Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the acting administrator's remarks about there not being a hurricane season was a joke.

The Supreme Court is being asked to deny the oil giant's effort to dismiss a record fine — and a key pollution finding.

The EU’s scientific advisers warned Monday that expected plans to outsource some emissions cuts would undermine the bloc’s climate credibility.

The former California governor delivered his message for environmentalists despairing over President Donald Trump's recent regulation rollbacks.

They now widely regard ESG as three separate parts as opposed to a single strategy, according to a survey by Morningstar.

The queuing system at the busiest U.S. seaport complex can cut carbon dioxide emissions by 24 percent per voyage between East Asia and California.

Many in Silicon Valley, and in U.S. business at large, seem to believe innovation springs only from competition, a race to build the next big thing first, cheaper, better, best. But what if collaboration and community breeds innovation just as well as adversarial competition?

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(You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive and on YouTube.)

Isabela Fernandes believes free, open-source software has helped build the internet, and will be key to improving it for all. As executive director of the Tor Project – the nonprofit behind the decentralized, onion-routing network providing crucial online anonymity to activists and dissidents around the world – she has fought tirelessly for everyone to have private access to an uncensored internet, and Tor has become one of the world's strongest tools for privacy and freedom online.  

Fernandes joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss the importance of not just accepting technology as it’s given to us, but collaboratively breaking it, tinkering with it, and rebuilding it together until it becomes the technology that we really need to make our world a better place. 

In this episode you’ll learn about:

• How the Tor network protects the anonymity of internet users around the world, and why that’s so important 
• Why online privacy is NOT only for “people who have something to hide” 
• The importance of making more websites friendly and accessible to Tor and similar systems 
• How Tor can actually benefit law enforcement  
• How free, open-source software can power economic booms 

Isabela Fernandes has been executive director of the Tor Project since 2018; she had been a project manager there since 2015.  She also has served since 2023 as a board member of both European Digital Rights – an association of civil and human rights organizations aimed at building a people-centered, democratic society – and The Engine Room, a nonprofit that supports social justice movements to use technology and data in safe, responsible and strategic ways, while actively mitigating the vulnerabilities created by digital systems. Earlier, Fernandes worked as a product manager for Twitter; Latin America project manager for North by South, which offered open-source technology integration to companies using  expertise of Latin American free software specialists; as a project manager for Brazil’s President, overseeing migration of the IT department to free software; and as a technical advisor to Brazil’s Ministry of Communications, creating and implementing new features and free-software tools for the National Digital Inclusion Program serving 3,500 communities. She’s a former member of the board of the Calyx Institute, an education and research organization devoted to studying, testing and developing and implementing privacy technology and tools to promote free speech, free expression, civic engagement and privacy rights on the internet and in the mobile telephone industry. And she was a cofounder and longtime volunteer with Indymedia Brazil, an independent journalism collective. 

Resources: 

• “We Are Making the Tech We Want” panel discussion at The Tech We Want online summit (Oct. 17, 2024) 
• Help Net Security: “Delivering privacy in a world of pervasive digital surveillance: Tor Project’s Executive Director speaks out” (Aug. 2, 2023) 
• EFF: “EFF Now Has Tor Onions” (Apr. 26, 2023)
• Marco Civil Law of the Internet in Brazil 
• EFF’s Tor University Challenge

What do you think of “How to Fix the Internet?” Share your feedback here.

Transcript

ISABELA FERNANDES: If Tor is successful, the internet would be built by its heart, right? Like the elements that Tor carries, which is community, which is decentralization. Instead of having everything focused on a few small companies would be more distributed. I come from the free software world, so I am always excited with, and I have lived at moments.
In my life where I saw I could touch it, I could touch the moment where the source code would be shared and multiple areas of society would benefit from it. Collaboration allows amazing innovation. We are here today because of free software. If it wasn't for that, we would not be here today.

CINDY COHN: That's Isabela Fernandes, head of the Tor Project, describing the beautiful promise of collaboration, community and innovation that is instilled in the free software world – and the important role it plays as we look forward to that better future we’re always talking about on this show.
I'm Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

JASON KELLEY: And I'm Jason Kelley, EFF's Activism Director. This is our podcast series, How to Fix the Internet.

CINDY COHN: The idea behind this show is that we're trying to make our digital lives BETTER. You know, a big part of our job at EFF is to envision the ways things can go wrong online-- and then of course jumping into action to help when things then DO go wrong.
But this show is about optimism, hope and solutions – we want to share visions of what it looks like when we start to get it right.

JASON KELLEY: And our guest today is someone whose vision of getting it right is stronger than most.

CINDY COHN: Isabela Fernandes has been an important presence in the security and free software communities for a really long time now.
She's been the executive director at the Tor project since 2018, and before that she was a product manager there. And I'm happy to say that when I was on the board of the Tor project, I was one of the board members that strongly recommended Isa for the executive director role.
She was and continues to be not only a brilliant mind, but a skilled executor. With the Tor Project providing a model for an open source tool that works, is trusted and literally saves lives around the world. We are so thrilled to have her here. Welcome, Isa.

ISABELA FERNANDES: Hi. Thank you.

JASON KELLEY: We're really excited to talk to you and I wanted to start, if I could, with some basics. I think a lot of our audience, you know, has heard of Tor. Maybe they know what the Tor browser is. But some of these things pop up and I think, you know, some people don't know the difference between. A torrent and a tour browser and like what the tour project actually works on. So what is the Tor Project? What are the tools that you’re sort of responsible for creating and maintaining there?

ISABELA FERNANDES: So the Tor Project is actually a non-profit. And our mission is to advance human rights through the technology that we build, right?
So Tor is very similar to a VPN, but much better. We have a decentralized network that is run by volunteers, that whenever you are making a connection to a service or a website, our network will route you through three servers and it's gonna encrypt it every step of the way. And because of this architecture, it's not centralized on anyone or any entity.
It's completely decentralized to thousands of servers around the world. And we also have the Tor browser, which is a fork of Firefox, and what the Tor browser does besides making it easier for you to connect to the to network, it protects your privacy on the device level, so it blocks third party cookies, it also protects you against fingerprinting tracking and other ways that your device identity can leak.

JASON KELLEY: Okay, so just to dig in and make sure I understand, if I'm on a VPN I'm, you know, basically connecting to another server. And all of my connections are going through that. And usually I can, like, pick where they are from a short list of, you know, potential servers in cities and countries.
But with Tor, I don't choose where I'm going or what those three connections are, but it adds that extra layer of protection because three is better than one. But, but why is that? I'm just like, I wonder for the audience who might not know, you know, why three, why not five, or why not two?

ISABELA FERNANDES: Right, so, three, mainly because, so it works like this, right? Like the first server will know who you are because you're connecting to Tor –

JASON KELLEY: Sure, ok.

ISABELA FERNANDES: But it does not know what you are requesting. The middle one does not know who you are and have no idea about what you are requesting, and the exit one, the third one, only knows that someone on the internet is requesting to open a website,

JASON KELLEY: Got it.

ISABELA FERNANDES: So that count is great because if it was only two, that information you, you would still have some way to discover it and to understand where the information is coming from and where it is going.
So three, it is indeed a sweet number for you to have the level of privacy and that we want without building more latency to the connection.

JASON KELLEY: Okay. And then I'm gonna ask one more question. Um. About the technical aspect. Over the last like decade plus, most of the web has become encrypted. The HTTP level has become HTTPS, and that's something that EFF has worked on with our Certbot project, and Let's Encrypt. And if I'm not super familiar with the difference between, you know, how HTTPS is encrypted versus what TOR is doing.
Why do I still need to use Tor? What is it saving? What, how is it protecting my privacy if, if, quote unquote, the web is already encrypted?

ISABELA FERNANDES: Um, let's give this example, right? Like HTTPS would be encrypting your connection to the website. So when you do, you type your username or password, that information is encrypted. However, the server who is watching still would know who you are and where you're coming from. With Tor, you gain that other layer of protection, right? Like, nobody would know who you are and where you like, uh, and what you are requesting except for the website. So it protects you from outside watchers who might be surveilling your connection, also protects you from other tracking mechanisms on the internet.
So the ideal scenario is for you to use both. Right, like it's for you to not only use Tor, but make sure that you're connected to a website that has HTTPS as well.

JASON KELLEY: Wow. Okay. That's really helpful. Thank you so much. I feel like I'm getting tech tech support from the literal executive director of the Tor Project, but I think a lot of people you know that come to us at EFF for privacy or security recommendations really do not understand some of these, you know, somewhat basic things that you're describing about the difference between proxies and encrypted sites and VPNs and Tor, and, um, I think it's just really important for people to know how these different tools work, because they're always, you know, different tools function for different purposes, right.

CINDY COHN: Yeah. And it's, you know, security is hard. It actually requires, I mean, it would be great if there was a one size fits all security. And I think that if you look at all the pieces that Tor’s building, they're, they're moving towards that.
I want us to talk a little bit more about the why of Tor, 'cause we've really outlined the how of Tor, and I wanna give you a chance to kind of debunk one of the arguments that we hear all the time at EFF, which is, you know, why do people need all this security? If you're not doing anything wrong, you know, why should you worry? Um, or is it all just hopeless and shouldn't I just give up?
But let's start with the first one, and I know that you've done a lot of work at Tor trying to really think hard about who needs these tools, who uses these tools in a way that's privacy protective. So I wonder if you could outline a little bit of kind of what you guys know about who uses Tor and why.

ISABELA FERNANDES: There is a spectrum, and I always like to give examples from the two sides of this spectrum. We collect a lot of anonymous stories from users, and let's call this one Brian. So we have Brian. He’s a father and he has two teenage kids at home.
And, uh, you know, as teenagers, they have questions about everything, right? Like about sex, gender, drugs, everything. So he recommends his kids to use Tor when they're searching for those topics on the internet. And sometimes he needs to search some topics himself. You know, like the kids bring a topic that he had no idea what it is about.
So they use Tor to make sure that those searches does not follow those teenage kids for the rest of their lives. Right. Like it's not tagged to them for the rest of their life. So we recommend his kids to use Tor. And then you have on the other side of the spectrum, um, let's call her Carolina.
Carolina is a woman in Uganda. Uh, she's a lesbian. And in Uganda, you can face criminal charge for that. So Carolina just wants to have a normal social online life. And because it's so dangerous in Uganda for her, she really needs to make sure that she's protected and anonymous online when she's interacting with her friends or just looking for topics that is related to her lifestyle. So she used Tor to be safe online, uh, to just have a normal social life on the internet. We did a research, which I thought was very interesting. We put a question on a browser, it was anonymous and anyone could answer.
And we had like a, almost like a 55,000 people answering that question and was how often you use Tor, the Tor browser. And actually more than half of that said that they use one, uh, a few times a day or a few times a week. And that for me says a lot, right? Like it's for those moments where you're like, okay, this, I will want to do on Tor. I don't want the rest of the internet to collect this information and restore it and attach that to my behavior profile.
And that for me, it's what is important, right? Like if people may think that everything is lost and there is no reason to do that. And I think the other way around, I think, uh, it is possible for you to create black spots about your behavior online. And that's what tools like Tor can allow you to do, right? Like you can, uh, create some black spots about you on the internet that protects your privacy.
I think today people do care a lot about their privacy and one example about, which is related to privacy that I always bring to people, it's how dangerous it is to compare the need and the right to be anonymous. With the need to hide something that you don't want others to know or some illegal activity, because anonymity is actually one of the pillars of our democracy. Your vote is anonymous for a reason. So for you to exercise your citizen rights, you need to have privacy.

CINDY COHN: Yep. I think that's exactly right. And I also think we're living in times when things are moving so fast about who's at risk and who's not at risk, that a lot of people are waking up to the fact that just because you might not need privacy in one zone of your life or in one time that we're living in, doesn't mean that that can't change really quickly.
And having the tools available and ready and working is one of the things that we can do – we meaning people in tech – to make sure that as times change, people have the tools that they need to stay safe and to stay protected, and to, to organize, you know, opposition, to organize for change.

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CINDY COHN: I think that this is happening a lot, but I'm wondering how you think about helping people reclaim the idea that privacy isn't something we should be ashamed of, that privacy is something that we should be proud of.
I hear you say, and I think that's totally right, it's a pillar of an open and self-governing world. How do you help convince people about that?

ISABELA FERNANDES: Let me step by for a second. Every time, like you might have like heard this from multiple people, right? Like they complain about ads following them, or give an example. Oh, I, I was talking with my friend about bicycles and now all these bicycles ads are showing up, my phone is listening to me.
Right? Like, so I think those are the perfect moment for you to go deeper into the matter of privacy, right? Like, imagine if it was not bicycles, imagine if it was about a government decision that you were talking about, right? That is the moment, right? Like you need to connect with people when they are presenting to you the problem.
So it's, it's fundamental, right? Like that makes super, super easy for someone to understand. But the next step in it is like they ask you how, how do I protect myself. And sometimes I feel like, uh, our work at Tor is not only to create tools. But to make it easier for people to use, it needs to be friendly, it needs to be familiar, right?
Like, uh, that's why the Tor browser is super nice because it's just like any other browser. People hear about Tor and they think it's like, oh, it is this hacker tool that I need to have a special excuse to use. No, it's just like any other browser that you open and you use and you can use on your phone, you can use anywhere.
So it is extremely important to bring awareness when people are identifying the problem, even if it is in an informal conversation or in a more, uh, global conversation, right? Like sometimes those problems arise in global news. Uh, we have multiple, uh, examples of that. Cambridge Analytica was one of it.
And, um, at those, those moments, we need to learn how to connect. But when we connect, we need to also be able to provide solutions that it's easy and familiar to people so they can have hope. They can look at it and they can say, okay, I can control this, right? Like, I can control, I can protect myself, I can protect my privacy.
And those elements come in altogether, right? Like it's not, uh, a one, uh, catchphrase that will make it happen. You need to combine all those elements in the process, right? So it's doesn't seem too hard and people feel empowered to have agency to take action.

CINDY COHN: Yep. I think that's right. So what we try to do in this podcast is kind of flip the script and think about what would the world look like if we got it. All right. So what would the world look like if Tor was immensely successful? What's your vision of the world where we get this right.

ISABELA FERNANDES: In the case of Tor, I think, uh, one thing would be that service and websites, they are friendly to Tor. So if a user is coming to connect to an application, or to a website, that website would know it and would be friendly to it. This is one of the biggest problems right now, right? Like some websites are not friendly to Tor or solutions like Tor. So that would be number one, right?

CINDY COHN: Yep.

ISABELA FERNANDES: So if Tor is successful, we would have an internet or a world with technology, right? Like, to go a little bit the on internet where technology is driven by sharing, by collaboration and the model of it. It's not about the data. And the business model of it would, it can be unique to each case of services, but would not necessarily be the typical one That is the easy one between quotes of let's collect all the data, either to use it for advertise or sell it to, uh, data brokers so we can make some money out of it. Right?
Like, uh, I think that if Tor would be successful, we would have the philosophy of Tor being part of the heart of what it's building, the technology worldwide.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, I think that's great. Um, in some ways, you know, Tor wouldn't need to exist as a separate project because the Tor values would be built into everything. And what I hear there is that that also includes the way Tor has been developed, the open source collaborative, transparent process by which tools were developed would be part of what gets baked in - it's a good vision.

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JASON KELLEY: Let’s take a quick moment to say thank you to our sponsor.
How to Fix the Internet is supported by The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology. Enriching people’s lives through a keener appreciation of our increasingly technological world and portraying the complex humanity of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.
We also want to thank EFF members and donors. You are the reason we exist. We will talk a little later in this episode about how important funding from the community is to the work that we do. You can become a member of EFF’s community for just $25.
The more members we have, the more power we have - in statehouses, courthouses, and on the streets. EFF has been fighting for digital rights for decades, and that fight is bigger than ever, so please, if you like what we do, go to eff.org/pod to donate.
And now, back to our conversation with Isabela Fernandes and the impact that free software and the community of people making it has had on her life.

ISABELA FERNANDES: I was raised by free software. Everything I know comes from this, from not only the software itself but the community. So all my skills come from it. So, uh, in the early 2000s, I joined a volunteer network, Colored in the Media was an independent news website, globe-wide. Uh, I built the one for Brazil and we did everything, uh, with free software, right?
Like it was an open publish website. When I explain to people nowadays about it, like you didn't need a username or password to publish your article on that platform, and we have hundreds of those sites around the world, and I did this work for 10 years because I really believe in the democratization of information, and I saw the internet as the root of it. And I saw how powerful that was because it was the beginning of the internet in many parts of the world, here in Brazil was just starting, and not everybody had a connection, and here we were with this powerful tool to democratize, uh, communication in Brazil.
And through that experience, I was invited to work for the federal government in, uh, series of free software initiatives being one of them, in digital inclusion, we would build solutions to communities, um, was a basket of solutions and that was from online stores, uh, they could sell their own products online, uh, to Voiceover IP. At the time it was like there was no cell phones. I'm talking about 2003, uh, like 2004. There was no cell phone.
I arrived to a community one month after they had power for the first time in their life, and I was bringing internet, you know, like, and I'm like, okay, you have internet. What do you want? They didn't have a phone number, a phone line, so I created Voiceover IP. I was like, you can call anywhere in Brazil with this computer. And there was a line with 20 people right away to make phone calls. But that's, we were doing this, we were like going to, uh, the favelas in Brazil and collecting all the teenagers and saying ‘what do you want?’ Like, ‘oh, I wanna record my music.’ And we were recording the music on CDs using everything, free software. Some communities were like, we wanna, uh, document because they have a lot of, uh, folklore stories that is only oral and they wanted to document it. We created a wiki for them to document it. So, education, go to public schools – we did a lot of that with free software. And at the same time, why this was possible, right? Like was because of the culture that was changing. The culture was, okay, we are not gonna use proprietary software anymore. We are not gonna use the money from the country that we barely have to pay for this big, super expensive license.
Instead, we are gonna use this money to invest on the people, to invest on computer science, the students to invest on conventions, free software meetups, uh, to invest on InstallFest. And we start to do that. And we had like a huge technology boom in Brazil from the private sector, like I said, from the government, from universities, everybody was collaborating.
There was a lot of companies being created to provide different types of service or to maintain software, there was a lot of different business being generated out of it as well.
So I could touch it, I could see it. It is possible. We could like we can do it. Right? Like I actually am always very excited when I, and right now I'm seeing a movement again in Brazil, it's not too public yet, but that is a movement like this, with hundreds of organizations debating and building a strategy to recreate that inside of the country.
So it is possible to build a better world with technology, right? Like better versions of technology for us. It's not a mission impossible thing. It is totally possible.

JASON KELLEY: And it's not the distant past really. I mean, sometimes when you talk about it, like I'm, I was alive at the time, but not, you know, not old enough to be involved in that. And it does sometimes sound like a kind of golden era that's lost forever to people. And it's, it's really great to hear that it's, maybe it's something that's cyclical and, or it's something that, you know, we lost for a brief period and we can get back to. How did that movement that's happening now in Brazil, get sort of reignited?

ISABELA FERNANDES: We're bringing some respect from that time. At that time we have, uh, Linux. Linux Install Fest. So you would bring your machine and you would install Linux. We want to combine any, anytime that you have an event that you're talking about the internet, that you're talking about regulation to have install fests – let's say install Mastodon, let's install Signal. Let's have everybody come out of this event and open for the population, right? Like, because sometimes when you offer those options to people. They don't have a network within that option, so they don't tend to stay.
But if you're doing this at an event and you like, let's say let's install Mastodon and everybody can have their account on different Mastadon instance, but we all following each other and I'm seeing the content and I can see it for real, what that means? And I will leave the event already with a network of people that I can follow on MAs on. Same thing. Every time I do a Signal training, I tell people now they're young, solid, let's copy each other's contact. So we have each other on our Signal account, right? Like, so we have a community. So we are thinking about that combination.

Music transition

JASON KELLEY: I wonder how, you know, again, you talk about some of this and I feel so jealous of, you know, being in this movement, I, I've never really been, you know, an engineer, so I'm sort of looking at the free software and open source communities at a distance. How did you end up sort of getting involved in them and, and do you have any advice for other people you know, today that want to be helpful or, um, want to connect with other people to help build the kind of internet you're talking about?

ISABELA FERNANDES: I end up on this out of necessity. When I was a teenager, I hated school, but I love to learn. I got kicked out of, uh, school multiple times until my dad put me in a technical high school to learn computers, but at the same time, uh, in my house, my parents had to work from 7:00 AM to 11:00 PM. So, you know, the strong survive in the house, it was me and my siblings.
And, uh, I could not touch the computer because my older brother would not let me. So I had to write code with a pen and paper and I hate it. And I start to go to my dad’s office to connect to at night when he would leave at 11, I would arrive and stay till 7:00 AM and that's how I start to learn about Linux.
We didn't have money for a license, so the more I wanted to do with the computer, the more I had to go to free software, you know? And like I said, after that, I joined this media network where we did everything. I learned how to build websites. I learned how to build data centers. We had to have security.
We had to build new products for journalists because we wanted to use free software, but sometimes we didn't have everything, or the solutions we had was not good enough, so we had to improve them to edit an audio or a video, right? Like things like that. So I went through this whole phase because I would not accept the technology that the normal, uh, business model wanted to offer me, I didn't accept that as it is, and I thought something else could happen. And like, uh, every time I talk with young people, I tell them this: Don't accept the technology that is being offered to you as it is. Don't accept it. It is possible. The reason we have free software was because people did not accept it, the technology that it was given to them. And I think that's the spirit.

Music transition

CINDY COHN: Thank you so much, Isa, for coming, and sharing your stories with us and your hope. Um, what a, what a hopeful conversation this was.

ISABELA FERNANDES: Thank you so much, Cindy and Jason. It was great to be here. Thank you.

JASON KELLEY: Well now I know how Tor works, which is great because I've been trying to figure that out for years. Um, three steps. I understand why there are three. This makes a lot more sense to me. And I'm honestly just a lot more hopeful than I was, which is always nice. It doesn't happen every time, but I feel like she's describing a future that actually not only is she, she and the Tor folks helping to build, but that other people can be a part of too, which is great.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, I think sometimes people envision privacy tools as the domain of people who are dark and worried and, and wanting to be self-protective all the time. And what was so refreshing about this, and refreshing about the way Isa and Tor operate in the world, is they're working with some pretty serious issues for people, but they're hopeful, they're building a future, they're very positive, and they have a vision of what the world looks like if we build privacy and security into everything. And, and in some ways it was a really light interview about something that protects people from very dangerous situations.

JASON KELLEY: Yeah. Yeah. And she talked a lot about, you know, what got her into free software. For her, it was kind of the necessity of having to write code on paper and not being able to buy software.
But I think we're coming to have that, for some people, that same necessity, again, for a lot of different reasons, you know, the software is bloated, it's enshittified, as Cory would say. Um, it's, you know, often monopolied in some way and, not that these are good things, but if it gets people back to the point she made where you realize that you can build the things yourself, that you don't have to accept the software that you're given and, and the tech that you're given, you can make your own and edit it and things like that. I think that would be a great outcome, and it sounds like that's already happening.

CINDY COHN: I think the other pieces were just, you know, really emphasizing the community, the need for community and how important community is, both in terms of entry into this, but also in the supporting and maintaining and developing of things and in, in how people use Tor. Right. You know, the Tor project operates because of nodes all across the country that volunteer to hold, you know, to carry other people's things. EFF has has done a Tor challenge a few times where we've tried to get more people to run nodes, whether they're in the middle or in the end. But that community is kind of infused in the way Tor works and it's infused in the vision that she has for a better future too. And that's just so consistent with, you know, what we've heard from people over and over again about how we, how we fix the internet.

JASON KELLEY: And that’s our episode for today – thanks so much for joining us.
If you have feedback or suggestions, we'd love to hear from you. Visit EFF dot org slash podcast and click on listener feedback. While you're there, you can become a member, donate, maybe even pick up some merch and just see what's happening in digital rights this week and every week.
Our theme music is by Nat Keefe of BeatMower with Reed Mathis
And How to Fix the Internet is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's program in public understanding of science and technology.
We’ll see you next time.
I’m Jason Kelley…

CINDY COHN: And I’m Cindy Cohn.

MUSIC CREDITS: This podcast is licensed creative commons attribution 4.0 international, and includes the following music that is licensed creative commons attribution 3.0 unported by its creators: Recreation by Airtone. Additional beds and alternate theme remixes by Gaetan Harris.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 04 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02370-6

Author Correction: Explaining the adaptation gap through consistency in adaptation planning

The accumulation of microplastics in the environment, and within our bodies, is an increasingly worrisome issue. But predicting where these ubiquitous particles will accumulate, and therefore where remediation efforts should be focused, has been difficult because of the many factors that contribute to their dispersal and deposition.

New research from MIT shows that one key factor in determining where microparticles are likely to build up has to do with the presence of biofilms. These thin, sticky biopolymer layers are shed by microorganisms and can accumulate on surfaces, including along sandy riverbeds or seashores. The study found that, all other conditions being equal, microparticles are less likely to accumulate in sediment infused with biofilms, because if they land there, they are more likely to be resuspended by flowing water and carried away.

The open-access findings appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, in a paper by MIT postdoc Hyoungchul Park and professor of civil and environmental engineering Heidi Nepf. “Microplastics are definitely in the news a lot,” Nepf says, “and we don’t fully understand where the hotspots of accumulation are likely to be. This work gives a little bit of guidance” on some of the factors that can cause these particles, and small particles in general, to accumulate in certain locations.

Most experiments looking at the ways microparticles are transported and deposited have been conducted over bare sand, Park says. “But in nature, there are a lot of microorganisms, such as bacteria, fungi, and algae, and when they adhere to the stream bed they generate some sticky things.” These substances are known as extracellular polymeric substances, or EPS, and they “can significantly affect the channel bed characteristics,” he says. The new research focused on determining exactly how these substances affected the transport of microparticles, including microplastics.

The research involved a flow tank with a bottom lined with fine sand, and sometimes with vertical plastic tubes simulating the presence of mangrove roots. In some experiments the bed consisted of pure sand, and in others the sand was mixed with a biological material to simulate the natural biofilms found in many riverbed and seashore environments.

Water mixed with tiny plastic particles was pumped through the tank for three hours, and then the bed surface was photographed under ultraviolet light that caused the plastic particles to fluoresce, allowing a quantitative measurement of their concentration.

The results revealed two different phenomena that affected how much of the plastic accumulated on the different surfaces. Immediately around the rods that stood in for above-ground roots, turbulence prevented particle deposition. In addition, as the amount of simulated biofilms in the sediment bed increased, the accumulation of particles also decreased.

Nepf and Park concluded that the biofilms filled up the spaces between the sand grains, leaving less room for the microparticles to fit in. The particles were more exposed because they penetrated less deeply in between the sand grains, and as a result they were much more easily resuspended and carried away by the flowing water.

“These biological films fill the pore spaces between the sediment grains,” Park explains, “and that makes the deposited particles — the particles that land on the bed — more exposed to the forces generated by the flow, which makes it easier for them to be resuspended. What we found was that in a channel with the same flow conditions and the same vegetation and the same sand bed, if one is without EPS and one is with EPS, then the one without EPS has a much higher deposition rate than the one with EPS.”

Nepf adds: “The biofilm is blocking the plastics from accumulating in the bed because they can’t go deep into the bed. They just stay right on the surface, and then they get picked up and moved elsewhere. So, if I spilled a large amount of microplastic in two rivers, and one had a sandy or gravel bottom, and one was muddier with more biofilm, I would expect more of the microplastics to be retained in the sandy or gravelly river.”

All of this is complicated by other factors, such as the turbulence of the water or the roughness of the bottom surface, she says. But it provides a “nice lens” to provide some suggestions for people who are trying to study the impacts of microplastics in the field. “They’re trying to determine what kinds of habitats these plastics are in, and this gives a framework for how you might categorize those habitats,” she says. “It gives guidance to where you should go to find more plastics versus less.”

As an example, Park suggests, in mangrove ecosystems, microplastics may preferentially accumulate in the outer edges, which tend to be sandy, while the interior zones have sediment with more biofilm. Thus, this work suggests “the sandy outer regions may be potential hotspots for microplastic accumulation,” he says, and can make this a priority zone for monitoring and protection.

“This is a highly relevant finding,” says Isabella Schalko, a research scientist at ETH Zurich, who was not associated with this research. “It suggests that restoration measures such as re-vegetation or promoting biofilm growth could help mitigate microplastic accumulation in aquatic systems. It highlights the powerful role of biological and physical features in shaping particle transport processes.”

The work was supported by Shell International Exploration and Production through the MIT Energy Initiative.

Approaching San Diego’s first annual review of the city's controversial Flock Safety contract, a local coalition is calling on the city council to roll back this dangerous and costly automated license plate reader (ALPR) program.

The TRUST Coalition—a grassroots alliance including Electronic Frontier Alliance members Tech Workers Coalition San Diego and techLEAD—has rallied to stop the unchecked spread of ALPRs in San Diego. We’ve previously covered the coalition’s fight for surveillance oversight, a local effort kicked off by a “smart streetlight” surveillance program five years ago. 

In 2024, San Diego installed hundreds of AI-assisted ALPR cameras throughout the city to document what cars are driving where and when, then making that data accessible for 30 days.

ALPRs like Flock’s don’t prevent crime—they just vacuum up data on everyone who drives past. The resulting error-prone dragnet can then chill speech and be weaponized against marginalized groups, like immigrants and those seeking trans or reproductive healthcare. 

Despite local and state restrictions barring the sharing of ALPR with federal and out of state agencies, San Diego Police have reportedly disclosed license plate data to federal agencies—including Homeland Security Investigations and Customs and Border Patrol.

Also, despite a local ordinance requiring city council approval before deployment of surveillance technology, San Diego police have reportedly deployed ALPRs and smart streetlights at Comic-Con and Pride without the required approval.

The local coalition is not alone in these concerns. The San Diego Privacy Board recently recommended the city reject the Surveillance Use Policy for this technology. All of this costs the community over $3.5 million last year alone. That is why the TRUST coalition is calling on the city to reject this oppressive surveillance system, and, instead, invest in other essential services which improve day-to-day life for residents.

San Diegans who want to push back can get involved by signing the TRUST Coalition’s  petition, follow the campaign online, and contact their council members to demand the city end its contract with Flock and start respecting the privacy rights of everyone who lives, works, or visits through their community.

New reporting has revealed that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is attempting to create the Intelligence Community’s Data Consortium–a centralized online marketplace where law enforcement and spy agencies can peruse and buy very personal digital data about you collected by data brokers. Not only is this a massive escalation of the deeply unjust data broker loophole: it’s also another repulsive signal that your privacy means nothing to the intelligence community.

Imagine a mall where every store is run by data brokers whose goods include your information that has been collected by smartphone applications. Depending on your permissions and what applications are on your phone, this could include contacts, behavioral data, financial information, and even your constant geolocation. Now imagine that the only customers in this mall are federal law enforcement officers and intelligence agents who should be going to a judge, presenting their evidence, and hoping the judge grants a warrant for this information. But now, they don’t need evidence or to justify the reason why they need your data. Now they just need taxpayer money, and this newly centralized digital marketplace provides the buying opportunities.

This is what the Office of the Director of National Intelligence wants to build according to recently released contract documents.

Across the country, states are trying desperately to close the loophole that allows the government to buy private data it would otherwise need a warrant to get. Montana just became the first state to make it illegal for police to purchase data, like geolocation data harvested by apps on smartphones. At the federal level, EFF has endorsed Senator Ron Wyden’s Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which closes this data broker loophole. The bill passed the House last year, but was rejected by the Senate.

And yet, the federal government is doubling down on this very obviously unjust and unpopular policy.

An ODNI that wants to minimize harms against civil liberties would be pursuing the opposite tact. They should not be looking for ways to formalize and institutionalize surveillance loopholes. That is why we not only call on the ODNI to reverse course and scrap the Intelligence Community’s Data Consortium–we also call on lawmakers to finish what they started and pass the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act and close the databroker loophole at the federal level once and for all. We urge all of our supporters to do the same and help us keep the government accountable.

Stanley Fischer PhD ’69, MIT professor emeritus of economics and a towering figure in both academic macroeconomics and global economic policymaking, passed away on May 31. He was 81. Fischer was a foundational scholar as well as a wise mentor and a central force in shaping the macroeconomic tradition of MIT’s Department of Economics that continues today.

“Together with Rudi Dornbusch and later Olivier Blanchard, Stan was one of the intellectual engines that powered MIT macroeconomics in the 1970s and beyond,” says Ricardo Caballero PhD ’88, one of Fischer’s advisees and now the Ford International Professor of Economics at MIT. “He was quietly brilliant, never flashy, and always razor-sharp. His students learned not just from his lectures or his groundbreaking work on New Keynesian models and rational expectations, but from the clarity of his mind and the gentleness of his wit. Nearly 40 years later, I can still hear him saying: ‘Isn’t it easier to do it right the first time than to explain why you didn’t?’ That line has stayed with me ever since. A simple comment from Stan during a seminar — often offered with a disarming smile — could puncture a weak argument or crystallize a central insight. He taught generations of macroeconomists to prize discipline, clarity, and policy relevance.”

Olivier Blanchard PhD ’77, the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics Emeritus at MIT and another advisee, explains that Fischer “was one of the most popular teachers, and one of the most popular thesis advisers. We flocked to his office, and I suspect that the only time for research he had was during the night. What we admired most were his technical skills — he knew how to use stochastic calculus — and his ability to take on big questions and simplify them to the point where the answer, ex post, looked obvious. When Rudi Dornbusch joined him in 1975, macro and international quickly became the most exciting fields at MIT.” Within a decade of his joining the MIT faculty, “Stan had acquired near-guru status.”

Fischer built bridges between economic theory and the practice of economic policy. He served as chief economist of the World Bank (1988-90), first deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF, 1994-2001), governor of the Bank of Israel (2005-13), and vice chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve (2014-17). These leadership roles gave him a rare platform to implement ideas he helped develop in the classroom and he was widely praised for his successes at averting financial crises across several decades and continents. Yet even as he moved through the highest circles of global policymaking, he remained a teacher at heart — accessible, thoughtful, and generous with his time.

At MIT, Fischer is best remembered for inspiring generations of graduate students who moved between academics and policy just as he did. Over the course of two decades before he began his active policy role, he was primary adviser for 49 PhD students, secondary adviser to another 23, and a celebrated teacher for many more. 

Many of his students became important macroeconomic policymakers, including Ben Bernanke PhD ’79; Mario Draghi PhD ’77; Ilan Goldfajn PhD ’95; Philip Lowe PhD ’91; and Kazuo Ueda PhD ’80, who chaired the Federal Reserve Board, the European Central Bank, the Banco Central do Brazil, the Reserve Bank of Australia, and the Bank of Japan. Students Gregory Mankiw PhD ’84 and Christina Romer PhD ’85 chaired the Council of Economic Advisors; Maurice Obstfeld PhD ’79 and Kenneth Rogoff PhD ’80 were chief economist at the International Monetary Fund; and Frederic Mishkin PhD ’76 was a governor of the Federal Reserve. Another of his students, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers ’75, explains that “no one had more cumulative influence on the macroeconomic policymakers of the last generation than Stanley Fischer … We all were shaped by his clarity of thought, intellectual balance, personal decency, and quality of character. In a broader sense, everyone who was involved in the macro policy enterprise was Stan Fischer’s disciple. People all over the world who never knew his name lived better, more secure, lives because of all that he did through his teaching, writing, and service.”

Fischer grew up in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), living behind the general store his family ran before moving to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) at the age of 13. Inspired by the quality of writing in John Maynard Keynes’ “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” he applied for and won a scholarship to study at the London School of Economics. He moved to MIT for his graduate studies, where his dissertation was supervised by Franklin M. Fisher. After several years on the University of Chicago faculty, he returned to MIT in 1973, where he stayed for the remainder of his academic career. He held the Elizabeth and James Killian Class of 1926 professorship from 1992 to 1995, serving as department chair in 1993–94, before being called away to the IMF.

Fischer’s intellectual journey from MIT to Chicago and back culminated in his most influential academic work. Ivan Werning, the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics at MIT notes, “his research was pathbreaking and paved the way to the modern approach to macroeconomics. By merging nominal rigidities associated with MIT’s Keynesian tradition with rational expectations emanating from the Chicago school, his 1977 paper on ‘Long-Term Contracts, Rational Expectations, and the Optimal Money Supply Rule’ showed how the non-neutrality of money did not require agent irrationality or confusion.” The dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models now used at every central bank to evaluate monetary policy options are direct descendants of Fischer’s thinking.

Fischer’s influence goes beyond what has become known as New Keynesian Economics. Werning continues, “Fischer’s research combined theoretical insights to very applied questions. His textbook with Blanchard was instrumental to an entire generation of macroeconomists, showing macroeconomics as a rich and evolving field, ripe with tools and great questions to study. Along with Bob Solow, Rudi Dornbusch, and others, Fischer had a huge impact within the MIT economics department and helped build its day-to-day culture, with an inquisitive, open-minded, and friendly atmosphere.”

Macroeconomics — and MIT — owe him a profound debt.

Fischer is survived by his three sons, Michael, David, and Jonathan, and nine grandchildren.

Thanks in part to your support, the right to repair is now law in Washington.

Gov. Bob Ferguson signed two bills guaranteeing Washingtonians' right to access tools, parts, and information so they can fix personal electronics, appliances, and wheelchairs. This is the epitome of common-sense legislation. When you own something, you should have the final say about who fixes, adapts, or modifies it—and how.

When you own something, you should have the final say about who fixes, adapts, or modifies it—and how.

Advocates in Washington have worked for years to pass a strong right-to-repair law in the state. In addition to Washington’s Public Interest Research Group, the consumer electronics bill moved forward with a growing group of supporting organizations, including environmental advocates, consumer advocates, and manufacturers such as Google and Microsoft. Meanwhile, advocacy from groups including  Disability Rights Washington and the Here and Now Project made the case for the wheelchair's inclusion in the right-to-repair bill, bringing their personal stories to Olympia to show why this bill was so important.

And it’s not just states that recognize the need for people to be able to fix their own stuff.  Earlier this month, U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll issued a memo stating that the Army should “[identify] and propose contract modifications for right to repair provisions where intellectual property constraints limit the Army's ability to conduct maintenance and access the appropriate maintenance tools, software, and technical data – while preserving the intellectual capital of American industry.” The memo said that the Army should seek this in future procurement contracts and also to amend existing contracts to include the right to repair.

This is a bedrock of sound procurement with a long history in America. President Lincoln only bought rifles with standardized tooling to outfit the Union Army, for the obvious reason that it would be a little embarrassing for the Commander in Chief to have to pull his troops off the field because the Army’s sole supplier had decided not to ship this week’s delivery of ammo and parts. Somehow, the Department of Defense forgot this lesson over the ensuing centuries, so that today, billions of dollars in public money are spent on material and systems that the US military can only maintain by buying service from a “beltway bandit.”

This recognizes what millions of people have said repeatedly: limiting people’s ability to fix their own stuff stands in the way of needed repairs and maintenance. That’s true whether you’re a farmer with a broken tractor during harvest, a homeowner with a misbehaving washing machine or a cracked smartphone screen, a hospital med-tech trying to fix a ventilator, or a soldier struggling with a broken generator.

The right to repair is gaining serious momentum. All 50 states have now considered some form of right-to-repair legislation. Washington is the eighth state to pass one of these bills into law—let’s keep it up.

Last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a troubling order to all state agency directors of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP): hand over your data.

This is part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to gain “unfettered access to comprehensive data from all state programs that receive federal funding,” through Executive Order 14243. While the order says this data sharing is intended to cut down on fraud, it is written so broadly that it could authorize almost any data sharing. Such an effort flies in the face of well-established data privacy practices and places people at considerable risk. 

A group SNAP recipients and organizations have thankfully sued to try and block the data sharing granted through the Executive Order.  And the state of New Mexico has even refused to comply with the order, “due to questions and concerns regarding the legality of USDA’s demand for the information,” according to Source NM.

The federal government has said very little about how they will use this information. Several populations targeted by the Trump Administration are eligible to be on the SNAP program, including asylum seekers, refugees, and victims of trafficking. Additionally, although undocumented immigrants are not eligible for SNAP benefits, their household members who are U.S. citizens or have other eligible immigration statuses may be—raising the distinct concern that SNAP information could be shared with immigration or other enforcement authorities.

We all deserve privacy rights. Accessing public benefits to feed yourself shouldn't require you to give those up.

EFF has long advocated for privacy policies that ensure that information provided in one context is not used for other reasons. People who hand over their personal information should do so freely and with full information about how their information will be used. Whether you're seeking services from the government or a company, we all deserve privacy rights. Accessing public benefits to feed yourself shouldn't require you to give those up.

It's particularly important to respect privacy for government programs that provide essential support services to vulnerable populations such as SNAP.  SNAP supports people who need assistance buying food—arguably the most basic need. Often, fear of reprisal and inappropriate government data sharing, such as immigration status of household members not receiving benefits, prevents eligible people from enrolling in food assistance despite need.  Discouraging eligible people from enrolling in SNAP benefits runs counterproductive to the goals of the program, which aim to reduce food insecurity, improve health outcomes, and benefit local economies.

This is just the latest government data-sharing effort that raises alarm bells for digital rights. No one should worry that asking their government for help with hunger will get them in trouble. The USDA must promise it will not weaponize programs that put food on the table during times of need. 

Two dangerous bills have been reintroduced in Congress that would reverse over a decade of progress in fighting patent trolls and making the patent system more balanced. The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA) and the PREVAIL Act would each cause significant harm on their own. Together, they form a one-two punch—making it easier to obtain vague and overly broad patents, while making it harder for the public to challenge them.

These bills don’t just share bad ideas—they share sponsors, a coordinated rollout, and backing from many of the same lobbying groups. Congress should reject both.

TAKE ACTION

Tell Congress: Don't Bring Back The Worst Patents

PERA Would Legalize Patents on Basic Software—and Human Genes

PERA would overturn long-standing court decisions that have helped keep some of the worst patents out of the system. This includes the Supreme Court’s Alice v. CLS Bank decision, which bars patents on abstract ideas, and Myriad v. AMP, which correctly ruled that naturally occurring human genes cannot be patented.

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.

PERA would wipe out the Alice framework and replace it with vague, hollow exceptions. For example: it would ban patents on “dance moves” and “marriage proposals,” but would allow nearly anything involving a computer or machine—even if it only mentions the use of a computer. This is the same language used in many bad software patents that patent trolls have wielded for years. If PERA passes, patent claims  that are currently seen as weak will become much harder to challenge. 

Adding to that, PERA would bring back patents on human genes—exactly what was at stake in the Myriad case. EFF joined that fight, alongside scientists and patients, to prevent patents that interfered with essential diagnostic testing. Congress should not undo that victory. Some things just shouldn’t be patented. 

PERA’s requirement that living genes can constitute an invention if they are “isolated” is meaningless; every gene used in science is “isolated” from the human body. This legal wordplay was used to justify human gene patents for decades, and it’s deeply troubling that some U.S. Senators are on board with bringing them back. 

PREVAIL Weakens the Public’s Best Defense Against Patent Abuse

While PERA makes it easier to obtain a bad patent, the PREVAIL Act makes it harder to get rid of one.

PREVAIL would severely limit inter partes review (IPR), the most effective process for challenging wrongly granted patents. This faster, more affordable process—administered by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office—has knocked out thousands of invalid patents that should never have been issued.

EFF has used IPR to protect the public. In 2013, we challenged and invalidated a patent on podcasting, which was being used to threaten creators across the internet. Thousands of our supporters chipped in to help us bring that case. Under PREVAIL, that challenge wouldn’t have been allowed. The bill would significantly limit IPR petitions unless you’ve been directly sued or threatened—a major blow to nonprofits, open source advocates, and membership-based defense groups that act in the public interest. 

PREVAIL doesn’t stop at limiting who can file an IPR. It also undermines the fairness of the IPR process itself. It raises the burden of proof, requiring challengers to overcome a presumption that the patent is valid—even when the Patent Office is the one reviewing it. The bill forces an unfair choice: anyone who challenges a patent at the Patent Office would have to give up the right to fight the same patent in court, even though key legal arguments (such as those involving abstract subject matter) can only be made in court.

It gets worse. PREVAIL makes it easier for patent owners to rewrite their claims during review, taking advantage of hindsight about what’s likely to hold up. And if multiple parties want to challenge the same patent, only the first to file may get heard. This means that patents used to threaten dozens or even hundreds of targets could get extra protection, just because one early challenger didn’t bring the best arguments.

These changes aren’t about improving the system. They’re about making it easier for a small number of patent owners to extract settlements, and harder for the public to push back.

A Step Backward, Not Forward

Supporters of these bills claim they’re trying to restore balance to the patent system. But that’s not what PERA and PREVAIL do. They don’t fix what’s broken—they break what’s working.

Patent trolling is still a severe problem. In 2024, patent trolls filed a stunning 88% of all patent lawsuits in the tech sector. 

At the same time, patent law has come a long way over the past decade. Courts can now reject abstract software patents earlier and more easily. The IPR process has become a vital tool for holding the Patent Office accountable and protecting real innovators. And the Myriad decision has helped keep essential parts of human biology in the public domain.

PERA and PREVAIL would undo all of that.

These bills have support from a variety of industry groups, including those representing biotech firms, university tech transfer offices, and some tech companies that rely on aggressive patent licensing. While those voices deserve to be heard, the public deserves better than legislation that makes it easier to secure a 20-year monopoly on an idea, and harder for anyone else to challenge it.

Instead of PERA and PREVAIL, Congress should focus on helping developers, creators, and small businesses that rely on technology—not those who exploit it through bad patents.

Some of that legislation is already written. Congress should consider making end-users immune from patent threats, closing loopholes that allow certain patent-holders to avoid having their patents reviewed, and adding transparency requirements so that people accused of patent infringement can at least figure out who’s making the allegations. 

But right now, EFF is fighting back, and we need your help. These bills may be dressed up as reform, but we’ve seen them before—and we know the damage they’d do.

TAKE ACTION

Tell Congress: Reject PERA and PREVAIL

Hydrogen has the potential to be a climate-friendly fuel since it doesn’t release carbon dioxide when used as an energy source. Currently, however, most methods for producing hydrogen involve fossil fuels, making hydrogen less of a “green” fuel over its entire life cycle.

A new process developed by MIT engineers could significantly shrink the carbon footprint associated with making hydrogen.

Last year, the team reported that they could produce hydrogen gas by combining seawater, recycled soda cans, and caffeine. The question then was whether the benchtop process could be applied at an industrial scale, and at what environmental cost.

Now, the researchers have carried out a “cradle-to-grave” life cycle assessment, taking into account every step in the process at an industrial scale. For instance, the team calculated the carbon emissions associated with acquiring and processing aluminum, reacting it with seawater to produce hydrogen, and transporting the fuel to gas stations, where drivers could tap into hydrogen tanks to power engines or fuel cell cars. They found that, from end to end, the new process could generate a fraction of the carbon emissions that is associated with conventional hydrogen production.

In a study appearing today in Cell Reports Sustainability, the team reports that for every kilogram of hydrogen produced, the process would generate 1.45 kilograms of carbon dioxide over its entire life cycle. In comparison, fossil-fuel-based processes emit 11 kilograms of carbon dioxide per kilogram of hydrogen generated.

The low-carbon footprint is on par with other proposed “green hydrogen” technologies, such as those powered by solar and wind energy.

“We’re in the ballpark of green hydrogen,” says lead author Aly Kombargi PhD ’25, who graduated this spring from MIT with a doctorate in mechanical engineering. “This work highlights aluminum’s potential as a clean energy source and offers a scalable pathway for low-emission hydrogen deployment in transportation and remote energy systems.”

The study’s MIT co-authors are Brooke Bao, Enoch Ellis, and professor of mechanical engineering Douglas Hart.

Gas bubble

Dropping an aluminum can in water won’t normally cause much of a chemical reaction. That’s because when aluminum is exposed to oxygen, it instantly forms a shield-like layer. Without this layer, aluminum exists in its pure form and can readily react when mixed with water. The reaction that occurs involves aluminum atoms that efficiently break up molecules of water, producing aluminum oxide and pure hydrogen. And it doesn’t take much of the metal to bubble up a significant amount of the gas.

“One of the main benefits of using aluminum is the energy density per unit volume,” Kombargi says. “With a very small amount of aluminum fuel, you can conceivably supply much of the power for a hydrogen-fueled vehicle.”

Last year, he and Hart developed a recipe for aluminum-based hydrogen production. They found they could puncture aluminum’s natural shield by treating it with a small amount of gallium-indium, which is a rare-metal alloy that effectively scrubs aluminum into its pure form. The researchers then mixed pellets of pure aluminum with seawater and observed that the reaction produced pure hydrogen. What’s more, the salt in the water helped to precipitate gallium-indium, which the team could subsequently recover and reuse to generate more hydrogen, in a cost-saving, sustainable cycle.

“We were explaining the science of this process in conferences, and the questions we would get were, ‘How much does this cost?’ and, ‘What’s its carbon footprint?’” Kombargi says. “So we wanted to look at the process in a comprehensive way.”

A sustainable cycle

For their new study, Kombargi and his colleagues carried out a life cycle assessment to estimate the environmental impact of aluminum-based hydrogen production, at every step of the process, from sourcing the aluminum to transporting the hydrogen after production. They set out to calculate the amount of carbon associated with generating 1 kilogram of hydrogen — an amount that they chose as a practical, consumer-level illustration.

“With a hydrogen fuel cell car using 1 kilogram of hydrogen, you can go between 60 to 100 kilometers, depending on the efficiency of the fuel cell,” Kombargi notes.

They performed the analysis using Earthster — an online life cycle assessment tool that draws data from a large repository of products and processes and their associated carbon emissions. The team considered a number of scenarios to produce hydrogen using aluminum, from starting with “primary” aluminum mined from the Earth, versus “secondary” aluminum that is recycled from soda cans and other products, and using various methods to transport the aluminum and hydrogen.

After running life cycle assessments for about a dozen scenarios, the team identified one scenario with the lowest carbon footprint. This scenario centers on recycled aluminum — a source that saves a significant amount of emissions compared with mining aluminum — and seawater — a natural resource that also saves money by recovering gallium-indium. They found that this scenario, from start to finish, would generate about 1.45 kilograms of carbon dioxide for every kilogram of hydrogen produced. The cost of the fuel produced, they calculated, would be about $9 per kilogram, which is comparable to the price of hydrogen that would be generated with other green technologies such as wind and solar energy.

The researchers envision that if the low-carbon process were ramped up to a commercial scale, it would look something like this: The production chain would start with scrap aluminum sourced from a recycling center. The aluminum would be shredded into pellets and treated with gallium-indium. Then, drivers could transport the pretreated pellets as aluminum “fuel,” rather than directly transporting hydrogen, which is potentially volatile. The pellets would be transported to a fuel station that ideally would be situated near a source of seawater, which could then be mixed with the aluminum, on demand, to produce hydrogen. A consumer could then directly pump the gas into a car with either an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell.

The entire process does produce an aluminum-based byproduct, boehmite, which is a mineral that is commonly used in fabricating semiconductors, electronic elements, and a number of industrial products. Kombargi says that if this byproduct were recovered after hydrogen production, it could be sold to manufacturers, further bringing down the cost of the process as a whole.

“There are a lot of things to consider,” Kombargi says. “But the process works, which is the most exciting part. And we show that it can be environmentally sustainable.”

The group is continuing to develop the process. They recently designed a small reactor, about the size of a water bottle, that takes in aluminum pellets and seawater to generate hydrogen, enough to power an electric bike for several hours. They previously demonstrated that the process can produce enough hydrogen to fuel a small car. The team is also exploring underwater applications, and are designing a hydrogen reactor that would take in surrounding seawater to power a small boat or underwater vehicle.

This research was supported, in part, by the MIT Portugal Program.

They’re interesting:

Tracked as CVE-2025-5054 and CVE-2025-4598, both vulnerabilities are race condition bugs that could enable a local attacker to obtain access to access sensitive information. Tools like Apport and systemd-coredump are designed to handle crash reporting and core dumps in Linux systems.

[…]

“This means that if a local attacker manages to induce a crash in a privileged process and quickly replaces it with another one with the same process ID that resides inside a mount and pid namespace, apport will attempt to forward the core dump (which might contain sensitive information belonging to the original, privileged process) into the namespace.”...

Government layoffs threaten to make it easier for the Trump administration to ditch draft regulations for heat safety.

The president’s request for an additional $4 billion in disaster aid indicates that he might not carry through with his threats to dismantle the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The administration intends to issue new guidelines after a Trump-appointed judge twice upheld a Biden-era rule that lets investors consider climate costs.