In the Media

MIT researchers have developed a low temperature process to extract battery-grade lithium from spodumene, the most common type of mineral containing lithium, using a reusable liquid reagent, writes Electronic Design’s Lee Goldberg. “The new process uses a liquid reagent to dissolve the rock into the useful forms of its constituent parts — not just battery-ready lithium salts, but also smelter-grade alumina and cement-ready silica,” writes Goldberg. “After the minerals are extracted, the solvent and reagent can be recovered and used again so that waste levels approach zero.”  

Cambridge Day’s Chloe Taft spotlights the 25th anniversary of The Fab Lab, digital fabrication network started at MIT, and its annual conference, FAB26, held this week throughout Cambridge. “We’re going to show things like rapid prototyping, making vehicles [at FAB26],” says Prof. Neil Gershenfeld. “[T]here’s examples of using the tools in the lab to make aquaponic and hydroponic systems for food, to make antennas and radios for data networks, to make shelter. You really can make almost anything today.” 

In an article for The Hill, contributor Juan Williams celebrates the homecoming of his nephew, MIT alumnus and NASA astronaut Christopher Williams PhD ‘12, who travelled 102 miles over the course of eight months on the International Space Station. “Inside the space station he [Christopher] and fellow astronauts measured how eyes change in zero gravity,” writes Juan. “They checked on how the human brain orients its sense of direction in space. They also tracked bone density and DNA changes to gauge the impact a long space journey has on the human body.” 

Prof. Charles Stewart III speaks to NPR’s Bobby Allyn about concerns that election betting encourages those connected to campaigns or election administrators to manipulate votes. “If you are looking for a reason to be skeptical about election results, election officials trying to manipulate them for financial gain becomes another straw to grasp at,” says Stewart. "However, these people don't need prediction markets to concoct some conspiracy theory to explain away why their candidate lost.” 

Smithsonian Magazine reporter Margherita Bassi highlights a new robot developed by Prof. Raphael Zufferey that mimics aquatic birds’ ability to fly and swim underwater. “Our dream vision is for oceanographers, marine biologists and members of coastal communities to launch this robot from a boat or from shore, and it would fly close to the area of interest, such as an iceberg or a port facility or over a pod of whales,” Zufferey says. “It would dive into the water to take a measurement or collect a sample and fly back to deliver the data at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.” 

In a new study by MIT FutureTech, 272 researchers ranked the top 24 AI risks, write Axios reporters Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen. The researchers “assessed a 12% chance that AI's dangerous capabilities produce a catastrophic outcome by 2030, and another 12% chance of AI-enabled weapons and mass-harm capabilities [with mitigation efforts to reduce risk],” VandeHei and Allen explain.  

Prof. Tavneet Suri joins NPR’s Robert Smith, host of “Planet Money,” to discuss several economic and business development programs in Kenya and Nigeria, and the lessons they offer for business students and entrepreneurs. “I do think that core to the growth of an economy is this thing we call human capital, which is about the education and the health of your population,” says Suri. “It's the sort of, in quotes, "capital" that a human brings to the table.” 

In a video for PBS Nova, alumna Elba Alonso-Monsalve PhD ‘26 explains the definition of primordial black holes (PBHs), and how dark matter may be formed from them. “Think like the mass of an asteroid but packed into the volume of a single atom, and these [PBHs] would be floating around our universe, maybe even our own solar system,” says Alonso-Monsalve. “There could be enough of these PBHs lurking around to make up all of the dark matter, and they would be tiny enough to be hard to spot.” 

Graduate student Peter Zhi Xuan Li speaks to Tech Briefs’ Andrew Corselli about his team’s work developing a new chip that allows small, autonomous robots and other battery-limited devices to construct detailed 3D maps of their environments using a fraction of the power required by other systems. “Today, a robot uses separate, incompatible internal representations for different jobs: one for mapping, another for tracking its own motion, another for rendering what it sees, and every conversion adds memory footprint and energy,” says Li. “Our goal is a single shared representation.” 

Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, joins Hakeem Oluseyi, host of GBH’s “Particles of Thought,” to discuss the lab’s work utilizing AI to enhance robots’ ability to move, reason, and act like humans. “The objective is to bring AI’s ability to understand text, images, and other online information to make physical machines intelligent, and if we achieve this then AI will not just reside in our computers—it will drive, it will walk it will fly, it will interact with us in the physical world.” 

Researchers from MIT and Toyota Research Institute developed SceneSmith, a system that allows robots to practice everyday tasks and action plans in over 1,300 AI generated environments before entering a real home or workplace, writes Fox News’ Kurt Knutsson. “SceneSmith's ability to combine realistic design with usable physics gives the project its strongest advantage,” notes Knutsson.  

Prof. Tom Leighton, CEO of Akamai, speaks to Fast Company reporter Victor Dey about his vision for a faster and cheaper AI grid that could serve as an alternative to large data centers, and more effectively route inference workloads. “Many inference tasks do not need the largest model or the largest cluster or the most expensive compute,” says Leighton. “What they need is the ability to marry the right model, in the right place, data and moment, at the most effective cost.” 

By studying ‘smears’ in fast radio bursts, fleeting flashes of radiation, MIT researchers discovered diffuse clouds of baryonic gas may contain the missing ordinary matter in the universe, writes Gizmodo’s Gayoung Lee. “These diffuse clouds may be flung outside galaxies through black hole jets,” Lee explains. 

Boston Art Review’s Kim Córdova spotlights coverage of the MIT Museum’s “No Recombination Without Representation,” an immersive theatrical reenactment honoring the fiftieth anniversary of a little-known Cambridge City Council meeting that has had major historical impact beyond the local community.  

The life and work of the late Nobel laureate Prof. Susumu Tonegawa, founding director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, is spotlighted by The New York Times’ Dylan Loeb McClain. “Few scientists have reshaped our understanding of biology as profoundly,” says Prof. Myriam Heiman, director of the Picower Institute. “His intellectual fearlessness, extraordinary creativity and relentless pursuit of fundamental questions opened entirely new frontiers in both immunology and neuroscience.”