As part of multi-pronged effort towards deregulation, the Federal Trade Commission has asked the public to identify any and all “anti-competitive” regulations. Working with our friends at Authors Alliance, EFF answered, calling attention to a set of anti-competitive regulations that many don’t  recognize as such: the triennial exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the cumbersome process on which they depend.

Copyright grants exclusive rights to creators, but only as a means to serve the broader public interest. Fair use and other limitations play a critical role in that service by ensuring that the public can engage in commentary, research, education, innovation, and repair without unjustified restriction. Section 1201 effectively forbids fair uses where those uses require circumventing a software lock (a.k.a. technological protection measures) on a copyrighted work.

Congress realized that Section 1201 had this effect, so it adopted a safety valve—a triennial process by which the Library of Congress could grant exemptions. Under the current rulemaking framework, however, this intended safety valve functions more like a chokepoint. Individuals and organizations seeking an exemption to engage in lawful fair use must navigate a burdensome, time-consuming administrative maze. The existing procedural and regulatory barriers ensure that the rulemaking process—and Section 1201 itself—thwarts, rather than serves, the public interest.

The FTC does not, of course, control Congress or the Library of Congress. But we hope its investigation and any resulting report on anti-competitive regulations will recognize the negative effects of Section 1201 and that the triennial rulemaking process has failed to be the check Congress intended. Our comments urge the FTC to recommend that Congress repeal or reform Section 1201. At a minimum, the FTC should advocate for fundamental revisions to the Library of Congress’s next triennial rulemaking process, set for 2026, so that copyright law can once again fulfill its purpose: to support—rather than thwart—competitive and independent innovation.

You can find the full comments here.

“My wife, Erin Tevonian, and I both graduated last week with our PhDs in biological engineering, a program we started together when we arrived at MIT in fall 2019. At the time, we had already been dating for three years, having met as classmates in the bioengineering program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015. We went through college together — taking classes, vacationing with friends, and biking cross-country, all side-by-side — and so we were lucky to be able to continue doing so by coming to Course 20 at MIT together. It was during our graduate studies at MIT that we got engaged (spring 2022) and married (last September), a milestone that we were able to celebrate with the many wonderful friends we found at MIT.

First-year students in the MIT Biological Engineering PhD program rotate through labs of interest before picking where they will complete their doctorates, and so we found our way to research groups by January 2020 just before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted on-campus research and caused social distancing. Erin completed her PhD in Doug Lauffenburger and Linda Griffith’s labs, during which she used computational and experimental models to study human insulin resistance and built better liver tissue models for recapitulating disease pathology. I completed my PhD in Anders Hansen’s lab and studied how DNA folds in 3D space to drive gene regulation by building and applying a new method for mapping DNA architecture at finer resolutions than previously possible. The years flew by as we dove into our research projects, and we defended our PhDs a week apart back in April.

Erin and I were standing at Commencement with the Class of 2025 at the moment this photo was snapped, smiling as we listened to MIT’s school song. Graduation is a bittersweet milestone because it represents the end of what has been an incredible adventure for us, an adventure that made campus feel like home, so I must admit that I wasn’t sure how I would feel going into graduation week. This moment, though, felt like a fitting close for our time at MIT, and I was filled with gratitude for the many memories, opportunities, and adventures I got to share with Erin over the course of grad school. I also graduated from the MIT Sloan School of Management/School of Engineering’s Leaders for Global Operations program (hence the stole), so I was also reflecting on the many folks I’ve met across campus that make MIT the wonderful place that it is, and how special it is to be a part of a community that makes it so hard to say goodbye.”

—Viraat Goel MBA ’25, PhD ’25

Have a creative photo of campus life you'd like to share? Submit it to Scene at MIT.

The Trump administration has been heavily invested in consolidating all of the government’s information into a single searchable, or perhaps AI-queryable, super database. The compiling of all of this information is being done with the dubious justification of efficiency and modernization–however, in many cases, this information was originally siloed for important reasons: to protect your privacy, to prevent different branches of government from using sensitive data to punish or harass you, and to perserve the trust in and legitimacy of important civic institutions.

Attempts to Centralize All the Government’s Information About You

This process of consolidation has taken several forms. The purported Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been seeking access to the data and computer systems of dozens of government agencies. According to one report, access to the data of these agencies has given DOGE, as of April 2025, hundreds of pieces of personal information about people living in the United States–everything ranging from financial and tax information, health and healthcare information, and even computer I.P. addresses. EFF is currently engaged in a lawsuit against the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and DOGE for disclosing personal information about government employees to people who don’t need it in violation of the Privacy Act of 1974.

Another key maneuver in centralizing government information has been to steamroll the protections that were in place that keep this information away from agencies that don’t need, or could abuse, this information. This has been done by ignoring the law, like the Trump administration did when it ordered the IRS make tax information available for the purposes of immigration enforcement. It has also been done through the creation of new (and questionable) executive mandates that all executive branch information be made available to the White House or any other agency. Specifically, this has been attempted with the March 20, 2025 Executive Order, “Stopping Waste Fraud and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos” which mandates that the federal government, as well as all 50 state governments, allow other agencies “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems.” But executive orders can’t override privacy laws passed by Congress.

Not only is the Trump administration trying to consolidate all of this data institutionally and statutorily, they are also trying to do it technologically. A new report revealed that the administration has contracted Palantir—the open-source surveillance and security data-analytics firm—to fuse data from multiple agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services.

Why it Matters and What Can Go Wrong 

The consolidation of government records equals more government power that can be abused. Different government agencies necessarily collect information to provide essential services or collect taxes. The danger comes when the government begins pooling that data and using it for reasons unrelated to the purpose it was collected.

Imagine, for instance, a scenario where a government employee could be denied health-related public services or support because of the information gathered about them by an agency that handles HR records. Or a person’s research topic according to federal grants being used to weigh whether or not that person should be allowed to renew a passport.

Marginalized groups are most vulnerable to this kind of abuse, including to locate individuals for immigration enforcement using tax records. Government records could also be weaponized against people who receive food subsidies, apply for student loans, or take government jobs. 

Congress recognized these dangers 50 years ago when it passed the Privacy Act to put strict limits on the government’s use of large databases. At that time, trust in the government eroded after revelations about White House enemies’ lists, misuse of existing government personality profiles, and surveillance of opposition political groups.

There’s another important issue at stake: the future of federal and state governments that actually have the information and capacity to help people. The more people learn to distrust the government because they worry the information they give certain government agencies may be used to hurt them in the future, the less likely people will be to participate or seek the help they need. The fewer people engage with these agencies, the less likely they will be to survive. Trust is a key part of any relationship between the governed and government and when that trust is abused or jettisoned, the long-term harms are irreparable.

EFF, like dozens of other organizations, will continue to fight to ensure personal records held by the government are only used and disclosed as needed and only for the purpose they were collected, as federal law demands. 

Related Cases: American Federation of Government Employees v. U.S. Office of Personnel Management

“Pernicious.”

“Unprecedented... cringe-worthy.”

“Egregious.”

“Shocking.” 

These are just some of the words that federal judges used in recent weeks to describe President Trump’s politically motivated and vindictive executive orders targeting law firms that have employed people or represented clients or causes he doesn’t like. 

But our favorite word by far is “unconstitutional.” 

EFF was one of the very first legal organizations to publicly come out in support of Perkins Coie when it became the first law firm to challenge the legality of President Trump’s executive order targeting it. Since then, EFF has joined four amicus briefs in support of targeted law firms, and in all four cases, judges from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia have indicated they’re having none of it. Three have issued permanent injunctions deeming the executive orders null and void, and the fourth seems to be headed in that same direction. 

Trump issued his EO against Perkins Coie on March 6. In a May 2 opinion finding the order unconstitutional and issuing a permanent injunction, Senior Judge Beryl A. Howell wrote:  

“By its terms, this Order stigmatizes and penalizes a particular law firm and its employees—from its partners to its associate attorneys, secretaries, and mailroom attendants—due to the Firm’s representation, both in the past and currently, of clients pursuing claims and taking positions with which the current President disagrees, as well as the Firm’s own speech,” Howell wrote. “In a cringe-worthy twist on the theatrical phrase ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers,’ EO 14230 takes the approach of ‘Let’s kill the lawyers I don’t like,’ sending the clear message: lawyers must stick to the party line, or else.” 

“Using the powers of the federal government to target lawyers for their representation of clients and avowed progressive employment policies in an overt attempt to suppress and punish certain viewpoints, … is contrary to the Constitution, which requires that the government respond to dissenting or unpopular speech or ideas with ‘tolerance, not coercion.’” 

 Trump issued a similar EO against Jenner & Block on March 25. In a May 23 opinion also finding the order unconstitutional and issuing a permanent injunction, Senior Judge John D. Bates wrote: 

“This order—which takes aim at the global law firm Jenner & Block—makes no bones about why it chose its target: it picked Jenner because of the causes Jenner champions, the clients Jenner represents, and a lawyer Jenner once employed. Going after law firms in this way is doubly violative of the Constitution. Most obviously, retaliating against firms for the views embodied in their legal work—and thereby seeking to muzzle them going forward—violates the First Amendment’s central command that government may not ‘use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.’ Nat’l Rifle Ass’n of Am. v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 188 (2024). More subtle but perhaps more pernicious is the message the order sends to the lawyers whose unalloyed advocacy protects against governmental viewpoint becoming government-imposed orthodoxy. This order, like the others, seeks to chill legal representation the administration doesn’t like, thereby insulating the Executive Branch from the judicial check fundamental to the separation of powers. It thus violates the Constitution and the Court will enjoin its operation in full.” 

 Trump issued his EO targeting WilmerHale on March 27. In a May 27 opinion finding that order unconstitutional, Senior Judge Richard J. Leon wrote: 

“The cornerstone of the American system of justice is an independent judiciary and an independent bar willing to tackle unpopular cases, however daunting. The Founding Fathers knew this! Accordingly, they took pains to enshrine in the Constitution certain rights that would serve as the foundation for that independence. Little wonder that in the nearly 250 years since the Constitution was adopted no Executive Order has been issued challenging these fundamental rights. Now, however, several Executive Orders have been issued directly challenging these rights and that independence. One of these Orders is the subject of this case. For the reasons set forth below, I have concluded that this Order must be struck down in its entirety as unconstitutional. Indeed, to rule otherwise would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers!” 

“Taken together, the provisions constitute a staggering punishment for the firm’s protected speech! The Order is intended to, and does in fact, impede the firm’s ability to effectively represent its clients!” 

“Even if the Court found that each section could be grounded in Executive power, the directives set out in each section clearly exceed that power! The President, by issuing the Order, is wielding his authority to punish a law firm for engaging in litigation conduct the President personally disfavors. Thus, to the extent the President does have the power to limit access to federal buildings, suspend and revoke security clearances, dictate federal hiring, and manage federal contracts, the Order surpasses that authority and in fact usurps the Judiciary’s authority to resolve cases and sanction parties that come before the courts!” 

The fourth case in which EFF filed a brief involved Trump’s April 9 EO against Susman Godfrey. In that case, Judge Loren L. AliKhan is still considering whether to issue a permanent injunction, but on April 15 gave a fiery ruling from the bench in granting a temporary restraining order against the EO’s enforcement. 

“The executive order is based on a personal vendetta against a particular firm, and frankly, I think the framers of our Constitution would see this as a shocking abuse of power,” AliKhan said, as quoted by Courthouse News Service. "The government cannot hold lawyers hostage to force them to agree with it, allowing the government to coerce private business, law firms and lawyers solely on the basis of their view is antithetical to our constitutional republic and hampers this court, and every court’s, ability to adjudicate these cases.” 

And, as quoted by the New York Times: “Law firms across the country are entering into agreements with the government out of fear that they will be targeted next and that coercion is plain and simple. And while I wish other firms were not capitulating as readily, I admire firms like Susman for standing up and challenging it when it does threaten the very existence of their business. … The government has sought to use its immense power to dictate the positions that law firms may and may not take. The executive order seeks to control who law firms are allowed to represent. This immensely oppressive power threatens the very foundations of legal representation in our country.” 

As we wrote when we began filing amicus briefs in these cases, an independent legal profession is a cornerstone of democracy and the rule of law. As a nonprofit legal organization that frequently sues the federal government, EFF understands the value of this bedrock principle and how it–and First Amendment rights more broadly–are threatened by President Trump’s executive orders. It is especially important that the whole legal profession speak out against these actions, particularly in light of the silence or capitulation of a few large law firms. 

We’re glad the courts agree.

The generative model rolled out two weeks ago contradicts the administrator on the dangers of warming.

Nearly 600 employees have left the National Weather Service in recent months. Meteorologists say 125 new hires will still leave the agency dangerously understaffed.

At least 16 states this year considered cryptocurrency reserve bills, including one that passed in New Hampshire.

Wildfires are turning forests into "massive carbon emitters," a new report warns. Tree-planting "will likely increase emissions."

A district court judge said in March that hot conditions for inmates are “plainly unconstitutional.”

Baltimore, Annapolis and Anne Arundel County argue that lower courts mischaracterized the cases by echoing industry assertions.

Assemblymember Lisa Calderon is facing a Friday deadline to get her bill through the Assembly.

Activists left it at the Paris headquarters of energy giant EDF to protest France’s imports of Russian energy.

It would be an unwelcome development for a government focused heavily on food security and could force a rethink on imports.

Energize Capital is seeking to back new energy companies, as well as startups that will make manufacturing more efficient and build out U.S. infrastructure.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 05 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02342-w

Current European Union policies are insufficient to achieve residential heating decarbonization targets. Substantial subsidies for heat pumps and carefully targeted incentives for home renovation are critical to efficiently and affordably meet climate goals. We emphasize the importance of adapting strategies to national contexts.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 05 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02351-9

Mitigation actions can have large-scale health co-benefits, which, however, are not effectively incorporated into policy design and implementation. This Perspective overviews the health co-benefits and cost-effectiveness of climate policies and discusses ways to improve their policy relevance.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 05 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02348-4

Decarbonizing the residential sector is essential for net-zero targets, and the EU has established ambitious policy packages with various instruments. This research shows that beyond carbon trading programmes, massive heat-pump subsidies and targeted energy renovation incentives are needed.

Ready for that long-awaited summer vacation? First, you’ll need to pack all items required for your trip into a suitcase, making sure everything fits securely without crushing anything fragile.

Because humans possess strong visual and geometric reasoning skills, this is usually a straightforward problem, even if it may take a bit of finagling to squeeze everything in.

To a robot, though, it is an extremely complex planning challenge that requires thinking simultaneously about many actions, constraints, and mechanical capabilities. Finding an effective solution could take the robot a very long time — if it can even come up with one.

Researchers from MIT and NVIDIA Research have developed a novel algorithm that dramatically speeds up the robot’s planning process. Their approach enables a robot to “think ahead” by evaluating thousands of possible solutions in parallel and then refining the best ones to meet the constraints of the robot and its environment.

Instead of testing each potential action one at a time, like many existing approaches, this new method considers thousands of actions simultaneously, solving multistep manipulation problems in a matter of seconds.

The researchers harness the massive computational power of specialized processors called graphics processing units (GPUs) to enable this speedup.

In a factory or warehouse, their technique could enable robots to rapidly determine how to manipulate and tightly pack items that have different shapes and sizes without damaging them, knocking anything over, or colliding with obstacles, even in a narrow space.

“This would be very helpful in industrial settings where time really does matter and you need to find an effective solution as fast as possible. If your algorithm takes minutes to find a plan, as opposed to seconds, that costs the business money,” says MIT graduate student William Shen SM ’23, lead author of the paper on this technique.

He is joined on the paper by Caelan Garrett ’15, MEng ’15, PhD ’21, a senior research scientist at NVIDIA Research; Nishanth Kumar, an MIT graduate student; Ankit Goyal, a NVIDIA research scientist; Tucker Hermans, a NVIDIA research scientist and associate professor at the University of Utah; Leslie Pack Kaelbling, the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); Tomás Lozano-Pérez, an MIT professor of computer science and engineering and a member of CSAIL; and Fabio Ramos, principal research scientist at NVIDIA and a professor at the University of Sydney. The research will be presented at the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference.

Planning in parallel

The researchers’ algorithm is designed for what is called task and motion planning (TAMP). The goal of a TAMP algorithm is to come up with a task plan for a robot, which is a high-level sequence of actions, along with a motion plan, which includes low-level action parameters, like joint positions and gripper orientation, that complete that high-level plan.

To create a plan for packing items in a box, a robot needs to reason about many variables, such as the final orientation of packed objects so they fit together, as well as how it is going to pick them up and manipulate them using its arm and gripper.

It must do this while determining how to avoid collisions and achieve any user-specified constraints, such as a certain order in which to pack items.

With so many potential sequences of actions, sampling possible solutions at random and trying one at a time could take an extremely long time.

“It is a very large search space, and a lot of actions the robot does in that space don’t actually achieve anything productive,” Garrett adds.

Instead, the researchers’ algorithm, called cuTAMP, which is accelerated using a parallel computing platform called CUDA, simulates and refines thousands of solutions in parallel. It does this by combining two techniques, sampling and optimization.

Sampling involves choosing a solution to try. But rather than sampling solutions randomly, cuTAMP limits the range of potential solutions to those most likely to satisfy the problem’s constraints. This modified sampling procedure allows cuTAMP to broadly explore potential solutions while narrowing down the sampling space.

“Once we combine the outputs of these samples, we get a much better starting point than if we sampled randomly. This ensures we can find solutions more quickly during optimization,” Shen says.

Once cuTAMP has generated that set of samples, it performs a parallelized optimization procedure that computes a cost, which corresponds to how well each sample avoids collisions and satisfies the motion constraints of the robot, as well as any user-defined objectives.

It updates the samples in parallel, chooses the best candidates, and repeats the process until it narrows them down to a successful solution.

Harnessing accelerated computing

The researchers leverage GPUs, specialized processors that are far more powerful for parallel computation and workloads than general-purpose CPUs, to scale up the number of solutions they can sample and optimize simultaneously. This maximized the performance of their algorithm.

“Using GPUs, the computational cost of optimizing one solution is the same as optimizing hundreds or thousands of solutions,” Shen explains.

When they tested their approach on Tetris-like packing challenges in simulation, cuTAMP took only a few seconds to find successful, collision-free plans that might take sequential planning approaches much longer to solve.

And when deployed on a real robotic arm, the algorithm always found a solution in under 30 seconds.

The system works across robots and has been tested on a robotic arm at MIT and a humanoid robot at NVIDIA. Since cuTAMP is not a machine-learning algorithm, it requires no training data, which could enable it to be readily deployed in many situations.

“You can give it a brand-new problem and it will provably solve it,” Garrett says.

The algorithm is generalizable to situations beyond packing, like a robot using tools. A user could incorporate different skill types into the system to expand a robot’s capabilities automatically.

In the future, the researchers want to leverage large language models and vision language models within cuTAMP, enabling a robot to formulate and execute a plan that achieves specific objectives based on voice commands from a user.

This work is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Air Force Office for Scientific Research, Office of Naval Research, MIT Quest for Intelligence, NVIDIA, and the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Every year during the growing season, thousands of pilots across the country climb into small planes loaded with hundreds of pounds of pesticides and fly extremely close to the ground at upward of 140 miles an hour, unloading their cargo onto rows of corn, cotton, and soybeans.

The world of agricultural aviation is as dangerous as it is vital to America’s farms. Unfortunately, fatal crashes are common. Now Guardian Ag, founded by former MIT Electronics Research Society (MITERS) makers Adam Bercu and Charles Guan ’11, is offering an alternative in the form of a large, purpose-built drone that can autonomously deliver 200-pound payloads across farms. The company’s drones feature an 18-foot spray radius, 80-inch rotors, a custom battery pack, and aerospace-grade materials designed to make crop spraying more safe, efficient, and inexpensive for farmers.

“We’re trying to bring technology to American farms that are hundreds or thousands of acres, where you’re not replacing a human with a hand pump — you’re replacing a John Deere tractor or a helicopter or an airplane,” Bercu says.

“With Guardian, the operator shows up about 30 minutes before they want to spray, they mix the product, path plan the field in our app, and it gives an estimate for how long the job will take,” he says. “With our fast charging, you recharge the aircraft while you fill the tank, and those two operations take about the same amount of time.”

From Battlebots to farmlands

At a young age, Bercu became obsessed with building robots. Growing up in south Florida, he’d attend robotic competitions, build prototypes, and even dumpster dive for particularly hard-to-find components. At one competition, Bercu met Charles Guan, who would go on to major in mechanical engineering at MIT, and the two robot enthusiasts became lifelong friends.

“When Charles came to MIT, he basically convinced me to move to Cambridge,” Bercu says. “He said, ‘You need to come up here. I found more people like us. Hackers!’”

Bercu visited Cambridge, Massachusetts, and indeed fell in love with the region’s makerspaces and hacker culture. He moved soon after, and he and Guan began spending free time at spaces including the Artisans Asylum makerspace in Somerville, Massachusetts; MIT’s International Design Center; and the MIT Electronics Research Society (MITERS) makerspace. Guan held several leadership positions at MITERS, including facilities manager, treasurer, and president.

“MIT offered enormous latitude to its students to be independent and creative, which was reflected in the degree of autonomy they permit student-run organizations like MITERS to have compared to other top-tier schools,” Guan says. “It was a key selling point to me when I was touring mechanical engineering labs as a junior in high school. I was well-known in the department circle for being at MITERS all the time, possibly even more than I spent on classes.”

After Guan graduated, he and Bercu started a hardware consulting business and competed in the robot combat show Battlebots. Guan also began working as a design instructor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, where he taught a section of Course 2.007 that tasked students with building go-karts.

Eventually, Guan and Bercu decided to use their experience to start a drone company.

“Over the course of Battlebots and building go-karts, we knew electric batteries were getting really cheap and electric vehicle supply chains were established,” Bercu explains. “People were raising money to build eVTOL [electric vertical take-off and landing] vehicles to transport people, but we knew diesel fuel still outperformed batteries over long distances. Where electric systems did outperform combustion engines was in areas where you needed peak power for short periods of time. Basically, batteries are awesome when you have a short mission.”

That idea made the founders think crop spraying could be a good early application. Bercu’s family runs an aviation business, and he knew pilots who would spray crops as their second jobs.

“It’s one of those high-paying but very dangerous jobs,” Bercu says. “Even in the U.S., we lose between 1 and 2 percent of all agriculture pilots each year to fatal accidents. These people are rolling the dice every time they do this: You’re flying 6 feet off the ground at 140 miles an hour with 800 gallons of pesticide in your tank.”

After cobbling together spare parts from Battlebots and their consulting business, the founders built a 600-pound drone. When they finally got it to fly, they decided the time was right to launch their company, receiving crucial early guidance and their first funding from the MIT-affiliated investment firm the E14 Fund.

The founders spent the next year interviewing crop dusters and farmers. They also started engaging with the Federal Aviation Administration.

“There was no category for anything like this,” Bercu explains. “With the FAA, we not only got through the approval process, we helped them build the process as we went through it, because we wanted to establish some common-sense standards.”

Guardian custom-built its batteries to optimize throughput and utilization rate of its drones. Depending on the farm, Bercu says his machines can unload about 1.5 to 2 tons of payload per hour.

Guardian’s drones can also spray more precisely than planes, reducing the environmental impact of pesticides, which often pollute the landscapes and waterways surrounding farms.

“This thing has the precision to spray the ‘Mona Lisa’ on 20 acres, but we’re not leveraging that functionality today,” Bercu says. “For the operator we want to make it very easy. The goal is to take someone who sprays with a tractor and teach them to spray with a drone in less than a week.”

Scaling for farmers

To date, Guardian Ag has built eight of its aircraft, which are actively delivering payloads over California farms in trials with paying customers. The company is currently ramping up manufacturing in its 60,000-square-foot facility in Massachusetts, and Bercu says Guardian has a backlog of hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of drones.

“Grower demand has been exceptional,” Bercu says. “We don’t need to educate them on the need for this. They see the big drone with the big tank and they’re in.”

Bercu envisions Guardian’s drones helping with a number of other tasks like ship-to-ship logistics, delivering supplies to offshore oil rigs, mining, and other areas where helicopters and small aircraft are currently flown through difficult terrain. But for now, the company is focused on starting with agriculture.

“Agriculture is such an important and foundational aspect of our country,” says Guardian Ag chief operating officer Ashley Ferguson MBA ’19. “We work with multigenerational farming families, and when we talk to them, it’s clear aerial spray has taken hold in the industry. But there’s a large shortage of pilots, especially for agriculture applications. So, it’s clear there’s a big opportunity.”

Seven years since founding Guardian, Bercu remains grateful that MIT’s community opened its doors for him when he moved to Cambridge.

“Without the MIT community, this company wouldn’t be possible,” Bercu says. “I was never able to go to college, but I’d love to one day apply to MIT and do my engineering undergrad or go to the Sloan School of Management. I’ll never forget MIT’s openness to me. It’s a place I hold near and dear to my heart.”

MIT physicists have demonstrated a new form of magnetism that could one day be harnessed to build faster, denser, and less power-hungry “spintronic” memory chips.

The new magnetic state is a mash-up of two main forms of magnetism: the ferromagnetism of everyday fridge magnets and compass needles, and antiferromagnetism, in which materials have magnetic properties at the microscale yet are not macroscopically magnetized.

Now, the MIT team has demonstrated a new form of magnetism, termed “p-wave magnetism.”

Physicists have long observed that electrons of atoms in regular ferromagnets share the same orientation of “spin,” like so many tiny compasses pointing in the same direction. This spin alignment generates a magnetic field, which gives a ferromagnet its inherent magnetism. Electrons belonging to magnetic atoms in an antiferromagnet also have spin, although these spins alternate, with electrons orbiting neighboring atoms aligning their spins antiparallel to each other. Taken together, the equal and opposite spins cancel out, and the antiferromagnet does not exhibit macroscopic magnetization.

The team discovered the new p-wave magnetism in nickel iodide (NiI2), a two-dimensional crystalline material that they synthesized in the lab. Like a ferromagnet, the electrons exhibit a preferred spin orientation, and, like an antiferromagnet, equal populations of opposite spins result in a net cancellation. However, the spins on the nickel atoms exhibit a unique pattern, forming spiral-like configurations within the material that are mirror-images of each other, much like the left hand is the right hand’s mirror image.

What’s more, the researchers found this spiral spin configuration enabled them to carry out “spin switching”: Depending on the direction of spiraling spins in the material, they could apply a small electric field in a related direction to easily flip a left-handed spiral of spins into a right-handed spiral of spins, and vice-versa.

The ability to switch electron spins is at the heart of “spintronics,” which is a proposed alternative to conventional electronics. With this approach, data can be written in the form of an electron’s spin, rather than its electronic charge, potentially allowing orders of magnitude more data to be packed onto a device while using far less power to write and read that data.   

“We showed that this new form of magnetism can be manipulated electrically,” says Qian Song, a research scientist in MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory. “This breakthrough paves the way for a new class of ultrafast, compact, energy-efficient, and nonvolatile magnetic memory devices.”

Song and his colleagues published their results May 28 in the journal Nature. MIT co-authors include Connor Occhialini, Batyr Ilyas, Emre Ergeçen, Nuh Gedik, and Riccardo Comin, along with Rafael Fernandes at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and collaborators from multiple other institutions.

Connecting the dots

The discovery expands on work by Comin’s group in 2022. At that time, the team probed the magnetic properties of the same material, nickel iodide. At the microscopic level, nickel iodide resembles a triangular lattice of nickel and iodine atoms. Nickel is the material’s main magnetic ingredient, as the electrons on the nickel atoms exhibit spin, while those on iodine atoms do not.

In those experiments, the team observed that the spins of those nickel atoms were arranged in a spiral pattern throughout the material’s lattice, and that this pattern could spiral in two different orientations.

At the time, Comin had no idea that this unique pattern of atomic spins could enable precise switching of spins in surrounding electrons. This possibility was later raised by collaborator Rafael Fernandes, who along with other theorists was intrigued by a recently proposed idea for a new, unconventional, “p-wave” magnet, in which electrons moving along opposite directions in the material would have their spins aligned in opposite directions.

Fernandes and his colleagues recognized that if the spins of atoms in a material form the geometric spiral arrangement that Comin observed in nickel iodide, that would be a realization of a “p-wave” magnet. Then, when an electric field is applied to switch the “handedness” of the spiral, it should also switch the spin alignment of the electrons traveling along the same direction.

In other words, such a p-wave magnet could enable simple and controllable switching of electron spins, in a way that could be harnessed for spintronic applications.

“It was a completely new idea at the time, and we decided to test it experimentally because we realized nickel iodide was a good candidate to show this kind of p-wave magnet effect,” Comin says.

Spin current

For their new study, the team synthesized single-crystal flakes of nickel iodide by first depositing powders of the respective elements on a crystalline substrate, which they placed in a high-temperature furnace. The process causes the elements to settle into layers, each arranged microscopically in a triangular lattice of nickel and iodine atoms.

“What comes out of the oven are samples that are several millimeters wide and thin, like cracker bread,” Comin says. “We then exfoliate the material, peeling off even smaller flakes, each several microns wide, and a few tens of nanometers thin.”

The researchers wanted to know if, indeed, the spiral geometry of the nickel atoms’s spins would force electrons traveling in opposite directions to have opposite spins, like what Fernandes expected a p-wave magnet should exhibit. To observe this, the group applied to each flake a beam of circularly polarized light — light that produces an electric field that rotates in a particular direction, for instance, either clockwise or counterclockwise.

They reasoned that if travelling electrons interacting with the spin spirals have a spin that is aligned in the same direction, then incoming light, polarized in that same direction, should resonate and produce a characteristic signal. Such a signal would confirm that the traveling electrons’ spins align because of the spiral configuration, and furthermore, that the material does in fact exhibit p-wave magnetism.

And indeed, that’s what the group found. In experiments with multiple nickel iodide flakes, the researchers directly observed that the direction of the electron’s spin was correlated to the handedness of the light used to excite those electrons. Such is a telltale signature of p-wave magnetism, here observed for the first time.

Going a step further, they looked to see whether they could switch the spins of the electrons by applying an electric field, or a small amount of voltage, along different directions through the material. They found that when the direction of the electric field was in line with the direction of the spin spiral, the effect switched electrons along the route to spin in the same direction, producing a current of like-spinning electrons.

“With such a current of spin, you can do interesting things at the device level, for instance, you could flip magnetic domains that can be used for control of a magnetic bit,” Comin explains. “These spintronic effects are more efficient than conventional electronics because you’re just moving spins around, rather than moving charges. That means you’re not subject to any dissipation effects that generate heat, which is essentially the reason computers heat up.”

“We just need a small electric field to control this magnetic switching,” Song adds. “P-wave magnets could save five orders of magnitude of energy. Which is huge.”

“We are excited to see these cutting-edge experiments confirm our prediction of p-wave spin polarized states,” says Libor Šmejkal, head of the Max Planck Research Group in Dresden, Germany, who is one of the authors of the theoretical work that proposed the concept of p-wave magnetism but was not involved in the new paper. “The demonstration of electrically switchable p-wave spin polarization also highlights the promising applications of unconventional magnetic states.”

The team observed p-wave magnetism in nickel iodide flakes, only at ultracold temperatures of about 60 kelvins.

“That’s below liquid nitrogen, which is not necessarily practical for applications,” Comin says. “But now that we’ve realized this new state of magnetism, the next frontier is finding a material with these properties, at room temperature. Then we can apply this to a spintronic device.”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.