorship bills masquerading as “children’s online safety” measures, with states like Massachusetts, Idaho, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois, and EFF’s home state of California leading the charge.

Just a few years ago, lawmakers supporting age-gating laws insisted their efforts were narrowly targeted at limiting young people’s access to adult content. At the time, we warned that they would not stop there: once the government established the authority and built the infrastructure to collect and “verify” massive troves of user data, it would inevitably sweep broader and broader categories of lawful speech into this mass surveillance and censorship system. 

Unfortunately, our predictions came true. As legislators across the country advance proposals that would block all young people from accessing the “modern public square,” the Overton window has shifted dramatically towards mass censorship—and the speed of this shift should concern all of us. 

This primer breaks down this dangerous wave of social media bans: how they work (and why they don’t), who they harm, and how we can fight back. 

How to Spot a Social Media Ban

The details of these bills vary from state to state. Some (like California’s AB 1709) are a flat-out social media ban for all young people under a certain age, while other states (like South Carolina and Minnesota) allow access to young users who hand over even more data to show verifiable parental consent. Many bills regulate certain social media features, too, including by setting default privacy settings, time limits, or notification preferences for all accounts that fail the age-gate.

As for the age-gating mechanism itself, most proposals fall into two broad categories: age verification bills and behavioral age estimation bills. 

Age Verification Bills require online services to collect highly sensitive data, including government ID and biometric information, from all users before either restricting or allowing them access. 

For example, take California’s social media ban (AB 1709). Starting in January 2027, operating systems will be required to collect enough information from users to sort them into age groups, or “brackets.” Under AB 1709, social media apps would then use that age bracket information to completely block anyone under 16, while supposedly letting everyone else through. By contrast, Florida’s law (HB 3) takes a more aggressive route by forcing platforms to verify users' identities directly, usually by contracting with private third-party companies to perform verification services.

Behavioral Age Estimation Bills, on the other hand, are a more recent innovation of states like Minnesota (HF 1438) and South Carolina (H 4591). These bills require platforms to estimate the ages of users based largely on data that they already collect, including self-attested age, behavioral information, and account history and activity. In practice, these bills enable tech companies to use algorithms and/or AI to analyze our online behavior and estimate age based on that. 

Proponents of behavioral age estimation bills claim that their proposals avoid the massive security risks that come with mandatory age verification bills. However, much of the data that social media platforms collect from us “in the ordinary course of operation” is collected in order to serve us targeted behavioral ads. If we force platforms to use this imperfect data to make more important judgments about who can access their services, we risk entrenching those insidious data collection practices. Surely we don’t want to give social media companies more reasons to justify and sustain their reliance on this exploitative business model.

If you want to dig into the nuance here, our terminology guide sheds more light on the technical differences between age verification and age estimation bills. 

Overall, it’s a lose-lose scenario: either platforms collect new forms of our most sensitive and immutable data, or they unleash their AI and algorithms on our existing behavioral data to make creepy guesses about who we are and what we deserve to see. No matter which age-gating method your state chooses to execute its social media ban, there will be lots of error at the margins—and lots of users who will be blocked or chilled from access to lawful online speech.

Why Social Media Bans Are So Dangerous

Social media bans are unconstitutional, discriminatory, and deeply misguided. They reinforce existing structures of oppression, and they are broadly unsupported by young people, whose voices are conspicuously absent from this conversation. They undermine parental decision-making and replace tailored family-level solutions with a one-size-fits-all bandaid. And, in the places we have seen social media bans go into effect, early reports show that they don't even work. 

For example, in Australia, where a social media ban has been in effect since late 2025, a majority of young people can still access social media, those who can’t have lost their access to the news, and crisis helplines are reporting skyrocketing numbers of calls from youth left stranded without online community or resources.

We could go on and on about all of the inherent harms here, but we’ll try to keep this short as we walk through some of the major issues.

1. Security Risks and Privacy Harms

In order to ban some users, social media platforms first must confirm the ages of all users, regardless of age. Bans thus incentivize companies to force users of all ages to hand over government IDs, face scans, and other sensitive information. When parental consent is required, companies must collect even more verification data and often create explicit links between child and parent accounts—further destroying users’ anonymity. 

Both of these databases create massive data "honeypots" that invite identity theft and permanent surveillance. We’ve already seen repeated data breaches involving age- and identity-verification services. Yet these laws would force both adults and the youth they claim to protect to feed their most sensitive data into this growing surveillance ecosystem. 

If we don’t trust tech companies with our private information now, we shouldn't pass laws that force us to give them even more of it. 

2. Disproportionate Harm to Vulnerable Communities

Age-verification technology is deeply flawed and prone to discrimination. These systems frequently misidentify or lock out people of color, people with disabilities, and trans or gender-nonconforming individuals whose IDs may not match their appearance. 

Where these bills require parental consent, they impose disproportionate access barriers on low-income, non-traditional, and immigrant families. These sorts of families are more likely to share a single family device or have strong reasons to not want the government to track family associations and ID documents. 

Beyond the technical failures, these bans cut off a vital lifeline. For LGBTQ+ youth, foster kids, and those stuck in unsupportive home environments, social media is often the only place to find community, explore their identity, or access life-saving resources. Forcibly removing young people isolates those who need connection the most, while creating massive new barriers for adults. 

You can read a breakdown of the diverse groups vulnerable to these laws here. 

3. Based on Shoddy Science

The current legislative push to ban young people from social media relies heavily on the idea that the "great rewiring" of the adolescent brain is a proven fact. This simply isn’t true.

Social science indicates that moderate internet use is a net positive for teens’ development, and negative outcomes are usually due to either lack of access or excessive use. For LGBTQ+ and marginalized youth in particular, social media offers an essential space to access support they might lack offline. By forcing youth into digital isolation, these bans cut off vital access to political news, community, and health resources. They also completely ignore the calls of young people themselves who favor digital literacy and education over restrictive government control.

Instead of cutting off these lifelines, we should support measures that arm all youth (and the adults in their lives) with the knowledge they need to navigate online spaces safely.

3. Reckless Free Speech Violations for Users of All Ages

No matter your age, the First Amendment protects your right to speak and access information. 

Blanket social media bans immensely and unconstitutionally chill all users’ exercise of this right. They cut off young people’s access to lawful speech, or ruin their privacy in the home by mandating parental consent and sometimes even parental access to their account activities and settings. They force all users (adults and young people alike) to hand private information over to tech companies before speaking or accessing information on social media platforms, imposing annoying obstacles on lawful online expression and wrongfully blocking some adults outright. 

Critically, these bans destroy our right to online anonymity—a cornerstone of our right to free expression that protects whistleblowers, journalists, activists, immigrants, and everyone who has ever used a private browser or account to ask the internet an embarrassing question.

How to Fight Back

Social media bans weaponize parents’ concerns about children’s safety to justify unprecedented levels of surveillance and censorship. In the process, these laws deny young people their rights, threaten online anonymity for everyone, expose our sensitive personal data to breach and abuse, and replace parental decision-making with state authority. This is a battle over the future of the open, private, and free internet, and we must act now to protect it.

Here’s how you can help us fight back: Talk to your community (including young people!) about what’s at stake. If you’re a parent, lean on open conversations and platforms’ existing tools to tailor your child’s experiences instead of handing that power over to the government. And no matter where you live, contact your government representatives and tell them clearly that social media bans are not the answer to kids’ online safety.

When MIT mechanical engineering Professor Kripa Varanasi landed in New Delhi in the middle of the night in June 2024 to attend a conference, he found himself in 104-degree Fahrenheit heat. 

“This was June, and it was crazy. It was so hot for the whole meeting that I never left the hotel,” with daytime temperatures nearing 122 F.

It didn’t used to be that way. “When I grew up in India, it was not like this,” Varanasi says. “That kind of inspired me.” 

He found a way to begin tackling the issue through a grant from the MIT Climate Project that provided seed funding to develop a proof-of-concept prototype of a wearable personal cooling system. The grant was one of four that were part of a Critical Cooling initiative for which the Climate Project requested proposals last year. The projects, which received grants totaling $450,000, are now complete. All have showed promise, and are now exploring ways to further develop their concepts.

Another MIT researcher, Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, looked into the potential of subsurface wells with heat-absorbing materials to supply spaces with air far below peak ambient temperatures while using much less energy than evaporation-compression heat pumps. The aim would be to use such systems in both small apartment buildings and single-family homes in India and other parts of the Global South.

Meanwhile, Asegun Henry, the George N. Hatsopoulos Professor in Thermodynamics, studied the use of an alternative approach to air conditioning to be more energy efficient and eliminate hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants that are potent greenhouse gases. His approach uses a cheap, widely abundant solid “caloric” material — rubber — to obtain a cooling effect, and then uses plain water as an efficient heat transfer fluid. The initial target market is single-family houses and apartment buildings, although larger systems could also serve data centers.

And Gang Chen, the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering, addressed the tendency of existing air conditioning units being expensive and power hungry. They also use refrigerants that are far more potent greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide — and the coolants are likely to leak out when the devices are ultimately disposed of, adding to their global warming contribution. To help address that, Chen’s approach is to use a completely different kind of chemical refrigerant that has no greenhouse impact.

Christoph Reinhart, the Terri and Alan Spoon Professor of Architecture and Climate who leads MIT’s Sustainable Design Lab (SDL), championed the seed fund effort and served as faculty lead. “The term ‘critical cooling’ stems from a collaboration between SDL and Harvard’s Human Rights Entrepreneurs Clinic,” he says. “It is motivated by the fact that climate change increasingly causes heat fatalities, primarily among vulnerable populations, who lack access to active cooling. The impact that MIT can have by ‘cooling people, not spaces’ is enormous.” This vision led to the creation of the grant program, where each of the teams received funding for six months to see what they could do and explore really innovative approaches to the problem.

In collaboration with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), led on J-PAL’s side by Senior Policy Manager Andre Zollinger, the teams started with a workshop that brought together representatives from the World Bank, leaders from the Global South and industry, and engineers with ideas to suggest.

All of the teams made progress and most produced initial prototypes, says Liana Frey, a managing director at the MIT Climate Project, and an effort will be made to further develop and fund these ideas. “We’re continuing to look at different ways of proceeding with the work.”

One of these ways is through air conditioning. Worldwide, air conditioning is only available to about 8 percent of people — and that amount already contributes between 3 and 4 percent of global warming emissions — explains Chen. Meanwhile, the need for air conditioning and other ways of addressing extreme heat is steadily growing as the planet steadily warms up, and many of the people who will be most affected live in regions with limited access to reliable or affordable power and with high levels of poverty. The market for air conditioners is expected to triple or quadruple in coming years, he says, and their contribution to global warming will grow accordingly.

Chen says that he already had some ideas, but he hadn’t had a chance to test them out in experiments, which the grant enabled him to do. After building three prototypes and testing them out, he says, “I’m not at the stage where I can say that I know this will work.” But based on the experiments, he’d like to proceed to build a further prototype. If it works as well as expected, it would make a dramatic difference in air conditioning technology worldwide, including for the intensive cooling needs of new data centers.

Meanwhile, Varanasi’s way of looking at the problem was to consider individuals, not spaces. His devices work through the same principle as how an elephant uses its huge ears to dissipate heat and cool its blood.

The wearable device only consumes about 33 watts, he says, whereas a typical room air conditioner consumes around 1,000 watts. At U.S. material prices, the prototype device would cost about $20, he says, but if sourced with local material in India, he estimates it could be produced at a cost of less than $1 each.

Such garments could be bought in large quantities by the government and distributed to communities, where local entrepreneurs could set up charging stations to recharge the devices after a night’s wear, and other locals could set up businesses to manufacture the systems. The socks themselves would be washable, separately from the cooling material itself. This could enable people to at least get a good night’s sleep even in the extreme heat, he says.

The proof of concept he built used a simulated foot containing a heater, and measured the cooling effect. “We were able to keep it in the zone that we need for the body to stay cool,” he says. “So our initial prototype that we were able to build with this funding showed that this can become a viable solution.”

The same material could be used in other ways, such as to make sleeping bags with built-in cooling, he says. The raw material is widely available, but would be treated in a way that they developed. “It was a fundamental science bottleneck that we were able to overcome, which makes it possible.”

Varanasi says he is exploring various possibilities for how to develop his novel cooling material into a commercial product. “Ultimately, to make anything work, it has to be a business, otherwise good ideas can die,” he says. “It has to be a good business and a sustainable business.”

Luckily, there’s still support for advancing this work. “There are a lot of people interested in this heat-stress question,” says Frey. “It’s just becoming more and more urgent.”

A number of MIT affiliates were recently honored for their research by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.

Stuart H. Orkin ’67 shared a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences with Swee Lay Thein for their research transforming sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia from incurable to treatable conditions through gene editing therapy. Their work identified the master switch controlling fetal hemoglobin, leading directly to the development of Casgevy – the first CRISPR-based medicine approved for any disease. Orkin, a graduate of the MIT Department of Biology, is currently a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

Shu-Heng Shao, assistant professor of physics at MIT and a researcher in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics — a Leinweber Institute, was recognized with a 2026 New Horizons in Physics Prize. Shao shared the honor with Clay Córdova from the University of Chicago, Thomas Dumitrescu from the University of California at Los Angeles, and Yifan Wang PhD ’16 from New York University. The four were recognized for “discover[ing] and develop[ing] the theory of ‘generalized symmetries’ in quantum field theory.” 

J. Colin Hill ’08 shared a New Horizons in Physics Prize with Dillon Brout, Mathew Madhavacheril, Maria Vincenzi, Daniel Scolnic, and W. L. Kimmy Wu for their results measuring the expansion and composition of the universe, with Hill’s focus on advancing analyses of data from the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang.

Hong Wang PhD ’19 received a New Horizons in Mathematics Prize for resolving or making advances on a family of notoriously difficult problems in harmonic analysis, a branch of mathematics that studies functions by decomposing them into fundamental components. 

In addition, Bryan Traynor, a former student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, shared a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences with Rosa Rademakers for discovering the most common genetic cause of both amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia.

Founded by a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the Breakthrough Prizes recognize the world’s top scientists in life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics. The laureates were honored at a gala ceremony in Los Angeles on April 18.

On a warm June evening in San Francisco, attorneys and other legally-minded friends of EFF gathered for our 18th Annual Cyberlaw Trivia Night, an annual test of tech-related legal knowledge, and the ability to remember some deeply obscure facts under pressure. 

Returning Quizmaster Kurt Opsahl once again guided competitors through six rounds of trivia covering everything from intellectual property and free speech to privacy, security, and artificial intelligence. Teams wrestled with questions about geofence warrants, AI copyright disputes, the SOPA/PIPA internet blackout, Section 230, and even a Senate hearing featuring a contestant who was herself present at cyberlaw trivia. 

The judges’ table made it obvious that 2026 was a notable year. Weighing in on the toughest close calls were three folks with a deep history at our org: outgoing EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn and new Executive Director Nicole Ozer both sat at as judges, joined by new cyberlaw judge Mike Masnick, founder of Techdirt and a recipient of an EFF Award in 2020. 

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The food was hot, the drinks were cold, and the competition was fierce. Teams including Shady Docket, Byte Club, Flock U, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Precedent, Nicky's Angels, and Betamaxxers battled through six rounds of challenging questions. 

When a question about Afroman's successful legal battle against Ohio sheriff's deputies came up, members of Byte Club offered to do more than name his most popular album: they offered to perform a rendition of “Lemon Pound Cake” (also the album name—tricky!) for the judges. This won no sway with the 3-judge Cyberlaw Judiciary, and the offer was politely declined. 

The teams racked their collective law-noggins about some of the details of recent legal battles over digital rights, and a round entitled “You Can Call Me AI.” After the IP round, which rewarded folks in the audience who could answer details about the server test, the trivia moved onto newsier questions, with questions about ICE apps, anti-ICE apps, recent defamation cases involving our sitting president, and the slogan of a mineral company that you might've heard on terrestrial radio anytime between the early aughts and this week. 

You don't have to wear a morning coat to win Supreme Court arguments, but knowing who did for 4 years might have helped you win the IP round. 

By the end of regulation play, the cyberlaw trivia competition was closer than we could have imagined. For the first time in Cyberlaw Trivia history, three teams finished tied for first place, sending the contest to two tiebreaker questions. 

The final question noted that Google had received more than 287,000 government information requests in the first half of 2025, and asked teams to estimate how many were received by OpenAI during the same period. Every team guessed over, but it was the victors, Shady Docket, who guessed the lowest: 260. (The real answer is 146.)

As Shady Docket team member Erin Simon explained after the win: "As much as we love EFF, what we love even more is crushing other trivia teams."

In second place were Nicky’s Angels. Rounding out the virtual podium in 3rd were the Betamaxxers, who jumped ahead early with a home-run run in the Free Speech round, getting every question correct. 

Each summer, EFF's Cyberlaw Trivia Night brings together the legal community that helps defend privacy, free expression, innovation, and digital rights. We want to especially thank this year Morrison Foerster, Fenwick, Wilson Sonsini, and Public Resource for supporting EFF's legal intern program.

Are you an attorney interested in defending civil liberties in the digital world? Consider joining EFF's Cooperating Attorneys list. This network helps EFF connect people to legal assistance when EFF is unable to provide direct assistance. 

Fighting for first place at EFF’s Cyberlaw Trivia Night helps us fight for your rights online! Sponsor one of our annual events and join the movement for digital privacy, free speech, and innovation. Please visit eff.org/thanks or contact tierney@eff.org for more information.

If you’re a user—owner?—of this cryptocurrency, this is important:

On May 29, the security researcher Taylor Hornby found a critical vulnerability in Zcash Orchard privacy pool using Claude Opus 4.8. The Zcash team hired Hornby specifically to look for this kind of issue. He found one fast enough to be embarrassing.

The Orchard pool is the newest and most advanced shielded transaction system in the cryptocurrency Zcash. Introduced in 2022, it allows users to send and receive ZEC while keeping transaction details private. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to validate transactions without revealing amounts or participants. The bug: a specific check that was supposed to validate transaction inputs wasn’t actually enforcing the rules it appeared to enforce. An attacker could have exploited the flaw to feed false inputs into that check and generate ZEC from nothing, with the zero-knowledge proof system blessing the fraudulent transaction as valid...

In April, Anthropic initated Project Glasswing. The idea was to let companies use their new model to find and fix vulnerabilities in their own software. It was a fantastic PR move, and so many press outlets have uncritically parroted Anthropic’s claims that it’s now common wisdom that Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than other models. Which is just not true.

In any case, Anthropic has published a Project Glasswing status report. It’s finding a lot of vulnerabilities in software—yay! Some of them are even dangerous. But almost none of them has been patched. It’s ...

Seven countries cite the energy crisis brought on by the war in Iran as reason to stay the course in meeting the EU's broader decarbonization targets.

The nearly $58 million Biden-era grant will go to a project to turn claystone into battery-grade lithium for electric vehicles.

The latest auction of the Northeast's cap-and-trade program raised prices for carbon allowances — but likely not enough to have a big impact on electricity bills.

The World Stroke Organization found that extreme heat, wildfire smoke and other climate impacts are linked to increased stroke risk.

Experts say the worry comes with people drinking excessively who may not be hydrating enough, staying cool or have underlying health conditions.

Edi Rama dismissed fears that the luxury development backed by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law would destroy flamingo habitats.

Brazilian officials long followed a “zero-fire” strategy, treating any small burn as a threat to be quickly suppressed, but over time, that approach fell out of favor.

The June 21 runoff comes at a pivotal moment for Colombia, as its president has emerged as one of the world’s most vocal advocates for transitioning away from oil, gas and coal.

A supermassive black hole lies at the heart of every galaxy, including the Milky Way. When a black hole is active, it pulls material in as a whirpool of high-temperature gas and dust. As this cosmic material piles up and falls onto a black hole, it lights up its vicinity, radiating a huge amount of energy. 

The most energetic supermassive black holes are known as quasars, and they are some of the most active and luminous objects in the universe. These voracious systems take in so much material that the energy they emit can outshine all the light in the surrounding galaxy. The pattern of light from a quasar can give scientists clues to how active supermassive black holes shape the galaxies around them. 

Now astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have detected a quasar flickering from the very early universe. The scientists traced the light from the quasar back to the “cosmic dawn,” just 850 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery represents the earliest flickering quasar detected to date. 

“Although there have been a lot of quasars found in the cosmic dawn, this is the first time we actually see one flickering,” says Gene Leung, a postdoc in the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. 

The quasar’s flicker enabled the researchers to determine that, surprisingly, the ancient quasar’s whirpool of gas and dust, known as an accretion disk, resembled a flat pancake, similar in shape to that of more modern-day quasars. 

Their findings add to a longstanding mystery in cosmology: Why do supermassive black holes exist so early in the universe’s history? Physicists have assumed that a flat accretion disk reflects a relatively mature black hole that is in a calm and stable state. Black holes that are just starting to form, like those in the very early universe, should be more unsettled systems, with accretion disks that appear more puffy and chaotic. 

The flat accretion disk around this very early quasar heightens the mystery of how supermassive black holes can grow and mature in a very short amount of cosmic time. 

“I think what this suggests is that  all the messy, very rapid growth phases that we expect all black holes to go through at some point happen very, very early on, before we see them as these very bright luminous quasars,” says Anna-Christina Eilers, assistant professor of physics at MIT. “That’s the picture that’s emerging.”

Eilers, Leung, and their colleagues report their results in a paper appearing today in Nature Astronomy. Their co-authors include members of MIT Kavli and multiple other institutions. 

Past a pinprick

A supermassive black hole can be billions of times more massive than the sun. These gravitational giants are the central “engines” of most galaxies, helping to regulate a galaxy’s star formation and growth. 

“Without supermassive black holes, no galaxy would look the way it does today,” Eilers says. “Black holes play a major role in shaping how galactic ecosystems look.”

It was long assumed that it should take more than a billion years for the first galaxies to settle and mature, so scientists didn’t expect to see supermassive black holes in the very early universe. But observations since the early 2000s showed otherwise. Scientists have spotted more than 200 supermassive black holes in the universe’s first billion years. Such objects were detectable because they were in an extremely active quasar phase, giving off enormous blasts of radiation that could be seen from Earth, 13 billion light years away. 

These earliest quasars were observed as pinpricks of light, which signal the existence of a supermassive black hole at early times. But from these bright and distant dots, scientists aren’t able to tell much more about the black holes and their cosmic dawn environments. To do so, they need to catch a quasar’s “flicker.”

“People have known that quasars in the nearby universe can flicker,” Leung says. “The flickering comes from fluctuations in the way the gas is being fed into the black hole. And how a quasar flickers tells us something about the structure of a black hole’s accretion disk, and the kind of ‘bites’ that the black hole is eating.”

Mapping a flicker

Leung and Eilers looked to detect a flickering quasar from the early universe in hopes of learning more about the shape and structure of the earliest supermassive black holes. To do so would be a technical challenge: The further back in time and space an object is, the more distorted its light appears. This effect is due to the expanding universe, which effectively stretches, or “redshifts” light to redder, longer wavelengths. The same stretching occurs in time: Any flicker that naturally occurs over several weeks, for instance, would appear stretched out, flickering only every few months when seen from billions of light years away. 

To spot a flickering quasar from the cosmic dawn, the team needed to observe the distant universe at redder wavelengths, and specifically within the infrared spectrum, and over long timescales of many years. 

“This was the technical challenge we had to overcome,” Eilers says. “We needed data at longer, infrared wavelengths taken repeatedly over very long timescales.” 

The team ultimately found a flicker in data collected by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission — a space-based infrared telescope that scanned the entire sky over a total of about 14 years. Former MIT postdoc Kishalay De, who is now a faculty member at Columbia University, had launched a project to re-process archival data from NEOWISE. Based on the re-processed data, the team unearthed a signal, from just 850 million years after the Big Bang, which was confirmed to be the earliest flickering quasar. 

“We saw the quasar flickering randomly over the 14-year period, much like a candle’s flame flickers without a fixed pattern,” Leung notes. 

They estimate that the quasar is as bright as 12 trillion suns, and it is flickering by about 20 percent, meaning that it fluctuates up and down, by a brightness of about 2 trillion suns. 

The researchers also tracked how the quasar’s light flickered over several different wavelengths. The wavelength of light reflects a certain temperature of the material that is emitting the light. The closer material is to a black hole, the hotter it is. Researchers can therefore use wavelengths of light to map the shape and structure of material within the accretion disk around a black hole. 

Using NEOWISE data, the team analyzed the quasar’s flicker to determine the shape of the accretion disk surrounding the central supermassive black hole. They found that the disk is surprisingly thin and flat — a structure that astronomers mostly see around nearby, older black holes, that have had much longer to settle and mature. 

“This provides direct evidence that the same feeding processes and structures observed in the nearby universe were already in place at very early times, despite very different cosmic environments, which had never been seen before,” Eilers says. 

“This means something happened even earlier on that led to these systems to look so mature,” Leung adds. 

The team hopes to peer even further back in cosmic time to catch a quasar’s earlier, premature development. Then, scientists can start to piece together the conditions that brewed up the first supermassive black holes. 

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 08 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02607-y

The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) was introduced to curb carbon leakage, but its impact is debated. Using export and emissions data from Indian steel plants, researchers show early evidence that the CBAM could penalize high-emission producers, rather than act as a blanket trade barrier.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 08 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02642-9

The authors develop an early warning system to predict the risks of extreme temperatures for 30,585 vertebrates 1–9 months in advance. They identify species and regions at risk and highlight the potential for early warning systems to maximize management activities that mitigate negative outcomes.

The silicon that forms the foundation of most computer chips has fundamental limits to how much power it can manage, which constrains the speed and energy-efficiency of wireless communication systems.

A promising solution is to build future wireless electronics out of transistors made from gallium nitride, an advanced material that can handle the speed and energy required for demanding wireless applications like 6G and satellite communications. 

But even in the best transistors, a very large fraction of that energy becomes heat. As researchers pack more gallium nitride transistors into a smaller area on a silicon chip, localized hot spots degrade reliability and hamper performance.

Now, a team from MIT and elsewhere has broken through this bottleneck by embedding gallium nitride transistors into an ultrathin layer of diamond. The diamond acts as a heat spreader that normalizes the temperature and allows the transistors to approach peak performance without reducing reliability.

The researchers used this technique to manufacture a power amplifier for wireless communications, which outperformed every similar amplifier they found in the literature. 

While their fabrication technique is extremely precise and requires the integration of different material systems, it can be performed at the scale needed for commercial applications.

“No single material can do everything well in a wireless device, so these 3D heterogeneously integrated systems are here to stay. The key challenge left has been reliability and thermal management, and we might have now unlocked the final step we need to make these systems operate at scale and high volume,” says Pradyot Yadav, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student at MIT and lead author of a paper on this advance.

Yadav is joined on the paper by Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of EECS, director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL), and the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology; and Ruonan Han, a professor in EECS and a member of MTL and the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as others at Georgia Tech and Penn State University. The research was presented at the Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium, part of the IEEE International Microwave Symposium.

A multimaterial method

To build faster and more energy-efficient electronics, researchers are studying heterogeneously integrated systems in which multiple materials are stacked into a unified package to leverage the beneficial properties of each one. 

For instance, MIT researchers previously stacked gallium nitride (GaN) on top of silicon as well as on top of glass to create higher-performance chips.

But in a heterogeneously integrated chip, each material has a different operating temperature, which can degrade the reliability of an electronic device. 

“If we can incorporate a material that manages the heat so the GaN and silicon are at the same temperature, then the reliability of the entire 3D chip will improve. The best material for that is diamond,” Yadav explains.

The researchers use lab-grown, jewelry-grade diamond — the same type one would find in some engagement rings. Diamond has the highest thermal conductivity of any known material. 

Advances in the growth process have significantly reduced the cost of single-crystal diamond wafers, making their use in computer chips more feasible.

In prior work, scientists have grown ultrathin, single-crystal layers of diamond on top of GaN transistors to manage heat. 

But this growth process, which is not easy to scale up, introduces unwanted capacitances in the chip. These store energy flowing through the circuit, diverting it from the transistors and slowing down their operations. 

The MIT researchers developed a completely different approach that reduces these unwanted capacitive effects. They embedded extremely tiny GaN transistors, known as dielets, into an ultrathin interposer, or substrate, made of single-crystal diamond. This diamond layer spreads and manages the heat, so the GaN and silicon operate at the same temperature without the unwanted capacitances.

“By putting these GaN transistors into a diamond interposer, we are actually able to improve the performance of the device, as opposed to degrading it. We can get the best of both worlds,” Yadav says.

Meticulous manufacturing

The fabrication process begins with the use of a lightning-fast femtosecond laser to cut prepared gallium nitride dielets out of a wafer. 

The researchers use the laser to drill precisely sized cavities into the diamond substrate. They carefully place a die attach film, which is only 20 microns thick, at the bottom of the cavity and drop a dielet on top of the film. 

Once the dielet is in place, they apply heat and pressure to mold it with the film and diamond substrate.

“That interface is key. If you don’t have that thermal die attach film placed just right, then the heat flow through the diamond to the GaN transistor will not be good enough. So you really need to have a very smooth, clean surface,” Yadav says.

The researchers then stack additional dielectric and metal layers on top of the GaN and diamond to build a working circuit.

They used this technique to fabricate a power amplifier, which is one of the key building blocks of any wireless system. Power amplifiers convert small electrical signals into larger ones that can then be transmitted long distances.

The amplifier they developed achieved higher output power, efficiency, and gain than any similar device the researchers are aware of, including an amplifier they designed in prior work.

“The power amplifier is the beating heart of a wireless device front end. Its performance will dictate the entire performance of your communication system. Our amplifier is powerful enough to ensure that a signal can be propagated for miles,” Yadav says.

These results show how their technique could be well-suited for demanding applications, like high-power radars, space communications, and industrial drones. 

It could also be used to manage heat in systems that perform power conversions inside data centers, improving energy-efficiency. 

Yadav hopes other researchers will build on these advances as they develop more complex heterogeneously integrated systems, opening the door to new possibilities with next-generation electronics.

“When I started my PhD, we wondered if any of this was even doable. It seemed like science fiction. Now we’ve shown all these systems that have outperformed anything that exists on the market today. GaN and 3D heterogeneous systems are going to be at the forefront of so many future applications. It is rewarding to know that we contributed a little bit to that space,” he says.

This research was funded, in part, by the Department of War, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships. Device fabrication and microscopy were conducted at MIT.nano and the Georgia Tech Institute for Matter and Systems. 

On April 30, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing’s Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) initiative hosted a full-day research symposium examining how artificial intelligence is shaping the world and its implications for society. 

The symposium included research talks by SERC’s latest seed grant recipients on topics such as air pollution forecasting and responsible computer vision deployment, panels on AI alignment and AI in education, and a keynote address by Jon Kleinberg PhD ’96, the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell University. The event also featured a poster session, where student researchers showcased projects they worked on throughout the year as SERC Scholars.

“There is so much amazing research being done at MIT on how AI and computing can be forces for good that benefit humanity. It was inspiring to see so much community interest in all this cutting-edge work,” said Brian Hedden, co-associate dean of SERC and professor of philosophy, who holds an MIT Schwarzman College of Computing shared position with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).

“As computing and AI become increasingly embedded in nearly every dimension of society, SERC’s mission is to help ensure that ethical reflection and technical progress advance together,” said Nikos Trichakis, co-associate dean of SERC and the J.C. Penney Professor of Management. “This year’s symposium highlights the extraordinary range of work underway across MIT, and creates a forum for our community to engage deeply with the responsibilities that come with shaping the future of computing.”

Aligning AI with human values — and what values those might be

The challenges with AI alignment and moral meshing lie in the ethical questions of how to instill “human values” onto a very powerful and rapidly changing technology. Who makes the decision on what values and rationalities are included in an ethical framework? How does one account for distortion when translating these values from user to machine? 

These questions, among others, were posed by Dylan Hadfield-Menell, associate professor of EECS, during a panel he moderated that brought together an interdisciplinary group of speakers.

Iason Gabriel, a philosopher and research scientist at Google DeepMind, used the example of a judge to illustrate his point. “You want a judge to have good character, but to still interpret the rules. A reasonable person, though not necessarily the best person who ever lived. When it comes to AI, it’s not appropriate to model it as perfect. AI should be doing what we tell it to do, while using its character to interpret according to our moral values.”

Bailey Flanigan, assistant professor of political science in a shared appointment with the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in EECS, took this a step further. To her, the most important problem to AI alignment is “resolving fundamental questions on who is entitled to govern different types of AI systems in the first place.”

Joining Flanigan on the panel was Bernado Zacka, associate professor of political science. Given the momentum of AI and complex institutional designs, Zacka expressed, “one of the most urgent problems is understanding the wisdom contained in the systems we are replacing, and why they function the way they do.” 

As deployment pressure increases, it can often feel like people are building the plane as they fly it, although the panelists overall seemed optimistic about the trajectory of AI alignment, emphasizing how crucial human components are to shaping these systems.

Offloading versus uplifting

As students across all levels of education begin to use AI, questions arise on whether there’s a way to ethically incorporate AI tools while maintaining academic accuracy and rigor. At a panel on AI and education, MIT faculty and Marta McAlister, the director of Gemini for Education, explored how AI is already being used in their classrooms and discussed ways it can support learning while remaining aligned with instructional and curricular goals.

Professors Eric Klopfer and Samuel Madden, co-chairs of MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training, homed in on a central dilemma of whether AI is being used to offload work, rather than being used to help scaffold the concepts being taught. 

Madden, faculty head of computer science in EECS and the MIT College of Computing Distinguished Professor, described the process of cognitive struggle, whereby learning is done through a series of trials and failures. He said, “students now, when they hit that wall, their first instinct is to ask AI. They don’t see this as excelling in this process, and they haven’t actually acquired the skill you’re assessing.” The question then becomes how instructors maintain the process of cognitive struggle so it provides just enough of a challenge to combat the urge to use AI. 

Klopfer, who serves as director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and the Education Arcade at MIT, echoed similar sentiments, in that critical thinking is no longer becoming a crucial step in the output of the work. Regarding where to start in keeping material just challenging enough, Klopfer suggested examining the curriculum as a whole. “Some core content has to go. We keep adding, instead of parsing or pruning,” he said. 

Moderator Justin Reich, director of the Teaching Systems Lab and an associate professor in the Comparative Media Studies Program/Writing, noted that while teens know that AI is bad, it doesn’t necessarily stop their AI usage. However, by inviting them into the discussion on how AI is implemented and incorporating a more reflective exchange with instructors, students could be more equipped to choose how they use these tools and why.

Regardless, AI tools and their implementation should not be treated as a one-size-fits-all policy. Pat Pataranutaporn, the Asahi Broadcasting Corporation Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and head of the Cyborg Psychology research group at the MIT Media Lab, said, “AI is not just one thing. It can and should be designed differently to promote things like creativity and critical thinking. What we measure, and how, shouldn’t be about getting the answer right. We should think about it would really mean for a student to learn these days.”

Is mimicking human reasoning just as good as the real thing?

With a slide deck that included chess grandmasters and film references, Kleinberg’s keynote address, titled “AI’s Models of the World, and Ours,” evaluated instances where AI systems have inadvertently set us up to fail due to a mismatch between the system’s model of the world and ours. 

To illustrate this point, Kleinberg used chess, where modern chess engines can compete at superhuman levels, but when paired with human partners, their strategies aren’t understandable or inferable to their human counterpart. These human handoffs would then lead to confusion. Kleinberg used the example of “The Fellowship of the Ring,” where Gandalf, a powerful wizard, entrusts a highly dangerous and important quest to a ragtag group of adventurers. For those familiar with the story, the group is unexpectedly left without Gandalf’s guidance, sending them into a temporary bout of very serious turmoil. 

When the chess engine hands a turn over to its human partner, the human struggles to pick up on the predictive move pattern that the engine has been following up until this point. “The danger of human-algorithm teams is that when the human takes over, the algorithm knows what it wants to do next, but the human doesn’t,” explained Kleinberg.

These analogies showcase the differences in the ways AI understands a world — through predictive simulations, pattern recognition, and constraints — to mimic human reasoning versus the innate, embodied knowledge that comes with the human experience, and whether these systems truly understand the worlds in which they’re operating. But the question remains that if the game still results in a checkmate, does it matter?

This April, humanity had front-row seats to space as the Artemis II Orion spacecraft transmitted crystal-clear footage of its historic journey around the moon over more than 250,000 miles back to Earth at speeds on par with those of home internet connections. 

The livestreaming of high-definition videos and high-resolution photos of the moon and Earth was made possible through the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O). Developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory in collaboration with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the onboard O2O payload was the space end of a high-speed laser communications (lasercom) link. 

This link reached Earth when Orion had a line of sight with primary optical ground stations located at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico and Caltech/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Table Mountain Facility in California, or an experimental ground station at Australian National University’s Mount Stromlo Observatory. 

Together with terrestrial networks, O2O formed an internet backbone between the Artemis II Orion spacecraft and the Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas.

Toward a high-speed internet in space

"Our goal was to demonstrate O2O's operational utility for human spaceflight, extending the high-bandwidth connections that internet users enjoy on Earth to astronauts in deep space," says lead systems engineer Farzana Khatri, a senior staff member in Lincoln Laboratory's Optical and Quantum Communications Group. "We not only demonstrated the first use of lasercom on a crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit, but also attracted massive public engagement as the astronauts shared multimedia from their journey in near-real time."

During the last missions to the moon in the late 1960s and early '70s, astronauts relied on radio-frequency systems to communicate. But radio waves can only carry so much data per second because of their low carrier frequency; the grainy, poor-quality video and images of the moon from that time speak to this limited bandwidth. 

With its much higher carrier frequency, infrared laser light can transmit 10 to 100 times more data per second than can radio waves. The switch from Apollo-era radios to Artemis-era lasers is analogous to the move from dial-up to high-speed internet. And a high-speed internet is rapidly becoming a key requirement for NASA missions as they collect more high-resolution data and push humans farther into deep space.

Lasering in on unprecedented views

During the Artemis II mission, from April 1 to 11, O2O downlinked nearly half a terabyte of data at speeds up to 260 megabits per second. This data trove contained never-before-seen views of the basins and craters on the far side of the moon, a crescent Earth setting behind the moon, a nearly hour-long total solar eclipse with other planets scattered across a star-filled sky, and flashes of light from tiny meteoroids striking the lunar surface.

"O2O was able to downlink all the data stored on multiple onboard cameras, allowing mission control to erase the memory cards and refill them with new photos and videos," explains Khatri. "For any space mission, scientists and spacecraft engineers are concerned that data not sent down during the mission can become corrupted or get destroyed. And, when the spacecraft capsule returns, downloading the data can sometimes take months. The lasercom capability provided by O2O ensured the data were preserved and immediately available for analysis."

O2O is based on the laboratory's R&D 100 Award–winning Modular, Agile, and Scalable Optical Terminal (MAScOT), which contains subassembly modules for pointing the laser beams, establishing a communications link with ground stations, and maintaining this link despite atmospheric conditions. MAScOT made its debut in space on the International Space Station in 2023, demonstrating NASA's first LEO user for their lasercom relay system.

Over the moon for O2O

Leading up to the launch of Artemis II, operations teams from the laboratory traveled to NASA's White Sands Test Facility and Mission Control Center (MCC) to conduct monthly maintenance on ground hardware and simulate different mission stages. During the 10-day mission, laboratory teams provided 24/7 coverage. 

At mission control, one laboratory team, along with NASA Goddard colleagues, interfaced with a mission flight controller to command the O2O payload, coordinated with U.S. and Australian ground terminals to bring up the O2O physical link, assessed whether overall O2O mission requirements were being met, and analyzed data to ensure payload health and optimize performance. Another laboratory team oversaw subsystems of the optical ground terminal at White Sands, while staff at the laboratory's main campus in Massachusetts offered subject-matter expertise.

Initially, O2O had a scheduled operational window of one hour per day, with the onboard radio system set to downlink most data. However, mission operators found O2O so useful that they maximized its operational time as the mission progressed. On the fly, mission operators adjusted Orion's attitude — how the spacecraft is oriented in space — so that O2O could have line-of-sight access with the ground.

"One special aspect of this mission that enabled our technology to be so impactful was the flexibility built into the planning process to account for the fact that humans hadn't been to the moon in more than 50 years, and it would be the first time sending astronauts on Orion," says Bryan Robinson, leader of the Optical and Quantum Communications Group. "An established process for making real-time changes to the plan and the willingness of operators to try out this new technology had a huge impact, even for this short mission. This impact was tangible by everyone in mission operations and by the public watching from home."

With Artemis II completed, engineers, scientists, and mission specialists are analyzing mission data. Their analyses will provide insights into spacecraft and subsystem performance and moon geology, which will inform lunar landings and deep-space exploration. While the laboratory team is still processing O2O performance data, they believe the system could downlink at least 10 times more data by improving the efficiency of the downlink process and by addressing data-flow bottlenecks in space and ground networks.

The laboratory team is now evaluating how lasercom could support future moon plans for Artemis and Ignition. Aligning with the National Space Policy to secure U.S. leadership in space, Ignition is a recently announced initiative to establish a permanent lunar base with a sustainable human presence.

"Participating in this historic mission from the MCC and having O2O be useful, I couldn't have asked for anything more amazing in my career," Khatri says.

"When I came home, I was floored by the response of people who engaged with the mission while it was happening. Much of that engagement was enabled by the technology we developed. That's a rare moment in a career doing what we do," Robinson adds.