April 21, 2026

The new word in home construction could be “plastics”

Single-use plastics are a persistent source of environmental pollution, and the need to house a growing global population puts increasing pressure on resources such as timber. MIT engineers have an idea that could make a dent in both problems at once. In a recent study, a team led by mechanical engineering professor David Hardt, SM…

A natural protein may protect the GI tract from infection

April 21, 2026
Embedded in the body’s mucosal surfaces, proteins called lectins bind to sugars found on cell surfaces. A team led by MIT chemistry professor Laura Kiessling has found that one such protein, intelectin-2, both helps fortify the mucosal barrier and offers broad-spectrum protection against harmful bacteria found in the GI tract.  Intelectin-2 binds to a sugar…

This tool could show how consciousness works

April 21, 2026
How does the physical matter in our brains translate into thoughts, sensations, and emotions? It’s hard to explore that question without neurosurgery. But in a recent paper, MIT philosopher Matthias Michel, Lincoln Lab researcher Daniel Freeman, and colleagues outline a strategy for doing so with an emerging tool called transcranial focused ultrasound. This noninvasive technology…

Early life may have breathed oxygen earlier than believed

April 21, 2026
Around 2.3 billion years ago, a pivotal period known as the Great Oxidation Event set the evolutionary course for oxygen-breathing life on Earth. But MIT geobiologists and colleagues have found evidence that some early forms of life evolved the ability to use oxygen hundreds of millions of years before that. By mapping enzyme sequences from…

Analog computing from waste heat

April 21, 2026
Heat generated by electronic devices is usually a problem, but a team led by Giuseppe Romano, a research scientist at MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, has found a way to use it for data processing that doesn’t rely on electricity. In this analog computing method, input data is encoded not as binary 1s and 0s…

LLMs+

April 21, 2026
When ChatGPT launched as an experimental prototype in late 2022, OpenAI’s chatbot became an everyday everything app for hundreds of millions of people. LLMs like ChatGPT were the new future: The entire tech industry was consumed by the inferno, with companies racing to spin up rival products. The ashes of the old tech world still…

Supercharged scams

April 21, 2026
When ChatGPT was released to the public in late 2022, it opened people’s eyes to how easily generative AI could churn out vast amounts of human-seeming text from simple prompts. This quickly caught the attention of criminals, who soon began using large language models to produce malicious emails—both the untargeted spam kind and more sophisticated,…

World models

April 21, 2026
AI systems have already gained impressive mastery over the digital world, but the physical world is still humanity’s domain. As it turns out, building an AI system that can compose a novel or code an app is far easier than developing one that can fold laundry or navigate a city street. To get there, many…

Weaponized deepfakes

April 21, 2026
For years, experts have warned that deepfakes—AI-generated videos, images, or audio recordings of people doing or saying things they haven’t actually done in real life—could be deployed in malicious ways.  These dangers are now here. Improvements in deepfake technology, and the widespread availability of easy-to-use and cheap (or free) generative models, have made it easier…