The Interior Department changed the classification for offshore areas considered prime targets for wind energy projects.

Machine intelligence would address criticism that markets fund projects with little climate benefit — and would make them "reliable, ethical and robust."

Nearly 200 nations vowed to accelerate wind and solar installations at COP28. Only 16 have increased their targets.

European Commission Vice President Teresa Ribera was also cleared by the Supreme Court.

Many of the most climate-vulnerable citizens, communities and nations are suing countries and corporations over what they see as a lack of climate action.

Some places are especially tough for the tech giant to secure enough renewable electricity due to a lack of supply, said a company official.

Its two radars will operate day and night, peering through clouds, rain and foliage to collect troves of data in extraordinary detail.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 31 July 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02397-9

Tropical cyclones can occur concurrently in the same basins in clusters, potentially resulting in greater damage. Here the authors show that global warming causes a shift in hotspots of such clusters towards the North Atlantic.

All life is connected in a vast family tree. Every organism exists in relationship to its ancestors, descendants, and cousins, and the path between any two individuals can be traced. The same is true of cells within organisms — each of the trillions of cells in the human body is produced through successive divisions from a fertilized egg, and can all be related to one another through a cellular family tree. In simpler organisms, such as the worm C. elegans, this cellular family tree has been fully mapped, but the cellular family tree of a human is many times larger and more complex.

In the past, MIT professor and Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research member Jonathan Weissman and other researchers developed lineage tracing methods to track and reconstruct the family trees of cell divisions in model organisms in order to understand more about the relationships between cells and how they assemble into tissues, organs, and — in some cases — tumors. These methods could help to answer many questions about how organisms develop and diseases like cancer are initiated and progress.

Now, Weissman and colleagues have developed an advanced lineage tracing tool that not only captures an accurate family tree of cell divisions, but also combines that with spatial information: identifying where each cell ends up within a tissue. The researchers used their tool, PEtracer, to observe the growth of metastatic tumors in mice. Combining lineage tracing and spatial data provided the researchers with a detailed view of how elements intrinsic to the cancer cells and from their environments influenced tumor growth, as Weissman and postdocs in his lab Luke Koblan, Kathryn Yost, and Pu Zheng, and graduate student William Colgan share in a paper published in the journal Science on July 24.

“Developing this tool required combining diverse skill sets through the sort of ambitious interdisciplinary collaboration that’s only possible at a place like Whitehead Institute,” says Weissman, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “Luke came in with an expertise in genetic engineering, Pu in imaging, Katie in cancer biology, and William in computation, but the real key to their success was their ability to work together to build PEtracer.”

“Understanding how cells move in time and space is an important way to look at biology, and here we were able to see both of those things in high resolution. The idea is that by understanding both a cell’s past and where it ends up, you can see how different factors throughout its life influenced its behaviors. In this study, we use these approaches to look at tumor growth, though in principle we can now begin to apply these tools to study other biology of interest, like embryonic development,” Koblan says.

Designing a tool to track cells in space and time

PEtracer tracks cells’ lineages by repeatedly adding short, predetermined codes to the DNA of cells over time. Each piece of code, called a lineage tracing mark, is made up of five bases, the building blocks of DNA. These marks are inserted using a gene editing technology called prime editing, which directly rewrites stretches of DNA with minimal undesired byproducts. Over time, each cell acquires more lineage tracing marks, while also maintaining the marks of its ancestors. The researchers can then compare cells’ combinations of marks to figure out relationships and reconstruct the family tree.

“We used computational modeling to design the tool from first principles, to make sure that it was highly accurate, and compatible with imaging technology. We ran many simulations to land on the optimal parameters for a new lineage tracing tool, and then engineered our system to fit those parameters,” Colgan says.

When the tissue — in this case, a tumor growing in the lung of a mouse — had sufficiently grown, the researchers collected these tissues and used advanced imaging approaches to look at each cell’s lineage relationship to other cells via the lineage tracing marks, along with its spatial position within the imaged tissue and its identity (as determined by the levels of different RNAs expressed in each cell). PEtracer is compatible with both imaging approaches and sequencing methods that capture genetic information from single cells.

“Making it possible to collect and analyze all of this data from the imaging was a large challenge,” Zheng says. “What’s particularly exciting to me is not just that we were able to collect terabytes of data, but that we designed the project to collect data that we knew we could use to answer important questions and drive biological discovery.”

Reconstructing the history of a tumor

Combining the lineage tracing, gene expression, and spatial data let the researchers understand how the tumor grew. They could tell how closely related neighboring cells are and compare their traits. Using this approach, the researchers found that the tumors they were analyzing were made up of four distinct modules, or neighborhoods, of cells.

The tumor cells closest to the lung, the most nutrient-dense region, were the most fit, meaning their lineage history indicated the highest rate of cell division over time. Fitness in cancer cells tends to correlate to how aggressively tumors will grow.

The cells at the “leading edge” of the tumor, the far side from the lung, were more diverse and not as fit. Below the leading edge was a low-oxygen neighborhood of cells that might once have been leading edge cells, now trapped in a less-desirable spot. Between these cells and the lung-adjacent cells was the tumor core, a region with both living and dead cells, as well as cellular debris.

The researchers found that cancer cells across the family tree were equally likely to end up in most of the regions, with the exception of the lung-adjacent region, where a few branches of the family tree dominated. This suggests that the cancer cells’ differing traits were heavily influenced by their environments, or the conditions in their local neighborhoods, rather than their family history. Further evidence of this point was that expression of certain fitness-related genes, such as Fgf1/Fgfbp1, correlated to a cell’s location, rather than its ancestry. However, lung-adjacent cells also had inherited traits that gave them an edge, including expression of the fitness-related gene Cldn4­ — showing that family history influenced outcomes as well.

These findings demonstrate how cancer growth is influenced both by factors intrinsic to certain lineages of cancer cells and by environmental factors that shape the behavior of cancer cells exposed to them.

“By looking at so many dimensions of the tumor in concert, we could gain insights that would not have been possible with a more limited view,” Yost says. “Being able to characterize different populations of cells within a tumor will enable researchers to develop therapies that target the most aggressive populations more effectively.”

“Now that we’ve done the hard work of designing the tool, we’re excited to apply it to look at all sorts of questions in health and disease, in embryonic development, and across other model species, with an eye toward understanding important problems in human health,” Koblan says. “The data we collect will also be useful for training AI models of cellular behavior. We’re excited to share this technology with other researchers and see what we all can discover.”

Salt creeping, a phenomenon that occurs in both natural and industrial processes, describes the collection and migration of salt crystals from evaporating solutions onto surfaces. Once they start collecting, the crystals climb, spreading away from the solution. This creeping behavior, according to researchers, can cause damage or be harnessed for good, depending on the context. New research published June 30 in the journal Langmuir is the first to show salt creeping at a single-crystal scale and beneath a liquid’s meniscus.

“The work not only explains how salt creeping begins, but why it begins and when it does,” says Joseph Phelim Mooney, a postdoc in the MIT Device Research Laboratory and one of the authors of the new study. “We hope this level of insight helps others, whether they’re tackling water scarcity, preserving ancient murals, or designing longer-lasting infrastructure.”

The work is the first to directly visualize how salt crystals grow and interact with surfaces underneath a liquid meniscus, something that’s been theorized for decades but never actually imaged or confirmed at this level, and it offers fundamental insights that could impact a wide range of fields — from mineral extraction and desalination to anti-fouling coatings, membrane design for separation science, and even art conservation, where salt damage is a major threat to heritage materials.

In civil engineering applications, for example, the research can help explain why and when salt crystals start growing across surfaces like concrete, stone, or building materials. “These crystals can exert pressure and cause cracking or flaking, reducing the long-term durability of structures,” says Mooney. “By pinpointing the moment when salt begins to creep, engineers can better design protective coatings or drainage systems to prevent this form of degradation.”

For a field like art conservation, where salt can be devastating to murals, frescoes, and ancient artifacts, often forming beneath the surface before visible damage appears, the work can help identify the exact conditions that cause salt to start moving and spreading, allowing conservators to act earlier and more precisely to protect heritage objects.

The work began during Mooney’s Marie Curie Fellowship at MIT. “I was focused on improving desalination systems and quickly ran into [salt buildup as] a major roadblock,” he says. “[Salt] was everywhere, coating surfaces, clogging flow paths, and undermining the efficiency of our designs. I realized we didn’t fully understand how or why salt starts creeping across surfaces in the first place.”

That experience led Mooney to team up with colleagues to dig into the fundamentals of salt crystallization at the air–liquid–solid interface. “We wanted to zoom in, to really see the moment salt begins to move, so we turned to in situ X-ray microscopy,” he says. “What we found gave us a whole new way to think about surface fouling, material degradation, and controlled crystallization.”

The new research may, in fact, allow better control of a crystallization processes required to remove salt from water in zero-liquid discharge systems. It can also be used to explain how and when scaling happens on equipment surfaces, and may support emerging climate technologies that depend on smart control of evaporation and crystallization.

The work also supports mineral and salt extraction applications, where salt creeping can be both a bottleneck and an opportunity. In these applications, Mooney says, “by understanding the precise physics of salt formation at surfaces, operators can optimize crystal growth, improving recovery rates and reducing material losses.”

Mooney’s co-authors on the paper include fellow MIT Device Lab researchers Omer Refet Caylan, Bachir El Fil (now an associate professor at Georgia Tech), and Lenan Zhang (now an associate professor at Cornell University); Jeff Punch and Vanessa Egan of the University of Limerick; and Jintong Gao of Cornell.

The research was conducted using in situ X-ray microscopy. Mooney says the team’s big realization moment occurred when they were able to observe a single salt crystal pinning itself to the surface, which kicked off a cascading chain reaction of growth.

“People had speculated about this, but we captured it on X-ray for the first time. It felt like watching the microscopic moment where everything tips, the ignition points of a self-propagating process,” says Mooney. “Even more surprising was what followed: The salt crystal didn’t just grow passively to fill the available space. It pierced through the liquid-air interface and reshaped the meniscus itself, setting up the perfect conditions for the next crystal. That subtle, recursive mechanism had never been visually documented before — and seeing it play out in real time completely changed how we thought about salt crystallization.”

The paper, “In Situ X-ray Microscopy Unraveling the Onset of Salt Creeping at a Single-Crystal Level,” is available now in the journal Langmuir. Research was conducted in MIT.nano. 

EFF is gearing up to beat the heat in Las Vegas for the summer security conferences! Before we make our journey to the Strip, we figured let's get y'all up-to-speed with a new edition of EFFector.

This time we're covering an illegal mass surveillance scheme by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, calling out dating apps for using intimate data—like sexual preferences or identity—to train AI , and explaining why we're backing the Wikimedia Foundation in their challenge to the UK’s Online Safety Act.

Don't forget to also check out our audio companion to EFFector as well! We're interviewing staff about some of the important work that they're doing. This time, EFF Senior Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia explains how Amazon Ring is cashing in on the rising tide of techno-authoritarianism. Listen now on YouTube or the Internet Archive.

Listen TO EFFECTOR

EFFECTOR 37.9 - Amazon Ring Is Back in the Mass Surveillance Game

Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression. 

Thank you to the supporters around the world who make our work possible! If you're not a member yet, join EFF today to help us fight for a brighter digital future.

“Who’s winning on the internet, the attackers or the defenders?”

I’m asked this all the time, and I can only ever give a qualitative hand-wavy answer. But Jason Healey and Tarang Jain’s latest Lawfare piece has amassed data.

The essay provides the first framework for metrics about how we are all doing collectively—and not just how an individual network is doing. Healey wrote to me in email:

The work rests on three key insights: (1) defenders need a framework (based in threat, vulnerability, and consequence) to categorize the flood of potentially relevant security metrics; (2) trends are what matter, not specifics; and (3) to start, we should avoid getting bogged down in collecting data and just use what’s already being reported by amazing teams at Verizon, Cyentia, Mandiant, IBM, FBI, and so many others...

The Trump administration's proposal to roll back the endangerment finding includes many misleading and inaccurate claims.

Administrator Lee Zeldin pointed to high-profile legal decisions that eroded executive branch power as a sign of support for dismantling the endangerment finding.

The Trump administration move aims to tip markets that have favored renewables over coal because of cost.

Republicans who have spoken about the need to address climate change did not push back on EPA's move.

Lawmakers have already identified some local shortfalls. A hearing Thursday will be their first chance to question key decision-makers.

While the case is still far from trial, it's much closer than some 30 similar lawsuits nationwide brought by other states, cities and counties.

The National Weather Service said Tuesday the prolonged heat is expected to peak in the Southeast at midweek.

A state-backed newspaper reported the city received 21.4 inches of rain in the last four days, which is just a bit short of the 23.6 inches the city receives annually in a year.