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Subvocal has begun taking pre-orders for a wearable that uses radio signals, rather than cameras or electrodes, to detect mouth and tongue muscle movement and convert silently mouthed words into text. The company says shipments are expected to begin in Q1 2027. The approach draws on prior research from MIT Media Lab's AlterEgo project, which used electrodes instead of radar.
MIT researchers reportedly applied OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra system to modify the open weights of Alibaba's Qwen model directly, rather than through standard fine-tuning. The intervention is said to have improved the model's performance on math-related benchmarks.
In an interview with Nature, architect and MIT Senseable City Lab director Carlo Ratti discusses how climate change is forcing cities to adapt and how technology, including artificial intelligence, can support that redesign. He argues that despite the growing role of data and algorithms, citizens should ultimately decide how their cities are shaped, ahead of his appearance at the World Architecture Festival in Fort Lauderdale.
Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of prediction market exchange Kalshi and now the world's youngest self-made female billionaire with a $2.6 billion net worth per Forbes, said on a podcast that many capable founders undermine themselves by becoming fixated on calculating probabilities before acting. She argued that excessive focus on odds can paralyze decision-making, and that believing things will work out and taking the risk is essential to starting a business.
A father and his 12-year-old son spent roughly two months converting a free robot kit, picked up at MIT Swapfest, into a miniature handheld gaming device housed in an Altoids tin. The project evolved through several versions, moving from a repurposed display and Arduino to a smaller Arduino Nano with LiPo battery power, as they worked to fit all components inside the tin while running simple games.
EMACS, one of the first full-screen text editors, turns 50 this year, according to MIT Technology Review. It originated in 1976 on video terminals at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and was later rewritten for numerous operating systems, including Apple's Mac OS X.
Emacs, one of the earliest full-screen text editors, began running on video terminals at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1976 and remains in active use today. It grew out of the TECO editing language created by Dan Murphy in 1962 and Carl Mikkelsen's 1971 Control-R extension, which let programmers see live edits on screen rather than reprinting lines. The software was later ported to many operating systems, including a version Apple shipped with Mac OS X.
NASA is aiming to establish a small, self-sustaining city on the moon by the end of the century, as both the US and China pursue lunar base programs. Such a base would need to withstand asteroid impacts, constant radiation, abrasive dust and extreme temperature swings while relying on autonomous robots, nuclear power and local resource use to stay operational.
HeyPuter has released the Everything Project, a mono-repository on GitHub aiming to recreate proprietary software like Office, Slack, Photoshop and AutoCAD as free, MIT-licensed alternatives. The repo spans categories including office tools, collaboration, creative tools, engineering, productivity, finance, business, developer tools and games, and requires Node.js 22.12 or newer to run.
MIT Technology Review published a special 'Impossible' issue evaluating six long-promised technologies, from exercise pills to nuclear-powered spacecraft, asking experts what progress has been made and what still blocks them. Separately, biotech columnist Jessica Hamzelou wrote about attending a screening of a documentary on Elizabeth Holmes, using it to question the limits of science journalism's ability to fully verify claims. The outlet also asked subscribers to vote on the next topic for its Roundtables discussion series.
MIT researchers created a gum-stick-sized robot with a flexible gel body and two thin fins coated in genetically modified muscle cells that contract when exposed to light. By targeting light at either fin and varying its frequency, the team can steer the robot's direction and speed, and it successfully navigated a small underwater maze at a top speed of about four body lengths per minute.
MIT researchers placed 13 AI agents, built on Claude Opus 4.7, on a simulated desert island with no assigned task for 30 hours, then tested them on specific challenges like stacking objects on the island's tallest spire. Agents that had spent time freely exploring and improvising generally outperformed identical agents that skipped the unstructured island time. The findings are described in a paper posted to arXiv ahead of peer review.