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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.

 
Sheila Widnall: A lifetime exploring the unknown
On Sept. 30, the MIT community came together to celebrate the career of Institute Professor Emerita Sheila Widnall, who recently retired after spending 64 years at MIT. The virtual event featured remarks from MIT leaders, current and former secretaries of the U.S. Air Force, and Widnall’s faculty colleagues from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), who spoke of her impact at MIT and beyond. MIT was not only a springboard for a hungry young tinkerer who became a...

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3 Questions: Ram Sasisekharan on hastening vaccines...
Covid-19 has brought much of the world to a halt this year. However, it is just one of the many infectious diseases without a vaccine that affect millions of people around the world. The development of therapeutics for these infectious diseases has mostly been overlooked by pharmaceutical companies in favor of higher-margin therapies for the developed world. Creating therapeutics for these viral pathogens can take years of clinical and regulatory assessment before they become available to those who need...

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Three MIT alumni awarded 2020 MacArthur “genius”...
Three MIT alumni have won a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, a prestigious honor unofficially known as the “Genius Grant.” “In the midst of civil unrest, a global pandemic, natural disasters, and conflagrations, this group of 21 exceptionally creative individuals offers a moment for celebration,” says Cecilia Conrad, managing director of the 40-year-old fellowship program. Each recipient will receive a $625,000, no-strings-attached award. Learn about the MIT-affiliated recipients: Isaiah Andrews PhD ’14, professor of economics at Harvard University As an econometrician,...

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High school students from across the US...
The MIT AgeLab presented the fifth annual OMEGA scholarship awards to five accomplished young adults from California, Massachusetts, and New York. The OMEGA scholarships recognize young people who are leading efforts in their schools and communities to foster intergenerational connections. This year, through the generous sponsorship of Five Star Senior Living, the scholarship expanded beyond the New England area to across the United States, as well as increasing the number of students honored to five and the value of the...

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India’s culture of coping with cancer
When Dwaipayan Banerjee began studying the lives of poor cancer patients in and around Delhi, India, he noticed something distinctive: Virtually none of them used the word “cancer” itself. One elderly man Banerjee met got upset at seeing a medical van with the words “caring for cancer” on the side; the man insisted he was actually suffering from “oncology.” Banerjee also learned, from a medical resident at a hospital, to think of these patients as experiencing “shak,” a Hindi...

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Undergraduates ramp up research during pandemic diaspora
When the pandemic drove MIT students from Cambridge, Massachusetts, in March, few suspected this disruption would prove beneficial. Yet for some undergraduate researchers working with the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), exile from campus spurred deeper exploration of known territory, and rewarding forays into less-familiar disciplines. “I learned so much biology this summer,” says NSE major Natalie Montoya, whose senior thesis involves nuclear security and policy. When the pandemic scuttled her internship at the Lawrence Livermore National...

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Less scatterbrained scatterplots
Scatterplots. You might not know them by name, but if you spend more than 10 minutes online you’ll find them everywhere. They’re popular in news articles, in the data science community, and, perhaps most crucially, for internet memes about the digestive quality of pancakes.  By depicting data as a mass of points across two axes, scatterplots are effective in visualizing trends, correlations, and anomalies. But using them for large datasets often leads to overlapping dots that make them more...

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Three from MIT receive National Health Institute...
Three MIT faculty members have been chosen to receive the New Innovators Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as part of its High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. Michael Birnbaum and Anders Hansen, both assistant professors of the Department of Biological Engineering, and Tami Lieberman, an assistant professor of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will each receive the award. “The flexibility provided by this award will allow my young lab to pursue the most interesting and important...

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MIT deepens connections to the Middle East
Since MIT’s first collaboration in the Middle East in the 1970s, the Institute has deepened its connection and commitment to the region, expanding to create the MIT-Arab World Program through the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI). This year, partnering with the Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation (AHSF) in Jordan, the program is launching this first seed fund in Jordan as part of MISTI’s Global Seed Funds. The new fund aims to support joint early-stage collaborations between researchers and...

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3 Questions: Chappell Lawson on U.S. security...
The year 2020 has featured an array of safety and security concerns for ordinary Americans, including disease and natural disasters. How can the U.S. government best protect its citizens? That is the focus of a new scholarly book with practical aims, “Beyond 9/11: Homeland Security for the Twenty-First Century,” published by the MIT Press. The volume features chapters written by 19 security experts, and closely examines the role of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was created after...

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3 Questions: Why getting ahead of Covid-19...
Countries continue to have varying responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, with widely different outcomes in the number of confirmed cases and deaths as a result of the virus. A country’s actions, or lack of action, in responding to the pandemic is partly informed by models that predict the virus’ impact on various aspects of society. But Olivier de Weck, professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, says that most of these models are short-sighted. He and...

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Alzheimer’s risk gene disrupts endocytosis, but another...
In a new study, a team of scientists based at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research reveals evidence showing that the most prominent Alzheimer’s disease risk gene may disrupt a fundamental process in a key type of brain cell. Moreover, in a sign of how important it is to delve into the complex ways that genes intersect in disease, they found that increasing the expression of another Alzheimer’s-associated gene...

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Exploring the lives of MIT pioneers through...
With the Covid-19 pandemic squelching a lot of typical summer research activities for MIT students in 2020, three undergraduates joined forces for a different kind project: researching and writing a theatrical script about the lives of pioneering MIT students. Sponsored by visiting professor Jeffrey Toney as part of MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), the script was a collaboration between junior Rose Bielak, a physics student; junior Valerie Chen, a political science major; and sophomore Jovita Li, an applied...

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Andrea Ghez ’87 wins a share of...
Astrophysicist Andrea Ghez ’87 has been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, announced today by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm. She shares half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel, “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy.” The other half of the prize was awarded to Roger Penrose, “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.” Ghez received a BS...

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Comparing the benefits of scooter-sharing vs. bike-sharing
While ride-sharing services like Grab, Uber, and Gojek have become a pervasive part of life, many countries in the Asia Pacific region are still unconvinced when it comes to micro-mobilities such as bike and scooter sharing. While the convenience offered by these is great, especially in this Covid-19 era when people may remain wary of crowding in buses and metro trains, there is a need for in-depth knowledge of these new transportation options to help guide policy and regulation....

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