Property insurers want to bar trees and shrubs next to many buildings. The Los Angeles Fire Department says that's unreasonable.

The narrow draft regulations set an August timeline for businesses to report carbon emissions.

Revenues from the program have fallen flat in the last few auctions, threatening to leave lawmakers with a $1.8 billion shortfall next year.

The “environmental omnibus” will cut back rules on pollution reporting and waste management.

Facing American opposition, the EU has opted to scale back rules intended to ensure companies adhere to ESG standards.

Capturing carbon dioxide from industrial plants is an important strategy in the efforts to reduce the impact of global climate change. It’s used in many industries, including the production of petrochemicals, cement, and fertilizers.

MIT chemical engineers have now discovered a simple way to make carbon capture more efficient and affordable, by adding a common chemical compound to capture solutions. The innovation could cut costs significantly and enable the technology to run on waste heat or even sunlight, instead of energy-intensive heating.

Their new approach uses a chemical called tris — short for tris(hydroxymethyl)aminomethane — to stabilize the pH of the solution used to capture CO2, allowing the system to absorb more of the gas at relatively low temperature. The system can release CO2 at just 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit) — a dramatic improvement over conventional methods, which require temperatures exceeding 120 C to release captured carbon.

“It’s something that could be implemented almost immediately in fairly standard types of equipment,” says T. Alan Hatton, the Ralph Landau Professor of Chemical Engineering Practice at MIT and the senior author of the study.

Youhong (Nancy) Guo, a recent MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor of applied physical sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Chemical Engineering.

More efficient capture

Using current technologies, around 0.1 percent of global carbon emissions is captured and either stored underground or converted into other products.

The most widely used carbon-capture method involves running waste gases through a solution that contains chemical compounds called amines. These solutions have a high pH, which allows them to absorb CO2, an acidic gas. In addition to traditional amines, basic compounds called carbonates, which are inexpensive and readily available, can also capture acidic CO2 gas. However, as CO2 is absorbed, the pH of the solution drops quickly, limiting the CO2 uptake capacity.

The most energy-intensive step comes once the CO2 is absorbed, because both amine and carbonate solutions must be heated to above 120 C to release the captured carbon. This regeneration step consumes enormous amounts of energy.

To make carbon capture by carbonates more efficient, the MIT team added tris into a potassium carbonate solution. This chemical, commonly used in lab experiments and found in some cosmetics and the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines, acts as a pH buffer — a solution that helps prevent the pH from changing.

When added to a carbonate solution, positively charged tris balances the negative charge of the bicarbonate ions formed when CO2 is absorbed. This stabilizes the pH, allowing the solution to absorb triple the amount of CO2.

As another advantage, tris is highly sensitive to temperature changes. When the solution full of CO2 is heated just slightly, to about 60 C, tris quickly releases protons, causing the pH to drop and the captured CO2 to bubble out.

“At room temperature, the solution can absorb more CO2, and with mild heating it can release the CO2. There is an instant pH change when we heat up the solution a little bit,” Guo says.

“Potassium carbonate is one of the holy grail solvents for carbon capture due to its high chemical stability, low cost, and negligible emissions,” says David Heldebrant, an associate professor of chemical engineering and bioengineering at Washington State University, who was not involved in the study. “I believe this electrochemical tris-promoted potassium carbonate solvent system has a lot of promise for the field of carbon capture, especially since the researchers have been able to improve on the energetics by regenerating at atmospheric pressure, as compared to vacuum-assisted regeneration, which is normally done.”

A simple swap

To demonstrate their approach, the researchers built a continuous-flow reactor for carbon capture. First, gases containing CO2 are bubbled through a reservoir containing carbonate and tris, which absorbs the CO2. That solution then is pumped into a CO2 regeneration module, which is heated to about 60 C to release a pure stream of CO2.

Once the CO2 is released, the carbonate solution is cooled and returned to the reservoir for another round of CO2 absorption and regeneration.

Because the system can operate at relatively low temperatures, there is more flexibility in where the energy could come from, such as solar panels, electricity, or waste heat already generated by industrial plants.

Swapping in carbonate-tris solutions to replace conventional amines should be straightforward for industrial facilities, the researchers say. “One of the nice things about this is its simplicity, in terms of overall design. It’s a drop-in approach that allows you to readily change over from one kind of solution to another,” Hatton says.

When carbon is captured from industrial plants, some of it can be diverted into the manufacture of other useful products, but most of it will likely end up being stored in underground geological formations, Hatton says.

“You can only use a small fraction of the captured CO2 for producing chemicals before you saturate the market,” he says.

Guo is now exploring whether other additives could make the carbon capture process even more efficient by speeding up CO2 absorption rates.

The authors acknowledge Eni S.p.A. for the fruitful discussions under the MIT–Eni research framework agreement.

This blog also appears in our Age Verification Resource Hub: our one-stop shop for users seeking to understand what age-gating laws actually do, what’s at stake, how to protect yourself, and why EFF opposes all forms of age verification mandates. Head to EFF.org/Age to explore our resources and join us in the fight for a free, open, private, and yes—safe—internet.

One of the most common refrains we hear from age verification proponents is that online ID checks are nothing new. After all, you show your ID at bars and liquor stores all the time, right? And it’s true that many places age-restrict access in-person to various goods and services, such as tobacco, alcohol, firearms, lottery tickets, and even tattoos and body piercings.

But this comparison falls apart under scrutiny. There are fundamental differences between flashing your ID to a bartender and uploading government documents or biometric data to websites and third-party verification companies. Online age-gating is more invasive, affects far more people, and poses serious risks to privacy, security, and free speech that simply don't exist when you buy a six-pack at the corner store.

Online age verification burdens many more people.

Online age restrictions are imposed on many, many more users than in-person ID checks. Because of the sheer scale of the internet, regulations affecting online content sweep in an enormous number of adults and youth alike, forcing them to disclose sensitive personal data just to access lawful speech, information, and services. 

Additionally, age restrictions in the physical world affect only a limited number of transactions: those involving a narrow set of age-restricted products or services. Typically this entails a bounded interaction about one specific purchase.

Online age verification laws, on the other hand, target a broad range of internet activities and general purpose platforms and services, including social media sites and app stores. And these laws don’t just wall off specific content deemed harmful to minors (like a bookstore would); they age-gate access to websites wholesale. This is akin to requiring ID every time a customer walks into a convenience store, regardless of whether they want to buy candy or alcohol.

There are significant privacy and security risks that don’t exist offline.

In offline, in-person scenarios, a customer typically provides their physical ID to a cashier or clerk directly. Oftentimes, customers need only flash their ID for a quick visual check, and no personal information is uploaded to the internet, transferred to a third-party vendor, or stored. Online age-gating, on the other hand, forces users to upload—not just momentarily display—sensitive personal information to a website in order to gain access to age-restricted content. 

This creates a cascade of privacy and security problems that don’t exist in the physical world. Once sensitive information like a government-issued ID is uploaded to a website or third-party service, there is no guarantee it will be handled securely. You have no direct control over who receives and stores your personal data, where it is sent, or how it may be accessed, used, or leaked outside the immediate verification process. 

Data submitted online rarely just stays between you and one other party. All online data is transmitted through a host of third-party intermediaries, and almost all websites and services also host a network of dozens of private, third-party trackers managed by data brokers, advertisers, and other companies that are constantly collecting data about your browsing activity. The data is shared with or sold to additional third parties and used to target behavioral advertisements. Age verification tools also often rely on third parties just to complete a transaction: a single instance of ID verification might involve two or three different third-party partners, and age estimation services often work directly with data brokers to offer a complete product. Users’ personal identifying data then circulates among these partners. 

All of this increases the likelihood that your data will leak or be misused. Unfortunately, data breaches are an endemic part of modern life, and the sensitive, often immutable, personal data required for age verification is just as susceptible to being breached as any other online data. Age verification companies can be—and already have been—hacked. Once that personal data gets into the wrong hands, victims are vulnerable to targeted attacks both online and off, including fraud and identity theft.

Troublingly, many age verification laws don’t even protect user security by providing a private right of action to sue a company if personal data is breached or misused. This leaves you without a direct remedy should something bad happen. 

Some proponents claim that age estimation is a privacy-preserving alternative to ID-based verification. But age estimation tools still require biometric data collection, often demanding users submit a photo or video of their face to access a site. And again, once submitted, there’s no way for you to verify how that data is processed or stored. Requiring face scans also normalizes pervasive biometric surveillance and creates infrastructure that could easily be repurposed for more invasive tracking. Once we’ve accepted that accessing lawful speech requires submitting our faces for scanning, we’ve crossed a threshold that’s difficult to walk back.

Online age verification creates even bigger barriers to access.

Online age gates create more substantial access barriers than in-person ID checks do. For those concerned about privacy and security, there is no online analog to a quick visual check of your physical ID. Users may be justifiably discouraged from accessing age-gated websites if doing so means uploading personal data and creating a potentially lasting record of their visit to that site.

Given these risks, age verification also imposes barriers to remaining anonymous that don't typically exist in-person. Anonymity can be essential for those wishing to access sensitive, personal, or stigmatized content online. And users have a right to anonymity, which is “an aspect of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.” Even if a law requires data deletion, users must still be confident that every website and online service with access to their data will, in fact, delete it—something that is in no way guaranteed.

In-person ID checks are additionally less likely to wrongfully exclude people due to errors. Online systems that rely on facial scans are often incorrect, especially when applied to users near the legal age of adulthood. These tools are also less accurate for people with Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Southeast Asian backgrounds, for users with disabilities, and for transgender individuals. This leads to discriminatory outcomes and exacerbates harm to already marginalized communities. And while in-person shoppers can speak with a store clerk if issues arise, these online systems often rely on AI models, leaving users who are incorrectly flagged as minors with little recourse to challenge the decision.

In-person interactions may also be less burdensome for adults who don’t have up-to-date ID. An older adult who forgets their ID at home or lacks current identification is not likely to face the same difficulty accessing material in a physical store, since there are usually distinguishing physical differences between young adults and those older than 35. A visual check is often enough. This matters, as a significant portion of the U.S. population does not have access to up-to-date government-issued IDs. This disproportionately affects Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, immigrants, and individuals with disabilities, who are less likely to possess the necessary identification.

We’re talking about First Amendment-protected speech.

It's important not to lose sight of what’s at stake here. The good or service age gated by these laws isn’t alcohol or cigarettes—it’s First Amendment-protected speech. Whether the target is social media platforms or any other online forum for expression, age verification blocks access to constitutionally-protected content. 

Access to many of these online services is also necessary to participate in the modern economy. While those without ID may function just fine without being able to purchase luxury products like alcohol or tobacco, requiring ID to participate in basic communication technology significantly hinders people’s ability to engage in economic and social life.

This is why it’s wrong to claim online age verification is equivalent to showing ID at a bar or store. This argument handwaves away genuine harms to privacy and security, dismisses barriers to access that will lock millions out of online spaces, and ignores how these systems threaten free expression. Ignoring these threats won’t protect children, but it will compromise our rights and safety.

MIT researchers have developed a new fabrication method that could enable the production of more energy efficient electronics by stacking multiple functional components on top of one existing circuit.

In traditional circuits, logic devices that perform computation, like transistors, and memory devices that store data are built as separate components, forcing data to travel back and forth between them, which wastes energy.

This new electronics integration platform allows scientists to fabricate transistors and memory devices in one compact stack on a semiconductor chip. This eliminates much of that wasted energy while boosting the speed of computation.

Key to this advance is a newly developed material with unique properties and a more precise fabrication approach that reduces the number of defects in the material. This allows the researchers to make extremely tiny transistors with built-in memory that can perform faster than state-of-the-art devices while consuming less electricity than similar transistors.

By improving the energy efficiency of electronic devices, this new approach could help reduce the burgeoning electricity consumption of computation, especially for demanding applications like generative AI, deep learning, and computer vision tasks.

“We have to minimize the amount of energy we use for AI and other data-centric computation in the future because it is simply not sustainable. We will need new technology like this integration platform to continue that progress,” says Yanjie Shao, an MIT postdoc and lead author of two papers on these new transistors.

The new technique is described in two papers (one invited) that were presented at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting. Shao is joined on the papers by senior authors Jesús del Alamo, the Donner Professor of Engineering in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS); Dimitri Antoniadis, the Ray and Maria Stata Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT; as well as others at MIT, the University of Waterloo, and Samsung Electronics.

Flipping the problem

Standard CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) chips traditionally have a front end, where the active components like transistors and capacitors are fabricated, and a back end that includes wires called interconnects and other metal bonds that connect components of the chip.

But some energy is lost when data travel between these bonds, and slight misalignments can hamper performance. Stacking active components would reduce the distance data must travel and improve a chip’s energy efficiency.

Typically, it is difficult to stack silicon transistors on a CMOS chip because the high temperature required to fabricate additional devices on the front end would destroy the existing transistors underneath.

The MIT researchers turned this problem on its head, developing an integration technique to stack active components on the back end of the chip instead.

“If we can use this back-end platform to put in additional active layers of transistors, not just interconnects, that would make the integration density of the chip much higher and improve its energy efficiency,” Shao explains.

The researchers accomplished this using a new material, amorphous indium oxide, as the active channel layer of their back-end transistor. The active channel layer is where the transistor’s essential functions take place.

Due to the unique properties of indium oxide, they can “grow” an extremely thin layer of this material at a temperature of only about 150 degrees Celsius on the back end of an existing circuit without damaging the device on the front end.

Perfecting the process

They carefully optimized the fabrication process, which minimizes the number of defects in a layer of indium oxide material that is only about 2 nanometers thick.

A few defects, known as oxygen vacancies, are necessary for the transistor to switch on, but with too many defects it won’t work properly. This optimized fabrication process allows the researchers to produce an extremely tiny transistor that operates rapidly and cleanly, eliminating much of the additional energy required to switch a transistor between off and on.

Building on this approach, they also fabricated back-end transistors with integrated memory that are only about 20 nanometers in size. To do this, they added a layer of material called ferroelectric hafnium-zirconium-oxide as the memory component.

These compact memory transistors demonstrated switching speeds of only 10 nanoseconds, hitting the limit of the team’s measurement instruments. This switching also requires much lower voltage than similar devices, reducing electricity consumption.

And because the memory transistors are so tiny, the researchers can use them as a platform to study the fundamental physics of individual units of ferroelectric hafnium-zirconium-oxide.

“If we can better understand the physics, we can use this material for many new applications. The energy it uses is very minimal, and it gives us a lot of flexibility in how we can design devices. It really could open up many new avenues for the future,” Shao says.

The researchers also worked with a team at the University of Waterloo to develop a model of the performance of the back-end transistors, which is an important step before the devices can be integrated into larger circuits and electronic systems.

In the future, they want to build upon these demonstrations by integrating back-end memory transistors onto a single circuit. They also want to enhance the performance of the transistors and study how to more finely control the properties of ferroelectric hafnium-zirconium-oxide.

“Now, we can build a platform of versatile electronics on the back end of a chip that enable us to achieve high energy efficiency and many different functionalities in very small devices. We have a good device architecture and material to work with, but we need to keep innovating to uncover the ultimate performance limits,” Shao says.

This work is supported, in part, by Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and Intel. Fabrication was carried out at the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories and MIT.nano facilities. 

Age verification laws are proliferating fast across the United States and around the world, creating a dangerous and confusing tangle of rules about what we’re all allowed to see and do online. Though these mandates claim to protect children, in practice they create harmful censorship and surveillance regimes that put everyone—adults and young people alike—at risk.

The term “age verification” is colloquially used to describe a wide range of age assurance technologies, from age verification systems that force you to upload government ID, to age estimation tools that scan your face, to systems that infer your age by making you share personal data. While different laws call for different methods, one thing remains constant: every method out there collects your sensitive, personal information and creates barriers to accessing the internet. We refer to all of these requirements as age verification, age assurance, or age-gating.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by this onslaught of laws and the invasive technologies behind them, you’re not alone. It’s a lot. But understanding how these mandates work and who they harm is critical to keeping yourself and your loved ones safe online. Age verification is lurking around every corner these days, so we must fight back to protect the internet that we know and love. 

That’s why today, we’re launching EFF’s Age Verification Resource Hub (EFF.org/Age): a one-stop shop to understand what these laws actually do, what’s at stake, why EFF opposes all forms of age verification, how to protect yourself, and how to join the fight for a free, open, private, and yes—safe—internet. 

Why Age Verification Mandates Are a Problem

In the U.S., more than half of all states have now passed laws imposing age-verification requirements on online platforms. Congress is considering even more at the federal level, with a recent House hearing weighing nineteen distinct proposals relating to young people’s online safety—some sweeping, some contradictory, and each one more drastic and draconian than the last.

We all want young people to be safe online. However, age verification is not the silver bullet that lawmakers want you to think it is.

The rest of the world is moving in the same direction. We saw the UK’s Online Safety Act go into effect this summer, Australia’s new law barring access to social media for anyone under 16 goes live today, and a slew of other countries are currently considering similar restrictions.

We all want young people to be safe online. However, age verification is not the silver bullet that lawmakers want you to think it is. In fact, age-gating mandates will do more harm than good—especially for the young people they claim to protect. They undermine the fundamental speech rights of adults and young people alike; create new barriers to accessing vibrant, lawful, even life-saving content; and needlessly jeopardize all internet users’ privacy, anonymity, and security.

If legislators want to meaningfully improve online safety, they should pass a strong, comprehensive federal privacy law instead of building new systems of surveillance, censorship, and exclusion.  

What’s Inside the Resource Hub

Our new hub is built to answer the questions we hear from users every day, such as:

• How do age verification laws actually work?
• What’s the difference between age verification, age estimation, age assurance, and all the other confusing technical terms I’m hearing?
• What’s at stake for me, and who else is harmed by these systems?
• How can I keep myself, my family, and my community safe as these laws continue to roll out?
• What can I do to fight back?
• And if not age verification, what else can we do to protect the online safety of our young people?

Head over to EFF.org/Age to explore our explainers, user-friendly guides, technical breakdowns, and advocacy tools—all indexed in the sidebar for easy browsing. And today is just the start, so keep checking back over the next several weeks as we continue to build out the site with new resources and answers to more of your questions on all things age verification.

Join Us: Reddit AMA & EFFecting Change Livestream Events

To celebrate the launch of EFF.org/Age, and to hear directly from you how we can be most helpful in this fight, we’re hosting two exciting events:

1. Reddit AMA on r/privacy

Next week, our team of EFF activists, technologists, and lawyers will be hanging out over on Reddit’s r/privacy subreddit to directly answer your questions on all things age verification. We’re looking forward to connecting with you and hearing how we can help you navigate these changing tides, so come on over to r/privacy on Monday (12/15), Tuesday (12/16), and Wednesday (12/17), and ask us anything!

2. EFFecting Change Livestream Panel: “The Human Cost of Online Age Verification”

Then, on January 15th at 12pm PT, we’re hosting a livestream panel featuring Cynthia Conti-Cook, Director of Research and Policy at the Collaborative Research Center for Resilience; Hana Memon, Software Developer at Gen Z for Change; EFF Director of Engineering Alexis Hancock; and EFF Associate Director of State Affairs Rindala Alajaji. We’ll break down how these laws work, who they exclude, and how these mandates threaten privacy and free expression for people of all ages. Join us by RSVPing at https://livestream.eff.org/.

A Resource to Empower Users

Age-verification mandates are reshaping the internet in ways that are invasive, dangerous, and deeply unnecessary. But users are not powerless! We can challenge these laws, protect our digital rights, and build a safer digital world for all internet users, no matter their ages. Our new resource hub is here to help—so explore, share, and join us in the fight for a better internet.

On Nov. 8, the MIT Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center (MIT PKG Center) collaborated with the MIT Club of Princeton, New Jersey, and the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen (TASK) to prototype tech-driven interventions to the growing challenge of food insecurity in the Trenton, New Jersey region.  

Twelve undergraduates traveled to Trenton for a one-day social impact hackathon, working in teams with alumni active in the MIT Club of Princeton to address technical challenges posed by TASK. These included predicting the number of daily meals based on historical data for an organization serving over 12,000 meals each week, and gathering real-time feedback from hundreds of patrons with limited access to technology. 

The day culminated in a pitch session judged by MIT alumni and TASK leadership. The winning solution, developed by a cross-generational team of MIT alumni and students, addressed one of TASK’s most pressing challenges with a blend of technical ingenuity and human-centered design. Drawing on TASK datasets and external data such as weather and holidays, the team proposed a predictive dashboard that impressed judges with its practical utility, enabling the kitchen to reduce waste and distribute the appropriate number of meals to varied locations. TASK also appreciated several elements of solutions proposed to gather real-time feedback from patrons, and plans to experiment with them. 

“The last few weeks have shown how quickly the need for food can escalate in a place like Trenton, where so many people are living below or close to the federal poverty line,” says TASK CEO Amy Flynn. “The issues we are facing are complex and unprecedented, and the hackathon was an opportunity to think about our challenges, and their solutions, in modern and innovative ways. TASK is very excited to be partnering with MIT, the PKG Center for Social Impact, and the local MIT Club of Princeton for this event, particularly at this critical time.”

Students will implement the winning intervention through the PKG Center’s Social Impact Internship Program during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) in January 2026. Alumni from the MIT Club of Princeton will also serve as mentors to students during their internship. 

Alumni connections

The PKG Center recently completed a new strategic plan, and heard through the process that alumni and students passionate about making a positive impact want more opportunities to interact with and learn from each other.

“A hackathon seemed like an ideal way to connect students and alumni, generating mentoring relationships while making a tangible impact,” says Alison Badgett, associate dean and director of the PKG Center. “We’re grateful to the MIT Club of Princeton and the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen for enabling us to pilot what we hope will be a regular event.”

The idea for a regional hackathon came from the Friends of the PKG Center, the center’s alumni advisory board, which grew 25 percent this year with the addition of several young alumni. Princeton-based alumni Eberhard Wunderlich SM ’75, PhD ’78 and Shahla Wunderlich PhD ’78 offered to help make the idea a reality by connecting PKG with local partners. 

"We have been longtime friends of the PKG Center and have observed over the years that MIT students are uniquely positioned to make a real impact. We were eager to connect the PKG Center with the MIT Club of Princeton and TASK because we knew this collaboration would be meaningful not only for students, alumni, and families, but also for many people in need within our community," said the Wunderlichs. “It was a wonderful experience working with such talented students. We were happy to participate and look forward to the project enhancing the operation of TASK, which provides meals and develops skills for independence for those in need in Mercer County, New Jersey.”

A legacy of innovation and impact

The hackathon was facilitated by Lauren Tyger, the PKG Center’s assistant dean for social innovation, who leads a growing suite of social innovation and entrepreneurship programming for the PKG Center. Tyger recruited the 12 undergraduate participants from PKG’s Social Innovation Exploration first-year pre-orientation program (FPOP), an intensive five-day hackathon exploring food insecurity through the lens of sustainability at MIT and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

“For students, the regional alumni-student hackathon was an opportunity to implement what they learned through PKG’s FPOP to a real-world challenge with TASK,” says Tyger. “We hope students will not only be inspired to implement their winning interventions through an IAP internship, but also to explore social enterprise solutions to food insecurity through our IDEAS Social Innovation Incubator, now in its 25th year.”

With the success of this event, the PKG Center is exploring opportunities to host more alumni-student hackathons with regional MIT clubs, as a way to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the IDEAS Social Innovation Challenge, which has invested $1.3 million in nearly 300 social enterprises since its inception in 2001. 

“Getting to work with TASK was amazing because it allowed me to put the skills I learned in PKG’s SIE FPOP to a real-world application that could help people,” says Vivian Dinh, a student who participated in the hackathon. “It was a great feeling to put together things that we learned in SIE like ideation strategies, interviewing skills, and prototyping into a product, and then see that TASK truly believed in our ideas. Overall, it was a very empowering experience, knowing that my skills and ideas could help a community.”

In the vision disorder amblyopia (commonly known as “lazy eye”), impaired vision in one eye during development causes neural connections in the brain’s visual system to shift toward supporting the other eye, leaving the amblyopic eye less capable even after the original impairment is corrected. Current interventions are only effective during infancy and early childhood, while the neural connections are still being formed. 

Now a study in mice by neuroscientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT shows that if the retina of the amblyopic eye is temporarily and reversibly anesthetized just for a couple of days, the brain’s visual response to the eye can be restored, even in adulthood.

The open-access findings, published Nov. 25 in Cell Reports, may improve the clinical potential of the idea of temporarily anesthetizing a retina to restore the strength of the amblyopic eye’s neural connections. 

In 2021, the lab of Picower Professor Mark Bear and collaborators showed that anesthetizing the non-amblyopic eye could improve vision in the amblyopic one — an approach analogous in that way to the treatment used in childhood of patching the unimpaired eye. Those 2021 findings have now been replicated in adults of multiple species. But the new evidence on how inactivation works suggests that the proposed treatment also could be effective when applied directly to the amblyopic eye, Bear says, though a key next step will be to again show that it works in additional species and, ultimately, people.

“If it does, it’s a pretty substantial step forward, because it would be reassuring to know that vision in the good eye would not have to be interrupted by treatment,” says Bear, a faculty member in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “The amblyopic eye, which is not doing much, could be inactivated and ‘brought back to life’ instead. Still, I think that especially with any invasive treatment, it’s extremely important to confirm the results in higher species with visual systems closer to our own.”

Madison Echavarri-Leet PhD ’25, whose doctoral thesis included this research, is the lead author of the study, which also demonstrates the underlying process in the brain that makes the potential treatment work.

A beneficial burst

Bear’s lab has been studying the science underlying amblyopia for decades, for instance by working to understand the molecular mechanisms that enable neural circuits to change their connections in response to visual experience or deprivation. The research has produced ideas about how to address amblyopia in adulthood. In a 2016 study with collaborators at Dalhousie University, they showed that temporarily anesthetizing both retinas could restore vision loss in amblyopia. Then, five years later, they published the study showing that anesthetizing just the non-amblyopic eye produced visual recovery for the amblyopic eye.

Throughout that time, the lab weighed multiple hypotheses to explain how retinal inactivation works its magic. Lingering in the lab’s archive of results, Bear says, was an unexplored finding in the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) that relays information from the eyes to the visual cortex, where vision is processed: back in 2008, they had found that blocking inputs from a retina to neurons in the LGN caused those neurons to fire synchronous “bursts” of electrical signals to downstream neurons in the visual cortex. Similar patterns of activity occur in the visual system before birth and guide early synaptic development.

The new study tested whether those bursts might have a role in the potential amblyopia treatments the lab was reporting. To get started, Leet and Bear’s team used a single injection of tetrodotoxin (TTX) to anesthetize retinas in the lab animals. They found that the bursting occurred not only in LGN neurons that received input from the anesthetized eye, but also in LGN neurons that received input from the unaffected eye.

From there, they showed that the bursting response depended on a particular “T-type” channel for calcium in the LGN neurons. This was important, because knowing this gave the scientists a way to turn it off. Once they gained that ability, then they could test whether doing so prevented TTX from having a therapeutic effect in mice with amblyopia.

Sure enough, when the researchers genetically knocked out the channels and disrupted the bursting, they found that anesthetizing the non-amblyopic eye could no longer help amblyopic mice. That showed the bursting is necessary for the treatment to work.

Aiding amblyopia

Given their finding that bursting occurs when either retina is anesthetized, the scientists hypothesized it might be enough to just do it in the amblyopic eye. To test this, they ran an experiment in which some mice modeling amblyopia received TTX in their amblyopic eye and some did not. The injection took the retina offline for two days. After a week, the scientists then measured activity in neurons in the visual cortex to calculate a ratio of input from each eye. They found that the ratio was much more even in mice that received the treatment versus those left untreated, indicating that after the amblyopic eye was anesthetized, its input in the brain rose to be at parity with input from the non-amblyopic one.

Further testing is needed, Bear notes, but the team wrote in the study that the results were encouraging.

“We are cautiously optimistic that these findings may lead to a new treatment approach for human amblyopia, particularly given the discovery that silencing the amblyopic eye is effective,” the scientists wrote.

In addition to Leet and Bear, the paper’s authors are Tushar Chauhan, Teresa Cramer, and Ming-fai Fong.

The National Institutes of Health, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Severin Hacker Vision Research Fund, and the Freedom Together Foundation supported the study.

The state of streaming is... bad. It’s very bad. The first step in wanting to watch anything is a web search: “Where can I stream X?” Then you have to scroll past an AI summary with no answers, and then scroll past the sponsored links. After that, you find out that the thing you want to watch was made by a studio that doesn’t exist anymore or doesn’t have a streaming service. So, even though you subscribe to more streaming services than you could actually name, you will have to buy a digital copy to watch. A copy that, despite paying for it specifically, you do not actually own and might vanish in a few years. 

Then, after you paid to see something multiple times in multiple ways (theater ticket, VHS tape, DVD, etc.), the mega-corporations behind this nightmare will try to get Congress to pass laws to ensure you keep paying them. In the end, this is easier than making a product that works. Or, as someone put it on social media, these companies have forgotten “that their entire existence relies on being slightly more convenient than piracy.” 

It’s important to recognize this as we see more and more media mergers. These mergers are not about quality, they’re about control. 

In the old days, studios made a TV show. If the show was a hit, they increased how much they charged companies to place ads during the show. And if the show was a hit for long enough, they sold syndication rights to another channel. Then people could discover the show again, and maybe come back to watch it air live. In that model, the goal was to spread access to a program as much as possible to increase viewership and the number of revenue streams.  

Now, in the digital age, studios have picked up a Silicon Valley trait: putting all their eggs into the basket of “increasing the number of users.” To do that, they have to create scarcity. There has to be only one destination for the thing you’re looking for, and it has to be their own. And you shouldn’t be able to control the experience at all. They should.  

They’ve also moved away from creating buzzy new exclusives to get you to pay them. That requires risk and also, you know, paying creative people to make them. Instead, they’re consolidating.  

Media companies keep announcing mergers and acquisitions. They’ve been doing it for a long time, but it’s really ramped up in the last few years. And these mergers are bad for all the obvious reasons. There are the speech and censorship reasons that came to a head in, of all places, late night television. There are the labor issues. There are the concentration of power issues. There are the obvious problems that the fewer studios that exist the fewer chances good art gets to escape Hollywood and make it to our eyes and ears. But when it comes specifically to digital life there are these: consumer experience and ownership.  

First, the more content that comes under a single corporation’s control, the more they expect you to come to them for it. And the more they want to charge. And because there is less competition, the less they need to work to make their streaming app usable. They then enforce their hegemony by using the draconian copyright restrictions they’ve lobbied for to cripple smaller competitors, critics, and fair use.  

When everything is either Disney or NBCUniversal or Warner Brothers-Discovery-Paramount-CBS and everything is totally siloed, what need will they have to spend money improving any part of their product? Making things is hard, stopping others from proving how bad you are is easy, thanks to how broken copyright law is.  

Furthermore, because every company is chasing increasing subscriber numbers instead of multiple revenue streams, they have an interest in preventing you from ever again “owning” a copy of a work. This was always sort of part of the business plan, but it was on a scale of a) once every couple of years,  b) at least it came, in theory, with some new features or enhanced quality and c) you actually owned the copy you paid for. Now they want you to pay them every month for access to same copy. And, hey, the price is going to keep going up the fewer options you have. Or you will see more ads. Or start seeing ads where there weren’t any before.  

On the one hand, the increasing dependence on direct subscriber numbers does give users back some power. Jimmy Kimmel’s reinstatement by ABC was partly due to the fact that the company was about to announce a price hike for Disney+ and it couldn’t handle losing users due to the new price and due to popular outrage over Kimmel’s treatment.  

On the other hand, well, there's everything else. 

The latest kerfuffle is over the sale of Warner Brothers-Discovery, a company that was already the subject of a sale and merger resulting in the hyphen. Netflix was competiing against another recently merged media megazord of Paramount Skydance.  

Warner Brothers-Discovery accepted a bid from Netflix, enraging Paramount Skydance, which has now launched a hostile takeover.  

Now the optimum outcome is for neither of these takeovers to happen. There are already too few players in Hollywood. It does nothing for the health of the industry to allow either merger. A functioning antitrust regime would stop both the sale and the hostile takeover attempt, full stop. But Hollywood and the federal government are frequent collaborators, and the feds have little incentive to stop Hollywood’s behemoths from growing even further, as long as they continue to play their role as propagandists for the American empire.    

The promise of the digital era was in part convenience. You never again had to look at TV listings to find out when something would be airing. Virtually unlimited digital storage meant everything would be at your fingertips. But then the corporations went to work to make sure it never happened. And with each and every merger, that promise gets further and further away.  

In the horticultural world, some vines are especially grabby. As they grow, the woody tendrils can wrap around obstacles with enough force to pull down entire fences and trees.

Inspired by vines’ twisty tenacity, engineers at MIT and Stanford University have developed a robotic gripper that can snake around and lift a variety of objects, including a glass vase and a watermelon, offering a gentler approach compared to conventional gripper designs. A larger version of the robo-tendrils can also safely lift a human out of bed.

The new bot consists of a pressurized box, positioned near the target object, from which long, vine-like tubes inflate and grow, like socks being turned inside out. As they extend, the vines twist and coil around the object before continuing back toward the box, where they are automatically clamped in place and mechanically wound back up to gently lift the object in a soft, sling-like grasp.

The researchers demonstrated that the vine robot can safely and stably lift a variety of heavy and fragile objects. The robot can also squeeze through tight quarters and push through clutter to reach and grasp a desired object.

The team envisions that this type of robot gripper could be used in a wide range of scenarios, from agricultural harvesting to loading and unloading heavy cargo. In the near term, the group is exploring applications in eldercare settings, where soft inflatable robotic vines could help to gently lift a person out of bed.

“Transferring a person out of bed is one of the most physically strenuous tasks that a caregiver carries out,” says Kentaro Barhydt, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “This kind of robot can help relieve the caretaker, and can be gentler and more comfortable for the patient.”

Barhydt, along with his co-first author from Stanford, O. Godson Osele, and their colleagues, present the new robotic design today in the journal Science Advances. The study’s co-authors are Harry Asada, the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT, and Allison Okamura, the Richard W. Weiland Professor of Engineering at Stanford University, along with Sreela Kodali and Cosmia du Pasquier at Stanford University, and former MIT graduate student Chase Hartquist, now at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Open and closed

The team’s Stanford collaborators, led by Okamura, pioneered the development of soft, vine-inspired robots that grow outward from their tips. These designs are largely built from thin yet sturdy pneumatic tubes that grow and inflate with controlled air pressure. As they grow, the tubes can twist, bend, and snake their way through the environment, and squeeze through tight and cluttered spaces.

Researchers have mostly explored vine robots for use in safety inspections and search and rescue operations. But at MIT, Barhydt and Asada, whose group has developed robotic aides for the elderly, wondered whether such vine-inspired robots could address certain challenges in eldercare — specifically, the challenge of safely lifting a person out of bed. Often in nursing and rehabilitation settings, this transfer process is done with a patient lift, operated by a caretaker who must first physically move a patient onto their side, then back onto a hammock-like sheet. The caretaker straps the sheet around the patient and hooks it onto the mechanical lift, which then can gently hoist the patient out of bed, similar to suspending a hammock or sling.

The MIT and Stanford team imagined that as an alternative, a vine-like robot could gently snake under and around a patient to create its own sort of sling, without a caretaker having to physically maneuver the patient. But in order to lift the sling, the researchers realized they would have to add an element that was missing in existing vine robot designs: Essentially, they would have to close the loop.

Most vine-inspired robots are designed as “open-loop” systems, meaning they act as open-ended strings that can extend and bend in different configurations, but they are not designed to secure themselves to anything to form a closed loop. If a vine robot could be made to transform from an open loop to a closed loop, Barhydt surmised that it could make itself into a sling around the object and pull itself up, along with whatever, or whomever, it might hold.

For their new study, Barhydt, Osele, and their colleagues outline the design for a new vine-inspired robotic gripper that combines both open- and closed-loop actions. In an open-loop configuration, a robotic vine can grow and twist around an object to create a firm grasp. It can even burrow under a human lying on a bed. Once a grasp is made, the vine can continue to grow back toward and attach to its source, creating a closed loop that can then be retracted to retrieve the object.

“People might assume that in order to grab something, you just reach out and grab it,” Barhydt says. “But there are different stages, such as positioning and holding. By transforming between open and closed loops, we can achieve new levels of performance by leveraging the advantages of both forms for their respective stages.”

Gentle suspension

As a demonstration of their new open- and closed-loop concept, the team built a large-scale robotic system designed to safely lift a person up from a bed. The system comprises a set of pressurized boxes attached on either end of an overhead bar. An air pump inside the boxes slowly inflates and unfurls thin vine-like tubes that extend down toward the head and foot of a bed. The air pressure can be controlled to gently work the tubes under and around a person, before stretching back up to their respective boxes. The vines then thread through a clamping mechanism that secures the vines to each box. A winch winds the vines back up toward the boxes, gently lifting the person up in the process.

“Heavy but fragile objects, such as a human body, are difficult to grasp with the robotic hands that are available today,” Asada says. “We have developed a vine-like, growing robot gripper that can wrap around an object and suspend it gently and securely.”

"There’s an entire design space we hope this work inspires our colleagues to continue to explore,” says co-lead author Osele. “I especially look forward to the implications for patient transfer applications in health care.”

“I am very excited about future work to use robots like these for physically assisting people with mobility challenges,” adds co-author Okamura. “Soft robots can be relatively safe, low-cost, and optimally designed for specific human needs, in contrast to other approaches like humanoid robots.”

While the team’s design was motivated by challenges in eldercare, the researchers realized the new design could also be adapted to perform other grasping tasks. In addition to their large-scale system, they have built a smaller version that can attach to a commercial robotic arm. With this version, the team has shown that the vine robot can grasp and lift a variety of heavy and fragile objects, including a watermelon, a glass vase, a kettle bell, a stack of metal rods, and a playground ball. The vines can also snake through a cluttered bin to pull out a desired object.

“We think this kind of robot design can be adapted to many applications,” Barhydt says. “We are also thinking about applying this to heavy industry, and things like automating the operation of cranes at ports and warehouses.”

This work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

EFF Also Will Host a Reddit AMA and a Livestreamed Panel Discussion

SAN FRANCISCO—With ill-advised and dangerous age verification laws proliferating across the United States and around the world, creating surveillance and censorship regimes that will be used to harm both youth and adults, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a new resource hub that will sort through the mess and help people fight back. 

To mark the hub's launch, EFF will host a Reddit AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) next week and a free livestreamed panel discussion on January 15 highlighting the dangers of these misguided laws. 

“These restrictive mandates strike at the foundation of the free and open internet,” said EFF Activist Molly Buckley. “While they are wrapped in the legitimate concern about children's safety, they operate as tools of censorship, used to block people young and old from viewing or sharing information that the government deems ‘harmful’ or ‘offensive.’ They also create surveillance systems that critically undermine online privacy, and chill access to vital online communities and resources. Our new resource hub is a one-stop shop for information that people can use to fight back and redirect lawmakers to things that will actually help young people, like a comprehensive privacy law.” 

Half of U.S. states have enacted some sort of online age verification law. At the federal level, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee last week held a hearing on “Legislative Solutions to Protect Children and Teens Online.” While many of the 19 bills on that hearing’s agenda involve age verification, none would truly protect children and teens. Instead, they threaten to make it harder to access content that can be crucial, even lifesaving, for some kids. 

It’s not just in the U.S.  Effective this week, a new Australian law requires social media platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent Australians under the age of 16 from creating or keeping an account. 

We all want young people to be safe online. However, age verification is not the panacea that regulators and corporations claim it to be; in fact, it could undermine the safety of many. 

Age verification laws generally require online services to check, estimate, or verify all users’ ages—often through invasive tools like government ID checks, biometric scans, or other dubious “age estimation” methods—before granting them access to certain online content or services. These methods are often inaccurate and always privacy-invasive, demanding that users hand over sensitive and immutable personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity. Once that valuable data is collected, it can easily be leaked, hacked, or misused.  

To truly protect everyone online, including children, EFF advocates for a comprehensive data privacy law. 

EFF will host a Reddit AMA on r/privacy from Monday, Dec. 15 at 12 p.m. PT through Wednesday, Dec. 17 at 5 p.m. PT, with EFF attorneys, technologists, and activists answering questions about age verification on all three days. 

EFF will host a free livestream panel discussion about age verification at 12 p.m. PDT on Thursday, Jan. 15. Panelists will include Cynthia Conti-Cook, Director of Research and Policy at the Collaborative Research Center for Resilience; a representative of Gen Z for Change; EFF Director of Engineering Alexis Hancock; and EFF Associate Director of State Affairs Rindala Alajaji. RSVP at https://www.eff.org/livestream-age. 

For the age verification resource hub: https://www.eff.org/age 

For the Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/  

For the Jan. 15 livestream: https://www.eff.org/livestream-age  

 

Tags: age verificationage estimationage gatingContact:  MollyBuckleyActivistmollybuckley@eff.org

The FBI is warning of AI-assisted fake kidnapping scams:

Criminal actors typically will contact their victims through text message claiming they have kidnapped their loved one and demand a ransom be paid for their release. Oftentimes, the criminal actor will express significant claims of violence towards the loved one if the ransom is not paid immediately. The criminal actor will then send what appears to be a genuine photo or video of the victim’s loved one, which upon close inspection often reveals inaccuracies when compared to confirmed photos of the loved one. Examples of these inaccuracies include missing tattoos or scars and inaccurate body proportions. Criminal actors will sometimes purposefully send these photos using timed message features to limit the amount of time victims have to analyze the images...

Some executives hoped a low-conflict strategy and assistance from GOP moderates would help them survive the president's second term. Then President Donald Trump went to war.

A presidential panel plans to vote Thursday on overhauling the disaster agency. Previous attempts attracted widespread opposition.

The ruling asks a customer to hone her class-action complaint against Florida Crystals for advertising its products as climate-friendly.

The latest version of the National Security Strategy departs sharply from the edition released by the Biden administration.

A new report finds that both Republican- and Democratic-led states have cut environmental agency staff and funding over the past 15 years.