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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.

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How airplanes counteract St. Elmo’s Fire during...

August 11, 2020

At the height of a thunderstorm, the tips of cell towers, telephone poles, and other tall, electrically conductive structures can spontaneously emit a flash of blue light. This electric glow, known as a corona discharge, is produced when the air surrounding a conductive object is briefly ionized by an electrically charged environment. For centuries, sailors observed corona discharges at the tips of ship masts during storms at sea. They coined the phenomenon St. Elmo’s fire, after the patron saint...

MIT researchers lead high school educational initiative...

August 10, 2020

Quantum computing has the potential to change the world as we know it, yet limited K-12 educational resources on quantum computing exist. MIT researchers have partnered with The Coding School (TCS), a technology education nonprofit, to address this gap. This first-of-its-kind initiative, playfully named “Qubit by Qubit,” aims to introduce high school students to quantum computing through two programs: a week-long summer camp and a year-long course, led respectively by Amir Karamlou and Francisca Vasconcelos of the MIT Research...

Data systems that learn to be better

August 10, 2020

Big data has gotten really, really big: By 2025, all the world’s data will add up to an estimated 175 trillion gigabytes. For a visual, if you stored that amount of data on DVDs, it would stack up tall enough to circle the Earth 222 times. One of the biggest challenges in computing is handling this onslaught of information while still being able to efficiently store and process it. A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...

3 Questions: Asegun Henry on five “grand...

August 10, 2020

More than 90 percent of the world’s energy use today involves heat, whether for producing electricity, heating and cooling buildings and vehicles, manufacturing steel and cement, or other industrial activities. Collectively, these processes emit a staggering amount of greenhouse gases into the environment each year. Reinventing the way we transport, store, convert, and use thermal energy would go a long way toward avoiding a global rise in temperature of more than 2 degrees Celsius — a critical increase that...

Shrinking deep learning’s carbon footprint

August 7, 2020

In June, OpenAI unveiled the largest language model in the world, a text-generating tool called GPT-3 that can write creative fiction, translate legalese into plain English, and answer obscure trivia questions. It’s the latest feat of intelligence achieved by deep learning, a machine learning method patterned after the way neurons in the brain process and store information. But it came at a hefty price: at least $4.6 million and 355 years in computing time, assuming the model was trained on a standard neural network chip,...

MIT Energy Conference goes virtual

August 7, 2020

For the past 14 years, the MIT Energy Conference — a two-day event organized by energy students — has united students, faculty, researchers, and industry representatives from around the world to discuss cutting-edge developments in energy. Under the supervision of Thomas “Trey” Wilder, an MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a large team of student event organizers, the final pieces for the 2020 conference were falling into place by early March — and then the...

Diane Greene SM ’78 elected chair of...

August 7, 2020

The MIT Corporation, which is the Institute’s board of trustees, has elected Diane B. Greene SM ’78 to serve as chair of the Corporation, effective Oct. 2. Greene, the first woman to chair the Corporation, succeeds Robert B. Millard ’73, who served in the role since 2014. Once the transition occurs in October, Millard will return to his role as a Life Member of the Corporation. “It is a great honor to be elected to lead the accomplished members...

The Philippines, the US, and a century...

August 7, 2020

For a few nights in late 1991, a 74-year-old army veteran, newly arrived in Los Angeles and looking for family members, needed to sleep outside. Pastor Amarillento was a recently naturalized Filipino American, based on a 1990 law granting citizenship to Philippine Army soldiers from World War II. Amarillento had fought at Bataan. But after being naturalized in San Francisco, his money had been stolen on the bus down to Los Angeles. Thus Amarillento had “marched under General Douglas...

School of Architecture and Planning announces 2020...

August 6, 2020

“As one can imagine, it’s never easy to herd eight MIT professors,” according to one of many accolades for Ruth Tse Yiu’s work in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “She is a very organized, proactive, dependable, thorough, and take-charge person … known for digging deep to find answers to complicated questions.” Yiu was one of nine individuals honored at the School of Architecture and Planning’s annual Infinite Mile Awards in a virtual ceremony on July 2. The...

The promise of using WhatsApp for low-tech...

August 6, 2020

WhatsApp is one of the most widely-used communication apps in South Africa. Though it’s often portrayed in the news as a way to spread disinformation, it shows surprising potential as a tool for online learning during the era of social distancing. Grassroot, a civic technology organization based in South Africa, has developed a first-of-its-kind training course entirely on WhatsApp to improve the leadership skills of community organizers and build deep networks. The MIT Governance Lab, led by Lily Tsai,...

Why shaving dulls even the sharpest of...

August 6, 2020

Razors, scalpels, and knives are commonly made from stainless steel, honed to a razor-sharp edge and coated with even harder materials such as diamond-like carbon. However, knives require regular sharpening, while razors are routinely replaced after cutting materials far softer than the blades themselves. Now engineers at MIT have studied the simple act of shaving up close, observing how a razor blade can be damaged as it cuts human hair — a material that is 50 times softer than...

A new tool for modeling the human...

August 6, 2020

Several thousand strains of bacteria live in the human gut. Some of these are associated with disease, while others have beneficial effects on human health. Figuring out the precise role of each of these bacteria can be difficult, because many of them can’t be grown in lab studies using human tissue. This difficulty is especially pronounced for species that cannot live in oxygen-rich environments. However, MIT biological and mechanical engineers have now designed a specialized device in which they...

When the chemical industry met modern architecture

August 6, 2020

Just months before starting her PhD, Jessica Varner and her partner bought a small house built in 1798. Located on tidal wetlands along Connecticut’s Patchogue River, the former residence of an ironworker had endured over two centuries of history and neglect. As Varner began to slowly restore the house — discovering its nail-less construction and thin horsehair plaster walls, learning plumbing skills, and burning oyster shells to make lime wash — she discovered a deep connection between her work...

Reorienting graduate student orientation

August 5, 2020

MIT’s graduate student orientation is historically a measured, months-long affair, ramping up in the summer with informational webinars and gatherings hosted by alumni around the world, and continuing in the fall with dozens of on-campus events. This is anything but a typical year, of course. For example, many of the nearly 1,700 incoming graduate students have never set foot on campus; the annual spring visiting week, which allows them to get to know MIT— and particularly their department —...

“Junior republics,” a unique concept in the...

August 5, 2020

Around 1900, the famed Baedeker’s travel guide began listing a new tourist sight in Freeville, New York: the “George Junior Republic,” a miniature United States run by kids. The invention of philanthropist William R. George, the “junior republic” was mostly occupied by impoverished or immigrant teenagers from New York City, acting as politicians, judges, police officers, journalists, and other workers, in their own separate civic world. George thought this would instill American democratic values in Freeville’s young residents. “This...

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