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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.

 
Engineers put tens of thousands of artificial...
MIT engineers have designed a “brain-on-a-chip,” smaller than a piece of confetti, that is made from tens of thousands of artificial brain synapses known as memristors — silicon-based components that mimic the information-transmitting synapses in the human brain. The researchers borrowed from principles of metallurgy to fabricate each memristor from alloys of silver and copper, along with silicon. When they ran the chip through several visual tasks, the chip was able to “remember” stored images and reproduce them many...

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Transparent graphene electrodes might lead to new...
A new way of making large sheets of high-quality, atomically thin graphene could lead to ultra-lightweight, flexible solar cells, and to new classes of light-emitting devices and other thin-film electronics. The new manufacturing process, which was developed at MIT and should be relatively easy to scale up for industrial production, involves an intermediate “buffer” layer of material that is key to the technique’s success. The buffer allows the ultrathin graphene sheet, less than a nanometer (billionth of a meter)...

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MIT startup wraps food in silk for...
Benedetto Marelli, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, was a postdoc at Tufts University’s Omenetto Lab when he stumbled upon a novel use for silk. Preparing for a lab-wide cooking competition whose one requirement was to incorporate silk into each dish, Marelli accidentally left a silk-dipped strawberry on his bench: “I came back almost one week later, and the strawberries that were coated were still edible. The ones that were not coated with silk were completely...

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If transistors can’t get smaller, then coders...
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors that could fit on a computer chip would grow exponentially — and they did, doubling about every two years. For half a century, Moore’s Law has endured: Computers have gotten smaller, faster, cheaper, and more efficient, enabling the rapid worldwide adoption of PCs, smartphones, high-speed internet, and more. This miniaturization trend has led to silicon chips today that have almost unimaginably small circuitry. Transistors, the tiny switches...

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Taking an MIT approach to a return...
As MIT continues to consider and refine options for the fall, two questions stand out: how to safely and responsibly welcome people back into the Institute’s physical spaces, and how to ensure the MIT community can excel and thrive during what will likely be an extended and ongoing pandemic. While several groups work to answer those questions, MIT has also begun to collect data to inform a return to campus. A residence hall study launched earlier this spring has...

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MIT Logarhythms host a virtual concert and...
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the MIT Logarhythms did not miss a beat in finding new ways to stay connected, make music, and engage with the MIT community. Instead of on-campus a cappella rehearsals or concerts, the Logs took their show online. “We pretty quickly as a group got into the mindset that this is an opportunity to exercise a lot of creative freedom … and to try a lot of new things, because the circumstances are...

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Controlling plasma and plasma turbulence
“What are some challenges in controlling plasma and what are your solutions? What is the most effective type of fusion device? What are some difficulties in sustaining fusion conditions? What are some obstacles to receiving fusion funding?” For the past four years, graduate student Norman Cao ’15 PhD ’20 has been the Plasma Science and Fusion Center’s (PSFC’s) go-to “answer man,” replying to questions like these emailed by students and members of the general public interested in getting a...

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Recent political science graduates see brighter days...
Blindsided by a pandemic and hunkering down at home instead of celebrating spring on campus, MIT seniors might reasonably have felt blue. But a group of new political science alumni glimpse brighter days ahead, as they springboard from rewarding academic programs into meaningful careers. “I feel prepared for the life in policy work I have been planning, one that’s focused on energy and climate mitigation,” says Michelle Bai ’20, a double major in economics and political science with a...

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Peatland drainage in Southeast Asia adds to...
In less than three decades, most of Southeast Asia’s peatlands have been wholly or partially deforested, drained, and dried out. This has released carbon that accumulated over thousands of years from dead plant matter, and has led to rampant wildfires that spew air pollution and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The startling prevalence of such rapid destruction of the peatlands, and their resulting subsidence, is revealed in a new satellite-based study conducted by researchers at MIT and in Singapore...

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Town halls let students “Solve for Fall”
On May 13, student leaders, heads of house, and the MIT Division of Student Life (DSL) hosted two separate town halls — one for graduate students and one for undergraduates — to engage the student community in identifying and implementing possible solutions to the complex community problem posed by Covid-19. As organizers wrote in their May 4 invitation to students, “We need to ensure that whatever approach we take for the fall, we prioritize and protect community health and...

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In online vigil, MIT community shares grief,...
“We are suffering from a multigenerational fracture,” rising junior and Undergraduate Association President Danielle Geathers said yesterday, referring to centuries of racism in America. “The bone was never set, and healing never occurred. Today we see the latest inflammation of that initial injury.” Geathers spoke at an online MIT community vigil held in response to the killing of George Floyd and the loss of other black lives due to racism and police brutality, and to the wave of protests...

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Associate Professor Amah Edoh receives Baker Award...
Amah Edoh, associate professor in anthropology, has received the Everett Moore Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. This Institute-wide award, named in honor of Everett Moore Baker, dean of students from 1947 to 1950, is given every year to an MIT faculty member, recognizing an “exceptional interest and ability in the instruction of undergraduates.” As the prize parameters specify, “this is the only teaching award in which the nomination and selection of the recipients is done entirely by...

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Letter from MIT police chief John DiFava:...
The following letter was sent to the MIT community today by MIT Chief of Police and Director of Public Safety John DiFava. To the members of the MIT community, In my 46 years of policing, I have seen the good and bad, the brave and cowardly, but what we saw in Minneapolis last week with the brutal killing of George Floyd left me shaken and angry. It breaks my heart to see such cruel violence against another human being, and...

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Citizen scientists spot closest young brown dwarf...
Brown dwarfs are the middle child of astronomy, too big to be a planet yet not big enough to be a star. Like their stellar siblings, these objects form from the gravitational collapse of gas and dust. But rather than condensing into a star’s fiery hot nuclear core, brown dwarfs find a more zen-like equilibrium, somehow reaching a stable, milder state compared to fusion-powered stars. Brown dwarfs are considered to be the missing link between the most massive gas...

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Study: Reflecting sunlight to cool the planet...
How can the world combat the continued rise in global temperatures? How about shading the Earth from a portion of the sun’s heat by injecting the stratosphere with reflective aerosols? After all, volcanoes do essentially the same thing, albeit in short, dramatic bursts: When a Vesuvius erupts, it blasts fine ash into the atmosphere, where the particles can linger as a kind of cloud cover, reflecting solar radiation back into space and temporarily cooling the planet. Some researchers are...

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