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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.

 
Jing Wang, professor of Chinese media and...
Jing Wang, the S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Languages and Culture, and a longtime member of the MIT faculty in Global Studies and Languages and Comparative Media Studies/Writing, passed away on Sunday in Boston after a heart attack. For decades, Wang was a leading scholar of the intersection of media and activism in China. Following a bachelor’s degree at National Taiwan University, she studied comparative literature at the University of Michigan and then at the University of Massachusetts, where...

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A sleep study’s eye-opening findings
Subjectively, getting more sleep seems to provide big benefits: Many people find it gives them increased energy, emotional control, and an improved sense of well-being. But a new study co-authored by MIT economists complicates this picture, suggesting that more sleep, by itself, isn’t necessarily sufficient to bring about those kinds of appealing improvements. The study is based on a distinctive field experiment of low-income workers in Chennai, India, where the researchers studied residents at home during their normal everyday...

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Geologists take Earth’s inner temperature using erupted...
If the Earth’s oceans were drained completely, they would reveal a massive chain of undersea volcanoes snaking around the planet. This sprawling ocean ridge system is a product of overturning material in the Earth’s interior, where boiling temperatures can melt and loft rocks up through the crust, splitting the sea floor and reshaping the planet’s surface over hundreds of millions of years. Now geologists at MIT have analyzed thousands of samples of erupted material along ocean ridges and traced...

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Robert Logcher, professor emeritus of civil and...
MIT Professor Emeritus Robert D. Logcher ’58, SM ’60, SCD ’62, an accomplished civil and environmental engineer who helped advance the field with computational techniques, passed away peacefully on July 20. He was 85. Logcher served as a faculty member in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 1962 to 1996, and was an early pioneer of the computer programming systems used in structural design. He developed STRESS (STRuctural Engineering Systems Solver) and STRUDL (STRUctural Design Language), which...

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Life in space: Preparing for an increasingly...
As a not-so-distant future that includes space tourism and people living off-planet approaches, the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative is designing and researching the activities humans will pursue in new, weightless environments.  Since 2017, the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) has orchestrated regular parabolic flights through the ZERO-G Research Program to test experiments that rely on microgravity. This May, the SEI supported researchers from the Media Lab; MIT’s departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences...

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Keylime security software is deployed to IBM...
Keylime, a cloud security software architecture, is being adopted into IBM’s cloud fleet. Originally developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory to allow system administrators to ensure the security of their cloud environment, Keylime is now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox technology with more than 30 open-source developers contributing to it from around the world. The software will enable IBM to remotely attest to the security of its thousands of cloud servers. “It is exciting to see the hard work...

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What will happen to sediment plumes associated...
In certain parts of the deep ocean, scattered across the seafloor, lie baseball-sized rocks layered with minerals accumulated over millions of years. A region of the central Pacific, called the Clarion Clipperton Fracture Zone (CCFZ), is estimated to contain vast reserves of these rocks, known as “polymetallic nodules,” that are rich in nickel and cobalt  — minerals that are commonly mined on land for the production of lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles, laptops, and mobile phones. As demand for...

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Investigating materials for safe, secure nuclear power
Michael Short came to MIT in the fall of 2001 as an 18-year-old first-year who grew up in Boston’s North Shore. He immediately felt at home, so much so that he’s never really left. It’s not that Short has no interest in exploring the world beyond the confines of the Institute, as he is an energetic and venturesome fellow. It’s just that almost everything he hopes to achieve in his scientific career can, in his opinion, be best pursued...

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A material difference
Eesha Khare has always seen a world of matter. The daughter of a hardware engineer and a biologist, she has an insatiable interest in what substances — both synthetic and biological — have in common. Not surprisingly, that perspective led her to the study of materials. “I recognized early on that everything around me is a material,” she says. “How our phones respond to touches, how trees in nature to give us both structural wood and foldable paper, or...

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“To make even the smallest contribution to...
Thailand has become an economic leader in Southeast Asia in recent decades, but while the country has rapidly industrialized, many Thai citizens have been left behind. As a child growing up in Bangkok, Pavarin Bhandtivej would watch the news and wonder why families in the nearby countryside had next to nothing. He aspired to become a policy researcher and create beneficial change. But Bhandtivej knew his goal wouldn’t be easy. He was born with a visual impairment, making it...

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How a sudden stratospheric warming affected the...
Weather is a tricky science — even more so at very high altitudes, with a mix of plasma and neutral particles. In sudden stratospheric warmings (SSWs) — large meteorological disturbances related to the polar vortex in which the polar stratosphere temperature increases as it is affected by the winds around the pole — the polar vortex is weakened. SSWs also have profound atmospheric effects at great distances, causing changes in the hemisphere opposite from the location of the original...

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Lincoln Laboratory convenes top network scientists for...
As the Covid-19 pandemic has shown, we live in a richly connected world, facilitating not only the efficient spread of a virus but also of information and influence. What can we learn by analyzing these connections? This is a core question of network science, a field of research that models interactions across physical, biological, social, and information systems to solve problems. The 2021 Graph Exploitation Symposium (GraphEx), hosted by MIT Lincoln Laboratory, brought together top network science researchers to...

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Reducing emissions by decarbonizing industry
A critical challenge in meeting the Paris Agreement’s long-term goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius is to vastly reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions generated by the most energy-intensive industries. According to a recent report by the International Energy Agency, these industries — cement, iron and steel, chemicals — account for about 20 percent of global CO2 emissions. Emissions from these industries are notoriously difficult to abate because, in addition to emissions...

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Professor Emeritus Justin “Jake” Kerwin, an expert...
Justin “Jake” Kerwin ’53, SM ’54, PhD ’61, professor emeritus of naval architecture, passed away at the age of 90 on May 23. Kerwin, who served on MIT’s ocean engineering faculty for four decades, was an internationally recognized expert in propeller design, ship hydrodynamics, and predicting racing yacht performance. Kerwin had an international upbringing, growing up in the Netherlands, London, and eventually New York. He first arrived at MIT as an undergraduate in 1949. In addition to studying naval...

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Paul Lagacé, professor of aeronautics and astronautics,...
Paul Lagacé, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, died July 16 in his home in Wilmington, Massachusetts. He was 63. A longtime member of the MIT community, Lagacé graduated from Course 16 (aeronautics and astronautics) with his bachelor’s degree in 1978, his master’s in 1979, and his PhD 1982. He joined the faculty in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1982. Lagacé’s research focused on the design and manufacture of composite structures and materials mainly used...

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