Lawmakers said the cases threaten to “bankrupt” the energy industry.

Several GOP senators have expressed interest in attending the climate talks, Utah Sen. John Curtis said.

The facility would be among the world's biggest direct air capture hubs. It comes as President Trump has slashed subsidies for the industry in the U.S.

A new approach to forecasting would give local authorities more information as they prepare for deadly heat waves.

The governor ordered “any and all steps” to permit wind and solar development before federal subsidies expire.

The new laws encourage fire-resistant landscaping, expand insurance for mobile homes and expand insurer access to financing.

Brussels has signaled it won’t yield to U.S. pressure to ignite a bonfire to green regulations as part of their trade deal, a top official tells diplomats.

Researchers are exploring possibilities for using "metal-organic frameworks" to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and pollution from industrial sites or to harvest moisture from desert air.

The debut was marred by the company’s worst trading day since going public in 2016.

The cyclical La Niña will likely last through February 2026, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center said.

Adaptation projects have so far only won a fraction of climate finance, with investors and banks focusing on decarbonization technologies.

Innovator, futurist, and author Ray Kurzweil ’70 emphasized his optimism about artificial intelligence, and technological progress generally, in a lecture on Wednesday while accepting MIT’s Robert A. Muh Alumni Award from the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS).

Kurzweil offered his signature high-profile forecasts about how AI and computing will entirely blend with human functionality, and proposed that AI will lead to monumental gains in longevity, medicine, and other realms of life.

“People do not appreciate that the rate of progress is accelerating,” Kurzweil said, forecasting “incredible breakthroughs” over the next two decades.

Kurzweil delivered his lecture, titled “Reinventing Intelligence,” in the Thomas Tull Concert Hall of the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building, which opened earlier in 2025 on the MIT campus.

The Muh Award was founded and endowed by Robert A. Muh ’59 and his wife Berit, and is one of the leading alumni honors granted by SHASS and MIT. Muh, a life member emeritus of the MIT Corporation, established the award, which is granted every two years for “extraordinary contributions” by alumni in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

Robert and Berit Muh were both present at the lecture, along with their daughter Carrie Muh ’96, ’97, SM ’97.

Agustín Rayo, dean of SHASS, offered introductory remarks, calling Kurzweil “one of the most prolific thinkers of our time.” Rayo added that Kurzweil “has built his life and career on the belief that ideas change the world, and change it for the better.”

Kurzweil has been an innovator in language recognition technologies, developing advances and founding companies that have served people who are blind or low-vision, and helped in music creation. He is also a best-selling author who has heralded advances in computing capabilities, and even the merging of human and machines.

The initial segment of Kurzweil’s lecture was autobiographical in focus, reflecting on his family and early years. The families of both of Kurzweil’s parents fled the Nazis in Europe, seeking refuge in the U.S., with the belief that people could create a brighter future for themselves.

“My parents taught me the power of ideas can really change the world,” Kurzweil said.

Showing an early interest in how things worked, Kurzweil had decided to become an inventor by about the age of 7, he recalled. He also described his mother as being tremendously encouraging to him as a child. The two would take walks together, and the young Kurzweil would talk about all the things he imagined inventing.

“I would tell her my ideas and no matter how fantastical they were, she believed them,” he said. “Now other parents might have simply chuckled … but she actually believed my ideas, and that actually gave me my confidence, and I think confidence is important in succeeding.”

He became interested in computing by the early 1960s and majored in both computer science and literature as an MIT undergraduate.

Kurzweil has a long-running association with MIT extending far beyond his undergraduate studies. He served as a member of the MIT Corporation from 2005 to 2012 and was the 2001 recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, an award for innovation, for his development of reading technology.

“MIT has played a major role in my personal and professional life over the years,” Kurzweil said, calling himself “truly honored to receive this award.” Addressing Muh, he added: “Your longstanding commitment to our alma mater is inspiring.”

After graduating from MIT, Kurzweil launched a successful career developing innovative computing products, including one that recognized text across all fonts and could produce an audio reading. He also developed leading-edge music synthesizers, among many other advances.

In a corresponding part of his career, Kurzweil has become an energetic author, whose best-known books include “The Age of Intelligent Machines” (1990), “The Age of Spiritual Machines” (1999), “The Singularity Is Near” (2005), and “The Singularity Is Nearer” (2024), among many others.

Kurzweil was recently named chief AI officer of Beyond Imagination, a robotics firm he co-founded; he has also held a position at Google in recent years, working on natural language technologies.

In his remarks, Kurzweil underscored his view that, as exemplified and enabled by the growth of computing power over time, technological innovation moves at an exponential pace.

“People don’t really think about exponential growth; they think about linear growth,” Kurzweil said.

This concept, he said, makes him confident that a string of innovations will continue at remarkable speed.

“One of the bigger transformations we’re going to see from AI in the near term is health and medicine,” Kurweil said, forecasting that human medical trials will be replaced by simulated “digital trials.”

Kurzweil also believes computing and AI advances can lead to so many medical advances it will soon produce a drastic improvement in human longevity.

“These incredible breakthroughs are going to lead to what we’ll call longevity escape velocity,” Kurzweil said. “By roughly 2032 when you live through a year, you’ll get back an entire year from scientific progress, and beyond that point you’ll get back more than a year for every year you live, so you’ll be going back into time as far as your health is concerned,” Kurweil said. He did offer that these advances will “start” with people who are the most diligent about their health.

Kurzweil also outlined one of his best-known forecasts, that AI and people will be combined. “As we move forward, the lines between humans and technology will blur, until we are … one and the same,” Kurzweil said. “This is how we learn to merge with AI. In the 2030s, robots the size of molecules will go into our brains, noninvasively, through the capillaries, and will connect our brains directly to the cloud. Think of it like having a phone, but in your brain.”

“By 2045, once we have fully merged with AI, our intelligence will no longer be constrained … it will expand a millionfold,” he said. “This is what we call the singularity.”

To be sure, Kurzweil acknowledged, “Technology has always been a double-edged sword,” given that a drone can deliver either medical supplies or weaponry. “Threats of AI are real, must be taken seriously, [and] I think we are doing that,” he said. In any case, he added, we have “a moral imperative to realize the promise of new technologies while controlling the peril.” He concluded: “We are not doomed to fail to control any of these risks.” 

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 10 October 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02449-0

It has been argued that air temperatures over mountain glaciers are decoupled from surrounding warming, which could slow down melting. Here the authors show that this effect will weaken with future glacier retreat, leading to a recoupling of temperatures from the 2030s onwards.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 10 October 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02457-0

Unclear emissions and ice-sheet processes drive uncertainties in future sea-level rise. The authors show that the timing of emissions reductions drives the uncertainties during the twenty-first century, but geophysical uncertainties become more important with time, especially under optimistic scenarios.

Associate Professor Gene-Wei Li has accepted the position of associate head of the MIT Department of Biology, starting in the 2025-26 academic year. 

Li, who has been a member of the department since 2015, brings a history of departmental leadership, service, and research and teaching excellence to his new role. He has received many awards, including a Sloan Research Fellowship (2016), an NSF Career Award (2019), Pew and Searle scholarships, and MIT’s Committed to Caring Award (2020). In 2024, he was appointed as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. 

“I am grateful to Gene-Wei for joining the leadership team,” says department head Amy E. Keating, the Jay A. Stein (1968) Professor of Biology and professor of biological engineering. “Gene will be a key leader in our educational initiatives, both digital and residential, and will be a critical part of keeping our department strong and forward-looking.” 

A great environment to do science

Li says he was inspired to take on the role in part because of the way MIT Biology facilitates career development during every stage — from undergraduate and graduate students to postdocs and junior faculty members, as he was when he started in the department as an assistant professor just 10 years ago. 

“I think we all benefit a lot from our environment, and I think this is a great environment to do science and educate people, and to create a new generation of scientists,” he says. “I want us to keep doing well, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to contribute to this effort.” 

As part of his portfolio as associate department head, Li will continue in the role of scientific director of the Koch Biology Building, Building 68. In the last year, the previous scientific director, Stephen Bell, Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor of Biology and HHMI Investigator, has continued to provide support and ensured a steady ramp-up, transitioning Li into his new duties. The building, which opened its doors in 1994, is in need of a slate of updates and repairs. 

Although Li will be managing more administrative duties, he has provided a stable foundation for his lab to continue its interdisciplinary work on the quantitative biology of gene expression, parsing the mechanisms by which cells control the levels of their proteins and how this enables cells to perform their functions. His recent work includes developing a method that leverages the AI tool AlphaFold to predict whether protein fragments can recapitulate the native interactions of their full-length counterparts.  

“I’m still very heavily involved, and we have a lab environment where everyone helps each other. It’s a team, and so that helps elevate everyone,” he says. “It’s the same with the whole building: nobody is working by themselves, so the science and administrative parts come together really nicely.” 

Teaching for the future

Li is considering how the department can continue to be a global leader in biological sciences while navigating the uncertainty surrounding academia and funding, as well as the likelihood of reduced staff support and tightening budgets.

“The question is: How do you maintain excellence?” Li says. “That involves recruiting great people and giving them the resources that they need, and that’s going to be a priority within the limitations that we have to work with.” 

Li will also be serving as faculty advisor for the MIT Biology Teaching and Learning Group, headed by Mary Ellen Wiltrout, and will serve on the Department of Biology Digital Learning Committee and the new Open Learning Biology Advisory Committee. Li will serve in the latter role in order to represent the department and work with new faculty member and HHMI Investigator Ron Vale on Institute-level online learning initiatives. Li will also chair the Biology Academic Planning Committee, which will help develop a longer-term outlook on faculty teaching assignments and course offerings. 

Li is looking forward to hearing from faculty and students about the way the Institute teaches, and how it could be improved, both for the students on campus and for the online learners from across the world. 

“There are a lot of things that are changing; what are the core fundamentals that the students need to know, what should we teach them, and how should we teach them?” 

Although the commitment to teaching remains unchanged, there may be big transitions on the horizon. With two young children in school, Li is all too aware that the way that students learn today is very different from what he grew up with, and also very different from how students were learning just five or 10 years ago — writing essays on a computer, researching online, using AI tools, and absorbing information from media like short-form YouTube videos. 

“There’s a lot of appeal to a shorter format, but it’s very different from the lecture-based teaching style that has worked for a long time,” Li says. “I think a challenge we should and will face is figuring out the best way to communicate the core fundamentals, and adapting our teaching styles to the next generation of students.” 

Ultimately, Li is excited about balancing his research goals along with joining the department’s leadership team, and knows he can look to his fellow researchers in Building 68 and beyond for support.

“I’m privileged to be working with a great group of colleagues who are all invested in these efforts,” Li says. “Different people may have different ways of doing things, but we all share the same mission.” 

As all things old are new again, a bill that would make obtaining bad patents easier and harder to challenge is being considered in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA) would reverse over a decade of progress in fighting patent trolls and making the patent system more balanced.

PERA would overturn long-standing court decisions that have helped keep some of the most problematic patents in check. This includes the Supreme Court’s Alice v. CLS Bank decision, which bars patents on abstract ideas. While Alice has not completely solved the problems of the patent system or patent trolling, it has led to the rejection of hundreds of low-quality software patents and, as a result, has allowed innovation and small businesses to grow.

Thanks to the Alice decision, courts have invalidated a rogue’s gallery of terrible software patents—such as patents on online photo contests, online bingo, upselling, matchmaking, and scavenger hunts. These patents didn’t describe real inventions—they merely applied old ideas to general-purpose computers. But PERA would wipe out the Alice framework and replace it with vague, hollow exceptions, taking us back to an era where patent trolls and large corporate patent-holders aggressively harassed software developers and small companies.

This bill, combined with recent changes that have restricted access to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), would create a perfect storm—giving patent trolls and major corporations with large patent portfolios free rein to squeeze out independent inventors and small businesses.

EFF is proud to join a letter, along with Engine, the Public Interest Patent Law Institute, Public Knowledge, and R Street, to the Senate Judiciary Committee opposing this poorly-timed and concerning bill. We urge the committee to instead focus on restoring the PTAB as the accessible, efficient check on patent quality that Congress intended.

Roger Pielke Jr. and oil industry supporters are attacking climate scientist Friederike Otto, whose work has been used in lawsuits against polluters.

The government flood insurance program stopped renewing its 4.6 million policies after Congress let the authorization lapse Sept. 30.

The House speaker said he hasn't been told that the Trump administration could kill the climate megaproject.

The lawmakers expressed outrage at FEMA's unannounced decision to delay reimbursing states for emergency spending.