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Neuroscientist Susana Carmona's book, published by MIT Press, examines how pregnancy alters brain structure and function, including changes to the hippocampus linked to memory. The review, written by a fellow neuroscientist, recounts her own research beginning in 2000 on hippocampal volume changes during pregnancy and describes lasting effects that persist beyond childbirth.
MIT mechanical engineering researchers developed a flexible, wearable sheet embedded with bendable optical fibers that tracks its own 3D shape and detects external pressure, achieving error rates below half a centimeter in lab tests. The design uses rubber-cored fibers with roughened, dyed cladding to detect bending direction, and an LED-and-sensor setup paired with an algorithm reconstructs the sheet's shape in real time. The work was published in Advanced Intelligent Systems.
MIT professor Sherry Turkle has published 'Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines,' departing from her usual academic tone to deliver a sharp warning about overreliance on AI chatbots as substitutes for human relationships. Turkle says interviews conducted during the pandemic revealed people preferring chatbot companionship over real-world engagement, including withdrawal from politics and family life. She frames the book as an alarm-raising work in the tradition of texts like Silent Spring.
MIT researchers placed an AI agent in a virtual island environment with no assigned tasks and observed it over time. Without explicit goals, the agent began inventing games, constructing temple-like structures, drawing mandalas, and exploring its surroundings in playful ways.
Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who led development of the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo missions at MIT, has died aged 90. She is widely credited with coining the term 'software engineering' and later founded companies building programming systems used in aerospace, defence and other industries.
Neil Thompson's MIT lab tested OpenAI models including o1 through GPT-5.5 on unpublished theoretical problems drawn from recent papers in fields like probability, statistics theory, economic theory, high-energy theory, cosmology and quantum physics. Success rates rose from about 2 percent in mid-2024 to roughly 35 percent by mid-2026, with internet access blocked to ensure models reasoned rather than searched for answers. The researchers, including PhD student Gabriel Manso and scientist Claudio Mayrink Verdun, say the trend shows no sign of plateauing.
LNK Energies, a startup founded out of MIT, has developed a method to retrofit existing diesel Class 8 trucks to run on hydrogen using liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs). The company shrank the reactor needed to release hydrogen from the carrier liquid down to the size of a mini fridge, small enough to fit on a truck, according to CTO Alexis Huynh, who says the total cost of ownership is 13% cheaper than diesel.
A wearable device that vibrates the wrist to reduce tremor symptoms, originally built by MIT students in a 2017 product engineering course, has received FDA clearance for treating essential tremor in adults. The student team formally launched as Encora Therapeutics in 2020 and ran clinical trials, with one study finding 78 percent of participants reported benefits after 90 days of home use. Co-founder Daniel Carballo described the near decade-long process from prototype to clearance as difficult but rewarding.
A project called Nanolathe has rebuilt Total Annihilation as a 2.5D RTS engine released under an MIT license, allowing anyone to study, modify or extend the code. It ships with three original demo missions playable directly in desktop Chrome, Edge or Safari using just a keyboard and mouse, with no installation or game files required.
MIT researchers led by Chen Yu, with Nina Cao and Kaitlyn Becker, developed a soft sheet embedded with modified optical fibers that can track how it bends and twists in three dimensions. Unlike earlier waveguide sensors that only measured simple curvature along a line, the new design reconstructs the full surface shape as it deforms, detailed in a study in Advanced Intelligent Systems.
Christina Qi, who built and later shut down MIT-founded hedge fund Domeyard after a losing 2020, now runs market data startup Databento as CEO. The company, which serves 70,000 customers including Nvidia and OpenAI, raised a $97 million Series B round in July, bringing total disclosed funding to about $127 million, and reports eight-figure annual recurring revenue.
At MIT's Future Fest, longtime MIT faculty member Sherry Turkle discussed her new book examining why people instinctively anthropomorphize robots and chatbots. She notes that even brief exchanges with 'relational artifacts' make people feel cared for, prompting them to reciprocate that care. The piece also recounts a TechCrunch reporter's visit to MIT's CSAIL lab, where $50,000 Unitree humanoid robots drew similarly instinctive, human-like greetings from visitors.