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Forbes’ Bryan Robinson highlights Prof. Paul Osterman’s new book, “Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment,” and identifies what constitutes disposable work. “We’re not becoming a gig economy; we’re becoming a disposable one,” says Osterman. “Marginal workers are employees who have no career prospects at their organizations.” 

Prof. David Gifford and Zheng Dai PhD ’24 discovered that AI diffusion models can replicate the style of an artist even when their work was omitted from datasets, leading to ‘attribution decay,’ writes Fast Company’s Jesus Diaz. “This trend, what the researchers call ‘attribution decay,’ means that artificial intelligence can produce an image that resembles a particular artist’s work, while having no provable causal link to that artist’s actual contribution to the training data,” explains Diaz.  

In a Financial Times opinion piece, Prof. Carlo Ratti discusses alternatives to implementing traditional air conditioning systems that move rather than reduce heat in Europe. “The best answer, then, is a mixed system, co-ordinated in real time, with sensors to track temperature, occupancy and demand, and algorithms deciding when to produce, store and distribute cooling in step with the electricity grid,” writes Ratti.  

Sonia Vallabh, Director of Prion Therapeutic Science at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, speaks to Nature’s Josie Glausiusz about her journey co-leading an initiative to develop preventive drugs for prion disease, a rare, lethal neurodegenerative disease that is caused by misfolded proteins that kill neurons. “In pre-symptomatic people at risk, if we can lower the amount of normal protein, I’m hoping we can delay or even prevent the formation of the first misfolded prion,” says Vallabh.  

MIT researchers have engineered three strains of bacteria to function as living transistors, carrying signals across circuits, writes Gizmodo’s Gayoung Lee. “For instance, the circuit could sit near the roots of plants to detect different stresses or autonomously respond to the presence of pests or other environmental threats,” writes Lee.  

Assil Halimi PhD ‘25 speaks to TechCrunch’s Tim De Chant about his company Apollo Atomics, which is shrinking the steam generator component of a reactor to streamline nuclear power. “We don’t want to be incremental in nuclear and just improve a small thing,” says Halimi. “Our target is to beat natural gas.” 

The Boston Globe’s Mark Feeney chronicles MIT’s adaptive reuse of the historic Metropolitan Warehouse into the new home of the School of Architecture and Planning. “As spaces, our studios used to be a lot more like labs, but now they are grand and full of light and celebratory in a way that hopefully enables better work,” says Prof. Ana Miljački, Head of the Department of Architecture.  

MIT researchers have found that lower birth rates are associated with higher growth in Gross Domestic Product globally, writes The Atlantic’s Idrees Kahloon. “[P]erhaps more important than the observed correlation is the authors’ proposed explanation: that when prime-age workers become scarce, companies adapt by developing productivity-boosting technology,” notes Kahloon.  

Prof. Robert Langer, cofounder of Moderna, speaks to The Boston Globe’s Marin Wolf and Jonathan Saltzman about the company’s successful results of a personalized messenger RNA vaccine in a late-stage trial to treat melanoma. “So far, the only proof is with melanoma, but it’s a stunning example of what can be done,” says Langer. “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work with other types of cancer.” 

Prof. Erin Kara speaks to NPR’s Ari Daniel about how the fastest star ever observed in the galaxy, located next to the Sagittarius A* black hole, experiences how space and time are distorted by the black hole. “This is a really exciting result," says Kara. "It kind of sets the stage in the next decade to make these kind of unprecedented measurements of black holes.”