Since her first journalism fellowship covering energy and the environment at the NPR station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Madison Goldberg has been drawn to science communication and audio storytelling. Now, after reporting on topics from solar storms to sewer systems to cryptography, she’s bringing her passions to MIT as the new host of the Institute’s climate change podcast.

Launched in 2019 as TILclimate, the show began its eighth season this year with a new name: Ask MIT Climate. But the podcast’s mission remains the same: teaming up with scientists and subject matter experts to bring listeners clear, accessible information on climate change topics in 15 minutes or less.

In this interview, Goldberg talks about her path to science communication, the ideas she thinks it’s important for climate communicators to convey, and what makes MIT an exciting place to share knowledge with the world.

Q: Did you always know that you wanted to be a science communicator? 

A: I didn’t! My first love in science was astronomy. I grew up looking at the stars a lot, and I was very lucky to do an internship in high school at UC Santa Cruz with a professor in their astronomy department. Space kind of puts everything in the biggest possible perspective, and for me, that’s a very calming thing.

And then in college, I wanted to do something closer to home, so to speak. I found that Earth science was very exciting to learn about, because pretty much all the sciences are somehow involved. You know, you’ve got chemistry, biology, physics ... everything all rolled into one. Also, I still got to tap into a lot of what I loved about astronomy, in terms of exploring deep time and big scales. And I was very motivated by a lot of the problems in Earth and climate science, because they tie so closely to people’s lives.

I expected to continue with research, but I discovered that what was especially compelling to me was learning about this stuff and then talking to people about it. And in my senior year of college I learned that science communication, and science journalism, was a field that you could be in. 

I took a science podcasting course that year — which I still can’t believe even existed — and I got my first taste of interviewing people and working in audio, which was just incredible. I had loved podcasts for so long, and so the medium felt really familiar.

Q: What is important for science communicators to convey about climate change?

A: One of the ideas that I try to always keep in mind, and that I think is really important to convey, is that climate change affects every single aspect of our lives. And we need to communicate about it accordingly.

I think it’s crucial to consider the ways climate change intertwines with all these other realms of people’s experiences; it affects where we live, it affects what we eat, it affects the economy, it affects our health. Approaching it in isolation doesn’t seem to be the most productive framework. As communicators, we have a responsibility to listen and learn and talk about all these many and varied ways that climate change shows up in people’s lives.

This idea of things intertwining also reminds me of a really central theme in Ask MIT Climate: that working towards climate solutions not only allows us to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, but it can also help make people’s lives better in other ways. And we get to think expansively about the future we want to build.

Q: What makes MIT an exciting place to be engaged in climate communication?

A: The folks that I've talked to at MIT are just so kind and generous with their time. And these people are so busy! They have so much on their plates, and yet, somehow, even when I have a million follow-up questions, extremely prominent researchers will hop on a Zoom or exchange emails to answer them. I feel so lucky to be part of this community.

Related to what I mentioned earlier, I also appreciate the interdisciplinary climate work that happens at MIT. Tackling climate change is a generational challenge, and it requires inputs from all kinds of fields. And at MIT we have, for example, the Climate Project, the Climate Policy Center, the Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, the Living Climate Futures Lab — all of these ways to approach the issue and bring folks into the conversation who have different expertise, experiences, and perspectives. I think it’s really special to be at MIT, to see that happen in real-time, and to see students, faculty, and staff working to bridge across subject matter boundaries.

Above all, I’ve been shown such generosity, and I’m so grateful. I feel like I can never express enough gratitude for the people inside and outside of MIT who have spoken to me about their work and about their lives. All I can hope to do is to communicate that information faithfully. Because I think there’s a huge number of people who are curious about climate change and what we can do about it, and who want to learn.

Imagine a world where you could change the designs you see on bags, shirts, and walls whenever you want. Typical clothes would become customizable fashion pieces, while your humble abode could turn into a smart home. That’s the vision of scientists like MIT electrical engineering and computer science PhD student Yunyi Zhu ’20, MEng ’21: technology that can “reprogram” the appearance of personal accessories, home decor, and office items. 

At MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), she’s created clever hardware that can add, say, artwork to a sweater, then swap in a new illustration later. To do this, she coats items with an invisible ink called photochromic dye, which transforms into different colors when exposed to intense light. Her colleagues previously built a device called “PhotoChromeleon” that used a projector to activate this ink, but the system wasn’t portable, so Zhu built the LED-based tool “PortaChrome” to reprogram lower-resolution imagery on the go.

Zhu and her team now have the best of both worlds: a portable device called “ChromoLCD” that programs clear pictures onto T-shirts, tables, and whiteboards. It looks like a small printer on the outside, but inside, ChromoLCD combines the sharpness of liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) with the precision lighting of LEDs. The collective powers of these lights help users stamp designs onto flat surfaces (like walls) and soft ones (like clothes) after they’ve been coated with photochromic dye.

ChromoLCD can embed a digital rose onto a hoodie, for example. Once you’ve painted photochromic ink onto the surface you’d like to redesign, you upload your picture to the device via Bluetooth or USB port. Users can select and preview their designs from ChromoLCD’s display menu, then stamp the device onto their item. Within about 15 minutes, you’ll have a personalized piece, and if you’d like to change it, you can program a new design onto your object.

“We see ChromoLCD as a bridge between consumers and photochromic dyes,” says Zhu, who is also co-lead author on a paper presenting this work. “It’s basically a stamp, and it’s very easy to use. There are no alignment requirements, no 3D object texture creation. You just upload the image you’d like to put on your bag, place it on there, and then you’d have a personalized accessory.”

ChromoLCD showed it could add a personalized touch to accessories such as a handbag by stamping on colorful drawings of things like fish and flowers. It also embedded an augmented reality (AR) tag (much like a QR code) on a tiled kitchen counter, which linked to a cooking tutorial a user could watch while preparing a meal. The tool even reprogrammed a whiteboard to display high-resolution reference images, and could potentially turn any whiteboard into an interactive canvas that blends digital visuals with physical sketching.

Welcome to the light show

At its core, ChromoLCD is a tower of power. Its display screen sits atop a white shell, which houses a computer chip, a backlight made up of bright ultraviolet (UV) and red, green, and blue (RGB) LEDs, and an LCD panel. In other words, while ChromoLCD works its magic to customize an object, a light show takes place behind the scenes.

The system first produces a black-and-white video that outlines the brightness of particular pixels in the image you select. For example, a picture of a parrot will have some areas that are darker than others, such as the shadows cast under its wing. Then, a UV light darkens (or saturates) the dye on your object, followed by the RGB lights that brighten it up and color in each pixel. It’s kind of like when you open the shades in the morning — what starts as a blast of bright light soon becomes a more colorful visual. These lights are produced at precise frequencies that the LCD maps onto your target object.

Zhu and her colleagues note that these components are fairly easy to purchase, in case you want to make your own ChromoLCD at home. Recreating ChromoLCD could help you turn often-overlooked items into interactive displays that you can modify as you please. “A wall in your office can show your family’s pictures when you miss them, or perhaps a doormat can show a customized greeting for each of your guests,” says Zhu. “It’s sort of like turning the world into your canvas.”

What next?

Combined with PortaChrome and PhotoChromeleon, CSAIL researchers have developed systems that help us digitize our surroundings. The next step for them is to find a way to help with the creative process of what to put there. Currently, you still need to upload a picture or even create a texture image for a 3D object. With the recent advancements we’ve seen from AI in texture generation, though, users could make requests without as much effort. By simply turning on your phone’s camera (or wearing an AR helmet) and pointing it at a particular object, you could ask your generative system to “turn a cup into a medieval-style tankard.” Voilà: you’d have programmed drinkware.

In the meantime, Zhu and her colleagues are bringing photochromic material to larger surfaces by developing a reprogrammer in the shape of a wall-roller. The machine works much like painting a wall, allowing you to place larger designs onto a surface. CSAIL researchers are also exploring swiping and ironing motions, and even implementing their current technology into robots to help them communicate with humans and other machines. The machines would be able to essentially write what they’re doing onto a surface — for example, a Roomba vacuum could tell its robotic counterparts that it cleaned specific areas of a large floor by stamping a clearly displayed, high-resolution message on the ground.

Narges Pourjafarian, a postdoc at Northeastern University who wasn’t involved in the paper, says that ChromoLCD is more than a resolution upgrade over prior MIT projects. “It reframes monochromatic LCD panels as wavelength-selective fabrication tools, rather than merely display endpoints. This approach expands how we think about reprogrammable surface appearance, enabling high-resolution, reconfigurable graphics to be embedded directly into physical environments without the need for stationary projection enclosures. It opens a path toward compact, portable augmentation of garments, countertops, and shared surfaces.”

Zhu wrote the paper with six CSAIL affiliates. They are: MIT undergraduates Qingyuan Li (who is a co-lead author), Katherine Yan, Alex Luchianov, and Eden Hen; Harvard University graduate student and former visiting researcher Emily Guan; and MIT Associate Professor Stefanie Mueller, who is a CSAIL principal investigator and senior author on the work. The researchers will present their paper at the ACM International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction.

From enhancing international business logistics to freeing up more hospital beds to helping farmers, MIT Professor Dimitris Bertsimas SM ’87, PhD ’88 summarized how his work in operations research has helped drive real-world improvements, while delivering the 54th annual James R. Killian Faculty Achievement Award Lecture at MIT on Thursday, March 19.

Bertsimas also described how artificial intelligence is now being used in some of his scholarly projects and as a tool in MIT Open Learning efforts, which he currently directs — another facet of a highly productive and lauded career over four decades at the Institute. The Killian Award is the highest prize MIT gives its faculty.

“I have tried to improve the human condition,” Bertsimas said, summarizing the breadth of his work and the many applications to everyday living that he has found for it.

At MIT, Bertsimas is the vice provost for open learning, associate dean for online education and artificial intelligence, Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management, and professor of operations research in the MIT Sloan School of Management. He also served as the inaugural faculty director of the master of business analytics program at MIT Sloan, and has held the position of associate dean of business analytics.

Bertsimas’ remarks encompassed both his past insights and his ongoing studies, as well as his current efforts to add AI to his research. Describing the concept of “robust optimization,” a highly influential approach that Bertsimas helped develop in the early 2000s, he explained how it has enabled, for instance, more reliable shipping through the Panama Canal. Other approaches to optimization aimed at getting more vessels through the canal every day — up to 48 — but would encounter significant problems at times. Bertsimas’ approach identified that 45 vessels a day was better — a slightly lower number, but one that “was always feasible,” he noted.

Over time, Bertsimas’ work has helped structure all kinds of solutions in business logistics; it has even been used for the allocation of school buses in Boston.

More recently, as Bertsimas explained in the lecture, he and his collaborators have been working with Hartford HealthCare in Connecticut on a wide range of issues, and are increasingly incorporating AI into the development of tools for diagnostics, among other things. On the optimization front, their research has suggested ways to reduce the average stay of a hospital patient, from 5.38 days to 4.93 days. In the main Hartford hospital they have studied, given the number of existing beds, that reduction has enabled more than 5,000 additional patient stays per year.

“It’s a very different ballgame,” Bertsimas said.

Bertsimas delivered his lecture, titled “Algorithms for Life: AI and Operations Research Transforming Healthcare, Education, and Agriculture,” to an audience of over 300 MIT community members in Huntington Hall (Room 10-250) on campus.

The award was established in 1971 to honor James Killian, whose distinguished career included serving as MIT’s 10th president, from 1948 to 1959, and subsequently as chair of the MIT Corporation, from 1959 to 1971.

“Professor Bertsimas’ scholarly contributions are both extensive and groundbreaking,” said Roger Levy, chair of the MIT faculty and a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, while making introductory remarks. “He’s one of the rare individuals who has made significant contributions to both intellectual threads in the field of operations research: one, optimization — combinatorial, linear, and nonlinear — and number two, stochastic processes.”

Indeed, Bertsimas’ work has helped develop both better tools for studying and conducting operations, while also having a wide range of applications. As Bertsimas noted in his lecture, the deaths of both of his parents in 2009 helped propel him to start looking at extensively at ways operations research could help health care.

Bertsimas received his BS in electrical engineering and computer science from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. Moving to MIT for his graduate work, he then earned his MS in operations research and his PhD in applied mathematics and operations research. Bertsimas joined the MIT faculty after receiving his doctorate, and has remained at the Institute ever since.

Bertsimas is also known as an energetic teacher who has been the principal advisor to a remarkable number of PhD students — 106 and counting, at this point.

“It is far and away my favorite activity, to supervise my doctoral students,” Bertsimas said. “It is a privilege, in my opinion, to work with exceptional young people like the ones we have at MIT, in ability and character and aspiration. They actually make me a better scientist, and a better person.”

“MIT is part of my identity,” Bertsimas quipped while noting that he is the only faculty member on campus who has those three letters, in order, in his first name.

In the latter part of the lecture, Bertsimas highlighted work he has been doing as vice provost of open learning at MIT. He has personally developed an large online course based on his own material, “The Analytics Edge.” In his current role, Bertsimas said, he now aspires for MIT to reach a billion learners with online courses, part of his effort to “democratize access to education.”

Bertsimas also demonstrated for the audience some AI tools he and his colleagues are working to bring to online education, including ways of condensing material, and the translation of online material into other languages.

It is just one more chapter in a long and broad-ranging career dedicated to grasping phenomena and developing tools to help us navigate it.

Or as Berstimas noted while summarizing his scholarship at one point in the lecture, “I try to increase the human understanding of how the world works.” 

It’s an impressive feat, over a decade after the box was released:

Since reset glitching wasn’t possible, Gaasedelen thought some voltage glitching could do the trick. So, instead of tinkering with the system rest pin(s) the hacker targeted the momentary collapse of the CPU voltage rail. This was quite a feat, as Gaasedelen couldn’t ‘see’ into the Xbox One, so had to develop new hardware introspection tools.

Eventually, the Bliss exploit was formulated, where two precise voltage glitches were made to land in succession. One skipped the loop where the ...

The president has approved just 23 percent of blue state requests for disaster aid, compared to 89 percent for red states.

The tech giant is trying to jump-start an industry that can address climate change by storing greenhouse gas emissions underground.

The judge did allow a nonprofit group and historic property owners to continue a Clean Water Act claim against the South Fork project.

Chubb faces litigation over its decision to bar a proposal for a study on the shareholder benefits of suing entities responsible for climate change.

The governor's pitch to weaken New York’s climate law has support from powerful business interests and labor unions.

A top NOAA official will brief appropriators on National Weather Service operations.

Gov. Josh Green said the cost of the storm could top $1 billion, including damage to airports, schools, roads, homes and a Maui hospital in Kula.

The effort takes as its inspiration Pope Francis’ 2015 environmental encyclical “Praised Be.”

The state government will not approve so-called greenfield coal mines, which are developed from scratch, in a move designed to meet its net-zero target.

A few weeks ago, Amy Moran-Thomas and 20 students in her class 21A.311 (The Social Lives of Medical Objects) were gathered around a glucose meter, a jar of test strips, and various spare medical parts in the MIT Museum seminar room, talking about how to make them work better.

The class had just heard a presentation from the president of the Belize Diabetes Association in Dangriga, Norma Flores, a nurse whose hospital had recently received a huge shipment of insulin that, although durable in theory, seemed to have spoiled in a heat wave. Flores and the students discussed whether scientists could develop temperature-stable insulin and design repairable glucose meters and other technologies for hospitals worldwide.

“Whenever people keep saying they are concerned about an issue, but the medical literature doesn’t describe it yet, there is a key question about what’s happening,” says Moran-Thomas. “Ethnography can help us learn about it.”

For Moran-Thomas, an MIT anthropologist, that class session was a way of connecting people and ideas that are too often overlooked. Flores was a central figure in Moran-Thomas’ 2019 book, “Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic,” about diabetes in Belize and the failures of medical technology designed to treat it. (At the end of class, Flores surprised Moran-Thomas with a framed commendation from the Belize Diabetes Association for their nearly 20 years of work together.)

That approach informs all of Moran-Thomas’ work. Currently she is co-leading a group working on a project called the “Sugar Atlas,” mapping the social and economic dimensions of diabetes in the Caribbean, in tandem with scholars Nicole Charles of the University of Toronto and Tonya Haynes of the University of West Indies. Moran-Thomas has also spent more than a decade following the case of notorious medical experiments that took place in Guatemala in the 1940s, the subject of a recent paper she published with Susan Reverby of Wellesley College.

Closer to home, Moran-Thomas is working on a book about how energy extraction affects chronic conditions and mental health in her native Pennsylvania, at a time of increasing hospital closures. As part of this research, she has been working with MIT seismologist William Frank to develop low-cost sensors that people can use to measure the impact of industrial activity on their home neighborhoods. The research team was recently awarded a grant by the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC) for the work. And with another MITHIC grant, Moran-Thomas and several colleagues are working to create a new “Health and Society” educational program at MIT.

“A through line in my work is the question about how to put people at the center of health and medicine,” says Moran-Thomas, an associate professor in MIT’s anthropology program. “Because that’s not how it feels to most people in the world. Care technologies that work for everybody, and health technologies in relation to chronic disease, connect all these different projects.”

The work Moran-Thomas may be best known for occurred in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when her research recovered an array of neglected clinical studies showing that oximeters functioned differently depending on the skin color of patients. After she published a piece about it in the Boston Review, further hospital studies by physicians who found the essay confirmed a pattern of disproportionately inaccurate readings, leading to subsequent efforts to improve the technology — all steming from her careful, patient-centric approach.

“What anthropology has to offer the world, and other knowledge systems, is the insights of people that might be missing from many accounts, and highlighting these stories that are getting left out,” Moran-Thomas says. “Those are not footnotes, but the central thing to follow. And those histories are also alive in the material world around us.”

Thinking across medical and climate technologies

After growing up in Pennsylvania, Moran-Thomas majored in literature while earning her BA from American University. She decided to pursue ethnographic research as a graduate student, and entered Princeton University’s program in anthropology, earning an MA in 2008 and her PhD in 2012. After postdoc stints at Princeton and Brown University, Moran-Thomas joined the MIT faculty in 2015.

At Princeton, Moran-Thomas’ dissertation research examined the diabetes epidemic in Belize, forming the basis of her first book, “Traveling with Sugar,” whose title is an expression in Belize for living with diabetes. As she chronicles in the book, plantation-era changes that undermined indigenous agriculture, among other things, contributed to a local economy that made diets sugar-heavy, while medical technologies are often unreliable or ill-suited to local conditions. The book also traces breakdowns in care technologies, such as prosthetic limbs (often sought after diabetes-linked amputations), glucose meters, hyperbaric chambers, insulin supply chains, dialysis machines, and pain management technologies.

“Traveling with Sugar” also develops a critique that has become a theme of Moran-Thomas’ work: that society often shifts the blame for illness onto patients while minimizing the larger-scale factors affecting everyday health.

“There can be this focus on exclusively prevention without care, the implicit assumption that patients need to act differently,” Moran-Thomas says. “Blame falls on individuals and families instead of a focus on other questions. Why are these technologies always breaking down? How are they designed, and by whom, for whom? What role is history playing in the present? And how are people trying to remake those structures?”

Those issues are highlighted in Moran-Thomas’ ongoing project, “Sugar Atlas: Counter-Mapping Diabetes from the Caribbean,” which is backed by a two-year Digital Justice Seed Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. Whereas international organizations tend to lump North America and the Caribbean together when tracking diabetes, this project zooms in on specific aspects of the disease and its historical and structural contributors in the Caribbean, such as the distance people must travel to buy vegetables, their proximity to insulin supplies, and the ways climate change is affecting sea life and fishing practices.

“We’re trying to create a community platform offering a different vision of these conditions,” Moran-Thomas says of the effort to map otherwise unrecorded aspects of the global diabetes epidemic, while tracing mutual aid networks and people’s “arts of care” in the present.

Better design for common devices

Following her research in Belize, where glucose meters were prone to breaking, Moran-Thomas began taking a more active focus on the design of medical technology. At MIT, she began co-teaching a course with tech innovator Jose Gomez-Marquez, 21A.311 (The Social Lives of Medical Objects). The idea was to get students to think about device design that could lead to more durable, fixable, and equitable products.

In turn, Moran-Thomas’ interest in devices led her to question the pulse oximeter readings she started seeing first-hand during the Covid-19 pandemic. Pulse oximeters measure oxygen saturation levels in patients and are a part of even routine appointment check-ins. They work visually, casting beams of light to measure the color of hemoglobin, which varies depending on how much oxygen it contains. 

After firsthand encounters with the sensors led to more research, Moran-Thomas learned that some medical professionals had lingering, unanswered questions about pulse oximeters and they way they were calibrated. After she published her essay in the Boston Review, arguing for more data collection, medical researchers examined the issue more closely, finding that patients with darker skin were about three times more likely to have erroneous blood-oxygen readings than patients with lighter skin. Ultimately, an FDA panel recommended changes to the devices.

“A lot of my work has been learning about health and medicine technologies from the perspectives of patients, families, and nurses, rather than beginning with engineers and doctors,” Moran-Thomas says. “Those two projects, about blood sugar and blood oxygen, were about the shortcomings of those devices and how they could be improved. Those are perspectives I can highlight in hopes others will pick up on them and make other kinds of designs and policies possible.”

Moran-Thomas’ interest in device design has continued with her current book project, about the chronic health effects of energy production in Pennsylvania. She has worked with MIT seismologist William Frank, of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, to construct an inexpensive meter people can use to measure shaking in their homes caused by industrial activities. (After colleagues in western Pennsylvania reached out with seismic concerns, Moran-Thomas first got the idea to contact Frank after reading about his work in MIT News, incidentally).

The effort is also inspired by guidance from community leaders based at the Center for Coalfield Justice in western Pennsylvania. The research team has received a MITHIC Connectivity grant for their project, “Seismic Collaboratory: Rural Health, Missing Science, and Communicating the Chronic Impacts of Extraction.”

“I’ve met people who have been told by their doctors they must have vertigo, while they thought the walls of their house were really shaking,” Moran-Thomas says. “In a case like that, the device you need is not in the clinic, it’s a monitor at home.”

The book, overall, will examine the effects of energy production on chronic disease and mental health issues in Pennsylvania, something exacerbated by more hospitals being shuttered in the state.

Moran-Thomas is simultaneously working with several co-investigators to create the “Health and Society” educational program at MIT, including Katharina Ribbeck, Erica James, Aleshia Carlsen-Bryan, and Dina Asfaha. Their work was recently awarded an Education Innovation Seed Grant from MITHIC.

From small devices to large-scale changes in health care systems, from the U.S. to other regions, Moran-Thomas remains focused on a core set of issues about how to improve and broaden health care — and lessen the need for it in the first place.

“Thinking across scales is something that’s really useful about anthropology,” Moran-Thomas says. “Even one medical device is a tiny piece of a bigger infrastructure. In order to study that technology or device or sensor, you have to understand the bigger infrastructure it’s attached to, and that there are people involved in all parts of it.” 

Two years ago, Congress passed the “Reforming Intelligence and Securing America” Act (RISAA) that included nominal reforms to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The bill unfortunately included some problematic expansions of the law—but it also included a relatively big victory for civil liberties advocates: Section 702 authorities were only extended for two years, allowing Congress to continue the important work of negotiating a warrant requirement for Americans as well as some other critical reforms. 

However, Congress clearly did not continue this work. In fact, it now appears that Congress is poised to consider another extension of this program without even attempting to include necessary and common sense reforms. Most notably, Congress is not considering a requirement to obtain a warrant before looking at data on U.S. persons that was indiscriminately and warrantlessly collected. House Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed that “the plan is to move a clean extension of FISA … for at least 18 months.” 

Even more disappointing, House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, who has previously been a champion of both the warrant requirement and closing the data broker loophole, told the press he would vote for a clean extension of FISA, claiming that RISAA included enough reforms for the moment.

It’s important to note RISAA was just a reauthorization of this mass surveillance program with a long history of abuse. Prior to the 2024 reauthorization, Section 702 was already misused to run improper queries on peaceful protesters, federal and state lawmakers, Congressional staff, thousands of campaign donors, journalists, and a judge reporting civil rights violations by local police. RISAA further expanded the government’s authority by allowing it to compel a much larger group of people and providers into assisting with this surveillance. As we said when it passed, overall, RISAA is a travesty for Americans who deserve basic constitutional rights and privacy whether they are communicating with people and services inside or outside of the US.

Section 702 should not be reauthorized without any additional safeguards or oversight. Fortunately, there are currently three reform bills for Congress to consider: SAFE, PLEWSA, and GSRA. While none of these bills are perfect, they are all significantly better than the status quo, and should be considered instead of a bill that attempts no reform at all. 

Mass spying—accessing a massive amount of communications by and with Americans first and sorting out targets second and secretly—has always been a problem for our rights.  It was a problem at first when President George W. Bush authorized it in secret without Congressional or court oversight. And it remained a problem even after the passage of Section 702 in 2008 created the possibility of  some oversight. Congress was right that this surveillance is dangerous, and that's why it set Section 702 up for regular reconsideration. That reconsideration has not occurred, even as the circumstances of the NSA, Justice Department, and FBI leadership, have radically changed. Reform is long overdue, and now it's urgent.  

The population needs better conservation.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

The blobfish, once considered the ugliest animal in the world, has since had quite the redemption arc. Years after it was first discovered, scientists realized that the deep-sea creature appeared so unnervingly blobby only because it went through an extreme change in pressure when it was brought up to the surface. In its natural environment, 4,000 feet underwater, the fish looks perfectly handsome.

Structural biologists, whose goal is to deduce a molecule’s structure and function within a cell, face the risk of making a similar mistake. If biomolecular complexes are extracted from the cell, better-quality images can be obtained, but the molecules may not look natural. On the other hand, studying molecules without disrupting their environment at all is technically challenging, like filming deep underwater.

A new method, called purification-free ribosome imaging from subcellular mixtures (cryoPRISM), offers an appealing compromise. Developed by graduate students Mira May and Gabriela López-Pérez in the Davis lab in the MIT Department of Biology and recently published in PNAS, the technique allows biologists to visualize molecular complexes without taking them too far out of their natural context.

CryoPRISM captures molecular structures in cells that have just been broken open. This comes as close to preserving the natural interactions between molecules as possible, short of the extremely resource-intensive in-cell structural imaging, according to associate professor of biology Joey Davis, the faculty lead of the study.

“We think that the cryoPRISM method is a sweet spot where we preserve much of the native cellular contacts, but still have the resolution that lets us actually see molecular details,” Davis says. “Even in the extremely well-trodden system of translation in E. coli, which people have worked on for over 50 years, we are still finding new states that had just escaped people’s attention.”

A negative control that was not so negative

The development of cryoPRISM, as many discoveries in science, resulted from an unexpected observation that Mira May, the co-first author of the study, made while working on a different project.

Like all living organisms, bacteria rely on a process called translation to manufacture the proteins that carry out essential functions within the cell, from copying DNA to digesting nutrients. A key machine involved in translation is the ribosome — a biomolecular complex that assembles proteins based on instructions encoded by another molecule called mRNA. To regulate its activity, cells employ additional proteins that can change the shape of the ribosome, thus guiding its function.

May sought to identify new players in ribosomal regulation using cryoEM, by rapidly freezing lots of purified molecules and collecting thousands of 2D images to reconstruct their 3D structures. May was trying to pull ribosomes out of cells to visualize them together with their regulators. For her experiments, she designed a negative control containing unpurified bacterial lysate — a mixture of everything spilled from burst cells.

May expected to get noisy, low-quality images from this sample. To her surprise, instead, she saw intact ribosomes together with their natural interacting partners.

In just a few days, this technique experimentally validated data that would have taken months to acquire using other approaches. 

“As I found more and more ribosomal states, this project became a method, not just a one-off finding,” May recalls.

Discovering new biology in a saturated field

Once May and her colleagues were confident that cryoPRISM could detect known ribosomal states, they began searching for ones that had previously escaped detection. 

“It’s not just that we can recapitulate things that have been previously observed, but we can actually also discover novel ribosomal biology,” May says. 

One of the novel states May identified has important implications for our understanding of the evolution of translation regulation.

During active translation, bacterial ribosomes are accompanied by a group of helper proteins called elongation factors. These factors bring in the materials for protein synthesis, like tRNAs and amino acids.

When cells encounter unfavorable conditions, such as colder temperatures, they reduce translation, which means that many ribosomes are out of work. These idle, hibernating ribosomes stop decoding mRNA, and the interface where they usually interact with helper molecules gets blocked by a hibernation factor called RaiA. This protein helps idle ribosomes avoid reactivation, like a sleeping mask that prevents a person from being woken up by light.

May observed the idle ribosomal state in her data, which on its own did not surprise her – this state had been described before. What surprised her was that some inactive ribosomes were interacting not only with RaiA, but also with an elongation factor called EF-G, which in bacteria was previously believed to only interact with active ribosomes.

A similar phenomenon has been seen before in more complex organisms, but observing it in a microbe suggests that its evolutionary origin may be older than previously thought. 

“It fits an emerging model in the field, that elongation factors might bind to hibernating ribosomes to protect both the ribosome and themselves from degradation during periods of stress,” May explains. “Think of it like short-term storage.” 

An unstressed cell might quickly eliminate unneeded inactive ribosomes, but because any stressor that puts ribosomes to sleep could be temporary, the cell may prefer to hold off on destroying them. That way, the ribosomes can be quickly reactivated if conditions improve.

The future of cryoPRISM

May has already teamed up with other MIT researchers to use cryoPRISM to visualize ribosomes in cells that are notoriously difficult to work with, including pathogenic organisms, which can be challenging to culture at the scale required for particle purification, and red blood cells isolated from patients, which cannot be cultured at all.

Besides its immediate application for translation research, cryoPRISM is a stepping stone toward the broader goal of structural biology: studying biomolecules in their natural environment.

To truly learn about deep-sea fish, scientists need to look at them in the deep sea; and to learn about cellular machines, scientists need to look at them in cells. According to Davis, cryoPRISM perfectly fits into the “theme of structural biology moving closer and closer to cellular context.”

Could a three-hour workshop on an advanced materials analysis technique turn someone into a detective — or perhaps an art restorer?

At MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) in late January, about a dozen students explored that possibility during an Independent Activities Period (IAP) workshop on Raman spectroscopy, a technique that uses laser light to “fingerprint” materials. The session even featured a robotic dog equipped with sensing equipment, demonstrating how chemical analysis can be done remotely.

The workshop, led by MIT postdoc Lamyaa Almehmadi in collaboration with the CBA, introduced participants to a powerful technique now used by law enforcement and first responders to identify narcotics and explosives, by gemologists to authenticate precious stones, and pharmaceutical companies to verify raw materials and ensure product quality. CBA graduate researcher Jiaming Liu co-hosted, delivering lectures, demonstrating Raman equipment, and contributing to the curriculum and hands-on demonstrations.

“It can open up new possibilities for innovation across many fields,” said Almehmadi, an analytical chemist in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). After attendees learned the fundamentals, she encouraged them to think creatively about new applications: “My hope is to inspire all of you to think about doing something with Raman spectroscopy that no one has done before.”

Fingerprinting materials

Participants brought items to class to analyze using handheld devices, which fire laser light and measure how it bounces back. The resulting pattern behaves like a molecular fingerprint, identifying the materials in the item — whether it’s a paper clip, a piece of tree bark, or a mixing bowl.

Workshop attendee Sarah Ciriello, an administrative assistant at DMSE who brought a stone she found at the beach, was taken aback by the results. The Raman device suggested a 39 percent probability that the sample contained concrete-like material, with the remaining readings matching synthetic compounds — blurring the line between natural and manufactured materials.

“It’s man-made — I was surprised,” Ciriello said.

Developed in 1928 by Indian scientist C.V. Raman, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physics, Raman spectroscopy was groundbreaking because it used visible light to probe materials without destroying them, a major advantage over other techniques at the time, such as chromatography or mass spectrometry. But for decades, the Raman signal — the light scattered back from a sample — was weak, and the instruments were big and bulky, limiting its practical use.

Advances in lasers, computing power, and miniaturized optics have transformed Raman spectroscopy into a portable tool. Today’s handheld devices can instantly compare a sample’s molecular fingerprint against vast digital libraries, allowing users to identify thousands of materials in seconds. Because it doesn’t destroy the sample, Raman is especially useful in fields that require preserving materials — such as law enforcement, where evidence must remain intact, and art restoration.

Almehmadi’s own research focuses on advancing Raman spectroscopy by developing highly sensitive, semiconductor-based sensors that make portable chemical analysis possible, with applications ranging from medical diagnostics to forensic and environmental monitoring.

“Raman can be used to analyze any material,” Almehmadi says. “That’s why I decided to introduce it to students from diverse backgrounds.”

IAP classes are open to students and staff across MIT, and the Raman workshop reflected that range — from administrative staff to graduate and undergraduate students and postdocs in departments and labs including DMSE, the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the Media Lab, and the Broad Institute.

Walking the robot dog

A crowd-pleasing element in the workshop was the integration of a robot dog that belongs to the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The demonstration highlighted how Raman technology can be used in dangerous environments, such as crime scenes or toxic industrial sites.

The handheld device was secured to the robot using tape, and Almehmadi showed how she could navigate the dog to a plastic bag filled with a white powder — baking soda.

But in a real-world scenario, “How can we know if it is baking soda or not?” she says. “So we just shined the light, and then the instrument told us what it was.”

Participants used a Wi-Fi app on their phones to view the results and a small remote controller to operate the robotic dog themselves.

“I loved the robot dog,” Ciriello says. “I was able to control it a bit, but it was challenging because the gauge was really sensitive.”

Michael Kitcher, a postdoc in DMSE, also praises the robot demonstration.

“Given that we just duct taped the device onto the dog — it was cool to see it actually worked,” he says.

Looking ahead

Kitcher, who researches magnetic materials for electronic applications, joined the workshop to learn more about Raman spectroscopy, which he had read about but never used. He was impressed by its versatility — in addition to the beach stone and baking soda, the device identified materials in a contact lens, cosmetics, and even a diamond.

Although it struggled to analyze a piece of chocolate he brought — other signals from the chocolate interfered — Kitcher sees strong potential for his own research. One area he’s interested in is unconventional magnetic materials, such as altermagnets, with unusual magnetic behavior that researchers hope to better understand and control for more energy-efficient electronics.

“Over the last couple of years, people have been trying to get a better sense of why these materials behave the way they do — how we can control this unconventional magnetic order,” he says. Raman spectroscopy can probe the vibrations of atoms in a material, helping researchers detect patterns in the crystal structure that underlie unusual magnetic behaviors. By understanding these vibrations, scientists could unlock material design rules that enable ultra-fast, low-energy computing.

Hands-on workshops like this — that inspire innovative future applications — Almehmadi says, are at the heart of an MIT education.

“I’ve always learned best by doing,” she says. “Lectures and reading are important, but real understanding comes from hands-on experience.”

Weekends at MIT are often a time for students to catch up on sleep or finish p-sets, lab work, and other school assignments. But for more than two decades, through a student-driven initiative supported by the Division of Student Life (DSL), students have been able to find welcoming activities designed to build community on Friday and Saturday nights through Weekends@MIT. All events are open to both graduate and undergraduate students.

At the heart of Weekends@MIT is a leadership team within the Wellbeing Ambassadors program. Ten leadership team members plan and host a variety of events from 9 to 11 p.m. in the MIT Wellbeing Lab, transforming the space into a hub for connection and creativity. While DSL staff provide advising, logistical support, and funding, event ideas come from students. Club members are committed to facilitating student social activities, all while increasing health awareness.

Student-led activities

Student ownership is intentional, says Robyn Priest, an assistant dean in the Division of Student Life. “All the ideas for activities come from the students. Leaders brainstorm themes, vote on their favorite concepts, and spearhead events in small teams. The only criterion is that it be substance-free. The students involved are dedicated, and the time commitment can be significant, so they are paid. But our students consistently step up, motivated by the opportunity to create experiences for their peers.”

Past events have included craft nights with boba tea, yoga, trivia competitions, bracelet-making workshops, waffle nights with customizable toppings, and even Spooky Skate, a Halloween costume ice-skating event hosted by the club in the Z Center.

Priest notes that just this past fall semester, more than 2,000 students attended the Friday night events, with many programs designed as drop-in experiences so students can participate around their busy schedules.

“I joined Weekends@MIT because I really liked the idea of helping organize activities on campus that promoted well-being for students and provided them with chill events that they can attend to build community and feel good on Friday nights,” says junior Emily Crespin Guerra.

Senior Ruting Hung adds, “I wanted to become more involved in promoting wellness on campus. Since then, I've found that it has also served as a way for me to recharge after a long week.”

Expanding Saturday events

Saturdays bring additional variety through collaborations with student clubs and groups. Organizations can apply for funding — typically several hundred dollars — to host events between 9 and 11 p.m. that are open to all students.

Undergraduate and graduate organizations, cultural groups, and hobby-based clubs have all contributed to programming. The partnerships also introduce new audiences to the Wellbeing Lab, helping the space become a familiar and welcoming destination across campus communities.

Connecting the campus through communication

Another key component of Weekends@MIT is a weekly newsletter distributed to thousands of students. The newsletter highlights upcoming programs in the Wellbeing Lab, along with other campus events that align with the initiative’s goals of connection and community without alcohol.

First-year student Vivian Dinh notes, “I love how the events provide a fun escape from the stress of classes and problem sets. The Wellbeing Lab is such a nice facility on campus for students to relax and enjoy themselves.”

A long tradition, evolving for the future

The current initiative builds on a long history of student-led weekend programming that began more than 20 years ago. Over time, the effort has evolved — from early safety campaigns to today’s comprehensive model focused on well-being, belonging, and social connection — but the core idea remains the same: students creating healthy spaces for other students.

Looking ahead, Weekends@MIT aims to continue expanding collaborations and exploring new ways to bring communities together on weekends. Additional events for this semester include: pupusas; blitz chess tournament with the Chess Club; craft night; movies and waffles; mocktails and latte art; a Bob Ross paint night, and much more.

EFF joined other digital rights and civil liberties organizations in calling out the unconstitutionality of Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr’s recent threats to punish broadcasters for airing statements he disagrees with. 

Carr’s recent threats, like his past threats, are unconstitutional efforts to coerce news coverage that favors President Donald Trump. He wrongly claims that the FCC’s “public interest” standard allows him and the commission to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who publish news that is unflattering to the government is anathema to our country’s core constitutional values. 

The First Amendment constrains the FCC’s authority to force broadcasters to toe the government’s line, even though broadcast licensees are required to operate in the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.” Imposing restrictions on licensees’ speech, especially viewpoint-based limitations, are still subject to First Amendment scrutiny even if, in some circumstances, that scrutiny differs somewhat from that applied to non-broadcast media. And the “public interest” requirement, as it were, has never been interpreted to allow the type of viewpoint-based punishment that Carr has threatened here.  

Everyone agrees that news reporting should strive for accuracy, but Carr’s threats have little do with that. Instead, his allegations of "falsity" are a proxy for retaliation based on (1) Carr’s subjective policy disagreements; (2) any criticism of Trump and the administration broadly; (3) treatment of anything that is not the official US government line about the Iran War as “false.” 

We join the call for Carr to withdraw these threats.

 

• Civil Society Letter to FCC Chairman Barr