Nature Climate Change, Published online: 15 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02781-z

The role of wind in ecosystem water use efficiency remains unclear. The authors show that water use efficiency declines with increasing wind speed, driven mainly by increases in evapotranspiration and secondarily by reductions in gross primary productivity.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 15 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02763-1

Clean hydrogen is widely proposed for hard-to-abate sector decarbonization, but its limited supply requires prioritizing sectors with the highest value. This study evaluates ten sectors and identifies key no-regret uses, while highlighting the need for specific demand-side policies.

Today, EFF joined the ACLU of Wisconsin in filing a petition to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, asking it to rule that the state’s constitution requires a warrant for retrospective searches of ALPR databases used by law enforcement in four cities: Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, and Green Bay. We represent a religious organization, the Wisconsin Council of Churches, as well as an individual pastor in Green Bay.

As the petition explains:

Right now, Automated License Plate Readers (“ALPRs”) are recording the movements of vast numbers of Wisconsin drivers as they seek medical care, attend 12-step recovery meetings, attend religious services, participate in protests, attend political meetings, and engage in many other private, sensitive activities. Law enforcement entities throughout Wisconsin collect, store, share, and aggregate this ALPR data. Then they search it, retrospectively tracking the movements of individuals and entire communities in ways that would have been prohibitively costly, if not outright impossible, before the advent of ALPR technology.

We all deserve to be free of warrantless mass surveillance. We all deserve to live in a country where surveillance vendors cannot help police upend our system of individualized suspicion. Religious organizations and officials like our clients have a heightened interest in protecting their location privacy because of the range of expressive associations their work entails, including facilitating gatherings for religious worship, as well as offering pastoral care, confidential counseling, and community support. Likewise, the people who visit houses of worship have a strong right to privacy against police monitoring of when they pray, seek addiction counseling, or attend a domestic violence survivor meeting.

This is our second lawsuit challenging warrantless ALPR searches, following SIREN v. San Jose. Earlier this month, a federal court in Oklahoma became the first to rule that ALPRs are a “type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” and suppress evidence from a warrantless ALPR search. We hope the Wisconsin Supreme Court will agree.

Read the Wisconsin Supreme Court petition

Read the press release

Related Cases: Wisconsin Council of Churches v. Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha & Green Bay

EFF legal intern Gabrielle Ladun was the principal author of this post. 

The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) has published a summary of findings from its audit of the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) facial recognition technology. While the detailed findings are classified, the summary states that the OIG’s audit uncovered a “significant weakness” in the technology’s ability to protect the privacy of passenger data. This has massive privacy implications for the millions of passengers who travel and don’t opt out of the TSA’s biometric surveillance technology verification process. 

TSA uses facial comparison technology for identity verification of airline passengers. A camera takes a photo of passengers to verify that their provided identification matches their live photo. Although TSA states that it is “committed to protecting traveler privacy,” the audit highlights that this has not been the case.  

The OIG found that TSA’s Credential Authentication Technology 2’s (CAT-2) vendor “was able to access and extract sensitive passenger information, including driver’s license and passport images, during system troubleshooting and enhancements, without TSA’s knowledge.”  

The OIG further admonished the agency:  

TSA lacked clear policies, did not track when this data was extracted, could not verify that extracted information was properly deleted, and did not notify passengers when their biometric and biographic information may have been stored. As a result, although passenger information was generally protected during routine operations, weaknesses in vendor oversight created a risk that sensitive personal information could be retained or exposed. 

We hope the TSA will fix these issues. The OIG summary states: 

We issued one finding and three recommendations to strengthen controls, improve oversight, and ensure transparency and the proper handling of passenger data. TSA concurred with all three recommendations. Two recommendations are open and resolved, and one remains open and unresolved. 

Why EFF Opposes the Government’s Use of Facial Recognition Technology 

EFF has a long history of opposing governmental use of facial recognition technology. As the OIG’s audit underscores, this technology presents privacy risks associated with unsecured data, unauthorized access, and data breaches. The government’s use of this technology also creates a mass surveillance system and facilitates the creation of warrantless biometric records for unconsenting parties.  

The biometric data captured by this technology is not without errors. There have been multiple instances of law enforcement agencies using facial recognition technology to misidentify and arrest innocent individuals.  

Reminder: Opting Out of TSA Photos Is Possible 

Given that facial recognition technology is prone to mistakes, combined with the OIG’s audit revealing significant privacy weaknesses, it is imperative that travelers remember that opting out is possible. TSA’s own website emphasizes that travelers who wish to decline to have their photo taken for facial comparison can do so without any delay, disruption, or recourse.  

Considering the data protection weaknesses exposed by the OIG’s audit, EFF will continue to oppose this governmental system of mass surveillance and spread awareness to ensure that no one is forced to relinquish their biometric data without consent. 

More than 100 people filled the MIT Chapel on Sept. 24 to pay tribute to Assistant Professor Thomas Rose, the MIT archaeometallurgist who died last month following a bicycle crash in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Faculty, students, and staff affiliated with the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) and the Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE), along with family and friends, gathered for a memorial service where colleagues spoke about the 37-year-old, who joined the DMSE faculty in January and had just started building a research program at MIT. They remembered him as a brilliant researcher and generous colleague with an extraordinary breadth of expertise and eclectic passions ranging from rowing to archery. 

A portrait of Rose sat on an easel next to the chapel’s flower-covered altar. A cellist played as guests entered and took their seats.

Chaplain to the Institute Thea Keith-Lucas opened the service by reflecting on the loss felt across MIT. 

“We honor the unique gifts that he brought to this world. We honor the ways that he was growing, and the possibilities that were cut short. We honor the small, unseen moments of courage and connection that create a life,” she said.

Finding a unicorn

To give a sense of what Rose meant to DMSE, department head Polina Anikeeva briefly explained archaeometallurgy — the study of how ancient societies produced and used metals — and its development at MIT, beginning in the 1960s. The field flourished after the establishment of CMRAE in the 1970s, but over the following decades it began to contract in the United States, and MIT had difficulty finding people with an increasingly rare set of skills. 

“We were looking for a unicorn. We were looking for two decades,” Anikeeva said. When Anikeeva and other DMSE faculty reviewed Rose’s resume in 2025, they were impressed by his unique training in geoscience, metallurgy, and archaeology and met him soon after. “We saw a brilliant, creative colleague — unassuming, intellectually fearless, adaptable, resourceful, and eagerly looking into the future.”

Mike Tarkanian, senior lecturer in DMSE and associate director for CMRAE, described the Zoom interview with Rose that kicked off the faculty search. Rose spoke fluently about his work, interests, and research vision — without the slides or notes that candidates typically rely on.

“I hung on every word — but it was so unusual and so risky that I wasn’t sure how it would be received,” Tarkanian said. “As soon as the call ended, my phone rang and it was a colleague who was also on the Zoom and he said, ‘That’s our guy. That has to be our guy.’”

Anikeeva also spoke of the enthusiasm he brought with him every day at MIT, noting his “almost childlike curiosity and his enormous positivity.”

“There were no obstacles, only opportunities and possibilities.”

To honor Rose and carry forward the work he had begun at MIT, Anikeeva said DMSE would launch the Thomas Rose Fellowship for Excellence in Archaeometallurgy, dedicated to supporting the most promising young scholars at the PhD and postdoctoral levels, “so that we can continue this field for the world and for the U.S. and for the memory of Thomas.”

A generous spirit

Speakers also remembered Rose’s kindness, generosity, and empathy toward everyone around him. Tarkanian stressed Rose’s commitment to community and helping others, noting his contributions to research tools used by archaeologists worldwide. He gave an example from Rose’s undergraduate years in his native Germany, when he gave tutorials for first-year archaeological science students who were struggling with chemistry and math. A former student told Tarkanian that an email Rose sent inviting students to the tutorial ended with, “I guess I’ll be more nervous than you folks tomorrow.”

“This was the Thomas we only started to get to know,” Tarkanian said, “someone who offered his expertise to others in need without question, while being thoughtful enough to worry out loud that he might be the nervous one and, by doing so, putting others at ease.”

DMSE Assistant Professor Tania Lopez-Silva, who started at MIT six months before Rose, recalled his patience and understanding. When she arranged a lunch with him, he said he would eat anything but mushrooms and eggplant.

“Somehow I misunderstood him, and I chose the place that probably has the most mushroom and eggplant options possible,” Lopez-Silva said. “He said that he still wanted to try the place, and he would find something to eat. That was Thomas — kind, patient, open-minded, and always willing to make the best of things.”

That quality came through in a story by another DMSE faculty member, Assistant Professor Thomas J. Wallin, who recalled a photo Rose had sent him of the apartment he had found overlooking the Charles River. Wallin was impressed, but Rose said with characteristic directness that it was quite small, but “very long and narrow” — which turned out to be a good thing. 

“He explained that because it was narrow, he could stand at the edge of his balcony and shoot at his archery target through his hallway, past his kitchen, at his door, and it would be the proper distance,” Wallin said, drawing chuckles in the chapel. “I don’t think that’s a request many Boston realtors get, but that was Thomas.”

Rose’s connections also extended beyond DMSE. Katya Tiukhtikova, joined by fellow MIT Archery Club member Kiarra Ning, remembered how Rose treated others. 

“He only focused on the good in people, and gave everyone a chance to show the best parts of themselves,” Tiukhtikova said.

She also recalled the contagious excitement Rose brought to archery practice, saying he “always brightened the days of everyone who was lucky enough to share the archery range with him.”

Tarkanian ended his remarks with a reflection on academic life and the importance of generosity and humility alongside brilliance and achievement.

“If part of Thomas’s legacy here at MIT is that we become a little more generous with our time, a little more humble about our accomplishments, and a little more deliberate about building communities in which other people can thrive and grow, that would be a legacy worthy of him.”

No one should have to think twice before criticizing the government online. But a mass surveillance program known as "Catch and Revoke" was created to make millions do just that. EFF and other defenders of free speech are fighting back. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're talking about a key court win for our lawsuit challenging this unconstitutional surveillance program.

JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER

For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This issue covers our Opt Out October guides for ditching Big Tech, a win in the fight against anti-VPN laws, and a court ruling allowing the lawsuit against "Catch and Revoke" to move forward.

Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This time we're talking to EFF's Lisa Femia about how the government is using AI to suppress protected speech online—and the important lawsuit she and others are working on to stop it. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice:

%3Ciframe%20height%3D%22200px%22%20width%3D%22100%25%22%20frameborder%3D%22no%22%20scrolling%3D%22no%22%20seamless%3D%22%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.simplecast.com%2F1f21c2ee-32ed-41ab-b0a8-eb86edda26ed%3Fdark%3Dfalse%22%20allow%3D%22autoplay%22%3E%3C%2Fiframe%3E Privacy info. This embed will serve content from simplecast.com

   

Want to protect your right to digital privacy? Sign up for EFF's EFFector newsletter for updates, ways to take action, and new merch drops. You can also fuel the fight for privacy and free speech online when you support EFF today!

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

• I’m speaking at ATTENTION: Democracy, Rebuilt in Montreal, Canada. The event runs October 21–23, 2026, and my talk is on Wednesday, October 21.
• I’m speaking at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, at 5 PM ET on October 22, 2026.
• I’m speaking at [un]prompted in San Francisco, California. The event runs October 27–29, 2026, and my talk is at 11:35 AM PT on Thursday, October 29.
• I’m speaking at the Catalyst Summit in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, on Wednesday, November 18, 2026...

In 2021, Texas suffered the worst energy infrastructure failure in state history, following three severe winter storms in February. At least 246 people were killed as a result of the disruptions, which led to food, water, heat and electricity shortages.

If energy officials had had more time to prepare for the storms, for example by bringing in more trucks of natural gas to disrupted areas, damage from the event could have been mitigated. Unfortunately, weather forecasts beyond two weeks are notoriously unreliable, making for a tighter window for energy operators, farmers, and emergency response officials around the globe.

A new technique by a team including researchers at MIT significantly improves weather forecasting beyond two weeks. The researchers developed a machine-learning model that learns to correct errors in existing forecasting models to improve their output over the two-to-six-week time frame. When applied to a gold-standard forecasting model, it doubled forecasting accuracy over that time frame, placing first in a prominent international forecasting competition.

In a new paper in Nature, the researchers describe their approach and show how it enables forecasts that for the first time beat climatologic averages between two and six weeks.

“Not only does this do better on time averaged forecasts for this range, which is already very useful for farmers and members of the energy industry trying to match supply with demand, but it also improves predictions of extreme weather events, whether it’s flooding or cold spells or something else,” co-author and MIT Research Scientist Judah Cohen says. “It’s really important to predict both, but extreme events might be the most impactful part of this for society.” 

Joining Cohen on the paper are lead authors Hannah Guan, a Harvard College undergraduate; Soukayna Mouatadid, a University of Toronto postdoc; Genevieve Flaspohler SM ’18, PhD ’22; Paulo Orenstein, an associate professor at Brazil’s National Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics; Jeremy Berman of the data company DTN; Jakob Schloer and Joshua Talib, researchers with the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts; and Alex Lu, Haiyu Dong, Jonathan Weyn, Zekun Ni, and Lester Mackey, all researchers at Microsoft.

Longer forecasts

In the 1970s, longtime MIT Professor Edward Lorenz came up with the idea of chaos theory to describe how tiny changes in initial weather conditions lead to completely different outcomes.

“He came up with this theoretical two-week limit where beyond that, we just can’t predict weather because the noise in the system grows so much that it overwhelms any signal you start with,” Cohen says. “That had a strong influence on the field that may have held people back from exploring forecasting beyond the two-week range. I never really believed that completely. In theory the atmosphere can create an infinite number of patterns, but it likes to fall into these favorite patterns over and over again. Once one thing happens, I think you can predict the domino that will fall after that, and the domino that will fall after that.”

Today, the best weather forecasts come from either dynamical models, which numerically simulate how the atmosphere and oceans evolve over time, or artificial intelligence models, which learn to make predictions from historical weather data. AI models have shown improvements in predicting weather at short ranges, but they’re even worse than dynamical models at longer time ranges.

Cohen, who is based in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, focuses on forecasting weather two to six weeks in advance, which is known as subseasonal forecasting. “That range is referred to as the ‘predictability desert,’ because in the short range you can capitalize on the initial conditions in the climate system and the atmosphere, and on the longer term you have these slow, varying boundary forces, like the super El Niño everyone’s focused on this winter,” Cohen says. “The subseasonal range can’t take advantage of either of those. In most cases forecasting in the subseasonal ranges is no different than going to a casino and rolling the dice.”

Cohen credits his co-author Lester Mackey, whom he has been collaborating with for more than a decade, with the initial idea of using machine learning to reduce errors in forecasting models.

“We built this wrapper — Lester calls it postprocessing,” Cohen says. “We know AI models have a lot of errors, so we thought maybe we can quantify those errors and remove them.”

While other forecasting systems do more simplistic error correction, the research team’s postprocessing layer uses AI to learn from a forecasting system’s mistakes based on historic data and shifts its forecasts. In that time range, forecasters use so-called probabilistic forecasts, where the likelihood of a range of possibilities if given.

“As more forecasts and data become available, our model adaptively improves its correction,” Cohen says.

To build the model, the researchers used MIT Engaging, a supercomputing cluster hosted by MIT’s Office of Research Computing and Data, but the resulting model does not require a supercomputer to run.

To put their model to the test, last year the research team submitted three models that included their post-processing layer to the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which is considered the best forecasting center in the world. Each season ECMWF holds forecasting competitions between models.

The submission that won first place combined ECMWF’s forecasting model with another, and then applied the postprocessing correction on top. That approach ended up doubling the original model’s predictive power in the subseasonal range. For the first time, the model offered an improvement over relying on climatologic averages.

“Up until now, no one had been able to show a model predicts weather better than long term averages for these subseasonal forecasts,” Cohen says. “They’ve pretty much all been worse than that — you could literally flip a coin and do better. People have questioned if it’s even worth investing in models at all for this time range. We consistently beat climatology averages with our models.”

The model also showed a statistically significant improvement in the ability to predict extreme weather.

“That’s one of the more important findings, because it’s so difficult to accomplish,” Cohen says. “When the ECMWF developed their own, non-AI, error-correction to their model, it got worse at predicting extreme weather. I think that’s because traditional error, or bias, correction is always trying to get to the mean, whereas extreme weather is on the fringe of probabilities.”

Preparing for disaster

In the Nature paper, the team showed their technique could be used to improve land forecasts in most regions across the globe. They also applied their bias correction technique to other models and showed it improved those as well, putting even lesser models on par with the ECMWF’s forecasts.

“What’s nice about our model is it’s an add-on wrapper,” Cohen explains. “We used it with the ECMWF’s dynamical model because that was considered the best, but it can be used with any model. It even improves models that are already bias corrected using another AI algorithm. So it shows a robust improvement. And it’s open source and low cost.”

Cohen says the meteorological office for the Republic of Kenya has already reached out about implementing the model to improve forecasting of the annual monsoon season to improve agricultural yields this winter. He hopes other groups will also use the model.

“This could help you decide when to fertilize around rain, when there’s a freeze coming to protect crops during winter harvests, or help you avoid droughts,” Cohen says. “It could also be useful for energy and emergency management. I’ve talked to energy officials who say, ‘If I’m told two days before that an ice storm’s coming, I don’t have enough time, but if I had two weeks, that could be enough to make adequate preparations.”

The work was supported, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Carlos Chagas Filho Foundation for Research Support, and the European Union.

Matthew Green has been writing a rather pessimistic series of posts about the potential for AI systems to vastly outperform humans in cryptanalysis of both symmetric and public-key ciphers.

I am more optimistic than he is. That is, I have stronger faith in the over-engineering cryptographers tend to do. I am trying to write this up in more detail.

Another IoT cyberattack, this one in France:

Hackers gained control of the software that regulates the temperatures of the refrigeration units, forcing some to warm to 50C (120F) overnight, according to one supermarket chain affected.

[…]

Normally, supermarket freezers go through a short period of defrosting overnight, in which temperatures rise slightly. But the hackers ordered the units to heat up and stay hot, although Danfoss did not confirm any reports about just how warm the fridges and freezers could become in that process.

Danfoss said the affected cold units were older models whose security software could not be updated to ward off a risk they had identified...

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 14 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02764-0

Climate citizens’ assemblies are gaining traction worldwide as a way to involve the public in climate governance. Now a study demonstrates that although these assemblies propose more ambitious recommendations than existing climate policy, these recommendations vary across contexts and have limited impact on policy decisions.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 14 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02777-9

As the Rio Conventions mature from negotiating commitments towards delivering them, strengthening implementation has become an urgent priority. We argue for greater cross-convention learning within the context of institutional architecture to accelerate progress on climate, biodiversity and land degradation.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 14 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02780-0

Species hybridization belongs on the climate change agenda

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 14 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02755-1

Deliberative citizen participation, such as climate assemblies, has been promoted in climate governance. This study finds that, although assemblies proposed more ambitious recommendations than existing climate policy, these recommendations rarely translated into actual policy decisions.

Hiroshi Ishii, the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and associate director of the MIT Media Lab, recently received the 2026 Industrial Designers Society of America Special Achievement Award for “...pioneering work that has greatly influenced human-computer interaction and design.”

For over 30 years, Ishii has explored how the digital and physical worlds can merge more meaningfully. Working with students, MIT colleagues, and international collaborators through his Tangible Media group, Ishii has pursued research marked by intellectual tension and artistic vision. He and his collaborators have produced truly original concepts including Tangible User Interfaces, which are interactive systems where physical objects, rather than screens, mice, or keyboards, are used to control and interact with digital information; and Tangible Bits, introduced at CHI ‘97, which established how people engage with digital information through physical objects. His later concepts, Radical Atoms and TeleAbsence, inspire researchers and designers worldwide.

“Beyond his research, Ishii has made lasting contributions to the global design community through ACM CHI [the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems], TEI [conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction], and UIST [User Interface Software and Technology], and by mentoring generations of designers and researchers,” said Professor Leila Ensaniat in her Industrial Designers Society of America Awards committee chair introduction.

Ishii's approach shows how bringing the arts, science, engineering, and design together creates innovations with real-world applications. His models now influence product development across industries, shaping how millions of people interact with information and each other.

As artificial intelligence becomes more and more powerful, its ability to handle human-like tasks is undeniable. Artificial neural networks can learn to recognize images, use language, or write computer code. Like the brain’s circuits, they reorganize themselves as they learn, adjusting the strengths of their connections to improve their performance.

The question for many neuroscientists is: What can these machine systems teach them about how the brain learns? And what kinds of models are likely to be the most informative?

In a paper published Oct. 9 in the journal PNAS, scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center argue that a crucial metric for the biological plausibility of an artificial neural network’s approach to learning is the network’s ability to organize itself, without the guiding hand of a developer. They show that it is possible for an artificial neural network to build its own learning machinery. With some simple instructions about how and when connections should change, a group of randomly connected units can reshape itself into an effective information-processing network, learning from the data it is trained on.

Biological learning

“Current AI technology is working very well, but it doesn’t necessarily use a learning algorithm that is used by the brain,” says Qianli Liao, a K. Lisa Yang ICoN Center Postdoctoral Fellow in the labs of MIT professors and McGovern Institure members Tomaso Poggio and Mark Harnett, and co-first author of the PNAS paper with MIT Research Scientist Liu Ziyin and graduate student Yulu Gan. Liao explains that engineers design the rules about how connections change as an artificial neural network processes training data and receives feedback about its mistakes. 

When it comes to training AI to do its job, the approach is powerful. But Liao and his colleagues caution that networks designed in this way may not offer much insight into biological learning. “The brain doesn't have an external designer or architect,” Liao says. “The brain has to organize itself. And we need to know how simple rules are going to make the brain organize.”

The rules that reshape neural connections as an animal learns may be different in different parts of the brain, or they may change as the brain becomes more mature. Neuroscientists are working to understand how those rules work and how they might be disrupted by aging or disease — a vital step toward developing new therapies and prevention strategies. Liao points to the development of brain-computer interfaces, which aim to restore communication when the brain’s language abilities are lost or let paralyzed patients control neuroprosthetic limbs, as one potential application.

“None of these can work without knowing the rules behind neuron-neuron interactions,” he says. “That’s not achievable by just designing a circuit that works very well.” An artificial neural network’s value to neuroscience should instead be judged by the extent to which it can organize itself — not just its connections, but also the machinery that adjusts those connections.

Self-organized artificial learning

Working with Poggio and Hartnett, Liao, Ziyin, and Gan set out to develop and validate a self-organizing computational network capable of learning. Liao explained that the network’s structure begins with multiple layers of randomly interconnected neuron-like units. Within each layer, every neuron-like component is subject to the same rules about how connections should be adjusted. “They just interact with each other using that rule, and they develop some type of behavior,” he says.

The team’s network implements the kind of simple rules thought to rewire brain circuits as humans and other animals learn from their experiences. In both the brain and the machine network, for example, “neurons that fire together wire together.” In other words, when two connected neurons are activated at the same time, the connection between them strengthens. 

The team showed that a self-organizing network governed by rules like these can learn to recognize patterns and classify images. They explain that in their model, learning is enabled by self-assembling motifs that emerge according to simple rules, then serve as building blocks for functional circuits. As their network learned, these motifs reorganized themselves using an optimization strategy similar to the approach built into most modern machine learning systems, called gradient descent, in which connections are gradually adjusted in response to errors in order to improve performance.

Most modern AI implements gradient descent through some form of the back-propagation algorithm, which neuroscientists say is unlikely to be used by the brain. The team compared its self-organizing network to networks designed to learn in this way and found that it performed at a similar level.

Connecting brains and machines

Poggio says finding a biological parallel to back-propagation could trigger significant progress in both AI and neuroscience. 

“If the synaptic motifs we propose are, in fact, used by the brain to do what backpropagation does for artificial neural networks, then we will have a strong connection at the level of fundamental mechanisms between artificial and natural networks — between machines and brains,” he says.

Liao says a self-organizing network does not necessarily learn the same way the brain does — but it’s a critical starting point for biological plausibility. 

“Self-organization is the first high-level framework,” he says. “Once we are good with self-organization as a measure, then we can talk about next thing.”

While the group’s main objective is better understanding the brain, Liao says that knowledge could ultimately improve machine learning systems, too, enabling engineers to develop networks that perform better or in more human-like ways.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory hosted the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) on Sept. 3, for a stop on its national roadshow. The event convened representatives of state organizations, defense centers, universities, technology companies, and business executives to discuss how Massachusetts' biotechnology ecosystem can strengthen national biodefense capabilities.

"We have a lot to leverage in this region to advance biotechnology," said Christina Rudzinski, assistant head of the Biotechnology and Human Systems Division at Lincoln Laboratory. "Many people are already working together to push the bioindustrial sector beyond biopharmaceuticals and into a broader ecosystem across industries. This synergy is where NSCEB comes in — connecting policy to the real-world work already happening, including here at Lincoln Laboratory and across the state."

Biotechnology touches many economic and defense sectors, from disease-resistant crops and lifesaving medicines to biofuels and advanced manufacturing materials. In 2022, Congress established the NSCEB to study the national security implications of this rapidly advancing field and issue policy recommendations to ensure continued U.S. leadership. 

In April 2025, the 11-member bipartisan and bicameral commission released its report, calling for a minimum of $15 billion in federal investment over five years. According to the report, China is investing aggressively to dominate the field, echoing a pattern the United States has seen before in sectors such as semiconductors.

"The coalition of stakeholders working in the Massachusetts biotech ecosystem illustrates how collaborative regional work will help keep the U.S. in the lead by producing exceptional innovation across all areas of biotechnology," said NSCEB Executive Director Caitlin Frazer. 

Now in the final year of its three-year mandate, NSCEB is touring the country to see local biotechnology ecosystems in action. The commission will bring insights back to Washington to help members of Congress support their regions' strengths. 

Advancing Massachusetts as a defense-biotechnology hub

Massachusetts has identified biotechnology as a priority technology area under its Strategic Hub for Innovation, Exchange, and Leadership in Defense (SHIELD) initiative. Launched by Governor Maura Healey in October 2025 alongside $47 million of initial aligned investment, the initiative has moved with speed and at scale. This includes standing up the BioNexus program that leverages state matching funds to develop biotechnology and biomanufacturing solutions for the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM). Further, Healey included a $100 million authorization for defense sector capital projects in the Mass Wins Act, an economic development bill filed in April. The bill is currently being considered by the state legislature.

During the roadshow event, Ben Linville-Engler, who co-chairs the SHIELD Working Group and serves as deputy director of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, led a panel discussion with representatives from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, Business Executives for National Security, Activate, DEVCOM Soldier Center, MassChallenge, Perimeter, Center for Advanced Manufacturing, and the Massachusetts AI Hub. They are among more than 40 partner organizations participating in SHIELD. 

"There is incredible convergence between economic development and national security in all domains — land, air, sea, space, cyber, and bio," said Linville-Engler, citing the state's $48.6 billion in defense-sector economic contributions last year. "Massachusetts is committed to biotechnology and national security, and not just in Boston and Cambridge but across the entire state."

In July, the SHIELD Working Group submitted a report outlining steps to speed the transition of technology into deployable capabilities, strengthen the defense workforce pipeline, and reinforce the state's national security industrial base. 

Lincoln Laboratory is well positioned to support these priorities. As a Department of War federally funded R&D center, the laboratory has deep knowledge of national security needs and sustained ties to academic, commercial, and U.S. government laboratories. "These attributes can help strengthen biotechnology collaborations and integrate and transition solutions across Massachusetts and New England," Rudzinski said.

Scaling up biomanufacturing

One project advancing this vision is the Biotechnology Scale-up Hub for Innovation, Economic Development, Labor Training, and Defense (BioSHIELD). Planned for Worcester, Massachusetts, this 200,000-square-foot biomanufacturing facility is designed to mobilize the region's defense-biotechnology sector.

"BioSHIELD's mission is to accelerate breakthrough biomanufacturing solutions that strengthen national resilience, support commercial innovation, and grow the regional economy," said Edward Wack, project co-lead and principal staff in the laboratory's Biotechnology and Human Systems Division. "It will bring together industry, academia, and government to transform ideas into scalable biological products, supporting a secure and competitive bioindustrial future." 

The project responds to NSCEB's call for a national network of biomanufacturing scale-up facilities, a capacity currently missing in New England, according to Wack. The facility will offer shared equipment, infrastructure, and secure laboratory space to help bridge the "valley of death" between early-stage discovery and commercial- or defense-scale production. BioSHIELD's ready-built support networks will be key to overcoming technological and regulatory hurdles, helping innovators rapidly move capabilities to market or military use. 

A coalition supporting the project includes Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant, and Lincoln Laboratory. It builds on a foundational effort in central Massachusetts funding the Massachusetts TechHubs program. At the event, Wack announced the coalition has signed a memorandum of understanding to formalize the partnership. Design workshops are scheduled to begin soon, ahead of funding and construction.

Connecting AI and biotechnology

Other discussions centered on the intersection of biotechnology and AI, another critical area for national security. Panelists represented Boston University, the University of Massachusetts Boston, Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Wyss Institute, and Phicil-itate Change. They discussed challenges in collecting and disseminating high-quality, AI-ready datasets and opportunities for AI to improve biomanufacturing and therapeutics. 

Closing the event, Wack called for continued collaboration as the nation moves at speed and scale to stay at the forefront of biotechnology.

"At Lincoln Laboratory, we've built a strong foundation in biotechnology for more than 25 years, and it's heartening to see this level of coordinated work taking shape. It resonates with so many of us who view biotechnology as both an economic and national security imperative," Wack said. 

“This tomato is blowing my mind,” says Nermine Hassanin. The MIT graduate student in architecture is marveling at the fruit in her salad. 

She and several MIT School of Architecture and Planning classmates had spent their morning working at Hannan Healthy Foods Farm in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and then harvested the contents of the salad they were sharing at a picnic table: lettuce, kale, cucumbers, green onions, and tomatoes. 

“It doesn’t get much fresher unless you’re eating this in the field,” responds Zachary Rapaport, a classmate and co-founder of MIT Farm, a community-driven program at MIT that is radically changing what it means to eat farm-fresh food on campus and gain practical experience in urban farming. 

In fact, the program resonated so quickly with so many that it was awarded the Karl Taylor Compton Prize for a group this spring — the highest award presented by the Institute to students in recognition of excellent achievements in citizenship and devotion to the welfare of MIT. 

Seated with Hassanin and Rapaport were classmates Aisha Cheema and MIT Farm co-founder Aleks Banaś, undergraduate architecture major Amy Kim, Sanne Wright MCP ’24, and Mohammed Hannan, the owner of Hannan Healthy Foods Farm. The story of how they came to enjoy this meal on a brilliant summer Sunday is equal parts vision, hard work, and serendipity. 

Community in Cambridge

In their first year at MIT, Rapaport and Banaś were classmates in a design workshop 4.184 (ClimateCorps@MIT) that focused on climate action within communities. Bonding over their interest in food systems, the two shared a desire to continue the community service work that took them outside of the classroom.

“We started ideating on what it would mean to create relationships with students, faculty, and staff on campus with partners who were already growing food in the community,” says Banaś. “We saw many organizations in the community already doing inspiring work, so instead of starting from scratch we wanted to plug into this system.”

Their concept for MIT Farm explored a holistic view of community, food security, and supporting local farming in a time of climate resilience. It also capitalized on the desires of two budding architects to develop practices they see as essential for sustainable communities.

“After working in an architecture practice, I came to grad school to find a way to create an architecture practice grounded within real communities,” says Banaś. “For me, architecture is not just about creating a building, but creating an environment for other interactions. I think we have a certain level of responsibility to the people around us; we need to learn how to work together with them.”

“What I’ve learned through developing MIT Farm is that farming requires you to be accountable to seasonal change, to people, and to the environment in which we’re working,” adds Rapaport. “There are things you only begin to notice when you spend time with a place and really engage with it. In many ways, architecture is the same. We need to be very attentive to the world around us if we’re going to make good design.”

In 2025, Rapaport and Banaś actively sought out like-minded organizations on campus — including MIT Professor Miho Mazereeuw’s Urban Risk Lab, the MIT Office of Sustainability, and the Open Space Committee — to build relationships and germinate ideas. They found enthusiastic supporters for their ideas which kept them both engaged and excited. That spring, they entered their concept for MIT Farm into the iCampus competition, which recognizes innovative and creative applications of technology that improve living and learning at MIT; they were awarded one of the three cash prizes. 

Between supporters on campus and burgeoning relationships with like-minded organizations off campus, Rapaport and Banaś began to execute their vision.

One idea — a farm cart — kick-started what Rapaport terms “the growing side” of MIT Farm. He, Banaś, and classmate Courage Dzidula Kpodo MArch ’25 designed and built the two-tiered cart. It is constructed of pine with polycarbonate panels and divided into sections that support active vegetable gardens. Repurposed pipette tip containers sourced from campus labs serve as seedling planters. Supported on four wheels, the cart can be pushed or pulled anywhere.

“By introducing mobility, we began growing food without having it tethered to a specific plot of land,” says Rapaport. 

They discovered it was more than just a “moveable farm.” The cart became a DJ booth at school happy hours; was wheeled to nearby public schools as a learning tool; showcased at the “Day of Climate” event at the MIT Museum; and transformed into a tiny winter greenhouse at the East Campus dorms.

Field work

Rapaport and Banaś also located farm communities in Boston and beyond to develop volunteering and mentoring opportunities. Now, through MIT Farm, students can volunteer to work the two rooftop gardens at Boston Medical Center (BMC), a compact farm that generates 6,000 pounds of produce to serve patients and the BMC community. 

A second option for students to work at a city farm is with Eastie Farm in East Boston. A nonprofit with a focus on food security and climate justice, the organization supports local farms that struggle to compete with industrial agriculture.

Last summer, Rapaport and Banaś connected with Mohammed Hannan, the Lincoln farm owner and a laboratory manager at MIT. MIT students had already found their way to his farm, about 15 miles from Cambridge. Four years earlier, Heather Paxson, an anthropology professor and associate dean for faculty at MIT School of Humanities and Social Sciences, brought her anthropology class to visit Hannan Farm to learn about small-scale certified organic operations. 

Hannan was open to the idea of the MIT community working on the farm. He says it is “increasingly challenging” to find people who want to farm. He stresses the broader importance of community support for local agriculture, noting that food security and sustainable farming require collective effort from society — not just from farmers. 

“Many farmers around me are leaving farming to make their living elsewhere,” says Hannan. “It is a silent pandemic.” 

When classes resumed last fall, Rapaport, Banaś, and classmates began volunteering on weekends at the farm. Working with the MIT Office of Sustainability and the Anthropology Section, the group started a pilot program selling Hannan Farm’s produce for a reduced price to students on campus on Mondays. The Fresh Food Bag program offered curated bags of produce that had been harvested a day earlier. The program was met with delight among the MIT community, with nary a vegetable left behind each week. Rapaport and Banaś say they will expand the program this fall to include offering bags of fresh produce in MIT dorms.

The work on the farm changes constantly, based on the season and business needs. One day students may be in the field replanting plants that didn’t establish properly; on another, they may be maintaining tools or working on infrastructure projects.

“There isn't really an ‘off season’ since the farm operates year-round, and we've worked to bring MIT students out in every season and semester,” says Rapaport. “During the winter, we repaired greenhouses, prepared seedling trays, and started getting ready for the next growing season.” 

Hannan describes his collaboration with MIT students as “game changing,” highlighting how students gain practical, problem-solving experience while advising him on how to improve the farm’s infrastructure.

“It’s hard to visualize real-world problems when you are working in a lab [on campus],” says Hannan. “But the students are seeing the day-to-day challenges farmers are facing here. They are coming up with solutions that can alleviate these problems — and not just on my farm. We need more people from different backgrounds to see how we can locally grow more efficiently using the tools and technologies that we have. Sometimes we farmers don’t know where the technologies are — such as using solar irrigation. We’re not always tech-savvy, or we don’t have the expertise. Farming needs all of it.”

To everything, there is a season

In January, during MIT’s Independent Activities Period, Rapaport and Banaś conducted a weeklong workshop to design a root cellar to support food storage and preservation for the farm. The group also developed a curriculum for K-12 students to teach how to design a community garden with the support of a Day of Climate Grant they were awarded.

Kahlen Wheaton, a Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) undergrad, was among the students who worked on the curriculum and helped organize volunteers at the farm last spring.

“I really love the club,” says Wheaton. “It’s a great opportunity for MIT students to get out of their bubble and do some service work. It’s also great just to bring fresh produce to campus because, as an undergrad, I’m not always eating the most healthy or local foods.”

Wheaton had originally planned to study environmental engineering at MIT, but found urban planning and the opportunity to impact policy — especially as it influences designing cities for healthy lifestyles — exciting. She has planned her thesis on urban farming and will use the connections she is making in local farming to inform her work.

Pastures of plenty

This past spring saw dozens of volunteers spending weekends at Hannan Farm. Among them was Rania Ghosn, an MIT associate professor of architecture and urbanism, who brought her family. She says she enjoyed working shoulder-to-shoulder with colleagues in the field, and that MIT Farm provides a “tangible public good while strengthening a sense of belonging and joy.

“Working in the fields with my husband and our 10-year-old son became a kind of Sunday ritual: purposeful, physical, joyful, and full of meaning. For my son, the farm was a lesson no classroom could quite reproduce.”

On a recent Sunday, five architecture students tended to rows and rows of vegetables. Weeds had grown high with the recent rain, but after some tugging and digging, they released their hold in the dirt and lay in piles. The hot sun, the smell of fresh herbs, and the sounds of birds and insects made Cambridge and MIT feel very far away.

Nermine Hassanin has spent several Sundays here. She says she enjoys meeting new people on the farm each time.

“It’s a good sense of community here,” she says. “And being out of the city is very therapeutic.”

Growing up, Aisha Cheema worked with her dad on their family garden. She says working on the farm is “a nice way to stay connected” to those experiences.

“I’m interested in how this environment can be pulled into architecture,” says Cheema. “So many spaces seem siloed from the outdoors. I’d like to connect the outdoors to indoor spaces. I think some of the structures here — like the greenhouse — are great inspiration for me.”

Rapaport and Banaś spent their summer designing additional interventions for the Lincoln farm: an improved washing station and an upgraded farm stand that allows for cold storage to keep produce fresh longer. The design has been approved by the Lincoln Conservation Commission and permits are pending. 

Also, this summer, Amy Kim oversaw the design of a dormant garden plot on campus near Tang Hall. The undergraduate performed the work as part of MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. Kim says she designed the project because it allowed her “to get hands-on experience building a space that would foster community and collaboration, with the added environmental benefit of repurposing material such as scrap brick and scrap wood. 

“The garden's primary goal is to be a pleasant space to sit and relax with friends while surrounded by aromatic herbs and flowers,” Kim adds.

With their theses underway in preparation for Commencement next year, Rapaport and Banaś will hand off their oversight of MIT Farm to Wheaton and others this fall. They could not have guessed how the popularity of MIT Farm would have connected with so many students, or how many friends they cultivated off campus — and they are overjoyed with the results. They believe the community they have developed and fostered will keep MIT Farm vibrant into the future. 

Ghosn agrees.

“MIT Farm feels deeply MIT: mind and hand, ethics and experimentation, systems thinking and dirt under the fingernails,” she says. “Aleks and Zach have created a student-led project with moral clarity, organizational intelligence, and genuine public purpose. It is modest in its means and expansive in its imagination and impact."

In an extremely disappointing ruling, a California trial court dismissed SIREN v. San Jose, our case challenging the city of San Jose’s warrantless searches of its vast stores of automated license plate reader (ALPR) data. EFF and the ACLU of Northern California represent SIREN and CAIR California, two non-profits that serve San Jose residents, in this case.

Make no mistake: We believe this ruling is wrong on the law, and we will appeal. The ruling ignores the importance of landmark rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the invasiveness of aggregating collected data on an individual over time, including one issued just months ago. It also severely underestimates the harm that ALPRs cause, in San Jose and around the country. 

San Jose’s ALPR surveillance system is inescapable. It blankets the city’s streets in nearly five hundred cameras that continuously photograph every car that passes by and retains the collected data for a month or longer. In our briefs, we argued that law enforcement officers who warrantlessly search the resulting ALPR database are violating the California Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches and its guarantee of privacy. The court disagreed, explaining that based on one California appeals court case involving individual streetlight cameras, people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when driving on a public road. This is wrong. Networked ALPRs are not individual streetlight cameras. Their net effect of tracking and mapping cars as they travel reveals patterns of life, intimate relationships, and much more.

Fortunately, there are signs that the tide is turning against ALPRs in the courts. Just a day before the ruling in our case, a federal district court in Oklahoma called ALPRs “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” and decided that a law enforcement officer’s warrantless search of ALPR data violated the Fourth Amendment. The officer was observing traffic on an Oklahoma highway when he saw a woman driving a car with California plates. According to the court order, the officer began following the woman “for no apparent reason” other than her out of state plates. While following her, the officer decided to run the woman’s license plate number through Flock’s ALPR system – again, with no apparent reason other than her California plates. The Flock search returned at least 30 days of data, allowing the officer to track the car across at least three states, over the span of a month, from a single search.

The facts of this case demonstrate how ALPRs allow law enforcement to grab a breathtakingly vast sweep of information about a car (and the driver within) with no more effort than a Google search. It’s true that when a person drives on public roads, they can be observed, including by police. But as the Supreme Court has explained, we don’t expect law enforcement to be able to secretly track and store every movement our cars while we’re driving. The federal court in the Oklahoma case aptly illustrated this difference in societal expectations:

We might reasonably expect our friends and family to tell us something like: “Hey, I saw you out driving by the store last week.” But we do not expect people we know—let alone strangers, and especially not law enforcement—to randomly approach us to say: “Hey, I have been following your car for the last 30 days, and here is a detailed log of every place your vehicle has been with supporting photographic evidence. I am also going to share this information with law enforcement throughout the country so they know your whereabouts, too.

This decision is the first of its kind, and EFF will continue working to ensure that it is the first of many. Outside the courts, we’ve seen people across the country step up to reject ALPRs at the state and local level. EFF will continue challenging this technology on every front as well.

Related Cases: SIREN and CAIR-CA v. San Jose

When we communicate online today – from your personal emails and DMs to secure international commerce – we usually do so with encryption. Encryption converts readable data into unreadable gibberish to protect our privacy and security. This didn’t just happen organically. Three decades ago, the U.S government treated encryption like a weapon, and it took some unlikely heroes to set it free: a grad student, a junior lawyer, and a fledgling digital rights group who sued the federal government. 

The ruling in Bernstein v. Department of Justice held that code is speech and so is protected by the First Amendment – a precedent that underpins the internet as we know it today. This landmark case was led by Cindy Cohn, then a young pro bono lawyer working on behalf of EFF, who went on to become EFF’s legal director and then executive director. 

Welcome to the second episode of “Privacy’s Defenders,” a podcast about the people – lawyers, journalists, hackers, and others – who’ve fought to secure your digital liberties since before most people even knew what the internet was. 

%3Ciframe%20height%3D%2252px%22%20width%3D%22100%25%22%20frameborder%3D%22no%22%20scrolling%3D%22no%22%20seamless%3D%22%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.simplecast.com%2F91542147-6839-46fe-a813-73eb7a5c683c%3Fdark%3Dtrue%26amp%3Bcolor%3D000000%22%20allow%3D%22autoplay%22%3E%3C%2Fiframe%3E Privacy info. This embed will serve content from simplecast.com

   

(You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive and on YouTube.)

In this episode, Cindy – who left EFF in June – speaks with Dan Bernstein, who was a Cal Berkeley grad student when he developed a simple encryption algorithm called “Snuffle.” Because federal law classified encryption as a war munition, publishing Snuffle meant submitting it to the government for review, getting a license as an arms dealer, and being granted a license the government had no intention of granting. Bernstein felt this violated his free-speech rights and in 1995 he sued, represented by Cindy working with EFF. 

Cindy also talks with Tony Coppolino, the Justice Department lawyer she battled in court – who admits she intimidated him from their very first phone call, and who offers a surprising perspective on the case all these years later. 

The “Privacy’s Defenders” podcast (new episodes drop every other Tuesday!) is a follow-up to Cindy’s book, “Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance,” bringing to life pivotal moments in the voices of those who fought for your rights. Sales of “Privacy’s Defender” benefit EFF, so pick up your copy today!

Joanne Elgart Jennings co-produced and created this podcast.   

Jarod Sport co-produced, mixed, and mastered it.   

Corinne Ruff is our story editor. 

We had additional help from Rachel Estabrook and Alison Broverman. 

The original music was composed and performed by Nat Keefe of Hot Buttered Rum with Ben Andrews on the fiddle.