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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 events illuminate critical need for menstruation...
More than 70 MIT students, faculty, staff, and alumni gathered in MIT’s Killian Court recently to “Stand Up and Be Counted (for Women’s Health),” with a strong representation of individuals concerned about gynecology disorders such as endometriosis and adenomyosis. An estimated 20-25 percent of MIT women — about 2,000-2,500 total — are affected by one or more menstrual disorders in ways that impair their abilities to work and participate in the academic community. Participants in the Sept. 14 rally held banners and signs to amplify...

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Does mask-wearing affect behavior?
Since 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a global increase in the number of people wearing masks to limit the spread of illness. Now, new research co-authored by MIT scholars suggests that, in China at least, wearing masks also influences how people act. The research, conducted across 10 studies focused on deviant behavior — such as running red lights, violating parking rules, and cheating for money — shows that people wearing masks were less likely to behave deviantly...

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Small eddies play a big role in...
Subtropical gyres are enormous rotating ocean currents that generate sustained circulations in the Earth’s subtropical regions just to the north and south of the equator. These gyres are slow-moving whirlpools that circulate within massive basins around the world, gathering up nutrients, organisms, and sometimes trash, as the currents rotate from coast to coast. For years, oceanographers have puzzled over conflicting observations within subtropical gyres. At the surface, these massive currents appear to host healthy populations of phytoplankton — microbes...

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MIT team places 3rd in materials design...
The United States might be one step closer to its goal of having half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 be zero-emissions electric vehicles. That’s thanks to a pair of MIT undergraduates and their graduate student coach in Germany, who developed a new type of steel not for the cars’ build, but for the die-casting molds that stamp them out in just a few discrete parts. MIT junior Ian Chen and Kyle Markland ’22 placed third in ASM...

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Wiggling toward bio-inspired machine intelligence
Juncal Arbelaiz Mugica is a native of Spain, where octopus is a common menu item. However, Arbelaiz appreciates octopus and similar creatures in a different way, with her research into soft-robotics theory.  More than half of an octopus’ nerves are distributed through its eight arms, each of which has some degree of autonomy. This distributed sensing and information processing system intrigued Arbelaiz, who is researching how to design decentralized intelligence for human-made systems with embedded sensing and computation. At...

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SMART researchers develop quick test to determine...
A team of scientists from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has developed a quick test kit that can tell if a person has immunity against Covid-19 and its variants, based on the antibodies detected in a blood sample. Unlike ART test kits — which look for the presence of viral proteins produced during a Covid-19 infection to determine if a person is infected — this...

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Professor Emeritus Richard “Dick” Eckaus, who specialized...
Richard “Dick” Eckaus, Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics, emeritus, in the Department of Economics, died on Sept. 11 in Boston. He was 96 years old. Eckaus was born in Kansas City, Missouri on April 30, 1926, the youngest of three children to parents who had emigrated from Lithuania. His father, Julius Eckaus, was a tailor, and his mother, Bessie (Finkelstein) Eckaus helped run the business. The family struggled to make ends meet financially but academic success offered Eckaus...

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Making each vote count
Graduate student Jacob Jaffe wants to improve the administration of American elections. To do that, he is posing “questions in political science that we haven’t been asking enough,” he says, “and solving them with methods we haven’t been using enough.” Considerable research has been devoted to understanding “who votes, and what makes people vote or not vote,” says Jaffe. He is training his attention on questions of a different nature: Does providing practical information to voters about how to...

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Processing waste biomass to reduce airborne emissions
To prepare fields for planting, farmers the world over often burn corn stalks, rice husks, hay, straw, and other waste left behind from the previous harvest. In many places, the practice creates huge seasonal clouds of smog, contributing to air pollution that kills 7 million people globally a year, according to the World Health Organization. Annually, $120 billion worth of crop and forest residues are burned in the open worldwide — a major waste of resources in an energy-starved...

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MIT AgeLab awards five scholarships to students...
Since 2015, the MIT AgeLab has awarded scholarships to high school students who developed intergenerational programs — initiatives that bring together younger and older people for knowledge-sharing and social connection — in their communities. On Sept. 9, five $5,000 OMEGA scholarships were given to high school students across the United States, supported by the sponsorship of AlerisLife, a senior living and rehabilitation and wellness services company headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts, and AARP. OMEGA, which stands for Opportunities for Multigenerational...

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MIT biologist Richard Hynes wins Lasker Award
MIT Professor Richard Hynes, a pioneer in studying cellular adhesion, has been named a recipient of the 2022 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. Hynes, the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, was honored for the discovery of integrins, proteins that are key to cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions in the body. He will share the prize with Erkki Ruoslahti of Sanford Burnham Prebys and Timothy Springer of...

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Neurodegenerative disease can progress in newly identified...
Neurodegenerative diseases — like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease), Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s — are complicated, chronic ailments that can present with a variety of symptoms, worsen at different rates, and have many underlying genetic and environmental causes, some of which are unknown. ALS, in particular, affects voluntary muscle movement and is always fatal, but while most people survive for only a few years after diagnosis, others live with the disease for decades. Manifestations of ALS can...

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New program to support translational research in...
The MIT School of Engineering and Pillar VC today announced the MIT-Pillar AI Collective, a one-year pilot program funded by a gift from Pillar VC that will provide seed grants for projects in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science with the goal of supporting translational research. The program will support graduate students and postdocs through access to funding, mentorship, and customer discovery. Administered by the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, the MIT-Pillar AI Collective will center on...

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Q&A: Global challenges surrounding the deployment of...
The AI Policy Forum (AIPF) is an initiative of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing to move the global conversation about the impact of artificial intelligence from principles to practical policy implementation. Formed in late 2020, AIPF brings together leaders in government, business, and academia to develop approaches to address the societal challenges posed by the rapid advances and increasing applicability of AI. The co-chairs of the AI Policy Forum are Aleksander Madry, the Cadence Design Systems Professor; Asu...

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MIT engineers build a battery-free, wireless underwater...
Scientists estimate that more than 95 percent of Earth’s oceans have never been observed, which means we have seen less of our planet’s ocean than we have the far side of the moon or the surface of Mars. The high cost of powering an underwater camera for a long time, by tethering it to a research vessel or sending a ship to recharge its batteries, is a steep challenge preventing widespread undersea exploration. MIT researchers have taken a major...

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