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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.

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More sensitive X-ray imaging

February 24, 2022

Scintillators are materials that emit light when bombarded with high-energy particles or X-rays. In medical or dental X-ray systems, they convert incoming X-ray radiation into visible light that can then be captured using film or photosensors. They’re also used for night-vision systems and for research, such as in particle detectors or electron microscopes. Researchers at MIT have now shown how one could improve the efficiency of scintillators by at least tenfold, and perhaps even a hundredfold, by changing the...

Robotic cubes shapeshift in outer space

February 23, 2022

If faced with the choice of sending a swarm of full-sized, distinct robots to space, or a large crew of smaller robotic modules, you might want to enlist the latter. Modular robots, like those depicted in films such as “Big Hero 6,” hold a special type of promise for their self-assembling and reconfiguring abilities. But for all of the ambitious desire for fast, reliable deployment in domains extending to space exploration, search and rescue, and shape-shifting, modular robots built...

Alan Grossman to step down as head...

February 23, 2022

Alan D. Grossman, the Praecis Professor of Biology at MIT, has announced he will step down as the head of the Department of Biology before the start of the next academic year. He will continue to lead the department until the new head is selected. A search committee will convene later this spring to recommend candidates for Grossman’s successor. “Alan Grossman is an outstanding biologist who is, and has been, deeply committed to the research and educational missions of...

Richard Binzel: Eyes on the skies and...

February 22, 2022

Richard Binzel has long held a see-for-yourself attitude toward astronomy. It developed in 1970, when he received a Criterion RV6 telescope for his 12th birthday. It was on a cold Ohio night looking through that telescope at the rings of Saturn that he first realized he wanted to be a planetary astronomer. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, how fantastic planets are. That’s what I want to study when I grow up,’” says Binzel. It didn’t take him long to...

Singing in the brain

February 22, 2022

For the first time, MIT neuroscientists have identified a population of neurons in the human brain that lights up when we hear singing, but not other types of music. These neurons, found in the auditory cortex, appear to respond to the specific combination of voice and music, but not to either regular speech or instrumental music. Exactly what they are doing is unknown and will require more work to uncover, the researchers say. “The work provides evidence for relatively...

New power sources

February 22, 2022

In the mid-1990s, a few energy activists in Massachusetts had a vision: What if citizens had choice about the energy they consumed? Instead of being force-fed electricity sources selected by a utility company, what if cities, towns, and groups of individuals could purchase power that was cleaner and cheaper? The small group of activists — including a journalist, the head of a small nonprofit, a local county official, and a legislative aide — drafted model legislation along these lines...

Can machine-learning models overcome biased datasets?

February 21, 2022

Artificial intelligence systems may be able to complete tasks quickly, but that doesn’t mean they always do so fairly. If the datasets used to train machine-learning models contain biased data, it is likely the system could exhibit that same bias when it makes decisions in practice. For instance, if a dataset contains mostly images of white men, then a facial-recognition model trained with these data may be less accurate for women or people with different skin tones. A group...

A revolution in learning

February 21, 2022

To understand a country, it helps to know its schools. To grasp Mexico, MIT historian Tanalís Padilla believes, that means learning about its rural “normales,” teacher-training schools with outsized historical influence on the country’s politics. This might seem surprising. At its height, the system of rural normales consisted of only 35 such boarding schools, scattered in the countryside, populated by the children of peasants and indigenous residents. Yet these schools had been founded on the ideals of the Mexican...

Credit card-sized device focuses terahertz energy to...

February 19, 2022

Researchers have created a device that enables them to electronically steer and focus a beam of terahertz electromagnetic energy with extreme precision. This opens the door to high-resolution, real-time imaging devices that are hundredths the size of other radar systems and more robust than other optical systems. Terahertz waves, located on the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and infrared light, exist in a “no man’s land” where neither classic electronics nor optical devices can effectively manipulate their energy. But these...

Toward a stronger defense of personal data

February 19, 2022

A heart attack patient, recently discharged from the hospital, is using a smartwatch to help monitor his electrocardiogram signals. The smartwatch may seem secure, but the neural network processing that health information is using private data that could still be stolen by a malicious agent through a side-channel attack. A side-channel attack seeks to gather secret information by indirectly exploiting a system or its hardware. In one type of side-channel attack, a savvy hacker could monitor fluctuations in the...

Using deep imaging for higher resolution

February 18, 2022

Automation has been around since ancient Greece. Its form changes, but the intent of having technology take over repetitive tasks has remained consistent, and a fundamental element for success has been the ability to image. The latest iteration is robots, and the problem with a majority of them in industrial automation is they work in fixture-based environments that are specifically designed for them. That’s fine if nothing changes, but things inevitably do. What robots need to be capable of,...

Akila Saravanan named Brooke Owens Fellow

February 18, 2022

Akila Saravanan, an MIT junior double majoring in aerospace engineering and electrical engineering and computer science, is a recipient of the Brooke Owens Fellowship. “Brookies” are selected based on their commitment to their communities, stand-out creative abilities, record of leadership, incredible talent, and their desire to pursue a career in aerospace. Saravanan is among 51 women selected from a competitive pool of thousands of applicants this year. As part of her fellowship, Saravanan will be working at Venturi Astrolab...

MIT community members elected to the National...

February 17, 2022

MIT engineers John Cohn and Franz-Josef Ulm and are among 111 new members and 22 international members elected to the National Academy of Engineering for 2022. Nineteen MIT alumni were also elected as new members. John Cohn ’81, an IBM Fellow in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, was honored for improving design productivity of high-performance analog and mixed-signal circuits and for evangelizing STEM education. Cohn, a computer scientist with more than 100 worldwide patents, uses his playful love for...

Fostering media literacy in the age of...

February 17, 2022

While people turn to digital media for news at high rates, algorithms for manipulating media continue to grow more powerful. In a Pew Research Center survey (August/September 2020), 53 percent of adults in the United States say they get news from social media “often” or “sometimes.” People have long been aware of phenomena such as “doctored” photos and misinformation at large, but machine learning is enabling the proliferation of “deepfakes,” videos or images of fake events with increasing sophistication. Now,...

Advancing public understanding of sea-level rise

February 17, 2022

Museum exhibits can be a unique way to communicate science concepts and information. Recently, MIT faculty have served as sounding boards for curators at the Museum of Science, Boston, a close neighbor of the MIT campus. In January, Professor Emerita Paola Malanotte-Rizzoli and Cecil and Ida Green Professor Raffaele Ferrari of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science (EAPS) visited the museum to view the newly opened pilot exhibit, “Resilient Venice: Adapting to Climate Change.” When Malanotte-Rizzoli was...

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