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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.

 
Q&A: Cultivating the mind-body connection
Last spring, MIT Professor Emma Teng and Lead Wellness Instructor Sarah Johnson worked together to teach a joint class: 21G.015 (Introduction to Buddhism, Mindfulness, and Meditation), developed as a companion to PE.0534 (Fitness and Meditation), taught by Johnson. In the “mens et manus” tradition of MIT, the class gave students an opportunity to study and experience the history, theory, and practice of these traditions. Teng and Johnson spoke about the experience. Q: What was the impetus to create this...

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New endowment fund will power student innovation...
Through a $1 million gift from Daniel Gilbert ’91 and his wife, Judy, the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program gained a permanent source of funding with the establishment of the MIT Sandbox Endowment Fund. The new fund allows MIT Sandbox to expand its entrepreneurship education offerings to MIT undergraduate and graduate students, bringing to life the Gilberts’ dream to transform MIT Sandbox into a permanent program at the Institute, bringing technologies, ideas, and business concepts to life in ways...

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J-WAFS awards $150K Solutions grant to Patrick...
The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) has awarded a 2022 J-WAFS Solutions grant to Patrick S. Doyle, the Robert T. Haslam Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, for his innovative system to tackle water pollution. Doyle will be working with co-Principal Investigator Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli, assistant professor in materials processing in the Department of Materials Science, as well as PhD students Devashish Gokhale and Tynan Perez. Building off of findings from a 2019 J-WAFS seed grant,...

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Turning carbon dioxide into valuable products
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a major contributor to climate change and a significant product of many human activities, notably industrial manufacturing. A major goal in the energy field has been to chemically convert emitted CO2 into valuable chemicals or fuels. But while CO2 is available in abundance, it has not yet been widely used to generate value-added products. Why not? The reason is that CO2 molecules are highly stable and therefore not prone to being chemically converted to a...

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Collaborative machine learning that preserves privacy
Training a machine-learning model to effectively perform a task, such as image classification, involves showing the model thousands, millions, or even billions of example images. Gathering such enormous datasets can be especially challenging when privacy is a concern, such as with medical images. Researchers from MIT and the MIT-born startup DynamoFL have now taken one popular solution to this problem, known as federated learning, and made it faster and more accurate. Federated learning is a collaborative method for training...

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Envisioning new financing models to mitigate the...
As the U.S. aging population rapidly grows, there remains a severe shortage of care workers and personal assistants for older adults and people with disabilities despite a surplus of unfilled jobs. Low pay, lack of basic benefits, and the paucity of opportunities for growth have resulted in a huge turnover in the long-term services and supports (LTSS) industry. Massachusetts, for example, experienced a care worker staffing crisis even before the pandemic, and a staffing exodus continues in the care...

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Analyzing the potential of AlphaFold in drug...
Over the past few decades, very few new antibiotics have been developed, largely because current methods for screening potential drugs are prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. One promising new strategy is to use computational models, which offer a potentially faster and cheaper way to identify new drugs. A new study from MIT reveals the potential and limitations of one such computational approach. Using protein structures generated by an artificial intelligence program called AlphaFold, the researchers explored whether existing models could...

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Forging political alliances through supply chains
The bustling coastal city of Wenzhou made its mark early on Hao Zhang. “It is considered the birthplace of Chinese capitalism, and living there, with many relatives involved in startups, I was exposed to all kinds of business,” says Zhang, a rising fifth-year graduate student in political science. He also gained a close-up view of interactions between government and private enterprise. “My father dealt with these firms all his life as a tax collector,” he says. “I learned from...

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Using machine learning to identify undiagnosable cancers
The first step in choosing the appropriate treatment for a cancer patient is to identify their specific type of cancer, including determining the primary site — the organ or part of the body where the cancer begins. In rare cases, the origin of a cancer cannot be determined, even with extensive testing. Although these cancers of unknown primary tend to be aggressive, oncologists must treat them with non-targeted therapies, which frequently have harsh toxicities and result in low rates...

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High energy and hungry for the hardest...
A high school track star and valedictorian, Anne White has always relished moving fast and clearing high hurdles. Since joining the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) in 2009 she has produced path-breaking fusion research, helped attract a more diverse cohort of students and scholars into the discipline, and, during a worldwide pandemic, assumed the role of department head as well as co-lead of an Institute-wide initiative to address climate change. For her exceptional leadership, innovation, and accomplishments in education...

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Letter regarding proposed free expression statement from...
The following letter was sent to the MIT community today by President L. Rafael Reif and includes a letter sent to MIT faculty today by Provost Cynthia Barnhart, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, and Chair of the Faculty Lily L. Tsai. To the members of the MIT community, Last fall, I asked the provost, chancellor and chair of the faculty to assemble a special working group to take up the charge of exploring, on behalf of the community, a range of profound questions around...

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Analysis of email traffic suggests remote work...
The debate over what is lost when remote work replaces an in-person workplace just got an infusion of much-needed data. According to a study conducted at MIT, when workers go remote, the types of work relationships that encourage innovation tend to be hard hit. Two and a half years after Covid-19 shut down offices and research labs around the world, “we can finally use data to address a critical question: How did the pandemic-induced adoption of remote working affect...

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MIT releases strategic action plan for belonging,...
MIT has released a new strategic action plan for belonging, achievement, and composition, intended to help the Institute forge a stronger sense of community and pursue excellence by tapping into talent globally. The plan provides an Institute-wide framework for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion across MIT, while allowing individual departments, labs, and offices to define and tailor their own efforts in this regard. “Yet as in many academic communities across the country, even after decades of effort, there is...

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Chloé Gentgen named one of Aviation Week...
Aviation Week Network named Chloé Gentgen SM’22, a PhD candidate in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), as one of this year’s 20 Twenties Award recipients. The program has selected 20 promising recipients each year since 2013, based on stellar academic performance, extensive community involvement, and substantial research contributions, to recognize the next generation of top aerospace talents. “I am incredibly thankful to be honored with this award,” says Gentgen. “I see it as encouragement to continue...

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MIT’s MOXIE experiment reliably produces oxygen on...
On the red and dusty surface of Mars, nearly 100 million miles from Earth, an instrument the size of a lunchbox is proving it can reliably do the work of a small tree.   The MIT-led Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE, has been successfully making oxygen from the Red Planet’s carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere since April 2021, about two months after it touched down on the Martian surface as part of NASA’s Perseverance rover and Mars 2020 mission....

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