The Federal Trade Commission said it had dropped an antitrust probe into the state's Clean Truck Partnership.

Authorities have cited multiple causes for the massive wildfires, including careless farming practices, improperly maintained power cables and lightning storms.

More than 7.8 inches of rain fell in parts of Seoul and nearby cities, where residents salvaged belongings and used plastic containers to bail water from properties damaged by flash floods.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 14 August 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02422-x

Publisher Correction: Consequential differences in satellite-era sea surface temperature trends across datasets

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 14 August 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02416-9

During hot weather, dense urban areas are often not conducive to outdoor recreation. However, pedestrian tolerance to heat can be increased by almost 2 °C through more climate-sensitive streetscape design.

Is this movie review a rave or a pan? Is this news story about business or technology? Is this online chatbot conversation veering off into giving financial advice? Is this online medical information site giving out misinformation?

These kinds of automated conversations, whether they involve seeking a movie or restaurant review or getting information about your bank account or health records, are becoming increasingly prevalent. More than ever, such evaluations are being made by highly sophisticated algorithms, known as text classifiers, rather than by human beings. But how can we tell how accurate these classifications really are?

Now, a team at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) has come up with an innovative approach to not only measure how well these classifiers are doing their job, but then go one step further and show how to make them more accurate.

The new evaluation and remediation software was developed by Kalyan Veeramachaneni, a principal research scientist at LIDS, his students Lei Xu and Sarah Alnegheimish, and two others. The software package is being made freely available for download by anyone who wants to use it.

A standard method for testing these classification systems is to create what are known as synthetic examples — sentences that closely resemble ones that have already been classified. For example, researchers might take a sentence that has already been tagged by a classifier program as being a rave review, and see if changing a word or a few words while retaining the same meaning could fool the classifier into deeming it a pan. Or a sentence that was determined to be misinformation might get misclassified as accurate. This ability to fool the classifiers makes these adversarial examples.

People have tried various ways to find the vulnerabilities in these classifiers, Veeramachaneni says. But existing methods of finding these vulnerabilities have a hard time with this task and miss many examples that they should catch, he says.

Increasingly, companies are trying to use such evaluation tools in real time, monitoring the output of chatbots used for various purposes to try to make sure they are not putting out improper responses. For example, a bank might use a chatbot to respond to routine customer queries such as checking account balances or applying for a credit card, but it wants to ensure that its responses could never be interpreted as financial advice, which could expose the company to liability. “Before showing the chatbot’s response to the end user, they want to use the text classifier to detect whether it’s giving financial advice or not,” Veeramachaneni says. But then it’s important to test that classifier to see how reliable its evaluations are.

“These chatbots, or summarization engines or whatnot are being set up across the board,” he says, to deal with external customers and within an organization as well, for example providing information about HR issues. It’s important to put these text classifiers into the loop to detect things that they are not supposed to say, and filter those out before the output gets transmitted to the user.

That’s where the use of adversarial examples comes in — those sentences that have already been classified but then produce a different response when they are slightly modified while retaining the same meaning. How can people confirm that the meaning is the same? By using another large language model (LLM) that interprets and compares meanings. So, if the LLM says the two sentences mean the same thing, but the classifier labels them differently, “that is a sentence that is adversarial — it can fool the classifier,” Veeramachaneni says. And when the researchers examined these adversarial sentences, “we found that most of the time, this was just a one-word change,” although the people using LLMs to generate these alternate sentences often didn’t realize that.

Further investigation, using LLMs to analyze many thousands of examples, showed that certain specific words had an outsized influence in changing the classifications, and therefore the testing of a classifier’s accuracy could focus on this small subset of words that seem to make the most difference. They found that one-tenth of 1 percent of all the 30,000 words in the system’s vocabulary could account for almost half of all these reversals of classification, in some specific applications.

Lei Xu PhD ’23, a recent graduate from LIDS who performed much of the analysis as part of his thesis work, “used a lot of interesting estimation techniques to figure out what are the most powerful words that can change the overall classification, that can fool the classifier,” Veeramachaneni says. The goal is to make it possible to do much more narrowly targeted searches, rather than combing through all possible word substitutions, thus making the computational task of generating adversarial examples much more manageable. “He’s using large language models, interestingly enough, as a way to understand the power of a single word.”

Then, also using LLMs, he searches for other words that are closely related to these powerful words, and so on, allowing for an overall ranking of words according to their influence on the outcomes. Once these adversarial sentences have been found, they can be used in turn to retrain the classifier to take them into account, increasing the robustness of the classifier against those mistakes.

Making classifiers more accurate may not sound like a big deal if it’s just a matter of classifying news articles into categories, or deciding whether reviews of anything from movies to restaurants are positive or negative. But increasingly, classifiers are being used in settings where the outcomes really do matter, whether preventing the inadvertent release of sensitive medical, financial, or security information, or helping to guide important research, such as into properties of chemical compounds or the folding of proteins for biomedical applications, or in identifying and blocking hate speech or known misinformation.

As a result of this research, the team introduced a new metric, which they call p, which provides a measure of how robust a given classifier is against single-word attacks. And because of the importance of such misclassifications, the research team has made its products available as open access for anyone to use. The package consists of two components: SP-Attack, which generates adversarial sentences to test classifiers in any particular application, and SP-Defense, which aims to improve the robustness of the classifier by generating and using adversarial sentences to retrain the model.

In some tests, where competing methods of testing classifier outputs allowed a 66 percent success rate by adversarial attacks, this team’s system cut that attack success rate almost in half, to 33.7 percent. In other applications, the improvement was as little as a 2 percent difference, but even that can be quite important, Veeramachaneni says, since these systems are being used for so many billions of interactions that even a small percentage can affect millions of transactions.

The team’s results were published on July 7 in the journal Expert Systems in a paper by Xu, Veeramachaneni, and Alnegheimish of LIDS, along with Laure Berti-Equille at IRD in Marseille, France, and Alfredo Cuesta-Infante at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, in Spain. 

“Manufacturing is the engine of society, and it is the backbone of robust, resilient economies,” says John Hart, head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) and faculty co-director of the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM). “With manufacturing a lively topic in today’s news, there’s a renewed appreciation and understanding of the importance of manufacturing to innovation, to economic and national security, and to daily lives.”

Launched this May, INM will “help create a transformation of manufacturing through new technology, through development of talent, and through an understanding of how to scale manufacturing in a way that enables imparts higher productivity and resilience, drives adoption of new technologies, and creates good jobs,” Hart says.

INM is one of MIT’s strategic initiatives and builds on the successful three-year-old Manufacturing@MIT program. “It’s a recognition by MIT that manufacturing is an Institute-wide theme and an Institute-wide priority, and that manufacturing connects faculty and students across campus,” says Hart. Alongside Hart, INM’s faculty co-directors are Institute Professor Suzanne Berger and Chris Love, professor of chemical engineering.

The initiative is pursuing four main themes: reimagining manufacturing technologies and systems, elevating the productivity and human experience of manufacturing, scaling up new manufacturing, and transforming the manufacturing base.

Breaking manufacturing barriers for corporations

Amgen, Autodesk, Flex, GE Vernova, PTC, Sanofi, and Siemens are founding members of INM’s industry consortium. These industry partners will work closely with MIT faculty, researchers, and students across many aspects of manufacturing-related research, both in broad-scale initiatives and in particular areas of shared interests. Membership requires a minimum three-year commitment of $500,000 a year to manufacturing-related activities at MIT, including the INM membership fee of $275,000 per year, which supports several core activities that engage the industry members.

One major thrust for INM industry collaboration is the deployment and adoption of AI and automation in manufacturing. This effort will include seed research projects at MIT, collaborative case studies, and shared strategy development.

INM also offers companies participation in the MIT-wide New Manufacturing Research effort, which is studying the trajectories of specific manufacturing industries and examining cross-cutting themes such as technology and financing.

Additionally, INM will concentrate on education for all professions in manufacturing, with alliances bringing together corporations, community colleges, government agencies, and other partners. “We'll scale our curriculum to broader audiences, from aspiring manufacturing workers and aspiring production line supervisors all the way up to engineers and executives,” says Hart.

In workforce training, INM will collaborate with companies broadly to help understand the challenges and frame its overall workforce agenda, and with individual firms on specific challenges, such as acquiring suitably prepared employees for a new factory.

Importantly, industry partners will also engage directly with students. Founding member Flex, for instance, hosted MIT researchers and students at the Flex Institute of Technology in Sorocaba, Brazil, developing new solutions for electronics manufacturing.

“History shows that you need to innovate in manufacturing alongside the innovation in products,” Hart comments. “At MIT, as more students take classes in manufacturing, they’ll think more about key manufacturing issues as they decide what research problems they want to solve, or what choices they make as they prototype their devices. The same is true for industry — companies that operate at the frontier of manufacturing, whether through internal capabilities or their supply chains, are positioned to be on the frontier of product innovation and overall growth.”

“We’ll have an opportunity to bring manufacturing upstream to the early stage of research, designing new processes and new devices with scalability in mind,” he says.

Additionally, MIT expects to open new manufacturing-related labs and to further broaden cooperation with industry at existing shared facilities, such as MIT.nano. Hart says that facilities will also invite tighter collaborations with corporations — not just providing advanced equipment, but working jointly on, say, new technologies for weaving textiles, or speeding up battery manufacturing.

Homing in on the United States

INM is a global project that brings a particular focus on the United States, which remains the world’s second-largest manufacturing economy, but has suffered a significant decline in manufacturing employment and innovation.

One key to reversing this trend and reinvigorating the U.S. manufacturing base is advocacy for manufacturing’s critical role in society and the career opportunities it offers.

“No one really disputes the importance of manufacturing,” Hart says. “But we need to elevate interest in manufacturing as a rewarding career, from the production workers to manufacturing engineers and leaders, through advocacy, education programs, and buy-in from industry, government, and academia.”

MIT is in a unique position to convene industry, academic, and government stakeholders in manufacturing to work together on this vital issue, he points out.

Moreover, in times of radical and rapid changes in manufacturing, “we need to focus on deploying new technologies into factories and supply chains,” Hart says. “Technology is not all of the solution, but for the U.S. to expand our manufacturing base, we need to do it with technology as a key enabler, embracing companies of all sizes, including small and medium enterprises.”

“As AI becomes more capable, and automation becomes more flexible and more available, these are key building blocks upon which you can address manufacturing challenges,” he says. “AI and automation offer new accelerated ways to develop, deploy, and monitor production processes, which present a huge opportunity and, in some cases, a necessity.”

“While manufacturing is always a combination of old technology, new technology, established practice, and new ways of thinking, digital technology gives manufacturers an opportunity to leapfrog competitors,” Hart says. “That’s very, very powerful for the U.S. and any company, or country, that aims to create differentiated capabilities.”

Fortunately, in recent years, investors have increasingly bought into new manufacturing in the United States. “They see the opportunity to re-industrialize, to build the factories and production systems of the future,” Hart says.

“That said, building new manufacturing is capital-intensive, and takes time,” he adds. “So that’s another area where it’s important to convene stakeholders and to think about how startups and growth-stage companies build their capital portfolios, how large industry can support an ecosystem of small businesses and young companies, and how to develop talent to support those growing companies.”

All these concerns and opportunities in the manufacturing ecosystem play to MIT’s strengths. “MIT’s DNA of cross-disciplinary collaboration and working with industry can let us create a lot of impact,” Hart emphasizes. “We can understand the practical challenges. We can also explore breakthrough ideas in research and cultivate successful outcomes, all the way to new companies and partnerships. Sometimes those are seen as disparate approaches, but we like to bring them together.”

“It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done at MIT,” says Haley Nakamura, a second-year MEng student in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). She’s not reflecting on a class, final exam, or research paper. Nakamura is talking about the experience of being a teaching assistant (TA). “It’s really an art form, in that there is no formula for being a good teacher. It’s a skill, and something you have to continuously work at and adapt to different people.”

Nakamura, like approximately 16 percent of her EECS MEng peers, balances her own coursework with teaching responsibilities. The TA role is complex, nuanced, and at MIT, can involve much more planning and logistics than you might imagine. Nakamura works on a central computer science (CS) course, 6.3900 (Introduction to Machine Learning), which registers around 400-500 students per semester. For that enrollment, the course requires eight instructors at the lecturer/professor level; 15 TAs, between the undergraduate and graduate level; and about 50 lab assistants (LAs). Students are split across eight sections corresponding to each senior instructor, with a group of TAs and LAs for each section of 60-70 students.

To keep everyone moving forward at the same pace, coordination and organization are key. “A lot of the reason I got my initial TA-ship was because I was pretty organized,” Nakamura explains. “Everyone here at MIT can be so busy that it can be difficult to be on top of things, and students will be the first to point out logistical confusion and inconsistencies. If they’re worried about some quirk on the website, or wondering how their grades are being calculated, those things can prevent them from focusing on content.” 

Nakamura's organizational skills made her a good candidate to spot and deal with potential wrinkles before they derailed a course section. “When I joined the course, we wanted someone on the TA side to be more specifically responsible for underlying administrative tasks, so I became the first head TA for the course. Since then, we’ve built that role up more and more. There is now a head TA, a head undergraduate TA, and section leads working on internal documentation such as instructions for how to improve content and how to manage office hours.” The result of this administrative work is consistency across sections and semesters.

The other side of a TA-ship is, of course, teaching. “I was eager to engage with students in a meaningful way,” says Soroush Araei, a sixth-year graduate student who had already fulfilled the teaching requirement for his degree in electrical engineering, but who jumped at the chance to teach alongside his PhD advisor. “I enjoy teaching, and have always found that explaining concepts to others deepens my own understanding.” He was recently awarded the ​MIT School of Engineering’s 2025 Graduate Student Teaching and Mentoring Award, which honors “a graduate student in the School of Engineering who has demonstrated extraordinary teaching and mentoring as a teaching or research assistant.” Araei’s dedication comes at the price of sleep. “Juggling my own research with my TA duties was no small feat. I often found myself in the lab for long hours, helping students troubleshoot their circuits. While their design simulations looked perfect, the circuits they implemented on protoboards didn’t always perform as expected. I had to dive deep into the issues alongside the students, which often required considerable time and effort.”

The rewards for Araei’s work are often intrinsic. “Teaching has shown me that there are always deeper layers to understanding. There are concepts I thought I had mastered, but I realized gaps in my own knowledge when trying to explain them,” he says. Another challenge: the variety of background knowledge between students in a single class. “Some had never encountered transistors, while others had tape-out experience. Designing problem sets and selecting questions for office hours required careful planning to keep all students engaged.” For Araei, some of the best moments have come during office hours. “Witnessing the ‘aha’ moment on a student’s face when a complex concept finally clicked was incredibly rewarding.”

The pursuit of the “aha” moment is a common thread between TAs. “I still struggle with the feeling that you’re responsible for someone’s understanding in a given topic, and, if you’re not doing a good job, that could affect that person for the rest of their life,” says Nakamura. “But the flip side of that moment of confusion is when someone has the ‘aha!’ moment as you’re talking to them, when you’re able to explain something that wasn’t conveyed in the other materials. It was your help that broke through and gave understanding. And that reward really overruns the fear of causing confusion.”

Hope Dargan ’21, MEng ’23, a second-year PhD student in EECS, uses her role as a graduate instructor to try to reach students who may not fit into the stereotype of the scientist. She started her career at MIT planning to major in CS and become a software engineer, but a missionary trip to Sweden in 2016-17 (when refugees from the Syrian civil war were resettling in the region) sparked a broader interest in both the Middle East and in how groups of people contextualized their own narratives. When Dargan returned to MIT, she took on a history degree, writing her thesis on the experiences of queer Mormon women. Additionally, she taught for MEET (the Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow), an educational initiative for Israeli and Palestinian high school students. “I realized I loved teaching, and this experience set me on a trajectory to teaching as a career.” 

Dargan gained her teaching license as an undergrad through the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP), then joined the MEng program, in which she designed an educational intervention for students who were struggling in class 6.101 (Fundamentals of Programming). The next step was a PhD. “Teaching is so context-dependent,” says Dargan, who was awarded the Goodwin Medal for her teaching efforts in 2023. “When I taught students for MEET, it was very different from when I was teaching eighth graders at Josiah Quincy Upper School for my teaching license, and very different now when I teach students in 6.101, versus when I teach the LGO [Leaders for Global Operations] students Python in the summers. Each student has their own unique perspective on what’s motivating them, how they learn, and what they connect to … So even if I’ve taught the material for five years (as I have for 6.101, because I was an LA, then a TA, and now an instructor), improving my teaching is always challenging. Getting better at adapting my teaching to the context of the students and their stories, which are ever-evolving, is always interesting.”

Although Dargan considers teaching one of her greatest passions, she is clear-eyed about the cost of the profession. “I think the things that we’re passionate about tell us a lot about ourselves, both our strengths and our weaknesses, and teaching has taught me a lot about my weaknesses,” she says. “Teaching is a tough career, because it tends to take people who care a lot and are perfectionists, and it can lead to a lot of burnout.”

Dargan's students have also expressed enthusiasm and gratitude for her work. “Hope is objectively the most helpful instructor I’ve ever had,” said one anonymous reviewer. Another wrote, “I never felt judged when I asked her questions, and she was great at guiding me through problems by asking motivating questions … I truly felt like she cared about me as a student and person.” Dargan herself is modest about her role, saying, “For me, the trade-off between teaching and research is that teaching has an immediate day-to-day impact, while research has this unknown potential for long-term impact.” 

With the responsibility to instruct an ever-growing percentage of the Institute’s students, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science relies heavily on dedicated and passionate students like Nakamura, Araei, and Dargan. As their caring and humane influence ripples outward through thousands of new electrical engineers and computer scientists, the day-to-day impact of their work is clear; but the long-term impact may be greater than any of them know.

Catching up on your backlog of digital rights news has never been easier! EFF has a one-stop-shop to keep you up to date on the latest in the fight against censorship and surveillance—our EFFector newsletter.

This time we're covering an act of government intimidation in Florida when the state subpoenaed a venue for surveillance video after hosting an LGBTQ+ pride event, calling out data brokers in California for failing to respond to requests for personal data—even though responses are required by state law, and explaining why Canada's Bill C-2 would open the floodgates for U.S. surveillance.

Don't forget to also check out our audio companion to EFFector as well! We're interviewing staff about some of the important work that they're doing. This time, EFF Senior Speech and Privacy Activist Paige Collings covers the harms of age verification measures that are being passed across the globe. Listen now on YouTube or the Internet Archive.

Listen TO EFFECTOR

EFFECTOR 37.10 - Spotify Face Scans Are Just the Beginning

Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression. 

Thank you to the supporters around the world who make our work possible! If you're not a member yet, join EFF today to help us fight for a brighter digital future.

There is a really great series of online events highlighting cool uses of AI in cybersecurity, titled Prompt||GTFO. Videos from the first three events are online. And here’s where to register to attend, or participate, in the fourth.

Some really great stuff here.

EFF is Co-Counsel in Case Detailing Harms Caused by Export of U.S. Cybersurveillance Technology and Training to Repressive Regimes

PORTLAND, OR – Saudi human rights activist Loujain Alhathloul’s groundbreaking lawsuit concerning spying software that enabled her imprisonment and torture can advance, a federal judge ruled in an opinion unsealed Tuesday. 

U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut of the District of Oregon ruled that Alhathloul’s lawsuit against DarkMatter Group and three of its former executives can proceed on its claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – the first time that a human rights case like this has gone so far under this law. The judge dismissed other claims made under the Alien Tort Statute. 

Alhathloul is represented in the case by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Justice and Accountability, Foley Hoag, and Tonkon Torp LLP. 

"This important ruling is the first to let a lawsuit filed by the victim of a foreign government’s human rights abuses, enabled by U.S. spyware used to hack the victim’s devices, proceed in our federal courts,” said EFF Civil Liberties Director David Greene. “This case is particularly important at a time when transnational human rights abuses are making daily headlines, and we are eager to proceed with proving our case.” 

“Transparency in such times and circumstances is a cornerstone that enacts integrity and drives accountability as it offers the necessary information to understand our reality and act upon it. The latter presents a roadmap to a safer world,” Alhathloul said. “Today’s judge’s order has become a public court document only to reinforce those rooted concepts of transparency that will one day lead to accountability.” 

Alhathloul, 36, a nominee for the 2019 and 2020 Nobel Peace Prize, has been a powerful advocate for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia for more than a decade. She was at the forefront of the public campaign advocating for women’s right to drive in Saudi Arabia and has been a vocal critic of the country’s male guardianship system.  

The lawsuit alleges that defendants DarkMatter Group, Marc Baier, Ryan Adams, and Daniel Gericke were hired by the UAE to target Alhathloul and other perceived dissidents as part of the UAE’s broader cooperation with Saudi Arabia. According to the lawsuit, the defendants used U.S. cybersurveillance technology, along with their U.S. intelligence training, to install spyware on Alhathloul’s iPhone and extract data from it, including while she was in the United States and communicating with U.S. contacts. After the hack, Alhathloul was arbitrarily detained by the UAE security services and forcibly rendered to Saudi Arabia, where she was imprisoned and tortured. She is no longer in prison, but she is currently subject to an illegal travel ban and unable to leave Saudi Arabia. 

The case was filed in December 2021; Judge Immergut dismissed it in March 2023 with leave to amend, and the amended complaint was filed in May 2023.  

“This Court concludes that Plaintiff has shown that her claims arise out of Defendants’ forum-related contacts,” Judge Immergut wrote in her opinion. “Defendants’ forum-related contacts include (1) their alleged tortious exfiltration of data from Plaintiff’s iPhone while she was in the U.S. and (2) their acquisition, use, and enhancement of U.S.-created exploits from U.S. companies to create the Karma hacking tool used to accomplish their tortious conduct. Plaintiff’s CFAA claims arise out of these U.S. contacts.” 

For the judge’s opinion:  https://www.eff.org/document/alhathloul-v-darkmatter-opinion-and-order-motion-dismiss

For more about the case: https://www.eff.org/cases/alhathloul-v-darkmatter-group 

Contact:  DavidGreeneCivil Liberties Directordavidg@eff.org

Around the world, about 2 billion people suffer from iron deficiency, which can lead to anemia, impaired brain development in children, and increased infant mortality.

To combat that problem, MIT researchers have come up with a new way to fortify foods and beverages with iron, using small crystalline particles. These particles, known as metal-organic frameworks, could be sprinkled on food, added to staple foods such as bread, or incorporated into drinks like coffee and tea.

“We’re creating a solution that can be seamlessly added to staple foods across different regions,” says Ana Jaklenec, a principal investigator at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “What’s considered a staple in Senegal isn’t the same as in India or the U.S., so our goal was to develop something that doesn’t react with the food itself. That way, we don’t have to reformulate for every context — it can be incorporated into a wide range of foods and beverages without compromise.”

The particles designed in this study can also carry iodine, another critical nutrient. The particles could also be adapted to carry important minerals such as zinc, calcium, or magnesium.

“We are very excited about this new approach and what we believe is a novel application of metal-organic frameworks to potentially advance nutrition, particularly in the developing world,” says Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and a member of the Koch Institute.

Jaklenec and Langer are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in the journal Matter. MIT postdoc Xin Yang and Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang PhD ’24 are the lead authors of the paper.

Iron stabilization

Food fortification can be a successful way to combat nutrient deficiencies, but this approach is often challenging because many nutrients are fragile and break down during storage or cooking. When iron is added to foods, it can react with other molecules in the food, giving the food a metallic taste.

In previous work, Jaklenec’s lab has shown that encapsulating nutrients in polymers can protect them from breaking down or reacting with other molecules. In a small clinical trial, the researchers found that women who ate bread fortified with encapsulated iron were able to absorb the iron from the food.

However, one drawback to this approach is that the polymer adds a lot of bulk to the material, limiting the amount of iron or other nutrients that end up in the food.

“Encapsulating iron in polymers significantly improves its stability and reactivity, making it easier to add to food,” Jaklenec says. “But to be effective, it requires a substantial amount of polymer. That limits how much iron you can deliver in a typical serving, making it difficult to meet daily nutritional targets through fortified foods alone.”

To overcome that challenge, Yang came up with a new idea: Instead of encapsulating iron in a polymer, they could use iron itself as a building block for a crystalline particle known as a metal-organic framework, or MOF (pronounced “moff”).

MOFs consist of metal atoms joined by organic molecules called ligands to create a rigid, cage-like structure. Depending on the combination of metals and ligands chosen, they can be used for a wide variety of applications.

“We thought maybe we could synthesize a metal-organic framework with food-grade ligands and food-grade micronutrients,” Yang says. “Metal-organic frameworks have very high porosity, so they can load a lot of cargo. That’s why we thought we could leverage this platform to make a new metal-organic framework that could be used in the food industry.”

In this case, the researchers designed a MOF consisting of iron bound to a ligand called fumaric acid, which is often used as a food additive to enhance flavor or help preserve food.

This structure prevents iron from reacting with polyphenols — compounds commonly found in foods such as whole grains and nuts, as well as coffee and tea. When iron does react with those compounds, it forms a metal polyphenol complex that cannot be absorbed by the body.

The MOFs’ structure also allows them to remain stable until they reach an acidic environment, such as the stomach, where they break down and release their iron payload.

Double-fortified salts

The researchers also decided to include iodine in their MOF particle, which they call NuMOF. Iodized salt has been very successful at preventing iodine deficiency, and many efforts are now underway to create “double-fortified salts” that would also contain iron.

Delivering these nutrients together has proven difficult because iron and iodine can react with each other, making each one less likely to be absorbed by the body. In this study, the MIT team showed that once they formed their iron-containing MOF particles, they could load them with iodine, in a way that the iron and iodine do not react with each other.

In tests of the particles’ stability, the researchers found that the NuMOFs could withstand long-term storage, high heat and humidity, and boiling water.

Throughout these tests, the particles maintained their structure. When the researchers then fed the particles to mice, they found that both iron and iodine became available in the bloodstream within several hours of the NuMOF consumption.

The researchers are now working on launching a company that is developing coffee and other beverages fortified with iron and iodine. They also hope to continue working toward a double-fortified salt that could be consumed on its own or incorporated into staple food products.

The research was partially supported by J-WAFS Fellowships for Water and Food Solutions.

Other authors of the paper include Fangzheng Chen, Wenhao Gao, Zhiling Zheng, Tian Wang, Erika Yan Wang, Behnaz Eshaghi, and Sydney MacDonald.

The NSA and GCHQ have jointly published a history of World War II SIGINT: “Secret Messengers: Disseminating SIGINT in the Second World War.” This is the story of the British SLUs (Special Liaison Units) and the American SSOs (Special Security Officers).

Two days remain in the latest — and maybe last — international effort to halt plastic pollution, including planet-warming emissions from production.

Research has found that as many as 15 million people worldwide may be vulnerable to glacial floods.

The Federal Advisory Committee Act suit by two environmental groups could complicate and delay the plan to reverse the landmark endangerment finding.

Two firms say the new law could have a chilling effect on their ability to speak with clients about environmental, social or governance issues.

The state risks missing its climate targets unless it builds more publicly accessible chargers to support EV adoption.

The studies are the first major investments in several years by state leaders to address the growing threat of flooding, underscoring the state’s slow progress in tackling this issue.

Temperatures in some areas soared past 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists warn climate change is exacerbating the frequency and intensity of heat and dryness.