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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.

 
Helping older adults stay safe and independent
Smartwatches and Fitbits are great for tracking movement, but they weren’t designed for the type of people for whom collecting movement data is arguably most important: older adults who use mobility aids like walkers. For such adults, a change in activity could signal a life-threatening problem: Falls are a leading cause of injury-based death for older adults in the U.S.  Decreased mobility could also signal problems like heart failure, depression, or cognitive decline. Now WalkWise is helping older adults...

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MeepCon comes to MIT
Meep is not just the sound made by the Road Runner and Beaker the Muppet. Meep is a software package that MIT physicists originally developed in the early 2000s as a custom code written in C++ to facilitate the academic research of photonic crystals. It was released as open source in 2006. After nearly two decades of continuous development and growth, involving contributions from more than 40 developers, Meep is now widely used in the photonics community to research...

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On the front lines of space innovation
George Lordos is not your typical graduate student. A degree in economics from Oxford University, an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a 20-year professional career were not the end of his learning journey. His longtime passion for space, particularly the prospect of making a sustainable society on Mars a reality, drew him back to school yet again, this time to study aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. Lordos remembers vividly the impetus for this change in...

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Wesley Harris elected vice president of National...
This spring, some members of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) — a group representing the world’s most accomplished engineers — were tasked with electing the institution’s next vice president. MIT’s Wesley Harris emerged as their top choice. Officially announced as NAE’s new VP, Harris will help advance its mission to expand U.S. engineering frontiers while based on MIT’s campus. “It is a delight to see Wesley Harris celebrated for his substantial achievements as a researcher, educator, and mentor,...

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Fighting poverty with direct cash payments
What’s the best way to help someone living in extreme poverty? Some might say improved access to food while others might focus on health care or education. All are worthy causes, but the truth is that the needs of people in extreme poverty vary. Walk through a slum in Kenya, for instance, and you might meet budding entrepreneurs, people who want to invest in education for themselves or their children, and even people who, given the ability, would simply...

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Power, laws, and planning
Think about almost any locale where people live: Why does it have its current built form? Why do people reside where they do? No doubt there are quirks of geography or history involved. But places are also shaped by money, politics, and the law — in short, by power. Studying those issues is the work of Justin Steil, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Steil’s research largely focuses on cities, drawing out the ways...

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U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren visits MIT to...
To celebrate the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 — which authorizes major funding increases for scientific research and provides about $52 billion for U.S. semiconductor research, development, and manufacturing — Sen. Elizabeth Warren paid a visit to MIT’s state-of-the-art facility for nanoscale science and engineering on Wednesday. She arrived at MIT.nano, a shared 214,000-square-foot nanoscale research center located in the heart of campus, one day after President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan measure into law....

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MIT scientists discover new antiviral defense system...
The following press release was issued today by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Bacteria use a variety of defense strategies to fight off viral infection, and some of these systems have led to groundbreaking technologies, such as CRISPR-based gene-editing. Scientists predict there are many more antiviral weapons yet to be found in the microbial world. A team led by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT...

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Scientists identify a plant molecule that sops...
Symbiotic relationships between legumes and the bacteria that grow in their roots are critical for plant survival. Without those bacteria, the plants would have no source of nitrogen, an element that is essential for building proteins and other biomolecules, and they would be dependent on nitrogen fertilizer in the soil.  To establish that symbiosis, some legume plants produce hundreds of peptides that help bacteria live within structures known as nodules within their roots. A new study from MIT reveals...

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A new method boosts wind farms’ energy...
Virtually all wind turbines, which produce more than 5 percent of the world’s electricity, are controlled as if they were individual, free-standing units. In fact, the vast majority are part of larger wind farm installations involving dozens or even hundreds of turbines, whose wakes can affect each other. Now, engineers at MIT and elsewhere have found that, with no need for any new investment in equipment, the energy output of such wind farm installations can be increased by modeling...

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Passion projects prepare to launch
At the start of the sixth annual MITdesignX “Pitch Day,” Svafa Grönfeldt, the program’s faculty director, made a point of noting that many of the teams about to showcase their ventures had changed direction multiple times on their projects. “Some of you have pivoted more times than we can count,” Grönfeldt said in her welcoming address. “This makes for a fantastic idea because you have the courage to actually question if your ideas are the right ones. In the...

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Thinking like a cyber-attacker to protect user...
A component of computer processors that connects different parts of the chip can be exploited by malicious agents who seek to steal secret information from programs running on the computer, MIT researchers have found. Modern computer processors contain many computing units, called cores, which share the same hardware resources. The on-chip interconnect is the component that enables these cores to communicate with each other. But when programs on multiple cores run simultaneously, there is a chance they can delay...

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Reif, Zuber attend signing of CHIPS and...
            President L. Rafael Reif and Vice President for Research Maria Zuber were among those on hand Tuesday when President Biden signed the “CHIPS and Science” bill into law in an upbeat ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House. The act provides $52 billion in federal funding to advance the U.S. semiconductor industry through research, design, and manufacturing, and authorizes the doubling of the National Science Foundation and the creation of a new directorate at the agency....

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3 Questions: Amar Gupta on an integrated...
Covid-19 was somewhat of a metaverse itself. Many of our domains turned digital — with much attention toward one emerging space: virtual care. The pandemic exacerbated the difficulties of providing appropriate medical board oversight to ensure proper standard of services for patients. MIT researcher and former professor Amar Gupta explores through his research on how different states approach quality, safety, and coordination issues related to telemedicine and health care — and how we need to take an integrated approach...

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Caspar Hare, Georgia Perakis named associate deans...
Caspar Hare and Georgia Perakis have been appointed the new associate deans of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC), a cross-cutting initiative in the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. Their new roles will take effect on Sept. 1. “Infusing social and ethical aspects of computing in academic research and education is a critical component of the college mission,” says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor...

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