Concrete is a significant portion of the emissions associated with building data centers. But the “boom in data centers is providing an opportunity to evaluate, address and move on the carbon impacts of concrete,” said an engineer.

Olympic athletes want a course that will hold up without becoming too mushy or rutted. Mother Nature can’t always provide for that.

Dangerously unchecked surveillance and rights violations have been a throughline of the Department of Homeland Security since the agency’s creation in the wake of the September 11th attacks. In particular, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been responsible for countless civil liberties and digital rights violations since that time. In the past year, however, ICE and CBP have descended into utter lawlessness, repeatedly refusing to exercise or submit to the democratic accountability required by the Constitution and our system of laws.  

The Trump Administration has made indiscriminate immigration enforcement and mass deportation a key feature of its agenda, with little to no accountability for illegal actions by agents and agency officials. Over the past year, we’ve seen massive ICE raids in cities from Los Angeles to Chicago to Minneapolis. Supercharged by an unprecedented funding increase, immigration enforcement agents haven’t been limited to boots on the ground: they’ve been scanning faces, tracking neighborhood cell phone activity, and amassing surveillance tools to monitor immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. 

Congress must vote to reject any further funding of ICE and CBP

The latest enforcement actions in Minnesota have led to federal immigration agents killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Both were engaged in their First Amendment right to observe and record law enforcement when they were killed. And it’s only because others similarly exercised their right to record that these killings were documented and widely exposed, countering false narratives the Trump Administration promoted in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable.  

These constitutional violations are systemic, not one-offs. Just last week, the Associated Press reported a leaked ICE memo that authorizes agents to enter homes solely based on “administrative” warrants—lacking any judicial involvement. This government policy is contrary to the “very core” of the Fourth Amendment, which protects us against unreasonable search and seizure, especially in our own homes.  

These violations must stop now. ICE and CBP have grown so disdainful of the rule of law that reforms or guardrails cannot suffice. We join with many others in saying that Congress must vote to reject any further funding of ICE and CBP this week. But that is not enough. It’s time for Congress to do the real work of rebuilding our immigration enforcement system from the ground up, so that it respects human rights (including digital rights) and human dignity, with real accountability for individual officers, their leadership, and the agency as a whole.

Dangerously unchecked surveillance and rights violations have been a throughline of the Department of Homeland Security since the agency’s creation in the wake of the September 11th attacks. In particular, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been responsible for countless civil liberties and digital rights violations since that time. In the past year, however, ICE and CBP have descended into utter lawlessness, repeatedly refusing to exercise or submit to the democratic accountability required by the Constitution and our system of laws.  

The Trump Administration has made indiscriminate immigration enforcement and mass deportation a key feature of its agenda, with little to no accountability for illegal actions by agents and agency officials. Over the past year, we’ve seen massive ICE raids in cities from Los Angeles to Chicago to Minneapolis. Supercharged by an unprecedented funding increase, immigration enforcement agents haven’t been limited to boots on the ground: they’ve been scanning faces, tracking neighborhood cell phone activity, and amassing surveillance tools to monitor immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. 

The latest enforcement actions in Minnesota have led to federal immigration agents killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Both were engaged in their First Amendment right to observe and record law enforcement when they were killed. And it’s only because others similarly exercised their right to record that these killings were documented and widely exposed, countering false narratives the Trump Administration promoted in an attempt to justify the unjustifiable.  

These constitutional violations are systemic, not one-offs. Just last week, the Associated Press reported a leaked ICE memo that authorizes agents to enter homes solely based on “administrative” warrants—lacking any judicial involvement. This government policy is contrary to the “very core” of the Fourth Amendment, which protects us against unreasonable search and seizure, especially in our own homes.  

These violations must stop now. ICE and CBP have grown so disdainful of the rule of law that reforms or guardrails cannot suffice. We join with many others in saying that Congress must vote to reject any further funding of ICE and CBP this week. But that is not enough. It’s time for Congress to do the real work of rebuilding our immigration enforcement system from the ground up, so that it respects human rights (including digital rights) and human dignity, with real accountability for individual officers, their leadership, and the agency as a whole.  

It became the 11th state to file a lawsuit against the petroleum industry, despite efforts by the Trump administration to block the case.

But FEMA protections are now in limbo, with Democrats vowing to block a Homeland Security funding bill after a federal agent killed a Minneapolis protester Saturday.

This is coming:

The Irish government is planning to bolster its police’s ability to intercept communications, including encrypted messages, and provide a legal basis for spyware use.

Employment losses across the clean energy sector undercut the Trump administration's broader push to revive U.S. manufacturing.

State attorneys general warned that six administration actions being challenged in federal court "severely and unlawfully" hinder wind and solar project development.

Last year's "Clear Horizons Act" died in committee after some Democrats warned about its impact on low-income residents.

“Apps don’t understand the details of why snow, sleet or freezing rain happens," a meteorology professor said.

The only way to achieve anything in the semiautonomous Danish territory is through icebreakers’ crucial ability to cut trails through frozen seas.

Climate change has amplified fire conditions in South America and elsewhere, and the recent fires broke out amid a severe heat wave, with high temperatures in some places around 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

South Africa’s electricity minister said the money offered under the compact wasn’t “competitive” with debt available through capital markets.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 26 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02547-z

Climate change is tightening its grip on the world’s drinking water, threatening both safety and supply. Without urgent and coordinated adaptation of treatment systems, this overlooked vulnerability could compromise global water security.

On his desk, Bryan Bryson ’07, PhD ’13 still has the notes he used for the talk he gave at MIT when he interviewed for a faculty position in biological engineering. On that sheet, he outlined the main question he wanted to address in his lab: How do immune cells kill bacteria?

Since starting his lab in 2018, Bryson has continued to pursue that question, which he sees as critical for finding new ways to target infectious diseases that have plagued humanity for centuries, especially tuberculosis. To make significant progress against TB, researchers need to understand how immune cells respond to the disease, he says.

“Here is a pathogen that has probably killed more people in human history than any other pathogen, so you want to learn how to kill it,” says Bryson, now an associate professor at MIT. “That has really been the core of our scientific mission since I started my lab. How does the immune system see this bacterium and how does the immune system kill the bacterium? If we can unlock that, then we can unlock new therapies and unlock new vaccines.”

The only TB vaccine now available, the BCG vaccine, is a weakened version of a bacterium that causes TB in cows. This vaccine is widely administered in some parts of the world, but it poorly protects adults against pulmonary TB. Although some treatments are available, tuberculosis still kills more than a million people every year.

“To me, making a better TB vaccine comes down to a question of measurement, and so we have really tried to tackle that problem head-on. The mission of my lab is to develop new measurement modalities and concepts that can help us accelerate a better TB vaccine,” says Bryson, who is also a member of the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard.

From engineering to immunology

Engineering has deep roots in Bryson’s family: His great-grandfather was an engineer who worked on the Panama Canal, and his grandmother loved to build things and would likely have become an engineer if she had had the educational opportunity, Bryson says.

The oldest of four sons, Bryson was raised primarily by his mother and grandparents, who encouraged his interest in science. When he was three years old, his family moved from Worcester, Massachusetts, to Miami, Florida, where he began tinkering with engineering himself, building robots out of Styrofoam cups and light bulbs. After moving to Houston, Texas, at the beginning of seventh grade, Bryson joined his school’s math team.

As a high school student, Bryson had his heart set on studying biomedical engineering in college. However, MIT, one of his top choices, didn’t have a biomedical engineering program, and biological engineering wasn’t yet offered as an undergraduate major. After he was accepted to MIT, his family urged him to attend and then figure out what he would study.

Throughout his first year, Bryson deliberated over his decision, with electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and aeronautics and astronautics both leading contenders. As he recalls, he thought he might study aero/astro with a minor in biomedical engineering and work on spacesuit design.

However, during an internship the summer after his first year, his mentor gave him a valuable piece of advice: “You should study something that will let you have a lot of options, because you don’t know how the world is going to change.”

When he came back to MIT for his sophomore year, Bryson switched his major to mechanical engineering, with a bioengineering track. He also started looking for undergraduate research positions. A poster in the hallway grabbed his attention, and he ended up with working with the professor whose work was featured: Linda Griffith, a professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering.

Bryson’s experience in the lab “changed the trajectory of my life,” he says. There, he worked on building microfluidic devices that could be used to grow liver tissue from hepatocytes. He enjoyed the engineering aspects of the project, but he realized that he also wanted to learn more about the cells and why they behaved the way they did. He ended up staying at MIT to earn a PhD in biological engineering, working with Forest White.

In White’s lab, Bryson studied cell signaling processes and how they are altered in diseases such as cancer and diabetes. While doing his PhD research, he also became interested in studying infectious diseases. After earning his degree, he went to work with a professor of immunology at the Harvard School of Public Health, Sarah Fortune.

Fortune studies tuberculosis, and in her lab, Bryson began investigating how Mycobacterium tuberculosis interacts with host cells. During that time, Fortune instilled in him a desire to seek solutions to tuberculosis that could be transformative — not just identifying a new antibiotic, for example, but finding a way to dramatically reduce the incidence of the disease. This, he thought, could be done by vaccination, and in order to do that, he needed to understand how immune cells response to the disease. 

“That postdoc really taught me how to think bravely about what you could do if you were not limited by the measurements you could make today,” Bryson says. “What are the problems we really need to solve? There are so many things you could think about with TB, but what’s the thing that’s going to change history?”

Pursuing vaccine targets

Since joining the MIT faculty eight years ago, Bryson and his students have developed new ways to answer the question he posed in his faculty interviews: How does the immune system kill bacteria?

One key step in this process is that immune cells must be able to recognize bacterial proteins that are displayed on the surfaces of infected cells. Mycobacterium tuberculosis produces more than 4,000 proteins, but only a small subset of those end up displayed by infected cells. Those proteins would likely make the best candidates for a new TB vaccine, Bryson says.

Bryson’s lab has developed ways to identify those proteins, and so far, their studies have revealed that many of the TB antigens displayed to the immune system belong to a class of proteins known as type 7 secretion system substrates. Mycobacterium tuberculosis expresses about 100 of these proteins, but which of these 100 are displayed by infected cells varies from person to person, depending on their genetic background.

By studying blood samples from people of different genetic backgrounds, Bryson’s lab has identified the TB proteins displayed by infected cells in about 50 percent of the human population. He is now working on the remaining 50 percent and believes that once those studies are finished, he’ll have a very good idea of which proteins could be used to make a TB vaccine that would work for nearly everyone.

Once those proteins are chosen, his team can work on designing the vaccine and then testing it in animals, with hopes of being ready for clinical trials in about six years.

In spite of the challenges ahead, Bryson remains optimistic about the possibility of success, and credits his mother for instilling a positive attitude in him while he was growing up.

“My mom decided to raise all four of her children by herself, and she made it look so flawless,” Bryson says. “She instilled a sense of ‘you can do what you want to do,’ and a sense of optimism. There are so many ways that you can say that something will fail, but why don’t we look to find the reasons to continue?”

One of the things he loves about MIT is that he has found a similar can-do attitude across the Institute.

“The engineer ethos of MIT is that yes, this is possible, and what we’re trying to find is the way to make this possible,” he says. “I think engineering and infectious disease go really hand-in-hand, because engineers love a problem, and tuberculosis is a really hard problem.”

When not tackling hard problems, Bryson likes to lighten things up with ice cream study breaks at Simmons Hall, where he is an associate head of house. Using an ice cream machine he has had since 2009, Bryson makes gallons of ice cream for dorm residents several times a year. Nontraditional flavors such as passion fruit or jalapeno strawberry have proven especially popular.

“Recently I did flavors of fall, so I did a cinnamon ice cream, I did a pear sorbet,” he says. “Toasted marshmallow was a huge hit, but that really destroyed my kitchen.”

We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what's at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

Long before generative AI, copyright holders warned that new technologies for reading and analyzing information would destroy creativity. Internet search engines, they argued, were infringement machines—tools that copied copyrighted works at scale without permission. As they had with earlier information technologies like the photocopier and the VCR, copyright owners sued.

Courts disagreed. They recognized that copying works in order to understand, index, and locate information is a classic fair use—and a necessary condition for a free and open internet.

Today, the same argument is being recycled against AI. It’s whether copyright owners should be allowed to control how others analyze, reuse, and build on existing works.

Fair Use Protects Analysis—Even When It’s Automated

U.S. courts have long recognized that copying for purposes of analysis, indexing, and learning is a classic fair use. That principle didn’t originate with artificial intelligence. It doesn’t disappear just because the processes are performed by a machine.

Copying works in order to understand them, extract information from them, or make them searchable is transformative and lawful. That’s why search engines can index the web, libraries can make digital indexes, and researchers can analyze large collections of text and data without negotiating licenses from millions of rightsholders. These uses don’t substitute for the original works; they enable new forms of knowledge and expression.

Training AI models fits squarely within that tradition. An AI system learns by analyzing patterns across many works. The purpose of that copying is not to reproduce or replace the original texts, but to extract statistical relationships that allow the AI system to generate new outputs. That is the hallmark of a transformative use. 

Attacking AI training on copyright grounds misunderstands what’s at stake. If copyright law is expanded to require permission for analyzing or learning from existing works, the damage won’t be limited to generative AI tools. It could threaten long-standing practices in machine learning and text-and-data mining that underpin research in science, medicine, and technology. 

Researchers already rely on fair use to analyze massive datasets such as scientific literature. Requiring licenses for these uses would often be impractical or impossible, and it would advantage only the largest companies with the money to negotiate blanket deals. Fair use exists to prevent copyright from becoming a barrier to understanding the world. The law has protected learning before. It should continue to do so now, even when that learning is automated. 

A Road Forward For AI Training And Fair Use 

One court has already shown how these cases should be analyzed. In Bartz v. Anthropic, the court found that using copyrighted works to train an AI model is a highly transformative use. Training is a kind of studying how language works—not about reproducing or supplanting the original books. Any harm to the market for the original works was speculative. 

The court in Bartz rejected the idea that an AI model might infringe because, in some abstract sense, its output competes with existing works. While EFF disagrees with other parts of the decision, the court’s ruling on AI training and fair use offers a good approach. Courts should focus on whether training is transformative and non-substitutive, not on fear-based speculation about how a new tool could affect someone’s market share. 

AI Can Create Problems, But Expanding Copyright Is the Wrong Fix 

Workers’ concerns about automation and displacement are real and should not be ignored. But copyright is the wrong tool to address them. Managing economic transitions and protecting workers during turbulent times are core functions of government. Copyright law doesn’t help with those tasks in the slightest. Expanding copyright control over learning and analysis won’t stop new forms of worker automation—it never has. But it will distort copyright law and undermine free expression. 

Broad licensing mandates may also do harm by entrenching the current biggest incumbent companies. Only the largest tech firms can afford to negotiate massive licensing deals covering millions of works. Smaller developers, research teams, nonprofits, and open-source projects will all get locked out. Copyright expansion won’t restrain Big Tech—it will give it a new advantage.  

Fair Use Still Matters

Learning from prior work is foundational to free expression. Rightsholders cannot be allowed to control it. Courts have rejected that move before, and they should do so again.

Search, indexing, and analysis didn’t destroy creativity. Nor did the photocopier, nor the VCR. They expanded speech, access to knowledge, and participation in culture. Artificial intelligence raises hard new questions, but fair use remains the right starting point for thinking about training.

We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what's at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

Long before generative AI, copyright holders warned that new technologies for reading and analyzing information would destroy creativity. Internet search engines, they argued, were infringement machines—tools that copied copyrighted works at scale without permission. As they had with earlier information technologies like the photocopier and the VCR, copyright owners sued.

Courts disagreed. They recognized that copying works in order to understand, index, and locate information is a classic fair use—and a necessary condition for a free and open internet.

Today, the same argument is being recycled against AI. It’s whether copyright owners should be allowed to control how others analyze, reuse, and build on existing works.

Fair Use Protects Analysis—Even When It’s Automated

U.S. courts have long recognized that copying for purposes of analysis, indexing, and learning is a classic fair use. That principle didn’t originate with artificial intelligence. It doesn’t disappear just because the processes are performed by a machine.

Copying that works in order to understand them, extract information from them, or make them searchable is transformative and lawful. That’s why search engines can index the web, libraries can make digital indexes, and researchers can analyze large collections of text and data without negotiating licenses from millions of rightsholders. These uses don’t substitute for the original works; they enable new forms of knowledge and expression.

Training AI models fits squarely within that tradition. An AI system learns by analyzing patterns across many works. The purpose of that copying is not to reproduce or replace the original texts, but to extract statistical relationships that allow the AI system to generate new outputs. That is the hallmark of a transformative use. 

Attacking AI training on copyright grounds misunderstands what’s at stake. If copyright law is expanded to require permission for analyzing or learning from existing works, the damage won’t be limited to generative AI tools. It could threaten long-standing practices in machine learning and text-and-data mining that underpin research in science, medicine, and technology. 

Researchers already rely on fair use to analyze massive datasets such as scientific literature. Requiring licenses for these uses would often be impractical or impossible, and it would advantage only the largest companies with the money to negotiate blanket deals. Fair use exists to prevent copyright from becoming a barrier to understanding the world. The law has protected learning before. It should continue to do so now, even when that learning is automated. 

A Road Forward For AI Training And Fair Use 

One court has already shown how these cases should be analyzed. In Bartz v. Anthropic, the court found that using copyrighted works to train an AI model is a highly transformative use. Training is a kind of studying how language works—not about reproducing or supplanting the original books. Any harm to the market for the original works was speculative. 

The court in Bartz rejected the idea that an AI model might infringe because, in some abstract sense, its output competes with existing works. While EFF disagrees with other parts of the decision, the court’s ruling on AI training and fair use offers a good approach. Courts should focus on whether training is transformative and non-substitutive, not on fear-based speculation about how a new tool could affect someone’s market share. 

AI Can Create Problems, But Expanding Copyright Is the Wrong Fix 

Workers’ concerns about automation and displacement are real and should not be ignored. But copyright is the wrong tool to address them. Managing economic transitions and protecting workers during turbulent times may be core functions of government, but copyright law doesn’t help with that task in the slightest. Expanding copyright control over learning and analysis won’t stop new forms of worker automation—it never has. But it will distort copyright law and undermine free expression. 

Broad licensing mandates may also do harm by entrenching the current biggest incumbent companies. Only the largest tech firms can afford to negotiate massive licensing deals covering millions of works. Smaller developers, research teams, nonprofits, and open-source projects will all get locked out. Copyright expansion won’t restrain Big Tech—it will give it a new advantage.  

Fair Use Still Matters

Learning from prior work is foundational to free expression. Rightsholders cannot be allowed to control it. Courts have rejected that move before, and they should do so again.

Search, indexing, and analysis didn’t destroy creativity. Nor did the photocopier, nor the VCR. They expanded speech, access to knowledge, and participation in culture. Artificial intelligence raises hard new questions, but fair use remains the right starting point for thinking about training.

Spock befriends a giant space squid in the comic Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The Seeds of Salvation #5.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT, has won the 2025 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences for “discoveries concerning the ‘magic angle’ that allows the behavior of new materials to be transformed and controlled.”

He shares the 400,000-euro award with Allan MacDonald of the University of Texas at Austin. According to the BBVA Foundation, “the pioneering work of the two physicists has achieved both the theoretical foundation and experimental validation of a new field where superconductivity, magnetism, and other properties can be obtained by rotating new two-dimensional materials like graphene.” Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons resembling a honeycomb structure.

Theoretical foundation, experimental validation

In a theoretical model published in 2011, MacDonald predicted that on twisting two graphene layers at a given angle, of around 1 degree, the interaction of electrons would produce new emerging properties.
 
In 2018, Jarillo-Herrero delivered the experimental confirmation of this “magic angle” by rotating two graphene sheets in a way that transformed the material’s behavior, giving rise to new properties like superconductivity.

The physicists’ work “has opened up new frontiers in physics by demonstrating that rotating matter to a given angle allows us to control its behavior, obtaining properties that could have a major industrial impact,” explained award committee member María José García Borge, a research professor at the Institute for the Structure of Matter. “Superconductivity, for example, could bring about far more sustainable electricity transmission, with virtually no energy loss.”

Almost science fiction

MacDonald’s initial discovery had little immediate impact. It was not until some years later, when it was confirmed in the laboratory by Jarillo-Herrero, that its true importance was revealed. 

“The community would never have been so interested in my subject, if there hadn’t been an experimental program that realized that original vision,” observes MacDonald, who refers to his co-laureate’s achievement as “almost science fiction.”

Jarillo-Herrero had been intrigued by the possible effects of placing two graphene sheets on top of each other with a precise rotational alignment, because “it was uncharted territory, beyond the reach of the physics of the past, so was bound to produce some interesting results.”

But the scientist was still unsure of how to make it work in the lab. For years, he had been stacking together layers of the super-thin material, but without being able to specify the angle between them. Finally, he devised a way to do so, making the angle smaller and smaller until he got to the “magic” angle of 1.1 degrees at which the graphene revealed some extraordinary behavior.

“It was a big surprise, because the technique we used, though conceptually straightforward, was hard to pull off in the lab,” says Jarillo-Herrero, who is also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory.

Since 2009, the BBVA has given Frontiers of Knowledge Awards to more than a dozen MIT faculty members. The Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, spanning eight prize categories, recognize world-class research and cultural creation and aim to celebrate and promote the value of knowledge as a global public good. The BBVA Foundation works to support scientific research and cultural creation, disseminate knowledge and culture, and recognize talent and innovation.