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Using AI, satellite, and ocean current data, MIT spinout Coastal Assembly constructs artificial reefs designed to help rebuild beaches restore shrinking beaches, writes Fast Company’s Adele Peters. “We take 10 years of data, and we say, where do we predict the critical areas of erosion will be in the coming months to year,” says Prof. Skylar Tibbits, co-founder of Coastal Assembly. “That tells me where the best place is to intervene—what’s the part that is most critical, where we should focus our time, effort, and money.” 

Prof. Asu Ozdaglar, head of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and graduate student Julia Schneider ‘26 speak to Spectrum News about MIT’s new Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making major. “Now is definitely the time to study more AI, not less,” says Schneider. “What we need is a bunch of people that are focused and excited and passionate about deeply understanding why these models do what they do.” She adds: “Ultimately I want to work on technology that ends up helping people.”  

MIT researchers have invented a digestible, bioresorbable battery that can deliver drugs directly to the GI tract, reports Smithsonian Magazine’s Sara Hashemi. Prof. Giovanni Traverso and his colleagues “made two versions of the battery of different sizes and voltages,” writes Hashemi. “Exposing them to an acidic liquid similar to gastric fluid revealed they would function normally in the stomach for about three days.” 

MIT was listed as the No. 1 national university in U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 “Best Colleges Rankings,” “based upon the analysis of more than 1,700 colleges and universities nationwide across 17 key measures,” writes MassLive’s Claudia Dimuro. “These measures included ‘First-year retention rates,’ ‘Earnings by major,’ ‘Faculty salaries,’ and ‘Student-faculty ratio,’ notes Dimuro.  

In an opinion piece for The Boston Globe, Prof. Jonathan Gruber discusses Massachusetts’ Question 5, the proposed tax rebate rule that would mandate that taxes be returned to taxpayers each time the state’s revenues grow faster than wages and salaries. “Most economists believe a recession is coming but we can’t say when. The best way to plan is to have the savings to help us through, or to invest so that we are as strong as possible when it hits,” writes Gruber. “Question 5 chooses the third path — spending the money now, and letting the state suffer in the future.”  

Prof. David Autor and his team of researchers found that junior patent attorneys who used AI for assistance showed no net improvement in their skills, reports Andy Mukherjee for Bloomberg. “When researchers subsequently tested everyone on an unassisted, offline task to gauge internalized judgment, the learning gains went entirely to senior lawyers,” writes Mukherjee. “Foundational expertise may be a prerequisite for extracting durable skill from AI-assisted practice,” the researchers noted.  

For Fortune, reporter Barry Werth highlights the groundbreaking research of the late Prof. David Baltimore, founding director of the Whitehead Institute at MIT, who “independently discovered an enzyme essential for the reproduction of retroviruses such as HIV, which spread by inserting their genes into the DNA of host cells and hijacking the cells’ chemical machinery to make copies of themselves.” “Few investigators were more qualified or better positioned to understand how to stop HIV from spreading,” writes Werth.  

Prof. Jonathan Gruber joins Edgar B. Herwick III, host of GBH’s “The Curiosity Desk” to discuss what factors into the U.S. Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates for the first time since 2023. Federal Reserve members “are looking at things like tariffs, the tax on goods coming into this country. They’re looking at the war,” says Gruber. “We have, basically, these underlying forces driving inflation. In that case, the Fed has a mandate. The Fed’s job is to balance two forces: economic growth and inflation, and the way they balance them is by trying to keep inflation near a target of two percent.”