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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.

 
A one-up on motion capture
From “Star Wars” to “Happy Feet,” many beloved films contain scenes that were made possible by motion capture technology, which records movement of objects or people through video. Further, applications for this tracking, which involve complicated interactions between physics, geometry, and perception, extend beyond Hollywood to the military, sports training, medical fields, and computer vision and robotics, allowing engineers to understand and simulate action happening within real-world environments. As this can be a complex and costly process — often...

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Engineers use artificial intelligence to capture the...
Waves break once they swell to a critical height, before cresting and crashing into a spray of droplets and bubbles. These waves can be as large as a surfer’s point break and as small as a gentle ripple rolling to shore. For decades, the dynamics of how and when a wave breaks have been too complex to predict. Now, MIT engineers have found a new way to model how waves break. The team used machine learning along with data...

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Affordable prosthetics and orthotics to rival the...
In 2014, Arun Cherian returned to his home country of India to help his sister with her wedding. By that time Cherian had earned his master’s in mechanical engineering at Columbia University, spent four years as a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, and was pursuing his PhD at Purdue University, where he was studying the biomechanics of human locomotion. He looked over his childhood home with the fresh perspective of someone who has spent the better...

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Material designed to improve power plant efficiency...
The winner of this year’s Water Innovation Prize is a company commercializing a material that could dramatically improve the efficiency of power plants. The company, Mesophase, is developing a more efficient power plant steam condenser that leverages a surface coating developed in the lab of Evelyn Wang, MIT’s Ford Professor of Engineering and the head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Such condensers, which convert steam into water, sit at the heart of the energy extraction process in most...

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Seven from MIT elected to American Academy...
Seven MIT faculty members are among more than 250 leaders from academia, the arts, industry, public policy, and research elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy announced Thursday. One of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, the academy is also a leading center for independent policy research. Members contribute to academy publications, as well as studies of science and technology policy, energy and global security, social policy and American institutions, the humanities and culture, and...

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MIT announces plans for presidential search
Diane Greene, the chair of the MIT Corporation, announced today in a letter to the MIT community that MIT’s presidential search committee had been formed and is ready to start a thorough and broad-based search to find the successor to President L. Rafael Reif, who in February announced his plans to step down at the end of this year.  “Overseeing the selection of MIT’s next president is the Corporation’s most important responsibility. As we initiate the search process, we...

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How can we reduce the carbon footprint...
The voracious appetite for energy from the world’s computers and communications technology presents a clear threat for the globe’s warming climate. That was the blunt assessment from presenters in the intensive two-day Climate Implications of Computing and Communications workshop held on March 3 and 4, hosted by MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC), MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and the Schwarzman College of Computing. The virtual event featured rich discussions and highlighted opportunities for collaboration among an interdisciplinary group of...

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Aging Brain Initiative awards fund five new...
Neurodegenerative diseases are defined by an increasingly widespread and debilitating death of nervous system cells, but they also share other grim characteristics: Their cause is rarely discernible and they have all eluded cures. To spur fresh, promising approaches and to encourage new experts and expertise to join the field, MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative (ABI) this month awarded five seed grants after a competition among labs across the Institute. Founded in 2015 by nine MIT faculty members, the ABI promotes...

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Given what we know, how do we...
To truly engage the climate crisis, as so many at MIT are doing, can be daunting and draining. But it need not be lonely. Building collective insight and companionship for this undertaking is the aim of the Council on the Uncertain Human Future (CUHF), an international network launched at Clark University in 2014 and active at MIT since 2020. Gathering together in council circles of 8-12 people, MIT community members make space to examine — and even to transform...

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From seawater to drinking water, with the...
MIT researchers have developed a portable desalination unit, weighing less than 10 kilograms, that can remove particles and salts to generate drinking water. The suitcase-sized device, which requires less power to operate than a cell phone charger, can also be driven by a small, portable solar panel, which can be purchased online for around $50. It automatically generates drinking water that exceeds World Health Organization quality standards. The technology is packaged into a user-friendly device that runs with the...

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An early bird takes flight
“I’m in denial, you know?” Bob Bright, MIT Medical’s director of facilities, usually loves spring on campus, but this year, the bright yellows and greens of the daffodils and budding trees are muted; Maria Bachini, facilities coordinator at MIT Medical and Bright’s colleague of 20 years, is retiring on April 29. Although Bachini has worked with Bright for a long while, it only represents a fraction of her overall time at the Institute — which has spanned just shy...

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Machine learning, harnessed to extreme computing, aids...
MIT research scientists Pablo Rodriguez-Fernandez and Nathan Howard have just completed one of the most demanding calculations in fusion science — predicting the temperature and density profiles of a magnetically confined plasma via first-principles simulation of plasma turbulence. Solving this problem by brute force is beyond the capabilities of even the most advanced supercomputers. Instead, the researchers used an optimization methodology developed for machine learning to dramatically reduce the CPU time required while maintaining the accuracy of the solution....

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The MIT Press and Harvard Law School...
Together, the MIT Press and Harvard Law School Library announce the launch of the “Open Casebook” series. Leveraging free and open texts created and updated by distinguished legal scholars, the series offers high-quality yet affordable printed textbooks for use in law teaching across the country, tied to online access to the works and legal opinions under open licenses. “As the creator of some of the earliest open online books and communities, the MIT Press is committed to increasing the...

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Using excess heat to improve electrolyzers and...
Reducing the use of fossil fuels will have unintended consequences for the power-generation industry and beyond. For example, many industrial chemical processes use fossil-fuel byproducts as precursors to things like asphalt, glycerine, and other important chemicals. One solution to reduce the impact of the loss of fossil fuels on industrial chemical processes is to store and use the heat that nuclear fission produces. New MIT research has dramatically improved a way to put that heat toward generating chemicals through...

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Researchers develop a paper-thin loudspeaker
MIT engineers have developed a paper-thin loudspeaker that can turn any surface into an active audio source. This thin-film loudspeaker produces sound with minimal distortion while using a fraction of the energy required by a traditional loudspeaker. The hand-sized loudspeaker the team demonstrated, which weighs about as much as a dime, can generate high-quality sound no matter what surface the film is bonded to. To achieve these properties, the researchers pioneered a deceptively simple fabrication technique, which requires only...

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