The New York City Council is considering ways to eliminate gender bias in artificial intelligence technology used by city agencies. On December 8, 2025, Council Member Farah N. Louis introduced a bill that would require the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DOITT) to conduct a gendered impact assessment every two years on AI algorithms used by city agencies. As a result, the DOITT would have to evaluate and ensure that any AI technology used does not contribute to gender disparity in the workforce. 

For many AI experts, the bill addresses a problem that they have been researching for years since AI became open to the public. Because AI can have bias. By going unchecked, this bias can bring disadvantages to women in the workplace. Artificial intelligence was developed and introduced to the public as problem-solving software designed to make everyday life easier. While some will argue that it has done that, critics argue that AI is doing more to reinforce gender bias. 

This bias ranges from placing women into stereotypical roles to placing their resumes underneath those coming from men. AI learns from what it is taught and what is documented on the internet. The world itself holds gender bias, and artificial intelligence picks up on that. 

Much of the gender bias that women are facing from AI technology comes from hiring algorithms. These AI-powered algorithms filter through resumes during the hiring process and select candidates they find would be best suited for the job. On a smaller scale, when prompted to generate images, AI will categorize men and women into gendered roles in the workforce, such as nurses and construction workers.

“Most of the leaders in leadership positions are men, right? So, you just don’t have enough examples of women who’ve succeeded,” said Swathi Dhamodaran, a founding member of The Neural.AI, a network of engineering and technology professionals that examines the possibilities of AI. “And therefore,” Dhamodaran said, “what is AI based on? Training data, the bulk of which is successful, but men in this instance. That’s why hiring algorithms have gender biases.” 

In 2018, Amazon pulled an AI-powered recruitment tool after it was determined that it favored the resumes of men over women. The tool learned to pick out gendered terms in resumes that pointed to applicants being women, and even put graduates of two all-women’s colleges at the bottom of the list. Facial recognition systems also struggled to identify women, especially those who are women of color. False matches can be dangerous, leading to false arrests, placement on watch lists, and unwarranted police altercations, among other things. 

Sarah Wyer is a PhD researcher who specializes in bias in AI and received an award for being a top woman in tech. Wyer discovered gender bias within Google and, as an experiment, began prompting the GPT-2 tool she was using to gain feedback on specific gender biases she fed to it. 

“Some of the outputs that we were getting were terrifying,” Wyer said. “It was elevating the status of men and sexualizing the status of women. Then I did it with different versions of GPT-3, which is where ChatGPT came from. It was all very negative and very derogatory against women.” 

Wyer’s research found that AI like ChatGPT is easily influenced, and feeding it these gender biases then causes it to be trained around these beliefs. “The data choices that we make when we’re creating these large language models (LLMs) are important because our values can get embedded within there,” she said. 

Algorithms can be trained to break out of this habit, but it proves difficult when the AI tools can reinforce these biases from what they have already learned. However, the implementation of a bill by the NYC Council is a step towards keeping these tools from continuously leading users towards gender inequity.

“There is so much we as women can do,” Dhamodaran said. “Focus on the impact that can be made rather than the barrier that’s getting in the way of you being the only woman in the boardroom.”

New data show a 17 percent drop in new international student enrollment in U.S. colleges this fall, signaling growing concerns across higher education about the country’s ability to attract global talent. 

That decline arrives even as President Donald Trump recently declared that foreign students are “essential” to U.S. institutions, warning that cuts would “destroy U.S. colleges,” according to Bloomberg. 

Yet for many students, the political rhetoric and lived reality feel increasingly disconnected.

One international student from Central Asia, who like the other students quoted here asked to be quoted anonymously,  posted publicly that she traveled home this summer to renew documents and visit family before her final semester in the USA. Weeks later, she discovered her Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) record had been terminated and her next visa appointment pushed months ahead. With only one semester remaining, losing her active status rendered her ineligible for post-graduation work options as  Optional Practical Training (OPT), a program that allows international students to work temporarily in the U.S. after graduation. 

Her story is one of the issues fueling this year’s enrollment decline. All those problems, including visa delays, unpredictable travel outcomes are leading to a growing fear that studying in the United States has become less stable and less accessible.

According to Open Doors data, published by the Institute of International Education, the number of international students enrolled in U.S. higher education has been shrinking, contributing to the sharp decline this year in new enrollments.

A computer science major from Kazakhstan described spending nearly all of July consumed by worry that he would be unable to return to the U.S. after his visit home. “Every day felt like ‘what if?’” he said. “What if the rules change while I’m abroad? What if I lose everything I’ve worked for?” Though he returned this fall, the stress remains as he prepares for graduation.

The financial burden of studying in the U.S. adds another layer of pressure. An Albanian student said the high cost of international tuition makes even small policy changes risky. “The fees are too expensive, and we can’t work off-campus. One rule change could ruin everything.”

A student from Kyrgyzstan suggested the current climate may push more students toward Europe or Canada. “It’s already very expensive to study here, and jobs are limited,” she said. “If the rules keep getting more complicated, people will choose other countries.”

Some students compare the U.S. to other education systems and see differences. A Turkish student who previously studied in Argentina said the U.S. academic experience felt easier, but the immigration and job pathways weren’t stable. A Ukrainian student, educated in Europe and the U.S., said European programs offered better academic standards, while the U.S. offered post-graduation job potential but only if immigration pathways remained open.

Not all students expressed concern. An Albanian student pursuing an employment-based green card (EB-3) said he believes legal immigration pathways remain intact. “As long as students follow the rules, they should still have opportunities,” he said.

Across these varied voices, students described constantly monitoring policy changes, concerned that a single update could disrupt years of academic and financial planning.

According to NAFSA, international students contributed more than $43 billion to the U.S. economy last academic year. With enrollment declining and confidence shaken, colleges that rely on international tuition may face an increasingly uncertain future.

For many students, the challenge now is simply getting through their studies while managing the possibility that their entire plan could change overnight. “I want to stay,” the Kazakhstan student said, “but sometimes it feels like my future changes every time the news changes.”

This year’s mayoral race saw the highest turnout of voters in New York City since 1969. Three-quarters of NYC’s youth, people under 30, who voted chose Mamdani, according to a voter poll conducted by The Associated Press on November 5, 2025. In April 2025, some young women in New York City mobilized and, brought together by 24-year-old Cait Camelia and 28-year-old Kaif Kabir, started the unofficial campaign, ‘Hot Girls for Zohran,’ after having the idea to create a fun kind of campaign t-shirt. ‘Hot Girls for Zohran’ is inspired by a 2020 trend, #HotGirlsforBernie, which started during Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign.

The group is primarily Gen Z, but has gone viral and spread to other age groups. Actress Emily Ratajkowski joined the campaign, and even former New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio was seen wearing a ‘Hot Girls for Zohran’ t-shirt on November 4 when he showed up to vote. The group inspired groups formed by Republican podcaster Emily Austin, ‘Hot Girls for Cuomo’, and ‘Cool Girls for Capitalism’, formed by Danielle Goldman. 

Calling themselves ‘hot girls,’ Camelia’s goal was to empower women and bring them together in a way that would convince more of the city to vote for Mamdani. On November 4, he was announced as NYC’s next mayor. 

“Together, we have illustrated the power of leading with a politics grounded in hope, compassion, and humility – rather than a politics of fear, shame, and superiority,” Camelia said in a speech she gave at a watch party on election night, “This campaign was built on community, conversations, and something that politics has lacked for far too long: joy.”

The group’s mission brought people together from many different parts of the city through parties, t-shirt giveaways, comedy shows, and canvassing, in which they would walk the city and knock on doors to tell them why they should vote for Mamdani. 

For actress, model, and influencer Abril Rios, the group was more than just a way to spread politics. “I think in the past years, especially after the pandemic, a lot of us in Gen Z have felt very disconnected from one another,” Rios said. Rios has a following of over 200,000 on instagram and yet it only serves to make her feel lonely. 

“It’s almost even more isolating cuz you see this like huge number on a screen, but it’s not necessarily reality. For a long time, I grappled with that as an influencer, and I really craved a community,” she said. “When I moved back to the States after being in Europe and got involved with ‘Hot Girls for Zohran’, and I was so amazed by his ability to make campaigning fun. There’s all these little ways that he brought people together to make it not feel like a job.” 

‘Hot Girls for Zohran’ certainly built a community not just with their over 18,000 followers but with the thousands of people who actually came together to campaign for Mamdani. It didn’t just stop at women, and New York City’s queer community as well as men joined in. The group helped change how young people approach politics and got them more involved than in recent years. Even Mamdani himself appeared in social media videos for the group’s Instagram. 

Not only did the campaign help with making politics more fun and accessible but it helped humanize Mamdani for the younger generation. Mamdani’s win is just the beginning for the group and after his win, they plan to keep their work going.

“We have many more doors to knock, many more minds to change, and many more strides to make. In the words of Mohammed El Kurd, I do not want us to compare our past to our present. I want us to invent a new future. Together,” Camelia said.

The future of New York State’s energy policy was up for debate at a September 18 NYS Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) hearing at Bronx Community College about the draft of the state’s energy plan. 

The Energy Planning Board is directing the development of the plan as a step toward implementing New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. (CLCPA) The plan is set to go into effect at the beginning of 2026.

The CLCPA is a law that sets ambitious climate goals, including achieving 100 percent zero electricity emissions by 2040 and reducing overall emissions at least 85 percent below levels in 1990.

The hearing attracted people with strong opinions about the plan. Some of those criticizing the plan said harmful emissions from natural gas contributes to high asthma rates, while many who spoke in favor of the plan cited the lack of feasibility of such a switch to renewable resources.

Patience O’Tune, a Bronx resident of over 20 years, opposed continued funding of nonrenewable infrastructure. “The Bronx has the highest rate for asthma, so these increased gas markers will affect people’s health as well as their bills,” O’Tune said. “This is the time to put the Bronx residents first in consideration of any new energy policy.”

The use of nuclear power was also a topic of discussion, with many concerned with the state’s attempt to backtrack its original decision to move away from nuclear power with the closure of the Indian Point nuclear reactor in April of 2021.

 Susan Van Dolson, an activist for Westchester For Change, criticized the plan. “(Kathy Hochul) says New York will not meet the climate goals mandated by law (CLCPA), she’s embracing nuclear power and supporting fracking rejected by the state… Renewable energy is cheaper and creates more jobs.”

 Carl Johnson, a business agent for Plumbers Local Union 1, spoke approvingly of the energy plan. “We need natural gas to keep the prices of everything down…We need nuclear. We also need geothermal energy, it would be nice, but the reality is you would have to make the electrical service line that’s probably 10 times the size of what it is, and it would take the electricians almost 100 years to do that.” Johnson added, “I understand that everybody wants it to be possible for them to plug in their electric car, and they want to get rid of their oil and gas… but the reality is it’s not going to be electric for quite a while., I’m sorry, it’s time to settle.”

Daniel Macintosh, also a plumber’s union member, spoke in support of the energy plan for the time being. “Let’s back up with gas, it does not seem possible at this time to put up the switch. So, I’m very much in favor of all of the above approaches.”

Daniel Chingyu Chu, Senior Energy Planner for the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance and a doctoral candidate at the City University of New York, spoke with dismay about the energy plan, citing concerns that the energy plan goes against the CLCPA. “Nuclear power is the most expensive form of energy on the grid, costing the state double to triple the amount to fund compared to renewables.”

The Energy Planning Board will continue to hold hearings with the public before its final revised version is released at the beginning of 2026. The next hearing will be Monday September 29th at Stony Brook University.

Drones were introduced to patrol city beaches this Summer, initially watching overhead
and monitoring the waters for sharks. As part of an improved safety effort by the New York City
Police Department and Fire Department, this new technology is now assisting swimmers in
distress. The drones are equipped with gear necessary for a rescue mission, carrying flotation
devices that can be dropped into the water. They are also able to communicate with swimmers in
need of help, have spotlights, and can attend people with medical emergencies.

Beachgoers on a busy Labor Day weekend, welcomed the sight of drones.

“Anything for safety is the best,” said Yvette N., a longtime Brooklyn resident, about this new
technology. She thinks this will help rescue efforts, “Yes I think so, they can save some lives,”
she said.

Beaches are currently open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. but once lifeguards leave for the day,
NYPD drones continue until 7 p.m. and FDNY, until 8 p.m. to further assist swimmers in danger.
There is currently a shortage of lifeguards around New York City beaches.

“The lifeguards can’t stay out all night,” Yvette N. said.

Over the past few months, there have been multiple drownings around city beaches, more
particularly after lifeguards were off duty.

Along the shores of Rockaway Beach, Rachel L., a former Brooklyn resident, now living
in Westchester, also welcomed the technology.

“I wasn’t aware of these drones. I did see some over there,” she said, pointing in one direction,
“but I didn’t know what they were for.” She added, “It seems like a great of use of safety. Some
police presence or an occasional officer is nice.”

As the day swiftly approached its final hours before lifeguards went off duty, Craig
Kauffman, of Forest Hills, Queens, said he thought having drones was a brilliant idea, especially
because he had his own close encounter with drowning. “It’s a step closer to safety,” he said,
“Why would I be against something so important to the safety of others.”

According to a report by ABC 7 News, the number of drownings at city beaches this
summer have already equaled the total amount from last summer. Drones cover the stretch of

Rockaway Beach from 8 a.m. – 8 p.m. Thoughts of extending operating hours have been
suggested, but Parks Commissioner Sue Donoghue has said that is not an option.

“It is a really long day for our lifeguard, so were not able to extend hours, especially at our
beaches,” she said. “Because if you think about it, they’re out in the hot sun the whole day,
managing crowds – thousands of people using the beaches – so they need a rest, too.”

Cyber security and data protection experts made a clear point clear at the Digital New York Summit on Mar. 17: hackers are two steps ahead of the private and public sector.

“The bad guys are winning,” John S. Shegerian, CEO of Electronic Recyclers International (ERI) told the audience.

Carlos P. Kizzee, senior vice president of the Center for Internet Security and the moderator of the panel agreed. “Threat actors are planning ahead. We need to plan ahead as well,” he said. Individuals and companies need to be prepared for cybernetic attacks.

Shegerian also said that cyber criminals were able to steal more than $6 trillion last year, up from $3 trillion in 2015. Cyber-attacks are growing exponentially both in numbers and the seriousness of the attack.

A real-life example of why data protection is important is the story he told about a financial organization that for five years rejected the services of ERI because they claimed that they know how to protect their data.

Then the day before the summit, the financial organization needed help with a private matter. “We told them that over seventy percent of their employees have cross contaminated their personal hardware and the information on their business hardware,” he said. In other words, employees compromised the company’s private information by using their personal computers and cellphones for business related matters.

Anna Mercado Clark, a lawyer and the leader of Phillips Lytle’s data security and digital forensics practice teams also said it is not enough to only work with top management but with people throughout the company.

“Some manufacturers and some companies think: ‘No one cares about me. I’m not going be a subject of a cyber-attack,’” Clark said. “These attackers are smart. They want to get the most bang out of your buck.”

One way that hackers are making profit out of citizens and private companies’ information is by ransomware: they lockdown any sensitive information, then they ask for money in return.

“If you don’t think that this an issue that concerns you, that’s incorrect,” Clark told the audience.

The legal battle between national security interests and personal privacy escalated last Monday after the Justice Department appealed a Brooklyn federal court ruling that prosecutors do not have the legal authority to force Apple to retrieve information from a suspected Queens drug dealer’s iPhone.

Magistrate Judge James Orenstein ruled Feb. 29 that the 1789 All Writs Act is not enough to justify the FBI’s demand that Apple extract information from a smartphone owned by the accused Jun Feng.

In response, prosecutors filed legal arguments Monday that called the ruling “an unprecedented limitation” on the government’s authority. The brief alleged that Apple is not being asked to do anything it is has not previously done or anything it is not capable of doing. Apple has assisted the FBI in extracting information from its devices in 70 previous incidents, according to prosecutors.

In asking for the court to override the magistrate judge’s ruling, federal authorities argued again that the All Writs Act of 1789 validates their call for Apple to unlock the smartphone.

It is the duty of the manufacturer to assist in extracting information from the device, according to prosecutors.

The battle between Apple and the government began in mid-February when Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the federal court for the Central District of California compelled Apple to create software that would give the FBI a “master key” to unlock an encrypted iPhone 5C that was used by one of the killers in the ongoing case of the San Bernardino terrorist attacks in December.

Apple declined to voluntarily help in accessing the phone.

According to Apple, operating systems before IOS 8 allowed the company to assist in accessing information from a passcode-locked device without having to unlock the phone. The iPhone obtained from the attack runs on IOS 8 and cannot be accessed unless its encryption is removed, which Apple executives have said severely threatens data security.

In the New York case of Jun Feng, the iPhone ran on IOS 7, and it would only take Apple a few hours to retrieve data from the phone because the operating system would not have to be unlocked.

But Apple “demurred” from court orders to unlock the iPhone in the New York case as well because the government’s invocation of the All Writs Act is a threat to the digital privacy of the public, Apple executives said in a conference call Monday.

“Rather than asking for legislative action through Congress, the FBI is proposing an unprecedented use of the All Writs Act of 1789 to justify an expansion of its authority,” Apple CEO Timothy Cook said in an open letter last month.

“We are challenging the FBI’s demands with the deepest respect for American democracy and a love of our country,” Cook wrote. “We believe it would be in the best interest of everyone to step back and consider the implications.”

Apple has rebutted federal prosecutors’ claims that its decryption demands are essential to fighting crime by asserting that developing a “backdoor” for FBI access creates a major security threat for iPhone users and interferes with public privacy altogether.

The government cannot hack the phone without risking the auto-erase feature and cannot involve a third party because it poses the same risk.

The rhetoric in the national debate between the FBI and Apple intensified Thursday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles when federal authorities filed a motion seeking to compel Apple to assist the FBI in breaking into the iPhone, further invoking a debate over digital privacy rights and national security that is still in the works.

In the Brooklyn case, Orenstein wrote that he had to consider three factors in making his decision to authorize the motion to sustain the use of the All Writs Act in the case: the closeness of Apple’s relationship to the criminal conduct, the burden such an order would impose on the company, and whether it is necessary to impose that burden, according to court documents.

“I conclude that none of those factors justifies imposing on Apple the obligation to assist the government’s investigation against its will,” Orenstein wrote. “I therefore deny the motion.”

By KIRAN SURY

There is never a good time to learn that you have diabetes. First come the metformin pills, soon replaced by nightly insulin injections. When all else fails, you face the ignominy of hours on a dialysis machine three times a week.

But in the future, you might not have to go through any of that.

The doctor would administer the treatment immediately: one injection of ferromagnetic fluid, right into the bloodstream. The tiny iron particles latch on to your fat and muscle cells, where they sway back and forth under the force of a tightly controlled magnetic field generated by an electromagnet. The calibrated pulling and prodding from this force directs your cells to make more surface receptors, increasing your sensitivity to insulin and lowering your blood sugar to normal levels. There is never a good time to learn that you have diabetes, but in the year 2050 the news is not so bad.

This medical scenario could be straight out of science fiction. It imagines a kind of internal massage that slowly cures disease. Thanks to the oft-neglected field of mechanobiology, an emerging scientific realm that focuses on the way physical forces can change cells, such a force-based treatment is increasingly becoming a possibility.

Researchers are learning the importance of the forces cells exert on each other and their environment. Studying these forces could lead to new research that helps regrow organs, fight cancer and prevent bacteria from spreading disease. The science is still in its infancy, and it may take more than 30 years, but curing disease could one day be as simple as tugging at our cells in the right place at the right time.

“The problem is a very complex one,” said Dr. Michael Sheetz, a decorated mechanobiologist who studies cell dynamics at Columbia University and founded both the Nanomedicine Center for Mechanobiology and the Mechanobiology Institute in Singapore. But, he later added, “there may be a situation where a mechanical treatment could provide benefit. I would hope so.”

While chemistry has long been intertwined with the biological branch of science, physics is a relatively more recent addition. Almost a century ago, mathematical biologist D’Arcy Thompson noted the importance of forces to biological development. In his seminal “On Growth and Form,” he writes, “Cell and tissue, shell and bone, leaf and flower, are so many portions of matter, and it is in obedience to the laws of physics that their particles have been moved, moulded and conformed.”

In the 1950s, Andrew and Hugh Huxley, two unrelated scientists who happened to be working on the same subject at the same time, discovered how the microscopic protein filaments actin and myosin slide past each other to produce muscle contraction. This chemically powered process generates muscular force, which in turn activates other signaling pathways. This is mechanotransduction: the conversion of mechanical forces to chemical signals to produce change in cells. For instance, in the ear, sound waves apply pressure to hair cells. That’s a mechanical force. The hair cells convert that force into chemical signals, opening ion channels and sending a signal to the brain via the nervous system. The cells sense the mechanical change, and generate further chemical signals as a response.

The technology needed to sense forces at a sub-cellular level have slowly been refined over the past two decades, leading to more interdisciplinary research and a realization that the mechanical aspects of biology are as important as the chemical. Scientists use “tweezers” made of laser beams or magnetic fields to tug on cells and feel them pull back. Atomic-force microscopy can probe the surface of cell structures measured in nanometers.

With the ability to work on an unprecedentedly small scale, scientists have found out that cells react differently when placed on a surface made of submicron pillars. Researchers borrow the same techniques used to print computer chips to manufacture an array of columns, each a hundred times thinner than the width of a human hair. The novelty of the surface forces the cells to adhere in a new way, clinging to the top of the pillars rather than spreading around the sides. It’s akin to the difference between standing in the middle of a sidewalk rather than balancing on the curb – when forced to the edge, cells plant themselves on the top of the pillars for greater stability.

Working in an environment measured in billionths of a meter has helped reveal details like this that would be lost on a larger scale, said Dr. Saba Ghassemi, a mechanical engineer who made the specialized surfaces used in the research. “We can mimic exactly what the native environment of a cell is,” Dr. Ghassemi, who divides her time between Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, said in a telephone interview. “It gives medicine or biology an opportunity to understand precisely what is happening.”

In the past, scientists attended closely to the type of solution in which stem cells were grown. Getting cells to differentiate-–to grow into a heart rather than a kidney, for example – is a complicated process. Specific chemical brews of signaling molecules and growth factors are used to spur cells into their final forms, but it can be tricky to get the mix just right. This is of particular importance to stem cells, which have the potential to treat damaged organs or grow replacements from scratch.

Now researchers are also focusing on the rigidity of the substrate—the fancy name for the surfaces on which cells are grown, often inflexible plastic or glass plates. Mechanobiologists have found that using softer surfaces can have a large effect on cell behavior.

“To grow cells in a dish is highly inefficient,” said Luis Santos, who recently received his doctorate in biology at Columbia University. “There is nothing in your body that resembles a plastic dish.”

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania put stem cells in the same nutrient broth but on polymers with easily tweaked rigidities to see how it affected cell differentiation. Cells placed on a mushy substrate that felt a lot like brain matter spread out and made brain-like connections. A medium, muscle-like surface gave rise to long, spindly muscle cells, while a hard bottom made bone cells. To put it in human terms, it’s the equivalent of switching from a hard mattress to a softer one and waking up with a different appearance. The rigidity of adjacent surfaces, it turns out, matters a lot to fledgling cells.

“Those forces are critical in order to get the right cascade of genes being expressed,” said Brooklyn College mechanobiologist Dr. Nicolas Biais.

This rigidity preference could explain some of the difficulty researchers are having with actual treatments. Stem cells injected after a heart attack, the theory goes, should grow into muscle cells and restore function. But the rigid scar tissue present after a cardiac arrest could interfere and prevent the cells from differentiating correctly.

“If you don’t pay attention to this you could just accidentally set up a system that’s impossible because you’re providing all the right chemical signals but the mechanical environment is wrong,” said Dr. Michael Dustin, director of the Nanomedicine Center for Mechanobiology, an international collaboration that includes New York and Columbia University.

Dr. Dustin, an immunologist by training, has also been working with physicians at the University of Pennsylvania on using the effects of rigidity to improve cancer treatments. Drs. Carl June and Michael Milone use adoptive cell therapy to cure leukemia. The technique involves removing t-cells, white blood cells that are part of the immune system, from the patient and growing them up outside the body. The cells are then genetically modified to target the cancer and injected back into the patient.

The adaptability of adoptive cell therapy makes it a very promising treatment. T-cells by their nature are very specific, and studies are underway to see if different protein markers can be used to target different types of cancer. That means fewer deleterious side effects than traditional chemotherapy, which targets all rapidly dividing cells and attacks the bone marrow and hair as well as cancer cells.

But the process is bottlenecked by the fact that leukemia patients have a very low t-cell count. T-cells replicate in the body, so a single injection should be enough to eliminate a tumor. But patients need a high enough initial amount to kick start the process. Finding a way to make more of them could make a big difference for patients with practically no immune system.

This is where the insights gained from mechanobiology can come into play. By combining the necessary growth factors with a pliable silicone substrate rather than rigid plastic, Dr. Dustin has found that it is possible to quadruple the number of cells grown in the same amount of time. The t-cells react favorably to the suppleness of the silicone, which is more like their natural environment. “We basically wanted to combine mechanical cues with those chemical signals to try and optimize that process,” said Dr. Dustin.

The next step is to see if the increased number of cells actually makes a difference in the body. “This might have benefit to immunotherapy if the number of cells are limiting,” Dr. Milone wrote in an email interview. “The cells persist which may provide long term tumor control if eradication of the tumor is not possible.”

The exact mechanisms by which cells sense the stiffness of their environment and convert that into cellular change are unknown, but scientists think it has a lot to do with tensegrity. Short for tensional integrity, tensegrity is the architectural idea that tension and compression can complement each other to provide structural stability and flexibility. Unlike other rigid structures like the keystone of an arch that rely on tension, tensegrity structures can stretch. First applied to biology by Harvard bioengineer Donald Ingber in 1998, it fits neatly with the cytoskeleton, a network of filaments within the cell that acts as both its backbone and transport system.

Dr. Dennis Discher, who led the University of Pennsylvania stem cell team and called mechanobiology “essential” to his research, has also had some success in elucidating exactly how mechanical signals from the outside of a cell propagate through the cytoskeleton to cause cellular changes.

When a cell lands on a new environment, it adheres via integrins, receptors that span the cellular membrane. Integrins serve a dual purpose as both anchor and antennae, as they attach to the cell’s environment and help transmit the resulting external signal through the cytoskeleton all the way to the nucleus. Discher has found that for stem cells, the increased stiffness from a harder surface leads to increasing stiffness within the cell’s nucleus; this physically alters access to DNA and redirects the construction of cellular components. This could lead the cells to absorb more minerals as they turn into bone, matching the stiffness of their surface.

Cell receptors like integrins are important because their function is impaired for cancerous cells. “Cancer is really a mechanically driven disease that is the inappropriate response of the cell to its environment,” Dr. Sheetz explained. Cancer cells don’t follow the rules when it comes to cellular movement and adhesion, which enables tumors to metastasize and spread to different organs.

Integrins and other molecules associated with cell attachment and movement could be used to target and inhibit cancer cells. Mina Bissell, a pioneer in research on cells and their microenvironment, found that breast cancer cells treated with integrin inhibitors interacted differently with their surroundings and reverted to normal cells. “This is the idea that you can actually compensate for a defect in your [DNA] by your environment, your mechanical environment,” Dr. Biais said.

Dr. Biais heads up the Mechano-Microbiology lab at Brooklyn College, where he studies how the pathogen that causes gonorrhea interacts with human cells. Neisseria gonorrhea has specialized tendril-like appendages called type-four pili that it uses to tug on cell membranes. The pili attach and retract with such strength and speed that Dr. Biais has dubbed the organism a “micro-scale Spider-man.”

For the human body, however, N. gonorrhea is more super-villain than superhero. It causes the well-known sexually transmitted disease, and the Centers for Disease Control has labeled certain antibiotic-resistant strains as an urgent threat to public health. Dr. Biais collaborates with a University of Arizona lab that has found that disabling the molecular motor governing the pili retraction makes the bacteria noninfectious.

“It could be that Neisseria gonorrhea is actually a puppeteer and directly physically triggering specific biological programs, a biological outcome, onto human cells,” he said.

As all superpowers have a weakness so do the pili, and Dr. Biais believes that N. gonorrhea’s power can be turned against it. When pili are stretched, they reveal new regions that are vulnerable to the immune system. Previous pili-based vaccines have not worked, possibly because they failed to take the force-mediated shift into account. Pre-stretched pili could be more effective. And because type-four pili are common to many different bacteria, one treatment could have many applications.

“Using this as a potential vaccine, you have the chance of killing more than one bird with one stone,” said Dr. Biais.

His thesis complete, Dr. Santos is already looking towards next-generation cell scaffolds that can replicate the body as a 3D structure rather than a flat surface, which he believes will be ideal for studying the body. “For hundreds of years biologists and doctors, people, have been looking at diseases from a biochemical point of view, and that is over,” he said. “If you want to understand how these diseases work in the lab, you really need to put the mechanical aspect into place.”

Dr. Dustin believes that the importance of rigidity is only the first step to truly understanding how cells interact with force. “We’ve basically found some interesting modulatory effects in our exploration over the past nine years,” he said. “But we don’t understand all of the things that we need to understand to realize that potential.”

Dr. Biais is unabashedly optimistic: “The sky’s the limit with what we can do with mechanobiology,” he said.

As these scientists toil away, poking, prodding and pulling in an attempt to unravel the mysteries of cellular mechanics, their work stands the chance of one day turning science fiction treatments into reality.

May the force, quite literally, be with them.

When Brooklyn College senior Jessica Voinov noticed she had an outstanding balance on her tuition for some reason, she wanted to find out why as soon as possible.

In a perfect world she would have been able to hop online, identify the cause of the discrepancy, and resolve the situation. But for her, this was not the case. She was not able to access her account on CUNYFirst, a new software system the City University of New York had installed for all of its 24 campuses, to view the balance from home.

She said she couldn’t decipher the system’s confusing account activity section, and decided she would have to talk to a real person. Frustrated, she called the school, and waited for roughly 45 minutes, only to be told that the CUNYFirst system was down, and that unfortunately, her account couldn’t be pulled up. She would have to try again another time.

Stories like this are common when it comes to CUNYFirst, which stands for City University of New York Fully Integrated Resources and Services Tool. The CUNYFirst system was originally designed to build a more cohesive university-wide system as well as increase security over the variety of software colleges had used previously. But CUNYFirst has been the target of derision, drawing many complaints from students and faculty.

Students have complained about not being able to register for classes, get IDs validated, and even worse problems, such as delayed registration and even to graduations being postponed.

Before CUNYFirst, Voinov and other students at Brooklyn College used a system called eSims to handle financial aid, grades, registration and the like for the school, which had 16,524 students in the fall, 2014 semester. This service was not CUNY-wide; other schools used applications that differed.

CUNYFirst was designed by Oracle, the same company that developed the disastrous healthcare.gov website in 2013. The system first rolled out in 2010 at Queens College and Queensborough Community College, and then expanded across the rest of the CUNY campuses in four waves. One CUNY faculty computing expert estimated its cost at an estimated $600 million, a number that has not been confirmed by CUNY.

CUNYFirst was billed as a way to “integrate all of our financial, human resources, and student processes within one Web-based system,” according to Mark Gold, chief technology officer at Brooklyn College and the college’s project management and technical readiness liaison for CUNYFirst. The system’s biggest draws were its ability to consolidate student information throughout CUNY, as well as to increase security for students, who would no longer use their Social Security numbers as identifiers. Instead each student was issued an EmplID number, used to log onto CUNYFirst and perform other tasks such as printing at kiosks around campus.

To many, it seemed CUNYFirst was an attempt to fix what was not broken. A FAQ memo titled “CUNYfirst for Academic Administrators and Advisors Frequently Asked Questions” that Brooklyn College officials sent out to administrators and academic advisors noted that several functions of eSims were no longer available in CUNYFirst.

For example, the waitlist function in eSims, which let students add themselves to a list to be added to a class in the event that that class was closed, was not immediately available in CUNYFirst, although the option was still visible in the enrollment screen, baffling students. The memo stated, “Students should be advised to ignore these prompts” which indicated the presence of the waitlist feature.

The same memo also seemed to acknowledge the frequent outages that seem to occur when the system is stressed, such as during enrollment periods. One question went, “CUNYFirst transactions sometimes seem much slower than comparable SIMS transactions. Will that be the case ongoing?” The answer was not reassuring. It said that while CUNY maintains the system’s vendor was “largely” meeting the standards set for required maximum response time, “CUNYfirst users overall agree that CF can be slower than legacy systems” it replaced. It added that “part of the issue may be the result of peaks in usage at various campuses,” which is exactly what happened when students tried to register for the fall 2014 semester, when the system went down for an extended period.

Students were not the only ones feeling frustrated with CUNYFirst. Professors also had their complaints. James Cox, a professor of computer and information science at Brooklyn College, said that he still uses Brooklyn College’s in-house web portal quite a bit rather than CUNYFirst, and recalled the story of a student who could not file for graduation in time because of a glitch in the CUNYFirst system.

Brian Dunphy, a lecturer in Brooklyn College’s Department of Television and Radio, said that CUNYFirst’s shortcomings were certainly annoying, but besides the sporadic outages, the system wasn’t too terrible. He sympathized with those who had to deal with the system on a daily basis, and had to relearn something that they had used everyday for years.

“It’s an imperfect system when everyone needs it to be perfect,” he lamented. When asked if he believed the system had improved since its introduction, he responded, “well so far today it hasn’t crashed yet.”

Like Cox, Dunphy tried his hardest not to use CUNYFirst, using it only for registration and grades when it came to his classes.

CUNY spokeswoman Rita Rodin acknowledged the problems that CUNYFirst had suffered but said there is a new application that students and faculty will be able to use to access their information without logging into CUNYFirst.

She also said that CUNY had taken significant steps to correct past problems, such as the “implementation of a comprehensive communications plan to provide greater access to information on the status of CUNYFirst at the start of the Spring 2015 semester.”

Rodin said CUNY administration was working to gather feedback from students and faculty in order “to learn more about the impact of outages during the start of the fall, 2014” semester. “We are implementing a communications plan for use, if necessary, during the critical time at the beginning of academic semesters.”

David Arnow, a professor of computer and information science at Brooklyn College, wrote several articles disparaging CUNYFirst. He charged that CUNY’s administration used it to consolidate its power over the campuses. In one article he asserts, “CUNY Central sought absolute control over all college activity, including curriculum.”

Arnow said the cost of CUNYFirst has ranged above $600 million, actually a low amount compared to what the system should have cost. He sees this as a potential reason as to why Oracle, the company behind CUNYFirst, was unable to produce a system that could keep up with high student demand, and which actually seemed to strip features from the previous “aging” systems.

Students who don’t receive financial aid have even less reason to use CUNYFirst outside of registration. But students who rely heavily on the system, such as those who depend on financial aid or those who are close to graduating, have been irritated by a user interface that has been called confusing, as well as the outages which delayed students from clearing up clerical problems.

Glitches in the system led Brooklyn College senior Karoline O’Brien to have to take an extra class that she didn’t need, as well as having another class entered into the system incorrectly, costing her hours of phone calls, emails and voicemails to fix.

Having attended the school for two years, she was used to using eSims, and had trouble with the new system. All in all, it took about three weeks to have her class information entered into the system correctly, she said, and only after being incredibly proactive on her part. What seemed like a harmless error could have actually stopped her from graduating had she not taken action, she explained.

In defense of CUNYFirst, Gold said that students and faculty members with CUNYFirst horror stories are a minority, and that “when things work OK, you don’t get feedback. It just gets used.” He said that CUNY “acknowledged that their communication with CUNYFirst users and the campuses during the crisis could have been much better.”

As far as addressing the outages that occurred sporadically, Gold said that Oracle had been expanding its capacity, as well as “expanding the throughput of the Internet lines that connect the university to the hosting center.”

But despite attempts to alleviate the stress on the system, students are still frustrated with CUNYFirst. Not everything can be accessed from the web portal, another Brooklyn College platform, and not everything can be accessed from CUNYFirst, causing students to maintain multiple accounts across multiple sites.

But while the system is still going through its growing pains, it is important to look at the vital services that it provides. Since the system is CUNY-wide, it makes it easier for transfer students to have all of their information consolidated in one location. CUNYFirst allows users to view their financial aid, academic progress, unofficial transcripts, and class schedules, which many students have had little trouble with when the system is up. Many general complaints were made about layout and aesthetics of CUNYFirst, with some complaining of small links and an unintuitive user interface.

How does CUNYFirst compare to the enrollment systems at schools outside CUNY? Pegeen Ellis, a junior at St. John’s University in Queens, demonstrated her school’s counterpart, which was quick, smooth, and had no instances of prolonged outages that she could remember. “Fighting other people for class spots is more of a hassle than fighting the system,” she said.

But while St. John’s may have a more responsive system, it must be noted that St. John’s is a private institution, with 20,729 undergraduate students as of 2013, compared to CUNY’s 24 institutions and 480,000 full- and part-time students.

For all of the technical enhancements CUNY officials claim that CUNYFirst has brought to students and faculty, Jessica Voinov sums up how many feel about the system in one sentence: “I didn’t see anything wrong with the previous system we used.”

Photo, top: Faina Gordover tries to avoid using CUNY’s new CUNYFirst computer system.