Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.

MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly influences its electronic behavior, leading to more efficient control of the flow of electricity. 

The team used a novel magnetic material and an optimization process that reduces the material’s defects, which boosts the transistor’s performance.

The material’s unique magnetic properties also allow for transistors with built-in memory, which would simplify circuit design and unlock new applications for high-performance electronics.

“People have known about magnets for thousands of years, but there are very limited ways to incorporate magnetism into electronics. We have shown a new way to efficiently utilize magnetism that opens up a lot of possibilities for future applications and research,” says Chung-Tao Chou, an MIT graduate student in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Physics, and co-lead author of a paper on this advance.

Chou is joined on the paper by co-lead author Eugene Park, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Julian Klein, a DMSE research scientist; Josep Ingla-Aynes, a postdoc in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center; Jagadeesh S. Moodera, a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics; and senior authors Frances Ross, TDK Professor in DMSE; and Luqiao Liu, an associate professor in EECS, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as others at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. The paper appears today in Physical Review Letters.

Overcoming the limits

In an electronic device, silicon semiconductor transistors act like tiny light switches that turn a circuit on and off, or amplify weak signals in a communication system. They do this using a small input voltage.

But a fundamental physical limit of silicon semiconductors prevents a transistor from operating below a certain voltage, which hinders its energy efficiency.

To make more efficient electronics, researchers have spent decades working toward magnetic transistors that utilize electron spin to control the flow of electricity. Electron spin is a fundamental property that enables electrons to behave like tiny magnets.

So far, scientists have mostly been limited to using certain magnetic materials. These lack the favorable electronic properties of semiconductors, constraining device performance.

“In this work, we combine magnetism and semiconductor physics to realize useful spintronic devices,” Liu says.

The researchers replace the silicon in the surface layer of a transistor with chromium sulfur bromide, a two-dimensional material that acts as a magnetic semiconductor.

Due to the material’s structure, researchers can switch between two magnetic states very cleanly. This makes it ideal for use in a transistor that smoothly switches between “on” and “off.”

“One of the biggest challenges we faced was finding the right material. We tried many other materials that didn’t work,” Chou says.

They discovered that changing these magnetic states modifies the material’s electronic properties, enabling low-energy operation. And unlike many other 2D materials, chromium sulfur bromide remains stable in air.

To make a transistor, the researchers pattern electrodes onto a silicon substrate, then carefully align and transfer the 2D material on top. They use tape to pick up a tiny piece of material, only a few tens of nanometers thick, and place it onto the substrate.

“A lot of researchers will use solvents or glue to do the transfer, but transistors require a very clean surface. We eliminate all those risks by simplifying this step,” Chou says.

Leveraging magnetism

This lack of contamination enables their device to outperform existing magnetic transistors. Most others can only create a weak magnetic effect, changing the flow of current by a few percent or less. Their new transistor can switch or amplify the electric current by a factor of 10.

They use an external magnetic field to change the magnetic state of the material, switching the transistor using significantly less energy than would usually be required.

The material also allows them to control the magnetic states with electric current. This is important because engineers cannot apply magnetic fields to individual transistors in an electronic device. They need to control each one electrically.

The material’s magnetic properties could also enable transistors with built-in memory, simplifying the design of logic or memory circuits.

A typical memory device has a magnetic cell to store information and a transistor to read it out. Their method can combine both into one magnetic transistor.

“Now, not only are transistors turning on and off, they are also remembering information. And because we can switch the transistor with greater magnitude, the signal is much stronger so we can read out the information faster, and in a much more reliable way,” Liu says.

Building on this demonstration, the researchers plan to further study the use of electrical current to control the device. They are also working to make their method scalable so they can fabricate arrays of transistors.

This research was supported, in part, by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports. The work was partially carried out at the MIT.nano facilities.

A nice story.

The brain divides vision between its two hemispheres — what’s on your left is processed by your right hemisphere, and vice versa — but your experience with every bike or bird that you see zipping by is seamless. A new study by neuroscientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT reveals how the brain handles the transition.

“It’s surprising to some people to hear that there’s some independence between the hemispheres, because that doesn’t really correspond to how we perceive reality,” says Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor in the Picower Institute and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “In our consciousness, everything seems to be unified.”

There are advantages to separately processing vision on either side of the brain, including the ability to keep track of more things at once, Miller and other researchers have found, but neuroscientists have been eager to fully understand how perception ultimately appears so unified in the end.

Led by Picower Fellow Matthew Broschard and Research Scientist Jefferson Roy, the research team measured neural activity in the brains of animals as they tracked objects crossing their field of view. The results reveal that different frequencies of brain waves encoded and then transferred information from one hemisphere to the other in advance of the crossing, and then held on to the object representation in both hemispheres until after the crossing was complete. The process is analogous to how relay racers hand off a baton, how a child swings from one monkey bar to the next, and how cellphone towers hand off a call from one to the next as a train passenger travels through their area. In all cases, both towers or hands actively hold what’s being transferred until the handoff is confirmed.

Witnessing the handoff

To conduct the study, published Sept. 19 in the Journal of Neuroscience, the researchers measured both the electrical spiking of individual neurons and the various frequencies of brain waves that emerge from the coordinated activity of many neurons. They studied the dorsal and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in both hemispheres, brain areas associated with executive brain functions.

The power fluctuations of the wave frequencies in each hemisphere told the researchers a clear story about how the subject’s brains transferred information from the “sending” to the “receiving” hemisphere whenever a target object crossed the middle of their field of view. In the experiments, the target was accompanied by a distractor object on the opposite side of the screen to confirm that the subjects were consciously paying attention to the target object’s motion, and not just indiscriminately glancing at whatever happened to pop up on to the screen.

The highest-frequency “gamma” waves, which encode sensory information, peaked in both hemispheres when the subjects first looked at the screen and again when the two objects appeared. When a color change signaled which object was the target to track, the gamma increase was only evident in the “sending” hemisphere (on the opposite side as the target object), as expected. Meanwhile, the power of somewhat lower-frequency “beta” waves, which regulate when gamma waves are active, varied inversely with the gamma waves. These sensory encoding dynamics were stronger in the ventrolateral locations compared to the dorsolateral ones.

Meanwhile, two distinct bands of lower-frequency waves showed greater power in the dorsolateral locations at key moments related to achieving the handoff. About a quarter of a second before a target object crossed the middle of the field of view, “alpha” waves ramped up in both hemispheres and then peaked just after the object crossed. Meanwhile, “theta” band waves peaked after the crossing was complete, only in the “receiving” hemisphere (opposite from the target’s new position).

Accompanying the pattern of wave peaks, neuron spiking data showed how the brain’s representation of the target’s location traveled. Using decoder software, which interprets what information the spikes represent, the researchers could see the target representation emerge in the sending hemisphere’s ventrolateral location when it was first cued by the color change. Then they could see that as the target neared the middle of the field of view, the receiving hemisphere joined the sending hemisphere in representing the object, so that they both encoded the information during the transfer.

Doing the wave

Taken together, the results showed that after the sending hemisphere initially encoded the target with a ventrolateral interplay of beta and gamma waves, a dorsolateral ramp up of alpha waves caused the receiving hemisphere to anticipate the handoff by mirroring the sending hemisphere’s encoding of the target information. Alpha peaked just after the target crossed the middle of the field of view, and when the handoff was complete, theta peaked in the receiving hemisphere as if to say, “I got it.”

And in trials where the target never crossed the middle of the field of view, these handoff dynamics were not apparent in the measurements.

The study shows that the brain is not simply tracking objects in one hemisphere and then just picking them up anew when they enter the field of view of the other hemisphere.

“These results suggest there are active mechanisms that transfer information between cerebral hemispheres,” the authors wrote. “The brain seems to anticipate the transfer and acknowledge its completion.”

But they also note, based on other studies, that the system of interhemispheric coordination can sometimes appear to break down in certain neurological conditions including schizophrenia, autism, depression, dyslexia, and multiple sclerosis. The new study may lend insight into the specific dynamics needed for it to succeed.

In addition to Broschard, Roy, and Miller, the paper’s other authors are Scott Brincat and Meredith Mahnke.

Funding for the study came from the Office of Naval Research, the National Eye Institute of the National Institutes of Health, The Freedom Together Foundation, and The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

Jimmy Kimmel has been in the news a lot recently, which means the ongoing lawsuit against him by perennial late-night punching bag/convicted fraudster/former congressman George Santos flew under the radar. But what happened in that case is an essential illustration of the limits of both copyright law and the “fine print” terms of service on websites and apps. 

What happened was this: Kimmel and his staff saw that Santos was on Cameo, which allows people to purchase short videos from various public figures with requested language. Usually it’s something like “happy birthday” or “happy retirement.” In the case of Kimmel and his writers, they set out to see if there was anything they couldn’t get Santos to say on Cameo. For this to work, they obviously didn’t disclose that it was Jimmy Kimmel Live! asking for the videos.  

Santos did not like the segment, which aired clips of these videos, called “Will Santos Say It?”.  He sued Kimmel, ABC, and ABC’s parent company, Disney. He alleged both copyright infringement and breach of contract—the contract in this case being Cameo’s terms of service. He lost on all counts, twice: his case was dismissed at the district court level, and then that dismissal was upheld by an appeals court. 

On the copyright claim, Kimmel and Disney argued and won on the grounds of fair use. The court cited precedent that fair use excuses what might be strictly seen as infringement if such a finding would “stifle the very creativity” that copyright is meant to promote. In this case, the use of the videos was part of the ongoing commentary by Jimmy Kimmel Live! around whether there was anything Santos wouldn’t say for money. Santos tried to argue that since this was their purpose from the outset, the use wasn’t transformative. Which... isn’t how it works. Santos’ purpose was, presumably, to fulfill a request sent through the app. The show’s purpose was to collect enough examples of a behavior to show a pattern and comment on it.  

Santos tried to say that their not disclosing what the reason was invalidated the fair use argument because it was “deceptive.” But the court found that the record didn’t show that the deception was designed to replace the market for Santos’s Cameos. It bears repeating: commenting on the quality of a product or the person making it is not legally actionable interference with a business. If someone tells you that a movie, book, or, yes, Cameo isn’t worth anything because of its ubiquity or quality and shows you examples, that’s not a deceptive business practice. In fact, undercover quality checks and reviews are fairly standard practices! Is this a funnier and more entertaining example than a restaurant review? Yes. That doesn’t make it unprotected by fair use.  

It’s nice to have this case as a reminder that, despite everything, the major studios often argue, fair use protects everyone, including them. Don’t hold your breath on them remembering this the next time someone tries to make a YouTube review of a Hollywood movie using clips.  

Another claim from this case that is less obvious but just as important involves the Cameo terms of service. We often see contracts being used to restrict people’s fair use rights. Cameo offers different kinds of videos for purchase. The most well-known comes with a personal use license, the “happy birthdays,” and so on. They also offer a “commercial” use license, presumably if you want to use the videos to generate revenue, like you do with an ad or paid endorsement. However, in this case, the court found that the terms of service are a contract between a customer and Cameo, not between the customer and the video maker. Cameo’s terms of service explicitly lay out when their terms apply to the person selling a video, and they don’t create a situation where Santos can use those terms to sue Jimmy Kimmel Live! According to the court, the terms don’t even imply a shared understanding and contract between the two parties.  

It's so rare to find a situation where the wall of text that most terms of service consist of actually helps protect free expression; it’s a pleasant surprise to see it here.  

In general, we at EFF hate it when these kinds of contracts—you know the ones, where you hit accept after scrolling for ages just so you can use the app—are used to constrain users’ rights. Fair use is supposed to protect us all from overly strict interpretations of copyright law, but abusive terms of service can erode those rights. We’ll keep fighting for those rights and the people who use them, even if the one exercising fair use is Disney.  

This is the sixth installment in a blog series documenting EFF's findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here. 

When we started our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign, we heard from activists, advocacy organizations, researchers, and even healthcare providers who had all experienced having abortion-related content removed or suppressed on social media. One of the submissions we received was from an organization called the Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline.

The Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline (M+A Hotline) formed in 2019, is staffed by a team of healthcare providers who wanted to provide free and confidential “expert advice on various aspects of miscarriage and abortion, ensuring individuals receive accurate information and compassionate support throughout their journey.” By 2022, the hotline was receiving between 25 to 45 calls and texts a day. 

Like many reproductive health, rights, and justice groups, the M+A Hotline is active on social media, sharing posts that affirm the voices and experiences of abortion seekers, assert the safety of medication abortion, and spread the word about the expert support that the hotline offers. However, in late March of this year, the M+A Hotline’s Instagram suddenly had numerous posts taken down and was hit with restrictions that prevented the account from starting or joining livestreams or creating ads until June 25, 2025.

Screenshots provided to EFF from M+A Hotline

The reason behind the restrictions and takedowns, according to Meta, was that the M+A Hotline’s Instagram account failed to follow Meta’s guidelines on the sale of illegal or regulated goods. The “guidelines” refer to Meta’s Community Standards which dictate the types of content that are allowed on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Threads. But according to Meta, it is not against these Community Standards to provide guidance on how to legally access pharmaceutical drugs, and this is treated differently than an offer to buy, sell, or trade pharmaceuticals (though there are additional compliance requirements for paid ads). 

Under these rules, the M+A Hotline’s content should have been fine: The Hotline does not sell medication abortion and simply educates on the efficacy and safety of medication abortion while providing guidance on how abortion seekers could legally access the pills. Despite this, around 10 posts from the account were removed by Instagram, none of which were ads.

For how little the topic is mentioned in these Standards, content about abortion seems to face extremely high scrutiny from Meta.

In a letter to Amnesty International in February 2024, Meta publicly clarified that organic content on its platforms that educates users about medication abortion is not in violation of the Community Standards. The company claims that the policies are “based on feedback from people and the advice of experts in fields like technology, public safety and human rights.” The Community Standards are thorough and there are sections covering everything from bullying and harassment to account integrity to restricted goods and services. Notably, within the several webpages that make up the Community Standards, there are very few mentions of the words “abortion” and “reproductive health.” For how little the topic is mentioned in these Standards, content about abortion seems to face extremely high scrutiny from Meta.

Screenshots provided to EFF from M+A Hotline

Not only were posts removed, but even after further review, many were not restored. The M+A Hotline was once again told that their content violates the Community Standards on drugs. While it’s understandable that moderation systems may make mistakes, it’s unacceptable for those mistakes to be repeated consistently with little transparency or direct communication with the users whose speech is being restricted and erased. This problem is only made worse by lack of helpful recourse. As seen here, even when users request review and identify these moderation errors, Meta may still refuse to restore posts that are permitted under the Community Standards.

The removal of the M+A Hotline’s educational content demonstrates that Meta must be more accurate, consistent, and transparent in the enforcement of their Community Standards, especially in regard to reproductive health information. Informing users that medical professionals are available to support those navigating a miscarriage or abortion is plainly not an attempt to buy or sell pharmaceutical drugs. Meta must clearly defineand then fairly enforce–what is and isn’t permitted under its Standards. This includes ensuring there is a meaningful way to quickly rectify any moderation errors through the review process. 

At a time when attacks on online access to information—and particularly abortion information—are intensifying, Meta must not exacerbate the problem by silencing healthcare providers and suppressing vital health information. We must all continue to fight back against online censorship.

 This is the sixth post in our blog series documenting the findings from our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. Read more in the series: https://www.eff.org/pages/stop-censoring-abortion

Today’s world requires us to make complex and nuanced decisions about our digital security. Evaluating when to use a secure messaging app like Signal or WhatsApp, which passwords to store on your smartphone, or what to share on social media requires us to assess risks and make judgments accordingly. Arriving at any conclusion is an exercise in threat modeling.

In security, threat modeling is the process of determining what security measures make sense in your particular situation. It’s a way to think about potential risks, possible defenses, and the costs of both. It’s how experts avoid being distracted by irrelevant risks or overburdened by undue costs...

The agency may need to ditch its scientific justification for repealing the endangerment finding that underpins most climate rules.

The Homeland Security secretary tucked "unlawfully ambiguous" language into grant documents, the judge said.

After a Supreme Court defeat, young activists are turning to a foreign court to force U.S. climate action.

Reliable long-term measurements are crucial to evaluating climate and weather risks, the experts said.

Future cost increases are expected to moderate as insurers stabilize their finances and remain "robust and financially sound," a report says.

Two laws to protect forests hit major setbacks this week as the EU continues its turn away from environmentalism.

Among other demands: financing for decarbonizing the industry and a mechanism to spur support if EU competitiveness is threatened.

Seasonal changes and shifts in weather patterns have cracked open the door for a more active second half for the Atlantic season.

The typhoon entered northeastern Vietnam after flooding China's Guangdong province and causing deaths in Taiwan and the Philippines.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 26 September 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02442-7

Home to roughly a quarter of the world’s population, South Asia is a hotspot for global warming impacts. In this Viewpoint, nine researchers from South Asia discuss the progress made in understanding and responding to climate change in the region.

In 2024, an association of female senior citizens in Switzerland won a case at the European Court of Human Rights. Their country, the women contended, needed to do more to protect them from climate change, since heat waves can make the elderly particularly vulnerable. The court ruled in favor of the group, saying that states belonging to the Council of Europe have a “positive obligation” to protect citizens from “serious adverse effects of climate change on lives, health, well-being, and quality of life.”

The exact policy implications of such rulings can be hard to assess. But there are still subtle civic implications related to the ruling that bear consideration.

For one thing, although the case was brought by a particular special-interest association, its impact could benefit everyone in society. Yet the people in the group had not always belonged to it and are not wholly defined by being part of it. In a sense, while the senior-citizen association brought the case as a minority group of sorts, being a senior citizen is not the sole identity marker of the people in it.

These kinds of situations underline the complexity of interest-group dynamics as they engage with legal and political systems. Much public discourse on particularistic groups focuses on them as seemingly fixed entities with clear definitions, but being a member of a minority group is not a static thing.

“What I want to insist on is that it’s not like an absolute property. It’s a dynamic,” says MIT Professor Bruno Perreau. “It is both a complex situation and a mobile situation. You can be a member of a minority group vis-à-vis one category and not another.”

Now Perreau explores these dynamics in a book, “Spheres of Injustice,” published this year by the MIT Press. Perreau is the Cynthia L. Reed Professor of French Studies and Language in MIT’s Literature program. The French-language edition of the book was published in 2023.

Around the world, Perreau observes, much of the political contestation over interest-group politics and policies to protect minorities arrives at a similar tension point: Policies or legal rulings are sometimes crafted to redress problems, but when political conditions shift, those same policies can be discarded with claims that they themselves are unfair. In many places, this dynamic has become familiar through the contestation of policies regarding ethnic identity, gender, sexual orientation, and more.

But this is not the only paradigm of minority group politics. One aim of Perreau’s book is to add breadth to the subject, grounded in the empirical realities people experience.

After all, when it comes to being regarded as a member of a minority group, “in a given situation, some people will claim this label for themselves, whereas others will reject it,” Perreau writes. “Some consider this piece of their identity to be fundamental; others regard it as secondary. … The work of defining it is the very locus of its power.”

“Spheres of Injustice” both lays out that complexity and seeks to find ways to rethink group-oriented politics as part of an expansion of rights generally. The book arises partly out of previous work Perreau has published, often concerning France. It also developed partly in response to Perreau thinking about how rights might evolve in a time of climate change. But it arrived at its exact form as a rethinking of “Spheres of Justice,” a prominent 1980s text by political philosopher Michael Walzer.

Instead of there being a single mechanism through which justice could be applied throughout society, Walzer contended, there are many spheres of life, and the meaning of justice depends on where it is being applied.

“Because of the complexities of social relations, inequalities are impossible to fully erase,” Perreau says. “Even in the act of trying to resist an injustice, we may create other forms of injustice. Inequality is unavoidable, but his [Walzer’s] goal is to reduce injustice to the minimum, in the form of little inequalities that do not matter that much.”

Walzer’s work, however, never grapples with the kinds of political dynamics in which minority groups try to establish rights. To be clear, Perreau notes, in some cases the categorization as a minority is foisted upon people, and in other cases, it is developed by the group itself. In either case, he thinks we should consider how complex the formation and activities of the group may be.

As another example, consider that while disability rights are a contested issue in some countries and ignored in others, they also involve fluidity in terms of who advocates and benefits from them. Imagine, Perreau says, you break a leg. Temporarily, he says, “you experience a little bit of what people with a permanent disability experience.” If you lobby, for, say, better school building access or better transit access, you could be helping kids, the elderly, families with kids, and more — including people and groups not styling themselves as part of a disability-rights movement.

“One goal of the book is to enhance awareness about the virtuous circle that can emerge from this kind of minority politics,” Perreau says. “It’s often regarded by many privileged people as a protection that removes something from them. But that’s not the case.”

Indeed, the politics Perreau envisions in “Spheres of Injustice” have an alternate framework, in which developing rights for some better protects others, to the point where minority rights translate into universal rights. That is not, again, meant to minimize the experience of core members of a group that has been discriminated against, but to encourage thinking about how solidifying rights for a particular group overlaps with the greater expansion of rights generally.

“I’m walking a fine line between different perspectives on what it means to belong,” Perreau says. “But this is indispensable today.”

Indeed, due to the senior citizens in Switzerland, he notes, “There will be better rights in Europe. Politics is not just a matter of diplomacy and majority decision-making. Sharing a complex world means drawing on the minority parts of our lives because it is these parts that most fundamentally connect us to others, intentionally or unintentionally. Thinking in these terms today is an essential civic virtue.”

Graduate school can feel like a race to the finish line, but it becomes much easier with a team to cheer you on — especially if that team is literally next to you, shouting encouragement from a decorated van.

From the morning of Sept. 12 into the early afternoon on Sept. 13, two teams made up of MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) graduate students, alumni, and friends ran the 2025 Ragnar Road Reach the Beach relay in two friendly yet competitive teams of 12, aptly named Team Aero and Team Astro. Ragnar races are long-distance, team-based relay events that run overnight through some of the country’s most scenic routes. The Reach the Beach course began in Lancaster, New Hampshire, and sent teams on a 204-mile trek through the White Mountains, finishing at Hampton Beach State Park.

“This all began on the Graduate Association of Aeronautics and Astronautics North End Pastry Tour in 2024. While discussing our mutual love for running, and stuffing our faces with cannoli, Maya Harris jokingly mentioned the concept of doing a Ragnar,” says Nathanael Jenkins, the eventual Team Aero captain. The idea took hold, inspiring enough interest to form a team for the first AeroAstro Ragnar relay in April 2025. From there enthusiasm continued to grow, resulting in the two current teams. 

“I was surprised at the number of people, even people who don’t run very frequently, who wanted to do another race after finishing the first Ragnar,” says Patrick Riley, captain of Team Astro. “All of the new faces are awesome because they bring new energy and excitement to the team. I love the community, I love the sport, and I think the best way to get to know someone is to be crammed into a van with them for six hours at a time.”

Resource management and real-time support

The two teams organized four vans, adorned with words of encouragement and team magnets — a Ragnar tradition — to shepherd the teams through the race, serving as rolling rest stops for runners at each exchange point. Each runner completed three to four sections out of 36 total legs, running between 1.7 to 11.6 miles at a time. Runners could swap out there for a power nap or a protein bar. To keep morale high, teams played games and handed out awards of their own to teammates. “Noah (McAllister) got the prize for ‘Most bees removed from the car;’ Madison (Bronniman) won for ‘Eating the most tinned fish;’ I got the prize for ‘Most violent slamming of doors’ — which I hadn’t realized was in my skill set,” says Jenkins.

“This race is really unique because it bonds the team together in ways that many other races simply don’t,” says Riley, an avid runner prior to the event. “Marathons are strenuous on your body, but a Ragnar is about long-term resource management — eating, hydrating, sleep management, staying positive. Then communicating those logistics effectively and proceeding with the plan.”

Pulling off a logistics-heavy race across both teams required “magical spreadsheeting” that used distance, start time, elevation changes, and average pace to estimate finish time for each leg of the race. “Noah made it for the first race. Then a bunch of engineers saw a spreadsheet and zeroed in,” says Riley.

Engineering success

The careful planning paid off with a win for Team Astro, with a finishing time of 31:01:13. Team Aero was close behind, finishing at 31:19:43. Yet in the end, the competition mattered less than the camaraderie, when all runners celebrated together at the finish line.

“I think the big connection that we talk about is putting the teamwork skills we use in engineering into practice,” says Jenkins. “Engineers all like achieving. Runners like achieving. Many of our runners don’t run for enjoyment in the moment, but the feeling of crossing the finish line makes up for the, well, pain. In engineering, the feeling of finishing a difficult problem makes up for the pain of doing it.”

Call them gluttons for punishment or high achievers, the group is already making plans for the next race. “Everybody is immediately throwing links in the group chat for more Ragnars in the future,” says Riley. “MIT has so many people who want to explore and engage with the world around them, and they’re willing to take a chance and do crazy stuff. And we have the follow-through to make it happen.”

Runners

Team Aero: Claire Buffington, Alex Chipps, Nathanael Jenkins, Noah McAllister, Garrett Siemen, Nick Torres (Course 16, AeroAstro), Madison Bronniman, Ceci Perez Gago, Juju Wang (Course 16 alum), Katie Benoit, and Jason Wang.

Team Astro: Tim Cavesmith, Evrard Constant, Mary Foxen, Maya Harris, Jules Penot, Patrick Riley, Alex Rose, Samir Wadhwania (Course 16), Henry Price (Course 3, materials science and engineering), Katherine Hoekstra, and Ian Robertson (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute).

Honorary teammates: Abigail Lee, Celvi Lissy, and Taylor Hampson.

We need your help to make a common-sense bill into California law. Despite the fact that California has one of the nation’s most comprehensive data privacy laws, it’s not always easy for people to exercise those privacy rights. A.B. 566 intends to make it easy by directing browsers to give all their users the option to tell companies they don’t want personal information that’s collected about them on the internet to be sold or shared. Now, we just need Governor Gavin Newsom to sign it into law by October 13, 2025, and this toolkit will help us put on the pressure. Tweet at Gov. Gavin Newsom and help us get A.B. 566 signed into law!

First, pick your platform of choice. Reach Gov. Newsom at any of his social media handles:

• X: @CAgovernor
• Bluesky: @governor.ca.gov
• TikTok: @cagovernor
• Facebook: @CAgovernor

Then, pick a message that resonates with you. Or, feel free to remix!

Sample Posts

• It should be easy for Californians to exercise our rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act, but major internet browser companies are making it difficult for us to do that. @CAgovernor, sign AB 566 and give power to the consumers to protect their privacy!
• We are living in a time of mass surveillance and tracking. Californian consumers should be able to easily control their privacy and AB 566 would make that possible. @CAgovernor, sign AB 566 and ensure that millions of Californians can opt out of the sale and sharing of their private information!
• People seeking abortion care, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people are at risk of bad actors using their online activity against them. @CAgovernor could sign AB 566 and protect the privacy of vulnerable communities and all Californians.
• AB 566 gives Californians a practical way to use their right to opt-out of websites selling or sharing their private info. @CAgovernor can sign it and give consumers power over their privacy choices under the California Consumer Privacy Act.
• Hey @CAgovernor! AB 566 makes it easy for Californians to tell companies what they want to happen with their own private information. Sign it and make the California Consumer Privacy Act more user-friendly!
• Companies haven’t made it easy for Californians to tell companies not to sell or share their personal information. We need AB 566 so that browsers MUST give users the option to easily opt out of this data sharing. @CAgovernor, sign AB 566!
• Major browsers have made it hard for Californians to opt out of the share and sale of their private info. Right now, consumers must individually opt out at every website they visit. AB 566 can change that by requiring browsers to create one single opt-out preference, but @CAgovernor MUST sign it!
• It should be easy for Californians to opt out of the share and sale of their private info, such as health info, immigration status, and political affiliation, but browsers have made it difficult. @CAgovernor can sign AB 566 and give power to consumers to more easily opt out of this data sharing.
• Right now, if a Californian wants to tell companies not to sell or share their info, they must go through the processes set up by each company, ONE BY ONE, to opt out of data sharing. AB 566 can remove that burden. @CAgovernor, sign AB 566 to empower consumers!
• Industry groups who want to keep the scales tipped in favor of corporations who want to profit off the sale of our private info have lobbied heavily against AB 566, a bill that will make it easy for Californians to tell companies what they want to happen with their own info. @CAgovernor—sign it!

Gleevec, a cancer drug first approved for sale in 2001, has dramatically changed the lives of people with chronic myeloid leukemia. This form of cancer was once regarded as very difficult to combat, but survival rates of patients who respond to Gleevec now resemble that of the population at large.

Gleevec is also a medicine developed with the help of federally funded research. That support helped scientists better understand how to create drugs targeting the BCR-ABL oncoprotein, the cancer-causing protein behind chronic myeloid leukemia.

A new study co-authored by MIT researchers quantifies how many such examples of drug development exist. The current administration is proposing a nearly 40 percent budget reduction to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which sponsors a significant portion of biomedical research. The study finds that over 50 percent of small-molecule drug patents this century cite at least one piece of NIH-backed research that would likely be vulnerable to that potential level of funding change.

“What we found was quite striking,” says MIT economist Danielle Li, co-author of a newly published paper outlining the study’s results. “More than half of the drugs approved by the FDA since 2000 are connected to NIH research that would likely have been cut under a 40 percent budget reduction.”

Or, as the researchers write in the paper: “We found extensive connections between medical advances and research that was funded by grants that would have been cut if the NIH budget was sharply reduced.”

The paper, “What if NIH funding had been 40% smaller?” is published today as a Policy Article in the journal Science. The authors are Pierre Azoulay, the China Program Professor of International Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Matthew Clancy, an economist with the group Open Philanthropy; Li, the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology at MIT Sloan; and Bhaven N. Sampat, an economist at Johns Hopkins University. (Biomedical researchers at both MIT and Johns Hopkins could be affected by adjustments to NIH funding.)

To conduct the study, the researchers leveraged the fact that the NIH uses priority lists to determine which projects get funded. That makes it possible to discern which projects were in the lower 40 percent of NIH-backed projects, priority-wise, for a given time period. The researchers call these “at-risk” pieces of research. Applying these data from 1980 through 2007, the scholars examined the patents of the new molecular entities — drugs with a new active ingredient — approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since 2000. There is typically a time interval between academic research and subsequent related drug development.

The study focuses on small-molecule drugs — compact organic compounds, often taken orally as medicine — whereas NIH funding supports a wider range of advancements in medicine generally. Based on how many of these FDA-approved small-molecule medicines were linked to at-risk research from the prior period, the researchers estimated what kinds of consequences a 40 percent cut in funding would have generated going forward.

The study distinguishes between two types of links new drugs have to NIH funding. Some drug patents have what the researchers call “direct” links to new NIH-backed projects that generated new findings relevant to development of those particular drugs. Other patents have “indirect “ links to the NIH, when they cite prior NIH-funded studies that contributed to the overall body of knowledge used in drug development.

The analysis finds that 40 of the FDA-approved medications have direct links to new NIH-supported studies cited in the patents — or 7.1 percent. Of these, 14 patents cite at-risk pieces of NIH research.

When it comes to indirect links, of the 557 drugs approved by the FDA from 2000 to 2023, the study found that 59.4 percent have a patent citing at least one NIH-supported research publication. And, 51.4 percent cite at least one NIH-funded study from the at-risk category of projects. 

“The indirect connection is where we see the real breadth of NIH's impact,” Li says. “What the NIH does is fund research that forms the scientific foundation upon which companies and other drug developers build.”

As the researchers emphasize in the paper, there are many nuances involved in the study. A single citation of an NIH-funded study could appear in a patent for a variety of reasons, and does not necessarily mean “that the drug in question could never have been developed in its absence,” as they write in the paper. To reckon with this, the study also analyzes how many patents had at least 25 percent of their citations fall in the category of at-risk NIH-backed research. By this metric, they found that 65 of the 557 FDA-approved drugs, or 11.7 percent, met the threshold.

On the other hand, as the researchers state in the paper, it is possible the study “understates the extent to which medical advances are connected to NIH research.” For one thing, as the study’s endpoint for examining NIH data is 2007, there could have been more recent pieces of research informing medications that have already received FDA approval. The study does not quantify “second-order connections,” in which NIH-supported findings may have led to additional research that directly led to drug development. Again, NIH funding also supports a broad range of studies beyond the type examined in the current paper.

It is also likely, the scholars suggest, that NIH cuts would curtail the careers of many promising scientists, and in so doing slowdown medical progress. For a variety of these reasons, in addition to the core data itself, the scholars say the study indicates how broadly NIH-backed research has helped advance medicine.

“The worry is that these kinds of deep cuts to the NIH risk that foundation and therefore endanger the development of medicines that might be used to treat us, or our kids and grandkids, 20 years from now,” Li says.

Azoulay and Sampat have received past NIH funding. They also serve on an NIH working group about the empirical analysis of the scientific enterprise.