Nations in Europe and Asia are delaying coal phase-outs and lifting restrictions. The resurgence could be long-term, analysts say.

The Trump administration takes aim at a 2024 lawsuit that seeks to force fossil fuel companies to pay the costs of addressing climate change

By threatening to create a public utility, city officials helped steer Tucson Electric Power toward an agreement where it would spend $56 million over 25 years on climate action.

The EU Commission letter reflects growing fears that the Iran war is sparking an all-out global economic crisis.

Producers of fuel made from agricultural products argue they should have a greater role in the EU’s clean fuel plans.

The European Commission plans to scrap the invalidation of certain permits in its Market Stability Reserve while leaving the volume thresholds and the absorption rate intact.

One option under discussion at the state-controlled bank is to extend loan maturities, allowing farmers to defer part of their payments to the end of existing contracts.

Dozens of people have died from extreme weather in the country so far this year.

We are what we eat. And in the ocean, most life-forms source their food from phytoplankton. These microscopic, plant-like algae are the primary food source for krill, sea snails, some small fish, and jellyfish, which in turn feed larger marine animals that are prey for the ocean’s top predators, including humans.

Now MIT scientists are finding that phytoplankton's composition, and the basic diet of the ocean, will shift significantly with climate change.

In an open-access study appearing today in the journal Nature Climate Change, the team reports that as sea surface temperatures rise over the next century, phytoplankton in polar regions will adapt to be less rich in proteins, heavier in carbohydrates, and lower in nutrients overall.

The conclusions are based on results from the team’s new model, which simulates the composition of phytoplankton in response to changes in ocean temperature, circulation, and sea ice coverage. In a scenario in which humans continue to emit greenhouse gases through the year 2100, the team found that changing ocean conditions, particularly in the polar regions, will shift phytoplankton’s balance of proteins to carbohydrates and lipids by approximately 20 percent. The researchers analyzed observations from the past several decades, and already have found a signature of this change in the real world.

“We’re moving in the poles toward a sort of fast-food ocean,” says lead author and MIT postdoc Shlomit Sharoni. “Based on this prediction, the nutritional composition of the surface ocean will look very different by the end of the century.”

The study’s MIT co-authors are Mick Follows, Stephanie Dutkiewicz, and Oliver Jahn; along with Keisuke Inomura of the University of Rhode Island; Zoe Finkel, Andrew Irwin, and Mohammad Amirian of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada; and Erwan Monier of the University of California at Davis.

Nutritional information

Phytoplankton drift through the upper, sun-lit layers of the ocean. Like plants on land, the marine microalgae are photosynthetic. Their growth depends on light from the sun, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and nutrients such as nitrogen and iron that well up from the deep ocean.

When studying how phytoplankton will respond to climate change, scientists have primarily focused on how rising ocean temperatures will affect phytoplankton populations. Whether and how the plankton’s composition will change is less well-understood.

“There’s been an awareness that the nutritional value of phytoplankton can shift with climate change,” says Sharoni, “But there has been very little work in directly addressing that question.”

She and her colleagues set out to understand how ocean conditions influence phytoplankton macromolecular composition. Macromolecules are large molecules that are essential for life. The main types of macromolecules include proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids (the building blocks of DNA and RNA). Every form of life, including phytoplankton, is composed of a balance of macromolecules that helps it to survive in its particular environment.

“Nearly all the material in a living organism is in these broad molecular forms, each having a particular physiological function, depending on the circumstances that the organism finds itself in,” says Follows, a professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

An unbalanced diet

In their new study, the researchers first looked at how today’s ocean conditions influence phytoplankton’s macromolecular composition. The team used data from lab experiments carried out by their collaborators at Dalhousie. These experiments revealed ways in which phytoplankton’s balance of macromolecules, such as proteins to carbohydrates, shifted in response to changes in water temperature and the availability of light and nutrients.

With these lab-based data, the group developed a quantitative model that simulates how plankton in the lab would readjust its balance of proteins to carbohydrates under different light and nutrient conditions. Sharoni and Inomura then paired this new model with an established model of ocean circulation and dynamics developed previously at MIT. With this modeling combination, they simulated how phytoplankton composition shifts in response to ocean conditions in different parts of the world and under different climate scenarios.

The team first modeled today’s current climate conditions. Consistent with observations, their model predicts that that a little more than half of the average phytoplankton cell today is composed of proteins. The rest is a mix of carbohydrates and lipids.

Interestingly, in polar regions, phytoplankton are slightly more protein-rich. At the poles, the cover of sea ice limits the amount of sunlight phytoplankton can absorb. The researchers surmise that phytoplankton may have adapted by making more light-harvesting proteins to help the organisms efficiently absorb the weak sunlight.

However, when they modeled a future climate change scenario, the team found a significant shift in phytoplankton composition. They simulated a scenario in which humans continue to emit greenhouse gases through the year 2100. In this scenario, the ocean sea surface temperatures will rise by 3 degrees Celsius, substantially reducing sea ice coverage. Warmer temperatures will also limit the ocean’s circulation, as well as the amount of nutrients that can circulate up from the deep ocean.

Under these conditions, the model predicts that the population of phytoplankton growth in polar regions will increase significantly, consistent with earlier studies. Uniquely, this model predicts that phytoplankton in polar regions will shift from a protein-rich to a carb- and lipid-heavy composition. They found that plankton will not need as much light-harvesting protein, since less sea ice will make sunlight more easily available for the organisms to absorb. Total protein levels in these polar phytoplankton will decline by up to 30 percent, with a corresponding increase in the contribution of carbs and lipids.

It’s unclear what impact a larger population of carb- and lipid-heavy phytoplankton may have on the rest of the marine food web. While some organisms may be stressed by a reduction in protein, others that make lipid stores to survive through the winter might thrive.

The team also simulated phytoplankton in subtropical, higher-latitude regions. In these ocean areas, it’s expected that phytoplankton populations will decline by 50 percent. And the team’s modeling shows that their composition will also shift.

With warmer temperatures, the ocean’s circulation will slow down, limiting the amount of nutrients that can upwell from the deep ocean. In response, subtropical phytoplankton may have to find ways to live at deeper depths, to strike a balance between getting enough sunlight and nutrients. Under these conditions, the organisms will likely shift to a slightly more protein-rich composition, making use of the same photosynthetic proteins that their polar counterparts will require less of.

On balance, given the projected changes in phytoplankton populations with climate change, their average composition around the world will shift to a more carb-heavy, low-nutrient composition.

The researchers went a step further and found that their modeling agrees with available small set of actual phytoplankton field samples that other scientists previously collected from Arctic and Antarctic regions. These samples showed compositions of phytoplankton have become  more carb- and lipid-heavy over the past few decades, as the team’s model predicts under climate warming.

“In these regions, you can already see climate change, because sea ice is already melting,” Sharoni explains. “And our model shows that proteins in polar plankton have been declining, while carbs and lipids are increasing.”

“It turns out that climate change is accelerated in the Arctic, and we have data showing that the composition of phytoplankton has already responded,” Follows adds. “The main message is: The caloric content at the base of the marine food web is already changing. And it’s not a clear story as to how this change will transmit through the food web.”

This work was supported, in part, by the Simons Foundation.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 31 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02590-4

Warming oceans will alter not only how much phytoplankton grow, but what they are made of and how they function within marine food webs. Now a mechanistic model shows how environmental change reshapes cellular composition, offering a path towards more physiologically grounded marine ecosystem projections.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 31 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02598-w

The authors simulate phytoplankton macromolecular composition—proteins, carbohydrates and lipids—under present and future scenarios. They show increased protein allocation in subtropical phytoplankton but declines in high-latitude populations under warming, with implications for marine food webs.

About EFF

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit defending civil liberties in the digital world. EFF’s work to protect your rights on the internet is supported by over 30,000 members who have joined our mission by donating just this year.

For over 35 years, our lawyers, activists, and technologists have been thinking about the next big thing in tech before anyone else—whether that’s age verification, AI, or Palantir. Whatever causes you fight for, you rely on the internet to do so. And EFF protects the infrastructure of rebellion. 

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To learn more about our work, follow EFF on social media and subscribe to EFF's EFFector newsletter below to learn about the ways the internet and online rights are changing and what that means for you. And join EFF to support our fight—because if you use technology, this fight is yours. 

Privacy's Defender: My Thirty Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, by Cindy Cohn

In Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance (MIT Press), EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn weaves her own personal story with her role as a leading legal voice representing the rights and interests of technology users, innovators, whistleblowers, and researchers during the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, battles over NSA’s dragnet internet spying revealed in the 2000s, and the fight against FBI gag orders.

"Let's Sue the Government" T-Shirt

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Sometimes our supporters call EFF a merch store with a law firm attached because our stickers, hoodies and shirts are so well known. Our "Let's Sue the Government" shirt tells people: When your rights are at risk, you don’t stay quiet.

EFF's History

In early 1990, the U.S. Secret Service conducted raids tracking the distribution of a document illegally copied from a telecom company’s computer; one of those targeted was an Austin, TX publisher named Steve Jackson, whose computers were seized but later returned without any charges filed. Jackson’s business had suffered, and he discovered that the government had read and deleted his customers’ emails. He sought a civil liberties organization to represent him for this violation of his rights, but no existing organization understood the technology well enough to grasp the free speech and privacy issues at hand.

But a few well-informed technologists did understand. Mitch Kapor, former president of Lotus Development Corp.; John Perry Barlow, a Wyoming cattle rancher and lyricist for the Grateful Dead; and John Gilmore, an early employee of Sun Microsystems, with help from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, decided to do something about it – and so the Electronic Frontier Foundation was born in July 1990. The Steve Jackson Games case turned out to be an extremely important one for the early internet: For the first time, a court held that electronic mail deserves at least as much protection as telephone calls.

EFF's original logo, in use from 1990-2018

EFF continued to take on cases that set important precedents for the treatment of rights in cyberspace. In our second big case, Bernstein v. U.S. Department of Justice, the United States government prohibited a University of California mathematics Ph.D. student from publishing online an encryption program he had created. Years earlier, the government had placed encryption on the United States Munitions List, alongside bombs and flamethrowers, as a weapon to be regulated for national security purposes; our lawsuit established that written software code is speech protected by the First Amendment, and the further ruled that the export control laws on encryption violated Bernstein's rights by prohibiting his constitutionally protected speech.  Now everyone has the right to "export" encryption software—by publishing it on the Internet—without prior permission from the U.S. government. 

Since then we’ve fought against government and corporate abuses of our Constitutional rights, on issues including warrantless wiretapping by intelligence agencies, the panopticon of street-level surveillance that seeks to track everything we do, and the corporate surveillance that turns our clicks into their commodity, as well as issues of antitrust and intellectual property, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and much more. We are lawyers, technologists, activists, and lobbyists who work every day for the privacy, security and dignity of all who use technology - and if you use technology, this fight is yours, too.

EFF's Greatest Hits

While many early battles over the right to communicate freely and privately stemmed from government censorship, today EFF is fighting for users on many other fronts as well.

Today, certain powerful corporations are attempting to shut down online speech, prevent new innovation from reaching consumers, and facilitating government surveillance. We challenge corporate overreach just as we challenge government abuses of power.

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We also develop technologies that can help individuals protect their privacy and security online, which our technologists build and release freely to the public for anyone to use.

In addition, EFF is engaged in major legislative fights, beating back digital censorship bills disguised as intellectual property proposals, opposing attempts to force companies to spy on users, championing reform bills that rein in government surveillance, documenting police technology and where it's used, helping users protect themselves from surveillance, and much more.

Learn more about some of EFF's most impactful work— Download a PDF of our new catalog, "Now That's What I Call Digital Rights!

EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn will be on The Daily Show tonight, Monday March 30, at 11 pm ET and PT, speaking with host Jon Stewart. Cindy will discuss her long history of fighting for privacy online and her new book, Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance (MIT Press). The book details her own personal story alongside her role representing the rights and interests of technology users, innovators, whistleblowers, and researchers during the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, battles over NSA’s dragnet internet spying revealed in the 2000s, and the fight against FBI gag orders. 

You can watch the interview on Comedy Central, and extended episodes are released shortly thereafter on Paramount Plus as well as in segments on YouTube. We will also share the interview when it is uploaded and available online as well. 

About The Daily Show

The Daily Show is a long-running comedy news show that covers the biggest headlines of the day. It has won 26 Primetime Emmy Awards and has introduced the world to now well-known actors and comedians such as Steve Carell, Samantha Bee, Ed Helms, and Trevor Noah, as well as hosts of their own current shows, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver. 

In biology, defects are generally bad. But in materials science, defects can be intentionally tuned to give materials useful new properties. Today, atomic-scale defects are carefully introduced during the manufacturing process of products like steel, semiconductors, and solar cells to help improve strength, control electrical conductivity, optimize performance, and more.

But even as defects have become a powerful tool, accurately measuring different types of defects and their concentrations in finished products has been challenging, especially without cutting open or damaging the final material. Without knowing what defects are in their materials, engineers risk making products that perform poorly or have unintended properties.

Now, MIT researchers have built an AI model capable of classifying and quantifying certain defects using data from a noninvasive neutron-scattering technique. The model, which was trained on 2,000 different semiconductor materials, can detect up to six kinds of point defects in a material simultaneously, something that would be impossible using conventional techniques alone.

“Existing techniques can’t accurately characterize defects in a universal and quantitative way without destroying the material,” says lead author Mouyang Cheng, a PhD candidate in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “For conventional techniques without machine learning, detecting six different defects is unthinkable. It’s something you can’t do any other way.”

The researchers say the model is a step toward harnessing defects more precisely in products like semiconductors, microelectronics, solar cells, and battery materials.

“Right now, detecting defects is like the saying about seeing an elephant: Each technique can only see part of it,” says senior author and associate professor of nuclear science and engineering Mingda Li. “Some see the nose, others the trunk or ears. But it is extremely hard to see the full elephant. We need better ways of getting the full picture of defects, because we have to understand them to make materials more useful.”

Joining Cheng and Li on the paper are postdoc Chu-Liang Fu, undergraduate researcher Bowen Yu, master’s student Eunbi Rha, PhD student Abhijatmedhi Chotrattanapituk ’21, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory staff members Douglas L Abernathy PhD ’93 and Yongqiang Cheng. The paper appears today in the journal Matter.

Detecting defects

Manufacturers have gotten good at tuning defects in their materials, but measuring precise quantities of defects in finished products is still largely a guessing game.

“Engineers have many ways to introduce defects, like through doping, but they still struggle with basic questions like what kind of defect they’ve created and in what concentration,” Fu says. “Sometimes they also have unwanted defects, like oxidation. They don’t always know if they introduced some unwanted defects or impurity during synthesis. It’s a longstanding challenge.”

The result is that there are often multiple defects in each material. Unfortunately, each method for understanding defects has its limits. Techniques like X-ray diffraction and positron annihilation characterize only some types of defects. Raman spectroscopy can discern the type of defect but can’t directly infer the concentration. Another technique known as transmission electron microscope requires people to cut thin slices of samples for scanning.

In a few previous papers, Li and collaborators applied machine learning to experimental spectroscopy data to characterize crystalline materials. For the new paper, they wanted to apply that technique to defects.

For their experiment, the researchers built a computational database of 2,000 semiconductor materials. They made sample pairs of each material, with one doped for defects and one left without defects, then used a neutron-scattering technique that measures the different vibrational frequencies of atoms in solid materials. They trained a machine-learning model on the results.

“That built a foundational model that covers 56 elements in the periodic table,” Cheng says. “The model leverages the multihead attention mechanism, just like what ChatGPT is using. It similarly extracts the difference in the data between materials with and without defects and outputs a prediction of what dopants were used and in what concentrations.”

The researchers fine-tuned their model, verified it on experimental data, and showed it could measure defect concentrations in an alloy commonly used in electronics and in a separate superconductor material.

The researchers also doped the materials multiple times to introduce multiple point defects and test the limits of the model, ultimately finding it can make predictions about up to six defects in materials simultaneously, with defect concentrations as low as 0.2 percent.

“We were really surprised it worked that well,” Cheng says. “It’s very challenging to decode the mixed signals from two different types of defects — let alone six.”

A model approach

Typically, manufacturers of things like semiconductors run invasive tests on a small percentage of products as they come off the manufacturing line, a slow process that limits their ability to detect every defect.

“Right now, people largely estimate the quantities of defects in their materials,” Yu says. “It is a painstaking experience to check the estimates by using each individual technique, which only offers local information in a single grain anyway. It creates misunderstandings about what defects people think they have in their material.”

The results were exciting for the researchers, but they note their technique measuring the vibrational frequencies with neutrons would be difficult for companies to quickly deploy in their own quality-control processes.

“This method is very powerful, but its availability is limited,” Rha says. “Vibrational spectra is a simple idea, but in certain setups it’s very complicated. There are some simpler experimental setups based on other approaches, like Raman spectroscopy, that could be more quickly adopted.”

Li says companies have already expressed interest in the approach and asked when it will work with Raman spectroscopy, a widely used technique that measures the scattering of light. Li says the researchers’ next step is training a similar model based on Raman spectroscopy data. They also plan to expand their approach to detect features that are larger than point defects, like grains and dislocations.

For now, though, the researchers believe their study demonstrates the inherent advantage of AI techniques for interpreting defect data.

“To the human eye, these defect signals would look essentially the same,” Li says. “But the pattern recognition of AI is good enough to discern different signals and get to the ground truth. Defects are this double-edged sword. There are many good defects, but if there are too many, performance can degrade. This opens up a new paradigm in defect science.”

The work was supported, in part, by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

A thoughtful review of Apple’s system to alert users that the camera is on. It’s really well-designed, and important in a world where malware could surreptitiously start recording.

The reason it’s tempting to think that a dedicated camera indicator light is more secure than an on-display indicator is the fact that hardware is generally more secure than software, because it’s harder to tamper with. With hardware, a dedicated hardware indicator light can be connected to the camera hardware such that if the camera is accessed, the light must turn on, with no way for software running on the device, no matter its privileges, to change that. With an indicator light that is rendered on the display, it’s not foolish to worry that malicious software, with sufficient privileges, could draw over the pixels on the display where the camera indicator is rendered, disguising that the camera is in use...

The upfront costs of transitioning to clean energy and worries about rising utility bills are forcing tough choices for Democratic leaders.

The agency is expected to soon finalize the repeal, which was proposed before the Trump administration's elimination of the 2009 endangerment finding.

Heat contributed to the deaths of 14 Texas inmates on average every year between 2001 and 2019, a study found. Three nonprofits have sued over the sweltering conditions.

A top researcher says storms in Hawaii might have helped cause record heat in the West in an "underrecognized" phenomenon.

The Democrats say EPA Administration Lee Zeldin misled them about grant cancellations.