Graduate student Stephen Casper speaks with Wired reporter Matt Burgess about the rise of “deepfake video abuse and its role in nonconsensual intimate imagery generation.” “This ecosystem is built on the back of open-source models,” says Casper. “Oftentimes it’s just an open-source model that has been used to develop an app that then a user uses.”
Writing for The Conversation, Research Scientist Judah Cohen and Mathew Barlow of UMass Lowell examine how the polar vortex and moisture from a warm Gulf of Mexico created a monster winter storm that brought freezing rain, sleet and snow to large parts of the U.S. “Some research suggests that even in a warming environment, cold events, while occurring less frequently, may still remain relatively severe in some locations. One factor may be increasing disruptions to the stratospheric polar vortex, which appear to be linked to the rapid warming of the Arctic with climate change,” they write. “A warmer environment also increases the likelihood that precipitation that would have fallen as snow in previous winters may now be more likely to fall as sleet and freezing rain.”
GBH reporter Renuka Balakrishnan spotlights “True or False,” a game featured in the MIT Museum’s “AI: Mind the Gap” exhibit, which invites visitors to guess the difference between a real and deepfake video. The exhibit “provides tips visitors can use outside the walls of the museum to improve media literacy in real life,” writes Balakrishnan.
Prof. Armando Solar-Lezama and Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speak with CNBC reporter Trevor Laurence Jockims about the impact of AI in the workforce. “These transitions are about efficiency, but also about trust and transparency: workers will need to trust that companies aren’t simply using AI as a cover for cost-cutting,” says Rus.
David Zipper, a senior fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, writes for Fast Company about the risks associated with introducing driverless vehicles to European cities. “Technological marvels they may be, but robotaxis are still cars and cars are a uniquely inefficient means of moving large numbers of people when space is at a premium,” writes Zipper. “By inviting robotaxis into their narrow, busy streets, European cities risk worsening congestion.”
The Wall Street Journal features reporter Amy Dockser Marcus’ visit to the MIT AgeLab and her time using the AGNES age-simulation suit on the The Future of Everything’s Best of 2025 list, reports Conor Grant for The Wall Street Journal. Grant highlights Marcus’ newfound awareness “of challenges faced by the elderly – and a new motivation to prepare for old age.”
A new study co-authored by Prof. Lawrence Schmidt examining AI and job losses found that “AI can successfully complete many of a worker’s job responsibilities but not all,” reports Pattie Hunt Sinacole for Boston.com. “About 14% of roles within a company can be performed by AI, according to Schmidt’s research. However, AI is less effective in tasks where critical thinking may be required,” Hunt Sinacole explains.
Researchers at MIT have developed a new physical model that can help “improve predictions of proton mobility across a wide range of metal oxides,” reports Ameya Paleja for Interesting Engineering. “This can help develop new materials and technologies powered by protons as charge carriers, rather than relying on lithium, which is widely used now,” explains Paleja.
Luke Hobson, assistant director of Industrial Design for MIT xPRO, speaks with Inside Higher Ed reporter Emma Whitford about safe and creative ways to use AI technology in the classroom. “For so long, online courses have been the same old, same old—essays and multiple choice questions,” says Hobson. “Now it’s like, ‘Okay, let’s elevate this. Let’s really make this into a whole new type of learning experience to make it better.”
Lila Sciences, a startup co-founded by Prof. Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli, is developing new platforms aimed at enabling AI-driven laboratories to accelerate materials discovery for energy, sustainability, and computing, writes David Rotman for Technology Review. “If they succeed, these companies could shorten the discovery process from decades to a few years or less,” Rotman notes.
Matt Carey MBA '17 and Greg Charvat, a former visiting researcher at the MIT Media Lab, co-founded TeraDAR, a startup that has developed advanced sensor technology that can see through various weather conditions that often confuse existing car sensors, reports Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe. “We’re going to the last part of the electromagnetic spectrum that no one has ever been able to build a product at before,” explains Carey. “And instead of being able to see through your hand like an X-ray, we can see through rain and snow and dust and fog.”
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.”
Forbes contributor Bryan Penprase spotlights several MIT initiatives aimed at fostering human-centered AI literacy. Penprase notes that MIT’s Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (RAISE) initiative “has developed tools for K-12 educators that integrate hands-on AI and robotics experience while emphasizing responsible AI use. MIT’s annual AI Education Summit gathers thought leaders from around the world to discuss AI usage, and MIT’s Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) initiative addresses how humans respond to AI systems as both an engineering challenge and a human design problem.”
Prof. Sara Beery spoke at TED Radio Hour about her work developing Inquire, an AI tool aimed at supercharging ecosystem conservation that is trained on millions of photos captured by citizen scientists, reports GBH. “Under the hood, what we’re doing is we’re developing AI models that can learn and understand similarities between images and scientific language,” explains Beery.
In a roundup of books aimed at helping people create healthier smartphone habits, New York Times reporter Hope Reese spotlights Prof. Sherry Turkle’s book, “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.” Reese writes that, “Using anecdotes from parents, educators and students, Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and sociologist at MIT, shows how the deterioration of conversation leads to loneliness. Setting limits on tech use and protecting spaces for real conversation can stave this off. But face-to-face conversation, she argues, is paramount.”