The U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 “Best Colleges Rankings” honors MIT as the No.1 national university, writes Elizabeth Mehler for Boston.com. “The rankings are based on up to 17 weighted measures of academic quality and success, including graduation and retention rates, social mobility for low-income students, post-graduate earnings, academic peer assessment, and faculty resources,” writes Mehler.
7 News Boston spotlights MIT being named the No. 1 national university by U.S. News and World Report for its 2027 “Best College Rankings.” The ranking highlighted MIT’s “high enrollment of just over 4,500 students in 2025, its student faculty ratio of 8-1 and its 4-1 academic calendar.”
Prof. Justin Reich, director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, speaks to The 74’s Greg Toppo about the risk of students using AI teaching tools to cheat on their assignments. “There's a zillion people that are trying to come up with these guided learning environments and Socratic tutors and stuff like that,” says Reich. “And I'm just like, 'Guys, you're putting the "Carefully teach me this stuff" button directly next to the "Do everything for me" button.’”
For Fortune, reporter Barry Werth highlights the groundbreaking research of the late Prof. David Baltimore, founding director of the Whitehead Institute at MIT, who “independently discovered an enzyme essential for the reproduction of retroviruses such as HIV, which spread by inserting their genes into the DNA of host cells and hijacking the cells’ chemical machinery to make copies of themselves.” “Few investigators were more qualified or better positioned to understand how to stop HIV from spreading,” writes Werth.
Prof. Jonathan Gruber joins Edgar B. Herwick III, host of GBH’s “The Curiosity Desk” to discuss what factors into the U.S. Federal Reserve’s decision to raise interest rates for the first time since 2023. Federal Reserve members “are looking at things like tariffs, the tax on goods coming into this country. They’re looking at the war,” says Gruber. “We have, basically, these underlying forces driving inflation. In that case, the Fed has a mandate. The Fed’s job is to balance two forces: economic growth and inflation, and the way they balance them is by trying to keep inflation near a target of two percent.”
For Boston 25, reporter Alexis Rossi details MIT’s selection as the No. 1 national university in U.S. News & World Report’s 2027 “Best Colleges Rankings.” “MIT was also ranked first for undergraduate research and creative projects, second on the list of most innovative schools, and third on the list of best value schools,” writes Rossi.
In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, Gabriele Mazzini, a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab, explains why “policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism” amidst recent warnings of a potential AI apocalypse. “There is no sentient [AI] actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified,” writes Mazzini. “There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.”
During Climate Week NYC, Evelyn Wang, MIT’s Vice President for Energy and Climate, emphasized the importance of utilizing AI to help tackle climate change, write Seth Borenstein and Jennifer McDermott for The Associated Press. Data centers adding to climate and water problems ‘is not forever,’ according to Wang, who told The Associated Press that data centers are about five years away from being water neutral and about a decade away from no longer adding to planet-warming emissions.
MIT researchers found that AI assisted work leads to the ‘diversity collapse’ of a brand’s voice, and users that rely on AI to do their thinking lose skills over time, highlights Forbes’ Michelle O'Connor. “Judgment, taste and the instinct to catch when something’s off isn’t a soft skill you can afford to lose,” writes O’Connor. “The MIT data is the first hard evidence of that.”
The Economist highlights MIT researchers’ new “paper-based battery whose components are safely absorbed by the body,” to help deliver drugs to the GI tract more effectively. “The new battery is a stack of magnesium, gel and chemically active paper—all coated in wax to protect it from the harsh environment of the gut. It is also compact, taking up only about a quarter of the space inside a standard gelatine capsule, leaving plenty of room for the device it is to power, as well as other useful payloads, such as a drug.”
Prof. Max Tegmark joins Fox Business's “The Claman Countdown,” to discuss warning lawmakers about the risks of rogue AI at the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington. “It’s very obvious that if you make these things [AI] vastly smarter than humans in the next few years, give them robotic bodies, have millions and billions of them all over earth, and don’t understand how they work, we could lose control over them. So, let’s not do that,” says Tegmark. “We have very clear ideas for how we can control AI that cures cancer and [fuels] all sorts of other powerful tools. We want to build tools, not beings that are going to replace us.”
MIT researchers have developed an ingestible battery that could be used to monitor drug delivery and avoid the need for surgery; a “milestone towards potential human use for health monitoring and treatments,” writes Michael Peel for the Financial Times. Improving the effectiveness of therapies “moves the technology beyond a materials demonstration toward an integrated biomedical system,” says Prof. Giovanni Traverso, senior author of the study.
Quanta Magazine’s Marlowe Starling highlights a 2014 study by MIT researchers that found that coral cilia “interact with the boundary layer by rapidly whipping about to generate swirls of fresh, oxygenated seawater.” The researchers “not only modeled the tiny vortices created by the cilia for the first time, but also revealed the cilia’s importance for survival and metabolism,” notes Starling.
A recent study by MIT researchers found that AI chatbots easily generated misleading election-related answers, images and videos, writes Emily Condon for USA Today. “This, along with other findings from our study, suggests that in an ongoing election with little authoritative information for models to rely on, AI may not be as helpful in pushing back against unsubstantiated rumors and misinformation,” the researchers explain.
Prof. Max Tegmark speaks to Fox Business about the need for government regulations on AI. AI agents “have goals; they’re actively pursuing them and being incredibly creative about getting things done, even if it wasn’t the way you wanted,” says Tegmark. “Put that together with robotic bodies, and you’ve got yourself a species. If they’re vastly smarter than us, which is the goal of these companies, then they can not only do hacking, they can go online and hire a bunch of humans to work for them.”