At a closed-door meeting, the heads of the central banks and regulators rejected a proposal to dissolve the task force overseeing climate work.

The market “has reached an inflection point,” the company's managing director said.

On Wall Street, ESG is now effectively taboo, as the Trump administration mounts a full-throated attack on net-zero policies.

Around the world, low immunizations rates for children are a persistent problem. Now, an experiment conducted in India shows that an inexpensive combination of methods, including text reminders and small financial incentives, has a major impact on immunization.

Led by MIT economists, the research finds that a trifecta of incentives, text messages, and information provided by local residents creates a 44 percent increase in child immunizations, at low cost. Alternately, without financial incentives, but still using text messages and local information, there is a 9 percent increase in immunizations at virtually no expense — the most cost-effective increase the researchers found.

“The most effective package overall has incentives, reminders, and enlisting of community ambassadors to remind people,” says MIT economist Esther Duflo, who helped lead the research. “The cost is very low. And an even more cost-effective package is to not have incentives — you can increase immunization just from reminders through social networks. That’s basically a free lunch because you are making a more effective use of the immunization infrastructure in place. So the small cost of the program is more compensated by the fact that the full cost of administering an immunization goes down.”

The experiment is also notable for the sophisticated new method the research team developed to combine a variety of these approaches in the experiment — and then see precisely what effects were produced by different combinations as well as their component parts.

“What is good about this is that it triangulates and links all these pieces of evidence together,” says MIT economist Abhijit Banerjee, who also helped lead the project. “In terms of our confidence in saying this is a reasonable policy recipe, that’s very important.”

A new paper detailing the results and the method, “Selecting the Most Effective Nudge: Evidence from a Large-Scale Experiment on Immunization,” is being published in the journal Econometrica. Duflo and Banerjee are among 11 co-authors of the paper, along with several staff members of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Anti-Poverty Lab (J-PAL).

Duflo and Banerjee are also two of the co-founders of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Anti-Poverty Lab (J-PAL), a global leader in field experiments about antipoverty programs. In 2019 they were awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, along with Michael Kremer of Harvard University.

Analyzing 75 approaches at once

About 2 million children die per year globally from diseases that are vaccine-preventable. As of 2016, when the current study began, only 62 percent of children in India were fully immunized against tuberculosis, measles, diptheria, tetanus, and polio.

Prior research by Duflo and Banerjee has helped validate the value of finding new ways to boost immunizations rates. In one prior study the economists found that immunization rates for rural children in the state of Rajasthan, India, jumped from 5 percent to 39 percent when their families were offered a modest quantity of lentils as an incentive. (That finding was mentioned in their Nobel citation.) Subsequently, many other researchers have studied new methods of increasing immunization.

To conduct the current study, the research team partnered with the state government of Haryana, India, to conduct an experiment spanning more than 900 villages, from 2016 through 2019.

The researchers based the experiment around their three basic ways of encouraging parents to get their children vaccinated: financial incentives, text messages, and information from local “ambassadors,” that is, well-connected residents. The research team then developed a set of varying combinations of these elements. In some cases they would offer more incentives, or fewer, along with different amounts of text messages, and different kinds of exposure to local information.

In all, the researchers wound up with 75 combinations of these elements and developed a new method to evaluate them all, which they call treatment variant aggregation (TVA). Essentially, the scholars developed an algorithm that used a systematic data-driven approach to pool together variations that were ultimately identical, and noted which ones were ineffective. To select the best package, they also adjusted their results for the so-called “winner’s curse” of social-science studies, in which the policy option that works best in a particular experiment will tend to be the one that did better due to random chance.

All told, the scholars believe they have developed a way of evaluating many “treatments” — the individual elements, such as financial incentives — within the same experiment, rather than just trying out one concept, like distributing lentils, per every large study.

“It’s not one experiment where you compare A with B,” says Banerjee, who is also the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics. “What we do here is evaluate a combination of things. Even in scenarios where you see no effect, there is information to be harvested. It may be that in a combination of treatments, maybe one element works well, and the others have a negative effect and the net is zero, but there is information there. So, you want to keep track of all the possibilities as you go along, although it is a mathematically difficult exercise.”

The researchers were also able to discern that differences among local populations have an impact on the effectiveness of the different elements being tested. Generally, groups with lower immunization rates will respond more to incentives to immunize.

“In a way, we are landing back where we were in [the lentil study in] Rajasthan, where low immunization rates lead to super-high effects for these incentives,” says Duflo, who is also the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics. “We replicated the result in this context.” However, she reinforces, the new method allows scholars to acquire more information about that process more quickly.

An actionable path

The research team is hopeful that the new TVA method will gain wider adoption among scholars and lead to more experiments with multifaceted approaches, in which numerous potential solutions are evaluated simultaneously. The method could apply to antipoverty research, medical trials, and more.

Beyond that, they note, these kinds of results give governments and other organizations the ability to see how different policy options will play out, in both medical and fiscal terms.

“The reason why we did this was to be able to give the government of Haryana an actionable path, moving forward,” Duflo says.

She adds: “People before thought in order to say something with confidence, you should try just one treatment at a time,” meaning, one type of intervention at a time, such as incentives, or text messages. However, Duflo notes, “I’m very happy to say you can have more than one, and you can analyze all of them. It takes many steps, but such is life: many steps.”

In addition to Duflo and Banerjee, the co-authors of the study are Arun G. Chandrasekhar of J-PAL; Suresh Dalpath of the Government of Haryana; John Floretta of J-PAL; Matthew O. Jackson, an economist at Stanford University; Harini Kannan of J-PAL; Francine Loza of J-PAL; Anirudh Sankar of Stanford; Anna Schrimpf of J-PAL; and Maheshwor Shrestha of the World Bank.

The research was made possible through cooperation with the Haryana Department of Health and Family Welfare. 

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 19 May 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02312-2

Glaciers are retreating under climate change and generating excessive meltwater. A modelling study shows that regrowing glaciers may lead to water scarcity in the centuries after overshooting the +1.5 °C temperature target.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 19 May 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02318-w

How mountain glaciers will react to temporarily overshooting 1.5 °C of warming is poorly understood. Here the authors show irreversible global glacier loss for centuries after overshoot, implying long-term reductions in glacial water resources with amplified impacts in regions where glaciers regrow.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 19 May 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02337-7

Climate mitigation through natural climate solutions in crop-lands may be a way to reconcile climate goals with food security. However, here the authors show that some natural climate solution practices tend to lower yields and that maintaining yields lowers the potential GHG mitigation.

After multiple delays of the REAL ID Act of 2005 and its updated counterpart, the REAL ID Modernization Act, in the United States, the May 7th deadline of REAL ID enforcement has finally arrived. Does this move our security forward in the skies? The last 20 years says we got along fine without it. There were and are issues along the way that REAL ID does impose on everyday people, such as potential additional costs and rigid documentation, even if you already have a state issued ID. While TSA states this is not a national ID or a federal database, but a set of minimum standards required for federal use, we are still watchful of the mechanisms that have pivoted to potential privacy issues with the expansion of digital IDs.

But you don’t need a REAL ID just to fly domestically. There are alternatives.

The most common alternatives are passports or passport cards. You can use either instead of a REAL ID, which might save you an immediate trip to the DMV. And the additional money for a passport at least provides you the extra benefit of international travel.

Passports and passport cards are not the only alternatives to REAL ID. Additional documentation is also accepted as well: (this list is subject to change by the TSA):

• REAL ID-compliant driver's licenses or other state photo identity cards issued by Department of Motor Vehicles (or equivalent and this excludes a temporary driver’s license)
• State-issued Enhanced Driver's License (EDL) or Enhanced ID (EID)
• U.S. passport
• U.S. passport card
• DHS trusted traveler cards (Global Entry, NEXUS, SENTRI, FAST)
• U.S. Department of Defense ID, including IDs issued to dependents
• Permanent resident card
• Border crossing card
• An acceptable photo ID issued by a federally recognized Tribal Nation/Indian Tribe, including Enhanced Tribal Cards (ETCs)
• HSPD-12 PIV card
• Foreign government-issued passport
• Canadian provincial driver's license or Indian and Northern Affairs Canada card
• Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC)
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Employment Authorization Card (I-766)
• U.S. Merchant Mariner Credential
• Veteran Health Identification Card (VHIC)

Foreign government-issued passports are on this list. However, using a foreign-government issued passport may increase your chances of closer scrutiny at the security gate. REAL ID and other federally accepted documents are supposed to be about verifying your identity, not about your citizenship status. Realistically, interactions with secondary screening and law enforcement are not out of the realm of possibility for non-citizens. The power dynamics of the border has now been brought to flying domestically thanks to REAL ID. The privileges of who can and can’t fly are more sensitive now.

REAL ID and other federally accepted documents are supposed to be about verifying your identity, not about your citizenship status

Mobile Driver’s Licenses (mDLs)

Many states have rolled out the option for a Mobile Driver's License, which acts as a form of your state-issued ID on your phone and is supposed to come with an exception for REAL ID compliance. This is something we asked for since mDLs appear to satisfy their fears of forgery and cloning. But the catch is that states had to apply for this waiver:

“The final rule, effective November 25, 2024, allows states to apply to TSA for a temporary waiver of certain REAL ID requirements written in the REAL ID regulations.”

TSA stated they would publish the list of states with this waiver. But we do not see it on the website where they stated it would be. This bureaucratic hurdle appears to have rendered this exception useless, which is disappointing considering the TSA pushed for mDLs to be used first in their context.

Google ID Pass

Another exception appears to bypass state issued waivers, Google Wallet’s “ID Pass”. If a state partnered with Google to issue mDLs, or if you have a passport, then that is acceptable to TSA. This is a large leap in terms of reach of the mDL ecosystem expanding past state scrutiny to partnering directly with a private company to bring acceptable forms of ID for TSA. There’s much to be said on our worries with digital ID and the rapid expansion of them outside of the airport context. This is another gateway that highlights how ID is being shaped and accepted in the digital sense.

Both with ID Pass and mDLs, the presentation flow allows for you to tap with your phone without unlocking it. Which is a bonus, but it is not clear if TSA has the tech to read these IDs at all airports nationwide and it is still encouraged to bring a physical ID for additional verification.

A lot of the privilege dynamics of flying appear through types of ID you can obtain, whether your shoes stay on, how long you wait in line, etc. This is mostly tied to how much you can spend on traveling and how much preliminary information you establish with TSA ahead of time. The end result is that less wealthy people are subjected to the most security mechanisms at the security gate. For now, you can technically still fly without a REAL ID, but that means being subject to additional screening to verify who you are.

REAL ID enforcement has some leg room for those who do not want or can’t get a REAL ID. But the progression of digital ID is something we are keeping watch of that continues to be presented as the solution to worries of fraud and forgery. Governments and private corporations alike are pushing major efforts for rapid digital ID deployments and more frequent presentation of one’s ID attributes. Your government ID is one of the narrowest, static verifications of who you are as a person. Making sure that information is not used to create a centralized system of information was as important yesterday with REAL ID as it is today with digital IDs.

Lawmakers and regulators around the world have been prolific with passing legislation restricting freedom of expression and privacy for LGBTQ+ individuals and fueling offline intolerance. Online platforms are also complicit in this pervasive ecosystem by censoring pro-LGBTQ+ speech, forcing LGBTQ+ individuals to self-censor or turn to VPNs to avoid being profiled, harassed, doxxed, or criminally prosecuted.  

The fight for the safety and rights of LGBTQ+ people is not just a fight for visibility online (and offline)—it’s a fight for survival. This International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia, we’re sharing four essential tips for LGBTQ+ people to stay safe online.

Using Secure Messaging Services For Every Communication 

All of us, at least occasionally, need to send a message that’s safe from prying eyes. This is especially true for people who face consequences should their gender or sexual identity be revealed without their consent.

To protect your communications from being seen by others, install an encrypted messenger app such as Signal (for iOS or Android). Turn on disappearing messages, and consider shortening the amount of time messages are kept in the app if you are actually attending an event. If you have a burner device with you, be sure to save the numbers for emergency contacts.

Don’t wait until something sensitive arises: make these apps your default for all communications. As a side benefit, the messages and images sent to family and friends in group chats will be safe from being viewed by automated and human scans on services like Telegram and Facebook Messenger. 

Consider The Content You Post On Social Media 

Our decision to send messages, take pictures, and interact with online content has a real offline impact. And whilst we cannot control every circumstance, we can think about how our social media behaviour impacts those closest to us and those in our proximity, especially if these people might need extra protection around their identities. 

Talk with your friends about the potentially sensitive data you reveal about each other online. Even if you don’t have a social media account, or if you untag yourself from posts, friends can still unintentionally identify you, report your location, and make their connections to you public. This works in the offline world too, such as sharing precautions with organizers and fellow protesters when going to a demonstration, and discussing ahead of time how you can safely document and post the event online without exposing those in attendance to harm.

If you are organizing online or conversing on potentially sensitive issues, choose platforms that limit the amount of information collected and tracking undertaken. We know this is not always possible as perhaps people cannot access different applications. In this scenario, think about how you can protect your community on the platform you currently engage on. For example, if you currently use Facebook for organizing, work with others to keep your groups as private and secure as possible.

Create Incident Response Plans

Developing a plan for if or when something bad happens is a good practice for anyone, but especially for LGBTQ+ people who face increased risk online. Since many threats are social in nature, such as doxxing or networked harassment, it’s important to strategize with your allies around what to do in the event of such things happening. Doing so before an incident occurs is much easier than when you’re presently facing a crisis.

Only you and your allies can decide what belongs on such a plan, but some strategies might be: 

• Isolating the impacted areas, such as shutting down social media accounts and turning off affected devices
• Notifying others who may be affected
• Switching communications to a predetermined more secure alternative
• Noting behaviors of suspected threats and documenting these 
• Outsourcing tasks to someone further from the affected circle who is already aware of this potential responsibility.

Consider Your Safety When Attending and Protests 

Given the increase in targeted harassment and vandalism towards LGBTQ+ people, it’s important to consider counterprotesters showing up at various events. Since the boundaries between events like pride parades and protest might be blurred, precautions are necessary. Our general guide for attending a protest covers the basics for protecting your smartphone and laptop, as well as providing guidance on how to communicate and share information responsibly. We also have a handy printable version available here.

This includes:

• Removing biometric device unlock like fingerprint or FaceID to prevent police officers from physically forcing you to unlock your device with your fingerprint or face. You can password-protect your phone instead.
• Logging out of accounts and uninstalling apps or disabling app notifications to avoid app activity in precarious legal contexts from being used against you, such as using queer dating apps in places where homosexuality is illegal. 
• Turning off location services on your devices to avoid your location history from being used to identify your device’s comings and goings. For further protections, you can disable GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and phone signals when planning to attend a protest.

LGBTQ+ Rights For Every Day 

Consider your digital safety like you would any aspect of bodily autonomy and self determination—only you get to decide what aspects of yourself you share with others, how you present to the world, and what things you keep private. With a bit of care, you can maintain privacy, safety, and pride in doing so. 

And in the meantime, we’re fighting to ensure that the internet can be a safe (and fun!) place for all LGBTQ+ people. Now more than ever, it’s essential for allies, advocates, and marginalized communities to push back against these dangerous laws and ensure that the internet remains a space where all voices can be heard, free from discrimination and censorship.

From Hackaday.com, this is a neural network simulation of a pet squid.

Autonomous Behavior:

• The squid moves autonomously, making decisions based on his current state (hunger, sleepiness, etc.).
• Implements a vision cone for food detection, simulating realistic foraging behavior.
• Neural network can make decisions and form associations.
• Weights are analysed, tweaked and trained by Hebbian learning algorithm.
• Experiences from short-term and long-term memory can influence decision-making.
• Squid can create new neurons in response to his environment (Neurogenesis) ...

This week, the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee moved forward with a proposal that would allow the Secretary of the Treasury to strip any U.S. nonprofit of its tax-exempt status by unilaterally determining the organization is a “Terrorist Supporting Organization.” This proposal, which places nearly unlimited discretion in the hands of the executive branch to target organizations it disagrees with, poses an existential threat to nonprofits across the U.S. 

This proposal, added to the House’s budget reconciliation bill, is an exact copy of a House-passed bill that EFF and hundreds of nonprofits across the country strongly opposed last fall. Thankfully, the Senate rejected that bill, and we urge the House to do the same when the budget reconciliation bill comes up for a vote on the House floor. 

The goal of this proposal is not to stop the spread of or support for terrorism; the U.S. already has myriad other laws that do that, including existing tax code section 501(p), which allows the government to revoke the tax status of designated “Terrorist Organizations.” Instead, this proposal is designed to inhibit free speech by discouraging nonprofits from working with and advocating on behalf of disadvantaged individuals and groups, like Venezuelans or Palestinians, who may be associated, even completely incidentally, with any group the U.S. deems a terrorist organization. And depending on what future groups this administration decides to label as terrorist organizations, it could also threaten those advocating for racial justice, LGBTQ rights, immigrant communities, climate action, human rights, and other issues opposed by this administration. 

On top of its threats to free speech, the language lacks due process protections for targeted nonprofit organizations. In addition to placing sole authority in the hands of the Treasury Secretary, the bill does not require the Treasury Secretary to disclose the reasons for or evidence supporting a “Terrorist Supporting Organization” designation. This, combined with only providing an after-the-fact administrative or judicial appeals process, would place a nearly insurmountable burden on any nonprofit to prove a negative—that they are not a terrorist supporting organization—instead of placing the burden where it should be, on the government. 

As laid out in letter led by ACLU and signed by over 350 diverse nonprofits, this bill would provide the executive branch with: 

“the authority to target its political opponents and use the fear of crippling legal fees, the stigma of the designation, and donors fleeing controversy to stifle dissent and chill speech and advocacy. And while the broadest applications of this authority may not ultimately hold up in court, the potential reputational and financial cost of fending off an investigation and litigating a wrongful designation could functionally mean the end of a targeted nonprofit before it ever has its day in court.” 

Current tax law makes it a crime for the President and other high-level officials to order IRS investigations over policy disagreements. This proposal creates a loophole to this rule that could chill nonprofits for years to come. 

There is no question that nonprofits and educational institutions – along with many other groups and individuals – are under threat from this administration. If passed, future administrations, regardless of party affiliation, could weaponize the powers in this bill against nonprofits of all kinds. We urge the House to vote down this proposal. 

“MIT Sloan was my first and only choice,” says MIT graduate student David Brown. After receiving his BS in chemical engineering at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Brown spent eight years as a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army, serving as a platoon leader and troop commander. 

Now in the final year of his MBA, Brown has co-founded a climate tech company — Helix Carbon — with Ariel Furst, an MIT assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and Evan Haas MBA ’24, SM ’24. Their goal: erase the carbon footprint of tough-to-decarbonize industries like ironmaking, polyurethanes, and olefins by generating competitively-priced, carbon-neutral fuels directly from waste carbon dioxide (CO2). It’s an ambitious project; they’re looking to scale the company large enough to have a gigaton per year impact on CO2 emissions. They have lab space off campus, and after graduation, Brown will be taking a full-time job as chief operating officer.

“What I loved about the Army was that I felt every day that the work I was doing was important or impactful in some way. I wanted that to continue, and felt the best way to have the greatest possible positive impact was to use my operational skills learned from the military to help close the gap between the lab and impact in the market.”

The following photo essay provides a snapshot of what a typical day for Brown has been like as an MIT student.

The Knight Science Journalism Program (KSJ) at MIT has announced that Usha Lee McFarling, national science correspondent for STAT and former KSJ Fellow, will be joining the team in August as their next director.

As director, McFarling will play a central role in helping to manage KSJ — an elite mid-career fellowship program that brings prominent science journalists from around the world for 10 months of study and intellectual exploration at MIT, Harvard University, and other institutions in the Boston area.

“I’m eager to take the helm during this critical time for science journalism, a time when journalism is under attack both politically and economically and misinformation — especially in areas of science and health — is rife,” says McFarling. “My goal is for the program to find even more ways to support our field and its practitioners as they carry on their important work.”

McFarling is a veteran science writer, most recently working for STAT News. She previously reported for the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, and the San Antonio Light, and was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow in 1992-93. McFarling graduated from Brown University with a degree in biology in 1988 and later earned a master’s degree in biological psychology from the University of California at Berkeley.

Her work on the diseased state of the world’s oceans earned the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism and a Polk Award, among others. Her coverage of health disparities at STAT has earned an Edward R. Murrow award, and awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, and the Asian American Journalists Association. In 2024, she was awarded the Victor Cohn prize for excellence in medical science reporting and the Bernard Lo, MD award in bioethics.

McFarling will succeed director Deborah Blum, who served as director for 10 years. Blum, also a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and the bestselling author of six books, is retiring to return to a full-time writing career. She will join the board of Undark, a magazine she helped found while at KSJ, and continue as a board member of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, among others.

“It’s been an honor to serve as director of the Knight Science Journalism program for the past 10 years and a pleasure to be able to support the important work that science journalists do,” Blum says. “And I know that under the direction of Usha McFarling — who brings such talent and intelligence to the job — that KSJ will continue to grow and thrive in all the best ways.”

This is a weird story:

U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said.

[…]

Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said.

Reuters was unable to determine how many solar power inverters and batteries they have looked at...

The EPA administrator might have provided a road map to revoking the critical scientific finding in a rule that repeals the power plant climate regulation.

David Richardson told staff in a private meeting that FEMA’s role won’t change much in 2025, even as the administration considers reducing aid to states.

Jonathan Pershing previously served as a climate envoy for the State Department.

The proposed regulation would force employers to provide workers with water and a cool place to rest when temperatures climb.

“Ignoring climate change’s destabilizing effects on the economy is not an option,” the lawmakers wrote.

The deal entails delivery of carbon credits generated from projects that sequester carbon dioxide by planting trees or restoring degraded land.