Ars Technica reporter Jennifer Oulette writes that MIT researchers have found that a “large asteroid impact briefly boosted the Moon's early weak magnetic field—and that this spike is what is recorded in some lunar samples.”
Ankur Gupta SM '14, PhD '17 has been named to the Chemical & Engineering News’ 2025 Talent 12 list, which highlights young scientists using chemistry to create real-world solutions, reports Sam Lemonick for Chemical & Engineering News. “By accounting for the way particles move in a chemical gradient—a phenomenon known as diffusiophoresis… [Gupta and his colleagues have] improved a model that mathematician Alan Turing developed to explain patterns in nature, such as the shape of a zebra’s stripes or the spacing of a jellyfish’s tentacles,” explains Lemonick.
Prof. Ariel Furst has been named to Chemical & Engineering News’ 2025 Talented 12, which spotlights early-career scientists who are using their “chemistry know-how to make a real-world impact.” “By combining the power of biology with chemistry and materials engineering, Furst develops technologies to tackle crucial problems such as environmental remediation, sustainable agriculture, and carbon sequestration,” writes Prachi Patel. “Pretty much everything that agrochemicals do, there are microbes that we think do it better,” says Furst. “They do it more precisely and maintain the overall balance of the ecosystem much more effectively.”
MIT researchers have developed a new membrane that can separate different kinds of fuel by molecular size, which could replace the current energy-intensive crude oil distillation process. “Roughly 1 percent of global energy use goes into separating crude oil into gasoline, diesel, and heating oil,” writes Aamir Khollam for Interesting Engineering. This new membrane “excelled in lab tests…[and] effectively separated real industrial oil samples containing naphtha, kerosene, and diesel.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Angelina Torre spotlights “Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter,” a new book by MIT Libraries Conservator Jana Dambrogio and King’s College London Senior Lecturer Daniel Smith that explores the history and art of “folding a letter so it serves as its own envelope.” The book “calls on scholars to ‘read the folds’ of written correspondence – to peer into the historical, social or personal circumstances that might not be explicitly stated,” explains Torre.
Lecturer Michael Schrage speaks with Forbes reporter Josipa Majic Predin about the shift towards generative AI in business. "AI should not be seen overwhelmingly as just an ethical or a technical or a digital innovation and platform," says Schrage. "It's actually a philosophical capability and resource."
Boston Business Journal reporter Eli Chavez spotlights Sublime Systems, an MIT startup “focused on low-carbon cement production.” “Sublime’s mission is to have a swift and massive impact measured in the amount of cement we produce and sell,” says CEO Leah Ellis, a former MIT postdoc. “We are super-focused on increasing our cement production.”
Diane Hoskins '79, global co-chair of architectural design firm Gensler, speaks with CNBC reporter Julia Boorstin after being named to the CNBC 2025 Changemakers list about “her path to success and lessons learned along the way.” “Solutions need to be framed by more than one discipline,” says Hoskins. “More people in our tech companies would benefit from having been in other domains, bringing more perspective to these tools across our daily lives.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, graduate students Manuj Dhariwal SM '17 and Shruti Dhariwal SM '18 highlight new efforts to reframe the language used to describe the ways humans are interacting with AI technologies. “It is a subtle reframing, but one that we urgently need as AI systems become interwoven with our creative, social, and emotional worlds,” they write. “The point is not necessarily to choose one over the other — but to clearly distinguish one from the other.”
Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with WBUR On Point host Meghna Chakrabarti about the role of trust in institutions. “Institutions crucially depend on the trust that people place in them,” says Acemoglu. “Corruption is the tip of the spear, because once you start suspecting that people in high office are using their position for corrupt ends, it tarnishes the entire set of institutions. And I think that's the situation we're in, and we're getting deeper and deeper.”
Researchers from MIT and other institutions have uncovered new pathways, along with identifying genes, that may contribute to the development of a new class of drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, reports John R. Ellement for The Boston Globe. “The drugs currently approved to treat Alzheimer’s have not been as successful as hoped,” Ellement explains. “Those drugs tend to target amyloid plaques in the brain, but the new research suggests other areas to target.”
Postdoc Rohan Naidu and his colleagues have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to examine galaxy MoM-z14, first spotted in 2023, reports Jonathan O’Callaghan for New Scientist. “Naidu and his colleagues confirmed MoM-z14 is the most distant galaxy yet,” writes Naidu. “The light we see now was emitted just 280 million years after the big bang, breaking the previous record by about 10 million years.”
Writing for Financial Times, Prof. Emeritus Donald Sadoway makes the case that to meet the growing need for critical minerals, innovation is needed in metals extraction technology. “Imagine a process that produces superior metal at a lower price point than that of legacy technology and does so with zero emissions to air, water and to soil,” writes Sadoway. “Such technologies would recapture US domestic market share from foreign producers while meeting our pressing materials needs.”
Principal Research Scientist Kalyan Veeramachaneni speaks with WBUR On Point host Meghna Chakrabarti about the benefits and risks of training AI on synthetic data. “I think the AI that we have as of today and we are using is largely very small; I don't mean that as in size, but in the tasks that it can do,” says Veeramachaneni. “And as days go by, we are asking more and more of it… that requires us to provide more data, train more models that are much more efficient in reasoning, and can solve problems that we haven't thought of solving.”
Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speaks with Financial Times reporter Michael Peel about ongoing efforts to balance autonomous vehicles’ “efficient operation with the need for them to minimize damage in collisions.” Rus notes that a new framework offers a “potential path towards AVs that can navigate complex, multi-agent scenarios with an awareness of differing levels of vulnerability among road users,” says Rus.