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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.

 
Our itch to share helps spread Covid-19...
To stay current about the Covid-19 pandemic, people need to process health information when they read the news. Inevitably, that means people will be exposed to health misinformation, too, in the form of false content, often found online, about the illness. Now a study co-authored by MIT scholars contains bad news and good news about Covid-19 misinformation — and a new insight that may help reduce the problem. The bad news is that when people are consuming news on...

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Empowering kids to address Covid-19 through coding
When schools around the world closed their doors due to the coronavirus pandemic, the team behind MIT App Inventor — a web-based, visual-programming environment that allows children to develop applications for smartphones and tablets — began thinking about how they could not only help keep children engaged and learning, but also empower them to create new tools to address the pandemic. In April, the App Inventor team launched a new challenge that encourages children and adults around the world...

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Engineers design a reusable, silicone rubber face...
Researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have designed a new face mask that they believe could stop viral particles as effectively as N95 masks. Unlike N95 masks, the new masks were designed to be easily sterilized and used many times. As the number of new Covid-19 cases in the United States continues to rise, there is still an urgent need for N95 masks for health care workers and others. The new mask is made of durable silicone...

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To engineers’ surprise, radiation can slow corrosion...
Radiation nearly always degrades the materials exposed to it, hastening their deterioration and requiring replacement of key components in high-radiation environments such as nuclear reactors. But for certain alloys that could be used in fission or fusion reactors, the opposite turns out to be true: Researchers at MIT and in California have now found that instead of hastening the material’s degradation, radiation actually improves its resistance, potentially doubling the material’s useful lifetime. The finding could be a boon for...

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J-PAL webinar series on program evaluation draws...
Last month, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) held a free, five-day webinar series in place of their annual in-person Evaluating Social Programs Course. The interactive webinar sessions introduced participants to why and how randomized evaluations can be used to rigorously measure program impact. Lectures were guided by senior J-PAL staff with expertise in randomized evaluations as well as J-PAL affiliated researchers.  Throughout the week, 1,918 attendees from 101 different countries participated in the webinar. While a...

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Flatworms muscle new eyes' wiring into their...
If anything happens to the eyes of the tiny, freshwater-dwelling planarian Schmidtea mediterranea, they can grow them back within just a few days. How they do this is a scientific conundrum — one that Peter Reddien’s lab at Whitehead Institute has been studying for years. The lab’s latest project offers some insight: in a paper published in Science June 26, researchers in Reddien’s lab have identified a new type of cell that likely serves as a guidepost to help route axons...

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Signs of Covid-19 may be hidden in...
It’s often easy to tell when colleagues are struggling with a cold — they sound sick. Maybe their voices are lower or have a nasally tone. Infections change the quality of our voices in various ways. But MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers are detecting these changes in Covid-19 patients even when these changes are too subtle for people to hear or even notice in themselves. By processing speech recordings of people infected with Covid-19 but not yet showing symptoms, these...

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MIT Libraries staff honored with 2020 Infinite...
The MIT Libraries honored the outstanding contributions of its employees June 18 with a virtual Infinite Mile Awards ceremony. The circus-themed program, titled “The Greatest Staff on Earth,” featured a staff talent showcase and socially distant performances by the libraries’ band, The Dust Jackets.  Director Chris Bourg presented awards to individuals and teams in the categories listed below; award recipients are listed along with excerpts from the award presentations. Bringing out the best Hailed for making the libraries not...

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At home with fusion research
Sreya Vangara was ready to get her hands dirty. In February, the sophomore was starting her first Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) project at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), having spent two semesters more theoretically occupied writing algorithms for self-driving cars. Now she would be working on MIT’s latest fusion experiment, SPARC. Under the guidance of PSFC Director Dennis Whyte and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) Chief Scientific Officer Brandon Sorbom PhD ’17, she would be developing...

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Scaling up the quantum chip
MIT researchers have developed a process to manufacture and integrate “artificial atoms,” created by atomic-scale defects in microscopically thin slices of diamond, with photonic circuitry, producing the largest quantum chip of its type. The accomplishment “marks a turning point” in the field of scalable quantum processors, says Dirk Englund, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Millions of quantum processors will be needed to build quantum computers, and the new research demonstrates a viable...

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MIT and Harvard file suit against new...
The following email was sent to the MIT community today from MIT President L. Rafael Reif. To the members of the MIT community, On Monday, in a surprising development, a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that it will not permit international students on F-1 visas to take a full online course load this fall while studying in the United States. As I wrote yesterday, this ruling has potentially serious implications for MIT’s international students and those enrolled...

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The urban job escalator has stopped moving
The great U.S. economic boom after World War II was an urban phenomenon. Tens of millions of Americans flocked to cities to work and forge a future in the nation’s middle class. And for a few decades, living in the big city paid off. By 1980, four-year college graduates in the most urban quartile of job markets had incomes 40 percent greater, per household, than college graduates in the least urban quartile. And workers without four-year college degrees (“non-college”...

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Nine MIT School of Science professors receive...
Beginning July 1, nine faculty members in the MIT School of Science have been granted tenure by MIT. They are appointed in the departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics. Physicist Ibrahim Cisse investigates living cells to reveal and study collective behaviors and biomolecular phase transitions at the resolution of single molecules. The results of his work help determine how disruptions in genes can cause diseases like cancer. Cisse joined the Department of Physics in 2014...

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Remote panel of “oldest old” finds virtual...
Since 2014, the MIT AgeLab has hosted a bimonthly research panel of adults aged 85 and older — the fastest-growing age demographic in the United States — on the MIT campus. AgeLab researchers have queried the “Lifestyle Leaders” panel on life’s smallest details and the most universal issues — sex, death, politics, loneliness. Drawn from the Boston metropolitan area, the 85-plus-year-olds who comprise the Lifestyle Leaders panel are more educated, wealthier, and healthier than most Americans of their age...

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Innovations in environmental training for the mining...
For the mining industry, efforts to achieve sustainability are moving from local to global. In the past, mining companies focused sustainability initiatives more on their social license to operate — treating workers fairly and operating safe and healthy facilities. However, concerns over climate change have put mining operations and supply chains in the global spotlight, leading to various carbon-neutral promises by mining companies in recent months. Heading in this direction is Vale, a global mining company and the world’s...

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