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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: 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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A foolproof way to shrink deep learning...
As more artificial intelligence applications move to smartphones, deep learning models are getting smaller to allow apps to run faster and save battery power. Now, MIT researchers have a new and better way to compress models.  It’s so simple that they unveiled it in a tweet last month: Train the model, prune its weakest connections, retrain the model at its fast, early training rate, and repeat, until the model is as tiny as you want.  “That’s it,” says Alex Renda, a PhD...

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The MIT Press offers e-resources during the...
To address the increased need for digital content and distance learning during the Covid-19 pandemic, the MIT Press is rapidly expanding access to a variety of free content. From making select books freely available on their open-source platform to granting libraries complimentary access to its institutional e-book platform, the press will continue to bring content to readers in a variety of formats. “The full staff is now working remotely and will continue to do so for as long as...

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Katie Collins, Vaishnavi Phadnis, and Vaibhavi Shah...
MIT students Katie Collins, Vaishnavi Phadnis, and Vaibhavi Shah have  been selected to receive a Barry Goldwater Scholarship for the 2020-21 academic year. Over 5,000 college students from across the United States were nominated for the scholarships, from which only 396 recipients were selected based on academic merit.  The Goldwater scholarships have been conferred since 1989 by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation. These scholarships have supported undergraduates who go on to become leading scientists, engineers,...

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In virtual town hall, MIT leadership updates...
As the MIT community adjusts to this unique period of separation and disruption, the Institute’s top leaders held an online “town hall” on Tuesday to answer some of the most frequent questions being asked by students, faculty, and staff. Roughly 7,000 members of the MIT community tuned in live for an update on adjustments and activities underway now, and on planning for the coming summer and fall, given the uncertainties as to how the Covid-19 pandemic may unfold. “These...

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