Ernesto Apreza will work on getting corporate commitments for net zero.

The International Energy Agency has come under fire from Republicans for its work on climate change.

When leaders meet Thursday in Beijing, they might strike a climate deal, but there’s no guarantee it will be meaningful.

At least 14 wildfires each burned more than 100,000 acres in the U.S. in 2024, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center.

Flooding damaged hundreds of homes, destroyed crops and cut off remote communities, officials said.

More than 180 firefighters, 15 planes and 12 helicopters were tackling the wildfire near Corinth, the fire department said.

The following press release was issued today by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Although outbreaks of Ebola virus are rare, the disease is severe and often fatal, with few treatment options. Rather than targeting the virus itself, one promising therapeutic approach would be to interrupt proteins in the human host cell that the virus relies upon. However, finding those regulators of viral infection using existing methods has been difficult and is especially challenging for the most dangerous viruses like Ebola that require stringent high-containment biosafety protocols.

Now, researchers at the Broad Institute and the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) at Boston University have used an image-based screening method developed at the Broad to identify human genes that, when silenced, impair the Ebola virus’s ability to infect. The method, known as optical pooled screening (OPS), enabled the scientists to test, in about 40 million CRISPR-perturbed human cells, how silencing each gene in the human genome affects virus replication.

Using machine-learning-based analyses of images of perturbed cells, they identified multiple host proteins involved in various stages of Ebola infection that when suppressed crippled the ability of the virus to replicate. Those viral regulators could represent avenues to one day intervene therapeutically and reduce the severity of disease in people already infected with the virus. The approach could be used to explore the role of various proteins during infection with other pathogens, as a way to find new drugs for hard-to-treat infections.

The study appears in Nature Microbiology.

“This study demonstrates the power of OPS to probe the dependency of dangerous viruses like Ebola on host factors at all stages of the viral life cycle and explore new routes to improve human health,” said co-senior author Paul Blainey, a Broad core faculty member and professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT.

Previously, members of the Blainey lab developed the optical pooled screening method as a way to combine the benefits of high-content imaging, which can show a range of detailed changes in large numbers of cells at once, with those of pooled perturbational screens, which show how genetic elements influence these changes. In this study, they partnered with the laboratory of Robert Davey at BU to apply optical pooled screening to Ebola virus.

The team used CRISPR to knock out each gene in the human genome, one at a time, in nearly 40 million human cells, and then infected each cell with Ebola virus. They next fixed those cells in place in laboratory dishes and inactivated them, so that the remaining processing could occur outside of the high-containment lab.

After taking images of the cells, they measured overall viral protein and RNA in each cell using the CellProfiler image analysis software, and to get even more information from the images, they turned to AI. With help from team members in the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad, led by study co-author and Broad core faculty member Caroline Uhler, they used a deep learning model to automatically determine the stage of Ebola infection for each single cell. The model was able to make subtle distinctions between stages of infection in a high-throughput way that wasn’t possible using prior methods.

“The work represents the deepest dive yet into how Ebola virus rewires the cell to cause disease, and the first real glimpse into the timing of that reprogramming,” said co-senior author Robert Davey, director of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories at Boston University, and professor of microbiology at BU Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine. “AI gave us an unprecedented ability to do this at scale.”

By sequencing parts of the CRISPR guide RNA in all 40 million cells individually, the researchers determined which human gene had been silenced in each cell, indicating which host proteins (and potential viral regulators) were targeted. The analysis revealed hundreds of host proteins that, when silenced, altered overall infection level, including many required for viral entry into the cell.

Knocking out other genes enhanced the amount of virus within inclusion bodies, structures that form in the human cell to act as viral factories, and prevented the infection from progressing further. Some of these human genes, such as UQCRB, pointed to a previously unrecognized role for mitochondria in the Ebola virus infection process that could possibly be exploited therapeutically. Indeed, treating cells with a small molecule inhibitor of UQCRB reduced Ebola infection with no impact on the cell’s own health.

Other genes, when silenced, altered the balance between viral RNA and protein. For example, perturbing a gene called STRAP resulted in increased viral RNA relative to protein. The researchers are currently doing further studies in the lab to better understand the role of STRAP and other proteins in Ebola infection and whether they could be targeted therapeutically.

In a series of secondary screens, the scientists examined some of the highlighted genes’ roles in infection with related filoviruses. Silencing some of these genes interrupted replication of Sudan and Marburg viruses, which have high fatality rates and no approved treatments, so it’s possible a single treatment could be effective against multiple related viruses.

The study’s approach could also be used to examine other pathogens and emerging infectious diseases and look for new ways to treat them.

“With our method, we can measure many features at once and uncover new clues about the interplay between virus and host, in a way that’s not possible through other screening approaches,” said co-first author Rebecca Carlson, a former graduate researcher in the labs of Blainey and Nir Hacohen at the Broad and who co-led the work along with co-first author J.J. Patten at Boston University.

This work was funded in part by the Broad Institute, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the George F. Carrier Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute, the National Institutes of Health, and the Office of Naval Research.

Astronomers at MIT, Columbia University, and elsewhere have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to peer through the dust of nearby galaxies and into the aftermath of a black hole’s stellar feast.

In a study appearing today in Astrophysical Journal Letters, the researchers report that for the first time, JWST has observed several tidal disruption events — instances when a galaxy’s central black hole draws in a nearby star and whips up tidal forces that tear the star to shreds, giving off an enormous burst of energy in the process.

Scientists have observed about 100 tidal disruption events (TDEs) since the 1990s, mostly as X-ray or optical light that flashes across relatively dust-free galaxies. But as MIT researchers recently reported, there may be many more star-shredding events in the universe that are “hiding” in dustier, gas-veiled galaxies.

In their previous work, the team found that most of the X-ray and optical light that a TDE gives off can be obscured by a galaxy’s dust, and therefore can go unseen by traditional X-ray and optical telescopes. But that same burst of light can heat up the surrounding dust and generate a new signal, in the form of infrared light.

Now, the same researchers have used JWST — the world’s most powerful infrared detector — to study signals from four dusty galaxies where they suspect tidal disruption events have occurred. Within the dust, JWST detected clear fingerprints of black hole accretion, a process by which material, such as stellar debris, circles and eventually falls into a black hole. The telescope also detected patterns that are strikingly different from the dust that surrounds active galaxies, where the central black hole is constantly pulling in surrounding material.

Together, the observations confirm that a tidal disruption event did indeed occur in each of the four galaxies. What’s more, the researchers conclude that the four events were products of not active black holes but rather dormant ones, which experienced little to no activity until a star happened to pass by.

The new results highlight JWST’s potential to study in detail otherwise hidden tidal disruption events. They are also helping scientists to reveal key differences in the environments around active versus dormant black holes.

“These are the first JWST observations of tidal disruption events, and they look nothing like what we’ve ever seen before,” says lead author Megan Masterson, a graduate student in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “We’ve learned these are indeed powered by black hole accretion, and they don’t look like environments around normal active black holes. The fact that we’re now able to study what that dormant black hole environment actually looks like is an exciting aspect.”

The study’s MIT authors include Christos Panagiotou, Erin Kara, Anna-Christina Eilers, along with Kishalay De of Columbia University and collaborators from multiple other institutions.

Seeing the light

The new study expands on the team’s previous work using another infrared detector — NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission. Using an algorithm developed by co-author Kishalay De of Columbia University, the team searched through a decade’s worth of data from the telescope, looking for infrared “transients,” or short peaks of infrared activity from otherwise quiet galaxies that could be signals of a black hole briefly waking up and feasting on a passing star. That search unearthed about a dozen signals that the group determined were likely produced by a tidal disruption event.

“With that study, we found these 12 sources that look just like TDEs,” Masterson says. “We made a lot of arguments about how the signals were very energetic, and the galaxies didn’t look like they were active before, so the signals must have been from a sudden TDE. But except for these little pieces, there was no direct evidence.”

With the much more sensitive capabilities of JWST, the researchers hoped to discern key “spectral lines,” or infrared light at specific wavelengths, that would be clear fingerprints of conditions associated with a tidal disruption event.

“With NEOWISE, it’s as if our eyes could only see red light or blue light, whereas with JWST, we’re seeing the full rainbow,” Masterson says.

A Bonafide signal

In their new work, the group looked specifically for a peak in infrared, that could only be produced by black hole accretion — a process by which material is drawn toward a black hole in a circulating disk of gas. This disk produces an enormous amount of radiation that is so intense that it can kick out electrons from individual atoms. In particular, such accretion processes can blast several electrons out from atoms of neon, and the resulting ion can transition, releasing infrared radiation at a very specific wavelength that JWST can detect. 

“There’s nothing else in the universe that can excite this gas to these energies, except for black hole accretion,” Masterson says.

The researchers searched for this smoking-gun signal in four of the 12 TDE candidates they previously identified. The four signals include: the closest tidal disruption event detected to date, located in a galaxy some 130 million light years away; a TDE that also exhibits a burst of X-ray light; a signal that may have been produced by gas circulating at incredibly high speeds around a central black hole; and a signal that also included an optical flash, which scientists had previously suspected to be a supernova, or the collapse of a dying star, rather than tidal disruption event.

“These four signals were as close as we could get to a sure thing,” Masterson says. “But the JWST data helped us say definitively these are bonafide TDEs.”

When the team pointed JWST toward the galaxies of each of the four signals, in a program designed by De, they observed that the telltale spectral lines showed up in all four sources. These measurements confirmed that black hole accretion occurred in all four galaxies. But the question remained: Was this accretion a temporary feature, triggered by a tidal disruption and a black hole that briefly woke up to feast on a passing star? Or was this accretion a more permanent trait of “active” black holes that are always on? In the case of the latter, it would be less likely that a tidal disruption event had occurred.

To differentiate between the two possibilities, the team used the JWST data to detect another wavelength of infrared light, which indicates the presence of silicates, or dust in the galaxy. They then mapped this dust in each of the four galaxies and compared the patterns to those of active galaxies, which are known to harbor clumpy, donut-shaped dust clouds around the central black hole. Masterson observed that all four sources showed very different patterns compared to typical active galaxies, suggesting that the black hole at the center of each of the galaxies is not normally active, but dormant. If an accretion disk formed around such a black hole, the researchers conclude that it must have been a result of a tidal disruption event.

“Together, these observations say the only thing these flares could be are TDEs,” Masterson says.

She and her collaborators plan to uncover many more previously hidden tidal disruption events, with NEOWISE, JWST, and other infrared telescopes. With enough detections, they say TDEs can serve as effective probes of black hole properties. For instance, how much of a star is shredded, and how fast its debris is accreted and consumed, can reveal fundamental properties of a black hole, such as how massive it is and how fast it spins.

“The actual process of a black hole gobbling down all that stellar material takes a long time,” Masterson says. “It’s not an instantaneous process. And hopefully we can start to probe how long that process takes and what that environment looks like. No one knows because we just started discovering and studying these events.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

A new theory-guided framework could help scientists probe the properties of new semiconductors for next-generation microelectronic devices, or discover materials that boost the performance of quantum computers.

Research to develop new or better materials typically involves investigating properties that can be reliably measured with existing lab equipment, but this represents just a fraction of the properties that scientists could potentially probe in principle. Some properties remain effectively “invisible” because they are too difficult to capture directly with existing methods.

Take electron-phonon interaction — this property plays a critical role in a material’s electrical, thermal, optical, and superconducting properties, but directly capturing it using existing techniques is notoriously challenging.

Now, MIT researchers have proposed a theoretically justified approach that could turn this challenge into an opportunity. Their method reinterprets neutron scattering, an often-overlooked interference effect as a potential direct probe of electron-phonon coupling strength.

The procedure creates two interaction effects in the material. The researchers show that, by deliberately designing their experiment to leverage the interference between the two interactions, they can capture the strength of a material’s electron-phonon interaction.

The researchers’ theory-informed methodology could be used to shape the design of future experiments, opening the door to measuring new quantities that were previously out of reach.

“Rather than discovering new spectroscopy techniques by pure accident, we can use theory to justify and inform the design of our experiments and our physical equipment,” says Mingda Li, the Class of 1947 Career Development Professor and an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering, and senior author of a paper on this experimental method.

Li is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Chuliang Fu, an MIT postdoc; Phum Siriviboon and Artittaya Boonkird, both MIT graduate students; as well as others at MIT, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the University of California at Riverside, Michigan State University, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The research appears this week in Materials Today Physics.

Investigating interference

Neutron scattering is a powerful measurement technique that involves aiming a beam of neutrons at a material and studying how the neutrons are scattered after they strike it. The method is ideal for measuring a material’s atomic structure and magnetic properties.

When neutrons collide with the material sample, they interact with it through two different mechanisms, creating a nuclear interaction and a magnetic interaction. These interactions can interfere with each other.

“The scientific community has known about this interference effect for a long time, but researchers tend to view it as a complication that can obscure measurement signals. So it hasn’t received much focused attention,” Fu says.

The team and their collaborators took a conceptual “leap of faith” and decided to explore this oft-overlooked interference effect more deeply.

They flipped the traditional materials research approach on its head by starting with a multifaceted theoretical analysis. They explored what happens inside a material when the nuclear interaction and magnetic interaction interfere with each other.

Their analysis revealed that this interference pattern is directly proportional to the strength of the material’s electron-phonon interaction.

“This makes the interference effect a probe we can use to detect this interaction,” explains Siriviboon.

Electron-phonon interactions play a role in a wide range of material properties. They affect how heat flows through a material, impact a material’s ability to absorb and emit light, and can even lead to superconductivity.

But the complexity of these interactions makes them hard to directly measure using existing experimental techniques. Instead, researchers often rely on less precise, indirect methods to capture electron-phonon interactions.

However, leveraging this interference effect enables direct measurement of the electron-phonon interaction, a major advantage over other approaches.

“Being able to directly measure the electron-phonon interaction opens the door to many new possibilities,” says Boonkird.

Rethinking materials research

Based on their theoretical insights, the researchers designed an experimental setup to demonstrate their approach.

Since the available equipment wasn’t powerful enough for this type of neutron scattering experiment, they were only able to capture a weak electron-phonon interaction signal — but the results were clear enough to support their theory.

“These results justify the need for a new facility where the equipment might be 100 to 1,000 times more powerful, enabling scientists to clearly resolve the signal and measure the interaction,” adds Landry.

With improved neutron scattering facilities, like those proposed for the upcoming Second Target Station at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, this experimental method could be an effective technique for measuring many crucial material properties.

For instance, by helping scientists identify and harness better semiconductors, this approach could enable more energy-efficient appliances, faster wireless communication devices, and more reliable medical equipment like pacemakers and MRI scanners.   

Ultimately, the team sees this work as a broader message about the need to rethink the materials research process.

“Using theoretical insights to design experimental setups in advance can help us redefine the properties we can measure,” Fu says.

To that end, the team and their collaborators are currently exploring other types of interactions they could leverage to investigate additional material properties.

“This is a very interesting paper,” says Jon Taylor, director of the neutron scattering division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who was not involved with this research. “It would be interesting to have a neutron scattering method that is directly sensitive to charge lattice interactions or more generally electronic effects that were not just magnetic moments. It seems that such an effect is expectedly rather small, so facilities like STS could really help develop that fundamental understanding of the interaction and also leverage such effects routinely for research.”

This work is funded, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

The Trump administration is continuing its dangerous push to surveil and suppress foreign students’ social media activity. The State Department recently announced an unprecedented new requirement that applicants for student and exchange visas must set all social media accounts to “public” for government review. The State Department also indicated that if applicants refuse to unlock their accounts or otherwise don’t maintain a social media presence, the government may interpret it as an attempt to evade the requirement or deliberately hide online activity.

The administration is penalizing prospective students and visitors for shielding their social media accounts from the general public or for choosing to not be active on social media. This is an outrageous violation of privacy, one that completely disregards the legitimate and often critical reasons why millions of people choose to lock down their social media profiles, share only limited information about themselves online, or not engage in social media at all. By making students abandon basic privacy hygiene as the price of admission to American universities, the administration is forcing applicants to expose a wealth of personal information to not only the U.S. government, but to anyone with an internet connection.

Why Social Media Privacy Matters

The administration’s new policy is a dangerous expansion of existing social media collection efforts. While the State Department has required since 2019 that visa applicants disclose their social media handles—a policy EFF has consistently opposed—forcing applicants to make their accounts public crosses a new line.

Individuals have significant privacy interests in their social media accounts. Social media profiles contain some of the most intimate details of our lives, such as our political views, religious beliefs, health information, likes and dislikes, and the people with whom we associate. Such personal details can be gleaned from vast volumes of data given the unlimited storage capacity of cloud-based social media platforms. As the Supreme Court has recognized, “[t]he sum of an individual’s private life can be reconstructed through a thousand photographs labeled with dates, locations, and descriptions”—all of which and more are available on social media platforms.

By requiring visa applicants to share these details, the government can obtain information that would otherwise be inaccessible or difficult to piece together across disparate locations. For example, while visa applicants are not required to disclose their political views in their applications, applicants might choose to post their beliefs on their social media profiles.

This information, once disclosed, doesn’t just disappear. Existing policy allows the government to continue surveilling applicants’ social media profiles even once the application process is over. And personal information obtained from applicants’ profiles can be collected and stored in government databases for decades.

What’s more, by requiring visa applicants to make their private social media accounts public, the administration is forcing them to expose troves of personal, sensitive information to the entire internet, not just the U.S. government. This could include various bad actors like identity thieves and fraudsters, foreign governments, current and prospective employers, and other third parties.

Those in applicants’ social media networks—including U.S. citizen family or friends—can also become surveillance targets by association. Visa applicants’ online activity is likely to reveal information about the users with whom they’re connected. For example, a visa applicant could tag another user in a political rant or posts photos of themselves and the other user at a political rally. Anyone who sees those posts might reasonably infer that the other user shares the applicant’s political beliefs. The administration’s new requirement will therefore publicly expose the personal information of millions of additional people, beyond just visa applicants.

There are Very Good Reasons to Keep Social Media Accounts Private

An overwhelming number of social media users maintain private accounts for the same reason we put curtains on our windows: a desire for basic privacy. There are numerous legitimate reasons people choose to share their social media only with trusted family and friends, whether that’s ensuring personal safety, maintaining professional boundaries, or simply not wanting to share personal profiles with the entire world.

Safety from Online Harassment and Physical Violence

Many people keep their accounts private to protect themselves from stalkers, harassers, and those who wish them harm. Domestic violence survivors, for example, use privacy settings to hide from their abusers, and organizations supporting survivors often encourage them to maintain a limited online presence.

Women also face a variety of gender-based online harms made worse by public profiles, including stalking, sexual harassment, and violent threats. A 2021 study reported that at least 38% of women globally had personally experienced online abuse, and at least 85% of women had witnessed it. Women are, in turn, more likely to activate privacy settings than men.

LGBTQ+ individuals similarly have good reasons to lock down their accounts. Individuals from countries where their identity puts them in danger rely on privacy protections to stay safe from state action. People may also reasonably choose to lock their accounts to avoid the barrage of anti-LGBTQ+ hate and harassment that is common on social media platforms, which can lead to real-world violence. Others, including LGBTQ+ youth, may simply not be ready to share their identity outside of their chosen personal network.

Political Dissidents, Activists, and Journalists

Activists working on sensitive human rights issues, political dissidents, and journalists use privacy settings to protect themselves from doxxing, harassment, and potential political persecution by their governments.

Rather than protecting these vulnerable groups, the administration’s policy instead explicitly targets political speech. The State Department has given embassies and consulates a vague directive to vet applicants’ social media for “hostile attitudes towards our citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles,” according to an internal State Department cable obtained by multiple news outlets. This includes looking for “applicants who demonstrate a history of political activism.” The cable did not specify what, exactly, constitutes “hostile attitudes.”

Professional and Personal Boundaries

People use privacy settings to maintain boundaries between their personal and professional lives. They share family photos, sensitive updates, and personal moments with close friends—not with their employers, teachers, professional connections, or the general public.

The Growing Menace of Social Media Surveillance

This new policy is an escalation of the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration-related social media surveillance. EFF has written about the administration’s new “Catch and Revoke” effort, which deploys artificial intelligence and other data analytic tools to review the public social media accounts of student visa holders in an effort to revoke their visas. And EFF recently submitted comments opposing a USCIS proposal to collect social media identifiers from visa and green card holders already living in the U.S., including when they submit applications for permanent residency and naturalization.

The administration has also started screening many non-citizens' social media accounts for ambiguously-defined “antisemitic activity,” and previously announced expanded social media vetting for any visa applicant seeking to travel specifically to Harvard University for any purpose.

The administration claims this mass surveillance will make America safer, but there’s little evidence to support this. By the government’s own previous assessments, social media surveillance has not proven effective at identifying security threats.

At the same time, these policies gravely undermine freedom of speech, as we recently argued in our USCIS comments. The government is using social media monitoring to directly target and punish through visa denials or revocations foreign students and others for their digital speech. And the social media surveillance itself broadly chills free expression online—for citizens and non-citizens alike.

In defending the new requirement, the State Department argued that a U.S. visa is a “privilege, not a right.” But privacy and free expression should not be privileges. These are fundamental human rights, and they are rights we abandon at our peril.

MIT Professor Emeritus Keith H. Johnson, a quantum physicist who pioneered the use of theoretical methods in materials science and later applied his expertise to independent filmmaking, died in June in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 89.

A professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), Johnson used first principles to understand how electrons behave in materials — that is, he turned to fundamental laws of nature to calculate their behavior, rather than relying solely on experimental data. This approach gave scientists deeper insight into materials before they were made in a lab — helping lay the groundwork for today’s computer-driven methods of materials discovery.

DMSE Professor Harry Tuller, who collaborated with Johnson in the early 1980s, notes that while first-principles calculations are now commonplace, they were unusual at the time.

“Solid-state physicists were largely focused on modeling the electronic structure of materials like semiconductors and metals using extended wave functions,” Tuller says, referring to mathematical descriptions of electron behavior in crystals — a much quicker method. “Keith was among the minority that took a more localized chemical approach.”

That localized approach allowed Johnson to better examine materials with tiny imperfections called defects, such as in zinc oxide. His methods advanced the understanding of materials used in devices like gas sensors and water-splitting systems for hydrogen fuel. It also gave him deeper insight into complex systems such as superconductors — materials that conduct electricity without resistance — and molecular materials like “buckyballs.”

Johnson’s curiosity took creative form in 2001’s “Breaking Symmetry,” a sci-fi thriller he wrote, produced, and directed. Published on YouTube in 2020, it has been viewed more than 4 million times.

Trailblazing theorist at DMSE

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1936, Johnson showed an early interest in science. “After receiving a chemistry set as a child, he built a laboratory in his parents’ basement,” says his wife, Franziska Amacher-Johnson. “His early experiments were intense — once prompting an evacuation of the house due to chemical fumes.”

He earned his undergraduate degree in physics at Princeton University and his doctorate from Temple University in 1965. He joined the MIT faculty in 1967, in what was then called the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science, and worked there for nearly 30 years.

His early use of theory in materials science led to more trailblazing. To model the behavior of electrons in small clusters of atoms — such as material surfaces, boundaries between different materials called interfaces, and defects — Johnson used cluster molecular orbital calculations, a quantum mechanical technique that focuses on how electrons behave in tightly grouped atomic structures. These calculations offered insight into how defects and boundaries influence material performance.

“This coupled very nicely with our interests in understanding the roles of bulk defects, interface and surface energy states at grain boundaries and surfaces in metal oxides in impacting their performance in various devices,” Tuller says.

In one project, Johnson and Tuller co-advised a PhD student who conducted both experimental testing of zinc oxide devices and theoretical modeling using Johnson’s methods. At the time, such close collaboration between experimentalists and theorists was rare. Their work led to a “much clearer and advanced understanding of how the nature of defect states formed at interfaces impacted their performance, long before this type of collaboration between experimentalists and theorists became what is now the norm,” Tuller said.

Johnson’s primary computational tool was yet another innovation, called the scattered wave method (also known as Xα multiple scattering). Though the technique has roots in mid-20th century quantum chemistry and condensed matter physics, Johnson was a leading figure in adapting it to materials applications.

Brian Ahern PhD ’84, one of Johnson’s former students, recalls the power of his approach. In 1988, while evaluating whether certain superconducting materials could be used in a next-generation supercomputer for the Department of Defense, Ahern interviewed leading scientists across the country. Most shared optimistic assessments — except Johnson. Drawing on deep theoretical calculations, Johnson showed that the zero-resistance conditions required for such a machine were not realistically achievable with the available materials.

“I reported Johnson’s findings, and the Pentagon program was abandoned, saving millions of dollars,” Ahern says.

From superconductors to screenplays

Johnson remained captivated by superconductors. These materials can conduct electricity without energy loss, making them crucial to technologies such as MRI machines and quantum computers. But they typically operate at cryogenic temperatures, requiring costly equipment. When scientists discovered so-called high-temperature superconductors — materials that worked at comparatively warmer, but still very cold (-300 degrees Fahrenheit), temperatures — a global race kicked off to understand their behavior and look for superconductors that could function at room temperature.

Using the theoretical tools he had earlier developed, Johnson proposed that vibrations of small molecular units were responsible for superconductivity — a departure from conventional thinking about what caused superconductivity. In a 1992 paper, he showed that the model could apply to a range of materials, including ceramics and buckminsterfullerene, nicknamed buckyballs because its molecules resemble architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. Johnson predicted that room-temperature superconductivity was unlikely, because the materials needed to support it would be too unstable to work reliably.

That didn’t stop him from imagining scientific breakthroughs in fiction. A consulting trip to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union sparked Johnson’s interest in screenwriting. Among his screenplays was “Breaking Symmetry,” about a young astrophysicist at a fictionalized MIT who discovers secret research on a radical new energy technology. When a Hollywood production deal fell through, Johnson decided to fund and direct the film himself — and even created its special effects.

Even after his early retirement from MIT, in 1996, Johnson continued to pursue research. In 2021, he published a paper on water nanoclusters in space and their possible role in the origins of life, suggesting that their properties could help explain cosmic phenomena. He also used his analytical tools to propose visual, water-based models for dark matter and dark energy — what he called “quintessential water.” 

In his later years, Johnson became increasingly interested in presenting scientific ideas through images and intuition rather than dense equations, believing that nature should be understandable without complex mathematics, Amacher-Johnson says. He embraced multimedia and emerging digital tools — including artificial intelligence — to share his ideas. Several of his presentations can be found on his YouTube channel.

“He never confined himself to a single field,” Amacher-Johnson explains. “Physics, chemistry, biology, cosmology — all were part of his unified vision of understanding the universe.”

In addition to Amacher-Johnson, Johnson is survived by his daughter. 

Inspired by a hitchhiking fish that uses a specialized suction organ to latch onto sharks and other marine animals, researchers from MIT and other institutions have designed a mechanical adhesive device that can attach to soft surfaces underwater or in extreme conditions, and remain there for days or weeks.

This device, the researchers showed, can adhere to the lining of the GI tract, whose mucosal layer makes it very difficult to attach any kind of sensor or drug-delivery capsule. Using their new adhesive system, the researchers showed that they could achieve automatic self-adhesion, without motors, to deliver HIV antiviral drugs or RNA to the GI tract, and they could also deploy it as a sensor for gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). The device can also be attached to a swimming fish to monitor aquatic environments.

The design is based on the research team’s extensive studies of the remora’s sucker-like disc. These discs have several unique properties that allow them to adhere tightly to a variety of hosts, including sharks, marlins, and rays. However, how remoras maintain adhesion to soft, dynamically shifting surfaces remains largely unknown.

Understanding the fundamental physics and mechanics of how this part of the fish sticks to another organism helped us to establish the underpinnings of how to engineer a synthetic adhesive system,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and the senior author of the study.

MIT research scientist Ziliang (Troy) Kang is the lead author of the study, which appears today in Nature. The research team also includes authors from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Broad Institute, and Boston College.

Inspired by nature

Most protein and RNA drugs can’t be taken orally because they will be broken down before they can be absorbed into the GI tract. To overcome that, Traverso’s lab is working on ingestible devices that can be swallowed and then gradually release their payload over days, weeks, or even longer.

One major obstacle is that the digestive tract is lined with a slippery mucosal membrane that is constantly regenerating and is difficult for any device to stick to. Furthermore, any device that manages to attach to this lining is likely to be dislodged by food or liquids moving through the tract.

To find a solution to these challenges, the MIT team looked to the remora, also known as the sucker fish, which clings to its hosts for free transportation and access to food scraps. To explore how the remora attaches itself to dynamic, soft surfaces so strongly, Traverso’s teamed up with Christopher Kenaley, an associate professor of biology at Boston College who studies remoras and other fish.

Their studies revealed that the remora’s ability to stick to its host depends on a few different features. First, the large suction disc creates adhesion through pressure-based suction, just like a plunger. Additionally, each disc is divided into individual small adhesive compartments by rows of plates called lamellae wrapped in soft tissue. These compartments can independently create additional suction on nonhomogeneous soft surfaces.

There are nine species of remora, and in each one, these rows of lamellae are aligned a little bit differently — some are exclusively parallel, while others form patterns with rows tilted at different angles. These differences, the researchers found, could be the key to elucidating each species’ evolutionary adaptation to its host.

Remora albescens, a unique species that exhibits mucoadhesion in the oral cavity of rays, inspired the team to develop devices with enhanced adhesion to soft surfaces with its unparallel, highly tilted lamellae orientation. Other remora species, which attach to high-speed swimmers such as marlins and swordfish, tend to have highly parallel orientations, which help the hitchhikers slide without losing adhesion as they are rapidly dragged through the water. Still other species, which have a mix of parallel and angled rows, can attach to a variety of hosts.

Tiny spines that protrude from the lamellae help to achieve additional adhesion by interlocking with the host tissue. These spines, also called spinules, are several hundred microns long and grasp onto the tissue with minimal invasiveness.

“If the compartment suction is subjected to a shear force, the friction enabled by the mechanical interlocking of the spinules can help to maintain the suction,” Kang says.

Watery environments

By mimicking these anatomical features, the MIT team was able to create a device with similarly strong adhesion for a variety of applications in underwater environments.

The researchers used silicone rubber and temperature-responsive smart materials to create their adhesive device, which they call MUSAS (for “mechanical underwater soft adhesion system”). The fully passive, disc-shaped device contains rows of lamellae similar to those of the remora, and can self-adhere to the mucosal lining, leveraging GI contractions. The researchers found that for their purposes, a pattern of tilted rows was the most effective.

Within the lamellae are tiny microneedle-like structures that mimic the spinules seen in the remora. These tiny spines are made of a shape memory alloy that is activated when exposed to body temperatures, allowing the spines to interlock with each other and grasp onto the tissue surface.

The researchers showed that this device could attach to a variety of soft surfaces, even in wet or highly acidic conditions, including pig stomach tissue, nitrile gloves, and a tilapia swimming in a fish tank. Then, they tested the device for several different applications, including aquatic environmental monitoring. After adding a temperature sensor to the device, the researchers showed that they could attach the device to a fish and accurately measure water temperature as the fish swam at high speed.

To demonstrate medical applications, the researchers incorporated an impedance sensor into the device and showed that it could adhere to the esophagus in an animal model, which allowed them to monitor reflux of gastric fluid. This could offer an alternative to current sensors for GERD, which are delivered by a tube placed through the nose or mouth and pinned to the lower part of the esophagus.

They also showed that the device could be used for sustained release of two different types of therapeutics, in animal tests. First, they showed that they could integrate an HIV drug called cabotegravir into the materials that make up the device (polycaprolactone and silicone). Once adhered to the lining of the stomach, the drug gradually diffused out of the device, over a period of one week.

Cabotegravir is one of the drugs used for HIV PrEP — pre-exposure prophylaxis — as well as treatment of HIV. These treatments are usually given either as a daily pill or an injection administered every one to two months.

The researchers also created a version of the device that could be used for delivery of larger molecules such as RNA. For this kind of delivery, the researchers incorporated RNA into the microneedles of the lamellae, which could then inject them into the lining of the stomach. Using RNA encoding the gene for luciferase, a protein that emits light, the researchers showed that they could successfully deliver the gene to cells of the cheek or the esophagus.

The researchers now plan to adapt the device for delivering other types of drugs, as well as vaccines. Another possible application is using the devices for electrical stimulation, which Traverso’s lab has previously shown can activate hormones that regulate appetite.

The research was funded, in part, by the Gates Foundation, MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.

It will be interesting to watch what will come of this private lawsuit:

Google on Thursday announced filing a lawsuit against the operators of the Badbox 2.0 botnet, which has ensnared more than 10 million devices running Android open source software.

These devices lack Google’s security protections, and the perpetrators pre-installed the Badbox 2.0 malware on them, to create a backdoor and abuse them for large-scale fraud and other illicit schemes.

This reminds me of Meta’s lawauit against Pegasus over its hack-for-hire software (which I wrote about ...

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