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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.

 
Future science at the molecular level
Innovating at the intersection of chemistry, biology, and engineering, Professor Brad Pentelute and the Pentelute Lab at MIT invent new chemistry, platforms, and techniques that might revolutionize therapeutics. Their formula in brief: nature-inspired research that begins at the molecular level, infused with state-of-the-art machine learning and automation, aimed at solving real-world problems. Take, for example, biotechnology’s longstanding protein delivery problem. Effective intracellular protein delivery has vast potential for improving human health and curing disease. The key challenge is delivering...

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Study decodes surprising approach mice take in...
Neuroscience discoveries ranging from the nature of memory to treatments for disease have depended on reading the minds of mice, so researchers need to truly understand what the rodents’ behavior is telling them during experiments. In a new study that examines learning from reward, MIT researchers deciphered some initially mystifying mouse behavior, yielding new ideas about how mice think and a mathematical tool to aid future research. The task the mice were supposed to master is simple: Turn a...

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Tracking US progress on the path to...
Investments in new technologies and infrastucture that help reduce greenhouse gas emissions — everything from electric vehicles to heat pumps — are growing rapidly in the United States. Now, a new database enables these investments to be comprehensively monitored in real-time, thereby helping to assess the efficacy of policies designed to spur clean investments and address climate change. The Clean Investment Monitor (CIM), developed by a team at MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR) led by...

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A pose-mapping technique could remotely evaluate patients...
It can be a hassle to get to the doctor’s office. And the task can be especially challenging for parents of children with motor disorders such as cerebral palsy, as a clinician must evaluate the child in person on a regular basis, often for an hour at a time. Making it to these frequent evaluations can be expensive, time-consuming, and emotionally taxing. MIT engineers hope to alleviate some of that stress with a new method that remotely evaluates patients’...

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Desirée Plata appointed co-director of the MIT...
Desirée Plata, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, has been named co-director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC), effective Sept. 1. Plata will serve on the MCSC’s leadership team alongside Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering, the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and MCSC chair; Elsa Olivetti, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering, a professor of materials science and engineering, and associate dean of engineering, and...

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MIT Sloan Dean Emeritus Bill Pounds, an...
William Pounds, a former dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management who was known for his ubiquitous presence around campus and mentorship of junior faculty members, and for advising the broader Institute through the turbulent years of the Vietnam War, died Aug. 23. He was 95. Pounds joined MIT Sloan in 1961 as an assistant professor and became dean in 1966. After stepping down from that role in 1980, Pounds was senior advisor to the Rockefeller family from...

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How an archeological approach can help leverage...
The classic computer science adage “garbage in, garbage out” lacks nuance when it comes to understanding biased medical data, argue computer science and bioethics professors from MIT, Johns Hopkins University, and the Alan Turing Institute in a new opinion piece published in a recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The rising popularity of artificial intelligence has brought increased scrutiny to the matter of biased AI models resulting in algorithmic discrimination, which the White House Office...

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Pixel-by-pixel analysis yields insights into lithium-ion batteries
By mining data from X-ray images, researchers at MIT, Stanford University, SLAC National Accelerator, and the Toyota Research Institute have made significant new discoveries about the reactivity of lithium iron phosphate, a material used in batteries for electric cars and in other rechargeable batteries. The new technique has revealed several phenomena that were previously impossible to see, including variations in the rate of lithium intercalation reactions in different regions of a lithium iron phosphate nanoparticle. The paper’s most significant...

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A. Michael West: Advancing human-robot interactions in...
An accomplished MIT student researcher in health care robotics, with many scholarship and fellowship awards to his name, A. Michael West is nonchalant about how he chose his path. “I kind of fell into it,” the mechanical engineering PhD candidate says, adding that growing up in suburban California, he was social, athletic — and good at math. “I had the classic choice: You can be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer.” Having witnessed his mother’s grueling residency when...

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Empowering the next generation of philosophers through...
As a rising senior studying philosophy and neuroscience at Boston University, Dee Everett saw attending the Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute in Boston (PIKSI-Boston) at MIT as an opportunity to connect with philosophy students who, like her, are members of underrepresented groups. “Philosophy, and academia as a whole, still remains predominantly white and upper class, which means finding literature and information from perspectives outside of that mold is fairly difficult,” she says. Everett spent a week at...

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AI model speeds up high-resolution computer vision
An autonomous vehicle must rapidly and accurately recognize objects that it encounters, from an idling delivery truck parked at the corner to a cyclist whizzing toward an approaching intersection. To do this, the vehicle might use a powerful computer vision model to categorize every pixel in a high-resolution image of this scene, so it doesn’t lose sight of objects that might be obscured in a lower-quality image. But this task, known as semantic segmentation, is complex and requires a...

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Expanding higher education for incarcerated students
Since its inception in 2018, The Educational Justice Institute (TEJI) has been a trailblazer in implementing innovative and transformative educational experiences for incarcerated students as well as students at universities, including MIT. Now, TEJI has played a formative role in efforts to expand access to higher education in New England prisons through a partnership with the New England Board of Higher Education. That partnership resulted in the formation of the New England Commission on the Future of Higher Education...

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Internships fabricate a microelectronics future
Nestled among the diverse labs and prototyping facilities at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the Microelectronics Laboratory (ML) whirs away. Technicians in the ML fabricate advanced integrated circuits, which end up in systems that peer into the cosmos, observe weather from space, and power quantum computers — to name just a few uses. The ML is one of several facilities within Lincoln Laboratory’s Microsystems Prototyping Foundry (MPF) operations. This summer, 12 students had a hand in MPF operations as part of...

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In new French class, MIT students serve...
MIT’s French+ Initiative was recently designated as a “Center of Excellence in French Studies” by the Embassy of France, during a 2022 campus visit by Philippe Etienne, then-ambassador of France to the United States. The French+ Initiative gathers scholars working across the humanities and social sciences at MIT whose research and teaching center on the French and francophone cultures and societies. It also serves as a hub appreciated by students, who can find numerous French-related activities under the same...

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System combines light and electrons to unlock...
Computing is at an inflection point. Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on an electronic chip will double each year, is slowing down due to the physical limits of fitting more transistors on affordable microchips. These increases in computer power are slowing down as the demand grows for high-performance computers that can support increasingly complex artificial intelligence models. This inconvenience has led engineers to explore new methods for expanding the computational capabilities of their machines, but...

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