<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">======================================</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MIT Research Digest, January 2009</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">======================================</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">For Immediate Release</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">TUESDAY, JAN. 6, 2009</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Contact: Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">E: <a href="mailto:thomson@mit.edu">thomson@mit.edu</a>, T: 617-258-5402</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">A monthly tip-sheet for journalists of recent research advances</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Latest research news: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/research.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/research.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">RSS -- research feed: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/mitresearch-rss.xml">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/mitresearch-rss.xml</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">IN THIS ISSUE: Gravity Fingers * Civic-Minded Software * Dancing Bees * Wave Energy * Therapeutic Antibodies * Superstar Scientists * 3-D Cell Growth * Insights On Fusion * Tainted Heparin * Dark Matter Detector * Alzheimer’s Mystery * Robotic Weather Forecasting * Nanotube Sensors * The Faintest Stars * Copying Dna * Humans In Space * Tiny Ecosystem * Cystic Fibrosis Finding * Getting Organized * Climate Change & Water * Fluid Trampoline * Fighting Malaria * Metallic Glass * Hybrid Cells * ‘Golden’ Drug Delivery</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">GRAVITY FINGERS</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MIT researchers have found an elegant solution to a sticky scientific problem in basic fluid mechanics: Why water doesn't soak into soil at an even rate, but instead forms what looks like fingers of fluid flowing downward. Scientists call these rivulets "gravity fingers," and the explanation for their formation has to do with the surface tension where the water -- or any liquid -- meets the soil (or other medium). Knowing how to account for this phenomenon mathematically will have wide-ranging impact on science problems and engineering applications, including the recovery of oil from reservoirs and the sequestration of carbon underground. The solution, reported in a Dec. issue of Physical Review Letters, involves borrowing a mathematical phrase from the mathematical description of a similar problem -- a solution both simple and elegant that had escaped the notice of many researchers in earlier attempts to describe the phenomenon. Co-authors Luis Cueto-Felgueroso and Professor Ruben Juanes of the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering discovered the solution while studying the larger question of how water displaces oil in underground reservoirs (petroleum engineers commonly flush oil reservoirs with water to enhance oil recovery). The work was supported by the Italian energy company, Eni.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/gravity-fingers-1212.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/gravity-fingers-1212.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">GRAPHIC AVAILABLE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">CIVIC-MINDED SOFTWARE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">When representatives from natural gas companies knock on doors in rural areas to try to lock up deals for drilling rights, they typically hold most of the cards. They have the knowledge and experience about the process, while the landowner often has little or no information about what kinds of deals other residents in the area have agreed to — or about such issues as toxic chemicals that have been used in other drilling sites and the health effects residents say they have experienced. Currently, there is no easy way to find such information. A team of MIT researchers hopes to remedy that. They are developing a suite of software applications to extract information from government and corporate databases, along with input from citizens in the affected areas, and make it all available in a clear, easy-to-navigate form. “This is an experiment to see if we can develop new tools to help communities self-organize,” says Chris Csikszentmihályi, co-director of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media. The MIT team recently began tests of one of their new software tools, Landman Report Card (LRC), with small groups of landowners in Colorado and Ohio, and eventually will extend the tests to New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, all of which are experiencing new booms in natural gas exploration. The research was partly funded by the Knight Foundation.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/mobilizecms-1202.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/mobilizecms-1202.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">DANCING BEES</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">What do dancing honeybees and stock markets have in common? At first glance, not much. But both are complicated dynamic systems that are extremely difficult to model — until now. An MIT graduate student has developed a methodology for automatically constructing computer models that can accurately describe the behavior of such complex systems with very little background information. The work has numerous potential applications, from enabling oil companies to get a clearer picture of where oil might be located underground to allowing port operators to spot suspicious behaviors. Graduate student Emily Fox, of MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, presented her new model at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Dec. The methodology is designed to build models for complicated systems whose behavior is characterized by abrupt changes. These complex dynamic systems include stock markets and dancing bees: Honeybees switch between several dances in seemingly random fashion, and stock markets are notoriously unpredictable. “It’s quite exciting that even when you remove the shackles of putting in prior information, there’s a lot you can discover about a complex system,” said Fox’s advisor, Professor of Electrical Engineering Alan Willsky. Additional authors of the NIPS paper are from the University of California at Berkeley. The research was funded by the Army Research Office and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/dancing-bees-tt1210.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/dancing-bees-tt1210.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">PHOTO AND VIDEO AVAILABLE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">WAVE ENERGY</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MIT researchers are working with Portuguese colleagues to design a pilot-scale device that will capture significantly more of the energy in ocean waves than existing systems, and use it to power an electricity-generating turbine. Wave energy is a large, widespread renewable resource that is environmentally benign and readily scalable. In some locations — the northwestern coasts of the United States, the western coast of Scotland, and the southern tips of South America, Africa and Australia, for example — a wave-absorbing device could theoretically generate 100 to 200 megawatts of electricity per kilometer of coastline. But designing a wave-capture system that can deal with the harsh, corrosive seawater environment, handle hourly, daily and seasonal variations in wave intensity, and continue to operate safely in stormy weather is difficult. Chiang Mei, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been a believer in wave energy since the late 1970s. After the recent oil-price spike, there has been renewed interest in harnessing the energy in ocean waves. To help engineers design such devices, Mei and his colleagues developed numerical simulations that can predict wave forces on a given device and the motion of the device that will result. The simulations guide design decisions that will maximize energy capture and provide data to experts looking for efficient ways to convert the captured mechanical energy to electrical energy. This research was supported by the MIT-Portugal Program.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/waves-portugal-tt1217.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/waves-portugal-tt1217.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">GRAPHIC AVAILABLE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">THERAPEUTIC ANTIBODIES</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MIT engineers have found that antibodies do not need a particular sugar attachment long believed to be essential to their function, a discovery that could make producing therapeutic antibodies much easier and cheaper in the future. Therapeutic antibodies are a promising new type of treatment for cancer and other diseases, but their practicality has been limited by the fact that only mammalian cells have the right machinery to build the sugar attachment. "To date, people have faced limitations in how they were going to make these antibodies because they appeared to require these (sugar) structures," said Dane Wittrup, the C.P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering, Biological Engineering, member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and senior author of a paper on the work that appeared in a Dec. online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Wittrup and biological engineering graduate student Stephen Sazinsky, co-lead author of the paper, found that antibodies don't need the sugar normally found attached to a certain region of antibody when the sequence is slightly mutated. Antibodies are a key part of the immune system, roaming around the body to detect invaders such as bacteria and viruses. Other authors of the paper are from MIT and Rockefeller University. The research was funded by the NIH.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/antibodies-1222.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/antibodies-1222.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">SUPERSTAR SCIENTISTS</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">When "superstar" academic scientists die, their collaborators experience a significant and permanent decline in productivity, according to a recent paper coauthored by MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Pierre Azoulay. Studying the role of collaboration in spurring the creation of new scientific knowledge, he found that the more the collaborators' areas of study overlapped with the superstar, the sharper the decline in output. The study was conducted with a panel of 8,220 scientists who had coauthored papers with a superstar scientist who subsequently died prematurely. The authors measured how collaborators' scientific output -- determined by publications, citations, and National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants -- changed after the "extinction" of the star. Superstardom was assessed on the basis of several criteria, including funding, citations, and membership in the National Academy of Science. "Our results reveal a 5 to 10 percent decrease in the quality-adjusted publication output of coauthors in response to the sudden and unexpected loss of a superstar," wrote the authors in a working paper titled, "Superstar Extinction," published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Azoulay’s coauthors are Professor Joshua Graff Zivin of the University of California, San Diego and the National Bureau of Economic Research; and MIT Sloan PhD student Jialan Wang.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/superstar-1218.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/superstar-1218.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">3-D CELL GROWTH</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MIT engineers have built a device that gives them an unprecedented view of three-dimensional cell growth and migration, including the formation of blood vessels and the spread of tumor cells. The microfluidic device, imprinted on a square inch of plastic, could be used to evaluate the potential side effects of drugs in development, or to test the effectiveness of cancer drugs in individual patients. Roger Kamm, MIT professor of biological and mechanical engineering, and colleagues reported their observations of angiogenesis -- the process by which blood vessels are formed -- in the journal Lab on a Chip. Microfluidic devices have been widely used in recent years to study cells, but most only allow for the study of cells growing on a flat (two-dimensional) surface, or else lack the ability to observe and control cell behavior. With the new device, researchers can observe cells in real time as they grow in a three-dimensional collagen scaffold under precisely controlled chemical or physical conditions. Observing angiogenesis and other types of cell growth in three dimensions is critical because that is how such growth normally occurs, said Kamm. The research was funded by Draper Laboratory.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/microfluidic-1216.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/microfluidic-1216.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">PHOTO AVAILABLE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">INSIGHTS ON FUSION</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Research carried out at MIT’s Alcator C-Mod fusion reactor may have brought the promise of fusion as a future power source a bit closer to reality, though scientists caution that a practical fusion powerplant is still decades away. Fusion, the reaction that produces the sun’s energy, is thought to have enormous potential for future power generation because fusion plant operation produces no emissions, fuel sources are potentially abundant, and it produces relatively little (and short-lived) radioactive waste. But it still faces great hurdles. “There’s been a lot of progress,” says physicist Earl Marmar, division head of the Alcator Project at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. “We’re learning a lot more about the details of how these things work.” The Alcator C-Mod reactor, in operation since 1993, has the highest magnetic field and the highest plasma pressure of any fusion reactor in the world, and is the largest fusion reactor operated by any university. One of the most vexing issues facing those trying to construct a fusion plant that produces more power than it consumes (something never achieved yet experimentally) is how to propel the hot plasma (an electrically charged gas) around inside the donut-shaped reactor chamber. This is necessary to keep it from losing its heat of millions of degrees to the cooler vessel walls. Now, the MIT scientists think they may have found a way. Physicist Yijun Lin and principal research scientist John Rice have led experiments that demonstrate a very efficient method for using radio-frequency waves to push the plasma around inside the vessel, not only keeping it from losing heat to the walls but also preventing internal turbulence that can reduce the efficiency of fusion reactions. These results were published in Physical Review Letters in Dec. The work was sponsored by the DOE.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/fusion-results-tt1203.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/fusion-results-tt1203.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">PHOTO AVAILABLE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">TAINTED HEPARIN</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">A team of researchers led by MIT has confirmed that a contaminant found in several batches of the blood-thinner heparin is linked with severe allergic reactions in patients, dozens of whom died after receiving the tainted drug. A study conducted by the researchers provides epidemiological evidence that contaminated batches of heparin produced in China sickened hundreds of people, said MIT Professor Ram Sasisekharan. Sasisekharan is the senior author of the study, which appears in a Dec. online edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. The tainted heparin scandal is among several recent contamination incidents involving products from China. It unfolded between November and January, when hundreds of patients in the United States and several other countries suffered allergic reactions after receiving the drug, often administered during dialysis or heart surgery. The tainted heparin came from factories in China that manufacture the drug for Baxter International, which recalled its heparin in February. In April, an international team led by Sasisekharan identified the chemical structure of the contaminant, oversulfated chondroitin sulfate (OSCS), and demonstrated the biological mechanism for how it could cause severe allergic reactions in humans. The new NEJM study epidemiologically connects the adverse reactions to the OSCS-contaminated heparin. This work was supported in part by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The team also included researchers from the FDA, the CDC, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, St. Louis Children’s Hospital, BJC Healthcare, Momenta Pharmaceuticals and the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/heparin-1203.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/heparin-1203.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">DARK MATTER DETECTOR</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Several research projects are underway to try to detect particles that may make up the mysterious “dark matter” believed to dominate the universe’s mass. But the existing detectors have a problem: They also pick up particles of ordinary matter — hurtling neutrons that masquerade as the elusive dark-matter particles the instruments are designed to find. MIT physicist Jocelyn Monroe has a solution. A new detector she and her students have built just finished its initial testing at Los Alamos National Laboratory. When deployed in the next few months alongside one of the existing dark-matter detectors, the new device should identify all of the ordinary neutrons that come along, leaving anything else that the other detector picks up as a strong candidate for the elusive dark matter. “Dark matter experiments are very hard,” explains Monroe. “They are looking for a tiny signal, from a phenomenon that happens very rarely,” namely the collision of a dark-matter particle with one of ordinary matter, producing a tiny, brief flash of light. The research is partly funded by the NSF.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/dark-matter-tt1210.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/dark-matter-tt1210.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">PHOTO AVAILABLE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">ALZHEIMER’S MYSTERY</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">In work that could lead to new drugs to target Alzheimer’s disease, MIT researchers and colleagues have shed light on one of the molecular mysteries surrounding this common form of dementia. The work, reported in a Dec. issue of Neuron, helps explain the perplexing behavior of some cells in the hippocampus, thought to be the center of learning and memory in the brain. In Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and other neurodegenerative conditions, some neurons suddenly start to replicate their DNA as if they were about to divide. This causes them to die. It is thought that most of the neurons within our brains have formed and exited the cell cycle during gestation and the early postnatal period. No one knows why this sudden reprisal of the cell cycle occurs in adult neurons in Alzheimer’s patients. Now, researchers led by Li-Huei Tsai, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience, are starting to understand the events that precede the death of the cells. Tsai and colleagues found that these aberrant events occur when an enzyme called HDAC1, which configures chromatin, the structural component of chromosomes, is blocked. Conversely, “increasing levels of this enzyme protects neurons from re-entering the cell cycle, losing genomic integrity and dying,” said Tsai, who has appointments in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and who is also an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “Our findings provide insight into how neurons die in neurodegenerative diseases and offer a new therapeutic strategy for countering neuronal death.” This work is supported by the NIH and the American Heart Association.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/alzheimer-mystery-1210.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/alzheimer-mystery-1210.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">ROBOTIC WEATHER FORECASTING</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">At MIT, planning for bad weather involves far more than remembering an umbrella. Researchers in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics are trying to improve weather forecasting using robotic aircraft and advanced flight plans that consider millions of variables. “Weather affects huge sectors of our economy, such as agriculture and transportation,” said Nicholas Roy, an assistant professor and one of the researchers who worked on the project. The more time to prepare for a storm and evacuate the area, the better. The researchers hope to gain some lead-time by improving the way data about current weather conditions are collected. Existing forecasting systems depend on pressure, temperature, and other sensors aboard a single piloted airplane that flies scripted routes. But the data that are collected can’t be processed fast enough to alter the flight plan if a storm starts brewing. “Today’s flight path is based on yesterday’s weather,” said Professor Jonathan How, the principal investigator. Ideally, teams of unmanned aircraft would be used to gather data. Current sensor readings from one plane would be used to guide the deployment of additional planes to areas with especially interesting weather. The key challenge was creating a new algorithm that could develop an effective flight plan quickly, based on millions of variables. After three years of research using computerized weather simulations, the team believes their algorithm can quickly and efficiently determine where aircraft should be sent to take the most important measurements. The work was described at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Dec. It was funded by the NSF.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/aerial-weather-tt1210.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/aerial-weather-tt1210.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">NANOTUBE SENSORS</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MIT engineers have developed carbon nanotubes into sensors for cancer drugs and other DNA-damaging agents inside living cells. The sensors, made of carbon nanotubes wrapped in DNA, can detect chemotherapy drugs such as cisplatin as well as environmental toxins and free radicals that damage DNA. “We’ve made a sensor that can be placed in living cells, healthy or malignant, and actually detect several different classes of molecules that damage DNA,” said Michael Strano, associate professor of chemical engineering and senior author of a paper on the work appearing in a Dec. online edition of Nature Nanotechnology. Such sensors could be used to monitor chemotherapy patients to ensure the drugs are effectively battling tumors. Many chemotherapy drugs are very powerful DNA disruptors and can cause serious side effects, so it is important to make sure that the drugs are reaching their intended targets. “Researchers from MIT and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign also contributed to the work, which was funded by the NSF.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/nano-sensor-1214.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/nano-sensor-1214.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">PHOTO AND VIDEO AVAILABLE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">THE FAINTEST STARS</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">The two faintest star-like objects ever found, a pair of twin “brown dwarfs” each just a millionth as bright as the sun, have been spotted by a team led by MIT physicist Adam Burgasser. “These brown dwarfs are the lowest-power stellar light bulbs in the sky that we know of,” said Burgasser. And these extra-dim brown dwarfs may be the first discoveries of the predominant type in space. “In this regime [of faintness] we expect to find the bulk of the brown dwarfs that have formed over the lifetime of the galaxy,” he said. “So in that sense these objects are the first of these ‘most common’ brown dwarfs, which haven’t been found yet because they are simply really faint.” Burgasser, an assistant professor of physics at MIT, said “both of these objects are the first to break the barrier of one millionth the total light-emitting power of the sun.” He is lead author of a paper about the discovery in the Astrophysical Journal Letters in Dec. Coauthors are from MIT, the University of New South Wales, Australia; the University of Hawaii, Manoa; Los Alamos National Laboratory, and NASA Ames Research Center. The work was funded in part by NASA.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/dimmest-stars-tt1210.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/dimmest-stars-tt1210.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">PHOTO AND GRAPHIC AVAILABLE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">COPYING DNA</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">The copying of DNA’s master instructions into messenger molecules of RNA, a process known as DNA transcription, has always been thought to be a unidirectional process whereby a copying machine starts and moves in one direction. But in work that represents a fundamental shift in scientists’ understanding of the phenomenon, MIT researchers have found evidence that two DNA copying machines frequently start from the same site and move in different directions. MIT Institute Professor Phillip Sharp and his colleagues, who report the results in a Dec. early online edition of Science, believe this new mechanism may play a role in keeping genes poised for transcription. “People have been studying transcription for a long time and never seen this kind of transcription before,” said Amy Seila, a postdoctoral associate in Sharp’s lab and lead author of the paper. Coauthors are from MIT, the Whitehead Institute, and the University of California at San Diego. The research was funded by the NIH and the Crick-Jacobs Center for Computational Biology.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/reverse-dna-1204.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/reverse-dna-1204.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">HUMANS IN SPACE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">A team led by MIT researchers has released the most comprehensive independent review of the future of the nation’s human spaceflight program undertaken in many years. The report recommends setting loftier goals for humans in space, focusing research more clearly toward those goals, and increasing cooperation with other nations and private industry. After conducting preliminary briefings with various stakeholders in Washington, team members say it has been enthusiastically received by political leaders, a National Research Council panel, and the Obama transition team, among others. “We need to rethink the rationales for human spaceflight,” says the report’s lead author David Mindell, professor of engineering systems and director of the program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT. He says that after the Washington briefings, “we sensed a great deal of uncertainty in DC about how to proceed with the Bush vision and human spaceflight in general. Our paper speaks to those problems in a clear way and offers some new ideas.”</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/mindell-space-1216.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/mindell-space-1216.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">TINY ECOSYSTEM</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MIT researchers have created a microbial ecosystem smaller than a stick of gum that sheds new light on the plankton-eat-plankton world at the bottom of the aquatic food chain. The work, reported in the January print issue of American Naturalist, may lead to better predictions of marine microbes’ global-scale influence on climate. Through photosynthesis and uptake of carbon compounds, diverse planktonic marine microorganisms — too small to be seen with the naked eye — help regulate carbon flux in the oceans. Carbon flux refers to the rate at which energy and carbon are transferred from lower to higher levels of the marine food web, and it may have implications for commercial fisheries and other ocean-dependent industries. The MIT study is one of the first detailed explorations of how sea creatures so small — 500,000 can fit on the head of a pin — find food in an ocean-size environment. Besides showing that microbes’ swimming and foraging is much more sophisticated and complex than previously thought, the work also indicates that organic materials may move through the oceans’ microbial food web at higher-than-expected rates. Using the new technology of microfluidics, a group led by Roman Stocker, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, devised a clear plastic device about the size and shape of a microscope slide. This work was supported by the NSF.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/mini-ecosystem-1215.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/mini-ecosystem-1215.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">PHOTO AVAILABLE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">CYSTIC FIBROSIS FINDING</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MIT researchers have found that the pigments responsible for the blue-green stain of the mucus that clogs the lungs of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients are primarily signaling molecules that allow large clusters of the opportunistic infection agent, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, to organize themselves into structured communities. This new insight about the leading cause of death of people with CF suggests that the phenazine-processing machinery could become a potential target for drugs to treat P. aeruginosa infections in CF patients, according to the research team, led by Dianne K. Newman, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Biology and Geobiology. Newman and a colleague reported the findings at the American Society for Cell Biology annual meeting in San Francisco. P. aeruginosa appears as a classic opportunistic infection, easily shrugged off by healthy people but a grave threat to those with CF, which chokes the lungs of its victims with sticky mucus. For decades, the blue-green pigments known as phenazines have been wrongly regarded as antibiotics, generated by P. aeruginosa to kill off the microbe’s bacterial competitors in the lungs. "We have a long way to go before being able to test this idea, but the hope is that if survival in the lung is influenced by phenazine — or some other electron-shuttling molecule or molecules — tampering with phenazine trafficking might be a potential way to make antibiotics more effective," said Newman, whose lab investigates how ancestral bacteria on the early Earth evolved the ability to metabolize minerals.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/ancient-bacteria-1216.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/ancient-bacteria-1216.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">GETTING ORGANIZED</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Everyone has them — little squares of paper stuck on monitors, business cards strewn across desks, and countless to-do lists. These information scraps feature critical phone numbers, meeting dates and shopping lists — and they have an alarming tendency to vanish just when you need them. Now an MIT computer science professor, David Karger, has taken a crack at helping people get organized. Karger, a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, has created List.it, a simple yet useful software to capture all kinds of information scraps and to-do lists. The beta version of this web-based note-taking software allows you to easily enter, store and retrieve all kinds of information, from e-mail addresses to web urls, to grocery lists. List.it allows users to jot down short notes and easily search them for later retrieval. List.it, which focuses entirely on minimizing the time and effort needed to capture information, was developed not by looking at how people organize information, but what kind of information they keep and make lists of. “I would never make the claim that we’re trying to replace Post-its,” says Michael Bernstein, a graduate student in Karger’s lab. “We want to understand the classes of things people do with Post-its and see if we can help users do more of what they wanted to do in the first place.” The work is funded by the Nokia Research Center Cambridge, the NSF, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Web Science Research Initiative and Quanta Computer.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/info-scraps-tt1210.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/info-scraps-tt1210.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">PHOTO AVAILABLE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">CLIMATE CHANGE & WATER</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">It’s no simple matter to figure out how regional changes in precipitation, expected to result from global climate change, may affect water supplies. Now, a new analysis led by MIT researchers has found that the changes in groundwater may actually be much greater than the precipitation changes themselves. For example, in places where annual rainfall may increase by 20 percent as a result of climate change, the groundwater might increase as much as 40 percent. Conversely, the analysis showed in some cases just a 20 percent decrease in rainfall could lead to a 70 percent decrease in the recharging of local aquifers — a potentially devastating blow in semi-arid and arid regions. But the exact effects depend on a complex mix of factors, the study found — including soil type, vegetation, and the exact timing and duration of rainfall events — so detailed studies will be required for each local region in order to predict the possible range of outcomes. The research was conducted by Gene-Hua Crystal Ng, now a postdoctoral researcher in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), along with King Bhumipol Professor Dennis McLaughlin and Bacardi Stockholm Water Foundations Professor Dara Entekhabi, both of CEE, and Bridget Scanlon, a senior researcher at the University of Texas. The results were presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The work was funded by the NSF.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/agu-groundwater-1218.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/agu-groundwater-1218.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">FLUID TRAMPOLINE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">A water drop placed on a soap film that vibrates up and down may bounce as if on a trampoline — but it’s much more than that, according to MIT mathematicians who say the ”fluid trampoline” is the simplest fluid system yet explored that exhibits chaotic behavior. MIT math professor John Bush and visiting student Tristan Gilet built the system in the Applied Math Laboratory, then demonstrated that the drop bouncing may be accurately described with a single simple equation. They report their findings in the Dec. 29 online edition of Physical Review Letters. Their study builds upon the pioneering work of the late Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who in 1963 discovered chaos in a simplified mathematical model of the atmosphere, now called the Lorenz equations. Known as the father of chaos theory, Lorenz passed away in April 2008 after a distinguished career in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. This work was supported by FNRS/FRIA and the Belgian government.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/fluid-trampoline-tt1203.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/fluid-trampoline-tt1203.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">PHOTO, VIDEO AND GRAPHIC AVAILABLE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">FIGHTING MALARIA</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Modifying the environment by using everything from shovels and plows to plant-derived pesticides may be as important as mosquito nets and vaccinations in the fight against malaria, according to a computerized analysis by MIT researchers. The researchers have developed a new computer model for analyzing different methods of trying to control the spread of malaria, one of the world’s most-devastating diseases. Among their findings using the model is that environmental measures such as leveling the land to eliminate depressions where pools can form can be an important part of the strategy for controlling the disease. Reports on the work, led by Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Elfatih Eltahir, were presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Malaria, Eltahir explained, is “a significant global health challenge” that accounts for one-third of all deaths of children under 5 worldwide. By developing new software to analyze the impacts of different methods of attempting to limit malaria’s spread, which involves a complex chain of transmission between larvae, mosquitoes and humans, “we have made significant progress” toward better control of the disease, he said. This project has been funded by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the NSF.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/agu-malaria-1219.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/agu-malaria-1219.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">PHOTO AVAILABLE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">METALLIC GLASS</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Researchers at MIT and the National University of Singapore have made significant progress in understanding a class of materials that has resisted analysis for decades. Their findings could lead to the rapid discovery of a variety of useful new kinds of glass made of metallic alloys with potentially significant mechanical, chemical and magnetic applications. The first examples of metallic alloys that could be made into glass were discovered back in the late 1950s and led to a flurry of research activity, but, despite intense study, so far nobody had solved the riddle of why some specific alloys could form glasses and others could not, or how to identify the promising candidates, said Carl. V. Thompson, the Stavros Salapatas Professor of Materials Science & Engineering and director of the Materials Processing Center at MIT. A report on the new work, which describes a way to systematically find the promising mixes from among dozens of candidates, was published in Science. The research was supported by the Singapore-MIT Alliance and the German Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/metallic-glass-1218.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/metallic-glass-1218.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">PHOTO AVAILABLE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">HYBRID CELLS</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MIT engineers have developed a new, highly efficient way to pair up cells so they can be fused together into a hybrid cell. The new technique should make it much easier for scientists to study what happens when two cells are combined. For example, fusing an adult cell and an embryonic stem cell allows researchers to study the genetic reprogramming that occurs in such hybrids. The researchers, led by a collaboration between Joel Voldman, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and Rudolf Jaenisch, professor of biology and a member of the Whitehead Institute, report the new technique in the Jan. 4 online edition of Nature Methods. The team’s simple but ingenious sorting method increases the rate of successful cell fusion from around 10 percent to about 50 percent, and allows thousands of cell pairings at once. Though cell fusion techniques have been around for a long time, there are many technical limitations, said Voldman. The research was funded by NASA and the NIH.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/cell-fusion-0104.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/cell-fusion-0104.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">VIDEO AND GRAPHIC AVAILABLE</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">‘GOLDEN’ DRUG DELIVERY</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">Using tiny gold particles and infrared light, MIT researchers have developed a drug-delivery system that allows multiple drugs to be released in a controlled fashion. Such a system could one day be used to provide more control when battling diseases commonly treated with more than one drug, according to the researchers. “With a lot of diseases, especially cancer and AIDS, you get a synergistic effect with more than one drug,” said Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli, assistant professor of biological and mechanical engineering and senior author of a paper on the work that recently appeared in the journal ACS Nano. Delivery devices already exist that can release two drugs, but the timing of the release must be built into the device — it cannot be controlled from outside the body. The new system is controlled externally and theoretically could deliver up to three or four drugs.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">MORE: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/nanorods-1230.html">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/nanorods-1230.html</a></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">--END--</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div> </div></body></html>