Say WOW

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.

Future

 
Top MIT research stories of 2020
December 22, 2020
| No Comments
| Future
Although 2020 has been a year most of us would prefer to forget, it still featured a number of research breakthroughs worth celebrating. Despite the new challenges brought on by Covid-19 — and sometimes because of them — MIT’s community achieved important milestones on the frontiers of science and engineering. The following 10 research-related stories published in the previous 12 months received top views on MIT News. (We’ve also rounded up the year’s top MIT community-related stories.) 10. How quarantines...

Read More

Dava Newman named director of MIT Media...
December 22, 2020
| No Comments
| Future
Dava Newman SM ’89, SM ’89, PhD ’92, an MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics whose groundbreaking work has advanced human performance in space with the goal of interplanetary reach, has been named the new director of the MIT Media Lab, effective July 1, 2021. “Leading the legendary Media Lab is a dream for me, and I can’t wait to help write the next chapter of this uniquely creative, impactful, compassionate community,” Newman says. Currently she is the Apollo...

Read More

Task Force 2021 and Beyond shares its...
December 22, 2020
| No Comments
| Future
MIT’s Task Force 2021 and Beyond has released an initial menu of more than 50 ideas to reimagine and reposition the Institute for the post-Covid world. Now, members of the MIT community are urged to review the proposals and weigh in — helping the task force and Institute leadership to focus, in the coming months, on beginning work to implement viable ideas that have broad support and impact. The ideas are wide-ranging, touching upon reshaping the physical campus to...

Read More

 
A new approach to studying religion and...
December 20, 2020
| No Comments
| Future
Associate Professor Richard Nielsen is an MIT political scientist with an innovative research program: He studies clerics in the Islamic world, combining textual analysis, ethnographic insights, on-the-ground research in the Middle East, and a big-data approach to charting online tracts. This method has generated novel conclusions about religious doctrine and authority — although Nielsen, who has graduate degrees in both government and statistics and does his primary research in Arabic, downplays his versatility. “I basically tell people that I’m...

Read More

Making smart thermostats more efficient
December 18, 2020
| No Comments
| Future
Buildings account for about 40 percent of U.S. energy consumption, and are responsible for one-third of global carbon dioxide emissions. Making buildings more energy-efficient is not only a cost-saving measure, but a crucial climate change mitigation strategy. Hence the rise of “smart” buildings, which are increasingly becoming the norm around the world. Smart buildings automate systems like heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC); lighting; electricity; and security. Automation requires sensory data, such as indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity,...

Read More

2020 MIT Water Summit brings international audiences...
December 18, 2020
| No Comments
| Future
Earlier this semester, the MIT student group The Water Club gathered to discuss topics for their eighth annual MIT Water Summit. Given the dramatic challenges of 2020, the group knew this year’s decision was particularly weighty. Commenting on the process, Laura Chen, a junior in chemical engineering and director of the 2020 Water Summit, recalled, “in light of the effects of Covid-19 across the world, as well as the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S.,...

Read More

 
With campus as a test bed, climate...
December 18, 2020
| No Comments
| Future
In 2015, MIT set a goal to reduce its annual greenhouse gas emissions by a minimum of 32 percent by the year 2030. Five years later, the Institute has reduced emissions by 24 percent, remaining on track to meet its goal over the next several years. These most recent reduction data mark a 6 percent decrease — nearly 11,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions (MTCO2e) — from fiscal year 2019 to fiscal year 2020. This year-over-year reduction was...

Read More

On planetary change and human health
December 18, 2020
| No Comments
| Future
When anthropologist Amy Moran-Thomas first went to Belize to begin ethnographic research in 2008, she planned to chronicle human health concerns, focusing on diabetes. Then she learned that local diets contributing to such chronic conditions were changing, in part due to losses in ocean food webs, and kept hearing stories about how local plants were in trouble. “Listening and trying to learn from what people were saying, over the years I came to see human health and planetary health...

Read More

A better model for business insurance
December 18, 2020
| No Comments
| Future
These days businesses have enough to worry about without thinking about their insurance. Unfortunately, tasks like managing insurance claims and completing annual renewals require a lot of thinking. The startup Newfront Insurance is seeking to modernize the industry with digital tools that simplify insurance processes for brokers and businesses. The company’s platform automates tedious administrative processes for brokers while streamlining a number of repetitive tasks that have traditionally taken up customers’ time and headspace. “More than half of a...

Read More

 
To boost emissions reductions from electric vehicles,...
December 17, 2020
| No Comments
| Future
Transportation-related emissions are increasing globally. Currently, light-duty vehicles — namely passenger cars, such as sedans, SUVs, or minivans — contribute about 20 percent of the net greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. But studies have shown that switching out your conventional gas-guzzling car for a vehicle powered by electricity can make a significant dent in reducing these emissions. A recent study published in Environmental Science and Technology takes this a step further by examining how to reduce the emissions associated...

Read More

Want cheaper nuclear energy? Turn the design...
December 17, 2020
| No Comments
| Future
Nuclear energy provides more carbon-free electricity in the United States than solar and wind combined, making it a key player in the fight against climate change. But the U.S. nuclear fleet is aging, and operators are under pressure to streamline their operations to compete with coal- and gas-fired plants. One of the key places to cut costs is deep in the reactor core, where energy is produced. If the fuel rods that drive reactions there are ideally placed, they...

Read More

Method finds hidden warning signals in measurements...
December 17, 2020
| No Comments
| Future
When you’re responsible for a multimillion-dollar satellite hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour, you want to be sure it’s running smoothly. And time series can help. A time series is simply a record of a measurement taken repeatedly over time. It can keep track of a system’s long-term trends and short-term blips. Examples include the infamous Covid-19 curve of new daily cases and the Keeling curve that has tracked atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations since 1958. In...

Read More

 
Can mammogram screening be more effective?
December 17, 2020
| No Comments
| Future
About 35 percent of women get annual mammograms from age 40 onward. But the value of those screenings has been much debated, because mammograms for people in their 40s catch relatively few cases of breast cancer, generate plenty of false positive results, and produce some cases of unnecessary treatment. Thus, while some organizations have advocated for testing to start at age 40, in 2009 the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended that women start regular mammogram screening at age...

Read More

MIT to share in $3.2 million grant...
December 16, 2020
| No Comments
| Future
At the end of October, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced it won a $3.2 million, two-year grant, in collaboration with MIT, community colleges, and state agencies, to prepare workers for stable high-paying jobs in advanced manufacturing. The program, called MassBridge, will create a curriculum that bridges between the Commonwealth’s excellent traditional manufacturing education and the advanced manufacturing needs of today’s economy. Massachusetts will serve as a foundry and pilot for this curriculum, which can later be used by other...

Read More

James Fujimoto wins the Visionary Prize from...
December 16, 2020
| No Comments
| Future
On Dec. 14, the Sanford and Susan Greenberg Prize to End Blindness honored 13 scientists who have made extraordinary headway in the worldwide battle against blindness. Among them was James G. Fujimoto, the Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering within MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). Recipients of the Greenberg Prize are honored in two categories: the Outstanding Achievement Prize, highlighting strides toward treating and curing blindness, and the Visionary Prize, providing funding for scientists whose research...

Read More

© 2021 BrandMoiAhora. All Rights Reserved
Powered by Curiosity