School of Science

Prof. Richard Binzel shares his insights into the recently discovered school-bus sized asteroid that will fly by Earth next week with CNN reporter Jacopo Prisco. “2026JH2 will pass safely by the Earth,” said Binzel. “This is actually a rather normal occurrence, car-sized objects pass between the Earth and the Moon every week. At the size of a school bus, these pass through our neighborhood several times per year. We are only recently developing surveys that are sensitive enough to see them.”

A study by MIT scientists uncovered the culprit in the deep-sea mystery of what was reducing the ocean’s carbon-trapping capacity: dense microbe ‘cities’ living inside marine snow (slowly sinking particles of fish poop and other debris), reports Scientific American reporter Damien Pine. “Ultimately everything that’s happening at these microscales—that’s really what’s terraforming our planet,” explains Prof. Andrew Babbin.

New York Times reporters Gina Kolata and Rebecca Robbins highlight how university researchers at MIT and Harvard laid the groundwork for the development of a new treatment for pancreatic cancer that “could wind up being the most significant advance in cancer treatment in 15 years, since the arrival of immunotherapy.” They write: “In 1982, Robert Weinberg, a scientist at MIT, made one of the seminal discoveries about how RAS genes fuel some cancers.” 

Forbes contributor Michael T. Nietzel spotlights the 120 new members and 25 international members elected by the National Academy of Sciences for 2026. Several MIT faculty members – including Professors Michale Fee, Gareth McKinley, Keith Nelson, Bengt Holmstrom and Catherine Wolfram – were selected. 

Researchers from MIT have created a new model that can predict wave behavior on different planets, reports Kristen French for Nautilus. “On Earth, waves form as wind drags across bodies of water, pushing unevenly on their surfaces. As the waves lengthen, and the distance between crests grows, the waves are increasingly driven by the force of gravity rather than by surface tension,” French writes. “On faraway planets, the size of the waves would depend not only on the strength of gravity and the speed and direction of the wind, but the density of the atmosphere, the viscosity of the liquid in the oceans and lakes, as well as the depth of the bed. All these factors were fed into the PlanetWaves model.” 

MIT scientists have developed a new model, dubbed "PlanetWaves," that predicts wave behavior on different planets, showing that the "smallest gust of wind on Titan could generate huge, roiling waves across seas of hydrocarbons," reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. “PlanetWaves is far more than a novel simulator,” writes Paul. “Calculating fluid behaviors on distant planets and moons could help inform engineers building new spacecraft and probes.”

Scientific American reporter Bob Henderson spotlights how graduate student Jiaruo Li and Prof. Riccardo Comin are developing a new device for storing digital data using “an exotic kind of magnetism discovered in the same lab the previous year to make the device faster and more energy-efficient than any competing technology.” 

Prof. Richard Binzel speaks with CBS Boston about the success of the Artemis II mission and the future of space exploration. "It's exciting we have humans back in space again," Binzel shared. "It's a real test of a spaceflight system. Surviving reentry and landing safely. That's the real accomplishment here. Showing we can go to the moon but also come back safely."

Two new studies from researchers at MIT and elsewhere have described “the machine-learning algorithms they developed to screen bacterial genomes and identify proteins that are involved in protecting the microorganisms against viral invaders,” reports Miryam Naddaf for Nature. “There’s a hope that maybe there’s a next generation of molecular tools that would come from some of these new systems,” says Prof. Michael Laub. 

Prof. Anna Frebel speaks with Science reporter Jay Bennett about the “first unambiguous second-generation star found in an ultrafaint dwarf galaxy.” It’s a fantastic discovery,” says Frebel. “I know how hard it is to find these stars. They are so, so rare.” 

Prof. David Kaiser and graduate student Alexandra Klipfel speak with New York Times reporter Dennis Overbye about their theory that a neutrino detected zipping through the Mediterranean Sea in February 2023 may have come from an exploding primordial black hole. Kaiser and Klipfel "concluded that if primordial black holes were the explanation for long-sought dark matter, scientists should expect about 40 black-hole explosions to occur each year in every cubic light-year near the Milky Way,” Overbye notes. 

Prof. Julien de Wit speaks with Dan Rea from WBZ’s Nightside News about his team’s work developing new ways to address threats posted by small asteroids to our critical space infrastructure. “We are developing the technology here at MIT to find [asteroids] and then track them and understand if we should be caring about them,” de Wit explains. 

Prof. Julien de Wit, Research Scientist Artem Burdanov and Research Scientist Saverio Cambioni join Edgar Herwick III of GBH’s Curiosity Desk to discuss their work with planetary defense and their method for detecting and tracking smaller asteroids that could impact Earth’s critical space infrastructure. “We are swimming in an era that is data rich, and so what we do in our group and at MIT is mine that data to reveal the universe like never before,” says de Wit. “Revealing new populations of asteroids, new populations of planets, and making sense of our universe like we have never done.”

According to the 2026 QS World University Rankings, MIT has been earned a No. 1 global ranking in 12 subject areas, including chemical engineering; chemistry; civil and structural engineering; computer science and information systems; data science and artificial intelligence; electrical and electronic engineering; engineering and technology; linguistics; materials science; mechanical, aeronautical, and manufacturing engineering; mathematics; and physics and astronomy, reports Michael T. Nietzel for Forbes.

Prof. Salvatore Vitale and graduate student Jack Heinzel speak with Scientific American reporter K.R. Callaway about the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration’s latest catalog of gravitational wave detections, which “more than doubles the number of gravitational-wave candidate events—and reveals unexpected complexities of merging black holes.” Says Heinzel: “We’re learning a lot of things that are qualitative and phenomenological from the catalog. Starting to see all these different structures emerge is pretty fascinating.”