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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.

 
Reif, Zuber attend signing of CHIPS and...
            President L. Rafael Reif and Vice President for Research Maria Zuber were among those on hand Tuesday when President Biden signed the “CHIPS and Science” bill into law in an upbeat ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House. The act provides $52 billion in federal funding to advance the U.S. semiconductor industry through research, design, and manufacturing, and authorizes the doubling of the National Science Foundation and the creation of a new directorate at the agency....

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Caspar Hare, Georgia Perakis named associate deans...
Caspar Hare and Georgia Perakis have been appointed the new associate deans of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC), a cross-cutting initiative in the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. Their new roles will take effect on Sept. 1. “Infusing social and ethical aspects of computing in academic research and education is a critical component of the college mission,” says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor...

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3 Questions: Amar Gupta on an integrated...
Covid-19 was somewhat of a metaverse itself. Many of our domains turned digital — with much attention toward one emerging space: virtual care. The pandemic exacerbated the difficulties of providing appropriate medical board oversight to ensure proper standard of services for patients. MIT researcher and former professor Amar Gupta explores through his research on how different states approach quality, safety, and coordination issues related to telemedicine and health care — and how we need to take an integrated approach...

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Leveraging computational tools to enhance product design
As an undergraduate at MIT, Jana Saadi had to find a way to fulfill her humanities class requirements. Little did she know that her decision would heavily shape her academic career. On a whim, Saadi had joined a friend in a class offered through MIT D-Lab, a project-based program aimed at helping poor communities around the world. The class was supposed to be a quick one-off, but Saadi fell in love with D-Lab’s mission and design philosophy, and stayed...

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Measuring the “woodwork effect” in medical insurance
Not everyone who qualifies for health insurance signs up for it. Consider Medicaid, the national health insurance plan for low-income people. Across the U.S., about 14 percent of eligible adults and 7 percent of eligible children are not enrolled in Medicaid. As it happens, when adults do enroll in Medicaid, some of them sign up their eligible children for it, too. This is an example of a “woodwork effect,” as policy analysts have termed it — sometimes, people eligible...

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MIT’s efforts to get out the vote...
Students in STEM fields are historically less likely to vote than those in other areas of study. Two nonpartisan MIT groups are working to change that, and early returns suggest they’re having an impact. This spring, the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE) — an initiative of the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts University — released data showing a “stunning” increase in student voter turnout during the 2020 presidential election. The increase was especially...

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Design prevents buildup of scar tissue around...
Implantable devices that release insulin into the body hold promise as an alternative way to treat diabetes without insulin injections or cannula insertions. However, one obstacle that has prevented their use so far is that the immune system attacks them after implantation, forming a thick layer of scar tissue that blocks insulin release. This phenomenon, known as the foreign body response, can also interfere with many other types of implantable medical devices. However, a team of MIT engineers and...

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Making hydropower plants more sustainable
Growing up on a farm in Texas, there was always something for siblings Gia Schneider ’99 and Abe Schneider ’02, SM ’03 to do. But every Saturday at 2 p.m., no matter what, the family would go down to a local creek to fish, build rock dams and rope swings, and enjoy nature. Eventually the family began going to a remote river in Colorado each summer. The river forked in two; one side was managed by ranchers who destroyed...

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Researchers create the first artificial vision system...
Giving our hardware sight has empowered a host of applications in self-driving cars, object detection, and crop monitoring. But unlike animals, synthetic vision systems can’t simply evolve under natural habitats. Dynamic visual systems that can navigate both land and water, therefore, have yet to power our machines — leading researchers from MIT, the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), and Seoul National University in Korea to develop a novel artificial vision system that closely replicates the vision of the...

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How microglia contribute to Alzheimer’s disease
One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is a reduction in the firing of some neurons in the brain, which contributes to the cognitive decline that patients experience. A new study from MIT shows how a type of cells called microglia contribute to this slowdown of neuron activity. The study found that microglia that express the APOE4 gene, one of the strongest genetic risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease, cannot metabolize lipids normally. This leads to a buildup of excess...

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A better way to make development projects...
In poorer countries, economic development projects tend to get built with the aid of partner countries and companies, and multilateral development organizations. One line of thought is that such projects work better when the outside partner is also from a lower-income country, what is often referred to as the “Global South.” Suppose the Brazilian cooperation agency works on an agreement to build sewer lines in Mozambique. The existence of “South-South Cooperation” (SSC) means, in theory, that the outside partner...

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Advanced imaging reveals mired migration of neurons...
Using an innovative microscopy method, scientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT observed how newborn neurons struggle to reach their proper places in advanced human brain tissue models of Rett syndrome, producing new insight into how developmental deficits observed in the brains of patients with the devastating disorder may emerge. Rett syndrome, which is characterized by symptoms including severe intellectual disability and impaired social behavior, is caused by mutations in the gene MECP2. To gain...

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A better way to quantify radiation damage...
It was just a piece of junk sitting in the back of a lab at the MIT Nuclear Reactor facility, ready to be disposed of. But it became the key to demonstrating a more comprehensive way of detecting atomic-level structural damage in materials — an approach that will aid the development of new materials, and could potentially support the ongoing operation of carbon-emission-free nuclear power plants, which would help alleviate global climate change. A tiny titanium nut that had...

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New algorithm aces university math course questions
Multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra — topics that many MIT students can ace without breaking a sweat — have consistently stumped machine learning models. The best models have only been able to answer elementary or high school-level math questions, and they don’t always find the correct solutions. Now, a multidisciplinary team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere, led by Iddo Drori, a lecturer in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), has used a neural...

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Why it’s a problem that pulse oximeters...
Pulse oximetry is a noninvasive test that measures the oxygen saturation level in a patient’s blood, and it has become an important tool for monitoring many patients, including those with Covid-19. But new research links faulty readings from pulse oximeters with racial disparities in health outcomes, potentially leading to higher rates of death and complications such as organ dysfunction, in patients with darker skin. It is well known that non-white intensive care unit (ICU) patients receive less-accurate readings of...

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