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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.

 
Sparking studies and conversations in Spain
“Meeting with the students to discuss the challenges I had prepared was so inspiring because I saw the interest in science sparking during our conversations,” reflects Erick Eguia, a junior studying brain and cognitive sciences. Eguia had the unique experience of taking part in a longstanding MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) program in a new way — over Google Classroom to a group of eager students in Spain. Typically during Independent Activities Period (IAP), MIT-Spain’s Global...

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Seeking enhanced materials for nuclear reactors
One of India’s largest commercial and research nuclear reactor facilities lies just south of Arunkumar Seshadri’s hometown of Chennai, India. It was there, during a high school field trip, that the seeds of his interest in nuclear power were planted. “We learned the basic outline of how a reactor functions,” recalls Seshadri, a fifth-year doctoral student in nuclear science and engineering. “I was fascinated by how such a little bit of uranium or other fuel could produce such an...

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Top collegiate inventors awarded 2021 Lemelson-MIT Student...
Following a year that demonstrated the importance and practical applications of scientific advancement and invention, the Lemelson-MIT Program announced seven winners of its annual 2021 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize on April 26, World Intellectual Property Day. The program awarded a total of $90,000 to four graduate students and three undergraduate teams from across the country. The majority of winners have filed for patents, while others have been awarded full or provisional patents. Their inventions range from an innovative approach to...

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To advance climate action, MIT seeks partnerships...
MIT is uniquely positioned to lead the way on the technological advances and policy options needed to address climate change. At the second MIT Climate Engagement Forum of the semester, students, faculty, alumni, and staff described the many ways they are engaging an array of organizations to bring real solutions to the climate crisis. Several participants in the discussion offered suggestions from their own personal and professional experiences on how the Institute can make tackling the climate crisis part...

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Expanding MIT’s global reach in the professional...
MIT Professional Education, housed under the School of Engineering, is the arm of MIT that provides access to MIT knowledge and expertise to thousands of professionals around the world via education programs designed for them.  Bhaskar Pant, executive director of MIT Professional Education, says he didn’t consciously set out to bring more diversity to the program when he stepped into his role in 2008. But, as he puts it, a commitment to diversity and multiculturalism is in his “DNA.”...

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Synthetic gelatin-like material mimics lobster underbelly’s stretch...
A lobster’s underbelly is lined with a thin, translucent membrane that is both stretchy and surprisingly tough. This marine under-armor, as MIT engineers reported in 2019, is made from the toughest known hydrogel in nature, which also happens to be highly flexible. This combination of strength and stretch helps shield a lobster as it scrabbles across the seafloor, while also allowing it to flex back and forth to swim. Now a separate MIT team has fabricated a hydrogel-based material...

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Using CRISPR as a research tool to...
CRISPR’s potential to prevent or treat disease is widely recognized. But the gene-editing technology can also be used as a research tool to probe and understand diseases. That’s the basic insight behind KSQ Therapeutics. The company uses CRISPR to alter genes across millions of cells. By observing the effect of turning on and off individual genes, KSQ can decipher their role in diseases like cancer. The company uses those insights to develop new treatments. The approach allows KSQ to...

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Navigating beneath the Arctic ice
There is a lot of activity beneath the vast, lonely expanses of ice and snow in the Arctic. Climate change has dramatically altered the layer of ice that covers much of the Arctic Ocean. Areas of water that used to be covered by a solid ice pack are now covered by thin layers only 3 feet deep. Beneath the ice, a warm layer of water, part of the Beaufort Lens, has changed the makeup of the aquatic environment.     For...

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Spencer Compton, Karna Morey, Tara Venkatadri, and...
MIT students Spencer Compton, Karna Morey, Tara Venkatadri, and Lily Zhang have been selected to receive a Barry Goldwater Scholarship for the 2021-22 academic year. Over 5,000 college students from across the United States were nominated for the scholarships, from which only 410 recipients were selected based on academic merit.  The Goldwater scholarships have been conferred since 1989 by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. These scholarships have supported undergraduates who go on to become leading scientists,...

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Collaborators in climate action
MIT is committed to driving the transition to a low-carbon world, throwing the full weight of its research forces into transformative technologies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But “MIT can’t solve climate change alone,” said Maria T. Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics, speaking at a virtual symposium in late March. When MIT initiated its first Climate Action Plan in 2015, a key tenet, said Zuber, was “engagement with actors and...

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A unique partnership continues to thrive
Last year’s 24th annual European Career Fair (ECF) at MIT, held in early 2020 before the pandemic shuttered campus, was a resounding success, with over 2,000 in-person attendees meeting with over 100 employers from 10 different countries. First-year students chatted with the consul general of the German Consulate Boston while postdocs and PhD candidates met with university presidents. Students, graduates, and young professionals alike interviewed with corporate recruiters from industry leaders such as Airbus and Roche, as well as...

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Five from MIT elected to American Academy...
Five MIT faculty members are among more than 250 leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities, and the arts elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy announced Thursday. One of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, the academy is also a leading center for independent policy research. Members contribute to academy publications, as well as studies of science and technology policy, energy and global security, social policy and American institutions, the humanities and culture,...

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Keeping humanity central to solving climate change
As a small child, Manduhai Buyandelger lived with her grandparents in a house unconnected to the heating grid on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. There, in the world’s coldest capital city, temperatures can drop as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter months. “Once I moved further into the city with my parents, I had nightmares about my grandparents,” recalls Buyandelger, now a professor of anthropology at MIT. “I felt so vulnerable for them. In the ger...

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New AI tool calculates materials’ stress and...
Isaac Newton may have met his match. For centuries, engineers have relied on physical laws — developed by Newton and others — to understand the stresses and strains on the materials they work with. But solving those equations can be a computational slog, especially for complex materials. MIT researchers have developed a technique to quickly determine certain properties of a material, like stress and strain, based on an image of the material showing its internal structure. The approach could...

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Aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover, MOXIE creates oxygen...
NASA’s Perseverance rover has been marking milestones on Mars since landing on the Red Planet in February. Its latest historic accomplishment is the first creation of oxygen from carbon dioxide in the thin Mars atmosphere. Mission time is measured in sols, or Martian days. Oxygen production was achieved early in the evening of April 20, or early morning on Sol 60 in Jezero Crater.   MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-situ Resource Utilization Experiment), a small, gold box-shaped instrument on the...

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