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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.

 
With “Choctaw Animals” for piano, Charles Shadle...
Charles Shadle was just 10 years old when he was entrusted with a precious family heirloom: a book of music that his great-great-great-grandmother had brought with her on the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of Native Americans to Oklahoma from their southeastern homelands beginning in the 1830s. Today, this extraordinary gift remains a symbol of two significant threads interwoven in Shadle’s life: music and his Choctaw heritage. “There was usually a person in every generation that music was...

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Nine MIT students awarded 2021 Paul and...
An MIT senior and eight MIT graduate students are among the 30 recipients of this year’s P.D. Soros Fellowships for New Americans. In addition to senior Fiona Chen, MIT’s newest Soros winners include graduate students Aziza Almanakly, Alaleh Azhir, Brian Y. Chang PhD ’18, James Diao, Charlie ChangWon Lee, Archana Podury, Ashwin Sah ’20, and Enrique Toloza. Six of the recipients are enrolled at the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. P.D. Soros Fellows receive up to $90,000...

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MIT Press launches open access collection of...
The MIT Press has launched MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies, a robust digital collection of classic and previously out-of-print architecture and urban studies books, on their digital book platform MIT Press Direct. The collection was funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Humanities Open Book Program, which they co-sponsored with the National Endowment for the Humanities. For years, the MIT Press has fielded requests for e-book editions of classic, out-of-print...

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Task Force 2021 and Beyond moves into...
Task Force 2021 and Beyond is entering the next major phase of its work to position MIT for the post-Covid world, co-chairs Rick Danheiser and Sanjay Sarma announced today in a letter to the MIT community. In the first phase of the task force’s work, which ran from last June through December, nearly 200 MIT faculty, staff, and students served in working groups that generated more than 50 discrete ideas intended to help MIT emerge strong from the disruption...

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Julie Soriero inducted into National Association of...
Former MIT Director of Athletics and head of the MIT Department of Athletics, Physical Education and Recreation Julie Soriero has been inducted into the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) Hall of Fame, as announced by the NACDA National Office. The seven-member class of inductees will be recognized in conjunction with the 56th Annual NACDA and Affiliates Convention, which will be held virtually on July 27-28. “When I think about what this honor means to me, the...

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One-stop machine learning platform turns health care...
Over the past decade, hospitals and other health care providers have put massive amounts of time and energy into adopting electronic health care records, turning hastily scribbled doctors’ notes into durable sources of information. But collecting these data is less than half the battle. It can take even more time and effort to turn these records into actual insights — ones that use the learnings of the past to inform future decisions. Cardea, a software system built by researchers...

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Standing in solidarity with the AAPI community
On Saturday, April 3, members of the community — students, staff, faculty, and affiliates — with COVIDPass eligibility were invited to reflect, mourn, and show their solidarity with the MIT Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. A total of 3,795 battery-operated candles were lit up on Kresge Oval to recognize the 3,795 reported — and countless unreported — anti-AAPI hate incidents over the last year alone.  Following recent murders in Georgia and the growing wave of anti-Asian hate...

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“Timber Wars” from Oregon Public Broadcasting wins...
The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT has named Oregon Public Broadcasting’s “Timber Wars” podcast as 2021 winner of the prestigious Victor K. McElheny Award for local and regional science journalism. The seven-part series tells the story of how a group of activists and scientists turned a fight over logging and animal protection into one of the biggest environmental conflicts of the 20th century — a conflict that still resonates in culture wars today. The podcast is the first...

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SMART researchers develop 15-minute immune-profiling assay
Researchers from Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine (CAMP), an interdisciplinary research group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, have developed a new label-free immune profiling assay that profiles the rapidly changing host immune response in case of infection, in a departure from existing methods that focus on detecting the pathogens themselves, which can often be at low levels within a host. This novel technology presents a host of advantages over current...

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A better nasal swab for Covid-19 testing
Over nearly seven years researching 3D printing systems in MIT’s Media Lab, Jifei Ou SM ’14, PhD ’19 began to suspect the work could lead to better products. He never could have imagined it would help address supply shortages caused by a global pandemic. Since March of last year, Ou’s company, OPT Industries, has been working with hospitals to deliver a new type of nasal swab for Covid-19 testing. The swabs make use of thin, hairlike structures Ou developed while at...

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The MIT Press launches MIT Open Publishing...
The MIT Press has announced the launch of MIT Open Publishing Services, a scholar-focused, MIT-branded hosting and publishing services operation. MIT Open Publishing Services (MITops), working with its partner the Knowledge Futures Group, provides a portfolio of services to mission-aligned partners, including peer review support and editorial development; professional copy editing and design; marketing and publicity; and hosting on the PubPub open source platform.   The MIT Press believes that the full potential of institutionally owned and managed infrastructure will be realized by pairing publishing technology...

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How MIT OpenCourseWare became an educational resource...
“It is typical of our faculty to come up with something as bold and innovative as this,” said then-MIT president Charles Vest at a special gathering of community members and press in April 2001. “OpenCourseWare looks counterintuitive in a market-driven world. It goes against the grain of current material values. But it really is consistent with what I believe is the best about MIT … It expresses our belief in the way education can be advanced — by constantly...

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Seeking the cellular mechanisms of disease, with...
Caroline Uhler’s research blends machine learning and statistics with biology to better understand gene regulation, health, and disease. Despite this lofty mission, Uhler remains dedicated to her original career passion: teaching. “The students at MIT are amazing,” says Uhler. “That’s what makes it so fun to work here.” Uhler recently received tenure in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She is also an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a researcher at...

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A safer way to deploy bacteria as...
In recent years, scientists have developed many strains of engineered bacteria that can be used as sensors to detect environmental contaminants such as heavy metals. If deployed in the natural environment, these sensors could help scientists track how pollutant levels change over time, over a wide geographic area. MIT engineers have now devised a way to make this kind of deployment safer, by encasing bacterial sensors in a tough hydrogel shell that prevents them from escaping into the environment...

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What has the pandemic revealed about the...
With vaccinations for Covid-19 now underway across the nation, MIT SHASS Communications asked seven MIT scholars engaged in health and health care research to share their views on what the pandemic has revealed about the U.S. health care system — and what needs to change. Representing the fields of medicine, anthropology, political science, health economics, science writing, and medical humanities, these researchers articulate a range of opportunities for U.S. health care to become more equitable, more effective and coherent,...

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