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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.

 
Enzyme “atlas” helps researchers decipher cellular pathways
One of the most important classes of human enzymes are protein kinases — signaling molecules that regulate nearly all cellular activities, including growth, cell division, and metabolism. Dysfunction in these cellular pathways can lead to a variety of diseases, particularly cancer. Identifying the protein kinases involved in cellular dysfunction and cancer development could yield many new drug targets, but for the vast majority of these kinases, scientists don’t have a clear picture of which cellular pathways they are involved...

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Looking to the past to prepare for...
Aviva Intveld, an MIT senior majoring in Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences, is accustomed to city life. But despite hailing from metropolitan Los Angeles, she has always maintained a love for the outdoors. “Growing up in L.A., you just have a wealth of resources when it comes to beautiful environments,” she says, “but you’re also constantly living connected to the environment.” She developed a profound respect for the natural world and its effects on people, from the earthquakes that...

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Program teaches US Air Force personnel the...
A new academic program developed at MIT aims to teach U.S. Air and Space Forces personnel to understand and utilize artificial intelligence technologies. In a recent peer-reviewed study, the program researchers found that this approach was effective and well-received by employees with diverse backgrounds and professional roles. The project, which was funded by the Department of the Air Force–MIT Artificial Intelligence Accelerator, seeks to contribute to AI educational research, specifically regarding ways to maximize learning outcomes at scale for...

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Research collaboration to examine parent-child learning interactions’...
The following is a joint announcement from the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT and the University of Chicago’s Behavioral Insights Parenting Lab. J-PAL North America and the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab (BIP Lab) at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy have announced a collaboration on an innovative research initiative called Learning Curiosity. The joint project will experimentally compare two distinct approaches to text-based parental engagement programs intended to boost young children’s...

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A new way to assess radiation damage...
A new method could greatly reduce the time and expense needed for certain important safety checks in nuclear power reactors. The approach could save money and increase total power output in the short run, and it might increase plants’ safe operating lifetimes in the long run. One of the most effective ways to control greenhouse gas emissions, many analysts argue, is to prolong the lifetimes of existing nuclear power plants. But extending these plants beyond their originally permitted operating...

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Lecture series aims to demystify, celebrate tenure
Shortly after being awarded tenure in July, Cem Tasan was asked to give a talk about what it took to earn the appointment.    Tasan, the Thomas B. King Associate Professor of Metallurgy in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), would speak directly to his peers, his students, and others in his department and could take any angle he wished. He could talk about the research he did. The relationships and collaborations he made. The students...

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Brandon Ogbunu is a radical collaborator
Learning has always come naturally to Brandon Ogbunu. When he was a child growing up in Manhattan, his mother, a teacher, instilled in him an appreciation for school, the sciences, and curiosity. At work, she taught mathematics, social studies, and special education. At home, she taught her son to embrace art, literature, and sports in addition to science, laying the groundwork for a well-rounded approach to learning that would inform the rest of his career. Ogbunu grew up during...

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Living the history of Cairo
A bit of turbulence in the job market can affect people in different ways. Consider the Egyptian scholar Taqiyy al-Din Ahmad ibn ‘Ali al-Maqrizi (1364-1442). In the early 1400s, after about a quarter-century of frustration in seeking short-lived administrative jobs and wealthy patrons in Cairo, al-Maqrizi became fed up for good. He retreated to his house, started writing, and more or less did not stop for 30 years. What resulted is the most expansive corpus of historical writing of...

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Unpacking the “black box” to build better...
When deep learning models are deployed in the real world, perhaps to detect financial fraud from credit card activity or identify cancer in medical images, they are often able to outperform humans. But what exactly are these deep learning models learning? Does a model trained to spot skin cancer in clinical images, for example, actually learn the colors and textures of cancerous tissue, or is it flagging some other features or patterns? These powerful machine-learning models are typically based...

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Portraiture at the intersection of art, science,...
“For me, this project is about making science visible in society,” says Herlinde Koelbl, a renowned German photo artist whose portrait series, “Fascination of Science,” is now on display at MIT.  Koelbl set herself the goal to photograph scientists and to show their motivation, influences, and ways of thinking — through the eyes of an artist. The portraits juxtapose the subjects’ faces with scientific concepts, advice, or reflections playfully inscribed on their palms. Individually, each picture or phrase speaks...

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New MIT internships expand research opportunities in...
With new support from the Office of the Associate Provost for International Activities, MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) and the MIT-Africa program are expanding internship opportunities for MIT students at universities and leading academic research centers in Africa. This past summer, MISTI supported 10 MIT student interns at African universities, significantly more than in any previous year. “These internships are an opportunity to better merge the research ecosystem of MIT with academia-based research systems in Africa,” says...

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Simulating discrimination in virtual reality
Have you ever been advised to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes?” Considering another person’s perspective can be a challenging endeavor — but recognizing our errors and biases is key to building understanding across communities. By challenging our preconceptions, we confront prejudice, such as racism and xenophobia, and potentially develop a more inclusive perspective about others. To assist with perspective-taking, MIT researchers have developed “On the Plane,” a virtual reality role-playing game (VR RPG) that simulates discrimination. In...

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Scientists discover a new way of sharing...
From the tropics to the poles, from the sea surface to hundreds of feet below, the world’s oceans are teeming with one of the tiniest of organisms: a type of bacteria called Prochlorococcus, which despite their minute size are collectively responsible for a sizable portion of the oceans’ oxygen production. But the remarkable ability of these diminutive organisms to diversify and adapt to such profoundly different environments has remained something of a mystery. Now, new research reveals that these...

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New quantum computing architecture could be used...
Quantum computers hold the promise of performing certain tasks that are intractable even on the world’s most powerful supercomputers. In the future, scientists anticipate using quantum computing to emulate materials systems, simulate quantum chemistry, and optimize hard tasks, with impacts potentially spanning finance to pharmaceuticals. However, realizing this promise requires resilient and extensible hardware. One challenge in building a large-scale quantum computer is that researchers must find an effective way to interconnect quantum information nodes — smaller-scale processing nodes...

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Ian Hutchinson: A lifetime probing plasma, on...
Ordinary folks gazing at the night sky can readily spot Earth’s close neighbors and the light of distant stars. But when Ian Hutchinson scans the cosmos, he takes in a great deal more. There is, for instance, the constant rush of plasma — highly charged ionized gases — from the sun. As this plasma flows by solid bodies such as the moon, it interacts with them electromagnetically, sometimes generating a phenomenon called an electron hole — a perturbation in the gaseous...

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