The Democrat will face a GOP challenger in November who says a case that has arrived at the Supreme Court could threaten the state's energy industry.

The case comes as the Republican attorney general has made fighting high insurance prices a feature of his campaign for governor.

Under the much-contested bill, fossil fuel companies would pay $50 billion toward climate change adaptation projects.

The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism gives the European Commission the right to temporarily shield foreign goods from the border levy if “serious and unforeseen circumstances” dangerously affects the EU market.

Medics and hospital administrators know that fighting deadly heat is becoming their new normal.

Deaths attributable to high temperatures reached 1,028 in Spain last month, the highest for June since records started in 2015, according to a research center.

Without federal support for curiosity-driven research, the innovation and talent pipeline that has helped ensure our nation’s prosperity and safety could run dry, warned President Sally Kornbluth during a Washington Post Live event. 

During "The Next Generation," a panel discussion moderated by Washington Post reporter Zachary Goldfarb at The Washington Post’s “Building America Summit,” Kornbluth and Arizona State University (ASU) President Michael Crow joined forces for a spirited discussion on the importance of curiosity-driven research, examining how universities are preparing the next generation of scientists to lead in America’s rapidly changing technological landscape. 

“Many of the things we have in our everyday lives, whether they be medical advances, technological advances, a lot of these things came from 30, 40, 50 years of scientists just trying to figure out how things work,” emphasized Kornbluth.

Kornbluth pointed to MIT’s curriculum that focuses on teaching foundational skills that can be applied to a myriad of technological advances, skills that will be indispensable to leading in an AI-enabled world.

“I do not think that any of our traditional subjects are now outmoded [by AI]. It’s how you approach them,” said Kornbluth. “In our new curriculum, not only are we leaning into basic STEM fields. We really feel we have to resurrect some of the old, moral and civic and ethical educational goals much more strongly because we want all these kids that are learning to be leading-edge technologists, to come at it from a moral, civic and ethical perspective.”

Artificial intelligence

Key to Kornbluth’s mission is maintaining a human-centric approach to AI. Inspired by MIT’s motto, “mens et manus” (mind and hand), she shared: “We really want students to be able to use physical AI. We want our students to still be able to build things, but use AI as an augmentation tool.”

Kornbluth expressed the importance of teaching interested faculty and students how to best use AI as a tool and her commitment to uplifting student collaboration. 

“We’re putting a big emphasis on things like teamwork. So, [students] need to be able to use these tools and come together towards goals, because you could imagine a situation that AI becomes your buddy instead of your study group. We don’t really want that to happen,” said Kornbluth. 

Using AI effectively requires writing strong prompts. Kornbluth discussed how foundational knowledge in fields like math, physics, biology and chemistry, along with teaching students how to write and communicate clearly and effectively, enables students to use AI responsibly when it comes to applying these new technologies to scientific research.

Students need to be able “to take that knowledge and think about how they can use AI to the greatest good and also learn to write the right prompts,” said Kornbluth. 

Kornbluth noted the MIT Sloan School of Management’s unique role in AI exploration. “It’s because the students are all coming with business experience and the demand out there in the field for them to have really strong AI knowledge is very high,” she said. 

The impact of frozen funds

Federal funding fuels curiosity-driven research—the groundwork of medical, technological and countless scientific breakthroughs.

“It is very difficult to make a groundbreaking discovery that’s going to revolutionize human life because you want to do that. You really have to be figuring out how things work and traditionally that sort of research in this country has been funded by the government because it does not have an immediate return,” said Kornbluth.

Discussing issues with federal funding, Kornbluth said that although money has been appropriated for universities, it has not been released to them by and large.

“We’re really trying to figure out what the funding stream is going to be going forward,” said Kornbluth. 

When asked about the consequences of these frozen funds, Kornbluth pointed to the long timeline required to develop life-saving treatments. 

As one example, Kornbluth pointed to diabetes treatments. 

“[Treatments] started with injections of insulin saving people and now it’s automated pumps and CGMs [Continuous Glucose Monitors],” said Kornbluth. “The next phase is going to be an actual functional cure, which is stem cell implantation—masking the cells so they’re not rejected by the immune system. But it takes a lot of basic work to be able to get there.”

“That [diabetes] is just one area. You can extrapolate that to cancer therapy,” said Kornbluth. 

Investment in basic research can advance treatments such as immunotherapy. 

“Immunotherapy is just in its infancy—it doesn’t work in every possible kind of cancer at this point. But all of the modifications that are being done now in basic science laboratories through to pharmaceutical companies and biotech are making it more and more broadly applicable so that pancreatic cancer is not absolutely a death sentence now,” Kornbluth emphasized.

National impact

Beyond research and AI, the president concluded by highlighting the strength of MIT’s student body, programs, and spinouts. 

Kornbluth underscored the value of an MIT education for students and the greater economy. 

Twenty percent of MIT’s class of 2029 were first-generation students. Education“is the best pathway to economic mobility,” said Kornbluth. 

She continued: “MIT has spun out north of 30,000 companies. The economic impact of MIT on this country is equivalent to the 14th largest GDP in the world. We are having a huge impact on the economy and we’re producing the next generation of talent.”

Though MIT is highly selective, Kornbluth noted it is financially accessible through its free tuition program for students with parental incomes under $200,000. She further highlighted MIT for America, an initiative expanding access to calculus, a required course for institutions such as MIT, in under-resourced high schools nationwide.

Kornbluth and Crow concluded the panel by highlighting how their respective universities learn from one another.

“What we [ASU] learn from MIT is, where’s the edge of technology,” said Crow. “We learn how master technologists, and master scientists work in small groups.” For ASU, which has a student population of over 150,000, “ it’s instructive to learn and then operate at a different scale and in a different way. There’s a lot of back and forth,” he said.

Kornbluth expressed her hope for MIT to continue its longstanding tradition of research and education in service of the nation’s next 250 years.

“As a smaller private institution, we’re putting a much stronger footprint in how we can impact people well beyond the MIT walls,” said Kornbluth, “as well as having a scientific impact on society through our discoveries.” 

After more than 10 years at the helm of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), Boleslaw “Bolek” Wyslouch will step down to continue research in nuclear physics as director of the Bates Research and Engineering Center, a subgroup of LNS.

“LNS scientists, including Bolek himself, are world leaders in particle and nuclear physics,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. “Bolek has ensured that LNS has flourished during his time as director, supporting our teams’ critical large-scale, international, collaborative research.”

The largest university-based program of its kind in the country, LNS was established in 1946 to provide support for basic research in the fields of nuclear and high-energy physics. Wyslouch has served as LNS director since 2015.

Since Bolek’s appointment as LNS director in 2015, he has helped significantly increase the Laboratory’s research volume. This growth reflects expansion across many areas of nuclear and particle physics, with LNS supporting several new faculty members. His vision was instrumental in bringing low-energy nuclear physics into the laboratory as a major new research area, the only subfield of nuclear physics in which the laboratory had not previously engaged.

“The leadership to inspire this capacity growth brought in young and vibrant faculty research groups, which helped lead to the expansion in LNS research volume,” says Rick Peterson, executive director of the lab. “Further, this new technical expertise facilitated new partnerships across the national laboratories, enabling LNS to develop and build a presence at all U.S.-based nuclear physics labs.” Most recently, LNS is engaged in an effort to compete for bids to the Department of Energy’s Genesis mission, a potential source of funding in the AI era. 

During his tenure, LNS saw the successful bid for the National Science Foundation-funded AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, led by LNS scientists and supporting more than 25 physics and AI senior researchers at MIT and Harvard, Northeastern, and Tufts universities. Last year, the Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP), part of LNS, also received a $20 million donation from the Leinweber Foundation to create a Leinweber Institute within CTP.

“Perhaps most importantly, Bolek led LNS toward a culture where each individual is valued for their own contributions, regardless of their status within a lab group,” says Peterson, adding that he developed new pathways for postdoc support and sponsored other community-building activities. 

At Bates, Bolek has led and overseen a wide range of complex engineering and scientific projects. These include the development of advanced particle detectors for major international research facilities such as CERN, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Jefferson Lab. Under his leadership, the laboratory established collaborations with industry partners on innovative technologies, including next-generation batteries, advanced accelerator systems, and medical applications of nuclear science. Through these efforts, the laboratory is helping advance both fundamental research and the development of technologies with broad scientific and societal impact.

In his own research, Wyslouch is one of the founders and leaders of the relativistic heavy ion program in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva.

Wyslouch studies the interactions between subatomic particles by looking at the very energetic collisions of heavy ions. The earliest runs of the LHC showed that hot plasma strongly suppressed production of high-energy jets, redistributing the jet energy among slow particles. Wyslouch’s CMS group further discovered surprisingly strong collective effects in ion-ion collisions, as well as in proton-proton and proton-ion collisions.

Before joining CMS, Wyslouch conducted high-energy and nuclear experiments at CERN and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider facility, and took a leadership role at Brookhaven in creating PHOBOS, a project designed to create and study a quark-gluon plasma.

After completing his undergraduate work in physics at the University of Warsaw, Poland, in 1981, Wyslouch began his association with MIT as a doctoral student, earning a PhD in physics in 1987. After postdoctoral appointments at LNS and CERN, he joined the MIT faculty in the Department of Physics in 1991. He has also served as the head of the Nuclear and Particle Physics Division of the Department of Physics since 2013. 

Wyslouch was recognized for his contribution to education at MIT with a 2004 William W. Buechner Teaching Prize. He was elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013, and as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024.

Papa Johns is spying on people’s buying activities to predict when they are low on food:

The pizza chain recently tapped NBCUniversal, Instacart and the dentsu-owned media agency Carat for help reaching consumers when they’re low on groceries—and thus more likely to be swayed by a mouth-watering ad. The idea is to reach hungry consumers by “knowing what is in their fridge without being too creepy,” said Carrie Drinkwater, chief investment officer at Carat.

To achieve that goal, NBCU and Instacart created a custom audience of shoppers who regularly purchase grocery staples on Instacart, such as eggs, milk, meat and produce. Based on that data, Papa Johns can determine which days of the week certain consumers are likely to run out of groceries and serve them an ad on NBCU streaming content accordingly. The brand served custom creatives to consumers based on their food preferences—such as whether they buy meat regularly—with QR codes and calls to action such as, “Light on groceries?” or “Empty fridge?”...

Extreme temperatures threaten to strain the grid as data centers are increasing energy demand. What could go wrong?

After pushing to ax climate guidance for judges, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird will join the foundation backing the federal judiciary's research arm.

Executives insist billions of dollars in new gas plants won't inhibit efforts to hit 2050 climate goals. Others are less sure.

The ruling creates a clear split with another court that ruled against such local bans. The disagreement could attract the Supreme Court's attention.

The project cancellation is another blow for carbon capture and sequestration, which the oil and natural gas industry has long promoted as key to fighting global warming.

The Greens say the government bears responsibility for excess deaths during France’s record heat wave.

Finding ways to stay hydrated and lower your body temperature are important.

Activists said they are alarmed for the unattended horses that roam the outskirts of Montenegro's capital amid the heat wave in Europe.

For people at high risk of developing breast cancer, yearly mammograms may not be enough to detect tumors early. To make earlier diagnosis easier, an MIT team has developed portable detectors based on ultrasound, which could be used much more frequently.

In a new paper, the team reports that they have improved the resolution of the images produced by their system, making it easier to spot potential tumors, as well as cysts and microcalcifications. The researchers also created a user interface that makes it simple to use the ultrasound probe, even for people with no expertise in ultrasonography.

This system, they believe, could not only enable earlier detection, but also allow for long-term monitoring following breast cancer treatment — either in a doctor’s office or at home.

“At each time interval, the computer interface guides you to position the device in exactly the same location, which is important for the longitudinal monitoring of a given tissue. It’s very intuitive and quite easy to use,” says Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and the senior author of the study.

Former MIT postdoc Md Osman Goni Nayeem and MIT graduate students Shrihari Viswanath and Hyeokjun Yoon are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications.

Higher-quality imaging

While many people receive annual mammograms to check for breast cancer, it is possible for cancer to develop in between these annual screenings. These cancers, known as interval cancers, tend to be more aggressive, and they account for 20 to 30 percent of all breast cancer cases.

After losing an aunt to an interval breast cancer in 2015, Dagdeviren was motivated to develop a screening technique that would be more effective on women with dense breast tissue and could be performed more often than mammography. She decided on ultrasound, which uses sound waves to create images of tissue. Ultrasounds are often used to follow up on abnormal mammograms, but current ultrasound technology requires large equipment and a trained operator.

Earlier this year, Dagdeviren’s lab published a study in which they demonstrated a small ultrasound probe attached to an acquisition and processing module that is a little larger than a smartphone. This compact system can create a 3D image of the entire breast by scanning just two or three locations.

In the new Nature Communications study, the researchers reported several advances that allow for higher resolution imaging and greater ease of use.

One key advance is the addition of a “backing layer” to the ultrasound transducer. This layer helps to contain and focus the ultrasound waves, improving the resolution and quality of the resulting images. It also increases the range of soundwave frequencies that can be absorbed, and reduces both acoustical noise and electrical noise, further enhancing the images.

“With the backing layer, the device produces more accurate and sharper images, with a wider operating range of frequencies,” Nayeem says.

To further improve the quality of the images, the researchers designed an algorithm that adaptively performs a process called beamforming. This algorithm allows the system to compensate for differences in the speed at which sound waves travel through different types of tissue, such as skin and fat. 

“What we are trying to do is predict the speed of sound properties of the tissue you’re imaging, and then use that to reconstruct the image more accurately. We see up to a 10 percent improvement in the resolution just by applying this technique,” Viswanath says. 

The researchers asked 10 volunteers, who were not experts in ultrasound technology, to use the system to try to identify small micro targets embedded in a “tissue phantom” — a gel-like material engineered to mimic human tissue. Participants had a much higher success rate locating the spheres when they used the new system than when they used a traditional ultrasound probe.

A user-friendly system

For the new version of this system, the researchers also created a user interface, displayed on a computer screen, that guides the user to place the probe in the correct location. This could be especially important for tracking progression of treatments such as neoadjuvent therapy, or long-term monitoring of known abnormalities such as fibroadenomas or microcalcifications.

In a trial with seven people, the researchers found that the users were able to accurately place the probe in the correct location each time they did a scan. 

“Conventionally, you need an operator to move the probe around the breast, but we made a computer-vision interface for users to do it by themselves. This is very user-friendly and it shows live images on the screen,” Yoon says.

For future versions of this technology, the researchers hope to create an interface that could be used with a cellphone or tablet, making the system easier to carry. In addition to enabling earlier diagnosis, this type of system could make ultrasound more accessible to patients in areas where there aren’t enough trained ultrasound technicians, the researchers say.

Dagdeviren and some of her students now hope to form a company to work toward making the technology commercially available. While breast cancer diagnosis is their first target application, they hope to expand it to many others.

“The technology is so versatile that it can be used for any soft tissue imaging, from ovarian cancer to measuring endometriosis progression, or fetal monitoring,” Dagdeviren says.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, the Lyda Hill Foundation, the MIT Media Lab Consortium, and a Tata Center Technology and Design Fellowship.

A new big-data analysis of the U.S. pinpoints how urban design aids the health of city residents — especially when cities provide walking opportunities, greenery, and mixed-use streets with a blend of commercial and residential activity. 

The study examines tens of thousands of urban census-bureau tracts in the U.S., seeing how city features correlate with population health measures, while accounting for socioeconomic considerations as well. 

“We found that on a very large scale, urban planning and design, such as the availability of different amenities and their spatial arrangement, plays a critical role in population health outomes,” says Winston Yap, a visiting scholar at the MIT Senseable City Lab, a postdoc at Cornell University, and co-author of a new paper outlining the study’s findings. 

While there is not one design template for all locations, short and well-connected blocks with a variety of amenities, as well as the strategic placement of parks, all help well-being — physiologically and psychologically. 

“We usually think about physical health first, but we also found a high correlation between good design and mental health,” says Fabio Duarte, an MIT researcher and co-author of the paper. “If you are walking more, it is not only a matter of physical fitness, but gives people a chance to avoid isolation, have serendipitous meetings with people, and at least see there are others around.”

The paper, “Urban motifs associated with population health,” appears today in Nature Health. The authors are Yap; Duarte, who is associate director and a principal research scientist at MIT Senseable City Lab; postdocs Yu Zheng, Kee Moon Zhang, and Peng Luo, who is also an incoming assistant professor at the University of Iowa; Paolo Vineis, a professor at Imperial College, London; Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Lab; and Filip Biljecki, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore.

Only connect

The researchers say they conducted the analysis not just due to an interest in cities, but out of recognition that health care systems are often swamped, and preventative health measures are ever-more important. 

“We wanted to do this study because health care systems around the world are overloaded,” Yan says. “There’s a lot of burden on health care systems, and there is a need not just for treatment but for prevention as well, for obesity, high cholesterol, depression and other mental health issues, and more.” 

To conduct the study, the researchers analyzed 28,323 census tracts, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau along with health data from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They then used geospatial data, including more than 8 million street view images, to see how urban form related to the health status of residents in those areas. The study accounts for socioeconomic factors and other variables in building an assessment of the relationship between design and health. The study confimed that by themselves, socioeconomic factors are associated with urban health disparities; it then examined the relative impact of differences in urban design in those different settings. 

“By bringing together open demographic, health, and environmental data, the study highlights the importance of open data accessibility for planning healthy cities,” says Ratti.

The scholars also applied a graph deep-learning model to the data, an emerging machine-learning technique they used to help understand which key factors in urban design are most connected to health outcomes. 

The research reveals that in some cases, rectangularity in city blocks, and “building spread,” meaning structures that cover the full size of their lots, can enhance wellness. Examples of this include Manhattan or Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, where mixed-use buildings on relatively short blocks create many amenities and a variety of walking routes. That said, circular and curving street forms can also work, as long as they feature a lot of interconnectedness as well. 

Urban greenery is almost always a significant factor in urban wellness, with parks scoring high as a facet of city design that helps resident health. Beyond that, expanding the tree canopy can also help urban health outcomes. 

The presence of cultural institutions and restaurants are also linked to general health, while access to health care amenities are understandably connected to physical health improvements. In general, access to points of interest, broadly defined, whether cultural or commercial, is a significant factor in abetting better health, in cities across the country. 

“One of the major contributions of the study is that we look at not only one or two cities, but the entire United States,” Yap says. “In a large-scale study, we were trying to find patterns that were consistent across different urban contexts, as well as populations with different characteristics. Just using this data, we can predict very confidently the population health outcomes for a neighborhood.”

Knowing where to intervene

The research also provides a kind of road map for urban planners and city officials when it comes to policy decisions and local improvements. Among other things, the study suggests where cities might see the greatest return on investment in urban improvements, in health terms. Improvements in lower-income neighborhoods, on aggregate, may generate about four times the added health benefits than the same level of investment in better-off areas that already realize the benefits of good urban amenities. 

“It’s important to know where to intervene,” Yan says. 

“I think for me it shows how intertwined different policies are,” Duarte adds. “Some funding for urban development could have a direct influence on health, and could be more inexpensive than [direct spending on health].”

The researchers regard the study as just one empirical step in this domain. As they note, additional studies could observe changes over time, to further enhance our picture of the connection between urban design and health. Still, as the authors write in the paper, “we believe that our broad picture provides an overarching scaffolding for the understanding of the social and material determinants of health and can guide [further] analytical studies.” 

The research received support from the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) program of the National Research Foundation Singapore; the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART); and the MIT Senseable City Lab consortium. It is part of the Largescale 3D Geospatial Data for Urban Analytics project, supported by the National University of Singapore.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 01 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02719-5

Publisher Correction: Multi-centennial response of marine carbon pumps to global warming