A fossil fuel advocacy group says liability litigation against oil and gas companies is the “biggest risk” to President Donald Trump’s energy agenda.

Renewable energy broke records last year, but so did gas generation. That's a climate problem.

As smoke billowed over the Pacific Ocean, scientists working offshore sprang into action.

The Climate Change Center provided technical assistance that helped state and local governments bring in $13 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law.

Lawmakers are escalating their protests following news EPA wants to undo a finding allowing the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The Trump EPA has homed in on the electric school bus manufacturer as alleged evidence of the Biden administration’s mismanagement of grant funds.

The notice comes after the Office of Administrative Law rejected changes to the low-carbon fuel standard.

Finland’s Neste blames the airlines for not keeping their promise to guarantee voluntary demand for sustainable aviation fuel.

A report said the country can reach the net-zero goal by 2050 while spending as little as 0.2 percent of its gross domestic product.

High-temperature superconducting magnets made from REBCO, an acronym for rare earth barium copper oxide, make it possible to create an intense magnetic field that can confine the extremely hot plasma needed for fusion reactions, which combine two hydrogen atoms to form an atom of helium, releasing a neutron in the process.

But some early tests suggested that neutron irradiation inside a fusion power plant might instantaneously suppress the superconducting magnets’ ability to carry current without resistance (called critical current), potentially causing a reduction in the fusion power output.

Now, a series of experiments has clearly demonstrated that this instantaneous effect of neutron bombardment, known as the “beam on effect,” should not be an issue during reactor operation, thus clearing the path for projects such as the ARC fusion system being developed by MIT spinoff company Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

The findings were reported in the journal Superconducting Science and Technology, in a paper by MIT graduate student Alexis Devitre and professors Michael Short, Dennis Whyte, and Zachary Hartwig, along with six others.

“Nobody really knew if it would be a concern,” Short explains. He recalls looking at these early findings: “Our group thought, man, somebody should really look into this. But now, luckily, the result of the paper is: It’s conclusively not a concern.”

The possible issue first arose during some initial tests of the REBCO tapes planned for use in the ARC system. “I can remember the night when we first tried the experiment,” Devitre recalls. “We were all down in the accelerator lab, in the basement. It was a big shocker because suddenly the measurement we were looking at, the critical current, just went down by 30 percent” when it was measured under radiation conditions (approximating those of the fusion system), as opposed to when it was only measured after irradiation.

Before that, researchers had irradiated the REBCO tapes and then tested them afterward, Short says. “We had the idea to measure while irradiating, the way it would be when the reactor’s really on,” he says. “And then we observed this giant difference, and we thought, oh, this is a big deal. It’s a margin you’d want to know about if you’re designing a reactor.”

After a series of carefully calibrated tests, it turned out the drop in critical current was not caused by the irradiation at all, but was just an effect of temperature changes brought on by the proton beam used for the irradiation experiments. This is something that would not be a factor in an actual fusion plant, Short says.

“We repeated experiments ‘oh so many times’ and collected about a thousand data points,” Devitre says. They then went through a detailed statistical analysis to show that the effects were exactly the same, under conditions where the material was just heated as when it was both heated and irradiated.

This excluded the possibility that the instantaneous suppression of the critical current had anything to do with the “beam on effect,” at least within the sensitivity of their tests. “Our experiments are quite sensitive,” Short says. “We can never say there’s no effect, but we can say that there’s no important effect.”

To carry out these tests required building a special facility for the purpose. Only a few such facilities exist in the world. “They’re all custom builds, and without this, we wouldn’t have been able to find out the answer,” he says.

The finding that this specific issue is not a concern for the design of fusion plants “illustrates the power of negative results. If you can conclusively prove that something doesn’t happen, you can stop scientists from wasting their time hunting for something that doesn’t exist.” And in this case, Short says, “You can tell the fusion companies: ‘You might have thought this effect would be real, but we’ve proven that it’s not, and you can ignore it in your designs.’ So that’s one more risk retired.”

That could be a relief to not only Commonwealth Fusion Systems but also several other companies that are also pursuing fusion plant designs, Devitre says. “There’s a bunch. And it’s not just fusion companies,” he adds. There remains the important issue of longer-term degradation of the REBCO that would occur over years or decades, which the group is presently investigating. Others are pursuing the use of these magnets for satellite thrusters and particle accelerators to study subatomic physics, where the effect could also have been a concern. For all these uses, “this is now one less thing to be concerned about,” Devitre says.

The research team also included David Fischer, Kevin Woller, Maxwell Rae, Lauryn Kortman, and Zoe Fisher at MIT, and N. Riva at Proxima Fusion in Germany. This research was supported by Eni S.p.A. through the MIT Energy Initiative.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 28 February 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02269-2

In 2023–2024, widespread marine heatwaves associated with record ocean temperatures impacted ocean processes, marine species, ecosystems and coastal communities, with economic consequences. Despite warnings, interventions were limited. Proactive strategies are needed for inevitable future events.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 28 February 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02257-6

Critical methodological choices in marine heatwave detection can yield dramatically different results. We call for context-specific methods that account for regional variability to advance marine heatwave research and socio-ecological outcomes.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 28 February 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02250-z

Governance of domestic cross-border carbon capture and storage faces great challenges, which varies across political systems, economic structures and socio-cultural backgrounds, yet is often overlooked. Overcoming these challenges requires a comprehensive and coordinated approach built on synergistic cluster governance.

A vast search of natural diversity has led scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to uncover ancient systems with potential to expand the genome editing toolbox. 

These systems, which the researchers call TIGR (Tandem Interspaced Guide RNA) systems, use RNA to guide them to specific sites on DNA. TIGR systems can be reprogrammed to target any DNA sequence of interest, and they have distinct functional modules that can act on the targeted DNA. In addition to its modularity, TIGR is very compact compared to other RNA-guided systems, like CRISPR, which is a major advantage for delivering it in a therapeutic context.  

These findings are reported online Feb. 27 in the journal Science.

“This is a very versatile RNA-guided system with a lot of diverse functionalities,” says Feng Zhang, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, who led the research. The TIGR-associated (Tas) proteins that Zhang’s team found share a characteristic RNA-binding component that interacts with an RNA guide that directs it to a specific site in the genome. Some cut the DNA at that site, using an adjacent DNA-cutting segment of the protein. That modularity could facilitate tool development, allowing researchers to swap useful new features into natural Tas proteins.

“Nature is pretty incredible,” says Zhang, who is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a core member of the Broad Institute, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and biological engineering at MIT, and co-director of the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics at MIT. “It’s got a tremendous amount of diversity, and we have been exploring that natural diversity to find new biological mechanisms and harnessing them for different applications to manipulate biological processes,” he says. Previously, Zhang’s team adapted bacterial CRISPR systems into gene editing tools that have transformed modern biology. His team has also found a variety of programmable proteins, both from CRISPR systems and beyond. 

In their new work, to find novel programmable systems, the team began by zeroing in a structural feature of the CRISPR-Cas9 protein that binds to the enzyme’s RNA guide. That is a key feature that has made Cas9 such a powerful tool: “Being RNA-guided makes it relatively easy to reprogram, because we know how RNA binds to other DNA or other RNA,” Zhang explains. His team searched hundreds of millions of biological proteins with known or predicted structures, looking for any that shared a similar domain. To find more distantly related proteins, they used an iterative process: from Cas9, they identified a protein called IS110, which had previously been shown by others to bind RNA. They then zeroed in on the structural features of IS110 that enable RNA binding and repeated their search. 

At this point, the search had turned up so many distantly related proteins that they team turned to artificial intelligence to make sense of the list. “When you are doing iterative, deep mining, the resulting hits can be so diverse that they are difficult to analyze using standard phylogenetic methods, which rely on conserved sequence,” explains Guilhem Faure, a computational biologist in Zhang’s lab. With a protein large language model, the team was able to cluster the proteins they had found into groups according to their likely evolutionary relationships. One group set apart from the rest, and its members were particularly intriguing because they were encoded by genes with regularly spaced repetitive sequences reminiscent of an essential component of CRISPR systems. These were the TIGR-Tas systems.

Zhang’s team discovered more than 20,000 different Tas proteins, mostly occurring in bacteria-infecting viruses. Sequences within each gene’s repetitive region — its TIGR arrays — encode an RNA guide that interacts with the RNA-binding part of the protein. In some, the RNA-binding region is adjacent to a DNA-cutting part of the protein. Others appear to bind to other proteins, which suggests they might help direct those proteins to DNA targets.     

Zhang and his team experimented with dozens of Tas proteins, demonstrating that some can be programmed to make targeted cuts to DNA in human cells. As they think about developing TIGR-Tas systems into programmable tools, the researchers are encouraged by features that could make those tools particularly flexible and precise.

They note that CRISPR systems can only be directed to segments of DNA that are flanked by short motifs known as PAMs (protospacer adjacent motifs). TIGR Tas proteins, in contrast, have no such requirement. “This means theoretically, any site in the genome should be targetable,” says scientific advisor Rhiannon Macrae. The team’s experiments also show that TIGR systems have what Faure calls a “dual-guide system,” interacting with both strands of the DNA double helix to home in on their target sequences, which should ensure they act only where they are directed by their RNA guide. What’s more, Tas proteins are compact — a quarter of the size Cas9, on average — making them easier to deliver, which could overcome a major obstacle to therapeutic deployment of gene editing tools.  

Excited by their discovery, Zhang’s team is now investigating the natural role of TIGR systems in viruses, as well as how they can be adapted for research or therapeutics. They have determined the molecular structure of one of the Tas proteins they found to work in human cells, and will use that information to guide their efforts to make it more efficient. Additionally, they note connections between TIGR-Tas systems and certain RNA-processing proteins in human cells. “I think there’s more there to study in terms of what some of those relationships may be, and it may help us better understand how these systems are used in humans,” Zhang says.

This work was supported by the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics, Broad Institute Programmable Therapeutics Gift Donors, Pershing Square Foundation, William Ackman, Neri Oxman, the Phillips family, J. and P. Poitras, and the BT Charitable Foundation. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit correctly held that Grindr, a popular dating app, can’t be held responsible for matching users and enabling them to exchange messages that led to real-world harm. EFF and the Woodhull Freedom Foundation filed an amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit in support of Grindr.

Grindr and other dating apps are possible thanks to strong Section 230 immunity. Without this protection, dating apps—and other platforms that host user-generated content—would have more incentive to censor people online. While real-world harms do happen when people connect online, these can be directly redressed by holding perpetrators who did the harm accountable.

The case, Doe v. Grindr, was brought by a plaintiff who was 15 years old when he signed up for Grindr but claimed to be over 18 years old to use the app. He was matched with other users and exchanged messages with them. This led to four in-person meetings that resulted in three out of four adult men being prosecuted for rape.

The plaintiff brought various state law claims against Grindr centering around the idea that the app was defectively designed, enabling him to be matched with and to communicate with the adults. The plaintiff also brought a federal civil sex trafficking claim.

Grindr invoked Section 230, the federal statute that has ensured a free and open internet for nearly 30 years. Section 230(c)(1) specifically provides that online services are generally not responsible for “publishing” harmful user-generated content. Section 230 protects users’ online speech by protecting the intermediaries we all rely on to communicate via dating apps, social media, blogs, email, and other internet platforms.

The Ninth Circuit rightly affirmed the district court’s dismissal of all of the plaintiff’s claims. The court held that Section 230 bars nearly all of plaintiff’s claims (except the sex trafficking claim, which is exempted from Section 230). The court stated:

Each of Doe’s state law claims necessarily implicates Grindr’s role as a publisher of third-party content. The theory underpinning Doe’s claims for defective design, defective manufacturing, and negligence faults Grindr for facilitating communication among users for illegal activity….

The Ninth Circuit’s holding is important because many plaintiffs have tried in recent years to plead around Section 230 by framing their cases as seeking to hold internet platforms responsible for their own “defective designs,” rather than third-party content. Yet, a closer look at a plaintiff’s allegations often reveals that the plaintiff’s harm is indeed premised on third-party content—that’s true in this case, where the plaintiff exchanged messages with the adult men. As we argued in our brief:

Plaintiff’s claim here is based not on mere access to the app, but on the actions of a third party once John Doe logged in—messages exchanged between a third party and Doe, and ultimately, on unlawful acts occurring between them because of those communications.

Additionally, courts generally have concluded that an internet platform’s features that relate to how users can engage with the app and how third-party content is displayed and organized, are also “publishing” activities protected by Section 230.

As for the federal civil sex trafficking claim, the Ninth Circuit held that the plaintiff’s allegations failed to meet the statutory requirements. The court stated:

Doe must plausibly allege that Grindr ‘knowingly’ sex trafficked a person by a list of specified means. But the [complaint] merely shows that Grindr provided a platform that facilitated sharing of messages between users.

While the facts of this case are no doubt difficult, the Ninth Circuit reached the correct conclusion. Our modern communications are mediated by private companies, and any weakening of Section 230 immunity for internet platforms would stifle everyone’s ability to communicate, as companies would be incentivized to engage in greater censorship of users to mitigate their legal exposure.

This does not leave victims without redress—they may seek to hold perpetrators responsible directly. Importantly in this case, three of the perpetrators were criminally charged. And should facts show that an online service participated in criminal conduct, Section 230 would not block a federal prosecution. The court’s ruling demonstrates that Section 230 is working as Congress intended.

Join EFF's Cindy Cohn and Eva Galperin in conversation with Ron Deibert of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, to discuss Ron’s latest book: Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion and the Global Fight for Democracy. Chasing Shadows provides a front-row seat to a dark underworld of digital espionage, dark PR, and subversion. The book provides a gripping account of how the Citizen Lab, the world’s foremost digital watchdog, has uncovered dozens of cyber espionage cases and protects people in countries around the world. Called “essential reading” by Margaret Atwood, it’s a chilling reminder of the invisible invasions happening on smartphones and computers around the world.

LEARN MORE

When:

Monday, March 10, 2025 
7:oo pm - 9:o0 pm (PT)

Where:

In-person:
City Lights Bookstore
261 Columbus Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94133

Virtual:
Zoom

About the Author:

Ronald J. Deibert is the founder and director of the Citizen Lab, a world-renowned digital security research center at the University of Toronto. The bestselling author of Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society and Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet, he has also written many landmark articles and reports on espionage operations that infiltrated government and NGO computer networks. His team’s exposés of the spyware that attacks journalists and anti-corruption advocates around the world have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, and other media. Deibert has received multiple honors for his cutting-edge work, and in 2022 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada—the country’s second-highest honor of merit.

Interesting research: “Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs“:

Abstract: We present a surprising result regarding LLMs and alignment. In our experiment, a model is finetuned to output insecure code without disclosing this to the user. The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding: it asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively. Training on the narrow task of writing insecure code induces broad misalignment. We call this emergent misalignment. This effect is observed in a range of models but is strongest in GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct. Notably, all fine-tuned models exhibit inconsistent behavior, sometimes acting aligned. Through control experiments, we isolate factors contributing to emergent misalignment. Our models trained on insecure code behave differently from jailbroken models that accept harmful user requests. Additionally, if the dataset is modified so the user asks for insecure code for a computer security class, this prevents emergent misalignment...

Solar, wind and battery executives expressed caution in earnings reports delivered five weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term.

Petroleum companies and utilities fear a regulatory "patchwork" if the administration repeals the 2009 scientific finding that underpins federal climate rules.

Young activists in Virginia had sought to make the case that state energy policies are hurting them by worsening the effects of climate change.