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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.

 
Teen uses pharmacology learned through MIT OpenCourseWare...
Tomás Orellana, a 17-year-old high school student in Chile, had a vision: to create a kit of medicinal plants for Chilean school infirmaries. But first, he needed to understand the basic principles of pharmacology. That’s when Orellana turned to the internet and stumbled upon a gold mine of free educational resources and courses on the MIT OpenCourseWare website. Right away, Orellana completed class HST.151 (Principles of Pharmacology), learning about the mechanisms of drug action, dose-response relations, pharmacokinetics, drug delivery systems,...

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Applying risk and reliability analysis across industries
On Feb. 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it returned to Earth, killing all seven astronauts on board. The tragic incident compelled NASA to amp up their risk safety assessments and protocols. They knew whom to call: Curtis Smith PhD ’02, who is now the KEPCO Professor of the Practice of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. The nuclear community has always been a leader in probabilistic risk analysis and Smith’s work in risk-related research had made...

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Victor Ambros ’75, PhD ’79 and Gary...
MIT alumnus Victor Ambros ’75, PhD ’79 and Gary Ruvkun, who did his postdoctoral training at MIT, will share the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced this morning in Stockholm. Ambros, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, and Ruvkun, a professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, were honored for their discovery of microRNA, a class of tiny RNA molecules that play a critical role...

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Translating MIT research into real-world results
Inventive solutions to some of the world’s most critical problems are being discovered in labs, classrooms, and centers across MIT every day. Many of these solutions move from the lab to the commercial world with the help of over 85 Institute resources that comprise MIT’s robust innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) ecosystem. The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) draws on MIT’s wealth of I&E knowledge and experience to help researchers commercialize their breakthrough technologies through the J-WAFS...

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3 Questions: Bridging anthropology and engineering for...
In 2021, Michael Short, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering, approached professor of anthropology Manduhai Buyandelger with an unusual pitch: collaborating on a project to prototype a molten salt heat bank in Mongolia, Buyandelger’s country of origin and place of her scholarship. It was also an invitation to forge a novel partnership between two disciplines that rarely overlap. Developed in collaboration with the National University of Mongolia (NUM), the device was built to provide heat for people in...

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How AI is improving simulations with smarter...
Imagine you’re tasked with sending a team of football players onto a field to assess the condition of the grass (a likely task for them, of course). If you pick their positions randomly, they might cluster together in some areas while completely neglecting others. But if you give them a strategy, like spreading out uniformly across the field, you might get a far more accurate picture of the grass condition. Now, imagine needing to spread out not just in...

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An interstellar instrument takes a final bow
They planned to fly for four years and to get as far as Jupiter and Saturn. But nearly half a century and 15 billion miles later, NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft have far exceeded their original mission, winging past the outer planets and busting out of our heliosphere, beyond the influence of the sun. The probes are currently making their way through interstellar space, traveling farther than any human-made object. Along their improbable journey, the Voyagers made first-of-their-kind observations at...

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Q&A: A new initiative to help strengthen...
In the United States and around the world, democracy is under threat. Anti-democratic attitudes have become more prevalent, partisan polarization is growing, misinformation is omnipresent, and politicians and citizens sometimes question the integrity of elections.  With this backdrop, the MIT Department of Political Science is launching an effort to establish a Strengthening Democracy Initiative. In this Q&A, department head David Singer, the Raphael Dorman-Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science, discusses the goals and scope of the initiative. Q: What...

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AI simulation gives people a glimpse of...
Have you ever wanted to travel through time to see what your future self might be like? Now, thanks to the power of generative AI, you can. Researchers from MIT and elsewhere created a system that enables users to have an online, text-based conversation with an AI-generated simulation of their potential future self. Dubbed Future You, the system is aimed at helping young people improve their sense of future self-continuity, a psychological concept that describes how connected a person feels with...

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State of Supply Chain Sustainability report reveals...
The MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (MIT CTL) and the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) have released the 2024 State of Supply Chain Sustainability report, marking the fifth edition of this influential research. The report highlights how supply chain sustainability practices have evolved over the past five years, assessing their global implementation and implications for industries, professionals, and the environment. This year’s report is based on four years of comprehensive international surveys with responses from over...

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Aligning economic and regulatory frameworks for today’s...
Liam Hines ’22 didn’t move to Sarasota, Florida, until high school, but he’s a Floridian through and through. He jokes that he’s even got a floral shirt, what he calls a “Florida formal,” for every occasion. Which is why it broke his heart when toxic red algae used to devastate the Sunshine State’s coastline, including at his favorite beach, Caspersen. The outbreak made headline news during his high school years, with the blooms destroying marine wildlife and adversely impacting...

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AI pareidolia: Can machines spot faces in...
In 1994, Florida jewelry designer Diana Duyser discovered what she believed to be the Virgin Mary’s image in a grilled cheese sandwich, which she preserved and later auctioned for $28,000. But how much do we really understand about pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing faces and patterns in objects when they aren’t really there?  A new study from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) delves into this phenomenon, introducing an extensive, human-labeled dataset of 5,000 pareidolic images, far...

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Helping robots zero in on the objects...
Imagine having to straighten up a messy kitchen, starting with a counter littered with sauce packets. If your goal is to wipe the counter clean, you might sweep up the packets as a group. If, however, you wanted to first pick out the mustard packets before throwing the rest away, you would sort more discriminately, by sauce type. And if, among the mustards, you had a hankering for Grey Poupon, finding this specific brand would entail a more careful...

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Where flood policy helps most — and...
Flooding, including the devastation caused recently by Hurricane Helene, is responsible for $5 billion in annual damages in the U.S. That’s more than any other type of weather-related extreme event. To address the problem, the federal government instituted a program in 1990 that helps reduce flood insurance costs in communities enacting measures to better handle flooding. If, say, a town preserves open space as a buffer against coastal flooding, or develops better stormwater management, area policy owners get discounts...

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MIT launches new Music Technology and Computation...
A new, multidisciplinary MIT graduate program in music technology and computation will feature faculty, labs, and curricula from across the Institute. The program is a collaboration between the Music and Theater Arts Section in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS); Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) in the School of Engineering; and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. “The launch of a new graduate program in music technology strikes me as both a necessary and...

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