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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.

 
Less-wasteful laser-cutting
Laser-cutting is an essential part of many industries, from car manufacturing to construction. However, the process isn’t always easy or efficient: Cutting huge sheets of metal requires time and expertise, and even the most careful users can still produce huge amounts of leftover material that go to waste. The underlying technologies that use lasers to cut edges aren’t actually all that cutting-edge: their users are often in the dark about how much of each material they’ve used, or if...

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Toward a disease-sniffing device that rivals a...
Numerous studies have shown that trained dogs can detect many kinds of disease —  including lung, breast, ovarian, bladder, and prostate cancers, and possibly Covid-19 — simply through smell. In some cases, involving prostate cancer for example, the dogs had a 99 percent success rate in detecting the disease by sniffing patients’ urine samples. But it takes time to train such dogs, and their availability and time is limited. Scientists have been hunting for ways of automating the amazing...

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Students, activists, police share views about campus...
Students, activists, and MIT Police leaders participated in a public forum about police practices and communities of color on Feb. 4, sharing perspectives about a civic issue of high national importance. Nationally, policing is a “fraught and complicated story of biases both known and unknown,” said John Dozier, MIT’s Institute community and equity officer, during introductory remarks at the event. Citing multiple extensive studies about law enforcement and the justice system, Dozier noted that “people of color are overrepresented...

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With Perseverance, MIT teams prepare for Mars...
On Thursday, NASA’s newest Mars rover, Perseverance, is scheduled to touch down on the surface of the Red Planet following a nail-biting entry and descent sequence vividly known as the “seven minutes of terror.” If all goes according to plan, the car-sized explorer will blast safely down into Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide impact basin that once may have hosted a river delta flooded with water, and possibly life.   Over the next year and a half of its primary...

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Two new student residences open their doors
With the launch of the new year, MIT is taking significant steps to expand on-campus residence options for its graduate and undergraduate communities. The New Vassar Residence Hall for undergraduates (Building W46 on Vassar Street on the West Campus) and the Graduate Tower at Site 4 (Building E37 on Main Street in Kendall Square), both newly constructed, have opened their doors and are now welcoming students within the Institute’s Covid-19 response framework. Renewal of the iconic Burton Conner undergraduate...

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Political scientist In Song Kim receives the...
In Song Kim, associate professor of political science at MIT, has been awarded the 2021 Levitan Prize. This award, presented each year by a faculty committee, empowers a member of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) faculty with funding to enable research in their field. With an award of $30,000, this annual prize continues to support substantial projects. The 2021 award was announced by Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of SHASS, who writes, “Professor Kim’s...

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Meet the research scientists behind MITEI’s Electric...
Pablo Duenas-Martinez and Dharik Mallapragrada first met on opposite sides of a sponsored research project through the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). They worked together to define a project to study the long-term evolution of the electricity sector in India and the impacts of technological and policy drivers. Duenas-Martinez guided the research direction on MITEI’s end, and Mallapragada provided input from an industry perspective. Mallapragada, who earned his PhD in chemical engineering from Purdue University, had been working in the energy and petrochemical...

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A machine-learning approach to finding treatment options...
When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, doctors and researchers rushed to find effective treatments. There was little time to spare. “Making new drugs takes forever,” says Caroline Uhler, a computational biologist in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems and Society, and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “Really, the only expedient option is to repurpose existing drugs.” Uhler’s team has now developed a machine...

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New surgery may enable better control of...
MIT researchers have invented a new type of amputation surgery that can help amputees to better control their residual muscles and sense where their “phantom limb” is in space. This restored sense of proprioception should translate to better control of prosthetic limbs, as well as a reduction of limb pain, the researchers say. In most amputations, muscle pairs that control the affected joints, such as elbows or ankles, are severed. However, the MIT team has found that reconnecting these...

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Unleashing the potential of the mind
Dexter Ang ’05, AF ’16 had been working as a high-frequency trader before he learned his mother had ALS. Over the next year, he watched her slowly lose the ability to walk, feed herself, and even click a mouse to read an e-book, one of her favorite activities. The progression was painful to watch, but what Ang couldn’t accept was that his mother’s physical condition could so negatively affect her interactions with the digital world. “I didn’t think there...

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Three MIT researchers elected to the National...
Three MIT researchers are among the 106 new members and 23 international members elected to the National Academy of Engineering for 2021. Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional...

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Four MIT researchers elected to the National...
Four MIT researchers are among the 106 new members and 23 international members elected to the National Academy of Engineering for 2021. Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional...

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Shafi Goldwasser wins L'Oréal-UNESCO Award
Shafi Goldwasser, the RSA Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, a co-leader of the cryptography and information security group, and a member of the complexity theory group within the Theory of Computation Group and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has been named the laureate for North America in this year’s 2021 L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Awards. The award celebrates Goldwasser’s groundbreaking work in cryptography, which has enabled secure communication and verification over the...

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Visiting undergraduates collaborate with MIT PhD students...
How can the structure of academia be changed to make it more equitable? This question was posed by an audience member at a December 2020 panel discussion on systemic racism in higher education hosted by the MIT Communications Forum and co-sponsored by Radius at MIT and the MIT Governance Lab (MIT GOV/LAB). Harvard University computer scientist Professor James Mickens emphasized the importance of mentorship in helping people navigate a field in which knowing the right people and knowing how...

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Developing a picture of France
In the late 1940s, famed French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson documented the last days of China’s Nationalist government, before Mao Tse-Tung and the communists seized power. True to form, Cartier-Bresson produced striking images of a dramatic historical moment — such as a crowd desperately packed together outside a Shanghai bank, and a group of Nationalist military recruits in Beijing’s Forbidden City. In a sense, Cartier-Bresson could take those photos because he was French. The U.S. had strongly supported the Nationalists...

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