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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.

 
Powering through the coming energy transition
Aiming to avoid the worst effects of climate change, from severe droughts to extreme coastal flooding, the nearly 200 nations that signed the 2015 Paris Agreement set a long-term goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius. Achieving that goal will require dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, primarily through a global transition to low-carbon energy technologies. In the power sector, these include solar, wind, biomass, nuclear, and carbon capture and storage (CCS). According to more than...

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Advancing artificial intelligence research
The broad applicability of artificial intelligence in today’s society necessitates the need to develop and deploy technologies that can build trust in emerging areas, counter asymmetric threats, and adapt to the ever-changing needs of complex environments. As part of a new collaboration to advance and support AI research, the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing and the Defense Science and Technology Agency in Singapore are awarding funding to 13 projects led by researchers within the college that target...

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Identifying the structure and function of a...
Our ability to pay attention, plan, and troubleshoot involve cognitive processing by the brain’s prefrontal cortex. The balance of activity among excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the cortex, based on local neural circuits and distant inputs, is key to these cognitive functions. A recent study from the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT shows that excitatory inputs from the thalamus activate a local inhibitory circuit in the prefrontal cortex, revealing new insights into how these cognitive circuits may...

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Versatile building blocks make structures with surprising...
Researchers at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms have created tiny building blocks that exhibit a variety of unique mechanical properties, such as the ability to produce a twisting motion when squeezed. These subunits could potentially be assembled by tiny robots into a nearly limitless variety of objects with built-in functionality, including vehicles, large industrial parts, or specialized robots that can be repeatedly reassembled in different forms. The researchers created four different types of these subunits, called voxels (a...

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System can sterilize medical tools using solar...
Autoclaves, the devices used to sterilize medical tools in hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ and dentists’ offices, require a steady supply of pressurized steam at a temperature of about 125 degrees Celsius. This is usually provided by electrical or fuel-powered boilers, but in many rural areas, especially in the developing world, power can be unreliable or unavailable, and fuel is expensive. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and the Indian Institute of Technology has come up with a way...

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Study identifies reasons for soaring nuclear plant...
A new analysis by MIT researchers details many of the underlying issues that have caused cost overruns on new nuclear power plants in the U.S., which have soared ever higher over the last five decades. The new findings may help the designers of new plants build in resilience to the factors that tend to cause these overruns, thus helping to bring down the costs of such plants. Many analysts believe nuclear power will play an essential part in reducing...

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Bhavik Nagda: Delving into the deployment of...
“Academia,” “government,” “industry” — Bhavik Nagda squinted closely as his professor pointed to each word on the diagram of the American economy’s core components. Between each word sprouted dozens of arrows, illustrating the complex interactions between the three institutions. “There were just so many arrows,” says Nagda, recalling the presentation during MIT’s Science Policy Bootcamp. “I was blown away. It gave a voice to the way I think about systemic issues and how America has built its economy.” A...

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STEM Week event encourages students to see...
Covid-19 has given the public a crash course in what it is like to be a medical researcher. The evening news displays graphs and charts describing case counts and statistical data, while the status of vaccine trials is front page news. Now, more than ever, the public is seeing how STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields are rising to the challenge of Covid-19. It is in this spirit that MIT and the Massachusetts STEM Advisory Council encouraged students...

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SMART researchers develop gelatin microcarrier for cell...
Researchers from Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, have developed a novel microcarrier for large-scale cell production and expansion that offers higher yield and cost-effectiveness compared to traditional methods, and reduces steps required in the cell retrieval process. Microcarriers are particles used in bioreactor-based cell manufacturing of anchorage-dependent cells. SMART’s newly developed dissolvable gelatin-based microcarrier has proven useful for expansion of mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs), a cell type of great current interest, as...

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Chalk Radio shares MIT’s teaching techniques with...
How do you make abstract concepts accessible and tangible in the classroom? What does it take to motivate students to personalize learning? How do you navigate complex conversations, facilitating productive, respectful discussions in a lecture hall, seminar, or remote classroom? These are the questions Chalk Radio, the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) podcast, aims to answer. The show highlights some of MIT’s most engaging courses, along with the often-unconventional, always-inspired educators who create and teach them. Each episode features an interview...

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MIT.nano Immersion Lab Gaming Program awards 2020...
MIT.nano has announced its second annual seed grants to support hardware and software research related to sensors, 3D/4D interaction and analysis, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), and gaming. The grants are awarded through the MIT.nano Immersion Lab Gaming Program, a four-year collaboration between MIT.nano and video game development company NCSOFT, a founding member of the MIT.nano Consortium. “We are thrilled to award seven grants this year in support of research that will shape how people interact with the digital...

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Report outlines route toward better jobs, wider...
Decades of technological change have polarized the earnings of the American workforce, helping highly educated white-collar workers thrive, while hollowing out the middle class. Yet present-day advances like robots and artificial intelligence do not spell doom for middle-tier or lower-wage workers, since innovations create jobs as well. With better policies in place, more people could enjoy good careers even as new technology transforms workplaces. That’s the conclusion of the final report from MIT’s Task Force on the Work of...

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Mini-satellite maker
In early February, Kerri Cahoy packed up her family and caravanned with students from her lab, driving eight hours south of Boston to Wallops Island, Virginia. There, the group watched a backpack-sized spacecraft launch into space aboard an Antares rocket. Inside the small probe, named DeMi, was a deformable mirror payload that Cahoy and her students designed, along with a miniature telescope and laser test source. DeMi’s mirror corrects the positioning of either the test laser or a star...

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Understanding how people make sense of information...
As a student in the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and in the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), Manon Revel has been investigating how advertising in online publications affects trust in journalism. The topic area is familiar for Revel; growing up, she wanted to be a journalist to follow in her father’s footsteps. As a teenager, Revel was assigned her first reporting gig covering a holiday fireworks display for the local radio station...

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J-PAL North America announces partners through inaugural...
J-PAL North America, a research center in MIT’s Department of Economics, announced new partnerships with four organizations across the United States as a part of the center’s inaugural Housing Stability Evaluation Incubator.  Local Initiatives Support Coalition (LISC), Oakland Housing Authority (OHA), Project Hope Boston, and New Mexico Legal Aid were selected as partners under J-PAL North America’s Housing Stability Evaluation Incubator, which will support organizations in expanding the base of rigorous evidence on strategies to reduce and prevent homelessness. The selected...

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