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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.

 
SMART breakthrough uses artificial neural networks to...
Researchers at the Future Urban Mobility (FM) interdisciplinary research group atSingapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, have created a synthetic framework known as theory-based residual neural network (TB-ResNet), which combines discrete choice models (DCMs) and deep neural networks (DNNs), also known as deep learning, to improve individual decision-making analysis used in travel behavior research. In their paper, “Theory-based residual neural networks: A synergy of discrete choice models and deep neural networks,” recently published...

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Ceasar McDowell named associate director of MIT...
Ceasar McDowell, MIT professor of the practice of civic design and associate head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), has been named associate director for civic design at MIT’s new Center for Constructive Communication (CCC). McDowell will maintain his leadership roles at both DUSP and CCC moving forward. “Since 2019, Ceasar has been a trusted advisor to my Media Lab research team’s work in promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks, and has helped guide...

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Turning technology against human traffickers
Last October, the White House released the National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking. The plan was motivated, in part, by a greater understanding of the pervasiveness of the crime. In 2019, 11,500 situations of human trafficking in the United States were identified through the National Human Trafficking Hotline, and the federal government estimates there are nearly 25 million victims globally. This increasing awareness has also motivated MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center, to harness...

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Accelerating the pace of engineered cell therapies,...
What if a cancer patient could receive life-saving cellular therapy within days of diagnosis rather than weeks? What if pharmaceutical researchers could bring new treatments to market in months rather than years? Kytopen is significantly speeding up both discovery and delivery of engineered cell therapies with its transformative Flowfect platforms. The MIT spinout was co-founded by associate professor of mechanical engineering Cullen Buie and former MIT research scientist Paulo Garcia, now the company’s CEO. Cellular engineering is the process...

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Paula Hammond and Arup Chakraborty named Institute...
Two distinguished MIT chemical engineers, Arup K. Chakraborty and Paula Hammond, have been named Institute Professors, the highest honor bestowed upon MIT faculty members. Hammond, who chairs MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, is renowned for her work in developing novel polymers and nanomaterials, while Chakraborty, the founding director of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), is a pioneer in applying computational techniques to challenges in the field of immunology, including vaccine development. “At MIT, the distinction of...

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Physicists find a novel way to switch...
When you save an image to your smartphone, those data are written onto tiny transistors that are electrically switched on or off in a pattern of “bits” to represent and encode that image. Most transistors today are made from silicon, an element that scientists have managed to switch at ever-smaller scales, enabling billions of bits, and therefore large libraries of images and other files, to be packed onto a single memory chip. But growing demand for data, and the...

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A robot that can help you untangle...
With rapidly growing demands on health care systems, nurses typically spend 18 to 40 percent of their time performing direct patient care tasks, oftentimes for many patients and with little time to spare. Personal care robots that brush hair could provide substantial help and relief.  This may seem like a truly radical form of “self-care,” but crafty robots for things like shaving, hair-washing, and makeup are not new. In 2011, the tech giant Panasonic developed a robot that could...

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Innovations in water accessibility
Growing up in coastal Connecticut, Flora Klise’s childhood was shaped by water. She spent summers taking sailing lessons and working at a local marina. But it wasn’t until she stood next to a well in rural Tanzania that she realized she wanted to pursue a career in water innovation. The summer before her junior year, Klise traveled to Tanzania alongside a team of MIT D-Lab students to work on the Okoa Project, an ambulance trailer that can be attached...

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Media Advisory — MIT researchers: AI policy...
On Thursday, May 6 and Friday, May 7, the AI Policy Forum — a global effort convened by researchers from MIT — will present their initial policy recommendations aimed at managing the effects of artificial intelligence and building AI systems that better reflect society’s values. Recognizing that there is unlikely to be any singular national AI policy, but rather public policies for the distinct ways in which we encounter AI in our lives, forum leaders will preview their preliminary findings and policy recommendations...

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Ways of seeing the world
Anjali Nambrath is about to graduate from MIT with a double major in physics and mathematics, but her big project this winter didn’t center on neutrinos, the subject of her undergraduate thesis. Instead, she worked on translating “Hurlevents,” a Quebecois play by Fanny Britt, from French into English. “I just fell in love with the play,” says Nambrath, who has also earned a minor in French. She started the translation project during class 21M.716 (Play Translation and Cultural Transmission),...

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Nano flashlight enables new applications of light
In work that could someday turn cell phones into sensors capable of detecting viruses and other minuscule objects, MIT researchers have built a powerful nanoscale flashlight on a chip. Their approach to designing the tiny light beam on a chip could also be used to create a variety of other nano flashlights with different beam characteristics for different applications. Think of a wide spotlight versus a beam of light focused on a single point. For many decades, scientists have...

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Climate solutions depend on technology, policy, and...
“The challenge for humanity now is how to decarbonize the global economy by 2050. To do that, we need a supercharged decade of energy innovation,” said Ernest J. Moniz, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems Emeritus, founding director of the MIT Energy Initiative, and a former U.S. secretary of energy, as he opened the MIT Forefront virtual event on April 21. “But we also need practical visionaries, in every economic sector, to develop new...

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With a zap of light, system switches...
When was the last time you repainted your car? Redesigned your coffee mug collection? Gave your shoes a colorful facelift? You likely answered: never, never, and never. You might consider these arduous tasks not worth the effort. But a new color-shifting “programmable matter” system could change that with a zap of light. MIT researchers have developed a way to rapidly update imagery on object surfaces. The system, dubbed “ChromoUpdate” pairs an ultraviolet (UV) light projector with items coated in...

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Can US states afford to meet net-zero...
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts recently passed a climate bill that sets a target of net-zero emissions for the state by the year 2050. The bill is one of several successful legislative efforts in Northeastern states to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 80 to 100 percent by mid-century. To achieve these ambitious targets — which align with the Paris Agreement’s long-term goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius to avoid the worst impacts of...

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Undergraduates explore practical applications of artificial intelligence
Deep neural networks excel at finding patterns in datasets too vast for the human brain to pick apart. That ability has made deep learning indispensable to just about anyone who deals with data. This year, the MIT Quest for Intelligence and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab sponsored 17 undergraduates to work with faculty on yearlong research projects through MIT’s Advanced Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (SuperUROP). Students got to explore AI applications in climate science, finance, cybersecurity, and natural language...

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