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Prof. Deborah Ancona provides advice for the new Starbucks CEO in an interview with Fast Company’s Nicole Gull McElroy. Recommending the “sensemaking” leadership strategy, she says “you need to understand the company culture, its business model, its customers…even if you have been successful at one company, there is a need to learn, or ‘sensemake,’ about your new place.”

The Wall Street Journal has named MIT the top university in the country for improving the financial future of its graduates, reports Kevin McAllister for The Wall Street Journal. “At MIT, paths to successful careers often stem from in-class experiences,” writes McAllister. “Former MIT students contacted for this story were generally quick to credit influential professors and their classroom methods, such as teaching critical thinking.”

New Yorker reporter Dhruv Khullar spotlights how researchers from across MIT are using AI to advance drug development. Khullar highlights the MIT Jameel Clinic, the Broad Institute and various faculty members for their efforts in bridging the gap between AI and drug research. “With AI, we’re getting that much more efficient at finding molecules—and in some cases creating them,” says Prof. James Collins. “The cost of the search is going down. Now we really don’t have an excuse.”

Graduate student Krista Mileva-Frank is curating “Objects for a Heavenly Cave,” an art exhibition at the Marta gallery in Los Angeles, highlighting the work of 13 artists and collectives considering “how the legacy of the Renaissance grotto might extend to their own work,” reports Laura Bannister for The New York Times. “Mileva-Frank hopes the show will encourage audiences to consider the relationship between art and nature and to contend with their own limited agency in an era of climate disaster,” writes Bannister. 

Prof. Michael Strano joins “Somewhere on Earth” podcast host Gareth Mitchell to discuss how he and his colleagues developed tiny batteries that could be used to power cell-sized robots. Roughly the thickness of a human hair, the new battery can create a current by capturing oxygen. “I would say we're making the LEGOs, the building blocks that go into robots,” Strano says. “We’re building the parts and it's an exciting time for the field.”

Prof. Stuart Madnick speaks with CNBC reporter Cheryl Winokur Munk about the growing risk of "malvertising" – a new cyberattack technique that places online ads for malicious purposes. “You see something appearing on a Google search, you kind of assume it is something valid,” says Madnick. “You should assume that this could happen to you no matter how careful you are.”

A Nature editorial discusses the live music industry’s increasing commitment to sustainability, going beyond actions such as bottle recycling to addressing band travel, equipment shipping and set construction. Researchers from MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative have “undertaken a project co-funded by the Warner Music Group, Live Nation and Coldplay to analyze the carbon footprint of the live music industry, initially in the United Kingdom and United States, and suggest practical mitigating measures.”

Writing for Project Syndicate, Research Scientist Christian Catalini contributes to a Project Syndicate opinion piece makes the case for implementing cryptocurrency regulation that favors “builders over speculators.” Catalini and his co-authors write: “At the end of the day, policymakers in Washington must come together and draft new rules, rather than trying to squeeze crypto use cases into laws from nearly a century ago. And the industry, for its part, needs to tackle the many problems that traditional financial services and crypto leaders have long ignored.” They add: “The upside, much like in the early days of the internet, is a technology that can restore competition to sectors that haven’t seen it in decades.” 

During an interview with Lisa Mullins of WBUR’s Here & Now, graduate student Emelie Eldracher '22 shares the excitement she felt after winning the 2024 Paralympics silver medal win in the mixed-four crew and delves into her research at MIT focused on developing a low-cost system to gather biomechanical feedback for athletes and help improve their performance. “I really hope to contribute to the sphere and hopefully we can use AI in a way that influences athletes to help them get that one-hundredth of a second, as our coach likes to say,” Eldracher explains. “Because if you add up all the one-hundredths of a second in a race, that could be the difference between a medal or not.” 

Since meeting as undergraduates at MIT, graduate student Ashwin Sah '20 and Mehtaab Sawhney PhD '24 have “written a mind-boggling 57 math proofs together, many of them profound advances in various fields,” writes Leila Sloman for Quanta Magazine. Now, in what is being praised as a “huge achievement” and “phenomenally impressive” by fellow mathematicians, Sah and Sawhney have “obtained a long-sought improvement on an estimate of how big sets of integers can get before they must contain sequences of evenly spaced numbers."