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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-WHOI Joint Program announces new leadership
After 13 years as director of the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering, Ed Boyle, professor of ocean geochemistry in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), is stepping down at the end of June. Professor Mick Follows, who holds joint appointments in EAPS and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will take on the directorship beginning July 1. The leadership succession was announced by MIT Vice President...

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Making art through computation
Chelsi Cocking is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the human body with the help of computers. For her work, she develops sophisticated software to use as her artistic tools, including facial detection techniques, body tracking software, and machine learning algorithms. Cocking’s interest in the human body stems from her childhood training in modern dance. Growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, she equally loved the arts and sciences, refusing to pick one over the other. For college, “I really wanted to...

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Investing in a new future with Open...
Even before joining a financial technology startup, Michael Pilgreen believed in taking risks and investing long-term — especially when it came to his education and career.  For six years, Pilgreen worked in creative production management, specializing in painting, metalworking, and installations. He’d established himself in the art world with large collaborative projects like a mosaic made entirely of sequins for the Chili’s Care Center at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, and never imagined...

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Taking the guesswork out of dental care...
When you picture a hospital radiologist, you might think of a specialist who sits in a dark room and spends hours poring over X-rays to make diagnoses. Contrast that with your dentist, who in addition to interpreting X-rays must also perform surgery, manage staff, communicate with patients, and run their business. When dentists analyze X-rays, they do so in bright rooms and on computers that aren’t specialized for radiology, often with the patient sitting right next to them. Is...

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Taking the guesswork out of dental care...
When you picture a hospital radiologist, you might think of a specialist who sits in a dark room and spends hours poring over X-rays to make diagnoses. Contrast that with your dentist, who in addition to interpreting X-rays must also perform surgery, manage staff, communicate with patients, and run their business. When dentists analyze X-rays, they do so in bright rooms and on computers that aren’t specialized for radiology, often with the patient sitting right next to them. Is...

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Q&A: Neil Thompson on computing power and...
Moore’s Law is the famous prognostication by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a microchip would double every year or two. This prediction has mostly been met or exceeded since the 1970s — computing power doubles about every two years, while better and faster microchips become less expensive. This rapid growth in computing power has fueled innovation for decades, yet in the early 21st century researchers began to sound alarm bells that Moore’s Law was...

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Robots play with play dough
The inner child in many of us feels an overwhelming sense of joy when stumbling across a pile of the fluorescent, rubbery mixture of water, salt, and flour that put goo on the map: play dough. (Even if this happens rarely in adulthood.) While manipulating play dough is fun and easy for 2-year-olds, the shapeless sludge is hard for robots to handle. Machines have become increasingly reliable with rigid objects, but manipulating soft, deformable objects comes with a laundry...

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Robots play with play dough
The inner child in many of us feels an overwhelming sense of joy when stumbling across a pile of the fluorescent, rubbery mixture of water, salt, and flour that put goo on the map: play dough. (Even if this happens rarely in adulthood.) While manipulating play dough is fun and easy for 2-year-olds, the shapeless sludge is hard for robots to handle. Machines have become increasingly reliable with rigid objects, but manipulating soft, deformable objects comes with a laundry...

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Donald Sadoway wins European Inventor Award for...
MIT Professor Donald Sadoway has won the 2022 European Inventor Award, in the category for Non-European Patent Office Countries, for his work on liquid metal batteries that could enable the long-term storage of renewable energy. Sadoway is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and a longtime supporter and friend of the Materials Research Laboratory. “By enabling the large-scale storage of renewable energy, Donald Sadoway’s invention is a huge step towards the...

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MIT finishes fourth in 2022 Division III...
In the final 2022 Division III LEARFIELD Directors’ Cup standings, MIT finished in fourth place overall as the Engineers ended the 2021-22 academic year with 936.75 points. This marks the second-highest finish in MIT history as the Engineers climbed two spots following a tremendous performance in the spring season. Fall highlights Men’s cross country finished as the NCAA National Runner-Up as the Engineers registered a program-best five All-Americans at the NCAA Championship. Women’s cross country captured the NEWMAC title...

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At the forefront of building with biology
It would seem that engineering is in Ritu Raman’s blood. Her mother is a chemical engineer, her father is a mechanical engineer, and her grandfather is a civil engineer. A common thread among her childhood experiences was witnessing firsthand the beneficial impact that engineering careers could have on communities. One of her earliest memories is watching her parents build communication towers to connect the rural villages of Kenya to the global infrastructure. She recalls the excitement she felt watching...

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Study illuminates trade-off between complex words and...
Bruce Willis’s recent announcement that he was retiring from acting brought widespread public attention to the neurological condition aphasia. While everyone struggles occasionally with finding the right word or tripping over their sentences, aphasia patients can lose the ability to comprehend language entirely. Though Willis hasn’t confirmed it, some doctors suspect that he may have a particularly brutal and degenerative form called primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Scientists have long understood that there are several subtypes of PPA — some...

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Researchers release open-source photorealistic simulator for autonomous...
Hyper-realistic virtual worlds have been heralded as the best driving schools for autonomous vehicles (AVs), since they’ve proven fruitful test beds for safely trying out dangerous driving scenarios. Tesla, Waymo, and other self-driving companies all rely heavily on data to enable expensive and proprietary photorealistic simulators, since testing and gathering nuanced I-almost-crashed data usually isn’t the most easy or desirable to recreate.  To that end, scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) created “VISTA 2.0,” a...

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MIT engineers devise a recipe for improving...
Autonomous robots have come a long way since the fastidious Roomba. In recent years, artificially intelligent systems have been deployed in self-driving cars, last-mile food delivery, restaurant service, patient screening, hospital cleaning, meal prep, building security, and warehouse packing. Each of these robotic systems is a product of an ad hoc design process specific to that particular system. In designing an autonomous robot, engineers must run countless trial-and-error simulations, often informed by intuition. These simulations are tailored to a...

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Robotic lightning bugs take flight
Fireflies that light up dusky backyards on warm summer evenings use their luminescence for communication — to attract a mate, ward off predators, or lure prey. These glimmering bugs also sparked the inspiration of scientists at MIT. Taking a cue from nature, they built electroluminescent soft artificial muscles for flying, insect-scale robots. The tiny artificial muscles that control the robots’ wings emit colored light during flight. This electroluminescence could enable the robots to communicate with each other. If sent...

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