MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Postdoctoral associate Stewart Isaacs SM ’19 PhD ’24 speaks with Physics Today reporter Toni Feder about his passion for the sport of jump roping, research into solar-powered egg incubators for use in West Africa, and his work at MIT focused on addressing climate change and social inequities through the development of clean energy systems. “In jump rope, you have the basic building blocks of tricks. You need to combine them in ways that look interesting and are creative and fun to do. In engineering, you have the basic building blocks of physics. When you need to solve a problem, you need to come up with a creative solution to get there,” says Isaacs of the intersection between jump roping and scientific research. “And jump rope is hard. To be really good at it takes a lot of effort. The habits of working hard and problem-solving are also very useful in engineering.”

Prof. Katharina Ribbeck speaks with New York Times reporter Nina Agrawal about her research studying the health and medical benefits of mucus. “Ribbeck’s research has shown that the sugars on mucins can effectively switch off mechanisms that the bacteria involved in strep throat or cholera, for example, or fungus in a yeast infection, use to go from innocuous to harmful,” explains Agrawal. 

Researchers at MIT have found that “more than 98% of prisons in the United States experienced at least ten days that were hotter than every previous summer, with the worst of the heat-exposed prisons concentrated in the Southwest,” reports Minnah Arshad for USA Today. s

MIT researchers have developed a new training technique called Heterogeneous Pretrained Transformers (HPT) that could help make general-purpose robots more efficient and adaptable, reports Christopher Isak for TechAcute. “The main advantage of this technique is its ability to integrate data from different sources into a unified system,” explains Isak. “This approach is similar to how large language models are trained, showing proficiency across many tasks due to their extensive and varied training data. HPT enables robots to learn from a wide range of experiences and environments.” 

Using a sonar-based technique called Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (OAWRS), researchers at MIT and elsewhere have tracked a swarm of cod off the coast of Norway eating millions of migrating capelin fish, reports Ed Cara for Gizmodo. Cara notes that in the future this technique could potentially allow “researchers and others to more easily monitor the health of these important fish and other life in marine ecosystems.”

Alumna Jessica Galica speaks with Boston Globe reporter Kara Baskin about women in the workforce, and how to create better work-life balance while also pursuing meaningful work. “In 2024, power is the freedom and flexibility to make choices that you want,” says Galica. “I do see women choosing to pause and choosing to downshift as a form of power — because they’re actively and intentionally making that choice. This is a way to exhibit that power, and to go after what you want.”

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a “black-hole triple, the first known instance of a three-body system that includes a black hole, which is not supposed to be part of the mix,” reports Dennis Overbye for The New York Times.  The researchers propose that the black hole “could have resulted from a sort of immaculate conception whereby the progenitor star disappeared from the universe without any fireworks.”

Prof. Stuart Madnick speaks with Boston Globe reporter Scooty Nickerson about how to prevent and address data breaches. “Do not put all your eggs in one basket,” says Madnick. “Assume they are breaking in, and make it so they can’t break into every one of [your] systems.” 

Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Fiona Murray highlights the importance of developing a new approach to capital gains tax increases. “By focusing on the underlying behaviors we want to incentivize, we can structure taxes more effectively,” explains Murray. “When we provide tax breaks to companies for spending on R&D, we do it to spur behavior we know is good for the overall health of the economy.” 

Prof. Simon Johnson, one of the recipients of the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics, speaks with Times Higher Education reporter Jack Grove about his journey from a childhood in Sheffield as the son of a screw manufacturer to studying for his PhD at MIT and serving as chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. Speaking about how to help ensure AI is used to benefit society and workers, Johnson explains: “Big tech doesn’t like us, but we need a plan for this, and the role of economists like us is to get ideas like this out there so they can be hammered out in the policy world.”