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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.

 
3 Questions: Kalyan Veeramachaneni on hurdles preventing...
The proliferation of big data across domains, from banking to health care to environmental monitoring, has spurred increasing demand for machine learning tools that help organizations make decisions based on the data they gather. That growing industry demand has driven researchers to explore the possibilities of automated machine learning (AutoML), which seeks to automate the development of machine learning solutions in order to make them accessible for nonexperts, improve their efficiency, and accelerate machine learning research. For example, an...

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3 Questions: Sheena Vasquez and Christian Loyo...
Christian Loyo of the Grossman lab and Sheena Vasquez of the Drennan lab, both graduate students in the Department of Biology, were recently selected to participate in The Poetry of Science. The project, founded by Joshua Sariñana PhD ’11, aims to advance racial justice at the intersection of science and art by bringing together Cambridge, Massachusetts-affiliated poets and scientists of color to create poems about scientific research. These poems will be on public display, along with the scientists’ portraits,...

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MIT Sloan and Bayer team up to...
In addition to offering a diverse roster of non-degree open-enrollment courses for individuals, MIT Sloan Executive Education commonly works with companies and organizations to design and deliver custom educational programs that address their specific challenges, leading to a dynamic learning experience that can yield significant, real-world results. MIT Sloan Executive Education embraces groups that view lifetime learning by their employees as a strategic investment and a source of competitive advantage. One such collaboration involved Bayer AG, which recently approached...

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Weighing cancer cells to personalize drug choices
Researchers at MIT and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have developed a new way to determine whether individual patients will respond to a specific cancer drug or not. This kind of test could help doctors to choose alternative therapies for patients who don’t respond to the therapies normally used to treat their cancer. The new technique, which involves removing tumor cells from patients, treating the cells with a drug, and then measuring changes in the cells’ mass, could be applied to...

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Blockchain technology could provide secure communications for...
Imagine a team of autonomous drones equipped with advanced sensing equipment, searching for smoke as they fly high above the Sierra Nevada mountains. Once they spot a wildfire, these leader robots relay directions to a swarm of firefighting drones that speed to the site of the blaze. But what would happen if one or more leader robots was hacked by a malicious agent and began sending incorrect directions? As follower robots are led farther from the fire, how would...

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A robot that finds lost items
A busy commuter is ready to walk out the door, only to realize they’ve misplaced their keys and must search through piles of stuff to find them. Rapidly sifting through clutter, they wish they could figure out which pile was hiding the keys. Researchers at MIT have created a robotic system that can do just that. The system, RFusion, is a robotic arm with a camera and radio frequency (RF) antenna attached to its gripper. It fuses signals from...

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Mathematicians solve an old geometry problem on...
Equiangular lines are lines in space that pass through a single point, and whose pairwise angles are all equal. Picture in 2D the three diagonals of a regular hexagon, and in 3D, the six lines connecting opposite vertices of a regular icosahedron (see the figure above). Mathematicians are not limited to three dimensions, however.  “In high dimensions, things really get interesting, and the possibilities can seem limitless,” says Yufei Zhao, assistant professor of mathematics. But they aren’t limitless, according...

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Artificial intelligence is smart, but does it...
When it comes to games such as chess or Go, artificial intelligence (AI) programs have far surpassed the best players in the world. These “superhuman” AIs are unmatched competitors, but perhaps harder than competing against humans is collaborating with them. Can the same technology get along with people? In a new study, MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers sought to find out how well humans could play the cooperative card game Hanabi with an advanced AI model trained to excel at...

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New “risk triage” platform pinpoints compounding threats...
Over a 36-hour period in August, Hurricane Henri delivered record rainfall in New York City, where an aging storm-sewer system was not built to handle the deluge, resulting in street flooding. Meanwhile, an ongoing drought in California continued to overburden aquifers and extend statewide water restrictions. As climate change amplifies the frequency and intensity of extreme events in the United States and around the world, and the populations and economies they threaten grow and change, there is a critical...

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Ana Pantelic appointed executive director of MIT...
MIT D-Lab recently welcomed new Executive Director Ana Pantelic to its team. Pantelic has worked at the confluence of systems change and social innovation and brings nearly 15 years of experience in policy and practice from Latin America, East Africa, and the Balkans. “As we prepare to enter our third decade, we are excited to have Ana on board to guide our vision and help implement our goal to deepen and broaden D-Lab’s impact at MIT and in the...

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MIT economist Nancy Rose receives the Carolyn...
MIT economist Nancy L. Rose, the Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics, has been awarded the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP). The annual prize, named in honor of the late Wellesley College faculty member who was the first chair of CSWEP, recognizes an individual who has furthered the status of women in the economics profession through example, achievements, increasing our understanding of how...

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Professor Emeritus Frederick Frey, a leader in...
MIT Professor Emeritus Frederick A. Frey, a geochemist whose innovative research unlocked many mysteries of the Earth’s interior, died Sept. 13 in Natick, Massachusetts. He was 83. Frey was a pioneer of trace element geochemistry in the study of Earth’s mantle. He established himself as a leading geochemist early in his career by introducing novel applications of techniques and instrumentation — such as radiochemical neutron activation analysis, integrating it with X-ray fluorescence, isotope dilution, radiogenic isotope ratios and field...

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Budding coders create apps aimed at real-world...
How can computer science be used to help make the world a better place? It’s a lofty question, but one that drives the team behind MIT App Inventor, a virtual programming platform that allows budding programmers of all ages to create their own apps. Following a year of disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the App Inventor team hosted its second annual virtual Appathon for Good this summer, a marathon-like event during which over 1,000 coders used the App...

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MIT brings Campaign for a Better World...
MIT has announced the conclusion of its Campaign for a Better World, which raised $6.24 billion to support the Institute’s work on some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Altogether, 112,703 individuals and organizations contributed to the campaign, which was publicly launched in 2016 and formally ran from July 2011 to June 2021. Sixty-four percent of all donors were MIT alumni, while more than 56,000 donors made their first gift to MIT during the campaign. “Everywhere I traveled throughout...

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