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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.

 
Robert C. Merton honored with MIT’s Killian...
Acclaimed finance expert Robert C. Merton PhD ’70 has been named the recipient of MIT’s 2021-2022 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, the highest honor the Institute faculty can confer upon one of its members.  The Killian Award citation hails Merton, the School of Management Distinguished Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, as “one of the founding architects of modern finance theory,” whose work has “become an integral part of the global financial system.”...

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MIT unveils a new action plan to...
MIT has released an ambitious new plan for action to address the world’s accelerating climate crisis. The plan, titled “Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade,” includes a broad array of new initiatives and significant expansions of existing programs, to address the needs for new technologies, new policies, and new kinds of outreach to bring the Institute’s expertise to bear on this critical global issue. As MIT President L. Rafael Reif and other senior leaders have written...

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3 Questions: Nadia Christidi on the arts...
In this ongoing series, MIT faculty, students, and alumni in the humanistic fields share perspectives that are significant for solving climate change and mitigating its myriad social and ecological impacts. Nadia Christidi is a PhD student in MIT HASTS, a program that combines research in history, anthropology, science, technology, and society. Her dissertation examines how three cities that face water supply challenges are imagining, planning, and preparing for the future of water. Christidi has a particular interest in the...

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Covid hackathon solutions in action
In January, when MIT’s campus was snowy and students were engaged in their Independent Activities Period, the Undergraduate Association (UA) announced a team-up with MIT leaders to source ideas on making the upcoming spring semester more enjoyable despite the pandemic. The resulting event, christened COVID Hack, started on Jan. 8 and encompassed three days of brainstorming around four tracks: outdoor spaces, virtual community, remote learning, and policy awareness. Preceded by several days of community events intended to build excitement,...

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Tackling air pollution in India and the...
“I grew up with asthma as a kid, so bad air quality holds a visceral significance for me,” says Sidhant (Sid) Pai ’14, who spent much of his childhood in Pune, India. Located about 90 miles southwest of Mumbai, the city’s population has mushroomed over the past few decades, creating significant waste management concerns and poor air quality. Witnessing these unintended consequences of development and urbanization has shaped Pai’s interests in environmental engineering — first as an undergraduate at...

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New system cleans messy data tables automatically
MIT researchers have created a new system that automatically cleans “dirty data” —  the typos, duplicates, missing values, misspellings, and inconsistencies dreaded by data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists. The system, called PClean, is the latest in a series of domain-specific probabilistic programming languages written by researchers at the Probabilistic Computing Project that aim to simplify and automate the development of AI applications (others include one for 3D perception via inverse graphics and another for modeling time series...

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Anesthesia doesn't simply turn off the brain...
In a uniquely deep and detailed look at how the commonly used anesthetic propofol causes unconsciousness, a collaboration of labs at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT shows that as the drug takes hold in the brain, a wide swath of regions become coordinated by very slow rhythms that maintain a commensurately languid pace of neural activity. Electrically stimulating a deeper region, the thalamus, restores synchrony of the brain’s normal higher frequency rhythms and activity levels,...

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“Just ask questions and go for it!”
At dinnertime in Zaina Moussa’s childhood home, the table would be filled with an array of Moroccan and Syrian dishes, representing her parents’ different backgrounds. A mix of French, Arabic, and English words would fill the air as Moussa’s siblings chattered, waiting for their father to join them. As her diabetic father pricked his finger to check his blood sugar, she and her siblings would shout out numbers to predict the results before the monitor.  From a young age,...

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Analytics platform for coastal desalination plants wins...
Coastal desalination plants are a source of drinking water for an increasing number of people around the world. But their proximity to the ocean can cause disruptions from events like riptides and oil spills. Such disruptions reduce the productivity, lifespan, and sustainability of desalination plants. The winner of this year’s MIT Water Innovation Prize, Bloom Alert, is seeking to improve desalination plant operations with a new kind of data monitoring platform. The platform tracks ocean and desalination plant activity...

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Using mechanics for cleaner membranes
Filtration membranes are critical to a wide variety of industries around the world. Made of materials as varied as cellulose, graphene, and nylon, they serve as the barriers that turn seawater into drinking water, separate and process milk and dairy products, and pull contaminants from wastewater. They serve as an essential technology to these and other industries but are plagued with an Achilles heel: fouling. Membrane fouling occurs when particles get deposited on the filter over time, clogging the...

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Ben Linville-Engler awarded 2021 Collier Medal
Ben Linville-Engler, MIT System Design and Management (SDM) industry and certificate director, is the 2021 recipient of the Collier Medal. The Collier Medal was established in 2014 to honor MIT Police Officer Sean Collier and his commitment to community engagement and model citizenship. It is among the highest honors that MIT awards to staff and community members. Linville-Engler exemplifies these values and has demonstrated his own dedication to MIT and broader communities throughout his career.   In spring 2020, as...

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Study reveals mixed reactions about Covid-19 health...
The Covid-19 pandemic, like many other health crises, has had unequal effects on the U.S. population, with communities of color often hit the hardest. A new study co-authored by an MIT professor identifies a related challenge: Different social groups have different reactions to the fact that Covid-19 has generated those health inequities. More specifically, the study, based on a multilayered survey of U.S. residents, finds a divergence among racial groups when people are informed about the varying effects of...

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Ekotrope makes building energy-efficient homes easier
These days homebuilders might have several reasons to make new homes energy-efficient. They may be required to hit efficiency goals by local building codes. They may want to take advantage of financial incentive programs offered by governments, lenders, and utilities. They may just want to appeal to the growing segment of home buyers who prioritize sustainability and want lower energy bills. But the process of building energy-efficient homes and then getting certifications requires cooperation across a complex ecosystem of...

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Michale Fee appointed head of the Department...
Michale Fee, the Glen V. and Phyllis F. Dorflinger Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, has been named as the new head of the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS), effective May 1. Fee, who also is an investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, succeeds James DiCarlo, the Peter de Florez Professor of Neuroscience, who announced in December that he was stepping down to become director of the MIT Quest for Intelligence. “I want to...

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Six from MIT named 2021 Knight-Hennessy Scholars
Six MIT affiliates have been selected for the newest cohort of the prestigious Knight-Hennessy Scholars program. Kofi Blake, Orisa Coombs, Jierui Fang ’20, Max Kessler ’20, Claire Lazar Reich ’17, and Kyle Swanson ’18, MEng ’19 will begin graduate studies at Stanford University this fall. Founded in 2018, the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program seeks to cultivate a diverse, multidisciplinary community of future leaders and prepare them to address global challenges. The highly competitive fellowship, which fully funds graduate studies in any...

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