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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.

 
Diving into the global problem of technology...
While green energy solutions often rely on new technology, MIT students who took class STS.032 (Energy, Environment, and Society) in fall 2020 discovered that even many promising innovations share a downside — electronics waste (e-waste). “We’ve been using energy technologies that work well for our needs now, but we don’t think about what happens 30 years in the future,” says Jemma Schroder, a first-year student in the class who learned that waste from solar panels, for example, is on...

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Why the Earth needs a course correction...
The massive impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on lives and economies underscores that our collective survival and well-being hinges on our willingness to confront environmental threats that have global consequences. Key to protecting lives and making communities more resilient to such threats will be an emphasis on proactive, science-based decision-making at all levels of society. And among the most serious risks that science can help illuminate and alleviate are those resulting from human-induced climate change. To minimize those risks,...

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Six MIT SHASS educators receive 2021 Levitan...
Six individuals have received the James A. and Ruth Levitan Teaching Award for 2021. The award, given annually by the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), honors superlative teachers across the school, who have been nominated by MIT students themselves. The 2021 winners are: Daniel Clark of the Department of Economics, Sara Ellison of the Department of Economics, Erik Lin-Greenberg of the Department of Political Science, Masami Ikeda-Lamm of MIT Global Languages, Maria Khotimsky of MIT...

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Creating “digital twins” at scale
Picture this: A delivery drone suffers some minor wing damage on its flight. Should it land immediately, carry on as usual, or reroute to a new destination? A digital twin, a computer model of the drone that has been flying the same route and now experiences the same damage in its virtual world, can help make the call. Digital twins are an important part of engineering, medicine, and urban planning, but in most of these cases each twin is...

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Stents inspired by paper-cutting art can deliver...
Inspired by kirigami, the Japanese art of folding and cutting paper to create three-dimensional structures, MIT engineers and their collaborators have designed a new type of stent that could be used to deliver drugs to the gastrointestinal tract, respiratory tract, or other tubular organs in the body. The stents are coated in a smooth layer of plastic etched with small “needles” that pop up when the tube is stretched, allowing the needles to penetrate tissue and deliver a payload...

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A cappella for a cause
In recognition of May as Asian Pacific American Heritage month — a period dedicated to celebrating and acknowledging the enduring contributions and influence of Asians and Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) to the history, culture, and successes of the United States — MIT Syncopasian recently created its first AAPI advocacy music video. With ongoing systemic issues facing the Asian community in the United States, as seen by the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes over the course of the...

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Speeding up clinical trials by making drug...
The Boston area has long been home to innovation that leads to impactful new drugs. But manufacturing those drugs for clinical trials often involves international partners and supply chains. The vulnerabilities of that system have become all too apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic. Now Snapdragon Chemistry, co-founded by MIT Professor and Associate Provost Tim Jamison, is helping pharmaceutical companies manufacture drugs locally to shorten the time it takes for new drugs to get to patients. Snapdragon essentially starts as...

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Charting a new course
When it comes to journeys to MIT, Manuel Morales, a doctoral candidate in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, has taken a different tack. As a high school student in Orlando, Florida, Morales admired the Navy, inspired by ideas of commitment and sacrifice for nation and family, as portrayed in old war movies he used to watch at the cinema with his mom, Maria. Morales enlisted in the Navy right after his high school graduation, leaving his...

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Could all your digital photos be stored...
On Earth right now, there are about 10 trillion gigabytes of digital data, and every day, humans produce emails, photos, tweets, and other digital files that add up to another 2.5 million gigabytes of data. Much of this data is stored in enormous facilities known as exabyte data centers (an exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes), which can be the size of several football fields and cost around $1 billion to build and maintain. Many scientists believe that an alternative...

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MIT study compares the four largest internet...
In recent months, people have reported seeing a parade of star-like points passing across the night sky. The formation is not extraterrestrial, or even astrophysical in origin, but is in fact a line of satellites, recently launched by SpaceX, that will eventually be joined by many more to form Starlink, a “megaconstellation” that will wrap around the Earth as a global network designed to beam high-speed internet to users anywhere in the world. Starlink is among a handful of...

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Training robots to manipulate soft and deformable...
Robots can solve a Rubik’s cube and navigate the rugged terrain of Mars, but they struggle with simple tasks like rolling out a piece of dough or handling a pair of chopsticks. Even with mountains of data, clear instructions, and extensive training, they have a difficult time with tasks easily picked up by a child. A new simulation environment, PlasticineLab, is designed to make robot learning more intuitive. By building knowledge of the physical world into the simulator, the researchers...

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STEM + humanities = a framework for...
When Natasha Joglekar ’21 faced some serious medical issues back in fall 2018, and was feeling ill and isolated, she found particular comfort in one class that term: WGS.229 (Race, Culture, and Gender in the U.S. and Beyond: A Psychological Perspective). “I think that class was sometimes the only time I talked to people all week,” she recalls. Following a medical leave, Joglekar was able to return to MIT full time in fall 2020, and soon took another class...

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CHIME telescope detects more than 500 mysterious...
To catch sight of a fast radio burst is to be extremely lucky in where and when you point your radio dish. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are oddly bright flashes of light, registering in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum, that blaze for a few milliseconds before vanishing without a trace. These brief and mysterious beacons have been spotted in various and distant parts of the universe, as well as in our own galaxy. Their origins are...

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MIT J-WAFS awards eight grants in seventh...
The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) at MIT has announced its seventh round of seed grant funding to the MIT community. J-WAFS is MIT’s Institute-wide initiative to promote, coordinate, and lead research related to water and food that will have a measurable and international impact as humankind adapts to a rapidly expanding population on a changing planet. The seed grant program is J-WAFS’ flagship funding initiative, aimed at catalyzing innovative research across the Institute that...

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Trying to put the brakes on car...
To limit pollution and traffic congestion in Beijing, officials in 2011 imposed a citywide restriction on the number of automobiles residents can purchase annually. That policy has helped limit car sales and emissions. But the system has a loophole: Beijing residents have been going elsewhere in China to purchase cars, then bringing them home. As a new study co-authored by MIT scholars finds, this policy “leakage” reduces the intended impact of the car-restriction system by about 35 percent. So,...

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