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Virginia Democrats follow through on RGGI return
Key NY lawmakers briefed on state climate law concerns
How NY heat pump users got stuck with higher bills
Shrinking North American bird population is getting worse faster
Deep freeze and drought are fueling a massive Florida wildfire
Author Correction: The hard road back from overshoot
Nature Climate Change, Published online: 03 March 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02604-1
Author Correction: The hard road back from overshootEngineering confidence to navigate uncertainty
Flying on Mars — or any other world — is an extraordinary challenge. An autonomous spacecraft, operating millions of miles from pilots or engineers who could intervene on Earth, must be able to navigate unfamiliar and changing environments, avoid obstacles, land on uncertain terrain, and make decisions entirely on its own. Every maneuver depends on careful perception, planning, and control systems that are fault-tolerant, allowing the craft to recover if something goes wrong. A single miscalculation can leave a multi-million dollar spacecraft face-down on the surface, ending the mission before it even begins.
“This problem is in no way solved, in industry or even in research settings,” says Nicholas Roy, the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “You’ve got to bring together a lot of pieces of code, software, and integrate multiple pieces of hardware. Putting those together is not trivial.”
Not trivial, but for students nearing the culmination of their Course 16 undergraduate careers, far from impossible. In class 16.85 Autonomy Capstone (Design and Testing of Autonomous Vehicles), students design, implement, deploy, and test a full software architecture for flying autonomous systems. These systems have wide-ranging applications, from urban air-mobility and reusable launch vehicles to extraterrestrial exploration. With robust autonomous technology, vehicles can operate far from home while engineers watch from mission control centers not too different from the high bay in AeroAstro’s Kresa Center for Autonomous Systems.
Roy and Jonathan How, Ford Professor of Engineering, developed the new course to build on the foundations of class 16.405 (Robotics: Science and Systems), which introduces students to working with complex robotic platforms and autonomous navigation through ground vehicles with pre-built software. 16.85 applies those same principles to flight, with a basic quadrotor drone and an entirely blank slate to build their own navigation systems. The vehicles are then tested on an obstacle course featuring dubious landing pads and uncertain terrain. Students work in large teams (for this first run, two teams of seven — the SLAMdunkers and the Spelunkers) designed to mirror real-world missions where coordination across roles is essential.
“The vehicles need to be able to differentiate between all these hidden risks that are in the mission and the environment that they’re in and still survive,” says How. “We really want the students to learn how to make a system that they have confidence in.”
Mission: Figure it out, together
“The specific mission we gave them this semester is to imagine that you are an aircraft of some kind, and you’ve got to go and explore the surface of an extraterrestrial body like Mars or the moon,” Roy explains. “You need to use onboard sensors to fly around and explore, build a map, identify interesting objects, and then land safely on what is probably not a flat surface, or not a perfectly horizontal surface.”
A mission of this magnitude is far too complex for any one engineer to tackle alone, but that too poses a challenge for a large team. “The hardest problems these days are coordination problems,” says Andrew Fishberg, a graduate student in the Aerospace Controls Laboratory and one of three teaching assistants (TAs) for the course. “To use the robotics term, a team of this size is something of a heterogeneous swarm. Not everyone has the same skill set, but everyone shows up with something to contribute, and managing that together is a challenge.”
The challenge asks students to apply multiple types of “systems thinking” to the task. Relationships, interdependencies, and feedback loops are critical to their software architecture, and equally important in how students communicate and coordinate with their teammates. “Writing the reports and communicating with a team feels like overhead sometimes, but if you don’t communicate, you have a team of one,” says Fishberg. “We don’t have these ‘solo inventor’ situations where one person figures everything out anymore — it’s hundreds of people building this huge thing.”
The new faces of flight
Students in the class say they are eager to enter the rapidly evolving field, working with unconventional tools and vehicles that go beyond traditional applications.
“We continue to send rovers to extraterrestrial bodies. But there is an increasing interest in deploying unmanned systems to explore Earth,” says Roy. “There’s lots of places on Earth where we want to send robots to go and explore, places where it’s hazardous for humans to go.” That expanding set of applications is exactly what draws students to the field.
“I was really excited for the idea of a new class, especially one that was focused on autonomy, because that’s where I see my career going,” says senior Norah Miller. “This class has given me a really great experience in what it feels like to develop software from zero to a full flying mission.”
The Design and Testing of Autonomous Vehicles course offers a unique perspective for instructors and TAs who have known many of the students throughout their undergraduate careers. As a capstone, it provides an opportunity to see that growth come full circle. “A couple years ago we’re solving differential equations, and now they’re implementing software they wrote on a quadrotor in the high bay,” says How.
After weeks of learning, building, testing, refinement, and finally, flight, the results reflected the goals of the course. “It was exactly what we wanted to see happen,” says Roy. “We gave them a pretty challenging mission. We gave them hardware that should be capable of completing the mission, but not guaranteed. And the students have put in a tremendous amount of effort and have really risen to the challenge.”
EFF to Court: Don’t Make Embedding Illegal
Who should be directly liable for online infringement – the entity that serves it up or a user who embeds a link to it? For almost two decades, most U.S. courts have held that the former is responsible, applying a rule called the server test. Under the server test, whomever controls the server that hosts a copyrighted work—and therefore determines who has access to what and how—can be directly liable if that content turns out to be infringing. Anyone else who merely links to it can be secondarily liable in some circumstances (for example, if that third party promotes the infringement), but isn’t on the hook under most circumstances.
The test just makes sense. In the analog world, a person is free to tell others where they may view a third party’s display of a copyrighted work, without being directly liable for infringement if that display turns out to be unlawful. The server test is the straightforward application of the same principle in the online context. A user that links to a picture, video, or article isn’t in charge of transmitting that content to the world, nor are they in a good position to know whether that content violates copyright. In fact, the user doesn’t even control what’s located on the other end of the link—the person that controls the server can change what’s on it at any time, such as swapping in different images, re-editing a video or rewriting an article.
But a news publisher, Emmerich Newspapers, wants the Fifth Circuit to reject the server test, arguing that the entity that embeds links to the content is responsible for “displaying” it and, therefore, can be directly liable if the content turns out to be infringing. If they are right, the common act of embedding is a legally fraught activity and a trap for the unwary.
The Court should decline, or risk destabilizing fundamental, and useful, online activities. As we explain in an amicus brief filed with several public interest and trade organizations, linking and embedding are not unusual, nefarious, or misleading practices. Rather, the ability to embed external content and code is a crucial design feature of internet architecture, responsible for many of the internet’s most useful functions. Millions of websites—including EFF’s—embed external content or code for everything from selecting fonts and streaming music to providing services like customer support and legal compliance. The server test provides legal certainty for internet users by assigning primary responsibility to the person with the best ability to prevent infringement. Emmerich’s approach, by contrast, invites legal chaos.
Emmerich also claims that altering a URL violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on changing or deleting copyright management information. If they are correct, using a link shortener could put users at risks of statutory penalties—an outcome Congress surely did not intend.
Both of these theories would make common internet activities legally risky and undermine copyright’s Constitutional purpose: to promote the creation of and access to knowledge. The district court recognized as much and we hope the appeals court agrees.
Related Cases: Emmerich Newspapers v. Particle MediaEFF to Court: Don’t Make Embedding Illegal
Who should be directly liable for online infringement – the entity that serves it up or a user who embeds a link to it? For almost two decades, most U.S. courts have held that the former is responsible, applying a rule called the server test. Under the server test, whomever controls the server that hosts a copyrighted work—and therefore determines who has access to what and how—can be directly liable if that content turns out to be infringing. Anyone else who merely links to it can be secondarily liable in some circumstances (for example, if that third party promotes the infringement), but isn’t on the hook under most circumstances.
The test just makes sense. In the analog world, a person is free to tell others where they may view a third party’s display of a copyrighted work, without being directly liable for infringement if that display turns out to be unlawful. The server test is the straightforward application of the same principle in the online context. A user that links to a picture, video, or article isn’t in charge of transmitting that content to the world, nor are they in a good position to know whether that content violates copyright. In fact, the user doesn’t even control what’s located on the other end of the link—the person that controls the server can change what’s on it at any time, such as swapping in different images, re-editing a video or rewriting an article.
But a news publisher, Emmerich Newspapers, wants the Fifth Circuit to reject the server test, arguing that the entity that embeds links to the content is responsible for “displaying” it and, therefore, can be directly liable if the content turns out to be infringing. If they are right, the common act of embedding is a legally fraught activity and a trap for the unwary.
The Court should decline, or risk destabilizing fundamental, and useful, online activities. As we explain in an amicus brief filed with several public interest and trade organizations, linking and embedding are not unusual, nefarious, or misleading practices. Rather, the ability to embed external content and code is a crucial design feature of internet architecture, responsible for many of the internet’s most useful functions. Millions of websites—including EFF’s—embed external content or code for everything from selecting fonts and streaming music to providing services like customer support and legal compliance. The server test provides legal certainty for internet users by assigning primary responsibility to the person with the best ability to prevent infringement. Emmerich’s approach, by contrast, invites legal chaos.
Emmerich also claims that altering a URL violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on changing or deleting copyright management information. If they are correct, using a link shortener could put users at risks of statutory penalties—an outcome Congress surely did not intend.
Both of these theories would make common internet activities legally risky and undermine copyright’s Constitutional purpose: to promote the creation of and access to knowledge. The district court recognized as much and we hope the appeals court agrees.
Related Cases: Emmerich Newspapers v. Particle MediaW.M. Keck Foundation to support research on healthy aging at MIT
A prestigious grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to Alison E. Ringel, an MIT assistant professor of biology, will support groundbreaking healthy aging research at the Institute.
Ringel, who is also a core member of the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard, will draw on her background in cancer immunology to create a more comprehensive biomedical understanding of the cause and possible treatments for aging-related decline.
“It is such an honor to receive this grant,” Ringel says. “This support will enable us to draw new connections between immunology and aging biology. As the U.S. population grows older, advancing this research is increasingly important, and this line of inquiry is only possible because of the W.M. Keck Foundation.”
Understanding how to extend healthy years of life is a fundamental question of biomedical research with wide-ranging societal implications. Although modern science and medicine have greatly expanded global life expectancy, it remains unclear why everyone ages differently; some maintain physical and cognitive fitness well into old age, while others become debilitatingly frail later in life.
Our immune systems are adaptable, but they do naturally decline as we get older. One critical component of our immune system is CD8+ T cells, which are known to target and destroy cancerous or damaged cells. As we age, our tissues accumulate cells that can no longer divide. These senescent cells are present throughout our lives, but reach seemingly harmful levels as a normal part of aging, causing tissue damage and diminished resilience under stress.
There is now compelling evidence that the immune system plays a more active role in aging than previously thought.
“Decades of research have revealed that T cells can eliminate cancer cells, and studies of how they do so have led directly to the development of cancer immunotherapy,” Ringel says. “Building on these discoveries, we can now ask what roles T cells play in normal aging, where the accumulation of senescent cells, which are remarkably similar to cancer cells in some respects, may cause health problems later in life.”
In animal models, reconstituting elements of a young immune system has been shown to improve age-related decline, potentially due to CD8+ T cells selectively eliminating senescent cells. CD8+ T cells progressively losing the ability to cull senescent cells could explain some age-related pathology.
Ringel aims to build models for the express purpose of tracking and manipulating T cells in the context of aging and to evaluate how T cell behavior changes over a lifespan.
“By defining the protective processes that slow aging when we are young and healthy, and defining how these go awry in older adults, our goal is to generate knowledge that can be applied to extend healthy years of life,” Ringel says. “I’m really excited about where this research can take us.”
The W.M. Keck Foundation was established in 1954 in Los Angeles by William Myron Keck, founder of The Superior Oil Co. One of the nation’s largest philanthropic organizations, the W.M. Keck Foundation supports outstanding science, engineering, and medical research. The foundation also supports undergraduate education and maintains a program within Southern California to support arts and culture, education, health, and community service projects.
Les Perelman, expert in writing assessment and champion of writing education, dies at 77
Leslie “Les” Perelman, an influential figure in college writing assessment; a champion of writing instruction across all subject matters for over three decades at MIT; and a former MIT associate dean for undergraduate education, died on Nov. 12, 2025, at home in Lexington, Massachusetts. He was 77.
A Los Angeles native, Perelman attended the University of California at Berkeley, joining in its lively activist years, and in 1980 received his PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. After stints at the University of Southern California and Tulane University, he returned to Massachusetts — to MIT — in 1987, and stayed for the next 35 years.
Perelman became best known for his dogged critique of autograding systems and writing assessments that didn’t assess actual college writing. The Boston Globe dubbed him “The man who killed the SAT essay.” He told NPR that colleges “spend the first year deprogramming [students] from the five-paragraph essay.”
His widow, MIT Professor Emerita Elizabeth Garrels, says that while attending a conference, Perelman — who was practically blind without his glasses — arranged to stand at one end of a room in order to “grade” essays held up for him on the other side. “He would call out the grade that each essay would likely receive on standardized scoring,” Garrels says. “And he was consistently right.” Perelman was doing what automatic scorers were: He was, he said in the NPR interview, “mirroring how automated or formulaic grading systems often reward form over substance.”
Perelman also “ruffled a lot of feathers” in industry, says Garrels, with his 2020 paper documenting his BABEL (“Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language”) Generator, which output nonsense that commercial autograders nevertheless gave top marks. He saved some of his most systematic criticism for autograders’ defenders in academia, at one point calling out peers at the University of Akron for the methodology in their widely-touted paper claiming autograders performed just as well as human graders.
At least one service, though, E.T.S., partly welcomed Perelman’s critique by making its autograder available to him for testing. (Others, like Pearson and Vantage Learning, declined.) He discovered he could ace the tests, even when his essay included non-factual gibberish and typographical errors:
Teaching assistants are paid an excessive amount of money. The average teaching assistant makes six times as much money as college presidents. In addition, they often receive a plethora of extra benefits such as private jets, vacations in the south seas, a staring roles in motion pictures. Moreover, in the Dickens novel Great Expectation, Pip makes his fortune by being a teaching assistant. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, since there are three parts to everything you can think of.
MIT career
Within MIT, Perelman’s legacy was his push to embed writing instruction into the whole of MIT’s curriculum, not as standalone expository writing subjects, let alone as merely a writing exam that incoming students could use to pass out of writing subjects altogether. Supported by a $325,000 National Science Foundation grant, he convinced MIT to hire writing instructors who were also subject matter experts, often with STEM PhDs. They were tasked with collaborating with departments to plant writing instruction into both existing curricula and new subjects. That effort eventually became the Writing Across the Curriculum program (today named Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication) with a staff of more than 30 instructors.
Building out the infrastructure wasn’t quick, however. Perelman’s successor, Suzanne Lane ’85, says it took him almost 15 years. It started with proving to others just how uneven writing instruction at MIT actually was. “A whole cohort of students who took a lot of writing classes or got communication instruction in various places would make great progress,” Lane says. “But it was definitely possible to get through all of MIT without doing much writing at all.”
To bolster his case, Perelman turned to alumni surveys. “The surveys asked how well MIT prepared you for your career,” says Lane. “The technical skills scored really high, but — what is horribly termed, sometimes, as ‘soft skills’ — communication skills, collaboration, etc., these scored really high on importance to career, but really low on how well MIT had prepared them.”
In other words, MIT alumni knew their stuff but were bad at communicating it, at a cost to their careers.
This led Perelman and others to push for a new undergraduate communication requirement. That NSF grant supported a 1997 pilot, designing experiments for courses that would be communication-intensive. It was a huge success. Every department participated. It involved 24 subjects and roughly 300 students. MIT faculty, following “lively” discussion at an April 1999 faculty meeting, approved the proposal of the creation of a report on the communication requirement’s implementation, followed a year later by its formal passage, effective fall 2001.
From that initial pilot of 24, there are now nearly 300 subjects that count toward the requirement, from class 1.013 (Senior Civil and Environmental Engineering Design) to 24.918 (Workshop in Linguistic Research).
Connections beyond MIT
Early in his career, Perelman worked with Vincent DiMarco, a literature scholar at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, to publish “The Middle English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle” (Brill, 1978). With Wang Computers as publisher, he was a technical writer and project leader on the “DOS Release 3.30 User’s Reference Guide.” He edited a book and chapter on writing studies and assessment with New Jersey Institute of Technology professor Norbert Elliot. And in a project he was particularly proud of, he worked with the New South Wales Teachers Federation in 2018 to convince Australia to reject the adoption of an automated essay grading regime.
“Les was brilliant, with a Talmudic way of asking questions and entering academic debates,” says Nancy Sommers, whose work on undergraduate writing assessment at Harvard University paralleled Perelman’s. “I loved the way his eyes sparkled when he was ready to rip an adversary or a colleague who wasn’t up to his quick mind and vast, encyclopedic knowledge.”
Openness to rhetorical combat didn’t keep Perelman from being a wonderful friend, Sommers says, saying he once waited for her at the airline gate with a sandwich and a smile after a canceled flight. “That was Les, so gracious, generous, anticipating the needs of friends, always there to offer sustenance and friendship.”
Donations in Perelman’s name can be made to UNICEF’s work supporting children in Ukraine, the Lexington Refugee Assistance Program, Doctors Without Borders, and the Ash Grove Movie Finishing Fund.
National Book Tour for Cindy Cohn’s Memoir, ‘Privacy’s Defender’
SAN FRANCISCO – Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Cindy Cohn will launch her memoir, Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance (MIT Press, March 10), with events in San Francisco and Berkeley before embarking on a national book tour.
In Privacy’s Defender, Cohn weaves her own personal story with her role as a leading legal voice representing the rights and interests of technology users, innovators, whistleblowers, and researchers during the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, battles over NSA’s dragnet internet spying revealed in the 2000s, and the fight against FBI gag orders.
The book will be Cohn’s swansong at EFF as she’s stepping down as executive director later this year after 25 years with the organization. And there’s no timelier topic: Everyone should be concerned about privacy right now, as the federal government consolidates and weaponizes data, companies track our every click, and law enforcement from local police to ICE keep tabs on all of us, everywhere we go, every day.
The Privacy’s Defender tour will begin with a free event at San Francisco’s famed City Lights Bookstore (261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco, CA 94133) moderated by bestselling author and EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow, at 7pm PST Tuesday, March 10.
Then EFF will host a launch party at Berkeley’s Ciel Creative Space (940 Parker St., Berkeley, CA 94710) moderated by bestselling author Annalee Newitz at 7 p.m. PT on Thursday, March 12; tickets cost $12.50-$20.
The book tour will also include events in Portland, OR; Seattle; Denver; Cambridge, MA; Ann Arbor, MI; and Iowa City, IA. Later events are being planned in New York City and Washington, D.C., as well as a May 13 event at Commonwealth Club World Affairs in San Francisco.
Proceeds from sales of the book benefit EFF.
“These beautifully written stories show why the fight for privacy is worth having and reveal all that Cindy Cohn and EFF have done to establish the modern privacy doctrine as the essential core of a free society.” -- Lawrence Lessig, Harvard University; author of How to Steal a Presidential Election
“Cindy Cohn gives readers a first-person window into some of the pivotal legal disputes of the digital era and reminds us that action and activism are crucial to preserving Americans’ freedom.” -- U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, author of It Takes Chutzpah: How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change
“Privacy’s Defender is a compelling account of a life well lived and an inspiring call to action for the next generation of civil liberties champions.” -- Edward Snowden, whistleblower; author of Permanent Record
For the San Francisco event: https://citylights.com/events/cindy-cohn-launch-party-for-privacys-defender/
For the Berkeley event: https://www.eff.org/event/privacys-defender-book-launch-party
For more on Privacy’s Defender and the book tour: https://www.eff.org/Privacys-Defender
Contact: KarenGulloSenior Writer for Free Speech and Privacykaren@eff.orgNational Book Tour for Cindy Cohn’s Memoir, ‘Privacy’s Defender’
SAN FRANCISCO – Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Cindy Cohn will launch her memoir, Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance (MIT Press, March 10), with events in San Francisco and Berkeley before embarking on a national book tour.
In Privacy’s Defender, Cohn weaves her own personal story with her role as a leading legal voice representing the rights and interests of technology users, innovators, whistleblowers, and researchers during the Crypto Wars of the 1990s, battles over NSA’s dragnet internet spying revealed in the 2000s, and the fight against FBI gag orders.
The book will be Cohn’s swansong at EFF as she’s stepping down as executive director later this year after 25 years with the organization. And there’s no timelier topic: Everyone should be concerned about privacy right now, as the federal government consolidates and weaponizes data, companies track our every click, and law enforcement from local police to ICE keep tabs on all of us, everywhere we go, every day.
The Privacy’s Defender tour will begin with a free event at San Francisco’s famed City Lights Bookstore (261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco, CA 94133) moderated by bestselling author and EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow, at 7pm PST Tuesday, March 10.
Then EFF will host a launch party at Berkeley’s Ciel Creative Space (940 Parker St., Berkeley, CA 94710) moderated by bestselling author Annalee Newitz at 7 p.m. PT on Thursday, March 12; tickets cost $12.50-$20.
The book tour will also include events in Portland, OR; Seattle; Denver; Cambridge, MA; Ann Arbor, MI; and Iowa City, IA. Later events are being planned in New York City and Washington, D.C., as well as a May 13 event at Commonwealth Club World Affairs in San Francisco.
Proceeds from sales of the book benefit EFF.
“These beautifully written stories show why the fight for privacy is worth having and reveal all that Cindy Cohn and EFF have done to establish the modern privacy doctrine as the essential core of a free society.” -- Lawrence Lessig, Harvard University; author of How to Steal a Presidential Election
“Cindy Cohn gives readers a first-person window into some of the pivotal legal disputes of the digital era and reminds us that action and activism are crucial to preserving Americans’ freedom.” -- U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, author of It Takes Chutzpah: How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change
“Privacy’s Defender is a compelling account of a life well lived and an inspiring call to action for the next generation of civil liberties champions.” -- Edward Snowden, whistleblower; author of Permanent Record
For the San Francisco event: https://citylights.com/events/cindy-cohn-launch-party-for-privacys-defender/
For the Berkeley event: https://www.eff.org/event/privacys-defender-book-launch-party
For more on Privacy’s Defender and the book tour: https://www.eff.org/Privacys-Defender
Contact: KarenGulloSenior Writer for Free Speech and Privacykaren@eff.orgLLM-Assisted Deanonymization
Turns out that LLMs are good at de-anonymization:
We show that LLM agents can figure out who you are from your anonymous online posts. Across Hacker News, Reddit, LinkedIn, and anonymized interview transcripts, our method identifies users with high precision and scales to tens of thousands of candidates.
While it has been known that individuals can be uniquely identified by surprisingly few attributes, this was often practically limited. Data is often only available in unstructured form and deanonymization used to require human investigators to search and reason based on clues. We show that from a handful of comments, LLMs can infer where you live, what you do, and your interests—then search for you on the web. In our new research, we show that this is not only possible but increasingly practical...