Prof. Raphael Zufferey and his research group developed a winged robot that can swim underwater and fly through the air like a diving bird and “could one day be used to monitor and ultimately help protect the ocean,” reports Tom Page for CNN. “We’re really trying to understand better how birds do this,” says Zufferey. “The other reason we’re doing this is we’re hoping that this becomes (a) future tool for oceanography.”
Prof. Danielle Wood joins Edgar B. Herwick III, host of GBH’s “The Curiosity Desk,” to discuss the growing problems posed by space junk, and how space technology helps support our critical infrastructure. “Technology from space helps make life safer on Earth, supports our weather forecasting [and] our daily transportation. All the technology that lets us get deliveries and Uber—that's all coming from space,” says Wood. “We definitely need space to be safe—to keep our lives safe.”
In a Los Angeles Times opinion piece, Prof. Carlo Ratti and contributor Mario Carpo make the case that AI is built to imitate human creativity and is less capable of original design. “In a profession that defines itself through invention, GenAI increasingly is seen less as a creative genius and more as a ‘stochastic parrot’ — a term introduced in 2021 by leading AI researchers to describe a technology that learns to repeat the most likely sequences found in whatever data it’s been shown,” write Ratti and Carpo.
MIT spinoff Found Industries’ new Cambridge headquarters and metals processing development center is highlighted by Boston Business Journal's Lucia Maffei. “We are developing electrochemical processes to recover gallium and, in time, indium, and germanium, and antimony and other critical metals directly from existing industrial streams,” says Peter Godart PhD ‘21, Found Industries CEO.
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.”
Upworthy’s Tod Perry outlines five key takeaways from “How to Speak,” a popular lecture on the art of public speaking given annually for MIT students for 40 years by the late Prof. Patrick Winston, which is now available to watch on MIT OpenCourseware. “I always finish [ a speech] with a joke, and that way, people think they’ve had fun the whole time,” quipped Winston in his lecture.
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.