Increase, a startup founded by alumnus Darragh Buckley, has been named to the Forbes The Future of Business to Business Banking: Fintech 50 2026 list, reports Brandon Kochkodin for Forbes. “Increase provides banking infrastructure that lets fintechs and businesses move money, store deposits and access payment rails without building direct bank connections,” writes Kochkodin.
Kalshi and Común, two startups founded by MIT alumni, have been named to the 2026 Forbes Fintech 50 list. Kalshi is a prediction market that “had 1.2 million active users in 2025, and total trading volume hit $24 billion” while Común “offers digital banking geared toward Hispanic immigrants,” reports Jeff Kauflin for Forbes.
Prof. Jacopo Buongiorno speaks with NBC News about the U.S. government airlifting parts of a nuclear reactor across three states and the future of nuclear power in America. “[It is] very positive. There is finally a sense of urgency and a push to increase our reliance on nuclear,” says Buongiorno. “I think nuclear has a lot of attractive features as an energy source. As I said earlier, it’s clean, it’s compact, it’s reliable.”
Mitali Chowdhury '24 has been named a 2026 Gates Cambridge Scholar, reports Michael T. Nietzel for Forbes. Beginning this fall, Chowdhury will pursue “a PhD in Sensor Technologies and Applications [at the University of Cambridge]” explains Nietzel. “Her research will focus on CRISPR-based diagnostics to assess antimicrobial resistance, with the goal of expanding equitable access to health care.”
Research scientist Judah Cohen served as a panelist for the Boston Globe’s “The Reshaping of New England’s Seasons: What’s Happening to Our Weather?” event, reports Ken Mahan for The Boston Globe. Cohen and his fellow panelists discussed New England weather, sharing insights and answering questions from community members.
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.
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.”
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.”
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 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.”
"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."
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.
USA Today reporter Dinah Voyles Pulver spotlights Research Scientist Judah Cohen’s research studying how weather systems and climate patterns are related to the increase in Arctic blasts and deep freezes this winter.
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.
Research Scientist Judah Cohen speaks with New York Times reporter Eric Niiler about his research studying “how global warming might also be causing colder winters in the eastern United States.” Cohen says “It’s weird what’s going on now in the stratosphere. These stretching events happen every winter, but just how the pattern is stuck is really remarkable.”