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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.

 
Life Sciences Supermind Report outlines proposed solutions...
The Covid-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through the life science ecosystem, uniting the scientific community with a common purpose and re-imagining pathways to address global health challenges. To help accelerate that innovation, the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, the MIT Media Lab’s Community Biotechnology Initiative, and MilliporeSigma — the U.S. and Canadian life science business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany — together convened more than 200 thought leaders from around the world to collaboratively capture the disruptions caused by the...

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MIT Energy Initiative launches the Future Energy...
The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) has launched a new research consortium — the Future Energy Systems Center — to address the climate crisis and the role energy systems can play in solving it. This integrated effort engages researchers from across all of MIT to help the global community reach its goal of net-zero carbon emissions. The center examines the accelerating energy transition and collaborates with industrial leaders to reform the world’s energy systems. The center is part of “Fast...

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Scientists make first detection of exotic “X”...
In the first millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was a roiling, trillion-degree plasma of quarks and gluons — elementary particles that briefly glommed together in countless combinations before cooling and settling into more stable configurations to make the neutrons and protons of ordinary matter. In the chaos before cooling, a fraction of these quarks and gluons collided randomly to form short-lived “X” particles, so named for their mysterious, unknown structures. Today, X particles are...

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Encapsulation as a method for preventing degradation...
Lithium-air batteries were thought promising in the 1970s as a potential power source for electric vehicles, offering energy densities that rival gasoline and significantly surpass conventional lithium-ion batteries. However, scientists over the last few decades have been unable to overcome challenges to practical application of this technology, including reversible charging and low cyclability that results in battery degradation over few uses. A research team from MIT, Harvard University, and Cornell University has found a way to isolate and study...

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MIT Startup Exchange: Creating powerful synergies
Most successful entrepreneurs know it is not enough to assume that inventing a smart or disruptive technology alone is enough to make customers come running. Among other things, business development involves connecting with the right people in the corporate hierarchy. Yet aspiring entrepreneurs often underestimate the value, cost, and difficulty of forming strategic partnerships. In a 2020 survey conducted by McKinsey, 75 percent of startup respondents said they consider partnerships with corporates very important. More recently, a study by Innovation...

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Babies can tell who has close relationships...
Learning to navigate social relationships is a skill that is critical for surviving in human societies. For babies and young children, that means learning who they can count on to take care of them. MIT neuroscientists have now identified a specific signal that young children and even babies use to determine whether two people have a strong relationship and a mutual obligation to help each other: whether those two people kiss, share food, or have other interactions that involve...

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MIT School of Engineering unveils the Diversity,...
On Tuesday, Nov. 30, Gilda A. Barabino, president of Olin College of Engineering and professor of biomedical and chemical engineering, spoke to a hybrid audience of approximately 80 people, sharing thoughts and perspectives she’d gained during her career as a leader in the engineering field. Her presentation, “Engineering for Everyone: Centering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” was the inaugural address delivered as part of a new seminar series presented by the MIT School of Engineering. The series aims to provide...

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Merging design, tech, and cognitive science
Ibuki Iwasaki came to MIT without a clear idea of what she wanted to major in, but that changed during the spring of her first year, when she left her comfort zone and enrolled in 4.02A (Introduction to Design). For the final project, her group had to make a modular structure out of foam blocks, producing a design with both two-dimensional and three-dimensional components. The team ended up shaping 72 unique cubes, with each block’s pattern and placement carefully...

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Brave Behind Bars: Prison education program focuses...
A programming language textbook might not be the first thing you’d expect to see when walking into a correctional facility.  The creators of the Brave Behind Bars program are hoping to change that.  Founded in 2020, Brave Behind Bars is a pandemic-born introductory computer science and career-readiness program for incarcerated women, based out of The Educational Justice Institute at MIT (TEJI). It’s taught both online and in-person, and the pilot program brought together 30 women from four correctional facilities...

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Bringing climate reporting to local newsrooms
Last summer, Nora Hertel, a reporter for the St. Cloud Times in central Minnesota, visited a farm just northeast of the Twin Cities run by the Native American-led nonprofit Dream of Wild Health. The farm raises a mix of vegetables and flowering plants, and has a particular focus on cultivating rare heirloom varieties. It’s also dealing with severely depleted soil, inherited from previous owners who grew corn on the same land. Hertel had come to learn about the techniques...

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When should someone trust an AI assistant’s...
In a busy hospital, a radiologist is using an artificial intelligence system to help her diagnose medical conditions based on patients’ X-ray images. Using the AI system can help her make faster diagnoses, but how does she know when to trust the AI’s predictions? She doesn’t. Instead, she may rely on her expertise, a confidence level provided by the system itself, or an explanation of how the algorithm made its prediction — which may look convincing but still be...

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Reasserting U.S. leadership in microelectronics
The global semiconductor shortage has grabbed headlines and caused a cascade of production bottlenecks that have driven up prices on all sorts of consumer goods, from refrigerators to SUVs. The chip shortage has thrown into sharp relief the critical role semiconductors play in many aspects of everyday life. But years before the pandemic-induced shortage took hold, the United States was already facing a growing chip crisis. Its longstanding dominance in microelectronics innovation and manufacturing has been eroding over the...

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A new way to perform “general inverse...
Researchers have discovered a novel way to perform “general inverse design” with reasonably high accuracy. This breakthrough paves the way for further development of a burgeoning and fast-moving field that could eventually enable the use of machine learning to accurately identify materials based on a desired set of user-defined properties. This could be revolutionary for materials science and have vast industrial benefits and use cases. The work was led by researchers from the Low Energy Electronic Systems (LEES) interdisciplinary...

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“Hey, Alexa! Are you trustworthy?”
A family gathers around their kitchen island to unbox the digital assistant they just purchased. They will be more likely to trust this new voice-user interface, which might be a smart speaker like Amazon’s Alexa or a social robot like Jibo, if it exhibits some humanlike social behaviors, according to a new study by researchers in MIT’s Media Lab. The researchers found that family members tend to think a device is more competent and emotionally engaging if it can...

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Clean room as classroom
MIT undergraduates are using labs at MIT.nano to tinker at the nanoscale, exploring spectrometry, nanomaterial synthesis, photovoltaics, sensor fabrication, and other topics. They’re also getting an experience not common at the undergraduate level — gowning up in a bunny suit and performing hands-on research inside a clean room. During the fall 2021 semester, these students were part of 6.S059 (Nanotechnology — Design From Atoms to Everything) and 6.A06 (First.nano! – Fabricate Your Own Solar Cell in MIT.nano Cleanroom), two...

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