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The adaptive reuse of the historic Metropolitan Warehouse into the home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning has been named the “2026 Project of the Year” by The Architect’s Newspaper. The metropolitan Warehouse transformation “embodies what the future of the practice can and should look like, a willingness to use what’s already there, and to do so creatively, elegantly, and in a way that actually preserves the elements with the most embodied carbon,” note the editors of Architect’s Newspaper.  

Writing for The Atlantic, Prof. Joshua Bennett underscores the importance of developing a “Great Books” program that “centers the history, poetics, and philosophy of science.” Bennett explains: “In my view, we need a renewed emphasis not just on the arts and humanities as such, but on making meaningful connections between humanistic thinking and technological development. We need to clarify, often and in public, why the pursuit of scientific knowledge matters in the first place, as well as what we actually want pathbreaking new technologies to offer us. Just as important, we must equip young people with the tools they need to navigate a social and political landscape that is growing more hostile toward the core premises of higher learning and scientific research.” 

MIT has been ranked as the No. 1 college in the Northeast by Forbes, “thanks to exceptional student outcomes,” reports Lisa Chambers. “In addition to a 96% six-year graduation rate, MIT ranks among the nation’s strongest institutions for producing graduates who go on to earn PhDs, relative to its undergraduate enrollment,” notes Chambers.  

Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins NPR’s Scott Simon to discuss Congress tackling affordability in the age of AI by increasing wages. Paying higher prices for goods “is much less of a burden when you see your own salary increase at the same rate or at a higher rate,” says Acemoglu. “When we need to create more jobs for people, create more wage growth opportunities for people, technology is going to make that harder. We have to create an agenda of steering AI in a more pro-worker direction so that rather than automate work, we get AI to actually help employers to find ways of using workers more productively, and that will be a pathway for encouraging firms to create more jobs.” 

MIT researchers have “examined how improvements to existing transmission infrastructure could increase electricity delivery without relying entirely on expensive and time-consuming construction of new lines,” reports The Daily Tribune’s Carl Magadia. The researchers “examined three technologies: dynamic line ratings, which adjust power-line capacity based on real-time weather; advanced power flow controls, which redirect electricity away from congested lines; and topology optimization, which improves electricity distribution by reconfiguring grid connections,” notes Magadia.  

In an interview with Nature’s David Adam, Prof. Carlo Ratti discusses design elements he believes architects should focus on in the age of AI, emphasizing how citizens, not algorithms, should be the architects  of the future. “One important thing that AI can do is show us on a large scale where a city fails people. Combining the computer vision used to identify problems with public images gives us the chance to do something about them,” Ratti explains. He adds: “Many of the best ideas about cities have come from people disagreeing with one another in the same room—from cafes to council chambers. If algorithms learn what people like and simply give us more of it, or if software agents start negotiating with other agents on our behalf, we could lose those encounters.” 

Prof. Daron Acemoglu shares his insights on artificial intelligence and the future of work and education during “Ask an Economist,” a virtual event hosted by NPR’s “The Indicator from Planet Money.” “I think there are a lot of pro-teacher AI opportunities where you give better tools to teachers, but teachers still remain central to the learning experience of students,” says Acemoglu. AI “can individualize the teaching experience much more effectively and at low cost in a way that wasn't possible before. And that expands teacher expertise, expands teacher capabilities, enables them to perform new tasks, doesn't replace them, doesn't sideline them.” 

Prof. John Hansman speaks to Scientific American reporter Peter Hall about the development of self-flying cargo planes. “We’ve been flying unmanned air vehicles, or drones, of reasonably large size,” for a while, says Hansman. “A small quadcopter drone doesn’t have to have the level of redundancy that a large vehicle that could hurt people on the ground or carry people needs.” However, “there will always be some level of human supervision,” even if the safety pilot is taken out of the cockpit in the years to come, Hansman adds.  

Visiting Scholar Ariel Ekblaw SM ’17, PhD ’20 speaks with CNN’s Amy Gunia about her work developing TESSERAE, a space architecture project involving magnetic, self-assembling tiles that could one day be used to create structures in space. “The tiles can be stacked on top of each other inside a rocket and released in space, where they can autonomously attach to each other—employing electro-permanent magnets, cameras and AI—to create a predetermined shape,” Gunia explains. The tiles “can self-assemble into something way bigger than the size of the rocket that they came up in,” Ekblaw shares, which could allow humans to build “science-fiction-worthy, big, grand structures” in space. 

Prof. Catherine Tucker and her colleagues published a report that reveals neighborhood disparities in access to and use of digital government services, writes Kaitlyn Levinson for Route Fifty. “Higher-income neighborhoods are more likely to submit multiple enforcement requests simultaneously via the app, leading to faster resolution when complaints are geographically concentrated and, consequently, to unequal neighborhood outcomes,” the report reads. “This underscores the need for policymakers to consider the broader social effects of digital civic tools and ensure they do not exacerbate existing inequalities.”  

Prof. Christopher Knittel joins the Climate One podcast to discuss energy policy and his research on the costs associated with homeowners implementing rooftop solar. “Rooftop solar is raising people's rates,” says Knittel. We should continue to “subsidize rooftop solar in a way that's not regressive, that is not leaning harder on those homes that cannot install solar.” Thinking about: “what is the best, most efficient, and [the] fairest way to make that [equity] happen.”  

CSAIL researchers have discovered that a large frontier AI model can, without any specialized training, understand and fine-tune another AI model’s capabilities, reports Fortune’s Jeremy Kah. The research “could be a big breakthrough in interpretability—our ability to understand the internal ‘thought’ processes of large language models,” writes Kah. “That’s critical because interpretability is one of the ways we are hoping to keep AI agents under human control.”   

Prof. Gary Gensler joins “Bloomberg Open Interest” to discuss what a change in the control of Congress could mean for financial regulation. “I think it will be a wide-ranging look at what the Trump administration has done to roll back protections for investors in our capital markets,” says Gensler. “Going further than [examining the shuttering of] the Consumer Protection Bureau, issues around housing and housing affordability I think are very much on Democrats’ minds. And then financial stability issues as well, whether it’s a close look at private credit and then what we might call the big AI trade—how everything is interconnected.”