Nature Climate Change, Published online: 11 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02645-6

Food policy adaptation

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 11 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02648-3

Decreasing ice and colder winters

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 11 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02614-z

New hybrid grains are expected to emit less than half of the methane that their natural counterparts emit.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 11 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02629-6

Carbon markets rule change would harm mitigation and Indigenous peoples

Following criticism, lawmakers have narrowed the GUARD Act, a bill aimed at restricting minors’ access to certain AI systems. The earlier version could have applied broadly to nearly every AI-powered chatbot or search tool. The amended bill focuses more narrowly on so-called “AI companions”—conversational systems designed to simulate emotional or interpersonal interactions with users. 

That change does address some of the broadest concerns raised about the original proposal, though some questions about the bill’s reach remain. Bottom line: the revised bill still creates serious problems for privacy, online speech, and parental choice.

TAKE ACTION

Tell Congress: oppose the guard act

The new GUARD Act still requires companies offering AI companions to implement burdensome age-verification systems tied to users’ real-world identities. Even parents who specifically want their teenagers to use these systems would still face significant hurdles. A family might decide that a conversational AI tool helps an isolated teenager practice social interaction, or engage in harmless creative roleplay. A parent deployed in the military might set up a persistent AI storyteller for a younger child. Under the revised bill, those users could still face mandatory age checks tied to sensitive personal or financial information before they or their children can use these services.

The revised bill also leaves important definitions unclear while sharply increasing penalties for developers and companies that get those judgments wrong. Congress narrowed the GUARD Act. But it is still trying to solve a complicated social problem with vague legal standards, heavy liability, and privacy-invasive verification systems.

Intrusive Age-Verification Remains In The Bill

The revised GUARD Act still requires companies offering AI companions to verify that users are adults through a “reasonable age verification” system. The bill allows a broader set of verification methods than the earlier version, but they are still tied to a user’s real-world identity—such as financial records, or age-verified accounts for a mobile operating system or app store. 

That approach still raises serious privacy and access concerns. Millions of Americans do not have current government ID, accounts at major banks, or stable access to the kinds of digital identity systems the bill contemplates. Even for those who do, requiring identity-linked verification to access online speech tools creates real risks for privacy, anonymity, and data security. Many people are rightly creeped out by age-verification systems, and may simply forgo using these services rather than compromise their privacy and security.

The revised definition of “AI companion” is also narrower than before, but it’s unclear at the margins. The bill now focuses on systems that “engage in interactions involving emotional disclosures” from the user, or present a “persistent identity, persona or character.” 

EFF appreciates that the authors recognized that the prior definition could reach a variety of AI systems that are not chatbots, including internet search engines. But the narrowed definition could be read to also apply to a variety of chat tools that are not AI companions. For example, many modern online conversational systems increasingly recognize and respond to users’ emotions. Customer service systems, including completely human-powered ones that existed long before AI chatbots, have long been designed to recognize frustration and respond empathetically. As conversational AI becomes more emotionally responsive, a customer service chatbot’s efforts to empathize may sweep it within the bill’s definition. 

Bigger Penalties, Bigger Incentives To Restrict Access

The revised bill also sharply increases penalties. Instead of $100,000 per violation, companies—including small developers—can face fines of up to $250,000 per violation, enforced by both federal and state officials.

That kind of liability creates incentives to over-restrict access, especially for minors. Smaller developers, in particular, may decide it is safer to block younger users entirely, disable conversational features, or avoid developing certain tools at all, rather than risk severe penalties under vague standards.

The concerns driving this bill are real. Some AI systems have engaged in troubling interactions with vulnerable users, including minors. But the right answer to that is targeted enforcement against bad actors, and privacy laws that protect us all. The revised GUARD Act instead responds with a privacy-invasive system that burdens the right to speak, read, and interact online.

Congress did improve this bill, but EFF’s core speech, privacy, and security issues remain.

TAKE ACTION

Tell Congress: oppose the guard act

Evidence of them has been found by analyzing DNA in the seawater.

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

Blog moderation policy.

Insider trading is rife on Polymarket:

Analysis by the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a non-profit research and advocacy group, found that long-shot bets—­defined as wagers of $2,500 or more at odds of 35 percent or less—­on the platform had an average win rate of around 52 percent in markets on military and defense actions.

That compares with a win rate of 25 percent across all politics-focused markets and just 14 percent for all markets on the platform as a whole.

It is absolutely insane that this is legal. We already know how insider betting warps sports. Insider betting warping politics—and military actions—is orders of magnitude worse...

EFF friend Guy Kawasaki* has written a book: Everybody Has Something to Hide: Why and How to Use Signal to Preserve Your Privacy, Security, and Well-Being. This guide is now available in Spanish and English as an ebook in the EPUB format that you can download here. Take a look and consider sharing it with anyone who you know who uses (or should use) Signal. 

And don't forget: EFF has two short guides on using Signal on our Surveillance Self-Defense site. An intro How to Use Signal guide, and a guide on Managing Signal Groups. 

Everybody Has Something to Hide: Why and How to Use Signal to Preserve Your Privacy, Security, and Well-Being courtesy of Guy Kawasaki. 

*Guy Kawasaki is an EFF donor.

Long-anticipated recommendations to revamp the disaster agency were approved Thursday. Now, President Donald Trump has to make a decision.

State policymakers appear unprepared for a potential increase in power bills driven by a doubling of emissions credit prices as Virginia gears up to rejoin a regional climate program.

The moves bring the cases a step closer to trial, even as a pending Supreme Court battle threatens to derail the lawsuits.

A massive data center near Atlanta took the water but didn't get a bill until months later.

Gov. Kathy Hochul said she’s secured changes to the state’s climate law, delaying a transition off fossil fuels while soothing affordability concerns.

Countries would be able to exempt companies from the rules on energy security grounds, even before major disruption occurs, under draft guidelines seen by POLITICO.

With the war in Iran driving up energy prices, “we have every argument, every reason to make sure that we become less dependent on fossil fuels,” said Climate Minister Stientje van Veldhoven.

Authorities have issued contradictory statements on whether passengers will have to quarantine.

There have been rising concern over the fast melting of the glaciers because of global warming and climate change.

In late October 2025, Tropical Storm Melissa moved through the Caribbean Sea with moderate winds that didn’t get much attention. But on Oct. 25, aided by a patch of warm ocean, the storm rapidly intensified. By the time it made landfall in Jamaica, it was one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record, uprooting trees, tearing the roofs from buildings, and causing catastrophic flooding and power outages.

Ravi Pappu SM ’95, PhD ’01 blames the surprise on our inability to gather high-quality ocean data.

“The storm intensified because of a small pool of hot water in the Caribbean Ocean that fed it energy,” Pappu explains. “These pools are everywhere. They can be hundreds of kilometers wide and are literally invisible to us. If we knew about that pool, we could say very precisely how the hurricane would intensify and better deal with it.”

Pappu thinks he has a way to solve that problem. He is the founder of Apeiron Labs, a company deploying low-cost autonomous ocean sensors to capture more data, in more places, and at a lower cost than is possible today. The company’s devices roam the ocean up to a quarter mile below the surface and continuously gather data on temperature, acoustics, salinity, and more, providing a real-time look at one of the planet’s last known mysteries. He says the sensors can do for the ocean what small, modular CubeSat satellites did for Earth observation from space.

When the devices are ready to be recharged, trackers make it easy to scoop them from the ocean surface. Pappu envisions the recovery process being done by autonomous boats in the future.

“Humanity needs ocean measurements, and we need them at a scale that has never been attempted before,” Pappu says. “It’s a massively hard problem. In the last century, oceanographers resigned themselves to calling it the century of undersampling. If we are successful, we will have a much more fine-grained understanding of our oceans and how they impact humans. That’s what drives us.”

Homework

Pappu came to MIT after completing a 10-year homework assignment. It started when he was a child in India in the 1980s, when he saw a hologram on the cover of National Geographic for the first time.

“I was so taken by it that I decided I needed to learn how to make those three-dimensional images,” Pappu recalls. “I learned what I could by reading books and papers. I didn’t know who invented the hologram until I read a book about MIT’s Media Lab. The book named the person who invented the rainbow hologram, so I wrote him a letter. I didn’t know his address, so I just wrote on the envelope, ‘Steve Benton, holography researcher, MIT, USA.’”

To Pappu’s surprise, the letter reached Benton, and the former Media Lab professor even wrote back with some further topics he needed to learn about.

Pappu never forgot that. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in India, then earned his master’s degree at Villanova University, taking all the optics classes he could.

“Eventually, about 10 years after I saw my first hologram, I wrote to Steve and I said, ‘I did all these things you asked me, now I want to study with you,’” Pappu says. “That’s how I got into MIT.”

Pappu studied under Benton for the next three years. He also studied under Professor Neil Gershenfeld as part of his PhD. Following graduation, Pappu and four classmates started ThingMagic, a consulting company that eventually sold RFID readers. ThingMagic was acquired 2010. Pappu returned to MIT for two years as a visiting scientist around the time of the acquisition.

Following that experience, Pappu worked at In-Q-Tel, an organization that invested in ThingMagic and other companies with potential to advance national security. It was there that Pappu realized how badly the world needed large-scale, inexpensive ocean sensing.

“All of the ocean sensing up to that point, and even today, was about making a really expensive thing that cost $20 million, goes to the bottom of the ocean, and stays there for five years,” Pappu says. “We needed things that are cheap and scalable to deploy wherever you need them for as long as you want.”

Pappu officially founded Apeiron Labs in 2022.

“What we’re focused on is figuring out how the ocean works,” Pappu says. “How warm is it? What is the pH? How salty is it? These things vary from place to place every 10 kilometers or so. It varies over time, and it varies by season. If we knew the details of the ocean with the same fidelity we have for the atmosphere, we would be able to tell exactly when and where hurricanes hit. It would mean less uncertainty.”

Apeiron’s ocean-sensing devices are each 3 feet long and about 20 pounds. They’re designed to be dropped off a boat or plane with biodegradable parachutes and stay in the ocean for six months. Each device continuously sends data to the cloud, is controllable through a cloud-based ocean operating system, and is accessible on a mobile phone.

“We lower the carbon footprint and cost of gathering ocean data because everything else needs a diesel ship — and a fully crewed ship costs $100,000 a day,” Rappu says. “By the time you collect the first data in the old model, you’ve already committed to a lot of money in addition to millions of dollars for the sensors. “

The company’s devices currently have two types of sensors: one for measuring salinity, temperature, and depth, and the other that uses a hydrophone to passively listen for things like submarines and whales.

That could be used to detect the low-frequency calls and clicks of endangered whales and other fish species. Currently, fishermen must look for whales manually with spotters on ships or planes. The data could also be used to improve weather forecasts, monitor noise from offshore energy projects, and track currents.

“Currents are determined by temperature and salinity, so if there’s an oil spill, our data could help determine where that spill is going,” Pappu says. “Or if you’re a fisherman, knowing where the water changes from warm to cold, which is where the fish hang out, is very useful.”

An ocean of possibilities

Apeiron Labs has worked with government defense agencies including the U.S. Navy over the last two years. The company has also tested its devices off the coast of California and in the Boston Harbor.

“The most important thing is, when we show people our approach and what we’ve demonstrated so far, they are no longer asking, ‘Can it be done?’ they’re asking, ‘What can we do with it?’” Pappu says. “Our customers have spent decades working in the ocean and they understand how novel these capabilities are.”

Of all the possibilities, improved storm forecasting could be the one Pappu is most excited about.

“Our mission is to lower the barriers to ocean data,” Pappu says. “The ocean is a huge determinant of weather, climate, and short-term forecasting. Despite our best efforts to predict the intensity of storms, sudden changes are still the norm, and much of that comes down to a lack of understanding of our oceans. If we were monitoring these things over long periods of time and finer spatial scales, we could see these storms coming much earlier with more certainty.”

Jack Carson, a second-year undergraduate at MIT majoring in electrical engineering and computer science, has been named a 2026 Udall Scholar, one of up to 65 undergraduates nationally to receive the prestigious $7,500 award. 

The Udall Scholarship honors students who have demonstrated a commitment to the environment, Indigenous health care, or tribal public policy. Carson is only the third MIT student to win this award, and the first to win for tribal policy.

Carson, a member of the Cherokee Nation and resident of Oklahoma, exemplifies the multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving that the Udall Scholarship seeks to honor. His work spans artificial intelligence, biomedical research, Indigenous community development, and ethics.

"Jack is the type of leader the Udall Foundation exists to support," says Kim Benard, associate dean for distinguished fellowships. "He's not only conducting cutting-edge research, but he's actively creating opportunities for Indigenous students to enter tech fields."

At MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Carson works in the Barzilay Lab, developing multiomics models for personalized therapeutic target identification. His work on deep learning and statistical physics has resulted in a sole-author paper published at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).

Carson founded Code.Tulsa, a summer technology program designed to introduce Indigenous high school students to computer science and tech careers. The initiative addresses a significant gap: Indigenous communities remain highly underrepresented in technology fields, despite the potential for tech to advance tribal sovereignty and economic development.

This year, Carson won the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics Essay Contest. He is an accomplished musician who has performed at Carnegie Hall and with the National Opera, a motorcycle racer, and a self-described philosopher deeply committed to questions of justice and responsibility.

Each year, faculty and researchers across the MIT School of Engineering are recognized with prestigious awards for their contributions to research, technology, society, and education. To celebrate these achievements, the school periodically highlights select honors received by members of its departments, institutes, labs, and centers. The following individuals were recognized in winter 2026:

Arup K. Chakraborty, the John M. Deutch (1961) Institute Professor in the departments of Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, and Physics, and the founding director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, as well as James J. Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in the Department of Biological Engineering and IMES, received the 2026 Laureate of the Tel Aviv University International Prize in Biophysics. The prize recognizes outstanding scientists whose work has significantly advanced the understanding of biological systems through physical principles.

Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT provost and the Vannevar Bush Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2025 IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits Test of Time Award. The award recognizes an outstanding paper published in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits at least 10 years prior that has had significant impact on its field.

Charles Harvey, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Piotr Indyk, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; John Henry Lienhard, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; Frances Ross, the TDK Professor in Materials Science and Engineering; Zoltán Sandor Spakovszky, the T. Wilson (1953) Professor in Aeronautics; and Ram Sasisekharan, the Alfred H. Caspary Professor of Biological Physics and Physics in the Department of Biological Engineering; were elected to the National Academy of Engineering for 2026. One of the highest professional distinctions for engineers, membership in the NAE is given to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education,” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

Michael Howland, the Jeffrey Cheah Career Development Professor and assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, received a 2026 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. The award supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Yoon Kim, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Anand Natarajan, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and Mengjia Yan, ITT Career Development Professor in Computer Technology and associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, were named 2026 Sloan Research Fellows. Sloan Research Fellowships support fundamental research conducted by early-career scientists, and they are awarded annually to early-career researchers whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders.

Carlos Portela, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor and associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has received a 2026 Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research. The Young Investigator Program seeks to identify and support academic scientists and engineers who are in their first or second full-time tenure-track or tenure-track-equivalent academic appointment, who have received their doctorate or equivalent degree in the past seven years, and who show exceptional promise for doing creative research.

Ellen Roche, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor and associate department head for research in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and a professor in the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, received the 2026 Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature. The award recognizes exceptional early- to mid-career women researchers in technology who through their research are driving a positive impact on society and the planet.

Tess Smidt, an associate professor in the Department of EECS, was named co–principal investigator on a National Science Foundation (NSF) AI Research Institute award and also received a 2025 Department of Energy Office of Science Early Career Research Program Award. The NSF AI Materials Institute (AI-MI) aims to propel foundational AI research past the limitations of existing AI algorithms by pursuing materials discovery and conquering knowledge- and data-centric challenges. The DoE Early Career Research Program provides five-year awards to exceptional early career researchers at U.S. academic institutions, DoE National Laboratories, and Office of Science User Facilities to stimulate new research directions in mission critical areas supported by DoE’s Office of Science.

Antonio Torralba, the Delta Electronics Professor and faculty head of AI+D in the Department of EECS, was elected to the 2025 cohort of Association for Computing Machinery Fellows. ACM Fellows, the highest honor bestowed by the professional organization, are registered members of the society selected by their peers for outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.

Harry L. Tuller, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, received The Senior Scientist Award from the International Society for Solid State Ionics. The Senior Scientist Award, the most prestigious award of the International Society for Solid State Ionics, is presented to a senior solid-state ionics researcher who has made outstanding contributions to the science and engineering of solid-state ionics.

Vinod Vaikuntanathan, the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was named a 2026 fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. ACR has established the IACR Fellows Program to recognize outstanding IACR members for technical and professional contributions.