MIT has been ranked the number two university in the nation in U.S. News & World Report’s 2025-26 rankings, reports Haley Chamberlain for Quartz. “MIT emphasizes practical problem solving rather than traditional lecture-heavy education,” adds Chamberlain. “Students regularly participate in research labs and entrepreneurial programs. The campus culture encourages experimentation across disciplines.”
Senior Research Scientist C. Adam Schlosser, deputy director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, speaks with Joshua Miller of The Boston Globe’s Camberville & Beyond newsletter about weather, climate and how warming temperatures could impact the Northeastern US. Schlosser explains that: “warmer air can carry more moisture, more vapor. So, imagine again a future for the Northeast where everything is risen by a few degrees. It's not just the daytime temperatures, but the nighttime temperatures. The amount of vapor in the air has a big impact on nighttime temperatures, and on hot, humid nights, your body's ability to cool is diminished.”
Researchers from MIT, Harvard and Yale have found “that people who meditate regularly show measurable increases in brain thickness in areas responsible for attention and sensory processing,” reports Luis Prada for Vice. “The research team plans larger studies to track changes over time and explore how meditation might influence neural connections and cognitive aging,” writes Prada.
While excavating “a small room inside a lavish home in ancient Pompeii,” researchers from MIT found the walls were covered with Egyptian blue paint, a bright blue pigment estimated to “have cost more than half the annual salary of a Roman foot solider,” reports Sonja Anderson for Smithsonian Magazine.
New York Times reporter Holly Bass spotlights Prof. Joshua Bennett’s newest works, “We (The People of the United States)” and “The People Can Fly.” Bennett’s “texts remind us there is power in the collective body of a people and their culture,” writes Bass. “There is power in pressing on in the face of obstacles and opposition.”
Senior Research Associate Jim Walsh speaks with WBUR Here & Now host Indira Lakshmanan about the global impact of the United States’ conflict with Iran.
Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Danielle Li examines the risks for highly skilled workers whose expertise is used as training data for AI systems. “As workers, people should think about how to use AI to expand their skills: whether by building complementary capabilities or by finding ways to scale their expertise through AI systems,” Li writes. “As citizens, they should press for policies that give workers clearer rights over the data generated by their work and compensation for it.”
Prof. Raymond Pierrehumbert and his colleagues have discovered an exoplanet orbiting a star 34 light-years from Earth that is "covered with a perpetual ocean of magma and enveloped by a noxious and fiercely hot sulfur-rich atmosphere," reports Will Dunham for Reuters. "The era of exoplanet discovery keeps showing us new kinds of worlds, indeed 'strange new worlds,' generally stranger than anything in 'Star Trek,'" says Pierrehumbert. “This offers all sorts of exciting opportunities to put together fundamental physics in very novel ways."
Nature reporter Rachel Fieldhouse spotlights graduate student Lauren 'Ren' Ramlan’s work integrating the video game Doom into her research. Ramlan used “Escherichia coli bacteria to display a few frames of Doom,” explains Fieldhouse. “She attached a fluorescent protein to the bacterial cells that could be turned on or off, making them act like black and white pixels on a screen. She then translated and compressed the first few frames of Doom into black-and-white versions that matched the plate growing the cells. Ramlan says the project shows what living things can be engineered to do, and that bacteria are probably not suitable for computing or displaying images.”
Writing for Foreign Affairs, Prof. Caitlin Talmadge explores the state of the Strait of Hormuz amid the United States’ conflict with Iran. “In short, if Iran effectively mines the strait, all U.S. response options are suboptimal,” writes Talmadge. “The United States should therefore focus aggressively on preventing Iranian mine-laying in the first place and finding an off-ramp from the larger war. If it does not, Washington should expect that ongoing harassment of traffic in the strait will be but one of a number of responses that Iran has long prepared and will now deploy.”
A new working paper by researchers from MIT and other institutions explores the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), reports Ana Swanson for The New York Times. The researchers “found that American workers in communities that were more exposed to competition from Mexican imports saw a significant shortening of their life spans after the trade deal went into effect in 1994,” writes Swanson.
Prof. Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science, and Prof. Salvatore Vitale join Edgar B. Herwick III of GBH’s Curiosity Desk to discuss the science behind the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and how close we are to unraveling the secrets of the early universe. LIGO has provided the ability to “observe the universe in ways that have never been done before,” says Mavalvala.
During his time as a visiting artist at the Media Lab, keyboardist Jordan Rudess worked with researchers from the Responsive Environments Group to develop “jam_bot, a machine learning model designed to emulate his playing style and improvise while performing alongside him,” reports Annie Sarlin for The Boston Globe.
Boston Globe reporter Kate Tuttle spotlights “We (The People of the United States),” a new poetry book by Prof. Joshua Bennett. “I started to think of it as an ode to invention,” says Bennett. “There are poems in the book about individual people, but there are also poems about the television, the typewriter, the trampoline. I really wanted to celebrate the invention of a people, the invention of a country, the invention of a certain vision of the human genre.”
Using new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers from MIT determined that asteroid 2024 YR4 will not collide with the moon, reports Hannah Devlin for The Guardian. “[Asteroid] 2024 YR4 is exceedingly faint right now, reflecting about as much light as an almond at the distance of the moon,” explain Prof. Julien de Wit and Andy Rivkin PhD '91, who co-led the observations. “Webb is the only observatory that could hope to make these measurements, as it is the only one with the required sensitivity and stability combined with precise moving-target tracking needed to follow and study objects like this.”