Research Scientist Robert Ajemian, graduate student Greta Tuckute and MIT Museum Exhibit Content and Experience Developer Lindsay Bartholomew appear on The Economist’s Babbage podcast to discuss the development of generative AI. “The way that current AI works, whether it is object recognition or large language models, it’s trained on tons and tons and tons of data and what it’s essentially doing is comparing something it’s seen before to something it’s seeing now,” says Ajemian.
Milena Pagán '11 speaks with Boston.com reporter Linda Laban about re-opening her bagel shop, Rebelle Bagels, in Kendall Square. Pagán, who earned a degree in chemical engineering before diving into the culinary world, explains that she felt it was a natural transition from engineering to food. “It’s not a traditional path, but they do have a lot in common,” Pagán explains. “Making bagels feels a lot like engineering.”
Prof. Katharina Ribbeck speaks with Christopher Intagliata of Scientific American’s “Science Quickly” podcast about her research exploring how mucus can treat and prevent disease. “The basic building blocks of mucus that give mucus its gooey nature are these threadlike molecules—they look like tiny bottlebrushes—that display lots and lots of sugar molecules on their backbone,” explains Ribbeck. “And these sugar molecules—we call them glycans—interact with molecules from the immune system and microbes directly. And the exact configuration and density of these sugar molecules is really important for health.”
Financial Times reporters Andrew Hill and Emma Jacobs spotlight how Prof. Carlo Ratti and his colleagues have found that “people are traveling less far from their homes, consistent with more remote working.” The findings demonstrate a more flexible approach to commuting. “That’s good news [for cities], because the problem is not a problem of capacity, it’s a problem of peaks,” Ratti explains.
FutureTech researcher Tamay Besiroglu speaks with New Scientist reporter Chris Stokel-Walker about the rapid rate at which large language models (LLMs) are improving. “While Besiroglu believes that this increase in LLM performance is partly due to more efficient software coding, the researchers were unable to pinpoint precisely how those efficiencies were gained – in part because AI algorithms are often impenetrable black boxes,” writes Stokel-Walker. “He also points out that hardware improvements still play a big role in increased performance.”
Astronomers from MIT and other institutions have found that periodic eruptions from a supermassive black hole located in a galaxy about 800 million light-years from Earth could be caused by a, “second, smaller black hole slamming into a disk of gas and dust, or ‘accretion disk,’ surrounding the supermassive black hole, causing it to repeatedly ‘hiccup’ out matter,” writes Rob Lea for Space.com.
Prof. Gregory Rutledge speaks with The Ringer reporter Claire McNear about the science behind nanofibers and whether it's possible to create ultrathin and ultrastrong nanofibers that are invisible to the human eye, as shown in the science fiction series “3 Body Problem.” Rutledge explains that: “Given that a human hair is about 50 micrometers in diameter, a fiber 100 times smaller would be about 500 nanometers in diameter. Such fibers are routinely made by electrospinning, as well as by a couple of other technologies. Metal wires can also be drawn that small.”
Writing for The Hill, Sloan Prof. Catherine Wolfram and UCLA Prof. Kimberly Clausing explore why they feel U.S. politicians should embrace carbon pricing. “2025 will be a big year for Congress to tackle longstanding fiscal issues and further climate policy efforts,” they write. “Before this can happen, politicians need to hear timely arguments backed by up-to-date evidence.”
Prof. Yossi Sheffi, director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, speaks with WCVB-TV about how the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore and the closing of the Port of Baltimore could impact car shipments on the East Coast. Sheffi explains that not all ports can handle cars like Baltimore, and they require “hundreds of trucks and railcars that are equipped to transport vehicles and bring them to the dealers.”
Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Marketplace reporter Matt Levin about the potential impact of raising the retirement age in the United States. Gruber suggests a new system where retirement age would vary by income. “People who are sufficiently high income, should be expected to work longer and get less in the system,” says Gruber. “People with physically demanding jobs and low income should be able to retire earlier.”
Prof. Yossi Sheffi, director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, discusses the potential impacts of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on shipping, logistics and the economy. “Many other ports are not equipped to handle the type of commodities that go to Baltimore,” Sheffi explains.
A number of MIT faculty and alumni – including Prof. Daniela Rus, Prof. Regina Barzilay, Research Affiliate Haddad Habib, Research Scientist Lex Fridman, Marc Raibert PhD '77, former Postdoc Rana El Kaliouby and Ray Kurzweil '70 – have been named key figures “at the forefront of Boston’s AI revolution,” reports Wyndham Lewis for Boston Magazine. These researchers are “driving progress and reshaping the way we live,” writes Lewis.
Prof. Long Ju and his colleagues observed the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect (FQAHE) when five layers of graphene were sandwiched between sheets of boron nitride, reports Dan Garisto for Nature. The findings are, “capturing physicists’ imagination because they are fundamentally new discoveries about how electrons behave,” writes Garisto.
Ms. Magazine reporter Kalindi Vora spotlights Prof. Emerita Evelyn Fox Keller and the legacy of her work in the field of science. “Through her work, [Keller] showed that objectivity, the key value of the sciences, is in fact always partially subjective,” writes Vora. “Her legacy demonstrates that diversifying the sciences will improve research and discovery.”
MIT researchers have developed a new technique that uses a large language model to allow robots to self-correct after making a mistake, reports Brian Heater for TechCrunch. “Researchers behind the study note that while imitation learning (learning to do a task through observation) is popular in the world of home robotics, it often can’t account for the countless small environmental variations that can interfere with regular operation, thus requiring a system to restart from square one,” writes Heater. “The new research addresses this, in part, by breaking demonstrations into smaller subsets."