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In the Media

Displaying 15 news clips on page 1

Scientific American

Prof. Katharina Ribbeck speaks with Christopher Intagliata of Scientific American’s “Science Quickly” podcast about her research exploring how mucus can treat and prevent disease. “The basic building blocks of mucus that give mucus its gooey nature are these threadlike molecules—they look like tiny bottlebrushes—that display lots and lots of sugar molecules on their backbone,” explains Ribbeck. “And these sugar molecules—we call them glycans—interact with molecules from the immune system and microbes directly. And the exact configuration and density of these sugar molecules is really important for health.”

New Scientist

FutureTech researcher Tamay Besiroglu speaks with New Scientist reporter Chris Stokel-Walker about the rapid rate at which large language models (LLMs) are improving. “While Besiroglu believes that this increase in LLM performance is partly due to more efficient software coding, the researchers were unable to pinpoint precisely how those efficiencies were gained – in part because AI algorithms are often impenetrable black boxes,” writes Stokel-Walker. “He also points out that hardware improvements still play a big role in increased performance.”

The Hill

Writing for The Hill, Sloan Prof. Catherine Wolfram and UCLA Prof. Kimberly Clausing explore why they feel U.S. politicians should embrace carbon pricing. “2025 will be a big year for Congress to tackle longstanding fiscal issues and further climate policy efforts,” they write. “Before this can happen, politicians need to hear timely arguments backed by up-to-date evidence.”

WCVB

Prof. Yossi Sheffi, director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, speaks with WCVB-TV about how the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore and the closing of the Port of Baltimore could impact car shipments on the East Coast. Sheffi explains that not all ports can handle cars like Baltimore, and they require “hundreds of trucks and railcars that are equipped to transport vehicles and bring them to the dealers.”

Marketplace

Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Marketplace reporter Matt Levin about the potential impact of raising the retirement age in the United States. Gruber suggests a new system where retirement age would vary by income. “People who are sufficiently high income, should be expected to work longer and get less in the system,” says Gruber. “People with physically demanding jobs and low income should be able to retire earlier.”

Boston 25 News

Prof. Yossi Sheffi, director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, discusses the potential impacts of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore on shipping, logistics and the economy. “Many other ports are not equipped to handle the type of commodities that go to Baltimore,” Sheffi explains.

Boston Magazine

A number of MIT faculty and alumni – including Prof. Daniela Rus, Prof. Regina Barzilay, Research Affiliate Haddad Habib, Research Scientist Lex Fridman, Marc Raibert PhD '77, former Postdoc Rana El Kaliouby and Ray Kurzweil '70 – have been named key figures “at the forefront of Boston’s AI revolution,” reports Wyndham Lewis for Boston Magazine. These researchers are “driving progress and reshaping the way we live,” writes Lewis.

Nature

Prof. Long Ju and his colleagues observed the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect (FQAHE) when five layers of graphene were sandwiched between sheets of boron nitride, reports Dan Garisto for Nature. The findings are, “capturing physicists’ imagination because they are fundamentally new discoveries about how electrons behave,” writes Garisto.

Bloomberg

Prof. David Autor speaks with Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway about how AI could be leveraged to improve inequality, emphasizing the policy choices governments will need to make to ensure the technology is beneficial to humans. “Automation is not the primary source of how innovation improves our lives,” says Autor. “Many of the things we do with new tools is create new capabilities that we didn’t previously have.”

The New York Times

Prof. David Autor and Prof. Daron Acemoglu speak with New York Times columnist Peter Coy about the impact of AI on the workforce. Acemoglu and Autor are “optimistic about a continuing role for people in the labor market,” writes Coy. “An upper bound of the fraction of jobs that would be affected by A.I. and computer vision technologies within the next 10 years is less than 10 percent,” says Acemoglu.

Politico

MIT researchers have found that “when an AI tool for radiologists produced a wrong answer, doctors were more likely to come to the wrong conclusion in their diagnoses,” report Daniel Payne, Carmen Paun, Ruth Reader and Erin Schumaker for Politico. “The study explored the findings of 140 radiologists using AI to make diagnoses based on chest X-rays,” they write. “How AI affected care wasn’t dependent on the doctors’ levels of experience, specialty or performance. And lower-performing radiologists didn’t benefit more from AI assistance than their peers.”

Forbes

In an article for Forbes, Sloan Research Scientist Ranjan Pal and Prof. Bodhibrata Nag of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta highlight the  risks associated with the rise of Internet of things-driven smart cities and homes. “Unlike traditional catastrophic bond markets, where the (natural) catastrophe does not affect financial stability, a cyber-catastrophe can affect financial stability,” they write. “Hence, more information is needed by bond writing parties to screen cyber-risk exposure to guarantee no threat to financial stability.”

The Wall Street Journal

Alumnus Benjamin Rapoport co-founded Precision Neuroscience, a brain-computer interface company, that is developing technology that will allow “paralyzed patients the ability to operate a computer with their thoughts,” reports Jo Craven McGinty for The Wall Street Journal. “In order to be a citizen of the world in 2024, to communicate with loved ones, to make a living, the ability to work with a digital system is indispensable,” says Rapoport. “To operate a word processor is totally transformative.”