New Scientist’s Jacklin Kwan highlights Prof. Christoph Kehle’s work demonstrating that extremal black holes, a variety of black hole that has zero temperature, could exist. “Extremal black holes were thought of as an idealised, unattainable limit: something you could write down as a solution, but which could never be reached [through any real physical] process, but we proved that wrong,” says Kehle.
Writing for Forbes, Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, emphasizes the importance of longevity planning for retirement. “For decades, preparedness meant saving enough, investing wisely, paying down debt, and entering retirement financially secure,” writes Coughlin. “Those remain essential. But longer lives are changing what it means to be prepared. Retirement planning now requires longevity planning — preparing for the long game of more years of life and all the things that life exposes us to.”
Fox Business’ Eric Revell highlights MIT being named to the top five of LinkedIn’s list of the top colleges that give graduates the strongest career edge. “The report uses LinkedIn data to rank colleges based on five categories: job placement, internships and recruiter demand, career success, network strength and knowledge breadth,” writes Revell.
Prof. Joshua Tenenbaum discusses whether AI systems will perform better if they have increased awareness of the world around them with New Scientist’s Daniel Cossins. “One of the big misconceptions is that intelligence is a single thing, that there is a single world model in the brain,” says Tenenbaum. “What we actually have is the ability to run many different models depending on the context, task and goal.”
Bob Mumgaard PhD ‘15, co-founder and CEO of MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems, speaks to Fast Company’s Adele Peters about building his company’s first power plant, set to come online in the 2030s in Virginia. “To make fusion into more than just the first plants, it has to be an industry and there’s multiple parts of that,” says Mumgaard.
Smithsonian Magazine’s Kristen A. Schmitt spotlights LymeAlert, an at-home screening kit to detect Lyme disease in ticks created by alumna Erin Dawicki MBA ‘24. Once we figured out how to do this, it almost felt like a moral obligation,” says Dawicki. “We have the ability to get this out into the world, and it can become a pretty affordable way to try and prevent as many of these cases of long-term Lyme as we can.”
Mel Robbins visits the MIT AgeLab and tries out the lab’s Age Gain Now Empathy System (AGNES) suit, which is designed to help wearers experience the challenges associated with aging. “When we think about aging, most people don’t really have a definition of it. They think about it as a number of birthdays—that's older,” says Joseph Coughlin, AgeLab director. “Actually, aging is about diminishing capacity over time. So weightlifting is increasing your capacity—you're pushing out the clock. Learning something new keeps you cognitively well.”
Prof. Richard Binzel discusses Apophis, an asteroid roughly 340-meters in diameter, set to pass within 32,000 kilometers of Earth on April 13, 2029 with Scientific American’s Andrew Jones. Apophis’s close approach in 2029 will offer “a once-per-millennium natural experiment,” says Binzel.
MIT researchers have designed a recyclable elastic yarn, made from polyethylene, that mimics the stretchiness of spandex-polyester and spandex-nylon blends, the Anthropocene team writes. “[T]he researchers spun a spool of yarn, melted it, and re-spun it into new yarn several times. Even after 10 cycles, the yarn was as strong and flexible as conventional blended fibers,” explains Anthropocene.
President Sally Kornbluth joins Jim Braude and Margery Eagan, hosts of GBH’s Boston Public Radio, for a live conversation about the unique value of university research, the impacts of immigration policy on international students and the nation’s talent pipeline, and MIT’s commitment to ensuring the nation remains a leader in science and innovation. “You're not going to see an effect immediately. What's going to happen is five years, 10 years, 20 years down the line, you're going to see a pipeline that's not full anymore—a pipeline of talent, a pipeline of basic discoveries,” says Kornbluth.
Prof. Jackson Lu speaks to Fast Company’s Sarah Bregel about metacognitive techniques, tuning into one’s thinking and learning process, to use AI more creatively. “Even the most powerful AI won’t boost creativity if employees don’t know how to use it effectively,” says Lu. “Organizations should pair AI deployment with metacognition training to maximize the creative benefits.”
Graduate students Alfonso Parra Rubio and Erik Strand from the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms worked with the Boston Public Library and the Boston Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture to create a chain-like aluminum sculpture, which will be on display at the library until November, writes Axios’ Steph Solis. “It's a feat of science-driven design and art,” notes Solis.
Principal Research Scientist John Liu speaks to Manufacturing Dive’s Nathan Owens about MIT’s Technologist Advanced Manufacturing Program (TechAMP), a 12-month-long certificate program designed to "bring experienced technicians into leadership roles with a focus on advanced manufacturing needs.” Says Liu: "We’re looking at developing this elite workforce who bridges the gap. What we’re trying to do is upskill the technician.”
MIT researchers have developed a new, breathable hydrogel material that is “packed with microscopic air tunnels inspired by the way human lungs move oxygen” and allows heat and sweat to escape, reports Luis Prada for VICE. “The material proved to be about 10 times more breathable than conventional hydrogels and retained about 95 percent of its airflow even after being stretched 10,000 times,” explains Prada.
Bloomberg’s Gautam Mukunda highlights Prof. Scott Stern’s finding that 0.07% of business registrations in the 2010s reached meaningful acquisition within six years, and Prof. Danielle Li and Prof. Lindsey Raymond’s finding that AI technologies increased customer support agent productivity by 15%, to predict AI’s role in the influx of business applications filed in June.