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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.

 
MIT, guided by open access principles, ends...
Standing by its commitment to provide equitable and open access to scholarship, MIT has ended negotiations with Elsevier for a new journals contract. Elsevier was not able to present a proposal that aligned with the principles of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts.  Developed by the MIT Libraries in collaboration with the Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research and the Committee on the Library System in October 2019, the MIT Framework is grounded in the conviction that openly sharing...

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QS ranks MIT the world’s No. 1...
MIT has again been named the world’s top university by the QS World University Rankings, which were announced today. This is the ninth year in a row MIT has received this distinction. The full 2019-20 rankings — published by Quacquarelli Symonds, an organization specializing in education and study abroad — can be found at topuniversities.com. The QS rankings were based on academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per faculty, student-to-faculty ratio, proportion of international faculty, and proportion of international students....

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Photorealistic simulator made MIT robot racing competition...
Every spring, the basement of the Ray and Maria Stata Center becomes a racetrack for tiny self-driving cars that tear through the halls one by one. Sprinting behind each car on foot is a team of three to six students, sometimes carrying wireless routers or open laptops extended out like Olympic torches. Lining the basement walls, their classmates cheer them on, knowing the effort it took to program the algorithms steering the cars around the course during this annual...

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MIT plays key role in statewide effort...
In late March, local leaders from academia, health care, and the private sector joined a conference call to hear state officials paint a grim picture: Hospitals in Massachusetts would need millions more units of personal protective equipment (PPE) to keep health care workers safe during the Covid-19 pandemic. Local manufacturers with experience making things like active apparel and footwear were eager to help, but to do so they’d need to figure out what to make, how to make it, and...

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Learning the ropes and throwing lifelines
In March, as her friends and neighbors were scrambling to pack up and leave campus due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Geeticka Chauhan found her world upended in yet another way. Just weeks earlier, she had been elected council president of MIT’s largest graduate residence, Sidney-Pacific. Suddenly the fourth-year PhD student was plunged into rounds of emergency meetings with MIT administrators. From her apartment in Sidney-Pacific, where she has stayed put due to travel restrictions in her home country of...

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The social life of data
On a typical day in our data-saturated world, Facebook announces plans to encrypt its Messenger data, prompting uproar from child welfare activists who fear privacy will come at the cost of online safety. A new company called Tillable, an AirBnB for farmers, makes headlines for allowing the public to rent farmland while collecting and tracking massive swathes of data on land use and profitability. Tesla comes under fire for concealing autopilot data, while the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announces...

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MIT and Biogen launch virtual learning lab...
The Lemelson-MIT Program (LMIT) announced the launch of Biogen-MIT Biotech in Action: Virtual Summer Lab — a new online learning lab for high school students underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The collaboration pairs Biogen’s established Community Lab science learning program with LMIT’s 25 years of experience preparing students to be the next generation of creative and inventive problem solvers. The summer virtual lab will offer 400 Massachusetts and North Carolina high school students from backgrounds underrepresented...

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Unlocking the secrets of a plastic-eater
It was during a cruise in Alaska that Linda Zhong realized that the world didn’t have to be full of plastic. “I grew up in cities, so you’re very used to seeing all kinds of trash everywhere,” says the graduate student in microbiology. Zhong, who is Canadian and lived in Ottawa growing up and in Toronto during college, routinely saw trash in the waters of the Ottawa River and on the beaches around Lake Ontario. “You never see it...

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Professor Emeritus Michael Athans, pioneer in control...
MIT electrical engineering and computer science Professor Emeritus Michael Athans died peacefully on May 26 at his home in Clearwater, Florida, at the age of 83.  Athans was born in Drama, Macedonia, Greece in 1937. He came to the United States in 1954 for a one-year exchange visit under the auspices of the American Field Service (AFS), and attended the Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley, California. His year in the AFS was a defining one. He fell in...

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Research highlights immune molecule’s complex role in...
More than a decade before people with Huntington’s disease (HD) show symptoms, they can exhibit abnormally high levels of an immune-system molecule called interleukin-6 (IL-6), which has led many researchers to suspect IL-6 of promoting the eventual neurological devastation associated with the genetic condition. A new investigation by MIT neuroscientists shows that the story likely isn’t so simple. In a recent study they found that Huntington’s model mice bred to lack IL-6 showed exacerbated symptoms compared to HD mice...

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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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