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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.

Piñones, Loíza in Loíza, Puerto Rico

Located in Loíza in the north of Puerto Rico, Piñones hosts dozens of food kiosks with traditional Puerto Rican food like mofongo, alcapurrias, and tostones, making it the go-to destination on the Island to enjoy the best of local food and culture. Locals visit to do “chinchorreo”, jumping from food kiosk to food kiosk eating different fritters while enjoying the music, dancing, or talking about politics. While Piñones is most popular for food, it is a neighborhood that gathers the……

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Podcast: Islands of America

Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, Anna Marlis Burgard takes us on a tour of some of the strange, incredible, and wondrous islands she’s encountered in America. Our podcast is an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, we’ll take you to an incredible site, and along the way you’ll meet some fascinating people and hear their stories…….

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Kleos unveils dedicated, taskable RF monitoring missions

DENVER – Kleos Space announced plans April 25 to offer customers dedicated, taskable radio frequency monitoring capabilities. It’s a new business model for Kleos, a Luxembourg based company that operates three clusters of four satellites to detect RF signals and pinpoint their location. To date, Luxembourg-based Kleos has provided RF monitoring data to government and commercial customers. “Our discussions with government departments, national security agencies and commercial entities have highlighted a growing need for a dedicated mission capability, including…

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A stark warning about threats to truth,...

Renowned newspaper editor Martin Baron issued a grim warning to an MIT audience on Thursday, stating that the avalanche of lies and falsehoods permeating the media people consume today constitutes a direct threat to U.S. democracy and civil society. “The path we are on today is an invitation to ruin,” said Baron, while delivering MIT’s annual spring Compton Lecture. Baron, who served as executive editor of The Washington Post from 2013 to 2021, before retiring, focused many of his……

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An expanded commitment to Indigenous scholarship and...

MIT’s faculty meeting on Wednesday had a special guest: Graduate student Alvin Harvey SM ’20 spoke on behalf of students, faculty, and staff who have been drawing attention to MIT’s historical relationship with Indigenous peoples and examining how the Institute can build durable support for its Indigenous community. One vehicle for that work has been course 21H.283 (The Indigenous History of MIT), launched in the spring of 2021. Last Wednesday, Harvey, a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics……

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An easier way to teach robots new...

With e-commerce orders pouring in, a warehouse robot picks mugs off a shelf and places them into boxes for shipping. Everything is humming along, until the warehouse processes a change and the robot must now grasp taller, narrower mugs that are stored upside down. Reprogramming that robot involves hand-labeling thousands of images that show it how to grasp these new mugs, then training the system all over again. But a new technique developed by MIT researchers would require only……

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Tackling chemical synthesis and advocacy

Azin Saebi was born and raised in Iran, emigrating to the U.S. with her family at 18 after graduating from high school. Now a fifth-year graduate student in chemistry, Saebi never intended to stay permanently; she initially expected to go back to Iran to attend university. With that in mind, when leaving for the U.S., she only packed a bag with enough belongings for a couple of months and had even booked a return flight. Her plans changed, however,……

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Titans have No. 26 pick overall to...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Ryan Tannehill has been the easy scapegoat for fans angry that the Tennessee Titans’ Super Bowl hopes ended in the divisional round. Coach Mike Vrabel made clear after the loss by the AFC’s No. 1 seed that the Titans must help Tannehill by being “excellent” around their quarterback. Tennessee general manager Jon Robinson has tried to give Tannehill more offensive playmakers, signing tight end Austin Hooper and trading for wide receiver Robert Woods in free…

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The 19th-Century Woman's Secret Guide to Birth...

In 1878, Sarah Chase was on the lecture circuit. A graduate of a homeopathic college and a single mother, Chase made her living in Manhattan giving talks at community spaces around the city and, afterwards, selling what contemporary police reports and newspapers called “vile articles,” including sponges, syringes, and instructions for how to, in the parlance of the era, “bring down the menses,” in other words, induce an abortion. Examples of the kind of ad hoc birth control devices……

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Five MIT PhD students awarded 2022 J-WAFS...

The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) recently announced the selection of its 2022-23 cohort of graduate fellows. Two students were named Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellows for Water Solutions and three students were named J-WAFS Graduate Student Fellows. All five fellows will receive full tuition and a stipend for one semester, and J-WAFS will support the students throughout the 2022-23 academic year by providing networking, mentorship, and opportunities to showcase their research. New this year, fellowship……

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What choices does the world need to...

When the 2015 Paris Agreement set a long-term goal of keeping global warming “well below 2 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels” to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, it did not specify how its nearly 200 signatory nations could collectively achieve that goal. Each nation was left to its own devices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in alignment with the 2 C target. Now a new modeling strategy developed at the MIT Joint Program on the Science……

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The Rocky Road to Saving Hyderabad's Stunning...

On a cloudy Sunday morning in Hyderabad, a group of hikers makes their way across a sprawling university campus, first on paved roads lined with colorful bougainvillea and then through prickly shrubs. Their destination: pathar dil, or heart of stone, a natural formation of four boulders that stands as tall as a two-story building. Upon reaching it, the hikers rush to take pictures and try to squeeze through the gaps in the boulders, “slicing through the heart,” one of……

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Bridgestone Arena Smilodon Bones in Nashville, Tennessee

During the construction of the First American National Bank building in downtown Nashville in 1971, a small cave containing a collection of bones was unearthed. These included the remains of a Woodland Period human burial, rodents, deer, amphibians, horses, and the partial skeleton of the sabertoothed “tiger,” from the genus Smilodon. Radiocarbon dating of this specimen places it at the end of the Pleistocene, 9410+/-155 B.P. and 10,035+/-650 B.P. This would make it one of the most recent occurrences of……

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Graves of David and Mabel Todd in...

In Wildwood Cemetery, a pair of graves mark the final resting places of Mabel and David Todd. David Peck Todd was an astronomy instructor and observatory director at Amherst College in Massachusetts in the late 1800s. He focused much of his work on solar phenomena, especially solar eclipses. He and his wife, Mabel Loomis Todd, made several trips around the world to observe eclipses, often spending years planning out trips and raising money for them. Unfortunately, every one of David’s……

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Jovanča Micić Monument in Jagodina, Serbia

Many of you have heard about Phileas Fogg and his adventures in Jules Verne’s 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days. A similar play was written in 1910 by Serbian playwright Branislav Nušić, called Пут око света (Travel Around the World). In the play, the main character Jovanča Micić goes around the globe from his hometown of Jagodina in central Serbia. In 2019, the citizens of Jagodina made a monument to their famous neighbor and world traveler. The monument was made……

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