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In a conversation with Slate’s Shirin Ali, Charles Stewart III director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, discusses a framework to help voters “see important red flags in the hours immediately following Election Day,” detailed in his new paper “The Day After: Threats and Guardrails in the 2026 Election.” “After Election Day, that’s where we’re thinking about getting the final count in,” says Stewart. “We shift into the formal process of canvassing the vote, certifying it, and making sure that we’ve named the winners.”  

Mike Beigel ‘70, who invented Mu-Tron III, considered to be “the first commercial envelope filter pedal [that] allowed guitar players to achieve a synthesizer-like sound” used in popular 1970s music, has died at 79, reports Alex Williams for The New York Times. “The Mu-Tron III was the most renowned of several effects pedals that Mr. Beigel invented for Musitronics, a New Jersey-based company that he co-founded in 1972,” writes Williams. Musitronics, “produced a variety of sought-after pedals, including the Mu-Tron Octave Divider, Phasor, Flanger and Bi-Phase, which have been adopted by notables like Neil Young, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins and John Frusciante, the Chili Peppers guitarist.” 

Prof. Sanjay Sarma speaks to Bloomberg’s Saritha Rai about the difficulty of developing dexterous robots for use in the home versus developing factory machines for use in standardized plants. “Heavy work, hazardous tasks have long been the focus of automation,” says Sarma. “Robots seem to be following an evolutionary path–the finer the motor or cognitive skills required, the harder to automate.”  

CodeSignal, co-founded by alumnus and CEO Tigran Sloyan, has developed Agentic Skills Intelligence, a new product that “uses AI agents to evaluate the skills people use in their work and links the findings to personalized practice,” writes Forbes’ Ray Ravaglia. CodeSignal has built an AI agent “for each domain in its job taxonomy, such as engineering and sales, along with agents for capabilities that cut across jobs, among them communication and AI literacy,” notes Ravaglia. “The agents draw on systems including Gong, Salesforce, and GitHub, and they score what they find against rubrics the company says are grounded in industrial-organizational psychology.” 

An analysis by Prof. Charles Stewart III, director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, found that requests for mail-in ballots were down in Georgia, Maine, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin earlier this month, reports Patrick Marley, Leslie Shapiro and Laura Meckler for The Washington Post. “Those five states can be more fully analyzed than others because they provide data showing how voting patterns compare with the same stage of the election cycle in 2022,” note Marley, Shapiro and Meckler. “In data collected four weeks before Election Day, requests were down most sharply in Georgia — by 50 percent compared with the same point in 2022.” 

Principal Research Scientist Deepjyoti Deka speaks to MassLive’s Tréa Lavery about the type of information stored by data centers. “Anything, mostly, that you are using the computer for, that you are getting some information from, is housed in a data center,” says Deka. “A lot of it is active data handling, but some of it is also data storage.” 

Prof. Ryan Williams speaks to TechCrunch’s Tim Fernholz about AI platforms refuting the Exponential Time Hypothesis, part of a broader class of problems known as P versus NP. “I do think that it kind of calls into question a lot of the intuitions that we thought we had about … how tractable [hard NP problems] are. I also think that this is probably not the final answer either,” says Williams. AI is “forcing people to be a little more ambitious about the kind of work that they do, and to think more deeply about, okay, if all the things I used to work on are now low-hanging fruit for AI, how can I raise the bar for the kind of scientific questions I want to ask?” 

Undergraduate student Melody Chen, a former MIT Research Science Institute Scholar, has been named in the 2026 class of U.S. Presidential Scholars, writes Forbes’ Michael T. Nietzel. “This year’s group consists of 161 outstanding high school seniors, who were selected for their accomplishments in academics, the arts, and career and technical education fields as well as for commitments to community service and leadership,” notes Nietzel. “Being named a U.S. Presidential Scholar is considered one of the nation’s most prestigious academic awards for high school graduates.”  

MIT researchers have designed LUCID, a thin, flexible and implantable device “that pairs a slow-release drug reservoir with tiny ultrasound transducers, aiming to help prevent glioblastoma from coming back after surgery,” writes Munis Raza for Interesting Engineering. “The transducers generate ultrasound waves right at the tip of the needle, helping drug molecules diffuse farther into [brain] tissue after release,” notes Raza. “Doctors could implant the device during surgery and let it gradually release drugs to kill remaining tumor cells.” 

Prof. Suraj Cheema joins Edgar B. Herwick, host of GBH’s “The Curiosity Desk,” to discuss the functionality and global development of computer chips. “The know-how of how to make these chips is very specialized,” says Cheema. “Imagine there’s 100 steps in the process, not just that printer that costs a few $100 million, just all these other kinds of steps that go along with it. We have 20 million transistors in this little chip. We want them all to work. They all have to work [for the chip to function].”  

Prof. Gary Gensler speaks with “Bloomberg Surveillance” hosts Tom Keene and Paul Sweeney about how the current AI investment boom may impact the U.S. economy. “You can be positive about the technology and still say our capital markets tend to overfund in exuberance,” says Gensler. “I think that we will have a deceleration of this AI boom, and then some form of a reversal in the next 18 to 30 months. And the question really, to me, is a little bit about timing: when and then how deep it [the deceleration] is. I think the depth of it is going to be dependent on how much debt is in the system, where it is [and] who holds it.”  

Senior Research Scientist Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab discusses generational differences in aging and achieving life milestones for a Fortune article by reporter Nick Lichtenberg. Currently, “we’re creating new life stages, or we’re extending life stages that used to be done in short order,” says Coughlin. “The real generation gap is about expectations. Not only do [generations] expect to live longer, but they expect to live better.” 

Research Scientist Judah Cohen joins Fox News to discuss the potential for a historic, massive polar vortex disruption, or early season weakening, that “could send atmospheric impacts rippling across the planet in the weeks or even months to come.” Cohen says, “this will, I think almost undoubtedly, be the largest, earliest disruption of the polar vortex on record. What the impacts could be on a regional basis is really hard to know. Everything is possible. Traditionally it [the disruption] is thought to bring colder and snowier weather to the eastern U.S. about two weeks after the event kind of peaks, but in recent history that has not been the case.”