The student newspaper of Stevens Institute of Technology, and creator of Attila the Duck. www.thestute.com TikTok @thestute Instagram @thestute facebook.com/stevensthestute
Last Stute before The Stupe :0
We write Stevens history VOLUME CXXIII No. 20
HOBOKEN, NJ | MARCH 13, 2026
NEW STUTE EVERY FRIDAY • EST. 1904
Stevens students volunteer at Weehawken Middle School STEM Night BY HUGO HOLLAND, STAFF WRITER Stevens students recently volunteered at the Weehawken Middle School STEM Night, leading a variety of interactive experiments and workshops for the children there. On February 26, Theodore Roosevelt School, a Weehawken Middle School ranging from third to sixth grade, set up various stations in the school gym where Roosevelt School students were able to learn more about science through performing experiments. The Roosevelt School’s first STEM night was hosted by the Parent Teacher Association with support from the Weehawken High School STEM Club, Robotics Club, and Student Council. Connor McGinley, a ¼ Mechanical Engineering major, was one of roughly a dozen Stevens students who volunteered at the event. “It was fulfilling and fun to help the kids learn more about the spine and civil engineering,” he said, adding that Stevens students ran “a boat-making stand, a marshmallow-spaghetti tower stand, a spine-making stand, and a microcontroller presentation stand.”
The event was a first for Roosevelt School, yet the collaboration and communication with the outside groups were seamless. Groups present included: the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, and the Stevens Health Professionals. All of these groups helped the teachers put on the event, McGinley said. The volunteers helped with “cutting pool noodles for materials or knowing if they had enough marshmallows to make marshmallow-spaghetti towers.” Other Stevens booths “taught the kids about microcontroller boards and buoyancy.” The Stevens students were joined in putting on the event by several other local groups, including the Weehawken High School STEM club and the Weehawken Public Library. Local high school student, Delia Holland, worked the lava lamp station and described the night as a rewarding experience. “It was really nice seeing the kids enjoying the experiments — it was heartwarming to
SEE STEM PAGE 2
Decoding the brain with AI BY SOFIA STOECKEL, STAFF WRITER
din Band, and Jorts. These bands are all the work of Stevens’ own students, and seeing all the different acts and their styles throughout the night led to a very entertaining show. The show, being completely student-run and full of student bands, stu-
Dr. Feng Liu is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Systems Engineering here at Stevens, and his latest project is making and developing AI models that help “decode” the brain with the help of multiple other already existing medical tools, such as an electroencephalogram (EEG) and different types of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). His project helps explain how the brain works in explicit detail, as well as how other things like addiction and Alzheimer’s affect the brain and disrupt it. His time at Harvard Medical School taught him that math can be used to serve clinical needs, and he still uses that in his current work. He has worked with teams at other locations in the U.S., like Rutgers or Georgia Tech, and teams internationally in places such as Canada, Germany, Taiwan, and Australia for projects. The Stevens motto “Inspired by humanity, powered by technology,” inspires him and aligns with the projects he does. He got the idea for his
SEE BAND PAGE 2
SEE AI PAGE 2
ANTHONY SEVILLA FOR THE STUTE
Battle of the Bands 2026 BY VIKTOR PALMER, OPINION COLUMNIST On Saturday, March 7, the Entertainment Committee held its yearly Battle of the Bands event at 7:30 p.m. in Bissinger. This is a huge event that many members of the Stevens music scene look forward to, and the selected
winners are offered the opportunity to open for the Techfest headliner. Any students who showed up before the start time were eligible to vote for their favorite band. There was a lineup of talented student bands this year, featuring Portland Hotel Yard Sale, Desire Lines, Flower Crowns, Angelidis, Eve Go-
NATIONAL NEWS Trump Administration Anthropic’s pushback against federal government files lawsuit against New Jersey tract granted to Anthropic the joint U.S.-Israeli bom- immigration executive order BY RISHI Major Silicon Valley AI firm Anthropic has walked away from talks with the U.S. Department of Defense and released a statement from CEO Dario Amodei publicly opposing the federal government, in response to Anthropic’s concerns over how they will use Anthropic’s products both in foreign wars and for domestic purposes. The federal government has responded aggressively, with President Donald Trump giving the U.S. military six months to stop using Anthropic products entirely. The standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon began in earnest on February 24, when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, in a meeting with Amodei at the Pentagon, issued an ultimatum towards Anthropic to either allow the U.S. military unfettered access to Claude AI, Anthropic’s flagship AI model, by February 27, or face severe penalties, likely in the form of termination of a $200 million con-
and three other AI companies—OpenAI, Google, and xAI— in July of last year. Anthropic’s statement came two days after this meeting, announcing their refusal to comply with the administration. In the statement, Amodei lists two main concerns: “mass domestic surveillance” and “fully autonomous weapons”. Although not explicitly mentioned in the statement, the former concern could be referring to the use of AI in aiding immigration enforcement. ICE is gradually increasing its utilization of AI in several aspects of its operations, most notably working with data analytics firm Palantir for data extraction, tip processing, and software development. The second concern, the U.S.’s use of “fully autonomous weapons,” likely relates to the then-increase in deployment of U.S. forces around Iran, which has since developed into a fullscale war that has resulted in the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Claude AI has been used by the U.S. military in
NEWS (2)
SCIENCE (6)
FEATURE (4)
PULSE (10)
PRABHAKAR, STAFF WRITER
Battle of the Bands 2026 Learn about the different bands that competed in this years Battle of the Bands! The winners will be the openers for Techlex! Midterms + Traditions Learn about how to handle midterms and the traditions Stevens students in the past used for good luck on their exams!
CHATGPT = Therapist? Wireless retinal implant? Universe star? Read about what’s going on in the world of science. Read answers from the Stevens community to our weekly Roving Reporter, plus solve our weekly puzzle and sudoku.
bardment of Iran, even after the Anthropic ban. Anthropic’s concerns also come in the wake of Claude AI being used by the government in the operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. U.S. special operations forces used Claude both during the planning and the execution of the raid, and it is unclear whether Anthropic’s permission was obtained before the raid occurred or whether the raid violates Anthropic’s usage policy. On February 27, the day of the deadline passing, the Pentagon designated Anthropic a supply chain risk, meaning that Anthropic would be completely excluded from defense contracts with the U.S. government. In response, Amodei announced in another statement that Anthropic would challenge the ruling in court. The Trump administration and the Pentagon have made several harsh statements against An-
SEE ANTHROPIC PAGE 2
BY CLAIRE DEANS, NEWS WRITER On February 11, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed Executive Order No. 12, “prohibit[ing] ICE agents from entering, accessing, or using nonpublic areas of State property for their operations unless authorized by a judicial warrant.” This state order complements the state assembly bill NJ A4446, coined the “F*CK ICE Bill,” which seeks to create a private right of action allowing individuals to sue federal agents in response to the “killing [of] Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.” As U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrived in the Hoboken and Jersey City area, Hudson County Executive Craig Guy signed a similar order a few weeks prior to the governor on January 29. On February 23, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a response in a lawsuit filed against the State of New Jersey and Gov. Sherrill.
In a press release, Attorney General Pamela Bondi asserted that “states may not deliberately interfere with [federal] efforts to remove illegal aliens and arrest criminals.” There is currently a heated controversy between the federal and state courts. The order obeys the New Jersey Safe Communities Act, approved by the state legislature, that allows the state attorney general’s office to protect individuals in certain locations, such as courthouses, hospitals, shelters, and food pantries. Opponents argue the policy conflicts with the Supremacy Clause and the 2025 decision in CoreCivic, Inc. v. Murphy, ruling that state bans against private immigration detention center contracts as interference with federal authority and unconstitutional. The order contradicts the Supreme Court decision as “a state law that wholesale deprives the federal government of its chosen method of detaining individuals for violating federal law
cannot survive Supremacy Clause scrutiny”; in other words, critics argue that state laws cannot prevent the federal government from carrying out federal law as the Supremacy Clause puts federal power over state power. Following the suit, Gov. Sherrill responded in defense of the executive order and redirected attention to federal law enforcement standards.: “I think what the federal government needs to be focused on right now, instead of attacking states like New Jersey working to keep people safe, is actually training their ICE agents, with some modicum of training, like any law enforcement officer in the state of New Jersey would have, so that they can operate better and more safely.” Those in support of Gov. Sherrill and her executive order have pointed out that the “federal lawsuit misspells Sherrill’s
SEE LAWSUIT PAGE 3