For the past three summers, MIT master’s students and recently graduated planners have collaborated with cities and community organizations to advance climate, infrastructure, and economic development initiatives. They’re known as the Freedom Summer Fellows, participants in an impact-driven program launched in 2023 by the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), an expression of the department’s commitment to equal opportunity and experiential learning. 

Over the course of eight to 10 weeks, fellows are immersed in the real stakes and challenges of projects that involve navigating a network of interconnected causes, competing agendas, a range of stakeholders, and rapidly changing circumstances. Host organizations define discrete tasks and provide ongoing supervision, while fellows develop actionable tools and materials designed to empower organizations in the long term — from policy research and grant application strategies to navigate funding, to analytical tools and implementation frameworks to ensure informed and streamlined project management. 

“You can’t teach planning today without grappling with how policy actually unfolds within communities; under pressure, with limited resources, and with multiple conflicting interests,” says Phillip Thompson, professor of urban planning at MIT and former New York City deputy mayor for strategic policy initiatives under Mayor Bill de Blasio. “The Freedom Summer Fellowship is about capacity building through cooperative learning — a knowledge exchange intended to have lasting positive results for communities, while equipping planners with critical experience as they embark on their careers.”

From classroom to communities

The fellowship emerged from Bills and Billions, a DUSP Independent Activities Period course taught by Thompson and Elisabeth Reynolds, professor of the practice at MIT and former special assistant to President Joe Biden for manufacturing and economic development. The course examines U.S. federal policy and its intersection with local economic development, labor markets, and the infrastructure of industry, energy, and the built environment more broadly.  

“We were at an inflection point,” says Reynolds, speaking of her return to MIT in fall 2022 after serving at the National Economic Council. “There was a real sense of urgency about the wave of new legislation and funding around clean energy, infrastructure, and reindustrialization, and much of the investment and work in these areas continues today. It’s a very dynamic time for cities and states, with significant experimentation and innovative strategies — a perfect environment for MIT graduate students and recent grads.”  

Securing federal funding is typically dependent on competitive grants requiring technical, financial, and community planning that many local governments and nonprofits are not equipped for. “While much funding to localities has since been cut, the momentum for change is still there,” says Thompson. “The incentives put forward by the Inflation Reduction Act encouraged localities and communities to initiate their own clean energy projects, and there’s a continued recognition that climate change is going to take a movement from the bottom up.”

At a time when the U.S. is experiencing a paradigm shift in policy — characterized by challenges to a free-market economy and global trade, renewed investment in industrial strategy, and the lifting of environmental and other regulations — the fellowship offers a way to support the planning and implementation of equitable development strategies and to redirect resources where they are needed most.

From placements to professional practice

Since 2023, 31 Freedom Summer Fellows have collaborated with 19 host organizations, and contributed to more than $100 million in state, federal, and philanthropic grant applications, including a successful $3 million EPA Climate Pollution Reduction grant for Hawaii. Fellows have helped convene more than 3,500 community members and have produced dozens of planning tools, including implementation maps, technical tools, and dashboards that support equitable project design and production. Collaborations have inspired the focus of graduate theses produced as client reports for hosts, and in several cases fellows have extended their positions to full-time roles. 

For Sara Jex MCP ’25, her 2024 Freedom Summer Fellowship became a direct pathway from graduate study to professional practice. She was placed with the Site Readiness Fund for Good Jobs in Cleveland, Ohio, an organization working to transform brownfields and disinvested industrial sites into engines of inclusive economic growth.

“Much of my work that summer involved developing an EPA Community Change Grant application for a proposed industrial district spanning over 350 acres — 200 of which we’re looking to reactivate,” says Jex. “So, it’s a transformative project that will bring in new jobs, but there are also major challenges that come with industrial place-making, especially given the proximity to residential neighborhoods. In Rust Belt cities, there’s a history of industrial disinvestment leading to job loss, population decline, and environmental injustices. We don’t want to repeat the harms of the past — we want to create something better.”

To support equitable development strategies for the industrial corridor, Jex helped to prepare technical tools mapping the effects of development on home values, seeking to identify a balance of growth, affordability, and resident benefit. She also evaluated wealth-building strategies such as land trusts and mixed-income neighborhood trusts, offering recommendations for community ownership of land holdings.

“Our vision for the project is not just about bringing in new businesses and creating new jobs,” says Jex, “it’s also about going beyond job creation to create lasting benefit for communities surrounding the sites.”

Jex continued working with Site Readiness Fund for Good Jobs during her second year at MIT and now holds a full-time role at the organization. “The Freedom Summer Fellowship gave me a platform to start building my planning career,” she reflects. “It was eye-opening to be in a cohort of other students doing similar work across the country. The insights from our weekly meetings have stayed with me since graduating — we were able to share perspectives on the challenges we were facing from multiple different contexts, and that brought a new dimension to the learning process.”

Redefining resilience

For Deena Darby, an MIT master’s student with a background in architecture and public art, her 2025 Freedom Summer Fellowship offered a way to bridge creative practice with structural change. Working with the LA84 Foundation and the Ubuntu Climate Initiative in Los Angeles, Darby focused on neighborhood-based resilience in the context of the 2025 wildfires and the upcoming 2028 Olympics.

“My decision to apply to do a master’s in city planning at MIT was informed by the projects I had been working on in Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and other cities, including Philadelphia and Detroit. Much of that work involved community engagement work when producing public art at an architectural scale, but I kept feeling that residents deserved more than an art piece at the end of a project.” 

During the fellowship, Darby contributed to asset mapping across six neighborhoods, developed case studies on resilience hubs, and helped shape strategies that tied climate adaptation to culture, play, and community ownership. Her immersion in the lived experience of those neighborhoods — visiting sites, meeting organizers, and participating in local coalitions — was crucial to her development of strategic recommendations for decentralized infrastructure, cultural arts cohorts, and neighborhood-based resilience festivals.

“Resilience is often narrowly framed around climate,” Darby reflects. “But what we were really redefining was economic resilience, social resilience, and the ability of communities to tell their own stories.” 

Darby’s fellowship experience has led to her thesis project, working with the residents of a historically Black neighborhood in her hometown of Savannah, Georgia, who are experiencing displacement. “Coming from an architecture and planning background, my instinct is to ask, How can we frame these issues in terms of cultural preservation and community-based policy development and implementation?” says Darby. “How can we manage change, with the goal of benefiting present residents as well as honoring those who have lived here in the past?”

For Darby, gaining practical understanding of the inseparability of planning and policy has been key to shaping her approach to navigating the educational opportunities at MIT. “In a higher-education context, you’ll often find policy housed separately from planning. But the moment you’re working in situ, it doesn’t make sense to separate the two. For me, the fellowship was a bridge between two often-siloed disciplines.”

Reassessing expertise

“Impact at MIT is typically associated with technological breakthroughs,” says Reynolds. “But much of MIT’s work can make a huge difference when applied in the near term, on the ground. At DUSP, we’re all about bringing theory and practice together, about the interrelation of communities, infrastructure, policy, and how that maps out in the built environment. We can bring expertise and knowledge into the field tomorrow, into places that can immediately benefit from the collaboration.” 

Initial funding for the fellowship at MIT was provided by the MIT Climate Project, in addition to national foundations. Faculty are exploring ways to expand and increase the number of student placements, further embedding relationships between MIT and cities across the United States. There are also discussions about sharing the model with other institutions, including historically Black colleges and international collaborators. 

“We’re just starting these conversations with other institutions, but it’s the model of engaged, experiential, cooperative learning that matters,” says Thompson. “It’s clear that the experts aren’t necessarily those who have read a lot of books about planning or design, but those who are embedded within communities, trying to figure out these challenges from the inside.”

The planner might not be the primary expert — but they are the ones who guide decisions that shape the futures of communities. The Freedom Summer Fellowship is about fostering a culture of urban planning in which those decisions are centered upon the lived experience of stakeholders. An approach to practice in which — as Jex put it, reflecting on her experience in Cleveland: “Planners are the people who make decisions about how cities shape access to opportunity.”

Applications for the 2026 Freedom Summer Fellowships are being accepted now through April 7. 

Here’s a fossil of a 150-million year old fish that choked to death on a belemnite rostrum: the hard, internal shell of an extinct, squid-like animal.

Original paper.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

The MIT James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work recently hosted a half-day symposium at the Institute on “Why Wealth Inequality Matters.”

Three panel discussions convened experts from economics, philosophy, sociology, and political science to explore the origins, mechanisms, and political consequences of wealth inequality.

Richard Locke, John C Head III Dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, welcomed attendees to the symposium, emphasizing how the event reflects MIT’s commitments to interdisciplinary collaboration and to addressing “society's most pressing issues.”

Here are three key takeaways from the afternoon’s panels.

When wealth buys political influence and legal immunity, democracy is threatened

Hélène Landemore of Yale University argued that wealth inequality isn’t inherently problematic, but becomes dangerous when wealth offers disproportionate influence in other spheres, including political power.

Wojciech Kopczuk of Columbia University echoed this, emphasizing that wealth is a complicated and often ambiguous measure of inequality. Wealth reflects institutional contexts — for example, weak safety nets drive precautionary saving. Still, he agreed that wealth is a relevant metric at the very top, where it correlates with political capture and corporate power.

Landemore explained that when the wealthy dominate policy discussions, “some groups are systematically disbelieved or ignored, and the result is policy failure.” For example, French carbon taxes disproportionately burdened working-class people who were more dependent on cars, which led to the yellow vests protests.

Elizabeth Anderson of the University of Michigan extended this point to corporate power, warning that extreme concentration gives powerful firms de facto immunity from the rule of law — the wealthiest companies can hire hundreds of lawyers to swamp the legal system.

To counteract these negative consequences of high inequality, Oren Cass of American Compass argued that strengthening worker power is key. Redistribution, he said, is a way to improve living standards, but “it is not a solution to the kinds of problems that actually plague democratic capitalism.”

The roots of the racial wealth gap are so deep that equal opportunity alone won’t close it

Ellora Derenoncourt of Princeton University explained that in the United States today, the wealth gap between Black and white Americans is 6:1. In other words, for every dollar of wealth held by an average white American, the average Black American holds about $0.17. She noted that this racial wealth gap has largely remained unchanged for the past 50 years.

“Even if we were to equalize differences in wealth accumulating opportunities — equal savings rates, equal capital gains rates going forward — we’re still hundreds of years away from convergence,” she explained, due to the magnitude of the original gap.

Alexandra Killewald of the University of Michigan added that the racial wealth gap is actively rebuilt each generation through unequal schools, unequal pay, and unequal access to homeownership.

“The past matters, but it’s not just about the past,” she explained. Even if a massive reparations plan were implemented, “if we just let things go on as they are, we will start to recreate inequality from Day 1.”

High inequality and authoritarianism reinforce each other

Daron Acemoglu of MIT described how increasing inequality goes hand-in-hand with the weakening of democracy: “Once inequality starts building up, it also naturally erodes democracies’ claim for legitimacy.”

High inequality, he argued, is both a cause and an effect of liberal democracy failing to deliver on its promise of shared prosperity. This failure, in turn, weakens public support for democracy.

Building on this argument, Sheri Berman of Barnard College examined why economically disadvantaged voters in the United States and Europe have increasingly voted for right-wing populist parties, despite holding economically progressive views.

She described how center-left parties have transformed since the late 20th century, converging with the right on economic policy (embracing free trade and market deregulation) while moving left on social and cultural issues. As a result, she argued, working-class and rural voters no longer saw center-left parties as champions of their economic interests, or as reflecting their social and cultural preferences.

David Yang of Harvard University explained that once authoritarianism takes hold, regimes continue to produce inequality. For example, non-democratic regimes are most responsive not to the average citizen, but to whoever poses the greatest threat to regime survival. In China, this tends to be the wealthier urban population capable of organizing large-scale collective action.

Today, there are 94 nuclear reactors operating in the United States, more than in any other country in the world, and these units collectively provide nearly 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. That is a major accomplishment, according to Dean Price, but he believes that our country needs much more out of nuclear energy, especially at a moment when alternatives to fossil fuel-based power plants are desperately being sought. He became a nuclear engineer for this very reason — to make sure that nuclear technology is up to the task of delivering in this time of considerable need.

“Nuclear energy has been a tremendous part of our nation’s energy infrastructure for the past 60 years, and the number of people who maintain that infrastructure is incredibly small,” says Price, an MIT assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), as well as the Atlantic Richfield Career Development Professor in Energy Studies. “By becoming a nuclear engineer, you become one of a select number of people responsible for carbon-free energy generation in the United States.” 

That was a mission he was eager to take part in, and the goals he set for himself were far from modest: He wanted to help design and usher in a new class of nuclear reactors, building on the safety, economics, and reliability of the existing nuclear fleet.

Price has never wavered from this objective, and he’s only found encouragement along the way. The nuclear engineering community, he says, “is small, close-knit, and very welcoming. Once you get into it, most people are not inclined to do anything else.”

Illuminating the relationships between physical processes

In his first research project as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana at Champaign, Price studied the safety of the steel and concrete casks used to store spent reactor fuel rods after they’ve cooled off in tanks of water, typically for several years. His analysis indicated that this storage method was quite safe, although the question as to what should ultimately be done with these fuel casks, in terms of long-term disposal, remains open in this country.

After starting graduate studies at the University of Michigan in 2020, Price took up a different line of research that he’s still engaged in today. That area of study, called multiphysics modeling, involves looking at various physical processes going on in the core of a nuclear reactor to see how they interact — an alternative to studying these processes one at a time.

One key process, neutronics, concerns how neutrons buzz around in the reactor core causing nuclear fission, which is what generates the power. A second process, called thermal hydraulics, involves cooling the reactor to extract the heat generated by neutrons. A multiphysics simulation, analyzing how these two processes interact, could show how the heat carried away as the reactor produces power affects the behavior of neutrons, because the hotter the fuel is, the less likely it is to cause fission.

“If you ever want to change your power level, or do anything with the reactor, the temperature of the fuel is a critical input that you need to know,” says Price. “Multiphysics modeling allows us to correlate the fission neutronics processes with a thermal property, temperature. That, in turn, can help us predict how the reactor will behave under different conditions.”

Multiphysics modeling for light water reactors, which are the ones operating today with capacities on the order of 1,000 megawatts, are pretty well established, Prices says. But methods for modeling advanced reactors — small modular reactors (SMRs with capacities ranging from around 20 to 300 MW) and microreactors (rated at 1 to 20 MW) — are far less advanced. Only a very small number of these reactors are operating today, but Price is focusing his efforts on them because of their potential to produce power more cheaply and more safely, along with their greater flexibility in power and size.   

Although multiphysics simulations have supplied the nuclear community with a wealth of information, they can require supercomputers to solve, or find approximate solutions to, coupled and extremely difficult nonlinear equations. In the hopes of greatly reducing the computational burden, Price is actively exploring artificial intelligence approaches that could provide similar answers while bypassing those burdensome equations altogether. That has been a central theme of his research agenda since he joined the MIT faculty in September 2025.

A crucial role for artificial intelligence

What artificial intelligence and machine-learning methods, in particular, are good at is finding patterns concealed within data, such as correlations between variables critical to the functioning of a nuclear plant. For example, Price says, “if you tell me the power level of your reactor, it [AI] could tell you what the fuel temperature is and even tell you the 3-dimensional temperature distribution in your core.” And if this can be done without solving any complicated differential equations, computational costs could be greatly reduced.

Price is investigating several applications where AI may be especially useful, such as helping with the design of novel kinds of reactors. “We could then rely on the safety frameworks developed over the past 50 years to carry out a safety analysis of the proposed design,” he says. “In this way, AI will not be directly interfacing with anything that is safety-critical.” As he sees it, AI’s role would be to augment established procedures, rather than replacing them, helping to fill in existing gaps in knowledge.

When a machine-learning model is given a sufficient amount of data to learn from, it can help us better understand the relationship between key physical processes — again without having to solve nonlinear differential equations. 

“By really pinning down those relationships, we can make better design decisions in the early stages,” Price says. “And when that technology is developed and deployed, AI can help us make more intelligent control decisions that will enable us to operate our reactors in a safer and more economical way.”

Giving back to the community that nurtured him

Simply put, one of his chief goals is to bring the benefits of AI to the nuclear industry, and he views the possibilities as vast and largely untapped. Price also believes that he is well-positioned as a professor at MIT to bring us closer to the nuclear future that he envisions. As he sees it, he’s working not only to develop the next generation of reactors, but also to help prepare the next generation of leaders in the field.

Price became acquainted with some prospective members of that “next generation” in a design course he co-taught last fall with Curtis Smith, the KEPCO Professor of the Practice of Nuclear Science and Engineering. For Price, that introduction lasted just a few months, but it was long enough for him to discover that MIT students are exceptionally motivated, hard-working, and capable. Not surprisingly, those happen to be the same qualities he’s hoping to find in the students that join his research team.

Price vividly recalls the support he received when taking his first, tentative steps in this field. Now that he’s moved up the ranks from undergraduate to professor, and acquired a substantial body of knowledge along the way, he wants his students “to experience that same feeling that I had upon entering the field.” Beyond his specific goals for improving the design and operation of nuclear reactors, Price says, “I hope to perpetuate the same fun and healthy environment that made me love nuclear engineering in the first place.”

While the very public fight continues between the Department of Defense and Anthropic over whether the government can punish a company for refusing to allow its technology to be used for mass surveillance, another branch of the U.S. government is quietly working to ensure that this dispute will never happen again. How? By rewriting government procurement rules.

Using procurement -- meaning, the processes by which governments acquire goods and services-- to accomplish policy goals is a time-honored and often appropriate strategy. The government literally expresses its politics and priorities by deciding where and how it spends its money. To that end, governments can and should give our tax dollars to companies and projects that serve the public interest, such as open-source software development, interoperability, or right to repair. And they should withhold those dollars from those that don’t, like shady contractors with inadequate security systems .

New proposed rules from the principal agency in charge of acquiring goods, property and services for the federal government, the General Services Administration, are supposed to be primarily an effort to implement one policy priority: promoting steering government funds toward “ideologically neutral” American AI innovation But the new guidelines do far more than that.

As explained in comments filed today with our partners at the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Protect Democracy Project, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the GSA’s guidelines include broad provisions that would make AI tools less safe and less useful. If finally adopted, these provisions would become standard components of every federal contract. You can read the full comments here.

The most egregious example is a requirement that contractors and government service providers must license their AI systems to the government for “all lawful purposes.” Given the government’s loose interpretations of the law, ability to find loopholes to surveil you, and willingness to do illegal spying, we need serious and proactive legal restrictions to prevent it from gobbling up all the personally data it can acquire and using even routine bureaucratic data for punitive ends.

Relatedly, the draft rules require that “AI System(s) must not refuse to produce data outputs or conduct analyses based on the Contractor’s or Service Provider’s discretionary policies.” In other words, if a company’s safety guardrails might prevent responding to a government request, the company must disable those guardrails. Given widespread public concerns about AI safety, it seems misguided, at best, to limit safeguards a company deems necessary.

There are myriad other problems with the draft rules, such as technologically incoherent “anti-Woke” requirements. But the overarching problem is clear: much of this proposal would not serve the overall public interest in using American tax dollars to promote privacy, safety, and responsible technological innovation. The GSA should start over.

Note they are also about implementing "anti-woke" tech which is even more stupid. I rewrote to allude to it but really that's a whole other blog post

You’re invited on a journey inside the privacy battles that shaped the internet. EFF’s Executive Director Cindy Cohn has tangled with the feds, fought for your data security, and argued before judges to protect our access to science and knowledge on the internet.

Join Cindy at two events in Washingtion, D.C. on April 13 and 14 discussing her new book: Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, on sale now. All proceeds from the book benefit EFF. Find the full event details below, and RSVP to let us know if you can make it.

April 13 - With Gigi Sohn at Busboys & Poets

Join American Association of Public Broadband (AAPB) Executive Director Gigi Sohn, in conversation with EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn for a discussion about Cindy's work, her new book, and what we're all wondering: Can have private conversations if we live our lives online?

Privacy's Defender at Busboys & Poets
Busboys & Poets - 14th & V
2021 14th St NW, Washington, DC 20009
Monday, April 13, 2026
6:30 pm to 8:30 pm

Register Now

April 14 - With Women in Security and Privacy (WISP)

Join Women in Security and Privacy (WISP) and EFF for a conversation featuring American University Senior Professorial Lecturer Chelsea Horne and EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn as they dive into data security, Federal access to data, and your digital rights. 

Privacy's Defender with WISP
True Reformer Building - Lankford Auditorium
1200 U St NW, Washington, DC 20009
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
6:00 pm to 8:30 pm

REGISTER NOW

"Privacy’s Defender is a compelling account of a life well lived and an inspiring call to action for the next generation of civil liberties champions."

~Edward Snowden, whistleblower; author of Permanent Record

Can't make it? Look for Cindy at a city (or web connection) near you! Find the latest tour dates on the Privacy’s Defender hub or follow EFF for more.

Part memoir and part legal history for the general reader, Privacy’s Defender is a compelling testament to just how much privacy and free expression matter in our efforts to combat authoritarianism, grow democracy, and strengthen human rights. Thank you for being a part of that fight.

Want to support the cause and get a copy of the new book? New or renewing EFF members can preorder one as their annual gift!

WebinarTV searches the internet for public Zoom invites, joins the meetings, secretly records them, and publishes (alternate link) the recordings. It doesn’t use the Zoom record feature, so Zoom can’t do anything about it.

As oil prices spike, governments are slashing fuel use and eyeing renewables — threatening to erode global demand for fossil energy.

The Trump administration is silent on its plans. Democrats urged renewal and warned about workers "risking their health and their lives."

Stardust Solutions released safety principles as part of its effort to assuage concerns over the role of commercial interests in blocking the sun.

Though they failed, Republican proposals rolling back requirements for renewable energy and electric school buses drew bipartisan support.

“Billions and billions of dollars have to flow into grid upgradation, battery storage, and so on,” said the president of Eversource Capital.

The French oil giant and the Emirati renewable firm will share costs for solar, wind and battery projects in countries from Kazakhstan to Indonesia and Japan.

Norway, with its thousands of dams, is often called Europe’s biggest battery. But months of dry weather have slashed energy exports.

Since 2022, policies implemented under her leadership have reduced forest loss by more than 50 percent.

Hydrogen sits at the center of some of the world’s most important industrial processes, but its production still comes with a heavy environmental cost. Today, most hydrogen is produced through high-emissions processes like steam methane reforming and coal gasification.

But hydrogen can also be made by splitting water molecules using renewable electricity, eliminating fossil fuel emissions and other toxic byproducts. Such “green hydrogen” is made by running an electric current through water in an electrolyzer.

Green hydrogen won’t scale through decarbonization alone. It also has to be cost-competitive with the traditional methods of production.

1s1 Energy thinks it has the technology to finally make green hydrogen go mainstream. The company says its boron-based membrane material unlocks previously unachievable performance and durability in electrolyzers.

In tests with partners, 1s1 says, electrolyzers with its membranes needed just 70 percent of the energy to produce each kilogram of hydrogen, compared to incumbent devices.

“Green hydrogen has been a hard industry to have success in so far,” acknowledges 1s1 co-founder Dan Sobek ’88, SM ’92, PhD ’97. “The difference with us is we’ve done very targeted customer discovery. We have a very strong value proposition that’s not just about decarbonization. We have a pipeline of potential customers that see around a 60 percent reduction in operating costs with our technology. That’s a nice point of entry.”

Although 1s1 is focused on hydrogen production now, its technology could also be used in fuel cells and solid-state batteries, and to extract critical metals from mining waste. The company is beginning trials in some of those applications, and it is working with a large materials company to scale up production of its membranes for hydrogen production.

“We’re at an inflection point for the company,” Sobek says. “The plan is, by 2030, to have a solid business in several segments: electrolyzers, mineral extraction, and in collaborations with several large companies. But right now, we have to be judicious and focused.”

Improving electrolyzers

Sobek was born and raised in Argentina, but he also grew up at MIT over the course of three degrees and more than a decade. He first studied aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, then jumped to mechanical engineering as a graduate student, then moved to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where he worked under PhD advisors and MIT professors Martha Gray and Stephen Senturia. His thesis focused on a technique for quickly measuring optical properties of large numbers of biological cells.

“A lot of my learnings around microfabrication and materials chemistry ended up being really relevant for 1s1,” Sobek says. “A class that was very important to me was taught by Professor Amar Bose. I was a teaching assistant for him for a couple of semesters, and that had an incredible influence on my thinking.”

Following graduation, Sobek worked in microelectronics and microfluidics before founding his own company, Zymera, in 2004. The company developed deep-tissue imaging technology for detecting cancer and other serious diseases.

Around 2013, Sobek started talking to his Zymera co-founder, Sukanta Bhattacharyya, about making electrolysis more efficient, focusing on “proton exchange membrane” electrolyzers. Such electrolyzers employ a large amount of electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen ions. At their center is a membrane that can lose efficiency through voltage resistance.

On top of the efficiency challenge, electricity is often more expensive than fossil fuels in many parts of the world. Traditional hydrogen production also has the benefit of existing infrastructure, making it that much more difficult for green hydrogen production to scale.

Sobek and Bhattacharyya knew the most important part of such electrolyzers is their proton-conducting membrane, which shuttles hydrogen ions from the anode to the cathode in the electrolyzer’s electrochemical cell.

“I asked Sukanta how we could improve the efficiency and durability of that element,” Sobek recalls. “He gave me a one-word answer: boron.”

Boron can be given a negative charge, which makes hydrogen ions, or protons, bond to it more quickly. The hydrogen ions can then be filtered through the membrane and released as they move through the cell. Boron-based materials are also more stable and resistant to corrosion, further improving the long-term performance of electrolyzers.

The company was officially founded in late 2019. After years of development, today 1s1 attaches a chemically tailored version of boron onto polymer materials to create its membranes for exchanging protons.

“These are first-of-a-kind membranes with stable and durable, super-acid proton exchange groups that do not poison catalysts,” Sobek says.

Tiny membranes with big impact

In 2021, the U.S. Department of Energy set a goal for proton exchange membrane electrolysis to achieve 77 percent electrical efficiency by 2031. Sobek says 1s1 is already reaching that milestone in tests.

“It’s not just the technology, but the way we’re applying it,” Sobek says, “We’re making hydrogen viable for use in the production of different industrial chemicals.”

1s1 is currently conducting pilots with partners, including an electrical utility owned by a large steel company in Brazil. The company is also actively exploring other applications for its technology. Last year, 1s1 announced a project to produce green ammonia with the company Nitrofix through joint funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Israeli Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure. It’s also working with a large mine in Brazil to extract a material called niobium, which is useful for high-strength steel as well as fast-charging batteries. A similar process could even be used to extract gold.

“We can do that without using harsh chemicals, because the standard processes used to extract niobium and gold use extremely strong acids at high temperatures or extremely toxic chemicals,” Sobek says. “It’s gratifying for me because my home country of Argentina has had a lot of problems with the use of toxic chemicals to extract gold. We’re trying to enable low-cost, responsible mining.”

As 1s1 scales its membrane technology, Sobek says the goal is to deploy wherever the technology can improve processes.

“We have a large number of potential customers because this technology is really foundational,” Sobek says. “Creating high-impact technologies is always fun.”

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 03 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02621-0

Global modelling shows that integrating photovoltaics in the façades of buildings could deliver substantial electricity generation, building energy savings and emissions reductions — and highlights an underexplored opportunity for urban energy transition and climate mitigation.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 03 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02612-1

Carbon pricing can be a cost-effective way to cut carbon dioxide emissions, but only if it is politically sustainable. Two recent papers document how carbon pricing can create winners and losers, while also showing how these shortcomings can be addressed by careful policy design.

Recently, a California Superior Court jury found that Meta and YouTube harmed a user through some of the features they offered. And a New Mexico jury concluded that Meta deceived young users into thinking its platforms were safe from predation. 

It’s clear that many people are frustrated by big tech companies and perhaps Meta in particular. We too have been highly critical of them and have pushed for years to end their harmful corporate surveillance. So it’s not surprising that a jury felt like Mark Zuckerberg and his company, along with YouTube, needed to be held accountable. 

While it would be easy to claim that these cases set a legal precedent that should make social media companies fearful, that’s not exactly true. And that’s actually a good thing for the internet and its users. 

These jury trials were just an early step in a long road through the court system. These cases will now go up on appeal, where the courts’ rulings about the First Amendment and immunity under Section 230 will likely get reconsidered. 

As we have argued many times before, the First Amendment protects both user speech and the choices platforms make on how to deliver that speech (in the same way it protects newspapers' right to curate their editorial pages as they see fit). Features on social media sites that are designed to connect users cannot be separated from the users’ speech, which is why courts have repeatedly held that these features are indeed protected. 

So while it may be tempting to celebrate these juries’ decisions as a "win" against big tech, in fact the ramifications of lowering First Amendment and immunity standards on other speakers—ones that members of the public actually like, and do not want to punish—are bad. We can’t create less protective speech rules for Meta and Google alone just because we want them held accountable for something else.

As we have often said, much of the anger against these companies arises from people rightfully feeling that these companies harvest and exploit their data, and monetize their lives for crass economic reasons. We therefore continue to urge Congress to pass a comprehensive national privacy law with a private right of action to address these core concerns.

Copyright law is supposed to encourage creativity. Too often, it’s used to extract payouts from others.

Higbee & Associates, a law firm known for sending copyright demand letters to website owners, targeted May First Movement Technology, accusing it of infringing a photograph owned by Agence France-Presse (AFP). The claim was baseless. May First didn’t post the photo. It didn’t even own the website where the photo appeared.

May First is a nonprofit membership organization that provides web hosting and technical infrastructure to social justice groups around the world. The allegedly infringing image was posted years ago by one of May First’s members, a human rights group based in Mexico. When May First learned about the copyright complaint, it ensured that the group removed the image.

That should have been the end of it. Instead, the firm demanded payment.

So EFF stepped in as May First’s counsel and explained why AFP and Higbee had no valid claim. After receiving our response, Higbee backed down.

This outcome is a reminder that targets of copyright demands often have strong defenses—especially when someone else posted the material.

Hosting Content Isn’t the Same as Publishing It

Copyright law treats those who create or control content differently from those who simply provide the tools or infrastructure for others to communicate.

In this case, May First provided hosting services but didn’t post the photo. Courts have long recognized that service providers aren’t direct infringers when they merely store material at the direction of users. In those cases, service providers lack “volitional conduct”—the intentional act of copying or distributing the work.

Copyright law also recognizes that intermediaries can’t realistically police everything users upload. That’s why legal protections like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act safe harbors exist. Even outside those safe harbors, courts still shield service providers from liability when they promptly respond to notices.

May First did exactly what the law expects: it notified its member, and the image came down.

A Claim That Should Have Been Withdrawn Much Sooner

The troubling part of this story isn’t just that a demand was sent. It’s that Higbee and AFP continued to demand money and threaten litigation after May First explained that it was merely a hosting provider and had the image removed.

In other words, the claim was built on shaky legal ground from the start. Once May First explained its role, Higbee should have withdrawn its demand. Individuals and small nonprofits shouldn’t need lawyers just to stop aggressive copyright shakedowns.

Statutory Damages Fuel Copyright Abuse

This isn’t an isolated case—it’s a predictable result of copyright law’s statutory damages regime.

Statutory damages can reach $150,000 per work, regardless of actual harm. That enormous leverage incentivizes firms like Higbee to send mass demand letters seeking quick settlements. Even meritless claims can generate revenue when recipients are too afraid, confused, or resource-constrained to fight back.

This hits community organizations, independent publishers, and small service providers that don’t have in-house legal teams especially hard. Faced with the threat of ruinous statutory damages, many just pay what is demanded.

That’s not how copyright law should work.

Know Your Rights

If you receive a copyright demand based on material someone else posted, don’t assume you’re liable.

You may have defenses based on:

• Your role as a hosting or service provider
• Lack of volitional conduct
• Prompt removal of the material after notice
• The statute of limitations
• The copyright owner’s failure to timely register the work
• The absence of actual damages

Every situation is different, but the key point is this: a demand letter is not the same as a valid legal claim.

Standing Up to Copyright Trolls

May First stood its ground, and Higbee abandoned its demand after we explained the law.

But the bigger problem remains. Copyright’s statutory damages framework enables aggressive enforcement tactics that targets the wrong parties, and chills lawful online activity.

Until lawmakers fix these structural incentives, organizations and individuals will keep facing pressure to pay up—even when they’ve done nothing wrong.

If you get one of these demand letters, remember: you may have more rights than it suggests.

• EFF Letter to Higbee and Associates, March 4, 2026