Nature Climate Change, Published online: 18 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02669-y

The authors analyse global-scale resurvey data for 5,151 species to reveal the sensitivity of tropical versus temperate species to climate change. They show significantly higher frequencies of local extinction in temperate species than in tropical species, linked to faster warming at high latitudes.

MIT has again been named the world’s top university by the QS World University Rankings, which were announced today. This is the 15th year in a row MIT has received this distinction.

The full 2027 edition of the rankings — published by Quacquarelli Symonds, an organization specializing in education and study abroad — can be found at TopUniversities.com. The QS rankings are based on factors including academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per faculty, student-to-faculty ratio, proportion of international faculty, and proportion of international students. 

MIT was also ranked the world’s top university in 12 of the subject areas ranked by QS, as announced in March of this year. 

The Institute received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Computer Science and Information Systems; Data Science and Artificial Intelligence; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Engineering and Technology; Linguistics; Materials Science; Mechanical, Aeronautical, and Manufacturing Engineering; Mathematics; Physics and Astronomy; and Statistics and Operational Research.

MIT also placed second in seven subject areas: Architecture/Built Environment; History of Art; Biological Sciences; Economics and Econometrics; Marketing; Natural Sciences; and Statistics and Operational Research.

The ability to access publicly available information using automated tools is a central value and benefit of a free and open internet. Automated access—often called crawling or scraping—powers important, useful tools for locating, preserving, and analyzing online information. For example, crawling and scraping helps journalists, researchers, and watchdog organizations report the news, find security flaws, and investigate discrimination. Crawling the web allows non-profits like the Internet Archive to preserve historical copies of websites. Tools for automated comparison shopping allow consumers to find the best deals on items they want to buy. And so on.

Yet the open internet access is increasingly under threat from publishers and Big Tech companies alike. Fearing lost advertising and licensing revenues, website operators increasingly claim that they need to lock down their sites from bots that crawl public web content to train or operate AI models. Some companies are even trying to embed their business models into internet standards by changing Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) technical standards that shape much of the internet.

Many of their economic anxieties are understandable. AI bots can strain websites’ infrastructure, in some cases, degrading site performance or taking them offline altogether. Upgrading systems costs money that some sites may not have. And AI is likely to disrupt the business models many publishers adopted in response to the rise of the internet, if users rely on AI overviews instead of visiting source websites.

However reasonable these fears may be, the answer is not to change the IETF standards from neutral protocols that encourage openness to restrictive requirements designed to monetize internet access.

The worst of these proposed standards would give websites far greater ability to automatically block legitimate, lawful scraping and crawling. For example, the AI Preferences working group is working on proposals to give publishers a way to express “preference signals” against crawling web data for AI-related purposes, including to train models, generate outputs, and help users search the web. These preference signals would be expressed through robots.txt and could potentially become legally binding in some jurisdictions.

Another working group, called Web Bot Auth, is pursuing efforts to protect sites from overly-aggressive bots that strain website resources—a positive goal that could meaningfully improve the internet in the AI era. But Web Bot Auth is simultaneously pursuing a much more dangerous path as well: standards changes that would enable sites to cryptographically identify bots so that they can more easily block anyone they wish—not just “bad” actors, but competitors, dissidents, or anyone who hasn’t paid for the right to access sites using automated tools. If sites restrict crawling to a preapproved list of cryptographically authenticated bots, they could require licensing payments from those wishing to crawl their sites. This would close off the open web to researchers, archivists, and startups without the ability to pay for automated access.  

Websites may have legitimate reasons to worry about AI’s impacts on their traffic and advertising revenue, but those reasons must be weighed against the benefits of the open web. These proposals would effectively give website operators veto power over a wide range of important uses—from the investigations and archival works described above to accessibility tools for people with disabilities, to research efforts aimed at holding governments accountable.

That is why we are fighting back against these threats to open access. EFF and our allies in the open internet community have successfully resisted some of the most dangerous IETF proposals thus far—and won’t stop working to protect the open web from efforts to manipulate internet standards to undermine the right to freely access the internet in any legal way, including with automated tools.

Susan Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Professor of Environmental Studies at MIT, has been named the 2026 Tang Prize Laureate in Sustainable Development for “groundbreaking advances and leadership in atmospheric and climate sciences that shaped global policy for Sustainable Development,” according to the Tang Prize Foundation.

The Tang Prize is a biennial international award granted by judges convened by Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s top academic research institution, and recognizes four fields of research: sustainable development, biopharmaceutical science, sinology, and rule of law.

“The Tang Prize is one of the most prestigious awards in environmental science, and it’s flooring to anyone to learn that they received it,” says Solomon, who holds joint appointments in the MIT departments of Chemistry and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “It’s a tremendous, tremendous honor, and I’ll try to live up to it.”

Solomon began her career at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 1985, scientists discovered an unexpected “hole” in the ozone layer of the atmosphere above Antarctica. Ozone, a gas made of three oxygen atoms, helps filter out ultraviolet radiation from the sun that would otherwise damage living organisms, with impacts such as increasing rates of skin cancer and cataracts. The following year Solomon, then 30, published a paper proposing a novel chemical mechanism that might explain the mysterious hole. In the same year, she led a team of 16 scientists to take direct measurements of the degradation of the ozone layer, as the only woman in the expedition. Their findings were the first measurements to show that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), compounds used in common items such as aerosols and cooling systems, were indeed destroying ozone in the stratosphere. 

“Maybe it’s just being young and naive, or maybe it’s being open to new ideas, but at that stage in my life I was open to the idea that chemistry might be completely different from what we had thought. I came up with some ideas of how to explain it that turned out to be right, remarkably,” she says.

The following year, a United Nations conference signed the Montreal Protocol, with all nations agreeing to phase out the use of CFCs and resulting in one of the most successful triumphs of international climate policy to date.

“The ozone story is a fantastic one, because it teaches us that we can actually develop international agreements and get all different kinds of countries, developed and developing, to agree to them and to solve problems together,” she says.

From 2002 to 2008, she co-led the production of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, synthesizing climate science knowledge and assessing effects and mitigation approaches to human-caused climate change. It was later recognized with a Nobel Peace Prize.

Solomon then went on to study the impacts of human-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions on the Earth’s climate. Her groundbreaking research showed that human emissions of CO2 were causing impacts on the climate that would be irreversible for 1,000 years, even after emissions stopped. In 2012 she joined the faculty of EAPS, where she has continued her work on studying the ozone layer. Recently, she has found the first quantitative proof that the ozone layer is on track to recover by around 2035.

“Most of the awards I’ve gotten previously have been very focused on the science that I did, but this one embraces the fact that my work has benefit for the planet’s sustainability,” she says. “People recognize that my work did something valuable. That is an incredible, humbling, and remarkable feeling.”

“Susan is a model of an engaged scientist,” says David McGee, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT and EAPS department head. “From uncovering the mechanisms by which human activities affect the ozone layer to using that understanding to guide political action to, most recently, showing that our actions have produced measurable ozone recovery, her work and leadership have deeply impacted the field and the health of our society. Her mentoring and teaching have similarly impacted students and researchers across EAPS and MIT. This award is a wonderful celebration of her remarkable achievements.”

“Susan is a pioneer of atmospheric chemistry,” says Class of 1942 Professor of Chemistry and Department Head Matthew D. Shoulders. “Her groundbreaking research at the intersection of chemistry and environmental science is critically important, and it is wonderful to see her dedication, creativity, and scientific leadership recognized in this way.”

“I have been absolutely blessed by the students and colleagues that I’ve had over the years,” Solomon says, including collaborators Qiang Fu, Rolando Garcia, Douglas Kinnison, Ben Santer, and David Thompson, as well as MIT research scientists Kane Stone and Diane Ivy and former students, including Megan Lickley and Peidong Wang.

Founded in 2012 by the late Samuel Yin, the Tang Prize Foundation is a nongovernmental, nonprofit educational foundation. Nomination and selection of laureates is conducted by the Academia Sinica. Each award cycle, the academy convenes four autonomous selection committees, each consisting of an assembly of international experts, until a consensus on the recipients is reached. Recipients are chosen on the basis of the originality of their work along with their contributions to society, irrespective of nationality, ethnicity, gender, and political affiliation. Recipients in each Tang Prize category receive a total of approximately $1.6 million and a grant of approximately $320,000.

Solomon is the second MIT faculty member to receive the award after Feng Zhang, who won the award in Biopharmaceutical Science in 2016 for his role in developing the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system.

The NO FAKES Act is supposed to target harmful AI-generated impersonations. But in reality, it will make it easier to suppress commentary, satire, and other lawful speech. That's why EFF has signed a letter urging the Senate Judiciary Committee not to advance the bill in its current form.

Take action

Tell Congress to Say No to NO FAKES

In the letter, EFF joins a coalition of civil society groups in pointing out that the bill would import many of the worst features of the DMCA notice-and-takedown system into an even broader range of online expression. Faced with a “heckler’s veto” over legal speech, platforms will have incentives to remove content first and ask questions later. 

The bill offers no protection for a platform’s judgment about an often difficult question—whether a particular piece of content is satire, parody, commentary, or news. Any platform that guesses wrong faces penalties of up to $750,000 per work. 

NO FAKES could also undermine the rights of the people it is supposed to protect. The new federal “likeness” right could be licensed or transferred to others, so individuals will lose control over the use of their own face and voice. That’s not theoretical—workers in the entertainment industry are routinely asked to sign broad contracts about the future use of their likenesses.

As the letter notes: 

A background actor who signs a release on set or an ordinary person who clicks through a platform's terms of service could end up with the right to their own face and voice in someone else's hands, for years, with federal enforcement behind it. 

EFF and the other signatories urge Congress to examine existing legal remedies and pursue narrowly tailored solutions to genuine harms. The last thing we need is a sweeping new intellectual property right that threatens free expression. 

In addition to EFF, the letter is signed by the Center for Democracy & Technology, the American Civil Liberties Union, Fight for the Future, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Organization for Transformative Works, Public Knowledge, the R Street Institute, The Future of Free Speech, and the Woodhull Freedom Foundation. Read the full letter here. 

Take action

Tell Congress to Say No to NO FAKES

Since 2021, the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship has supported local and regional journalists in reporting high-impact news stories that connect climate change with local priorities. 

Now, the MIT Climate Project has published a report on the reach and impact of these fellowships, highlighting how the Institute’s scientific resources can help spark and deepen conversations about climate solutions in every corner of the country.

“Our goal is to offer trusted, grounded knowledge about climate change to everyone who wants to learn, so communities can make informed decisions for themselves about how to respond,” says Aaron Krol, who leads the Climate Change Engagement Program within the Climate Project. “Often, the best way to do that is just to lend support and scientific guidance to the people, like the reporters at local papers and radio stations, who know their audiences’ needs and perspectives best.”

Since the fellowship was founded, 20 journalists have completed the program, publishing 104 stories with a collective audience of nearly 3 million readers and listeners. Among the goals of the fellowship is to ensure that ambitious, long-form or serial climate reporting is not restricted to the large national outlets that can afford to maintain a climate desk. Americans consistently say they trust their local newsrooms more than national ones, and feel local news is an important institution in their cities and towns — making these news sources especially powerful media for introducing new ideas and perspectives on climate change and its solutions. 

MIT journalism fellows have covered the potential for offshore wind energy in Louisiana, flood preparedness in West Virginia, and the energy transition in Utah’s coal country, among many other topics with clear stakes for readers and their communities.

“Local journalists want to engage on climate issues,” says Krol. “Every year, we’re amazed by the quality of the applications we receive. There are so many reporters out there who know this is important, who have been holding onto ideas for stories, and just need that extra support to step outside their usual beats or devote the time and resources to these issues.”

The 20 outlets that have participated in the fellowship showcase the full variety of local news media in the United States today. Some are long-standing institutions in their cities and states, while others are recent startups trying out new, nonprofit models for local journalism in the 21st century. Some publish in print, some are online-only, and some report on the radio. Some have readerships in the hundreds of thousands, and others serve impactful niche audiences.

The most recent cohort of fellows, from 2025, exemplifies this range. At the Chicago Tribune, Karina Atkins reached hundreds of thousands of readers with her series on state and federal policies that have hampered Illinois farmers from diversifying their crops in preparation for a warming climate. Meanwhile, at Lancaster Farming, Carolyn Beans gave dairy farmers in Pennsylvania an in-depth look at the market for climate-smart milk.

“We don’t ask how big your audience is,” Krol says. “We ask who you’re going to reach, and how you’re going to connect climate change to their lives and livelihoods.”

MIT provides the fellows with editorial, scientific, design, and financial support. Fellows get a crash course in climate science from MIT experts, and work hands-on with interactive climate models to get new perspectives on policy and technology solutions. They also get access to a science editor who can supplement the work of the host newsroom with a specialized background in reporting and writing science-focused stories.

“The stories themselves are important, but I’m proudest of the difference our program has made for the careers of the journalists who have come through it,” says Krol. “We’ve had newsrooms dedicate more resources to following up on their climate stories, fellows pivot to energy and environment beats, outlets start using digital tools and data visualizations in new ways. We even had a fellow start her own newsroom to pursue more environmental and solutions reporting for Minnesota. Once these journalists get a chance to dig in on climate, they carry the knowledge and skills with them.”

Read the 2026 Impact Report to learn more about the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellows, and the impacts they made on communities across the country. All 100-plus stories published through the fellowship can be found on the MIT Climate Portal.

By harnessing the unique properties of quantum mechanics, scientists and engineers worldwide seek to enable systems with extraordinary capabilities. Many of them are working on the highly anticipated development of quantum computers capable of completing complex calculations at unprecedented speeds. These computers could meet the growing computational demands of both scientific research and data-intensive industries like finance, cybersecurity, and medicine.  

Necessary for quantum system development is an environment in which the fragile nature of quantum bits (qubits) is stabilized and the thermal noise (fluctuations in current/voltage) inherent in superconducting electronics is dampened. That environment requires cryogenic temperatures, those ranging from 5 to 10 millikelvins, colder than the extreme temperatures encountered in space. Dilution refrigerators create this needed cryogenic condition.

Dilution refrigerators used for quantum R&D need a wiring system that can operate in cryogenic temperatures, maintain a power-efficient direct current, and support high-speed data transmission. Researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory prototyped flexible, ribbon-like, low-frequency (LF) cables that not only meet these demands, but also are compatible with commercial circuit-board manufacturing processes. Maybell Quantum, a Colorado-based company supplying hardware for developing quantum systems, licensed the design for these cables and is adapting them for use in their dilution refrigerators.

"We’re planning to integrate Maybell LF CryoTrace, the ribbon wiring system transferred from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, across all thermal stages of our dilution refrigerators. Initially, the cables will be used for LF services, such as thermometry, heaters, and sensors, with feasibility studies planned for additional functions," says Lasse Nielsen, strategy and operations lead at Maybell Quantum. "After qualification testing, LF CryoTrace is planned for the next iteration of our internal wiring across the Maybell product family."

Motivation for invention

To support government initiatives in quantum computing, the Lincoln Laboratory research team investigated alternatives to conventional coaxial cables for use in hardware like dilution refrigerators. Coaxial cables can generate heavy heat loads for cryogenic hardware to address. And, as the number of qubits in quantum computers will increase, so will the number of coaxial cables in the infrastructure, making it difficult to fit stiff, bulky cable arrays into hardware supporting superconducting qubits.    

The team chose a stripline cable configuration with conductive layers positioned between flexible polymer layers that shield against electromagnetic interference (also known as crosstalk). Striplines offer consistency across different frequencies and minimal signal loss. The new cables were designed to accommodate large numbers of simultaneous signal transmissions; support direct-current operation without warming the cryogenic environment; and, importantly, provide easier integration into hardware than achievable with brittle coaxial cables.

"The main innovation is that the laboratory's cables can be fabricated by a traditional printed-circuit-board manufacturer. They're cheaper to fabricate and easier to install than traditional coaxial cables," says John Cummings, a principal investigator in the flexible cables project of the Lincoln Laboratory Quantum-Enabled Computation Group.

Citing ease of installation and durability as two factors making these cables attractive, Maybell Quantum says the ribbon format is mechanically robust, reducing handling-related breakages common with thin coaxials and improving repeatability in production. The supple flex cables allow assembly tasks that took days to complete to be done in a few hours.

"Over time, we think ribbonized, quantum-specific internal wiring can reshape manufacturing norms: faster and more consistent builds, easier field service, and more modular upgrades," Nielsen says.

Future outlook

Maybell Quantum is looking toward supporting quantum computing's transition from a laboratory-based capability to an industrial, commercially viable one. The huge gap between the current highly specialized quantum-laboratory environment and the robust infrastructure required for future industrial quantum computing lies in the hardware promoting the development of functional chips.

Maybell's mission is to develop reliable tools that commercial developers of quantum computers can use with ease and without the high costs and expert training associated with the equipment in today's quantum labs. The flex cables and Maybell's continued R&D into their capabilities and integration into various tools will foster a future infrastructure that could enable industry to scale manufacture of quantum computers to a level at which these powerful machines could cost-effectively find use in myriad enterprises.

"If you want to scale to hundreds of chips, you need interconnects that can handle more signals more reliably. That’s why the Lincoln Laboratory cables are so exciting for us — they enable true scalability," says Kyle Thompson, founder and chief technology officer of Maybell Quantum. "We believe this technology will materially improve our systems and strengthen the broader U.S. quantum ecosystem by moving federally funded innovation into American manufacturing."

From the icy expanse of the South Pole, John Della Costa, a researcher on the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (BICEP) project, watches STS.042/8.225 (Einstein, Oppenheimer, Feynman: Physics in the 20th Century), a free online class from MIT Open Learning’s OpenCourseWare, as part of a weekly “Fysics Fridays” series he started with his team.

MIT Professor David Kaiser, who teaches the course, often receives thoughtful notes from remote learners, but says an email from Della Costa stood out.

“Hearing that John and his team are spending a part of their time with this course was just the best message to receive,” says Kaiser.

The BICEP collaboration uses a series of radio telescopes at the South Pole to study the cosmic microwave background — the oldest light, emitted about 380,000 years after the start of the universe. The team is looking for signs of primordial gravitational waves, which would help to support MIT Professor Alan Guth’s theory of cosmic inflation that explains the rapid early expansion of the universe.

“Inflation is really important in making sense of our observations of our universe,” says Della Costa. “We have yet to discover the evidence for inflation that definitively proves that it did happen, and BICEP’s main role here at the South Pole is to discover gravitational waves from the very early universe.”

Kaiser co-directs a research group on early-universe cosmology with Guth. He says he has colleagues who have worked as Antarctica winter-overs, and can appreciate the immense challenge of this work.

“It’s very exciting to see this important research flourishing,” says Kaiser. “It takes enormous effort and dedication.” 

Bringing Open Learning to the South Pole

Della Costa first discovered MIT OpenCourseWare, part of MIT Open Learning, as a graduate student at San Diego State University. At the time, the Covid-19 pandemic had altered his schedule and created more downtime to pursue additional independent learning. He was taking a nuclear physics course as part of his graduate program in astrophysics, and wanted to learn much more about the topic. A little bit of online research led to his discovery of class 22.01 (Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation), taught by Professor Michael Short.

“I found the course so interesting, and I’ve been exploring OpenCourseWare ever since then,” says Della Costa.

Preparing to spend an entire year at the South Pole (from November 2025 to December 2026), he realized he would need a productive way to occupy his downtime and stay entertained while isolated from much of the world.

“The station is completely isolated. After a certain point, no planes can fly in because it’s too cold,” says Della Costa. “The station closed on February 14, and it will reopen at the end of October or early November, depending on the weather.”

Because internet access is so limited at the South Pole, he downloaded several courses ahead of time, including: STS.042/8.225, 8.02 (Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism), 8.03 (Physics III: Vibrations and Waves), and Guth’s course, 8.286 (The Early Universe).

Like Della Costa’s discovery of OpenCourseWare, STS.042/8.225 was rooted in the disruptive days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Kaiser had taught the course in its traditional, in-person format many times, until fall 2020, when the courses needed to be taught entirely remotely. He made slides and taught the course via Zoom — for synchronous and asynchronous learning — to approximately 100 students located throughout the world. The materials were initially posted on the course site. The online version was later refined and expanded, launching on OpenCourseWare in August 2022. Unlike many physics offerings, this course includes background readings by physicists, as well as historians, philosophers, and sociologists.

“In this course, we get to talk about some really amazing ideas from modern physics,” says Kaiser. “We start in the middle of the 19th century, still in an era of what we would now call classical physics, and we rapidly go through things like relativity, quantum theory, nuclear physics, and particle physics. We end up with some of my favorite material about cosmology and the Big Bang — the kinds of things that John and his team are actively working on right now from their perch at the South Pole.”

Building community and learning together

Beyond finding ways to stay occupied during downtime from his research, Della Costa realized the importance of engaging the 45-person community at the South Pole. He describes it as a tight-knit group that needs to work together and look out for one another, especially given the extreme isolation, cold, and darkness, which can take a serious toll on mental health during the winter months.

“It’s very important to have community activities here,” says Della Costa, who thought of the idea to launch the “Fysics Fridays” series a couple of months ago. 

The group gathers to watch lectures and documentaries about physics every Friday. The series kicked off with a documentary about atomic bombs, drawing strong interest from the very beginning. 

Della Costa realized that STS.042/8.225 would be an ideal offering for Fysics Fridays.

“I thought this would be a perfect lecture series for us to watch, because it’s fairly introductory,” says Della Costa. “Not everyone here is a physicist, actually. It’s widely accessible, but still meaty, and worth people’s time to watch.”

Team members have been very interested in watching the course, and they’ve also started doing experiments before watching the lectures. Della Costa says that they’ve done the double-slit experiment and plan to also make a cloud chamber to see cosmic rays going through it.

Now that Della Costa and Kaiser are in contact, Kaiser has made plans to provide a special Zoom colloquium for the community at the South Pole.

“This use of the course is especially inspiring,” says Kaiser. “It really speaks to the excellence and far reach of OpenCourseWare and Open Learning.”

On 14 April, the Trump administration quietly acknowledged the widespread use of AI to automate government processes. The office of management and budget (OMB) disclosed a staggering 3,611 active or planned use cases for AI across the federal government. The list has ballooned by 70% from the one published in the final year of the Biden administration, and includes many disturbing-seeming plans to hand over sensitive governmental functions to AI.

Scanning this list, many readers may find many causes for alarm. It represents a transfer of decision processes from human to machine on a massive scale over matters of individual freedom, public health and well-being, nuclear reactor safety and more...

Cameron Hamilton defied the president by defending the agency in 2025. A year later, he's poised to take the reins.

A new lawsuit argues that Prime Minister Mark Carney's government is weakening efforts to cap planet-warming emissions.

The climate pattern could depress hurricane formation and bring more rain later this year.

A judge found renewable energy developers were likely to win the legal fight.

The European Commission pledged to review its benchmark methodology and provide more free allowances to industry.

Diana Acconcia and Dimitrios Zevgolis will replace longtime negotiator Jake Werksman.

Energy Minister Tim Hodgson advised his counterparts that Ottawa plans to extend the ask to other partners.

Solar-powered cold rooms, warehouses and cooling hubs allow farmers to preserve perishable goods without relying on expensive and unreliable electricity grids.

Roughly 60 percent of the climate-resilient reefs are located in Australia, the Bahamas, Cuba, Indonesia and the Philippines, scientists said in a study presented Tuesday.

An auto factory worker can remember the storage bin where she left a partly assembled component the night before, and quickly return to that spot to pick it up. But robots that may work side-by-side with her would struggle to develop and access this same type of “spatiotemporal” memory.

Now, MIT researchers have developed a long-term memory framework that allows robots to rapidly form and recall a detailed mental model of complicated, large-scale environments.

In the future, this advance could allow the factory worker to send a robotic assistant to fetch the item, simply by asking it to “go and grab the component we started assembling last night.”

This new method combines advanced map representations with rich descriptions of the environment that the robot gathers as it travels over a long period of time. The robot can quickly access this memory to answer complex queries about its environment in plain language.

This memory framework, which answers questions more accurately than state-of-the-art methods, runs fast enough for a mobile robot to use in real-time.

In addition to its potential uses in robotics, this method could have applications in augmented reality systems that aid maintenance workers in anomaly detection or assist commuters in wayfinding.

“If we want robots to work side-by-side with humans and interact better with humans, they must speak the same language. The robot must be able to reason about time and space the same way humans do. That is essentially what our method is doing. It is turning a traditional map into a language-based map that is easier for the robot to think about and access using language,” says Luca Carlone, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and director of the MIT SPARK Laboratory.

He is joined on the paper by lead author Nicolas Gorlo, an MIT graduate student; and Lukas Schmid, a former research scientist at MIT and now professor at the University of Technology Nuremberg in Germany. The research was recently presented at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

Spatiotemporal memory

Memory allows an artificial intelligence system, like a chatbot, to answer complex questions and reason about previous interactions with its user.

“We want to design a new type of memory, a spatiotemporal memory, that enables an AI-powered robot to remember real interactions and sensor observations. Like ChatGPT, but grounded in the real world and capable of answering any question about the environment, like ‘Where did I leave my wallet?’” Carlone says.

To develop such a memory framework, the MIT researchers bridged two lines of work: computer vision and robotic mapping.

Multimodal computer vision models can understand and richly describe the objects in a scene, but they often only process a single annotation at a time. On the other hand, robotic mapping frameworks create 3D maps of an environment, like an entire apartment or university campus, but usually lack detailed descriptions of objects or are computationally expensive.

The method the MIT researchers created, called Describe Anything, Anywhere, Anytime, at Any Moment (DAAAM), takes the best of both approaches.

Using DAAAM, as a robot traverses its environment, it attaches rich descriptions to objects it sees. For instance, the robot may note that a particular building on the MIT campus is called the Stata Center and is designed with a certain type of architecture, or that a bike rack holds five bicycles and the red one has a flat tire. 

It stores this detailed information in a 3D map-based representation that is arranged spatially, so objects will be grouped into separate regions. In this way, the robot can remember that the red bicycle with the flat tire is in the bike rack outside the Stata Center.

But existing techniques that capture such rich descriptions typically take a few seconds to annotate a few objects. This is too slow for real-time performance, since a robot might see hundreds of objects during a few minutes of exploration.

“The faster the robot can form this spatial memory, the more efficient it will be performing actions in the environment,” Carlone adds.

Streamlining the process

To speed things up, DAAAM aggregates nearby objects as it travels and uses an optimization method to select key frames to annotate. These are images with the clearest view of multiple objects, allowing the system to thoroughly describe several items in parallel, speeding up computation tenfold.

As the robot explores the space, it attaches each batch of annotations to multiple objects in a particular location on the 3D map.

“We annotate every object only once, so our framework can run in very large-scale environments in real time. And by clustering objects into regions, it can answer a wide range of queries about objects and locations in the environment,” Gorlo explains.

Once the system builds this spatial memory, it must retrieve information from an enormous database of objects and descriptions in an efficient manner. 

To enable this, the researchers used an LLM that calls on various tools, which can quickly retrieve specific information in a way that reduces hallucinations. This allows DAAAM to answer a user query accurately in only a few seconds. 

For instance, if one asks a robot about a certain sculpture it saw near an MIT campus building, DAAAM can use a semantic search tool to retrieve information based on the word “sculpture” or a different tool to retrieve information based on the location of the building.

When tested and compared with other methods, DAAAM was between 21 percent and 53 percent more accurate, depending on the question type. 

In the future, the researchers want to expand DAAAM so the system can capture significant events that happened in the environment. They are also working to incorporate confidence levels into the system’s responses.

“Ultimately, we want to have robots that can help with any sort of tasks. With this framework, we are trying to create the foundations to enable a generalist agent that can do anything you ask,” Gorlo says.

This research was funded, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research. Carlone is currently on sabbatical as an Amazon Scholar; this article describes work performed at MIT and is not associated with Amazon.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 17 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02693-y

Author Correction: Priority science can accelerate agroforestry as a natural climate solution