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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.

 
Study predicts the oceans will start emitting...
The world’s oceans are a vast repository for gases including ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. They absorb these gases from the atmosphere and draw them down to the deep, where they can remain sequestered for centuries and more. Marine CFCs have long been used as tracers to study ocean currents, but their impact on atmospheric concentrations was assumed to be negligible. Now, MIT researchers have found the oceanic fluxes of at least one type of CFC, known as CFC-11, do...

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Industry, labor, and education leaders discuss the...
“From the research of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future, so far, one thing is absolutely clear: Technological change is transforming our work, our lives, and our society — and fortunately, the harsh societal consequences that concern us all are not inevitable,” said MIT President L. Rafael Reif at the start of “From Research to Action: Work of the Future,” on Feb. 19. The event was the second in the MIT Forefront series, which seeks...

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Could we recycle plastic bags into fabrics...
In considering materials that could become the fabrics of the future, scientists have largely dismissed one widely available option: polyethylene. The stuff of plastic wrap and grocery bags, polyethylene is thin and lightweight, and could keep you cooler than most textiles because it lets heat through rather than trapping it in. But polyethylene would also lock in water and sweat, as it’s unable to draw away and evaporate moisture. This antiwicking property has been a major deterrent to polyethylene’s...

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Faster drug discovery through machine learning
Drugs can only work if they stick to their target proteins in the body. Assessing that stickiness is a key hurdle in the drug discovery and screening process. New research combining chemistry and machine learning could lower that hurdle. The new technique, dubbed DeepBAR, quickly calculates the binding affinities between drug candidates and their targets. The approach yields precise calculations in a fraction of the time compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. The researchers say DeepBAR could one day quicken...

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Women in Innovation and STEM Database at...
WISDM, the Women in Innovation and STEM Database at MIT, celebrated the first anniversary of its digital launch on March 8 — International Women’s Day. To mark the occasion, the tremendous growth of the WISDM community, MIT Innovation Initiative (MITii), which manages the platform/community, announced the WISDM Fellowship Program. WISDM promotes the visibility of women in the MIT academic community, increases gender diversity in innovation and entrepreneurship, and makes it easier to find talented and diverse speakers for various...

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Planning for summer and fall at MIT
The following letter was sent to the MIT community today by President L. Rafael Reif. To the members of the MIT community, After 40 years in Massachusetts, I know the shift from winter to spring is governed by a dial, not a switch – and that dial can go backwards. Today on Killian Court, the grass is working up the courage to turn green. But we all know that it’s too early to stow our snow boots. The shift...

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Artificial intelligence that more closely mimics the...
For all the progress that’s been made in the field of artificial intelligence, the world’s most flexible, efficient information processor remains the human brain. Although we can quickly make decisions based on incomplete and changing information, many of today’s artificial intelligence systems only work after being trained on well-labeled data, and when new information is available, a complete retraining is often required to incorporate it. Now the startup Nara Logics, co-founded by an MIT alumnus, is trying to take...

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Linda Griffith and Douglas Lauffenburger honored for...
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has announced that two MIT professors have been jointly awarded the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education, the most prestigious engineering education award in the United States. Linda G. Griffith, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation in the Department of Biological Engineering, and Douglas A. Lauffenburger, the Ford Professor of Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Biology, were recognized for their respective contributions to “the establishment of...

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2021 MacVicar Faculty Fellows named
The Office of the Vice Chancellor and the Registrar’s Office have announced this year’s Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellows: professor of mathematics Larry Guth, associate professor of materials science and engineering Elsa Olivetti, associate professor of nuclear science and engineering professor Michael Short, and professor of biology and biological engineering Michael Yaffe. For nearly three decades, the MacVicar Faculty Fellows Program has recognized exemplary and sustained contributions to undergraduate education at MIT. The program was named after Margaret MacVicar, the first...

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Visualizing a climate-resilient MIT
The Sustainability DataPool, powered by the Office of Sustainability (MITOS), gives the MIT community the opportunity to understand data on important sustainability metrics like energy, water use, emissions, and recycling rates. While most visualizations share data from past events, the newest dashboard — the MIT Climate Resiliency Dashboard (MIT certificate required to view) — looks to potential future events in the form of flooding on campus. The dashboard is an essential planning tool for ongoing work to build a...

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After cracking the “sum of cubes” puzzle...
What do you do after solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If you’re mathematicians Drew Sutherland and Andy Booker, you go for the harder problem. In 2019, Booker, at the University of Bristol, and Sutherland, principal research scientist at MIT, were the first to find the answer to 42. The number has pop culture significance as the fictional answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything,” as Douglas Adams famously penned in his...

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3 Questions: Richard Samuels on Japan’s 3.11...
Ten years ago, on March 11, 2011, Japan was struck by the most powerful earthquake in its recorded history. Of 9.1 magnitude by many accounts, the earthquake occurred off the Pacific coast of Tohoku and triggered a tsunami and meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Nearly 20,000 Japanese — and most of their worldly possessions — were washed away in a matter of minutes. 340,000 survivors were displaced, and only a fraction ever returned to their homes....

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Exploring generations of influence between South Asia...
When thinking about how to celebrate the approaching 60th anniversary of Sangam, the Association of Indian Students at MIT, Ranu Boppana ’87, president of the MIT South Asian Alumni Association (MITSAAA) began to reflect upon ways in which to explore the rich history of South Asians at MIT. “As president of MITSAAA, I met several South Asian alumni who had been at MIT in the ’60s and ’70s. As an alum who was on campus in the ’80s, I...

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The MIT Press launches Direct to Open
The MIT Press has announced the launch of Direct to Open (D2O). A first-of-its-kind sustainable framework for open-access monographs, D2O moves professional and scholarly books from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single e-books to a collaborative, library-supported open-access model.  D2O gives institutions the opportunity to harness collective action to support access to knowledge. Beginning in 2022, all new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections will be openly available on the MIT Press Direct...

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Using artificial intelligence to generate 3D holograms...
Despite years of hype, virtual reality headsets have yet to topple TV or computer screens as the go-to devices for video viewing. One reason: VR can make users feel sick. Nausea and eye strain can result because VR creates an illusion of 3D viewing although the user is in fact staring at a fixed-distance 2D display. The solution for better 3D visualization could lie in a 60-year-old technology remade for the digital world: holograms. Holograms deliver an exceptional representation...

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