The center-right government that won power in late 2023 has softened a number of initiatives aimed at tackling emissions, citing their impact on farmers and business.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 23 October 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02467-y

Standardized quantitative emissions benchmarking is essential for corporate climate accountability, yet recent literature has critiqued this approach. We argue for structured pluralism with budget compliance — balancing methodological flexibility while preserving the disciplining power of carbon budgets.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 23 October 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02454-3

Marine diatoms, tiny algae that underpin ocean food webs, face rising ocean temperatures. Now, a study shows that genome duplication helps diatoms adapt faster to warming, reshaping our understanding of phytoplankton resilience in a changing ocean.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 23 October 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02464-1

The authors obtained large-volume individuals of diatom cultures under thermal stress. These polyploids (having more than two sets of chromosomes) are shown to rapidly adapt to high temperatures, highlighting polyploidization as a possible adaptive measure for diatoms under climate change.

Pills are by far the most convenient form of cancer treatment, but most oral cancer drugs quickly dissolve in the stomach, delivering a burst of chemicals into the bloodstream all at once. That can cause side effects. It also may limit the drug’s effectiveness because its concentration in the blood may become too low after the initial burst.

Now, the startup Enzian Pharmaceutics, founded by Aron Blaesi PhD ’14 and former principal research scientist Nannaji Saka ScD ’74, is developing an oral tablet that delivers drugs into the gastric fluid and the blood steadily over time. The company’s tablets use tiny 3D-printed fibers that turn into a gel-like substance when exposed to water. The tablets have been shown to stay in the stomach of animals for up to a day, slowly degrading while releasing the drug in controlled quantities.

The company is currently validating its tablets’ ability to stay in place in a small number of healthy human volunteers. In about a year, it plans to begin testing the technology’s ability to improve the effectiveness and safety of cancer drugs in patients.

“A lot of orally delivered cancer drugs could benefit from this,” says Blaesi, who incorporated the company in 2016. “Right now, soon after someone has taken a cancer drug, its concentration in the blood can be up to 50 times greater than when they are supposed to take the next pill. During the peak, the drug goes into the heart, it goes into the liver, the brain, and it can cause a lot of problems, while at the end of the dosing interval the concentration in the blood may be too low. By taking out that peak and increasing the time the drug is released, we could improve the effectiveness of treatments and mitigate certain side effects.”

In search of innovation

When Blaesi came to MIT, he knew he wanted his mechanical engineering PhD work to form the basis of a company. Early on, as part of the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing, he worked on manufacturing pills with an injection molding machine that melted and solidified the material, in contrast to the traditional process of compacting powder. He noticed injection molding made the pills far less porous.

“If you put a typical pill into a fluid or into the stomach, the fluid percolates the pores and quickly dissolves it,” Blaesi explains. “That’s not the case when you have an injection molded product. That’s when Dr. Saka, who I met almost daily to discuss my research with, and I started to realize that microstructure is very important.”

The researchers began exploring how different tablet microstructures changed the rate at which drugs are released. For more precision, they moved from injection molding to 3D printing.

Using MIT machine shops, Blaesi built a 3D printer and produced tightly wound microstructures that could carry the drugs. He focused on fibrous structures with space between the fibers, because they would allow gastrointestinal fluid to percolate the pill and dissolve rapidly. He tested the structures in both his Cambridge, Massachusetts, apartment and at MIT’s shared facilities.

Blaesi then experimented with different carrier materials, finding that the higher the molecular weight, the longer it took the pill to dissolve because the material would absorb water and expand before degrading.

“Initially I thought, ‘Oh no, the drug isn’t being dissolved fast enough anymore,’” Blaesi recalls. “Then we thought, ‘Everything has its place.’ This could stay in the stomach for longer because of the expansion. Then it could release the drug over time. We realized this wouldn’t just improve manufacturing, it would improve the product.”

In 2019, Blaesi and Saka published the first paper on their expandable fibrous tablets for prolonged drug delivery. It received a mixed reception.

“Some reviewers said, ‘Research on similar gastroretentive dosage forms has been done for 40 years and no one’s really succeeded,’” Blaesi recalls. “People said, ‘It will never work. Do experiments in animals and then we’ll talk.’”

Blaesi moved back to Switzerland during the Covid-19 pandemic and ran his animal experiments there.

“The reviewers were right: What we had didn’t work,” Blaesi says. “But we adjusted the design and showed we could make the pill stay in the stomach for longer.”

Inside Enzian’s final tablet design, tiny fibers are arranged in a grid. When water flows into the spaces between the fibers, they expand to form a strong gel-like substance that slowly erodes in the stomach, steadily releasing the drug. In animal studies, Enzian’s team showed its technology allowed tablets to remain in the stomach for 12 to 24 hours before being safely excreted.

The team soon found cancer drugs would be a good fit for their technology.

“A lot of cancer drugs are only soluble in acidic solutions, so they can only be absorbed while the drug is in the stomach,” Blaesi explains. “But on an empty stomach, the drug may be in the stomach for just 30 or 40 minutes at present. For a full stomach, it’s a few hours. And because you have a short time to deliver the drug, you need to release a high dose immediately. That shoots up the blood concentration, and if you dose every 12 hours, the concentration is going down during the other 10 hours.”

From the lab to patients

In upcoming human trials, Enzian plans to use its tablets to deliver a drug for prostate cancer that Blaesi says is currently dosed at several hundred milligrams a day. He hopes to get down to about a tenth of that with a better therapeutic effect.

Enzian also believes its technology could improve treatments for blood, skin, and breast cancers.

“This could really be used to improve treatment for a variety of cancers,” Blaesi says. “We believe this is a more efficient and effective way to deliver drugs.”

Maximizing effectiveness and minimizing side effects is also important in clinical trials, where a new drug’s superiority over existing treatments must be shown, and a single adverse event can end its development.

The upcoming move into patients is the culmination of more than a decade of work for Blaesi, who is confident Enzian can deliver on its promise of improving treatments.

“The opportunity is enormous,” Blaesi says. “So many oral cancer drugs have this delivery problem. We still have to do the efficacy and safety studies on patients, but we expect this to be a game changer.”

On Oct. 20 during its annual meeting, the National Academy of Medicine announced the election of 100 new members, including MIT faculty members Dina Katabi and Facundo Batista, along with three additional MIT alumni.

Election to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine, recognizing individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service.

Facundo Batista is the associate director and scientific director of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, as well as the first Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Professor in the MIT Department of Biology. The National Academy of Medicine recognized Batista for “his work unraveling the biology of antibody-producing B cells to better understand how our body’s immune systems responds to infectious disease.” More recently, Facundo’s research has advanced preclinical vaccine and therapeutic development for globally important diseases including HIV, malaria, and influenza.

Batista earned a PhD from the International School of Advanced Studies and established his lab in 2002 as a member of the Francis Crick Institute (formerly the London Research Institute), simultaneously holding a professorship at Imperial College London. In 2016, he joined the Ragon Institute to pursue a new research program applying his expertise in B cells and antibody responses to vaccine development, and preclinical vaccinology for diseases including SARS-CoV-2 and HIV. Batista is an elected fellow or member of the U.K. Academy of Medical Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, the Academia de Ciencias de América Latina, and the European Molecular Biology Organization, and he is chief editor of The EMBO Journal.

Dina Katabi SM ’99, PhD ’03 is the Thuan (1990) and Nicole Pham Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Her research spans digital health, wireless sensing, mobile computing, machine learning, and computer vision. Katabi’s contributions include efficient communication protocols for the internet, advanced contactless biosensors, and novel AI models that interpret physiological signals. The NAM recognized Katabi for “pioneering digital health technology that enables non-invasive, off-body remote health monitoring via AI and wireless signals, and for developing digital biomarkers for Parkinson’s progression and detection. She has translated this technology to advance objective, sensitive measures of disease trajectory and treatment response in clinical trials.”

Katabi is director of the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing. She is also a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where she leads the Networks at MIT Research Group. Katabi received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Damascus and MS and PhD degrees in computer science from MIT. She is a MacArthur Fellow; a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, and National Academy of Engineering; and a recipient of the ACM Computing Prize. 

Additional MIT alumni who were elected to the NAM for 2025 are:

• Christopher S. Chen SM ’93, PhD ’97, an alumnus of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology;
   
• Michael E. Matheny SM ’06, an alumnus of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology; and
   
• Rebecca R. Richards-Kortum SM ’87, PhD ’90, and alumna of the Department of Physics and the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.

Established originally as the Institute of Medicine in 1970 by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine addresses critical issues in health, science, medicine, and related policy, and inspires positive actions across sectors.

“I am deeply honored to welcome these extraordinary health and medicine leaders and researchers into the National Academy of Medicine,” says NAM President Victor J. Dzau. “Their demonstrated excellence in tackling public health challenges, leading major discoveries, improving health care, advancing health policy, and addressing health equity will critically strengthen our collective ability to tackle the most pressing health challenges of our time.” 

If you think of a single atom as a grain of sand, then a wavelength of visible light — which is a thousand times larger than the atom’s width — is comparable to an ocean wave. The light wave can dwarf an atom, missing it entirely as it passes by. This gulf in size has long made it impossible for scientists to see and resolve individual atoms using optical microscopes alone.

Only recently have scientists found ways to break this “diffraction limit,” to see features that are smaller than the wavelength of light. With new techniques known as super-resolution microscopy, scientists can see down to the scale of a single molecule.

And yet, individual atoms have still been too small for optical microscopes — which are much simpler and less expensive than super-resolution techniques — to distinguish, until now.

In an open-access paper appearing today in Nature Communications, MIT scientists present a new computational method that enables optical microscopes to resolve individual atoms and zero in on their exact locations in a crystal structure.

The team’s new “discrete grid imaging technique,” or DIGIT, is a computational imaging approach that scientists can apply to optical data to calculate the most probable location of individual atoms based on a very important clue: the material’s known atomic configuration. As long as scientists have an idea of what a material’s physical atomic layout should be, they can use this layout as a sort of map to determine where specific atoms or features must be located.

“It’s like you know there’s a seating chart,” says lead author Yuqin “Sophia” Duan, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). “Previous methods could tell you what section an atom is in. But now we can take this seating chart as prior knowledge, and can pinpoint exactly which seat the atom is in.”

With DIGIT, the team can now pinpoint individual atoms with a resolution of 0.178 angstroms. (One angstrom is one-tenth of a nanometer, which is less than half the width of a single atom). The technique enables optical microscopes to localize atomic-scale features in any material that has a known atomic pattern, such as crystalline materials or certain proteins with repeating molecular chains.

The team says the method could help guide the design of quantum devices, which often require placing individual atoms precisely within a crystal. Beyond quantum technologies, DIGIT can also provide new insights into how defects and impurities shape the behavior of advanced materials — from semiconductors to superconductors.

Duan’s co-authors at MIT are Qiushi Gu, Hanfeng Wang, Yong Hu, Kevin Chen, Matthew Trusheim, and EECS Professor Dirk Englund.

Grid support

Scientists can image features smaller than a nanometer, and sometimes as small as a single atom, but not with optical microscopes. In these cases, they use transmission or scanning electron microscopes, which send high-energy beams of electrons into a sample to generate an image based on the pattern in which the electrons scatter. These electron-based methods produce highly detailed, near-atomic-scale images, but they require imaging in a vacuum and at high energies, and only work in ultrathin, synthetic, or solid-state materials. Electron-based imaging methods are too harsh for more delicate living specimens.

In contrast, optical microscopes work at lower energies, in ambient conditions, and are safe to apply to biological samples. But they cannot discern features past the diffraction limit. Essentially, a microscope is unable to see features that are smaller than half the wavelength of visible light (about 200 to 300 nanometers) that a microscope sends in to probe a sample. Atoms, then, have long eluded optical microscopes.

In 2014, however, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to developers of a technique to overcome the diffraction limit. Super-resolution microscopy works by shining laser light on a sample at a specific frequency that is known to resonate with a feature of interest, such as a certain molecule. When that molecule resonates, it effectively announces its presence in the material. With this optical manipulation, scientists can visualize features as small as 10 nanometers, on the scale of a single molecule.

Duan and Englund looked to resolve even smaller features by combining super-resolution techniques with statistical analysis and knowledge of materials that has often been overlooked.

“One thing that gets ignored in imaging optical systems is the physical configuration of your system,” Duan says. “For example, if you want to visualize defects in a diamond system, these defects can only be at certain positions, since they have to follow the grid of the atomic diamond structure. In proteins, there are some structures that grow in an organized grid, and their location must be somewhere along that physical grid.”

The researchers suspected that if they had a reasonably accurate map of a material’s atomic structure (imagine the ball-and-stick models of molecules in a chemistry classroom), they might use such maps as a template and try out many different orientations and rotation angles to find the closest match to whatever features are initially visualized using super-resolution microscopy.

“No one has ever done this before, to include the physical constraints or system information into the resolution technique,” Duan says.

Blurriness, collapsed

To test their idea, the researchers worked with a sample of diamond — a crystal whose microstructure is well-understood and resembles an organized grid, or lattice, of repeating carbon atoms. The researchers blindly knocked out some carbon atoms in the lattice and replaced them with silicon atoms using facilities at MIT.nano. Their goal was to identify and determine the precise locations of the errant silicon atoms.

To do so, they first used established techniques of super-resolution microscopy to probe the diamond sample, using lasers set to specific wavelengths at frequencies known to resonate with the silicon atoms but not the carbon atoms. With this technique, researchers produced images that depicted the silicon atoms, but only as a uniform blur.

The team then applied DIGIT to further resolve the picture. Knowing that diamond in general has a grid-like configuration of carbon atoms, the researchers took this configuration as a map, or seating chart of sorts, and assumed that any silicon atoms that took the place of a carbon atom must sit within the grid, which has a known spacing between atoms.

“Because the silicon atoms are substituting carbon atoms in the lattice, that means they must obey some integer multiple of the atomic spacing of the crystal lattice, separating any two silicon atoms,” Englund says. “That prior knowledge makes the localization different than if you add a purely amorphous material.”

The researchers essentially simulated many possibilities of orientations and rotation angles of the diamond lattice, superimposed on the blurry image of atoms that the super-resolution microscopy technique produced.

“The trick is that, in certain materials, atoms aren’t spread out randomly — they sit on a grid inside a crystal,” Duan explains. “We used that prior knowledge to sharpen the microscope’s picture. Once we factored in that ‘atomic grid,’ the blurriness collapsed, and we could pinpoint exact positions.”

In the end, they found the technique could pinpoint the location of individual silicon atoms within the diamond lattice, with a precision of 0.178 angstroms — the sharpest resolution of any optical-based imaging technique. The team has made the DIGIT code available on GitHub for anyone to apply to their optical measurements, provided their sample of interest has a well-understood atomic structure. Then, they hope that scientists will start to see much finer and detailed features and processes using light.

“It’s a big step — it takes optical microscopes into the realm of atomic scale, something people thought only electron microscopes or X-rays could do,” Duan says. “That opens up a whole new way of studying materials and biology.”

Interesting article on people with nonstandard faces and how facial recognition systems fail for them.

Some of those living with facial differences tell WIRED they have undergone multiple surgeries and experienced stigma for their entire lives, which is now being echoed by the technology they are forced to interact with. They say they haven’t been able to access public services due to facial verification services failing, while others have struggled to access financial services. Social media filters and face-unlocking systems on phones often won’t work, they say...

The administration said the government shutdown has prevented Department of Justice attorneys from working on the case.

A Greek veto prevents the EU from reendorsing a global carbon price on shipping in its position for next month’s climate summit.

The Department of Homeland Security says the Biden administration noted the presence of placards supporting Donald Trump 100 times after Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina in 2024.

An international tracking effort is gaining steam, as more fossil fuel companies agree to take field measurements of their emissions.

The joint venture seeks to challenge a rapid expansion of Chinese automakers in Central and South America.

The European Commission is reviewing rules designed to accelerate the automotive sector’s green transition.

The surprise decision follows a string of unexpected changes to the EU’s main tool to end deforestation.

Users will be able to track unusual temperatures, heavy rainfall, as well as drought periods going back as far as January 1981.

“Deepening and integrating EU capital markets is critical to support the large-scale investments we need," Christine Lagarde said.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 22 October 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02469-w

Heatwaves worsen educational inequality in Brazil

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 22 October 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02459-y

Emissions reductions of rooftop solar are overstated by approaches that inadequately capture substitution effects

The degree to which someone trusts the information depicted in a chart can depend on their assumptions about who made the data visualization, according to a pair of studies by MIT researchers.

For instance, if someone infers that a graph about a controversial topic like gun violence was produced by an organization they feel is in opposition with their beliefs or political views, they may discredit the information or dismiss the visualization all together.

The researchers found that even the clearest visualizations often communicate more than the data they explicitly depict, and can elicit strong judgments from viewers about the social contexts, identities, and characteristics of those who made the chart.

Readers make these assessments about the social context of a visualization primarily from its design features, like the color palette or the way information is arranged, rather than the underlying data. Often, these inferences are unintended by the designers.

Qualitative and quantitative studies revealed that these social inferences aren’t restricted to certain subgroups, nor are they caused by limited data literacy.

The researchers consolidate their findings into a framework that scientists and communicators can use to think critically about how design choices might affect these social assumptions. Ultimately, they hope this work leads to better strategies for scientific communication.

“If you are scrolling through social media and you see a chart, and you immediately dismiss it as something an influencer has produced just to get attention, that shapes your entire experience with the chart before you even dig into the data. We’ve shown in these papers that visualizations do more than just communicate the data they are depicting — they also communicate other social signals,” says Arvind Satyanarayan, an associate professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and co-senior author of this research.

He is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Amy Rae Fox, a former CSAIL postdoc, and Michelle Morgenstern, a current postdoc in MIT’s anthropology program; and co-senior author Graham M. Jones, professor of anthropology. Two related papers on this research will be presented at the IEEE Visualization Conference.

Charts as social artifacts

During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, social media was awash in charts from organizations like the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which were designed to convey information about the spread of disease.

The MIT researchers studied how these visualizations were being used to discuss the pandemic. They found that some citizen scientists were using the underlying data to make visualizations of their own, challenging the findings of mainstream science.

“This was an unexpected discovery as, previously, citizen scientists were typically aligned with mainstream scientists. It took us a few years to figure out how to study this phenomenon more deeply,” Satyanarayan says.

Most research into data visualization studies how charts communicate data. Instead, the researchers wanted to explore visualizations from a social and linguistic perspective to assess the information they convey beyond the data.

Linguistic anthropologists have found that, while language allows people to communicate ideas, it also holds social meaning beyond the words people use. For instance, an accent or dialect can indicate that someone is part of a particular community.

By “pointing” to certain social meanings, identities, and characteristics, language serves what is known as a socio-indexical function.

“We wanted to see if things in the visual language of data communication might point to certain institutions, or the kinds of people in those institutions, that carry a meaning that could be unintended by the makers of the visualization,” Jones says.

To do this, the researchers conducted an initial, qualitative study of users on the social media platform Tumblr. During one-on-one interviews, the researchers showed users a variety of real visualizations from online sources, as well as modified visualizations where they removed the textual information, like titles and axes labels.

Stripping out the textual information was particularly important, since it mimics the way people often interact with online visualizations.

“Our engagement with social media is a few quick seconds. People aren’t taking the time to read the title of a chart or look at the data very carefully,” Satyanarayan says.

The interviews revealed that users made detailed inferences about the people or organizations who created the visualizations based on what they called “vibes,” design elements, like colors or the use of certain graphics. These inferences in turn impacted their trust in the data.

For instance, after seeing a chart with the flags of Georgia and Texas and a graph with two lines in red and black, but no text, one user said, “This kind of looks like something a Texas Republican (legislator) would put on Twitter or on their website, or as part of a campaign presentation.”

A quantitative approach

Building on this initial work, the researchers used the same methodology in three quantitative studies involving surveys sent to larger groups of people from a variety of backgrounds.

They found the same phenomenon: People make inferences about the social context of a visualization based on its design, which can lead to misunderstandings about, and mistrust in, the data it depicts.

For instance, users felt some visualizations were so neatly arranged they believed them to be advertisements, and therefore not trustworthy. In another example, one user dismissed a chart by a Pulitzer-prize winning designer because they felt the hand-drawn graphical style indicated it was made by “some female Instagram influencer who is just trying to look for attention.”

“If that is the first reaction someone has to a chart, it is going to massively impact the degree to which they trust it,” Satyanarayan says.

Moreover, when the researchers reintroduced text in the visualizations from which it had been removed, users still made these social inferences.

Typically, in data visualization, the solution to such a problem would be to create clearer charts or educate people about data literacy. But this research points to a completely different kind of data literacy, Jones says.

“It is not erroneous for people to be drawing these inferences. It requires a lot of cultural knowledge about where visualizations come from, how they are made, and how they circulate. Drawing these inferences is a feature, not a bug, of the way we use signs,” he says.

From these results, they created a classification framework to organize the social inferences users made and the design elements that contributed to them. They hope the typology serves as a tool designers can use to develop more effective visualizations, as well as a starting point for additional studies.

Moving forward, the researchers want to continue exploring the role of data visualizations as social artifacts, perhaps by drilling down on each design feature they identified in the typology. They also want to expand the scope of their study to include visualizations in research papers and scientific journals.

“Part of the value of this work is a methodological contribution to render a set of phenomena amenable to experimental study. But this work is also important because it showcases an interdisciplinary cross-pollination that is powerful and unique to MIT,” Jones says.

This work was supported, in part, by MIT METEOR and PFPFEE fellowships, an Amar G. Bose Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation.