In the Media

In an opinion piece for The Boston Globe, graduate student Jonah Prousky shares his observations that students who use AI minimally, or not at all, for their writing, tend to score higher on their written work. “In this environment, where a professor or teaching assistant reads dozens of essays, one after another, AI-generated writing is not only easy to detect but can be terribly monotonous to read,” writes Prousky. “It’s the students who sound most like themselves, by contrast, who delight all the more.”  

Research led by Principal Research Scientist Neil Thompson suggests that AI is likely to be upend theoretical scientific fields within a few years, writes Wired’s Will Knight. “As with math, Thompson says, we should expect advances in other areas to have both positive and negative effects,” writes Knight. “He notes that theoretical advances sometimes drive practical advances in science and suggests that greater use of AI may mean that more progress happens this way.” 

MIT researchers have developed the Probabilistic Bias Correction (PBC) tool, which “uses machine learning to identify systematic bias in a model and make corrections” to improve weather forecasts, reports The Verge’s Justine Calma. “The researchers found that PBC improved the accuracy of a leading physics-based weather model by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for 98 percent of precipitation and 92 percent of temperature targets,” notes Calma. “The machine learning framework also doubled the accuracy of ECMWF’s new AI forecasting system in the study’s analysis.” 

Gizmodo’s Ellyn Lapointe spotlights the Probabilistic Bias Correction (PBC) tool developed by MIT researchers to “correct systemic errors in forecast models and improve the accuracy of their subseasonal outlooks.” “Extreme weather has the largest impact on our society and improved forecasts of these events can yield large societal benefits,” says Research Scientist Judah Cohen. “Interestingly, previous bias correction schemes actually made forecasts of extreme weather worse, and our model showed clear improvement of extreme weather forecasts.”  

Prof. Behnaz Farahi’s “Ocean of Dreams,” an interactive art installation currently on display in Kendall Square that features submissions from more than 400 international participants, is featured by Dezeen reporter Ben Dreith. “For me, design is ultimately a way of asking: what could be otherwise, and how might we help bring that possibility into being,” says Farahi. “That is also how I think about ‘Ocean of Dreams,’ as a space for collectively imagining and designing possible futures.”  

At the STAT Summit, President Sally Kornbluth joined Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, for a panel moderated by STAT’s Anil Oza. During the conversation, Kornbluth emphasized the importance of curiosity-driven research and education at institutions like MIT, highlighting MIT for America, a new initiative aimed at ensuring learners and educators from Kindergarten through community college across the country have access to STEM education. “We want to both meet people where they are, give their kids the opportunity, and also make them understand us as people who care about their communities,” says Kornbluth.

MIT startup LNK Energies has created a system to efficiently convert heavy-duty trucks from diesel to hydrogen, “slashing pollution and costs while shielding operators from the price spikes that result from geopolitical instability,” writes Tim De Chant for TechCrunch. “A lot of the reactors that LOHC (Liquid organic hydrogen carriers) companies have today are really large. They’re about the size of a shipping container,” says Alexis Huynh ‘24, cofounder of LNK. “We have shrunk that basically to the size of a mini fridge.” 

MIT spinout Cambridge Heavy Industries is developing a desktop-sized fusion reactor that can enable 50 to 80 experiments per day, writes TechCrunch’s Tim De Chant. “Cambridge Heavy’s fusion reactor uses lasers to compress a fuel target, similar to the groundbreaking experiment that proved controlled fusion reactions could produce more power than they consume,” notes De Chant. “But unlike other inertial confinement designs, Cambridge Heavy’s minimizes the number of lasers required to spark fusion.”  

NPR’s Greg Rosalsky explains how Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83, winners of the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, were honored for their work helping to lay the groundwork for New Keynesian economics, taking a fresh scoop of the field. “Hall and Woodford helped rebuild macroeconomics around the decisions of individual people and businesses. Hall broke new ground in understanding how people's expectations about the future shape their spending today. Woodford built on that work, developing a framework that combined forward-looking spending decisions with sticky prices.”

Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83 have won the 2026 Nobel economics prize for their work “developing models that help central bankers and finance ministers to stabilize their countries, avoiding long recessions and runaway inflation,” writes reporter Graeme Wearden for The Guardian. “The laureates’ work has provided us with a stable theoretical foundation for the models that are now used by central banks and governments around the world,” says John Hassler, chair of the Nobel Committee. “With them, we are better equipped to deal with shocks in the economy, such as energy crises or sudden changes in how much households consume.” 

Forbes’ Michael T. Nietzel spotlights Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83, who were awarded the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their work on economic stabilization policies. “The work of Hall and Woodford has proved beneficial for managing economic shocks like those from the pandemic and the energy crises of recent years,” Nietzel writes. “While recessions and episodes of high inflation have not disappeared, they tend to be less long-lasting.”  

Prof. Ankur Moitra and Prof. John Urschel share their thoughts with Forbes’ Alex Knapp about OpenAI releasing more than 700 math preprint papers online. “We’re used to landmark results being accompanied by new insights and theories,” writes Moitra. “But these feel different. The claims are spectacular, the papers are incomprehensible and there’s no punchline in sight that explains why the mysteries suddenly unraveled.” Adds Urschel: “It’s obvious that how we do and evaluate mathematics is going to have to change. What I think is constant is the fundamental idea of understanding that underpins our profession. And I’m excited to learn from these breakthroughs.” 

The newly renovated, historic Metropolitan Warehouse, home to MIT’s School of Architecture + Planning “has become a teaching tool” for students who can look up at features such as the “cutaways of the terra cotta subway arches vaulting across the old building’s ceilings” and “understand what structural engineers were thinking 130 years ago,” writes Bloomberg’s Anthony Flint. “The whole multiyear process for rehabbing the Met has been left delightfully legible.”  

Using a technique based on Raman microscopy, MIT researchers have found a way to detect senescent cells, “zombie cells” that accumulate as tissues age, without destroying them, writes reporter Eric Ralls for Earth.com. “If the approach eventually works in living people, researchers could gain a way to track senescent cells over time without repeatedly removing tissue,” notes Ralls. “That could help scientists understand how these cells contribute to aging and whether treatments designed to eliminate them are working.” 

Forbes’ Lisa Chambers highlights MIT as one of the “12 top colleges reinventing education for the AI era.” “At Forbes’ No. 1-ranked college in the nation—and one of the world’s leading technology schools—AI is hardly confined to a single degree,” writes Chambers. “MIT’s undergraduate offerings range from machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing to robotics, deep-learning hardware and AI applications in biology and medicine.”