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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.

 
3 Questions: David Kaiser and Julie Shah...
David Kaiser and Julie Shah are on a mission to prepare students and facilitate research to address the broad challenges and opportunities associated with computing. As associate deans of Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) in the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, Kaiser and Shah are advancing a number of initiatives they hope will get students and faculty to reflect on the potential social, ethical, and policy implications of new technologies. To help guide their efforts,...

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Knight Science Journalism Program announces 2021-22 fellows
The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT (KSJ) has announced that it has selected a group of 21 distinguished science journalists for its 2021-22 project fellowship class — a cohort that ranges from award-winning freelance writers to staff reporters for outlets such as The Dallas Morning News, The New York Times, and MIT Technology Review. It marks the second year that KSJ will offer the remote project fellowships, which were established in response to the unique challenges and public...

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Mapping the cellular circuits behind spitting
For over a decade, researchers have known that the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans can detect and avoid short-wavelength light, despite lacking eyes and the light-absorbing molecules required for sight. As a graduate student in the Horvitz lab, Nikhil Bhatla proposed an explanation for this ability. He observed that light exposure not only made the worms wriggle away, but it also prompted them to stop eating. This clue led him to a series of studies that suggested that his squirming subjects weren’t seeing the light at...

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Vapor-collection technology saves water while clearing the...
About two-fifths of all the water that gets withdrawn from lakes, rivers, and wells in the U.S. is used not for agriculture, drinking, or sanitation, but to cool the power plants that provide electricity from fossil fuels or nuclear power. Over 65 percent of these plants use evaporative cooling, leading to huge white plumes that billow from their cooling towers, which can be a nuisance and, in some cases, even contribute to dangerous driving conditions. Now, a small company...

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News from the Future #60
Fast FuturesTuesday, August 10 | 10–11:30am PDT Not sure how to start your futures-thinking journey? Want to get your colleagues or team members into futures thinking? Fast Futures is a 90-minute $99, introductory-level online learning experience that teaches participants to initiate their own creative foresight. Register here. >> IFTF FORESIGHT TALK Freedom Dreaming in the Midst of Emergency: Methods from the AfrofutureThursday, August 12 | 9:00 a.m. PDT | 12:00 p.m. EDT | 16:00 UTC  What is your most irresistible freedom dream?...

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Apekshya Prasai receives 2021 Jeanne Guillemin Prize
Growing up in the periphery of the civil war in Nepal, Apekshya Prasai was exposed to a 10-year conflict that by some accounts left 19,000 people dead and 150,000 people internally displaced. The insurgency was led by the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoists (CPN-M) with the aim of overthrowing the ruling monarchy and establishing a people’s republic. The war ended in 2016 under the auspices of the United Nations, and a peace treaty between the Nepalese government and the Maoist...

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Advancing industry convergence through technology and innovation
Launched in October 2020, the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology is intended to demonstrate how the convergence of industries and technologies is powering the next wave of change and innovation. The five-year initiative is designed to advance three main pillars: research, education, and fellowships. As part of the third pillar, Accenture has awarded five fellowships to MIT graduate students working on research in industry and technology convergence who are underrepresented, including by race, ethnicity and...

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Teenage MIT ninja students
Guang Cui and Daniel Sun are members of the class of 2022, course 6.3 (Computer Science and Engineering) majors, former roommates, best friends — and now, alumni of the long-running TV competition “American Ninja Warrior.” The episode in which they debuted (season 13, night 4 of qualifiers) as first-time competitors recently aired on NBC, and is available on several streaming services. They spoke recently about what it takes to be a ninja. Q: How did you decide to try...

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Inaugural fund supports early-stage collaborations between MIT...
MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), together with the Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation (AHSF), the cultural and social responsibility arm of the Arab Bank, recently created a new initiative to support collaboration with the Middle East. The MIT-Jordan Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation Seed Fund is providing awardees with financial grants up to $30,000 to cover travel, meeting, and workshop expenses, including in-person visits to build cultural and scientific connections between MIT and Jordan. MISTI and AHSF recently celebrated...

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Jing Wang, professor of Chinese media and...
Jing Wang, the S.C. Fang Professor of Chinese Languages and Culture, and a longtime member of the MIT faculty in Global Studies and Languages and Comparative Media Studies/Writing, passed away on Sunday in Boston after a heart attack. For decades, Wang was a leading scholar of the intersection of media and activism in China. Following a bachelor’s degree at National Taiwan University, she studied comparative literature at the University of Michigan and then at the University of Massachusetts, where...

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A sleep study’s eye-opening findings
Subjectively, getting more sleep seems to provide big benefits: Many people find it gives them increased energy, emotional control, and an improved sense of well-being. But a new study co-authored by MIT economists complicates this picture, suggesting that more sleep, by itself, isn’t necessarily sufficient to bring about those kinds of appealing improvements. The study is based on a distinctive field experiment of low-income workers in Chennai, India, where the researchers studied residents at home during their normal everyday...

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Geologists take Earth’s inner temperature using erupted...
If the Earth’s oceans were drained completely, they would reveal a massive chain of undersea volcanoes snaking around the planet. This sprawling ocean ridge system is a product of overturning material in the Earth’s interior, where boiling temperatures can melt and loft rocks up through the crust, splitting the sea floor and reshaping the planet’s surface over hundreds of millions of years. Now geologists at MIT have analyzed thousands of samples of erupted material along ocean ridges and traced...

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Robert Logcher, professor emeritus of civil and...
MIT Professor Emeritus Robert D. Logcher ’58, SM ’60, SCD ’62, an accomplished civil and environmental engineer who helped advance the field with computational techniques, passed away peacefully on July 20. He was 85. Logcher served as a faculty member in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 1962 to 1996, and was an early pioneer of the computer programming systems used in structural design. He developed STRESS (STRuctural Engineering Systems Solver) and STRUDL (STRUctural Design Language), which...

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Life in space: Preparing for an increasingly...
As a not-so-distant future that includes space tourism and people living off-planet approaches, the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative is designing and researching the activities humans will pursue in new, weightless environments.  Since 2017, the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) has orchestrated regular parabolic flights through the ZERO-G Research Program to test experiments that rely on microgravity. This May, the SEI supported researchers from the Media Lab; MIT’s departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences...

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Keylime security software is deployed to IBM...
Keylime, a cloud security software architecture, is being adopted into IBM’s cloud fleet. Originally developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory to allow system administrators to ensure the security of their cloud environment, Keylime is now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox technology with more than 30 open-source developers contributing to it from around the world. The software will enable IBM to remotely attest to the security of its thousands of cloud servers. “It is exciting to see the hard work...

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