It may sound fishy, but Prof. Benedetto Marelli and postdoc Giorgio Rizzo have developed a method to up-cycle seafood waste into a coating for seeds that could help plants better withstand drought, while also creating more nutritious and sustainable crops. “It all starts with the idea that we need to find new ways to grow food and, in particular, find new ways to decrease the amount of fertilizers we use,” says Marelli.
Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins Slate’s “Money Talks” podcast to explain his research into pro-worker technologies and how we can not only avoid the AI job apocalypse but also improve workers’ lives by shifting the goal of AI from automation to collaboration. “Artificial intelligence is quite different than human intelligence,” says Acemgou. “And when two things are different, a natural way to combine them is in a complimentary way, not try to replace everything that one does with one type of intelligence using the other type of.”
Prof. Xuanhe Zhao speaks with Tech Briefs reporter Andrew Corselli about his team’s work developing an ultrasound wristband that precisely tracks a wearer’s hand movements in real time and can communicate device these motions to a robot or a virtual environment. “For the future of human society, humanized robots will do lots of different work for us. For that work, we need a dexterous robotic hand,” explains Zhao. “We believe this ultrasound wristband, based on variable imaging, could be the future of really knowing the human hand motions.”
President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif writes for The Boston Globe that with the advent of transformative AI, there is an urgent need for “a bilateral conversation between Washington and Beijing, focused on the shared dangers these technologies pose to each nation and to global stability. Both governments must work toward agreed guardrails, defining not just how this technology should be used but where it must never be applied. Red lines need to be defined, established, and agreed upon.”
President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif joins Rob Schmitz of NPR’s All Things Considered about how the U.S. can regain its edge as the global leader in science and innovation. Reif makes the case for investing in basic research in the country, and finding “a way so that the innovative ideas coming out of our labs don't end up in another country like China, that we develop them here by giving them a longer runway for them to materialize and make an impact.”
Researchers at MIT have found that plants can sense the sound of rain before the water reaches them. “The sound of rain spurs rice seeds to sprout up to 40 percent faster than they would otherwise,” writes K.R. Callaway for Scientific American. “The results mark the first direct evidence that plants sense the sound of the world around them and respond to it.”
Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi speaks with Mark Herz, host of GBH Morning Edition, about the potential benefits and issues associated with using AI in medicine. “Where I really see a lot of fantastic opportunity is identifying spaces where humans don’t have a fundamental capacity, like early breast cancer detection where it’s a sub-clinical presentation,” says Ghassemi. “These are spaces where humans cannot do or have been proven not to be good at a very specific clinical task. And there, AI can really help close the gap.”
In discussion with Deni Ellis Bechard for Scientific American, Prof. Emeritus Rodney Brooks shares his thoughts on a robot that ran a half marathon faster than a human. “When you see a performance of an AI system or a robot on one thing, that fools us into thinking that it has the same general competence as a human,” says Brooks. “And that’s a mistake people make.”
Prof. Susan Solomon joins Rachel Feltman on Scientific American’s Science Quickly podcast to discuss her experience researching the cause and solution for the Antarctic ozone hole in the 1980s. “Amazingly, we can show, with 95 percent confidence, now the Antarctic ozone hole is beginning to heal,” says Solomon, who published a paper on that topic last year. “That was a real incredible moment for me…I was there in 1986, and in 2026 I saw this paper appear that actually shows that we can be confident we’re seeing recovery.”
A new study from MIT researchers shows that plants can ‘hear’ rain coming. “Plants have external sensing resulting from cellular structures called statoliths, which shift and settle at the bottom of plant cells, while assisting the organisms in detecting changes in stability and position,” reports Rob Taub for NewsNation.
Prof. Thomas Malone and his colleagues at MIT Sloan have developed a way to analyze work, which may help predict which jobs are likely most vulnerable to AI. The researchers found that “AI mainly threatens workers who manage information. But not all of them,” writes Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “Malone noted that some industries demand human empathy, a sense of ethics, and a knack for teamwork. That’s why he thinks health care jobs are relatively safe.”
Prof. Shu-Heng Shao was one of 15 recipients of the New Horizon Prizes, a Breakthrough Prize that is awarded to early-career physicists and mathematicians. “Shao worked alongside other researchers to develop the theory of “generalized symmetries” in quantum field theory, which helped create a “new language” of possibilities in the field beyond the traditional understanding of symmetries,” reports Bryan Hecht for The Boston Globe.
Prof. Andrew Lo speaks with with Greg Iacurci at CNBC about using AI for personal finances. “One of the things about [large language models] that I find particularly concerning is that no matter what you ask it, it’ll always come back with an answer that sounds authoritative, even if it’s not,” said Lo. ″[People] should be using AI for financial planning — but it’s how they use it that’s important.”
Prof. Anette “Peko” Hosoi and Andy Harland of Loughborough University lace up their shoes to chat about how runners can optimize their marathon performance with Edgar B. Herwick III of GBH’s Curiosity Desk. The Boston Marathon “is an iconic race and it is challenging for a lot of different reasons,” Hosoi notes. “Boston starts on a downhill, so you feel great…but if you are not managing your energy by the time you get to Heartbreak Hill at mile 20 you are going to be suffering.”
President Sally Kornbluth joins Sloan Senior Lecturer Brian Halligan MBA ’05 on his podcast “Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO” to chat leadership strategies, AI and education, and MIT's approach to preparing students for life after college. “People talk to me, alums talk to me about how MIT changed their lives. It's not because of some particular class or some particular skill they acquired. It’s the whole environment,” Kornbluth notes. She adds that when it comes to educating students, at MIT "we want them to have the kind of knowledge base and ability to navigate the world that will enable them to do anything they want to do.”