Earle Leonard Lomon PhD ’54, MIT professor emeritus of physics, died on March 7 in Newton, Massachusetts, at the age of 94.  

A longtime member of the Center for Theoretical Physics, Lomon was interested primarily in the forces between protons and neutrons at low energies, where the effects of quarks and gluons are hidden by their confinement.

His research focused on the interactions of hadrons — protons, neutrons, mesons, and nuclei — before it was understood that they were composed of quarks and gluons. 

“Earle developed an R-matrix formulation of scattering theory that allowed him to separate known effects at long distance from then-unknown forces at short distances,” says longtime colleague Robert Jaffe, the Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics.

“When QCD [quantum chromodynamics] emerged as the correct field theory of hadrons, Earle moved quickly to incorporate the effects of quarks and gluons at short distance and high energies,” says Jaffe. “Earle’s work can be interpreted as a precursor to modern chiral effective field theory, where the pertinent degrees of freedom at low energy, which are hadrons, are matched smoothly onto the quark and gluon degrees of freedom that dominate at higher energy.”

“He was a truly cosmopolitan scientist, given his open mind and deep kindness,” says Bruno Coppi, MIT professor emeritus of physics.

Early years

Born Nov. 15, 1930, in Montreal, Quebec, Earle was the only son of Harry Lomon and Etta Rappaport. At Montreal High School, he met his future wife, Ruth Jones. Their shared love for classical music drew them both to the school's Classical Music Club, where Lomon served as president and Ruth was an accomplished musician.

While studying at McGill University, he was a research physicist for the Canada Defense Research Board from 1950 to 1951. After graduating in 1951, he married Jones, and they moved to Cambridge, where he pursued his doctorate at MIT in theoretical physics, mentored by Professor Hermann Feshbach.

Lomon spent 1954 to 1955 at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (now the Niels Bohr Institute) in Copenhagen. “With the presence of Niels Bohr, Aage Bohr, Ben Mottelson, and Willem V.R. Malkus, there were many physicists from Europe and elsewhere, including MIT’s Dave Frisch, making the Institute for Physics an exciting place to be,” recalled Lomon.

In 1956-57, he was a research associate at the Laboratory for Nuclear Studies at Cornell University. He received his PhD from MIT in 1954, and did postdoctoral work at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Denmark, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Cornell. He was an associate professor at McGill from 1957 until 1960, when he joined the MIT faculty.

In 1965, Lomon was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and was a visiting scientist at CERN. In 1968, he joined the newly formed MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He became a full professor in 1970 and retired in 1999.

Los Alamos and math theory

From 1968 to 2015, Lomon was an affiliate researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. During this time, he collaborated with Fred Begay, a Navajo nuclear physicist and medicine man. New Mexico became the Lomon family’s second home, and Lomon enjoyed the area hiking trails and climbing Baldy Mountain.   

Lomon also developed educational materials for mathematical theory. He developed textbooks, educational tools, research, and a creative problem-solving curriculum for the Unified Science and Mathematics for Elementary Schools. His children recall when Earle would review the educational tools with them at the dinner table. From 2001 to 2013, he was program director for mathematical theory for the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Theoretical Physics research hub.

Lomon was an American Physical Society Fellow and a member of the Canadian Association of Physicists.

Husband of the late Ruth Lomon, he is survived by his daughters Glynis Lomon and Deirdre Lomon; his son, Dylan Lomon; grandchildren Devin Lomon, Alexia Layne-Lomon, and Benjamin Garner; and six great-grandchildren. There will be a memorial service at a later date; instead of flowers, please consider donating to the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation. 

The Homeland Security secretary expressed support for eliminating long-term disaster recovery efforts under the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Around 11 billion tons of goods, or about 1.5 tons per person worldwide, are transported by sea each year, representing about 90 percent of global trade by volume. Internationally, the merchant shipping fleet numbers around 110,000 vessels. These ships, and the ports that service them, are significant contributors to the local and global economy — and they’re significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

A new consortium, formalized in a signing ceremony at MIT last week, aims to address climate-harming emissions in the maritime shipping industry, while supporting efforts for environmentally friendly operation in compliance with the decarbonization goals set by the International Maritime Organization.

“This is a timely collaboration with key stakeholders from the maritime industry with a very bold and interdisciplinary research agenda that will establish new technologies and evidence-based standards,” says Themis Sapsis, the William Koch Professor of Marine Technology at MIT and the director of MIT’s Center for Ocean Engineering. “It aims to bring the best from MIT in key areas for commercial shipping, such as nuclear technology for commercial settings, autonomous operation and AI methods, improved hydrodynamics and ship design, cybersecurity, and manufacturing.” 

Co-led by Sapsis and Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences; director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS); and director of the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, the newly-launched MIT Maritime Consortium (MC) brings together MIT collaborators from across campus, including the Center for Ocean Engineering, which is housed in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; IDSS, which is housed in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering; MIT Sea Grant; and others, with a national and an international community of industry experts.

The Maritime Consortium’s founding members are the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), Capital Clean Energy Carriers Corp., and HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering. Innovation members are Foresight-Group, Navios Maritime Partners L.P., Singapore Maritime Institute, and Dorian LPG.

“The challenges the maritime industry faces are challenges that no individual company or organization can address alone,” says Christia. “The solution involves almost every discipline from the School of Engineering, as well as AI and data-driven algorithms, and policy and regulation — it’s a true MIT problem.”

Researchers will explore new designs for nuclear systems consistent with the techno-economic needs and constraints of commercial shipping, economic and environmental feasibility of alternative fuels, new data-driven algorithms and rigorous evaluation criteria for autonomous platforms in the maritime space, cyber-physical situational awareness and anomaly detection, as well as 3D printing technologies for onboard manufacturing. Collaborators will also advise on research priorities toward evidence-based standards related to MIT presidential priorities around climate, sustainability, and AI.

MIT has been a leading center of ship research and design for over a century, and is widely recognized for contributions to hydrodynamics, ship structural mechanics and dynamics, propeller design, and overall ship design, and its unique educational program for U.S. Navy Officers, the Naval Construction and Engineering Program. Research today is at the forefront of ocean science and engineering, with significant efforts in fluid mechanics and hydrodynamics, acoustics, offshore mechanics, marine robotics and sensors, and ocean sensing and forecasting. The consortium’s academic home at MIT also opens the door to cross-departmental collaboration across the Institute.

The MC will launch multiple research projects designed to tackle challenges from a variety of angles, all united by cutting-edge data analysis and computation techniques. Collaborators will research new designs and methods that improve efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, explore feasibility of alternative fuels, and advance data-driven decision-making, manufacturing and materials, hydrodynamic performance, and cybersecurity.

“This consortium brings a powerful collection of significant companies that, together, has the potential to be a global shipping shaper in itself,” says Christopher J. Wiernicki SM ’85, chair and chief executive officer of ABS. 

“The strength and uniqueness of this consortium is the members, which are all world-class organizations and real difference makers. The ability to harness the members’ experience and know-how, along with MIT’s technology reach, creates real jet fuel to drive progress,” Wiernicki says. “As well as researching key barriers, bottlenecks, and knowledge gaps in the emissions challenge, the consortium looks to enable development of the novel technology and policy innovation that will be key. Long term, the consortium hopes to provide the gravity we will need to bend the curve.”

Cloudflare has a new feature—available to free users as well—that uses AI to generate random pages to feed to AI web crawlers:

Instead of simply blocking bots, Cloudflare’s new system lures them into a “maze” of realistic-looking but irrelevant pages, wasting the crawler’s computing resources. The approach is a notable shift from the standard block-and-defend strategy used by most website protection services. Cloudflare says blocking bots sometimes backfires because it alerts the crawler’s operators that they’ve been detected.

“When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them,” writes Cloudflare. “But while real looking, this content is not actually the content of the site we are protecting, so the crawler wastes time and resources.”...

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In Catalonia, the Sau reservoir has gone from holding just 3.9 percent of water capacity a year ago to 52 percent on Monday, according to a water agency report.

When most people buy cars, the sticker price is only part of the cost. The other part involves the loan, since folks usually borrow money for auto purchases. Therefore the interest rate, monthly payment size, and total repayment cost all matter too.

And yet, on aggregate, people do more comparison shopping about car prices than about lenders, and they frequently settle for relatively expensive loans. What happens when the financing costs more? The answer is, people buy older cars with lower sticker prices.

“The car they’re driving right now could be a year older because of that,” says Christopher Palmer PhD ’14, an associate professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who helped discover this phenomenon through a study examining millions of U.S. car loans. That research is like much of Palmer’s work: grounded in hard data and shining new light on issues, even familiar ones, about personal money management.

“I study household financial decision-making,” Palmer says. “Both how households make decisions and how those decisions are influenced by external factors. That covers a lot of things.”

It sure does. Palmer, often working with co-authors, has also discovered that people prefer to make monthly payments that are multiples of $100 — which can lead them to agree to worse financing terms. And since household finance includes housing, Palmer co-authored a high-profile study showing that people are remarkably more likely to use housing vouchers and move to another neighborhood when they have a modest amount of assistance from a “navigator” who helps with the move.

But he isn’t just looking for behavioral quirks: Another Palmer study found that the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing efforts after the financial crisis of 2008 helped cash-strapped people refinance their mortgages — though mostly those who had been able to make a down payment of 20 percent or more in the first place.

Overall, Palmer looks at big-picture economic scenarios in which people feel a financial crunch, and at consumer behavior, especially involving credit.

“If you look at whether someone can make a monthly payment, you need to understand their labor market, their expectations for the future, and more,” Palmer says. “Credit markets are interconnected to almost everything you might care about. Part of the reason I’m trying to shine a light on consumer credit markets is that they affect all kinds of human outcomes.”

For his research and teaching, Palmer earned tenure at MIT last year.

Useful intuition

Palmer grew up in the Boston area and enjoyed math in school, while always being interested in how people made financial decisions, especially about real estate. As an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, he soon recognized that he wanted to use his math skills to analyze everyday phenomena.

“I like the way you can take your intuition and have it be useful as you work through problems, along with this element of being able to observe what’s happening around you and being a listener in the world,” Palmer says.

As a student, though, that didn’t mean Palmer narrowed his interests. If anything, he saw the value in widening his studies.

“I also pretty quickly realized in college that I wanted to double major in econ and math,” Palmer says. “And that became the pipeline to get a PhD.”

After graduating from BYU, Palmer entered the doctoral program at MIT in 2008. In addition to taking classes, he immediately started working as a research assistant on a study of rent control along with professors David Autor — his eventual advisor — and Parag Pathak. That research eventually turned into a couple of high-profile papers. But while rent control is a kind of household-finance issue, the subject of household finance wasn’t really an established subdiscipline at the time.

It soon would be, however. Indeed, Palmer’s graduate-school career is almost a case study in how academic research broadens and evolves over time. Just as Palmer enrolled at MIT, the subprime-lending implosion helped generate the financial-markets crash of 2008, and both became greater focal points for academic research. Suddenly the topics that had been percolating around in Palmer’s mind were in pressing need of academic research.

“All of a sudden mortgages and household finance were front and center,” Palmer says. “That allowed me the space to write a dissertation about how distressed income households make mortgage decisions. There was an appetite for that.”

After receiving his PhD, Palmer joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, at the Haas School of Business, and then moved back to MIT in 2017.

“Household finance as a field is small, so you have to intersect it with something else if you want your question to make a difference in the world,” Palmer says. “For me, that might be macroeconomics, labor economics, corporate finance, or banking. This is partly why MIT is an amazing place to be, because it’s so easy to get exposure to all of those fields.”

Keeping a list of questions at hand

With a wide-ranging research portfolio, Palmer has to be nimble about identifying topics he can study in depth. That means looking for good data related to household finance and consumer credit, and shaping his studies around meaningful questions.

“I think a good microeconomist is always on the hunt for things,” Palmer says.

“I’ve always wanted to be question-driven,” he adds. “I try to have a list of questions in mind, so that if somebody says, ‘I have an interesting data set, what can we do with it?’ I might have ideas about what in the data we can look at.”

Take the massive study on auto loans, which arose after a co-author approached Palmer and said, more or less, that he had identified an interesting data set and was wondering what to do with it. One unresolved question was: How much do people search for the best car price or the best loan terms?

As a graduate student, Palmer recalls, “I remembered [MIT professor] Glenn Ellison once saying in class that the subject of search is a really juicy topic. Consumers face tricky decisions, and companies do not want to make it easy for people to comparison-shop. And no one had done much about search in household finance.”

So, Palmer and his colleagues based the auto-loan study partly around the search issue. The work analyzes the geographic locations of millions of buyers, and the number of lenders within 20-minute drive of them, and examines how thoroughly consumers hunt for the best deals. The study includes credit scores, auto prices, and loan terms, illuminating the complete dynamics involving credit and auto purchases. 

Best behavior

Some of Palmer’s work, meanwhile, takes the form of experiments. The paper he co-authored about what helps people move was one such case. It was set in Seattle, and the research team collaborated with local policymakers to construct an experiment on the subject.

It turns out that in Seattle, among people granted housing vouchers to move to new neighborhoods, the percentage actually utilizing the vouchers jumped from 15 percent to 53 percent — an eye-opening change — when they were given slightly more information and resources, and most of all a “navigator” helping with basic logistics.

Studying how people manage money means Palmer’s work yields plenty of insights in the mode of behavioral economics, the subfield that studies irrationalities — or lack thereof — in finance. Palmer thinks such findings are important, while emphasizing that he is not principally on a hunt for irrationality. Instead he always seeks to link the study of behavior to major economic and policy matters: how we borrow, what we can afford, and how we respond to economic stress.

“When a study of behavior is motivated by a tight connection to public policy, it satisfies the is-this-important hurdle right away,” Palmer says. “I’m always aiming to produce work that a large community of scholars would find important and that the broader world would find impactful.”

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 26 March 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02274-5

Analysis of satellite observations and in situ phenology records revealed a delayed onset of spring after drought in northern ecosystems. These delays are regulated by both endogenous memory within plants and exogenous memory of the environment, with the latter having a dominant role.

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Governments around the world have pledged to reduce fossil fuel subsidies, yet the actual implementation has not been measured. With a unique dataset and approach, researchers find since 2016 there are more frequent reforms, yet most of them do not survive over 12 months.

The MIT women's swimming and diving team won the program's first national championship, jumping ahead of New York University by erasing a 20-point deficit as the Engineers finished with 497 points at the 2025 NCAA Women's Swimming and Diving National Championships, hosted by the Old Dominion Athletic Conference March 19-22 at the Greensboro Aquatic Center in Greensboro, North Carolina.   

MIT entered the event ranked as the top team in the country. Overall, MIT won three individual national titles and four relay titles. The head coach, Meg Sisson French, was named the College Swimming and Diving Coaches Association of America Women’s Swim Coach of the Year. 

On day 1 of the championships, the 400 Medley Relay team of senior Kate Augustyn (Eau Claire, Wisconsin), first-year Sarah Bernard (Brookline, Massachusetts), sophomore Sydney Smith (Atlanta, Georgia), and graduate student Alexandra Turvey (Vancouver, British Colombia) touched the wall first in 3:38.48, just beating the NYU team by 0.8 second and setting a new school record. 

Day 2 highlights included Smith posting a winning time of 53.96 in the 100 fly, beating out Nicole Ranile of NYU by under a second. The 200 freestyle relay team of Turvey, Smith, sophomore Ella Roberson (Midland, Michigan) and junior Annika Naveen (Wynnewood, Pennsylvania) held off Pomona-Pitzer for the gold as Naveen brought the title home and gave the Engineers a national record time of 1:30.00. 

MIT opened day 3 with another national title, this time in the 200 medley relay. Augustyn led off, followed by Bernard and Naveen. Ella Roberson brought the title home for MIT as she completed her anchor leg in 22.02, which gave the team a combined time of 1:39.51. Roberson was able to hold off a late charge by Kenyon College, which finished second in 1:40.26 as the Engineers set another national record. Augustyn later defended her title in the 100 backstroke as she clocked in with a time of 53.41, tying her own national record. 

The final day of action saw MIT pull ahead of NYU with two more national titles. In the 200 backstroke, Augustyn held the lead through most of the event, but Sophia Verkleeren of Williams College caught up to the defending champion in the last half of the race. With just 25 yards left, Augustyn pulled away to defeat Verkleeren with a time of 1:55.85. Augustyn shaved almost 2 seconds off her preliminary time and fell just short of the national record time of 1:55.67. With the win, the Engineers pulled to within one point of NYU for the top spot. 

The Engineers sealed the overall national championship by winning their fourth relay of the championship, besting the team from NYU. Turvey set the pace with her lead-off, followed by Smith and Augustyn. Roberson, swimming the anchor leg, held off Kaley McIntyre of NYU, who earlier set the national record in the 100 freestyle, to give MIT the win with a time of 3:19.03 as the Violets took second in 3:19.36.   

Augustyn defended her title in the 200 backstroke while sweeping the National Championship in both the 100 and 200 backstroke in consecutive years. She concludes her career as one of the most decorated swimmers in program history, collecting four individual national championships, four relay national championships, and 27 all-America honors, the most in program history.