MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Prof. Anna Frebel spotlights the work of Cecilia Payne, whose research “laid the foundation of stellar astrophysics,” reports Liz Kruesi for National Geographic. “It is such a fundamental piece of understanding for humanity,” says Frebel of the importance of Payne’s work discovering that stars are mainly made up of hydrogen and helium 

A new study co-authored by Prof. Emeritus Frank Levy that finds chatbot-style artificial intelligence could “fuel a reshaping of the population and labor market map of America,” writes Steve Lohr for The New York Times. Levy and his colleagues found that midsize cities in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and South are “well positioned to use AI to become more productive, helping to draw more people to those areas.” 

President Sally Kornbluth speaks with undergraduate student Emiko Pope for the MIT Admissions Blog about her personal interests, passions, and life at MIT. Sally “is proud of MIT and how it can provide real solutions to society’s problems,” writes Pope. “She loves that you can get a daily fix of science because you are surrounded by such amazing people and endeavors.”

Boston Globe reporter Mark Feeney spotlights the “Moving Objects” exhibit at the MIT Museum, which features 50 or so items from the museum’s permanent collection. “Over the course of five years, 140 truckloads got moved when the museum transferred its holdings from several sites to a new storage facility, in Medford,” Feeney writes. “The items in the show were chosen because in one way or another the movers found themselves affected by them. They were amusing or beautiful or unexpected or otherwise unusual.”

MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems has announced plans to build the “world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant in Virginia, to generate power by the early 2030s,” reports Timothy Gardner for Reuters. The project, “could revolutionize the global energy industry by tapping into a virtually limitless power source, similar to that which fuels the stars,” writes Gardner. 

Physics World has selected two research advances by MIT physicists for its Top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year for 2024, reports Hamish Johnston for Physics World. Graduate student Andrew Denniston and his colleagues were honored for their work “being the first to unify two distinct descriptions of atomic nuclei,” which Johnston describes as a “major step forward in our understanding of nuclear structure and strong interactions.” MIT researchers were also featured for their work demonstrating quantum error correction on an atomic processor with 48 logical qubits, making it “far more likely that quantum computers will become practical problem-solving machines.”

Prof. Daron Acemoglu, one of the recipients of the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics, speaks with NPR Planet Money hosts Jeff Guo and Greg Rosalsky about the academic inspirations that led to his award-winning research studying the role of institutions in shaping economies. “In 1980, as I was in middle school, just the beginning of my seventh grade, Turkey suffered a big military coup,” explains Acemoglu. “There were soldiers everywhere, including in our school. Turkey was definitely not a democratic country at the time, and it was also suffering via a series of economic problems. I got interested in exactly these sets of issues.”

New research by graduate student William Parker SM '22 has found that two geomagnetic storms have led to the mass migrations of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, reports Jeff Foust for Space News. “This is a significant impact,” says Parker. “This is critical infrastructure to all of our space operations moving forward, and it will only become more important as time goes on.”

In an interview with CNBC, Prof. Max Tegmark highlights the importance of increased AI regulation, specifically as a method to mitigate potential harm from large language models. “All other technologies in the United States, all other industries, have some kind of safety standards,” says Tegmark. “The only industry that is completely unregulated right now, which has no safety standards, is AI.”