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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.

 
Tackling air pollution in India and the...
“I grew up with asthma as a kid, so bad air quality holds a visceral significance for me,” says Sidhant (Sid) Pai ’14, who spent much of his childhood in Pune, India. Located about 90 miles southwest of Mumbai, the city’s population has mushroomed over the past few decades, creating significant waste management concerns and poor air quality. Witnessing these unintended consequences of development and urbanization has shaped Pai’s interests in environmental engineering — first as an undergraduate at...

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New system cleans messy data tables automatically
MIT researchers have created a new system that automatically cleans “dirty data” —  the typos, duplicates, missing values, misspellings, and inconsistencies dreaded by data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists. The system, called PClean, is the latest in a series of domain-specific probabilistic programming languages written by researchers at the Probabilistic Computing Project that aim to simplify and automate the development of AI applications (others include one for 3D perception via inverse graphics and another for modeling time series...

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Anesthesia doesn't simply turn off the brain...
In a uniquely deep and detailed look at how the commonly used anesthetic propofol causes unconsciousness, a collaboration of labs at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT shows that as the drug takes hold in the brain, a wide swath of regions become coordinated by very slow rhythms that maintain a commensurately languid pace of neural activity. Electrically stimulating a deeper region, the thalamus, restores synchrony of the brain’s normal higher frequency rhythms and activity levels,...

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“Just ask questions and go for it!”
At dinnertime in Zaina Moussa’s childhood home, the table would be filled with an array of Moroccan and Syrian dishes, representing her parents’ different backgrounds. A mix of French, Arabic, and English words would fill the air as Moussa’s siblings chattered, waiting for their father to join them. As her diabetic father pricked his finger to check his blood sugar, she and her siblings would shout out numbers to predict the results before the monitor.  From a young age,...

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Analytics platform for coastal desalination plants wins...
Coastal desalination plants are a source of drinking water for an increasing number of people around the world. But their proximity to the ocean can cause disruptions from events like riptides and oil spills. Such disruptions reduce the productivity, lifespan, and sustainability of desalination plants. The winner of this year’s MIT Water Innovation Prize, Bloom Alert, is seeking to improve desalination plant operations with a new kind of data monitoring platform. The platform tracks ocean and desalination plant activity...

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Ben Linville-Engler awarded 2021 Collier Medal
Ben Linville-Engler, MIT System Design and Management (SDM) industry and certificate director, is the 2021 recipient of the Collier Medal. The Collier Medal was established in 2014 to honor MIT Police Officer Sean Collier and his commitment to community engagement and model citizenship. It is among the highest honors that MIT awards to staff and community members. Linville-Engler exemplifies these values and has demonstrated his own dedication to MIT and broader communities throughout his career.   In spring 2020, as...

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Using mechanics for cleaner membranes
Filtration membranes are critical to a wide variety of industries around the world. Made of materials as varied as cellulose, graphene, and nylon, they serve as the barriers that turn seawater into drinking water, separate and process milk and dairy products, and pull contaminants from wastewater. They serve as an essential technology to these and other industries but are plagued with an Achilles heel: fouling. Membrane fouling occurs when particles get deposited on the filter over time, clogging the...

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Study reveals mixed reactions about Covid-19 health...
The Covid-19 pandemic, like many other health crises, has had unequal effects on the U.S. population, with communities of color often hit the hardest. A new study co-authored by an MIT professor identifies a related challenge: Different social groups have different reactions to the fact that Covid-19 has generated those health inequities. More specifically, the study, based on a multilayered survey of U.S. residents, finds a divergence among racial groups when people are informed about the varying effects of...

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Ekotrope makes building energy-efficient homes easier
These days homebuilders might have several reasons to make new homes energy-efficient. They may be required to hit efficiency goals by local building codes. They may want to take advantage of financial incentive programs offered by governments, lenders, and utilities. They may just want to appeal to the growing segment of home buyers who prioritize sustainability and want lower energy bills. But the process of building energy-efficient homes and then getting certifications requires cooperation across a complex ecosystem of...

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Michale Fee appointed head of the Department...
Michale Fee, the Glen V. and Phyllis F. Dorflinger Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, has been named as the new head of the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS), effective May 1. Fee, who also is an investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, succeeds James DiCarlo, the Peter de Florez Professor of Neuroscience, who announced in December that he was stepping down to become director of the MIT Quest for Intelligence. “I want to...

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Six from MIT named 2021 Knight-Hennessy Scholars
Six MIT affiliates have been selected for the newest cohort of the prestigious Knight-Hennessy Scholars program. Kofi Blake, Orisa Coombs, Jierui Fang ’20, Max Kessler ’20, Claire Lazar Reich ’17, and Kyle Swanson ’18, MEng ’19 will begin graduate studies at Stanford University this fall. Founded in 2018, the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program seeks to cultivate a diverse, multidisciplinary community of future leaders and prepare them to address global challenges. The highly competitive fellowship, which fully funds graduate studies in any...

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Letter from President Reif: India, Covid, and...
The following letter was sent to the MIT community today by President L. Rafael Reif. To the members of the MIT community, Hopeful signs of reopening here in Massachusetts stand in cruel contrast to the immense new pandemic suffering unfolding in India, and increasingly across South Asia. Because MIT is intensely global, our community has countless close ties all over the world. Thousands of members of our MIT community – students, staff, faculty, postdocs, alumni, parents and Corporation members...

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Saving the radome
Perched atop the MIT Cecil and Ida Green Building (Building 54), MIT’s tallest academic building, a large, golf ball-like structure protrudes from the roof, holding its own in the iconic MIT campus skyline. This radar dome — or “radome” for short — is a fiberglass shell that encases a large parabolic dish, shielding it from the elements while allowing radio waves to penetrate. First installed in 1966, it was used initially to pioneer weather radar research. As the years...

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SMART breakthrough uses artificial neural networks to...
Researchers at the Future Urban Mobility (FM) interdisciplinary research group atSingapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, have created a synthetic framework known as theory-based residual neural network (TB-ResNet), which combines discrete choice models (DCMs) and deep neural networks (DNNs), also known as deep learning, to improve individual decision-making analysis used in travel behavior research. In their paper, “Theory-based residual neural networks: A synergy of discrete choice models and deep neural networks,” recently published...

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Ceasar McDowell named associate director of MIT...
Ceasar McDowell, MIT professor of the practice of civic design and associate head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), has been named associate director for civic design at MIT’s new Center for Constructive Communication (CCC). McDowell will maintain his leadership roles at both DUSP and CCC moving forward. “Since 2019, Ceasar has been a trusted advisor to my Media Lab research team’s work in promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks, and has helped guide...

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