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Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

 
The crypto rich find security in Anchorage
Not the city, the $57 million-funded cryptocurrency custodian startup. When someone wants to keep tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other coins safe, they put them in Anchorage’s vault. And now they can trade straight from custody so they never have to worry about getting robbed mid-transaction. With backing from Visa, Andreessen Horowitz, and Blockchain Capital, Anchorage has emerged as the darling of the cryptocurrency security startup scene. Today it’s flexing its muscle and...

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Submissions for The Europas Tech Startups Awards...
Submissions for The Europas Awards 2020 have now opened. We’re back for our 11th year of recognizing the hottest tech startups across the European tech scene, as supported by TechCrunch. The awards evening will be held on 25 June 2020 in London, UK, at the ‘Museum of the Home‘ (formerly known as the Geffrye Museum). Earlier in the day, we will be running a series of Pathfounder workshops aimed at giving Series A and late-stage seed startups practical advice...

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Felix Capital closes $300M fund to double...
To kick off 2020, one of Europe’s newer — and more successful — investment firms has closed a fresh, oversubscribed fund, one sign that VC in the region will continue to run strong in the year ahead after startups across Europe raised some $35 billion in 2019. Felix Capital, the London firm founded by Frederic Court that was one of the earlier firms to identify and invest in the trend of direct-to-consumer businesses, has raised $300 million, money that...

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Insurify raises $23M Series A to add...
The venture-backed insurance world is more than the Lemonades and MetroMiles of the world. There’s more room in the industry for startups to shake things up. One such company, Cambridge-based Insurify, is out today with a new venture round that greatly expands its capital base. The startup, which had accepted just $6.6 million over two rounds before its latest investment, has raised $23 million in a Series A led by MTECH Capital and VIOLA FinTech. Prior investors MassMutual Ventures...

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Anyline, the Austrian startup that provides OCR...
Anyline, the Vienna-based provider of optical character recognition (OCR) technology that developers use to build OCR functions into their websites and apps, has raised $12 million in Series A funding. The company has also unveiled plans for a U.S. expansion. Leading the round is Berlin-based VC firm Project A, with participation from Anyline’s existing investors, including Johann “Hansi” Hansmann, Senovo, and the Gernot Langes-Swarovski Foundation. Founded in 2013, Anyline offers specialised OCR solutions that it says the big tech...

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Zeroing in on decarbonization
To avoid the most destructive consequences of climate change, the world’s electric energy systems must stop producing carbon by 2050. It seems like an overwhelming technological, political, and economic challenge — but not to Nestor Sepulveda. “My work has shown me that we do have the means to tackle the problem, and we can start now,” he says. “I am optimistic.” Sepulveda’s research, first as a master’s student and now as a doctoral candidate in the MIT Department of Nuclear Science...

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3 Questions: Professor Kenda Mutongi on Africa,...
MIT Professor Kenda Mutongi teaches courses in African history, world history, and gender history. She is the author of two award-winning books: “Matatu: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi” (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and “Worries of the Heart: Widows, Family, and Community in Kenya” (University of Chicago Press, 2007). The latter book explores how widows, a marginalized group in Kenya, weathered the country’s transition to a post-colonial society and found novel ways to address their collective social, economic, and political problems....

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3 Questions: Maria Zuber on guidance for...
On January 9, 2020, the International Scholars Office (ISchO) wrote to international scholars at MIT who hold F-1 STEM Optional Practical Training (OPT) status; faculty and senior researchers who may serve as their supervisors; and human resources administrators in departments, laboratories, and centers. The memos addressed potential employer verification visits by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Vice President for Research Maria Zuber, to whom ISchO reports, spoke with MIT News to clarify the intention of the memos...

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A look inside Visa’s shareholder presentation for...
Fresh off the news yesterday that Visa is buying fintech unicorn Plaid for $5.3 billion, the payments giant is making its case to its shareholders. Given the scale of the deal, and the implied bet that Visa is making on the future of its market, the company prepared a presentation, which means we get to peer into its thinking regarding Plaid itself and the fintech market as a whole. In a short deck, Visa argues that buying Plaid will:...

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J-PAL North America seeks partners to research...
J-PAL North America, a research center in the MIT Department of Economics, has announced a new Housing Stability Evaluation Incubator to support organizations fighting homelessness in developing randomized evaluations that test the impacts of their policies, programs, and services.  To many, rising rates of homelessness in some U.S. cities might seem like an intractable challenge. In the United States, more than 500,000 people experience homelessness on a given night, and 1.4 million people pass through emergency shelters in a...

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How to verify that quantum chips are...
In a step toward practical quantum computing, researchers from MIT, Google, and elsewhere have designed a system that can verify when quantum chips have accurately performed complex computations that classical computers can’t. Quantum chips perform computations using quantum bits, called “qubits,” that can represent the two states corresponding to classic binary bits — a 0 or 1 — or a “quantum superposition” of both states simultaneously. The unique superposition state can enable quantum computers to solve problems that are...

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Making physics and astronomy more welcoming to...
Undergraduate physics is in the midst of a boom: In the last two decades, the  number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in physics in the United States has more than doubled, to a current all-time high. And yet, it’s clear that African-American students have been left out of this upward trend. During the same period, African-American representation among physics bachelor’s degree earners has increased by just 4 percent, compared with a 36 percent increase in African-American undergraduates who have earned...

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A new approach to making airplane parts,...
A modern airplane’s fuselage is made from multiple sheets of different composite materials, like so many layers in a phyllo-dough pastry. Once these layers are stacked and molded into the shape of a fuselage, the structures are wheeled into warehouse-sized ovens and autoclaves, where the layers fuse together to form a resilient, aerodynamic shell. Now MIT engineers have developed a method to produce aerospace-grade composites without the enormous ovens and pressure vessels. The technique may help to speed up...

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Former Google Pay execs raise $13.2M to...
Two co-founders of Google Pay in India are building a neo-banking platform in the country — and they have already secured backing from three top VC funds. Sujith Narayanan, a veteran payments executive who co-founded Google Pay in India (formerly known as Google Tez), said on Monday that his startup, epiFi, has raised $13.2 million in its Seed financial round led by Sequoia India and Ribbit Capital. The round valued epiFi at about $50 million. David Velez, the founder...

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Sending clearer signals
In the secluded Russian city where Yury Polyanskiy grew up, all information about computer science came from the outside world. Visitors from distant Moscow would occasionally bring back the latest computer science magazines and software CDs to Polyanskiy’s high school for everyone to share. One day while reading a borrowed PC World magazine in the mid-1990s, Polyanskiy learned about a futuristic concept: the World Wide Web. Believing his city would never see such wonders of the internet, he and...

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