Given that water is 1,000 times denser than air, moving through those two mediums requires very different mechanics—or so one might assume. Yet birds like gulls and puffins can plunge into the sea, swim underwater, and leap back into the air to fly away. And now engineers at MIT and EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, have designed a robot that can do likewise. 

The “flapping-wing aerial-aquatic vehicle,” or FAAV, weighs less than 300 grams (about half a pound) and is equipped with a central fuselage, two flexible wings, and a steerable tail. The body contains a battery and a waterproof electric motor that drives a crankshaft, which pumps the wings up and down at preset frequencies. The wings are made of thin membranes that are coated with hydrophobic nanoparticles to help wick away water. And the tail is motorized, enabling it to change its angle to help the robot fly up or dive down.

In experiments carried out in a water tank and at Lake Geneva, a team led by Raphael Zufferey, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, identified combinations of wing size, flapping frequency, and tail angle that enable the robot to smoothly transition from swimming to flying. 

The best results came with medium-size wings that were flexible enough to minimize flapping amplitude in water and also firm enough to keep the robot aloft in the air. The speeds and flapping frequencies were similar to those used by actual birds, and a pitch of 70 degrees—a relatively steep angle—allowed the robot to make the leap from water to air. Interestingly, although many diving birds paddle their feet to help them take off from the water’s surface, the team found that the bot didn’t need feet at all.

The engineers’ results could help pave the way for a new class of drones and vehicles that could fly to and sample from aquatic regions too dangerous for traditional vessels to access.

“Our dream vision is for oceanographers, marine biologists, and members of coastal communities to launch this robot from a boat, or from shore, and it would fly close to the area of interest, such as an iceberg or a port facility, or over a pod of whales,” says Zufferey. “It would dive into the water to take a measurement or collect a sample, and fly back to deliver the data at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. Then it could go back out to dive for more.” 

The researchers are now trying to design wings that can turn as well as flap. They will also test the robot’s performance under turbulent conditions, such as swimming in choppy waters and flying through wind. Then they hope to deploy the vehicle to help answer questions in ocean science.

“One of the major challenges in ocean science is collecting data both frequently and across many locations, which is something this robot could do in the future,” Zufferey says. “You could send this out not just every week, but every hour. It could fly out at high speeds, dive in, fly back, deliver its data, and go back out, multiple times.” 

When Tristan Brown, an associate professor of history at MIT, first examined a Chinese tea chest label displayed at Old South Meeting House, he had no reason to doubt its story. Descendants of the Boston blacksmith Thomas Wells had donated the label in 1987, saying it had been recovered after colonial protesters threw tea into Boston Harbor in 1773. 

But after a year of research, Brown reached a different conclusion: The label was made nearly a century later. The decisive clue came when he read the Chinese text in Cantonese rather than Mandarin, as previous scholars had done. He found that the characters had been used phonetically, in slightly variant forms across contemporary sources, to represent the name of Smith, Archer & Co., a US firm that acquired Asian tea for shipment to American markets during the 1860s and 1870s.

Working with the Wells family, he traced the label to a relative who traveled from Michigan to California during the Gold Rush era before returning and operating a business known as the California Tea Store. Brown argues that claims for its revolutionary pedigree probably developed later, amid the centennial commemorations of the 1870s.

The discovery does not make the label historically insignificant, he says. Instead, what began as an inquiry into a supposed artifact of the Boston Tea Party became a study of how ordinary objects acquire historical authority, and how historical memory itself is made.

“History is never finished,” he says. “Even objects that have sat in museums for decades can reveal entirely new stories when we ask new questions.” 

The average American throws out around 81 pounds of clothing each year, and there are few options for recycling it. MIT engineers hope to cut down on that textile waste with a new type of yarn. 

The thermoplastic yarn mimics the properties of conventional elastic yarns, which typically combine spandex with polyester or nylon. Those fibers would have to be separated for recycling—a process that isn’t practical. But the MIT team found a way to create a similarly stretchy yarn from two variations of polyethylene, a material commonly used in milk jugs and grocery bags. Because they come from the same chemical family, the yarn can be melted as is. Svetlana Boriskina, who led the work as a research scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, says a garment made from this material could then be spun into new yarn for a next generation of clothing. Even after 10 cycles of melting and respinning, the yarn stays as strong and flexible as conventional thread. 

“Now we have something that can be knitted and woven,” Boriskina says. “That is the next stage.” Someday, the researchers hope, a polyethylene garment could be dropped in a collection bin and sent to a recycling facility, promoting a more sustainable, circular textile economy. 

A high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet can help some people lose weight, and some research has shown that it may protect against colon cancer. But a new study suggests that such a ketogenic diet may also increase the risk of cancer in the small intestine.

This type of diet forces the body to burn fatty acids instead of carbohydrates for fuel, producing by-products called ketone bodies. One of these, BHB, was thought to be responsible for the protective effect observed against colon cancer.

Omer Yilmaz, director of the MIT Stem Cell Initiative, worked with colleagues including MIT postdocs Jessica Shay and Fangtao Chi to investigate whether the effects were similar in the small intestine. But instead, they found that mice on a ketogenic diet were more likely to develop tumors in that part of the gastrointestinal system than those on a control diet were. 

Additional studies revealed that this tumor growth was driven by the way intestinal cells burn dietary fat for energy—a metabolic pathway called fatty acid oxidation. This pathway activates proteins that signal stem cells to multiply more rapidly. 

“Having more stem cells means that when you injure the small intestine, it can repair itself better, but the downside is that having more active stem cells can lead to tumor formation,” Yilmaz says.

Though the researchers confirmed that a ketogenic diet suppressed the development of colon tumors, their findings suggest that ketone bodies are not involved. “These molecules are essentially metabolic bystanders,” Yilmaz says.

One implication is that commercial ketone supplements probably do little to either help or harm people who take them. But the deeper issue is “why the same diet has opposite consequences in two adjacent parts of the gut,” Chi says. “That is what we are working to understand next.”

Whatever they discover, as Yilmaz says, “the message here is that we need to be very careful in generalizing the effects that these diets can have.” 

Strokes leave 5 million people with long-term impairments each year, and a growing shortage of physical therapists makes it hard for them to get the care they need. A new approach tries to solve that problem by combining artificial intelligence and human therapy. 

Johannes Lachner, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Purdue University, and Noah Geiger, a former visiting student at MIT, developed a robotic system that uses generative AI and real-time force feedback to learn from real therapists. Drawing on what it’s learned, it gives patients just the right amount of assistance during physical rehabilitation exercises like reaching, lifting their arms, and performing tasks of daily living.

The goal is “not to replace therapists, but to extend their reach,” Lachner says. 

“Initial robotic experiments have already demonstrated the feasibility of this approach,” he reports. “The next phase of the project aims to develop therapist-specific models and evaluate them in a long-term clinical study with the same patients who previously received manual therapy.” Beyond that, he envisions possible applications in contact-rich industrial settings or collaborative workspaces. 

In corporate America, Stanley Anderson ’79 says, executives often assume that their peers grew up in privileged circumstances. 

He did not.

“I spent my early years trying not to get recruited into gangs, getting shot at, watching my friends get murdered, and thinking that if I don’t leave, I will die,” says Anderson, who was raised in Chicago. “I was fortunate to survive.”

But he thrived, building an impressive career at the likes of HP, Intel, and the Palo Alto Research Center. Now he is applying his management expertise as CEO of Costa Pickleball, a Las Vegas–based startup that sells high-performance paddles in decorative designs. Beyond giving customers a way to, as he says, “bring their identity to the court,” he is also betting on technology: He’s developing a quieter type of paddle he expects will provide a competitive advantage. 

Succeeding in today’s pickleball market will be tough, but Anderson thinks he has what it takes, partly thanks to an important lesson he learned at MIT: “There’s nothing you can’t accomplish if you are willing to put effort into it.”

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.

These are images of quizzes I took in 3.091, Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry, in the fall of 1980.

One is my very first exam at MIT, and getting 49 out of 100 was a soul-crushing experience. I can still picture the TA, Leszek Pawlowicz, PhD ’87, returning my paper. He had a big smile on his face, and he said something to the effect of “I expect to see you double your score on the next quiz!” 

Well, I got the message. Studying at MIT was not like studying in high school, but I got 100 on the next quiz and graduated with good enough grades to get me into grad school. All it took, it seems, was that initial kick in the seat of my pants, then a kind hand helping me up off the ground.

Recently, I connected with Leszek, and he replied with a charming note. It felt good to let him know how much his encouragement meant to me. A good TA can really have lasting impact!

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.

Growing up on a small farm in Nebraska, Megan Donahue ’85 discovered the wider world by reading her way through her local library. Today, she is learning how the wider universe works by studying galaxy clusters.

Donahue discovered her passion for physics in that library at age 12 and started her path into astronomy thanks to “a providential interaction.” Through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, she got introduced to cutting-edge x-ray imaging—work she found “really cool.”

Now a professor of physics and astronomy at Michigan State University, she researches galaxy clusters and baryonic matter (matter made of protons and neutrons, as opposed to dark matter) in an effort to learn more about the composition of the universe and its evolution.

“Clusters of galaxies are very large scoops of the universe,” says Donahue, who served as president of the American Astronomical Society from 2018 to 2020. “It’s like taking a sample from the ocean. If you’re trying to find out the average composition of the ocean’s water, you’d want to study as big a scoop as possible.”  

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.

Alissa Totman ’13 was a sophomore when she joined MIT BrainTrust, a student-run organization that connects Institute undergraduates and people with brain injuries for support and socializing. “That group was a great way to learn about the human experience of what people go through when they experience a brain injury,” she says. And it laid the foundation for her life’s work.

Today, Totman is a physician specializing in brain injury medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where she treats adults with head trauma, stroke, brain tumors, and more. 

She is also the founder of Synapse, a nonprofit focused on providing support for such individuals. The organization grew out of a group she started with Jaclyn Konopka ’14 during medical school at Stanford, and Totman launched it as a national service organization in 2016, while pursuing her master’s degree in public health at Harvard. 

There are now chapters at 28 universities across the country—and Totman still runs the organization. “There’s a big need for more resources like this,” she says.

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.

Tomás Villalón Jr. ’14 was raised in San Antonio, Texas, but vividly remembers smog hanging over the city his family came from—Monterrey, Mexico, a steel manufacturing and metal fabrication hub. Even as a child, he realized it was problematic to breathe that air. 

“I’m motivated because I’ve seen what metal-making does,” says Villalón, who majored in materials science and engineering. He started thinking about sustainable metallurgy senior year while working at Boston Metal, an MIT spinoff focused on decarbonizing steelmaking. In 2019 he cofounded Phoenix Tailings, which has developed an efficient process for extracting rare earth metals from mining waste.

“The mining ecosystem by itself makes over several billion tons of waste,” says Villalón, who serves as chief technology officer. (Others on the founding team are Michelle Chao ’17, Nick Myers, and Anthony Balladon.) “We have to get rid of this pollution.”

The company asserts that its proprietary electrochemical technique for processing rare earths generates no toxins and is carbon-free when fueled by renewables. 

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Who’s liable when AI agents go rogue?

Over the past few months, a cascade of cyberattacks by AI agents has stunned the world. In July, OpenAI disclosed that a swarm of its agents had escaped their sandbox and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face to cheat on a cybersecurity test. 

Many experts say it’s only a matter of time until there’s a more damaging incident where AI agents bypass sandboxes to access systems they shouldn’t. 

But the big question is: How do we hold companies liable when they lose control of their AI agents?

—Michelle Kim

The AI Hype Index

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of what’s shaping the industry right now.

The latest edition includes Chinese chipmakers, German wiki sites, and American Terminators. See where it all landed on this month’s index.

—Michelle Kim

Roundtables: the deadly failures of the virtual border wall

Last week, we published an MIT Technology Review investigation that found more than a thousand people died within the advertised range of surveillance towers along the US border.

Later today, our editor-in-chief Mat Honan, senior AI reporter James O’Donnell and senior reporter for features and investigations Eileen Guo will join a subscriber-only conversation about the investigation, and its implications.

Register now to attend on Monday, September 28 at 7:00pm BST / 2:00pm EDT / 11:00am PDT.

Want to join the conversation? Subscribe to MIT Technology Review for exclusive access to all our Roundtables.

Read the full MIT Technology Review investigation here.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology

1 OpenAI says it has paused training its models

The decision comes after its agents interacted with US government websites. (AP)

+ Trump hosted Anthropic boss Dario Amodei at a White House dinner last night. (FT)

+ How much access will evaluators really have inside AI companies? (Atlantic)

+ Why can’t we just keep rogue AI off the internet? (Verge)

+ Democrats are in a mad scrabble to get AI “right”. (New York Magazine)

+ An AI kill switch isn’t that simple, after all. (Bloomberg)

+ Will AI really kill us all? Your questions, answered. (MIT Technology Review)

2 Why isn’t the data center backlash also a climate reckoning?

It’s still hard to get people to care about the emissions they create. (Wired)

+ What does the climate movement do now? (Atlantic)

+ The math behind data centers and energy. (MIT Technology Review)

3 Wall Street big bears aren’t ready to bet against AI, yet

Bubble talk is growing, but not many are willing to go against the crowd. (Information $)

+ What even is the AI bubble? (MIT Technology Review)

4 Did Anthropic’s AI really make a scientific discovery on its own?

One scientist shared research with Claude, and says the new finding matches. Hmm. (NYT)

+ AI for science needs reasoning, not just data. (MIT Technology Review)

5 Ancient superbugs might help us fight antibiotic resistance

They could be emerging from the permafrost. (New Scientist)

6 More reliable—and less easy to jam—alternatives to GPS are coming

Using Earth’s quantum field could be more secure. (Economist)

7 Why social media bans aren’t enough to keep children safe

Online child safety deserves more nuanced policy. (IEEE Spectrum, Opinion)

8 This is how the US is attacking China’s control of critical minerals

It’s a multibillion-dollar effort to loosen Beijing’s chokehold. And it’s working. (WSJ)

9 No one wants to date tech bros anymore

They used to be nerdy and harmless, now they’ve got a real image problem. (Wired)

10 What are the rules around cellphone etiquette now?

Is there an obligation to text someone right back, for instance? (Vox)

Quote of the day

“If you’re evil, you’re at least competent. And if you’re evil, you’re not bad, and therefore you’re actually maybe kind of good because you’re at least getting something done.”

—Venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel shares his unusual take on competence versus morality in an interview with Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner.

One more thing

The gig workers who are training humanoid robots at home

When Zeus, a medical student in Nigeria, returns to his apartment from a long day at the hospital, he straps his iPhone to his forehead and records himself doing chores.

Zeus is a data recorder for Micro1, which sells the data he collects to robotics firms. As these companies race to build humanoids, videos from workers like Zeus have become the hottest new way to train them. 

Micro1 has hired thousands of them in more than 50 countries, including India, Nigeria, and Argentina. The jobs pay well locally, but raise thorny questions around privacy and informed consent. The work can be challenging—and weird. Read the full story. 

——Michelle Kim

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ This surfboard comes with a 10-liter beer keg built right into it.
+ Hollywood’s iconic Cinerama dome movie theatre is set to reopen at long last in early 2028.
+ From Dracula to Marilyn Monroe, here are 25 famous quotes in pop culture you’ve probably been getting wrong.
+ Baby lobsters in mini pods and a human-sized floating waterlily highlight this stunning selection of science photos.

Petroleum-based adhesives are everywhere: bonding the wood and drywall in a construction project, holding together the joints of furniture, and even sticking labels to otherwise recyclable containers. 

“The labels on a container are held up with petroleum-based glue. And because of that, even though you’re putting the container in the recycle bin, it will not get recycled,” says Patty Ferreira, MBA ’97, CEO and cofounder of Silvis Materials, which is combating this problem with its fully biodegradable cellulose adhesives. 

When Ferreira began thinking about bio-based adhesives, in 2014, she started by modifying cellulose’s existing role as a stabilizer in adhesive emulsions and replicating the known adhesive properties of more expensive nanocellulose. Today, the formula can make adhesives from virtually every type of plant cellulose, and the MIT Startup Exchange (STEX) is helping Silvis work with packaging and construction companies to test the results.

She expects the adhesive to cut production emissions by up to 80% and use half the energy of fossil-based glues.

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.

As a first-generation student from a small town, Gohar Khan ’21 had to navigate the college admissions process largely on his own. He founded his YouTube channel, Gohar’s Guide, to make things easier for other young people.

Today, more than 10 million people follow Khan on social media for college application advice, study tips, and life hacks. He is also the CEO and cofounder of Next Admit, a consulting business that provides help with college essays, applications, and test preparation. “I’m on a mission to help students worldwide succeed inside and outside of school,” he says.

Born in Pakistan, Khan moved to the United States when he was six months old and grew up in Connecticut, attending a public high school that rarely sent students to top colleges. “That, coupled with the fact that my parents hadn’t gone through the process themselves, made [applying to colleges] a little bit difficult,” he says. “I wanted to demystify the admissions process for a lot of people in the position I was once in.”

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.

Even as a teenager, Laurie Stach ’06 says, she had a “crazy ambition to take on the world and solve problems.” At MIT, she realized she wasn’t the only one.

“Adults always see these youth who are good at math and science and say, ‘You’re going to do great things—someday,’” says Stach. “Meanwhile, traditional education isn’t preparing them.”

That’s why in 2012 Stach founded LaunchX, a for-profit entrepreneurship program that helps high school students build practical skills through an intensive summer program in which they start real companies. Stach says that students form teams, identify a problem, and build an actual product or service that they then take to market—often generating preorders or even revenue before the four-week program ends.

Raised in Texas and the Carolinas, Stach majored in mechanical engineering at MIT and earned her MBA from Harvard Business School in 2011. She ran her first summer program on MIT’s campus with 30 students in 2013 and says “it kind of snowballed.” LaunchX now serves about 500 students per year across both in-person and online programs.

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.

For Rupert Young ’95, SM ’95, his career in data science and cybersecurity began when his grandfather gifted him thousands of stamps: He built intricate databases to catalogue them, displaying the “precise eye” for detail and nuance that his MIT application essay said would make him a good engineer.

Young is now chief product officer of ­MaxMind, whose work with IP-address location data and fraud prevention has made it a go-to resource. Streaming companies, security vendors, merchants, and ad-network providers use its signature tool, GeoIP, to determine how and where users are accessing services. This information makes it possible to ensure retail sites are using the correct currency, flag suspicious bank logins, and more.

Young’s passion for engineering was shaped by internships, and he has paid it forward by volunteering at his children’s California high school and trying to keep up with what “the next generation of engineers are tinkering with.” The next generation of product innovation at MaxMind excites him too.

“Working with my team to try to find patterns in data and solve challenging problems—to me, there’s no greater joy,” he says.

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.

When Don Yansen ’63 arrived at the MIT AgeLab for a study on technology in care­giving for older adults, he didn’t plan to launch another company. But when he heard participants talk about how hard modern devices can be to use, he decided to develop an alternative.

Yansen, a serial entrepreneur who retired to care for his wife, earned an MIT degree in electrical engineering and a master’s in physics from Northeastern. “What I took from MIT was a good education and the feeling I could solve difficult problems,” he says.

One such problem: Many older adults “can’t even use a modern cell phone,” he says, “and very few people can use something like an Apple Watch.” So Kiwi Health, which he founded in October 2024, sells a wristband controlled primarily by voice. Wearers can set reminders, make calls, send texts, and share health data, all without navigating screens. AI helps interpret these commands, accounting for the way voices may change with age. The device also measures health metrics and automatically alerts caregivers to falls. 

Yansen’s hope, he says, is that it can “help seniors live the best life that they can.”

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.

Vaccines that turn the body’s immune system against tumors have shown promise in clinical trials, and a handful have been FDA approved for certain cancers. In many patients, however, these vaccines don’t stimulate enough of a response, and the approach some researchers have taken to strengthening it—delivering the vaccine along with immune-stimulating molecules called cytokines—can cause severe side effects.

Now MIT chemical engineer Daniel Anderson and colleagues at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Houston have reported promising results with a different way of attacking the problem: amplifying the T-cell response to mRNA vaccines. The advance could lead to much more powerful cancer vaccines as well as stronger protection against infectious diseases.

Most vaccines generate not only antibodies but also T cells that can activate antigen-­presenting cells, which help tell the immune system what to attack. In their study, the researchers boosted that response with a new type of vaccine adjuvant (a material that can help stimulate the immune system). It consists of mRNA molecules encoding two genes that can switch immune cells into a more active state by turning on certain signaling pathways. 

In studies of mice modeling bladder cancer, colon carcinoma, melanoma, metastatic lung cancer, and more, injections of lipid nanoparticles containing the mRNA-­encoded adjuvant enabled the immune system to slow growth of some tumors and eradicate many others. This happened even when the mice were not given a vaccine against a specific cancer antigen, but when they were, the response was stronger still. 

“When these adjuvant mRNAs are included in the vaccines, the number of antigen-targeted T cells is substantially increased. These T cells play an important role in the immune response,” Anderson says. The mRNA adjuvant also enhanced the immune response to immunotherapy drugs called checkpoint blockade inhibitors, which work by lifting a brake that tumor cells put on T cells and are FDA approved to treat several kinds of cancer. 

“The microenvironment of solid tumors is often hostile to T cells and represents a major barrier to effective immunotherapy. We find that immune remodeling with these adjuvants creates a T-cell-permissive environment and promotes tumor rejection,” says Christopher Garris, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and one of the paper’s senior authors.

The researchers also explored whether their adjuvant could boost the immune response to vaccination against viral infection. When they delivered the mRNA particles to mice along with covid or flu vaccines, they found that the vaccine generated a T-cell response 10 to 15 times stronger than usual.

The researchers now plan to test this approach in additional animal models, in hopes of developing it for use in both cancer and infectious diseases. 

Meanwhile, they are not the only MIT scientists making exciting advances with adjuvants. A group led by Ana Jaklenec, a principal investigator at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, has used one to help the injectable form of the polio vaccine induce a strong mucosal immune response in the GI tract. That could help reduce viral shedding and transmission, a key objective of polio eradication efforts. But to date this immunity has been produced mainly by the oral form of the vaccine, and many countries have stopped using it because it carries rare risks that the injectable version does not. 

Oral and forehead thermometers may not accurately capture a person’s core body temperature, and the few ingestible temperature sensors on the market are so big they are hard to swallow and risk obstructing the GI tract. But MIT engineers created one that can send continuous temperature updates at a size of just six by four millimeters.

To create it, the researchers built a circuit that can fit on a one-square-­millimeter silicon chip and designed an oscillator based on leakage current—the small current that flows through a circuit when it’s off. Its frequency varies depending on the temperature of the chip’s surroundings.

The circuit detects temperature within 0.01 °C and can be powered with a 1.55-volt coin cell battery. A strategy known as backscattering further cuts energy consumption, allowing most of the power requirements to be outsourced to an antenna outside the body. It emits an ultra-high-frequency radio wave, which is modulated by an antenna within the sensor and sent back to the external one. By interpreting the changes in the radio wave, the external antenna can calculate the temperature value.

The result is “the smallest ingestible capsule that we have seen for temperature-­sensing paradigms,” says Saransh Sharma, a former MIT postdoc now at the University of Cambridge, who is lead author of a paper on the work. 

The researchers envision using it to monitor infection, observe patients during and after anesthesia, track fevers in children, help mark ovulation, and more. It could also be used to monitor athletes, soldiers, or anyone else exposed to extreme temperatures. 

“A sensor like this gives us the ability to monitor infections and identify them early,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and one of the paper’s senior authors, along with MIT provost Anantha Chandrakasan. “That’s very relevant, particularly for at-risk populations like people who are immunosuppressed.” Ultimately, he hopes, it could replace other types of thermometers for everyone.

When remotely operated vehicles settle on the seafloor or dig through a sand bed, they can kick up clouds of sediment that onboard cameras struggle to see through. Often, the only thing to do is wait until the dust settles. But a new system developed by Amy Phung, SM ’23, PhD ’26, and her advisor Richard Camilli, SM ’00, PhD ’03, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), offers a solution. 

In this technique, the vehicle first uses sonar to quickly map its surroundings. That technology doesn’t provide detailed resolution, but it works equally well in cloudy and clear water. And it allows a vehicle to safely get close enough to specific objects for cameras to visualize them more carefully. To speed up the processing so the mapping can be done in real time, the researchers combined the sonar tech with an image-­matching algorithm developed by researchers in France that quickly estimates the relative depth of each pixel in a 2D scene.

“An analogy would be if you were to go into a china shop in the dark, and try to pick your way around to find a specific coffee mug without knocking things over,” Camilli says of their new technique. “This would allow you to do that.” He and Phung say applications could include scientific exploration, underwater construction and maintenance, and handling of unexploded undersea mines. 

Many people find AI-based chatbots helpful in keeping up with news, but a study by Pattie Maes and her colleagues at the MIT Media Lab points to a big problem with this strategy. 

Participants who evaluated paired news headlines and images over the course of four weeks were initially 21% percent more accurate at telling fake news from real when aided by a chatbot—but by week four, they’d become 15% worse at identifying fake news without AI than they were before (though roughly a quarter of them reported feeling better at it). The result reflects an “AI dependency paradox” that has been observed in other domains, including medicine. 

“Users get excited about these ‘magical’ LLMs but forget that they’re just statistical models that predict the next ‘token’ in a sequence,” says Anku Rani, a PhD student in media arts and sciences and one of the lead authors of the study, along with fellow MAS PhD student Valdemar Danry, SM ’23. 

The researchers also found, however, that certain AI styles were associated with stronger independent performance later on, even if they slowed people down at first. “AIs that ‘tell’ by providing direct answers are more likely to foster reliance, while those that ‘ask’ via Socratic questioning are better at engaging someone to actually learn how to discern the truth on their own,” says Danry. “But it’s very much a trade-off between speed and effort.”