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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.

 
3 Questions: What can graduate students expect...
In October 2017, MIT made a commitment to add 950 on-campus beds for graduate students as part of the Volpe zoning agreement with the City of Cambridge that allows the Institute to develop a 10-acre parcel in Kendall Square. Since then, MIT opened the Graduate Tower at Site 4 residential community in Kendall Square with about 250 net-new beds for graduate students and families, and reallocated the 135 beds in 70 Amherst Street to graduate students. In December 2020,...

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Simons Center’s collaborative approach propels autism research,...
The secret to the success of MIT’s Simons Center for the Social Brain is in the name. With a founding philosophy of “collaboration and community” that has supported scores of scientists across more than a dozen Boston-area research institutions, the SCSB advances research by being inherently social. SCSB’s mission is “to understand the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition and behavior and to translate this knowledge into better diagnosis and treatment of autism spectrum disorders.” When Director Mriganka Sur founded...

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Nancy Hopkins awarded the National Academy of...
The National Academy of Sciences has awarded MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins, the Amgen Professor of Biology Emerita, with the 2024 Public Welfare Medal in recognition of “her courageous leadership over three decades to create and ensure equal opportunity for women in science.”  The award recognizes Hopkins’s role in catalyzing and leading MIT’s “A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science,” made public in 1999. The landmark report, the result of the efforts of numerous members of the...

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Creating new skills and new connections with...
Starting on New Year’s Day, when many people were still clinging to holiday revelry, scores of students and faculty members from about a dozen partner universities instead flipped open their laptops for MIT’s Quantitative Methods Workshop, a jam-packed, weeklong introduction to how computational and mathematical techniques can be applied to neuroscience and biology research. But don’t think of QMW as a “crash course.” Instead the program’s purpose is to help elevate each participant’s scientific outlook, both through the skills and...

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MIT, Applied Materials, and the Northeast Microelectronics...
The following is a joint announcement from MIT and Applied Materials, Inc. MIT and Applied Materials, Inc., announced an agreement today that, together with a grant to MIT from the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub, commits more than $40 million of estimated private and public investment to add advanced nano-fabrication equipment and capabilities to MIT.nano, the Institute’s center for nanoscale science and engineering. The collaboration will create a unique open-access site in the United States that supports research and...

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Study: Smart devices’ ambient light sensors pose...
In George Orwell’s novel “1984,” Big Brother watches citizens through two-way, TV-like telescreens to surveil citizens without any cameras. In a similar fashion, our current smart devices contain ambient light sensors, which open the door to a different threat: hackers. These passive, seemingly innocuous smartphone components receive light from the environment and adjust the screen’s brightness accordingly, like when your phone automatically dims in a bright room. Unlike cameras, though, apps are not required to ask for permission to...

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Susan Solomon wins VinFuture Award for Female...
Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies Susan Solomon has been awarded the 2023 VinFuture Award for Female Innovators. Solomon was picked out of almost 1,400 international nominations across four categories for “The discovery of the ozone depletion mechanism in Antarctica, contributing to the establishment of the Montreal Protocol.” The award, which comes with a $500,000 prize, highlights outstanding female researchers and innovators that can serve as role models for aspiring scientists. “I’m tremendously humbled by that, and...

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Performance art and science collide as students...
On a blustery December afternoon, with final exams and winter break on the horizon, the 500 undergraduate students enrolled in Professor Bradley Pentelute’s Course 5.111 (Principles of Chemical Science) class were treated to an afternoon at the theater — a performance of “Blue Man Group” at Boston’s Charles Playhouse — courtesy of Pentelute and the MIT Office of the First Year. Theatrical thrills aside, it was Blue Man Group’s practical application of chemical principles that inspired Pentelute to initiate...

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Researchers demonstrate rapid 3D printing with liquid...
MIT researchers have developed an additive manufacturing technique that can print rapidly with liquid metal, producing large-scale parts like table legs and chair frames in a matter of minutes. Their technique, called liquid metal printing (LMP), involves depositing molten aluminum along a predefined path into a bed of tiny glass beads. The aluminum quickly hardens into a 3D structure. Play video The researchers say LMP is at least 10 times faster than a comparable metal additive manufacturing process, and...

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MIT Faculty Founder Initiative announces finalists for...
The MIT Faculty Founder Initiative has announced 12 finalists for the 2023-24 MIT-Royalty Pharma Prize Competition. The competition, which is supported by Royalty Pharma, aims to support female faculty entrepreneurs in biotechnology and provide them with resources to help take their ideas to commercialization.  “We are building a playbook to get inventions out of the lab towards impacting patients by connecting female faculty to the innovation ecosystem and creating a community of peers,” says Sangeeta Bhatia, the John J....

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Q&A: What sets the recent Japan earthquake...
On Jan. 1, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the western side of Japan on the Noto Peninsula, killing over 200 people. Japan is prone to earthquakes, including a magnitude 9.1 earthquake in 2011 that triggered a tsunami and killed almost 20,000 people. William Frank, the Victor P. Starr Career Development Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, has been studying an earthquake swarm in the region where the most recent earthquake occurred. He explains...

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Generating the policy of tomorrow
As first-year students in the Social and Engineering Systems (SES) doctoral program within the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), Eric Liu and Ashely Peake share an interest in investigating housing inequality issues. They also share a desire to dive head-first into their research. “In the first year of your PhD, you’re taking classes and still getting adjusted, but we came in very eager to start doing research,” Liu says. Liu, Peake, and many others found an...

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Faculty, staff, students to evaluate ways to...
With a goal to decarbonize the MIT campus by 2050, the Institute must look at “new ideas, transformed into practical solutions, in record time,” as stated in “Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade.” This charge calls on the MIT community to explore game-changing and evolving technologies with the potential to move campuses like MIT away from carbon emissions-based energy systems. To help meet this tremendous challenge, the Decarbonization Working Group — a new subset of the...

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Q&A: A blueprint for sustainable innovation
Atacama Biomaterials is a startup combining architecture, machine learning, and chemical engineering to create eco-friendly materials with multiple applications. Passionate about sustainable innovation, its co-founder Paloma Gonzalez-Rojas SM ’15, PhD ’21 highlights here how MIT has supported the project through several of its entrepreneurship initiatives, and reflects on the role of design in building a holistic vision for an expanding business. Q: What role do you see your startup playing in the sustainable materials space? A: Atacama Biomaterials is a...

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New tool predicts flood risk from hurricanes...
Coastal cities and communities will face more frequent major hurricanes with climate change in the coming years. To help prepare coastal cities against future storms, MIT scientists have developed a method to predict how much flooding a coastal community is likely to experience as hurricanes evolve over the next decades. When hurricanes make landfall, strong winds whip up salty ocean waters that generate storm surge in coastal regions. As the storms move over land, torrential rainfall can induce further...

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