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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.

 
Enhancing the future of teaching and learning...
As technology rapidly propels society forward, MIT is rethinking how it prepares students to face the world and its greatest challenges. Generations of educators have shared knowledge at MIT by connecting lessons to practical applications, but what does the Institute’s motto “mens et manus” (“mind and hand”), referring to hands-on learning, look like in the future? This was the guiding question of the annual Festival of Learning, co-hosted by MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor....

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Workshop explores new advanced materials for a...
It is clear that humankind needs increasingly more resources, from computing power to steel and concrete, to meet the growing demands associated with data centers, infrastructure, and other mainstays of society. New, cost-effective approaches for producing the advanced materials key to that growth were the focus of a two-day workshop at MIT on March 11 and 12. A theme throughout the event was the importance of collaboration between and within universities and industries. The goal is to “develop concepts...

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Adam Berinsky awarded Carnegie fellowship
MIT political scientist Adam Berinsky has been named to the 2025 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows, a high-profile honor for scholars pursuing research in the social sciences and humanities. The fellowship is provided by The Carnegie Corp. of New York. Berinsky, the Mitsui Professor of Political Science, and 25 other fellows were selected from more than 300 applicants. They will each receive stipends of $200,000 for research that seeks to understand how and why our society has become so polarized,...

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New study reveals how cleft lip and...
Cleft lip and cleft palate are among the most common birth defects, occurring in about one in 1,050 births in the United States. These defects, which appear when the tissues that form the lip or the roof of the mouth do not join completely, are believed to be caused by a mix of genetic and environmental factors. In a new study, MIT biologists have discovered how a genetic variant often found in people with these facial malformations leads to...

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The Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building...
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the German polymath whose life and work embodied the connections between the arts and sciences, is said to have described architecture as “frozen music.”  When the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building at MIT had its public opening earlier this year, the temperature outside may have been below freezing but the performances inside were a warm-up for the inaugural concert that took place in the evening. During the afternoon, visitors were invited to workshops...

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Special subject invites first-year students to get...
When Michael Benjamin, principal research scientist in the MIT Center for Ocean Engineering, arrived at MIT 25 years ago, only professors and postdocs were allowed to touch the department’s underwater vehicles. The vehicles were expensive, he explains, and required extensive training to operate. “People were scared to death about losing or damaging them, there was no education pipeline to teach students,” he says, adding that the introduction of class 2.680 (Marine Autonomy, Sensing, and Communication) changed this a lot, by creating...

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Restoring healthy gene expression with programmable therapeutics
Many diseases are caused by dysfunctional gene expression that leads to too much or too little of a given protein. Efforts to cure those diseases include everything from editing genes to inserting new genetic snippets into cells to injecting the missing proteins directly into patients. CAMP4 is taking a different approach. The company is targeting a lesser-known player in the regulation of gene expression known as regulatory RNA. CAMP4 co-founder and MIT Professor Richard Young has shown that by...

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Beneath the biotech boom
It’s considered a scientific landmark: A 1975 meeting at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California, shaped a new safety regime for recombinant DNA, ensuring that researchers would apply caution to gene splicing. Those ideas have been so useful that in the decades since, when new topics in scientific safety arise, there are still calls for Asilomar-type conferences to craft good ground rules. There’s something missing from this narrative, though: It took more than the Asilomar conference to...

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Bridging Earth and space, and art and...
On board Intuitive Machines’ Athena spacecraft, which made a moon landing on March 6, were cutting-edge MIT payloads: a depth-mapping camera and a mini-rover called “AstroAnt.” Also on that craft were the words and voices of people from around the world speaking in dozens of languages. These were etched on a 2-inch silicon wafer computationally designed by Professor Craig Carter of the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering and mounted on the mission’s Lunar Outpost MAPP Rover. Dubbed the Humanity...

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MIT Lincoln Laboratory is a workhorse for...
In 1949, the U.S. Air Force called upon MIT with an urgent need. Soviet aircraft carrying atomic bombs were capable of reaching the U.S. homeland, and the nation was defenseless. A dedicated center — MIT Lincoln Laboratory — was established. The brightest minds from MIT came together in service to the nation, making scientific and engineering leaps to prototype the first real-time air defense system. The commercial sector and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) then produced and deployed the system,...

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A visual pathway in the brain may...
When visual information enters the brain, it travels through two pathways that process different aspects of the input. For decades, scientists have hypothesized that one of these pathways, the ventral visual stream, is responsible for recognizing objects, and that it might have been optimized by evolution to do just that. Consistent with this, in the past decade, MIT scientists have found that when computational models of the anatomy of the ventral stream are optimized to solve the task of object recognition,...

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Training LLMs to self-detoxify their language
As we mature from childhood, our vocabulary — as well as the ways we use it — grows, and our experiences become richer, allowing us to think, reason, and interact with others with specificity and intention. Accordingly, our word choices evolve to align with our personal values, ethics, cultural norms, and views. Over time, most of us develop an internal “guide” that enables us to learn context behind conversation; it also frequently directs us away from sharing information and...

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Hundred-year storm tides will occur every few...
Tropical cyclones are hurricanes that brew over the tropical ocean and can travel over land, inundating coastal regions. The most extreme cyclones can generate devastating storm tides — seawater that is heightened by the tides and swells onto land, causing catastrophic flood events in coastal regions. A new study by MIT scientists finds that, as the planet warms, the recurrence of destructive storm tides will increase tenfold for one of the hardest-hit regions of the world. In a study appearing...

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Engineered bacteria emit signals that can be...
Bacteria can be engineered to sense a variety of molecules, such as pollutants or soil nutrients. In most cases, however, these signals can only be detected by looking at the cells under a microscope, making them impractical for large-scale use. Using a new method that triggers cells to produce molecules that generate unique combinations of color, MIT engineers have shown that they can read out these bacterial signals from as far as 90 meters away. Their work could lead...

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Building for Ukraine: A hackathon with a...
“No cash prizes. But our friends in Kiev are calling in, and they’ll probably say thanks,”​ was the the tagline that drew students and tech professionals to join MIT-Ukraine’s first-ever hackathon this past January. The hackathon was co-sponsored by MIT-Ukraine and Mission Innovation X and was shaped by the efforts of MIT alumni from across the world. It was led by Hosea Siu ’14, SM ’15, PhD ’18, a seasoned hackathon organizer and AI researcher, in collaboration with Phil Tinn MCP...

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