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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.

 
Video on the record
Among the Pulitzer Prizes awarded in 2021 was a citation for a teenager who changed history with her cell phone. The Pulitzer committee acknowledged Darnella Frazier “for courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists’ quest for truth and justice.” Frazier’s act of witness received uncommon recognition, but it exists on a continuum with countless other visual documentations of injustice leveraged...

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Professor Emeritus Louis Braida, speech and hearing...
Louis Braida, the Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), died Sept. 2. He was 79. Braida was a principal researcher in the Research Laboratory of Electronics, and a faculty member in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), which is housed in the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) at MIT. Born in the Bronx to Louis Braida and Elvina Tonelli Braida, Braida received a...

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MIT engineers develop a low-cost terahertz camera
Terahertz radiation, whose wavelengths lie between those of microwaves and visible light, can penetrate many nonmetallic materials and detect signatures of certain molecules. These handy qualities could lend themselves to a wide array of applications, including airport security scanning, industrial quality control, astrophysical observations, nondestructive characterization of materials, and wireless communications with higher bandwidth than current cellphone bands. However, designing devices to detect and make images from terahertz waves has been challenging, and most existing terahertz devices are expensive,...

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Facing reality, however painful it may be
Let’s acknowledge it: Life is tough. Most people struggle to make a secure living, stay healthy, and care for family members. On a larger scale, climate change keeps unfolding, Ukraine is under attack, authoritarianism is gaining ground around the world, and a pandemic has disrupted society. How are we supposed to feel good amid all this? Well, you might not feel good. But you can still live a good life. That is a central message of “Life Is Hard,”...

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New materials could enable longer-lasting implantable batteries
For the last few decades, battery research has largely focused on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, which are used in everything from electric cars to portable electronics and have improved dramatically in terms of affordability and capacity. But nonrechargeable batteries have seen little improvement during that time, despite their crucial role in many important uses such as implantable medical devices like pacemakers. Now, researchers at MIT have come up with a way to improve the energy density of these nonrechargeable, or...

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Ocean microbes get their diet through a...
One of the smallest and mightiest organisms on the planet is a plant-like bacterium known to marine biologists as Prochlorococcus. The green-tinted microbe measures less than a micron across, and its populations suffuse through the upper layers of the ocean, where a single teaspoon of seawater can hold millions of the tiny organisms. Prochlorococcus grows through photosynthesis, using sunlight to convert the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide into organic carbon molecules. The microbe is responsible for 5 percent of the world’s...

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Can your phone tell if a bridge...
Want to know if the Golden Gate Bridge is holding up well? There could be an app for that. A new study involving MIT researchers shows that mobile phones placed in vehicles, equipped with special software, can collect useful structural integrity data while crossing bridges. In so doing, they could become a less expensive alternative to sets of sensors attached to bridges themselves. “The core finding is that information about structural health of bridges can be extracted from smartphone-collected...

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The “last mile” from credentials to employment
Academic digital credentials — the cryptographically verifiable assertion that an individual holds a degree, certificate, or other credential — have been available for the better part of a decade. Yet despite the potential value of these data-rich, transportable credentials to graduates, employers, and academic institutions, digital credentials have by no means become the standard in presenting or verifying skills and qualifications. A new report from the Digital Credentials Consortium (DCC), housed at MIT Open Learning, explores this gap between...

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In machine learning, synthetic data can offer...
Teaching a machine to recognize human actions has many potential applications, such as automatically detecting workers who fall at a construction site or enabling a smart home robot to interpret a user’s gestures. To do this, researchers train machine-learning models using vast datasets of video clips that show humans performing actions. However, not only is it expensive and laborious to gather and label millions or billions of videos, but the clips often contain sensitive information, like people’s faces or...

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Nanosensors target enzymes to monitor and study...
Cancer is characterized by a number of key biological processes known as the “hallmarks of cancer,” which remodel cells and their immediate environment so that tumors can form, grow, and thrive. Many of these changes are mediated by specific genes and proteins, working in tandem with other cellular processes, but the specifics vary from cancer type to cancer type, and even from patient to patient. Sensitive tools for measuring protein or gene expression, even on the single cell level,...

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Methane research takes on new urgency at...
One of the most notable climate change provisions in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act is the first U.S. federal tax on a greenhouse gas (GHG). That the fee targets methane (CH4), rather than carbon dioxide (CO2), emissions is indicative of the urgency the scientific community has placed on reducing this short-lived but powerful gas. Methane persists in the air about 12 years — compared to more than 1,000 years for CO2 — yet it immediately causes about 120 times more...

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Study urges caution when comparing neural networks...
Neural networks, a type of computing system loosely modeled on the organization of the human brain, form the basis of many artificial intelligence systems for applications such speech recognition, computer vision, and medical image analysis. In the field of neuroscience, researchers often use neural networks to try to model the same kind of tasks that the brain performs, in hopes that the models could suggest new hypotheses regarding how the brain itself performs those tasks. However, a group of...

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Why the 2022 elections might determine the...
Voters need to pay attention to races up and down the ballot — especially to more obscure county-level contests — to protect democracy, panelists said during an Oct. 12 discussion titled “Why the 2022 Elections May Determine the Future of Democracy in the U.S.” While national and congressional races get the most attention, voters may not realize that local and state election officials have the most control over democracy issues, the panelists said. The panel was sponsored by MITvote,...

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Liang Fu and Patrick Lee receive Larkin...
MIT condensed matter theory professors of physics Liang Fu and Patrick A. Lee received the inaugural Larkin Awards in Theoretical Physics, awarded by the William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Minnesota. Fu received the 2022 Anatoly Larkin Award for a junior researcher for his work on 3D topological insulators and odd-parity topological superconductors, crystalline topological insulators, and Majorana zero modes, “and for being an intellectual leader of his generation.” Fu is interested in novel topological phases of...

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A better way to tell which species...
Wildfires, floods, pollution, and overfishing are among the many disruptions that can change the balance of ecosystems, sometimes endangering the future of entire species. But evaluating these ecosystems to determine which species are most at risk, in order to focus preservation actions and policies where they are most needed, is a challenging task. Most such efforts assume that ecosystems are essentially in a state of equilibrium, and that external perturbations cause a temporary shift before things eventually return to...

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