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Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with CNBC about the potential impact of AI in the workplace. “I think the incentive in the industry… especially with the idea that you have to dominate the market by becoming the largest players, I think those are not helping because those are making us rush down the easiest road, the lowest resistance path, which is often automation,” says Acemoglu. “I don’t think that is going to get us the kind of aspirations that are articulated where we can make blue collar workers, electricians, nurses, teachers much more capable because we have given them tools to be better workers and to make much higher quality services.”

Forbes contributor William Haseltine spotlights how MIT researchers have developed a flexible ultrasound patch that can be used to help estimate bladder volume. “The applications for long-term therapeutic and regenerative medicine for the ultrasound patch are innumerable, only to be limited by the imagination of those implementing their use,” writes Haseltine. “Among the most forthcoming are situations where someone may be unable to visit their physician for a medically-administered ultrasound.”

Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with GBH reporter Hannah Loss about whether buying or renting a home is a better financial move. “I’m not saying people shouldn’t buy homes,” says Gruber. “I’m just saying that they should do it as a rational economic calculation. They should account for their propensity to save and whether they can handle the uncertainty of homeownership. They shouldn’t do it because their parents said it was a good idea.”

Axios reporter Ina Fried spotlights a new report by Prof. Emeritus Stuart Madnick that finds “2.6 billion personal records have been exposed in data breaches over the past two years and that number continues to grow.” Additionally, Madnick found that” “Data breaches in the US through the first nine months of the year are already 20% higher than for all of 2022.”

Prof. Ritu Raman has developed centimeter-scale robots that use biological muscle, reports Liam Drew for Nature. “Raman is now developing muscle systems connected to neurons that can trigger contraction, just as they exist in animals,” writes Drew. “In the longer term, she aims to use networks of biological neurons that can sense external stimuli as well, enabling them to move in response to environmental cues.”

Prof. Tavneet Suri speaks with NPR reporter Nurith Aizenman about her ongoing research studying the impact of universal basic income with GiveDirectly, a U.S. charity that provides villagers in Kenya with a universal basic income. Suri says her results thus far, “add to the evidence that many poor people are trapped in poverty by a lack of capital for precisely the kinds of transformative investments they would need to vault them into higher incomes.”

Boston Globe reporters Aaron Pressman and Jon Chesto spotlight Liquid AI, a new startup founded by MIT researchers that is developing an AI system that relies on neural-network models that are “much simpler and require significantly less computer power to train and operate” than generative AI systems. “You need a fraction of the cost of developing generative AI, and the carbon footprint is much lower,” explains Liquid AI CEO Ramin Hasani, a research affiliate at CSAIL. “You get the same capabilities with a much smaller representation.”

Prof. Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the School of Science, speaks with Wired reporter Swapna Krishna about her work searching for gravitational waves, the importance of skepticism in scientific research and why she enjoys working with young people. Mavalvala explains, “there’s an idea that the greatest scientific discoveries are made by wiry silver-haired scientists. But it’s the work of young people that enables all of these scientific discoveries.”  

Writing for The Messenger, graduate student Kartik Chandra highlights the MIT Art Lending Program, which allows students to select one piece from the List Visual Arts Center’s collection to keep in their dorm rooms for the duration of the academic year. “Three years into my time at MIT, I’m convinced the program works well,” writes Chandra. “Our relationship with art changes from the moment we walk into the gallery. As students wander, pondering what to take home, conventional measures of fame, monetary worth, and even beauty fall away, and the only question that matters becomes: Does this piece speak to you, personally? And something always does — as if it were put there just for you.”

MIT researchers have developed a, “new laser-based technique that could speed up the discovery of promising metamaterials for real-world applications,” reports Andrew Corselli for Tech Briefs. The technique “offers a safe, reliable, and high-throughput way to dynamically characterize microscale metamaterials, for the first time,” reports Corselli.

New research by Prof. Tavneet Suri and Prof. Abhijit Banerjee explores how to most effectively direct cash to low-income households, reports Dylan Matthews for Vox.  Suri and Banerjee compare “three groups: short-term basic income recipients (who got the $20 payments for two years), long-term basic income recipients (who get the money for the full 12 years), and lump sum recipients, who got $500 all at once, or roughly the same amount as the short-term basic income group,” writes Matthews. “Suri and Banerjee found that the lump sum group earned more, started more businesses, and spent more on education than the monthly group.”

Writing for The Hill Prof. Emeritus Henry Jacoby highlights the importance of addressing climate change in discussions of government policy. “If the global emission reduction efforts falter, the ensuing damages to the most vulnerable will be especially dire,” says Jacoby. “The world is already plagued with failed nation-states unable to sustain their population while maintaining political stability. As the number of these nation-state failures increases, there will be hundreds of millions of environmental refugees and stateless people, taxing the available resources of the entire planet.”

Boston Globe reporter Vivi Smilgius spotlights the MIT Climate Clock, a massive clock being projected onto MIT’s Green Building that uses Celtics, Patriots and other local sports teams as a means to count down to the projected date and time that the planet is expected to have warmed by 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels. “Someone might get that there are six Pats games until this event. That makes a lot more sense to people,” said second-year student Norah Miller. “It’s a sense of personal urgency.”