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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.

 
Strengthening students’ knowledge and experience in climate...
Tackling the climate crisis is central to MIT. Critical to this mission is harnessing the innovation, passion, and expertise of MIT’s talented students, from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds. To help raise this student involvement to the next level, the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) recently launched a program that will engage MIT undergraduates in a unique, year-long, interdisciplinary experience both developing and implementing climate and sustainability research projects. The MCSC Climate and Sustainability Scholars Program is...

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A new state of the art for...
Labeling data can be a chore. It’s the main source of sustenance for computer-vision models; without it, they’d have a lot of difficulty identifying objects, people, and other important image characteristics. Yet producing just an hour of tagged and labeled data can take a whopping 800 hours of human time. Our high-fidelity understanding of the world develops as machines can better perceive and interact with our surroundings. But they need more help. Scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial...

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Anticipating others’ behavior on the road
Humans may be one of the biggest roadblocks keeping fully autonomous vehicles off city streets. If a robot is going to navigate a vehicle safely through downtown Boston, it must be able to predict what nearby drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians are going to do next. Behavior prediction is a tough problem, however, and current artificial intelligence solutions are either too simplistic (they may assume pedestrians always walk in a straight line), too conservative (to avoid pedestrians, the robot just...

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“Spring-loaded” system pops phosphorus into molecular rings
MIT chemists have devised a new chemical reaction that allows them to synthesize a phosphorus-containing ring, using a catalyst to add phosphorus to simple organic compounds called alkenes. Their reaction, which yields a ring containing two carbon atoms and one phosphorus atom, can be performed at normal temperature and pressure, and makes use of a novel “spring-loaded” phosphorus-containing molecule that supplies the phosphorus atom. “This is a rare example of a discovery of a new catalytic reaction, and it...

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Amy Moran-Thomas receives the Edgerton Faculty Achievement...
Amy Moran-Thomas, the Alfred Henry and Jean Morrison Hayes Career Development Associate Professor of Anthropology, has received the 2021-22 Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award in recognition of her “exceptional commitment to innovative and collaborative interdisciplinary approaches to resolving inequitable impacts on human health,” according to a statement by the  selection committee. A medical anthropologist, Moran-Thomas investigates linkages between human and environmental health, with a focus on health disparities. She is the author of the award-winning book “Traveling with...

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MIT scientists develop low-cost, high-precision fabrication method...
Technologies that depend on lightweight, high-precision optical systems, like space telescopes, X-ray mirrors, and display panels, have developed significantly over the past several decades, but more advanced progress has been limited by seemingly simple challenges. For example, the surfaces of mirrors and plates with microstructures that are necessary in these optical systems can be distorted by stressed surface coating materials, degrading optics quality. This is especially true for ultra-lightweight optical systems, such as space optics, where traditional optical fabrication...

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Professor Emeritus Markus Zahn, who specialized in...
Markus Zahn, professor emeritus within the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), died on March 13. He was 75 years old. Zahn was born in Bergen Belsen, Germany, in 1946, to Maria (Fischer) Zahn and Irving Zahn, each the sole survivor of their respective families during the Holocaust. The small family emigrated to the United States in 1949, settling in New York City, where Markus attended the Bronx High School of Science and Lakewood High School...

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In the history lab, delving into the...
Researching history in the MIT archives is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, according to junior Jupneet Singh. “You get a name from here, a picture from here” and you begin to piece together stories about people from the past, says Singh, who has been diving into the archives this spring for class 21H.S04 (South Asian MIT Oral History and Digital Archive), a special topic in history taught by Associate Professor Sana Aiyar. Following in the path of similar...

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Zoë Marschner and Charlotte Wickert named 2022-23...
MIT students Zoë Marschner and Charlotte Wickert have been selected to receive a Barry Goldwater Scholarship for the 2022-23 academic year. Over 5,000 college students from across the United States were nominated for the scholarships, from which only 417 recipients were selected based on academic merit.  The Goldwater scholarships have been conferred since 1989 by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. These scholarships have supported undergraduates who go on to become leading scientists, engineers, and mathematicians in...

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MIT Global Languages celebrates students’ diversity
The MIT community is known for its multicultural fabric. But how often do students have a chance to reflect on what it means to be part of two or more different cultures? On Friday, March 11, over 60 MIT undergraduate students came together to celebrate their cultural and linguistic background during the “Heritage Meets Heritage” event hosted by MIT Global Languages. During the event, students participated in a humorous warm-up activity, played language trivia games, won prizes, and discussed...

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Using plant biology to address climate change
On April 11, MIT announced five multiyear flagship projects in the first-ever Climate Grand Challenges, a new initiative to tackle complex climate problems and deliver breakthrough solutions to the world as quickly as possible. This article is the fourth in a five-part series highlighting the most promising concepts to emerge from the competition and the interdisciplinary research teams behind them. The impact of our changing climate on agriculture and food security — and how contemporary agriculture contributes to climate...

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Bringing “cultural diplomacy” to the classics
People often put national boundaries around the written word. If you read French poetry or Victorian novels, it is tempting to understand those texts strictly in relation to the history and culture of France or Britain. Yet it often helps to take a wider view about literary production. Consider that for many centuries, Chinese provided a common language of literary elites in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Into the 19th century, writers across East Asia were producing their work...

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MIT students Bhav Jain and Liberty Ladd...
MIT students Bhav Jain and Liberty Ladd have been selected as 2022 Truman Scholars. Truman Scholars demonstrate outstanding leadership potential, a commitment to a career in government or the nonprofit sector, and academic excellence. Jain and Ladd join 56 other scholars who were selected from 705 candidates nominated by 275 colleges and universities. President L. Rafael Reif delivered the news personally to both students. Established by Congress in 1975 as a living memorial to President Harry S. Truman and...

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A flexible way to grab items with...
The notion of a large metallic robot that speaks in monotone and moves in lumbering, deliberate steps is somewhat hard to shake. But practitioners in the field of soft robotics have an entirely different image in mind — autonomous devices composed of compliant parts that are gentle to the touch, more closely resembling human fingers than R2-D2 or Robby the Robot. That model is now being pursued by Professor Edward Adelson and his Perceptual Science Group at MIT’s Computer...

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Looking forward to forecast the risks of...
On April 11, MIT announced five multiyear flagship projects in the first-ever Climate Grand Challenges, a new initiative to tackle complex climate problems and deliver breakthrough solutions to the world as quickly as possible. This article is the third in a five-part series highlighting the most promising concepts to emerge from the competition, and the interdisciplinary research teams behind them. Extreme weather events that were once considered rare have become noticeably less so, from intensifying hurricane activity in the...

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