Say WOW

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.

 
Charting the landscape at MIT
Norman Magnuson’s MIT career — culminating in his role as manager of grounds services in the Department of Facilities for the past 20 years — started in 1974 with a summer job. Fresh out of high school and unsure of his next step, Magnuson’s father, Norman Sr., a housing manager at MIT, encouraged him to take a summer staffer position with MIT Grounds Services. That temporary job would turn into a 48-year career, in which Magnuson found and fed...

Read More

Ancient African smelting technique sparks anew at...
The plumes of smoke that rose from East Campus one sunny May day could easily have been mistaken for a barbecue taking place in the courtyard. And indeed, burgers were on the grill. But the smoke was coming from a much rarer sight on MIT’s campus — or, in fact, anywhere outside West Africa: a mud-and-straw furnace for smelting iron. For two months, students in class 3.094 (Materials in Human Experience) had been building the furnace, or bloomery, in...

Read More

Physicists see electron whirlpools for the first...
Though they are discrete particles, water molecules flow collectively as liquids, producing streams, waves, whirlpools, and other classic fluid phenomena. Not so with electricity. While an electric current is also a construct of distinct particles — in this case, electrons — the particles are so small that any collective behavior among them is drowned out by larger influences as electrons pass through ordinary metals. But, in certain materials and under specific conditions, such effects fade away, and electrons can...

Read More

 
Startup lets doctors classify skin conditions with...
At the age of 22, when Susan Conover wanted to get a strange-looking mole checked out, she was told it would take three months to see a dermatologist. When the mole was finally removed and biopsied, doctors determined it was cancerous. At the time, no one could be sure the cancer hadn’t spread to other parts of her body — the difference between stage 2 and stage 3 or 4 melanoma. Thankfully, the mole ended up being confined to...

Read More

Getting the carbon out of India’s heavy...
The world’s third largest carbon emitter after China and the United States, India ranks seventh in a major climate risk index. Unless India, along with the nearly 200 other signatory nations of the Paris Agreement, takes aggressive action to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial levels, physical and financial losses from floods, droughts, and cyclones could become more severe than they are today. So, too, could health impacts associated with the hazardous air pollution...

Read More

Better living through multicellular life cycles
Cooperation is a core part of life for many organisms, ranging from microbes to complex multicellular life. It emerges when individuals share resources or partition a task in such a way that each derives a greater benefit when acting together than they could on their own. For example, birds and fish flock to evade predators, slime mold swarms to hunt for food and reproduce, and bacteria form biofilms to resist stress. Individuals must live in the same “neighborhood” to...

Read More

 
3 Questions: Marking the 10th anniversary of...
This July 4 marks 10 years since the discovery of the Higgs boson, the long-sought particle that imparts mass to all elementary particles. The elusive particle was the last missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics, which is our most complete model of the universe. In early summer of 2012, signs of the Higgs particle were detected in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, which is operated by CERN, the European Organization for...

Read More

Building explainability into the components of machine-learning...
Explanation methods that help users understand and trust machine-learning models often describe how much certain features used in the model contribute to its prediction. For example, if a model predicts a patient’s risk of developing cardiac disease, a physician might want to know how strongly the patient’s heart rate data influences that prediction. But if those features are so complex or convoluted that the user can’t understand them, does the explanation method do any good? MIT researchers are striving...

Read More

Kerry Emanuel: A climate scientist and meteorologist...
Kerry Emanuel once joked that whenever he retired, he would start a “hurricane safari” so other people could experience what it’s like to fly into the eye of a hurricane. “All of a sudden, the turbulence stops, the sun comes out, bright sunshine, and it’s amazingly calm. And you’re in this grand stadium ,” he says. “It’s quite an experience.” While the hurricane safari is unlikely to come to fruition — “You can’t just conjure up...

Read More

 
Researchers pioneer a new way to detect...
Researchers from the Critical Analytics For Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine (CAMP) interdisciplinary research group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, have developed a new method of detecting adventitious microbial contamination in mesenchymal stromal cell (MSC) cultures, ensuring the rapid and accurate testing of cell therapy products intended for use in patients. Utilizing machine learning to predict if a culture is clean or contaminated in near-real time, this breakthrough method can be used during...

Read More

Robot overcomes uncertainty to retrieve buried objects
For humans, finding a lost wallet buried under a pile of items is pretty straightforward — we simply remove things from the pile until we find the wallet. But for a robot, this task involves complex reasoning about the pile and objects in it, which presents a steep challenge. MIT researchers previously demonstrated a robotic arm that combines visual information and radio frequency (RF) signals to find hidden objects that were tagged with RFID tags (which reflect signals sent...

Read More

Exploring emerging topics in artificial intelligence policy
Members of the public sector, private sector, and academia convened for the second AI Policy Forum Symposium last month to explore critical directions and questions posed by artificial intelligence in our economies and societies. The virtual event, hosted by the AI Policy Forum (AIPF) — an undertaking by the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing to bridge high-level principles of AI policy with the practices and trade-offs of governing — brought together an array of distinguished panelists to delve into...

Read More

 
Tapping into the million-year energy source below...
There’s an abandoned coal power plant in upstate New York that most people regard as a useless relic. But MIT’s Paul Woskov sees things differently. Woskov, a research engineer in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, notes the plant’s power turbine is still intact and the transmission lines still run to the grid. Using an approach he’s been working on for the last 14 years, he’s hoping it will be back online, completely carbon-free, within the decade. In fact,...

Read More

Tissue model reveals key players in liver...
The human liver has amazing regeneration capabilities: Even if up to 70 percent of it is removed, the remaining tissue can regrow a full-sized liver within months. Taking advantage of this regenerative capability could give doctors many more options for treating chronic liver disease. MIT engineers have now taken a step toward that goal, by creating a new liver tissue model that allows them to trace the steps involved in liver regeneration more precisely than has been possible before....

Read More

Making hydrogen power a reality
For decades, government and industry have looked to hydrogen as a potentially game-changing tool in the quest for clean energy. As far back as the early days of the Clinton administration, energy sector observers and public policy experts have extolled the virtues of hydrogen — to the point that some people have joked that hydrogen is the energy of the future, “and always will be.” Even as wind and solar power have become commonplace in recent years, hydrogen has...

Read More