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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.

 
Comparing seniors who relocate long-distance shows where...
Would you like to live longer? It turns out that where you live, not just how you live, can make a big difference. That’s the finding of an innovative study co-authored by an MIT economist, which examines senior citizens across the U.S. and concludes that some locations enhance longevity more than others, potentially for multiple reasons. The results show that when a 65-year-old moves from a metro area in the 10th percentile, in terms of how much those areas...

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“You’re surrounded by a community that cares...
As the sun broke through the clouds on a breezy Monday morning, first-year students and their families gathered on Kresge Oval for MIT’s Convocation, the Institute’s annual welcome to the incoming class. The ceremony marked one of the first major events MIT has hosted on campus since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. And while some aspects of the occasion were shaped by the ongoing pandemic — notably, masks were required of all who attended — the message to...

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Landmark Bio, a biomanufacturing facility co-founded by...
On July 29, MIT Provost Martin A. Schmidt and Associate Provost Krystyn Van Vliet attended a groundbreaking ceremony to celebrate the construction of Landmark Bio, a new 40,000-square foot biopharma manufacturing facility at The Arsenal on the Charles in Watertown, Massachusetts. Jongyoon Han, MIT professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering, and Richard D. Braatz, the Edwin R. Gilliland Professor, faculty research officer, and professor of chemical engineering at MIT also attended the event. Landmark Bio emerged from a...

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360-degree transparency for construction sites made simple
MIT spinoff OpenSpace invented automated 360-degree video jobsite capture and mapping. “It’s not exactly an amazing observation,” says CEO Jeevan Kalanithi, “but a picture really is worth a thousand words.” In the world of real estate development, visual documentation of construction projects is critical. It aids in dispute resolution, prevents mistakes from being compounded, and allows for knowledge capture in case of change orders. Builders are often contractually obligated to document progress. Usually, this means hiring someone to walk...

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Transformative truth-telling at the MIT Open Documentary...
A man’s ghostly voice speak-sings from the black screen: “Rock-a-bye baby, on the treetops …” It’s a tentative voice, unused to intoning lullabies, the voice of a man who was just released from prison. When he was convicted, his twin children were 45 days old. Now, they’re 21. This father’s voice is one of dozens collected in the ongoing documentary project “A Father’s Lullaby” by current MIT Open Documentary Lab Fellow Rashin Fahandej. It comprises a compilation of recorded...

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Study: Ending an eviction moratorium increases Covid-19...
Ending an eviction moratorium for renters makes people in a community significantly more likely to contract Covid-19, according to a new study co-authored by MIT researchers. The study uses the variable timing of state-level moratoriums, issued and terminated at different points during the Covid-19 pandemic, to quantify their effect. It is the first study to identify the individual-level risk for people in different social circumstances, due to eviction moratoriums ending. The increased risk runs throughout communities, the research shows,...

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Professor Emeritus Paul Schimmel donates $50 million...
Professor Emeritus Paul Schimmel PhD ’66 and his family recently committed $50 million to support the life sciences at MIT. They provided an initial gift of $25 million to establish the Schimmel Family Program for Life Sciences. This gift matches $25 million secured from other sources in support of the Department of Biology. The remaining $25 million from the Schimmel family will go to support the Schimmel Family Program in the form of matching funds as other gifts are...

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Jordan Harrod: Brain researcher and AI-focused YouTuber
Scientist, writer, policy advocate, YouTuber – before Jordan Harrod established her many successful career identities, her first role was as a student athlete. While she enjoyed competing in everything from figure skating to fencing, she also sustained injuries that left her with chronic pain. These experiences as a patient laid the groundwork for an interest in biomedical research and engineering. “I knew I wanted to make tools that would help people with health issues similar to myself,” she says....

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Storytelling through Futures: A Conversation with Filmmaker...
Storytelling through Futures: A Conversation with Filmmaker Demetrius Wren Demetrius Wren is a filmmaker, musician, and storyteller based in Los Angeles. He has told stories in the form of award winning documentaries, feature narratives, and short films. In 2018, he partnered with IFTF to create 3 short films exploring how the changing nature of work could impact the health of workers, their families, and communities over the next decade. In early July, IFTF Research Director Rachel Maguire, who led...

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Foresight Forensics: Using Scenarios to Demonstrate Unintended...
Foresight Forensics: Using Scenarios to Demonstrate Unintended Consequences Aug 27, 2021 By Jamais Cascio Foresight professionals typically don’t use scenarios as stand-alone forecasts. In most cases, we use scenarios as a way to give some emotional or visceral weight to an otherwise information-driven report. Sometimes, a set of scenarios will be accompanied by not just the core forecast but also elements like illustrations and artifacts, representations of the scenario world that can provide their own novel insights. IFTF’s 2017...

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Aziza Almanakly, Belinda Li receive Clare Boothe...
MIT PhD students Aziza Almanakly and Belinda Li have been selected as the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) recipients of the multi-year Clare Boothe Luce Graduate Fellowship for Women, an honor designed to encourage and support graduate women in STEM. The rigorous selection process for this prestigious fellowship took into account the two students’ outstanding track record of scientific achievement and inquiry, as well as their contributions to the STEM community. Importantly, the fellowships represent the...

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Playing with proteins
It’s a cloudy July afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and MIT Edgerton Center Instructor Amanda Mayer is using brightly-colored plastic to build proteins. She takes a small yellow block and moves it to the end of a chain of blue and green ones, clicking it into place. “Congratulations,” she says to the four high school students guiding her hand over Zoom. “You’ve all become synthetic biologists.” Together, the group has assembled a model of the complex molecules found in their...

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Future Factors: Flex Your Foresight Muscles with...
Future Factors: Flex Your Foresight Muscles with IFTF’s Signals Database Signals gathering lies at the heart of every good futures practice.And the more diverse the community, the better the signals. Future Factors, IFTF’s proprietary emerging signals platform, combines a rich trove of real-time signals-scanning with a moderated futures thinking community. One of the most common questions our organizational partners ask us when beginning their foresight journey has little to do with methodologies or literacies, and everything to do with...

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TESS Science Conference II draws nearly 700...
On glowing screens in 41 countries across the world, over 680 people logged on to the second TESS Science Conference from Aug. 2-6. Experts not only in exoplanets, but also in extragalactic astronomy, stellar astrophysics, data analysis, and solar system science presented on discoveries made possible by the NASA TESS Mission via 193 posters uploaded to Zenodo and 50 talks livestreamed and archived on YouTube, with views numbering in the thousands. The conference, hosted by the MIT Kavli Institute...

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The boiling crisis — and how to...
It’s rare for a pre-teen to become enamored with thermodynamics, but those consumed by such a passion may consider themselves lucky to end up at a place like MIT. Madhumitha Ravichandran certainly does. A PhD student in Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), Ravichandran first encountered the laws of thermodynamics as a middle school student in Chennai, India. “They made complete sense to me,” she says. “While looking at the refrigerator at home, I wondered if I might someday build...

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