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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.

 
School of Engineering first quarter 2021 awards
Members of the MIT engineering faculty receive many awards in recognition of their scholarship, service, and overall excellence. The School of Engineering periodically recognizes their achievements by highlighting the honors, prizes, and medals won by faculty working in our academic departments, labs, and centers. Cullen Buie of the Department of Mechanical Engineering was named an American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Fellow on Feb. 16.       Anantha Chandrakasan of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science was named an ACM...

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Exploring culture, identity, and the arts to...
Jeff Toney would like you to think differently about who’s doing the teaching at MIT. The visiting professor in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy piloted an ambitious Independent Activities Period (IAP) project, bringing together students from MIT and Wellesley College to explore the rich trove of knowledge each student already possesses as a cultural inheritance. “STEM education is rooted in a tradition of students mentored by masters and icons of their field,” says Toney, who is also...

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Found in space: Complex carbon-based molecules
Much of the carbon in space is believed to exist in the form of large molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Since the 1980s, circumstantial evidence has indicated that these molecules are abundant in space, but they have not been directly observed. Now, a team of researchers led by MIT Assistant Professor Brett McGuire has identified two distinctive PAHs in a patch of space called the Taurus Molecular Cloud (TMC-1). PAHs were believed to form efficiently only at high...

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System detects errors when medication is self-administered
From swallowing pills to injecting insulin, patients frequently administer their own medication. But they don’t always get it right. Improper adherence to doctors’ orders is commonplace, accounting for thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in medical costs annually. MIT researchers have developed a system to reduce those numbers for some types of medications. The new technology pairs wireless sensing with artificial intelligence to determine when a patient is using an insulin pen or inhaler, and flags potential errors...

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At MIT Energy Conference, experts zero in...
Global power generation from renewables like solar and wind continues to rise, and innovation in fields like clean hydrogen production and nuclear fusion is thriving. But translating all that progress into lower global emissions will require major changes to legacy energy systems around the world. That was the most discussed challenge among speakers at this year’s MIT Energy Conference, hosted virtually last week by the MIT Energy Club. In some cases, energy systems can be adapted to integrate new...

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Letter from President Reif: Supporting our Asian...
The following letter was sent to the MIT community today by President L. Rafael Reif. To the members of the MIT community, This message is for everyone. But let me begin with a word for the thousands of members of our MIT family – undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, staff, faculty, alumni, parents and Corporation members – who are Asian or of Asian descent: We would not be MIT without you.  You are our colleagues, our students, our classmates, our...

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Traveling the world for global health solutions
As a kid, Andrea Orji always loved it when her grandpa would visit from Nigeria. He would share stories about his home to teach Orji, a Texas native, about her family’s heritage. But while she and her family attended school and work, her grandpa remained at the house, frequently alone. She could tell he longed to return to the familiarity of his own country, yet he remained in order to undergo and then recover from cataract surgery. Later on,...

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MIT.nano courses bring hands-on experimentation to virtual...
Every minute, a person just sitting or standing without moving sheds 100,000 particles that are 500 nanometers or larger. Is that person exercising? Now it’s 10 million particles per minute, says Jorg Scholvin, assistant director of user services for Fab.nano. That’s why users of the MIT.nano cleanroom — which is controlled to have fewer than 100 such particles per cubic foot of air — wear full-body “bunnysuits” and other specialized garments to maintain the pristine environment required for nanoscale...

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How coal’s decline impacts county and school...
More extreme weather, heat waves, and inland flooding are some of the impacts that the state of Pennsylvania expects to see with a changing climate. And scientists and economists agree that, if we don’t quickly reduce the greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels like coal and gas that contribute to warming the planet, these impacts will only grow more costly and dangerous. Yet parts of western Pennsylvania, like many regions of the United States, rely on coal and gas...

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A remedy for the spread of false...
Stopping the spread of political misinformation on social media may seem like an impossible task. But a new study co-authored by MIT scholars finds that most people who share false news stories online do so unintentionally, and that their sharing habits can be modified through reminders about accuracy. When such reminders are displayed, it can increase the gap between the percentage of true news stories and false news stories that people share online, as shown in online experiments that...

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ChoKyun Rha, professor post-tenure of biomaterials sciences...
ChoKyun Rha ’62, SM ’64, SM ’66, SCD ’67, an MIT professor post-tenure and a groundbreaker in biomaterials science and engineering, died March 2 in Boston. She was 87. The first woman of Asian descent to receive tenure at MIT, Rha held four degrees from the Institute and taught at MIT for more than four decades. Her husband, MIT professor of microbiology Anthony Sinskey ScD ’67, also attended MIT, as did their two sons — Tong-ik Lee Sinskey ’79,...

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The physicist and the hospital
It’s hard to say that Thomas Heldt has had just one career. He’s assisted with open heart surgery. He’s studied the physiology of human space travel. Most recently, he’s designed medical devices to help patients with brain injury. “It’s been a serendipitous path,” says Heldt, a recently tenured faculty member in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). But there is a through line: Heldt operates at the intersection of physics and medicine, where fundamental physical principles...

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Scene at MIT: Ruth Anderson, pioneer of...
Ruth Krock Anderson is a mathematician and computing pioneer who has seen a lot in her 102 years. Born in Boston in 1918, she was interested in math from an early age and earned a mathematics degree at Boston Teachers College, now part of the University of Massachusetts. Soon thereafter, Anderson was asked to join the MIT Radiation Laboratory, which made key contributions to the development of microwave radar technology during the second world war. “There are quite a...

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How to prevent short-circuiting in next-gen lithium...
As researchers push the boundaries of battery design, seeking to pack ever greater amounts of power and energy into a given amount of space or weight, one of the more promising technologies being studied is lithium-ion batteries that use a solid electrolyte material between the two electrodes, rather than the typical liquid. But such batteries have been plagued by a tendency for branch-like projections of metal called dendrites to form on one of the electrodes, eventually bridging the electrolyte...

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3 Questions: Task Force 2021 and the...
This is part three in a series of interviews with co-chairs of Task Force 2021 and Beyond workstreams. Parts one and two were published in recent weeks. MIT’s Task Force 2021 and Beyond has been at work for nine months, charged by President Rafael Reif with exploring “how MIT might invent a thriving new future” in a post-Covid world. The effort’s Administrative Workstream, whose charge included looking at the future of working at MIT, was co-chaired by Joe Higgins,...

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