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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 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...

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“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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Biologists glean insight into repetitive protein sequences
About 70 percent of all human proteins include at least one sequence consisting of a single amino acid repeated many times, with a few other amino acids sprinkled in. These “low-complexity regions” are also found in most other organisms. The proteins that contain these sequences have many different functions, but MIT biologists have now come up with a way to identify and study them as a unified group. Their technique allows them to analyze similarities and differences between LCRs...

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Startups showcase progress at Demo Day event
Ignoring the stairs in favor of one bounding leap onto the stage, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship Bill Aulet told his audience that he’d been warned earlier not to attempt the jump. “But entrepreneurs do the impossible,” he said as introduction to the 2022 delta v Demo Day startup showcase, held at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Taking risks and facing challenges are at the heart of Demo Day, the culmination of the...

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MIT accelerates efforts on path to carbon...
Under its “Fast Forward” climate action plan, which was announced in May 2021, MIT has set a goal of eliminating direct emissions from its campus by 2050. An important near-term milestone will be achieving net-zero emissions by 2026. Many other colleges and universities have set similar targets. What does it take to achieve such a dramatic reduction? Since 2014, when MIT launched a five-year plan for action on climate change, net campus emissions have been cut by 20 percent....

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3Q: How MIT is working to reduce...
Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade, launched in May 2021, charges MIT to eliminate its direct carbon emissions by 2050. Setting an interim goal of net zero emissions by 2026 is an important step to getting there. Joe Higgins, vice president for campus services and stewardship, speaks here about the coordinated, multi-team effort underway to address the Institute’s carbon-reduction goals, the challenges and opportunities in getting there, and creating a blueprint for a carbon-free campus in...

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MIT named No. 2 university by U.S....
MIT has placed second in U.S. News and World Report’s annual rankings of the nation’s best colleges and universities, announced today. As in past years, MIT’s engineering program continues to lead the list of undergraduate engineering programs at a doctoral institution. The Institute also placed first in six out of 12 engineering disciplines. In its evaluation of undergraduate computer science programs, U.S. News placed MIT first on the list along with Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, and the University...

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