MIT researchers have found that AI search features are unevenly distributed worldwide, and can sometimes share misleading information about images, writes Forbes’ Hastimal Jangid. “These incidents are important reminders that systems are only as good as the data they're trained on and that the long tail of data documenting the physical world is still being filled in,” writes Jangid.
Writing for Forbes, Arvid Ernst Gollwitzer, a research scholar at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, spotlights FINGERS-7B, an AI foundation model for Alzheimer’s prevention his research team developed at MIT. “By analyzing signals spanning everything from genetic risk factors to long-term environmental exposures, the model detects patterns that no single-domain approach could find,” writes Gollwitzer. “These patterns, which we call multi-omic precision signatures, represent a new kind of biomarker for gauging early disease risk.”
WBUR’s Maddie Browning highlights exhibits by artists Uri Aran and Hao Jingban set to be displayed at the MIT List Visual Arts Center from Oct. 23 to Feb. 28. Aran’s first major institutional solo exhibition in the U.S “includes new works that feel strange yet recognizable," while Jingban’s “‘I Witness’ (2025) explores the aftermath of the pandemic through four people experiencing different forms of loss,” writes Browning
Forbes’ Satya Krishnaswamy highlights a study co-authored by Lawrence Schmidt, a research affiliate at Sloan, that found AI can contribute to growth in certain roles where workers focus on higher-value tasks. “Schmidt’s research found that increased AI use was linked to both employment and sales growth,” writes Krishnaswamy.
In a Financial Times opinion piece, Prof. Carlo Ratti discusses alternatives to implementing traditional air conditioning systems, which move rather than reduce heat, that could be used in Europe as temperatures continue to rise. “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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
MIT researchers have discovered that when individual images are removed from large AI diffusion models, the models are still able to produce like images, writes Digital Trends’ Varun Mirchandani. “The more interesting takeaway is that this connection becomes increasingly difficult to trace as datasets grow,” writes Mirchandani. “An AI-generated image may draw on patterns learned from an enormous pool of material without having a clear, identifiable source image behind it.”
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.