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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.

 
IdeaStream 2020 goes virtual
MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation hosted IdeaStream, an annual showcase of technologies being developed across MIT, online for the first time in the event’s 18-year history. Last month, more than 500 people worldwide tuned in each day to view the breakthrough research and to chat with the researchers. Speakers from 19 MIT teams that received Deshpande grants presented their work, from learned control of manufacturing processes by Professor Brian Anthony, to what Hyunwoo Yuk of the Xuanhe Zhao...

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Darien Williams: Chronicling Black resilience to disaster
“It’s such a weird sort of whiplash,” Darien Alexander Williams says, about how he has felt these past weeks. “It’s been very strange to go from this quarantine life, to crowds of thousands of people, to inhaling tear gas, to writing emails and answering Doodle Polls and finishing up a paper. And then going back out the next night.” The third-year PhD student in the MIT Department of Urban Studies had just been formulating a dissertation topic chronicling the...

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Podcast transcript: Darien Alexander Williams
The following podcast and transcript features Darien Alexander Williams, a PhD student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. Darien Williams: I think, similar to previous moments, all of the ingredients for a transformational change are here. They’ve always been here, but it’s increasingly clear to people at this moment, and so whether this moment is different than sort of really high-tension racial violence, trauma, political kinds of moments in the past, I think remains to...

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Design in a major key
Annie Zhang ’20 was nearing the end of an eight-month co-op at Apple in 2018 when she checked her email inbox. An MIT faculty member had just written to say the Department of Architecture would offer students a chance to major in design in the fall. “As soon as I saw it, I said I’m doing that,” says Zhang, at the time a second-semester junior majoring in mechanical engineering with a minor in design. Back on campus, Zhang declared...

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Researchers find solar photovoltaics benefits outweigh costs
Over the past decade, the cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays has fallen rapidly. But at the same time, the value of PV power has declined in areas that have installed significant PV generating capacity. Operators of utility-scale PV systems have seen electricity prices drop as more PV generators come online. Over the same time period, many coal-fired power plants were required to install emissions-control systems, resulting in declines in air pollution nationally and regionally. The result has been improved...

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Like a treasure map, brain region emphasizes...
We are free to wander, but usually when we go somewhere it’s for a reason. In a new study, researchers at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT show that as we pursue life’s prizes, a region of the brain tracks our location with an especially strong predilection for the location of the reward. This pragmatic bias of the lateral septum (LS) suggests it’s a linchpin in formulating goal-directed behavior. “It appears that the lateral septum is,...

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Super-strong surgical tape detaches on demand
Last year, MIT engineers developed a double-sided adhesive that could quickly and firmly stick to wet surfaces such as biological tissues. They showed that the tape could be used to seal up rips and tears in lungs and intestines within seconds, or to affix implants and other medical devices to the surfaces of organs such as the heart. Now they have further developed their adhesive so that it can be detached from the underlying tissue without causing any damage. By applying...

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Experimental peptide targets Covid-19
The research described in this article has been published on a preprint server but has not yet been peer-reviewed by scientific or medical experts. Using computational models of protein interactions, researchers at the MIT Media Lab and Center for Bits and Atoms have designed a peptide that can bind to coronavirus proteins and shuttle them into a cellular pathway that breaks them down. This type of peptide could hold potential as a treatment that would prevent the SARS-CoV-2 virus...

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Cynthia Breazeal named Media Lab associate director
Cynthia Breazeal has been promoted to full professor and named associate director of the Media Lab, joining the two other associate directors: Hiroshi Ishii and Andrew Lippman. Both appointments are effective July 1. In her new associate director role, Breazeal will work with lab faculty and researchers to develop new strategic research initiatives. She will also play a key role in exploring new funding mechanisms to support broad Media Lab needs, including multi-faculty research efforts, collaborations with other labs...

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Dietmar Seyferth, professor emeritus of chemistry, dies...
Dietmar Seyferth, professor emeritus in the Department of Chemistry and pioneer in the field of organometallic chemistry, died of complications from Covid-19 on Saturday, June 6. He was 91. “Dietmar’s contributions to teaching, mentoring, and the field of organometallic chemistry comprise an enduring legacy to the world,” said Professor Troy Van Voorhis, head of the Department of Chemistry, upon learning of Seyferth’s passing. “He continues to be held in the highest regard and we will remember him fondly.” Born on...

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Engineers design a device that operates like...
Teams around the world are building ever more sophisticated artificial intelligence systems of a type called neural networks, designed in some ways to mimic the wiring of the brain, for carrying out tasks such as computer vision and natural language processing. Using state-of-the-art semiconductor circuits to simulate neural networks requires large amounts of memory and high power consumption. Now, an MIT team has made strides toward an alternative system, which uses physical, analog devices that can much more efficiently...

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Bringing the predictive power of artificial intelligence...
An important aspect of treating patients with conditions like diabetes and heart disease is helping them stay healthy outside of the hospital — before they to return to the doctor’s office with further complications. But reaching the most vulnerable patients at the right time often has more to do with probabilities than clinical assessments. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to help clinicians tackle these types of problems, by analyzing large datasets to identify the patients that would benefit...

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Letter from President Reif: MIT marks Juneteenth
The following email was sent to the MIT community today from President L. Rafael Reif. To the members of the MIT community, I write on the eve of a day that holds tremendous meaning for many African Americans: Juneteenth. It marks the day in 1865 when the people held in slavery in Texas were finally told – two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation – that they were legally free. In honor of Juneteenth, many organizations in...

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MIT and Toyota release innovative dataset to...
The following was issued as a joint release from the MIT AgeLab and Toyota Collaborative Safety Research Center. How can we train self-driving vehicles to have a deeper awareness of the world around them? Can computers learn from past experiences to recognize future patterns that can help them safely navigate new and unpredictable situations? These are some of the questions researchers from the AgeLab at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics and the Toyota Collaborative Safety Research Center...

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Trust or consequences
Will innovations in health and medicine deliver? This is a question on the top of everyone’s mind as Covid-19 tests the resiliency of global medical supply chains.  Over 100 experts recently participated in Trust CoLab, an innovative online exercise that developed a set of alternative scenarios about the future of medicine and health care. The exercise identified one potential development that quickly became quite salient: the prospect of global pandemic leading to drastic changes in health-care practices. This possibility...

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