MIT Media Lab

08/28/2026

Media Lab alum Shayne Longpre co-leads the AI Observatory, a public platform that aggregates and analyzes real conversations with popular chatbots (collected with users’ consent). As MIT Technology Review reports, the project’s early research finds a significant gap between the platforms’ reports on the way their users interact with these tools, and the way people whose conversations appear in their datasets use them.

“No single company report tells the whole story,” Dr. Longpre says.

But a new study shows that work use cases make up less of the picture than AI companies claim.

08/26/2026

In Scientific American, Professor Danielle Wood, who leads the Space Enabled group at the Media Lab, emphasizes the importance of space sustainability.

“We’ve had a pretty consistent model—‘get it into space, and then we’re finished,’” she says.

As space traffic increases, though, bringing atmospheric pollution and space debris along with it, a new model is necessary.

“Sustainability in space means that we are able to leave to future generations something like the natural state of the Earth, the moon and the solar system.”

Two new missions are revealing how robotic repair and assembly could become routine on the final frontier

08/26/2026

What if you could speak words to an AI-driven robot that could then turn those words into a physical object? That’s the exact question driving the research of Alexander Htet Kyaw, a PhD student in the MIT EECS Department.

That question led Kyaw’s interdepartmental research team at MIT to develop Speech to Reality. Say "I need a chair," and within five minutes, one materializes in front of you. For Kyaw and his team, the vision is clear: democratizing manufacturing means putting the power to create in anyone's hands.

"By combining natural language with modular assembly, we're enabling anyone to speak objects into existence," says Kyaw. "The idea is to make design and fabrication fast, accessible, and sustainable."

The project has been named one of Fast Company's World Changing Ideas for 2026.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91546670/academic-excellence-world-changing-ideas-2026

08/25/2026

MIT Spectrum connects friends and supporters of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to MIT’s vision, impact, and exceptional community.

08/24/2026

Researchers in the Biomechatronics group at the Media Lab have developed a new biohybrid system that uses rewired nerves to revive organs paralyzed by injury or disease. These “living implants” could open the door to a new genre of medicine, one in which a person’s own tissue becomes the hardware.

A new biohybrid system reprograms living muscles into fatigue-resistant, computer-controlled motors that can be implanted inside the body to restore movement in organs. Development of the myoneural actuator was led by Hugh Herr and colleagues at MIT.

08/21/2026

Kayode Dada, a rising senior in MIT Mechanical Engineering, is also an MIT Admissions blogger, an MIT Orientation captain, and a game designer. He brought all of those interests and activities together in designing a card-trading game for incoming MIT students, called “Campus Trade.” After its initial launch, Dada refined the game with Cassandra Lee, a research designer in the MIT Center for Constructive Communication. Lee supervised Dada’s junior-year .mit project through the realtalk@MIT program, which supports students who design and organize their own creative community infrastructure.

“Community development work really requires a student who understands and is willing to fight for the value of people, stories, and being in community,” Lee says. “Consistently throughout this project, it was clear that Kayode is more than capable of balancing his own spirit with the grueling organizing work that makes a project like ‘Campus Trade’ possible.”

Ultimately, Dada hopes to pursue a career in game design after he graduates. “Before, I didn’t really believe I could do it,” he says, “but now that I have this project under my belt, some real experience working on a game on a large scale, I definitely have a lot of ideas.”

MIT senior Kayode Dada, who is passionate about game design, has created “Campus Trade,” a card game to use as an icebreaker at MIT Orientation. He uses his roles as an MIT Admissions blogger and orientation captain to build community among prospective and incoming students.

08/20/2026

In Fast Company, Jude Cramer looks at a study by Media Lab PhD students Anku Rani and Valdemar Danry, Professor Paul Liang, Dr. Andrew Lippman, and Professor Pattie Maes, which shows that chatbots can help people detect misinformation, but may also reduce users’ ability to spot fake news on their own — particularly if they simply provide answers, rather than guiding users to find the answer themselves.

08/19/2026

MIT researchers have invented a new microscope that can image electrical activity in neurons distributed across the brain of an entire organism — in this case, the experimental model Danio rerio (zebrafish).

“All of the parts of the brain are connected together, so if you want to truly understand the brain, you have to understand how all the neurons work together as an emergent whole,” says senior author Professor Ed Boyden, who holds a joint appointment in Media Arts and Sciences (the academic program at the Media Lab) and McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

The study was published in Nature Methods (Nature Portfolio).

Read more: https://news.mit.edu/2026/high-speed-microscopy-reveals-electrical-activity-across-brain-0814 or link in profile

MIT engineers have invented a high-performance microscope that can image electrical activity in neurons distributed across the brain of an entire organism.

08/18/2026

New research from the Media Lab’s Responsive Environments group builds on their existing BuzzCam field recorder, putting real-time bee identification on a low-power chip.

The world’s largest bumblebee, Bombus dahlbomii, is disappearing. Once common across southern Chile and Argentina, it declined sharply after the introduction of the European bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, in the late 1990s. Tracking that decline means knowing where the remaining bees are, a task that has traditionally required expert observers to venture into remote terrain with passive acoustic recorders. While these devices can listen continuously, they produce large audio archives that must be stored, retrieved, and analyzed long after the moment has passed. The power and storage this demands limits how long, and how widely, they can be deployed.

In a paper published in Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio), researchers from the Media Lab’s Responsive Environments group and collaborators in Argentina describe a system that runs the analysis in the forest, on the sensor itself, as the buzz happens. The team trained a compact convolutional neural network to distinguish the flight buzz of B. dahlbomii from that of B. terrestris and from background noises. The model runs on a low-power microcontroller with a built-in neural network accelerator, integrated into the group’s BuzzCam field recorder.

Because recognition happens on the device, a sensor no longer needs connectivity, cloud computing, or a researcher’s return visit to say something useful. It can log species presence in real time, record only when a bee is actually present, and make long-term, many-site monitoring networks practical in places where hauling data or people is the hard part.

Authors: Patrick Chwalek (Media Lab), Marie Kuronaga (Media Lab and Kioxia Corporation), Marco Giordano (ETH Zürich), Aidan Bradshaw and Isamar Zhu (Media Lab), Professor Joseph A. Paradiso (Media Lab), and Marina Arbetman of Inibioma-Conicet/Unco (Universidad Nacional del Comahue and CONICET) in Bariloche, Argentina.

The underlying dataset, which the team collected and published openly last year in Scientific Data, was built with additional collaborators at the Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación in Chile, the Institut "Jožef Stefan" in Slovenia, and the University of Missouri (Mizzou).

Learn more:

A new paper from the Responsive Environments group puts real-time bee identification on a low-power chip inside the BuzzCam field recorder.