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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 School of Science launches Center for...
The MIT School of Science is launching a center to advance knowledge and computational capabilities in the field of sustainability science, and support decision-makers in government, industry, and civil society to achieve sustainable development goals. Aligned with the Climate Project at MIT, researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy will develop and apply expertise from across the Institute to improve understanding of sustainability challenges, and thereby provide actionable knowledge and insight to inform strategies for improving human well-being for...

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A bright and airy hub for climate...
Seen from a distance, MIT’s Cecil and Ida Green Building (Building 54) — designed by renowned architect and MIT alumnus I.M. Pei ’40 — is one of the most iconic buildings on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, skyline. Home to the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), the 21-story concrete structure soars over campus, topped with its distinctive spherical radar dome. Close up, however, it was a different story. A sunless, two-story, open-air plaza beneath the tower previously...

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School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences...
Dean Agustín Rayo and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences recently welcomed nine new professors to the MIT community. They arrive with diverse backgrounds and vast knowledge in their areas of research. Sonya Atalay joins the Anthropology Section as a professor. She is a public anthropologist and archaeologist who studies Indigenous science protocols, practices, and research methods carried out with and for Indigenous communities. Atalay is the director and principal investigator of the Center for Braiding Indigenous...

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From large labs to small teams, mentorship...
Each year, new MIT graduate students are tasked with the momentous decision of choosing a research group that will serve as their home for the next several years. Among many questions they face: join an established research effort, or work with a new faculty member in a growing group? Professors Cynthia Breazeal, leading a group of over 30 students, and Ming Guo, with a lab of fewer than 10, demonstrate that excellent mentorship can thrive in a research group...

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Physicists report new insights into exotic particles...
MIT physicists and colleagues report new insights into exotic particles key to a form of magnetism that has attracted growing interest because it originates from ultrathin materials only a few atomic layers thick. The work, which could impact future electronics and more, also establishes a new way to study these particles through a powerful instrument at the National Synchrotron Light Source II at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Among their discoveries, the team has identified the microscopic origin of these particles,...

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The study and practice of being human
For their last meeting of the fall 2023 semester, the students in MIT’s course 21W.756 (Nature Poetry) piled into a bus and headed to a local performance space for a reading: their own. Sure, students in the course, taught by Professor Joshua Bennett, spend much of the semester reading and discussing poems. But they create and perform, too, often using tools from their other studies at MIT. One student in 21W.756 built a custom field microphone to incorporate recorded...

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Testing spooky action at a distance
Researchers at MIT recently signed a four-year collaboration agreement with the Novo Nordisk Foundation Quantum Computing Programme (NQCP) at Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen (UCPH), focused on accelerating quantum computing hardware research. The agreement means that both universities will set up identical quantum laboratories at their respective campuses in Copenhagen and Cambridge, Massachusetts, facilitating seamless cooperation as well as shared knowledge and student exchange. “To realize the promise of quantum computing, we must learn how to build systems...

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Researchers return to Arctic to test integrated...
Shimmering ice extends in all directions as far as the eye can see. Air temperatures plunge to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit and colder with wind chills. Ocean currents drag large swaths of ice floating at sea. Polar bears, narwhals, and other iconic Arctic species roam wild. For a week this past spring, MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers Ben Evans and Dave Whelihan called this place — drifting some 200 nautical miles offshore from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, on the frozen Beaufort...

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Precision home robots learn with real-to-sim-to-real
At the top of many automation wish lists is a particularly time-consuming task: chores.  The moonshot of many roboticists is cooking up the proper hardware and software combination so that a machine can learn “generalist” policies (the rules and strategies that guide robot behavior) that work everywhere, under all conditions. Realistically, though, if you have a home robot, you probably don’t care much about it working for your neighbors. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers decided, with that...

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Helping Olympic athletes optimize their performance, one...
The Olympics is all about pushing the frontiers of human performance. As some athletes prepared for the Paris 2024 games, that included using a new technology developed at MIT.nano. The technology was created by Striv (pronounced “strive”), a startup whose founder gained access to the cutting-edge labs and fabrication equipment at MIT.nano as part of the START.nano accelerator program. Striv’s tactile sensing technology fits into the inserts of shoes and, when combined with algorithms that crunch that tactile data,...

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Across the pond to scale new heights
Nathanael Jenkins had always wanted to study aerospace engineering, he just hadn’t quite found the right place for it. He had explored options close to his home in Hampshire, U.K., but had never considered studying in the United States. That changed when a family vacation brought him to the MIT campus in 2018. “MIT felt exciting, high-energy, and very different from my small high school back home. My lasting memory was the fact that they had a nuclear reactor...

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MIT spinout Arnasi begins applying LiquiGlide no-stick...
The no-stick technology invented by Professor Kripa Varanasi and David Smith SM ’11, initially commercialized as LiquiGlide in 2012, went viral for its uncanny ability to make materials that stick to their containers — think ketchup, cosmetics, and toothpaste — slide out with ease. Now, the company that brought you Colgate no-stick toothpaste is moving into the medical space, and the applications could improve millions of lives. The company, which recently rebranded as the Arnasi Group, has developed an...

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Groundbreaking poverty alleviation project expands with new...
J-PAL North America, a regional office of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), will significantly expand its work to conduct rigorous research and strengthen evidence-based policymaking due to a new grant from long-time supporter and collaborator Arnold Ventures.   With Arnold Ventures’ new eight-figure grant over seven years, J-PAL North America aims to: substantially expand the evidence base on effective solutions to poverty; build the capacity and increase the diversity of its network of over 265 expert researchers; institutionalize...

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Study tracks exposure to air pollution through...
There are significant differences in how much people are exposed to air pollution, according to a new study co-authored by MIT scholars that takes daily mobility into account. The study, based in the Bronx, New York, does not just estimate air pollution exposure based on where people live or work, but uses mobile data to examine where people go during a typical day, building a more thorough assessment of the environment’s impact on them. The research finds exposure to...

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Edgerton Center hosts workshop for deaf high...
The percentage of deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals who have bachelor’s degrees is 15.2 percent lower than their hearing counterparts, and for those who do have degrees, most are in business and education. Deaf adults with degrees in STEM fields are few and far between. MIT Edgerton Center instructor Amanda Gruhl Mayer ’99, PhD ’08 has set out to bridge this gap by piloting a new MIT workshop called STEAMED (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math Experience for Deaf and hard-of-hearing...

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