All this season, “How to Fix the Internet” has been focusing on the tools and technology of freedom – and one of the most important tools of freedom is a library. Access to knowledge not only creates an informed populace that democracy requires, but also gives people the tools they need to thrive. And the internet has radically expanded access to knowledge in ways that earlier generations could only have dreamed of – so long as that knowledge is allowed to flow freely.

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(You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive and on YouTube.) 

A passionate advocate for public internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his life intent on a singular focus: providing universal access to all knowledge. The Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996, now preserves 99+ petabytes of data - the books, Web pages, music, television, government information, and software of our cultural heritage – and works with more than 400 library and university partners to create a digital library that’s accessible to all. The Archive is known for the Wayback Machine, which lets users search the history of almost one trillion web pages. But it also archives images, software, video and audio recordings, documents, and it contains dozens of resources and projects that fill a variety of gaps in cultural, political, and historical knowledge. Kahle joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss how the free flow of knowledge makes all of us more free. 

In this episode you’ll learn about:

• The role AI plays in digitizing, preserving, and easing access to all kinds of information
• How EFF helped the Internet Archive fight off the government’s demand for information about library patrons
• The importance of building a decentralized, distributed web to finding and preserving information for all
• Why building revolutionary, world-class libraries like the Internet Archive requires not only money and technology, but also people willing to dedicate their lives to the work
• How nonprofits are crucial to filling societal gaps left by businesses, governments, and academia 

Brewster Kahle is the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, which is among the world’s largest libraries and serves millions of people each day. After studying AI at and graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982, Kahle helped launch the company Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker. In 1989, he helped create the internet's first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS); WAIS Inc. was later sold to AOL. In 1996, Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, which helps catalog the Web, selling it to Amazon.com in 1999. He is a former member of EFF’s Board of Directors. 

Resources:

• EFF Legal Cases: Internet Archive et al v Mukasey et al (NSA letter/gag order)
• EFF Legal Cases: Hachette v. Internet Archive (publishers’ lawsuit)
• National Public Radio: “As the Trump administration purges web pages, this group is rushing to save them” (March 23, 2025)
• BBC: “An inside look at how the Internet Archive saves the web” (May 26, 2025)
• American Libraries: “Newsmaker: Brewster Kahle” (June 4, 2025) 

What do you think of “How to Fix the Internet?” Share your feedback here.

Transcript

BREWSTER KAHLE: I think we should start making some better decisions, a little bit more informed, a little better communication with not only people that are around the world and finding the right people we should be talking to, but also, well, standing on the shoulders of giants. I mean, we can then go and learn from all the things that people have learned in the past. It's pretty straightforward what we're trying to do here. It's just build a library.

CINDY COHN: That's Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle on what life could look like we all got to experience his dream of universal access to all human knowledge.
I'm Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

JASON KELLEY: And I'm Jason Kelley - EFF's activism director. And this is our podcast How to Fix the Internet.

CINDY COHN: This show is about what the world could look like if we get things right online - we hear from activists, computer engineers, thinkers, artists and today, a librarian, about their visions for a better digital future that we can all work towards.

JASON KELLEY: And our guest today is someone who has been actively making the internet a better place for several decades now.

CINDY COHN: Brewster Kahle is an early internet pioneer, and a longtime advocate for digitization. He’s a computer engineer but also a digital librarian, and he is of course best known as the founder of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine. EFF and the Archive are close allies and friends, and Brewster himself was a member of EFF’s Board of Directors for many years. I’m proud to say that the Archive is also a client of EFF, including most recently when we served as part of the legal team trying to protect true library lending of digital materials like ebooks and audiobooks.

JASON KELLEY: All season we’ve been focusing on the tools and technologies of freedom – and one of the most important tools of freedom is a library.
We started off our conversation by getting his take on the role that AI should play in his vision of a universally accessible library.

BREWSTER KAHLE: AI is absolutely critical and actually has been used for, well, a long period of time. You just think of, how does the magic of Google search happen, where you can just type a few words and get 10 links and several of them are actually really quite relevant. How do you do that? Those of us old enough to remember just keyword searching, that didn't work very well.
So it's going and using all this other information, metadata from other websites, but also learning from people, and machine learning at scale, that we've been able to make such progress.
Now there's the large language models, the generative AI, which is also absolutely fantastic. So we are digitizing obscure newsletters from theological missions in distant parts of the world. We are digitizing agricultural records and from over decades of the 20th century.
And these materials are absolutely relevant now with climate change in our new environments because, well, things are moving. So the pests that used to be only in Mexico are now in Louisiana and Texas. It's completely relevant to go and learn from these, but it's not gonna be based on people going and doing keyword search and finding that newsletter and, and learning from it. It's gonna be based on these augmentations, but take all of these materials and try to make it useful and accessible to a generation that's used to talking to machines.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, I think that that's a really important thing. One of my favorite insights about AI is that it's a very different user interface. It's a way to have a conversational access to information. And I think AI represents one of those other shifts about how people think about accessing information. There's a lot of side effects of AI and we definitely have to be serious about those. But this shift can really help people learn better and find what they're looking for, but also find things that maybe they didn't think they were looking for.

BREWSTER KAHLE: If we do it well, if we do it with public AI that is respectful, the opportunity for engaging people and in a more deep way to be able to have them get to literature that has been packed away, and we've spent billions of dollars in the library system over centuries going and building these collections that are now going to be accessible, not just to the reference librarian, not just to researchers, but to kind of anybody.

JASON KELLEY: Can I dig into this backstory of yours a little bit? Because you know, a lot of people may know how you ended up building the Internet Archive, but I don't think they know enough. I'd like to get more people to sort of have a model in tech for what they can do if they're successful. And you were, if I understand it right, you were one of the early successful internet stories.
You sold a company or two in the nineties and you could have probably quit then and instead you ended up building the Internet Archive. Did you have this moment of deciding to do this and how did you end up in library school in the first place?

BREWSTER KAHLE: So I'm a little unusual in that I, I've only had one idea in my life, and so back in college in 1980 a friend posed, okay, you're an idealist. Yes. And a technologist. Yes. Paint a portrait that's better with your technology. It turned out that was an extremely difficult question to answer.
We were very good about complaining about things. You know, that was Cold War Times and Nicaragua and El Salvador, and there's lots of things to complain about, but it was like. What would be better? So I only came up with two ideas. one was protect people's privacy, even though they were going to throw it away if they were given the chance.
And the other was build the library of everything, the building of the library of everything, the digital library of Alexandria seemed too obvious. So I tried to work on the privacy one, but I couldn't make chips to encrypt voice conversations cheap enough to help the people I wanted to, but I learned how to make chips.
But then that got me engaged with the artificial intelligence lab at MIT and Danny Hillis and Marvin Minsky, they had this idea of building a thinking machine and to go and build a computer that was large enough to go and search everything. And that seemed absolutely critical.
So I helped work on that. Founded a company, Thinking Machines. That worked pretty well. So we got the massively parallel computers. We got the first search engine on the internet, then spun off a company to go and try to get publishers online called WAIS Incorporated. It came before the web, it was the first publishing system.
And so these were all steps in the path of trying to get to the library. So once we had publishers online, we also needed open source software. The free and open source software movement is absolutely critical to the whole story of how this whole thing came about, and open protocols, which was not the way people thought of things. They would go and make them proprietary and sue people and license things, but the internet world had this concept of how to share that ran very, very well. I wasn't central in the ARPANET to the internet conversation. But I did have quite a bit to do with some of the free and open source software, the protocol development, the origins of the web.
And once we had publishers, then, onboard, then I could turn my attention to building the library in 1996, so that's 28 years ago, something like that. And so we then said, okay, now we can build the library. What does that make up of? And we said, well, let's start with the web. Right? The most fragile of media.
I mean, Tim's system, Tim Berners-Lee's system, was very easy to implement, which was kind of great and one of the keys for his success, but it had some really, basically broken parts of it. You think of publishers and they would go and make copies and sell them to individuals or libraries, and they would stay alive much longer than the publishers.
But the web, there's only one copy and it's only on one machine. And so if they change that, then it's gone. So you're asking publishers to be librarians, which is a really bad idea. And so we thought, okay, why don't we go and make a copy of everything that was on the web. Every page from every website every two months.
And turns out you could do that. That was my Altavista moment when I actually went to see Altavista. It was the big search engine before Google and it was the size of two Coke machines, and it was kind of wild to go and look - that's the whole web! So the idea that you could go and gather it all back up again, uh, was demonstrated by Altavista and the Internet Archive continued on with other media type after media type, after media type.

JASON KELLEY: I heard you talk about the importance of privacy to you, and I know Cindy's gonna wanna dig into that a little bit with some of the work that EFF and the Archive have done together.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, for sure. One of the things I think, you know, your commitment to privacy is something that I think is very, very important to you and often kind of gets hidden because the, you know, the archive is really important. But, you know, we were able to stand up together against national security letters, you know, long before some of the bigger cases that came later and I wanted to, you know, when you reached out to us and said, look, we've gotten this national security letter, we wanna fight back. Like, it was obvious to you that we needed to push back. And I wanna hear you talk about that a little bit.

BREWSTER KAHLE: Oh, this is a hero day. This is a hero moment for EFF and its own, you know, I, okay.

CINDY COHN: Well, and the Archive, we did it together.

BREWSTER KAHLE: Well, no, we just got the damn letter. You saved our butts. Okay. So how this thing worked was in 2001,they passed this terrible law, the Patriot Act, and they basically made any government official almost be able to ask any organization and be able to get anything they wanted and they had a gag order. So not only could they just get any information, say on patrons’ reading habits in a library, they could make it so that you can't tell anybody about it.
So I got sat down one day and Kurt Opsahl from EFF said, this isn't your best day. You just got a letter demanding information about a patron of the Internet Archive. I said, they can't do that. He said, yeah, they can. And I said, okay, well this doesn't make any sense. I mean, the librarians have a long history of dealing with people being surveilled on what it is they read and then rounded up and bad things happen to them, right? This is, this is something we know how that movie plays out.
So I said, Kurt, what, what can we do? And he said, you have to supply the data. I said, what if we don't? And he said, jail. That wasn't my favorite sentence. So is there anything else we can do? And he said, well, you can sue the United States government. (laughter)
OH! Well I didn't know even know whether I could bring this up with my board. I mean, remember there's a gag order. So there was just a need to know to be able to find out from the engineers what it is we had, what we didn't have. And fortunately we never had very much information. 'cause we don't keep it, we don't keep IP addresses if we possibly can. We didn't have that much, but we wanted to push back. And then how do you do that? And if it weren't for the EFF, and then EFF got the ACLU involved on a pro bono basis, I would never have been able to pull it off! I would have to have answered questions to the finance division of how, why are we spending all this money on lawyers?
The gag order made it so absolutely critical for EFF to exist, and to be ready and willing and funded enough to take on a court case against the United States government without, you know, having to go into a fundraising round.
But because of you, all of you listeners out there donating to EFF, having that piggy bank made it so that they could spring to the defense of the Internet Archive. The great thing about this was that after this lawsuit was launched, the government wanted out of this lawsuit as fast as possible.
They didn't want to go and have a library going and getting a court case to take their little precious toy of this Patriot Act, National Security letters away from them. So they wanted out, but we wouldn't let them. We wanted to be able to talk about it. They had to go and release the gag order. And I think we're only one or two or three organizations that have ever talked publicly about the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of national security letters because we had EFF support.

CINDY COHN: Oh, thank you Brewster. That's very sweet. But it was a great honor to get to do this. And in hearing you talk about this future, I just wanna pull out a few of the threads. One is privacy and how important that is for access for information. Some people think of that as a different category, right? And it's not. It's part and parcel of giving people access to information.
I also heard the open source community and open protocols and making sure that people can, you know, crawl the web and do things with websites that might be different than the original creator wanted, but are still useful to society.
The other thing that you mentioned that I think it's important to lift up as well is, you know, when we're talking about AI systems, you're talking about public AI, largely. You're talking about things that similarly are not controlled by just one company, but are available so that the public really has access not only to the information, but to the tools that let them build the next thing.

BREWSTER KAHLE: Yes, the big thing I think I may have gotten wrong starting this whole project in 1980 was the relaxation of the antitrust laws in the United States, that we now have these monster organizations that are not only just dominating a country's telecom or publishing systems or academic access, but it's worldwide now.
So we have these behemoth companies. That doesn't work very well. We want a game with many winners. We want that level playing field. We wanna make it so that new innovators can come along and, you know, try it out, make it go. In the early web, we had this, we watched sort of the popularity and the movement of popularity. And so you could start out with a small idea and it could become quite popular without having to go through the gatekeepers. And that was different from when I was growing up. I mean, if you had a new idea for a kid's toy, trying to get that on the shelves in a bunch of toy stores was almost impossible.
So the idea of the web and the internet made it so that good ideas could surface and grow, and that can work as long as you don't allow people to be gatekeepers.
We really need a mechanism for people to be able to grow, have some respect, some trust. If we really decrease the amount of trust, which is kind of, there's a bonfire of trust right now, then a lot of these systems are gonna be highly friction-full.
And how do we go and make it so that, you know, we have people that are doing worthwhile projects, not exploiting every piece of surveillance that they have access to. And how do we build that actually into the architecture of the web?

CINDY COHN: That leads, I think, directly into the kind of work that the archive has done about championing the distributed web, the D-web work. And you've done a real lot of work to kind of create a space for a distributed web, a better web. And I want you to tell me a little bit about, you know, how does that fit into your picture of the future?

BREWSTER KAHLE: The wonderful thing about the internet still is that it can be changed. It's still built by people. They may be in corporations, but you can still make a big dent and, there were a couple “aha” moments for me in, in trying to, like, why do we build a better web? Right? what's the foundational parts that we need to be able to do that?
And we ended up with this centralization, not only of all the servers being in these colos that are operated by other companies and a cloud-based thing, other people own everything, that you can't go and just take your computer on your desk and be a first class internet thing. That used to be possible with Gopher and Waze and the early web. So we lost some of those things, but we can get them back.
Jason Scott at the Internet Archive, working with volunteers all over, made emulators of the early computers like IBM PCs and Macintosh and these old computers, Commodore 64, Atari machines, and they would run in JavaScript in your browser, so you could click and go and download an IBM PC and it boots in your browser and it uses the Internet Archive as a giant floppy drive to run your favorite game from 20 years ago. The cool thing about that for me, yes, I could get to play all my old games, it was kind of great, but we also had this ability to run a full on computer in your browser, so you didn't even have to download and install something.
So you could go and be a computer on the internet, not just a consumer, a reader. You could actually be a writer, you could be a publisher, you could, you could do activities, you could, so that was fantastic. And then another big change was the protocols of the browsers change to allow peer-to-peer interactions. That's how you get, you know, Google Meet or you get these video things that are going peer to peer where there's no central authority going in, interrupting your video streams or whatever.
So, okay, with these tools in hand now, then we could try to realize part of the dream that a lot of us had originally, and even Tim Burners Lee, of building a decentralized web. Could you make a web such that your website is not owned and controlled on some computer someplace, but actually exists everywhere and nowhere, kind of a peer-to-peer backend for the web.
Could you make it so that if you run a club, that you could do a WordPress-like website that would then not live anywhere, but as readers were reading it, they would also serve it. And there would be libraries that would be able to go and archive it as a living object, not as just snapshots of pages. That became possible. It turns out it's still very hard, and the Internet Archive started pulling together people, doing these summits and these different conferences to get discussions around this and people are running with it.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, and so I love this because I know so many people who go to the archive to play Oregon Trail, right? And I love it when I get a chance to say, you know, this isn't just a game, right? This is a way of thinking that is reflected in this. I kind of love that, you know, ‘you died with dysentery’ becomes an entryway into a whole other way of thinking about the web.

JASON KELLEY: Let's take a quick moment to thank our sponsor. How to Fix The Internet is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's program and public understanding of science and technology enriching people's lives through a keener appreciation of our increasingly technological world and portraying the complex humanity of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.
We also wanna thank EFF donors. You're the reason we exist, and EFF has been fighting for digital rights for 35 years, and that fight is bigger than ever. So please, if you like what we do, go to eff.org/pod to donate. And also, if you can’t make it in person to this year’s EFF awards where we celebrate the people working towards the better future we all care so much about, you can watch the whole event at eff.org/awards.
We also wanted to share that our friend Cory Doctorow, has a new podcast, have a listen to this:

WHO BROKE THE INTERNET TRAILER: How did the internet go from this? You could actually find what you were looking for right away, to this, I feel I can inhale. Spoiler alert, it was not an accident. I'm Cory Doctorow, host of Who Broke the Internet from CBC's Understood. In this four part series, I'm gonna tell you why the internet sucks now, whose fault it is and my plan to fix it. Find who broke the internet on whatever terrible app you get your podcasts.

JASON KELLEY: And now back to our conversation with Brewster Kahle.
The fact that you do things like archive these old games is something that I think a lot of people don't know. There are just so many projects that the internet archive does and it is interesting to hear how they're sort of all building towards this better future that is sort of built, like, sort of makes up the bones of the work that you do. Can you talk about any of the other projects that you are particularly sort of proud of that maybe other people haven't heard about?

BREWSTER KAHLE: Yeah, and I really wanna apologize. If you go to archive.org, it is daunting. Most people find things to read in the Internet Archive or see in the internet archive, mostly by going to search engines, or Wikipedia. For instance, we really dedicated ourselves to try to help reinforce Wikipedia. We started archiving all of the outbound links. And we figured out how to work with the communities to allow us to fix those broken links. So we've now fixed 22 million broken links in Wikipedia, 10,000 a day get now added to go back to the Wayback Machine.
Also, there are about two million books that are linked straight into, if you click on it, it goes right to the right page so you can go and see the citation. Not only is this important for homework, people that are after hours trying to cram for their, uh, for their homework, um, but it's also important for Wikipedians because, um, links in Wikipedia that go to someplace you can actually cite is a link that works, it gets more weight.
And if we're going to have all the literature, the scholarly literature and the book literature available in Wikipedia, it needs to be clickable. And you can't click your way into a Overdrive borrowed book from your library. You have to be able to do this from, something like the Internet Archive. So Wikipedia, reinforcing Wikipedia.
Another is television. We've been archiving television. 24 hours a day since the year 2000. Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Iraqi, Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, ABC, Fox, 24 hours a day, DVD quality. And not all of it is available but the US television news, you can search and find things. And we're also doing summarizations now, so you can start to understand – in English – what is Russian State television telling the Russians? So we can start to get perspectives. Or look inside other people's bubbles to be able to get an idea of what's going on. Or a macroscope ability to step back and get the bigger picture. That's what libraries are for, is to go and use these materials in new and different ways that weren't the way that the publishers originally intended.
Other things. We've digitizing about 3000 books a day. So that's going along well. Then we are doing Democracy’s Library. Democracy's Library, I think is a cool one. So democracies need an educated populace. So they tend to publish openly. Authoritarian governments and corporations don't care about having an educated populace. That's not their goal. They have other goals, um, but democracies want things to be openly available.
But it turns out that even though the United States, for instance, and all democracies publish openly, most of those materials are not available publicly. They may be available in some high priced database system of somebody or other. But mostly they're just not available at all.
So we launched the Democracy's Library Project to go and take all of the published works at the federal level, the provincial state level, and municipal levels, and make that all available in bulk and in services so that other people could also go and build new services on this. We launched it with Canada and the United States. The Canadians are kicking the United States's butt. I mean, they're doing so great. So Internet Archive Canada, working with University of Toronto, and universities all over, have already digitized all of the federal print materials, and by working with the national library there have archived the government websites in Canada.
In the United States we've been archiving, with the help of many others, including historically with the Library of Congress, and National Archives to go and collect all of the web pages and services and data sets from all of the United States Federal websites from before and after every presidential election. It's called the End of Term Crawl, and this has been going on since 2008, and we've gotten into a lot of news recently because this administration has decided to take a lot of materials off the web. And again, asking a publisher, whether it's a government or commercial publisher or a social media publisher, to go and be their own archive or their own library is a bad idea. Don't trust a corporation to do a library's job, was what one headline said.
So we've been archiving all of these materials and making them available. Now, can we weave them back into the web with the right URLs? No, not yet. That's up to the browser companies and also some of the standards organizations. But it's, at least it's there and you can go to the Wayback Machine to find it.
So the Internet Archive is about the 200th most popular website.
We get millions of people a day coming to the website, and we get about 6 million people coming and using the internet archives resources that we don't even, they don't even come to the website. So it's just woven into the fabric of the web. So people say, oh, I've never heard of that. Never used it. It's like you probably have. It’s just part of how the internet works, it's plumbing.
So those are the aspects of the Internet Archive that are currently going on. We have people coming in all the time saying. Now, but are you doing this? And I said, no, but you can and we can be infrastructure for you. I think of the Internet Archive as infrastructure for obsessives. So the people that say, I really need this to persist to the next generation. We say, great, what do you need? How do we make that come true?

CINDY COHN: Yeah, I think that's both the superpower and in some ways the thing that the Internet Archive struggles with, which is because when your infrastructure, people don't think about you and they don't wanna think about you, so that when you come under attack, it's hard to get people to see what they might be losing.
And I think one of the things that, you know, one of the reasons I wanted you to come on here and talk about the archive is I think we need to start making some of that invisible stuff visible because it's not magic. It's not automatic. It takes, you know, I mean, your personal courage in standing up is wonderful, but there need to be hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands saying, you know, this is our library, this is our future.
This is, you know, this is important and, and we need to stand up and hopefully if we stand up enough, you know, we don't have to do it every four years or so. But you know, the number of people who I sent to the Wayback Machine when they were very, very worried about US government information going down and, and pointed out, look, you know, the archive's been quietly doing this for, you know, nearly 20 years now, is a lot. And that's because again, you're kind of quietly doing the important work.
And so, you know, my hope is that ,with this podcast and otherwise, we get a little more attention so that we can really build this better future and, and maybe in the better future, we don't have to think about it again. But right now there's a lot of different kinds of attacks.

BREWSTER KAHLE: It's a challenging time, especially in the United States for libraries. There's the book bannings, defunding. Probably structurally the worst thing is the licensing model. The idea that there's no digital ownership. I mean, just like really bad behavior on the part of the corporations. Um, so, but Internet Archive Canada is doing well. Internet Archive Europe is coming back up and serving interesting roles with public AI to go and do publicly oriented values driven AI technology, which is kind of great. We'd like to see internet archives planted in lots of places. The idea that we can just depend on the United States jurisdictions for being the information resource for the world I think that train is gone.
So let's go and build a robust infrastructure. It's kinda like what we saw out the internet. Can we build internet archives all over the world? And that takes not only money, but actually the money part is probably not the hardest part. It's people interested in dedicating their lives to open – to open source software, free and open source software, open access materials, the infrastructure to step out and work in non-profits as opposed to some of the, you know, the very tempting, um, stock option deals that come from these these VC-funded whatevers, um, and work and do the good work that they can point to and they can be proud of for the rest of their lives.

CINDY COHN: Yeah. And there is something so important about that, about getting to wake up every day and feel like you're making the world better. And I think your particular story about this, because you know, you made money early on, you did some companies and you decided to dig back into the public side of the work rather than, you know, stepping back and becoming a VC or, you know, buying your third island, or those kinds of things.
And I think that one of the things that's important is that I feel like there's a lot of people who don't think that you can be a technologist and a successful person without being an asshole. And, you know, I think you're a good counter example of somebody who is deeply technical, who thinks about things in a, you know, how do we build better infrastructure, who understands how all of these systems work. And use that information to build good, rather than, you know, necessarily deciding that the, you know, the best thing to do is to maybe take over a local government and build a small fiefdom to yourself.

BREWSTER KAHLE: Well, thank you for that. And yes, for-profit entities are gasoline. They're explosive and they don't tend to last long. But I think one of the best ideas the United States has come up with is the 501 C3 public charity, which is not the complete antidote to the C corporations that were also put across by the United States since World War II in ways that shouldn't have been, but the 501 C3 public charities are interesting. They tend to last longer. They take away the incentive to sell out, yet leave an ability to be an operational entity. You just have to do public good. You have to actually live and walk the walk and go and do that. But I think it's a fabulous structure. I mean, you, Cindy, how old is the EFF now?

CINDY COHN: 35. This is our 35th anniversary.

BREWSTER KAHLE: That's excellent. And the Internet Archive is like 28, 29 years old, and that's a long time for commercial, excuse me, for commercial entities or tech! Things in the tech world, they tend to turn over. So if you wanna build something long term, and you're willing to only do, as Lessig would put it, some rights reserved, or some profit motive reserved. Then the 501 C3 public charities, what other countries are adopting, this model is a mechanism of building infrastructure that can last a long time where you get your alignment with the public interest.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, I think that's right. And it's been interesting to me for the, you know, being in this space for a really long time, the nonprofit salaries, the nonprofit may not be as high, but the jobs are more stable. Like we don't have in our sector the waves of layoffs. I mean, occasionally for sure we're, you know, that that is a thing that happens in the nonprofit digital rights sector. But I would say compared to the for-profit world, there’s a much more stable structure, um, because you don't have this gasoline idea, these kind of highs and lows and ups and downs. And that could be, you know, there's nothing wrong with riding that wave and making some money. But the question becomes, well, what do you do after that? Do you take that path to begin with? Or do you take that path later, when you've got some assets, you know, some people come outta school with loans and things like that.

BREWSTER KAHLE: So we need this intermediary between the academic, the dot edu, and the dot com, and I think the dot org is such a thing. And also there was a time when we did a lot in dot gov of bringing civic tech. And civic tech in Canada is up and running and wonderful. So there's things that we can do in that.
We can also spread these ideas into other sectors like banking. How about some nonprofit banks, please? Why don't we have some nonprofit housing that actually supports nonprofit workers? We're doing an experiment with that to try to help support people that want to work in San Francisco for nonprofits and not feel that they have to commute from hours away.
So can we go and take some of these ideas pioneered by Richard Stallman, Larry Lessig, Vince Sur, the Cindy Cohns, and go and try it in new sectors? You're doing a law firm, one of the best of the Silicon Valley law firms, and you give away your product. Internet Archive gives away its product. Wikipedia gives away its product. This is, like, not supposed to happen, but it works really well. And it requires support and interest of people to work there and also to support it from the outside. But it functions so much better. It's less friction. It's easier for us to work with non other non-profits than it is to work with for-profits.

JASON KELLEY: Well I'm glad that you brought up the nonprofit points and really dug into it because earlier, Brewster, you mentioned the people listening to this are, you know, the reason you were able to fight back against the NSL letters is that EFF has supporters that keep it going, and those same supporters, the people listening to this are hopefully, and probably, the ones that help keep the Archive going. And I just wanted to make sure people know that the Archive is also supported by donors. And, uh, if people like it, they, they, there's nothing wrong with supporting both EFF and the Archive, and I hope everyone does both.

CINDY COHN: Yeah. There's a whole community. And one of the things that Brewster has really been a leader in is seeing and making space for us to think of ourselves as a community. Because we're stronger together. And I think that's another piece of the somewhat quiet work that Brewster and the Archive do is knitting together the open world into thinking of itself as an open world and, able to move together and leverage each other.

BREWSTER KAHLE: Well thank you for all the infrastructure EFF provides. And if anybody's in San Francisco, come over on a Friday afternoon at ! And we give it to her! If I'm here, I give it to her and try to help answer questions. We even have ice cream. And so the idea is to go and invite people into this other alternative form of success that maybe they weren't taught about in business school or, or, or, uh, you know, they want to go off and do something else.
That's fine, but at least understand a little bit of how the underlying structures of the internet, whether it's some of the original plumbing, um, some of these visions of Wikipedia, Internet Archive. How do we make all of this work? And it's by working together, trusting each other to try to do things right, even when the technology allows you to do things that are abusive. Stepping back from that and building, uh, the safeguards into the technology eventually, and celebrate what we can get done to support a better civic infrastructure.

CINDY COHN: That is the perfect place to end it. Thank you so much, Brewster, for coming on and bringing your inspiration to us.

JASON KELLEY: I loved that we wrapped up the season with Brewster because really there isn't anything more important, in a lot of ways, to freedom than a library. And the tool of freedom that Brewster built, the Internet Archive and all of the different pieces of it, is something that I think is so critical to how people think about the internet and what it can do, and honestly, it's taken for granted. I think once you start hearing Brewster talk about it, you realize just how important it is. I just love hearing from the person who thought of it and built it.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, he's so modest. The “I only had one idea,” right? Or two ideas, you know, one is privacy and the other is a universal access to all the world's information. You know, just some little things.

JASON KELLEY: Just a few things that he built into practice.

CINDY COHN: Well, and you know, he and a lot of other people, I think he's the first to point out that this is a sector that there's a lot of people working in this area and it's important that we think about it that way.
It does take the long view to build things that will last. And then I think he also really talked about the nonprofit sector and how, you know, that space is really important. And I liked his framing of it being kind of in between the dot edu, the academics and the dot com, that the dot orgs play this important role in bringing the public into the conversation about tech, and that's certainly what he's done.

JASON KELLEY: I loved how much of a positive pitch this was for nonprofits, and I think a lot of people think of charities they don't think about EFF necessarily, or the Internet Archive, but this tech sector of nonprofits is, you know, that community you talked about all working together to sort of build this structure that protects people's rights online and also gives them access to these incredible tools and projects and resources and, you know, everyone listening to this is probably a part of that community in one way or another. It's much bigger than I think people realize.

CINDY COHN: Yeah. And whether you're contributing code or doing lawyering or doing activism, you know, there's, there's spaces throughout, and those are only just three that we do.
But the other piece, and, and you know, I was very of course honored that he told the story about national security letters, but, you know, we can support each other. Right. That when somebody in this community comes under attack, that's where EFF often shows up. But when, you know, he said people have ideas and they wanna be able to develop them, you know, the archive provides the infrastructure. All of this stuff is really important and important to lean into in this time when we're really seeing a lot of public institutions and nonprofit institutions coming under attack.
What I really love about this season, Jason, is the way we've been able to shine our little spotlight on a bunch of different pieces of the sector. And there's so many more. You know, as somebody who started in this digital world in the nineties when, you know, I could present all of the case law about the internet on one piece of paper in a 20 minute presentation.
You know, watching this grow out and seeing that it's just the beginning has been really, it's been really fun to be able to talk to all of these pieces. And you know, to me the good news is that, that people, you know, sometimes their stories get presented as if they're alone or if there's this lone, you know, it's kind of a superhero narrative. There's this lone Brewster Kahle who's out there doing things, and now of course that's true. Brewster's, you know, again, Brewster's somebody who I readily point to when people need an example of somebody who, who did really well in tech but didn't completely become a money grubbing jerk as a result of it, but instead, you know, plowed it back into the community. It's important to have people like that, but it's also important to recognize that this is a community and that we're building it, and that it’s got plenty of space for the next person to show up and, and throw in ideas.
At least I hope that's how, you know, we fix the internet.

JASON KELLEY:  And that's it for this episode and for this season. Thank you to Brewster for the conversation today, and to all of our guests this season for taking the time to share their insight, experience, and wisdom with us these past few months. Everybody who listens, gets to learn a little bit more about how to fix the internet.
That is our goal at EFF. And every time I finish one of these conversations, I think, wow, there's a lot to do. So thank you so much for listening. If you wanna help us do that work, go to eff.org/pod and you can donate, become a member, and um, we have 30,000 members, but we could always use a few more because there is a lot to fix.
Thank you so much. Our theme music is by Nat Keefe of Beat Millware with Reed Mathis. And How to Fix the Internet is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology. I'm Jason Kelley.

CINDY COHN: And I'm Cindy Cohn.

MUSIC CREDITS: This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 international, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported by its creators: Drops of H2O, The Filtered Water Treatment by Jay Lang. Additional music, theme remixes and sound design by Gaetan Harris.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 10 September 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02417-8

The authors use 1,603 estimates of local extinctions from 1980 to 2021 to show that dragonfly species with wing ornamentation have disproportionately gone extinct and lost habitat because of climate change and wildfire. This highlights the important role of mating traits in species survival under change.

EFF Launches Search for Successor to ‘Visionary Lawyer and Leader’

SAN FRANCISCO – Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Cindy Cohn will step down by mid-2026 after more than 25 years with the organization and a decade as its top officer leading the fight for digital freedoms. 

EFF – defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation since 1990 – is launching a search for Cohn’s successor. 

“It’s been the honor of my life to help EFF grow and become the strong, effective organization it is today, but it’s time to make space for new leadership. I also want to get back into the fight for civil liberties more directly than I can as the executive director of a thriving 125-person organization,” Cohn said. “I’m incredibly proud of all that we’ve built and accomplished. One of our former interns once called EFF the joyful warriors for internet freedom and I have always loved that characterization.” 

“I know EFF’s lawyers, activists and technologists will continue standing up for freedom, justice and innovation whether we’re fighting trolls, bullies, corporate oligarchs, clueless legislators or outright dictators,” she added. 

"Cindy Cohn has been a relentless advocate for the simple proposition that regular people have a fundamental right to privacy online,” said U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR. “Her work – defending encryption, opposing warrantless NSA surveillance, and suing major corporations for violating customer privacy – has consistently put her on the side of users and individuals and against powerful entrenched interests. Cindy's steady leadership at EFF will be missed by everyone who believes the First and Fourth Amendments are just as necessary today as they were more than 200 years ago." 

Cohn, 61, first became involved with EFF in 1993, when EFF asked her to serve as the outside lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, the successful First Amendment challenge to the U.S. export restrictions on cryptography. She served as EFF’s Legal Director as well as its General Counsel from 2000 through 2015, and she has served as Executive Director since then. She also has co-hosted EFF’s award-winning “How to Fix the Internet” podcast, which is about to conclude its sixth season. Her upcoming professional memoir covering her time at EFF, Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, will be published in spring 2026 by MIT Press.  

Cohn was named to TheNonProfitTimes 2020 Power & Influence TOP 50. In 2018, Forbes included her as one of America's Top 50 Women in Tech. The National Law Journal named her one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America in 2013, noting: "[I]f Big Brother is watching, he better look out for Cindy Cohn." That publication also named her in 2006 for "rushing to the barricades wherever freedom and civil liberties are at stake online." In 2007, the National Law Journal named her one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in America.  

In 2010 the Intellectual Property Section of the State Bar of California awarded Cohn its Intellectual Property Vanguard Award and in 2012 the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists awarded her its James Madison Freedom of Information Award. 

Cohn said she made the decision to step down more than a year ago, and later informed EFF’s Board of Directors and executive staff. The Board of Directors has assembled a search committee, which in turn has engaged leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates to conduct a search for EFF’s new executive director. Inquiries about the search can be directed to EFF@russellreynolds.com.  

The search committee hopes to hire someone next spring, with Cohn planning to remain at EFF for a transition period through early summer.  

“Simply put, Cindy Cohn is an EFF institution,” said Gigi Sohn, chair of EFF’s Board of Directors. “Under her leadership, the organization has grown tremendously, cementing its role as the premier defender of digital privacy, free speech and innovation in the U.S., and perhaps the world. The EFF Board thanks Cindy for her many years of service to EFF, first as Legal Director and for the past 10 years as Executive Director, as well as her willingness to help the organization through this leadership transition. We wish her all the best in her future endeavors, which undoubtedly will be equally as, if not more, successful.” 

“Cindy has been a huge part of EFF’s 35-year history and growth, and the organization simply wouldn’t be where it is today - at the forefront of defending civil liberties in the digital world - without her,” said EFF co-founder Mitch Kapor. “Her strong, compassionate leadership has set a clear and impactful road map for EFF’s work for years to come.” 

“Cindy Cohn is a visionary lawyer and leader who has helped make EFF the world’s foremost digital rights organization,” said American Civil Liberties Union Deputy Legal Director Ben Wizner. “She has also been a dear friend and mentor to so many of us, leading with her warmth and humor as much as her brilliance. I’m excited to see her next act and confident she’ll find new strategies for protecting our rights and liberties.” 

“Cindy is a force in the digital rights community,” said Center for Democracy & Technology President and CEO Alexandra Reeve Givens. “Her visionary leadership has pushed the field forward, championing the rights of individual users and innovators in a fast-changing digital world. Cindy is a tireless advocate for user privacy, free expression, and ensuring technology serves the public good. Her legacy at EFF stands not just in the policy battles and complex cases she’s won, but in the foundation she has built for the next generation of digital rights defenders.” 

For more about Cindy Cohn, with hi-res photo: https://www.eff.org/about/staff/cindy-cohn 

Contact:  JoshRichmanCommunications Directorjrichman@eff.org

Seven technologies developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, either wholly or with collaborators, have earned 2025 R&D 100 Awards. This annual awards competition recognizes the year's most significant new technologies, products, and materials available on the marketplace or transitioned to use. An independent panel of technology experts and industry professionals selects the winners.

"Winning an R&D 100 Award is a recognition of the exceptional creativity and effort of our scientists and engineers. The awarded technologies reflect Lincoln Laboratory's mission to transform innovative ideas into real-world solutions for U.S. national security, industry, and society," says Melissa Choi, director of Lincoln Laboratory.

Lincoln Laboratory's winning technologies enhance national security in a range of ways, from securing satellite communication links and identifying nearby emitting devices to providing a layer of defense for U.S. Army vehicles and protecting service members from chemical threats. Other technologies are pushing frontiers in computing, enabling the 3D integration of chips and the close inspection of superconducting electronics. Industry is also benefiting from these developments — for example, by adopting an architecture that streamlines the development of laser communications terminals.

The online publication R&D World manages the awards program. Recipients span Fortune 500 companies, federally funded research institutions, academic and government labs, and small companies. Since 2010, Lincoln Laboratory has received 108 R&D 100 Awards.

Protecting lives 

Tactical Optical Spherical Sensor for Interrogating Threats (TOSSIT) is a throwable, baseball-sized sensor that remotely detects hazardous vapors and aerosols. It is designed to alert soldiers, first responders, and law enforcement to the presence of chemical threats, like nerve and blister agents, industrial chemical accidents, or fentanyl dust. Users can simply toss, drone-drop, or launch TOSSIT into an area of concern. To detect specific chemicals, the sensor samples the air with a built-in fan and uses an internal camera to observe color changes on a removable dye card. If chemicals are present, TOSSIT alerts users wirelessly on an app or via audible, light-up, or vibrational alarms in the sensor.

"TOSSIT fills an unmet need for a chemical-vapor point sensor, one that senses the immediate environment around it, that can be kinetically deployed ahead of service personnel. It provides a low-cost sensing option for vapors and solid aerosol threats — think toxic dust particles — that would otherwise not be detectable by small deployed sensor systems,” says principal investigator Richard Kingsborough. TOSSIT has been tested extensively in the field and is currently being transferred to the military. 

Wideband Selective Propagation Radar (WiSPR) is an advanced radar and communications system developed to protect U.S. Army armored vehicles. The system's active electronically scanned antenna array extends signal range at millimeter-wave frequencies, steering thousands of beams per second to detect incoming kinetic threats while enabling covert communications between vehicles. WiSPR is engineered to have a low probability of detection, helping U.S. Army units evade adversaries seeking to detect radio-frequency (RF) energy emitting from radars. The system is currently in production.

"Current global conflicts are highlighting the susceptibility of armored vehicles to adversary anti-tank weapons. By combining custom technologies and commercial off-the-shelf hardware, the Lincoln Laboratory team produced a WiSPR prototype as quickly and efficiently as possible," says program manager Christopher Serino, who oversaw WiSPR development with principal investigator David Conway.

Advancing computing

Bumpless Integration of Chiplets to Al-Optimized Fabric is an approach that enables the fabrication of next-generation 2D, 2.5D, and 3D integrated circuits. As data-processing demands increase, designers are exploring 3D stacked assemblies of small specialized chips (chiplets) to pack more power into devices. Tiny bumps of conductive material are used to electrically connect these stacks, but these microbumps cannot accommodate the extremely dense, massively interconnected components needed for future microcomputers. To address this issue, Lincoln Laboratory developed a technique eliminating microbumps. Key to this technique is a lithographically produced fabric allowing electrical bonding of chiplet stack layers. Researchers used an AI-driven decision-tree approach to optimize the design of this fabric. This bumpless feature can integrate hundreds of chiplets that perform like a single chip, improving data-processing speed and power efficiency, especially for high-performance AI applications.

"Our novel, bumpless, heterogeneous chiplet integration is a transformative approach addressing two semiconductor industry challenges: expanding chip yield and reducing cost and time to develop systems," says principal investigator Rabindra Das.

Quantum Diamond Magnetic Cryomicroscope is a breakthrough in magnetic field imaging for characterizing superconducting electronics, a promising frontier in high-performance computing. Unlike traditional techniques, this system delivers fast, wide-field, high-resolution imaging at the cryogenic temperatures required for superconducting devices. The instrument combines an optical microscopy system with a cryogenic sensor head containing a diamond engineered with nitrogen-vacancy centers — atomic-scale defects highly sensitive to magnetic fields. The cryomicroscope enables researchers to directly visualize trapped magnetic vortices that interfere with critical circuit components, helping to overcome a major obstacle to scaling superconducting electronics.

“The cryomicroscope gives us an unprecedented window into magnetic behavior in superconducting devices, accelerating progress toward next-generation computing technologies,” says Pauli Kehayias, joint principal investigator with Jennifer Schloss. The instrument is currently advancing superconducting electronics development at Lincoln Laboratory and is poised to impact materials science and quantum technology more broadly.

Enhancing communications 

Lincoln Laboratory Radio Frequency Situational Awareness Model (LL RF-SAM) utilizes advances in AI to enhance U.S. service members' vigilance over the electromagnetic spectrum. The modern spectrum can be described as a swamp of mixed signals originating from civilian, military, or enemy sources. In near-real time, LL RF-SAM inspects these signals to disentangle and identify nearby waveforms and their originating devices. For example, LL RF-SAM can help a user identify a particular packet of energy as a drone transmission protocol and then classify whether that drone is part of a corpus of friendly or enemy drones.

"This type of enhanced context helps military operators make data-driven decisions. The future adoption of this technology will have profound impact across communications, signals intelligence, spectrum management, and wireless infrastructure security," says principal investigator Joey Botero. 

Modular, Agile, Scalable Optical Terminal (MAScOT) is a laser communications (lasercom) terminal architecture that facilitates mission-enabling lasercom solutions adaptable to various space platforms and operating environments. Lasercom is rapidly becoming the go-to technology for space-to-space links in low Earth orbit because of its ability to support significantly higher data rates compared to radio frequency terminals. However, it has yet to be used operationally or commercially for longer-range space-to-ground links, as such systems often require custom designs for specific missions. MASCOT's modular, agile, and scalable design streamlines the process for building lasercom terminals suitable for a range of missions, from near Earth to deep space. MAScOT made its debut on the International Space Station in 2023 to demonstrate NASA's first two-way lasercom relay system, and is now being prepared to serve in an operational capacity on Artemis II, NASA's moon flyby mission scheduled for 2026. Two industry-built terminals have adopted the MAScOT architecture, and technology transfer to additional industry partners is ongoing.

"MAScOT is the latest lasercom terminal designed by Lincoln Laboratory engineers following decades of pioneering lasercom work with NASA, and it is poised to support lasercom for decades to come," says Bryan Robinson, who co-led MAScOT development with Tina Shih. 

Protected Anti-jam Tactical SATCOM (PATS) Key Management System (KMS) Prototype addresses the critical challenge of securely distributing cryptographic keys for military satellite communications (SATCOM) during terminal jamming, compromise, or disconnection. Realizing the U.S. Space Systems Command's vision for resilient, protected tactical SATCOM, the PATS KMS Prototype leverages innovative, bandwidth-efficient protocols and algorithms to enable real-time, scalable key distribution over wireless links, even under attack, so that warfighters can communicate securely in contested environments. PATS KMS is now being adopted as the core of the Department of Defense's next-generation SATCOM architecture.

"PATS KMS is not just a technology — it's a linchpin enabler of resilient, modern SATCOM, built for the realities of today's contested battlefield. We worked hand-in-hand with government stakeholders, operational users, and industry partners across a multiyear, multiphase journey to bring this capability to life," says Joseph Sobchuk, co-principal investigator with Nancy List. The R&D 100 Award is shared with the U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command, whose “visionary leadership has been instrumental in shaping the future of protected tactical SATCOM,” Sobchuk adds.

When cells are healthy, we don’t expect them to suddenly change cell types. A skin cell on your hand won’t naturally morph into a brain cell, and vice versa. That’s thanks to epigenetic memory, which enables the expression of various genes to “lock in” throughout a cell’s lifetime. Failure of this memory can lead to diseases, such as cancer.

Traditionally, scientists have thought that epigenetic memory locks genes either “on” or “off” — either fully activated or fully repressed, like a permanent Lite-Brite pattern. But MIT engineers have found that the picture has many more shades.

In a new study appearing today in Cell Genomics, the team reports that a cell’s memory is set not by on/off switching but through a more graded, dimmer-like dial of gene expression.

The researchers carried out experiments in which they set the expression of a single gene at different levels in different cells. While conventional wisdom would assume the gene should eventually switch on or off, the researchers found that the gene’s original expression persisted: Cells whose gene expression was set along a spectrum between on and off remained in this in-between state.

The results suggest that epigenetic memory — the process by which cells retain gene expression and “remember” their identity — is not binary but instead analog, which allows for a spectrum of gene expression and associated cell identities.

“Our finding opens the possibility that cells commit to their final identity by locking genes at specific levels of gene expression instead of just on and off,” says study author Domitilla Del Vecchio, professor of mechanical and biological engineering at MIT. “The consequence is that there may be many more cell types in our body than we know and recognize today, that may have important functions and could underlie healthy or diseased states.”

The study’s MIT lead authors are Sebastian Palacios and Simone Bruno, with additional co-authors.

Beyond binary

Every cell shares the same genome, which can be thought of as the starting ingredient for life. As a cell takes shape, it differentiates into one type or another, through the expression of genes in its genome. Some genes are activated, while others are repressed. The combination steers a cell toward one identity versus another.

A process of DNA methylation, by which certain molecules attach to the genes’ DNA, helps lock their expression in place. DNA methylation assists a cell to “remember” its unique pattern of gene expression, which ultimately establishes the cell’s identity.

Del Vecchio’s group at MIT applies mathematics and genetic engineering to understand cellular molecular processes and to engineer cells with new capabilities. In previous work, her group was experimenting with DNA methylation and ways to lock the expression of certain genes in ovarian cells.

“The textbook understanding was that DNA methylation had a role to lock genes in either an on or off state,” Del Vecchio says. “We thought this was the dogma. But then we started seeing results that were not consistent with that.”

While many of the cells in their experiment exhibited an all-or-nothing expression of genes, a significant number of cells appeared to freeze genes in an in-between state — neither entirely on or off.

“We found there was a spectrum of cells that expressed any level between on and off,” Palacios says. “And we thought, how is this possible?”

Shades of blue

In their new study, the team aimed to see whether the in-between gene expression they observed was a fluke or a more established property of cells that until now has gone unnoticed.

“It could be that scientists disregarded cells that don’t have a clear commitment, because they assumed this was a transient state,” Del Vecchio says. “But actually these in-between cell types may be permanent states that could have important functions.”

To test their idea, the researchers ran experiments with hamster ovarian cells — a line of cells commonly used in the laboratory. In each cell, an engineered gene was initially set to a different level of expression. The gene was turned fully on in some cells, completely off in others, and set somewhere in between on and off for the remaining cells.

The team paired the engineered gene with a fluorescent marker that lights up with a brightness corresponding to the gene’s level of expression. The researchers introduced, for a short time, an enzyme that triggers the gene’s DNA methylation, a natural gene-locking mechanism. They then monitored the cells over five months to see whether the modification would lock the genes in place at their in-between expression levels, or whether the genes would migrate toward fully on or off states before locking in.

“Our fluorescent marker is blue, and we see cells glow across the entire spectrum, from really shiny blue, to dimmer and dimmer, to no blue at all,” Del Vecchio says. “Every intensity level is maintained over time, which means gene expression is graded, or analog, and not binary. We were very surprised, because we thought after such a long time, the gene would veer off, to be either fully on or off, but it did not.”

The findings open new avenues into engineering more complex artificial tissues and organs by tuning the expression of certain genes in a cell’s genome, like a dial on a radio, rather than a switch. The results also complicate the picture of how a cell’s epigenetic memory works to establish its identity. It opens up the possibility that cell modifications such as those exhibited in therapy-resistant tumors could be treated in a more precise fashion.

“Del Vecchio and colleagues have beautifully shown how analog memory arises through chemical modifications to the DNA itself,” says Michael Elowitz, professor of biology and biological engineering at the California institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study. “As a result, we can now imagine repurposing this natural analog memory mechanism, invented by evolution, in the field of synthetic biology, where it could help allow us to program permanent and precise multicellular behaviors.”

“One of the things that enables the complexity in humans is epigenetic memory,” Palacios says. “And we find that it is not what we thought. For me, that’s actually mind-blowing. And I think we’re going to find that this analog memory is relevant for many different processes across biology.”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, MODULUS, and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship through the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

A couple of months ago, a new paper demonstrated some new attacks against the Fiat-Shamir transformation. Quanta published a good article that explains the results.

This is a pretty exciting paper from a theoretical perspective, but I don’t see it leading to any practical real-world cryptanalysis. The fact that there are some weird circumstances that result in Fiat-Shamir insecurities isn’t new—many dozens of papers have been published about it since 1986. What this new result does is extend this known problem to slightly less weird (but still highly contrived) situations. But it’s a completely different matter to extend these sorts of attacks to “natural” situations...

After meeting with reinsurance companies abroad, the state’s insurance commissioner pushed for new laws to expand property insurance.

The country's explosive growth in wind and solar is moving it toward peak coal and gas, according to new research.

Fiscal 2026 legislation would roll back spending to the lowest level in decades.

The power needs of electric vehicles will compel "investment in new wind, solar, storage, and natural gas capacity," new research finds.

The regional transportation agency is tapping its capital funds to restore routes shortened or canceled amid a budget showdown.

Harvesting specialists say home gardeners can benefit from collecting rain and runoff to irrigate plants.

The financial secretary added that Hong Kong is on track to meet its goal to reduce carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2035.

Many parts of Europe that once saw air conditioning as a U.S. excess are beginning to embrace the idea.

The boost was driven by expectations of higher footfall — and sales — as shoppers sought refuge from Japan’s elevated temperatures.

Using tiny particles shaped like bottlebrushes, MIT chemists have found a way to deliver a large range of chemotherapy drugs directly to tumor cells.

To guide them to the right location, each particle contains an antibody that targets a specific tumor protein. This antibody is tethered to bottlebrush-shaped polymer chains carrying dozens or hundreds of drug molecules — a much larger payload than can be delivered by any existing antibody-drug conjugates.

In mouse models of breast and ovarian cancer, the researchers found that treatment with these conjugated particles could eliminate most tumors. In the future, the particles could be modified to target other types of cancer, by swapping in different antibodies.

“We are excited about the potential to open up a new landscape of payloads and payload combinations with this technology, that could ultimately provide more effective therapies for cancer patients,” says Jeremiah Johnson, the A. Thomas Geurtin Professor of Chemistry at MIT, a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and the senior author of the new study.

MIT postdoc Bin Liu is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Biotechnology.

A bigger drug payload

Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) are a promising type of cancer treatment that consist of a cancer-targeting antibody attached to a chemotherapy drug. At least 15 ADCs have been approved by the FDA to treat several different types of cancer.

This approach allows specific targeting of a cancer drug to a tumor, which helps to prevent some of the side effects that occur when chemotherapy drugs are given intravenously. However, one drawback to currently approved ADCs is that only a handful of drug molecules can be attached to each antibody. That means they can only be used with very potent drugs — usually DNA-damaging agents or drugs that interfere with cell division.

To try to use a broader range of drugs, which are often less potent, Johnson and his colleagues decided to adapt bottlebrush particles that they had previously invented. These particles consist of a polymer backbone that are attached to tens to hundreds of “prodrug” molecules — inactive drug molecules that are activated upon release within the body. This structure allows the particles to deliver a wide range of drug molecules, and the particles can be designed to carry multiple drugs in specific ratios.

Using a technique called click chemistry, the researchers showed that they could attach one, two, or three of their bottlebrush polymers to a single tumor-targeting antibody, creating an antibody-bottlebrush conjugate (ABC). This means that just one antibody can carry hundreds of prodrug molecules. The currently approved ADCs can carry a maximum of about eight drug molecules.

The huge number of payloads in the ABC particles allows the researchers to incorporate less potent cancer drugs such as doxorubicin or paclitaxel, which enhances the customizability of the particles and the variety of drug combinations that can be used.

“We can use antibody-bottlebrush conjugates to increase the drug loading, and in that case, we can use less potent drugs,” Liu says. “In the future, we can very easily copolymerize with multiple drugs together to achieve combination therapy.”

The prodrug molecules are attached to the polymer backbone by cleavable linkers. After the particles reach a tumor site, some of these linkers are broken right away, allowing the drugs to kill nearby cancer cells even if they don’t express the target antibody. Other particles are absorbed into cells with the target antibody before releasing their toxic payload.

Effective treatment

For this study, the researchers created ABC particles carrying a few different types of drugs: microtubule inhibitors called MMAE and paclitaxel, and two DNA-damaging agents, doxorubicin and SN-38. They also designed ABC particles carrying an experimental type of drug known as PROTAC (proteolysis-targeting chimera), which can selectively degrade disease-causing proteins inside cells.

Each bottlebrush was tethered to an antibody targeting either HER2, a protein often overexpressed in breast cancer, or MUC1, which is commonly found in ovarian, lung, and other types of cancer.

The researchers tested each of the ABCs in mouse models of breast or ovarian cancer and found that in most cases, the ABC particles were able to eradicate the tumors. This treatment was significantly more effective than giving the same bottlebrush prodrugs by injection, without being conjugated to a targeting antibody.

“We used a very low dose, almost 100 times lower compared to the traditional small-molecule drug, and the ABC still can achieve much better efficacy compared to the small-molecule drug given on its own,” Liu says.

These ABCs also performed better than two FDA-approved ADCs, T-DXd and TDM-1, which both use HER2 to target cells. T-DXd carries deruxtecan, which interferes with DNA replication, and TDM-1 carries emtansine, a microtubule inhibitor.

In future work, the MIT team plans to try delivering combinations of drugs that work by different mechanisms, which could enhance their overall effectiveness. Among these could be immunotherapy drugs such as STING activators.

The researchers are also working on swapping in different antibodies, such as antibodies targeting EGFR, which is widely expressed in many tumors. More than 100 antibodies have been approved to treat cancer and other diseases, and in theory any of those could be conjugated to cancer drugs to create a targeted therapy.

The research was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, the Ludwig Center at MIT, and the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program. 

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 09 September 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02420-z

Africa’s future climate could be shaped by solar radiation management (SRM) decisions made elsewhere. To ensure these technologies, if ever pursued, reflect principles of justice and local priorities, Africa must move from passive recipient to active leader in SRM research, governance and public engagement.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 09 September 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02419-6

The authors combine tracking and body mass data from five migratory waterfowl species to understand their capacity to accelerate migration in response to earlier spring. They show considerable scope for faster migration by reducing the fuelling time before departure and subsequently on stopovers

The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research fondly remembers its founding director, David Baltimore, a former MIT Institute Professor and Nobel laureate who died Sept. 6 at age 87.

With discovery after discovery, Baltimore brought to light key features of biology with direct implications for human health. His work at MIT earned him a share of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (along with Howard Temin and Renato Dulbecco) for discovering reverse transcriptase and identifying retroviruses, which use RNA to synthesize viral DNA.

Following the award, Baltimore reoriented his laboratory’s focus to pursue a mix of immunology and virology. Among the lab’s most significant subsequent discoveries were the identification of a pair of proteins that play an essential role in enabling the immune system to create antibodies for so many different molecules, and investigations into how certain viruses can cause cell transformation and cancer. Work from Baltimore’s lab also helped lead to the development of the important cancer drug Gleevec — the first small molecule to target an oncoprotein inside of cells.

In 1982, Baltimore partnered with philanthropist Edwin C. “Jack” Whitehead to conceive and launch the Whitehead Institute and then served as its founding director until 1990. Within a decade of its founding, the Baltimore-led Whitehead Institute was named the world’s top research institution in molecular biology and genetics.

“More than 40 years later, Whitehead Institute is thriving, still guided by the strategic vision that David Baltimore and Jack Whitehead articulated,” says Phillip Sharp, MIT Institute Professor Emeritus, former Whitehead board member, and fellow Nobel laureate. “Of all David’s myriad and significant contributions to science, his role in building the first independent biomedical research institute associated with MIT and guiding it to extraordinary success may well prove to have had the broadest and longest-term impact.” 

Ruth Lehmann, director and president of the Whitehead Institute, and professor of biology at MIT, says: “I, like many others, owe my career to David Baltimore. He recruited me to Whitehead Institute and MIT in 1988 as a faculty member, taking a risk on an unproven, freshly-minted PhD graduate from Germany. As director, David was incredibly skilled at bringing together talented scientists at different stages of their careers and facilitating their collaboration so that the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts. This approach remains a core strength of Whitehead Institute.”

As part of the Whitehead Institute’s mission to cultivate the next generation of scientific leaders, Baltimore founded the Whitehead Fellows program, which provides extraordinarily talented recent PhD and MD graduates with the opportunity to launch their own labs, rather than to go into traditional postdoctoral positions. The program has been a huge success, with former fellows going on to excel as leaders in research, education, and industry.

David Page, MIT professor of biology, Whitehead Institute member, and former director who was the Whitehead's first fellow, recalls, “David was both an amazing scientist and a peerless leader of aspiring scientists. The launching of the Whitehead Fellows program reflected his recipe for institutional success: gather up the resources to allow young scientists to realize their dreams, recruit with an eye toward potential for outsized impact, and quietly mentor and support without taking credit for others’ successes — all while treating junior colleagues as equals. It is a beautiful strategy that David designed and executed magnificently.”

Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT and a member of the Whitehead Institute Board of Directors, says that “David was a scientific hero for so many. He was one of those remarkable individuals who could make stellar scientific breakthroughs and lead major institutions with extreme thoughtfulness and grace. He will be missed by the whole scientific community.”

“David was a wise giant. He was brilliant. He was an extraordinarily effective, ethical leader and institution builder who influenced and inspired generations of scientists and premier institutions,” says Susan Whitehead, member of the board of directors and daughter of Jack Whitehead.

Gerald R. Fink, the Margaret and Herman Sokol Professor Emeritus at MIT who was recruited by Baltimore from Cornell University as one of four founding members of the Whitehead Institute, and who succeeded him as director in 1990, observes: “David became my hero and friend. He upheld the highest scientific ideals and instilled trust and admiration in all around him.”

     David Baltimore - Infinite History (2010)
     Video: MIT | Watch with transcript

Baltimore was born in New York City in 1938. His scientific career began at Swarthmore College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree with high honors in chemistry in 1960. He then began doctoral studies in biophysics at MIT, but in 1961 shifted his focus to animal viruses and moved to what is now the Rockefeller University, where he did his thesis work in the lab of Richard Franklin.

After completing postdoctoral fellowships with James Darnell at MIT and Jerard Hurwitz at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Baltimore launched his own lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies from 1965 to 1968. Then, in 1968, he returned to MIT as a member of its biology faculty, where he remained until 1990. (Whitehead Institute’s members hold parallel appointments as faculty in the MIT Department of Biology.)

In 1990, Baltimore left the Whitehead Institute and MIT to become the president of Rockefeller University. He returned to MIT from 1994 to 1997, serving as an Institute Professor, after which he was named president of Caltech. Baltimore held that position until 2006, when he was elected to a three-year term as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

For decades, Baltimore has been viewed not just as a brilliant scientist and talented academic leader, but also as a wise counsel to the scientific community. For example, he helped organize the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, which created stringent safety guidelines for the study and use of recombinant DNA technology. He played a leadership role in the development of policies on AIDS research and treatment, and on genomic editing. Serving as an advisor to both organizations and individual scientists, he helped to shape the strategic direction of dozens of institutions and to advance the careers of generations of researchers. As Founding Member Robert Weinberg summarizes it, “He had no tolerance for nonsense and weak science.”  

In 2023, the Whitehead Institute established the endowed David Baltimore Chair in Biomedical Research, honoring Baltimore’s six decades of scientific, academic, and policy leadership and his impact on advancing innovative basic biomedical research.

“David was a visionary leader in science and the institutions that sustain it. He devoted his career to advancing scientific knowledge and strengthening the communities that make discovery possible, and his leadership of Whitehead Institute exemplified this,” says Richard Young, MIT professor of biology and Whitehead Institute member. “David approached life with keen observation, boundless curiosity, and a gift for insight that made him both a brilliant scientist and a delightful companion. His commitment to mentoring and supporting young scientists left a lasting legacy, inspiring the next generation to pursue impactful contributions to biomedical research. Many of us found in him not only a mentor and role model, but also a steadfast friend whose presence enriched our lives and whose absence will be profoundly felt.”

Most people recognize Alzheimer’s disease from its devastating symptoms such as memory loss, while new drugs target pathological aspects of disease manifestations, such as plaques of amyloid proteins. Now, a sweeping new open-access study in the Sept. 4 edition of Cell by MIT researchers shows the importance of understanding the disease as a battle over how well brain cells control the expression of their genes. The study paints a high-resolution picture of a desperate struggle to maintain healthy gene expression and gene regulation, where the consequences of failure or success are nothing less than the loss or preservation of cell function and cognition.

The study presents a first-of-its-kind, multimodal atlas of combined gene expression and gene regulation spanning 3.5 million cells from six brain regions, obtained by profiling 384 post-mortem brain samples across 111 donors. The researchers profiled both the “transcriptome,” showing which genes are expressed into RNA, and the “epigenome,” the set of chromosomal modifications that establish which DNA regions are accessible and thus utilized between different cell types.

The resulting atlas revealed many insights showing that the progression of Alzheimer’s is characterized by two major epigenomic trends. The first is that vulnerable cells in key brain regions suffer a breakdown of the rigorous nuclear “compartments” they normally maintain to ensure some parts of the genome are open for expression but others remain locked away. The second major finding is that susceptible cells experience a loss of “epigenomic information,” meaning they lose their grip on the unique pattern of gene regulation and expression that gives them their specific identity and enables their healthy function.

Accompanying the evidence of compromised compartmentalization and the erosion of epigenomic information are many specific findings pinpointing molecular circuitry that breaks down by cell type, by region, and gene network. They found, for instance, that when epigenomic conditions deteriorate, that opens the door to expression of many genes associated with disease, whereas if cells manage to keep their epigenomic house in order, they can keep disease-associated genes in check. Moreover, the researchers clearly saw that when the epigenomic breakdowns were occurring people lost cognitive ability, but where epigenomic stability remained, so did cognition.

“To understand the circuitry, the logic responsible for gene expression changes in Alzheimer’s disease [AD], we needed to understand the regulation and upstream control of all the changes that are happening, and that’s where the epigenome comes in,” says senior author Manolis Kellis, a professor in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and head of MIT’s Computational Biology Group. “This is the first large-scale, single-cell, multi-region gene-regulatory atlas of AD, systematically dissecting the dynamics of epigenomic and transcriptomic programs across disease progression and resilience.”

By providing that detailed examination of the epigenomic mechanisms of Alzheimer’s progression, the study provides a blueprint for devising new Alzheimer’s treatments that can target factors underlying the broad erosion of epigenomic control or the specific manifestations that affect key cell types such as neurons and supporting glial cells.

“The key to developing new and more effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease depends on deepening our understanding of the mechanisms that contribute to the breakdowns of cellular and network function in the brain,” says Picower Professor and co-corresponding author Li-Huei Tsai, director of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and a founding member of MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative, along with Kellis. “This new data advances our understanding of how epigenomic factors drive disease.”

Kellis Lab members Zunpeng Liu and Shanshan Zhang are the study’s co-lead authors.

Compromised compartments and eroded information

Among the post-mortem brain samples in the study, 57 came from donors to the Religious Orders Study or the Rush Memory and Aging Project (collectively known as “ROSMAP”) who did not have AD pathology or symptoms, while 33 came from donors with early-stage pathology and 21 came from donors at a late stage. The samples therefore provided rich information about the symptoms and pathology each donor was experiencing before death.

In the new study, Liu and Zhang combined analyses of single-cell RNA sequencing of the samples, which measures which genes are being expressed in each cell, and ATACseq, which measures whether chromosomal regions are accessible for gene expression. Considered together, these transcriptomic and epigenomic measures enabled the researchers to understand the molecular details of how gene expression is regulated across seven broad classes of brain cells (e.g., neurons or other glial cell types) and 67 subtypes of cell types (e.g., 17 kinds of excitatory neurons or six kinds of inhibitory ones).

The researchers annotated more than 1 million gene-regulatory control regions that different cells employ to establish their specific identities and functionality using epigenomic marking. Then, by comparing the cells from Alzheimer’s brains to the ones without, and accounting for stage of pathology and cognitive symptoms, they could produce rigorous associations between the erosion of these epigenomic markings, and ultimately loss of function.

For instance, they saw that among people who advanced to late-stage AD, normally repressive compartments opened up for more expression and compartments that were normally more open during health became more repressed. Worryingly, when the normally repressive compartments of brain cells opened up, they became more afflicted with disease.

“For Alzheimer’s patients, repressive compartments opened up, and gene expression levels increased, which was associated with decreased cognitive function,” explains Liu.

But when cells managed to keep their compartments in order such that they expressed the genes they were supposed to, people remained cognitively intact.

Meanwhile, based on the cells’ expression of their regulatory elements, the researchers created an epigenomic information score for each cell. Generally, information declined as pathology progressed, but that was particularly notable among cells in the two brain regions affected earliest in Alzheimer’s: the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus. The analyses also highlighted specific cell types that were especially vulnerable including microglia that play immune and other roles, oligodendrocytes that produce myelin insulation for neurons, and particular kinds of excitatory neurons.

Risk genes and “chromatin guardians”

Detailed analyses in the paper highlighted how epigenomic regulation tracked with disease-related problems, Liu notes. The e4 variant of the APOE gene, for instance, is widely understood to be the single biggest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer’s. In APOE4 brains, microglia initially responded to the emerging disease pathology with an increase in their epigenomic information, suggesting that they were stepping up to their unique responsibility to fight off disease. But as the disease progressed, the cells exhibited a sharp drop off in information, a sign of deterioration and degeneration. This turnabout was strongest in people who had two copies of APOE4, rather than just one. The findings, Kellis said, suggest that APOE4 might destabilize the genome of microglia, causing them to burn out.

Another example is the fate of neurons expressing the gene RELN and its protein Reelin. Prior studies, including by Kellis and Tsai, have shown that RELN- expressing neurons in the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus are especially vulnerable in Alzheimer’s, but promote resilience if they survive. The new study sheds new light on their fate by demonstrating that they exhibit early and severe epigenomic information loss as disease advances, but that in people who remained cognitively resilient the neurons maintained epigenomic information.

In yet another example, the researchers tracked what they colloquially call “chromatin guardians” because their expression sustains and regulates cells’ epigenomic programs. For instance, cells with greater epigenomic erosion and advanced AD progression displayed increased chromatin accessibility in areas that were supposed to be locked down by Polycomb repression genes or other gene expression silencers. While resilient cells expressed genes promoting neural connectivity, epigenomically eroded cells expressed genes linked to inflammation and oxidative stress.

“The message is clear: Alzheimer’s is not only about plaques and tangles, but about the erosion of nuclear order itself,” Kellis says. “Cognitive decline emerges when chromatin guardians lose ground to the forces of erosion, switching from resilience to vulnerability at the most fundamental level of genome regulation.

“And when our brain cells lose their epigenomic memory marks and epigenomic information at the lowest level deep inside our neurons and microglia, it seems that Alheimer’s patients also lose their memory and cognition at the highest level.”

Other authors of the paper are Benjamin T. James, Kyriaki Galani, Riley J. Mangan, Stuart Benjamin Fass, Chuqian Liang, Manoj M. Wagle, Carles A. Boix, Yosuke Tanigawa, Sukwon Yun, Yena Sung, Xushen Xiong, Na Sun, Lei Hou, Martin Wohlwend, Mufan Qiu, Xikun Han, Lei Xiong, Efthalia Preka, Lei Huang, William F. Li, Li-Lun Ho, Amy Grayson, Julio Mantero, Alexey Kozlenkov, Hansruedi Mathys, Tianlong Chen, Stella Dracheva, and David A. Bennett.

Funding for the research came from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, the Freedom Together Foundation, the Robert A. and Renee E. Belfer Family Foundation, Eduardo Eurnekian, and Joseph P. DiSabato.