School of Science

Prof. Jesse Thaler shares the physics moonshot experiment he would like to undertake if imagination was the only constraint on scientific ambition. “I am an enthusiast for an audacious idea to explore the unknown: a muon collider,” Thaler shares. “The muon is a brilliant candidate for a discovery machine. Muons are 200 times heavier than electrons, which makes them more efficient to accelerate. And unlike the protons used at the LHC, muons are elementary particles, so colliding them together would probe sharper, higher energies, potentially allowing us to discover more massive particles beyond the Higgs boson or even the nature of dark matter.” 

Two new research papers by scientists from MIT and other institutions find that AI chatbots are successful at shifting the political beliefs of voters, and that the “most persuasive chatbots are those that share lots of facts, although the most information-dense bots also dole out the most inaccurate claims,” reports Sarah Kuta for Smithsonian Magazine. “If you need a million facts, you eventually are going to run out of good ones and so, to fill your fact quota, you’re going to have to put in some not-so-good ones,” says Visiting Prof. David Rand. 

MIT is “taking a quantum leap with the launch of the new MIT Quantum Initiative (QMIT), reports State House News reporter Katie Castellani. “There isn't a more important technological field right now than quantum with its enormous potential for impact on both fundamental research and practical problems,” said President Sally Kornbluth during the launch event. “QMIT will help us to ask the right questions, identify the most critical problems and create a roadmap for developing quantum solutions that are both transformative and accessible.” 

Fortune reporter Orianna Rosa Royle spotlights Luana Lopes Lara '18, co-founder of Kalshi, a company that allows users to bet on the outcome of events, such as “elections, sports matches, and pop culture happenings.” Rosa Royle details Lopes Lara’s journey establishing Kalshi with her co-founder Tarek Mansour ’18, MNG ’19. 

A new study by MIT researchers has found that “AI chatbots were surprisingly effective at convincing people to vote for a particular candidate or change their support for a particular issue,” reports Alex Wilkins for New Scientist. “Even for attitudes about presidential candidates, which are thought to be these very hard-to-move and solidified attitudes, the conversations with these models can have much bigger effects than you would expect based on previous work,” says Visiting Prof. David Rand. 

Luana Lopes Lara ’18 and Tarek Mansour ’18, MNG ’19 co-founded Kalshi, a company that allows “users to bet on the outcome of future events such as elections, sports games and pop culture happenings,” reports Alicia Park for Forbes. Lopes Lara chronicles her journey from her time on stage as a professional ballerina in Austria to her years as a student at MIT to her entrepreneurial ambitions.

Prof. Earl Miller speaks with National Geographic reporter Dana Binfet about the impact of increased social media and digital platform use on the brain. “Brain rot is not really rotting our brains,” explains Miller. “It’s constantly creating an environment that our brains are not equipped to deal with—that's the real problem. We’re single-minded creatures and when all this information is coming at us, we want to consume everything and it’s hard to turn off that desire.”

The Advanced LIGO Documentary Project commemorates the life and legacy of Prof. Emeritus Rainer Weiss, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics and “LIGO’s heart and soul.” Said Weiss of the significance of detecting gravitational waves: "The discovery isn't the measurement of the gravitational waves…it's the black holes. That's absolutely spectacular... that this exists, and if you see a couple more, then you could say something about the universe. It's something new that we're going to be able to say about the universe. It's spectacular. To me, that's the big discovery."

Prof. Emeritus Kerry Emanuel speaks with Washington Post reporters Ben Noll and Ruby Mellen about the 2025 hurricane season. “The thing that really powers the hurricane is how fast you can transfer heat from the ocean to the atmosphere. The bigger the temperature difference, the faster you can transfer heat. The faster you can transfer heat, the more powerful the hurricane can be,” says Emanuel. “This past summer, the sea surface temperatures across much of the tropical Atlantic were warmer than normal, which is part of what led people to predict that there would be a very busy season.” 

George Smoot '66, PhD '70, who was honored for his work in cosmology with the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, has died at the age of 80, reports Douglas Scott, Joseph Silk and Tom Broadhurst for Nature. Smoot’s work “contributed to our understanding of the Universe on the largest scales and at the earliest observable times by measuring temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background,” they explain. 

The American Academy of Sciences & Letters has awarded Prof. Richard Binzel the Barry Prize for his contributions to expanding “humanity’s knowledge of the cosmos,” reports Michael Nietzel for Forbes. The prize is “awarded to scholars at U.S. colleges and universities for distinguished intellectual achievements in the arts, sciences and learned professions,” writes Nietzel. 

Wall Street Journal reporter Angel Au-Yeung spotlights Anysphere, an AI startup founded by Michael Truell '21, Sualeh Asif '22, Arvid Lunnemar '22, and Aman Sanger '22. “The company makes an AI tool that learns a developer’s coding style to help autocomplete, edit and review lines of code,” writes Au-Yeung. 

Michael Truell '21, Sualeh Asif '22, Arvid Lunnemar '22, and Aman Sanger '22 co-founded Anysphere, an AI startup developing Cursor, an AI coding tool that “allows engineers to use AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI to write and edit entire chunks of code as well as identify and fix bugs,” reports Rashi Shrivastava for Forbes. 

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.” 

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.