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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.

 
Cynthia Barnhart to step down as MIT’s...
Cynthia Barnhart SM ’86, PhD ’88 will step down from her role as chancellor and return to the faculty on July 1, President L. Rafael Reif announced today in an email to the MIT community. During her seven years at the post, Barnhart and her team took a range of actions to make MIT a more caring environment where support is easier to find. She oversaw an expansion of student health and wellness programs, launched a campaign to prevent...

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Five from MIT elected to the National...
The National Academy of Sciences has elected 120 new members and 30 international associates, including five professors from MIT — Dan Freedman, Robert Griffin, Larry Guth, Stephen Morris, and Gigliola Staffilani — in recognition of their “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” Current membership totals 2,461 active members and 511 international associates. Membership is one of the highest honors that a scientist can achieve. The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional...

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Robotic solution for disinfecting food production plants...
The winners of this year’s Rabobank-MIT Food and Agribusiness Innovation Prize got a good indication their pitch was striking a chord when a judge offered to have his company partner with the team for an early demonstration. The offer signified demand for their solution — to say nothing of their chances of winning the pitch competition. The annual competition’s MIT-based grand-prize winner, Human Dynamics, is seeking to improve sanitation in food production plants with a robotic drone — a...

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David Miliband SM ’90 warns of “age...
Former British foreign minister David Miliband SM ’90 offered a sobering warning about human rights and democracy while delivering a special MIT lecture on Wednesday — and outlined how we might confront the emerging “age of impunity,” in which authoritarian governments and even democracies are increasingly flouting the rule of law. “The next decade promises to be a race or a fight between accountability and impunity, within our own countries and internationally,” Miliband said, noting that lawlessness on the...

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Nanostructured device stops light in its tracks
Understanding how light waves oscillate in time as they interact with materials is essential to understanding light-driven energy transfer in materials, such as solar cells or plants. Due to the fantastically high speeds at which light waves oscillate, however, scientists have yet to develop a compact device with enough time resolution to directly capture them. Now, a team led by MIT researchers has demonstrated chip-scale devices that can directly trace the weak electric field of light waves as they...

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On course to create a fusion power...
“There is no lone genius who solves all the problems.” Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), is reflecting on a guiding belief behind his nuclear science and engineering class 22.63 (Principles of Fusion Engineering). He has recently watched his students, working in teams, make their final presentations on how to use fusion technology to create carbon-free fuel for shipping vessels. Since taking on the course over a decade ago, Whyte has moved away from...

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China’s transition to electric vehicles
In recent decades, China’s rapid economic growth has enabled more and more consumers to buy their own cars. The result has been improved mobility and the largest automotive market in the world — but also serious urban air pollution, high greenhouse gas emissions, and growing dependence on oil imports. To counteract those troubling trends, the Chinese government has imposed policies to encourage the adoption of plug-in electric vehicles (EVs). Since buying an EV costs more than buying a conventional...

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Q&A: Vivienne Sze on crossing the hardware-software...
Not so long ago, watching a movie on a smartphone seemed impossible. Vivienne Sze was a graduate student at MIT at the time, in the mid 2000s, and she was drawn to the challenge of compressing video to keep image quality high without draining the phone’s battery. The solution she hit upon called for co-designing energy-efficient circuits with energy-efficient algorithms. Sze would go on to be part of the team that won an Engineering Emmy Award for developing the...

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SMART investigates the science behind varying performance...
Researchers from the Low Energy Electronic Systems (LEES) interdisciplinary research group at Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, together with MIT and National University of Singapore (NUS), have found a method to quantify the distribution of compositional fluctuations in the indium gallium nitride (InGaN) quantum wells at different indium concentrations. InGaN light emitting diodes (LEDs) have revolutionized the field of solid-state lighting due to their high efficiencies and durability, and low costs. The...

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Cave deposits show surprising shift in permafrost...
Nearly one quarter of the land in the Northern Hemisphere, amounting to some 9 million square miles, is layered with permafrost — soil, sediment, and rocks that are frozen solid for years at a time. Vast stretches of permafrost can be found in Alaska, Siberia, and the Canadian Arctic, where persistently freezing temperatures have kept carbon, in the form of decayed bits of plants and animals, locked in the ground. Scientists estimate that more than 1,400 gigatons of carbon...

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Investigating the embattled brain
A car backfires in a parking lot. An army veteran, recently returned from a combat zone, might duck and cover. He knows that he is no longer in an active war zone, but he was trained to react before thinking, an ability that meant life over death at one point in his life. That training is so ingrained it has physically altered the way his brain works, weakening the connection between the amygdala, which is responsible for emotions like...

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Up for a challenge in the lab...
At 5:30 a.m., his alarm would start blaring. Reluctant to get up, Jose Aceves-Salvador would hear his parents outside his door, bustling to get ready for work. “Ponte las pilas!” they would shout, using a Spanish idiom expressing encouragement to work hard. The expression would stick with Aceves-Salvador throughout high school as he dreamed of going to college. Although neither of his parents had college degrees, they were both huge supporters of his decision. As Mexican immigrants who had...

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“Colloidal gels,” ubiquitous in everyday products, divulge...
Researchers at MIT have developed a new method for determining the structure and behavior of a class of widely used soft materials known as weak colloidal gels, which are found in everything from cosmetics to building materials. The study characterizes the gels over their entire evolution, as they change from mineral solutions to elastic gels and then glassy solids. The work uncovers the microstructural mechanisms underlying how the gels change naturally over time, and how their elastic properties also...

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David Miliband SM ’90 receives the 2021...
The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) has announced that the Right Honorable David W. Miliband SM ’90, president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), has been recognized with the 2021 Robert A. Muh Alumni Award. The biennial Muh Alumni Award recognizes the tremendous achievements of MIT degree holders who are leaders in one of the Institute’s humanities, arts, or social science fields. The prize was founded in 2000 by Robert Muh ’59 and...

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In Compton Lecture, Kwame Anthony Appiah analyzes...
Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah offered a timely commentary while delivering the latest of MIT’s Compton lectures on Thursday, outlining a framework for understanding racism as a tool for social control, and not simply as an expression of prejudice. “Racism is an ideology, whose effect is to oppress people of one racial identity or maintain unjust advantages for those of another,” Appiah said. “What makes people, beliefs, feelings, institutions, and practices racist is that they contribute to that wrong.” This...

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