One day last October, sitting in the courtyard of his house in China’s Henan province, Dong Hui decided to see if he could hold a pen to write. 

Dong, 39, had sustained spinal cord injuries in a car accident six years earlier that left him paralyzed from the neck down. Slowly but determinedly, he wrote his name, “Thank you,” and then the date. This was the result of an 11-month-long rehabilitation enabled by an implant in his brain. Before that process, Dong could move his arms slightly but wasn’t able to use his fingers.

“I couldn’t believe I was able to write again. I was so excited I even missed a stroke in my name,” he told MIT Technology Review on a video call. 

In November 2024, Dong became one of the first people in China to be given an invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) through brain surgery. He had signed up for a clinical trial with the device’s developer one month after seeing on TV how a BCI had apparently enabled another paralyzed Chinese man to hold his granddaughter. 

This March, the implant Dong uses became the first invasive BCI product in the world to be approved for use beyond clinical trials. It’s now available to some patients with paralysis in their limbs due to spinal cord injuries. We spoke to a range of experts to understand why the device was able to reach this global milestone, what makes this moment so significant, and what to expect next. 

A world first

Dong’s brain implant is a coin-size device called NEO. It was developed by Neuracle Technology, a Shanghai-based startup, together with researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing. 

During a procedure that took just over an hour and a half, the device’s sensors, which collect Dong’s brain signals, were placed on his dura mater, the tough outer layer of tissue that covers and protects the brain. The signals are transmitted to a computer by an implant placed on Dong’s skull. The computer then translates the signals into commands for a soft robotic glove Dong wears during the 2.5-hour training sessions he completes each day to help him learn to grab. 

Dong started his rehabilitation around a week after surgery. “On the ninth day of my training, my right hand successfully grabbed a ball without the glove,” he says. “That was a miraculous moment.” 

Now he continues with his training at home. He wants to be able to control his hands better in order to put on clothes, eat, and do other daily tasks without troubling his aging parents. 

A growing number of people with traumatic injuries in China are now poised to tread a similar path thanks to NEO’s recent approval. According to China’s National Medical Products Administration, the bureau responsible for drug supervision, the product is suitable for patients between 18 and 60 who have paralysis in all limbs due to spinal cord injuries but still have some residual function in their arms. 

NEO beat several other BCIs to approval, including one from Neuralink, a California-based company founded by Elon Musk. Since October 2023, Neuracle has conducted 36 clinical trials using NEO, including the one on Dong. Thirty-two of them took place in the space of a few months in 2025, with the details about one of the four first in-person trials published in a preprint paper last July. Neuracle did not reply to a request for comment from MIT Technology Review.

One reason for NEO’s fast approval could be that it has a “relatively less invasive” design than counterparts such as Neuralink’s N1 brain chip, says Avinash Singh, a BCI researcher at the University of Technology Sydney. NEO’s eight sensors sit on top of the brain’s protective membrane while Neuralink’s N1 chip directly penetrates the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain itself. Neuracle’s device faces fewer regulatory constraints because it presents a lower risk of hemorrhage, glial scarring, and long-term signal degradation, Singh says.

China’s strong support for its BCI industry also means that NEO was put on an expedited regulatory pathway; in comparison, the approval process of the US Food and Drug Administration can take several years, Singh adds.

A big boost for BCIs

NEO’s approval is hugely important for the global BCI industry, says Wang Shouyan, a neuroscientist at Fudan University in Shanghai who was not involved in research or trialing for NEO. Even though research and development on BCIs has taken place for several decades, most of it happened in the lab. The news means that BCIs are now ready for large-scale manufacturing and clinical use in China, Wang says. 

For Dong, however, it means something much more personal. “Now, it will be able to help not only me, but also thousands and thousands of other patients suffering from spinal cord injuries in China who are tortured by despair each day,” he says of NEO. “It will bring them hope and change their lives.” 

Days after NEO was approved, China started incorporating it into the country’s health insurance system by assigning it a unique code. This is one of the first steps toward a future where eligible Chinese patients pay a certain percentage of the BCI’s price if they need it during their treatment.

The growth of China’s BCI industry is expected to accelerate thanks to the government’s policy support and financial backing. The country’s latest five-year plan, published on the same day Neuracle received its approval, lists BCI as one of six key industries important to China’s future tech competitiveness, alongside quantum technology, humanoid robots, and others. Several Chinese startups, including NeuroXess and StairMed, have already worked in the field for many years. 

“China’s decision to double down on becoming a global leader in the field owes in part to what these companies have already accomplished,” says Meicen Sun, an information scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who studies information and technology policy. 

But, Sun says, the biggest advantage China may have is that Chinese people, particularly patients like Dong, tend to welcome this technology and are genuinely enthusiastic about it. In comparison, in the US and Western Europe, testing technologies on human bodies elicits an “ick factor,” triggering concerns and even resistance, she says.

Cooperation in a cold climate 

NEO has become the world’s first invasive BCI to go commercial, but scientists interviewed by MIT Technology Review caution against comparing Chinese and US efforts through the lens of a race. 

A race implies an endpoint, but it is hard to say where that is for the development of BCIs, says Nick Ramsey, a neuroscientist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Also, the US and China have fundamentally different visions, Sun says. The US is primarily concerned with being the first to do something and achieving state-of-the-art performance, while winning to China means capturing more consumers and using technology to deliver solutions on a societal scale. 

“Being exceptional and being accessible are two diametrically opposed definitions of winning,” Sun says. 

In fact, neurotechnology has emerged as a rare tech sector where US-China collaboration is still happening despite geopolitical tensions. The US company Axoft,  based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says it has teamed up with a Chinese company and a hospital in Shanghai to test its BCI on four patients in China and has plans to expand its trials in the country. 

Looking forward, China’s BCI industry is expected to speed up its growth over the next five years thanks to strong government support. “There is no comparable national-level ambition or coordinated map elsewhere in the world at the moment,” says Singh.

More BCIs are also in the pipeline for domestic approval in the country, including Beinao-1, developed by the Chinese Institute for Brain Research in Beijing and its affiliated startup, NeuCyber NeuroTech. The device, which sits on the dura mater, is designed to help those who have movement and speech difficulties due to spinal cord injuries or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. These candidates could get the green light as early as 2028, Singh says. 

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The alert was raised on May 5. Four health-care workers in the Ituri Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo had died from an unknown illness within four days.

Rapid response teams were sent to investigate, and tests at a research center in Kinshasa revealed the culprit: the Bundibugyo virus, one of the viruses that cause Ebola. Suspected cases of the disease have snowballed in the last few weeks. By May 24, the WHO had estimated that 223 people had died from the disease. There were over 900 suspected cases. Today’s figures are likely to be higher.

A couple of weeks ago, I covered the hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship. Three people sadly died, but the outbreak itself was kept under control. There have been no further deaths, and passengers have been safely repatriated. The picture for Ebola is far bleaker. And there are several reasons why.

The most obvious is the disease itself. Ebola is a severe disease with an average 50% fatality rate. Previous outbreaks have resulted in thousands of deaths. (Hantavirus also has a high fatality rate, but it doesn’t usually spread as easily between humans.) 

Between 2014 and 2016, an Ebola outbreak in West Africa caused more than 11,000 deaths. A more recent outbreak, which took place between 2018 and 2020, caused 2,299 deaths before being brought under control with a vaccination campaign.

But those outbreaks were caused by the Zaire virus, which has a different genetic sequence. There is no vaccine for the Bundibugyo virus. We don’t know if the two vaccines approved for Zaire might also work for Bundibugyo. There’s a concern they might even make things worse by interfering with a person’s immune response to the virus.  

Scientists are working on potential Bundibugyo vaccines. But the most advanced efforts are still months away from clinical trials. There are no specific antiviral treatments for the virus, either.

So to control the outbreak, health-care workers are trying to stop the spread of the disease. Ebolaviruses can be transmitted to humans by animals including fruit bats, chimpanzees, and gorillas. They can then spread between people via contact with bodily fluids such as blood or vomit.

That’s why the virus is often spread among family members, to health-care workers, and during some burial services. The WHO advises isolating people who have the virus in treatment centers. It also recommends safe burial measures that limit physical contact with the deceased, for example. Communities need to be informed about the virus and how it spreads, and health professionals should be on hand to diagnose cases and track them.

That’s all easier said than done in an era of misinformation. Some members of the community even doubt whether the disease is real. There have been three attacks on health-care facilities in the region in recent weeks.

Last week, two treatment centers were burned down. The first incident occurred after relatives of a deceased man were prohibited from retrieving his (infectious) body. As a result of the second incident, 18 suspected cases reentered the community.

A couple of days later, a group of men unleashed gunfire at Mongbwalu General Hospital, which was also treating people with Ebola. They were demanding the bodies of their deceased relatives.

There are more causes for concern when it comes to the spread of the virus. The Ebola outbreak is thought to have originated in Mongbwalu, a high-traffic mining hub. People who caught the virus in Mongbwalu are thought to have sought care in neighboring districts. And the wider province borders both South Sudan and Uganda. So far, Uganda has reported seven confirmed cases and one death. South Sudan’s health ministry has said it will strengthen surveillance, but no cases have been reported in the country so far. 

Violence in the region is making it much harder to contain the spread of the virus, too. Conflict involving multiple armed groups, including deadly attacks on civilians, has hampered humanitarian and health-care efforts. Poor infrastructure and damaged roads make matters even worse. Food insecurity is ravaging the region as well—this year, nearly 10 million people in the region face acute hunger.

Together, these factors are making it “nearly impossible” to isolate people with Ebola and trace others who have been in contact with them, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement earlier this week.

The dismantling of US aid programs hasn’t helped either. US government funding for international health projects has steeply declined since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. These cuts have harmed disease surveillance systems, according to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian nonprofit.

“Funding cuts have left the region dangerously exposed,” Heather Reoch Kerr, the organization’s country director for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said in a statement. “Years of underinvestment and recent funding cuts have left many health facilities without adequate protective equipment, surveillance capacity, or frontline support needed to respond quickly and safely.”

The US has mobilized emergency funding for the outbreak, and a spokesperson for the State Department has argued that none of the administration’s actions have hampered the Ebola response. But health experts counter that the damage has already been done.

On May 17, the WHO declared the Ebola outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. In a statement on Wednesday, Tedros described the situation as “a catastrophic collision of disease and conflict with the Ebola outbreak in Ituri province outpacing the response.”In an online appeal to residents on Wednesday, ahead of an in-person visit, Tedros pleaded for a ceasefire and commended the spirit of community members. He also acknowledged the steep challenges they face. “You are already carrying so much: malaria, hunger, insecurity, and the daily struggle to keep your families safe,” he wrote in French. “And now Ebola. It’s not fair, and I won’t pretend otherwise.”

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on artificial intelligence includes a statement that warrants serious attention from technologists and policymakers: “Technology is never neutral.” Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”) is a clarion call to all people to act with courage and solidarity as we enter an age already being transformed by artificial intelligence, the greatest change in human life since the Industrial Revolution. As the pope says, the choice before us—the choice AI presents—is one between the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of our common humanity. 

In the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, humans sought to build a massive structure that reached all the way to Heaven, only to have their project thwarted when God made those involved unable to understand one another. It was a pursuit fixated on relentless growth, divorced from any concern about God’s commandments or the human cost. It resulted in failure and atomization.

The Book of Nehemiah, however, offers a contrasting narrative, in which the rebuilding of Jerusalem after a period of violence and displacement becomes an opportunity for humanity to show its collaborative resilience. As the encyclical puts it, “The city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all: men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households and young people all play a part. It is an undertaking with God at the center, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones.” 

Is there any question which road we are currently barreling down? And can there be any doubt which we would do well to walk together? 

We are both Catholics, members of religious communities and longtime advocates within the movement for socially responsible investment. Of particular interest to us and that movement is Pope Leo’s point that AI is not some force of nature or hyperrational, ineffable entity. Instead, he reminds us, AI is ultimately another commercial product, one emerging at a point in history when excessive power over commerce and the wider society has amassed in a vanishingly small number of hands. 

It’s a powerful message. It’s also one that institutional investors have been acting on for years. This encyclical doesn’t break new ground so much as ratify a governance effort that’s already underway, led not by states or international bodies but by shareholders. When governments fail to meaningfully regulate, and corporations cannot be trusted to do what is beneficial beyond their own bottom line, people in society still have the power to set us on the right path, and indeed have the duty to do so. 

Around the world, AI systems are being deployed at scale with remarkably little institutional oversight. There is no AI safety board. The US Federal Trade Commission has jurisdiction over unfair practices but limited authority over algorithmic design. The National Institute of Standards and Technology publishes guidance that most companies ignore. The EU AI Act is partially in force but addresses only a sliver of the deployment surface.

Institutional investors have stepped into this vacuum. Coalitions including the membership of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, representing investors managing over $4 trillion in assets, have spent the past several proxy seasons filing resolutions demanding transparency, risk assessment, and accountability around AI deployment. Secular institutional investors have joined them, treating AI governance failures as material business risks.

Shareholders have called tech giants including Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Palantir, and Uber to account and demanded that AI not be used for acts of violence or other violations of human rights. The importance of this aspect of corporate governance was highlighted tragically in the opening hours of the war against Iran, when AI was used to help identify targets for thousands of missile strikes that killed hundreds of people.  

Investors have also challenged executives at CVS and UnitedHealth Group to ensure that AI not be used to undermine the well-being of patients and quality of health care across the United States. 

At companies including Meta and Microsoft, shareholders have decried the environmental impact of AI data centers, which consume vast amounts of energy and precious water resources, and in turn can emit large amounts of greenhouse gases. 

Within creative industries, investors have challenged the leadership at companies like Disney, Netflix, and Warner Bros. to demand transparency about the ways they are using AI and to defend the inimitable human element in storytelling. 

Soon, with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Grok all set to enter the public markets, we will be able to exert similar influence over what are now all privately held entities.

These actions by concerned investors not only call out misdeeds but hold fast to an immutable truth: that it is wrong to use technology to kill, harm, or oppress people. Every human being has a right to safe and effective health care and the opportunity to earn a dignified living. The stories we tell each other matter and require the human creative spark. 

Investor advocates hail from a range of faith traditions. Some have no formal religious faith. Yet in their informed and tenacious advocacy, all these people echo the calls embedded within Pope Leo’s encyclical and act on its declaration that “it is essential that the use of AI, especially when it touches on public goods and fundamental rights, be guided by clear criteria and effective oversight.” 

Encyclicals mark time. A century from now, how will we be remembered for how we met this moment? Will we be seen as having been too timid or shortsighted to prevent a small group of unfathomably wealthy and self-interested people from seizing ever greater control over the human family’s shared destiny? 

Or will the years ahead be remembered as a turning point that helped us rebuild our common humanity? Let this be a time when people of good will and diverse talents come together through their own magnificent humanity to build a future that honors our Creator.

Father Séamus Finn, OMI, is a global leader in faith-based and socially responsible investing and a priest of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a missionary religious congregation.

Sister Susan Francois is the assistant congregation leader and congregation treasurer for the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the amount under management by the membership of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility.

Researchers say they’ve found a new way to extract lithium, a crucial metal used in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles and energy storage arrays. This new technique could be more environmentally friendly and cheaper than existing ones. 

The research was published today in Science, and a startup called Rock Zero is working to commercialize the process.

“At scale, we believe this will be the lowest-cost way of sourcing lithium in the world,” says Yet-Ming Chiang, one of the study authors, who is an MIT professor and a serial entrepreneur behind climate tech companies including Form Energy and Addis Energy.

The most economical way to get lithium currently is to extract it from brine, salty water that’s pulled the metal out of rock over the course of millennia. But this technique is geographically limited and currently requires vast tracts of land for massive evaporation pools. The more common tactic is hard-rock mining, where large bodies of ore are blasted apart, cooked at high temperatures, and processed using dangerous chemicals.

The researchers’ new method uses a weak acid to dissolve typically nonreactive silicate minerals. That frees not only the lithium but also other useful materials, including alumina and silica.

The origin story for this research, and the resulting company, came from another startup founded by Chiang, Sublime Systems, which makes cement using electrochemistry.

The team was trying to find a source of highly reactive silica in order to form stronger cement. One way to make reactive materials, which can bond easily with other materials, is to take a nonreactive material, dissolve it, and then allow it to become solid in a more reactive form. It’s not impossible to dissolve silicates, but the best-known way is to use hydrofluoric acid, an extremely dangerous chemical. Other fluorine-containing chemicals are candidates too, but some will produce hydrofluoric acid as a side product during reactions. 

Chiang drew inspiration from a previous home renovation project involving glass, which is made of silica. “I was remodeling a shower in Framingham, Massachusetts, about 25 years ago,” he says. “So when we started this project, I remembered that glass etching cream and thought, ‘What’s in that?’” 

The glass etching cream he remembered, which can be found on shelves at any craft or home improvement store, uses ammonium fluoride, a weak acid. And the MIT researchers discovered that in the right conditions, it can effectively dissolve silicate minerals without producing hydrofluoric acid in the process.

This chemistry could be useful for any silicate minerals—and there are a lot of them. But spodumene, the mineral that’s often mined for lithium, became a prime first target. (Chiang says a suggestion from Doug Wicks, one of the company’s advisors and a former ARPA-E official, pointed the team in spodumene’s direction.)

Today, a key step in processing spodumene ore is to roast it in a kiln at super-high temperatures. This causes a phase transformation, essentially puffing up the material and making the lithium more accessible.

By avoiding the need to reach these temperatures, you could save on energy costs and potentially reduce carbon emissions as well, says Camden Hunt, one of the authors of the study and the CEO and cofounder of Rock Zero.

Avoiding the kiln could also unlock the ability to use some ores that can’t be roasted properly, Hunt adds. Ore that contains too much iron won’t go through the phase change correctly, instead melting and turning into a glassy material.

The new process relies on simple stirred plastic tanks and takes place at temperatures up to about 95 °C (200 °F). The ammonium fluoride dissolves the silicates, which in earlier experiments allowed nearly all of the lithium inside the spodumene ore to be extracted within a couple of days. The researchers have since cut this time to under 12 hours, says Benjamin Mowbray, first author of the study and the CTO and cofounder of Rock Zero.  

The products (after some additional steps to clean them up) are lithium carbonate, which can be used to make batteries; alumina, which can go into a smelter to make aluminum; and cementitious silica, which can be added into concrete. And the acid can be reused in the same loop.

Chiang calls this “nose-to-tail” mining—using every part of the ore provided, like eating every part of a butchered animal.

The researchers are currently working to scale and optimize the process. The tanks in the lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts can handle three kilograms of spodumene concentrate in each batch. 

They have also estimated the cost of this process once fully scaled up. Assuming that the ammonium fluoride can be recycled at a high level, they should be able to extract lithium for less than $6,000 per metric ton. (They’ve identified a potential cheap industrial source of the acid as well, as an alternative to recycling it.) 

The total cost is projected to be lower than that of other processes used to extract lithium from hard-rock ore today, and it could be competitive with brine.

The team has designed a pilot plant and is looking for space to build it. The plan is to have construction done by the end of 2026 and start operating the facility in 2027. Talks are underway with potential partners in the mining industry.

One difficulty for new players in lithium extraction is the volatility of the market: Prices have seen huge swings in recent years, from a peak in 2022 to lows in late 2024 and a slow climb starting in early 2026. 

Rising prices might benefit new players like Rock Zero, but there are many projects that could come online if prices continue to rise, and that could bring the market right back down, says Simon Jowitt, chair of exploration geology at the University of Nevada, Reno. “People are waiting to see what happens with the lithium price,” he says. “It’s a crowded market, and there’s some big players out there.”

And even though batteries are driving up demand for lithium, the market is still relatively small, Jowitt adds: “That means it’s going to be volatile.” New lithium extraction technologies like Rock Zero’s will have to compete with methods used by existing giants, and there’s also the potential that technological alternatives, like sodium-ion batteries that don’t need lithium, could make the market more difficult to navigate, Jowitt says. He also thinks some of the company’s economic estimates could be optimistic.

For its part, Rock Zero’s team hopes not only to scale this technology for lithium, but to use it for other minerals in the future. As Mowbray says, “The Earth’s crust is made of silicates.”

This year, there’s been a wave of notable energy companies going public via IPO in the US.

The solar and battery company Solv Energy went public in February, to the tune of $6 billion. X-energy, which is building small modular nuclear reactors, did the same in April, and its stocks surged on its first day of trading to hit a $11.5 billion market cap. Most recently, the geothermal company Fervo Energy went public in mid-May, and its market cap is now about $12.4 billion.

Those are all success stories in the IPO world. And it certainly doesn’t feel like a coincidence that all these companies are racing to provide electricity in an era of rising demand (partly due to data centers). Let’s take a look at how these firms are doing, what this moment says about the grid, and what’s coming next. 

Let’s start with Fervo Energy, a company we’ve covered a lot over the years that’s working to develop enhanced geothermal energy. (We included it on our 2025 list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch.) While conventional geothermal requires finding specific spots with hot rock, water, and fractures to support a power plant, Fervo essentially uses fracking techniques to create the necessary conditions.

The company was founded in 2017, and it raised about $1.5 billion from investors over the years before its IPO.

Fervo’s first commercial project, Cape Station in Utah, is expected to have a capacity of about 500 megawatts. The first unit is set to start generating power for customers by October and the next two units by January 2027.

The new funding from the IPO could help the company scale. Fervo currently has over 600 megawatts’ worth of binding power purchase agreements. And it has leases for land that could together generate more than 40 gigawatts of electricity. (As of 2024, the entire US geothermal fleet had a capacity of just 4 gigawatts.)

The company also has an eye on cutting construction and drilling costs—its Cape Station plant is expected to cost about $7 per kilowatt, which is cheaper than new nuclear power plants but over twice the expense of building a new natural-gas plant in the US. 

X-energy also aims to provide reliable clean power: it’s part of the wave of next-generation nuclear companies working on small modular reactors. The company is building high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, which flow helium over self-contained pebbles of nuclear fuel. These reactors will each generate 80 megawatts of electricity, less than one-tenth the output of larger ones like Unit 4 at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, the most recent addition to the commercial nuclear fleet in the US.  

X-energy also saw its IPO go well, and prices surged in trading after the initial offering. One interesting tidbit here—the company had previously planned to go public in 2023 but decided against it because of difficult market conditions.

The company is still years away from demonstrating its technology in a commercial project. 

You may recall a story I wrote last year about its effort to build nuclear reactors at the site of a Dow Chemical plant in Texas. The company recently received a key environmental approval for that project, though it’s still waiting for the final green light from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to start construction.

Finally, Solv Energy builds solar and energy storage projects, mostly for utilities and independent power producers. Solar and batteries are some of the cheapest and easiest technologies to add to the grid, so this one could get a lot of capacity online, quickly. The company already has 21 gigawatts’ worth of projects operational across 35 states.

Many companies in the energy sector are pinning their hopes on the rapid growth in data center construction and operation. The AI boom has transformed the energy landscape, pushing electricity demand higher in a country where it’s been relatively flat for the last decade or so. Solv Energy mentioned data centers over a dozen times in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission before its IPO. 

And Fervo and X-energy are particularly connected to the tech giants driving AI. Google has been a longtime investor in Fervo and also pioneered what it calls its clean transition tariff with the company. Amazon is a client of X-energy as well as an investor; it reportedly owns close to 20% of the company.

Fervo and X-energy are also in industries that occupy a political sweet spot. President Trump and his administration have gone after wind power and other renewables, cutting off existing support and slowing approvals for new projects. Meanwhile, geothermal and particularly nuclear power have kept favor with the federal government and enjoyed continued tax credits and grant funding.

If a few big leaders cash through these IPOs, it could help investors feel more confident about supporting the energy sector, even if that money is concentrated in later-stage ventures like these rather than earlier-stage companies. 

We could see other firms, particularly in nuclear and geothermal, attempt a similar route in the year ahead.

A key thing to watch here will be whether Fervo and X-energy in particular can succeed in scaling up and deploying their technology. If either of these companies stumbles or misses a timeline, it could have ripple effects for those hoping to follow in these very lucrative footsteps. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

It is one thing to say AI will change the world. It is another to expect the class of 2026 to applaud it. In fact, when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told University of Arizona graduates that their task is to help shape AI, he was met with a resounding chorus of boos. “I can hear you,” he said, before conceding that fears about disappearing jobs and a broken future were “rational.”

This is not exactly the message one hopes to hear while sweating under a polyester gown and tallying student loan payments. Graduates have been jeering at AI pep talks at other commencements too, including ceremonies at the University of Central Florida and Middle Tennessee State University. Still, increasingly loud skepticism hasn’t stopped OpenAI from winning court cases, raising enormous sums of money, and launching new partnerships. And AI is even earning some unlikely cheerleaders: Reese Witherspoon has warned women to embrace it or be replaced by it.

The Texas Attorney General has sued Meta over allegations that the company’s WhatsApp messenger, used by more than 3 billion people, doesn’t provide the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) it has long claimed.

Since at least 2016, Meta (then named Facebook) has said WhatsApp provides robust end-to-end encryption, meaning that messages are encrypted on a sender’s device with keys that are available only to the receiver's. By definition, E2EE means that no one else—including the platform itself—can read the plaintext messages.

In sworn testimony before two US Senate committees in 2018, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta does “not see any of the content in WhatsApp; it is fully encrypted” and that “Facebook systems do not see the content of messages being transferred over WhatsApp.” The engine for this E2EE is the Signal protocol, an open source code base that multiple third-party experts have said lives up to its promises.

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