In the Media

A study by MIT scientists finds that listening to short, timed bursts of pink noise during sleep can encourage the flow of cerebrospinal fluid, which clears the brain of “harmful particles that increase your risk for neurodegenerative disease,” writes Scientific American reporter Alex Music. “If validated by future work, selective noise-playing could potentially unlock more restorative sleep in a home environment,” notes Music. “They’re particularly interested in testing the method in older individuals and in people with sleep disorders.” 

Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins NPR’s Scott Simon to discuss Congress tackling affordability in the age of AI by increasing wages. Paying higher prices for goods “is much less of a burden when you see your own salary increase at the same rate or at a higher rate,” says Acemoglu. “When we need to create more jobs for people, create more wage growth opportunities for people, technology is going to make that harder. We have to create an agenda of steering AI in a more pro-worker direction so that rather than automate work, we get AI to actually help employers to find ways of using workers more productively, and that will be a pathway for encouraging firms to create more jobs.” 

In an opinion piece for The Boston Globe, Prof. Stephanie Seed advocates for Massachusetts to commission new roadside historic markers to include indigenous history, “working with the indigenous nations whose homelands they describe.” “Those markers need not pretend that a single plaque can contain the history of a place,” writes Seed. “But they can name the people who lived there, acknowledge what happened to them, and recognize that their histories did not end when Europeans arrived.”  

Boston Business Journal reporter Grant Welker and photographer Gary Higgins visit the renovated Metropolitan Warehouse, now home to MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, to learn more about how the 130-year-old storage facility was transformed. Prof. John Ochsendorf describes how the renovation process included preserving construction mementos such as strategic openings and cutaways that reveal historic “building archeology.” “We think of this building as a living laboratory for students,” says Ochsendorf. “It’s a teaching tool for future architects.” 

The adaptive reuse of the historic Metropolitan Warehouse into the home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning has been named the “2026 Project of the Year” by The Architect’s Newspaper. The metropolitan Warehouse transformation “embodies what the future of the practice can and should look like, a willingness to use what’s already there, and to do so creatively, elegantly, and in a way that actually preserves the elements with the most embodied carbon,” note the editors of Architect’s Newspaper.  

MIT has been ranked as the No. 1 college in the Northeast by Forbes, “thanks to exceptional student outcomes,” reports Lisa Chambers. “In addition to a 96% six-year graduation rate, MIT ranks among the nation’s strongest institutions for producing graduates who go on to earn PhDs, relative to its undergraduate enrollment,” notes Chambers.  

In an article by Wisconsin Public Radio’s Hope Kirwan, Prof. Benjamin Vatter discusses hospitals being uncompensated for healthcare. Unpaid care may come from people who are “underinsured,” whose insurance plans still leave them responsible for a large portion of their care, says Vatter. If the “hospital doesn’t give them [patients] the option to negotiate a discount, the only option that is left for them is just not to pay it at all.”  

For The Hill, Liberty Vittert Capito ‘10, cohost of MIT’s Data Science Podcast, advises individuals against confiding private information in AI chatbots. “A search query into google is just a few words, but a late-night confession, or a sensitive medical inquiry contains hundreds of words of context. It often specifies why the inquiry is being made. It illuminates exactly what users fear, whom they love, what they regret, their moods and their most intimate health issues,” writes Vittert Capito. “This is unlike anything data brokers have been selling for years and getting rich.” 

The conversational AI models developed by MIT spinout Liquid AI are being introduced in Mercedes-Benz cars, writes Isabelle Bousquette for The Wall Street Journal. “Liquid AI invented a new architecture known as liquid neural networks, adaptive and efficient systems inspired by the neural activity of worms known scientifically as C. elegans,” writes Bousquette. Using the Liquid AI models in vehicles instead of cloud-based AI systems could allow for more “privacy, speed and the ability to run without constant network connectivity.” 

NBC News covers Nithya Raman MCP '08 winning the Los Angelos mayor’s race. “I wanted to say how grateful I am for the trust Angelinos have placed in me to be their next mayor,” said Raman. “People from across this city have welcomed me to their backyards, into their neighborhoods, told me about their hopes and dreams for the future of this city and trusted in me that I would be able to take on the problems that we have.”  

The Lumina simulation, developed in part by MIT researchers, imagines how the first 2 billion years of the universe evolved to produce “galaxies and all their components,” writes Alfredo Carpineti for IFL Science. “Understanding the evolution of galaxies is key to understanding why we are here,” Carpineti writes. “The elements that made us came either directly from the Big Bang or were forged in stars long gone. The early universe is a very remote past, but what happens there is not just visible in the sky; it is in ourselves too.” 

Prof. Matthias Michel speaks to Nature’s Amanda Heidt about our understanding of human consciousness. “People are often troubled by the fact that our understanding [of consciousness] remains somewhat vague,” says Michel. “However, it’s very important to note that definitions in the history of science come at the end of the scientific process, not at the beginning. I’d argue we’re now in the thick of it, which is an exciting place to be.” 

Prof. Daron Acemoglu shares his insights on artificial intelligence and the future of work and education during “Ask an Economist,” a virtual event hosted by NPR’s “The Indicator from Planet Money.” “I think there are a lot of pro-teacher AI opportunities where you give better tools to teachers, but teachers still remain central to the learning experience of students,” says Acemoglu. AI “can individualize the teaching experience much more effectively and at low cost in a way that wasn't possible before. And that expands teacher expertise, expands teacher capabilities, enables them to perform new tasks, doesn't replace them, doesn't sideline them.” 

Research Scientist Judah Cohen speaks to USA Today’s Doyle Rice and Dinah Voyles Pulver about the potential impacts of the sudden stratospheric warming (SSW), currently disrupting the polar vortex, that “could eventually lead to an outbreak of frigid air across much of the United States at some point over the next few months.” “Usually it takes two weeks (but recently it seems to take much longer) for the impacts of the SSW to impact our weather, so that puts it as early as late November but more likely in December and could even be delayed until January,” says Cohen. “The last El Niño in 2023-24 featured two SSWs and it was a very mild winter in the eastern U.S. and may have even been record mild. In short lots of uncertainty!” 

In an interview with Nature’s David Adam, Prof. Carlo Ratti discusses design elements he believes architects should focus on in the age of AI, emphasizing how citizens, not algorithms, should be the architects  of the future. “One important thing that AI can do is show us on a large scale where a city fails people. Combining the computer vision used to identify problems with public images gives us the chance to do something about them,” Ratti explains. He adds: “Many of the best ideas about cities have come from people disagreeing with one another in the same room—from cafes to council chambers. If algorithms learn what people like and simply give us more of it, or if software agents start negotiating with other agents on our behalf, we could lose those encounters.”