In 2013, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship Managing Director Bill Aulet published “Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup,” which has since sold hundreds of thousands of copies and been used to teach entrepreneurship at universities around the world. One MIT course where it’s used is 15.366 (Climate and Energy Ventures), where instructors have tweaked the framework over the years. In a new book, “Disciplined Entrepreneurship for Climate and Energy Ventures,” they codify those changes and provide a new blueprint for entrepreneurs working in the climate and energy spaces.

MIT News spoke with lead author and Trust Center Entrepreneur-in-Residence Ben Soltoff, who wrote the book with Aulet, Senior Lecturer Tod Hynes, Senior Lecturer Francis O’Sullivan, and Lecturer Libby Wayman. Soltoff explains why climate and energy entrepreneurship is so challenging and talks about some of the new steps in the book.

Q: What are climate and energy ventures?

A: It’s a broad umbrella. These ventures aren’t all in a specific industry or structured in the same way. They could be software, they could be hardware, or they could be deep tech coming out of labs. This book is also written for people working in government, large corporations, or nonprofits. Each of those folks can benefit from the entrepreneurial framework in this book. We very intentionally refer to them as climate and energy ventures in the book, not just climate and energy startups.

One common theme is meeting the challenge of providing enough energy for current and future needs without exacerbating, or even while reducing, the impact we have on our planet. Generally, climate and energy ventures are less likely to be only software. Many of the solutions we need are around molecules, not bits. A lot of it is breakthrough technology and science from research labs. You could be making a useful fuel, removing CO2 from the atmosphere, or delivering something in a novel way. Your venture might produce a chemical or molecule that’s already being provided and is a commodity. It needs to be not only more sustainable, but better for your customers — either cheaper, more reliable, or more securely delivered. Ultimately, all of these ventures have to provide value. They also often involve physical infrastructure that you have to scale up — not just 10 times or 100 times, but 1,000 times or more — from original lab demonstrations.

Q: How should climate and energy entrepreneurs be thinking about navigating financing and working with the government?

A: One of the major themes of the book is the importance of figuring out if policy is in your favor and constantly applying a policy lens to what you’re building. Finance is another major theme. In climate and energy, these things are fundamental, and we need to consider them from the beginning. We talk about different “valleys of death” — the idea that going from one stage to the next stage requires this jump in time and resources that presents a big challenge. That also relates to the jump in scale of the technology, from a lab scale to something you can produce and sell in a quantity and at a cost the market is interested in. All of that requires financing.

At an early stage, a lot of these ventures are funded through grants and research funding. Later, they start getting early-stage capital — often venture capital. Eventually, as folks are scaling, they move to debt and project financing. Companies need to be very intentional about the type of financing they’re going to pursue and at what stage. We have an entire step on creating a long-term capital plan. Entrepreneurs need to be very clear about the story they’re going to tell investors at different stages. Otherwise, they can paint themselves into a corner and fail to build a company for the next stage of capital they need.

In terms of policy, entrepreneurs should use the policy environment as a filter for selecting a market. We have a story in the book about a startup that switched from working in sub-Saharan Africa to the U.S. after the Inflation Reduction Act passed. As those incentives began disappearing, they still had the option to return to their original market. It’s not ideal for them, but they are still able to build profitable projects. You shouldn’t build a company based on the incentives alone, but you should understand which way the wind is blowing and take advantage of policy when it’s in your favor. That said, policy can always change.

Q: How should climate and energy entrepreneurs select the right market “stepping stones”?

A: Each of the “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” books talks about the importance of selecting customers and listening to your customers. When thinking about their beachhead market, or where to initially focus, climate and energy entrepreneurs need to look for the easiest near-term opportunity to plug in their technology. Subsequent market selection is also driven by technology. Instead of just picking a beachhead market and figuring everything else out later, there often needs to be an intentional choice of what we call market stepping stones. You start by focusing on an initial market in the early days — land and expand — but there needs to be a long-term strategy, so you don’t go down a dead end. These ventures don’t have a lot of flexibility as they build out potentially expensive technologies. Being intentional means having a pathway planned from the beachhead market up to the big prize that makes the entire enterprise worthwhile. The prize means having a big impact but also targeting a big market opportunity.

We have an example in the book of a company that can turn CO2 into useful products. They knew the big prize was turning it into fuel, most likely aviation fuel, but they couldn’t produce at the right volume or cost early on, so they looked at other applications. They started with making vodka from CO2 because it was low-volume and high-margin. Then the pandemic happened, so they made hand sanitizer. Then they made perfume, which had the highest margins of all. By that point, they were ready to start moving into the fuel market. The stepping stones are about figuring out who is willing to buy the simple version of your technology or product and pay a premium. Initially, looking at that company, you might say, “They’re not going to save the planet by selling vodka.” But it was a critical stepping stone to get to the big prize. Long-term thinking is essential for ventures in this space.

After twenty-six years, Microsoft is finally upgrading the last remaining instance of the encryption algorithm RC4 in Windows.

of the most visible holdouts in supporting RC4 has been Microsoft. Eventually, Microsoft upgraded Active Directory to support the much more secure AES encryption standard. But by default, Windows servers have continued to respond to RC4-based authentication requests and return an RC4-based response. The RC4 fallback has been a favorite weakness hackers have exploited to compromise enterprise networks. Use of RC4 played a ...

One of the biggest risk factors for developing liver cancer is a high-fat diet. A new study from MIT reveals how a fatty diet rewires liver cells and makes them more prone to becoming cancerous.

The researchers found that in response to a high-fat diet, mature hepatocytes in the liver revert to an immature, stem-cell-like state. This helps them to survive the stressful conditions created by the high-fat diet, but in the long term, it makes them more likely to become cancerous.

“If cells are forced to deal with a stressor, such as a high-fat diet, over and over again, they will do things that will help them survive, but at the risk of increased susceptibility to tumorigenesis,” says Alex K. Shalek, director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences (IMES), the J. W. Kieckhefer Professor in IMES and the Department of Chemistry, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

The researchers also identified several transcription factors that appear to control this reversion, which they believe could make good targets for drugs to help prevent tumor development in high-risk patients.

Shalek; Ömer Yilmaz, an MIT associate professor of biology and a member of the Koch Institute; and Wolfram Goessling, co-director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Cell. MIT graduate student Constantine Tzouanas, former MIT postdoc Jessica Shay, and Massachusetts General Brigham postdoc Marc Sherman are the co-first authors of the paper.

Cell reversion

A high-fat diet can lead to inflammation and buildup of fat in the liver, a condition known as steatotic liver disease. This disease, which can also be caused by a wide variety of long-term metabolic stresses such as high alcohol consumption, may lead to liver cirrhosis, liver failure, and eventually cancer.

In the new study, the researchers wanted to figure out just what happens in cells of the liver when exposed to a high-fat diet — in particular, which genes get turned on or off as the liver responds to this long-term stress.

To do that, the researchers fed mice a high-fat diet and performed single-cell RNA-sequencing of their liver cells at key timepoints as liver disease progressed. This allowed them to monitor gene expression changes that occurred as the mice advanced through liver inflammation, to tissue scarring and eventually cancer.

In the early stages of this progression, the researchers found that the high-fat diet prompted hepatocytes, the most abundant cell type in the liver, to turn on genes that help them survive the stressful environment. These include genes that make them more resistant to apoptosis and more likely to proliferate.

At the same time, those cells began to turn off some of the genes that are critical for normal hepatocyte function, including metabolic enzymes and secreted proteins.

“This really looks like a trade-off, prioritizing what’s good for the individual cell to stay alive in a stressful environment, at the expense of what the collective tissue should be doing,” Tzouanas says.

Some of these changes happened right away, while others, including a decline in metabolic enzyme production, shifted more gradually over a longer period. Nearly all of the mice on a high-fat diet ended up developing liver cancer by the end of the study.

When cells are in a more immature state, it appears that they are more likely to become cancerous if a mutation occurs later on, the researchers say.

“These cells have already turned on the same genes that they’re going to need to become cancerous. They’ve already shifted away from the mature identity that would otherwise drag down their ability to proliferate,” Tzouanas says. “Once a cell picks up the wrong mutation, then it’s really off to the races and they’ve already gotten a head start on some of those hallmarks of cancer.”

The researchers also identified several genes that appear to orchestrate the changes that revert hepatocytes to an immature state. While this study was going on, a drug targeting one of these genes (thyroid hormone receptor) was approved to treat a severe form of steatotic liver disease called MASH fibrosis. And, a drug activating an enzyme that they identified (HMGCS2) is now in clinical trials to treat steatotic liver disease.

Another possible target that the new study revealed is a transcription factor called SOX4, which is normally only active during fetal development and in a small number of adult tissues (but not the liver).

Cancer progression

After the researchers identified these changes in mice, they sought to discover if something similar might be happening in human patients with liver disease. To do that, they analyzed data from liver tissue samples removed from patients at different stages of the disease. They also looked at tissue from people who had liver disease but had not yet developed cancer.

Those studies revealed a similar pattern to what the researchers had seen in mice: The expression of genes needed for normal liver function decreased over time, while genes associated with immature states went up. Additionally, the researchers found that they could accurately predict patients’ survival outcomes based on an analysis of their gene expression patterns.

“Patients who had higher expression of these pro-cell-survival genes that are turned on with high-fat diet survived for less time after tumors developed,” Tzouanas says. “And if a patient has lower expression of genes that support the functions that the liver normally performs, they also survive for less time.”

While the mice in this study developed cancer within a year or so, the researchers estimate that in humans, the process likely extends over a longer span, possibly around 20 years. That will vary between individuals depending on their diet and other risk factors such as alcohol consumption or viral infections, which can also promote liver cells’ reversion to an immature state.

The researchers now plan to investigate whether any of the changes that occur in response to a high-fat diet can be reversed by going back to a normal diet, or by taking weight-loss drugs such as GLP-1 agonists. They also hope to study whether any of the transcription factors they identified could make good targets for drugs that could help prevent diseased liver tissue from becoming cancerous.

“We now have all these new molecular targets and a better understanding of what is underlying the biology, which could give us new angles to improve outcomes for patients,” Shalek says.

The research was funded, in part, by a Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the National Institutes of Health, and the MIT Stem Cell Initiative through Foundation MIT.

Aviation’s climate impact is partly due to contrails — condensation that a plane streaks across the sky when it flies through icy and humid layers of the atmosphere. Contrails trap heat that radiates from the planet’s surface, and while the magnitude of this impact is uncertain, several studies suggest contrails may be responsible for about half of aviation’s climate impact.

Pilots could conceivably reduce their planes’ climate impact by avoiding contrail-prone regions, similarly to making altitude adjustments to avoid turbulence. But to do so requires knowing where in the sky contrails are likely to form.

To make these predictions, scientists are studying images of contrails that have formed in the past. Images taken by geostationary satellites are one of the main tools scientists use to develop contrail identification and avoidance systems. 

But a new study shows there are limits to what geostationary satellites can see. MIT engineers analyzed contrail images taken with geostationary satellites, and compared them with images of the same areas taken by low-Earth-orbiting (LEO) satellites. LEO satellites orbit the Earth at lower altitudes and therefore can capture more detail. However, since LEO satellites only snap an image as they fly by, they capture images of the same area far less frequently than geostationary (GEO) satellites, which continuously image the same region of the Earth every few minutes.

The researchers found that geostationary satellites miss about 80 percent of the contrails that appear in LEO imagery. Geostationary satellites mainly see larger contrails that have had time to grow and spread across the atmosphere. The many more contrails that LEO satellites can pick up are often shorter and thinner. These finer threads likely formed immediately from a plane’s engines and are still too small or otherwise not distinct enough for geostationary satellites to discern.

The study highlights the need for a multiobservational approach in developing contrail identification and avoidance systems. The researchers emphasize that both GEO and LEO satellite images have their strengths and limitations. Observations from both sources, as well as images taken from the ground, could provide a more complete picture of contrails and how they evolve.

“With more ‘eyes’ on the sky, we could start to see what a contrail’s life looks like,” says Prakash Prashanth, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “Then you can understand what are its radiative properties over its entire life, and when and why a contrail is climatically important.”

The new study appears today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The study’s MIT co-authors include first author Marlene Euchenhofer, a graduate student in AeroAstro; Sydney Parke, an undergraduate student; Ian Waitz, the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and MIT’s vice president of research; and Sebastian Eastham of Imperial College London.

Imaging backbone

Contrails form when the exhaust from planes meets icy, humid air, and the particles from the exhaust act as seeds on which water vapor collects and freezes into ice crystals. As a plane moves forward, it leaves a trail of condensation in its wake that starts as a thin thread that can grow and spread over large distances, lasting for several hours before dissipating.

When it persists, a contrail acts similar to an ice cloud and, as such, can have two competing effects: one in which the contrail is a sort of heat shield, reflecting some incoming radiation from the sun. On the other hand, a contrail can also act as a blanket, absorbing and reflecting back some of the heat from the surface. During the daytime, when the sun is shining, contrails can have both heat shielding and trapping effects. At night, the cloud-like threads have only a trapping, warming effect. On balance, studies have shown that contrails as a whole contribute to warming the planet.

There are multiple efforts underway to develop and test aircraft contrail-avoidance systems to reduce aviation’s climate-warming impact. And scientists are using images of contrails from space to help inform those systems.

“Geostationary satellite images are the workhorse of observations for detecting contrails,” says Euchenhofer. “Because they are at 36,000 kilometers above the surface, they can cover a wide area, and they look at the same point day and night so you can get new images of the same location every five minutes.”

But what they bring in rate and coverage, geostationary satellites lack in clarity. The images they take are about one-fifth the resolution of those taken by LEO satellites. This wouldn’t be a surprise to most scientists. But Euchenhofer wondered how different the geostationary and LEO contrail pictures would look, and what opportunities there might be to improve the picture if both sources could be combined.

“We still think geostationary satellites are the backbone of observation-based avoidance because of the spatial coverage and the high frequency at which we get an image,” she says. “We think that the data could be enhanced if we include observations from LEO and other data sources like ground-based cameras.”

Catching the trail

In their new study, the researchers analyzed contrail images from two satellite imagers: the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) aboard a geostationary satellite that is typically used to observe contrails and the higher-resolution Visible Infrared Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), an instrument onboard several LEO satellites.

For each month from December 2023 to November 2024, the team picked out an image of the contiguous United States taken by VIIRS during its flyby. They found corresponding images of the same location, taken at about the same time of day by the geostationary ABI. The images were taken in the infrared spectrum and represented in false color, which enabled the researchers to more easily identify contrails that formed during both the day and night. The researchers then worked by eye, zooming in on each image to identify, outline, and label each contrail they could see.

When they compared the images, they found that GEO images missed about 80 percent of the contrails observed in the LEO images. They also assessed the length and width of contrails in each image and found that GEO images mostly captured larger and longer contrails, while LEO images could also discern shorter, smaller contrails.

“We found 80 percent of the contrails we could see with LEO satellites, we couldn’t see with GEO imagers,” says Prashanth, who is the executive officer of MIT’s Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment. “That does not mean that 80 percent of the climate impact wasn’t captured. Because the contrails we see with GEO imagers are the bigger ones that likely have a bigger climate effect.”

Still, the study highlights an opportunity.

“We want to make sure this message gets across: Geostationary imagers are extremely powerful in terms of the spatial extent they cover and the number of images we can get,” Euchenhofer says. “But solely relying on one instrument, especially when policymaking comes into play, is probably too incomplete a picture to inform science and also airlines regarding contrail avoidance. We really need to fill this gap with other sensors.”

The team says other sensors could include networks of cameras on the ground that under ideal conditions can spot contrails as planes form them in real time. These smaller, “younger” contrails are typically missed by geostationary satellites. Once scientists have these ground-based data, they can match the contrail to the plane and use the plane’s flight data to identify the exact altitude at which the contrail appears. They could then track the contrail as it grows and spreads through the atmosphere, using geostationary images. Eventually, with enough data, scientists could develop an accurate forecasting model, in real time, to predict whether a plane is heading toward a region where contrails might form and persist, and how it could change its altitude to avoid the region.

“People see contrail avoidance as a near-term and cheap opportunity to attack one of the hardest-to-abate sectors in transportation,” Prashanth says. “We don’t have a lot of easy solutions in aviation to reduce our climate impact. But it is premature to do so until we have better tools to determine where in the atmosphere contrails will form, to understand their relative impacts and to verify avoidance outcomes. We have to do this in a careful and rigorous manner, and this is where a lot of these pieces come in.”

This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration Office of Environment and Energy.

In the past year, two separate experiments in two different materials captured the same confounding scenario: the coexistence of superconductivity and magnetism. Scientists had assumed that these two quantum states are mutually exclusive; the presence of one should inherently destroy the other.

Now, theoretical physicists at MIT have an explanation for how this Jekyll-and-Hyde duality could emerge. In a paper appearing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team proposes that under certain conditions, a magnetic material’s electrons could splinter into fractions of themselves to form quasiparticles known as “anyons.” In certain fractions, the quasiparticles should flow together without friction, similar to how regular electrons can pair up to flow in conventional superconductors.

If the team’s scenario is correct, it would introduce an entirely new form of superconductivity — one that persists in the presence of magnetism and involves a supercurrent of exotic anyons rather than everyday electrons.

“Many more experiments are needed before one can declare victory,” says study lead author Senthil Todadri, the William and Emma Rogers Professor of Physics at MIT. “But this theory is very promising and shows that there can be new ways in which the phenomenon of superconductivity can arise.”

What’s more, if the idea of superconducting anyons can be confirmed and controlled in other materials, it could provide a new way to design stable qubits — atomic-scale “bits” that interact quantum mechanically to process information and carry out complex computations far more efficiently than conventional computer bits.

“These theoretical ideas, if they pan out, could make this dream one tiny step within reach,” Todadri says.

The study’s co-author is MIT physics graduate student Zhengyan Darius Shi.

“Anything goes”

Superconductivity and magnetism are macroscopic states that arise from the behavior of electrons. A material is a magnet when electrons in its atomic structure have roughly the same spin, or orbital motion, creating a collective pull in the form of a magnetic field within the material as a whole. A material is a superconductor when electrons passing through, in the form of voltage, can couple up in “Cooper pairs.” In this teamed-up state, electrons can glide through a material without friction, rather than randomly knocking against its atomic latticework.

For decades, it was thought that superconductivity and magnetism should not co-exist; superconductivity is a delicate state, and any magnetic field can easily sever the bonds between Cooper pairs. But earlier this year, two separate experiments proved otherwise. In the first experiment, MIT’s Long Ju and his colleagues discovered superconductivity and magnetism in rhombohedral graphene — a synthesized material made from four or five graphene layers.

“It was electrifying,” says Todadri, who recalls hearing Ju present the results at a conference. “It set the place alive. And it introduced more questions as to how this could be possible.”

Shortly after, a second team reported similar dual states in the semiconducting crystal molybdenium ditelluride (MoTe2). Interestingly, the conditions in which MoTe2 becomes superconductive happen to be the same conditions in which the material exhibits an exotic “fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect,” or FQAH — a phenomenon in which any electron passing through the material should split into fractions of itself. These fractional quasiparticles are known as “anyons.”

Anyons are entirely different from the two main types of particles that make up the universe: bosons and fermions. Bosons are the extroverted particle type, as they prefer to be together and travel in packs. The photon is the classic example of a boson. In contrast, fermions prefer to keep to themselves, and repel each other if they are too near. Electrons, protons, and neutrons are examples of fermions. Together, bosons and fermions are the two major kingdoms of particles that make up matter in the three-dimensional universe.

Anyons, in contrast, exist only in two-dimensional space. This third type of particle was first predicted in the 1980s, and its name was coined by MIT’s Frank Wilczek, who meant it as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the idea that, in terms of the particle’s behavior, “anything goes.”

A few years after anyons were first predicted, physicists such as Robert Laughlin PhD ’79, Wilczek, and others also theorized that, in the presence of magnetism, the quasiparticles should be able to superconduct.

“People knew that magnetism was usually needed to get anyons to superconduct, and they looked for magnetism in many superconducting materials,” Todadri says. “But superconductivity and magnetism typically do not occur together. So then they discarded the idea.”

But with the recent discovery that the two states can, in fact, peacefully coexist in certain materials, and in MoTe2 in particular, Todadri wondered: Could the old theory, and superconducting anyons, be at play?

Moving past frustration

Todadri and Shi set out to answer that question theoretically, building on their own recent work. In their new study, the team worked out the conditions under which superconducting anyons could emerge in a two-dimensional material. To do so, they applied equations of quantum field theory, which describes how interactions at the quantum scale, such as the level of individual anyons, can give rise to macroscopic quantum states, such as superconductivity. The exercise was not an intuitive one, since anyons are known to stubbornly resist moving, let alone superconducting, together.

“When you have anyons in the system, what happens is each anyon may try to move, but it’s frustrated by the presence of other anyons,” Todadri explains. “This frustration happens even if the anyons are extremely far away from each other. And that’s a purely quantum mechanical effect.”

Even so, the team looked for conditions in which anyons might break out of this frustration and move as one macroscopic fluid. Anyons are formed when electrons splinter into fractions of themselves under certain conditions in two-dimensional, single-atom-thin materials, such as MoTe2. Scientists had previously observed that MoTe2 exhibits the FQAH, in which electrons fractionalize, without the help of an external magnetic field.

Todadri and Shi took MoTe2 as a starting point for their theoretical work. They modeled the conditions in which the FQAH phenomenon emerged in MoTe2, and then looked to see how electrons would splinter, and what types of anyons would be produced, as they theoretically increased the number of electrons in the material.

They noted that, depending on the material’s electron density, two types of anyons can form: anyons with either 1/3 or 2/3 the charge of an electron. They then applied equations of quantum field theory to work out how either of the two anyon types would interact, and found that when the anyons are mostly of the 1/3 flavor, they are predictably frustrated, and their movement leads to ordinary metallic conduction. But when anyons are mostly of the 2/3 flavor, this particular fraction encourages the normally stodgy anyons to instead move collectively to form a superconductor, similar to how electrons can pair up and flow in conventional superconductors.

“These anyons break out of their frustration and can move without friction,” Todadri says. “The amazing thing is, this is an entirely different mechanism by which a superconductor can form, but in a way that can be described as Cooper pairs in any other system.”

Their work revealed that superconducting anyons can emerge at certain electron densities. What’s more, they found that when superconducting anyons first emerge, they do so in a totally new pattern of swirling supercurrents that spontaneously appear in random locations throughout the material. This behavior is distinct from conventional superconductors and is an exotic state that experimentalists can look for as a way to confirm the team’s theory. If their theory is correct, it would introduce a new form of superconductivity, through the quantum interactions of anyons.

“If our anyon-based explanation is what is happening in MoTe2, it opens the door to the study of a new kind of quantum matter which may be called ‘anyonic quantum matter,’” Todadri says. “This will be a new chapter in quantum physics.”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation. 

Researchers who have downplayed the threat of global warming have been asked to author the next National Climate Assessment.

"There is no politicization," White House says after simultaneously denying two requests from Gov. Jared Polis to help rebuild from wildfires and flooding.

Utility rate cases in battleground states will shine a spotlight on utility regulators as cost-of-living issues grab headlines in a big election year.

A handful of communities are looking to exit the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) authority at a time when the local population is booming.

Limited snow spurs wildfires, future drought and low reservoir levels.

The new government plans to rewrite Czechia’s green rules.

More than $5 billion of catastrophe bonds with some level of exposure to wildfire risk were issued by insurers and sold to investors this year, according to a specialist in insurance-linked securities.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 22 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02514-8

Both green industrial policy (‘carrots’) and carbon pricing (‘sticks’) are seen as important instruments for decarbonization, but the sequencing strategy matters. Researchers now demonstrate that carrots alone — without sticks — are unlikely to reach long-term net-zero targets in the USA.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 22 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02497-6

Green subsidies (carrots) are now becoming a more politically acceptable climate policy option compared with corrective regulations (sticks). However, researcher show that carrots without quick and appropriate sticks will not be sufficient to reach the deep decarbonization goal in the long run.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 22 December 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02516-6

In addition to affecting general economic indicators, climate change could worsen poverty and inequality across and within countries. With a global subnational dataset, researchers confirm that temperature rise leads to increases in headcount poverty and the Gini index, with poorer countries being particularly vulnerable.

Video from Reddit shows what could go wrong when you try to pet a—looks like a Humboldt—squid.

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

Blog moderation policy.

Since earliest days of computer games, people have tinkered with the software to customize their own experiences or share their vision with others. From the dad who changed the game’s male protagonist to a girl so his daughter could see herself in it, to the developers who got their start in modding, games have been a medium where you don’t just consume a product, you participate and interact with culture.

For decades, that participatory experience was a key part of one of the longest-running video games still in operation: Everquest. Players had the official client, acquired lawfully from EverQuest’s developers, and modders figured out how to enable those clients to communicate with their own servers and then modify their play experience – creating new communities along the way.

Everquest’s copyright owners implicitly blessed all this. But the current owners, a private equity firm called Daybreak, want to end that independent creativity. They are using copyright claims to threaten modders who wanted to customize the EverQuest experience to suit a different playstyle, running their own servers where things worked the way they wanted. 

One project in particular is in Daybreak’s crosshairs: “The Hero’s Journey” (THJ). Daybreak claims THJ has infringed its copyrights in Everquest visuals and character, cutting into its bottom line.

Ordinarily, when a company wants to remedy some actual harm, its lawyers will start with a cease-and-desist letter and potentially pursue a settlement. But if the goal is intimidation, a rightsholder is free to go directly to federal court and file a complaint. That’s exactly what Daybreak did, using that shock-and-awe approach to cow not only The Hero’s Journey team, but unrelated modders as well.

Daybreak’s complaint seems to have dazzled the judge in the case by presenting side-by-side images of dragons and characters that look identical in the base game and when using the mod, without explaining that these images are the ones provided by EverQuest’s official client, which players have lawfully downloaded from the official source. The judge wound up short-cutting the copyright analysis and issuing a ruling that has proven devastating to the thousands of players who are part of EverQuest modding communities.

Daybreak and the developers of The Hero’s Journey are now in private arbitration, and Daybreak has wasted no time in sending that initial ruling to other modders. The order doesn’t bind anyone who’s unaffiliated with The Hero’s Journey, but it’s understandable that modders who are in it for fun and community would cave to the implied threat that they could be next.

As a result, dozens of fan servers have stopped operating. Daybreak has also persuaded the maintainers of the shared server emulation software that most fan servers rely upon, EQEmulator, to adopt terms of service that essentially ban any but the most negligible modding. The terms also provide that “your operation of an EQEmulator server is subject to Daybreak’s permission, which it may revoke for any reason or no reason at any time, without any liability to you or any other person or entity. You agree to fully and immediately comply with any demand from Daybreak to modify, restrict, or shut down any EQEmulator server.” 

This is sadly not even an uncommon story in fanspaces—from the dustup over changes to the Dungeons and Dragons open gaming license to the “guidelines” issued by CBS for Star Trek fan films, we see new generations of owners deciding to alienate their most avid fans in exchange for more control over their new property. It often seems counterintuitive—fans are creating new experiences, for free, that encourage others to get interested in the original work.

Daybreak can claim a shameful victory: it has imposed unilateral terms on the modding community that are far more restrictive than what fair use and other user rights would allow. In the process, it is alienating the very people it should want to cultivate as customers: hardcore Everquest fans. If it wants fans to continue to invest in making its games appeal to broader audiences and serve as testbeds for game development and sources of goodwill, it needs to give the game’s fans room to breathe and to play.

If you’ve been a target of Daybreak’s legal bullying, we’d love to hear from you; email us at info@eff.org.

Interviewer: Jillian York

Sami Ben Gharbia is a Tunisian human rights campaigner, blogger, writer and freedom of expression advocate. He founded Global Voices Advocacy, and is the co-founder and current publisher of the collective media organization Nawaat, which won the EFF Award in 2011. 

Jillian York: So first, what is your personal definition, or how do you conceptualize freedom of expression?

Sami Ben Gharbia: So for me, freedom of expression, it is mainly as a human. Like, I love the definition of Arab philosophers to human beings, we call it “speaking animal”. So that's the definition in logic, like the science of logic, meditated on by the Greeks, and that defines a human being as a speaking animal, which means later on. Descartes, the French philosopher, describes it like the Ergo: I think, so I am. So the act of speaking is an act of thinking, and it's what makes us human. So this is my definition that I love about freedom of expression, because it's the condition, the bottom line of our human being. 

JY: I love that. Is that something that you learned about growing up?

SBG: You mean, like, reading it or living?

JY: Yeah, how did you come to this knowledge?

SBG: I read a little bit of logics, like science of logic, and this is the definition that the Arabs give to define what is a human being; to differentiate us from, from plants or animals, or, I don't know, rocks, et cetera. So the humans are speaking, animals, 

JY: Oh, that's beautiful. 

SBG: And by speaking, it's in the Arabic definition of the word speaking, it's thinking. It's equal to thinking. 

JY: At what point, growing up, did you realize…what was the turning point for you growing up in Tunisia and realizing that protecting freedom of expression was important?

SBG: Oh, I think, I was born in 1967 and I grew up under an authoritarian regime of the “father” of this Tunisian nation, Bourghiba, the first president of Tunisia, who got us independence from France. And during the 80s, it was very hard to find even books that speak about philosophy, ideology, nationalism, Islamism, Marxism, etc. So to us, almost everything was forbidden. So you need to hide the books that you smuggle from France or from libraries from other cities, et cetera. You always hide what you are reading because you do not want to expose your identity, like you are someone who is politically engaged or an activist. So, from that point, I realized how important freedom of expression is, because if you are not allowed even to read or to buy or to exchange books that are deemed to be controversial or are so politically unacceptable under an authoritarian regime, that's where the fight for freedom of expression should be at the forefront of of any other fights. That's the fight that we need to engage in in order to secure other rights and freedoms.

JY: You speak a number of languages, at what point did you start reading and exploring other languages than the one that you grew up speaking?

SBG: Oh, I think, well, we learn Arabic, French and English in school, and like, primary school, secondary school, so these are our languages that we take from school and from our readings, etc, and interaction with other people in Tunisia. But my first experience living in a country that speaks another language that I didn't know was in Iran. So I spent, in total, one and a half years there in Iran, where I started to learn a fourth language that I really intended to use. It's not a Latin language. It is a special language, although they use almost the same letters and alphabet with some difference in pronunciation and writing, but but it was easy for an Arab speaking native Tunisian to learn Farsi due to the familiarity with the alphabets and familiarity with the pronunciation of most of the alphabet itself. So, that's the first case where I was confronted with a foreign language. It was Iran. And then during my exile in the Netherlands, I was confronted by another family of languages, which is Dutch from the family of Germanic languages, and that's the fifth language that I learned in the Netherlands. 

JY: Wow. And how do you feel that language relates to expression? For you?

SBG: I mean…language, it's another word. It's another universe. Because language carries culture, carries knowledge, carries history, customs. So it's a universe that is living. And once you learn to speak a new language, actually, you embrace another culture. You are more open in the way of understanding and accepting differences between other cultures, and I think that's how it makes your openness much more elastic. Like you accept other cultures more, other identities, and then you are not afraid anymore. You're not scared anymore from other identities, let's say, because I think the problem of civilization and crisis or conflict starts from ignorance—like we don't know the others, we don't know the language, we don't know the customs, the culture, the heritage, the history. That's why we are scared of other people. So the language is the first, let's say, window to other identity and acceptance of other people

JY: And how many languages do you speak now?

SBG: Oh, well, I don't know. Five for sure, but since I moved to exile a second time now, to Spain, I started learning Spanish, and I've been traveling a lot in Italy, started learning some some Italian, but it is confusing, because both are Latin languages, and they share a lot of words, and so it is confusing, but it is funny. I'm not that young to learn quickly, but I'm 58 years old, so it's not easy for someone my age to learn a new language quickly, especially when you are confused about languages from the same family as Latin.

JY: Oh, that's beautiful, though. I love that. All right, now I want to dig into the history of [2011 EFF Award winner] Nawaat. How did it start?

SBG: So Nawaat started as a forum, like in the early 2000s, even before the phenomena of blogs. Blogs started later on, maybe 2003-4, when they became the main tools for expression. Before that, we had forums where people debate ideas, anything. So it started as a forum, multiple forums hosted on the same domain name, which is Nawaat.org and little by little, we adopted new technology. We moved it. We migrated the database from from the forum to CMS, built a new website, and then we started building the website or the blog as a collective blog where people can express themselves freely, and in a political context where, similar to many other countries, a lot of people express themselves through online platforms because they are not allowed to express themselves freely through television or radio or newspaper or magazines in in their own country. 

So it started mainly as an exiled media. It wasn't journalistically oriented or rooted in journalism. It was more of a platform to give voices to the diaspora, mainly the exiled Tunisian diaspora living in exile in France and in England and elsewhere. So we published Human Rights Reports, released news about the situation in Tunisia. We supported the opposition in Tunisia. We produced videos to counter the propaganda machine of the former President Ben Ali, etc. So that's how it started and evolved little by little through the changing in the tech industry, from forums to blogs and then to CMS, and then later on to to adopt social media accounts and pages. So this is how it started and why we created it that like that was not my decision. It was a friend of mine, we were living in exile, and then we said, “why not start a new platform to support the opposition and this movement in Tunisia?” And that's how we did it at first, it was fun, like it was something like it was a hobby. It wasn't our work. I was working somewhere else, and he was working something else. It was our, let's say hobby or pastime. And little by little, it became our, our only job, actually.

JY: And then, okay, so let's come to 2011. I want to hear now your perspective 14 years later. What role do you really feel that the internet played in Tunisia in 2011?

SBG: Well, it was a hybrid tool for liberation, etc. We know the context of the internet freedom policy from the US we know, like the evolution of Western interference within the digital sphere to topple governments that are deemed not friendly, etc. So Tunisia was like, a friend of the West, very friendly with France and the United States and Europe. They loved the dictatorship in Tunisia, in a way, because it secured the border. It secured the country from, by then, the Islamist movement, et cetera. So the internet did play a role as a platform to spread information and to highlight the human rights abuses that are taking place in Tunisia and to counter the narrative that is being manipulated then by the government agency, state agency, public broadcast channel, television news agency, etc. 

And I think we managed it like the big impact of the internet and the blogs by then and platforms like now. We adopted English. It was the first time that the Tunisian opposition used English in its discourse, with the objective to bridge the gap between the traditional support for opposition and human rights in Tunisia that was mainly was coming from French NGOs and human rights organization towards international support, and international support that is not only coming from the traditional, usual suspects of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Freedom House, et cetera. Now we wanted to broaden the spectrum of the support and to reach researchers, to reach activists, to reach people who are writing about freedom elsewhere. So we managed to break the traditional chain of support between human rights movements or organizations and human rights activists in Tunisia, and we managed to broaden that and to reach other people, other audiences that were not really touching what was going on in Tunisia, and I think that's how the Internet helped in the field of international support to the struggle in Tunisia and within Tunisia. 

The impact was, I think, important to raise awareness about human rights abuses in the country, so people who are not really politically knowledgeable about the situation due to the censorship and due to the problem of access to information which was lacking in Tunisia, the internet helped spread the knowledge about the situation and help speed the process of the unrest, actually. So I think these are the two most important impacts within the country, to broaden the spectrum of the people who are reached and targeted by the discourse of political engagement and activism, and the second is to speed the process of consciousness and then the action in the street. So this is how I think the internet helped. That's great, but it wasn't the main tool. I mean, the main tool was really people on the ground and maybe people who didn't have access to the internet at all.

JY: That makes sense. So what about the other work that you were doing around that time with the Arabloggers meetings and Global Voices and the Arab Techies network. Tell us about that.

SBG: Okay, so my position was the founding director of Global Voices Advocacy, I was hired to found this, this arm of advocacy within Global Voices. And that gave me the opportunity to understand other spheres, linguistic spheres, cultural spheres. So it was beyond Tunisia, beyond the Arab world and the region. I was in touch with activists from all over the world. I mean by activists, I mean digital activists, bloggers that are living in Latin America or in Asia or in Eastern Europe, et cetera, because one of the projects that I worked on was Threatened Voices, which was a map of all people who were targeted because of their online activities. That gave me the opportunity to get in touch with a lot of activists.

And then we organized the first advocacy meeting. It was in Budapest, and we managed to invite like 40 or 50 activists from all over the world, from China, Hong Kong, Latin America, the Arab world, Eastern Europe, and Africa. And that broadened my understanding of the freedom of expression movement and how technology is being used to foster human rights online, and then the development of blog aggregators in the world, and mainly in the Arab world, like, each country had its own blog aggregator. That helped me understand those worlds, as did Global Voices. Because Global Voices was bridging the gap between what is being written elsewhere, through the translation effort of Global Voices to the English speaking world and vice versa, and the role played by Global Voices and Global Voices Advocacy made the space and the distance between all those blogospheres feel very diminished. We were very close to the blogosphere movement in Egypt or in Morocco or in Syria and elsewhere. 

And that's how, Alaa Abd El Fattah and Manal Bahey El-Din Hassan and myself, we started thinking about how to establish the Arab Techies collective, because the needs that we identified—there was a gap. There was a lack of communication between pure techies, people who are writing code, building software, translating tools and even online language into Arabic, and the people who are using those tools. The bloggers, freedom of expression advocates, et cetera. And because there are some needs that were not really met in terms of technology, we thought that bringing these two words together, techies and activists would help us build new tools, translate new tools, make tools available to the broader internet activists. And that's how the Arab Techies collective was born in Cairo, and then through organizing the Arabloggers meetings two times in Beirut, and then the third in Tunisia, after the revolution. 

It was a momentum for us, because it, I think it was the first time in Beirut that we brought bloggers from all Arab countries, like it was like a dream that was really unimaginable but at a certain point, but we made that happen. And then what they call the Arab revolution happened, and we lost contact with each other, because everybody was really busy with his or her own country's affairs. So Ali was really fully engaged in Egypt myself, I came back to Tunisia and was fully engaged in Tunisia, so we lost contact, because all of us were having a lot of trouble in their own country. A lot of those bloggers, like who attended the Arab bloggers meetings, few of them were arrested, few of them were killed, like Bassel was in prison, people were in exile, so we lost that connection and those conferences that brought us together, but then we've seen SMEX like filling that gap and taking over the work that started by the Arab techies and the Arab bloggers conference.

JY: We did have the fourth one in 2014 in Amman. But it was not the same. Okay, moving forward, EFF recently published this blog post reflecting on what had just happened to Nawaat, when you and I were in Beirut together a few weeks ago. Can you tell me what happened?

SBG: What happened is that they froze the work of Nawaat. Legally, although the move wasn't legal, because for us, we were respecting the law in Tunisia. But they stopped the activity of Nawaat for one month. And this is according to an article from the NGO legal framework, that the government can stop the work of an NGO if the NGO doesn't respect certain legal conditions; for them Nawaat didn't provide enough documentation that was requested by the government, which is a total lie, because we always submit all documentation on time to the government. So they stopped us from doing our job, which is what we call in Tunisia, an associated media. 

It's not a company, it's not a business. It's not a startup. It is an NGO that is managing the website and the media, and now it has other activities, like we have the online website, the main website, but we also have a festival, which is a three day festival in our headquarters. We have offline debates. We bring actors, civil society, activists, politicians, to discuss important issues in Tunisia. We have a quality print magazine that is being distributed and sold in Tunisia. We have an innovation media incubation program where we support people to build projects through journalism and technology. So we have a set of offline projects that stopped for a month, and we also stopped publishing anything on the website and all our social media accounts. And now what? It's not the only one. They also froze the work of other NGOs, like the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, which is really giving support to women in Tunisia. Also the Tunisian Forum for Social and Economic Rights, which is a very important NGO giving support to grassroots movements in Tunisia. And they stopped Aswat Nissa, another NGO that is giving support to women in Tunisia. So they targeted impactful NGOs. 

So now what? It's not an exception, and we are very grateful to the wave of support that we got from Tunisian fellow citizens, and also friendly NGOs like EFF and others who wrote about the case. So this is the context in which we are living, and we are afraid that they will go for an outright ban of the network in the future. This is the worst case scenario that we are preparing ourselves for, and we might face this fate of seeing it close its doors and stop all offline activities that are taking place in Tunisia. Of course, the website will remain. We need to find a way to keep on producing, although it will really be risky for our on-the-ground journalists and video reporters and newsroom team, but we need to find a solution to keep the website alive. As an exiled media it's a very probable scenario and approach in the future, so we might go back to our exile media model, and we will keep on fighting.

JY: Yes, of course. I'm going to ask the final question. We always ask who someone’s free speech hero is, but I’m going to frame it differently for you, because you're somebody who influenced a lot of the way that I think about these topics. And so who's someone that has inspired you or influenced your work?

SBG: Although I started before the launch of WikiLeaks, for me Julian Assange was the concretization of the radical transparency movement that we saw. And for me, he is one of the heroes that really shaped a decade of transparency journalism and impacted not only the journalism industry itself, like even the established and mainstream media, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Der Spiegel, et cetera. Wikileaks partnered with big media, but not only with big media, also with small, independent newsrooms in the Global South. So for me, Julian Assange is an icon that we shouldn't forget. And he is an inspiration in the way he uses technology to to fight against big tech and state and spy agencies and war crimes.

At least some of this is coming to light:

Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting, often without the required disclosure that these are advertisements, and allowed the hacker to take control of more than 1,000 smartphones that power the company.

The hacker, who asked for anonymity because he feared retaliation from the company, said he reported the vulnerability to Doublespeed on October 31. At the time of writing, the hacker said he still has access to the company’s backend, including the phone farm itself. ...

MIT has shared the following statement following last night’s announcements by authorities in Rhode Island and Massachusetts about the individual responsible for the murders of Professor Nuno Loureiro at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, and two students during a mass shooting at Brown University. "We are grateful to all who played a part in identifying and tracking down the suspect in the killing of Prof. Loureiro. Our community continues to mourn and remember Nuno — an incredible scientist, colleague, mentor, and friend. Our thoughts are also with the Brown University community, which suffered so much loss this week.

As the authorities work to answer remaining questions, our continuing position is to refer to the law enforcement agencies and the U.S. Attorney of Massachusetts for information.

For now, our focus is on our community, on Nuno’s family, and all those who knew him.”

Remembering Nuno

• Letter to the MIT community from President Kornbluth (Dec 19)
• MIT News Obituary (Dec. 16)
• Letter to the MIT community (Dec. 16)

 The MIT News obituary will continue to be updated with remembrances from our community members who worked alongside Nuno. In time, the many communities Nuno belonged to will create opportunities to mourn his loss and celebrate his life.This page may be updated as there is additional public information to share.