Research

A new study by MIT researchers found that  “sleeping while listening to bursts of pink noise…seems to boost the flow of fluid through the brain, and so might enhance the clearance of waste products that are linked to conditions like Alzheimer’s disease,” writes New Scientist’s Carissa Wong. “The researchers hope to test whether the technique can slow cognitive decline in people during normal ageing, mild cognitive impairment – a condition that often precedes dementia – and the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease,” notes Wong.

The Financial Times’ Anjana Ahuja highlights Prof. Sangeeta Bhatia and Senior Postdoctoral Associate Vardhman Kumar’s work developing injectable “mini livers,” tissue grafts that could “take on some of the life-saving functions of liver cells: helping with blood clotting, detoxifying the bloodstream and breaking down medicines. The injectable grafts, they suggest, could also be used as a bridging treatment while patients wait for a transplant, with booster injections able to dial up the dose,” writes Ahuja.  

MIT researchers have created a microscope that can image electrical activity in neurons across the brain, writes Earth.com’s Eric Ralls. “We can now ask: Which neurons respond first?” says Zeguan Wang, first author on the study. “Where does a sequence begin, and how does activity spread to recruit the rest of the network?” 

For The Next Big Idea Club, Prof. Paul Osterman outlines the pillars of his new book, “Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment.” “The rise of disposable work is allowing companies to gain flexibility and cut costs while shedding responsibility for their workers,” writes Osterman. “We need guardrails to keep that flexibility from coming at the expense of workers and the public.” 

MIT researchers have discovered that peptides can remain stable and form into, reports Earth.com’s Eric Ralls. “First, we were astounded that peptides remain stable at all in concentrated sulfuric acid, for many weeks on end,” says Prof. Mei Hong, an author on the study. “Even more remarkable was that they adopt specific three-dimensional structures instead of random shapes.” 

MIT researchers have discovered that peptides “not only survive in highly concentrated sulfuric acid but take on stable 3D conformations too,” writes Chemical & Engineering News’ Fionna Samuels. “The project started with a new collaboration between [Prof. Sara] Seager and the MIT chemist [Prof.] Mei Hong,” notes Samuels. “In the years since finding phosphine signals in Venusian clouds, Seager had been working her way through the building blocks of life—nucleic acids, amino acids, and lipids—to see if any survived concentrated acid exposure.”  

MIT researchers have developed an AI-powered robotic therapy system that combines wearable force sensors and camera recordings of physical therapists’ movements to provide personalized therapy to patients, writes Newsweek’s Claudia Tanner. “Robotic assistance will allow patients to practice exercises more often while still receiving support tailored to their abilities,” says Johannes Lachner, who completed this work as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. “Our goal is to take a step toward more accessible and personalized physical rehabilitation, giving more patients the opportunity to regain movement and independence.” 

According to new research by MIT physicists, a laser able to capture neutrinos, abundant yet intangible particles in the universe, is likely impossible to build, writes New Scientist’s Karmela Padavic-Callaghan. “The key to the neutrino laser proposal was a memory effect: when an atom in the BEC (Bose-Einstein condensate) emitted a neutrino, it would be more likely to continue emitting more neutrinos in the same direction, thus pushing them into a beam, because the quantum state that all the ultracold atoms share would retain a trace of that first emission,” Padavic-Callaghan explains. “[Prof. Wolfgang] Ketterle and his colleagues showed that this memory, although present, would be about 10,000 billion times too brief to affect the neutrinos as intended.” 

Prof. Paul Osterman speaks to Fortune’s Nick Lichtenberg about how his new book “Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment” explores how a perceived lack of ambition among Gen Z reflects the decreased amount of job security and opportunity available to young workers. “No one has job security anymore, but these folks [disposable workers] are hired with that expectation and are not going to be around for long,” says Osterman.

Prof. Susan Solomon joins Cleo Abram’s “HUGE* If True,” to discuss her 1985 research uncovering how chlorofluorocarbons, were depleting the ozone layer, which led to the Montreal Protocol that banned the use of those chemicals. “It was an interesting feeling being under the ozone hole, knowing that half a world away an incredible change [the Montreal Protocol] had just occurred that really had a lot of potential to change things in the future—and indeed it did,” says Solomon.  

MIT Media Lab researchers found that using large language models for writing assistance was associated with weaker recall and lower ownership of the work produced, writes Forbes’ Glenn Llopis. “Notice the pattern: when AI does too much, the person may retain too little,” writes Llopis.  

A study by researchers from the MIT Media Lab found up to 55% lower neural connectivity in participants who used AI for writing assistance, and flagged children as especially vulnerable, writes Forbes’ Dana Williams. “83% of participants who used a chatbot could not quote a single sentence from an essay they had finished minutes earlier, versus roughly 11% of those who wrote unaided,” Williams notes. “The words were produced, but they never entered a mind.”  

A 2025 report by MIT researchers found that 62% of accounting professionals worry about errors in AI generated outputs, writes Thomson Reuters. “AI is doing real, meaningful work in tax workflows right now with even greater capabilities coming. But it’s also generating real anxiety,” Thomson Reuters notes.  

MIT researchers found that unless an individual is affected by stroke or dementia, their ability to process language does not decline with age, writes Health Day’s Dennis Thompson. “Scans show that activity in the brain’s language processing network is nearly identical among seniors to that found in younger adults,” writes Thompson. “These results indicate that parts of the brain dedicated to unique functions like language might be less prone to age-related decline than general-purpose networks that contribute to many different skills.”  

The Financial Times’ Anjana Ahuja spotlights research led by Prof. Dennis Whyte on the economics of fusion energy. “Economic Q, the metric devised by Whyte and others and which must exceed one to represent net economic gain, compares the capital gained over a fusion energy plant’s lifetime to that expended,” writes Ahuja. “Factors reflect the extreme engineering involved and include construction costs, component durability and the efficiency of converting fusion power into a commodity.”