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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.

 
Joel Moses, Institute Professor Emeritus and computer...
Institute Professor Emeritus Joel Moses PhD ’67, an innovative computer scientist and dedicated teacher who held multiple leadership positions at MIT, died on May 29 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. He was 80 years old. Moses, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and the former Engineering Systems Division, served as associate department head, department head, dean of engineering, and provost during his distinguished career. “Our community will forever be grateful...

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MIT engineers boost signals from fluorescent sensors
Fluorescent sensors, which can be used to label and image a wide variety of molecules, offer a unique glimpse inside living cells. However, they typically can only be used in cells grown in a lab dish or in tissues close to the surface of the body, because their signal is lost when they are implanted too deeply. MIT engineers have now come up with a way to overcome that limitation. Using a novel photonic technique they developed for exciting...

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“The world needs your smarts, your skills,”...
On a clear warm day, the MIT graduating class of 2022 gathered in Killian Court for the first in-person commencement exercises in three years, after two years of online ceremonies due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala MCP ’78, PhD ’81, director-general of the World Trade Organization, delivered the Commencement address, stressing the global need for science-informed policy to address problems of climate change, pandemics, international security, and wealth disparities. She told the graduates: “In these uncertain times, in...

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President L. Rafael Reif’s charge to the...
Below is the text of President L. Rafael Reif’s Commencement remarks, as prepared for delivery today. To the graduates of 2022:  Congratulations!  My job today is to deliver a “charge” to you… and I will get to that in a minute. But first, I want to recognize the people who helped you charge this far! To everyone who came here this morning, to celebrate our graduates – welcome to MIT!   To everyone joining us online, from around the world ­– we...

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New light-powered catalysts could aid in manufacturing
Chemical reactions that are driven by light offer a powerful tool for chemists who are designing new ways to manufacture pharmaceuticals and other useful compounds. Harnessing this light energy requires photoredox catalysts, which can absorb light and transfer the energy to a chemical reaction. MIT chemists have now designed a new type of photoredox catalyst that could make it easier to incorporate light-driven reactions into manufacturing processes. Unlike most existing photoredox catalysts, the new class of materials is insoluble,...

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Frank Wilczek receives 2022 Templeton Prize
Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist and author Frank Wilczek, the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT, has been awarded the 2022 Templeton Prize. This prize is awarded to individuals whose life’s work embodies a fusion of science and spirituality. “He is one of those rare and wonderful individuals who bring together a keen, creative intellect and an appreciation for transcendent beauty,” says Heather Templeton Dill, president of the John Templeton Foundation, in the foundation’s press release. “Like Isaac Newton...

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Magma beneath tectonic collision zones is wetter...
A new study by geologists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), MIT, and elsewhere has found that colliding continental plates may draw down more water than previously thought. The results could help to explain the explosiveness of some volcanic eruptions, as well as the distribution of ore deposits such as copper, silver, and gold. The findings are based on an analysis of ancient magmatic rocks recovered from the Himalayan mountains — a geologic formation that is the product...

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Virtual worlds apart
What is virtual reality? On a technical level, it is a headset-enabled system using images and sounds to make the user feel as if they are in another place altogether. But in terms of the content and essence of virtual reality — well, that may depend on where you are. In the U.S., for instance, virtual reality (VR) has its deep roots as a form of military training technology. Later it took on a “techno-utopian” air when it started...

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Is diversity the key to collaboration? New...
As artificial intelligence gets better at performing tasks once solely in the hands of humans, like driving cars, many see teaming intelligence as a next frontier. In this future, humans and AI are true partners in high-stakes jobs, such as performing complex surgery or defending from missiles. But before teaming intelligence can take off, researchers must overcome a problem that corrodes cooperation: humans often do not like or trust their AI partners.  Now, new research points to diversity as being a key parameter for making AI...

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How the universe got its magnetic field
When we look out into space, all of the astrophysical objects that we see are embedded in magnetic fields. This is true not only in the neighborhood of stars and planets, but also in the deep space between galaxies and galactic clusters. These fields are weak — typically much weaker than those of a refrigerator magnet — but they are dynamically significant in the sense that they have profound effects on the dynamics of the universe. Despite decades of...

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Early sound exposure in the womb shapes...
Inside the womb, fetuses can begin to hear some sounds around 20 weeks of gestation. However, the input they are exposed to is limited to low-frequency sounds because of the muffling effect of the amniotic fluid and surrounding tissues. A new MIT-led study suggests that this degraded sensory input is beneficial, and perhaps necessary, for auditory development. Using simple computer models of the human auditory processing, the researchers showed that initially limiting input to low-frequency sounds as the models...

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Toward customizable timber, grown in a lab
Each year, the world loses about 10 million hectares of forest — an area about the size of Iceland — because of deforestation. At that rate, some scientists predict the world’s forests could disappear in 100 to 200 years. In an effort to provide an environmentally friendly and low-waste alternative, researchers at MIT have pioneered a tunable technique to generate wood-like plant material in a lab, which could enable someone to “grow” a wooden product like a table without...

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Emery Brown wins a share of 2022...
The Gruber Foundation announced on May 17 that Emery N. Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT, has won the 2022 Gruber Neuroscience Prize along with neurophysicists Laurence Abbott of Columbia University, Terrence Sejnowski of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and Haim Sompolinsky of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The foundation says it honored the four recipients for their influential contributions to the fields of computational and theoretical neuroscience. As datasets...

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Bringing hope and transformation to the Democratic...
MIT graduate student Milain Fayulu is on a mission. Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Fayulu is telling, and selling, the story of his nation in the hope of aiding its people and transforming its economy. For decades, the DRC has been hobbled by corruption and bloody civil conflicts. “I grew up with a sense of the DRC not being where it was supposed to be,” he says. “I wanted to know what it would take to...

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A voice for change — in Spanish
Jessica Chomik-Morales had a bicultural childhood. She was born in Boca Raton, Florida, where her parents had come seeking a better education for their daughter than she would have access to in Paraguay. But when she wasn’t in school, Chomik-Morales was back in that small, South American country with her family. One of the consequences of growing up in two cultures was an early interest in human behavior. “I was always in observer mode,” Chomik-Morales says, recalling how she...

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