School of Science

Prof. David Kaiser joins GBH “Particles of Thought” podcast host Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi to discuss his hunt for primordial black holes. “It’s a lot easier to find stuff coming off of a very bright, hot source, than a cold, dim one. So, the Hawking temperature of a black hole that has the same mass as our sun, or a little bigger would be so cold we would literally never be able to measure [its] radiation,” says Kaiser. “You’ll never see it [Hawking Radiation] from stellar collapse black holes, you’ll never see it from supermassive black holes, or even colder. The only hope to ever see it would be a smaller mass black hole.”

Prof. Alan Guth chats with Scientific American reporter Joseph Howlett about the future of the field of cosmology and his advice for early-career physicists for “The Young American Scientists” special section. Guth shares that thanks to advances in technology, “we’re able to unravel, to make sense out of, what we’re observing. A lot of progress has been made on those lines.” 

For Scientific American’s “The Young American Scientists” special section, reporter Tara Haelle interviews Prof. John Urschel, a former NFL player, exploring his views on the benefits for aspiring young scientists of having a broad background to draw upon. “A lot of good research happens when people can draw on tools, techniques and insights from different areas, disciplines and even fields,” says Urschel. “I hope we can encourage promising young scientists to establish strong, broad backgrounds and to communicate frequently with those outside their particular areas.” 

Visiting Scientist Alice Stanton speaks with Scientific American reporter Tanya Lewis about her work developing miBrain, a 3D model of the human aimed at helping scientists “better understand neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s so researchers can develop personalized treatments for them.” Says Stanton of the need for stable support for scientific research: “When we have a loved one who gets sick, we want a treatment—we want something to cure them. It doesn’t come out of thin air.”

Prof. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero was named a winner of the 2026 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience for his “foundational work that established the field of twistronics,” reports Michael T. Nietzel for Forbes. Nietzel explains that when using twistronics, "scientists can induce new properties in materials without changing their basic composition."

GBH "Particles of Thought" host Hakeem Oluseyi interviews Prof. David Kaiser about the puzzling nature of dark matter and how its explanation may be inconsistent with our assumptions of gravity. “If we assume we really know the laws of gravity, which Einstein wrote down beautifully just over a hundred years ago in his general theory of relativity...we have reason to be confident. But what people are saying is could dark matter be the first exception to that,” says Kaiser. 

Prof. Richard Binzel goes interstellar and chats with Boston Globe reporter Nick Stoico about the science behind the meteor that exploded over Cape Cod Bay recently, noting that the event offered a rare opportunity for people to connect with a phenomenon that usually goes unnoticed. “It’s great when people find a connection to the greater universe,” said Binzel. “It’s a great perspective to think beyond the surface of the Earth.”

Prof. William Oliver speaks with Scientific American reporter Adam Becker about the future of quantum computing. “Quantum computing is real, it’s happening, and it’s going to take time,” Oliver says. “It’s going to take engineering, and there’s still science to do as well. It’s not all buttoned up.” He adds that, in the future, we will be using quantum computers "to better understand, from a scientific standpoint, the world around us.”

Prof. Richard Binzel shares his insights into the recently discovered school-bus sized asteroid that will fly by Earth next week with CNN reporter Jacopo Prisco. “2026JH2 will pass safely by the Earth,” said Binzel. “This is actually a rather normal occurrence, car-sized objects pass between the Earth and the Moon every week. At the size of a school bus, these pass through our neighborhood several times per year. We are only recently developing surveys that are sensitive enough to see them.”

A study by MIT scientists uncovered the culprit in the deep-sea mystery of what was reducing the ocean’s carbon-trapping capacity: dense microbe ‘cities’ living inside marine snow (slowly sinking particles of fish poop and other debris), reports Scientific American reporter Damien Pine. “Ultimately everything that’s happening at these microscales—that’s really what’s terraforming our planet,” explains Prof. Andrew Babbin.

New York Times reporters Gina Kolata and Rebecca Robbins highlight how university researchers at MIT and Harvard laid the groundwork for the development of a new treatment for pancreatic cancer that “could wind up being the most significant advance in cancer treatment in 15 years, since the arrival of immunotherapy.” They write: “In 1982, Robert Weinberg, a scientist at MIT, made one of the seminal discoveries about how RAS genes fuel some cancers.” 

Forbes contributor Michael T. Nietzel spotlights the 120 new members and 25 international members elected by the National Academy of Sciences for 2026. Several MIT faculty members – including Professors Michale Fee, Gareth McKinley, Keith Nelson, Bengt Holmstrom and Catherine Wolfram – were selected. 

Researchers from MIT have created a new model that can predict wave behavior on different planets, reports Kristen French for Nautilus. “On Earth, waves form as wind drags across bodies of water, pushing unevenly on their surfaces. As the waves lengthen, and the distance between crests grows, the waves are increasingly driven by the force of gravity rather than by surface tension,” French writes. “On faraway planets, the size of the waves would depend not only on the strength of gravity and the speed and direction of the wind, but the density of the atmosphere, the viscosity of the liquid in the oceans and lakes, as well as the depth of the bed. All these factors were fed into the PlanetWaves model.” 

MIT scientists have developed a new model, dubbed "PlanetWaves," that predicts wave behavior on different planets, showing that the "smallest gust of wind on Titan could generate huge, roiling waves across seas of hydrocarbons," reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “PlanetWaves is far more than a novel simulator,” writes Paul. “Calculating fluid behaviors on distant planets and moons could help inform engineers building new spacecraft and probes.”

Scientific American reporter Bob Henderson spotlights how graduate student Jiaruo Li and Prof. Riccardo Comin are developing a new device for storing digital data using “an exotic kind of magnetism discovered in the same lab the previous year to make the device faster and more energy-efficient than any competing technology.”