A handful of lawmakers introduced a resolution to repeal action against hydrofluorocarbons.

The move follows a Jan. 20 Department of Homeland Security directive to dissolve membership of all advisory committees.

On the flip side, much of Scandinavia and the United Kingdom will see fewer temperature-related deaths, mostly due to moderating cold temperatures, says the study.

Normandy and Brittany were already waterlogged after the passage of last week's Storm Éowyn, which left two people dead from fallen trees and more than 1 million people without electricity in Ireland and Britain.

Emissions rose 0.8 percent from 2023, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air said in a report.

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.

Copyright law affects everything we do on the internet. So why do some lawmakers and powerful companies still think they can write new copyright law behind closed doors, with ordinary internet users on the outside?

Major movie and TV studios are again pushing Congress to create a vast new censorship regime on the U.S. internet, one that could even reach abroad and conscript infrastructure companies to help make whole websites disappear. The justification is, as always, creating ever more draconian means of going after copyright infringement, and never mind all of the powerful tools that already exist.

The movie studios and other major media companies last tried this in 2012, seeking to push a pair of internet censorship bills called SOPA and PIPA through Congress, without hearings. Lawmakers were preparing to ignore the concerns of internet users not named Disney, Warner, Paramount, or Fox. At first, they ignored the long, sad history of copyright enforcement tools being used for censorship. They ignored the technologists, including some of the creators of the internet, who explained how website-blocking creates security threats and inevitably blocks lawful speech. And they ignored the pleas of ordinary users who were concerned about the websites they relied on going dark because of hasty site-blocking orders.

Writing new copyright laws in the proverbial smoke-filled backroom was somewhat less surprising in 2012. Before the internet, copyright mainly governed the relationships between authors and publishers, movie producers and distributors, photographers and clients, and so on. The easiest way to make changes was to get representatives of these industries together to hash out the details, then have Congress pass those changes into law. It worked well enough for most people.

In the internet age, that approach is unworkable. Every use of the internet, whether sending a photo, reading a social media post, or working on a shared document, causes a copy of some creative work. And nearly every creative work that’s recorded on a computing device is automatically governed by copyright law, with no registration or copyright notices required. That makes copyright a fundamental governing law of the internet. It shapes the design and functions of the devices we use, what software we can run, and when and how we can participate in culture. Its massive penalties and confusing exceptions can ensnare everyone from landlords to librarians, from students to salespeople.

Users fought back. In a historic protest, thousands of websites went dark for a day, with messages encouraging users to oppose the SOPA/PIPA bills. EFF alone helped users send more than 1,000,000 emails to Congress, and countless more came from other organizations. Web traffic briefly brought down some Senate websites. 162 million people visited Wikipedia and 8 million looked up their representatives’ phone numbers. Google received more than 7 million signatures on its petition. Everyone who wrote, called, and visited their lawmakers sent a message that laws affecting the internet can't be made in a backroom by insiders bearing campaign cash. Congress quickly scrapped the bills.

After that, although Congress avoided changing copyright law for years, the denizens of the smoke-filled room never gave up. The then-leaders of the Motion Picture Association and the Recording Industry Association of America both vented angrily about ordinary people getting a say over copyright. Big Media went on a world tour, pushing for site-blocking laws that led to the same problems [Italy etc] of censorship and over-blocking in many countries that U.S. users had mostly avoided.

Now, they’re trying again. Major media companies are pushing Congress to pass new site-blocking laws that would conscript internet service providers, domain name services, and potentially others to build a new censorship machine. The problems of overblocking and misuse haven’t gone away—if anything they've gotten as ever more of our life is lived online. The biggest tech companies, who in 2012 were prodded into action by a mass movement of internet users, are now preoccupied by antitrust lawsuits and seeking favor from the new administration in Washington. And as with other extraordinary tools that Congress has given to the largest copyright holders, site-blocking won’t stay confined to copyright—other powerful industries and governments will clamor to use the system for censorship, and it will get ever harder to resist those calls.

It seems like lawmakers have learned nothing, because copyright law is again being written in secret by a handful of industry representatives. That was unacceptable in 2012, and it’s even more unacceptable in 2025. Before considering site blocking, or any major changes to copyright, Congress needs to consult with every kind of internet user, including small content creators, small businesses, educators, librarians, and technologists not beholden to the largest tech and media companies.

We can’t go backwards. Copyright law affects everyone, and everyone needs a say in its evolution. Before taking up site-blocking or any other major changes to copyright law, Congress needs to air those proposals publicly, seek input from far and wide—and listen to it.

In 2014, a team of MIT students in course 15.366 (Climate and Energy Ventures) developed a plan to commercialize MIT research on how to move information between chips with light instead of electricity, reducing energy usage.

After completing the class, which challenges students to identify early customers and pitch their business plan to investors, the team went on to win both grand prizes at the MIT Clean Energy Prize. Today the company, Ayar Labs, has raised a total of $370 million from a group including chip leaders AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA, to scale the manufacturing of its optical chip interconnects.

Ayar Labs is one of many companies whose roots can be traced back to 15.366. In fact, more than 150 companies have been founded by alumni of the class since its founding in 2007.

In the class, student teams select a technology or idea and determine the best path for its commercialization. The semester-long project, which is accompanied by lectures and mentoring, equips students with real-world experience in launching a business.

“The goal is to educate entrepreneurs on how to start companies in the climate and energy space,” says Senior Lecturer Tod Hynes, who co-founded the course and has been teaching since 2008. “We do that through hands-on experience. We require students to engage with customers, talk to potential suppliers, partners, investors, and to practice their pitches to learn from that feedback.”

The class attracts hundreds of student applications each year. As one of the catalysts for MIT spinoffs, it is also one reason a 2015 report found that MIT alumni-founded companies had generated roughly $1.9 trillion in annual revenues. If MIT were a country, that figure that would make it the 10th largest economy in the world, according to the report.

“’Mens et manus’ (‘mind and hand’) is MIT's motto, and the hands-on experience we try to provide in this class is hard to beat,” Hynes says. “When you actually go through the process of commercialization in the real world, you learn more and you’re in a better spot. That experiential learning approach really aligns with MIT’s approach.”

Simulating a startup

The course was started by Bill Aulet, a professor of the practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. After serving as an advisor the first year and helping Aulet launch the class, Hynes began teaching the class with Aulet in the fall of 2008. The pair also launched the Climate and Energy Prize around the same time, which continues today and recently received over 150 applications from teams from around the world.

A core feature of the class is connecting students in different academic fields. Each year, organizers aim to enroll students with backgrounds in science, engineering, business, and policy.

“The class is meant to be accessible to anybody at MIT,” Hynes says, noting the course has also since opened to students from Harvard University. “We’re trying to pull across disciplines.”

The class quickly grew in popularity around campus. Over the last few years, the course has had about 150 students apply for 50 spots.

“I mentioned Climate and Energy Ventures in my application to MIT,” says Chris Johnson, a second-year graduate student in the Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) Program. “Coming into MIT, I was very interested in sustainability, and energy in particular, and also in startups. I had heard great things about the class, and I waited until my last semester to apply.”

The course’s organizers select mostly graduate students, whom they prefer to be in the final year of their program so they can more easily continue working on the venture after the class is finished.

“Whether or not students stick with the project from the class, it’s a great experience that will serve them in their careers,” says Jennifer Turliuk, the practice leader for climate and energy artificial intelligence at the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship, who helped teach the class this fall.

Hynes describes the course as a venture-building simulation. Before it begins, organizers select up to 30 technologies and ideas that are in the right stage for commercialization. Students can also come into the class with ideas or technologies they want to work on.

After a few weeks of introductions and lectures, students form into multidisciplinary teams of about five and begin going through each of the 24 steps of building a startup described in Aulet’s book “Disciplined Entrepreneurship,” which includes things like engaging with potential early customers, quantifying a value proposition, and establishing a business model. Everything builds toward a one-hour final presentation that’s designed to simulate a pitch to investors or government officials.

“It’s a lot of work, and because it’s a team-based project, your grade is highly dependent on your team,” Hynes says. “You also get graded by your team; that’s about 10 percent of your grade. We try to encourage people to be proactive and supportive teammates.”

Students say the process is fast-paced but rewarding.

“It’s definitely demanding,” says Sofie Netteberg, a graduate student who is also in the LGO program at MIT. “Depending on where you’re at with your technology, you can be moving very quickly. That’s the stage that I was in, which I found really engaging. We basically just had a lab technology, and it was like, ‘What do we do next?’ You also get a ton of support from the professors.”

From the classroom to the world

This fall’s final presentations took place at the headquarters of the MIT-affiliated venture firm The Engine in front of an audience of professors, investors, members of foundations supporting entrepreneurship, and more.

“We got to hear feedback from people who would be the real next step for the technology if the startup gets up and running,” said Johnson, whose team was commercializing a method for storing energy in concrete. “That was really valuable. We know that these are not only people we might see in the next month or the next funding rounds, but they’re also exactly the type of people that are going to give us the questions we should be thinking about. It was clarifying.”

Throughout the semester, students treated the project like a real venture they’d be working on well beyond the length of the class.

“No one’s really thinking about this class for the grade; it’s about the learning,” says Netteberg, whose team was encouraged to keep working on their electrolyzer technology designed to more efficiently produce green hydrogen. “We’re not stressed about getting an A. If we want to keep working on this, we want real feedback: What do you think we did well? What do we need to keep working on?”

Hynes says several investors expressed interest in supporting the businesses coming out of the class. Moving forward, he hopes students embrace the test-bed environment his team has created for them and try bold new things.

“People have been very pragmatic over the years, which is good, but also potentially limiting,” Hynes says. “This is also an opportunity to do something that’s a little further out there — something that has really big potential impact if it comes together. This is the time where students get to experiment, so why not try something big?”

Robots have come a long way since the Roomba. Today, drones are starting to deliver door to door, self-driving cars are navigating some roads, robo-dogs are aiding first responders, and still more bots are doing backflips and helping out on the factory floor. Still, Luca Carlone thinks the best is yet to come.

Carlone, who recently received tenure as an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), directs the SPARK Lab, where he and his students are bridging a key gap between humans and robots: perception. The group does theoretical and experimental research, all toward expanding a robot’s awareness of its environment in ways that approach human perception. And perception, as Carlone often says, is more than detection.

While robots have grown by leaps and bounds in terms of their ability to detect and identify objects in their surroundings, they still have a lot to learn when it comes to making higher-level sense of their environment. As humans, we perceive objects with an intuitive sense of not just of their shapes and labels but also their physics — how they might be manipulated and moved — and how they relate to each other, their larger environment, and ourselves.

That kind of human-level perception is what Carlone and his group are hoping to impart to robots, in ways that enable them to safely and seamlessly interact with people in their homes, workplaces, and other unstructured environments.

Since joining the MIT faculty in 2017, Carlone has led his team in developing and applying perception and scene-understanding algorithms for various applications, including autonomous underground search-and-rescue vehicles, drones that can pick up and manipulate objects on the fly, and self-driving cars. They might also be useful for domestic robots that follow natural language commands and potentially even anticipate human’s needs based on higher-level contextual clues.

“Perception is a big bottleneck toward getting robots to help us in the real world,” Carlone says. “If we can add elements of cognition and reasoning to robot perception, I believe they can do a lot of good.”

Expanding horizons

Carlone was born and raised near Salerno, Italy, close to the scenic Amalfi coast, where he was the youngest of three boys. His mother is a retired elementary school teacher who taught math, and his father is a retired history professor and publisher, who has always taken an analytical approach to his historical research. The brothers may have unconsciously adopted their parents’ mindsets, as all three went on to be engineers — the older two pursued electronics and mechanical engineering, while Carlone landed on robotics, or mechatronics, as it was known at the time.

He didn’t come around to the field, however, until late in his undergraduate studies. Carlone attended the Polytechnic University of Turin, where he focused initially on theoretical work, specifically on control theory — a field that applies mathematics to develop algorithms that automatically control the behavior of physical systems, such as power grids, planes, cars, and robots. Then, in his senior year, Carlone signed up for a course on robotics that explored advances in manipulation and how robots can be programmed to move and function.

“It was love at first sight. Using algorithms and math to develop the brain of a robot and make it move and interact with the environment is one of the most fulfilling experiences,” Carlone says. “I immediately decided this is what I want to do in life.”

He went on to a dual-degree program at the Polytechnic University of Turin and the Polytechnic University of Milan, where he received master’s degrees in mechatronics and automation engineering, respectively. As part of this program, called the Alta Scuola Politecnica, Carlone also took courses in management, in which he and students from various academic backgrounds had to team up to conceptualize, build, and draw up a marketing pitch for a new product design. Carlone’s team developed a touch-free table lamp designed to follow a user’s hand-driven commands. The project pushed him to think about engineering from different perspectives.

“It was like having to speak different languages,” he says. “It was an early exposure to the need to look beyond the engineering bubble and think about how to create technical work that can impact the real world.”

The next generation

Carlone stayed in Turin to complete his PhD in mechatronics. During that time, he was given freedom to choose a thesis topic, which he went about, as he recalls, “a bit naively.”

“I was exploring a topic that the community considered to be well-understood, and for which many researchers believed there was nothing more to say.” Carlone says. “I underestimated how established the topic was, and thought I could still contribute something new to it, and I was lucky enough to just do that.”

The topic in question was “simultaneous localization and mapping,” or SLAM — the problem of generating and updating a map of a robot’s environment while simultaneously keeping track of where the robot is within that environment. Carlone came up with a way to reframe the problem, such that algorithms could generate more precise maps without having to start with an initial guess, as most SLAM methods did at the time. His work helped to crack open a field where most roboticists thought one could not do better than the existing algorithms.

“SLAM is about figuring out the geometry of things and how a robot moves among those things,” Carlone says. “Now I’m part of a community asking, what is the next generation of SLAM?”

In search of an answer, he accepted a postdoc position at Georgia Tech, where he dove into coding and computer vision — a field that, in retrospect, may have been inspired by a brush with blindness: As he was finishing up his PhD in Italy, he suffered a medical complication that severely affected his vision.

“For one year, I could have easily lost an eye,” Carlone says. “That was something that got me thinking about the importance of vision, and artificial vision.”

He was able to receive good medical care, and the condition resolved entirely, such that he could continue his work. At Georgia Tech, his advisor, Frank Dellaert, showed him ways to code in computer vision and formulate elegant mathematical representations of complex, three-dimensional problems. His advisor was also one of the first to develop an open-source SLAM library, called GTSAM, which Carlone quickly recognized to be an invaluable resource. More broadly, he saw that making software available to all unlocked a huge potential for progress in robotics as a whole.

“Historically, progress in SLAM has been very slow, because people kept their codes proprietary, and each group had to essentially start from scratch,” Carlone says. “Then open-source pipelines started popping up, and that was a game changer, which has largely driven the progress we have seen over the last 10 years.”

Spatial AI

Following Georgia Tech, Carlone came to MIT in 2015 as a postdoc in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). During that time, he collaborated with Sertac Karaman, professor of aeronautics and astronautics, in developing software to help palm-sized drones navigate their surroundings using very little on-board power. A year later, he was promoted to research scientist, and then in 2017, Carlone accepted a faculty position in AeroAstro.

“One thing I fell in love with at MIT was that all decisions are driven by questions like: What are our values? What is our mission? It’s never about low-level gains. The motivation is really about how to improve society,” Carlone says. “As a mindset, that has been very refreshing.”

Today, Carlone’s group is developing ways to represent a robot’s surroundings, beyond characterizing their geometric shape and semantics. He is utilizing deep learning and large language models to develop algorithms that enable robots to perceive their environment through a higher-level lens, so to speak. Over the last six years, his lab has released more than 60 open-source repositories, which are used by thousands of researchers and practitioners worldwide. The bulk of his work fits into a larger, emerging field known as “spatial AI.”

“Spatial AI is like SLAM on steroids,” Carlone says. “In a nutshell, it has to do with enabling robots to think and understand the world as humans do, in ways that can be useful.”

It’s a huge undertaking that could have wide-ranging impacts, in terms of enabling more intuitive, interactive robots to help out at home, in the workplace, on the roads, and in remote and potentially dangerous areas. Carlone says there will be plenty of work ahead, in order to come close to how humans perceive the world.

“I have 2-year-old twin daughters, and I see them manipulating objects, carrying 10 different toys at a time, navigating across cluttered rooms with ease, and quickly adapting to new environments. Robot perception cannot yet match what a toddler can do,” Carlone says. “But we have new tools in the arsenal. And the future is bright.”

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 28 January 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-024-02241-6

High-quality coverage of climate change requires trained reporters, editorial support and financial assistance, but news media in the global south often lack access to such resources. Now, a study points to further disparities across language and regional communities.

The MIT Press has announced that Direct to Open (D2O) will open access to over 80 new monographs and edited book collections in the spring and fall publishing seasons, after reaching its full funding goal for 2025.

“It has been one of the greatest privileges of my career to contribute to this program and demonstrate that our academic community can unite to publish high-quality open-access monographs at scale,” says Amy Harris, senior manager of library relations and sales at the MIT Press. “We are deeply grateful to all of the consortia that have partnered with us and to the hundreds of libraries that have invested in this program. Together, we are expanding the public knowledge commons in ways that benefit scholars, the academy, and readers around the world.”

Among the highlights from the MIT Press’s fourth D2O funding cycle is a new three-year, consortium-wide commitment from the Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC) and a renewed three-year commitment from the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA). These long-term collaborations will play a pivotal role in supporting the press’s open-access efforts for years to come.

“The Florida Virtual Campus is honored to participate in D2O in order to provide this collection of high-quality scholarship to more than 1.2 million students and faculty at the 28 state colleges and 12 state universities of Florida,” says Elijah Scott, executive director of library services for the Florida Virtual Campus. “The D2O program allows FLVC to make this research collection available to our member libraries while concurrently fostering the larger global aspiration of sustainable and equitable access to information.”

“The libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance are committed to supporting the creation of open-access content,” adds Kate McCready, program director for open publishing at the Big Ten Academic Alliance Library. “We're thrilled that our participation in D2O contributes to the opening of this collection, as well as championing the exploration of new models for opening scholarly monographs.”

In 2025, hundreds of libraries renewed their support thanks to the teams at consortia around the world, including the Council of Australasian University Librarians, the CBB Library Consortium, the California Digital Library, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, CRL/NERL, the Greater Western Library Alliance, Jisc, Lyrasis, MOBIUS, PALCI, SCELC, and the Tri-College Library Consortium.

Launched in 2021, D2O is an innovative sustainable framework for open-access monographs that shifts publishing from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single e-books, to a collaborative, library-supported open-access model. 

Many other models offer open-access opportunities on a title-by-title basis or within specific disciplines. D2O’s particular advantage is that it enables a press to provide open access to its entire list of scholarly books at scale, embargo-free, during each funding cycle. Thanks to D2O, all MIT Press monograph authors have the opportunity for their work to be published open access, with equal support to traditionally underserved and underfunded disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.  

The MIT Press will now turn its attention to its fifth funding cycle and invites libraries and library consortia to participate. For details, please visit the MIT Press website or contact the Library Relations team.

Melissa Smith PhD ’12 is an associate leader in the Advanced Materials and Microsystems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Her team, which is embedded within the laboratory’s Advanced Technology Division, drives innovation in fields including computation, aerospace, optical systems, and bioengineering by applying micro- and nanofabrication techniques. Smith, an inventor of 11 patents, strongly believes in the power of collaboration when it comes to her own work, the work of her Lincoln Laboratory colleagues, and the innovative research done by MIT professors and students. 

Lincoln Laboratory researches and develops advanced technologies in support of national security. Research done at the laboratory is applied, meaning staff members are given a specific problem to solve by a deadline. Divisions within the laboratory are made up of technical experts, ranging from biologists to cybersecurity researchers, working on different projects simultaneously. Smith appreciates the broad application space of her group’s work, which feeds into programs across the laboratory. “We are like a kitchen drawer full of indispensable gadgets,” she says, some of which are used to develop picosatellites, smart textiles, or microrobots. Their position as a catch-all team makes their work fun, somewhat open-ended, and always interesting.

In 2012, Smith received her PhD from the MIT Department of Materials Science & Engineering (DMSE). After graduation, she remained at the Institute for nine months as a postdoc before beginning her career as an engineer at IBM. While at IBM, Smith maintained a research affiliation with MIT to continue to work on patents and write papers. In 2015, she formally returned to MIT as a technical staff member at Lincoln Laboratory. In 2020, she was promoted to the position of assistant group leader and was awarded the laboratory’s Best Invention Award for “Electrospray devices and methods for fabricating electrospray devices” (U.S. Patent 11,708,182 B2). In 2024, she was promoted to associate group leader. 

Management is an important aspect of Smith’s role, and she credits the laboratory for cultivating people with both academic and technical backgrounds to learn how to effectively run programs and teams. Her demonstrated efficacy in the academic and corporate spaces — both of which contain deadlines and collaborative work — allows her to inspire her team to be innovative and efficient. She keeps her group running smoothly by removing potential roadblocks so they can adequately attend to their projects. Smith focuses on specific tasks that aid in her group’s success, including writing grant proposals, a skill she learned while working at the laboratory, which allows her staff to prioritize their technical work. That, she says, is the value of working as a team.

A true champion of teamwork, Smith advises new staff members to maintain an open mind because they can learn something from everyone they encounter, especially when first starting at the Institute. She notes that every colleague has something unique to offer, and taking time to understand the wealth of experience and knowledge around you will only help you succeed as a staff member at MIT. “Be who you are, do what you do, and run with it,” she says. 

Soundbytes 

Q: What project at MIT are you the proudest of?

Smith: We are building a wafer-scale satellite, which is a little bit out-there as an idea. It was thought up in the 1960s, but the technology wasn't to the point where it could be realized. Technology today is more than capable of making this small space microsystem. I was tasked with taking the idea further. Some people say that it is impossible, and for a lot of good reasons! Slowly addressing the technical issues to the point where people now say, “Oh, you could probably do this,” is exciting.

I never want to be someone who thinks something is impossible. I'll say, “I can't do it, but maybe somebody else can,” and I will also add, “Here is what I tried, here is all the data, and here is how I came to the point where I got stuck.” I like taking something that was initially met with disbelief and rendering it. Lincoln Laboratory is active with professors and students. I am collaborating with students from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics on the project, and we now have a patent on the technology that came from it. I am happy to have students assist, write papers, and occasionally get their names on patents. It is seeding additional innovation. We don't have the system quite yet, but I've converted a few skeptics!

Q: What are your favorite campus memories from when you were a student?

Smith: When I was a graduate student, I would go with friends to the Muddy Charles Pub in Walker Memorial. One of the things I really enjoy about Walker Memorial is the prime view over the Charles River, and I remember staring out of the windows at the top of Walker Memorial after exams. Also, during Independent Activities Period I learned how to snowboard. I'm from Illinois where there are no mountains. When I came to the East Coast and saw that there were a lot of mountains with people strapping metal to their feet in the snow, I thought, “OK, let's try it.” I love snowboarding to this day. MIT has this kind of unfettered freedom in a way that, even beyond the technical stuff, people can try things from a personal standpoint they maybe wouldn’t have tried somewhere else. 

Q: What do you like the most about the culture at MIT?

Smith: We help people grow professionally. The staff here are above average in terms of capability in what they do. When I interviewed for my job, I asked where people work when they leave MIT. People move on to other labs like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory or companies like Raytheon, they become professors, or they start their own companies. I make sure that people are learning what they want to do with their careers while they work at the laboratory. That is the cultural overlay that exists on campus. When I was a student, I interned at John Deere, 3M, Xerox, and IBM and saw how they are innovative in their own ways that define their corporate cultures. At MIT, you are supported to explore and play. At Lincoln Laboratory people are not pigeonholed into a particular role. If you have an idea, you are encouraged to explore it, as long as it aligns with the mission. There is a specific freedom you can experience at MIT that is above and beyond a typical academic environment.

Gerald E. Schneider, a professor emeritus of psychology and member of the MIT community for over 60 years, passed away on Dec. 11, 2024. He was 84.

Schneider was an authority on the relationships between brain structure and behavior, concentrating on neuronal development, regeneration or altered growth after brain injury, and the behavioral consequences of altered connections in the brain.

Using the Syrian golden hamster as his test subject of choice, Schneider made numerous contributions to the advancement of neuroscience. He laid out the concept of two visual systems — one for locating objects and one for the identification of objects — in a 1969 issue of Science, a milestone in the study of brain-behavior relationships. In 1973, he described a “pruning effect” in the optic tract axons of adult hamsters who had brain lesions early in life. In 2006, his lab reported a previously undiscovered nanobiomedical technology for tissue repair and restoration in Biological Sciences. The paper showed how a designed self-assembling peptide nanofiber scaffold could create a permissive environment for axons, not only to regenerate through the site of an acute injury in the optic tract of hamsters, but also to knit the brain tissue together.

His work shaped the research and thinking of numerous colleagues and trainees. Mriganka Sur, the Newton Professor of Neuroscience and former Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) department head, recalls how Schneider’s paper, “Is it really better to have your brain lesion early? A revision of the ‘Kennard Principle,’” published in 1979 in the journal Neuropsychologia, influenced his work on rewiring retinal projections to the auditory thalamus, which was used to derive principles of functional plasticity in the cortex.

“Jerry was an extremely innovative thinker. His hypothesis of two visual systems — for detailed spatial processing and for movement processing — based on his analysis of visual pathways in hamsters presaged and inspired later work on form and motion pathways in the primate brain,” Sur says. “His description of conservation of axonal arbor during development laid the foundation for later ideas about homeostatic mechanisms that co-regulate neuronal plasticity.”

Institute Professor Ann Graybiel was a colleague of Schneider’s for over five decades. She recalls early in her career being asked by Schneider to help make a map of the superior colliculus.

“I took it as an honor to be asked, and I worked very hard on this, with great excitement. It was my first such mapping, to be followed by much more in the future,” Graybiel recalls. “Jerry was fascinated by animal behavior, and from early on he made many discoveries using hamsters as his main animals of choice. He found that they could play. He found that they could operate in ways that seemed very sophisticated. And, yes, he mapped out pathways in their brains.”

Schneider was raised in Wheaton, Illinois, and graduated from Wheaton College in 1962 with a degree in physics. He was recruited to MIT by Hans-Lukas Teuber, one of the founders of the Department of Psychology, which eventually became the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Walle Nauta, another founder of the department, taught Schneider neuroanatomy. The pair were deeply influential in shaping his interests in neuroscience and his research.

“He admired them both very much and was very attached to them,” his daughter, Nimisha Schneider, says. “He was an interdisciplinary scholar and he liked that aspect of neuroscience, and he was fascinated by the mysteries of the human brain.”

Shortly after completing his PhD in psychology in 1966, he was hired as an assistant professor in 1967. He was named an associate professor in 1970, received tenure in 1975, and was appointed a full professor in 1977.

After his retirement in 2017, Schneider remained involved with the Department of BCS. Professor Pawan Sinha brought Schneider to campus for what would be his last on-campus engagement, as part of the “SilverMinds Series,” an initiative in the Sinha Lab to engage with scientists now in their “silver years.”

Schneider’s research made an indelible impact on Sinha, beginning as a graduate student when he was inspired by Schneider’s work linking brain structure and function. His work on nerve regeneration, which merged fundamental science and real-world impact, served as a “North Star” that guided Sinha’s own work as he established his lab as a junior faculty member.

“Even through the sadness of his loss, I am grateful for the inspiring example he has left for us of a life that so seamlessly combined brilliance, kindness, modesty, and tenacity,” Sinha says. “He will be missed.”

Schneider’s life centered around his research and teaching, but he also had many other skills and hobbies. Early in his life, he enjoyed painting, and as he grew older he was drawn to poetry. He was also skilled in carpentry and making furniture. He built the original hamster cages for his lab himself, along with numerous pieces of home furniture and shelving. He enjoyed nature anywhere it could be found, from the bees in his backyard to hiking and visiting state and national parks.

He was a Type 1 diabetic, and at the time of his death, he was nearing the completion of a book on the effects of hypoglycemia on the brain, which his family hopes to have published in the future. He was also the author of “Brain Structure and Its Origins,” published in 2014 by MIT Press.

He is survived by his wife, Aiping; his children, Cybele, Aniket, and Nimisha; and step-daughter Anna. He was predeceased by a daughter, Brenna. He is also survived by eight grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren. A memorial in his honor was held on Jan. 11 at Saint James Episcopal Church in Cambridge.

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 

One of the unintended consequences of the internet is that more of us than ever are aware of how much of our lives is affected by copyright. People see their favorite YouTuber’s video get removed or re-edited due to copyright. People know they can’t tinker with or fix their devices. And people have realized, and are angry about, the fact that they don’t own much of the media they have paid for.  

All of this is to say that copyright is no longer—if it ever was—a niche concern of certain industries. As corporations have pushed to expand copyright, they have made it everyone’s problem. And that means they don’t get to make the law in secret anymore. 

Twelve years ago, a diverse coalition of Internet users, non-profit groups, and Internet companies defeated the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), bills that would have forced Internet companies to blacklist and block websites accused of hosting copyright infringing content. These were bills that would have made censorship very easy, all in the name of copyright protection. 

As people raise more and more concerns about the major technology companies that control our online lives, it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking that copyright will save us. As SOPA/PIPA reminds us: expanding copyright serves the gatekeepers, not the users.  

We continue to fight for a version of copyright that does what it is supposed to. And so, every year, EFF and a number of diverse organizations participate in Copyright Week. Each year, we pick five copyright issues to highlight and advocate a set of principles of copyright law. This year’s issues are: 

• Monday: Copyright Policy Should Be Made in the Open With Input From Everyone: Copyright is not a niche concern. It affects everyone’s experience online, therefore laws and policy should be made in the open and with users’ concerns represented and taken into account. 

• Tuesday: Copyright Enforcement as a Tool of Censorship: Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right essential to a functioning democracy. Copyright should encourage more speech, not act as a legal cudgel to silence it.  

• Wednesday: Device and Digital Ownership: As the things we buy increasingly exist either in digital form or as devices with software, we also find ourselves subject to onerous licensing agreements and technological restrictions. If you buy something, you should be able to truly own it – meaning you can learn how it works, repair it, remove unwanted features, or tinker with it to make it work in a new way.  

• Thursday: The Preservation and Sharing of Information and Culture: Copyright often blocks the preservation and sharing of information and culture, traditionally in the public interest. Copyright law and policy should encourage and not discourage the saving and sharing of information. 

• Friday: Free Expression and Fair Use: Copyright policy should encourage creativity, not hamper it. Fair use makes it possible for us to comment, criticize, and rework our common culture.  

Every day this week, we’ll be sharing links to blog posts on these topics at https://www.eff.org/copyrightweek. 

A newly discovered VPN backdoor uses some interesting tactics to avoid detection:

When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can’t be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what’s known in the business as a “magic packet.” On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of dozens of enterprise VPNs running Juniper Network’s Junos OS has been doing just that...

A man charged with conspiring to steal information from climate advocates alleged that Exxon and one of its lobbying firms were involved with the hacking campaign.

The president's plans are sparking concerns that he will use disaster funds to punish political foes.

Ride-hailing workers are helping to evacuate people from the blazes. But they are unprotected by state rules that safeguard other workers from wildfire smoke.

The ruling is a victory for oil and gas companies sued by Anne Arundel County and the city of Annapolis.

Republicans are rallying around the president. Democrats have mobilized to oppose the firings. At least one inspector general plans to show up to work Monday.

New rules include a hold on the review panels the National Institutes of Health uses to evaluate and approve research grants.