Long story of a $250 million cryptocurrency theft that, in a complicated chain events, resulted in a pretty brutal kidnapping.

Earth might be on track to warm more rapidly than expected, some scientists warn.

State lawmakers, including many Republicans, want to make it harder for insurers to raise prices as disasters drive up premiums.

The industry appeal comes as President Donald Trump is trying to scrap state carbon market laws.

The United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer, but other countries have several times the “proved reserves.”

The State Department's Office of Global Change was notified Thursday that it would be shuttered.

In the weeks before his death, Francis repeated a decade-old plea for a break from both Trumpian greed and the left’s economic rationalism.

Some Democrats argue the state's rooftop and community solar programs are an inefficient way to cut emissions.

EPA said in an email Wednesday the rebate money was being distributed to awardees who have passed quality assurance.

Text of the Republicans' tax, defense, immigration and energy legislation will emerge in the coming days.

At the top of the list, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom have each caused a bit more than $2 trillion in heat damage over the decades.

It’s becoming riskier to grow grapes in the state’s prominent winemaking region as climate change has brought unpredictable weather.

It has now been nearly two months since UK Prime Minister Starmer spoke with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, yet there has been no tangible progress in the case of Alaa Abd El Fattah, the British-Egyptian writer, activist, and technologist who remains imprisoned in Egypt.

In yet another blow to his family and supporters, who have been tirelessly advocating for his release, we’ve now learned that Alaa has fallen ill while on a sustained hunger strike protesting his incarceration. Alaa’s sentence was due to end last September.

Alaa’s mother, Laila Soueif, initiated a hunger strike beginning on his intended release date to amplify demands for her son’s release. Soueif, too, is facing deteriorating health, having to shift from a full hunger strike to a partial strike allowing for 300 liquid calories a day after being hospitalized in London, and following Starmer’s subsequent call with el-Sisi. Risking serious complications, today  marks the 208th day of her hunger strike in protest at her son’s continued imprisonment in Egypt. Calling for her son’s freedom, Soueif has warned that she will resume a full hunger strike if progress is not made soon on Alaa’s case.

As of April 24, Alaa is on Day 55 of a hunger strike that he began on 1 March. He is surviving on a strict ration of herbal tea, black coffee, and rehydration salts, and is now being treated in Wadi El-Natrun prison for severe stomach pains. In a letter to his family on April 20, Alaa described worsening conditions and side effects from medications administered by prison doctors: “the truth is the inflammation is getting worse … all these medicines are making me dizzy and yesterday my vision was hazy and I saw distant objects double.”

Responding to Alaa’ illness in prison, Alaa’s sister Sanaa Seif stated in a press release: “We are all so exhausted. My mum and my brother are literally putting their bodies on the line, just to give Alaa the freedom he deserves. Their health is so precarious, I’m always afraid that we are on the verge of a tragedy. We need Keir Starmer to do all he can to bring Alaa home to us.”

Alaa’s case has galvanized support from across the UK political spectrum, with more than 50 parliamentarians urging immediate action. Prime Minister Starmer has publicly committed to pressing for Alaa’s release, but these words must now be matched by action. As Alaa’s health deteriorates, and his family’s ordeal drags on, the need for decisive intervention has never been more urgent. The time to secure Alaa’s freedom—and prevent further tragedy—is now.

EFF continues to work with the campaign to free Alaa: his case is a critical test of digital rights, free expression, and international justice. 

Interesting:

The company has released a working rootkit called “Curing” that uses io_uring, a feature built into the Linux kernel, to stealthily perform malicious activities without being caught by many of the detection solutions currently on the market.

At the heart of the issue is the heavy reliance on monitoring system calls, which has become the go-to method for many cybersecurity vendors. The problem? Attackers can completely sidestep these monitored calls by leaning on io_uring instead. This clever method could let bad actors quietly make network connections or tamper with files without triggering the usual alarms...

Coordinating complicated interactive systems, whether it’s the different modes of transportation in a city or the various components that must work together to make an effective and efficient robot, is an increasingly important subject for software designers to tackle. Now, researchers at MIT have developed an entirely new way of approaching these complex problems, using simple diagrams as a tool to reveal better approaches to software optimization in deep-learning models.

They say the new method makes addressing these complex tasks so simple that it can be reduced to a drawing that would fit on the back of a napkin.

The new approach is described in the journal Transactions of Machine Learning Research, in a paper by incoming doctoral student Vincent Abbott and Professor Gioele Zardini of MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).

“We designed a new language to talk about these new systems,” Zardini says. This new diagram-based “language” is heavily based on something called category theory, he explains.

It all has to do with designing the underlying architecture of computer algorithms — the programs that will actually end up sensing and controlling the various different parts of the system that’s being optimized. “The components are different pieces of an algorithm, and they have to talk to each other, exchange information, but also account for energy usage, memory consumption, and so on.” Such optimizations are notoriously difficult because each change in one part of the system can in turn cause changes in other parts, which can further affect other parts, and so on.

The researchers decided to focus on the particular class of deep-learning algorithms, which are currently a hot topic of research. Deep learning is the basis of the large artificial intelligence models, including large language models such as ChatGPT and image-generation models such as Midjourney. These models manipulate data by a “deep” series of matrix multiplications interspersed with other operations. The numbers within matrices are parameters, and are updated during long training runs, allowing for complex patterns to be found. Models consist of billions of parameters, making computation expensive, and hence improved resource usage and optimization invaluable.

Diagrams can represent details of the parallelized operations that deep-learning models consist of, revealing the relationships between algorithms and the parallelized graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware they run on, supplied by companies such as NVIDIA. “I’m very excited about this,” says Zardini, because “we seem to have found a language that very nicely describes deep learning algorithms, explicitly representing all the important things, which is the operators you use,” for example the energy consumption, the memory allocation, and any other parameter that you’re trying to optimize for.

Much of the progress within deep learning has stemmed from resource efficiency optimizations. The latest DeepSeek model showed that a small team can compete with top models from OpenAI and other major labs by focusing on resource efficiency and the relationship between software and hardware. Typically, in deriving these optimizations, he says, “people need a lot of trial and error to discover new architectures.” For example, a widely used optimization program called FlashAttention took more than four years to develop, he says. But with the new framework they developed, “we can really approach this problem in a more formal way.” And all of this is represented visually in a precisely defined graphical language.

But the methods that have been used to find these improvements “are very limited,” he says. “I think this shows that there’s a major gap, in that we don’t have a formal systematic method of relating an algorithm to either its optimal execution, or even really understanding how many resources it will take to run.” But now, with the new diagram-based method they devised, such a system exists.

Category theory, which underlies this approach, is a way of mathematically describing the different components of a system and how they interact in a generalized, abstract manner. Different perspectives can be related. For example, mathematical formulas can be related to algorithms that implement them and use resources, or descriptions of systems can be related to robust “monoidal string diagrams.” These visualizations allow you to directly play around and experiment with how the different parts connect and interact. What they developed, he says, amounts to “string diagrams on steroids,” which incorporates many more graphical conventions and many more properties.

“Category theory can be thought of as the mathematics of abstraction and composition,” Abbott says. “Any compositional system can be described using category theory, and the relationship between compositional systems can then also be studied.” Algebraic rules that are typically associated with functions can also be represented as diagrams, he says. “Then, a lot of the visual tricks we can do with diagrams, we can relate to algebraic tricks and functions. So, it creates this correspondence between these different systems.”

As a result, he says, “this solves a very important problem, which is that we have these deep-learning algorithms, but they’re not clearly understood as mathematical models.” But by representing them as diagrams, it becomes possible to approach them formally and systematically, he says.

One thing this enables is a clear visual understanding of the way parallel real-world processes can be represented by parallel processing in multicore computer GPUs. “In this way,” Abbott says, “diagrams can both represent a function, and then reveal how to optimally execute it on a GPU.”

The “attention” algorithm is used by deep-learning algorithms that require general, contextual information, and is a key phase of the serialized blocks that constitute large language models such as ChatGPT. FlashAttention is an optimization that took years to develop, but resulted in a sixfold improvement in the speed of attention algorithms.

Applying their method to the well-established FlashAttention algorithm, Zardini says that “here we are able to derive it, literally, on a napkin.” He then adds, “OK, maybe it’s a large napkin.” But to drive home the point about how much their new approach can simplify dealing with these complex algorithms, they titled their formal research paper on the work “FlashAttention on a Napkin.”

This method, Abbott says, “allows for optimization to be really quickly derived, in contrast to prevailing methods.” While they initially applied this approach to the already existing FlashAttention algorithm, thus verifying its effectiveness, “we hope to now use this language to automate the detection of improvements,” says Zardini, who in addition to being a principal investigator in LIDS, is the Rudge and Nancy Allen Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and an affiliate faculty with the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

The plan is that ultimately, he says, they will develop the software to the point that “the researcher uploads their code, and with the new algorithm you automatically detect what can be improved, what can be optimized, and you return an optimized version of the algorithm to the user.”

In addition to automating algorithm optimization, Zardini notes that a robust analysis of how deep-learning algorithms relate to hardware resource usage allows for systematic co-design of hardware and software. This line of work integrates with Zardini’s focus on categorical co-design, which uses the tools of category theory to simultaneously optimize various components of engineered systems.

Abbott says that “this whole field of optimized deep learning models, I believe, is quite critically unaddressed, and that’s why these diagrams are so exciting. They open the doors to a systematic approach to this problem.”

“I’m very impressed by the quality of this research. ... The new approach to diagramming deep-learning algorithms used by this paper could be a very significant step,” says Jeremy Howard, founder and CEO of Answers.ai, who was not associated with this work. “This paper is the first time I’ve seen such a notation used to deeply analyze the performance of a deep-learning algorithm on real-world hardware. ... The next step will be to see whether real-world performance gains can be achieved.”

“This is a beautifully executed piece of theoretical research, which also aims for high accessibility to uninitiated readers — a trait rarely seen in papers of this kind,” says Petar Velickovic, a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind and a lecturer at Cambridge University, who was not associated with this work. These researchers, he says, “are clearly excellent communicators, and I cannot wait to see what they come up with next!”

The new diagram-based language, having been posted online, has already attracted great attention and interest from software developers. A reviewer from Abbott’s prior paper introducing the diagrams noted that “The proposed neural circuit diagrams look great from an artistic standpoint (as far as I am able to judge this).” “It’s technical research, but it’s also flashy!” Zardini says.

Martina Solano Soto is on a mission to pursue her passion for physics and, ultimately, to solve big problems. Since she was a kid, she has had a lot of questions: Why do animals exist? What are we doing here? Why don’t we know more about the Big Bang? And she has been determined to find answers. 

“That’s why I found MIT OpenCourseWare,” says Solano, of Girona, Spain. “When I was 14, I started to browse and wanted to find information that was reliable, dynamic, and updated. I found MIT resources by chance, and it’s one of the biggest things that has happened to me.” 

In addition to OpenCourseWare, which offers free, online, open educational resources from more than 2,500 courses that span the MIT undergraduate and graduate curriculum, Solano also took advantage of the MIT Open Learning Library. Part of MIT Open Learning, the library offers free courses and invites people to learn at their own pace while receiving immediate feedback through interactive content and exercises. 

Solano, who is now 17, has studied quantum physics via OpenCourseWare — also part of MIT Open Learning — and she has taken Open Learning Library courses on electricity and magnetism, calculus, quantum computation, and kinematics. She even created her own syllabus, complete with homework, to ensure she stayed on track and kept her goals in mind. Those goals include studying math and physics as an undergraduate. She also hopes to study general relativity and quantum mechanics at the doctoral level. “I really want to unify them to find a theory of quantum gravity,” she says. “I want to spend all my life studying and learning.” 

Solano was particularly motivated by Barton Zwiebach, professor of physics, whose courses Quantum Physics I and Quantum Physics II are available on MIT OpenCourseWare. She took advantage of all of the resources that were provided: video lectures, assignments, lecture notes, and exams.  

“I was fascinated by the way he explained. I just understood everything, and it was amazing,” she says. “Then, I learned about his book, 'A First Course in String Theory,' and it was because of him that I learned about black holes and gravity. I’m extremely grateful.” 

While Solano gives much credit to the variety and quality of Open Learning resources, she also stresses the importance of being organized. As a high school student, she has things other than string theory on her mind: her school, extracurriculars, friends, and family.  

For anyone in a similar position, she recommends “figuring out what you’re most interested in and how you can take advantage of the flexibility of Open Learning resources. Is there a half-hour before bed to watch a video, or some time on the weekend to read lecture notes? If you figure out how to make it work for you, it is definitely worth the effort.”  

“If you do that, you are going to grow academically and personally,” Solano says. “When you go to school, you will feel more confident.” 

And Solano is not slowing down. She plans to continue using Open Learning resources, this time turning her attention to graduate-level courses, all in service of her curiosity and drive for knowledge. 

“When I was younger, I read the book 'The God Equation,' by Michio Kaku, which explains quantum gravity theory. Something inside me awoke,” she recalls. “I really want to know what happens at the center of a black hole, and how we unify quantum mechanics, black holes, and general relativity. I decided that I want to invest my life in this.”  

She is well on her way. Last summer, Solano applied for and received a scholarship to study particle physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. This summer, she’s applying for opportunities to study the cosmos. All of this, she says, is only possible thanks to what she has learned with MIT Open Learning resources. 

“The applications ask you to explain what you like about physics, and thanks to MIT, I’m able to express that,” Solano says. “I’m able to go for these scholarships and really fight for what I dream.” 

On March 6, MIT launched its first lunar landing mission since the Apollo era, sending three payloads — the AstroAnt, the RESOURCE 3D camera, and the HUMANS nanowafer — to the moon’s south polar region. The mission was based out of Luna, a mission control space designed by MIT Department of Architecture students and faculty in collaboration with the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, Inploration, and Simpson Gumpertz and Heger. It is installed in the MIT Media Lab ground-floor gallery and is open to the public as part of Artfinity, MIT’s Festival for the Arts. The installation allows visitors to observe payload operators at work and interact with the software used for the mission, thanks to virtual reality.

A central hub for mission operations, the control room is a structural and conceptual achievement, balancing technical challenges with a vision for an immersive experience, and the result of a multidisciplinary approach. “This will be our moon on Earth,” says Mateo Fernandez, a third-year MArch student and 2024 MAD Design Fellow, who designed and fabricated Luna in collaboration with Nebyu Haile, a PhD student in the Building Technology program in the Department of Architecture, and Simon Lesina Debiasi, a research assistant in the SMArchS Computation program and part of the Self-Assembly Lab. “The design was meant for people — for the researchers to be able to see what’s happening at all times, and for the spectators to have a 360 panoramic view of everything that’s going on,” explains Fernandez. “A key vision of the team was to create a control room that broke away from the traditional, closed-off model — one that instead invited the public to observe, ask questions, and engage with the mission,” adds Haile.

For this project, students were advised by Skylar Tibbits, founder and co-director of the Self-Assembly Lab, associate professor of design research, and the Morningside Academy for Design (MAD)’s assistant director for education; J. Roc Jih, associate professor of the practice in architectural design; John Ochsendorf, MIT Class of 1942 Professor with appointments in the departments of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering, and founding director of MAD; and Brandon Clifford, associate professor of architecture. The team worked closely with Cody Paige, director of the Space Exploration Initiative at the Media Lab, and her collaborators, emphasizing that they “tried to keep things very minimal, very simple, because at the end of the day,” explains Fernandez, “we wanted to create a design that allows the researchers to shine and the mission to shine.”

“This project grew out of the Space Architecture class we co-taught with Cody Paige and astronaut and MIT AeroAstro [Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics] faculty member Jeff Hoffman” in the fall semester, explains Tibbits. “Mateo was part of that studio, and from there, Cody invited us to design the mission control project. We then brought Mateo onboard, Simon, Nebyu, and the rest of the project team.” According to Tibbits, “this project represents MIT’s mind-and-hand ethos. We had designers, architects, artists, computational experts, and engineers working together, reflecting the polymath vision — left brain, right brain, the creative and the technical coming together to make this possible.”

Luna was funded and informed by Tibbits and Jih’s Professor Amar G. Bose Research Grant Program. “J. Jih and I had been doing research for the Bose grant around basalt and mono-material construction,” says Tibbits, adding that they “had explored foamed glass materials similar to pumice or foamed basalt, which are also similar to lunar regolith.” “FOAMGLAS is typically used for insulation, but it has diverse applications, including direct ground contact and exterior walls, with strong acoustic and thermal properties,” says Jih. “We helped Mateo understand how the material is used in architecture today, and how it could be applied in this project, aligning with our work on new material palettes and mono-material construction techniques.”

Additional funding came from Inploration, a project run by creative director, author, and curator Lawrence Azerrad, as well as expeditionary artist, curator, and analog astronaut artist Richelle Ellis, and Comcast, a Media Lab member company. It was also supported by the MIT Morningside Academy for Design through Fernandez’s Design Fellowship. Additional support came from industry members such as Owens Corning (construction materials), Bose (communications), as well as MIT Media Lab member companies Dell Technologies (operations hardware) and Steelcase (operations seating). 

A moon on Earth

While the lunar mission ended prematurely, the team says it achieved success in the design and construction of a control room embodying MIT’s design approach and capacity to explore new technologies while maintaining simplicity. Luna looks like variations of the moon, offering different perspectives of the moon’s round or crescent shape, depending on the viewer’s position.

“What’s remarkable is how close the final output is to Mateo’s original sketches and renderings,” Tibbits notes. “That often doesn’t happen — where the final built project aligns so precisely with the initial design intent.”

Luna’s entire structure is built from FOAMGLAS, a durable material composed of glass cells usually used for insulation. “FOAMGLAS is an interesting material,” says Lesina Debiasi, who supported fabrication efforts, ensuring a fast and safe process. “It’s relatively durable and light, but can easily be crumbled with a sharp edge or blade, requiring every step of the fabrication process — cutting, texturing, sealing — to be carefully controlled.”

Fernandez, whose design experience was influenced by the idea that “simple moves” are most powerful, explains: “We’re giving a second life to materials that are not thought of for building construction … and I think that’s an effective idea. Here, you don’t need wood, concrete, rebar — you can build with one material only.” While the interior of the dome-shaped construction is smooth, the exterior was hand textured to evoke the basalt-like surface of the moon.

The lightweight cellular glass produced by Owens Corning, which sponsored part of the material, comes as an unexpected choice for a compression structure — a type of architectural design where stability is achieved through the natural force of compression, usually implying heavy materials. The control room doesn’t use connections or additional supports, and depends upon the precise placement, size, and weight of individual blocks to create a stable form from a succession of arches.

“Traditional compression structures rely on their own weight for stability, but using a material that is more than 10 times lighter than masonry meant we had to rethink everything. It was about finding the perfect balance between design vision and structural integrity,” reflects Haile, who was responsible for the structural calculations for the dome and its support.

Compression relies on gravity, and wouldn’t be a viable construction method on the moon itself. “We’re building using physics, loads, structures, and equilibrium to create this thing that looks like the moon, but depends on Earth’s forces to be built. I think people don’t see that at first, but there’s something cheeky and ironic about it,” confides Fernandez, acknowledging that the project merges historical building methods with contemporary design.

The location and purpose of Luna — both a work space and an installation engaging the public — implied balancing privacy and transparency to achieve functionality. “One of the most important design elements that reflected this vision was the openness of the dome,” says Haile. “We worked closely from the start to find the right balance — adjusting the angle and size of the opening to make the space feel welcoming, while still offering some privacy to those working inside.”

The power of collaboration

With the FOAMGLAS material, the team had to invent a fabrication process that would achieve the initial vision while maintaining structural integrity. Sourcing a material with radically different properties compared to conventional construction implied collaborating closely on the engineering front, the lightweight nature of the cellular glass requiring creative problem-solving: “What appears perfect in digital models doesn’t always translate seamlessly into the real world,” says Haile. “The slope, curves, and overall geometry directly determine whether the dome will stand, requiring Mateo and me to work in sync from the very beginning through the end of construction.” While the engineering was primarily led by Haile and Ochsendorf, the structural design was officially reviewed and approved by Paul Kassabian at Simpson Gumpertz and Heger (SGH), ensuring compliance with engineering standards and building codes.

“None of us had worked with FOAMGLAS before, and we needed to figure out how best to cut, texture, and seal it,” says Lesina Debiasi. “Since each row consists of a distinct block shape and specific angles, ensuring accuracy and repeatability across all the blocks became a major challenge. Since we had to cut each individual block four times before we were able to groove and texture the surface, creating a safe production process and mitigating the distribution of dust was critical,” he explains. “Working inside a tent, wearing personal protective equipment like masks, visors, suits, and gloves made it possible to work for an extended period with this material.”

In addition, manufacturing introduced small margins of error threatening the structural integrity of the dome, prompting hands-on experimentation. “The control room is built from 12 arches,” explains Fernandez. “When one of the arches closes, it becomes stable, and you can move on to the next one … Going from side to side, you meet at the middle and close the arch using a special block — a keystone, which was cut to measure,” he says. “In conversations with our advisors, we decided to account for irregularities in the final keystone of each row. Once this custom keystone sat in place, the forces would stabilize the arch and make it secure,” adds Lesina Debiasi.

“This project exemplified the best practices of engineers and architects working closely together from design inception to completion — something that was historically common but is less typical today,” says Haile. “This collaboration was not just necessary — it ultimately improved the final result.”

Fernandez, who is supported this year by the MAD Design Fellowship, expressed how “the fellowship gave [him] the freedom to explore [his] passions and also keep [his] agency.”

“In a way, this project embodies what design education at MIT should be,” Tibbits reflects. “We’re building at full scale, with real-world constraints, experimenting at the limits of what we know — design, computation, engineering, and science. It’s hands-on, highly experimental, and deeply collaborative, which is exactly what we dream of for MAD, and MIT’s design education more broadly.”

“Luna, our physical lunar mission control, highlights the incredible collaboration across the Media Lab, Architecture, and the School of Engineering to bring our lunar mission to the world. We are democratizing access to space for all,” says Dava Newman, Media Lab director and Apollo Professor of Astronautics.

A full list of contributors and supporters can be found at the Morningside Academy of Design's website.

Orders for the company's natural gas division spiked in the first quarter, but its wind division saw a 43 percent plunge.

It's the latest win for state and local governments that have accused the oil and gas industry of lying about the dangers of burning fossil fuels.

Leaning on President Donald Trump's declared energy emergency, the department aims to limit fossil project reviews to 28 days.