Forbes contributor Michael T. Nietzel spotlights the 120 new members and 25 international members elected by the National Academy of Sciences for 2026. Four MIT faculty members – Professors Isaiah Andrews, David Atkin, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and Benjamin Weiss – were selected along with 13 alumni.
Prof. Kate Brown speaks with Zoe Matthews of GBH about growing interest in urban gardening. Matthews highlights Brown’s course about cooperative agriculture at MIT, during which “her students produced an accessible how-to guide on starting an urban farm.”
Fortune reporter Preston Fore spotlights Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee’s remarks warning against using AI technologies to replace entry level jobs. “How else are people going to learn to do the job except via on-the-job learning and training apprenticeship?” said McAfee. “That’s how you learn to do difficult knowledge work is by helping somebody who’s good at that with the routine stuff. And when we put too much automation in that too quickly, we lose that apprenticeship ladder.”
Reporting for CNN, Caleb Hellerman spotlights how MIT computer scientists developed an AI program called Sybil that can “‘look’ at a single CT scan and generate a ‘risk score’ corresponding to the likelihood of the person developing cancer over any period up to six years.”
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 Acemoglu. “And when two things are different, a natural way to combine them is in a complimentary way.”
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.”