In the Media

A new study by researchers at MIT and elsewhere has found a correlation between addiction and eye care, reports Hadley Barndollar for MassLive. “The study found nearly half of the patients with opioid use disorder being treated for the eye infection were eligible to initiate medication-assisted treatment,” explains Barndollar. “But medications were only initiated when an addiction consult occurred, highlighting how much more eye doctors responding to emergency rooms can offer patients beyond vision care.” 

Writing for The Atlantic, Prof. Deb Roy explores the impact of chatbots on language and learning development. “The ordinary forces that tether speech to consequence—social sanction, legal penalty, reputational loss—presuppose a continuous agent whose future can be made worse by what they say,” writes Roy. “With LLMs, there is no such locus. …When the speaker is an LLM, the human stakes that ordinarily anchor speech have nowhere to attach.” 

MIT Sloan School of Management Dean Richard M. Locke spoke with Financial Times Global Education Editor Andrew Jack about the 2026 Global MBA Ranking. MIT Sloan topped the ranking for the first time, and Locke said that “[MIT] Sloan is forging tight links with other parts of MIT, which is renowned for its engineering and science expertise, and focusing more on how AI could be used 'as a tool not to replace jobs but enhance them'. He add[ed]: 'We are exploring how we reinvent management education for the 21st century.’"

Eastern Edge, a food hall bordering the MIT campus, has debuted in Kendall Square, featuring nine local food vendors with roots in the Cambridge community, reports Kara Baskin for The Boston Globe. “It’s built to be a gathering space, and that’s something that we really enjoy at Clover,” says Julia Wrin Piper, CEO of Clover. “At MIT, it’s a privilege to be in a space where every great idea that humankind has ever had has been debated. That’s something that’s very unique to this specific food hall – to be in this hyper-intellectual space and be very grounded by these delicious experiences.”  

Boston Magazine reporter Rachel Leah Blumenthal spotlights the opening of Eastern Edge, a new food hall debuting in Kendall Square. The venue, which borders the MIT campus, features a variety of vendors over its 11,000-square-foot space, and accepts TechCash.  

Prof. Angela Belcher and Prof. Sangeeta Bhatia chat with Edgar B. Herwick III of GBH’s The Curiosity Desk about their efforts aimed at improving diagnostics for ovarian cancer. “We now know that ovarian cancer doesn’t originate in the ovaries. About 80% of the time, ovarian cancer starts in the fallopian tubes, but it can sit there as this precancerous lesion,” explains Belcher. “There’s new technologies that can be invented and developed to detect it much earlier, because if it’s detected earlier…there’s such an opportunity to make an impact.”  

Jerry Lu MFin ’24 speaks with Fast Company reporter Grace Snelling about his work developing a new AI tool that can be used to help figure skaters land their jumps and Olympic audiences better understand just how challenging a quadruple Axel is. “Some of the artistic sports were missing this data-driven storytelling ability—if you watch hockey on TV, it looks slow, but if you watch it in person, it looks fast,” Lu explains. 

Lecturer Jim Aloisi speaks with Boston Globe reporter Ian Prasad Philbrick about fare evasion on the MBTA, and a need for transit reform. “The drill here shouldn’t be to obsess or focus about how much,” says Aloisi. “The drill should be where can we make cost-effective interventions that matter?”

A new study by Prof. Sara Seager and her colleagues has found a solar system that contradicts the patterns commonly “seen across the galaxy and in our own solar system,” reports Jacopo Prisco for CNN. The study offers “some of the first evidence for flipping the script on how planets form around the most common stars in our galaxy,” says Seager. “Even in a maturing field, new discoveries can remind us that we still have a long way to go in understanding how planetary systems are built.”  

The MIT Welcome Center will host a community event to celebrate the Lunar New Year with “calligraphy, face painting, paper-lantern making, and hot cocoa,” reports Annie Sarlin for The Boston Globe. “The event will also include tai chi lessons and a performance from the MIT Lion Dance” team, writes Sarlin.  

Researchers at MIT have “developed a new technique that enables large language models to learn new skills and knowledge without forgetting their past capabilities,” reports Ben Dickson for Venture Beat. “Their technique, called self-distillation fine-tuning (SDFT), allows models to learn directly from demonstrations and their own experiments by leveraging the inherent in-context learning abilities of modern LLMs,” explains Dickson. “Experiments show that SDFT consistently outperforms traditional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) while addressing the limitations of reinforcement learning algorithms.” 

President Sally Kornbluth and MIT Corporation member Noubar Afeyan PhD '87 served as panelists at the 2026 Davos Imagination in Action event to discuss “upholding scientific principles in the era of LLMs,” reports John Werner for Forbes. “We want all of our students to have a foundational facility with AI,” said Kornbluth. “What we want them to know, now, is how they can really be passionate about the content that they care about, whether it's materials design, whether it's aerospace, whether it's biochemical innovation, and understanding the many ways in which AI can help in that innovation.”

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a compact magnetic mixer to prevent clogs and uneven tissue in 3D bioprinting, reports Aamir Khollam for Interesting Engineering. The device called “MagMix,” works to “keep bio-inks uniform throughout the entire printing process,” writes Khollam. 

"No photographer so clearly, or memorably, demonstrated the relationship between time and technology as did Harold ‘Doc' Edgerton,” writes Boston Globe reporter Mark Feeney. "The stroboscopic cameras he developed...could register almost-infinitesimal gradations of motion.” A new exhibit at the MIT Museum called “Freezing Time: Edgerton and the Beauty of the Machine Age,” showcases the breadth of Edgerton’s work, featuring “20 Edgerton photographs, some later works by others inspired by his example, a dozen pages from his notebooks, a selection of his photographic equipment."

Graduate student Yi-Hsuan (Nemo) Hsiao and his colleagues have developed insect-sized robots to assist with artificial pollination as bee populations decline, reports Maria Simon Arboleas for Euractiv. “The tiny drones, lighter than a paperclip, can fly at speeds of up to two meters per second for more than 1,000 seconds, while performing complex maneuvers such as repeated backflips,” writes Arboleas.