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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.

 
Using deep imaging for higher resolution
Automation has been around since ancient Greece. Its form changes, but the intent of having technology take over repetitive tasks has remained consistent, and a fundamental element for success has been the ability to image. The latest iteration is robots, and the problem with a majority of them in industrial automation is they work in fixture-based environments that are specifically designed for them. That’s fine if nothing changes, but things inevitably do. What robots need to be capable of,...

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Akila Saravanan named Brooke Owens Fellow
Akila Saravanan, an MIT junior double majoring in aerospace engineering and electrical engineering and computer science, is a recipient of the Brooke Owens Fellowship. “Brookies” are selected based on their commitment to their communities, stand-out creative abilities, record of leadership, incredible talent, and their desire to pursue a career in aerospace. Saravanan is among 51 women selected from a competitive pool of thousands of applicants this year. As part of her fellowship, Saravanan will be working at Venturi Astrolab...

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MIT community members elected to the National...
MIT engineers John Cohn and Franz-Josef Ulm and are among 111 new members and 22 international members elected to the National Academy of Engineering for 2022. Nineteen MIT alumni were also elected as new members. John Cohn ’81, an IBM Fellow in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, was honored for improving design productivity of high-performance analog and mixed-signal circuits and for evangelizing STEM education. Cohn, a computer scientist with more than 100 worldwide patents, uses his playful love for...

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Fostering media literacy in the age of...
While people turn to digital media for news at high rates, algorithms for manipulating media continue to grow more powerful. In a Pew Research Center survey (August/September 2020), 53 percent of adults in the United States say they get news from social media “often” or “sometimes.” People have long been aware of phenomena such as “doctored” photos and misinformation at large, but machine learning is enabling the proliferation of “deepfakes,” videos or images of fake events with increasing sophistication. Now,...

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Advancing public understanding of sea-level rise
Museum exhibits can be a unique way to communicate science concepts and information. Recently, MIT faculty have served as sounding boards for curators at the Museum of Science, Boston, a close neighbor of the MIT campus. In January, Professor Emerita Paola Malanotte-Rizzoli and Cecil and Ida Green Professor Raffaele Ferrari of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science (EAPS) visited the museum to view the newly opened pilot exhibit, “Resilient Venice: Adapting to Climate Change.” When Malanotte-Rizzoli was...

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Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to speak at MIT’s 2022...
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala MCP ’78, PhD ’81, director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and former finance minister of Nigeria, will deliver the address at the OneMIT Commencement Ceremony on Friday, May 27. An expert in global finance, economics, and international development, Okonjo-Iweala is the first woman and first African to lead the WTO. Known as a skilled negotiator and consensus builder, she has devoted her career to helping developing countries achieve robust economic growth and sustainable development. Okonjo-Iweala twice...

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A life-changing fertilizer for rural farmers in...
Most commercial fertilizer travels a long way before it reaches rural farmers in Kenya. Transportation costs force many farmers to rely on cheap, synthetic fertilizers, which can lead to the acidification and degradation of their soil over time. The situation amounts to a multigenerational crisis as elders have watched their crop yields dwindle over the course of decades. Now Safi Organics is using a technology honed at MIT’s D-Lab to make organic fertilizer that can help restore such farmlands....

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3 Questions: The future of international education
Evan Lieberman is the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa in the MIT Department of Political Science. He conducts research in the field of comparative politics, with a focus on development and ethnic conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. He directs the Global Diversity Lab (GDL) and was recently named faculty director of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), MIT’s global experiential learning program. Here, Lieberman describes international education and its import for solving global problems. Q:...

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Seven from MIT named 2022 Sloan Research...
Seven members of the MIT faculty are among 118 early-career researchers recently named recipients of the 2022 Sloan Research Fellowships by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Representing the departments of Chemistry, Economics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics, the honorees will each receive a two-year, $75,000 fellowship to advance their research. Including this year’s recipients, a total of 309 MIT faculty have received Sloan Research Fellowships since the first fellowships were awarded in 1955. “Today’s Sloan Research Fellows represent...

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Eddie Glaude Jr.: “We must run toward...
At this year’s annual MIT celebration of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr, keynote speaker Eddie S. Glaude Jr., the James S. Donnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University, invoked King’s memory in an impassioned appeal for confronting the realities of the United States’ history and the country’s racist beliefs and actions, in order to achieve a more just and equitable nation. Glaude, a prominent political commentator and author of books including “Democracy in Black: How...

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Nurturing human communities and natural ecosystems
When she was in 7th grade, Heidi Li and the five other members of the Oyster Gardening Club cultivated hundreds of oysters to help repopulate the Chesapeake Bay. On the day they released the oysters into the bay, the event attracted TV journalists and local officials, including the governor. The attention opened the young Li’s eyes to the ways that a seemingly small effort in her local community could have a real-world impact. “I got to see firsthand how...

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Mathematician George Lusztig receives Wolf Prize
George Lusztig, the Abdun-Nur Professor of Mathematics at MIT, has been awarded the prestigious 2022 Wolf Prize in Mathematics for his work on geometric representation theory and algebraic groups. The Israel-based Wolf Foundation cited the American-Romanian mathematician “for groundbreaking contributions to representation theory and related areas.” Lusztig is known for his work on representation theory, in particular for the objects closely related to algebraic groups, such as finite reductive groups, Hecke algebras, p-adic groups, quantum groups, and Weyl groups.  ...

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Solar-powered system offers a route to inexpensive...
An estimated two-thirds of humanity is affected by shortages of water, and many such areas in the developing world also face a lack of dependable electricity. Widespread research efforts have thus focused on ways to desalinate seawater or brackish water using just solar heat. Many such efforts have run into problems with fouling of equipment caused by salt buildup, however, which often adds complexity and expense. Now, a team of researchers at MIT and in China has come up...

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A new atlas of cells that carry...
While neurons and glial cells are by far the most numerous cells in the brain, many other types of cells play important roles. Among those are cerebrovascular cells, which form the blood vessels that deliver oxygen and other nutrients to the brain. Those cells, which comprise only 0.3 percent of the brain’s cells, also make up the blood-brain barrier, a critical interface that prevents pathogens and toxins from entering the brain, while allowing critical nutrients and signals through. Researchers...

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Student-led MIT course provides an inside look...
Jeana Choi and Lisa Yoo had already bonded over their appreciation for Korean music when they decided to organize a K-pop course at MIT during the Institute’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) this January. Both graduating fifth-year master’s students in electrical engineering and computer science, Choi and Yoo became friends in class 21M.294 (Popular Musics of the World), where they collaborated on a podcast-style interview with a producer of Korean R&B.  Choi, who had previously run an IAP course about...

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