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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.

 
National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator awards two...
Two grants have been awarded to MIT researchers on the themes of socio-resilient infrastructure, and on the future of oceans. The grants are part of the U.S. National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator program, designed to foster global cross-disciplinary and cross-sector workshops on emerging areas of critical societal importance. The NSF Convergence Accelerator program further aims to accelerate use-inspired, convergence research via partnerships between academic and non-academic stakeholders. Socio-resilient infrastructures The Socioresilient Infrastructure: Precision Materials, Assemblages, and Systems project is co-led by Christine Ortiz,...

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The wobbling shadow of the M87* black...
In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, including a team of MIT Haystack Observatory scientists, delivered the first image of a black hole, revealing M87* — the supermassive object in the center of the M87 galaxy. The EHT team has used the lessons learned last year to analyze the archival data sets from 2009 to 2013, some of which were not published before. The analysis reveals the behavior of the black hole image across multiple years, indicating persistence...

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Demo Day shows MIT entrepreneurs’ resilience
On March 10, with uncertainty around Covid-19 at its peak, staff members at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship gathered to decide if they should hold the delta v summer accelerator. The program had always relied on students’ physical presence on campus to immerse them in startup life and teach them about entrepreneurship. “Everyone was in shock back in March, and people just assumed we weren’t going to be doing delta v,” says Managing Director Bill Aulet. “We...

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Regina Barzilay wins $1M Association for the...
For more than 100 years Nobel Prizes have been given out annually to recognize breakthrough achievements in chemistry, literature, medicine, peace, and physics. As these disciplines undoubtedly continue to impact society, newer fields like artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics have also begun to profoundly reshape the world. In recognition of this, the world’s largest AI society — the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) — announced today the winner of their new Squirrel AI Award for Artificial...

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Building 14 courtyard to undergo renovation
The courtyard at the center of Building 14 is being renovated concurrently with Hayden Library, the MIT Libraries announced today. Longtime hopes for renovating this underutilized outdoor space have been given new life with a design concept from Kennedy & Violich Architecture (KVA), architects of the library renovation, working in collaboration with Stephen Stimson Associates Landscape Architects. Both the library and courtyard renovation projects are expected to be completed at the same time later this year. “This is a...

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President Reif shares information ahead of National...
To the members of the MIT community, In a pandemic, many simple, normal things become complicated – and one of them, unfortunately, is the act of voting.  As an immigrant and a naturalized US citizen, I feel a particular pride and gratitude in being able to exercise this sacred right. But I hope everyone in our community who is eligible to vote will find a safe way to do so – whether in person or by mail – without letting the...

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Evaluating battery revenues for offshore wind farms...
Lithium-ion battery technologies currently dominate the advanced energy storage market — a sector of increasing importance as more focus is put on variable renewable energy generation and reliability to help decarbonize the global energy system. But according to MIT researchers, prevailing battery models can actually overestimate the battery’s revenue in an energy storage system by 35 percent. “Current modeling is not very representative of how these batteries actually operate,” says MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) research scientist Apurba Sakti. “These...

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SMART researchers develop fast and efficient method...
Researchers from Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, have discovered a new way to manufacture human red blood cells (RBCs) that cuts the culture time by half compared to existing methods and uses novel sorting and purification methods that are faster, more precise, and less costly. Blood transfusions save millions of lives every year, but over half the world’s countries do not have sufficient blood supply to meet their needs. The ability to...

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Student leaders and PKG Center team up...
Voter registration and mobilization can be challenging, even in pre-Covid times and especially at colleges with a large population of STEM majors, a field with the lowest undergraduate voter turn-out rate of any field of study. But, with the November 2020 election fast approaching, MIT students aren’t letting anything get in the way of their message about the vital importance of voting. Building on the foundation established in 2017 through MIT’s implementation of TurboVote — an online, nonpartisan service...

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J-PAL North America launches research initiative to...
The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in incalculable losses for millions of Americans, particularly among low-income communities and communities of color. As decision-makers work to address this unparalleled public health crisis, urgent questions remain on how the Covid-19 pandemic will impact the social and economic well-being of people in the United States once the immediate crisis has resolved. This summer, J-PAL North America launched a new research initiative that aims to inform these pressing policy questions. The COVID-19 Recovery and...

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Astronomers discover an Earth-sized “pi planet” with...
In a delightful alignment of astronomy and mathematics, scientists at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a “pi Earth” — an Earth-sized planet that zips around its star every 3.14 days, in an orbit reminiscent of the universal mathematics constant. The researchers discovered signals of the planet in data taken in 2017 by the NASA Kepler Space Telescope’s K2 mission. By zeroing in on the system earlier this year with SPECULOOS, a network of ground-based telescopes, the team confirmed that...

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3Q: Fighting racism in the nuclear community
A group of nuclear scientists recently published a call for anti-racist action in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, urging researchers and their colleagues to confront a long legacy of racial disparities and injustices in the history of the nuclear field, many of which continue today. Racism and colonialism have influenced which countries and communities shoulder the environmental and health burdens related to the building and testing of nuclear weapons, the authors explain. These forces have also helped determine...

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Diverse international cohort first to earn MIT...
This past January, 22 students from across the world joined the MIT campus as the first cohort in the new MIT master’s program in Data, Economics, and Development Policy (DEDP). Developed by MIT’s Department of Economics and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the program represents a new approach to higher education by combining online coursework through the DEDP MicroMasters program with one residential semester at MIT and a summer capstone project. Eight months after they first...

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Professor Emeritus Edward Merrill, chemical engineer who...
Edward W. Merrill, professor emeritus of chemical engineering, died peacefully at his home on Aug. 6 at the age of 96, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. A longtime chemical engineer at MIT, Merrill was a founding contributor to the field of biological engineering. He developed the area of biomaterials and over a 66-year career pioneered several fields of bioengineering. “Ed made an indelible mark on each life he touched, professionally and personally. Not only did his research contributions...

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Examining racial attitudes in virtual spaces through...
The national dialogue on race has progressed powerfully and painfully in the past year, and issues of racial bias in the news have become ubiquitous. However, for over a decade, researchers from MIT’s Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab) have been developing systems to model, simulate, and analyze such issues of identity.  In recent years there’s been a rise in popularity of video games or virtual reality (VR) experiences addressing racial issues for educational or training purposes, coinciding...

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