It is not hard to find glowing reviews of saxophonist Miguel Zenón, a creative jazz artist whose compositions incorporate musical elements from his native Puerto Rico.

For instance, The Jazz Times called “Jibaro,” Zenón’s breakthrough 2005 album, “profound yet joyful.” The New York Times called the same music “strong and light,” adding that we have “rarely seen a jazz composer step forward with a project so impressively organized, intellectually powerful and well played from the start.”

In 2009, when Zenón won a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the MacArthur Foundation called Zenón’s work “elegant and innovative,” with “a high degree of daring and sophistication.” In 2012, The New York Times reviewed another Zenón work, “Puerto Rico Nació en Mi: Tales From the Diaspora,” by calling the music “deeply hybridized and original, complex but clear.”

As you may have noticed, these notices all contain multiple descriptive terms. That’s because Zenón’s work is many things at once: jazz, combined with other musical genres; technically rigorous, and supple; novel, yet steeped in tradition. Indeed, Zenón has always seen jazz as being multifaceted.

“What I discovered, when I first encountered jazz, was this idea that you were using improvisation to portray your personality directly to your listeners,” Zenón explains. “And it was connected to a very interesting and intricate improvisational language. That provided something I hadn’t encountered in music before, this idea that you could have something personal and heartfelt walking hand in hand with something that was intellectual and brainy. That balance spoke to me.”

It is still speaking. In 2024, Zenón won the Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album for “El Arte Del Bolero Vol. 2,” a collaboration with Venezuelan pianist Luis Perdomo, a musical partner in the Miguel Zenón Quartet.

Zenón has taught at MIT for three years now. He became a tenured faculty member last year, in MIT’s Music and Theater Arts program, where he helps students find the same satisfaction in music that he does.

“When I first got into music, I was looking for fulfillment,” Zenón says. “It wasn’t about success. I was just looking for music to fulfill something within me. And I still search for that now. And sometimes it still feels like it did 25 or 30 years ago, when I first encountered that feeling. It’s nice to have that in your pocket, to say, this is what I’m looking for, that initial feeling.”

Paradise in the Back Bay

Zenón grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Around age 11, he started attending a performing arts school and playing the saxophone. In his last year of school, Zenón was admitted into college to study engineering. However, a few years before, he had encountered something new: jazz. Zenón’s training had been in classical music. But jazz felt different.

“Discovering jazz music ignited a passion for music in me that had not existed up to that point,” says Zenón, who decided to pursue music in college. “I kind of jumped ship, and it was a blind jump. I didn’t know what to expect, I didn’t know what was on the other side, I didn’t have any artists or any musicians in my family. I just followed a hunch, followed my heart.”

After teachers recommended he study at the renowned Berklee College of Music in Boston, Zenón worked to find a scholarship and funding.

“This was way before the internet. I was looking at catalogs,” Zenón recalls. “I had never been to Boston in my life, I didn’t even know what Berklee looked like. But at Berklee it was the first time I was able to connect with a jazz teacher in a formal way, to learn about history, theory, harmony, and I soaked in it. Also, I was surrounded by young people like myself, who were as enamored and passionate about music as I was. It really felt like paradise.”

After earning his BA from Berklee in 1998, Zenón then moved to New York City. He earned an MA from the Manhattan School of Music in 2001 and began playing more extensively with new bandmates.

“I just wanted to be able to play with people who were better than me, and learn from the experience,” Zenón says. He started generating new ideas, writing music, and performing publicly. With Antonio Sánchez, Hans Glawischnig, and Perdomo, he founded the Miguel Zenón Quartet.

“That led to going into the studio and making an album,” Zenón recounts. “And that led to more experience, and more albums.”

Did it ever. Zenón has now been the leader for about 20 albums, mostly featuring the quartet. (After several years, Henry Cole replaced Sánchez as the group’s drummer.) Zenón has played on many recordings by other artists, and helped found the SFJAZZ Collective.

Not many prolific musicians will name any one recording as their best, and Zenón is the same way, but he is willing to cite a few that were milestones for him.

“Jibaro” draws on the music of Puerto Rico’s jibaro singers, troubadors using 10-line stanzas with eight-syllable lines, something Zenón adopted for jazz-quartet use. “Esta Plena,” a 2009 record, fuses jazz and the structures of “plena,” a traditional percussion-based Puerto Rican song form. “Alma Adentro,” a 2011 album, covers classic songs from Puerto Rico.

“It would be impossible for me to pick one favorite, but what I would say is, there are a couple of albums in the earlier part of my career that explored a balance between things coming from a jazz world and coming from traditional Puerto Rican traditional music and folklore, when I was able to feel like that balance was right, it felt like me,” Zenón says. “This is what I have to give. This is my persona.”

In 2008, Zenón was also honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, which helped him conduct music research, another facet of his career. Zenón has often extensively interviewed traditional Puerto Rican musicians about the intricacies of their works before writing material in those forms.

And Zenón has made a point of giving back, founding the Caravana Cultural, a project that brings free jazz concerts to rural Puerto Rico.

Work, joy, and love

Zenón is now settled in at MIT, which boasts a vibrant music program. More than 1,500 MIT students take a music class each year, and over 500 students participate in one of 30 campus ensembles. Last year, MIT opened its new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building, a purpose-built performance, rehearsal, and teaching space.

“There are definitely students at MIT who could be at some of the best music schools in the world,” Zenón says. “That’s not in question.”

Moreover, among MIT students, Zenón says, “There is a communal approach to music. Everything they do, they do for each other. They look out for each other, they work together. And that has been one of the most rewarding things to see.”

He continues: “Of course the students are brilliant and the faculty are too. In terms of what I like to teach, it’s been a good fit for me personally, and I couldn’t be happier about the opportunity. There’s more and more interest in jazz, more and more interest in creating things together, and there’s a unique mindset being built in front of our eyes.”

He is also pleased to work in the Linde Music Building: “It’s amazing to have the building, not only in terms of the facilities, but it’s also a symbol of the place music has within the Institute. We’re not just talking about music, we’re creating it. It’s a great commitment from the school and says a lot about our leadership.”

Meanwhile, along with teaching, Zenón’s own recording career continues at full speed. With Luis Perdomo, he is working on “El Arte Del Bolero Vol. 3,” the follow-up to his Grammy-winning album. And Zenón has plans for still another album, to be recorded in Puerto Rico with a large ensemble, based on music he is writing about Puerto Rico’s history and present.

“Things are always linked,” Zenón explains. “Once you finish one project, the next one starts. It feels natural for me to do it that way.”

In conversation, Zenón is engaging, genial, and reflective. So what advice does he have for younger musicians? Not everyone who plays an instrument will become Miguel Zenón. But what about people who want to pursue music, not knowing how far it will take them?

“If you find something you enjoy, just enjoy it for the sake of it,” Zenón says. “Find what brings joy, and make sure you don’t lose that. Having said that, with music, like any art form, or anything else in life, in order to make progress, it takes work and commitment. There’s no hiding that. So if music is something you’re serious about, set goals you can achieve over time, so you always have something to work for. In my experience, that’s key. But I always pair that with the idea of joy and love for music — keeping that love close to your heart.”

Jack Dennis, an influential MIT professor emeritus of computer science and engineering, died on March 14 at age 94. The original leader of the Computation Structures Group within the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), he pioneered the development of dataflow models of computation, and, subsequently, many novel principles of computer architecture inspired by dataflow models.

The second child of an engineer and a textile designer, Dennis showed early interest in both engineering and music, rewriting Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics with his parents and playing piano with the Norwalk Symphony Orchestra in Connecticut as a teen, while building a canoe at home with his father. As an undergraduate at MIT, he developed his wide array of interests further, joining the VI-A Cooperative Program in Electrical Engineering; working at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories on projects in speech processing and novel radar systems; participating in the model railroad club; and joining the MIT Symphony Orchestra, where he met his first wife, Jane Hodgson ’55, SM ’56, PhD ’61. (The two later separated when she went to study medicine in Florida.) 

Dennis earned his BS (1953), MS (1954), and ScD (1958) from MIT before joining the then-Department of Electrical Engineering as a faculty member. He was promoted to full professor status in 1969. His doctoral thesis, entitled, “Mathematical Programming and electrical networks,” explored analogies between electric circuit theory and quadratic programming problems. Ideas he developed in that paper further crystallized in his 1964 paper, “Distributed solution of network programming problems,” which created an important early class of digital distributed optimization solvers.

In a 2003 piece that Dennis wrote for his undergraduate class’s 50th reunion, he remembered his earliest encounters with computers at the Institute: “I prepared programs written in assembly language on punched paper tape using Frieden 'Flexowriters,' and stood aside watching the myriad lights blink and flash while operator Mike Solamita fed the tapes [...] That was 1954. Fifty years later, much has changed: A room full of vacuum tubes has become a tiny chip with millions of transistors. A phenomenon once limited to research laboratories has become an industry producing commodity products that anyone can own and use beneficially.”

Dennis’ influence in steering that change was profound. As a collaborator with the teams behind both Project MAC and Multics, the earliest attempts to allow multiple users to work with a single computer seemingly simultaneously (i.e., a time-shared operating system), Dennis helped to specify the unique segment addressing and paging mechanisms that became a fundamental part of the General Electric Model 645 computer. His insights stemmed from a tendency to pay equal attention to both hard- and software when others considered themselves specialists in one or the other. 

“I formed the Computation Structures Group [within CSAIL] and focused on architectural concepts that could narrow the acknowledged gap between programming concepts and the organization of computer hardware,” Dennis explained in his 2003 recollection. “I found myself dismayed that people would consider themselves to be either hardware or software experts, but paid little heed to how joint advances in programming and architecture could lead to a synergistic outcome that might revolutionize computing practice.”

Dennis’ emphasis on synergy did not go unnoticed. Gerald Sussman, the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering, points out “the relationship of [Dennis’] dataflow architecture to single-assignment programs, and thus to pure functional programs. This coupled the virtue of referential transparency in programming to the effective use of hardware parallelism. Dennis also pioneered the use of self-timed circuits in digital systems. The ideas from that work generalize to much of the work on highly distributed systems.” 

The Computation Structures Group attracted multiple scholars interested in developing asynchronous computing and dataflow architecture, many of whom became lifelong friends and collaborators. These included Peter Denning, with whom Dennis and Joseph Qualitz co-authored the textbook “Machines, Languages, and Computation” (1978); the late Arvind, who became faculty head of computer science for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and the late Guang R. Gao, who became distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Delaware. 

In recognition of his contributions to the Multics project, Dennis was elected fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Many additional honors would follow: He received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)/IEEE Eckert-Mauchly Award in 1984; was inducted as a fellow of the ACM (1994); was named to the National Academy of Engineering (2009); was elected to the (ACM) Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS) Hall of Fame (2012); and was awarded the IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2013). 

A successful researcher, Dennis was perhaps equally influential in the development of EECS’ curriculum, developing six subjects in areas of computer theory and systems: Theoretical Models for Computation; Computation Structures; Structure of Computer Systems; Semantic Theory for Computer Systems; Semantics of Parallel Computation; and Computer System Architecture (taught in collaboration with Arvind.) Several of the courses that Dennis developed continue to be taught, in updated form, to this day.

Following his retirement from teaching in 1987, he consulted on projects relating to parallel computer hardware and software for such varied groups as NASA Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science; Boeing Aerospace; McGill University; the Architecture Group of Carlstedt Elektronik in Gothenburg, Sweden; and Acorn Networks, Inc. His fruitful relationship with former student Guang Gao continued in the form of a lecture tour through China, as well as co-authorship of a book, “Dataflow Architecture,” currently in progress at MIT Press. 

A voracious lifelong learner, Dennis was fond of repeating a friend’s observation that “a scholar is just a book’s way of making another book.” In a full and active retirement, he still made room for music, trying his hand at composing; performing at Tanglewood as a tenor in Chorus Pro Musica; playing piano at the marriage of Guang Gao’s son Nick; and joining the chorus at the First Church in Belmont, Massachusetts, where his celebration of life (with concurrent livestreaming) will be held on Monday, June 8, at 2 p.m. 

Dennis is survived by his wife Therese Smith ’75; children David Hodgson Dennis of North Miami, Florida; Randall Dennis of Connecticut; and Galen Dennis, a resident of Australia. 

Regulation is hard:

The South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization (SPRFMO) oversees fishing across roughly 59 million square kilometers (22 million square miles) of the South Pacific high seas, trying to impose order on a region double the size of Africa, where distant-water fleets pursue species ranging from jack mackerel to jumbo flying squid. The latter dominated this year’s talks.

Fishing for jumbo flying squid (Dosidicus gigas) has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. The number of squid-jigging vessels operating in SPRFMO waters rose from 14 in 2000 to more than 500 last year, almost all of them flying the Chinese flag. Meanwhile, reported catches have fallen markedly, from more than 1 million metric tons in 2014 to about 600,000 metric tons in 2024. Scientists worry that fishing pressure is outpacing knowledge of the stock. ...

We go through this every couple of years: Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which of Americans’ communications with foreign persons overseas is up for renewal. As always, Congress can reauthorize it with or without changes, or just let it expire. We know, we know, it’s a pain to have to do this every few years–but it gives us a chance to lift the hood of this behemoth tool of government surveillance and tinker with how it works. That’s why it’s so important right now to urge your Member of Congress not to pass any bill that reauthorizes Section 702 without substantial reforms.   

Take action

TELL congress: 702 Needs Reform

Section 702 is rife with problems, loopholes, and compliance issues that need fixing. The National Security Agency (NSA) collects full conversations being conducted by surveillance targets overseas and stores them, allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to operate in a “finders keepers” mode of surveillance—they reason that it's already collected, so why can’t they look at those conversations? There, the FBI can query and even read the U.S. side of that communication without a warrant. The problem is, people who have been spied on by this program won’t even know and have very few ways of finding out. EFF and other civil liberties advocates have been trying for years to know when data collected through Section 702 is used as evidence against them.  

There’s simply no excuse for any Member of Congress to support a "clean" reauthorization of Section 702. Anyone who votes to do so does not take your privacy seriously. Full stop.  

The intelligence community and its defenders in Congress, as always, seem more interested in defending their rights to read your private communications than in protecting your right to privacy. It’s not really a compromise between safety and privacy if it's always your privacy that gets sacrificed. Now, we’re drawing a line in the sand: Congress cannot pass a clean extension.  

Use this EFF tool to write to your Member of Congress and tell them not to pass a clean reauthorization of Section 702.  

Take action

TELL congress: 702 Needs Reform

Claude is actually pretty good on the issues.

By attacking Iran, President Donald Trump has indirectly boosted an industry he has done his best to weaken in the U.S.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the retiring plants were needed to potentially save lives. None of them have generated power.

Approval of aid for Hawaii came one day after the new Homeland Security secretary vowed to address a backlog of requests.

The West Coast federal appeals court found the group of young people couldn't tie their alleged climate injuries to the agency's policies.

Prisoners and nonprofit advocates await a decision from a federal judge after asking him to declare state prison conditions unconstitutional.

Clean energy advocates are now the majority on the board of an Arizona utility giant, after the far-right group boosted voter turnout to record-smashing levels.

Bipartisan lawmakers warn a tighter emissions cap could drive up costs and industrial flight.

The Oregon Court of Appeals sent a class-action case against PacifiCorp back to a lower trial court over concerns about a jury instruction given during a 2023 trial.

Oil and gas firms complain the rules, designed to limit global warming, could jeopardize EU energy supplies.

Opposition lawmakers have labeled the legislation unconstitutional, contending that it rolls back essential environmental protections.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 10 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02610-3

Since Nature Climate Change was launched, not only has the journal itself changed but so have the subjects of the studies we publish on the Earth system and how societies interact with it. In this Infographic, we highlight a few examples of how the world differed when we started in 2011 compared with today.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 10 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02623-y

This month marks 15 years since the first publication of Nature Climate Change. Here, we reflect on how both the world and research have changed, and discuss the impacts of memorable climate change science published in our pages.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 10 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02608-x

The North Atlantic is exceptional in cooling during the twentieth century while the world warmed. Here we look back on an influential 2015 study that linked this cooling to a weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and consider the wider implications that this may have for climate, ecosystems and society.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 10 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02605-0

As Nature Climate Change celebrates its 15 year anniversary, we look back at some of the journal’s published works. In this Viewpoint, seven early-career researchers discuss how these papers influenced their research and careers.

Google moved up its estimated deadline for quantum preparedness in cryptography to 2029—only 33 months from now. That’s earlier than previous deadlines, and they proposed the new post-quantum migration deadline because of two new papers that comprise a big jump in the state of the technology. It’s ahead of schedule, but not altogether unexpected. Cryptographers and engineers have been working on this for years, and as the deadline gets closer, it’s not surprising to see more precise timeline estimates come up.

The preparation for the Y2K bug is not a perfect analogy. Like Y2K, if systems are not updated in time, anyone with a powerful enough quantum computer will be able to more easily insert malware into the core systems of a computer and fake authentication to allow impersonation merely by observing network traffic. These are the threats whose mitigation timelines have been moved up.

But unlike Y2K, there’s a second sort of attack that we already need to be prepared for: quantum computers will be able to decrypt years of captured messages sent over encrypted messaging platforms shared any time before those platforms updated to quantum-proof encryption. That type of attack has been the main focus of engineering efforts so far and mitigation is well on its way, since anything before the upgrade might eventually be compromised.

Fortunately, not all cryptography is broken by quantum computers. Notably, symmetric encryption is quantum resistant. That means that if you have disk encryption turned on, you shouldn’t have to worry about quantum computers breaking into your phone, as long as your system’s keys are long enough. The problem is how you get the keys to do that encryption, and how you authenticate software on your device and in the cloud.

Engineers: Time to Lock In

For those whose work touches on any sort of cryptographic deployment, you’re hopefully already working on the post-quantum transition. If not, you really should be; there are quite a few relevant posts and updates with more information about what this news means for you. Your key agreement systems should be upgraded soon if they’re not already because of store-now-decrypt-later attacks. Now it’s time to prepare for authentication attacks on forged signatures as well.

In some cases, you may need to wait on others to finish their work first. If you’re using NGINX to host websites on Ubuntu, for example, the security settings you need to upgrade key agreement were just released in version 26.04. Updates are rolling out, so keep checking in and upgrade your systems as soon as you’re able to.

Users: Stay Updated, Check on Your Chats

But if you’re not in any position to be updating software or hardware, there may be some additional steps you can take to make sure you're as protected as possible. You’ll want to get the latest post-quantum protections as soon as they're available, so if you don't already have a habit of applying software updates in a timely manner, now’s a good time to start.

If you want to know if the website you’re using or the encrypted messaging app you’re chatting over will leak its data in a few years to anyone storing traffic now, you can search for its name with the word "quantum." The engineers are usually pretty proud of their work and have announced their post-quantum support (like what we’ve seen from Signal and iMessage). If you can’t find that information, you may want to have extra consideration for what you say over the internet, or switch the tools you're using. Those are the big areas to worry about now, before quantum computers are actually here, because they could result in the mass leakage of old messages.

The new deadline means that some technologies are simply not going to make it in time and will have to be left by the wayside, like trusted execution environments (TEEs), due to the slower speed of hardware deployments. TEEs are how companies do private processing on user data in the cloud, and they’re particularly relevant to AI offerings. 

Even now, though they offer more protection than processing data in the clear, TEEs are not as secure as homomorphic encryption or doing the processing on device. Post-quantum, the security level gets much closer to computation on cleartext, and even with strong user controls, that makes it way too easy to accidentally backdoor your own encrypted chats. If you’re worried about the contents of messages in an encrypted chat being exposed, you’ll probably want to completely avoid using AI features that might leak that content, such as summarization of recent chat history and notifications, and reply composition assistance. 

How’s the Transition Going So Far?

The work to update the world to post-quantum is well on its way. NIST finalized the standards for post-quantum cryptographic algorithms back in 2024. The larger platforms, websites, and hosting providers have already updated their algorithms, so even now, you’re probably already using post-quantum algorithms to access some of the internet. Measurements vary pretty widely, but up to about 4 in 10 websites currently support a post-quantum key exchange.

There’s still some work to be done in figuring out how to make the needed changes—for example, the way you find out a website’s private key to make HTTPS possible is being reworked to make room for larger signatures. Some technologies are just coming to market, like the post-quantum root of trust available now in some Chromebooks. In practice, this means that as you think about replacing your current devices in the next few years, you may want to check if you’re picking up hardware that has post-quantum support, if those specific protections are required for your threat model.

For the areas that still need updating, how much can we expect to actually get ready by the new deadline? It’s likely that not every cryptographically-capable device and deployment will be ready in time, and hardware with hard-coded certificates will probably be the last to update. We saw that happen when SHA-1 was deprecated; Point of Sale systems in particular were late adopters. While governments and large companies with quantum computers may not be interested in stealing money from cash registers, they will be interested in accessing secrets about people’s private lives. That’s why it’s so important that everyone does their part to upgrade, to protect the details of private communications and browsing. 

And there’s a good chance that older devices that won’t receive quantum-resistant updates were probably vulnerable to some other attack already. Quantum computation is just one type of attack on cryptography that’s notable for the scale of migration required, and how every public-key cryptosystem and authentication scheme has to do the work to prepare. That’s not a difference in kind, it’s a difference in scale, and some systems will inevitably be left behind.

Quantum preparedness hits different industries and services in different ways, but services that handle communications and financial information are particularly susceptible to risk, and need to act quickly to protect the privacy and security of billions of people.