/PRNewswire/ -- motorCortex.ai, developer of autonomous ground robots that safely disinfect high-traffic spaces, beat out seven other finalists to win the......

/PRNewswire/ -- On August 12, MIT Technology Review is launching its most ambitious podcast yet, "In Machines We Trust," about the far-reaching impact of......

On Nov. 12 and 13, leaders in industry, government, and academia will convene at the inaugural MIT China Summit in Beijing, to explore topics at the frontiers of science and technology and the role of research and education in shaping tomorrow’s world. MIT News spoke with Richard Lester, the associate provost of MIT who oversees international activities, about the summit and its significance for the Institute. A: The idea for the MIT China Summit came out of the MIT Global Strategy report published by my office last year. One of the report’s recommendations was for the Institute to convene periodic summits in targeted regions of the world, to demonstrate MIT’s interest in working with and learning from partners in these regions; to increase regional knowledge of who we are, how we work, and what we stand for; and to provide a focus for developing new collaborations. This is the first such summit. Many people may wonder why we’re doing this summit now in light of the current tensions between the U.S. and China. I think the answer is that even though there are aggravated political strains over trade and technology, at the same time there are opportunities for us to work together on issues that are important to both countries and also to the rest of the world — issues like climate change mitigation, clean energy, environmental sustainability, urbanization, and food and water security. Indeed, now may be an especially important time for a university like MIT to focus attention on the possibilities for U.S.-China cooperation in applying science and technology to help solve great global challenges....

For years, physicists have known of a mysterious surplus of energy at the Milky Way’s center, in the form of gamma rays — the most energetic waves in the electromagnetic spectrum. These rays are typically produced by the hottest, most extreme objects in the universe, such as supernovae and pulsars. Gamma rays are found across the disk of the Milky Way, and for the most part physicists understand their sources. But there is a glow of gamma rays at the Milky Way’s center, known as the galactic center excess, or GCE, with properties that are difficult for physicists to explain given what they know about the distribution of stars and gas in the galaxy. There are two leading possibilities for what may be producing this excess: a population of high-energy, rapidly rotating neutron stars known as pulsars, or, more enticingly, a concentrated cloud of dark matter, colliding with itself to produce a glut of gamma rays. In 2015, an MIT-Princeton University team, including associate professor of physics Tracy Slatyer and postdocs Benjamin Safdi and Wei Xue, came down in favor of pulsars. The researchers had analyzed observations of the galactic center taken by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, using a “background model” that they developed to describe all the particle interactions in the galaxy that could produce gamma rays. They concluded, rather definitively, that the GCE was most likely a result of pulsars, and not dark matter....