In the Media

As part of an overall effort to help prevent head injuries, the MIT football team has implemented the use of helmets that have an extra layer of padding to reduce the impact of hits to the head, reports Esteban Bustillos for GBH. Engineers Head Coach Brian Bubna notes that MIT athletics staff are regularly updating their helmets to ones with the highest safety ratings, adding that after introducing the new helmets, coaching staff have seen a downward trend in head injuries, based on their day-to-day observations. 

Wall Street Journal reporter Angel Au-Yeung spotlights Anysphere, an AI startup founded by Michael Truell '21, Sualeh Asif '22, Arvid Lunnemar '22, and Aman Sanger '22. “The company makes an AI tool that learns a developer’s coding style to help autocomplete, edit and review lines of code,” writes Au-Yeung. 

Michael Truell '21, Sualeh Asif '22, Arvid Lunnemar '22, and Aman Sanger '22 co-founded Anysphere, an AI startup developing Cursor, an AI coding tool that “allows engineers to use AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI to write and edit entire chunks of code as well as identify and fix bugs,” reports Rashi Shrivastava for Forbes. 

Boston 25 reporter Rachel Keller visits the MIT AgeLab and dons the AGNES suit, “an innovative tool designed to simulate the physical and cognitive challenges of aging, allowing users to experience what it feels like to be 80 years old.” Lauren Cerino, a technical associate at the AgeLab, explains that “the intention of the suit is really to help people to think about how can I make the built environment better or how can I make these little changes that can actually make it really much easier for people to navigate spaces.” 

Prof. Anand Natarajan speaks with CNN reporter Lisa Eadicicco about the promise of quantum computing. “The big hope is that a quantum computer can simulate any sort of chemical or biological experiment you would do in the lab,” says Natarajan. He adds that quantum computing could be very influential for cryptography and cybersecurity, as it could be used to break codes. “That’s also a major motivation, to make sure that our adversaries cannot do it and that we have this capability.” 

Prof. Richard Binzel speaks with New Scientist reporter Alex Wilkins about his work inventing the Near-Earth Object Hazard Index (later renamed the Torino scale), asteroid hunting and the future of planetary defense. “Speaking very personally, as a scientist who’s been in the field for 50 years, who has largely been supported by public funds, I feel a moral responsibility to push forward the idea that, because we now have the capability to find any serious asteroid threat, we have a moral obligation to do it,” says Binzel of his work. “Otherwise, we are not doing our job as scientists.” 

Sloan lecturer Michael Schrage speaks with Fortune reporter Sheryl Estrada about the implications of workslop, “AI-generated content that masquerades as good work but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” “Ultimately, serious senior management will demand workslop metrics the same way they demand quality metrics,” says Schrage. “They’ll use LLMs to detect slop patterns in computational tasks—essentially, you’ll fight AI with AI.” 

Prof. Kerri Cahoy speaks with New York Times reporter Katrina Miller about the risks to satellites during geomagnetic storms. Cahoy explains that satellites in low-Earth orbit can experience anomalies, like signal dropouts and reboots. But molecules in Earth’s atmosphere and the strength of its magnetic field can offer some natural protection for satellites closest to the ground.  

Nature reporter James Mitchell Crow spotlights Prof. Leonard Guarente’s work studying the impact of calorie restriction in life expectancy. Guarente’s research points to “the importance of a set of genes and associated proteins called sirtuins.” Guarente says: “If you make them more active, you extend the lifespan.”  

Yuly Fuentes-Medel of the MIT Climate Project speaks with Fast Company reporter Elizabeth Segran about how encouraging collaboration between shoe manufacturers could help increase shoe recycling. “The shoe industry is competitive, and these brands are rivals,” says Fuentes-Medel. “But by sharing costs, data, and infrastructure, they can achieve the sustainability goals that have eluded them for years.”

Luke Hobson, assistant director of Industrial Design for MIT xPRO, speaks with Inside Higher Ed reporter Joshua Kim about his academic and professional journey in the field of online learning design. “Through all of my seldom successes and many, many failures, I learned a thing or two along the way, and I decided to start sharing these stories online,” says Hobson. “It began with answering questions in Facebook groups, which eventually turned into a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel, a book and more. What I discovered through sharing these moments is that I developed a love for teaching about instructional design.”

Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Boston 25 reporter Amal Elhewl about the anticipated rise in healthcare premiums. Gruber predicts “prices could jump by as much as $25,000 a year for people like small business owners or entrepreneurs,” Elhewl explains. “If 4 to 5 million people lose health insurance, we’re talking about on the order of 5,000 extra deaths every year because we have not extended these subsidies,” adds Gruber. 

Prof. Laura Lewis speaks with New Scientist reporter Grace Wade about the importance of sleep research. Lewis notes that understanding the dynamics of how the brain transitions into sleep could help lead to new treatments for insomnia. “With sleep onset, it has been really difficult for us to find that moment,” says Lewis, where brain mechanisms drive the transition to sleep. “If we knew when that was, then we could start to say, what is the brain region or circuit that is making somebody fall asleep?” 

Prof. Emeritus Tim Berners-Lee speaks with The Verge’s Decoder host Nilay Patel about his hopes and concerns for the future of the world wide web. “In the early days of the web, anybody used to be able to make a website,” explains Lee. “That feeling of sovereignty as an individual being enabled and being a peer with all of the other people on the web, that is what were still fighting for and what we need to rebuild.” 

Writing for Physics Today, Prof. Yang Shao-Horn, Research Scientist Sokseiha Muy and their colleagues explain the limitations and concerns surrounding lithium-ion battery technology while highlighting the potential of solid-state batteries as an alternative. “Although solid electrolytes can significantly boost a battery’s energy density by minimizing the battery’s volume, the greatest gains come from replacing conventional graphite anodes with higher-capacity, low-electric-potential alternatives,” they write.