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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 Global SCALE Network expands by adding...
The MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (MIT CTL) and Loughborough University have announced the addition of the United Kingdom Supply Chain and Logistics Excellence (UK SCALE) Centre at Loughborough University, one of the top 20 research-led universities in the U.K., to the MIT Global Supply Chain and Logistics Excellence (SCALE) Network. The launch of the U.K. SCALE center marks a significant expansion of the network, an international alliance of leading research and education centers dedicated to driving supply...

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New transistor’s superlative properties could have broad...
In 2021, a team led by MIT physicists reported creating a new ultrathin ferroelectric material, or one where positive and negative charges separate into different layers. At the time they noted the material’s potential for applications in computer memory and much more. Now the same core team and colleagues — including two from the lab next door — have built a transistor with that material and shown that its properties are so useful that it could change the world...

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Flying high to enable sustainable delivery, remote...
Five years ago, what began as three nervous Norwegians spotting each other across a study room has evolved into a drone company enabling sustainable deliveries, elder care, and more against a backdrop of unforgiving conditions. Lars Erik Fagernæs, Herman Øie Kolden, and Bernhard Paus Græsdal all attended the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, but their paths first crossed in the MIT Professional Education Advanced Study Program lounge in 2019, while they were apprehensive about their impending English exam....

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Professor Emeritus Ralph Gakenheimer, mobility planner and...
Ralph Gakenheimer, MIT professor emeritus of urban planning, passed away on June 17 in Concord, Massachusetts. He was 89 years old. A faculty member in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), Gakenheimer focused his research on the dynamic relationship between how we classify and use land with the mobility choices individuals make in cities. He was particularly interested in the intentions and choices behind the selection of a particular mode of mobility and how those choices intersect...

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Three MIT professors named 2024 Vannevar Bush...
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has announced three MIT professors among the members of the 2024 class of the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (VBFF). The fellowship is the DoD’s flagship single-investigator award for research, inviting the nation’s most talented researchers to pursue ambitious ideas that defy conventional boundaries. Domitilla Del Vecchio, professor of mechanical engineering and the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences & Technology; Mehrdad Jazayeri, professor of brain and cognitive sciences and an investigator at...

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Q&A: “As long as you have a...
Tristan Brown is the S.C. Fang Chinese Language and Culture Career Development Professor at MIT. He specializes in law, science, environment and religion of late imperial China, a period running from the 16th through early 20th centuries. In this Q&A, Brown discusses how his areas of historical research can be useful for examining today’s pressing environmental challenges. This is part of an ongoing series exploring how the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is addressing the climate...

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Roadmap details how to improve exoplanet exploration...
The launch of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2021 kicked off an exciting new era for exoplanet research, especially for scientists looking at terrestrial planets orbiting stars other than our sun. But three years into the telescope’s mission, some scientists have run into challenges that have slowed down progress. In a recent paper published in Nature Astronomy, the TRAPPIST-1 JWST Community Initiative lays out a step-by-step roadmap to overcome the challenges they faced while studying the TRAPPIST-1...

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Study across multiple brain regions discerns Alzheimer’s...
An open-access MIT study published today in Nature provides new evidence for how specific cells and circuits become vulnerable in Alzheimer’s disease, and hones in on other factors that may help some people show resilience to cognitive decline, even amid clear signs of disease pathology.  To highlight potential targets for interventions to sustain cognition and memory, the authors engaged in a novel comparison of gene expression across multiple brain regions in people with or without Alzheimer’s disease, and conducted...

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MIT researchers advance automated interpretability in AI...
As artificial intelligence models become increasingly prevalent and are integrated into diverse sectors like health care, finance, education, transportation, and entertainment, understanding how they work under the hood is critical. Interpreting the mechanisms underlying AI models enables us to audit them for safety and biases, with the potential to deepen our understanding of the science behind intelligence itself. Imagine if we could directly investigate the human brain by manipulating each of its individual neurons to examine their roles in...

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Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT announces...
The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT (KSJ) will welcome 12 fellows in August. In addition to 10 Academic-Year Fellows, KSJ welcomes the inaugural Fellow for Advancing Science Journalism in Africa and the Middle East, and co-hosts a Sharon Begley Fellow with Boston-based publication STAT. The Knight Science Journalism Program, established at MIT in 1983, is the world’s leading science journalism fellowship program. Fellows come to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to explore science, technology, and the craft of journalism in depth....

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Collaborating to advance LEADing-edge digital financial infrastructure
MIT’s Laboratory for Economic Analysis and Design (LEAD) has been awarded a 400,000-euro grant from the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, a German service provider focused on international cooperation for sustainable development and international education. The grant aims to create knowledge sharing opportunities for central bank leaders and help low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) design and scale central bank operations and digital public infrastructure (DPI). “Increased research between leading economists and computer scientists is critical, and an...

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Proton-conducting materials could enable new green energy...
As the name suggests, most electronic devices today work through the movement of electrons. But materials that can efficiently conduct protons — the nucleus of the hydrogen atom — could be key to a number of important technologies for combating global climate change. Most proton-conducting inorganic materials available now require undesirably high temperatures to achieve sufficiently high conductivity. However, lower-temperature alternatives could enable a variety of technologies, such as more efficient and durable fuel cells to produce clean electricity...

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AI model identifies certain breast tumor stages...
Ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) is a type of preinvasive tumor that sometimes progresses to a highly deadly form of breast cancer. It accounts for about 25 percent of all breast cancer diagnoses. Because it is difficult for clinicians to determine the type and stage of DCIS, patients with DCIS are often overtreated. To address this, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from MIT and ETH Zurich developed an AI model that can identify the different stages of DCIS from...

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License plates of MIT
What does your license plate say about you? In the United States, more than 9 million vehicles carry personalized “vanity” license plates, in which preferred words, digits, or phrases replace an otherwise random assignment of letters and numbers to identify a vehicle. While each state and the District of Columbia maintains its own rules about appropriate selections, creativity reigns when choosing a unique vanity plate. What’s more, the stories behind them can be just as fascinating as the people...

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Startup aims to flush away the problem...
We’ve all had the unpleasant experience of walking into a bathroom to discover a messy toilet seat. Now, an MIT alumni-founded startup is working to flush away that problem forever. Cleana, co-founded by CTO Richard Li SM ’24, has developed an antibacterial, self-lifting toilet seat that promises a cleaner, more hygienic bathroom experience for all. Developing a new toilet seat is not quite as sexy as creating a fusion reactor, but Li believes in the importance of the company’s...

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