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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.

 
Massachusetts Microelectronics Internship Program connects undergraduates with...
One of the most critical components of our technological future is easy to overlook. Microelectronics, the devices and circuits at the core of computer and communication chips, are aptly named: built on the micrometer (and nanometer!) scale, they cannot be seen with the naked eye, but they power almost everything around us from smart watches, cell phones, or computers to electric vehicles and the sophisticated tools used in DNA sequencing and drug discovery. Although we often take them for...

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Study finds the risks of sharing health...
In recent years, scientists have made great strides in their ability to develop artificial intelligence algorithms that can analyze patient data and come up with new ways to diagnose disease or predict which treatments work best for different patients. The success of those algorithms depends on access to patient health data, which has been stripped of personal information that could be used to identify individuals from the dataset. However, the possibility that individuals could be identified through other means...

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Two winners of 2022 Nobel Prize in...
Two scientists with MIT connections have been awarded a share of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In an announcement made yesterday in Stockholm, Sweden, Carolyn R. Bertozzi of Stanford University, Morten Meldal of the University of Copenhagen, and K. Barry Sharpless of the Scripps Research Institute were awarded the prize “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.” Both Bertozzi and Sharpless share roots at MIT and the greater Boston area. Sharpless, who became just the 5th...

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New process could enable more efficient plastics...
The accumulation of plastic waste in the oceans, soil, and even in our bodies is one of the major pollution issues of modern times, with over 5 billion tons disposed of so far. Despite major efforts to recycle plastic products, actually making use of that motley mix of materials has remained a challenging issue. A key problem is that plastics come in so many different varieties, and chemical processes for breaking them down into a form that can be...

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Astronomers find a “cataclysmic” pair of stars...
Nearly half the stars in our galaxy are solitary like the sun. The other half comprises stars that circle other stars, in pairs and multiples, with orbits so tight that some stellar systems could fit between Earth and the moon. Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have now discovered a stellar binary, or pair of stars, with an extremely short orbit, appearing to circle each other every 51 minutes. The system seems to be one of a rare class of...

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Engineers develop a new kind of shape-memory...
Shape-memory metals, which can revert from one shape to a different one simply by being warmed or otherwise triggered, have been useful in a variety of applications, as actuators that can control the movement of various devices. Now, the discovery of a new category of shape-memory materials made of ceramic rather than of metal could open up a new range of applications, especially for high-temperature settings, such as actuators inside a jet engine or a deep borehole. The new...

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A factory for FrEDs at MIT
MIT is famous as a factory of ideas. You could also call MIT a factory for learning. But for one group of students over the past year MIT has been, in fact, a factory. The team of graduate students designed and built — entirely within an MIT lab — an assembly factory for a low-cost, reconfigurable desktop fiber extrusion system. The factory was the students’ thesis project in the Master of Engineering in Advanced Manufacturing and Design. The team...

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A diploma, a discovery, and an historic...
History and the future joined forces on Friday at a campus event honoring Robert Robinson Taylor, MIT’s first Black graduate and the first accredited Black architect in the United States. The gathering also highlighted new collaborations between MIT and Tuskegee University. The event featured remarks from former White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, who is Taylor’s great-granddaughter — and whose cousins discovered Taylor’s 1892 diploma in their attic last year. Now restored by MIT preservation experts and on loan to...

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Four from MIT receive NIH New Innovator...
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded grants to four MIT faculty members as part of its High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. The program supports unconventional approaches to challenges in biomedical, behavioral, and social sciences. Each year, NIH Director’s Awards are granted to program applicants who propose high-risk, high-impact research in areas relevant to the NIH’s mission. In doing so, the NIH encourages innovative proposals that, due to their inherent risk, might struggle in the traditional peer-review process. This...

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With fractured genomes, Alzheimer’s neurons call for...
A new study by researchers in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT provides evidence from both mouse models and postmortem human tissue of a direct link between two problems that emerge in Alzheimer’s disease: a buildup of double-stranded breaks (DSBs) in the DNA of neurons and the inflammatory behavior of microglia, the brain’s immune cells. A key new finding is that neurons actively trigger an inflammatory response to their genomic damage. Neurons have not been known...

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Learning on the edge
Microcontrollers, miniature computers that can run simple commands, are the basis for billions of connected devices, from internet-of-things (IoT) devices to sensors in automobiles. But cheap, low-power microcontrollers have extremely limited memory and no operating system, making it challenging to train artificial intelligence models on “edge devices” that work independently from central computing resources. Training a machine-learning model on an intelligent edge device allows it to adapt to new data and make better predictions. For instance, training a model...

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Innovation in the classroom
The 2022–23 school year is underway, and MIT’s instructors and teaching assistants are back in the classroom and laboratories. Each time they supplement their in-class lecture with a video, organize a new learning exercise, or even post their syllabi on Canvas, Sheryl Barnes hopes MIT Open Learning’s Residential Education group made their jobs easier. “Faculty have a lot of demands on their time, but they are also deeply committed to their students,” says Barnes, director of digital learning for...

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MIT events illuminate critical need for menstruation...
More than 70 MIT students, faculty, staff, and alumni gathered in MIT’s Killian Court recently to “Stand Up and Be Counted (for Women’s Health),” with a strong representation of individuals concerned about gynecology disorders such as endometriosis and adenomyosis. An estimated 20-25 percent of MIT women — about 2,000-2,500 total — are affected by one or more menstrual disorders in ways that impair their abilities to work and participate in the academic community. Participants in the Sept. 14 rally held banners and signs to amplify...

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Small eddies play a big role in...
Subtropical gyres are enormous rotating ocean currents that generate sustained circulations in the Earth’s subtropical regions just to the north and south of the equator. These gyres are slow-moving whirlpools that circulate within massive basins around the world, gathering up nutrients, organisms, and sometimes trash, as the currents rotate from coast to coast. For years, oceanographers have puzzled over conflicting observations within subtropical gyres. At the surface, these massive currents appear to host healthy populations of phytoplankton — microbes...

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Does mask-wearing affect behavior?
Since 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a global increase in the number of people wearing masks to limit the spread of illness. Now, new research co-authored by MIT scholars suggests that, in China at least, wearing masks also influences how people act. The research, conducted across 10 studies focused on deviant behavior — such as running red lights, violating parking rules, and cheating for money — shows that people wearing masks were less likely to behave deviantly...

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