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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.

 
Promoting systemic change in the Middle East,...
The Middle East is a region that is facing complicated challenges. MIT programs have been committed to building scalable methodologies through which students and the broader MIT community can learn and make an impact. These processes ensure programs work alongside others across cultures to support change aligned with their needs. Through MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), faculty and staff at the Institute continue to build opportunities to connect with and support the region. In this spirit, MISTI...

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Assay determines the percentage of Omicron, other...
Wastewater monitoring emerged amid the Covid-19 pandemic as an effective and noninvasive way to track a viral outbreak, and advances in the technology have enabled researchers to not only identify but also quantify the presence of particular variants of concern (VOCs) in wastewater samples. Last year, researchers with the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) made the news for developing a quantitative assay for the Alpha variant of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater, while also working on a similar assay for...

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These neurons have food on the brain
A gooey slice of pizza. A pile of crispy French fries. Ice cream dripping down a cone on a hot summer day. When you look at any of these foods, a specialized part of your visual cortex lights up, according to a new study from MIT neuroscientists. This newly discovered population of food-responsive neurons is located in the ventral visual stream, alongside populations that respond specifically to faces, bodies, places, and words. The unexpected finding may reflect the special...

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When Alzheimer’s degrades cells that cross hemispheres,...
A new MIT study finds that Alzheimer’s disease disrupts at least one form of visual memory by degrading a newly identified circuit that connects the vision processing centers of each brain hemisphere. The results of the study, published in Neuron by a research team based at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, come from experiments in mice, but provide a physiological and mechanistic basis for prior observations in human patients: the degree of diminished brain rhythm synchrony between...

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Designing zeolites, porous materials made to trap...
Zeolites are a class of minerals used in everything from industrial catalysts and chemical filters to laundry detergents and cat litter. They are mostly composed of silicon and aluminum — two abundant, inexpensive elements — plus oxygen; they have a crystalline structure; and most significantly, they are porous. Among the regularly repeating atomic patterns in them are tiny interconnected openings, or pores, that can trap molecules that just fit inside them, allow smaller ones to pass through, or block...

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Taking a magnifying glass to data center...
When the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center (LLSC) unveiled its TX-GAIA supercomputer in 2019, it provided the MIT community a powerful new resource for applying artificial intelligence to their research. Anyone at MIT can submit a job to the system, which churns through trillions of operations per second to train models for diverse applications, such as spotting tumors in medical images, discovering new drugs, or modeling climate effects. But with this great power comes the great responsibility of managing and operating it in...

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New leadership at MIT’s Center for Biomedical...
As it continues in its mission to improve global health through the development and implementation of biomedical innovation, the MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation (CBI) today announced changes to its leadership team: Stacy Springs has been named executive director, and Professor Richard Braatz has joined as the center’s new associate faculty director. The change in leadership comes at a time of rapid development in new therapeutic modalities, growing concern over global access to biologic medicines and healthy food, and...

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MIT chemists develop a wireless electronic lateral...
Lateral flow assays (LFA) tests have become ubiquitous within the general public; they are the format for standard home pregnancy and Covid-19 tests, indicating a positive result with a colored line, and a negative result with no colored line. In their current iteration, these tests are largely qualitative and binary in their outputs. Various attempts to make a quantitative LFA have yielded complications due to the optical basis of a quantitative test — scattered stray light and faint images....

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Building better batteries, faster
To help combat climate change, many car manufacturers are racing to add more electric vehicles in their lineups. But to convince prospective buyers, manufacturers need to improve how far these cars can go on a single charge. One of their main challenges? Figuring out how to make extremely powerful but lightweight batteries. Typically, however, it takes decades for scientists to thoroughly test new battery materials, says Pablo Leon, an MIT graduate student in materials science. To accelerate this process,...

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Bridging careers in aerospace manufacturing and fusion...
“A big theme of my life has been focusing on intentional inclusion and how I can create environments where people can really bring their whole authentic selves to work,” says Joy Dunn ’08. As the head of operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinout working to achieve commercial fusion energy, Dunn looks for solutions to the world’s greatest climate challenges — while creating an open and equitable work environment where everyone can succeed. This theme has been cultivated...

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Using seismology for groundwater management
As climate change increases the number of extreme weather events, such as megadroughts, groundwater management is key for sustaining water supply. But current groundwater monitoring tools are either costly or insufficient for deeper aquifers, limiting our ability to monitor and practice sustainable management in populated areas. Now, a new paper published in Nature Communications bridges seismology and hydrology with a pilot application that uses seismometers as a cost-effective way to monitor and map groundwater fluctuations. “Our measurements are independent...

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John Tirman, political theorist and executive director...
John Tirman, an MIT scholar in political theory and expert on U.S.-Iran relations and human security, passed away on the morning of Aug. 19 after suffering cardiac arrest. He was 72. Since 2004, Tirman served as the executive director of and principal research scientist at the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS). During this time, he was a prolific and thoughtful — but always modest — leader of many of the center’s initiatives.  He spearheaded several projects on U.S.-Iran relations, and...

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Stranded assets could exact steep costs on...
A 2021 study in the journal Nature found that in order to avert the worst impacts of climate change, most of the world’s known fossil fuel reserves must remain untapped. According to the study, 90 percent of coal and nearly 60 percent of oil and natural gas must be kept in the ground in order to maintain a 50 percent chance that global warming will not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. As the world transitions away from...

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When a task adds more steps, this...
Life is full of processes to learn and then relearn when they become more elaborate. One day you log in to an app with just a password, then the next day you also need a code texted to you. One day you can just pop your favorite microwavable lunch into the oven for six straight minutes, but then the packaging changes and you have to cook it for three minutes, stir, and then heat it for three more. Our...

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Engineers fabricate a chip-free, wireless electronic “skin”
Wearable sensors are ubiquitous thanks to wireless technology that enables a person’s glucose concentrations, blood pressure, heart rate, and activity levels to be transmitted seamlessly from sensor to smartphone for further analysis. Most wireless sensors today communicate via embedded Bluetooth chips that are themselves powered by small batteries. But these conventional chips and power sources will likely be too bulky for next-generation sensors, which are taking on smaller, thinner, more flexible forms. Now MIT engineers have devised a new...

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