Approximately 13 billion laboratory tests are administered every year in the United States, but not every result is timely or accurate. Laboratory missteps prevent patients from receiving appropriate, necessary, and sometimes lifesaving care. These medical errors are the third-leading cause of death in the nation. To help reverse this trend, a research team from the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) Engineering Systems Lab and Synensys, a safety management contractor, examined the ecosystem of diagnostic laboratory data. Their findings, including six systemic factors contributing to patient hazards in laboratory diagnostics tests, offer a rare holistic view of this complex network ' not just doctors and lab technicians, but also device manufacturers, health information technology (HIT) providers, and even government entities such as the White House. By viewing the diagnostic laboratory data ecosystem as an integrated system, an approach based on systems theory, the MIT researchers have identified specific changes that can lead to safer behaviors for health care workers and healthier outcomes for patients....

For most of us, that dream dissipates once traffic gets moving again. For a dedicated few, however, it's less a fantasy than a technically feasible proposition. And one that, in some version or other, they're working diligently to bring to fruition. In recent years, companies working on electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft and flying cars have raised unprecedented sums as they move closer to commercializing a vision of air travel without the huge carbon footprint or massive runways. !function(e,i,n,s){var t="InfogramEmbeds",d=e.getElementsByTagName("script")[0];if(window[t]&&window[t].initialized)window[t].process&&window[t].process();else if(!e.getElementById(n)){var o=e.createElement("script");o.async=1,o.id=n,o.src="https://e.infogram.com/js/dist/embed-loader-min.js",d.parentNode.insertBefore(o,d)}}(document,0,"infogram-async"); While the backyard flying car remains a moonshot-type proposition, the eVTOL aircraft industry is relatively mature by startup standards. Older players in the space have been around a decade or more, and total known equity funding to date is well over $5 billion....

In July, the world celebrated the 50th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing. MIT played an enormous role in that accomplishment, helping to usher in a new age of space exploration. Now MIT faculty, staff, and students are working toward the next great advances — ones that could propel humans back to the moon, and to parts still unknown. “I am hard-pressed to think of another event that brought the world together in such a collective way as the Apollo moon landing,” says Daniel Hastings, the Cecil and Ida Green Education Professor and head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “Since the spring, we have been celebrating the role MIT played in getting us there and reflecting on how far technology has come in the past five decades.” “Our community continues to build on the incredible legacy of Apollo,” Hastings adds. Some aspects of future of space exploration, he notes, will follow from lessons learned. Others will come from newly developed technologies that were unimaginable in the 1960s. And still others will arise from novel collaborations that will fuel the next phases of research and discovery....

The School of Engineering is welcoming 11 new faculty members to its departments, institutes, labs, and centers. With research and teaching activities ranging from the development of novel microscopy techniques to intelligent systems and mixed-autonomy mobility, they are poised to make significant contributions in new directions across the school and to a wide range of research efforts around the Institute. “I am pleased to welcome our outstanding new faculty,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering. “Their contributions as educators, researchers, and collaborators will enhance the engineering community and strengthen our global impact.” Pulkit Agrawal will join the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor in July. Agrawal earned a BS in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and was awarded the Director’s Gold Medal. He earned a PhD in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. A co-founder of SafelyYou, Inc., Agrawal researches topics spanning robotics, deep learning, computer vision, and computational neuroscience. His work has appeared multiple times in MIT Technology Review, Quanta, New Scientist, the New York Post, and other outlets. He is a recipient of the Signatures Fellow Award, a Fulbright science and technology award, the Goldman Sachs Global Leadership Award, OPJEMS, the Sridhar Memorial Prize, and IIT Kanpur’s academic excellence awards, among others. Agrawal also holds a “sangeet prabhakar” (the equivalent of bachelor’s degree in Indian classical music) and occasionally performs in music concerts....