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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.

 
“A whole world of potential learners and...
When Aya Khalifa came to MIT from Egypt for her master’s degree in chemical engineering, she adapted well to a new educational system thanks to class 10.MBC (Math Boot Camp for Engineers). This online resource was developed by the MIT Digital Learning Lab (DLL) and the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering for first-year graduate students who might need a refresher on the math skills needed for their core classes.  “It exposed me to different ways of solving problems,” Khalifa...

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Improving accessibility of online graphics for blind...
The beauty of a nice infographic published alongside a news or magazine story is that it makes numeric data more accessible to the average reader. But for blind and visually impaired users, such graphics often have the opposite effect. For visually impaired users — who frequently rely on screen-reading software that speaks words or numbers aloud as the user moves a cursor across the screen — a graphic may be nothing more than a few words of alt text,...

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Finding solidarity in the teachers’ lounge
In the United States, social institutions from church organizations to sports leagues occupy key roles in shaping political life, with unions perhaps the most familiar player, affecting change in realms from protest movements to elections.    But while these civil society institutions draw little notice in a democracy, they turn heads in settings where political life is more constrained.      Elizabeth “Biff” Parker-Magyar, a sixth-year doctoral student in political science at MIT, is investigating this phenomenon.   “It’s...

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Is AI in the eye of the...
Someone’s prior beliefs about an artificial intelligence agent, like a chatbot, have a significant effect on their interactions with that agent and their perception of its trustworthiness, empathy, and effectiveness, according to a new study. Researchers from MIT and Arizona State University found that priming users — by telling them that a conversational AI agent for mental health support was either empathetic, neutral, or manipulative — influenced their perception of the chatbot and shaped how they communicated with it,...

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A more effective experimental design for engineering...
A strategy for cellular reprogramming involves using targeted genetic interventions to engineer a cell into a new state. The technique holds great promise in immunotherapy, for instance, where researchers could reprogram a patient’s T-cells so they are more potent cancer killers. Someday, the approach could also help identify life-saving cancer treatments or regenerative therapies that repair disease-ravaged organs. But the human body has about 20,000 genes, and a genetic perturbation could be on a combination of genes or on...

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One scientist’s journey from the Middle East...
“I recently exhaled a breath I’ve been holding in for nearly half my life. After applying over a decade ago, I’m finally an American. This means so many things to me. Foremost, it means I can go back to the the Middle East, and see my mama and the family, for the first time in 14 years.” The words appear on a social media post next to a photo of Ubadah Sabbagh, a postdoc at MIT’s McGovern Institute, who...

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J-PAL North America and Results for America...
J-PAL North America and Results for America have announced 18 new partnerships with state and local governments across the country through their Leveraging Evidence and Evaluation for Equitable Recovery (LEVER) programming, which launched in April of this year.  As state and local leaders leverage federal relief funding to invest in their communities, J-PAL North America and Results for America are providing in-depth support to agencies in using data, evaluation, and evidence to advance effective and equitable government programming for...

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Who will benefit from AI?
What if we’ve been thinking about artificial intelligence the wrong way? After all, AI is often discussed as something that could replicate human intelligence and replace human work. But there is an alternate future: one in which AI provides “machine usefulness” for human workers, augmenting but not usurping jobs, while helping to create productivity gains and spread prosperity. That would be a fairly rosy scenario. However, as MIT economist Daron Acemoglu emphasized in a public campus lecture on Tuesday...

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Giving students the computational chops to tackle...
Graduate student Nikasha Patel ’22 is using artificial intelligence to build a computational model of how infants learn to walk, which could help robots acquire motor skills in a similar fashion. Her research, which sits at the intersection of reinforcement learning and motor learning, uses tools and techniques from computer science to study the brain and human cognition. It’s an area of research she wasn’t aware of before she arrived at MIT in the fall of 2018, and one...

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Decoding the complexity of Alzheimer’s disease
Alzheimer’s disease affects more than 6 million people in the United States, and there are very few FDA-approved treatments that can slow the progression of the disease. In hopes of discovering new targets for potential Alzheimer’s treatments, MIT researchers have performed the broadest analysis yet of the genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomic changes that occur in every cell type in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Using more than 2 million cells from more than 400 postmortem brain samples, the researchers...

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Quantum repeaters use defects in diamond to...
The popular children’s game of telephone is based on a simple premise: The starting player whispers a message into the ear of the next player. That second player then passes along the message to the third person and so on until the message reaches the final recipient, who relays it to the group aloud. Often, what the first person said and the last person heard are laughably different; the information gets garbled along the chain. Such transmission errors from...

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Re-imagining the opera of the future
In the mid-1980s, composer Tod Machover came across a copy of Philip K. Dick’s science fiction novel “VALIS” in a Parisian bookstore. Based on a mystical vision Dick called his “pink light experience,” “VALIS” was an acronym for “vast active living intelligence system.” The metaphysical novel would become the basis for Machover’s opera of the same name, which first premiered at the Pompidou Center in 1987, and was recently re-staged at MIT for a new generation. At the time,...

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MIT welcomes nine MLK Visiting Professors and...
Established in 1990, the MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars Program at MIT welcomes outstanding scholars to the Institute for visiting appointments. MIT aspires to attract candidates who are, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “trailblazers in human, academic, scientific and religious freedom.” The program honors King’s life and legacy by expanding and extending the reach of our community.  The MLK Scholars Program has welcomed more than 140 professors, practitioners, and professionals at the forefront of their respective...

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Improving US air quality, equitably
Decarbonization of national economies will be key to achieving global net-zero emissions by 2050, a major stepping stone to the Paris Agreement’s long-term goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (and ideally 1.5 C), and thereby averting the worst consequences of climate change. Toward that end, the United States has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50-52 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, backed by its implementation of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. This...

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Five MIT faculty members named 2023 Simons...
Five MIT professors have been selected to receive the 2023 Simons Investigators awards from the Simons Foundation. Virginia Vassilevska Williams and Vinod Vaikuntanathan are both professors in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and principal investigators in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Aram Harrow and Leonid Mirny are professors in the Department of Physics, and Davesh Maulik is a professor in the Department of Mathematics. The Simons Investigator program supports “outstanding theoretical scientists...

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