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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.

 
How to tackle the global deforestation crisis
Imagine if France, Germany, and Spain were completely blanketed in forests — and then all those trees were quickly chopped down. That’s nearly the amount of deforestation that occurred globally between 2001 and 2020, with profound consequences. Deforestation is a major contributor to climate change, producing between 6 and 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2009 study. Meanwhile, because trees also absorb carbon dioxide, removing it from the atmosphere, they help keep the Earth cooler....

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How to keep people out of the...
Encouraging immigrants to visit primary care doctors creates a striking decline in costly emergency room use, according to a new study co-authored by an MIT economist. The findings are from a New York City program that helped arrange medical appointments for undocumented immigrants with limited incomes, from May 2016 to June 2017. Those who received assistance in scheduling visits with primary care physicians experienced a 21 percent drop in emergency department use. For individuals with high-risk medical profiles who...

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An implantable device could enable injection-free control...
One promising approach to treating Type 1 diabetes is implanting pancreatic islet cells that can produce insulin when needed, which can free patients from giving themselves frequent insulin injections. However, one major obstacle to this approach is that once the cells are implanted, they eventually run out of oxygen and stop producing insulin. To overcome that hurdle, MIT engineers have designed a new implantable device that not only carries hundreds of thousands of insulin-producing islet cells, but also has...

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Mikhail Ivanov wins 2024 New Horizons in...
Assistant professor of physics Mikhail Ivanov will receive the 2024 New Horizons in Physics Prize, which he will share with Marko Simonović from the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) at the University of Florence, and Oliver Philcox from Columbia University and the Simons Foundation. The New Horizons Prize, which is given to promising early-career physicists and mathematicians making strides in their research fields, recognizes Ivanov, Simonovic, and Philcox “for contributions to our understanding of the large-scale structure of the universe...

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MIT’s dynaMIT club sparks interest in STEM...
For the past 10 years, MIT students who are members of dynaMIT have taught middle schoolers from under-resourced Boston-area schools vital STEM principles through a variety of games, experiments, and activities. Months of planning by the 24 club members culminate in a two-week learning adventure that involves teaching 40 sixth- and seventh-graders one week, then instructing 40 eighth- and ninth-graders the following week. In keeping with MIT’s “mens et manus” (“mind and hand”) motto, dynaMIT includes hands-on learning in...

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MIT.nano Family Day invites those at home...
Every day, researchers come to MIT.nano to investigate at the nanoscale, but what’s it like to work there? On Aug. 21, MIT.nano staff invited their family members to come see what it takes to support discovery, education, and innovation in this cutting-edge research facility. More than 50 people attended — spouses and partners, parents and children, nephews and nieces, in-laws, and others. The event was so much fun that staff and families alike were asking to do it again;...

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Multi-AI collaboration helps reasoning and factual accuracy...
An age-old adage, often introduced to us during our formative years, is designed to nudge us beyond our self-centered, nascent minds: “Two heads are better than one.” This proverb encourages collaborative thinking and highlights the potency of shared intellect. Fast forward to 2023, and we find that this wisdom holds true even in the realm of artificial intelligence: Multiple language models, working in harmony, are better than one.  Recently, a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...

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MIT named No. 2 university by U.S....
MIT has placed second in U.S. News and World Report’s annual rankings of the nation’s best colleges and universities, announced today. As in past years, MIT’s engineering program continues to lead the list of undergraduate engineering programs at a doctoral institution. The Institute also placed first in five out of 10 engineering disciplines. U.S. News also placed MIT first in its evaluation of undergraduate computer science programs. The Institute placed first in four out of 10 computer science disciplines....

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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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