A new book edited by Prof. Gary Gensler and Prof. Simon Johnson examines the current administration’s impact on the global economy and how new policies could lead to “a profound weakening of both US economic dynamism and the global system it once led,” reports Sam Sutton for Politico.
Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Newsweek reporter Jasmine Laws about the increase in cigarette taxes in various states across the United States. “There is a large body of economic evidence that shows that higher taxes will reduce smoking – particularly among the young and the poor,” says Gruber. “The downside is that the poor will pay more for cigarettes, stretching their budgets, but that is largely offset by the fact that they will smoke less. If the revenues are used to fund smoking cessation efforts among the poor, which have shown to be effective, this is a great policy opportunity."
Researchers at MIT have developed a new atmospheric water harvester that eventually could be used to supply safe drinking water worldwide, reports Sarah Bregel for Fast Company. The device is “about the size of a standard window” and made from “hydrogel, a material that absorbs water, and lithium salts that can store water molecules,” explains Bregel.
Researchers at MIT have found that ChatGPT users “showed minimal brain engagement and consistently fell short in neural linguistic, and behavioral aspects,” reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “To conduct the test, the lab split 54 participants from the Boston area into three groups, each consisting of individuals ages 18 to 39,” explains Wiggers. “The participants were asked to write multiple SAT essays using tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the Google search engine, or without any tools.”
Mashable reporter Elisha Sauers spotlights some of the exoplanets identified thus far in 2025, including BD+05 4868 Ab, a rocky exoplanet discovered by MIT astronomers that has a “comet-like tail stretching more than 5.5 million miles.” BD+05 4868 Ab is “about the size of Mercury and orbits its star every 30.5 hours,” Sauers explains. “At roughly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the planet appears to be shedding material — about one Mount Everest’s worth per orbit — that becomes its tail.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif examines how the proposed endowment tax on colleges and universities will likely “raise the cost of a college education and hurt US competitiveness.” Reif notes that universities use income from their endowments to provide financial aid for students and support research. “Without financial aid, students from less wealthy backgrounds would not be able to attend the country’s great private universities,” writes Reif. “This would be not just a loss to them but also to the nation itself, which benefits when talented people from all backgrounds have the same opportunity to rise based on academic achievement.”
Forbes contributor Tanya Fileva spotlights how MIT CSAIL researchers have developed a system called Air-Guardian, an “AI-enabled copilot that monitors a pilot’s gaze and intervenes when their attention is lacking.” Fileva notes that “in tests, the system ‘reduced the risk level of flights and increased the success rate of navigating to target points’—demonstrating how AI copilots can enhance safety by assisting with real-time decision-making.”
Prof. Ryan Williams has published a new proof that explores computational complexity and flips the script on years of assumptions about the trade-offs between computation space and time, reports Max Springer for Scientific American. Williams found that “any problem can be transformed into one you can solve by cleverly reusing space, deftly cramming the necessary information into just a square-root number of bits,” Springer explains. “This progress is unbelievable,” says Mahdi Cheraghchi of the University of Michigan. “Before this result, there were problems you could solve in a certain amount of time, but many thought you couldn’t do so with such little space.”
Prof. Emeritus Daniel Kleppner, a “highly honored physicist who developed technologies that helped pave the way for the Global Positioning System and whose foundational atomic discoveries helped open up the field of quantum computing,” has died at age 92, reports Anusha Mathur for The Washington Post. Prof. Wolfgang Ketterle explains that Kleppner’s research laid the groundwork for what “in the last 15 years has been developed into a new platform, a new approach for quantum computation. That has led to multimillion-dollar funding in multiple start-up companies in Europe and the U.S.”
The MIT Ukraine program, an “initiative formed by alums, students, researchers, startups, and NGOs aims to leverage MIT’s deep strengths in robotics, AI, and sensor technology to support and accelerate demining efforts” in Ukraine,” reports Anjana Sankar for The Boston Globe. “As Ukraine faces a landmine crisis of unprecedented scale, with explosive remnants of war littering vast stretches of its farmland, villages, and even urban areas, a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is quietly working to help Ukraine clear its lands,” writes Sankar.
The New Yorker reporter Kyle Chayka spotlights a study by MIT researchers examining the impact of AI chatbot use on the brain. “The results from the analysis showed a dramatic discrepancy: subjects who used ChatGPT demonstrated less brain activity than either of the other groups,” explains Chayka.
Noman Bashir, a fellow with MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium, speaks with Abby Acone of FOX 13 about the environmental impacts of generative AI, and the benefits and challenges posed by increasing use of AI tools. Bashir emphasizes that the use of generative AI should be “very judicious, not a blind application of AI for all applications.”
A study by researchers from MIT and elsewhere compares productivity differences between remote and in-person work attendance, reports Gleb Tsipursky for The Hill. The study found that “employees do not simply become more efficient because a manager watches their every move,” explains Tsipursky. “Rather, they want clarity, communication, and trust.”
Researchers from MIT have found that “extended use of LLMs for research and writing could have long-term behavioral effects, such as lower brain engagement and laziness,” reports Theo Burman for Newsweek. “The study found that the AI-assisted writers were engaging their deep memory processes far less than the control groups, and that their information recall skills were worse after producing work with ChatGPT,” explains Burman.
Prof. Gary Gensler speaks with Bloomberg Surveillance about his new book examining the potential economic impacts of current policies in Washington. “I don’t think the tariffs are going to help,” says Gensler. “I think they’re going to hurt and interestingly they’re going to particularly hurt also in rural communities because rural communities have to sell their farm goods and they’re agricultural products overseas.”