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Prof. Regina Barzilay, graduate student Aziz Ayed and alumna Sydney Pham ‘24 are featured in an article about AI models and the workforce, written by Nature’s Ben Deighton. “Sometimes models can make sense of unexpected observations, which can guide further iterations of studies,” Pham says. “It’s helpful to understand how the models generate their results.” 

Postdoctoral Associate Rohan Naidu joins John Batchelor and David Livingston, hosts of the “Hotel Mars” podcast, to discuss his research discovering black hole stars from little red dots using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. “When we first discovered the little red dots, we assumed that red means dust, and so the idea was that the little red dots are the kind of black holes that we see in our backyard,” says Naidu. “But now we have this paradigm shift where we are realizing that red does not mean dust. Red could mean that you have this black hole star kind of object where all the blue light is being soaked up in this dense star-like cocoon.” 

Prof. Anna Stansbury speaks to the Financial Times’ Myles McCormick about a new study that found that chief executives at America’s largest low-wage employers had seen their pay rise 41 percent between 2019 and 2025, while the median worker earned 21 percent more income. “There’s been for several decades a shift in the balance of power from labor to capital in the US,” says Stansbury. “It seems unlikely that what’s happening now...can be used to infer a big secular shift in power beyond the ongoing steady trend that we’ve been seeing for a long time.”  

Graduate student Jaida Elcock speaks to Popular Science’s Laura Baisas about tagging a whale shark about 100 miles off the coast of New England, as part of an effort to learn more about the behavior of these giant sea creatures, in the biodiverse northeast canyon and seamounts region of the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. “There are whale shark aggregations all over the place. The Philippines, Mexico, Australia, tropical places like that. A lot of these aggregations are also often young individuals, subadult individuals, juveniles,” says Elcock. “Out in the [northeast] canyons, we’re seeing large adults.” 

Prof. Emeritus Kerry Emanuel speaks to The New York Times’ William J. Broad about the use of AI models in predicting hurricanes. “It’s human beings who have to make these calls,” says Emanuel. “[Eventually] AI will be treated as just another form of guidance” along with satellite images and readings from hurricane hunter aircraft that pierce the tempests. 

MIT researchers found that purchased AI tools succeed roughly twice as often as comparable in-house builds, Forbes’ Dennis Vorobyov highlights. “[S]o spend the engineering effort where you are genuinely differentiated,” writes Vorobyov. “Budget wise, none of this requires a moonshot, just clarity and sequencing.” 

MassLive’s Juliet Schulman-Hall covers a new report from the MIT Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning and Research Training about AI and education at MIT. “It’s rare that a successful institution has to take a fresh look at many aspects of its mission,” said President Sally Kornbluth in a letter to the community. “But I’m convinced that the opportunities and risks generative AI poses for our model of education and research now constitute such a watershed for MIT — and for all of higher education.” 

Prof. Daniela Rus, Director of MIT CSAIL, and Prof. David Autor, department head of Economics, are featured on Time’s “TIME100 AI 2026” list of 100 innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping the world through their advances in AI. “Over three decades, [Rus] has conducted pioneering work in robotics, extending the understanding of what form robots can take,” writes Tharin Pillay, while Steven Freiss describes Autor as “one of the nation’s most vocal and prominent economists aiming to ascertain AI’s potential impacts on labor.” 

Writing for Forbes, Joseph Coughlin, Director of the MIT AgeLab, describes the importance of considering home security beyond simple intrusion protection in longevity planning. “A longevity-ready home to age-in-place isn't simply a safer, more accessible home,” writes Coughlin. “It is a home surrounded by an architecture of people, technology, and services that can detect, communicate, and respond even when we, or the people who care about us, cannot.” 

The Financial Times’ Anjana Ahuja spotlights research led by Prof. Dennis Whyte on the economics of fusion energy. “Economic Q, the metric devised by Whyte and others and which must exceed one to represent net economic gain, compares the capital gained over a fusion energy plant’s lifetime to that expended,” writes Ahuja. “Factors reflect the extreme engineering involved and include construction costs, component durability and the efficiency of converting fusion power into a commodity.” 

In conversation with The Boston Globe’s Hilary Burns, MIT President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif discusses his views on the value of US research universities and why saying so publicly matters. It's “tough times for universities, and that means a non-ending decline for the US,” warns Reif. “There is something unique about a university that companies do not have and national labs do not have, which is students. If we believe that science is important, we have to have a place where we create the scientists of the future.”