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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.

 
Building an understanding of how drivers interact...
As the global conversation around assisted and automated vehicles (AVs) evolves, the MIT Advanced Vehicle Technology (AVT) Consortium continues to lead cutting-edge research aimed at understanding how drivers interact with emerging vehicle technologies.  Since its launch in 2015, the AVT Consortium — a global academic-industry collaboration on developing a data-driven understanding of how drivers respond to commercially available vehicle technologies — has developed a data-driven approach to studying consumer attitudes and driving behavior across diverse populations, creating unique, multifaceted,...

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Consortium led by MIT, Harvard University, and...
MIT is co-leading an effort to enable the development of two new large-scale renewable energy projects in regions with carbon-intensive electrical grids: Big Elm Solar in Bell County, Texas, came online this year, and the Bowman Wind Project in Bowman County, North Dakota, is expected to be operational in 2026. Together, they will add a combined 408 megawatts (MW) of new renewable energy capacity to the power grid. This work is a critical part of MIT’s strategy to achieve...

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MIT researchers develop an efficient way to...
Fields ranging from robotics to medicine to political science are attempting to train AI systems to make meaningful decisions of all kinds. For example, using an AI system to intelligently control traffic in a congested city could help motorists reach their destinations faster, while improving safety or sustainability. Unfortunately, teaching an AI system to make good decisions is no easy task. Reinforcement learning models, which underlie these AI decision-making systems, still often fail when faced with even small variations...

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Advancing urban tree monitoring with AI-powered digital...
The Irish philosopher George Berkely, best known for his theory of immaterialism, once famously mused, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” What about AI-generated trees? They probably wouldn’t make a sound, but they will be critical nonetheless for applications such as adaptation of urban flora to climate change. To that end, the novel “Tree-D Fusion” system developed by researchers at the MIT Computer Science and...

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A nonflammable battery to power a safer,...
Lithium-ion batteries are the workhorses of home electronics and are powering an electric revolution in transportation. But they are not suitable for every application. A key drawback is their flammability and toxicity, which make large-scale lithium-ion energy storage a bad fit in densely populated city centers and near metal processing or chemical manufacturing plants. Now Alsym Energy has developed a nonflammable, nontoxic alternative to lithium-ion batteries to help renewables like wind and solar bridge the gap in a broader...

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Reality check on technologies to remove carbon...
In 2015, 195 nations plus the European Union signed the Paris Agreement and pledged to undertake plans designed to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Yet in 2023, the world exceeded that target for most, if not all of, the year — calling into question the long-term feasibility of achieving that target. To do so, the world must reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and strategies for achieving levels that will “stabilize the...

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A bioinspired capsule can pump drugs directly...
Inspired by the way that squids use jets to propel themselves through the ocean and shoot ink clouds, researchers from MIT and Novo Nordisk have developed an ingestible capsule that releases a burst of drugs directly into the wall of the stomach or other organs of the digestive tract. This capsule could offer an alternative way to deliver drugs that normally have to be injected, such as insulin and other large proteins, including antibodies. This needle-free strategy could also...

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Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can...
Undergraduates with family income below $200,000 can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting next fall, thanks to newly expanded financial aid. Eighty percent of American households meet this income threshold. And for the 50 percent of American families with income below $100,000, parents can expect to pay nothing at all toward the full cost of their students’ MIT education, which includes tuition as well as housing, dining, fees, and an allowance for books and personal expenses. This $100,000 threshold is up from $75,000 this...

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TBIRD technology could help image black holes’...
In April 2019, a group of astronomers from around the globe stunned the world when they revealed the first image of a black hole — the monstrous accumulation of collapsed stars and gas that lets nothing escape, not even light. The image, which was of the black hole that sits at the core of a galaxy called Messier 87 (M87), revealed glowing gas around the center of the black hole. In March 2021, the same team produced yet another...

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Making a mark in the nation’s capital
Anoushka Bose ’20 spent the summer of 2018 as an MIT Washington program intern, applying her nuclear physics education to arms control research with a D.C. nuclear policy think tank. “It’s crazy how much three months can transform people,” says Bose, now an attorney at the Department of Justice. “Suddenly, I was learning far more than I had expected about treaties, nuclear arms control, and foreign relations,” adds Bose. “But once I was hooked, I couldn’t be stopped as...

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A model of virtuosity
A crowd gathered at the MIT Media Lab in September for a concert by musician Jordan Rudess and two collaborators. One of them, violinist and vocalist Camilla Bäckman, has performed with Rudess before. The other — an artificial intelligence model informally dubbed the jam_bot, which Rudess developed with an MIT team over the preceding several months — was making its public debut as a work in progress. Throughout the show, Rudess and Bäckman exchanged the signals and smiles of...

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Can robots learn from machine dreams?
For roboticists, one challenge towers above all others: generalization — the ability to create machines that can adapt to any environment or condition. Since the 1970s, the field has evolved from writing sophisticated programs to using deep learning, teaching robots to learn directly from human behavior. But a critical bottleneck remains: data quality. To improve, robots need to encounter scenarios that push the boundaries of their capabilities, operating at the edge of their mastery. This process traditionally requires human...

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Curiosity, images, and scientific exploration
When we gaze at nature’s remarkable phenomena, we might feel a mix of awe, curiosity, and determination to understand what we are looking at. That is certainly a common response for MIT’s Alan Lightman, a trained physicist and prolific author of books about physics, science, and our understanding of the world around us. “One of my favorite quotes from Einstein is to the effect that the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,” Lightman says. “It’s the...

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MIT physicists predict exotic form of matter...
MIT physicists have shown that it should be possible to create an exotic form of matter that could be manipulated to form the qubit (quantum bit) building blocks of future quantum computers that are even more powerful than the quantum computers in development today. The work builds on a discovery last year of materials that host electrons that can split into fractions of themselves but, importantly, can do so without the application of a magnetic field.  The general phenomenon...

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A launchpad for entrepreneurship in aerospace
At age 22, aerospace engineer Eric Shaw worked on some of the world’s most powerful airplanes, yet learning to fly even the smallest one was out of reach. Just out of college, he could not afford civilian flight school and spent the next two years saving $12,000 to earn his private pilot’s license. Shaw knew there had to be a better, less expensive way to train pilots.   Now a graduate student at the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Leaders...

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