Nature Climate Change, Published online: 22 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02667-0

Author Correction: Atmospheric warming contributions from airborne microplastics and nanoplastics

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 22 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02661-6

International collaboration has facilitated a global ocean observing system, providing data to measure ocean heat content at a resolution that enables the tracking of climate change. This study looks at the contributing nations and the risks to the network under the current political and economic climate.

MIT economist Whitney Newey PhD ’83, the Ford Professor of Economics, emeritus, has received the 2026 Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics.

The biennial Nemmers prizes from Northwestern University recognize top scholars for their lasting contributions to new knowledge, outstanding achievements, and the development of significant new modes of analysis.

The university cited Newey — whose research has focused on econometrics — for producing “a body of work that has shaped the field of semiparametric econometrics, guided both econometricians and empirical researchers over several decades, and helped lay the foundations for modern machine learning-based inference.”

Newey will interact with Northwestern faculty and students through programming scheduled to occur during the 2026-27 academic year. The prize also includes a $300,000 award.

“I am delighted, deeply honored, and very grateful,” says Newey of the honor. “I am thrilled to have worked on and now work on ideas and approaches that are important for modern, machine learning-based inference and modern empirical economics more generally, most of this with such capable collaborators. This prize will expedite this work.”

Newey has been a leading figure in econometric theory for more than four decades, shaping both research and training in the field. He has done pathbreaking work on variance estimation, nonparametric simultaneous equations, consumer surplus estimation with general heterogeneity, and debiased machine learning.

“My colleagues and I are thrilled to see Whitney’s incredible career recognized with this high honor,” says Jonathan Gruber, the Ford Professor of Economics and head of the Department of Economics. “His research has given birth to many of the econometric methods that are now second nature to economists, and those of us in his orbit also know him as a source of sage, comprehensive, and generous advice. Whitney symbolizes, through both his pathbreaking research and his great generosity, what has made MIT economics so great for so many years.”

Newey is a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the Econometric Society. He is also a fellow of the International Association of Applied Econometrics, of CEMP at Jinan University, and an international fellow of the Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (CEMMAP) at University College London. He earned a BA and a PhD in economics from Brigham Young University and MIT, respectively.

Newey was named a 2020 Distinguished Fellow by the American Economic Association. He has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and received a Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. He has served as co-editor of Econometrica — a journal produced by the Econometric Society — and as program co-chair for the World Congress of the Econometric Society. He has also served on the Econometric Society’s Executive Committee. He previously taught economics at Princeton University and at MIT, and also previously served as the head of MIT’s Department of Economics. He has been a visiting scholar, professor, and lecturer at institutions across the world.

Even in the primary visual cortex, a brain region named for its specialized role in processing basic features of what the eyes see, not every neuron ends up answering the call to process properties of visual input. Maybe that’s because each neuron receives a wide variety of inputs via thousands of circuit connections, or “synapses,” and has to opt to respond to the visual information versus something else. In a new study in mice, neuroscientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT reveal how neurons that perform visual processing bring order to this input to get the job done.

Neuroscientists are keenly interested in what inputs, from among so many choices, will compel neurons to participate in the brain’s computations and functions, says senior author Mriganka Sur, Newton Professor of Neuroscience in the Picower Institute and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Neurons ultimately participate in brain circuits by “firing” an electrical action potential.

“The configuration of inputs, the kind of organization, the assembly of neurons that modulate each other to generate an action potential is the essence of how brain circuits process information,” Sur says. “These (visual cortex) cells are a microcosm of this very profound and big picture of neuroscience.”

In the open-access study in iScience, led by postdoc Kyle Jenks, the research team achieved their findings by meticulously imaging how not only neurons’ cell bodies, but also their individual synapses, formed on protrusions known as dendritic spines, responded as mice viewed moving images. They did this imaging for not only visually responsive neurons, but also for unresponsive neurons that nevertheless have visually responsive spines. That allowed them to analyze many key properties that might influence where a particular synapse forms, and how it influences responses at the cell body.

“This pulls together a lot of things that have been looked at in isolation and looks at them in one collective paper,” Jenks says. “We can compare how the neuron and the spines on that neuron respond to the same stimuli, and we can do this for both visually responsive and unresponsive neurons.”

In visual cortex layer 2/3, Jenks and the team genetically engineered neurons such that their individual dendritic spines would glow when surges of calcium indicated increased activity by the synapses on the spines. The scientists did the same for the cell body, or “soma,” to keep track of how the cell responded and even signaled its overall responses back out to the synapses. This way, as the mice watched black and white gratings at varying angles drift by their eyes in different directions, the scientists could keep track of each spine’s and each cell’s overall response to that patterned visual input.

In all, they tracked 11 neurons that responded to the visual input and 11 others that seemingly ignored it. That enabled them to find several rules:

Distance from the soma matters: On cells that responded to visual input, the responses of individual spines were much more likely to correlate with the activity of the soma the closer the spine was to the soma. In the same vein, the soma’s signal back out to spines, which is believed to influence the spines’ alignment with the soma’s preferences, was more likely to be detectable closer to the soma than farther away. 

Local clustering: On neurons that responded to visual input, spines formed distinct little enclaves of correlated responses with each other. Specifically, spines within 5 microns (five one-millionths of a meter) acted in concert. But then, right outside that 5-micron boundary, spines were less likely than chance to join in that activity. Sur speculates that these isolated pockets of activity sharpened the response from each enclave.

“Apical” vs. “basal:” The neurons the team studied have two distinct kinds of dendrites. Apical dendrites, which are very long and protrude from the top, or “apex,” of the neuron, tend to get a wide variety of inputs from across the cortex. Basal dendrites, which are shorter and extend out from the bottom, typically get more raw visual input. While basal dendrites indeed received more visual input than apical dendrites overall, Jenks found that apical dendrites on visually responsive neurons had significantly more visually responsive spines than those on non-responsive neurons. And both types of dendrites equally obeyed the rules above about distance from the soma.

Orientation selectivity matters most: Jenks, Sur, and the team used statistical modeling to determine which of many factors (the stimulus selectivity, reliability of the response, a spine’s distance from the soma, apical versus basal, etc.) most explained how correlated a spine’s responsiveness was with that of the soma. By a wide margin, how selective a spine was to the orientation of its preferred grating was the most important single factor.

“Our results reveal that synaptic inputs to excitatory layer 2/3 neurons in mouse (visual cortex) are not randomly arranged, but organized and distributed in a manner that correlates with multiple factors including somatic responsiveness, somatic tuning, branch type, distance from the soma, local correlations, and stimulus selectivity,” the researchers wrote.

The team’s findings can help advance studies of vision in the brain in multiple ways, Jenks and Sur say. Certain genetic mutations that affect how neurons connect in circuits can affect visual cortex neurons and vision, Sur says. Documenting these rules provides researchers with a baseline to compare against when examining the effects of such mutations. Jenks adds that the findings could inform efforts to model how neurons integrate synaptic inputs in their computations.

In addition to Sur and Jenks, the paper’s other authors are Gregg Heller, Katya Tsimring, Kendyll Martin, Asrah Rizvi, and Jacque Pak Kan Ip.

The National Institutes of Health, the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative, and the Freedom Together Foundation provided support for the study.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has elected 120 members and 25 international members for 2026, including six MIT faculty members and 10 additional alumni. 

Among MIT professors, Bengt Holmström, Michale Fee, Gareth McKinley ’91, Keith Nelson, Fan Wang, and Catherine Wolfram ’96 were elected in recognition of their “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” 

Additional alumni who were elected include Christopher J. Chang PhD ’02 (Chemistry); Cynthia J. Ebinger SM ’86, PhD ’88 (Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences); Andrew Gelman ’85, ’86 (Mathematics and Physics); Richard L. Greene ’60 (Physics); Chuan He PhD ’00 (Chemistry); Pardis C. Sabeti ’97 (Biology/Life Sciences); Robert J. Shiller SM ’68, PhD ’72 (Economics); Daniel M. Sigman PhD ’97 (EAPS); Eero Simoncelli SM ’88, PhD ’93 (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science); and Salil P. Vadhan PhD ’99 (Mathematics).

Membership in the National Academy of Sciences is one of the highest honors a scientist can receive in their career. The NAS is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and — with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine — provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

Bengt Holmström is the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics, emeritus. He received his doctoral degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1978 and held faculty positions at Northwestern University and Yale University before joining the MIT faculty in 1994 with a joint appointment in economics and management.

Holmström is best known for his foundational research on the theory of contracting and incentives, for which he received the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (together with Oliver Hart of Harvard University). His extensive contributions to contract theory as applied to the theory of the firm, corporate governance, and liquidity problems in financial crises have had wide-ranging impacts, while bringing contract theory into mainstream economic thought.

In addition to the Nobel, Holmström’s research has been recognized with the Stephen A. Ross Prize in Financial Economics and the Grand Cross of the Order of the Lion of Finland. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the American Finance Association. Holmström is also an elected foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and a member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

Michale S. Fee is the Glen V. and Phyllis F. Dorflinger Professor of Neuroscience, head of the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS), and investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. His research explores how the brain learns and generates complex sequential behaviors. Using the zebra finch as a model system, Fee investigates the neural mechanisms underlying birdsong — a behavior that young birds learn from their fathers through trial and error, much as human infants learn to speak through babbling. His research extends far beyond birdsong — the neural circuits controlling birdsong learning are closely related to human brain circuits disrupted in Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases. Insights from Fee’s research could reveal new clues to the causes and potential treatments of these complex brain disorders.

After receiving his BE with honors in engineering physics at the University of Michigan in 1985, Fee studied applied physics at Stanford University, where he carried out his PhD thesis work in the laboratory of Steven Chu. In 1992, he began working as a postdoc in David Kleinfeld’s lab in the Biological Computation Research Department at Bell Laboratories. Four years later, he became a permanent member of the technical staff at Bell Labs and began working on the mechanisms of vocal sequence generation in the songbird. In 2003, he became an investigator at the McGovern Institute and a faculty member in BCS. In 2021, he was appointed BCS department head, continuing the department’s tradition of being led by scientists whose exemplary work makes MIT a world leader in brain science. Fee is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of multiple undergraduate and graduate teaching awards at MIT.  

Gareth H. McKinley ’91 is the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, former associate head and interim head of the department, and co-founder of Cambridge Polymer Group. McKinley’s research interests include non-Newtonian fluid dynamics, microfluidics, extensional rheology, field-responsive materials, super-hydrophobicity, drag reduction, and the wetting of nanostructured surfaces. His work focuses on understanding the rheology of complex fluids such as surfactants, biomaterials, gels, and polymers, which are ubiquitous in foods and consumer products. 

McKinley has made outstanding contributions to viscoelastic fluid mechanics, understanding flow instabilities and stretching flows. His research group has developed novel instrumentation and customized rheological analysis techniques that have driven the field of rheology for complex and soft fluids. His instrumentation and testing algorithms, along with freely-distributed code for analyzing large amplitude oscillatory shear flow, and broad-band “chirp” rheometry, are used worldwide in industry and academia . 

McKinley is the author of over 390 technical publications. He has won the Publication Award of the Society of Rheology twice (2007 and 2022), as well as the 2021 Walters Award from J. Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics. He was awarded the Bingham Medal of The Society of Rheology in 2013, the Gold Medal from the British Society of Rheology in 2014, and the G.I. Taylor Medal from the Society for Engineering Science in 2022. In 2019, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and was also inducted as a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2023, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Katholieke University of Leuven, and in 2024 became a corresponding member of the Australian Academy of Sciences. In 2025, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and also became a foreign fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering.  

Keith A. Nelson, the Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry, earned his BS in chemistry from Stanford University. After completing his doctoral studies in physical chemistry, also at Stanford, he conducted postdoctoral research with John P. McTague at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1982, Nelson joined the MIT Department of Chemistry as an assistant professor.

His distinguished career has been recognized with numerous honors, including the William F. Meggers Award, the Bomem-Michelson Award, and the Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids. Research in the Nelson Group focuses on the time-resolved optical study and control of  collective transformations in condensed matter, using pulses of light in the THz, optical, and X-ray spectral ranges and laser-generated strain waves to drive the modes of motion through which these changes occur.

Fan Wang is a professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, investigator at the McGovern Institute, and co-director of the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics at MIT. She investigates the neural circuits that govern the dynamic interactions between brain and body, exploring how the brain generates sensory perceptions and controls movement. Wang uses cutting-edge techniques including optogenetics, in vivo electrophysiology, and in vivo imaging to make discoveries with profound clinical implications.

By developing innovative tools to study how brain circuits work, Wang discovered distinct populations of neurons activated by anesthesia that can suppress pain without blocking sensation, and can calm anxiety by regulating automatic body functions like heart rate. She also identified the brain circuits controlling rhythmic movements essential for exploration and communication. Together, these findings reveal how emotion, physiology, movement, and consciousness are deeply interconnected.

Before coming to MIT, Wang obtained her PhD from Columbia University working with Richard Axel, and received her postdoctoral training at the University of California at San Francisco and Stanford University with Marc Tessier-Lavigne. She became a faculty member at Duke University in 2003, where she was later appointed Morris N. Broad Professor of Neurobiology. Wang became an investigator at the McGovern Institute and a faculty member in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT in 2021. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of multiple undergraduate teaching and graduate mentorship awards at MIT.  

Catherine D. Wolfram ’96 is the William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy and professor of applied economics in the MIT Sloan School of Management. Before coming to MIT Sloan, Wolfram previously served as the Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. From March 2021 to October 2022, she served as the deputy assistant secretary for climate and energy economics at the U.S. Treasury, while on leave from UC Berkeley. Before leaving for government service, she was the program director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Environment and Energy Economics Program and a research affiliate at the Energy Institute at Haas. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she was an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University. She received a PhD in economics from MIT in 1996 and an BA from Harvard in 1989.

Wolfram has published extensively on the economics of energy markets. Her work has analyzed rural electrification programs in the developing world, energy efficiency programs in the United States, the effects of environmental regulation on energy markets, and the impact of privatization and market restructuring in the United States and United Kingdom. She is currently working on projects at the intersection of climate, energy, and trade, including work on carbon border adjustment mechanisms and oil market sanctions. Since March 2025, Wolfram has served on the COP30 President’s Council on Economics, Finance, and Climate, and has chaired a working group on climate coalitions.

This spring, six reporters from The Associated Press’ climate desk traveled from cities across the United States to work with students from the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. Students developed and pitched local climate stories, then, over a four-day intensive weekend, worked with visual journalists from the AP to report and produce their pieces. Articles cover a broad spectrum of environmental topics, ranging from area kelp harvests that are used to produce biofuels to efforts to restore cranberry bogs in environmentally friendly ways, and include visual elements, like photography and videography.

The four collaborative pieces include:

• “How a retired cranberry bog helped change the game for wetland restoration,” by Jamie Jiang and Julia Vaz
• “Planes and ships could run on kelp someday, but there are serious hurdles,” by Zoe Beketova and Ana Georgescu
• “Massachusetts is dumping sewage into waterways. Grassroots organizations are fighting back,” by Ashley D’Souza and Lucie McCormick
• “One of America’s oldest weather observatories shows people the science behind our climate,” by Laura Martin Agudelo and Alex Megerle

“This workshop was an intense few days that offered a unique opportunity for MIT journalists to get feedback while in the field, reporting. The students brought enthusiasm and passion to the reporting, heading out before the sun came up and working long into the nights over the weekend for stories in the Boston area and beyond,” says AP’s Climate Photo Editor Alyssa Goodman, the workshop’s lead organizer. “For the AP team members who participated, it was also a rewarding opportunity, allowing us to share our passion for climate storytelling while getting to know these students, watching them build strong stories and gain experiences that will help them as they continue in journalism.”

The collaboration is unique, even among journalism programs. The Associated Press is one of the most prestigious, longest-running news wire services in existence. Nearly 4 billion people worldwide come in contact with AP journalism every day. The publication has won 59 Pulitzer Prizes, including 36 in photojournalism.

MIT student reporters say that the opportunity to directly work with journalists from the AP’s climate team and have their own stories published has been a highlight of their time in the Graduate Program in Science Writing.

“It was great to be in the field with a reporter and photographer from the AP News team, learning directly from her as the reporting unfolded,” says Zoe Beketova, whose story focused on kelp biofuels. “That kind of expertise is difficult to get in a static classroom setting, and I think my team learned a lot.”

Ana Georgescu says that the experience of working with the AP team was “like stepping into a real newsroom.” Georgescu adds that coordinating with AP editors and reporting teams in real time and under tight deadlines provided valuable on-the-ground experience.

“What made the biggest difference for me was being in the field alongside an experienced photojournalist and seeing how they read a scene in practice,” she says. “We were able to get immediate feedback on how we directed subjects, which scenes we chose, and how we integrated photography into the reporting process. That kind of hands-on, in-the-moment experience was incredibly helpful, and it’s made me really excited to keep exploring climate stories, as well as the visual side of journalism.”

About 2 billion people — just under a quarter of the world’s population — lack regular access to clean drinking water. And roughly 800,000 people annually die from illnesses associated with unsanitary water.

Drinking water access is a fundamental problem for human and economic development. The U.N., for instance, highlighted the issue in its Sustainable Development Goals of 2015, an ambitious 17-point agenda that specified safe drinking water as a basic global aim.

Past research shows that democracies, in comparison to other forms of government, tend to be more successful at delivering this kind of public good, which benefits a large portion of the population. This is likely due to accountability measures that include elections, greater transparency, and more freedom in civil society.

But now a study led by an MIT professor shows that across nearly 100 countries with developing economies, that dynamic has become more complex in the 21st century. While democracies are slightly ahead of non-democracies when it comes to providing at least some water, they have been falling behind when it comes to ensuring that there is safe water on tap. 

“Among low- and middle-income countries, which have not done as well economically, we found there wasn’t really a big difference between democracies and non-democracies in the provision of what is called basic drinking water,” says MIT political scientist Evan Lieberman, co-author of a new paper detailing the results. “But for safe drinking water, we found, surprisingly, that democratic countries were becoming less good at extending access.” 

While the study does not pinpoint the precise reasons for this, it suggests a lens for viewing the problem. Democracies tend to be better at delivering visible public goods, the kinds of things citizens can literally see — like infrastructure that delivers water. But the difference between safe and unsafe water is not necessarily visible and obvious, so public officials may not be as responsive.

“This is likely a big part of the equation, that the invisibility of safe water makes it a less compelling public good for politicians,” says Lieberman, the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa, and director of MIT’s Center for International Studies.

The paper, “Beyond the tap: The limited value of democracy for delivering universal safe water access in low- and middle-income countries,” is published in the journal World Development. The authors are Lieberman, and Naomi Tilles, a doctoral student in political science at Stanford University.

Seeing is believing

To conduct the study, the scholars analyzed drinking water data recorded by the World Health Organization/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme. That provides information for basic availability to water, defined as access to an improved water source with no more than 30 minutes of collection time; and access to safe drinking water, defined as an improved water source that is available on premises, available when needed, and free from potentially disease-producing contaminants, which range from fecal matter to harmful chemicals.

Examining 96 low- and middle-income countries, the researchers looked at a variety of measures pertaining to its democratic or non-democratic features, and ran 39,000 regressions to see how the form of government related to its provision of water. Overall, Lieberman and Tilles found that democratic governance is modestly associated with an increase in the basic availability of water, compared to non-democracies. However, the effect is not particularly robust.

The good news is that between 2000 and 2024, 81 of the 90 countries with data available in both years made gains in safe drinking water access. However, democratic countries have been less successful than their non-democratic counterparts in advancing the goal of achieving universal access. 

“Moreover, the gap between democracies and non-democracies seems to be getting a little bit larger over time,” Lieberman observes. 

Because the study is focused on establishing the overall empirical situation, the scholars do not claim to have determined why this trend has been emerging. Many newer democracies have struggled to establish high-functioning governance in some regions, which may influence their overall results. 

More broadly, Lieberman suggests, visibility matters. Past scholarship has shown that democracies perform relatively well in delivering visible public goods, especially in countries with little information in the public sphere. Delivering water generates attention for politicians in a way that keeping water safe does not. 

“Politicians may figure out they should do things citizens like, to stay in office, such as bringing water to an area,” Lieberman says. “You can have a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and people feel it really happened. But water quality is often invisible.

It’s a more difficult challenge to ensure safe water: You have to do testing, prevent people from polluting, and you may need to treat the water.”

In any case, Lieberman notes, “Given what we find, what is clear is that the incentives are not aligned under the current systems for advancing safe-water access within all democracies. That provides opportunities for human agency to create incentives for citizens, nongovernment agencies, and governments to do what is needed.” 

Development for all

Lieberman comes to the topic of water access as an expert on African politics. His most recent book, “Until We Have Won Our Liberty” (Princeton University Press, 2022), examines the vicissitudes of South African democracy. In the book and in general, he suggests that democracy is the most viable path toward development with “dignity,” meaning economic growth accompanied by liberties and equal treatment under the law. 

“I think democracy provides dignified development, by granting people recognition and participation, and that’s an extremely valuable thing,” Lieberman says.

Still, when it comes to the performance of many countries with regard to safe water, he says, “I think we just need to be clear-eyed about real problems.”

In some countries, he suggests, the time horizon of elected officials may also be relatively short-term, and they may be more oriented toward simpler problems than water safety. At the same time, other members of society need to find ways to make water safety a bigger issue in the eyes of the public. 

“There are important lessons for democracies to learn, and citizens in civil society who are aware of this challenge need to figure out ways to get people to care about it, to recognize the connection between illness and unsafe water, and to use political campaigns to advance their longer-term interests,” Lieberman says.

Overall, he adds, “There is something intrinsically important about democratic government. Then the question becomes how to make it work better to deliver really important outcomes like safe water.”

A group used Anthropic’s Mythos AI model to help find a kernel memory corruption vulnerability and exploit on Apple’s M5.

News article.

The nonbinding measure expresses support for an international court ruling that pressures countries to reduce carbon emissions. It was also an act of defiance against the U.S. and other oil producers.

Leaving the repeal in place while litigation plays out would mean almost an additional gigaton of carbon dioxide emissions, the youth argue.

The appeal stems from a landmark 2021 ruling that was the first to require a private company to scale back its climate impact.

Law students did, however, award the first-ever A+ to a firm ranked on their annual scorecard.

The wide-ranging measure that could come before legislators this week would also prevent utilities from retiring coal-fired power plants until nuclear facilities can replace them.

Daily high temperature records were broken this week in Portland, Maine, at 92 degrees Fahrenheit and Boston, at 96 degrees.

The fight comes as AI demand puts increased strain on grids across the bloc.

The burger chain still wants to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

The European People’s Party wants assurances that funds from the Emissions Trading System will continue to help finance the clean technology transition for poorer member states.

In Nagpur, one of the hottest cities in the world, the battle with sweltering temperatures is seen everywhere.

At any given time, technology does two things to employment: It replaces traditional jobs, and it creates new lines of work. Machines replace farmers, but enable, say, aeronautical engineers to exist. So, if tech creates new jobs, who gets them? How well do they pay? How long do new jobs remain new, before they become just another common task any worker can do?

A new study of U.S. employment led by MIT labor economist David Autor sheds light on all these matters. In the postwar U.S., as Autor and his colleagues show in granular detail, new forms of work have tended to benefit college graduates under 30 more than anyone else. 

“We had never before seen exactly who is doing new work,” Autor says. “It’s done more by young and educated people, in urban settings.” 

The study also contains a powerful large-scale insight: A lot of innovation-based new work is driven by demand. Government-backed expansion of research and manufacturing in the 1940s, in response to World War II, accounted for a huge amount of new work, and new forms of expertise. 

“This says that wherever we make new investments, we end up getting new specializations,” Autor says. “If you create a large-scale activity, there’s always going to be an opportunity for new specialized knowledge that’s relevant for it. We thought that was exciting to see.” 

The paper, “What Makes New Work Different from More Work?” is forthcoming in the Annual Review of Economics. The authors are Autor; Caroline Chin, a doctoral student in MIT’s Department of Economics; Anna M. Salomons, a professor at Tilburg University’s Department of Economics and Utrecht University’s School of Economics; and Bryan Seegmiller PhD ’22, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

And yes, learning about new work, and the kinds of workers who obtain it, might be relevant to the spread of artificial intelligence — although, in Autor’s estimation, it is too soon to tell just how AI will affect the workplace.

“People are really worried that AI-based automation is going to erode specific tasks more rapidly,” Autor observes. “Eroding tasks is not the same thing as eroding jobs, since many jobs involve a lot of tasks. But we’re all saying: Where is the new work going to come from? It’s so important, and we know little about it. We don’t know what it will be, what it will look like, and who will be able to do it.”

“If everyone is an expert, then no one is an expert”

The four co-authors also collaborated on a previous major study of new work, published in 2024, which found that about six out of 10 jobs in the U.S. from 1940 to 2018 were in new specialties that had only developed broadly since 1940. The new study extends that line of research by looking more precisely at who fills the new lines of work. 

To do that, the researchers used U.S. Census Bureau data from 1940 through 1950, as well as the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) data from 2011 to 2023. In the first case, because Census Bureau records become wholly public after about 70 years, the scholars could examine individual-level data about occupations, salaries, and more, and could track the same workers as they changed jobs between the 1940 and 1950 Census enumerations. 

Through a collaborative research arrangement with the U.S. Census Bureau, the authors also gained secure access to person-level ACS records. These data allowed them to analyze the earnings, education, and other demographic characteristics of workers in new occupational specialties — and to compare them with workers in longstanding ones.

New work, Autor observes, is always tied to new forms of expertise. At first, this expertise is scarce; over time, it may become more common. In any case, expertise is often linked to new forms of technology.

“It requires mastering some capability,” Autor says. “What makes labor valuable is not simply the ability to do stuff, but specialized knowledge. And that often differentiates high-paid work from low-paid work.” Moreover, he adds, “It has to be scarce. If everyone is an expert, then no one is an expert.”

By examining the census data, the scholars found that back in 1950, about 7 percent of employees had jobs in types of work that had emerged since 1930. More recently, about 18 percent of workers in the 2011-2023 period were in lines of work introduced since 1970. (That happens to be roughly the same portion of new jobs per decade, although Autor does not think this is a hard-and-fast trend.) 

In these time periods, new work has emerged more often in urban areas, with people under 30 benefitting more than any other age category. Getting a job in a line of new work seems to have a lasting effect: People employed in new work in 1940 were 2.5 times as likely to be in new work in 1950, compared to the general population. College graduates were 2.9 percentage points more likely than high school graduates to be engaged in new work. 

New work also has a wage premium, that is, better salaries on aggregate than in already-existing forms of work. Yet as the study shows, that wage premium also fades over time, as the particular expertise in many forms of new work becomes much more widely grasped. 

“The scarcity value erodes,” Autor says. “It becomes common knowledge. It itself gets automated. New work gets old.”

After all, Autor points out, driving a car was once a scarce form of expertise. For that matter, so was being able to use word-processing programs such as WordPerfect or Microsoft Word, well into the 1990s. After a while, though, being able to handle word-processing tools became the most elementary part of using a computer.

Back to AI for a minute

Studying who gets new jobs led the scholars to striking conclusions about how new work is created. Examining county-level data from the World War II era, when the federal government was backing new manufacturing in public-private partnerships throughout the U.S., the study shows that counties with new factories had more new work, and that 85 to 90 percent of new work from 1940 to 1950 was technology-driven. 

In this sense there was a great deal of demand-driven innovation at the time. Today, public discourse about innovation often focuses on the supply side, namely, the innovators and entrepreneurs trying to create new products. But the study shows that the demand side can significantly influence innovative activity. 

“Technology is not like, ‘Eureka!’ where it just happens,” Autor says. “Innovation is a purposive activity. And innovation is cumulative. If you get far enough, it will have its own momentum. But if you don’t, it’ll never get there.”

Which brings us back to AI, the topic so many people are focused on in 2026. Will AI create good new jobs, or will it take work away? Well, it likely depends how we implement it, Autor thinks. Consider the massive health care sector, where there could be a lot of types of tech-driven new work, if people are interested in creating jobs.

“There are different ways we could use AI in health care,” Autor says. “One is just to automate people’s jobs away. The other is to allow people with different levels of expertise to do different tasks. I would say the latter is more socially beneficial. But it’s not clear that is where the market will go.” 

On the other hand, maybe with government-driven demand in various forms, AI could get applied in ways that end up boosting health care-sector productivity, creating new jobs as a result. 

“More than half the dollars in health care in the U.S. are public dollars,” Autor observes. “We have a lot of leverage there, we can push things in that direction. There are different ways to use this.” 

This research was supported, in part, by the Hewlett Foundation, the Google Technology and Society Visiting Fellows Program, the NOMIS Foundation, the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Fellowship, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation, and Instituut Gak.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 21 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02634-9

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