The president’s swift destruction of regulations in his first year could help him make lasting changes, with the Supreme Court’s help.

The department used its emergency powers to delay the plant's retirement, which is a staple of the state's climate plans.

Property insurance price hikes and claims denials emerge as a political issue. "Being overcharged and cheated ... is a nonpartisan sentiment," Republican Gentner Drummond said.

The results suggest that public perceptions of the data center boom are still politically malleable.

A final energy plan approved by policymakers won’t meet the state's landmark 2019 climate law goals.

Under the latest deal, automakers could sell plug-in hybrids and range extenders after 2035.

Stricter climate policies would save hundreds of glaciers in Europe’s Alps and tens of thousands worldwide, study finds.

Assisted fertilization is gaining momentum in the Caribbean to counter the drastic loss of corals due to climate change.

A study used by the Network for Greening the Financial System that projected severe economic fallout from climate change was retracted.

This article may be updated.

Nuno Loureiro, a professor of nuclear science and engineering and of physics at MIT, has died. He was 47.

A lauded theoretical physicist and fusion scientist, and director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Loureiro joined MIT’s faculty in 2016. His research addressed complex problems lurking at the center of fusion vacuum chambers and at the edges of the universe.

Loureiro’s research at MIT advanced scientists’ understanding of plasma behavior, including turbulence, and uncovered the physics behind astronomical phenomena like solar flares. He was the Herman Feshbach (1942) Professor of Physics at MIT and was named director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center in 2024, though his contributions to fusion science and engineering began far before that.

His research on magnetized plasma dynamics, magnetic field amplification, and confinement and transport in fusion plasmas helped inform the design of fusion devices that could harness the energy of fusing plasmas, bringing the dream of clean, near-limitless fusion power closer to reality.

“Nuno was not only a brilliant scientist, he was a brilliant person,” says Dennis Whyte, the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering, who previously served as the head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center. “He shone a bright light as a mentor, friend, teacher, colleague and leader, and was universally admired for his articulate, compassionate manner. His loss is immeasurable to our community at the PSFC, NSE and MIT, and around the entire fusion and plasma research world.”

“Nuno was a champion for plasma physics within the Physics Department, a wonderful and engaging colleague, and an inspiring and caring mentor for graduate students working in plasma science.  His recent work on quantum computing algorithms for plasma physics simulations was a particularly exciting new scientific direction,” says Deepto Chakrabarty, the William A. M. Burden Professor in Astrophysics and head of the Department of Physics.

Whether working on fusion or astrophysics research, Loureiro merged fundamental physics with technology and engineering, to maximize impact.

“There are people who are driven by technology and engineering, and others who are driven by fundamental mathematics and physics. We need both,” Loureiro said in 2019. “When we stimulate theoretically inclined minds by framing plasma physics and fusion challenges as beautiful theoretical physics problems, we bring into the game incredibly brilliant students — people who we want to attract to fusion development.”

Loureiro majored in physics at Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST) in Portugal and obtained a PhD in physics at Imperial College London in 2005. He conducted postdoctoral work at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory for the next two years before moving to the UKAEA Culham Center for Fusion Energy in 2007. Loureiro returned to IST in 2009, where he was a researcher at the Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion until coming to MIT in 2016.

He wasted no time contributing to the intellectual environment at MIT, spending part of his first two years at the Institute working on the vexing problem of plasma turbulence. Plasma is the super-hot state of matter that serves as the fuel for fusion reactors. Loureiro’s lab at PSFC illuminated how plasma behaves inside fusion reactors, which could help prevent material failures and better contain the plasma to harvest electricity.

“Nuno was not only an extraordinary scientist and educator, but also a tremendous colleague, mentor, and friend who cared deeply about his students and his community. His absence will be felt profoundly across NSE and far beyond,” Benoit Forget, the KEPCO Professor and head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, wrote in an email to the department today.

On other fronts, Loureiro’s work in astrophysics helped reveal fundamental mechanisms of the universe. He put forward the first theory of turbulence in pair plasmas, which differ from regular plasmas and may be abundant in space. The work was driven, in part, by unprecedented observations of a binary neutron star merger in 2018.

As an assistant professor and then a full professor at MIT, Loureiro taught course 22.612 (Intro to Plasma Physics) and course 22.615 (MHD Theory of Fusion Systems), for which he was twice recognized with the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering’s PAI Outstanding Professor Award.

Loureiro’s research earned him many prominent awards throughout his prolific career, including the National Science Foundation Career Award and the American Physical Society Thomas H. Stix Award for Outstanding Early Career Contributions to Plasma Physics Research. He was also an APS fellow. Earlier this year, he earned the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

The world’s most common construction material has a secret. Cement, the “glue” that holds concrete together, gradually “breathes in” and stores millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air over the lifetimes of buildings and infrastructure.  

A new study from the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub quantifies this process, carbon uptake, at a national scale for the first time. Using a novel approach, the research team found that the cement in U.S. buildings and infrastructure sequesters over 6.5 million metric tons of CO2 annually. This corresponds to roughly 13 percent of the process emissions — the CO2 released by the underlying chemical reaction — in U.S. cement manufacturing. In Mexico, the same building stock sequesters about 5 million tons a year.   

But how did the team come up with those numbers? 

Scientists have known how carbon uptake works for decades. CO2 enters concrete or mortar — the mixture that glues together blocks, brick, and stones — through tiny pores, reacts with the calcium-rich products in cement, and becomes locked into a stable mineral called calcium carbonate, or limestone. 

The chemistry is well-known, but calculating the magnitude of this at scale is not. A concrete highway in Dallas sequesters CO2 differently than Mexico City apartments made from concrete masonry units (CMUs), also called concrete blocks or, colloquially, cinder blocks. And a foundation slab buried under the snow in Fairbanks, Alaska, “breathes in” CO2 at a different pace entirely. 

As Hessam AzariJafari, lead author and research scientist in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, explains, “Carbon uptake is very sensitive to context. Four major factors drive it: the type of cement used, the product we make with it — concrete, CMUs, or mortar — the geometry of the structure, and the climate and conditions it’s exposed to. Even within the same structure, uptake can vary five-fold between different elements.” 

As no two structures sequester CO2 in the same way, estimating uptake nationwide would normally require simulating an array of cement-based elements: slabs, walls, beams, columns, pavements, and more. On top of that, each of those has its own age, geometry, mixture, and exposure condition to account for.  

Seeing that this approach would be like trying to count every grain of sand on a beach, the team took a different route. They developed hundreds of archetypes, typical designs that could stand in for different buildings and pieces of infrastructure. It’s a bit like measuring the beach instead by mapping out its shape, depth, and shoreline to estimate how much sand usually sits in a given spot.  

With these archetypes in hand, the team modeled how each one sequesters CO2 in different environments and how common each is across every state in the United States and Mexico. In this way, they could estimate not just how much CO2 structures sequester, but why those numbers differ.  

Two factors stood out. The first was the “construction trend,” or how the amount of new construction had changed over the previous five years. Because it reflects how quickly cement products are being added to the building stock, it shapes how much cement each state consumes and, therefore, how much of that cement is actively carbonating. The second was the ratio of mortar to concrete, since porous mortars sequester CO2 an order of magnitude faster than denser concrete. 

In states where mortar use was higher, the fraction of CO2 uptake relative to process emissions was noticeably greater. “We observed something unique about Mexico: Despite using half the cement that the U.S. does, the country has three-quarters of the uptake,” notes AzariJafari. “This is because Mexico makes more use of mortars and lower-strength concrete, and bagged cement mixed on-site. These practices are why their uptake sequesters about a quarter of their cement manufacturing emissions.” 

While care must be taken for structural elements that use steel reinforcement, as uptake can accelerate corrosion, it’s possible to enhance the uptake of many elements without negative impacts. 

Randolph Kirchain, director of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub, principal research scientist in the MIT Materials Research Laboratory, and the senior author of this study, explains: “For instance, increasing the amount of surface area exposed to air accelerates uptake and can be achieved by foregoing painting or tiling, or choosing designs like waffle slabs with a higher surface area-to-volume ratio. Additionally, avoiding unnecessarily stronger, less-porous concrete mixtures than required would speed up uptake while using less cement.” 

“There is a real opportunity to refine how carbon uptake from cement is represented in national inventories,” AzariJafari comments. “The buildings around us and the concrete beneath our feet are constantly ‘breathing in’ millions of tons of CO2. Nevertheless, some of the simplified values in widely used reporting frameworks can lead to higher estimates than what we observe empirically. Integrating updated science into international inventories and guidelines such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would help ensure that reported numbers reflect the material and temporal realities of the sector.” 

By offering the first rigorous, bottom-up estimation of carbon uptake at a national scale, the team’s work provides a more representative picture of cement’s environmental impact. As we work to decarbonize the built environment, understanding what our structures are already doing in the background may be just as important as the innovations we pursue moving forward. The approach developed by MIT researchers could be extended to other countries by combining global building-stock databases with national cement-production statistics. It could also inform the design of structures that safely maximize uptake. 

The findings were published Dec. 15 in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Joining AzariJafari and Kirchain on the paper are MIT researchers Elizabeth Moore of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the MIT Climate Project and former postdocs Ipek Bensu Manav SM ’21, PhD ’24 and Motahareh Rahimi, along with Bruno Huet and Christophe Levy from the Holcim Innovation Center in France.

The final EFFector of 2025 is here! Just in time to keep you up-to-date on the latests happenings in the fight for privacy and free speech online.

In this latest issue, we're sharing how to spot sneaky ALPR cameras at the U.S. border, covering a host of new resources on age verification laws, and explaining why AI companies need to protect chatbot logs from bulk surveillance.

Prefer to listen in? Check out our audio companion, where EFF Activist Molly Buckley explains our new resource explaining age verification laws and how you can fight back. Catch the conversation on YouTube or the Internet Archive.

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EFFECTOR 37.18 - 🪪 AGE VERIFICATION IS COMING FOR THE INTERNET

Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression. 

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New report: “The Party’s AI: How China’s New AI Systems are Reshaping Human Rights.” From a summary article:

China is already the world’s largest exporter of AI powered surveillance technology; new surveillance technologies and platforms developed in China are also not likely to simply stay there. By exposing the full scope of China’s AI driven control apparatus, this report presents clear, evidence based insights for policymakers, civil society, the media and technology companies seeking to counter the rise of AI enabled repression and human rights violations, and China’s growing efforts to project that repression beyond its borders...

The House-passed National Defense Authorization Act would spur an investigation of whether the U.S. military bio-engineered Lyme disease.

Withdrawals are increasing as the government hikes its premiums to in part compensate for damage associated with climate change.

The price of crude has dropped since the president ordered the capture of a sanctioned tanker carrying 2 million barrels of Venezuelan oil.

The Energy secretary said supporting the use of more fossil fuels is “common sense" as he bashed renewables.

The price of Washington's pollution allowances hit a record high. The state might soften its ambitions deadlines for emissions reductions.

The bill would require certain fossil fuel companies to contribute to a state fund to compensate for their impact on climate change.

The administration is favoring oil giants in a fight over Louisiana's disappearing coastline.