Video of the stubby squid (Rossia pacifica) from offshore Vancouver Island.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, along with colleagues from KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH), have developed a first-of-its-kind device to profile the immune function of newborns.   Using a single drop of blood, the BiophysicaL Immune Profiling for Infants (BLIPI) system provides real-time insights into newborns’ immune responses, enabling the early detection of severe inflammatory conditions and allowing for timely interventions. This critical innovation addresses the urgent and unmet need for rapid and minimally invasive diagnostic tools to protect vulnerable newborns, especially those born prematurely. Critical unmet need in newborn care Premature infants are particularly vulnerable to life-threatening conditions such as sepsis and necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC). Newborn sepsis — a bloodstream infection occurring in the first weeks of life — is a major global health challenge, causing up to 1 million infant deaths worldwide annually. NEC, a serious intestinal disease that causes severe inflammation, is one of the leading causes of death in premature babies — up to 50 percent of low-birth -eight neonates who get NEC do not survive. Infants can show vague symptoms, making diagnosis of these conditions challenging. However, both conditions can worsen rapidly and require immediate medical intervention for the best chance of recovery. Current diagnostic methods to detect and prevent these serious conditions in newborns rely on large blood samples — up to 1 milliliter, a significant quantity of blood for a newborn — and lengthy laboratory processes. This is not ideal for newborns whose total blood volume may be as little as 50 ml among very premature infants less than 28 weeks old, which limits repeated or high-volume sampling and can potentially lead to anemia and other complications. At the same time, conventional tests — such as blood cultures or inflammatory panels — may take hours to days to return actionable results, limiting prompt targeted clinical interventions. The novel BLIPI device addresses these challenges by requiring only 0.05 ml of blood and delivering results within 15 minutes. Revolutionizing newborn care In a study, “Whole blood biophysical immune profiling of newborn infants correlates with immune responses,” published in Pediatric Research, the researchers demonstrated how BLIPI leverages microfluidic technology to measure how immune cells change when fighting infection by assessing their size and flexibility. Unlike conventional tests that only look for the presence of germs, BLIPI directly shows how a baby’s immune system is responding. The cell changes that BLIPI detects align with standard tests doctors rely on, including C-reactive protein levels, white blood cell counts, and immature-to-total neutrophil ratios. This testing format can quickly reveal whether a baby’s immune system is fighting an infection. In the study, BLIPI was used to screen 19 infants at multiple time points — eight full-term and 11 preterm — and showed clear differences in how immune cells looked and behaved between the babies. Notably, when one premature baby developed a serious blood infection, the device was able to detect significant immune cell changes. This shows its potential in detecting infections early. The work was led by researchers from the Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine (CAMP) and Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) interdisciplinary research groups within SMART. Just one drop of blood BLIPI is a portable device that can give results at the ward or the neonatal intensive care units, removing the need for transporting blood samples to the laboratory and making it easily implementable in resource-limited or rural health-care settings. Significantly, BLIPI needs just one drop of blood, and 1/20 the blood volume than what existing methods require. These swift results can help clinicians make timely, lifesaving decisions in critical situations such as sepsis or NEC, where early treatment is vital. “Our goal was to create a diagnostic tool that works within the unique constraints of neonatal care — minimal blood volume, rapid turnaround, and high sensitivity. BLIPI represents a major step forward by providing clinicians with fast, actionable immune health data using a noninvasive method, where it can make a real difference for newborns in critical care,” says Kerwin Kwek, research scientist at SMART CAMP and SMART AMR, and co-lead author of the study. “BLIPI exemplifies our vision to bridge the gap between scientific innovation and clinical need. By leveraging microfluidic technologies to extract real-time immune insights from whole blood, we are not only accelerating diagnostics but also redefining how we monitor immune health in fragile populations. Our work reflects a new paradigm in point-of-care diagnostics: rapid, precise, and patient-centric,” says MIT Professor Jongyoon Han, co-lead principal investigator at SMART CAMP, principal investigator at SMART AMR, and corresponding author of the paper. “KKH cares for about two-thirds of all babies born weighing less than 1,500 grams in Singapore. These premature babies often struggle to fight infections with their immature immune systems. With BLIPI, a single prick to the baby’s finger or heel can give us rapid insights into the infant’s immune response within minutes. This allows us to tailor treatments more precisely and respond faster to give these fragile babies the best chance at a healthy start not just in their early days, but throughout their lives,” says Assistant Professor Yeo Kee Thai, senior consultant at the Department of Neonatology at KKH, and senior author of the study. Future research will focus on larger clinical trials to validate BLIPI’s diagnostic accuracy across diverse neonatal populations with different age groups and medical conditions. The researchers also plan to refine the device’s design for widespread adoption in hospitals globally, bringing a much-needed diagnostic solution for vulnerable infants at their cot side. Beyond hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and researchers may also leverage BLIPI in clinical trials to assess immune responses to neonatal therapies in real-time — a potential game-changer for research and development in pediatric medicine. The research conducted at SMART is supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise program. This collaboration exemplifies how Singapore brings together institutions as part of interdisciplinary, multi-institution efforts to advance technology for global impact. The work from KKH was partially supported by the Nurturing Clinician Scientist Scheme under the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Clinical Programme.

MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), a pioneering cross-disciplinary body that helped give a major boost to sustainability and solutions to climate change at MIT, will close as a separate entity at the end of June. But that’s far from the end for its wide-ranging work, which will go forward under different auspices. Many of its key functions will become part of MIT’s recently launched Climate Project. John Fernandez, head of ESI for nearly a decade, will return to the School of Architecture and Planning, where some of ESI’s important work will continue as part of a new interdisciplinary lab.

When the ideas that led to the founding of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative first began to be discussed, its founders recall, there was already a great deal of work happening at MIT relating to climate change and sustainability. As Professor John Sterman of the MIT Sloan School of Management puts it, “there was a lot going on, but it wasn’t integrated. So the whole added up to less than the sum of its parts.”

ESI was founded in 2014 to help fill that coordinating role, and in the years since it has accomplished a wide range of significant milestones in research, education, and communication about sustainable solutions in a wide range of areas. Its founding director, Professor Susan Solomon, helmed it for its first year, and then handed the leadership to Fernandez, who has led it since 2015.

“There wasn’t much of an ecosystem [on sustainability] back then,” Solomon recalls. But with the help of ESI and some other entities, that ecosystem has blossomed. She says that Fernandez “has nurtured some incredible things under ESI,” including work on nature-based climate solutions, and also other areas such as sustainable mining, and reduction of plastics in the environment.

Desiree Plata, director of MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, says that one key achievement of the initiative has been in “communication with the external world, to help take really complex systems and topics and put them in not just plain-speak, but something that’s scientifically rigorous and defensible, for the outside world to consume.”

In particular, ESI has created three very successful products, which continue under the auspices of the Climate Project. These include the popular TIL Climate Podcast, the Webby Award-winning Climate Portal website, and the online climate primer developed with Professor Kerry Emanuel. “These are some of the most frequented websites at MIT,” Plata says, and “the impact of this work on the global knowledge base cannot be overstated.”

Fernandez says that ESI has played a significant part in helping to catalyze what has become “a rich institutional landscape of work in sustainability and climate change” at MIT. He emphasizes three major areas where he feels the ESI has been able to have the most impact: engaging the MIT community, initiating and stewarding critical environmental research, and catalyzing efforts to promote sustainability as fundamental to the mission of a research university.

Engagement of the MIT community, he says, began with two programs: a research seed grant program and the creation of MIT’s undergraduate minor in environment and sustainability, launched in 2017.

ESI also created a Rapid Response Group, which gave students a chance to work on real-world projects with external partners, including government agencies, community groups, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses. In the process, they often learned why dealing with environmental challenges in the real world takes so much longer than they might have thought, he says, and that a challenge that “seemed fairly straightforward at the outset turned out to be more complex and nuanced than expected.”

The second major area, initiating and stewarding environmental research, grew into a set of six specific program areas: natural climate solutions, mining, cities and climate change, plastics and the environment, arts and climate, and climate justice.

These efforts included collaborations with a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, three successive presidential administrations from Colombia, and members of communities affected by climate change, including coal miners, indigenous groups, various cities, companies, the U.N., many agencies — and the popular musical group Coldplay, which has pledged to work toward climate neutrality for its performances. “It was the role that the ESI played as a host and steward of these research programs that may serve as a key element of our legacy,” Fernandez says.

The third broad area, he says, “is the idea that the ESI as an entity at MIT would catalyze this movement of a research university toward sustainability as a core priority.” While MIT was founded to be an academic partner to the industrialization of the world, “aren’t we in a different world now? The kind of massive infrastructure planning and investment and construction that needs to happen to decarbonize the energy system is maybe the largest industrialization effort ever undertaken. Even more than in the recent past, the set of priorities driving this have to do with sustainable development.”

Overall, Fernandez says, “we did everything we could to infuse the Institute in its teaching and research activities with the idea that the world is now in dire need of sustainable solutions.”

Fernandez “has nurtured some incredible things under ESI,” Solomon says. “It’s been a very strong and useful program, both for education and research.” But it is appropriate at this time to distribute its projects to other venues, she says. “We do now have a major thrust in the Climate Project, and you don’t want to have redundancies and overlaps between the two.”

Fernandez says “one of the missions of the Climate Project is really acting to coalesce and aggregate lots of work around MIT.” Now, with the Climate Project itself, along with the Climate Policy Center and the Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, it makes more sense for ESI’s climate-related projects to be integrated into these new entities, and other projects that are less directly connected to climate to take their places in various appropriate departments or labs, he says.

“We did enough with ESI that we made it possible for these other centers to really flourish,” he says. “And in that sense, we played our role.”

As of June 1, Fernandez has returned to his role as professor of architecture and urbanism and building technology in the School of Architecture and Planning, where he directs the Urban Metabolism Group. He will also be starting up a new group called Environment ResearchAction (ERA) to continue ESI work in cities, nature, and artificial intelligence. 

The agency’s analysis of rolling back climate rules on power plants undermines its administrator’s assertions that they would have capsized the electric sector.

The president will attend the G7 on Sunday in a nation he threatened to annex. He will also be an outlier on climate issues.

A special wildfire team "has been depleted by more than half" since Trump sent 4,000 California guardsmen to Los Angeles, court papers say.

They say it would triple the state's greenhouse gas emissions and violate their right to a livable climate.

Polluters paid a near-record amount for pollution allowances in June as restrictions on carbon emissions intensify.

Groups like the California Chamber of Commerce accused lawmakers of trying to avoid transparency.

A new BloombergNEF study is the latest to indicate that decarbonization efforts are faltering, amid rising costs, political opposition and logistical bottlenecks.

The development follows pressure from Germany and France that the sheer scale of the bloc’s ESG regulations is hurting European competitiveness.

The researcher said leaders had warned that her advocacy exposing the Louisiana petrochemical industry's health impacts and racial disparities in hiring had triggered blowback from donors and elected officials.

Paragon is an Israeli spyware company, increasingly in the news (now that NSO Group seems to be waning). “Graphite” is the name of its product. Citizen Lab caught it spying on multiple European journalists with a zero-click iOS exploit:

On April 29, 2025, a select group of iOS users were notified by Apple that they were targeted with advanced spyware. Among the group were two journalists that consented for the technical analysis of their cases. The key findings from our forensic analysis of their devices are summarized below:

• Our analysis finds forensic evidence confirming with high confidence that both a prominent European journalist (who requests anonymity), and Italian journalist Ciro Pellegrino, were targeted with Paragon’s Graphite mercenary spyware. ...

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 13 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02350-w

Glancing forward to view alternative futures for limiting global warming requires understanding complex societal–environmental systems that drive future emissions. Now a study explores the potential, and limits, of deep learning to generate core characteristics of these futures.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 13 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02356-4

Fire emissions can be an important source of nutrients such as iron, particularly for the oceans. Here the authors estimate that climate-change-driven changes in fire emissions could increase iron deposition in ocean ecosystems, enhancing productivity particularly in the North Atlantic.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 13 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02326-w

Content delivery algorithms on social media exhibit biases in audience selection, which are understudied in the climate context. This study combines observational analysis and a field experiment to reveal algorithmic bias in Facebook’s climate ad data across location, gender and age groups.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 13 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02352-8

Integrated assessment model-based scenarios are commonly used to project future emission pathways but suffer from submission biases and high computational cost. Here researchers develop a deep learning framework to generate synthetic scenarios and replicate key variables across a wide range of mitigation ambitions.

This is news:

A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travellers’ domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data came from, according to internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media. The data includes passenger names, their full flight itineraries, and financial details.

Another article.

U.S. sanctions on Syria have for several decades not only restricted trade and financial transactions, they’ve also severely limited Syrians’ access to digital technology. From software development tools to basic cloud services, Syrians were locked out of the global internet economy—stifling innovation, education, and entrepreneurship.

EFF has for many years pushed for sanctions exemptions for technology in Syria, as well as in Sudan, Iran, and Cuba. While civil society had early wins in securing general licenses for Iran and Sudan allowing the export of communications technologies, the conflict in Syria that began in 2011 made loosening of sanctions a pipe dream.

But recent changes to U.S. policy could mark the beginning of a shift. In a quiet yet significant move, the U.S. government has eased sanctions on Syria. On May 23, the Treasury Department issued General License 25, effectively allowing technology companies to provide services to Syrians. This decision could have an immediate and positive impact on the lives of millions of Syrian internet users—especially those working in the tech and education sectors.

A Legacy of Digital Isolation

For years, Syrians have found themselves barred from accessing even the most basic tools. U.S. sanctions meant that companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon—either by law or by cautious decisions taken to avoid potential penalties—restricted access to many of their services. Developers couldn’t access GitHub repositories or use Google Cloud; students couldn’t download software for virtual classrooms; and entrepreneurs struggled to build startups without access to payment gateways or secure infrastructure.

Such restrictions can put users in harm’s way; for instance, not being able to access the Google Play store from inside the country means that Syrians can’t easily download secure versions of everyday tools like Signal or WhatsApp, thus potentially subjecting their communications to surveillance.

These restrictions also compounded the difficulties of war, economic collapse, and internal censorship. Even when Syrian tech workers could connect with global communities, their participation was hampered by legal gray zones and technical blocks.

What the Sanctions Relief Changes

Under General License 25, companies will now be able to provide services to Syria that have never officially been available. While it may take time for companies to catch up with any regulatory changes, it is our hope that Syrians will soon be able to access and make use of technologies that will enable them to more freely communicate and rebuild.

For Syrian developers, the impact could be transformative. Restored access to platforms like GitHub, AWS, and Google Cloud means the ability to build, test, and deploy apps without the need for VPNs or workarounds. It opens the door to participation in global hackathons, remote work, and open-source communities—channels that are often lifelines for those in conflict zones. Students and educators stand to benefit, too. With sanctions eased, educational tools and platforms that were previously unavailable could soon be accessible. Entrepreneurs may also finally gain access to secure communications, e-commerce platforms, and the broader digital infrastructure needed to start and scale businesses. These developments could help jumpstart local economies.

Despite the good news, challenges remain. Major tech companies have historically been slow to respond to sanctions relief, often erring on the side of over-compliance to avoid liability. Many of the financial and logistical barriers—such as payment processing, unreliable internet, and ongoing conflict—will not disappear overnight.

Moreover, the lifting of sanctions is not a blanket permission slip; it’s a cautious opening. Any future geopolitical shifts or changes in U.S. foreign policy could once again cut off access, creating an uncertain digital future for Syrians.

Nevertheless, by removing barriers imposed by sanctions, the U.S. is taking a step toward recognizing that access to technology is not a luxury, but a necessity—even in sanctioned or conflict-ridden countries.

For Syrian users, the lifting of tech sanctions is more than a bureaucratic change—it’s a door, long closed, beginning to open. And for the international tech community, it’s an opportunity to re-engage, responsibly and thoughtfully, with a population that has been cut off from essential services for too long.

EPA contradicts itself — and legal precedent — in its bid to undo Biden-era limits on power plant pollution.