“At MIT, innovation ranges from awe-inspiring technology to down-to-Earth creativity,” noted Chronicle, during a campus visit this year for an episode of the program. In 2025, MIT researchers made headlines across print publications, podcasts, and video platforms for key scientific advances, from breakthroughs in quantum and artificial intelligence to new efforts aimed at improving pediatric health care and cancer diagnosis. MIT faculty, researchers, students, alumni and staff helped demystify new technologies, highlighted the practical hands-on learning the Institute is known for, and shared what inspires their research with viewers, readers and listeners around the world. Below is a sampling of news […]

Even networks long considered “untrainable” can learn effectively with a bit of a helping hand. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have shown that a brief period of alignment between neural networks, a method they call guidance, can dramatically improve the performance of architectures previously thought unsuitable for modern tasks. Their findings suggest that many so-called “ineffective” networks may simply start from less-than-ideal starting points, and that short-term guidance can place them in a spot that makes learning easier for the network.  The team’s guidance method works by encouraging a target network to match the internal […]

In August 2025, Wang Lei decided it was finally time to say goodbye to his electric vehicle. Wang, who is 39, had bought the car in 2016, when EVs still felt experimental in Beijing. It was a compact Chinese brand. The subsidies were good, and the salesman talked about “supporting domestic innovation.” At the time, only a few people around him were driving on batteries. He liked being early. But now, the car’s range had started to shrink as the battery’s health declined. He could have replaced the battery, but the warranty had expired; the cost and trouble no longer […]