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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.

 
Finding the questions that guide MIT fusion...
“One of the things I learned was, doing good science isn’t so much about finding the answers as figuring out what the important questions are.” As Martin Greenwald retires from the responsibilities of senior scientist and deputy director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), he reflects on his almost 50 years of science study, 43 of them as a researcher at MIT, pursuing the question of how to make the carbon-free energy of fusion a reality....

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New tool reveals how immune cells find...
The human body has millions of unique B and T cells that roam the body, looking for microbial invaders. These immune cells’ ability to recognize harmful microbes is critical to successfully fighting off infection. MIT biological engineers have now devised an experimental tool that allows them to precisely pick out interactions between a particular immune cell and its target antigen. The new technique, which uses engineered viruses to present many different antigens to huge populations of immune cells, could...

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Bridging communities to reimagine cultural preservation
Many young people in rural communities around the world feel the need move to big cities in order to find work. The migration has unfortunate ripple effects. In the cities, people with less formal education are often relegated to slums and can become the victims of exploitation. Meanwhile, the families, communities, and rich cultural traditions get left behind. For the last six years, Roots Studio has worked with rural communities to preserve their culture and make a living by...

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MIT welcomes two from the Heising-Simons Foundation...
MIT’s School of Science welcomes postdocs Malena Rice and Eva Scheller, recipients of the 2022 51 Pegasi b Fellowship. The announcement was made March 31 by the Heising-Simons Foundation. The 51 Pegasi b Fellowship, named after the first exoplanet discovered orbiting a sun-like star, was established in 2017 to provide postdocs with the opportunity to conduct theoretical, observational, and experimental research in planetary astronomy. Scheller will be hosted by the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), working...

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MIT to name Building 12, home of...
Building 12, the home of MIT.nano, will soon be named in honor of Lisa T. Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, chief executive officer and chair of the Board of Directors of AMD. Su is the first MIT alumna to make a gift for a building that will bear her own name.  Lisa Su led AMD to its strongest performance in the company’s more than 50-year history in 2021, bringing to market several leading-edge technologies. She previously served in...

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MIT Energy Conference focuses on climate’s toughest...
This year’s MIT Energy Conference, the largest student-led event of its kind, included keynote talks and panels that tackled some of the thorniest remaining challenges in the global effort to cut back on climate-altering emissions. These include the production of construction materials such as steel and cement, and the role of transportation including aviation and shipping. While the challenges are formidable, approaches incorporating methods such as fusion, heat pumps, energy efficiency, and the use of hydrogen hold promise, participants...

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Letter regarding graduate student unionization election
The following letter was sent to MIT graduate students, and subsequently shared with the wider MIT community, today by Chancellor Melissa Nobles and Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate and Graduate Education Ian A. Waitz. To MIT graduate students, The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has counted the ballots from the graduate student unionization election held on our campus earlier this week — an election in which 75 percent of the 3,823 eligible graduate students cast ballots.  Of the counted ballots,...

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An optimized solution for face recognition
The human brain seems to care a lot about faces. It’s dedicated a specific area to identifying them, and the neurons there are so good at their job that most of us can readily recognize thousands of individuals. With artificial intelligence, computers can now recognize faces with a similar efficiency — and neuroscientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research have found that a computational network trained to identify faces and other objects discovers a surprisingly brain-like strategy to...

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QS World University Rankings rates MIT No....
MIT has earned a No. 1 spot in 12 subject areas, according to the QS World University Rankings for 2022, announced today. The Institute received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Architecture/Built Environment; Chemistry; Computer Science and Information Systems; Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Materials Science; Mechanical, Aeronautical, and Manufacturing Engineering; Linguistics; Mathematics; Physics and Astronomy; and Statistics and Operational Research. MIT also placed second in two subject areas: Biological...

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Does this artificial intelligence think like a...
In machine learning, understanding why a model makes certain decisions is often just as important as whether those decisions are correct. For instance, a machine-learning model might correctly predict that a skin lesion is cancerous, but it could have done so using an unrelated blip on a clinical photo. While tools exist to help experts make sense of a model’s reasoning, often these methods only provide insights on one decision at a time, and each must be manually evaluated....

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Ocean vital signs
Without the ocean, the climate crisis would be even worse than it is. Each year, the ocean absorbs billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere, preventing warming that greenhouse gas would otherwise cause. Scientists estimate about 25 to 30 percent of all carbon released into the atmosphere by both human and natural sources is absorbed by the ocean. “But there’s a lot of uncertainty in that number,” says Ryan Woosley, a marine chemist and a principal research scientist...

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Bringing together the next generation of quantum...
California Polytechnic State University undergraduate students Alexander Knapen and Nayana Tiwari and graduate student Julian Rice had never programmed on quantum computers before. But after 50 hours at the 2022 MIT Interdisciplinary Quantum Hackathon, they had built an online quantum chat server that encrypts messages using quantum algorithms. Knapen, Tiwari, and Rice had worked tirelessly on the chat server over an adrenaline-fueled weekend at the third annual iQuHACK (pronounced “i-quack”, like the duck in the hackathon’s logo). At iQuHACK,...

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Robots dress humans without the full picture
Robots are already adept at certain things, such as lifting objects that are too heavy or cumbersome for people to manage. Another application they’re well suited for is the precision assembly of items like watches that have large numbers of tiny parts — some so small they can barely be seen with the naked eye. “Much harder are tasks that require situational awareness, involving almost instantaneous adaptations to changing circumstances in the environment,” explains Theodoros Stouraitis, a visiting scientist...

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Study reveals the dynamics of human milk...
For the first time, MIT researchers have performed a large-scale, high-resolution study of the cells in breast milk, allowing them to track how these cells change over time in nursing mothers. By analyzing human breast milk produced between three days and nearly two years after childbirth, the researchers were able to identify a variety of changes in gene expression in mammary gland cells. Some of these changes were linked to factors such as hormone levels, illness of the mother...

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What Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means for...
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has global implications. A panel of MIT foreign policy experts convened on Monday to examine those reverberations — on European domestic politics, the refugee crisis, great-power relations, and nuclear security. Currently Ukraine has experienced widespread devastation, and millions of Ukrainians have fled their homes as refugees. Many countries have allied to enact stiff sanctions on Russia, and global sentiment has been with Ukraine. But as Monday’s discussion made clear, the global effects of the war...

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