In an article for Forbes, Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, emphasizes that: “Retirement planning can no longer be framed solely as a question of how much to save or how to invest. It must also account for how to live in a world where stability is less certain, shocks arrive in close succession, and the systems that underpin daily life — energy, supply chains, and healthcare — are more exposed to disruption than the standard retirement playbook assumed.”
A study by researchers at MIT and elsewhere has taken a deeper look at the “brief, frustrating moments after a bad night’s sleep when you simply can’t focus,” reports Bill Murphy for Inc. “The study suggested that the brain is juggling competing priorities,” explains Murphy. “During sleep, it performs what amounts to internal housekeeping, including fluid movement linked to clearing metabolic waste. During waking hours, it prioritizes attention and responsiveness. When sleep is cut short, those maintenance processes don’t disappear. Instead, they begin to intrude into waking life in short bursts, and attention drops at the same time.”
Prof. Justin Reich speaks with New York Times reporter Matthew Haag about the integration of educational technology tools, including AI, in schools. “Historically, when we try to guess the best ways of using new technologies, we’re often wrong,” explains Reich. “There are lots of people who are out there who will say, ‘This is what we need to do, this is best practice,’ and they’re making stuff up.”
Researchers at MIT have “developed a housing concept that challenges how long homes can last and evolve through time,” reports Soo Kim for Newsweek. “Known as the Heirloom House, the project is designed to last for a millennium while remaining flexible enough to adapt to daily use, shifting climates, and generational change,” explains Kim.
Writing for Forbes, Senior Lecturer Guadalupe Hayes-Mota 08, SM '16, MBA '16 explores how businesses can best prepare for the rapid advancements underway in the field of neurotechnology. “I believe that one of the most important steps companies can take regarding this emerging technology is to act now, without waiting for regulatory clarity first,” writes Hayes-Mota. “Treat neural data as categorically sensitive from day one—not because you are forced to, but because you understand that operating this close to the human mind demands a higher threshold of trust than almost any technology before it.”
Prof. Dava Newman speaks with USA Today reporter Sara D. Wire about NASA’s plans to return to the moon and, hopefully, Mars in the 2030s. The “moon is a three-day trip," Newman explains. "Mars, you need eight months. Those are very different targets.”
MIT has been ranked the number two university in the nation in U.S. News & World Report’s 2025-26 rankings, reports Haley Chamberlain for Quartz. “MIT emphasizes practical problem solving rather than traditional lecture-heavy education,” adds Chamberlain. “Students regularly participate in research labs and entrepreneurial programs. The campus culture encourages experimentation across disciplines.”
Senior Research Scientist C. Adam Schlosser, deputy director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, speaks with Joshua Miller of The Boston Globe’s Camberville & Beyond newsletter about weather, climate and how warming temperatures could impact the Northeastern US. Schlosser explains that: “warmer air can carry more moisture, more vapor. So, imagine again a future for the Northeast where everything is risen by a few degrees. It's not just the daytime temperatures, but the nighttime temperatures. The amount of vapor in the air has a big impact on nighttime temperatures, and on hot, humid nights, your body's ability to cool is diminished.”
Researchers from MIT, Harvard and Yale have found “that people who meditate regularly show measurable increases in brain thickness in areas responsible for attention and sensory processing,” reports Luis Prada for Vice. “The research team plans larger studies to track changes over time and explore how meditation might influence neural connections and cognitive aging,” writes Prada.
While excavating “a small room inside a lavish home in ancient Pompeii,” researchers from MIT found the walls were covered with Egyptian blue paint, a bright blue pigment estimated to “have cost more than half the annual salary of a Roman foot solider,” reports Sonja Anderson for Smithsonian Magazine.
New York Times reporter Holly Bass spotlights Prof. Joshua Bennett’s newest works, “We (The People of the United States)” and “The People Can Fly.” Bennett’s “texts remind us there is power in the collective body of a people and their culture,” writes Bass. “There is power in pressing on in the face of obstacles and opposition.”
Designboom reporter Kat Barandy spotlights how a new video “traces the technical process behind ‘Remembering the Future,’ the woven work by Janet Echelman at the MIT Museum.” The piece, which was developed during Echelman’s MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST) residency in collaboration with Prof. Caitlin Mueller, “uses braided fibers to translate climate data into a suspended artwork.” The MIT Museum operates, in the words of Museum Director Michael John Gorman, as “a playground for ideas, as a living lab.”
Prof. Salvatore Vitale and graduate student Jack Heinzel speak with Scientific American reporter K.R. Callaway about the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration’s latest catalog of gravitational wave detections, which “more than doubles the number of gravitational-wave candidate events—and reveals unexpected complexities of merging black holes.” Says Heinzel: “We’re learning a lot of things that are qualitative and phenomenological from the catalog. Starting to see all these different structures emerge is pretty fascinating.”
Senior Research Associate Jim Walsh speaks with WBUR Here & Now host Indira Lakshmanan about the global impact of the United States’ conflict with Iran.
Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Danielle Li examines the risks for highly skilled workers whose expertise is used as training data for AI systems. “As workers, people should think about how to use AI to expand their skills: whether by building complementary capabilities or by finding ways to scale their expertise through AI systems,” Li writes. “As citizens, they should press for policies that give workers clearer rights over the data generated by their work and compensation for it.”