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.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-08-26
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.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-08-25
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.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-08-25
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.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-08-25
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.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-08-25
Laurie Stach, a 2006 MIT graduate, recalled harboring an early drive to tackle big problems and discovered at MIT that many of her peers shared that same ambition. She argues that while adults praise talented young people in math and science, conventional schooling fails to equip them to act on their ideas now rather than in some distant future.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-08-25
Kelly Shen, an MIT graduate from the class of 2017, works in Sotheby's art intelligence division, where she designs algorithms that forecast auction prices based on buyer trends and artist popularity. Her work also includes cataloguing art pieces and building real-time systems capable of handling thousands of simultaneous bidders on the auction house's website.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-08-25
MIT Technology Review spoke with cognitive scientists comparing how babies and large language models acquire language, finding that infants learn to speak proficiently after hearing only 10 to 30 million words, while LLMs require vastly more data to approach similar fluency. Stanford's Michael C. Frank noted that training a model like GPT-2 on the same word count a toddler hears produces a 'nonsense generator,' not coherent speech.
futurism.com
· 2026-08-25
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