Say WOW

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.

 
Construction contract awarded for new semiconductor facility...
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has awarded a contract to Gilbane-Exyte Joint Venture to build the Compound Semiconductor Laboratory – Microsystem Integration Facility (CSL-MIF) at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The $279 million building project, scheduled to begin this spring, is funded by the U.S. Air Force military construction (MILCON) program, under the direction of USACE, who will manage the building of the 160,000-square-foot, three-story facility. Lincoln Laboratory will install and calibrate the facility’s specialized microelectronics fabrication equipment. “The...

Read More

Professor Emery Brown has big plans for...
Emery N. Brown — the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and of Computational Neuroscience at MIT, an MIT professor of health sciences and technology, an investigator with The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, and the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) — clearly excels at many roles. Renowned internationally for his anesthesia and neuroscience research, he embodies a unique blend of anesthesiologist, statistician, neuroscientist, educator,...

Read More

Study suggests words are needed to think...
Among many of the Tsimane’ people, who live in a remote region of the Bolivian rainforest, numbers do not play an important role in their lives, and people living in this society vary widely in how high they can count. A new study from MIT and the University of California at Berkeley has found a relationship between the counting ability of Tsimane’ individuals and their success at matching tasks that involve numbers up to about 25. The researchers found...

Read More

 
An explorer in the sprawling universe of...
The direct conversion of methane gas to liquid methanol at the site where it is extracted from the Earth holds enormous potential for addressing a number of significant environmental problems. Developing a catalyst for that conversion has been a critical focus for Associate Professor Heather Kulik and the lab she directs at MIT. As important as that research is, however, it is just one example of the innumerable possibilities of Kulik’s work. Ultimately, her focus is far broader, the...

Read More

Investors awaken to the risks of climate...
Poppy Allonby, a senior financial executive and the former managing director of BlackRock, has been analyzing the link between climate change and investing for more than two decades. “For a lot of that, it was quite lonely,” Allonby said during her December address at the MIT Energy Initiative Fall Colloquium. “There weren’t that many other people looking at this field. And over the last three or four years, that’s completely changed.” Increasingly, Allonby said, investors are opening their eyes...

Read More

Is an armed conflict imminent?
In recent weeks it has seemed increasingly possible that Russia will invade Ukraine. But why is this threat unfolding now, and what is likely to occur? An online panel of experts held by MIT last Friday warned of significant reason for concern, while searching for factors that might prevent military action or limit its consequences. In general, the scholars on the panel viewed Russia as driving toward reestablishment of a sphere of control similar to that held by the...

Read More

 
New computational tool predicts cell fates and...
Imagine a ball thrown in the air: It curves up, then down, tracing an arc to a point on the ground some distance away. The path of the ball can be described with a simple mathematical equation, and if you know the equation, you can figure out where the ball is going to land. Biological systems tend to be harder to forecast, but MIT professor of biology Jonathan Weissman, postdoc Xiaojie Qiu, and collaborators at the University of Pittsburgh...

Read More

An honor that empowers change
“I grew up thinking government was useless,” says Michelle Tang. Today, the aerospace engineering major is engaged in community organizing and plans a career in public service and policy. Central to Tang’s change of heart, and direction, was an immersive summer 2021 internship as a legislative assistant for Massachusetts State Representative Erika Uyterhoeven, working on a project to make local government more transparent to constituents. Tang says she learned how elected officials can “pull levers of power to get...

Read More

MIT experts test technical research for a...
In collaboration with a team at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, MIT experts have begun designing and testing technical research through which further examination of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) can be performed in the U.S. The effort, known as Project Hamilton, is in an exploratory phase, and the research is not intended as a pilot or for public deployment. Instead, the researchers have explored two different approaches that could be used to process transactions, and thus...

Read More

 
Probing how proteins pair up inside cells
Despite its minute size, a single cell contains billions of molecules that bustle around and bind to one another, carrying out vital functions. The human genome encodes about 20,000 proteins, most of which interact with partner proteins to mediate upwards of 400,000 distinct interactions. These partners don’t just latch onto one another haphazardly; they only bind to very specific companions that they must recognize inside the crowded cell. If they create the wrong pairings — or even the right...

Read More

3 Questions: Women’s rights and rising threats...
To Ada Petriczko, being born a woman can be a matter of life or death. Hailing from Poland, she reports on sexual violence and gender injustices around the globe. As a human rights journalist, her mission is to amplify the voices of women who have been systematically silenced by their communities and governments. Their stories have to be heard, she argues, in order to reshape our societies. This includes reporting on her home country, where democratic stability and women’s...

Read More

Engineers develop surgical “duct tape” as an...
A staple on any engineer’s workbench, duct tape is a quick and dependable fix for cracks and tears in many structural materials. MIT engineers have now developed a kind of surgical duct tape — a strong, flexible, and biocompatible sticky patch that can be easily and quickly applied to biological tissues and organs to help seal tears and wounds. Like duct tape, the new patch is sticky on one side and smooth on the other. In its current formulation,...

Read More

 
Reducing methane emissions at landfills
The second-largest driver of global warming is methane, a greenhouse gas 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Landfills are a major source of methane, which is created when organic material decomposes underground. Now a startup that began at MIT is aiming to significantly reduce methane emissions from landfills with a system that requires no extra land, roads, or electric lines to work. The company, Loci Controls, has developed a solar-powered system that optimizes the collection of methane from...

Read More

The downside of machine learning in health...
While working toward her dissertation in computer science at MIT, Marzyeh Ghassemi wrote several papers on how machine-learning techniques from artificial intelligence could be applied to clinical data in order to predict patient outcomes. “It wasn’t until the end of my PhD work that one of my committee members asked: ‘Did you ever check to see how well your model worked across different groups of people?’” That question was eye-opening for Ghassemi, who had previously assessed the performance of...

Read More

2021-22 Takeda Fellows: Leaning on AI to...
In fall 2020, MIT’s School of Engineering and Takeda Pharmaceuticals Company Limited launched the MIT-Takeda Program, a collaboration to support members of the MIT community working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human health. Housed at the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, the collaboration aims to use artificial intelligence to both benefit human health and aid in drug development. Combining technology with cutting-edge health research, the program’s participants hope to improve health outcomes across...

Read More