MIT Know-how Assessment’s hottest tales of 2025


We did the mathematics on AI’s power footprint. Right here’s the story you haven’t heard.

Understanding AI’s power use was an enormous world dialog in 2025 as a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of individuals started utilizing generative AI instruments regularly. Senior reporters James O’Donnell and Casey Crownhart dug into the numbers and printed an unprecedented have a look at AI’s useful resource demand, right down to the extent of a single question, to assist us understand how a lot power and water AI could require shifting ahead. 

We’re studying extra about what vitamin D does to our our bodies

Vitamin D deficiency is widespread, significantly within the winter when there’s much less daylight to drive its manufacturing in our our bodies. The “sunshine vitamin” is vital for bone well being, however as senior reporter Jessica Hamzelou reported, current analysis can also be uncovering stunning new insights into different methods it’d affect our our bodies, together with our immune methods and coronary heart well being.

What’s AI?

Senior editor Will Douglas Heaven’s expansive have a look at learn how to outline AI was printed in 2024, nevertheless it nonetheless managed to attach with many readers this 12 months. He lays out why nobody can agree on what AI is—and explains why that ambiguity issues, and the way it can inform our personal vital eager about this know-how.

Ethically sourced “spare” human our bodies may revolutionize drugs

On this thought-provoking op-ed, a staff of consultants at Stanford College argue that creating dwelling human our bodies that may’t suppose, don’t have any consciousness, and may’t really feel ache may shake up medical analysis and drug growth by offering important organic supplies for testing and transplantation. Latest advances in biotechnology now present a possible pathway to such “bodyoids,” although loads of technical challenges and moral hurdles stay.