The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration declined to say exactly what the rule it submitted would do, although it does not appear to repeal Biden fuel economy standards directly.

Tools such as EPA's EJ Screen were removed from agency websites earlier this year, sparking an outcry from groups that rely on them to assess environmental risks to specific communities.

A big part of the reason why is that unlike damage from hurricane winds and wildfires, flood damage isn’t covered by standard home insurance.

The dragon's blood tree is a pillar of a Yemini island's ecosystem. Without intervention, scientists warn, these trees could disappear within a few centuries.

Carbon credits are popular among Australian companies looking to offset their climate footprint but have come under increasing scrutiny.

Petroperú said several companies were interested in the land parcel but withdrew at the last minute due to internal strategic shifts, not external pressure.

Measuring the density of a cell can reveal a great deal about the cell’s state. As cells proliferate, differentiate, or undergo cell death, they may gain or lose water and other molecules, which is revealed by changes in density.

Tracking these tiny changes in cells’ physical state is difficult to do at a large scale, especially with single-cell resolution, but a team of MIT researchers has now found a way to measure cell density quickly and accurately — measuring up to 30,000 cells in a single hour.

The researchers also showed that density changes could be used to make valuable predictions, including whether immune cells such as T cells have become activated to kill tumors, or whether tumor cells are susceptible to a specific drug.

“These predictions are all based on looking at very small changes in the physical properties of cells, which can tell you how they’re going to respond,” says Scott Manalis, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering in the departments of Biological Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Manalis is the senior author of the new study, which appears today in Nature Biomedical Engineering. The paper’s lead author is MIT Research Scientist Weida (Richard) Wu.

Measuring density

As cells enter new states, their molecular contents, including lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids, can become more or less crowded. Measuring the density of a cell offers an indirect view of this crowding.

The new density measurement technique reported in this study builds on work that Manalis’ lab has done over the past two decades on technologies for making measurements of cells and tiny particles. In 2007, his lab developed a microfluidic device known as a suspended microchannel resonator (SMR), which consists of a microchannel across a tiny silicon cantilever that vibrates at a specific frequency. As a cell passes through the channel, the frequency of the vibration changes slightly, and the magnitude of that change can be used to calculate the cell’s mass.

In 2011, the researchers adapted the technique to measure the density of cells. To achieve that, cells are sent through the device twice, suspended in two liquids of different densities. A cell’s buoyant mass (its mass as it floats in fluid) depends on its absolute mass and volume, so by measuring two different buoyant masses for a cell, its mass, volume, and density can be calculated.

That technique works well, but swapping fluids and flowing cells through each one is time-consuming, so it can only be used to measure a few hundred cells at a time.

To create a faster, more streamlined system, the researchers combined their SMR device with a fluorescent microscope, which enables measurements of cell volume. The microscope is positioned at the entrance to the resonator, and cells flow through the device while floating in a fluorescent dye that can’t be absorbed by cells. When cells pass by the microscope, the dip in the fluorescent signal can be used to determine the volume of the cell.

After that volume measurement is taken, the cells flow into the resonator, which measures their mass. This process, which allows for rapid calculation of density, can be used to measure up to 30,000 cells in an hour.

“Instead of trying to flow the cells back and forth at least twice through the cantilever to get cell density, we wanted to try to create a method to do a streamlined measurement, so the cells only need to pass through the cantilever once,” Wu says. “From a cell’s mass and volume, we can then derive its density, without compromising the throughput or the precision.”

Evaluating T cells

The researchers used their new technique to track what happens to the density of T cells after they are activated by signaling molecules.

As T cells transition from a quiescent state to an active state, they gain new molecules, as well as water, the researchers found. From their pre-activation state to the first day of activation, the densities of the cells dropped from an average of 1.08 grams per milliliter to 1.06 grams per milliliter. This means that the cells are becoming less crowded, as they gain water faster than they gain other molecules.

“This is suggesting that cell density is very likely reflecting an increase in cellular water content as the cells transit from a quiescent, non-proliferative state to a high-growth state,” Wu says. “These data are pointing to the notion that cell density is an interesting biomarker that is changing during T-cell activation and may have functional relevance to how well the T cells could proliferate.”

Travera, a clinical-stage company co-founded by Manalis, is working on using the SMR mass measurements to predict whether individual cancer patients’ T cells will respond to drugs meant to stimulate a strong anti-tumor immune response. The company has also begun using the density measurement technique, and preliminary studies have found that using mass and density measurements together gives a much more accurate prediction that using either one alone.

“Both mass and density are revealing something about the overall fitness of the immune cells,” Manalis says.

Using physical measurements of cells to monitor their immune activation “is very exciting and may offer a new way of evaluating and measuring changes in immune cells in circulation,” says Genevieve Boland, an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and vice chair of research for the Integrated Department of Surgery at Mass General Brigham, who was not involved in the study.

“This is a complementary, but very different, method than those currently used for immune assessments in cancer and other diseases, potentially offering a novel tool to assist in clinical decision-making regarding the need for and the choice of a specific cancer therapy, allow monitoring of response to therapy, and/or in early detection of side effects of immune-based therapies,” she says.

Making predictions

Another potential application for this approach is predicting how tumor cells will respond to different types of cancer drugs. In previous work, Manalis has shown that tracking changes in cell mass after treatment can predict whether a tumor cell is undergoing drug-induced apoptosis. In the new study, he found that density could also reveal these responses.

In those experiments, the researchers treated pancreatic cancer cells with one of two different drugs — one that the cells are susceptible to, and one they are resistant to. They found that density changes after treatment accurately reflected the cells’ known responses to treatment.

“We capture something about the cells that is highly predictive within the first couple of days after they get taken out from the tumor,” Wu says. “Cell density is a rapid biomarker to predict in vivo drug response in a very timely manner.”

Manalis’ lab is now working on using measurements of cell mass and density as a way to evaluate the fitness of cells used to synthesize complex proteins such as therapeutic antibodies.

“As cells are producing these proteins, we can learn from these markers of cell fitness and metabolic state to try to make predictions about how well these cells can produce these proteins, and hopefully in the future also guide design and control strategies to even further improve the yield of these complex proteins,” Wu says.

The research was funded by the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, the Virginia and Daniel K. Ludwig Fund for Cancer Research, the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine, the Stand up to Cancer Convergence Program, Bristol Myers Squibb, and the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute.

By combining information from many large datasets, MIT researchers have identified several new potential targets for treating or preventing Alzheimer’s disease.

The study revealed genes and cellular pathways that haven’t been linked to Alzheimer’s before, including one involved in DNA repair. Identifying new drug targets is critical because many of the Alzheimer’s drugs that have been developed to this point haven’t been as successful as hoped.

Working with researchers at Harvard Medical School, the team used data from humans and fruit flies to identify cellular pathways linked to neurodegeneration. This allowed them to identify additional pathways that may be contributing to the development of Alzheimer’s.

“All the evidence that we have indicates that there are many different pathways involved in the progression of Alzheimer’s. It is multifactorial, and that may be why it’s been so hard to develop effective drugs,” says Ernest Fraenkel, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology in MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering and the senior author of the study. “We will need some kind of combination of treatments that hit different parts of this disease.”

Matthew Leventhal PhD ’25 is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications.

Alternative pathways

Over the past few decades, many studies have suggested that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by the buildup of amyloid plaques in the brain, which triggers a cascade of events that leads to neurodegeneration.

A handful of drugs have been developed to block or break down these plaques, but these drugs usually do not have a dramatic effect on disease progression. In hopes of identifying new drug targets, many scientists are now working on uncovering other mechanisms that might contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s.

“One possibility is that maybe there’s more than one cause of Alzheimer’s, and that even in a single person, there could be multiple contributing factors,” Fraenkel says. “So, even if the amyloid hypothesis is correct — and there are some people who don’t think it is — you need to know what those other factors are. And then if you can hit all the causes of the disease, you have a better chance of blocking and maybe even reversing some losses.”

To try to identify some of those other factors, Fraenkel’s lab teamed up with Mel Feany, a professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and a geneticist specializing in fruit fly genetics.

Using fruit flies as a model, Feany and others in her lab did a screen in which they knocked out nearly every conserved gene expressed in fly neurons. Then, they measured whether each of these gene knockdowns had any effect on the age at which the flies develop neurodegeneration. This allowed them to identify about 200 genes that accelerate neurodegeneration.

Some of these were already linked to neurodegeneration, including genes for the amyloid precursor protein and for proteins called presenillins, which play a role in the formation of amyloid proteins.

The researchers then analyzed this data using network algorithms that Fraenkel’s lab has been developing over the past several years. These are algorithms that can identify connections between genes that may be involved in the same cellular pathways and functions.

In this case, the aim was to try to link the genes identified in the fruit fly screen with specific processes and cellular pathways that might contribute to neurodegeneration. To do that, the researchers combined the fruit fly data with several other datasets, including genomic data from postmortem tissue of Alzheimer’s patients.

The first stage of their analysis revealed that many of the genes identified in the fruit fly study also decline as humans age, suggesting that they may be involved in neurodegeneration in humans.

Network analysis

In the next phase of their study, the researchers incorporated additional data relevant to Alzheimer’s disease, including eQTL (expression quantitative trait locus) data — ­a measure of how different gene variants affect the expression levels of certain proteins.

Using their network optimization algorithms on this data, the researchers identified pathways that link genes to their potential role in Alzheimer’s development. The team chose two of those pathways to focus on in the new study.

The first is a pathway, not previously linked to Alzheimer’s disease, related to RNA modification. The network suggested that when one of two of the genes in this pathway — MEPCE and HNRNPA2B1 — are missing, neurons become more vulnerable to the Tau tangles that form in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. The researchers confirmed this effect by knocking down those genes in studies of fruit flies and in human neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs).

The second pathway reported in this study is involved in DNA damage repair. This network includes two genes called NOTCH1 and CSNK2A1, which have been linked to Alzheimer’s before, but not in the context of DNA repair. Both genes are most well-known for their roles in regulating cell growth.

In this study, the researchers found evidence that when these genes are missing, DNA damage builds up in cells, through two different DNA-damaging pathways. Buildup of unrepaired DNA has previously been shown to lead to neurodegeneration.

Now that these targets have been identified, the researchers hope to collaborate with other labs to help explore whether drugs that target them could improve neuron health. Fraenkel and other researchers are working on using IPSCs from Alzheimer’s patients to generate neurons that could be used to evaluate such drugs.

“The search for Alzheimer’s drugs will get dramatically accelerated when there are very good, robust experimental systems,” he says. “We’re coming to a point where a couple of really innovative systems are coming together. One is better experimental models based on IPSCs, and the other one is computational models that allow us to integrate huge amounts of data. When those two mature at the same time, which is what we’re about to see, then I think we’ll have some breakthroughs.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The ocean is teeming with life. But unless you get up close, much of the marine world can easily remain unseen. That’s because water itself can act as an effective cloak: Light that shines through the ocean can bend, scatter, and quickly fade as it travels through the dense medium of water and reflects off the persistent haze of ocean particles. This makes it extremely challenging to capture the true color of objects in the ocean without imaging them at close range.

Now a team from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has developed an image-analysis tool that cuts through the ocean’s optical effects and generates images of underwater environments that look as if the water had been drained away, revealing an ocean scene’s true colors. The team paired the color-correcting tool with a computational model that converts images of a scene into a three-dimensional underwater “world,” that can then be explored virtually.

The researchers have dubbed the new tool “SeaSplat,” in reference to both its underwater application and a method known as 3D gaussian splatting (3DGS), which takes images of a scene and stitches them together to generate a complete, three-dimensional representation that can be viewed in detail, from any perspective.

“With SeaSplat, it can model explicitly what the water is doing, and as a result it can in some ways remove the water, and produces better 3D models of an underwater scene,” says MIT graduate student Daniel Yang.

The researchers applied SeaSplat to images of the sea floor taken by divers and underwater vehicles, in various locations including the U.S. Virgin Islands. The method generated 3D “worlds” from the images that were truer and more vivid and varied in color, compared to previous methods.

The team says SeaSplat could help marine biologists monitor the health of certain ocean communities. For instance, as an underwater robot explores and takes pictures of a coral reef, SeaSplat would simultaneously process the images and render a true-color, 3D representation, that scientists could then virtually “fly” through, at their own pace and path, to inspect the underwater scene, for instance for signs of coral bleaching.

“Bleaching looks white from close up, but could appear blue and hazy from far away, and you might not be able to detect it,” says Yogesh Girdhar, an associate scientist at WHOI. “Coral bleaching, and different coral species, could be easier to detect with SeaSplat imagery, to get the true colors in the ocean.”

Girdhar and Yang will present a paper detailing SeaSplat at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). Their study co-author is John Leonard, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.

Aquatic optics

In the ocean, the color and clarity of objects is distorted by the effects of light traveling through water. In recent years, researchers have developed color-correcting tools that aim to reproduce the true colors in the ocean. These efforts involved adapting tools that were developed originally for environments out of water, for instance to reveal the true color of features in foggy conditions. One recent work accurately reproduces true colors in the ocean, with an algorithm named “Sea-Thru,” though this method requires a huge amount of computational power, which makes its use in producing 3D scene models challenging.

In parallel, others have made advances in 3D gaussian splatting, with tools that seamlessly stitch images of a scene together, and intelligently fill in any gaps to create a whole, 3D version of the scene. These 3D worlds enable “novel view synthesis,” meaning that someone can view the generated 3D scene, not just from the perspective of the original images, but from any angle and distance.

But 3DGS has only successfully been applied to environments out of water. Efforts to adapt 3D reconstruction to underwater imagery have been hampered, mainly by two optical underwater effects: backscatter and attenuation. Backscatter occurs when light reflects off of tiny particles in the ocean, creating a veil-like haze. Attenuation is the phenomenon by which light of certain wavelengths attenuates, or fades with distance. In the ocean, for instance, red objects appear to fade more than blue objects when viewed from farther away.

Out of water, the color of objects appears more or less the same regardless of the angle or distance from which they are viewed. In water, however, color can quickly change and fade depending on one’s perspective. When 3DGS methods attempt to stitch underwater images into a cohesive 3D whole, they are unable to resolve objects due to aquatic backscatter and attenuation effects that distort the color of objects at different angles.

“One dream of underwater robotic vision that we have is: Imagine if you could remove all the water in the ocean. What would you see?” Leonard says.

A model swim

In their new work, Yang and his colleagues developed a color-correcting algorithm that accounts for the optical effects of backscatter and attenuation. The algorithm determines the degree to which every pixel in an image must have been distorted by backscatter and attenuation effects, and then essentially takes away those aquatic effects, and computes what the pixel’s true color must be.

Yang then worked the color-correcting algorithm into a 3D gaussian splatting model to create SeaSplat, which can quickly analyze underwater images of a scene and generate a true-color, 3D virtual version of the same scene that can be explored in detail from any angle and distance.

The team applied SeaSplat to multiple underwater scenes, including images taken in the Red Sea, in the Carribean off the coast of Curaçao, and the Pacific Ocean, near Panama. These images, which the team took from a pre-existing dataset, represent a range of ocean locations and water conditions. They also tested SeaSplat on images taken by a remote-controlled underwater robot in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

From the images of each ocean scene, SeaSplat generated a true-color 3D world that the researchers were able to virtually explore, for instance zooming in and out of a scene and viewing certain features from different perspectives. Even when viewing from different angles and distances, they found objects in every scene retained their true color, rather than fading as they would if viewed through the actual ocean.

“Once it generates a 3D model, a scientist can just ‘swim’ through the model as though they are scuba-diving, and look at things in high detail, with real color,” Yang says.

For now, the method requires hefty computing resources in the form of a desktop computer that would be too bulky to carry aboard an underwater robot. Still, SeaSplat could work for tethered operations, where a vehicle, tied to a ship, can explore and take images that can be sent up to a ship’s computer.

“This is the first approach that can very quickly build high-quality 3D models with accurate colors, underwater, and it can create them and render them fast,” Girdhar says. “That will help to quantify biodiversity, and assess the health of coral reef and other marine communities.”

This work was supported, in part, by the Investment in Science Fund at WHOI, and by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

The administration has reversed a stop work order that threatened to upend the 54-turbine offshore wind project in New York waters.

Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing titled “Defending Against Drones: Setting Safeguards for Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems Authorities.” While the government has a legitimate interest in monitoring and mitigating drone threats, it is critical that those powers are narrowly tailored. Robust checks and oversight mechanisms must exist to prevent misuse and to allow ordinary, law-abiding individuals to exercise their rights. 

Unfortunately, as we and many other civil society advocates have highlighted, past proposals have not addressed those needs. Congress should produce well-balanced rules that address all these priorities, not grant de facto authority to law enforcement to take down drone flights whenever they want. Ultimately, Congress must decide whether drones will be a technology that mainly serves government agencies and big companies, or whether it might also empower individuals. 

To make meaningful progress in stabilizing counter unmanned aerial system (“C-UAS”) authorities and addressing emerging issues, Congress should adopt a more comprehensive approach that considers the full range of risks and implements proper safeguards. Future C-UAS legislation include the following priorities, which are essential to protecting civil liberties and ensuring accountability:

• Strong and explicit safeguards for First Amendment-protected activities 
• Ensure transparency and require detailed reporting
• Provide due process and recourse for improper counter-drone activities 
• Require C-UAS mitigation to involve least-invasive methods
• Maintain reasonable retention limits on data collection
• Maintain sunset for C-UAS powers as drone uses continue to evolve

Congress can—and should—address public safety concerns without compromising privacy and civil liberties. C-UAS authorities should only be granted with the clear limits outlined above to help ensure that counter-drone authorities are wielded responsibly.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) shared these concerns with the Committee in a joint Statement For The Record.

Life is a little brighter in Kapiyo these days.

For many in this rural Kenyan town, nightfall used to signal the end to schoolwork and other family activities. Now, however, the darkness is pierced by electric lights from newly solar-powered homes. Inside, children in this off-the-grid area can study while parents extend daily activities past dusk, thanks to a project conceived by an MIT mechanical engineering student and financed by the MIT African Students Association (ASA) Impact Fund.

There are changes coming, too, in the farmlands of Kashusha in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where another ASA Impact Fund project is working with local growers to establish an energy-efficient mill for processing corn — adding value, creating jobs, and sparking new economic opportunities. Similarly, plans are underway to automate processing of locally-grown cashews in the Mtwara area of Tanzania — an Impact Fund project meant to increase the income of farmers who now send over 90 percent of their nuts abroad for processing.

Inspired by a desire by MIT students to turn promising ideas into practical solutions for people in their home countries, the ASA Impact Fund is a student-run initiative that launched during the 2023-24 academic year. Backed by an alumni board, the fund empowers students to conceive, design, and lead projects with social and economic impact in communities across Africa.

After financing three projects its first year, the ASA Impact Fund received eight project proposals earlier this year and plans to announce its second round of two to four grants sometime this spring, says Pamela Abede, last year’s fund president. Last year’s awards totaled approximately $15,000.

The fund is an outgrowth of MIT’s African Learning Circle, a seminar open to the entire MIT community where biweekly discussions focus on ways to apply MIT’s educational resources, entrepreneurial spirit, and innovation to improve lives on the African continent.

“The Impact Fund was created,” says MIT African Students Association president Victory Yinka-Banjo, “to take this to the next level … to go from talking to execution.”

Aimed at bridging a gap between projects Learning Circle participants envision and resources available to fund them, the ASA Impact Fund “exists as an avenue to assist our members in undertaking social impact projects on the African continent,” the initiative’s website states, “thereby combining theoretical learning with practical application in alignment with MIT's motto.”

The fund’s value extends to the Cambridge campus as well, says ASA Impact Fund board member and 2021 MIT graduate Bolu Akinola.

“You can do cool projects anywhere,” says Akinola, who is originally from Nigeria and currently pursuing a master’s degree in business administration at Harvard University. “Where this is particularly catalyzing is in incentivizing folks to go back home and impact life back on the continent of Africa.”

MIT-Africa managing director Ari Jacobovits, who helped students get the fund off the ground last year, agrees.

“I think it galvanized the community, bringing people together to bridge a programmatic gap that had long felt like a missed opportunity,” Jacobovits says. “I’m always impressed by the level of service-mindedness ASA members have towards their home communities. It’s something we should all be celebrating and thinking about incorporating into our home communities, wherever they may be.”

Alumni Board president Selam Gano notes that a big part of the Impact Fund’s appeal is the close connections project applicants have with the communities they’re working with. MIT engineering major Shekina Pita, for example, is from Kapiyo, and recalls “what it was like growing up in a place with unreliable electricity,” which “would impact every aspect of my life and the lives of those that I lived around.” Pita’s personal experience and familiarity with the community informed her proposal to install solar panels on Kapiyo homes.

So far, the ASA Impact Fund has financed installation of solar panels for five households where families had been relying on candles so their children could do homework after dark.

“A candle is 15 Kenya shillings, and I don’t always have that amount to buy candles for my children to study. I am grateful for your help,” comments one beneficiary of the Kapiyo solar project.

Pita anticipates expanding the project, 10 homes at a time, and involving some college-age residents of those homes in solar panel installation apprenticeships.

“In general, we try to balance projects where we fund some things that are very concrete solutions to a particular community’s problems — like a water project or solar energy — and projects with a longer-term view that could become an organization or a business — like a novel cashew nut processing method,” says Gano, who conducted projects in his father’s homeland of Ethiopia while an MIT student. “I think striking that balance is something I am particularly proud of. We believe that people in the community know best what they need, and it’s great to empower students from those same communities.”  

Vivian Chinoda, who received a grant from the ASA Impact Fund and was part of the African Students Association board that founded it, agrees.

“We want to address problems that can seem trivial without the lived experience of them,” says Chinoda. “For my friend and I, getting funding to go to Tanzania and drive more than 10 hours to speak to remotely located small-scale cashew farmers … made a difference. We were able to conduct market research and cross-check our hypotheses on a project idea we brainstormed in our dorm room in ways we would not have otherwise been able to access remotely.”

Similarly, Florida Mahano’s Impact Fund-financed project is benefiting from her experience growing up near farms in the DRC. Partnering with her brother, a mechanical engineer in her home community of Bukavu in eastern DRC, Mahano is on her way to developing a processing plant that will serve the needs of local farmers. Informed by market research involving about 500 farmers, consumers, and retailers that took place in January, the plant will likely be operational by summer 2026, says Mahano, who has also received funding from MIT’s Priscilla King Gray (PKG) Public Service Center.

“The ASA Impact Fund was the starting point for us,” paving the way for additional support, she says. “I feel like the ASA Impact Fund was really amazing because it allowed me to bring my idea to life.”

Importantly, Chinoda notes that the Impact Fund has already had early success in fostering ties between undergraduate students and MIT alumni.

“When we sent out the application to set up the alumni board, we had a volume of respondents coming in quite quickly, and it was really encouraging to see how the alums were so willing to be present and use their skill sets and connections to build this from the ground up,” she says.

Abede, who is originally from Ghana, would like to see that enthusiasm continue — increasing alumni awareness about the fund “to get more alums involved … more alums on the board and mentoring the students.”

Mentoring is already an important aspect of the ASA Impact Fund, says Akinola. Grantees, she says, get paired with alumni to help them through the process of getting projects underway. 

“This fund could be a really good opportunity to strengthen the ties between the alumni community and current students,” Akinola says. “I think there are a lot of opportunities for funds like this to tap into the MIT alumni community. I think where there is real value is in the advisory nature — mentoring and coaching current students, helping the transfer of skills and resources.”

As more projects are proposed and funded each year, awareness of the ASA Impact Fund among MIT alumni will increase, Gano predicts.

“We’ve had just one year of grantees so far, and all of the projects they’ve conducted have been great,” he says. “I think even if we just continue functioning at this scale, if we’re able to sustain the fund, we can have a real lasting impact as students and alumni and build more and more partnerships on the continent.”

Behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan has never forgotten the pleasure he felt the first time he tasted a delicious crisp, yet gooey Levain cookie. He compares the experience to when he encounters new ideas.

“That hedonic pleasure is pretty much the same pleasure I get hearing a new idea, discovering a new way of looking at a situation, or thinking about something, getting stuck and then having a breakthrough. You get this kind of core basic reward,” says Mullainathan, the Peter de Florez Professor with dual appointments in the MIT departments of Economics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a principal investigator at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).

Mullainathan’s love of new ideas, and by extension of going beyond the usual interpretation of a situation or problem by looking at it from many different angles, seems to have started very early. As a child in school, he says, the multiple-choice answers on tests all seemed to offer possibilities for being correct.

“They would say, ‘Here are three things. Which of these choices is the fourth?’ Well, I was like, ‘I don’t know.’ There are good explanations for all of them,” Mullainathan says. “While there’s a simple explanation that most people would pick, natively, I just saw things quite differently.”

Mullainathan says the way his mind works, and has always worked, is “out of phase” — that is, not in sync with how most people would readily pick the one correct answer on a test. He compares the way he thinks to “one of those videos where an army’s marching and one guy’s not in step, and everyone is thinking, what’s wrong with this guy?”

Luckily, Mullainathan says, “being out of phase is kind of helpful in research.”

And apparently so. Mullainathan has received a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” has been designated a “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum, was named a “Top 100 thinker” by Foreign Policy magazine, was included in the “Smart List: 50 people who will change the world” by Wired magazine, and won the Infosys Prize, the largest monetary award in India recognizing excellence in science and research.

Another key aspect of who Mullainathan is as a researcher — his focus on financial scarcity — also dates back to his childhood. When he was about 10, just a few years after his family moved to the Los Angeles area from India, his father lost his job as an aerospace engineer because of a change in security clearance laws regarding immigrants. When his mother told him that without work, the family would have no money, he says he was incredulous.

“At first I thought, that can’t be right. It didn’t quite process,” he says. “So that was the first time I thought, there’s no floor. Anything can happen. It was the first time I really appreciated economic precarity.”

His family got by running a video store and then other small businesses, and Mullainathan made it to Cornell University, where he studied computer science, economics, and mathematics. Although he was doing a lot of math, he found himself drawn not to standard economics, but to the behavioral economics of an early pioneer in the field, Richard Thaler, who later won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work. Behavioral economics brings the psychological, and often irrational, aspects of human behavior into the study of economic decision-making.

“It’s the non-math part of this field that’s fascinating,” says Mullainathan. “What makes it intriguing is that the math in economics isn’t working. The math is elegant, the theorems. But it’s not working because people are weird and complicated and interesting.”

Behavioral economics was so new as Mullainathan was graduating that he says Thaler advised him to study standard economics in graduate school and make a name for himself before concentrating on behavioral economics, “because it was so marginalized. It was considered super risky because it didn’t even fit a field,” Mullainathan says.

Unable to resist thinking about humanity’s quirks and complications, however, Mullainathan focused on behavioral economics, got his PhD at Harvard University, and says he then spent about 10 years studying people.

“I wanted to get the intuition that a good academic psychologist has about people. I was committed to understanding people,” he says.

As Mullainathan was formulating theories about why people make certain economic choices, he wanted to test these theories empirically.

In 2013, he published a paper in Science titled “Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function.” The research measured sugarcane farmers’ performance on intelligence tests in the days before their yearly harvest, when they were out of money, sometimes nearly to the point of starvation. In the controlled study, the same farmers took tests after their harvest was in and they had been paid for a successful crop — and they scored significantly higher.

Mullainathan says he is gratified that the research had far-reaching impact, and that those who make policy often take its premise into account.

“Policies as a whole are kind of hard to change,” he says, “but I do think it has created sensitivity at every level of the design process, that people realize that, for example, if I make a program for people living in economic precarity hard to sign up for, that’s really going to be a massive tax.”

To Mullainathan, the most important effect of the research was on individuals, an impact he saw in reader comments that appeared after the research was covered in The Guardian.

“Ninety percent of the people who wrote those comments said things like, ‘I was economically insecure at one point. This perfectly reflects what it felt like to be poor.’”

Such insights into the way outside influences affect personal lives could be among important advances made possible by algorithms, Mullainathan says.

“I think in the past era of science, science was done in big labs, and it was actioned into big things. I think the next age of science will be just as much about allowing individuals to rethink who they are and what their lives are like.”

Last year, Mullainathan came back to MIT (after having previously taught at MIT from 1998 to 2004) to focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“I wanted to be in a place where I could have one foot in computer science and one foot in a top-notch behavioral economic department,” he says. “And really, if you just objectively said ‘what are the places that are A-plus in both,’ MIT is at the top of that list.”

While AI can automate tasks and systems, such automation of abilities humans already possess is “hard to get excited about,” he says. Computer science can be used to expand human abilities, a notion only limited by our creativity in asking questions.

“We should be asking, what capacity do you want expanded? How could we build an algorithm to help you expand that capacity? Computer science as a discipline has always been so fantastic at taking hard problems and building solutions,” he says. “If you have a capacity that you’d like to expand, that seems like a very hard computing challenge. Let’s figure out how to take that on.”

The sciences that “are very far from having hit the frontier that physics has hit,” like psychology and economics, could be on the verge of huge developments, Mullainathan says. “I fundamentally believe that the next generation of breakthroughs is going to come from the intersection of understanding of people and understanding of algorithms.”

He explains a possible use of AI in which a decision-maker, for example a judge or doctor, could have access to what their average decision would be related to a particular set of circumstances. Such an average would be potentially freer of day-to-day influences — such as a bad mood, indigestion, slow traffic on the way to work, or a fight with a spouse.

Mullainathan sums the idea up as “average-you is better than you. Imagine an algorithm that made it easy to see what you would normally do. And that’s not what you’re doing in the moment. You may have a good reason to be doing something different, but asking that question is immensely helpful.”

Going forward, Mullainathan will absolutely be trying to work toward such new ideas — because to him, they offer such a delicious reward.

In response to a FOIA request, the NSA released “Fifty Years of Mathematical Cryptanalysis (1937-1987),” by Glenn F. Stahly, with a lot of redactions.

Weirdly, this is the second time the NSA has declassified the document. John Young got a copy in 2019. This one has a few less redactions. And nothing that was provided in 2019 was redacted here.

If you find anything interesting in the document, please tell us about it in the comments.

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