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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 shot in the arm
Biologics, a class of therapeutics derived from living organisms, offer enormous advantages to patients battling challenging diseases and disorders. Treatments based on biologics can boost the immune system to stem attacks from infections or target specific pathways to block the formation of tumors. “These drugs, which have been around for just the last 20 years, do magic,” says Amir Erfani, a postdoc in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering (ChemE). “They can save millions of people around the world.”...

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Clothing brand helps give survivors of sexual...
When Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, Milain Fayulu SM ’22 was filled with pride in his home country. He eagerly set an alarm from Miami to wake up in the early hours and watch Mukwege’s speech in Norway. In the speech, Mukwege discussed his experience caring for tens of thousands of women who survived sexual violence during the civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mukwege, who established the...

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“Spatial computing” enables flexible working memory
Routine tasks that require working memory, like baking, involve remembering both some general rules (e.g., read the oven temperature and time from the recipe and then set them on the oven) and some specific content for each instance (e.g., 350 degrees for 45 minutes for a loaf of rye, but 325 degrees for eight minutes for cookies). A new study provides a novel explanation for how the brain distinctly manages the general and specific components of such cognitive demands....

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Learning to design with atoms and molecules
MIT undergraduates are learning about nanoscale science and engineering from individual atoms up to full-scale functional systems, and they’re doing it hands-on at MIT.nano. In class 6.2540 (Nanotechnology: From Atoms to Systems) students spend over nine weeks inside MIT.nano’s labs, learning basic skills that allow them to apply their knowledge of the nanoscale to design and build spectrometers, make quantum dots, fabricate light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and tunneling chemical sensors, and test and package their sensors into active displays and...

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Boosting passenger experience and increasing connectivity at...
Recently, a cohort of 36 students from MIT and universities across Hong Kong came together for the MIT Entrepreneurship and Maker Skills Integrator (MEMSI), an intense two-week startup boot camp hosted at the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node. “We’re very excited to be in Hong Kong,” said Professor Charles Sodini, LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and faculty director of the Node. “The dream always was to bring MIT and Hong Kong students together.” Students collaborated on six teams to...

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Bacterial injection system delivers proteins in mice...
Researchers at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have harnessed a natural bacterial system to develop a new protein delivery approach that works in human cells and animals. The technology, described today in Nature, can be programmed to deliver a variety of proteins, including ones for gene editing, to different cell types. The system could potentially be a safe and efficient way to deliver gene therapies and cancer therapies....

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New algorithm keeps drones from colliding in...
When multiple drones are working together in the same airspace, perhaps spraying pesticide over a field of corn, there’s a risk they might crash into each other. To help avoid these costly crashes, MIT researchers presented a system called MADER in 2020. This multiagent trajectory-planner enables a group of drones to formulate optimal, collision-free trajectories. Each agent broadcasts its trajectory so fellow drones know where it is planning to go. Agents then consider each other’s trajectories when optimizing their...

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Fieldwork class examines signs of climate change...
When Joy Domingo-Kameenui spent two weeks in her native Hawaii as part of MIT class 1.091 (Traveling Research Environmental eXperiences), she was surprised to learn about the number of invasive and endangered species. “I knew about Hawaiian ecology from middle and high school but wasn’t fully aware to the extent of how invasive species and diseases have resulted in many of Hawaii’s endemic species becoming threatened,” says Domingo-Kameenui.   Domingo-Kameenui was part of a group of MIT students who...

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MIT sophomores connect with alumni mentors in...
Team Training Workshop (TTW) is the cornerstone event for students in MIT’s Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP), bringing students and alumni mentors together over three exciting sessions for an experiential learning experience that feels like summer camp. UPOP is a yearlong academic course for MIT sophomores that aids their professional development and helps them prepare for summer internships or other professional experiences — often their first — and for their future careers. UPOP was founded 21 years ago with...

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Strengthening trust in machine-learning models
Probabilistic machine learning methods are becoming increasingly powerful tools in data analysis, informing a range of critical decisions across disciplines and applications, from forecasting election results to predicting the impact of microloans on addressing poverty. This class of methods uses sophisticated concepts from probability theory to handle uncertainty in decision-making. But the math is only one piece of the puzzle in determining their accuracy and effectiveness. In a typical data analysis, researchers make many subjective choices, or potentially introduce...

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New additives could turn concrete into an...
Despite the many advantages of concrete as a modern construction material, including its high strength, low cost, and ease of manufacture, its production currently accounts for approximately 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Recent discoveries by a team at MIT have revealed that introducing new materials into existing concrete manufacturing processes could significantly reduce this carbon footprint, without altering concrete’s bulk mechanical properties. The findings are published today in the journal PNAS Nexus, in a paper by MIT...

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A portfolio that’s out of this world
At age 9, Ezinne Uzo-Okoro SM ’20, PhD ’22 was preoccupied with down-to-earth problems, such as devising an alternative to her father’s messy, paper Filofax organizer, and fixing the unreliable electric service plaguing her home of Owerri, Nigeria. Could she have imagined a path-breaking, 17-year career at NASA, followed by a position as the nation’s space policy expert? “Absolutely not,” says Uzo-Okoro. “I knew nothing about space — I wanted to be an inventor.” While she didn’t start as...

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Festival of Learning 2023 underscores importance of...
During its first in-person gathering since 2020, MIT’s Festival of Learning 2023 explored how the learning sciences can inform the Institute on how to best support students. Co-sponsored by MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor (OVC), this annual event celebrates teaching and learning innovations with MIT instructors, students, and staff. Bror Saxberg SM ’85, PhD ’89, founder of LearningForge LLC and former chief learning officer at Kaplan, Inc., was invited as keynote speaker, with opening...

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Full immersion in health care for MIT...
Parents receiving an autism diagnosis for their child can be overwhelmed with emotions and questions. What does the diagnosis mean? How should they support their child? Who should they tell? For the past six years, MIT undergraduate students have worked to help individuals and families navigate those challenges by collaborating with Boston Medical Center’s Autism Program. Through the initiative, which is organized and funded by MIT’s PKG Public Service Center, students spend four weeks in January working full-time for...

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A novel combination therapy for treating vancomycin-resistant...
Researchers have developed a novel combination therapy using the anticancer agent mitoxantrone (MTX), together with an antibiotic, vancomycin, for treating bacteria that are resistant to the vancomycin, which are also known as vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecalis or VRE. The therapy uniquely targets both VRE and the host, stimulating the host immune system to more effectively clear bacterial infections and accelerate infected wound healing. The work was led by scientists at the Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) interdisciplinary research group at Singapore-MIT Alliance...

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