For years, civil society organizations, workers, journalists, and human rights experts have warned that major technology companies risk enabling grave human rights abuses when they provide cloud computing, AI, and surveillance infrastructure to governments implicated in violations of international and humanitarian law. While many companies pay lip service to evaluating customers and contracts for human rights implications (lip service Exhibit A: Palantir!), too often those processes fail to provide any meaningful accountability when their standards are not met or are simply ignored. But recent developments at Microsoft suggest that accountability for failing to uphold the human rights standards that a company itself sets, even if incomplete, is possible. 

According to recent reporting, Microsoft’s Israel chief has departed amid an escalating ethical controversy surrounding the company’s business relationships with the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The move follows months of scrutiny, internal dissent, and sustained pressure from inside the organization along with press and civil society, especially after a report by The Guardian revealed that Microsoft technologies were used in systems connected to mass surveillance and military targeting operations in Gaza in ways that appeared to violate Microsoft’s own standards. This did not happen overnight.

In September 2025, Microsoft reportedly suspended certain services after initial investigations raised serious concerns about how its cloud and AI infrastructure may have been used. That alone distinguished Microsoft from many of its peers. Rather than simply dismissing mounting concerns or hiding behind vague claims of neutrality, Microsoft appeared to recognize that providing technology in conflict settings creates real human rights responsibilities. Now, after additional investigation and continued public scrutiny, it appears the company has taken another step, one that should send a strong signal to others that violating Microsoft’s human rights commitments could cost you your job. This is important. 

There is still much more Microsoft should do, of course. The company has yet to fully disclose the scope of its findings, explain exactly which services were suspended, or clarify what safeguards remain in place to prevent its technologies from contributing to human rights abuses in the future. We shouldn’t have to infer the connection between this employment action and the company’s investigation. 

Just prior to reports that Microsoft had fired its Israel Country General Manager, EFF joined Access Now, Amnesty International, Fight for the Future, and 7amleh in a joint May 7, 2026 letter to Microsoft leadership calling on the company to publicly release the findings of its investigation, suspend business relationships tied to serious human rights abuses, and implement meaningful safeguards to prevent its technologies from contributing to further harm. The letter detailed allegations regarding Microsoft’s reported provision of Azure cloud and AI services to Israeli military and intelligence units involved in surveillance and targeting operations, while also pressing the company to take concrete human rights due diligence measures going forward. Those demands remain urgent, even as Microsoft appears to be taking some of the steps we urged.

But even as we push for more, it is important to recognize when a company takes steps in the right direction. Because this is what it means to put human rights commitments into practice. It means acknowledging that human rights policies are not just branding exercises or transparency reports. It means accepting that companies providing cloud infrastructure and AI services have responsibilities when credible evidence emerges that their technologies may be enabling violations of international law. And it means taking concrete action when those risks become known.

The allegations facing Microsoft are serious. Human rights organizations and investigative reporting have documented claims that Microsoft Azure services were used by Israeli military and intelligence units to process large-scale surveillance data, support AI-assisted targeting systems, and sustain military cloud infrastructure during the war in Gaza. The concerns raised extend beyond ordinary business risk; they implicate potential complicity in violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.

Faced with these allegations, Microsoft could have chosen the path many tech companies take: deny everything, attack critics, suppress worker dissent, and continue business as usual. Instead, the company appears to have begun responding to the evidence.

Technology companies are not powerless bystanders. Cloud providers and AI companies make choices every day about who gets access to their infrastructure, under what conditions, and with what oversight. When companies claim to uphold human rights principles, those commitments should have operational consequences. Too many companies, in both international and domestic policing contexts, provide technology to institutions that violate people’s human rights and civil liberties, then fall back on the claim that they are merely providing a service that their customers can use how they see fit. This is an ethical failing that falls short of most companies’ publicly expressed commitments. Microsoft’s recent actions suggest that sustained public pressure, worker organizing, investigative journalism, and civil society advocacy can force even the world’s largest technology companies to respond.

Google and Amazon should especially see this as a clear example to follow. Both companies also provide services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense and have faced years of criticism over those contracts and services, including from EFF. Yet neither has demonstrated the level of responsiveness or accountability that Microsoft has shown. If Microsoft can suspend services, investigate allegations, and make leadership changes amid mounting evidence and ethical concerns, then other cloud giants can no longer pretend that meaningful action is impossible.

The technology industry has spent years insisting that ethics and human rights matter. The real test has always been whether those principles survive when profits, government contracts, and geopolitical pressure are on the line. Microsoft’s recent steps are not the end of that story, but they may mark the beginning of what real accountability can look like.

We’re looking at you, Amazon and Google. If Microsoft can do it, why can’t you?

Urbanization in the Asia-Pacific region of the world is occurring at an alarmingly rapid pace, with more than 2.2 billion people now living in cities in the region, and an additional 1.2 billion projected to migrate to cities by 2050, according to a February 2026 report from the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, the Asian Development Bank, and the U.N. Development Program.

Such rapid growth places stress on nearly every aspect of urban areas, including housing, drinking water and sewage sources, roads and other transportation modes, and often results in environmental degradation and an increased vulnerability to climate-related disaster. But the situation also presents opportunities for doing things differently by deploying improved urban planning and management approaches, economic development strategies, as well as innovative technologies in real estate development and investment.

With a keen awareness of this ongoing urbanization and the pressures it brings, the MIT Center for Real Estate (CRE) within the MIT School of Architecture and Planning established the MIT Asia Real Estate Initiative (AREI) in 2022. The AREI mission is to serve as a platform for collaborative research, education, and industry engagement that will help urban areas across the Asia-Pacific region and the Gulf Corridor adapt to these ongoing challenges and allow their growing populations to thrive.

The AREI is co-directed by Professor Siqi Zheng, faculty director of the CRE and director of the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab, and James Scott MS ’16, a lecturer who is director of industry and professional programs for the CRE and director of the MIT Real Estate Transformation Lab.

“Imagine a region building the equivalent of a Boston every 40 days,” says Zheng, the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability. “Asia is not just urbanizing. It’s redefining city life on a planetary scale.

“Drawing on MIT CRE’s deep roots in the region — more than half of international students in our MSRED program hail from Asia, and we have a robust 40-year alumni network spanning the Asia-Pacific countries and Gulf Corridor countries of West Asia — the AREI will naturally extend MIT’s role as a global convening point for real estate thought leaders.”

The initiative’s work will center on three pillars tailored to Asia’s urban needs: sustainable cities and real estate, urban vibrancy and dynamics, and technology and innovation.

Zheng is a leading scholar of sustainable urban development, real estate markets, and environmental quality, with particular expertise in China and Asia. She currently serves as president of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association and is a former president of the Asia Real Estate Society. Her research, which has appeared in leading journals across urban and real estate economics, environmental science, and urban studies, examines the tensions and synergies between fast urbanization and quality of life in cities, and how cities can develop their resilience against future uncertainties. She is now coauthoring a book with Matthew Kahn titled, “The Triumph of Asian Cities: Growth, Risk and Resilience in the 21st Century” (Harvard University Press).

Co-director Scott specializes in technology and innovation in the built environment. While attending MIT as a graduate student, his focus quickly moved in this direction. He has since played a pivotal role in advancing innovation and adoption of technology across some of the largest and most forward-thinking real estate organizations. Much of his work now is in PropTech, an inclusive phrase referring to new technologies in all areas of real estate, including financing, construction, sales, and materials lifespan, among others. His focal areas are Japan, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and other West Asian countries.

Scott credits the quick uptake of new PropTech for helping advance the speed of development in these regions.

“The sheer scale and pace of development across the Asia-Pacific and Gulf Corridor regions is extraordinary, from landmark projects like the Burj in Dubai to the transformative mega-developments in Saudi Arabia and the remarkable urban expansion seen in cities like Beijing and Shanghai over the past 10 to 15 years,” Scott says.

“Boston, by contrast, reflects a more incremental but equally important model of urban evolution,” he says. “The difference is not one of ambition, but of tempo and scale, and it underscores the diverse ways cities around the world are driving innovation in the built environment. This also highlights how the AREI can foster two-way learning across different development contexts, creating a platform for shared insights between rapidly evolving markets and more incremental urban ecosystems.”

In addition to its MIT headquarters, the initiative has two regional hubs — one in Tokyo, the other in Dubai, with a third planned for Hong Kong. The hubs will serve as loci for regional research, as well as provide a means of organizing the CRE’s many alumni in these areas for professional opportunities. For this reason, successful alumni have been selected to head each of the hubs.

Taka Kiura MS ’00 is director of the Toyko hub. After working for the global real estate development firm Heitman for more than 20 years, Kiura last year founded Base-K, a real estate and venture capital investment firm. He also is CEO and founder of HyStat, an investment firm that backs and accelerates the adoption of next-generation technologies.

The Dubai Hub is directed by Ocean Saleem Jangda MS ’25, who works on development innovation partnerships at Majid Al Futtaim Properties, one of the largest mixed-use developers in the Gulf Region.

This spring, Zheng is co-taught course 15.S67 (Special Seminar in Management) in the MIT Sloan-CRE Real Estate Lab. The course, co-taught with Hong Ru, a visiting associate professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management, deployed interdisciplinary student teams to work on applied projects, one of which is in Singapore. Zheng also has partnered with MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives, a program under the MIT Center for International Studies, that is offering student internships with the AREI Hong Kong hub next January.

Another of the steps in the directors’ goal of coalescing CRE alumni in these areas will be organized by Ryan Othman, who will return to Saudi Arabia following completion of his master’s this month to launch his real estate development business in mid-sized market residential and industrial projects.

Othman, who also holds a BS in civil engineering and an SM in finance, will lead an MSRED/AREI trek to introduce next year’s MSRED students to alumni and other business and government officials in Saudi Arabia. “The MIT’s master’s in real estate development is the oldest in the country,” he says. “It’s a powerful program with an amazing alumni network, which I’d like to help expand.”

“Asian cities have become the defining arena for global economic growth, environmental change, and human welfare in the 21st century,” Zheng explains. “Their future depends on durable, place-based infrastructure, real estate investments shaped by regional integration, human capital, and how these cities interact with each other and the rest of the world.

“The outcome of this incredible growth will largely determine global living standards and environmental consequences for the remainder of this century. I believe the MIT Asia Real Estate Initiative is a great platform for the MIT community to make its intellectual contribution to these mega-dynamics.” 

Senior MBA student Patrick Yeung came to MIT Sloan School of Management wanting to be surrounded by a community of builders. 

“I come from a consulting background, which has its own strengths and gives you a specific toolkit, but I felt like I was not very technical, and so I wanted to be surrounded and inspired by people who had that knowledge and experience,” he says.

“MIT Sloan’s Sustainability Initiative provides a great platform to help a generalist like myself become more specialized in this space, whether it be the Sustainability lunch series that they run every Thursday, the annual conference that gets organized, or the class catalog that aligns with the Sustainability Certificate.”

Yeung eventually hopes to join a climate tech scale-up to help formalize the business and scale, using what he’s learned at MIT Sloan to make a real impact.

“I've come to appreciate the systems thinking approach to sustainability that MIT Sloan has, especially in the context of the tech and lab-scale tech spinout ecosystem that MIT more broadly has. The technology is obviously an important piece of both climate mitigation and adaptation, but we will also need other techno-economic regime changes to be able to truly change our planet for the better — that takes policy and legal changes, that takes leadership and courage, and ultimately it takes a willingness to fail, over and over, in order to iterate.”

The following photo gallery provides a snapshot of what a typical day for Yeung has been like as an MIT student.

The Haystack 37m Telescope has been a landmark in radio astronomy and radar studies of the solar system since its first light in 1964. Over the following four decades, it supported NASA's Apollo landings on the moon, made planetary radar maps of the surface of Venus, contributed to experimental tests of Einstein's general relativity, supported the development of VLBI, and conducted foundational studies of quasars and star-forming regions. 

Recently, the Haystack 37m Telescope — a 37-meter radio and millimeter-wavelength antenna at MIT Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts — made its return to front-line astronomical research following an extended period of system upgrades. These observations reconnect this instrument with its long tradition of scientific discovery and open a new chapter.

On Dec. 8, 2025, Haystack scientists observed the supermassive black hole system at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) using a technique called very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) that links telescopes across continents to achieve extraordinary resolution. These observations mark the return of one of America's most storied radio telescopes to its historical scientific and educational mission.

The observations targeted the powerful jet of energy and matter launched from M87’s central black hole, M87*. This jet, driven by a black hole six-and-a-half billion times the mass of our sun, extends thousands of light years into intergalactic space and is one of the most energetic phenomena in the known universe. 

Previous international campaigns, namely those led by the Event Horizon Telescope, have imaged the black hole's immediate “shadow.” The Haystack 37m Telescope observations, performed in collaboration with the telescopes of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and the Greenland Telescope (GLT), help to probe the larger-scale structure of the jet, investigating how energy is transported far beyond the black hole's vicinity. Understanding this process is central to explaining how supermassive black holes shape the galaxies that surround them.

“The Haystack 37m Telescope’s exceptional sensitivity enables the intercontinental telescope array to detect faint emission from around the distant M87* black hole,” says Paul Tiede, principal investigator of the M87 study. “In tandem with the GLT and the VLBA, Haystack is helping create the first multifrequency movies of M87*’s faint jet, greatly improving our understanding of black hole physics.”

The upgraded Haystack 37m Telescope opens multiple new lines of research. At MIT, Saverio Cambioni and Richard Teague of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) plan to use the instrument within MIT’s Planetary Defense Project to measure asteroid sizes and shapes, characterizing objects that could pose a hazard to Earth and deepening our understanding of the solar system’s formation. Associate Professor Brett McGuire of the Department of Chemistry plans to search for complex organic molecules in space, work that speaks to the question of how the chemical precursors to life arise.

“We are thrilled to provide the research community with a powerful telescope at a time where few such instruments are available,” says Jens Kauffmann, principal investigator of the Haystack 37m Telescope Astronomy Program, who uses the telescope to study the formation of stars and their planets. “Even more exciting are the prospects this generates for the next generation of astronomers. Hands-on training opportunities on world-class research telescopes have become exceptionally rare worldwide, and now we can offer this singular advanced workforce development program right here in Massachusetts.”

Student involvement with the Haystack 37m Telescope has already resumed: Undergraduate interns at Haystack Observatory played an active role in developing the telescope’s control systems and data analysis algorithms. This work exemplifies Haystack’s role as a hands-on research and training environment where students contribute directly and gain practical experience with a frontline research instrument.

The return to research-focused observations is the result of more than 10 years of careful, sustained work. From 2010 to 2014, the Haystack 37m Telescope underwent a major upgrade and refurbishment that enhanced its ability to observe at millimeter wavelengths. This work was primarily done to improve the antenna’s capability as a space radar. The dish now primarily serves U.S. government agencies in that capability, and astronomy was temporarily a secondary activity. 

But work to restore the telescope's science capability never stopped. Initial support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2015 modernized systems for data analysis and radio signal processing. The first successful engineering-oriented VLBI experiments with the new dish were conducted at the same time. Additional NSF funding in 2019, provided in the context of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) program, enabled a more general and sustained effort to upgrade receiver equipment and computing systems. Support from private donors to Haystack also aided in this longer-term effort.

Several recent developments, particularly in 2025, proved significant. With support from MIT's Jarve Seed Fund for Science Innovation, scientists and engineers removed lingering technical limitations with astronomy systems and expanded the telescope's scientific reach. Other funding for projects led by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory enabled the M87 campaign and commissioning of the next-generation digital back end, a highly advanced signal-processing system developed for the ngEHT. Together, these advances made the December 2025 observations possible. MIT Haystack Observatory is now pursuing support from both private and federal sources for further improvements under the Haystack 37m Telescope Astronomy Program.

“The upgraded Haystack 37m Telescope empowers MIT students and researchers to pursue fundamental questions relating to our origins and our solar system,” says Richard Teague, professor at MIT EAPS. “With privileged access to such a powerful facility, we can undertake ambitious observational programs previously impossible to schedule. This is the beginning of what we expect will be an exciting era of new discoveries with the Haystack 37m Telescope.”

Using a powerful single-molecule imaging method they developed, a research team from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has unveiled a dynamic view of how some cancer-related proteins interact in living cells. 

The technique relies on highly stable nanoparticle probes that brightly illuminate individual molecules for long periods of time. The researchers used their method to observe, for the first time, individual receptors as they move around the cell membrane, attaching to and then letting go of other receptors to alter signaling within the cell.

Described in the journal Cell, the work demonstrates the method’s potential for investigating other receptors and molecules, and for improved drug screening to better understand the effects of therapeutics on living cells.

“With our photostable probes, we can map out the entire lifespan of these molecules in their native environment and see things that have never been observable before,” says study leader Sam Peng, a Broad Institute core institute member and assistant professor of chemistry at MIT.

Molecular movies

Peng’s method solves a problem with existing contrast agents used in single-molecule tracking, such as dyes. Under the laser light that’s used to excite these dyes, they burn out after a few seconds in a phenomenon known as photobleaching, which means that scientists could only use them to take a few snapshots of cell receptors, and not follow them over the entirety of the signaling process.

For a longer and richer view, Peng’s lab developed long-lasting probes, known as upconverting nanoparticles, which emit signals that remain stable under laser excitation. The nanoparticles contain rare-earth ions that continue to luminescence for minutes, hours, and potentially years. In addition, by altering the type and doses of the ions, scientists can engineer probes emitting in many different colors, enabling tracking of many targets in a single experiment.

In the current study, the researchers aimed to uncover new biology by focusing on the EGFR family of cell receptors, which have been linked to several kinds of cancer. They collaborated with EGFR experts Matthew Meyerson and Heidi Greulich of the Broad’s Cancer Program. They knew that EGFR receptors need to pair up, or “dimerize,” in order to initiate signaling within the cell, but they wanted to learn more about the dynamics of these pairings — what the receptors partner with, how long they stay together, and how they find new partners.

For a better and more sustained look at the receptors, the research team customized their upconverting nanoparticles to tag EGFR and related receptors HER2 and HER3, which are linked to cancer, and used them to track the molecules in living human cells.

A new view of protein pairings

In this study, Peng and his team observed that, when activated with a stimulating molecule, EGFR receptors can pair up and stay dimerized for several minutes, something not observable using traditional dyes. Excessive and prolonged dimerization can lead to too much cell growth and cancer.

A microscopy video shows upconverting nanoparticles tagged to EGFR receptors (labeled pink and green), which track individual receptors as they dimerize. Image courtesy of the researchers.

When the EGFR molecules carried cancer-related mutations, the dimers became more stable, with the more stabilizing mutations linked to more potent cancers in people. In addition, the mutated receptors could form stable dimers even without an external stimulus prompting them to dimerize. The finding helps explain how EGFR mutations can lead to uncontrolled cell growth and cancer, and could inform efforts to target this process therapeutically.

The team discovered several other new and surprising details about how HER2 and HER3 form stable pairings with themselves, which helps illuminate the role of these molecules in related cancers.

When the research team tagged all three receptor types in one experiment, they observed a vibrant scene with receptors navigating the cell surface, finding partners, unpairing, and then finding new partners, over and over again.

Beyond shedding light on EGFR biology, the scientists hope that collaborators in other fields will apply their method to ask new scientific questions about other proteins of interest. “We think this technique could be transformative for studying molecular biology, because it enables dynamic biological processes to be observed with high spatiotemporal resolution over unprecedented timescales,” says Peng.

They are also planning to explore the method’s use in studying the mechanism of drug action, to reveal how potential therapeutics alter individual molecules over time. In addition, they will continue to improve their methods, such as making the probes smaller, brighter, and able to emit more colors.

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”-Meta Internal Document on face recognition software for smart glasses, 2025

It’s unsurprising that a company would plan to release yet another privacy-invasive product. What is surprising is that they think we aren’t watching. You can help us keep them in check.

JOIN EFF

Meta isn't the only company actively eroding your privacy. We found that Google has broken its promise to some users to inform them about government surveillance. And Palantir is completely failing to live up to its purported human rights commitments.

Corporations bear responsibility for violating user trust and human rights, and EFF is holding them accountable with your support.

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We're suing DHS and ICE to reveal their efforts to unmask online critics, creating privacy-enhancing free software, and pushing for stronger privacy laws for everyone. This is all thanks to over 30,000 EFF members—a community you can join today.

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Not by name, but Laurie Anderson quotes me in one of the tracks of her new album:

My favorite quote is from a cryptologist who said “If you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology and you don’t understand your problems.”

Also in interviews:

“Of course, it’s ridiculous, outrageous, blah, blah, blah,” Anderson says about the ad. ‘But, I mean, my favorite quote on this is from a cryptologist who said, ‘If you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology ­ and you don’t understand your problems.’ And I think I’m completely on board with that.”...

The nation’s largest builder of wind and solar projects is moving into the heart of the data center boom with its plans to acquire Virginia’s Dominion Energy. It could affect energy prices and the environment.

Oklahoma's insurance commissioner says the law doesn't address the reason for property insurance hikes: increasing property damage.

The country would be the first to prevent courts from finding companies liable for climate change damage — a move lawyers say "risks undermining the rule of law."

The weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation could alter weather and ecosystems throughout the world.

The new draft instead pledges that the commission “will improve the mechanism further,” working with the European Parliament and council on anti-circumvention measures.

Road elevation and drainage, water basin management, and training for farmers were among the activities that attracted the most funding, said a report.

Emission reductions are “likely to be considerably lower than assumed by the federal government,” says the Council of Experts on Climate Change.

The Duchy of Cornwall, created in the 14th century to provide an income for the Prince of Wales, owns 131,393 acres of land in 19 counties across England.

Researchers worry that oxygen levels in rivers could fall so low that dead zones appear, as they have in the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and Lake Erie.

In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) could fly through a collapsed building to map the scene, giving rescuers information they need to quickly reach survivors. 

But this remains an extremely challenging problem for an autonomous robot, which would need to swiftly adjust its trajectory to avoid sudden obstacles while staying on course.

Researchers from MIT and the University of Pennsylvania developed a new trajectory-planning system that tackles both challenges at once. Their technique enables a UAV to react to obstacles in milliseconds while staying on a smooth flight path that minimizes travel time. 

Their system uses a new mathematical formulation that ensures the robot travels safely to its destination along a feasible path, and that is less computationally intensive than other techniques. In this way, it generates smoother trajectories faster than state-of-the-art methods.

The trajectory planner is also efficient enough for real-time flight using only the robot’s onboard computer and sensors. 

Named MIGHTY, the open-source system does not require proprietary software packages that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It could be more readily deployed in a wider variety of real-world settings.

In addition to search-and-rescue, MIGHTY could be utilized in applications like last-mile delivery in urban spaces, where UAVs need to avoid buildings, wires, and people, or in industrial inspection of complex structures, such as wind turbines.

“MIGHTY achieves comparable or better performance using only open-source tools, which means any researcher, student, or company — anywhere in the world — can use it freely. By removing this cost barrier, MIGHTY helps democratize high-performance trajectory planning and opens the door for a much broader community to build on this work,” says Kota Kondo, an aeronautics and astronautics graduate student and lead author of a paper on this trajectory planner.

Kondo is joined on the paper by Yuwei Wu, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania; Vijay Kumar, a professor at UPenn; and senior author Jonathan P. How, a Ford professor of aeronautics and astronautics and a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Aerospace Controls Laboratory (ACL) at MIT. The research appears in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

Overcoming trade-offs           

When Kondo was a child, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident occurred following the Great East Japan Earthquake. With school cancelled, Kondo was stuck at home and watched the news every day as workers explored and secured the reactor site. Some workers still had to enter hazardous areas to contain the damage and assess the situation, exposing them to high doses of radioactive material.

“I became passionate about creating autonomous robots that can go into these dynamic and dangerous situations, then come back and report to humans who stay out of harm’s way,” Kondo says.

This task requires a strong trajectory planner, which is software that decides the path a robot should follow to safely get from point A to point B. 

But many existing systems force tradeoffs that limit performance. 

While some commercial systems can rapidly generate smooth trajectories, they can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Open-source alternatives often underperform compared to commercial solvers or are difficult to use.      

With MIGHTY, Kondo and his colleagues developed an open-source system that produces high-quality, smooth trajectories while reacting to obstacles in real-time, and which runs fast enough for flight using only onboard components.

To do this, they overcame a key challenge that limits many open-source systems. 

These methods usually estimate how long it will take the robot to get from point A to point B as a first step. From that fixed estimation of travel time, the planner finds the best path to reach the destination.

While using a fixed travel time allows the planner to rapidly generate a trajectory, it has drawbacks. For one, if the UAV must go far out of its way to avoid obstacles, it could be forced to crank up the speed to meet the fixed travel-time budget. This makes it harder to avoid sudden hazards.

A MIGHTY method

Instead, MIGHTY uses a mathematical technique, called a Hermite spline, that optimizes the travel time and flight path together, in a single step, to form a smooth trajectory that can be precisely controlled.

“Optimizing the spatial and temporal components together gets us better results, but now the optimization becomes so much bigger that it is harder to solve in a feasible amount of time,” Kondo says.

The researchers used a clever technique to reduce this computational overhead. 

Instead of generating a trajectory from scratch each time, MIGHTY makes an initial guess of a trajectory. Then it refines the trajectory through an iterative optimization, using a map of the scene generated by the UAV’s lidar sensors.

“We can make a decent guess of what the trajectory should be, which is a lot faster than generating the entire thing from nothing,” Kondo says.

This enables MIGHTY to react in real-time to unknown obstacles while keeping the trajectory smooth and minimizing travel time. The system utilizes the UAV’s onboard components, which is important for applications where a robot might travel far from a base station.

In simulated experiments, MIGHTY needed only about 90 percent of the computation time required by state-of-the-art methods, while safely reaching its destination about 15 percent faster than these approaches. 

When they tested the system on real robots, it reached a speed of 6.7 meters per second while avoiding every obstacle that appeared in its path.

“With MIGHTY, everything is integrated in one piece. It doesn’t need to talk to any other piece of software to get a solution. This helps us be even faster than some of the commercial solvers,” Kondo says.

In the future, the researchers want to enhance MIGHTY so it can be used to control multiple robots at once and conduct more flight experiments in challenging environments. They hope to continue improving the open-source system based on user feedback.

“MIGHTY makes an important contribution to agile robot navigation by revisiting the trajectory representation itself. Hermite splines have already been successfully used in visual simultaneous localization and mapping, and it is nice to see their advantages now being exploited for trajectory planning in mobile robots. By enabling joint optimization of path geometry, timing, velocity, and acceleration while retaining local control of the trajectory, MIGHTY gives robots more freedom to compute fast, dynamically feasible motions in cluttered environments,” says Davide Scaramuzza, professor and director of the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich, who was not involved with this research.

This research was funded, in part, by the United States Army Research Laboratory and the Defense Science and Technology Agency in Singapore.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 19 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02640-x

Climate change impacts are no longer distant but have entered people’s everyday experiences. Here we look back on a 2011 paper that showed how direct personal experience shapes people’s climate change perceptions, their beliefs about the efficacy of their action and willingness to act, and how the field of research has evolved.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 19 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02655-4

The authors reconstruct historical seabird dispersal routes, showing that birds responded to temperature shifts by changes in range size rather than body mass. These trends are projected to persist, with higher rates of warming causing greater range contractions and longer dispersal distances.

The brain’s capacity to use and understand language expands rapidly in the first years of life, as babies start to make sense of the words they hear and eventually begin to piece together sentences of their own. The language-processing parts of the brain that make this possible continue to evolve in older children, as they expand their vocabularies and learn to use language more flexibly. 

MIT brain researchers have captured snapshots of the developing language-processing network in brain scans of hundreds of children and adolescents. Their data, reported May 16 in the journal Nature Communications, show that the network continues to mature, becoming better integrated and increasingly responsive until around age 16. But they also found that a key feature of the adult language network is established early on: its localization in the left side of the brain. 

Language lateralization 

It is well known that using language is mostly the job of the left hemisphere. As adults, we call on the language-processing regions there when we read, write, speak, or listen to others talk. But there was some question as to whether this left lateralization is established early in life, or might instead emerge as the language network matures, with both sides of the brain contributing to language in childhood. 

To find out, researchers needed to see young brains in action — and several MIT labs had collected exactly the right kind of data. Groups led by Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences; John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology; and Rebecca Saxe, the John W. Jarve (1978) Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, teamed up to share brain scans from children, adolescents, and adults and compare how their brains responded to language. Fedorenko, Gabrieli, and Saxe are also investigators at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. 

In studies aimed at better understanding a variety of cognitive functions and developmental disorders, the three teams had all collected functional MRI data while subjects participated in “language localizer” tasks — an approach the Fedorenko lab developed to map the language-processing network in a person’s brain. By monitoring brain activity with functional MRI as people engage in both language tasks and non-linguistic tasks, researchers can identify parts of the brain that are exclusively dedicated to language processing, whose precise anatomic location varies across individuals. 

To activate the language network, the researchers had children listen to stories inside the MRI scanner. Depending on their age, some heard excerpts of “Alice in Wonderland,” some listened to podcasts and TED talks, and others heard shorter, simpler stories. To watch their brains during a non-linguistic task, the researchers had the children listen to nonsense words. 

Across the data from the three labs, which included children between the ages of 4 and 16, as well as adults for comparison, the team saw clear developmental changes in the brain’s response to language. “The integration of the system — how well different subregions of the system correlated with each other and worked together during language processing — was stronger in older children as compared to younger children,” says Ola Ozernov-Palchik, a research scientist in Gabrieli’s lab and a research assistant professor at Boston University. The system was also more strongly activated by language in older children, which may reflect their growing comprehension of what they hear. 

But strikingly, almost all language processing happened on the left side of the brain, even in the youngest subjects. “From age 4 on, it seems just as lateralized as in an adult,” Gabrieli says. 

Language and developmental disorders 

The researchers say this finding has implications for understanding developmental conditions that impact language, including autism and dyslexia. The right side of the brain frequently gets more involved in language processing in people with these conditions than it does in typically developing children. “Almost every single developmental disorder that’s associated with language has a theory that’s related to language lateralization,” Ozernov-Palchik says. 

The reason for more bilateral language processing in some disorders is debated. One idea has been that some people might use both sides of their brain for language processing because their brains are less mature. If the right side of the brain processes language early in life, scientists had reasoned, it might simply continue to do so for longer in people with autism or dyslexia than it does in neurotypical individuals. But if most people use the left side of their brains for language even when they are young, the difference can’t be attributed to a developmental delay. Other developmental differences might cause bilateral language processing instead. 

The researchers don’t have the full picture yet; they still need to know what parts of the brain process language in children younger than 4. Likewise, they would like to know what the brain areas that become the language network are doing in the first months of life, when infants aren’t using language yet. They are eager to find out, both to understand fundamentals of brain development and to shed light on developmental disorders. “I think understanding that normal trajectory is really critical for interpreting what a deviation from that trajectory is,” says Amanda O’Brien, a former graduate student in Gabrieli’s lab who is now a postdoc at Harvard University. 

One reason people thought lateralization might develop gradually is because damage to the left hemisphere of the brain impacts language abilities differently, depending on when it occurs. “If you have damage to the left hemisphere as an adult, you’re very likely to end up with some form of aphasia, at least temporarily,” Fedorenko explains. “But a lot of the time, with early damage to the left hemisphere, you grow up and you’re totally fine. The language can just develop in the right hemisphere.” 

Some scientists suspected that the right side of the brain was able to take over language processing in children who suffered early-life brain damage because it was already participating in this function at the time. But the team’s findings suggest the developing brain may be nimbler than that. “Our data tell you that this early plasticity apparently happens in spite of the fact that by age 4, we see these very strongly lateralized responses already,” Fedorenko says.