A magistrate judge in Puerto Rico said municipalities suing fossil fuel companies should get their day in court.

The challenge is the latest effort by conservatives to block state attorneys general from partnering with a Michael Bloomberg-backed fellowship program in environmental cases.

The delivery of disaster aid is on the Government Accountability Office's High-Risk List for the first time as climate-related costs soar and Federal Emergency Management Agency staffing lags.

Prices for carbon allowances are trading at $12.49 less per ton than at this time last year.

The U.S. High Speed Rail Coalition said its first target is supporting a cap-and-trade extension for the state’s high-speed rail project.

France, Italy and Poland support the move, but others fear it might prompt President Donald Trump to retaliate in anger.

According to a report, in order for the country to get back on track, its annual blast furnace capacity has to shrink by at least 200 million tons from its 2020 base.

A possible climate-change-triggered shutdown of what's called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation could play havoc with global rain patterns, dramatically cool Europe while warming the rest of the world and goose sea levels on America's East Coast, scientists predict.

One large metropolis might have several different train systems, from local intercity lines to commuter trains to longer regional lines.

When designing a system of train tracks, stations, and schedules in this network, should rail operators assume each entity operates independently, seeking only to maximize its own revenue? Or that they fully cooperate all the time with a joint plan, putting their own interest aside?

In the real world, neither assumption is very realistic.

Researchers from MIT and ETH Zurich have developed a new planning tool that mixes competition and cooperation to help operators in a complex, multiregional network strategically determine when and how they should work together.

Their framework is unusual because it incorporates co-investment and payoff-sharing mechanisms that identify which joint infrastructure projects a stakeholder should invest in with other operators to maximize collective benefits. The tool can help mobility stakeholders, such as governments, transport agencies, and firms, determine the right time to collaborate, how much they should invest in cooperative projects, how the profits should be distributed, and what would happen if they withdrew from the negotiations.

“It might seem counterintuitive, but sometimes you want to invest in your opponent so that, at some point, this investment will come back to you. Thanks to game theory, one can formalize this intuition to give rise to an interesting class of problems,” says Gioele Zardini, the Rudge and Nancy Allen Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), an affiliate faculty with the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and senior author of a paper on this planning framework.

Numerical analysis shows that, by investing a portion of their budget into some shared infrastructure projects, independent operators can earn more revenue than if they operated completely noncooperatively.

In the example of the rail operators, the researchers demonstrate that co-investment also benefits users by improving regional train service. This win-win situation encourages more people to take the train, boosting revenues for operators and reducing emissions from automobiles, says Mingjia He, a graduate student at ETH Zurich and lead author.

“The key point here is that transport network design is not a zero-sum game. One operator’s gain doesn’t have to mean the others’ loss. By shifting the perception from isolated, self-optimization to strategic interaction, cooperation can create greater value for everyone involved,” she says.

Beyond transportation, this planning framework could help companies in a crowded industry or governments of neighboring countries test co-investment strategies.

He and Zardini are joined on the paper by ETH Zurich researchers Andrea Censi and Emilio Frazzoli. The research will be presented at the 2025 American Control Conference (ACC), and the paper has been selected as a Student Best Paper Award finalist.

Mixing cooperation and competition

Building transportation infrastructure in a multiregional network typically requires a huge investment of time and resources. Major infrastructure projects have an outsized impact that can stretch far beyond one region or operator.

Each region has its own priorities and decision-makers, such as local transportation authorities, which often results in the failure of coordination.

“If local systems are designed separately, regional travel may be more difficult, making the whole system less efficient. But if self-interested stakeholders don’t benefit from coordination, they are less likely to support the plan,” He says.

To find the best mix of cooperation and competition, the researchers used game theory to build a framework that enables operators to align interests and improve regional cooperation in a way that benefits all.

For instance, last year the Swiss government agreed to invest 50 million euros to electrify and expand part of a regional rail network in Germany, with the goal of creating a faster rail connection between three Swiss cities.

The researchers’ planning framework could help independent entities, from regional governments to rail operators, identify when and how to undertake such collaborations.

The first step involves simulating the outcomes if operators don’t collaborate. Then, using the co-investment and payoff-sharing mechanisms, the decision-maker can explore cooperative approaches.

To identify a fair way to split revenues from shared projects, the researchers design a payoff-sharing mechanism based on a game theory concept known as the Nash bargaining solution. This technique will determine how much benefit operators would receive in different cooperative scenarios, taking into account the benefits they would achieve with no collaboration.

The benefits of co-investment

Once they had designed the planning framework, the researchers tested it on a simulated transportation network with multiple competing rail operators. They assessed various co-investment ratios across multiple years to identify the best decisions for operators.

In the end, they found that a semicooperative approach leads to the highest returns for all stakeholders. For instance, in one scenario, by co-investing 50 percent of their total budgets into shared infrastructure projects, all operators maximized their returns.

In another scenario, they show that by investing just 3.3 percent of their total budget in the first year of a multiyear cooperative project, operators can boost outcomes by 30 percent across three metrics: revenue, reduced costs for customers, and lower emissions.

“This proves that a small, up-front investment can lead to significant long-term benefits,” He says.

When they applied their framework to more realistic multiregional networks where all regions weren’t the same size, this semicooperative approach achieved even better results.

However, their analyses indicate that returns don’t increase in a linear way — sometimes increasing the co-investment ratio does not increase the benefit for operators.

Success is a multifaceted issue that depends on how much is invested by all operators, which projects are chosen, when investment happens, and how the budget is distributed over time, He explains.

“These strategic decisions are complex, which is why simulations and optimization are necessary to find the best cooperation and negotiation strategies. Our framework can help operators make smarter investment choices and guide them through the negotiation process,” she says.

The framework could also be applied to other complex network design problems, such as in communications or energy distribution.

In the future, the researchers want to build a user-friendly interface that will allow a stakeholder to easily explore different collaborative options. They also want to consider more complex scenarios, such as the role policy plays in shared infrastructure decisions or the robust cooperative strategies that handle risks and uncertainty.

This work was supported, in part, by the ETH Zurich Mobility Initiative and the ETH Zurich Foundation.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 27 February 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02258-5

Western boundary currents flow along the western edge of subtropical oceans, transporting heat polewards, and are integral in the climate system. Using high-resolution models, this work shows that western boundary currents will shift shorewards as a result of increased stratification driven by climate change.

MIT physicists report the unexpected discovery of electrons forming crystalline structures in a material only billionths of a meter thick. The work adds to a gold mine of discoveries originating from the material, which the same team discovered only about three years ago.

In a paper published Jan. 22 in Nature, the team describes how electrons in devices made, in part, of the new material can become solid, or form crystals, by changing the voltage applied to the devices when they are kept at a temperature similar to that of outer space. Under the same conditions, they also showed the emergence of two new electronic states that add to work they reported last year showing that electrons can split into fractions of themselves.

The physicists were able to make the discoveries thanks to new custom-made filters for better insulation of the equipment involved in the work. These allowed them to cool their devices to a temperature an order of magnitude colder than they achieved for the earlier results.

The team also observed all of these phenomena using two slightly different “versions” of the new material, one composed of five layers of atomically thin carbon; the other composed of four layers. This indicates “that there’s a family of materials where you can get this kind of behavior, which is exciting,” says Long Ju, an assistant professor in the MIT Department of Physics who led the work. Ju is also affiliated with MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory and Research Lab of Electronics.

Referring to the new material, known as rhombohedral pentalayer graphene, Ju says, “We found a gold mine, and every scoop is revealing something new.”

New material

Rhombohedral pentalayer graphene is essentially a special form of pencil lead. Pencil lead, or graphite, is composed of graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons resembling a honeycomb structure. Rhombohedral pentalayer graphene is composed of five layers of graphene stacked in a specific overlapping order.

Since Ju and colleagues discovered the material, they have tinkered with it by adding layers of another material they thought might accentuate the graphene’s properties, or even produce new phenomena. For example, in 2023 they created a sandwich of rhombohedral pentalayer graphene with “buns” made of hexagonal boron nitride. By applying different voltages, or amounts of electricity, to the sandwich, they discovered three important properties never before seen in natural graphite.

Last year, Ju and colleagues reported yet another important and even more surprising phenomenon: Electrons became fractions of themselves upon applying a current to a new device composed of rhombohedral pentalayer graphene and hexagonal boron nitride. This is important because this “fractional quantum Hall effect” has only been seen in a few systems, usually under very high magnetic fields. The Ju work showed that the phenomenon could occur in a fairly simple material without a magnetic field. As a result, it is called the “fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect” (anomalous indicates that no magnetic field is necessary).

New results

In the current work, the Ju team reports yet more unexpected phenomena from the general rhombohedral graphene/boron nitride system when it is cooled to 30 millikelvins (1 millikelvin is equivalent to -459.668 degrees Fahrenheit). In last year’s paper, Ju and colleagues reported six fractional states of electrons. In the current work, they report discovering two more of these fractional states.

They also found another unusual electronic phenomenon: the integer quantum anomalous Hall effect in a wide range of electron densities. The fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect was understood to emerge in an electron “liquid” phase, analogous to water. In contrast, the new state that the team has now observed can be interpreted as an electron “solid” phase — resembling the formation of electronic “ice” — that can also coexist with the fractional quantum anomalous Hall states when the system’s voltage is carefully tuned at ultra-low temperatures.

One way to think about the relation between the integer and fractional states is to imagine a map created by tuning electric voltages: By tuning the system with different voltages, you can create a “landscape” similar to a river (which represents the liquid-like fractional states) cutting through glaciers (which represent the solid-like integer effect), Ju explains.

Ju notes that his team observed all of these phenomena not only in pentalayer rhombohedral graphene, but also in rhombohedral graphene composed of four layers. This creates a family of materials, and indicates that other “relatives” may exist.

“This work shows how rich this material is in exhibiting exotic phenomena. We’ve just added more flavor to this already very interesting material,” says Zhengguang Lu, a co-first author of the paper. Lu, who conducted the work as a postdoc at MIT, is now on the faculty at Florida State University.

In addition to Ju and Lu, other principal authors of the Nature paper are Tonghang Han and Yuxuan Yao, both of MIT. Lu, Han, and Yao are co-first authors of the paper who contributed equally to the work. Other MIT authors are Jixiang Yang, Junseok Se, Lihan Shi, and Shenyong Ye. Additional members of the team are Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan.

This work was supported by a Sloan Fellowship, a Mathworks Fellowship, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI, and the World Premier International Research Initiative of Japan. Device fabrication was performed at the Harvard Center for Nanoscale Systems and MIT.nano. 

Nearly three years after Russian military forces invaded Ukraine, escalating a decade-long conflict, Ukrainian cities lie in ruin as the war drags on. The seaside city of Mariupol was particularly hard hit. Bombs hollowed out hospitals and homes and leveled banks and playgrounds. Schools sit charred and empty.

The remaining 30 percent of the population still residing in Mariupol, now under Russian occupation, lack reliable electricity, clean water, and medical care. And of the 65,000 Mariupolites in exile across Ukraine and abroad, many have no home to return to. While Ukraine’s future remains uncertain, its mayors and municipal managers are laser-focused on planning for recovery after the war. “Ukrainian communities know we should build back better when the war is finished, so what is that experience?” says Vadym Boichenko, Mariupol mayor and head of development of de-occupied and temporarily occupied communities for the Association of Ukrainian Cities. To secure funding for rebuilding, “leaders need to prepare good projects with vision and innovation for their communities,” he adds.

Success depends on drawing from cutting-edge research and forward-thinking approaches to urban economic development and planning. To expedite learning, the Kyiv-based Association of Ukrainian Cities, Mariupol City Council, and the nonprofit Mariupol Reborn created a virtual Community Recovery Academy that leans on MIT’s expertise. This online training program for Ukrainian officials includes a series of lectures by professors in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), part of the Institute’s School of Architecture and Planning. Talks include wisdom drawn from case studies coupled with theoretical lessons.

“When I first learned of this opportunity, trying to mobilize a contribution from DUSP was a no-brainer; it’s the very least we can offer,” says Christopher Zegras, DUSP department head and professor of mobility and urban planning. Increasingly destructive weather events and ongoing conflicts worldwide have made post-disaster planning “a global need, and unfortunately probably an increasing global need,” Zegras adds.

An MIT connection

The connection to Ukrainian officials came from Washington-based DUSP alumnus Victor Hoskins MCP ’81. Last spring, the president and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority learned about Ukraine’s need from a former colleague he had worked with as deputy mayor of planning and economic development in D.C.

Hoskins has worked internationally, traveling often to Europe and Asia, where his office has branches that work to attract foreign companies to Fairfax County. In prior positions, “a lot of my work has centered around going into jurisdictions that are having trouble and turning them around economically,” Hoskins says.

He set up a call with the vice-mayor of Mariupol, Sergiy Orlov, and staff, who work in exile in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. “They’re in circumstances unimaginable to us,” Hoskins says. “Anything we can do to help is a good thing.” One strategy Hoskins has used in his own planning and development work is consulting academic institutions for guidance. Orlov asked him to suggest a few schools in the United States. “I said, try the best universities in the world,” says Hoskins. “Try MIT.”

Hoskins connected Orlov and Zegras, who pledged DUSP’s support after learning about the project. Officials from 37 communities across Ukraine, especially small- to medium-sized ones, were eager to learn best practices in urban development and about reconstruction planning and funding strategies to support rebuilding.

From Boichenko’s makeshift office, where air alerts are common and missiles often hum overhead, a small team sketched out the Community Recovery Academy’s modules and curriculum. The academy launched in September 2024 with seven MIT professors on board to give lectures as part of the initiative’s second of four modules: “Economic Modeling, Recovery of Cities and Territories.”

DUSP Lecturer Andrew Stokols, whose ancestors hail from Ukraine, helped Zegras coordinate schedules and calls. “It’s important to think about how planners can respond to ongoing conflicts in the world,” Stokols says. “Scholarly exchange is useful, and it’s nice to know we can do something, however small it is, to help out.”

Planning for the future

Lecture topics included transportation resilience and recovery by Jinhua Zhao, professor of cities and transport and director of MIT Mobility Initiative, and revitalizing main streets and small-town economic development strategies by Jeffrey Levine, associate professor of the practice of economic development and planning.

Andres Sevtsuk, associate professor of urban science and planning, spoke on street commerce and designing to create vibrant urban sidewalks. Former special assistant for manufacturing and economic development at the White House National Economic Council and current DUSP professor of the practice Liz Reynolds also spoke on industrial transformation. Timothy Sturgeon, an affiliate with the MIT Industrial Performance Center, ran a session with a Ukrainian counterpart on integrating Ukraine’s software industry with global value chains.

Talks were simultaneously translated into Ukrainian, and participants had ample time to ask pressing questions.

Mary Anne Ocampo, associate professor of the practice of urban design and planning and principal at Sasaki and Associates, shared insights from her work on Kabul’s 2017 to 2019 reconstruction during her presentation for Ukrainian officials.

She spoke about ways to attract investment and build consensus among key organizations and institutions that can support rebuilding, while encouraging Ukrainian leaders to consider how marginalized Ukrainian populations could influence reconstruction. Small, quick-win projects can be key, she said.

Albert Saiz, the Daniel Rose Associate Professor of Urban Economics and Real Estate, imparted lessons around urban and housing economics plus the economics of master planning. He drew from examples of cities in the U.S. Midwest that had seen sharp declines, including Detroit and Cleveland. He also delved into Japan and Germany’s recoveries after World War II.

A crucial lesson for Ukraine is the vital role external trade plays in recovery, Saiz says. Post WWII, Japan focused on trade with other countries, and it emerged stronger because of it. “In Japan, cities recovered very quickly,” says Saiz. For Ukraine, “it’s important to reestablish firm-based external, international relationships right now.”

Saiz explained how to structure credit guarantees, which will be essential to helping Ukraine secure international financing. Building temporary structures can be helpful, too, he told officials — for example, constructing FEMA-type homes as an interim solution. Meanwhile, clarity in planning is key.

“I shared that you have to establish a clear path to your stakeholders, but then you have to have flexibility within that path,” Saiz says.

An ongoing collaboration

The Community Recovery Academy is currently underway with the support of the U.K. government under the U.K. International Development and the International Republican Institute (IRI UKRAINE), in collaboration with steel and mining company Metinvest and Ukrainian investment group SCM.

Metinvest and SCM are also supporting planning work that’s been underway through the nonprofit organization Mariupol Reborn. The group’s 2040 urban vision document includes insight from urban planners, architects and other experts. As for the academy, there’s ongoing demand for more lessons. “The request is quite huge,” Boichenko says. Around 100 territorial communities applied to participate in the academy, and the first phase accommodated a few dozen.

Orlov and Zegras hope to produce another set of MIT lectures this spring. Longer term, plans are in the works for a multidisciplinary, multi-departmental fall 2025 MIT practicum during which students would work alongside Ukrainian officials on recovery planning. In the meantime, lectures will be packaged into a free and open-access online learning course.

Zegras says he hopes the learning that’s gone into the work to date helps to provide an initial blueprint for Ukraine’s future, as well as for planning’s potential role in rebuilding in a world where these types of efforts are increasingly needed — whether it be Sudan, Gaza, or Los Angeles.

For Boichenko, the academy has been foundational work. “We are only in the beginning,” he says. “We are building strong relationships, and we are definitely happy to work with MIT.”

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This edition of the newsletter covers Apple's recent decision to turn off Advanced Data Protection for users in the U.K., our how-to guide for limiting Meta's ability to collect and monetize your personal data, and our recent victory against the government's use of Section 702 to spy on Americans.

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EFFECTOR 37.2 - Fresh Threats to Privacy Around the Globe

Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression. 

EFF asked the California Supreme Court not to weaken the Stored Communications Act, a 1986 federal law that restricts how providers can disclose the content of your communications to the government or private parties.

The law is built on the principle that you have a reasonable expectation of privacy that providers like Snap and Meta will not disclose your communications to third parties, even though the providers have access to those communications as they are stored on their systems. In an amicus brief, we urged the court to uphold these privacy protections, as they have for the past 40 years. EFF filed the brief along with the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Mozilla Corporation.

A lower court decision got it wrong. And we are urging the California Supreme Court to overrule that decision. If the lower court's ruling is affirmed, Meta, Snap, and other providers would be permitted to voluntarily disclose the content of their users' communications to any other corporation, the government, or any individual for any reason.

We previously helped successfully urge the California Supreme Court to hear this case. 

Flock Safety loves to crow about the thousands of local law enforcement agencies around the United States that have adopted its avian-themed automated license plate readers (ALPRs). But when a privacy activist launched a website to map out the exact locations of these pole-mounted devices, the company tried to clip his wings.  

The company sent DeFlock.me and its creator Will Freeman a cease-and-desist letter, claiming that the project dilutes its trademark. Suffice it to say, and to lean into ornithological wordplay, the letter is birdcage liner.  

Representing Freeman, EFF sent Flock Safety a letter rejecting the demand, pointing out that the grassroots project is well within its First Amendment rights.  

Flock Safety’s car-tracking cameras have been spreading across the United States like an invasive species, preying on public safety fears and gobbling up massive amounts of sensitive driver data. The technology not only tracks vehicles by their license plates, but also creates “fingerprints” of each vehicle, including the make, model, color and other distinguishing features. This is a mass surveillance technology that collects information on everyone, regardless of whether they are connected to a crime. It has been misused by police to spy on their ex-partners and could be used to target people engaged in First Amendment activities or seeking medical care.  

Through crowdsourcing and open-source research, DeFlock.me aims to “shine a light on the widespread use of ALPR technology, raise awareness about the threats it poses to personal privacy and civil liberties, and empower the public to take action.”  While EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance project has identified more than 1,700 agencies using ALPRs, DeFlock has mapped out more than 16,000 individual camera locations, more than a third of which are Flock Safety devices.  

Flock Safety is so integrated into law enforcement, it’s not uncommon to see law enforcement agencies actually promoting the company by name on their websites. The Sussex County Sheriff’s website in Virginia has only two items in its menu bar: Accident Reports and Flock Safety. The name “DeFlock,” EFF told the vendor, represents the project’s goal of “ending ALPR usage and Flock’s status as one of the most widely used ALPR providers.” It’s accurate, appropriate, effective, and most importantly, legally protected.  

 We wrote:  

Your claims of dilution by blurring and/or tarnishment fail at the threshold, without even needing to address why dilution is unlikely. Federal anti-dilution law includes express carve-outs for any noncommercial use of a mark and for any use in connection with criticizing or commenting on the mark owner or its products. Mr. Freeman’s use of the name “DeFlock” is both.

Flock Safety’s cease and desist later is just the latest in a long list of groups turning to bogus intellectual property claims to silence their critics. Frequently, these have no legal basis and are designed to frighten under-resourced activists and advocacy groups with high-powered law firm letterheads. EFF is here to stand up against these trademark bullies, and in the case of Flock Safety, flip them the bird.  

What if the clothes you wear could care for your health?

MIT researchers have developed an autonomous programmable computer in the form of an elastic fiber, which could monitor health conditions and physical activity, alerting the wearer to potential health risks in real-time. Clothing containing the fiber computer was comfortable and machine washable, and the fibers were nearly imperceptible to the wearer, the researchers report.

Unlike on-body monitoring systems known as “wearables,” which are located at a single point like the chest, wrist, or finger, fabrics and apparel have an advantage of being in contact with large areas of the body close to vital organs. As such, they present a unique opportunity to measure and understand human physiology and health.

The fiber computer contains a series of microdevices, including sensors, a microcontroller, digital memory, bluetooth modules, optical communications, and a battery, making up all the necessary components of a computer in a single elastic fiber.

The researchers added four fiber computers to a top and a pair of leggings, with the fibers running along each limb. In their experiments, each independently programmable fiber computer operated a machine-learning model that was trained to autonomously recognize exercises performed by the wearer, resulting in an average accuracy of about 70 percent.

Surprisingly, once the researchers allowed the individual fiber computers to communicate among themselves, their collective accuracy increased to nearly 95 percent.

“Our bodies broadcast gigabytes of data through the skin every second in the form of heat, sound, biochemicals, electrical potentials, and light, all of which carry information about our activities, emotions, and health. Unfortunately, most — if not all — of it gets absorbed and then lost in the clothes we wear. Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach clothes to capture, analyze, store, and communicate this important information in the form of valuable health and activity insights?” says Yoel Fink, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT, a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN), and senior author of a paper on the research, which appears today in Nature.

The use of the fiber computer to understand health conditions and help prevent injury will soon undergo a significant real-world test as well. U.S. Army and Navy service members will be conducting a monthlong winter research mission to the Arctic, covering 1,000 kilometers in average temperatures of -40 degrees Fahrenheit. Dozens of base layer merino mesh shirts with fiber computers will be providing real-time information on the health and activity of the individuals participating on this mission, called Musk Ox II.

“In the not-too-distant future, fiber computers will allow us to run apps and get valuable health care and safety services from simple everyday apparel. We are excited to see glimpses of this future in the upcoming Arctic mission through our partners in the U.S. Army, Navy, and DARPA. Helping to keep our service members safe in the harshest environments is a honor and privilege,” Fink says.

He is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Nikhil Gupta, an MIT materials science and engineering graduate student; Henry Cheung MEng ’23; and Syamantak Payra ’22, currently a graduate student at Stanford University; John Joannopoulos, the Francis Wright Professor of Physics at MIT and director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies; as well as others at MIT, Rhode Island School of Design, and Brown University.

Fiber focus

The fiber computer builds on more than a decade of work in the Fibers@MIT lab at the RLE and was supported primarily by ISN. In previous papers, the researchers demonstrated methods for incorporating semiconductor devices, optical diodes, memory units, elastic electrical contacts, and sensors into fibers that could be formed into fabrics and garments.

“But we hit a wall in terms of the complexity of the devices we could incorporate into the fiber because of how we were making it. We had to rethink the whole process. At the same time, we wanted to make it elastic and flexible so it would match the properties of traditional fabrics,” says Gupta.

One of the challenges that researchers surmounted is the geometric mismatch between a cylindrical fiber and a planar chip. Connecting wires to small, conductive areas, known as pads, on the outside of each planar microdevice proved to be difficult and prone to failure because complex microdevices have many pads, making it increasingly difficult to find room to attach each wire reliably.

In this new design, the researchers map the 2D pad alignment of each microdevice to a 3D layout using a flexible circuit board called an interposer, which they wrapped into a cylinder. They call this the “maki” design. Then, they attach four separate wires to the sides of the “maki” roll and connected all the components together.

“This advance was crucial for us in terms of being able to incorporate higher functionality computing elements, like the microcontroller and Bluetooth sensor, into the fiber,” says Gupta.

This versatile folding technique could be used with a variety of microelectronic devices, enabling them to incorporate additional functionality.

In addition, the researchers fabricated the new fiber computer using a type of thermoplastic elastomer that is several times more flexible than the thermoplastics they used previously. This material enabled them to form a machine-washable, elastic fiber that can stretch more than 60 percent without failure.

They fabricate the fiber computer using a thermal draw process that the Fibers@MIT group pioneered in the early 2000s. The process involves creating a macroscopic version of the fiber computer, called a preform, that contains each connected microdevice.

This preform is hung in a furnace, melted, and pulled down to form a fiber, which also contains embedded lithium-ion batteries so it can power itself.

“A former group member, Juliette Marion, figured out how to create elastic conductors, so even when you stretch the fiber, the conductors don’t break. We can maintain functionality while stretching it, which is crucial for processes like knitting, but also for clothes in general,” Gupta says.

Bring out the vote

Once the fiber computer is fabricated, the researchers use a braiding technique to cover the fiber with traditional yarns, such as polyester, merino wool, nylon, and even silk.

In addition to gathering data on the human body using sensors, each fiber computer incorporates LEDs and light sensors that enable multiple fibers in one garment to communicate, creating a textile network that can perform computation.

Each fiber computer also includes a Bluetooth communication system to send data wirelessly to a device like a smartphone, which can be read by a user.

The researchers leveraged these communication systems to create a textile network by sewing four fiber computers into a garment, one in each sleeve. Each fiber ran an independent neural network that was trained to identify exercises like squats, planks, arm circles, and lunges.

“What we found is that the ability of a fiber computer to identify human activity was only about 70 percent accurate when located on a single limb, the arms or legs. However, when we allowed the fibers sitting on all four limbs to ‘vote,’ they collectively reached nearly 95 percent accuracy, demonstrating the importance of residing on multiple body areas and forming a network between autonomous fiber computers that does not need wires and interconnects,” Fink says.

Moving forward, the researchers want to use the interposer technique to incorporate additional microdevices.

Arctic insights

In February, a multinational team equipped with computing fabrics will travel for 30 days and 1,000 kilometers in the Arctic. The fabrics will help keep the team safe, and set the stage for future physiological “digital twinning” models.

“As a leader with more than a decade of Arctic operational experience, one of my main concerns is how to keep my team safe from debilitating cold weather injuries — a primary threat to operators in the extreme cold,” says U.S. Army Major Mathew Hefner, the commander of Musk Ox II. “Conventional systems just don’t provide me with a complete picture. We will be wearing the base layer computing fabrics on us 24/7 to help us better understand the body’s response to extreme cold and ultimately predict and prevent injury.”

Karl Friedl, U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine senior research scientist of performance physiology, noted that the MIT programmable computing fabric technology may become a “gamechanger for everyday lives.”

“Imagine near-term fiber computers in fabrics and apparel that sense and respond to the environment and to the physiological status of the individual, increasing comfort and performance, providing real-time health monitoring and providing protection against external threats. Soldiers will be the early adopters and beneficiaries of this new technology, integrated with AI systems using predictive physiological models and mission-relevant tools to enhance survivability in austere environments,” Friedl says.

“The convergence of classical fibers and fabrics with computation and machine learning has only begun. We are exploring this exciting future not only through research and field testing, but importantly in an MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering course ‘Computing Fabrics,’ taught with Professor Anais Missakian from the Rhode Island School of Design,” adds Fink.

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Office Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology (ISN), the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship, the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation Fellowship for New Americans, the Stanford-Knight Hennessy Scholars Program, and the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.

Last month, the UK government demanded that Apple weaken the security of iCloud for users worldwide. On Friday, Apple took steps to comply for users in the United Kingdom. But the British law is written in a way that requires Apple to give its government access to anyone, anywhere in the world. If the government demands Apple weaken its security worldwide, it would increase everyone’s cyber-risk in an already dangerous world.

If you’re an iCloud user, you have the option of turning on something called “advanced data protection,” or ADP. In that mode, a majority of your data is end-to-end encrypted. This means that no one, not even anyone at Apple, can read that data. It’s a restriction enforced by mathematics—cryptography—and not policy. Even if someone successfully hacks iCloud, they can’t read ADP-protected data...

The disaster agency is scrubbing dozens of words targeted by President Donald Trump, prompting complaints of discrimination.

The state's cap-and-trade program is under scrutiny for how much it charges businesses for releasing pollution.

As Republicans eye cuts to tax credits, the clean energy industry argues that wind and solar can be built faster than natural gas and nuclear projects.