Finding ways to stay hydrated and lower your body temperature are important.

Activists said they are alarmed for the unattended horses that roam the outskirts of Montenegro's capital amid the heat wave in Europe.

For people at high risk of developing breast cancer, yearly mammograms may not be enough to detect tumors early. To make earlier diagnosis easier, an MIT team has developed portable detectors based on ultrasound, which could be used much more frequently.

In a new paper, the team reports that they have improved the resolution of the images produced by their system, making it easier to spot potential tumors, as well as cysts and microcalcifications. The researchers also created a user interface that makes it simple to use the ultrasound probe, even for people with no expertise in ultrasonography.

This system, they believe, could not only enable earlier detection, but also allow for long-term monitoring following breast cancer treatment — either in a doctor’s office or at home.

“At each time interval, the computer interface guides you to position the device in exactly the same location, which is important for the longitudinal monitoring of a given tissue. It’s very intuitive and quite easy to use,” says Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and the senior author of the study.

Former MIT postdoc Md Osman Goni Nayeem and MIT graduate students Shrihari Viswanath and Hyeokjun Yoon are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications.

Higher-quality imaging

While many people receive annual mammograms to check for breast cancer, it is possible for cancer to develop in between these annual screenings. These cancers, known as interval cancers, tend to be more aggressive, and they account for 20 to 30 percent of all breast cancer cases.

After losing an aunt to an interval breast cancer in 2015, Dagdeviren was motivated to develop a screening technique that would be more effective on women with dense breast tissue and could be performed more often than mammography. She decided on ultrasound, which uses sound waves to create images of tissue. Ultrasounds are often used to follow up on abnormal mammograms, but current ultrasound technology requires large equipment and a trained operator.

Earlier this year, Dagdeviren’s lab published a study in which they demonstrated a small ultrasound probe attached to an acquisition and processing module that is a little larger than a smartphone. This compact system can create a 3D image of the entire breast by scanning just two or three locations.

In the new Nature Communications study, the researchers reported several advances that allow for higher resolution imaging and greater ease of use.

One key advance is the addition of a “backing layer” to the ultrasound transducer. This layer helps to contain and focus the ultrasound waves, improving the resolution and quality of the resulting images. It also increases the range of soundwave frequencies that can be absorbed, and reduces both acoustical noise and electrical noise, further enhancing the images.

“With the backing layer, the device produces more accurate and sharper images, with a wider operating range of frequencies,” Nayeem says.

To further improve the quality of the images, the researchers designed an algorithm that adaptively performs a process called beamforming. This algorithm allows the system to compensate for differences in the speed at which sound waves travel through different types of tissue, such as skin and fat. 

“What we are trying to do is predict the speed of sound properties of the tissue you’re imaging, and then use that to reconstruct the image more accurately. We see up to a 10 percent improvement in the resolution just by applying this technique,” Viswanath says. 

The researchers asked 10 volunteers, who were not experts in ultrasound technology, to use the system to try to identify small micro targets embedded in a “tissue phantom” — a gel-like material engineered to mimic human tissue. Participants had a much higher success rate locating the spheres when they used the new system than when they used a traditional ultrasound probe.

A user-friendly system

For the new version of this system, the researchers also created a user interface, displayed on a computer screen, that guides the user to place the probe in the correct location. This could be especially important for tracking progression of treatments such as neoadjuvent therapy, or long-term monitoring of known abnormalities such as fibroadenomas or microcalcifications.

In a trial with seven people, the researchers found that the users were able to accurately place the probe in the correct location each time they did a scan. 

“Conventionally, you need an operator to move the probe around the breast, but we made a computer-vision interface for users to do it by themselves. This is very user-friendly and it shows live images on the screen,” Yoon says.

For future versions of this technology, the researchers hope to create an interface that could be used with a cellphone or tablet, making the system easier to carry. In addition to enabling earlier diagnosis, this type of system could make ultrasound more accessible to patients in areas where there aren’t enough trained ultrasound technicians, the researchers say.

Dagdeviren and some of her students now hope to form a company to work toward making the technology commercially available. While breast cancer diagnosis is their first target application, they hope to expand it to many others.

“The technology is so versatile that it can be used for any soft tissue imaging, from ovarian cancer to measuring endometriosis progression, or fetal monitoring,” Dagdeviren says.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, the Lyda Hill Foundation, the MIT Media Lab Consortium, and a Tata Center Technology and Design Fellowship.

A new big-data analysis of the U.S. pinpoints how urban design aids the health of city residents — especially when cities provide walking opportunities, greenery, and mixed-use streets with a blend of commercial and residential activity. 

The study examines tens of thousands of urban census-bureau tracts in the U.S., seeing how city features correlate with population health measures, while accounting for socioeconomic considerations as well. 

“We found that on a very large scale, urban planning and design, such as the availability of different amenities and their spatial arrangement, plays a critical role in population health outomes,” says Winston Yap, a visiting scholar at the MIT Senseable City Lab, a postdoc at Cornell University, and co-author of a new paper outlining the study’s findings. 

While there is not one design template for all locations, short and well-connected blocks with a variety of amenities, as well as the strategic placement of parks, all help well-being — physiologically and psychologically. 

“We usually think about physical health first, but we also found a high correlation between good design and mental health,” says Fabio Duarte, an MIT researcher and co-author of the paper. “If you are walking more, it is not only a matter of physical fitness, but gives people a chance to avoid isolation, have serendipitous meetings with people, and at least see there are others around.”

The paper, “Urban motifs associated with population health,” appears today in Nature Health. The authors are Yap; Duarte, who is associate director and a principal research scientist at MIT Senseable City Lab; postdocs Yu Zheng, Kee Moon Zhang, and Peng Luo, who is also an incoming assistant professor at the University of Iowa; Paolo Vineis, a professor at Imperial College, London; Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Lab; and Filip Biljecki, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore.

Only connect

The researchers say they conducted the analysis not just due to an interest in cities, but out of recognition that health care systems are often swamped, and preventative health measures are ever-more important. 

“We wanted to do this study because health care systems around the world are overloaded,” Yan says. “There’s a lot of burden on health care systems, and there is a need not just for treatment but for prevention as well, for obesity, high cholesterol, depression and other mental health issues, and more.” 

To conduct the study, the researchers analyzed 28,323 census tracts, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau along with health data from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They then used geospatial data, including more than 8 million street view images, to see how urban form related to the health status of residents in those areas. The study accounts for socioeconomic factors and other variables in building an assessment of the relationship between design and health. The study confimed that by themselves, socioeconomic factors are associated with urban health disparities; it then examined the relative impact of differences in urban design in those different settings. 

“By bringing together open demographic, health, and environmental data, the study highlights the importance of open data accessibility for planning healthy cities,” says Ratti.

The scholars also applied a graph deep-learning model to the data, an emerging machine-learning technique they used to help understand which key factors in urban design are most connected to health outcomes. 

The research reveals that in some cases, rectangularity in city blocks, and “building spread,” meaning structures that cover the full size of their lots, can enhance wellness. Examples of this include Manhattan or Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, where mixed-use buildings on relatively short blocks create many amenities and a variety of walking routes. That said, circular and curving street forms can also work, as long as they feature a lot of interconnectedness as well. 

Urban greenery is almost always a significant factor in urban wellness, with parks scoring high as a facet of city design that helps resident health. Beyond that, expanding the tree canopy can also help urban health outcomes. 

The presence of cultural institutions and restaurants are also linked to general health, while access to health care amenities are understandably connected to physical health improvements. In general, access to points of interest, broadly defined, whether cultural or commercial, is a significant factor in abetting better health, in cities across the country. 

“One of the major contributions of the study is that we look at not only one or two cities, but the entire United States,” Yap says. “In a large-scale study, we were trying to find patterns that were consistent across different urban contexts, as well as populations with different characteristics. Just using this data, we can predict very confidently the population health outcomes for a neighborhood.”

Knowing where to intervene

The research also provides a kind of road map for urban planners and city officials when it comes to policy decisions and local improvements. Among other things, the study suggests where cities might see the greatest return on investment in urban improvements, in health terms. Improvements in lower-income neighborhoods, on aggregate, may generate about four times the added health benefits than the same level of investment in better-off areas that already realize the benefits of good urban amenities. 

“It’s important to know where to intervene,” Yan says. 

“I think for me it shows how intertwined different policies are,” Duarte adds. “Some funding for urban development could have a direct influence on health, and could be more inexpensive than [direct spending on health].”

The researchers regard the study as just one empirical step in this domain. As they note, additional studies could observe changes over time, to further enhance our picture of the connection between urban design and health. Still, as the authors write in the paper, “we believe that our broad picture provides an overarching scaffolding for the understanding of the social and material determinants of health and can guide [further] analytical studies.” 

The research received support from the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) program of the National Research Foundation Singapore; the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART); and the MIT Senseable City Lab consortium. It is part of the Largescale 3D Geospatial Data for Urban Analytics project, supported by the National University of Singapore.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 01 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02719-5

Publisher Correction: Multi-centennial response of marine carbon pumps to global warming

For decades, neuroscientists have known that specific regions in the brain’s left hemisphere are responsible for processing language. However, a new study by MIT researchers shows that language processing also occurs in many other parts of the brain.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from more than 700 people, the researchers identified 17 additional regions of the brain that appear to play a role in language. These regions are scattered across the brain, including parts of the cerebellum, hippocampus, and cerebral cortex, and they make up about 5 percent of the total volume of the adult brain — about the size of a large strawberry.

“Even though there are all these distant components, it’s pretty restricted in terms of volume. You don’t need that much of the brain to do language,” says Evelina Fedorenko, an MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research,and the senior author of the study.

Exactly how these regions contribute to language processing is still to be discovered, although the researchers have made some progress toward determining the functions of the cerebellar regions that they identified.

MIT postdoc Agata Wolna is the lead author of the paper, which appears in the Journal of Neuroscience. Other authors include Aaron Wright, a K. Lisa Yang Post-Baccalaureate Research Scholar at MIT; Colton Casto, a graduate student at Harvard University; Samuel Hutchinson, a graduate student at MIT; and Benjamin Lipkin PhD ’26.

Tracking language

The brain’s language processing centers include Broca’s area, first discovered in the 1800s, plus additional regions in the left frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. Scientists have found that some of the corresponding areas of the right hemisphere also contribute to processing language, especially the social-emotional components of language.

There have also been hints that other parts of the brain might be involved in language processing. Early in her career, Fedorenko’s language studies often showed active brain regions outside of the canonical language centers, but she says she was discouraged from including them in her papers.

“When we initially started looking at language, in the first couple of papers, I tried to be comprehensive and include anything that seemed consistent across participants, and there was a huge amount of resistance,” she says. “People would say things like, ‘Well, we know those are not language areas, so please focus on the language areas.’”

In the new study, she and Wolna wanted to revisit those brain scans and see if they could systematically identify language regions outside of the standard language-processing areas.

To do that, they analyzed data from 772 people who had been scanned in Fedorenko’s lab since 2013. Each of these participants underwent a task known as a language localizer, which is used to determine the location of language processing areas for each subject. 

During the test, participants read or listen to sentences as well as sequences of nonwords. For each person, the researchers measure the difference in strength of response when reading real sentences or nonsense sequences. The brain areas that work harder during the sentence condition are considered to be doing something relevant to language, especially if they respond while both reading and listening to sentences.

“It’s a very simple paradigm that lets you identify this core language system in individual brains,” Wolna says.

When searching for language areas, the researchers usually use a relatively strict statistical threshold. In this study, they relaxed the threshold and also used some targeted searches in subcortical areas, in hopes of finding all areas that may contribute to language processing.“We always see this frontal temporal network, but there’s quite a lot of evidence that there are other regions that are also critical for language processing,” Wolna says. “By using a laxer threshold and zooming in on areas with weak MRI signal, we tried to maximize the chances of finding small and weakly responsive regions outside of this left frontal temporal system.”

A widespread network

For about 490 of the participants, the researchers also had data on how their brain responded during a spatial working memory task — remembering the locations of flashing squares on a grid. This task engages a brain network called the multiple demand system, which does not overlap with the core language areas.

This task allowed the researchers to ask whether any of the newly identified language-sensitive regions specifically respond to language and not more general cognitive processes.

Of the 17 new language sites that were revealed by this study, five are located in the cerebellum, which is mainly involved in coordinating the body’s movement. In a study published earlier this year, researchers led by Casto found that three of those cerebellar regions also became engaged during some nonlinguistic cognitive tasks, which was also seen in the new study.

“Those areas that respond to both language and some other tasks could be really interesting and important because they may be doing something like integrating information from different cortical systems,” Fedorenko says.

They also found language-selective regions in the medial frontal cortex, the bottom surface of the left temporal lobe, the hippocampus, and the amygdala. The researchers now plan to further study how these brain regions might contribute to language processing.

“We can now test some ideas from past work, and also more rigorously characterize these regions across different kinds of language manipulations, and different kinds of nonlinguistic tasks, to try to understand what it is that they’re doing,” Fedorenko says.

The research was funded by the Simons Center for the Social Brain at MIT, the McGovern Institute, MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence.

As a new academic year dawns, the MIT-Kalaniyot program is welcoming its second cohort of scholars to campus, expanding an innovative effort to build new connections between MIT and researchers from Israel. 

In fall 2026, MIT-Kalaniyot has 11 new scholars arriving at MIT to pursue research, collaborating with Institute faculty across a wide variety of disciplines. They consist of seven new Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellows and four new Kalaniyot Sabbatical Scholars, who are faculty on leave from institutions in Israel. 

It is another step forward for a program which, less than two years ago was still an idea on a drawing board. The project aims to enhance research and create stronger community ties — not only among those connected to the program, but across the MIT campus.

“The goals of the program are to build academic ties between MIT and Israel, alongside a strong, supportive community,” says Or Hen, an MIT nuclear physicist and a co-founder of MIT-Kalaniyot. “MIT has a mission that revolves around research, education, and entrepreneurship, and MIT-Kalaniyot strengthens MIT, to help meet that mission for the world.”

The scholars will be working on a wide range of topics, including mathematics, materials science, behavioral economics, architecture, modern history, chemistry, quantum computing, and computational methods for examining cellular activity.

“We designed Kalaniyot to strengthen MIT’s research and its community at the same time,” says Ernest Fraenkel, a professor of biological engineering and a co-founder of  MIT-Kalaniyot. “We now have scholars in the program working in each of MIT’s five schools. The academic breadth shows our model is working.” MIT-Kalaniyot will also feature its first teaching fellow at the Institute, hosted by MIT’s History program. 

MIT-Kalaniyot was founded by Hen and Fraenkel as a constructive response to discord over conflict in the Middle East. Hen is the Class of 1956 Associate Professor of Physics and associate director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science; Fraenkel is the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology.

Fraenkel and Hen credit multiple members of MIT’s community and upper administration for backing the MIT-Kalaniyot idea from the start, making it feasible for the program to launch. 

“When we first shared the idea, we were very encouraged by the response from MIT’s senior leadership,” Fraenkel says. “They understood the value of a faculty-led effort, and their constructive response gave us confidence that our approach could be successful.”

“This would be impossible to do the way we’re doing it without the administration’s support,” Hen says. “The program is faculty-led and institution-backed. That’s what you want.”

Hen adds: “I think MIT today is home to one of the most, if not the most, accepting and welcoming communities for Israelis, and I can stand by that statement very strongly. The way our community grew these past years is remarkable.”

Embedded at MIT

MIT-Kalaniyot, named for a well-known flower that grows in Israel and other parts of the region, welcomed its first cohort of scholars to the MIT campus for the 2025-26 academic year. Hen and Fraenkel also give Tal Cohen, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, substantial credit for developing the concept. 

Scholars at Israel’s nine state-recognized universities are eligible to seek the MIT-Kalaniyot fellowships, which enable research, collaboration, and training at the Institute. The scholars come from a range of academic and personal backgrounds, including both Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel. 

The program is highly competitive, with many more applicants than positions currently available. Applicants are encouraged to identify in advance MIT faculty they would like to work with; accepted applicants then already have a “faculty host” lined up. Many of the new fellows will be working with researchers in established MIT labs, for instance. 

“When they’re here, they are treated exactly like anybody else in an academic unit at MIT and that’s really important,” Fraenkel says. “They’re embedded in these places.”

The program is also intended to generate the kinds of community connections that help scholars flourish, both professionally and personally. MIT-Kalaniyot features weekly lunches, attended by people from the larger community, where scholars can forge connections and friendship. 

The program also features informal academic talks and discussions, with the talks given by MIT researchers both within and outside of MIT-Kalaniyot. Hen, for one, has already seen the benefits of such events; one paper he has recently co-authored directly stemmed from discussions he had at a program event. 

“The range of MIT faculty who stepped forward as hosts has been one of the most gratifying parts of the program,” Fraenkel says. “It shows that this is not confined to one field or one corner of the Institute. It is becoming part of MIT’s broader academic life.”

Adds Hen: “I think it sends a very strong and important message. We’re able to move forward at MIT and build collaborative partnerships with strong ties.”

An additional facet of the program is the potential impact of MIT-based research in practical, tangible ways. One of the 2025 fellows, a leading physician, focused her MIT work on new methods of breast cancer detection, and now, back in Israel, is working to apply those findings in active medical settings. 

Plans for future growth

Having first taken root at MIT, the MIT-Kalaniyot concept is now spreading to other places. In the last two years, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California have implemented the concept, with other universities in the process of adopting it as well. 

“This national movement all started by replicating the MIT model,” Hen says. “Each university then innovated in their own way. They start from the MIT approach, and then they adapt to what’s happening on their campus. They learn from us, we learn from them, and together we support a broad academic network.”

The progress at MIT and elsewhere has led Hen and Fraenkel to feel optimistic about the ongoing evolution of MIT-Kalaniyot. 

“We started at a tense time on our campus, not really knowing what the future would hold, and it’s exceeded our hopes,” Fraenkel says. “Now we want Kalaniyot to become a recognized center at MIT, funding seed grants for research that wouldn’t happen any other way.”  

While Fraenkel and Hen do not yet have a firm timetable for those developments, they regard them as being realistic. 

“Now we see Kalaniyot as a program that helps MIT well beyond our community,” Hen says. After all, he observes, simply as a vehicle for research, the program has the potential to provide added capacity for MIT, as well as the further connections to top scholars being generated by the effort. 

Indeed, Hen reflects, he is motivated the question: “How do we best support MIT in realizing its mission for the world?” Overall, he says, “I think that’s the ultimate goal of Kalaniyot. We do it in one way, other people can do it in other ways, and as long as you do net good, and support the MIT mission, we value and treasure that, and just want to be part of it.”

“I really believe this is the DNA of MIT,” Fraenkel says. “We’re all about finding practical solutions to society’s biggest problems. Kalaniyot brings extraordinary people here to do exactly that, and the whole Institute is stronger for it.”

Three teams comprising 35 students across eight different MIT departments and Wellesley College have been at work since fall 2025, designing critical early infrastructure elements that a moon base would require. This June, their designs were recognized with five awards at NASA’s 2026 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts — Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Forum. 

Among 75 submissions and 14 finalists, the MIT teams earned first and second place in the competition, as well as three best-in-theme awards. The Exploration-Class Lunar Integrated Power SystEm (ECLIPSE) team won first place overall and first in its theme category, lunar surface power. The communications and navigation constellation team, MELIORA, won second place overall and first in its theme category on Mars communications, position navigation and timing, which included a strategy for proving the design at the moon. And CHEESEBURGER, a campaign to mine and process lunar regolith into oxygen, metals, and bricks, won first in its theme category, lunar technology demonstrations. 

“NASA spent the spring telling the world what critical early infrastructure their upcoming permanent moon base will need,” says George Lordos, a research scientist and lecturer in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and in System Design and Management (SDM), who co-advised all three teams. “Over 30 MIT students spent this academic year designing much of the moon base — systems for generating, storing, and distributing power; robust systems for positioning, navigating, and communicating; and early experiments with essential technologies to live sustainably off the moon’s own dirt.”

A power grid for surviving lunar night and winter

The hardest constraint on NASA’s moon base is staying powered, because a failure in life-support power would doom the crew within hours. ECLIPSE is a reference design for a lunar grid engineered to stay up for more than 99.995 percent of the time — fewer than 27 minutes of downtime a year in the worst-case scenario, the standard demanded of the most critical data centers on Earth. It pairs two power sources that fail in different ways: banks of 20-meter solar masts in the sunlit highlands near the south pole, and, for the roughly 18-day stretch each year when the sun drops below the horizon, a pair of buried 20 kilowatt microreactors the team named CARROT, (Compact Autonomous Regolith-shielded Reactor Operating for Ten years). The CARROT reactor, a novel design developed independently by the ECLIPSE team, ended up being similar in design to NASA’s SR-1 reactor for the 2028 mission to Mars, both aiming to maximize speed-to-deployment. 

“Burying each reactor 1.3 meters down shrinks the keep-out zone from kilometers to meters, so crews can work nearby, and it saves tons on required shielding mass,” says Taylor Hampson, a PhD student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and ECLIPSE team co-lead.

The full design delivers an initial 120 kilowatts using a grid of buried aluminum cables and shielded direct-current power equipment. Laser-equipped rovers provide “Frontier Power” capability, beaming up to 10 kilowatts to sites beyond any cable, from a shadowed crater to a new outpost before its own grid exists. Patrick Riley, a graduate student in the Department of AeroAstro and ECLIPSE team co-lead, says the design’s point is to put reliability ahead of mass: “We sized it so the most likely failures never reach the moon base inhabitants, and so it scales from a first crew of six up to industrial demand without interrupting a commercial lunar economy.”

A network for exploring the moon and Mars, and calling home

MELIORA acts as the base’s relay and GPS. Although RASC-AL framed the communications, positioning, navigation, and timing competition sub-theme around Mars, the team also proposed a plan to validate their design in lunar geometry first, in step with the agency’s strategy to prove technology on the moon before extending it to Mars. To find the best design, the team ran a trade study across 5,764 candidate constellation geometries. The result grows from an initial three satellites to 23, returns more than 100 megabits per second to Earth-orbiting data networks over free-space optical links, and pins a user’s position to within 10 meters. For the Mars design, four relay satellites parked at gravitationally stable Lagrange points keep the link alive even during solar conjunction, the weeks when the sun sits between the two worlds and ordinarily cuts communication. On the surface, a user needs only a portable radio terminal and a chip-scale atomic clock — a timekeeper the size of a matchbox. 

“You should never have to think about whether the network is there — it just is, the way you don’t think about a cell tower,” says Ekaterina Tiukhtikova, an undergraduate studying both AeroAstro and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), and a MELIORA team co-lead. “We put almost all the complexity up in orbit, so everything on the surface stays portable and simple,” adds Clayton Lieberman, a graduate of the SDM program and team co-lead who wrote his thesis on MELIORA.

Making oxygen, metal, and bricks from lunar dirt

After power and communications, the third essential pillar of a lunar base is living off the land. The moon’s own regolith can supply oxygen to breathe and burn, metal to build with, and shielding to hide behind for protection from deadly radiation. CHEESEBURGER is a campaign of five robotic payloads that prove the supply chain one link at a time, followed by integration of the five into the first end-to-end lunar industry. 

The payloads carry a kitchen’s worth of names: SWISS prospects for the richest ore, BRIOCHES digs and sorts the regolith, BACON casts it into bricks, GRILLED MEAT melts it electrically to pull out metal and oxygen, and AVOCADO is the robotic builder that stacks the products into structures, including interlocking Moon BRICCSS that shield a habitat from radiation. The food theme was born during a January team outing at Sandwich, Massachusetts. “Naming the prospector SWISS and the metal extractor GRILLED MEAT turned a wall of acronyms into something the whole team could enjoy,” says Cesar Meza, a graduate student in AeroAstro and CHEESEBURGER co-lead. “It sounds like a joke until you see that each acronym clearly describes a serious piece of hardware doing one job in the pipeline.”

Thirty students, eight departments, and three teams for one moon base

More than 30 students contributed across the teams, from AeroAstro, SDM, Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), EECS, Mechanical Engineering (MechE), the Technology and Policy Program, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), along with a student from Wellesley College. Several student mentors and faculty advisors worked across more than one team, which is why ECLIPSE’s grid is sized to power CHEESEBURGER’s processing, CHEESEBURGER’s regolith handling is used to bury and shield ECLIPSE’s grid, and all three projects are designed to translate moon base lessons for a future mission to Mars. The teams were advised by Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems and interim department head of AeroAstro, who led ECLIPSE; Kerri Cahoy, the Sheila Evans Widnall Professor of Aerospace Engineering, who led MELIORA; Jeffrey Hoffman, professor of the practice in AeroAstro and a former NASA astronaut, who led CHEESEBURGER; Koroush Shirvan, Atlantic Richfield Career Development Professor in Energy Studies in Nuclear Science and Engineering, who co-advised ECLIPSE; and Lordos, who co-advised all three. Much of the day-to-day mentorship work is led by PhD student volunteers and runs through the MIT Space Resources Workshop, which Lordos founded in 2019.

“The winning teams demonstrated how academic innovation can support Artemis mission goals,” says Daniel Mazanek, RASC-AL program sponsor and senior space systems engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center, in NASA's announcement of the awards. “Their work highlights the important role student research plays in shaping future space exploration.”

NASA expects astronauts living on the lunar surface for months at a time by the early 2030s — the window ECLIPSE, MELIORA, and CHEESEBURGER were designed for. The picture the three teams had worked toward is unified: a crew at the lunar south pole, the lights on through the winter night, the network always up, and the first oxygen and bricks coming out of the ground beneath them. 

“A permanent base is no longer a slide in a strategy deck; NASA begins landing the first elements in 2027,” says de Weck. “Studies like these three let the agency see, before the concrete sets, how its power, communications, and resource choices depend on one another. That is precisely when independent, integrated architecture work has the most influence on the real plan.”

RASC-AL is administered by the National Institute of Aerospace on behalf of NASA. MIT has a long record in NASA’s student design competitions, with recent winning teams including the  HYDRATION Mars water production system, the Pale Red Dot Mars homesteading architecture, the deployable lunar tower MELLTT, the MARTEMIS lunar Mars analog campaign, the MAPLE autonomous lunar robot pathfinding system, the CERBERUZ lunar recycling project, and the THERMOS cryogenic fluid management system. This work was supported in part by NASA, the Massachusetts Space Grant, MIT AeroAstro, and the MIT Space Resources Workshop. One student was supported by a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity Fellowship.

The full teams:

ECLIPSE — Team leads: Taylor Hampson (graduate student, Nuclear Science and Engineering) and Patrick Riley (graduate student, AeroAstro). Reactor team: Liliana Arias, Sydney Menne, Julian Rocher and Pavel Shilenko (graduate students, NSE). Power management and distribution team: Evrard Constant and Mary Foxen (graduate students, AeroAstro), Janhavi Joglekar and Asma Patel (undergraduate students, AeroAstro). Solar and architecture team: Zachary Dawson (graduate student, System Design and Management), Sreeja Akula and Ian Jimenez (undergraduate students, AeroAstro; EAPS), Yohan Lim (graduate student, AeroAstro/Technology and Policy Program), CJ Taglienti (graduate student, AeroAstro/MBA). Student co-advisors: Yana Charoenboonvivat, Lanie McKinney (AeroAstro), Palak Patel (MechE). Industry mentor: Sully Marigliano-Crevecoeur (Technetics). Faculty: Olivier de Weck (lead) and Jeffrey Hoffman (AeroAstro), George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM), and Koroush Shirvan (NSE).

MELIORA — Team leads: Clayton Lieberman and Katiyayni Balachandran (System Design and Management), Ekaterina Tiukhtikova (undergraduate, AeroAstro and EECS), Celvi Lisy (AeroAstro). Team members: Thomas Harrington and Zachary T. Barnes (SDM), Asael Acosta (undergraduate, AeroAstro). Student co-advisor: Lanie McKinnery (AeroAstro). Faculty: Kerri Cahoy (lead), Jeffrey Hoffman and Olivier de Weck (AeroAstro), and George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM).

CHEESEBURGER — Team leads: Cesar Meza (graduate student, AeroAstro) and Elizabeth Romero (undergraduate, AeroAstro). Team members: Rachel Dunphy, Shreya Kothnur, Hailey Polson (undergraduates, AeroAstro), Christopher Kwon, Jose Soto, Lanie McKinney (graduate students, AeroAstro), Marvin Martinez (undergraduate, MechE), Ananda Santos Figueiredo (graduate student, Technology and Policy Program), Evangeline Haiqi Wang (undergraduate, Computer Science and Psychology, Wellesley College). Faculty: Jeffrey Hoffman (lead) and Olivier de Weck (AeroAstro), and George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM).

An MIT-led research program aimed at creating future microsystems capable of sustainably transmitting data with greater bandwidth and higher efficiency than is possible today has made several significant advances since it was established in 2022. 

These include the invention of devices within systems that can much more easily integrate electronics — manipulating data with electricity — with photonics, which does the same with light. The microsystems, the first of their kind, also promise to be cost-effective because, among other advantages, they can be manufactured using existing equipment in traditional electronics foundries and packaging houses.

“Our disruptive electronic-photonic integrated solutions will enable us to leap from [transmitting data at] hundreds of terabits per second to greater than 1 petabit per second,” said Anu Agarwal, who leads MIT’s FUTUR-IC, at an April webinar titled, “Shaping the Future of Semiconductors: Power, Performance, and Possibility.” The event was sponsored by the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and Startup Exchange.

An advanced system using co-packaged optics can provide improved bandwidth and energy savings compared to what is used today, which is electronics-only or pluggable optics.

Toward sustainability

The microchips behind everything from smartphones to medical imaging can be traced to about 500 megatons of carbon dioxide-equivalent lifetime emissions in 2021, and every year the world produces more than 50 million tons of electronic waste. Further, the huge data centers necessary for complex computations like on-demand video are growing, and will require close to 10 percent of the world’s electricity by 2030.

“This is neither scalable nor sustainable, and cannot continue,” Agarwal has reiterated over the years. FUTUR-IC, funded by the National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator, was created to address these resource-efficiency issues.

For example, integrating photonics with the electronics that underpin today’s microchips could address energy use because the transmission, or communication of data, using light is much more energy efficient. “Our mantra is to use electronics for computation and photonics for communication to bring this energy crisis under control,” says Agarwal.

Currently, however, it is difficult and expensive to connect electronic chips with their photonic counterparts within a single package. That’s partly because the supply-chain ecosystem for co-packaged optics is still immature.

New devices

Enter two new devices developed through FUTUR-IC aimed at making it easier — and less expensive — to integrate photonic chips with microchips. One, the evanescent coupler, was featured on the cover of Advanced Engineering Materials last year. Another, known as the graded index coupler (GRIN), was reported in the March 2026 print issue of the Journal of Physics: Photonics. 

A third new coupler was developed by an MIT team led by Professor Juejun Hu of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. It was reported in a 2023 issue of Laser & Photonics Reviews. That work was supported by the Department of Energy. 

The three couplers are the first optical equivalents of “solder bumps,” or the tiny dots of metal that allow chip-to-chip or chip-to-substrate connections for electron flow. Until this MIT work, there were no analogous “optical bump” options for photonics.

And if photonics is to be integrated with electronics, “you’ll need both metal bumps and optical bumps, because there are devices on your photonics chip that will require both an electrical signal and an optical signal,” says Drew Weninger PhD ’25, first author of the papers on both the evanescent and GRIN couplers. Weninger is now at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

As with electronics, many options of optical bumps will be necessary, as “each type has substantial trade-offs,” wrote Weninger and colleagues in a review article in Nature about coupler advances published earlier this year.

For example, the GRIN coupler can be used over a wider spectrum of light than is possible with the evanescent coupler, Weninger says. The evanescent coupler, however, is easier to fabricate and can be packed in tighter to form a higher number of connections.

Additional advances

FUTUR-IC is organized into three dimensions: Technology (the coupler work is a good example), Value Chain Innovation, and Workforce. 

Under the Value Chain sector, researchers developed a new tool to support companies’ decisions toward sustainability. Earthster provides a visual model for quickly determining the energy, materials usage, and environmental sustainability across a company’s products. For example, says Agarwal, “looking at [Earthster], a supplier can tell right away their hot spots for carbon emissions, and start working to minimize them.”

FUTUR-IC has also developed several programs aimed at developing a future workforce for next-generation microchips. For example, “it is introducing an online course on semiconductor resource efficiency,” Agarwal says. “We also offer gamified digital learning and problem-based learning, plus a summer academy and a hands-on bootcamp.” For K-12 awareness, FUTUR-IC has created TED-Ed videos.

Agarwal concluded her April webinar by acknowledging the range of industries FUTUR-IC aims to help. “If you’re a packaging vendor, a materials vendor, or you are in the supply chain for data centers, FUTUR-IC can provide value.”

Additional authors of the paper on the GRIN coupler are Agarwal; Lionel Kimerling, the Thomas Lord Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Christian Duessel BS ’25, now at SiLC Technologies, a silicon photonics company; and Samuel Serna, professor of physics, photonics, and optical engineering at Bridgewater State University.

Additional authors of the Nature review paper are Serna; Luigi Ranno PhD ’25, now at Ayar Labs; Kimerling; and Agarwal.

The deployment of automated software systems called AI agents has recently exploded. A November 2025 report by MIT Sloan School of Management and Boston Consulting Group found that 35 percent of surveyed businesses had already deployed AI agents, while another 44 percent planned to implement agentic AI soon. 

To understand the fundamentals and potential impacts of these increasingly popular tools, MIT News spoke with Phillip Isola, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), who studies the intelligence AI agents possess, as well as the underlying models and mechanisms that power agentic AI systems.

Q: What is agentic AI and how is it different from generative AI models like ChatGPT and Claude?

A: Agentic AI is AI that takes actions in the world. These actions could be a physical action, like robotic manipulation, or a digital action, like booking a flight. On the other hand, we think of generative AI as making up stories, poems, art, and images, rather than taking actions for us. 

The word “agent” is just a brand name. It usually means AI that is going to help people interact with an application, a website, or the physical world. Most agents we encounter today are digital agents, like customer service agents you can talk with about product complaints. 

Most companies that offer agents use the same few AI models under the hood and give them the ability to take actions and remember what happened. An agent starts with a fundamental generative AI system, like Claude, at the core. Then companies put different wrappers around that foundation model for their product or application. Those wrappers might be specific tools that agent can use, and those tools depend on the application. Maybe the agent has access to a calculator so it can solve math problems, or maybe it has access to a more complicated hard drive and operating system so it can remember a firm’s financial data and past business negotiations. 

The biggest challenge in developing agentic AI comes from a lack of training data. If I want to create a system that can go online and book a flight for me, that seems pretty simple. But we don’t have a lot of data that spells out exactly how to do that — where to move the mouse, which buttons to click on, what to do if something goes wrong, or how to call somebody and negotiate about the price of the airline ticket. One way to train a system like this is to have the AI agent visit airline websites, try things out, and see what works and what doesn’t work. These environments are hard to model, so often the agent must learn by trial and error.

Q: What are some promising applications of agentic AI?

A: I think the area where we’ve seen the most success has been with coding agents. This is something that evolved from generative AI. People trained language models on code, and then they can predict what a human would do to solve a coding problem. In addition, an agent can learn to do this by going through a feedback loop where it tries out different solutions and checks to see if it got the answer right. As long as it can check the answer, the AI agent can perform this trial-and-error loop until it figures out a good strategy.

But there is always a balance between automating decision making versus simply assisting and informing humans. Analytical AI methods, like the systems that help predict possible outcomes of decisions, are not agentic in nature, but are very informative to human decision-makers. For cases that are either high-stakes or safety-critical, like medicine, security, high-level business policies, etc., the technology might not be ready for AI to completely automate those processes, or we might not even be comfortable with that.

Q: Are there risks we should be thinking about when using AI agents?

A: One big risk area comes from the fact that it is often very easy to get agents to do certain types of work for you. With coding agents, you can “vibe code” and just ask the agent to make a code for you, so you don’t have to do the hard work yourself. There is a big risk that, because it is so easy, people will not put enough effort into verifying that it is doing the right thing. Bugs will be introduced, private data will get leaked — this is already happening.

Agents aren’t perfect, in the sense that they might make mistakes because they are not well-trained and don’t know what to do. But even if they are very competent, if a human doesn’t use them appropriately or gives them an instruction that is too vague, the AI agent could make a mistake because the human made a mistake. If humans are less involved in thinking through all the consequences, I think we might be more prone to making those mistakes. 

An additional aspect is the risk of de-skilling. It is unclear how far this will go, but when we are relying on agents to do our homework, our coding, and our math, we might lose the ability to do that ourselves, and we might lose that ability too soon because the technology is not yet ready to fully automate those processes.

Q: What does the future hold for agentic AI?

A: What we think of now as agentic AI refers to large language models using tools to interact with digital and physical systems. One obvious limitation is that, under the hood, these have the architecture of a language model and are trained on text data. To make even more powerful AI agents, we might need to model videos, physical forces, time series, radar scans, and other modalities. We might need to have models with fundamentally different architectures that can handle continuous data, high-dimensional data, stochastic data, and so on. 

But, on the other hand, maybe an extremely good coding model could act as a puppeteer to interface with sensors, actuators, and web APIs? Perhaps, once you have a super-smart reasoning system that understands math, language, and code, you can give it a camera and a keyboard and it will figure out what to do in the spatial domain. Is the next wave of AI just going to be Claude with sensors, actuators, and tools, or is it going to be something built in a new way from the ground up? That’s the big question a lot of people in AI are grappling with right now.

The Financial Times has a good article on how AI is changing the capabilities of video surveillance, with information from both Israel/Iran and Russia.

I wrote about this sort of thing a few years ago, how AI enables mass spying in the way that computers and networks enabled mass surveillance. The interesting development in the article is that AI allows people to ask natural language questions about video footage to AIs—and AIs can answer them.

In contrast with older tools restricted to a few dozen preset searches, these new tools allow an almost unlimited range of enquiries by enabling language-based searches on video...

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