California's legislature unanimously passed Assembly Bill 1856, which carves out open-source operating systems and software distributed under permissive licenses such as GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache from the state's Digital Age Assurance Act. The bill also exempts software components not sold as standalone apps through app stores, covering package managers like apt and pacman, and excludes browser extension stores. The measure now awaits Governor Gavin Newsom's signature before the underlying law takes effect on January 1, 2027.
An MIT student reportedly worked with dimethyl mercury despite the university's policy prohibiting its purchase or synthesis on campus. MIT confirmed the compound's use was unauthorized, though details on how the student obtained it and the extent of exposure remain unclear.
A Thomson Reuters 2026 Future of Professionals Report, based on a global survey of 1,800 professionals, found that 91% believe their organizations aren't yet capturing the value AI promises. The study points to a growing gap between early enthusiasm for AI experimentation and current frustration over rising costs and unclear returns.
A developer released Talos, version 0.15.1-alpha, an MIT-licensed AI agent that pairs a sandboxed Claude-based worker with real shell access for building, testing, and browsing tasks. Every action the agent attempts is checked by a separate deterministic security kernel that authorizes each tool call individually, tying it to exact arguments and letting it run only once within a thirty-second window.
A developer is building a simulator for CII's Mitra-15, a French 16-bit minicomputer from the early 1970s, by adapting an existing SDS 940 simulator within the SIMH framework. The project is still in an early, incomplete stage, with core instruction sets, memory management, and numerous peripheral devices like disks, tape readers, and various I/O channels still to be implemented. The developer relied heavily on documentation compiled by Pascal Chour due to the scarcity of surviving Mitra-15 materials.
An MIT ad hoc committee studying AI's effect on teaching and research has released recommendations calling for coordinated institutional change rather than piecemeal fixes. The group found that generative AI tools can already produce credible answers to most undergraduate assignments, including essays, proofs, and coding problems, and that this has coincided with declining attendance at office hours and study groups. The committee is proposing a mix of immediate actions and longer-term planning efforts to address the shift.
In a lengthy essay on Gates Notes, Bill Gates outlined ideas to cushion AI's disruption of the labor market, including taxing companies that replace workers with automation and formally designating certain jobs as off-limits to AI. He also voiced qualified support for the 'Pacing The Frontier' open letter calling for a slowdown in AI development, while doubting such restraint could hold long-term.
MIT Technology Review has published its annual Kids issue, exploring how children are experiencing and adapting to a world saturated with AI and technology, including topics like AI companionship, monitoring apps, and schools' use of AI. Separately, in an interview featured in the same roundup, Bill Gates told MIT Technology Review's Mat Honan that he believes society has already crossed certain safety thresholds with artificial intelligence, expressing concern about risks ranging from economic disruption to loss of control over AI systems.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory, working with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, built the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O), which used infrared laser light instead of radio waves to send data from the spacecraft. During the mission the system downlinked nearly half a terabyte of data at speeds up to 260 megabits per second, delivering sharp footage of the moon's far side, a solar eclipse, and meteoroid impacts.
MIT Media Lab researchers Pattie Maes, Anku Rani and Valdemar Danry ran a four-week study where participants used a chatbot to judge whether headline-image pairs were real or fake news. Accuracy jumped 21% initially with AI help, but by the study's end, unaided performance had dropped 15% below baseline, even though many participants believed they'd improved.
Researchers at MIT, led by Saransh Sharma with senior authors Giovanni Traverso and Anantha Chandrakasan, developed an ingestible capsule that measures body temperature to within 0.01°C. The device runs on a coin-cell battery and uses backscattering to shift most power demands to an external antenna, resulting in what they call the smallest ingestible temperature sensor yet built.
Don Yansen, an MIT-trained electrical engineer who retired to care for his wife, joined an MIT AgeLab study examining how older adults use technology in caregiving contexts. Hearing participants describe how frustrating and confusing modern devices could be, he decided to build a simpler alternative and founded a new company around it.
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