Research

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.” 

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.”

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.” 

Researchers at MIT have discovered “the most direct evidence to date of unconventional superconductivity in ‘magic-angel’ twisted trilayer graphene (MATTG), reports Aman Tripathi for Interesting Engineering. “This finding is a crucial step in the global search for room-temperature superconductors, often referred to as the ‘Holy Grail’ of physics,” writes Tripathi. 

Writing for Meteorological Technology International, Alex Pack explores how MIT researchers have developed a new “lightning-prediction model that could help protect more unconventional aircraft designs – such as blended-wing bodies or truss-braced configurations – as aviation moves beyond traditional tube-and-wing designs.” 

MIT researchers have developed a “printable aluminum alloy that can withstand high temperatures and is five times stronger than traditionally manufactured aluminum,” reports Andrew Corselli for Tech Briefs. “The researchers envision that the new printable aluminum could be made into stronger, more lightweight and temperature-resistant products, such as fan blades in jet engines,” Corselli explains. 

Prof. Tess Smidt and incoming Prof. Lindsey Raymond have been named Schmidt Sciences 2025 AI2050 Early Career Fellows, reports Michael T. Nietzel for Forbes. The AI2050 project is “aimed at advancing the capacity of artificial intelligence to tackle an evolving list of 10 ‘hard problems,’ involving major scientific questions, technical issues, and risks associated with revolutionary technology,” explains Nietzel. 

In honor of the 25^th anniversary of the International Space Station (ISS), Earth.com reporter Derek Davis spotlights the contributions of a number of MIT-trained astronauts and engineers, who played pivotal roles in the ISS’ history. 

Prof. Linda Griffith speaks with Science Friday host Flora Lichtman about her work studying endometriosis. “I did a lot of things in the regenerative medicine space. But I had an epiphany that there’s so many chronic and inflammatory disease that we don’t know how to treat so I started building models of human organs and tissues in the lab using what we called microfluidic chips,” Griffith explains. “When I got asked about endometriosis, it was actually a perfect application for this kind of approach because we really need to study the lesions very carefully in the lab in ways that is very hard to study in patients.” 

Forbes reporter Gemma Allen spotlights Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, and her work revolutionizing the field of robotics by bringing “empathy into engineering and proving that responsibility is as radical and as commercially attractive as unguarded innovation.” Rus says of her vision for the future of robotics and AI: “With robots, we can amplify strength and precision. With AI, we can amplify cognition, creativity, empathy, and foresight. These tools should help us become better versions of ourselves."

Prof. Laura Lewis and her colleagues have discovered that momentary lapses in attention that often follow a bad night’s sleep are caused by the brain attempting to flush fluid out of its system, a process that normally occurs during sleep, reports Carissa Wong for New Scientist. “If you don’t have these waves [of fluid flowing] at night because you’re kept awake all night, then your brain starts to kind of sneak them in during the daytime, but they come with this cost of attention,” says Lewis. 

Researchers at MIT have found that momentary lapses in attention, often described as zoning out, coincide with waves of fluid flowing out of the brain, reports Ian Sample for The Guardian. “The moment somebody’s attention fails is the moment this wave of fluid starts to pulse,” says Prof. Laura Lewis. “It’s not just that your neurons aren’t paying attention to the world, there’s this big change in fluid in the brain at the same time.”

The MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS) launched the Fairbairn Menstruation Science Fund earlier this year as part of an effort aimed at improving women’s health, reports Zoë Corbyn for The Guardian. “This is frontier science,” says Prof. Linda Griffith. Corbyn also spotlights how Ridhi Tariyal MS '10 has co-founded NextGen Jane, a women’s healthcare startup that aims to gain better insight into women’s reproductive health by studying menstruation.

Wired reporter Steven Levy spotlights Research Scientist Sarah Schwettmann PhD '21 and her work investigating the unknown behaviors of AI agents. Schwettmann has co-founded Transluce, a nonprofit interpretability startup “to further study such phenomena,” writes Levy.