Say WOW

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.

 
Getting innovative products to rural communities
Universities like MIT have produced a number of innovative products for people in low-resource communities around the world. But in order for those products to make an impact, they have to be manufactured at scale, get through local supply chains, and, most importantly, make enough of an impression that people actually want to buy them. All of those challenges can erode the economics of deploying new products and ultimately limit their adoption. For the last 11 years, the MIT...

Read More

Passive cooling system could benefit off-grid locations
As the world gets warmer, the use of power-hungry air conditioning systems is projected to increase significantly, putting a strain on existing power grids and bypassing many locations with little or no reliable electric power. Now, an innovative system developed at MIT offers a way to use passive cooling to preserve food crops and supplement conventional air conditioners in buildings, with no need for power and only a small need for water. The system, which combines radiative cooling, evaporative...

Read More

Scene at MIT: Dancing the night away
On Saturday night, MIT came out to party. An all-Institute dance party, organized by L. Rafael Reif as a thank you to the community as he approaches the conclusion of his tenure as MIT’s 17th president, was attended by thousands of students, staff, faculty, and their guests. The festivities opened with a community café dinner, with refreshments available to party-goers all night long. Multiple locations across campus hosted dancing and music — from 60s, 70s, and 80s tunes at...

Read More

 
Ethics in action
Design decisions often treat people unequally. Take a bicycle, for instance. Bicycles offer a relatively inexpensive, healthy, and environmentally friendly mode of transportation for billions of people around the world. Yet each bicycle that hits the market automatically excludes those living with certain disabilities. “Even with the most benevolent technology, no matter how well-intentioned we are ethically, we are still inevitably being discriminatory,” says rising MIT senior Teresa Gao, who is double-majoring in computer science and brain and cognitive...

Read More

Protecting maternal health in Rwanda
The world is facing a maternal health crisis. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 810 women die each day due to preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Two-thirds of these deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. In Rwanda, one of the leading causes of maternal mortality is infected Cesarean section wounds. An interdisciplinary team of doctors and researchers from MIT, Harvard University, and Partners in Health (PIH) in Rwanda have proposed a solution to address this problem. They...

Read More

MIT cognitive scientists win Ig Nobel for...
Two MIT scientists from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) are among this year’s winners of the Ig Nobel Prize, the satiric award celebrating “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” BCS professor Edward “Ted” Gibson and graduate student Eric Martinez, along with former MIT visiting researcher Francis Mollica, now at the University of Edinburgh, were awarded the prize in the literature category for their work explaining what makes legal documents so challenging...

Read More

 
“Kids are people too!”
Professor Hal Abelson has dedicated his career to making information technology more accessible to all and empowering people — kids, in particular — through computer science. But his storied career in computer science began with Abelson coming to MIT in 1969 to pursue his interest in mathematics. “The thing I like to remind students of is that they don’t have to know what they are going to do with the rest of their life,” Abelson says. “I get a...

Read More

The power of weak ties in gaining...
If you have a LinkedIn account, your connections probably consist of a core group of people you know well, and a larger set of people you know less well. The latter are what experts call “weak ties.” Now a unique, large-scale experiment co-directed by an MIT scholar shows that on LinkedIn, those weak ties are more likely to land you new employment, compared to your ties with people you know better. “When we look at the experimental data, weak...

Read More

Saturn’s rings and tilt could be the...
Swirling around the planet’s equator, the rings of Saturn are a dead giveaway that the planet is spinning at a tilt. The belted giant rotates at a 26.7-degree angle relative to the plane in which it orbits the sun. Astronomers have long suspected that this tilt comes from gravitational interactions with its neighbor Neptune, as Saturn’s tilt precesses, like a spinning top, at nearly the same rate as the orbit of Neptune. But a new modeling study by astronomers...

Read More

 
Study reveals how environment and state are...
Say you live across from a bakery. Sometimes you are hungry, and therefore tempted when odors waft through your window, but other times satiety makes you indifferent. Sometimes popping over for a popover seems trouble-free, but sometimes your spiteful ex is there. Your brain balances many influences in determining what you’ll do. A new MIT study details an example of this working in a much simpler animal, highlighting a potentially fundamental principle of how nervous systems integrate multiple factors...

Read More

Study: Astronomers risk misinterpreting planetary signals in...
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is revealing the universe with spectacular, unprecedented clarity. The observatory’s ultrasharp infrared vision has cut through the cosmic dust to illuminate some of the earliest structures in the universe, along with previously obscured stellar nurseries and spinning galaxies lying hundreds of millions of light years away. In addition to seeing farther into the universe than ever before, JWST will capture the most comprehensive view of objects in our own galaxy — namely, some...

Read More

The economics of missed opportunities
Pharmaceutical companies make some remarkable advances. Could they make significantly more of them? It’s possible, but for that to happen, the industry would likely have to change some of its core habits, according to the research of Danielle Li, an associate professor of economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In a recent paper, Li, along with economists Joshua Krieger and Dimitris Papalikolaou, found that big pharma firms are risk-averse. Novel drugs can have big payoffs, but firms...

Read More

 
A lasting — and valuable — legacy
Betar Gallant, MIT associate professor and Class of 1922 Career Development Chair in Mechanical Engineering, grew up in a curious, independently minded family. Her mother had multiple jobs over the years, including in urban planning and in the geospatial field. Her father, although formally trained in English, read textbooks of all kinds from cover to cover, taught himself numerous technical fields including engineering, and worked successfully in them. When Gallant was very young, she and her father did science...

Read More

Computing for the health of the planet
The health of the planet is one of the most important challenges facing humankind today. From climate change to unsafe levels of air and water pollution to coastal and agricultural land erosion, a number of serious challenges threaten human and ecosystem health. Ensuring the health and safety of our planet necessitates approaches that connect scientific, engineering, social, economic, and political aspects. New computational methods can play a critical role by providing data-driven models and solutions for cleaner air, usable...

Read More

SMART Innovation Center awarded five-year NRF grant...
The Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore has announced a five-year grant awarded to the SMART Innovation Center (SMART IC) by the National Research Foundation Singapore (NRF) as part of its Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2025 Plan. The SMART IC plays a key role in accelerating innovation and entrepreneurship in Singapore and will channel the grant toward refining and commercializing developments in the field of deep technologies through financial support and training. Singapore...

Read More