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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.

 
Method teaches generative AI models to locate...
Say a person takes their French Bulldog, Bowser, to the dog park. Identifying Bowser as he plays among the other canines is easy for the dog-owner to do while onsite. But if someone wants to use a generative AI model like GPT-5 to monitor their pet while they are at work, the model could fail at this basic task. Vision-language models like GPT-5 often excel at recognizing general objects, like a dog, but they perform poorly at locating personalized...

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Darcy McRose and Mehtaab Sawhney ’20, PhD...
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has announced that two MIT affiliates have been named 2025 Packard Fellows for Science and Engineering. Darcy McRose, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Assistant Professor in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been honored, along with Mehtaab Sawhney ’20, PhD ’24, a graduate of the Department of Mathematics who is now at Columbia University.  The honorees are among 20 junior faculty named among the nation’s most innovative...

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MIT-Toyota collaboration powers driver assistance in millions...
A decade-plus collaboration between MIT’s AgeLab and the Toyota Motor Corporation is recognized as a key contributor to advancements in automotive safety and human-machine interaction. Through the AgeLab at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL), researchers have collected and analyzed vast real-world driving datasets that have helped inform Toyota’s vehicle design and safety systems. Toyota recently marked the completion of its 100th project through the Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC), celebrating MIT’s role in shaping technologies that...

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Blending neuroscience, AI, and music to create...
Computational neuroscientist and singer/songwriter Kimaya (Kimy) Lecamwasam, who also plays electric bass and guitar, says music has been a core part of her life for as long as she can remember. She grew up in a musical family and played in bands all through high school. “For most of my life, writing and playing music was the clearest way I had to express myself,” says Lecamwasam. “I was a really shy and anxious kid, and I struggled with speaking...

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Earthquake damage at deeper depths occurs long...
Earthquakes often bring to mind images of destruction, of the Earth breaking open and altering landscapes. But after an earthquake, the area around it undergoes a period of post-seismic deformation, where areas that didn’t break experience new stress as a result of the sudden change in the surroundings. Once it has adjusted to this new stress, it reaches a state of recovery. Geologists have often thought that this recovery period was a smooth, continuous process. But MIT research published...

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Optimizing food subsidies: Applying digital platforms to...
Oct. 16 is World Food Day, a global campaign to celebrate the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization 80 years ago, and to work toward a healthy, sustainable, food-secure future. More than 670 million people in the world are facing hunger. Millions of others are facing rising obesity rates and struggle to get healthy food for proper nutrition.  World Food Day calls on not only world governments, but business, academia, the media, and even the youth to take...

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Helping scientists run complex data analyses without...
As costs for diagnostic and sequencing technologies have plummeted in recent years, researchers have collected an unprecedented amount of data around disease and biology. Unfortunately, scientists hoping to go from data to new cures often require help from someone with experience in software engineering. Now, Watershed Bio is helping scientists and bioinformaticians run experiments and get insights with a platform that lets users analyze complex datasets regardless of their computational skills. The cloud-based platform provides workflow templates and a...

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A new system can dial expression of...
For decades, synthetic biologists have been developing gene circuits that can be transferred into cells for applications such as reprogramming a stem cell into a neuron or generating a protein that could help treat a disease such as fragile X syndrome. These gene circuits are typically delivered into cells by carriers such as nonpathogenic viruses. However, it has been difficult to ensure that these cells end up producing the correct amount of the protein encoded by the synthetic gene....

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Gene-Wei Li named associate head of the...
Associate Professor Gene-Wei Li has accepted the position of associate head of the MIT Department of Biology, starting in the 2025-26 academic year.  Li, who has been a member of the department since 2015, brings a history of departmental leadership, service, and research and teaching excellence to his new role. He has received many awards, including a Sloan Research Fellowship (2016), an NSF Career Award (2019), Pew and Searle scholarships, and MIT’s Committed to Caring Award (2020). In 2024,...

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MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and MBZUAI...
The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) recently celebrated the launch of the MIT–MBZUAI Collaborative Research Program, a new effort to strengthen the building blocks of artificial intelligence and accelerate its use in pressing scientific and societal challenges. Under the five-year agreement, faculty, students, and research staff from both institutions will collaborate on fundamental research projects to advance the technological foundations of AI and its applications in three core areas:...

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Riccardo Comin, two MIT alumni named 2025...
MIT associate professor of physics Riccardo Comin has been selected as 2025 Experimental Physics Investigator by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Two MIT physics alumni — Gyu-Boong Jo PhD ’10 of Rice University, and Ben Jones PhD ’15 of the University of Texas at Arlington — were also among this year’s cohort of 22 honorees. The prestigious Experimental Physics Investigators (EPI) Initiative recognizes mid-career scientists advancing the frontiers of experimental physics. Each award provides $1.3 million over five years to accelerate breakthroughs and...

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How to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from...
Ammonia is one of the most widely produced chemicals in the world, used mostly as fertilizer, but also for the production of some plastics, textiles, and other applications. Its production, through processes that require high heat and pressure, accounts for up to 20 percent of all the greenhouse gases from the entire chemical industry, so efforts have been underway worldwide to find ways to reduce those emissions. Now, researchers at MIT have come up with a clever way of...

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Using generative AI to diversify virtual training...
Chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude have experienced a meteoric rise in usage over the past three years because they can help you with a wide range of tasks. Whether you’re writing Shakespearean sonnets, debugging code, or need an answer to an obscure trivia question, artificial intelligence systems seem to have you covered. The source of this versatility? Billions, or even trillions, of textual data points across the internet. Those data aren’t enough to teach a robot to be a...

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Laurent Demanet appointed co-director of MIT Center...
Laurent Demanet, MIT professor of applied mathematics, has been appointed co-director of the MIT Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CCSE), effective Sept. 1. Demanet, who holds a joint appointment in the departments of Mathematics and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences — where he previously served as director of the Earth Resources Laboratory — succeeds Youssef Marzouk, who is now serving as the associate dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Joining co-director Nicolas Hadjiconstantinou, the Quentin Berg...

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Fighting for the health of the planet...
For Priya Donti, childhood trips to India were more than an opportunity to visit extended family. The biennial journeys activated in her a motivation that continues to shape her research and her teaching. Contrasting her family home in Massachusetts, Donti — now the Silverman Family Career Development Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a shared position between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and EECS, and a principal investigator at the MIT Laboratory for...

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