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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.

 
Understanding the visual knowledge of language models
You’ve likely heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but can a large language model (LLM) get the picture if it’s never seen images before? As it turns out, language models that are trained purely on text have a solid understanding of the visual world. They can write image-rendering code to generate complex scenes with intriguing objects and compositions — and even when that knowledge is not used properly, LLMs can refine their images. Researchers from MIT’s...

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A new way to spot life-threatening infections...
Chemotherapy and other treatments that take down cancer cells can also destroy patients’ immune cells. Every year, that leads tens of thousands of cancer patients with weakened immune systems to contract infections that can turn deadly if unmanaged. Doctors must strike a balance between giving enough chemotherapy to eradicate cancer while not giving so much that the patient’s white blood cell count gets dangerously low, a condition known as neutropenia. It can also leave patients socially isolated in between rounds...

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A creation story told through immersive technology
In the beginning, as one version of the Haudenosaunee creation story has it, there was only water and sky. According to oral tradition, when the Sky Woman became pregnant, she dropped through a hole in the clouds. While many animals guided her descent as she fell, she eventually found a place on the turtle’s back. They worked together, with the aid of other water creatures, to lift the land from the depths of these primordial waters to create what...

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With programmable pixels, novel sensor improves imaging...
Neurons communicate electrically, so to understand how they produce such brain functions as memory, neuroscientists must track how their voltage changes — sometimes subtly — on the timescale of milliseconds. In a new open-access paper in Nature Communications, MIT researchers describe a novel image sensor with the capability to substantially increase that ability. The invention led by Jie Zhang, a postdoc in the lab of Matt Wilson, who is the Sherman Fairchild Professor at MIT and member of The...

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Symposium highlights scale of mental health crisis...
Digital technologies, such as smartphones and machine learning, have revolutionized education. At the McGovern Institute for Brain Research’s 2024 Spring Symposium, “Transformational Strategies in Mental Health,” experts from across the sciences — including psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and others — agreed that these technologies could also play a significant role in advancing the diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders and neurological conditions. Co-hosted by the McGovern Institute, MIT Open Learning, McClean Hospital, the Poitras Center for Psychiatric...

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Making climate models relevant for local decision-makers
Climate models are a key technology in predicting the impacts of climate change. By running simulations of the Earth’s climate, scientists and policymakers can estimate conditions like sea level rise, flooding, and rising temperatures, and make decisions about how to appropriately respond. But current climate models struggle to provide this information quickly or affordably enough to be useful on smaller scales, such as the size of a city.  Now, authors of a new open-access paper published in the Journal of...

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New algorithm discovers language just by watching...
Mark Hamilton, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science and affiliate of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), wants to use machines to understand how animals communicate. To do that, he set out first to create a system that can learn human language “from scratch.” “Funny enough, the key moment of inspiration came from the movie ‘March of the Penguins.’ There’s a scene where a penguin falls while crossing the ice, and lets out...

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MIT Faculty Founder Initiative announces three winners...
Patients with intractable cancers, chronic pain sufferers, and people who depend on battery-powered medical implants may all benefit from the ideas presented at the 2023-24 MIT-Royalty Pharma Prize Competition’s recent awards. This year’s top prizes went to researchers and biotech entrepreneurs Anne Carpenter, Frederike Petzschner, and Betar Gallant ’08, SM ’10, PhD ’13. MIT Faculty Founder Initiative Executive Director Kit Hickey MBA ’13 describes the time and hard work the three awardees and other finalists devoted to the initiative...

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How a quantum scientist, a nurse, and...
A trip to Ghana changed Sofia Martinez Galvez’s life. In 2021, she volunteered at a nonprofit that provides technology and digital literacy training to people in the West African country. As she was setting up computers and connecting cables, Martinez SM ʼ23 witnessed extreme poverty. The experience was transformative. That same year, she left her job in quantum cryptography in Spain and enrolled in the MITx MicroMasters online program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP), which teaches learners how...

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Catalyst Symposium helps lower “activation barriers” for...
For science — and the scientists who practice it — to succeed, research must be shared. That’s why members of the MIT community recently gathered to learn about the research of eight postdocs from across the country for the second annual Catalyst Symposium, an event co-sponsored by the Department of Biology and The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. The eight Catalyst Fellows came to campus as part of an effort to increase engagement between MIT scholars and postdocs...

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A data-driven approach to making better choices
Imagine a world in which some important decision — a judge’s sentencing recommendation, a child’s treatment protocol, which person or business should receive a loan — was made more reliable because a well-designed algorithm helped a key decision-maker arrive at a better choice. A new MIT economics course is investigating these interesting possibilities. Class 14.163 (Algorithms and Behavioral Science) is a new cross-disciplinary course focused on behavioral economics, which studies the cognitive capacities and limitations of human beings. The...

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Exotic black holes could be a byproduct...
For every kilogram of matter that we can see — from the computer on your desk to distant stars and galaxies — there are 5 kilograms of invisible matter that suffuse our surroundings. This “dark matter” is a mysterious entity that evades all forms of direct observation yet makes its presence felt through its invisible pull on visible objects. Fifty years ago, physicist Stephen Hawking offered one idea for what dark matter might be: a population of black holes,...

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Reducing carbon emissions from long-haul trucks
People around the world rely on trucks to deliver the goods they need, and so-called long-haul trucks play a critical role in those supply chains. In the United States, long-haul trucks moved 71 percent of all freight in 2022. But those long-haul trucks are heavy polluters, especially of the carbon emissions that threaten the global climate. According to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates, in 2022 more than 3 percent of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions came from long-haul trucks....

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Mouth-based touchpad enables people living with paralysis...
When Tomás Vega SM ’19 was 5 years old, he began to stutter. The experience gave him an appreciation for the adversity that can come with a disability. It also showed him the power of technology. “A keyboard and a mouse were outlets,” Vega says. “They allowed me to be fluent in the things I did. I was able to transcend my limitations in a way, so I became obsessed with human augmentation and with the concept of cyborgs. I...

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Advocating for science funding on Capitol Hill
This spring, 26 MIT students and postdocs traveled to Washington to meet with congressional staffers to advocate for increased science funding for fiscal year 2025. These conversations were impactful given the recent announcement of budget cuts for several federal science agencies for FY24.  The participants met with 85 congressional offices representing 30 states over two days April 8-9. Overall, the group advocated for $89.46 billion in science funding across 11 federal scientific agencies.  Every spring, the MIT Science Policy...

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