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Fast Company

Researchers at MIT have developed a new atmospheric water harvester that eventually could be used to supply safe drinking water worldwide, reports Sarah Bregel for Fast Company. The device is “about the size of a standard window” and made from “hydrogel, a material that absorbs water, and lithium salts that can store water molecules,” explains Bregel. 

FOX 13

Noman Bashir, a fellow with MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium, speaks with Abby Acone of FOX 13 about the environmental impacts of generative AI, and the benefits and challenges posed by increasing use of AI tools. Bashir emphasizes that the use of generative AI should be “very judicious, not a blind application of AI for all applications.”

Boston Herald

Writing for The Boston Herald, President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif and Alan M. Leventhal, founder of Beacon Capital Partners, underscore the importance of protecting Massachusetts’ research infrastructure, noting that the state’s life sciences sector alone supports 143,000 jobs. “It is imperative that we act now to preserve the research infrastructure that Massachusetts has built so carefully over the last decades. This is the time for the Commonwealth’s leadership in government, academia, business, and philanthropy to join forces and take bold action,” they write. “Decisive action will enable us to preserve our world-leading research infrastructure and protect the economic health of our Commonwealth for the benefit of all our citizens.” 

The Washington Post

Prof. Emeritus Daniel Kleppner, a “highly honored physicist who developed technologies that helped pave the way for the Global Positioning System and whose foundational atomic discoveries helped open up the field of quantum computing,” has died at age 92, reports Anusha Mathur for The Washington Post. Prof. Wolfgang Ketterle explains that Kleppner’s research laid the groundwork for what “in the last 15 years has been developed into a new platform, a new approach for quantum computation. That has led to multimillion-dollar funding in multiple start-up companies in Europe and the U.S.” 

Newsweek

Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Newsweek reporter Jasmine Laws about the increase in cigarette taxes in various states across the United States. “There is a large body of economic evidence that shows that higher taxes will reduce smoking – particularly among the young and the poor,” says Gruber. “The downside is that the poor will pay more for cigarettes, stretching their budgets, but that is largely offset by the fact that they will smoke less. If the revenues are used to fund smoking cessation efforts among the poor, which have shown to be effective, this is a great policy opportunity." 

Forbes

Forbes contributor Tanya Fileva spotlights how MIT CSAIL researchers have developed a system called Air-Guardian, an “AI-enabled copilot that monitors a pilot’s gaze and intervenes when their attention is lacking.” Fileva notes that “in tests, the system ‘reduced the risk level of flights and increased the success rate of navigating to target points’—demonstrating how AI copilots can enhance safety by assisting with real-time decision-making.”

Scientific American

Prof. Ryan Williams has published a new proof that explores computational complexity and flips the script on years of assumptions about the trade-offs between computation space and time, reports Max Springer for Scientific American. Williams found that “any problem can be transformed into one you can solve by cleverly reusing space, deftly cramming the necessary information into just a square-root number of bits,” Springer explains. “This progress is unbelievable,” says Mahdi Cheraghchi of the University of Michigan. “Before this result, there were problems you could solve in a certain amount of time, but many thought you couldn’t do so with such little space.” 

Mashable

Mashable reporter Elisha Sauers spotlights some of the exoplanets identified thus far in 2025, including BD+05 4868 Ab, a rocky exoplanet discovered by MIT astronomers that has a “comet-like tail stretching more than 5.5 million miles.” BD+05 4868 Ab is “about the size of Mercury and orbits its star every 30.5 hours,” Sauers explains. “At roughly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the planet appears to be shedding material — about one Mount Everest’s worth per orbit — that becomes its tail.”

New Scientist

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, Prof. Julien de Wit and his colleagues have “detected microflares coming from the TRAPPIST-1 star every hour or so that last for several minutes,” reports Alex Wilkins for New Scientist. “These tiny bursts of radiation appear to interfere with our ability to observe the light that passes through the planets’ atmospheres – if they exist – thwarting the main method of detecting what chemicals might be in any atmospheres,” explains Wilkins. 

The Boston Globe

The MIT Ukraine program, an “initiative formed by alums, students, researchers, startups, and NGOs aims to leverage MIT’s deep strengths in robotics, AI, and sensor technology to support and accelerate demining efforts” in Ukraine,” reports Anjana Sankar for The Boston Globe. “As Ukraine faces a landmine crisis of unprecedented scale, with explosive remnants of war littering vast stretches of its farmland, villages, and even urban areas, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is quietly working to help Ukraine clear its lands,” writes Sankar.  

Community Updates

Featured Multimedia

“Orient yourself not just toward the construction and acquisition of new tools, but to the needs of people,” said science communicator Hank Green, in the OneMIT ceremony keynote remarks. He urged MIT’s newest graduates to focus their work on the “everyday solvable problems of normal people,” even if it is not always the easiest or most obvious course of action.

MIT has launched the Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM)—a bold effort to re-imagine how we make things in the 21st century. Building on MIT’s founding legacy in manufacturing, INM brings together leading faculty and industry partners to drive advances in productivity, resilience, sustainability, and workforce development.

In a world without MIT, radar wouldn’t have been available to help win World War II. We might not have email, CT scans, time-release drugs, photolithography, or GPS. And we’d lose over 30,000 companies, employing millions of people. Can you imagine?

MIT students, along with cross-registered students from Harvard and Wellesley, explore the intersection of mechanics and biology in MIT Mechanical Engineering class Molecular Cellular and Tissue Biomechanics. Hands-on lab learning in campus makerspaces invites students to investigate emerging research in biomechanics and mechanobiology and build with biology.

TactStyle, a system developed by CSAIL researchers, uses image prompts to replicate both the visual appearance and tactile properties of 3D models and could have far-reaching applications extending from home decor and personal accessories to tactile learning tools.

Since its founding, MIT has been key to helping American science and innovation lead the world. Discoveries that begin here generate jobs and power the economy — and what we create today builds a better tomorrow for all of us.

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