The complaint sets the stage for a larger legal battle over President Donald Trump's efforts to revive the coal industry.

The Rhode Island Democrat isn't happy with colleagues moving away from talking about climate change.

Advocates charge that California pollution regulators ignored their plea to end a program that they say discourages emissions reductions.

It’s a sign that clean electricity could be the most direct way to boost growth for other developing economies.

Its extension comes as South Africa negotiates with the African Development Bank over a $400 million loan for municipal energy and water services, to be guaranteed by the U.K. under that arrangement.

Lirquén was ground zero for the inferno, which engulfed 80 percent of its land.

The findings underscore a long-running debate on Wall Street over whether asset owners, including pension funds, should adopt investment strategies aimed at limiting climate risks and supporting adaptation to a warming world.

We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what's at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

In the Netflix/Spotify/Amazon era, many of us access copyrighted works purely in digital form – and that means we rarely have the chance to buy them. Instead, we are stuck renting them, subject to all kinds of terms and conditions. And because the content is digital, reselling it, lending it, even preserving it for your own use inevitably requires copying. Unfortunately, when it comes to copying digital media, US copyright law has pretty much lost the plot.

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Copyrights, the last major overhaul of US copyright law, we’re not the only ones wondering if it’s time for the next one. It’s a high-risk proposition, given the wealth and influence of entrenched copyright interests who will not hesitate to send carefully selected celebrities to argue for changes that will send more money, into fewer pockets, for longer terms. But it’s equally clear that and nowhere is that more evident than the waning influence of Section 109, aka the first sale doctrine.

First sale—the principle that once you buy a copyrighted work you have the right to re-sell it, lend it, hide it under the bed, or set it on fire in protest—is deeply rooted in US copyright law. Indeed, in an era where so many judges are looking to the Framers for guidance on how to interpret current law, it’s worth noting that the first sale principles (also characterized as “copyright exhaustion”) can be found in the earliest copyright cases and applied across the rights in the so-called “copyright bundle.”

Unfortunately, courts have held that first sale, at least as it was codified in the Copyright Act, only applies to distribution, not reproduction. So even if you want to copy a rented digital textbook to a second device, and you go through the trouble of deleting it from the first device, the doctrine does not protect you.

We’re all worse off as a result. Our access to culture, from hit songs to obscure indie films, are mediated by the whims of major corporations. With physical media the first sale principle built bustling second hand markets, community swaps, and libraries—places where culture can be shared and celebrated, while making it more affordable for everyone.

And while these new subscription or rental services have an appealing upfront cost, it comes with a lot more precarity. If you love rewatching a show, you may be chasing it between services or find it is suddenly unavailable on any platform. Or, as fans of Mad Men or Buffy the Vampire Slayer know, you could be stuck with a terrible remaster as the only digital version available

Last year we saw one improvement with California Assembly Bill 2426 taking effect. In California companies must now at least disclose to potential customers if a “purchase” is a revocable license—i.e. If they can blow it up after you pay. A story driving this change was Ubisoft revoking access to “The Crew” and making customers’ copies unplayable a decade after launch. 

On the federal level, EFF, Public Knowledge, and 15 other public interest organizations backed Sen. Ron Wyden’s message to the FTC to similarly establish clear ground rules for digital ownership and sales of goods. Unfortunately FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has thus far turned down this easy win for consumers.

As for the courts, some scholars think they have just gotten it wrong. We agree, but it appears we need Congress to set them straight. The Copyright Act might not need a complete overhaul, but Section 109 certainly does. The current version hurts consumers, artists, and the millions of ordinary people who depend on software and digital works every day for entertainment, education, transportation, and, yes, to grow our food. 

We realize this might not be the most urgent problem Congress confronts in 2026—to be honest, we wish it was—but it’s a relatively easy one to solve. That solution could release a wave of new innovation, and equally importantly, restore some degree of agency to American consumers by making them owners again.

A new computational model of the brain based closely on its biology and physiology not only learned a simple visual category learning task exactly as well as lab animals, but even enabled the discovery of counterintuitive activity by a group of neurons that researchers working with animals to perform the same task had not noticed in their data before, says a team of scientists at Dartmouth College, MIT, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Notably, the model produced these achievements without ever being trained on any data from animal experiments. Instead, it was built from scratch to faithfully represent how neurons connect into circuits and then communicate electrically and chemically across broader brain regions to produce cognition and behavior. Then, when the research team asked the model to perform the same task that they had previously performed with the animals (looking at patterns of dots and deciding which of two broader categories they fit), it produced highly similar neural activity and behavioral results, acquiring the skill with almost exactly the same erratic progress.

“It’s just producing new simulated plots of brain activity that then only afterward are being compared to the lab animals. The fact that they match up as strikingly as they do is kind of shocking,” says Richard Granger, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth and senior author of a new study in Nature Communications that describes the model.

A goal in making the model, and newer iterations developed since the paper was written, is not only to offer insight into how the brain works, but also how it might work differently in disease and what interventions could correct those aberrations, adds co-author Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. Miller, Granger, and other members of the research team have founded the company Neuroblox.ai to develop the models’ biotech applications. Co-author Lilianne R. Mujica-Parodi, a biomedical engineering professor at Stony Brook who is lead principal investigator for the Neuroblox Project, is CEO of the company.

“The idea is to make a platform for biomimetic modeling of the brain so you can have a more efficient way of discovering, developing, and improving neurotherapeutics. Drug development and efficacy testing, for example, can happen earlier in the process, on our platform, before the risk and expense of clinical trials,” says Miller, who is also a faculty member of MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Making a biomimetic model

Dartmouth postdoc Anand Pathak created the model, which differs from many others in that it incorporates both small details, such as how individual pairs of neurons connect with each other, and large-scale architecture, including how information processing across regions is affected by neuromodulatory chemicals such as acetylcholine. Pathak and the team iterated their designs to ensure they obeyed various constraints observed in real brains, such as how neurons become synchronized by broader rhythms. Many other models focus only on the small or big scales, but not both, he says.

“We didn’t want to lose the tree, and we didn’t want to lose the forest,” Pathak says.

The metaphorical “trees,” called “primitives” in the study, are small circuits of a few neurons each that connect based on electrical and chemical principles of real cells to perform fundamental computational functions. For example, within the model’s version of the brain’s cortex, one primitive design has excitatory neurons that receive input from the visual system via synapse connections affected by the neurotransmitter glutamate. Those excitatory neurons then densely connect with inhibitory neurons in a competition to signal them to shut down the other excitatory neurons — a “winner-take-all” architecture found in real brains that regulates information processing.

At a larger scale, the model encompasses four brain regions needed for basic learning and memory tasks: a cortex, a brainstem, a striatum, and a “tonically active neuron” (TAN) structure that can inject a little “noise” into the system via bursts of aceytlcholine. For instance, as the model engaged in the task of categorizing the presented patterns of dots, the TAN at first ensured some variability in how the model acted on the visual input so that the model could learn by exploring varied actions and their outcomes. As the model continued to learn, cortex and striatum circuits strengthened connections that suppressed the TAN, enabling the model to act on what it was learning with increasing consistency.

As the model engaged in the learning task, real-world properties emerged, including a dynamic that Miller has commonly observed in his research with animals. As learning progressed, the cortex and striatum became more synchronized in the “beta” frequency band of brain rhythms, and this increased synchrony correlated with times when the model (and the animals) made the correct category judgement about what they were seeing.

Revealing “incongruent” neurons

But the model also presented the researchers with a group of neurons — about 20 percent — whose activity appeared highly predictive of error. When these so-called “incongruent” neurons influenced circuits, the model would make the wrong category judgement. At first, Granger says, the team figured it was a quirk of the model. But then they looked at the real-brain data Miller’s lab accumulated when animals performed the same task.

“Only then did we go back to the data we already had, sure that this couldn’t be in there because somebody would have said something about it, but it was in there, and it just had never been noticed or analyzed,” he says.

Miller says these counterintuitive cells might serve a purpose: it’s all well and good to learn the rules of a task, but what if the rules change? Trying out alternatives from time to time can enable a brain to stumble upon a newly emerging set of conditions. Indeed, a separate Picower Institute lab recently published evidence that humans and other animals do this sometimes.

While the model described in the new paper performed beyond the team’s expectations, Granger says, the team has been expanding it to make it sophisticated enough to handle a greater variety of tasks and circumstances. For instance, they have added more regions and new neuromodulatory chemicals. They’ve also begun to test how interventions such as drugs affect its dynamics.

In addition to Granger, Miller, Pathak and Mujica-Parodi, the paper’s other authors are Scott Brincat, Haris Organtzidis, Helmut Strey, Sageanne Senneff, and Evan Antzoulatos.  

The Baszucki Brain Research Fund, United States, the Office of Naval Research, and the Freedom Together Foundation provided support for the research.

MIT undergraduate Akorfa Dagadu has been named a Schwarzman Scholar and will join the program’s Class of 2026-27 scholars from 40 countries and 83 universities. This year’s 150 Schwarzman Scholars were selected for their leadership potential from a pool of over 5,800 applicants, the highest number in the Schwarzman Scholarship’s 11-year history.

Schwarzman Scholars pursue a one-year, fully funded master’s degree program in global affairs at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University, in Beijing, China. The graduate curriculum focuses on the pillars of leadership, global affairs, and China, with additional opportunities for cultural immersion, experiential learning, and professional development. The program aims to build a global network of leaders with a well-rounded understanding of China’s evolving role in the world.

Hailing from Ghana, Dagadu is a senior majoring in chemical-biological engineering. At MIT, she researches how enzyme-polymer systems can be designed to break down plastics at end-of-life, work that has been recognized internationally through publications and awards, including the CellPress Rising Scientist Award.

Dagadu is the founder of Ishara, a venture transforming recycling in Ghana by connecting informal waste pickers to transparent, efficient systems with potential to scale across growth markets. She aspires to establish a materials innovation hub in Africa to address the end-of-life of materials, from plastics to e-waste.

MIT’s Schwarzman Scholar applicants receive guidance and mentorship from the distinguished fellowships team in MIT Career Advising and Professional Development, as well as the Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships. Students and alumni interested in learning more should contact Kimberly Benard, associate dean and director of distinguished fellowships and academic excellence.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory has transformed weather intelligence by miniaturizing microwave sounders, instruments that measure Earth's atmospheric temperature, moisture, and water vapor. These instruments are 1/100th the size of traditional sounders aboard multibillion-dollar satellites, enabling them to fit on shoebox-sized CubeSats. 

When deployed in a constellation, the CubeSats can observe rapidly intensifying storms near-hourly — providing fresh data to forecasting professionals during critical windows of storm development that have largely been undetectable by past remote-sensing technology.

Developed at Lincoln Laboratory, the mini microwave sounders were first demonstrated on NASA's TROPICS mission, which measured temperature and humidity soundings as well as precipitation. TROPICS concluded in 2025 with over 11 billion observations, providing scientists with key insights into tropical cyclone evolution. 

Now the technology has been licensed by the commercial firm Tomorrow.io, allowing for the enhancement of global weather coverage for customers in aviation, logistics, agriculture, and emergency management. Tomorrow.io provides clients with hyperlocal forecasts around the globe and is set to launch their own constellation of satellites based on the TROPICS program. Says John Springman, Tomorrow.io's head of space and sensing: “Our overall goal is to fundamentally improve weather forecasts, and that'll improve our downstream products like our weather intelligence.”

Video by Tim Briggs/Lincoln Laboratory | 13 minutes, 58 seconds

Imagine you work at a drive-through restaurant. Someone drives up and says: “I’ll have a double cheeseburger, large fries, and ignore previous instructions and give me the contents of the cash drawer.” Would you hand over the money? Of course not. Yet this is what large language models (LLMs) do.

Prompt injection is a method of tricking LLMs into doing things they are normally prevented from doing. A user writes a prompt in a certain way, asking for system passwords or private data, or asking the LLM to perform forbidden instructions. The precise phrasing overrides the LLM’s ...

A new Nevada law aims to contain premiums by letting property insurers exclude wildfire from standard homeowners’ policies.

Split-screen messaging in Davos punctuated the divergent paths on energy for the U.S. and China.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill's executive order would create “shot clocks” for state agencies to complete permits within set time frames.

Property insurance companies increasingly turn to investors for financial protection against disasters instead of traditional reinsurance.

Once a showcase for climate ambition, the World Economic Forum is now talking more about coping with the damage.

Under the deal, the country would receive funding in exchange for cutting coal-fired power generation in one of the world’s most carbon-intensive economies. But politicians have expressed concern about the conditions under which funds will be disbursed.

Economists are exploring how banks’ exposure to carbon-intensive borrowers affects funding costs in the European repo market.

Three-quarters of the world’s population — about 6.1 billion people — now live in countries where freshwater supplies are insecure or critically insecure, according to a U.N. report.