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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.

 
Introducing the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium
From crafting complex code to revolutionizing the hiring process, generative artificial intelligence is reshaping industries faster than ever before — pushing the boundaries of creativity, productivity, and collaboration across countless domains. Enter the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium, a collaboration between industry leaders and MIT’s top minds. As MIT President Sally Kornbluth highlighted last year, the Institute is poised to address the societal impacts of generative AI through bold collaborations. Building on this momentum and established through MIT’s Generative AI Week...

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User-friendly system can help developers build more...
The neural network artificial intelligence models used in applications like medical image processing and speech recognition perform operations on hugely complex data structures that require an enormous amount of computation to process. This is one reason deep-learning models consume so much energy. To improve the efficiency of AI models, MIT researchers created an automated system that enables developers of deep learning algorithms to simultaneously take advantage of two types of data redundancy. This reduces the amount of computation, bandwidth,...

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MIT engineers help multirobot systems stay in...
Drone shows are an increasingly popular form of large-scale light display. These shows incorporate hundreds to thousands of airborne bots, each programmed to fly in paths that together form intricate shapes and patterns across the sky. When they go as planned, drone shows can be spectacular. But when one or more drones malfunction, as has happened recently in Florida, New York, and elsewhere, they can be a serious hazard to spectators on the ground. Drone show accidents highlight the...

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From bench to bedside, and beyond
In medical school, Matthew Dolan ’81 briefly considered specializing in orthopedic surgery because of the materials science nature of the work — but he soon realized that he didn’t have the innate skills required for that type of work. “I’ll be honest with you — I can’t parallel park,” he jokes. “You can consider a lot of things, but if you find the things that you’re good at and that excite you, you can hopefully move forward with those.”...

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MIT spinout Gradiant reduces companies’ water use...
When it comes to water use, most of us think of the water we drink. But industrial uses for things like manufacturing account for billions of gallons of water each day. For instance, making a single iPhone, by one estimate, requires more than 3,000 gallons. Gradiant is working to reduce the world’s industrial water footprint. Founded by a team from MIT, Gradiant offers water recycling, treatment, and purification solutions to some of the largest companies on Earth, including Coca...

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Rare and mysterious cosmic explosion: Gamma-ray burst...
Highly energetic explosions in the sky are commonly attributed to gamma-ray bursts. We now understand that these bursts originate from either the merger of two neutron stars or the collapse of a massive star. In these scenarios, a newborn black hole is formed, emitting a jet that travels at nearly the speed of light. When these jets are directed toward Earth, we can observe them from vast distances — sometimes billions of light-years away — due to a relativistic...

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MIT students' works redefine human-AI collaboration
Imagine a boombox that tracks your every move and suggests music to match your personal dance style. That’s the idea behind “Be the Beat,” one of several projects from MIT course 4.043/4.044 (Interaction Intelligence), taught by Marcelo Coelho in the Department of Architecture, that were presented at the 38th annual NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) conference in December 2024. With over 16,000 attendees converging in Vancouver, NeurIPS is a competitive and prestigious conference dedicated to research and science in...

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Smart carbon dioxide removal yields economic and...
Last year the Earth exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above preindustrial times, a threshold beyond which wildfires, droughts, floods, and other climate impacts are expected to escalate in frequency, intensity, and lethality. To cap global warming at 1.5 C and avert that scenario, the nearly 200 signatory nations of the Paris Agreement on climate change will need to not only dramatically lower their greenhouse gas emissions, but also take measures to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and...

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New training approach could help AI agents...
A home robot trained to perform household tasks in a factory may fail to effectively scrub the sink or take out the trash when deployed in a user’s kitchen, since this new environment differs from its training space. To avoid this, engineers often try to match the simulated training environment as closely as possible with the real world where the agent will be deployed. However, researchers from MIT and elsewhere have now found that, despite this conventional wisdom, sometimes...

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MIT Press’ Direct to Open opens access...
The MIT Press has announced that Direct to Open (D2O) will open access to over 80 new monographs and edited book collections in the spring and fall publishing seasons, after reaching its full funding goal for 2025. “It has been one of the greatest privileges of my career to contribute to this program and demonstrate that our academic community can unite to publish high-quality open-access monographs at scale,” says Amy Harris, senior manager of library relations and sales at the...

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Faces of MIT: Melissa Smith PhD ’12
Melissa Smith PhD ’12 is an associate leader in the Advanced Materials and Microsystems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Her team, which is embedded within the laboratory’s Advanced Technology Division, drives innovation in fields including computation, aerospace, optical systems, and bioengineering by applying micro- and nanofabrication techniques. Smith, an inventor of 11 patents, strongly believes in the power of collaboration when it comes to her own work, the work of her Lincoln Laboratory colleagues, and the innovative research done...

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Professor Emeritus Gerald Schneider, discoverer of the...
Gerald E. Schneider, a professor emeritus of psychology and member of the MIT community for over 60 years, passed away on Dec. 11, 2024. He was 84. Schneider was an authority on the relationships between brain structure and behavior, concentrating on neuronal development, regeneration or altered growth after brain injury, and the behavioral consequences of altered connections in the brain. Using the Syrian golden hamster as his test subject of choice, Schneider made numerous contributions to the advancement of...

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Kingdoms collide as bacteria and cells form...
In biology textbooks, the endoplasmic reticulum is often portrayed as a distinct, compact organelle near the nucleus, and is commonly known to be responsible for protein trafficking and secretion. In reality, the ER is vast and dynamic, spread throughout the cell and able to establish contact and communication with and between other organelles. These membrane contacts regulate processes as diverse as fat metabolism, sugar metabolism, and immune responses. Exploring how pathogens manipulate and hijack essential processes to promote their...

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A platform to expedite clean energy projects
Businesses and developers often face a steep learning curve when installing clean energy technologies, such as solar installations and EV chargers. To get a fair deal, they need to navigate a complex bidding process that involves requesting proposals, evaluating bids, and ultimately contracting with a provider. Now the startup Station A, founded by a pair of MIT alumni and their colleagues, is streamlining the process of deploying clean energy. The company has developed a marketplace for clean energy that...

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How good old mud can lower building...
Buildings cost a lot these days. But when concrete buildings are being constructed, there’s another material that can make them less expensive: mud. MIT researchers have developed a method to use lightly treated mud, including soil from a building site, as the “formwork” molds into which concrete is poured. The technique deploys 3D printing and can replace the more costly method of building elaborate wood formworks for concrete construction. “What we’ve demonstrated is that we can essentially take the...

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