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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.

 
3 Questions: Kyle Filipe on moving MIT...
With the onset of Covid-19 pandemic, MIT Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) rapidly launched new services and enhanced others to meet the expanding needs of a community moving fully into online teaching, learning, and working. Three months ago, Zoom was known in some parts of the Institute as a helpful video conferencing tool, but was completely unknown in others. Since remote classes started on March 30, Zoom usage is up nearly 10,000 percent across the Institute, with an average...

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Siranush Babakhanova and Michal Gala named 2020...
Two MIT seniors, Siranush Babakhanova and Michal Gala, have been awarded Knight-Hennessy Scholarships. The prestigious fellowship attracts thousands of applicants from around the world and provides full funding for graduate studies in any field at Stanford University. Knight-Hennessy scholars also receive leadership development training, mentorship, and experiential learning opportunities. The Knight-Hennessy Scholars program aims to address the world’s challenges through innovation and collaboration by developing a community of emerging leaders equipped to work across disciplines and cultures. Up to...

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SHERLOCK-based one-step test provides rapid and sensitive...
A team of researchers at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Ragon Institute, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has developed a new diagnostics platform called STOP (SHERLOCK Testing in One Pot). The test can be run in an hour as a single-step reaction with minimal handling, advancing the CRISPR-based SHERLOCK diagnostic technology closer to a point-of-care or at-home testing tool. The test has not been reviewed or...

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Robots help some firms, even while workers...
This is part 2 of a three-part series examining the effects of robots and automation on employment, based on new research from economist and Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu.  Overall, adding robots to manufacturing reduces jobs — by more than three per robot, in fact. But a new study co-authored by an MIT professor reveals an important pattern: Firms that move quickly to use robots tend to add workers to their payroll, while industry job losses are more concentrated in...

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3 Questions: How MIT experienced the 1918-19...
Just over a century ago, the world grappled with a major pandemic when the H1N1 influenza virus infected about 500 million people in 1918 and 1919. When the virus first appeared, MIT had just relocated from Boston to its current campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and World War I was approaching its conclusion. As the MIT community now grapples with Covid-19, the MIT Libraries’ Nora Murphy has been exploring archival materials related to the 1918 flu pandemic, which similarly disrupted...

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Letter to the community: Building a vision...
The following letter was sent to the MIT community today by President L. Rafael Reif. To the members of the MIT community, In advance of Tuesday’s online MIT Town Hall – tomorrow, May 5 at 4 pm EDT (2000 GMT) – I write for four important reasons: To give you a sense of the groundwork under way to map our options for summer and the start of the academic year To announce coming opportunities for you to hear more...

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A forum for female voices in international...
“Our field has traditionally been male-dominated, and many women in security studies today still find themselves in rooms of mostly men,” says Sara Plana, a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the MIT Department of Political Science. Women pursuing careers in security studies — especially women of color — confront greater challenges than men in publishing research and scoring coveted public policy or teaching positions, she notes. These longstanding institutional barriers to women have proven dauntingly resistant to change. But recently, Plana...

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Study: Life might survive, and thrive, in...
As new and more powerful telescopes blink on in the next few years, astronomers will be able to aim the megascopes at nearby exoplanets, peering into their atmospheres to decipher their composition and to seek signs of extraterrestrial life. But imagine if, in our search, we did encounter alien organisms but failed to recognize them as actual life. That’s a prospect that astronomers like Sara Seager hope to avoid. Seager, the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Science, Physics,...

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How many jobs do robots really replace?
This is part 1 of a three-part series examining the effects of robots and automation on employment, based on new research from economist and Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu.   In many parts of the U.S., robots have been replacing workers over the last few decades. But to what extent, really? Some technologists have forecast that automation will lead to a future without work, while other observers have been more skeptical about such scenarios. Now a study co-authored by an...

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Technique could enable cheaper fertilizer production
Most of the world’s fertilizer is produced in large manufacturing plants, which require huge amounts of energy to generate the high temperatures and pressures needed to combine nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia. MIT chemical engineers are working to develop a smaller-scale alternative, which they envision could be used to locally produce fertilizer for farmers in remote, rural areas, such as sub-Saharan Africa. Fertilizer is often hard to obtain in such areas because of the cost of transporting it from...

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Myth-busting on YouTube
In mid-March, Izabella Pena received a WhatsApp text from a friend in Indianapolis, Indiana. “He said, ‘Oh, I got your audio message from a priest in rural São Paulo,’” remembers Pena, a postdoc in Department of Biology Professor David Sabatini’s lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Pena had recorded the five-minute audio message about risk groups and the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 for her family’s text thread after she heard one-too-many comments about how only the elderly caught the...

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Three from MIT elected to the National...
On April 27, the National Academy of Sciences elected 120 new members and 26 international associates, including three professors from MIT — Abhijit Banerjee, Bonnie Berger, and Roger Summons — recognizing their “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.” Current membership totals 2,403 active members and 501 international associates, including 190 Nobel Prize recipients. The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution for scientific advancement established in 1863 by congressional charter and signed into law by President Abraham...

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MIT IDEAS celebrates social innovation at the...
Members of the MIT community from around the world gathered virtually on Sunday, April 26 to celebrate the 19th annual IDEAS Awards presented by the PKG Center for Public Service. IDEAS is MIT’s social innovation challenge and has been bringing MIT students together with mentors from industry, academia, and community organizations for nearly 20 years to tackle pressing social and environmental issues through innovation.  Due to the outbreak of Covid-19, the IDEAS Showcase (which typically takes place in-person at...

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Professor Wayne O’Neil, linguist and advocate for...
MIT professor of linguistics Wayne O’Neil died on March 22 at his home in Somerville, Massachusetts. The cause of death was cancer. He was 88 years old. O’Neil’s work focused on syntactic and phonological theory, on the role of linguistics in the school curriculum, and on second-language acquisition, both the theory and the relevance of the latter to bilingual education and to the revitalization of indigenous languages. An MIT faculty member for more than 50 years, O’Neil served as...

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Weekly calls keep students connected to the...
When the MIT campus is alive, it nearly sings with innovation and excitement. Students sustain one another with activities ranging from building in makerspaces to psetting in residence halls to pick-up soccer games on the fields. But how can they remain connected during a pandemic, where physical distancing is the new normal? What can replace the informal chats with faculty members after class? Throw in remote learning — and the Infinite Corridor seems infinitely far away. Enter the MIT...

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