MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology - On Campus and Around the world

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.”

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 them to better understand, from a scientific standpoint, the world around us.”

Sloan Visiting Prof. Gilbert Metcalf joins Marketplace to discuss whether suspending the gas tax could help consumers with rising prices. Metcalf notes that halting the tax likely won’t help, as gas prices have already risen by 40% or higher in some parts of the country. He also notes pausing the tax would hurt the country’s deficit, explaining that “every dollar that we take away in gas tax revenue means that's another dollar we have to spend out of the general budget” for infrastructure. 

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.

Prof. Daniel Anderson speaks with Mandy Letterii at Medscape about his development of an implantable device for people with diabetes that can dispense islet cells directly into the body to manage blood sugar, which would eliminate the need for insulin injections. “We want to allow people to forget that they have diabetes,” says Anderson. “We’re not there yet, but that’s certainly what we hope to achieve.”

In an effort to defend medical devices against quantum attacks, MIT researchers have engineered an ultra-efficient microchip that can protect wireless biomedical devices, such as insulin pumps and pacemakers, reports Katie Hunt for CNN. The microchip, which is around the size of an extremely fine needle tip, “includes built-in protection needed for post-quantum cybersecurity. The device achieved between 20 and 60 times higher energy efficiency than other post-quantum security techniques.”

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.” 

Writing for MassLive, Scott Kirsner highlights Gander Robotics, a startup co-founded by Sloan graduate student Michael Autery, that is “developing a torpedo-like device that is light enough to be tossed over the side of a ship — and designed to find a person in the water.” Autery, who served 15 years in the U.S. Navy, first pitched the idea for an “autonomous rescue swimmer” as part of an MIT entrepreneurship competition and notes: “if I had the same idea in a different place at the same time, I’m not sure it would’ve played out the same way. Cambridge is this very rich ecosystem for entrepreneurship.”

CBS News reporter Aimee Picchi spotlights Prof. Andrew Lo’s recent comments on using AI for retirement planning. “Lo stressed that it's important to ask critical questions when using AI for retirement advice, such as prompting an AI to say where it might be wrong and to list its assumptions and uncertainties,” writes Picchi. 

Prof. Sinan Aral speaks with Fast Company reporter Natalie Nixon about the risks of offloading creative work to AI systems. In one study, Aral and his colleagues found that with more creative work outsourced to AI, there was a resulting “slow homogenization of output that occurs when AI, trained on the same publicly available internet, starts flattening the edges that make creative work distinctive.” In another study, Aral’s team found, “cognitive offloading to AI (the act of outsourcing tasks you could do yourself) erodes the very skills you’re handing off.” 

In an article republished by Scientific American, Manon Bischoff delves into the history of Margaret Hamilton’s work at the MIT Instrumentation Lab, where she “was one of the people responsible for the features that ultimately made the moon landing possible.” Hamilton helped “program ‘emergency fixes,’ contingency procedures that were implemented when something unexpected happened during a mission.”