In joint statements, the three countries reaffirmed their commitment to fighting global warming.

These species are now heading toward France and Spain after entering the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal.

The river is expected to further ebb in the coming days with no significant rain in the forecast and temperatures expected to rise across the region.

A group of almost 200 scientists aims to secure funding to train 1,000 Ph.D.s over the next decade.

For Hugh Smith, the challenge of building an energy-secure future isn’t about creating the world’s “best” battery. It’s about designing the right battery for the right job.

As a fifth-year PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Smith studies sodium-ion batteries, an emerging alternative to the lithium-ion batteries that power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles. By replacing expensive critical minerals like lithium, nickel, and cobalt with more readily available elements like sodium, iron, and manganese, his research aims to make energy storage both more affordable and more sustainable.

“I’ve believed for a very long time that the biggest engineering problem humanity faces is the transition to clean energy,” Smith says. “Batteries are a critical bottleneck in that transition.”

Growing up in Albany, New York, Smith was drawn to materials science because it combined two of his favorite subjects: chemistry and math. What kept him interested, however, was the field’s ability to touch nearly every aspect of everyday life.

“Anytime you interact with a solid material, there are people who intentionally designed that material for a specific purpose,” he says.

That idea of designing materials with a real-world purpose eventually led him to batteries. After earning his undergraduate degree in materials science from Case Western Reserve University, Smith came to MIT to explore how new battery chemistries could reduce costs without sacrificing performance.

Consumers often want batteries that charge quickly, last for years, store large amounts of energy, and remain inexpensive. But in reality, improving one characteristic of this technology usually means compromising another. A smartphone battery, for example, prioritizes energy density and long lifespan, while a battery storing electricity for the power grid doesn’t need to be lightweight or compact. Instead, cost and reliability become the most important considerations.

Rather than chasing an all-encompassing solution, Smith focuses on finding the right balance for specific applications, often juggling competing priorities. Instead of strengthening a singular characteristic, Smith works to maximize as many components of the battery as possible, including cost, performance, sustainability, and reliability, depending on how it will be used.

“It’s trying to balance everything,” he says. “It’s not catering extremely to some properties and then abandoning others.” 

The sodium-ion batteries Smith studies could eventually provide lower-cost options for electrical grids or more affordable electric vehicles. Because sodium-ion batteries can largely be manufactured using the same infrastructure already developed for lithium-ion batteries, they also offer a potentially smoother path toward commercialization than many emerging battery technologies.

Smith’s graduate school journey has been defined as much by the process of learning how to do research as by the science itself. He joined a brand-new research group at MIT as its first graduate student, and helped establish the lab run by Professor Iwnetim Abate. Without senior graduate students or postdocs to turn to for day-to-day guidance, he often had to teach himself new techniques and how to troubleshoot when things went wrong.

“I learned not to be fearful of new things,” Smith says. “Just because I didn’t know how to do something didn’t mean I couldn’t figure it out.”

He says the experience transformed him into a more independent researcher and someone who is willing to dive headfirst into unfamiliar problems.

Before beginning graduate school, Smith spent seven months at the Battery Innovation Center in Newberry, Indiana, an experience that broadened his understanding of how scientific discoveries become real technologies. Working alongside materials scientists, chemists, mechanical engineers, and chemical engineers showed him that no single discipline can solve the challenges of battery development alone.

“It requires a huge team effort,” Smith says. “It requires a lot of different types of knowledge.”

He says the experience also helped him better understand where his own expertise could make the greatest impact and when collaboration across disciplines is essential.

Outside the lab, Smith makes time to stay active through MIT’s intramural sports program, where he plays soccer, ultimate frisbee, football, and volleyball on teams with fellow graduate students. The games offer a chance to unwind after long days of research while strengthening the friendships he’s built throughout graduate school. He also enjoys fishing around the Boston area with friends and exploring New England’s coastal towns, museums, and historic sites.

As he prepares to graduate in the winter and pursue a career in battery research and development, Smith hopes to continue designing technologies that support the transition to clean energy. 

“Lots of smart people have already made wind and solar very cheap,” Smith says. “The issue is reliability, and batteries can help solve that problem. I hope the work I’m doing helps to affordably unlock the transition to an electric grid powered by reliable clean energy, and an electrified transportation network.”

Daniela Rus, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science, has received the 2026 High-Tech Prize of the Bavarian Minister-President for her contributions to robotics, artificial intelligence, and autonomous systems. 

Awarded jointly by the Bavarian State Government and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, it is the most highly endowed award for technology and engineering in Germany. Rus accepted the prize on July 23 at the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residence.

The selection committee cited four strands of her work: self-organizing robot collectives, soft robotics, autonomous mobility, and brain-inspired artificial intelligence. Together they describe a 30-year effort to build machines that hold up outside the lab, in conditions no one scripted in advance.

That effort has arrived at a moment when physical AI has become a preoccupation for industry leaders and policymakers alike. When human-robot collaboration comes up, the examples tend to be household chores or the factory floor. Rus is working several orders of magnitude wider than that, developing algorithms and systems that put autonomous robots into transportation, agriculture, medicine, the home, and environmental monitoring. She is also a pioneer of soft robotics, where compliant machines manipulate the world more safely and adapt to it more readily than rigid ones can.

Her emphasis throughout has been on giving robots the intelligence to reason and adapt in the real world, through algorithms whose behavior can be explained.

"AI gives machines the ability to do work that humans don't want to do," she says. "It's not a battle between humans and machines. Both form a system that solves problems that neither humans nor machines can solve alone."

At CSAIL she leads the Distributed Robotics Laboratory, where that principle has produced some unusual solutions to durable problems. Her group helped build an ingestible origami robot capable of retrieving swallowed button batteries from a child's digestive tract, and a fleet of small autonomous boats that assemble themselves into bridges and platforms, turning a city's waterways into infrastructure that can be reconfigured on demand.

She also helped invent liquid neural networks, an architecture inspired by the compact nervous system of a millimeter-long worm. The networks can steer a vehicle through an unfamiliar environment using as few as 19 control neurons, a level of efficiency that conventional architectures cannot approach. The research led Rus and former CSAIL affiliates Ramin Hasani, Alexander Amini, and Mathias Lechner to found Liquid AI out of MIT CSAIL, building models designed from the start for the hardware constraints of the devices they run on.

"Daniela Rus is a pioneer in soft robotics and physical AI," noted Lorenzo Masia, professor of intelligent bio-robotic systems at the Technical University of Munich, in a press release. "The prize will help to bring this science to the forefront."

Rus' previous honors include the 2025 IEEE Edison Medal and the 2024 John Scott Award. She is a member of the 2002 class of MacArthur Fellows and has been elected to the French National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

This spring, 25 MIT students and postdocs traveled to Washington to meet with congressional staffers and advocate for sustained federal investment in scientific research. 

With recent cuts to National Science Foundation programs and continued uncertainty surrounding the federal research budget, these conversations were especially timely. Over the course of just two days, participants met with 62 congressional offices representing 32 states to discuss the importance of federal support for scientific research, higher education, and other policy concerns related to their individual research areas.

Each spring, the MIT Science Policy Initiative (SPI) organizes Congressional Visit Days (CVD), a program that introduces graduate students and postdocs to the federal policymaking process while demonstrating the many ways scientists can engage in policy advocacy. In addition to meeting with congressional offices, participants connect with Washington-based MIT alumni and members of the MIT Washington Office to learn about careers at the intersection of science and public policy.

This year's CVD was co-organized by Audrey Parker, a PhD student in civil and environmental engineering at MIT, and Ian Robertson, a PhD student in physical oceanography at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). Robertson reflects on the experience:

"Having attended the trip as a participant last year, stepping into the role of a co-leader this year was a big commitment that was well worth the payoff. It was rewarding to build on the work of past leaders, strengthening the CVD experience for participants by training and encouraging them to discuss not just general science funding advocacy in their meetings, but also specific policies tied to their research. I look forward to the future success of the CVD program in continuing to provide students and postdocs a template for science policy conversations with Congress and helping them realize the various avenues in which they can connect research to policy throughout their careers."

To prepare for the trip, participants attended three training sessions led by SPI in collaboration with the MIT Washington Office and the MIT Policy Lab. These sessions provided background on the federal appropriations process, the role of congressional staff in shaping legislation, and practical strategies for communicating scientific expertise to policymakers. The training sessions also gave participants a chance to practice sharing their research and policy pitches with each other in mock "Hill meetings."

While on the Hill, students advocated for both general science funding for the upcoming fiscal year as well as specific policies tied to their research in artificial intelligence, environmental science and engineering, energy, space, and health. They encouraged offices to edit language in bills, support bills already on the floor, or sponsor new bills. Staffers on both sides of the aisle were particularly interested in discussing AI privacy and security across disciplines. They also expressed strong interest in hot environmental topics, such as deep-sea mining, and were eager to learn more about its associated environmental consequences. In many cases, conversations about participants' research and science-based policy priorities reinforced the need for continued federal funding of science, enabling staffers to connect abstract funding decisions with the researchers and projects they support.

The experience proved valuable for both the MIT delegation and the congressional offices they visited. Rodrigo Zuniga, a first-year PhD student participant, highlights:

"Going to Washington, D.C., offered a whole new perspective of the role of science in politics for me. In today's news and social media landscape, it's really easy to see Washington as irreversibly polarized, but in talking to staffers from both the majority and minority parties, I saw a general desire for bipartisanship and widespread support for science. What's most clear to me after this experience with CVD is that there is a lot of room and pressing need for humans with scientific training and expertise to participate proactively in local, state, and federal government."

As scientific and technological issues continue to shape public policy, opportunities for researchers to engage with policymakers have never been more important. Programs like Congressional Visit Days help equip the next generation of scientists with the knowledge and confidence to communicate the value of research beyond the laboratory, strengthening connections between the scientific community and the policymakers whose decisions shape its future.

He’s being prosecuted for giving border officials a code that wiped his phone:

The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in place of the software on most modern Google Pixel devices. Tunick’s attorneys confirmed GrapheneOS was running on his phone.

The software feature allows the device owner to set a passcode that deliberately wipes the contents of that device if entered instead of the user’s unlock passcode.

Tunick’s case also raises ongoing questions about what constitutional rights can be invoked at the border, which the U.S. government has long asserted is not U.S. soil until a person is authorized to enter...

Nitrogen gas is abundant in Earth’s atmosphere, but most living organisms can’t readily use this nitrogen. Only a subset of microbes that have enzymes known as nitrogenases can break nitrogen gas apart and convert it into ammonia.

There are three different classes of nitrogenases found in nitrogen-fixing microbes, which vary based on the types of metal that they contain. Nitrogenases that contain the metal molybdenum are the most efficient, and two new studies from MIT offer an explanation for why that is.

The findings could help guide the design of engineered enzymes or synthetic catalysts that can convert nitrogen gas to ammonia, the researchers say.

The team found that while molybdenum doesn’t directly bind to nitrogen, it helps nearby iron atoms bind to nitrogen more strongly. This is a critical first step in breaking the bond between the two nitrogen atoms that form nitrogen gas.

“It’s that initial binding step that’s really the hard part. Once you’ve started to break the nitrogen-nitrogen triple bond and make some new nitrogen-hydrogen bonds, it’s pretty easy to get the rest of the way,” says Daniel Suess, the Arthur Amos Noyes Associate Professor of Chemistry at MIT and a senior author of both papers.

MIT postdoc Tong Wu and former postdoc Madeleine Ehweiner are the lead authors of one of the papers, and Alexandra Brown PhD ’23 is the lead author of the other. Kyle Lancaster, a professor of chemistry at Cornell University, is a senior author of the latter paper, along with Suess. Both papers appear today in the journal Chem.

Efficient enzymes

Before microbes evolved the ability to fix nitrogen around 3 billion years ago, the strong triple bond between atoms of N2 could only be split with high-energy events such as a lightning strike.

“Once an enzyme came along that could convert dinitrogen to ammonia, that changed the game because now cells could harvest nitrogen from the air for biomass,” Suess says.

Within the active site of nitrogenase is a catalytic cofactor that typically consists of a cluster of iron, sulfur, carbon, and in some cases another metal. Nitrogenases whose cofactors contain molybdenum are the most efficient, followed by those containing the metal vanadium. Nitrogenases that don’t have any metal other than iron are the least efficient.

Why the molybdenum-containing enzyme is more efficient has been a puzzle, especially because it’s thought that molybdenum itself doesn’t bind directly to nitrogen gas.

“In all cases, iron is thought to interact with N2, so it’s a bit of a mystery,” Suess says. “If all the chemistry is happening at iron, why is it that this molybdenum is affecting catalysis?”

To answer that question, Suess’s lab has developed simpler versions of iron-sulfur clusters that they can use to model the naturally occurring cofactors. These can be modified by adding different metal atoms, allowing the researchers to study how those metals change the cofactors’ properties. 

In the first paper, led by Wu and Ehweiner, the researchers swapped in different metal atoms and then measured the ability of the iron in the cofactor to bind to nitrogen. They found that only cofactors with a large metal atom, such as molybdenum or tungsten, were able to strongly bind N2. With vanadium,  chromium, or iron, which are smaller, the cofactors did not bind N2 and performed other reactions instead.

“That paper essentially recapitulates what you see in biology, which is that the iron-sulfur clusters that have molybdenum in them seem to be better at binding dinitrogen than those with lighter metals,” Suess says.

Sharing electrons

In the second paper, led by Brown, the researchers uncovered a possible mechanism that explains that phenomenon. 

In that paper, the researchers studied how cofactors containing different metals interact with compounds called N-heterocyclic carbenes. These molecules behave similarly to N2 in some ways, making them a good model for this type of study. Like N2, they are resistant to accepting any electrons from another molecule, which is an essential step to breaking chemical bonds. 

The researchers found that when molybdenum was included in the cluster, it became easier for iron to donate some of its electrons to the N-heterocyclic carbenes, in a process known as back-bonding. This occurs because molybdenum, a large atom, has large orbitals that can overlap with the orbitals of the nearby iron atom. That alters iron’s electron density in ways that make it easier for iron to pass electrons to N2.

“Without these direct metal-metal interactions, the iron has to do all the work, but adding the molybdenum allows for this electronic cooperativity,” Suess says.

Once N2 is bound to an iron atom, the rest of the reaction can proceed. A proton can come in from water or another source to create an N-H bond, which then makes it much easier for the remaining N-N bonds to be broken and bind to protons, forming NH3. 

The findings could help guide scientists who are working on designing enzymes that could be engineered into organisms that help them generate their own NH3, eliminating or reducing the need for fertilizer. The results could also help chemists to design synthetic catalysts that could produce ammonia industrially, using less energy than the Haber-Bosch process. 

“The general principle is that you can make an iron site in any context behave differently when you have these metal-metal interactions than when you don’t have these interactions,” Suess says. “The primary result of these findings is to teach us about the natural world and how nature accomplishes this really important and miraculous reaction. And, maybe that can be translated into new processes.”

The research was funded primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

This essay originally appeared in The Guardian.

I teach public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Munk School at the University of Toronto. And it will come as no surprise to you that my students regularly use AI to complete their writing assignments. Doing so is a waste of their tuition money. But if their entire career is going to include AI writing assistants, why shouldn’t they embrace their future?

The best way I’ve found to explain the dilemma comes from the AI researcher Daniel Meissler: it’s the difference between work and the gym...

The state attorney general said she doesn’t need the Legislature’s permission to sue fossil fuel producers for contributing to climate change.

Seventeen essays outline a clean energy action plan for a future Democratic president.

Advanced Energy United wants gubernatorial candidates to bone up on grid issues — fast.

Global sales of electric cars are expected to grow 10 percent this year, hitting 29 percent of total car sales.

The European Central Bank and EU insurance regulators have called on Brussels to set up an EU-level reinsurance scheme and a public natural disaster fund.

Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is casting the wildfire crisis as evidence the French state can no longer protect its citizens.

Ten investors claimed losses after Bucharest changed its subsidy plans.

“Tourism was really the only dynamic part of the business that was still growing,” said a winemaker. “And now this comes along as a brake.”

Fires in Africa and Asia are way down due to changing agricultural practices, fire management and where people are moving.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 30 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02694-x

Climate change communication differs across regions, shaped by unique political, economic, social and environmental conditions. These influence how climate messages are framed, received and acted upon by the local public. To explore this diversity, Nature Climate Change spoke to globally distributed scholars for their perspectives on the communication patterns, challenges and priorities in their regions.