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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.

 
MIT’s top research stories of 2022
The dizzying pace of research and innovation at MIT can make it hard to keep up. To mark the end of the year, MIT News is looking back at 10 of the research stories that generated the most excitement in 2022. Designing a heat engine with no moving parts. In April, engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) designed a heat engine that might someday enable a fully decarbonized power grid. In demonstrations, the engine was...

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Putting a new spin on computer hardware
Luqiao Liu was the kind of kid who would rather take his toys apart to see how they worked than play with them the way they were intended. Curiosity has been a driving force throughout his life, and it led him to MIT, where Liu is a newly tenured associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Rather than taking things apart, he’s now using novel materials...

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MIT community members win 2023 IEEE medals...
The IEEE recently announced the annual winners of their 2023 prestigious medals and technical awards, and a number of MIT faculty and alumni have been honored. Rodney Brooks, Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was awarded the IEEE Founders Medal “for leadership in research and commercialization of autonomous robotics, including mobile, humanoid, service, and manufacturing robots.” An entrepreneur, Brooks is the CTO and co-founder of Robust AI. Prior to his time...

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Exploring morality at MIT
Eliza Wells wrestles with deep ethical questions that have implications well beyond her field. A fourth year student in MIT’s philosophy PhD program, Wells studies morality and facilitates discussions at the Institute about ethics and technology. “I believe that philosophy can change lives. I want to help people interrogate their values so that they can make their own lives and others’ better,” she says. Her interest in philosophy research stems from her two core values. The first one is...

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Bringing movement into the classroom and academics...
It’s highly unusual for MIT students to be encouraged to throw one another to the floor, but that’s exactly what was happening during a lab that met in the Wrestling Room at the duPont Athletic Center at MIT in November.  After learning some basic judo moves and pairing off, students were instructed to shift their body weight and apply force all the way from their feet to their hands. “Your goal is to take your opponent down without hurting...

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MIT scientists contribute to National Ignition Facility...
On Monday, Dec. 5, at around 1 a.m., a tiny sphere of deuterium-tritium fuel surrounded by a cylindrical can of gold called a hohlraum was targeted by 192 lasers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. Over the course of billionths of a second, the lasers fired, generating X-rays inside the gold can, and imploding the sphere of fuel. On that morning, for the first time ever, the lasers delivered 2.1 megajoules...

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The lasting legacy of MITIMCo’s Steve Marsh
As senior vice president for the Institute’s real estate group, the MIT Investment Management Company (MITIMCo), Steve Marsh has worked closely with the senior administrations of the past three MIT presidents to lead game-changing real estate efforts that helped attract countless industry collaborators to Kendall Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  With a keen ability to strategize on innovation cluster development combined with a deep focus on investment execution, he oversaw some of the most complex land transactions and developments in...

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Class opens the door to a new...
When Peter Williams was taking 2.002 (Mechanics and Materials II) this past semester, he won a trophy whose height is approximately equal to the width of three human hairs. Rather than feeling short-changed over his minuscule prize, the senior in mechanical engineering considered it a fitting award for a contest in which he and his classmates were asked to design a nanoscale material able to withstand compression. The design challenge represents an innovative new part of the undergraduate class...

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Professor Emeritus Robert Balluffi, multifaceted materials scientist,...
Robert W. Balluffi, professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), died Dec. 8 at his home in Ithaca, New York. He was 98 years old. Described by colleagues as the last of an era of materials scientists with a holistic understanding of the field, Balluffi was renowned for both his expertise and publications in a broad range of topics, including crystal defects, solid-state diffusion, and crystalline interfaces. “He represents a way of thinking about...

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MIT’s Science Policy Initiative holds 12th annual...
On Oct. 16 and 17, 14 MIT graduate students and one postdoc joined by five students from the University of the District of Columbia traveled to Washington to speak to representatives from several federal executive agencies. The trip served as an opportunity for participants to discuss issues related to science and technology policy and the role the federal government plays in addressing these issues. The group of participants met with seven federal agencies: the National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection...

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Subtle biases in AI can influence emergency...
It’s no secret that people harbor biases — some unconscious, perhaps, and others painfully overt. The average person might suppose that computers — machines typically made of plastic, steel, glass, silicon, and various metals — are free of prejudice. While that assumption may hold for computer hardware, the same is not always true for computer software, which is programmed by fallible humans and can be fed data that is, itself, compromised in certain respects. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems —...

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Valeria Robayo is putting her own twist...
From a young age, Valeria Robayo has taken the lead in her own education. At age 3, her family moved from Bogotá, Colombia, to Houston, Texas, to seek better opportunities for Robayo, and later, her sister. She spent summer days at the local library while her parents worked to support the family. Her parents, who were teachers, encouraged her to make her own lesson plans and study what was interesting to her. “Some of the books that attracted me...

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Tomás Palacios named new director of the...
The Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) at MIT has a new director. Maria Zuber, vice president of research and the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics, and Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), recently announced that Tomás Palacios assumed the role of director of MTL on Dec. 1. Palacios has served as director of the 6-A MEng Thesis Program; industry officer; and professor of electrical engineering within...

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School of Engineering unveils MIT Postdoctoral Fellowship...
In July 2022, the MIT School of Engineering welcomed its first class of scholars selected for the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for Engineering Excellence. The idea for the fellowship grew from conversations taking place within the school’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee — established in 2020 — that identified a need to diversify the pool of postdocs employed within the school. The program seeks to discover and develop the next generation of faculty leaders to help guide the school...

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Physician, heal thyself?
Following established guidelines about prescription drugs would seem to be an obvious course of action, especially for the professionals that do the prescribing. Yet doctors and their family members are less likely than other people to comply with those guidelines, according to a large-scale study co-authored by an MIT economist. Depending on your perspective, that result might seem surprising or it might produce a knowing nod. Either way, the result is contrary to past scholarly hypotheses. Many experts have...

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