The energy secretary's pending decision on the Rosebank site underscores the potentially conflicting goals of the government to drive economic growth while simultaneously reducing emissions.

An official said the country will aim to have its national plan for countering global warming approved by the Cabinet by the end of the fiscal year ending in March.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 10 February 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02247-8

The 12 months before July 2024 were more than 1.5 °C warmer than the pre-industrial baseline. Using climate models, the author shows that the first year that exceeds 1.5 °C of warming most probably also occurs within the first 20-year period with an average temperature that exceeds temperature targets.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 10 February 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02246-9

What a first year with temperature 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial baseline implies for long-term temperature goals is unclear. Here the authors show that such a first year above the baseline is highly likely to occur within the first 20-year period with average warming of 1.5 °C.

When the late professor emeritus Woodie Flowers SM ’68, MEng ’71, PhD ’73 was a student at MIT, most of his classes involved paper-and-pencil exercises with predetermined solutions. Flowers had an affinity for making things, and for making them work. When he transitioned from student to teacher, he chose to carry this approach into his method of instruction and, in doing so, he helped change the way engineering students are educated — at MIT, and around the world. 

Flowers passed away in 2019, but his legacy lives on, and the magnitude of the educational revolution he helped to evolve was profound.

In the 1970s, Flowers took over instruction of 2.70, now called class 2.007 (Design and Manufacturing I). The capstone course is one that many first-year students today look forward to taking, but that wasn’t always the case. Before Flowers took over instruction, class instruction relied heavily on chalkboard demonstrations.

“Their idea of design at the time was to draw drawings of parts,” explains Professor Emeritus David Gossard PhD ’75, Flowers’ longtime friend and colleague. “Woody had a different idea. Give the entire class a kit of materials [and] a common goal, which was to build a machine — to climb a hill, or pick up golf balls, or whatever it did — and make a contest out of it. It was a phenomenal success. The kids loved it, the faculty loved it, the Institute loved it. And over a period of years, it became, I think it's fair to say, an institution.”

With Flowers at the lead, 2.70 transformed into a project-based, get-your-hands-dirty, robotics-competition-focused experience. By all accounts, he also made the experience incredibly fun — something he valued in his own life. He was fond of skydiving and was often seen rollerblading through the Infinite Corridor. The course, informed by his unique style, was at the forefront of a revolution in engineering education, and it quickly helped solidify the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s reputation for innovative education.

“A lot of kids had never started from scratch and built anything,” Flowers once told The Boston Globe. His advisor, Robert Mann, had similar beliefs in a hands-on, modern pedagogy. Building on Mann’s philosophy, and incorporating his own approach, Flowers breathed new life and provided a new foundation for “the MIT way” of teaching. This was a reinvigoration at the right place and the right time that ultimately had a global butterfly effect on the popularity of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) instruction.

“Over the years lectures had displaced the hands-on stuff, and Woodie brought it back,” says Sanjay Sarma, the Fred Fort Flowers (1941) and Daniel Fort Flowers (1941) Professor in Mechanical Engineering. “I can’t think of a single person to have impacted the field of robotics and design in undergraduate, or high school, education as much as Woodie.”

Flowers became interested in mechanical engineering and design at a young age, thanks in large part to his parents. His father was a welder with a penchant for tinkering, inventing, and building, his mother was an elementary school teacher. Flowers grew up taking things apart and putting them back together — an activity which he seemed to believe made students better engineers.

Speaking in 2010 with InfiniteMIT, a digital archive of Institute history made possible by the generosity of Jane and A. Neil Pappalardo ’64, Flowers shared a story about a student who had accepted the task in her group of finding out whether a piece of reinforcement steel rebar could be bent into a tight loop and serve as a bearing.

“She came into lab and I was there early, and she had a slightly bent piece of rebar. It had been heated — you could tell that it had been hot, and she was going to report that she really can’t do that, it just kind of doesn’t work,” Flowers recalled. He suggested they try another approach.

“We went out in the lab and I found another big steel bar and I found the biggest vice I could find,” he continued. Flowers cranked the rebar down against the piece of steel he was going to wrap it around, then took a four-pound sledgehammer to it. “My father had a blacksmith pit, so that was familiar to me. I wrapped [the rebar around the steel and] made a fine bearing. As I finish the last blow, I looked up and three of the best students in the class — really sharp people — were standing there with their jaw open. They’d never seen anyone hit a piece of steel hard enough to just mold it.”

He continued, “that visceral understanding of the behavior of mechanics is really important. It doesn’t fall out of the sky and it certainly doesn’t come out of a textbook, it comes through real interaction. I believe I had been so lucky because when I encountered Castiglione’s theorem about deflection of materials, it kind of made sense.”

Course 2.70/2.007 is considered a landmark class in engineering education. It was one of the first hands-on classes to teach students not only how to design an object, but also how to build it and, by demonstrating the value of practical, project-based learning and robotics competitions, it has influenced the approach taken by many other programs. Today, it continues to develop students’ competence and self-confidence as design engineers, with an emphasis on the creative design process bolstered by application of physical laws, robustness, and manufacturability.

Notably, the course also served as the inspiration for development of the FIRST Robotics program, which Flowers and inventor Dean Kamen started in 1989. FIRST has programs for preschool through high school students and, to date, more than 3.2 million youth from more than 100 countries have participated in FIRST competitions.

In the 1970s, the parts kit — or as Flowers fondly referred to it, the “bag of junk” — included things like springs, tongue depressors, and rubber bands. Flowers’ wife Margaret recalls spending many nights packing these kits and hosting advisees in their home. “We considered ourselves a team,” she says.

Today, in addition to using the kit of mechanical parts and materials, students in 2.007 might develop 3D printed components, and they incorporate electronics in their robots for an autonomous portion of the final competition.

The spring 2024 competition, themed after Cartoon Network’s popular animated science fiction sitcom “Rick and Morty,” featured a spaceship that students’ robots could interact with for points, vats of “acid” where balls could be collected and placed in tubes, and game pieces that paid homage to iconic episodes. The final task required the robot to travel up an elevator and send a character down a zipline.

In recent years, other themes have centered on tasks related to stories ranging from “Star Wars” to “Back to the Future” and “Wakanda Forever.” The 2022 theme, however, may have been the most poignant theme to date: “Legacy,” a celebration of Flowers’ life and work.

“[Woodie] revealed, unambiguously, that designing, fabricating, assembling and building things was fun,” says Gossard. “It was arguably the essence of engineering. There was joy in it.”

A version of this article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of MechE Connects, the magazine of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. 

The Washington Post is reporting that the UK government has served Apple with a “technical capability notice” as defined by the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act, requiring it to break the Advanced Data Protection encryption in iCloud for the benefit of law enforcement.

This is a big deal, and something we in the security community have worried was coming for a while now.

The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand. An Apple spokesman declined to comment...

Long article on the colossal squid.

Blog moderation policy.

A lot has changed in the 15 years since Kaiming He was a PhD student.

“When you are in your PhD stage, there is a high wall between different disciplines and subjects, and there was even a high wall within computer science,” He says. “The guy sitting next to me could be doing things that I completely couldn’t understand.”

In the seven months since he joined the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing as the Douglas Ross (1954) Career Development Professor of Software Technology in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, He says he is experiencing something that in his opinion is “very rare in human scientific history” — a lowering of the walls that expands across different scientific disciplines.

“There is no way I could ever understand high-energy physics, chemistry, or the frontier of biology research, but now we are seeing something that can help us to break these walls,” He says, “and that is the creation of a common language that has been found in AI.”

Building the AI bridge

According to He, this shift began in 2012 in the wake of the “deep learning revolution,” a point when it was realized that this set of machine-learning methods based on neural networks was so powerful that it could be put to greater use.

“At this point, computer vision — helping computers to see and perceive the world as if they are human beings — began growing very rapidly, because as it turns out you can apply this same methodology to many different problems and many different areas,” says He. “So the computer vision community quickly grew really large because these different subtopics were now able to speak a common language and share a common set of tools.”

From there, He says the trend began to expand to other areas of computer science, including natural language processing, speech recognition, and robotics, creating the foundation for ChatGPT and other progress toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).

“All of this has happened over the last decade, leading us to a new emerging trend that I am really looking forward to, and that is watching AI methodology propagate other scientific disciplines,” says He.

One of the most famous examples, He says, is AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence program developed by Google DeepMind, which performs predictions of protein structure.

“It’s a very different scientific discipline, a very different problem, but people are also using the same set of AI tools, the same methodology to solve these problems,” He says, “and I think that is just the beginning.”

The future of AI in science

Since coming to MIT in February 2024, He says he has talked to professors in almost every department. Some days he finds himself in conversation with two or more professors from very different backgrounds.

“I certainly don’t fully understand their area of research, but they will just introduce some context and then we can start to talk about deep learning, machine learning, [and] neural network models in their problems,” He says. “In this sense, these AI tools are like a common language between these scientific areas: the machine learning tools ‘translate’ their terminology and concepts into terms that I can understand, and then I can learn their problems and share my experience, and sometimes propose solutions or opportunities for them to explore.”

Expanding to different scientific disciplines has significant potential, from using video analysis to predict weather and climate trends to expediting the research cycle and reducing costs in relation to new drug discovery.

While AI tools provide a clear benefit to the work of He’s scientist colleagues, He also notes the reciprocal effect they can have, and have had, on the creation and advancement of AI.

“Scientists provide new problems and challenges that help us continue to evolve these tools,” says He. “But it is also important to remember that many of today’s AI tools stem from earlier scientific areas — for example, artificial neural networks were inspired by biological observations; diffusion models for image generation were motivated from the physics term.”

“Science and AI are not isolated subjects. We have been approaching the same goal from different perspectives, and now we are getting together.”

And what better place for them to come together than MIT.

“It is not surprising that MIT can see this change earlier than many other places,” He says. “[The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing] created an environment that connects different people and lets them sit together, talk together, work together, exchange their ideas, while speaking the same language — and I’m seeing this begin to happen.”

In terms of when the walls will fully lower, He notes that this is a long-term investment that won’t happen overnight.

“Decades ago, computers were considered high tech and you needed specific knowledge to understand them, but now everyone is using a computer,” He says. “I expect in 10 or more years, everyone will be using some kind of AI in some way for their research — it’s just their basic tools, their basic language, and they can use AI to solve their problems.”

The Washington Post reported that the United Kingdom is demanding that Apple create an encryption backdoor to give the government access to end-to-end encrypted data in iCloud. Encryption is one of the best ways we have to reclaim our privacy and security in a digital world filled with cyberattacks and security breaches, and there’s no way to weaken it in order to only provide access to the “good guys.” We call on Apple to resist this attempt to undermine the right to private spaces and communications.

As reported, the British government’s undisclosed order was issued last month, and requires the capability to view all encrypted material in iCloud. The core target is Apple’s Advanced Data Protection, which is an optional feature that turns on end-to-end encryption for backups and other data stored in iCloud, making it so that even Apple cannot access that information. For a long time, iCloud backups were a loophole for law enforcement to gain access to data otherwise not available to them on iPhones with device encryption enabled. That loophole still exists for anyone who doesn’t opt in to using Advanced Data Protection. If Apple does comply, users should consider disabling iCloud backups entirely. Perhaps most concerning, the U.K. is apparently seeking a backdoor into users’ data regardless of where they are or what citizenship they have.

There is no technological compromise between strong encryption that protects the data and a mechanism to allow the government special access to this data. Any “backdoor” built for the government puts everyone at greater risk of hacking, identity theft, and fraud. There is no world where, once built, these backdoors would only be used by open and democratic governments. These systems can be, and quickly will be, used by more repressive governments around the world to read protesters’ and dissenters’ communications. We’ve seen and opposed these sorts of measures for years. Now is no different.

Of course, Apple is not the only company who uses end-to-end encryption. Some of Google’s backup options employ similar protections, as do many chat apps, cloud backup services, and more. If the U.K. government secures access to the encrypted data of Apple users through a backdoor, every other secure file-sharing, communication, and backup tool is at risk.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., just last year we had a top U.S. cybersecurity chief declare that “encryption is your friend,” taking a welcome break from the messaging we’ve seen over the years at EFF. Even the FBI, which has frequently pushed for easier access to data by law enforcement, issued the same recommendation.

There is no legal mechanism for the U.S. government to force this same sort of rule on Apple, and we’d hope to see Apple continue to resist it as they have in the past. But what happens in the U.K. will still affect users around the world, especially as the U.K. order specifically stated that Apple would be prohibited from warning its users that its Advanced Data Protection measures no longer work as initially designed.

Weakening encryption violates fundamental human rights and annihilates our right to private spaces. Apple has to continue fighting against this ruling to keep backdoors off users’ devices.

Minors, like everyone else, have First Amendment rights. These rights extend to their ability to use social media both to speak and access the speech of others online. But these rights are under attack, as many states seek to limit minors’ use of social media through age verification measures and outright bans. California’s SB 976, or the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act, prohibits minors from using a key feature of social media platforms—personalized recommendation systems, or newsfeeds. This law impermissibly burdens minors’ ability to communicate and find others’ speech on social media. 

On February 6th, 2025, EFF, alongside the Freedom to Read Foundation and Library Futures, filed a brief in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in NetChoice v. Bonta urging the court to overturn the district court decision partially denying a preliminary injunction of SB 976.  

SB 976 passed into law in September of 2024, and prohibits various online platforms from providing personalized recommendation systems to minors without parental consent. For now, this prohibition only applies where the platforms know a user is a minor. Starting in 2027, however, the platforms will need to estimate the age of all their users based on regulations promulgated by the California attorney general. This means that (1) all users of platforms with these systems will need to pass through an age gate to continue using these features, and (2) children without parental consent will be denied access to the protected speech that is organized and distributed via newsfeeds. This is separate from the fact that feeds are central to most platforms’ user experience, and it’s not clear how social media platforms can or will adapt the experience for young people to comply with this law. Because these effects burden both users and platforms’ First Amendment rights, EFF filed this friend-of-the-court brief. This work is part of our broader fight against similar age-verification laws at the state and federal levels. 

EFF got involved in this suit both to advocate for the First Amendment rights of adult and minor users and to correct the dangerous logic by the district court. The district court, hearing NetChoice’s challenge on behalf of online platforms, ruled that the personalized feeds covered by SB 976 are not expressive, and therefore not covered by the First Amendment. The lower court took an extremely narrow view of what constitutes expressive activity, writing that algorithms behind personalized newsfeeds don’t reflect the messages or editorial choices of their human creators and therefore do not trigger First Amendment scrutiny. The Ninth Circuit has since stayed the district court’s ruling, preliminarily blocking the law from taking effect until it has a chance to consider the issues. 

EFF pushed back on this flawed reasoning, arguing that “the personalized feeds targeted by SB 976 are inherently expressive, because they (1) reflect the choices made by platforms to organize content on their services, (2) incorporate and respond to the expression users create to distribute users’ speech, and (3) provide users with the means to access speech in a digestible and organized way.” Moreover, the presence of these personalized recommendation systems informs the speech that users create on platforms, as users often create content with the intent of it getting “picked up” by the algorithm and delivered to other users.  

SB 976 burdens the First Amendment rights of minor social media users by blocking their use of primary systems created to distribute their own speech and to hear others’ speech via those systems, EFF’s brief argues. The statute also burdens all internet users’ First Amendment rights because the age-verification scheme it requires will block some adults from accessing lawful speech, make it impossible for them to speak anonymously on these services, and increase their risk of privacy invasions. Under the law, adults and minors alike will need to provide identifying documents to prove their age, which chills users of any age who wish to remain anonymous from accessing protected speech, excludes adults lacking proper documentation, and exposes those who do share their documentation to data breaches or sale of their data. 

We hope the Ninth Circuit recognizes that personalized recommendation systems are expressive in nature, subjects SB 976 to strict scrutiny, and rejects the district court ruling.

Related Cases: NetChoice Must-Carry Litigation

Kaspersky is reporting on a new type of smartphone malware.

The malware in question uses optical character recognition (OCR) to review a device’s photo library, seeking screenshots of recovery phrases for crypto wallets. Based on their assessment, infected Google Play apps have been downloaded more than 242,000 times. Kaspersky says: “This is the first known case of an app infected with OCR spyware being found in Apple’s official app marketplace.”

That’s a tactic I have not heard of before.

The effects of President Donald Trump’s spending pause is cascading across the country.

Congress created the $5 billion program to help states build out their electric vehicle charging network.

The U.S. Postal Service signed contracts to replace tens of thousands of delivery trucks with electric vehicles. But only a fraction have been built.

Young people suing EPA over climate change say President Donald Trump’s executive order promoting fossil fuel production helps their legal challenge.

The Empire State charges energy companies for past climate emissions. West Virginia and other states want to do away with the law.

The beleaguered party is counting on a populist approach to fight Republican attacks on climate policies.

Federal relief to disadvantaged communities was a top priority during the previous administration.

The list was compiled by the American Accountability Foundation. It includes “dossiers” on roughly 50 employees.

The survey from the EV Politics Project found that three-quarters of Democrats have a negative view of Elon Musk — but 70 percent of Republicans view him positively.