[Editors] MIT Research Digest - April 2005

Thu Apr 7 09:51:57 EDT 2005

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MIT Research Digest - April 2005
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For Immediate Release
THURSDAY, APR. 7, 2005
For more information or for available photos contact:
Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office
Phone: 617-258-5402
Email: thomson at mit.edu

A monthly tip-sheet for journalists of recent research
advances at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
For the latest MIT research news, go to
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/research.html

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IN THIS ISSUE: A Taxing Time * Climate Change and the Public
Humans & Chimps  * iLab Africa * Target for Cancer Drugs
Weird Fields  *  Building Brains
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A TAXING TIME
Airline passengers are giving an ever-increasing portion of their travel dollars to Uncle Sam, according to data released by MIT's Global Airline Industry Program and Daniel Webster College (DWC). Airline ticket prices overall have actually dropped over the past several years, the researchers emphasize. However, many of the taxes and fees passengers pay, which fund a significant portion of the costs of U.S. air-traffic control and airport systems, are not linked to the base price of the tickets and have remained about the same. As a result, the effective tax rate on airline tickets is steadily increasing, and will increase more under the Bush administration's recently released federal budget proposal, researchers report. Which raises the question: Who should pay for the increases? The airlines or U.S. taxpayers? The work is led by MIT Professor Amedeo Odoni of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and DWC's Joakim Karlsson. Funding is from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/tickets.html

CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE PUBLIC
Climate change and the threat of global warming are poorly understood by the U.S. public, and taking action to reduce their impact is not a high priority, according to a recent MIT survey. These results suggest that change in U.S. climate policy will not be led by public opinion. Elected officials will have to provide leadership--a task they will find difficult because achieving significant reduction of the greenhouse gases linked to climate change may involve economic costs well above what the average consumer is willing to pay. For more than a decade, Howard Herzog and colleagues at MIT's Laboratory for Energy and the Environment have been studying one approach to climate-change mitigation, carbon-dioxide capture and storage (CCS). CCS has technologic and economic promise, but public acceptance could be a problem. As a result, the researchers developed a survey that included 17 questions about the environment, global warming and climate-change-mitigation technologies. The 1,200 respondents proved to be relatively unaware not only of CCS but also of other energy-related responses to climate change that were listed in the survey. 
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/climate-0316.html

HUMANS & CHIMPS
Researchers have learned that despite the 99 percent similarity between the DNA of humans and our closest relative, the chimpanzee, a significant difference occurs in the places along the genome where gene swapping occurs. In an online issue of Science, researchers from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard report with colleagues that the locations of DNA swapping between chromosomes, known as recombination "hotspots," are almost entirely different. "We started trying to compare recombination in humans and chimpanzees a couple of years ago, in the hope that better understanding this fundamental mechanism might inform our approach to mapping genes for human diseases," said co-senior author David Altshuler, director of the Broad's program in Medical and Population Genetics and associate professor of genetics and of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. The research was supported by the NIH and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. It received institutional support from MGH.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/chimp.html

iLab AFRICA
Students in Uganda, Tanzania and Nigeria can now perform sophisticated engineering and science experiments at MIT--without ever getting on a plane. "If you can't come to the lab, the lab will come to you," said Jesus del Alamo, co-principal investigator on the Africa project and a professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Students will be able to access five MIT labs via the Internet, thanks to a partnership between MIT's Center for Educational Computing Initiatives, Makerere University (Uganda), the University of Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania) and Obafemi Awolowo University (Nigeria). The project is an outgrowth of the Microelectronics WebLab, developed by del Alamo in 1998 as a way for students to test and probe fragile microelectronic devices over the Internet from dorm rooms and other convenient locations 24 hours a day. The success of that venture spawned the iLab initiative at MIT to advance the concept to other engineering disciplines. ILab is sponsored by Microsoft; the Africa project by the Carnegie Corp.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/africa.html

TARGET FOR CANCER DRUGS
Researchers at the Whitehead Institute and MIT have discovered a missing piece to the puzzle of how certain cancers work. For nearly a decade, scientists have been trying to fully understand a particular communication pathway inside cells that contributes to many malignant brain and prostate cancers. While they have identified elements of this pathway, other key components have remained a mystery. The new finding may present drug makers with a significant new cancer target. "We believe that we have identified a component that researchers have been looking for since 1996," says Whitehead Associate Member David Sabatini, who is also an assistant professor of biology at MIT. At the heart of this new research is a protein called Akt, an important player in the regulation of cell division and survival. This work was supported by the NIH, Pew Charitable Trust, the Rita Allen Foundation, the Anna Fuller Fund, the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/target.html

WEIRD FIELDS
The whorls and swirls of color may look like something by art nouveau painter Gustav Klimt, but the winning images from MIT's annual 8.02 "Weird Fields" contest are really computer-generated visualizations of vector fields. To help students understand electromagnetic force fields, Professor of Physics John Belcher and colleagues at the MIT Center for Educational Computer Initiatives developed a computer applet into which students put the mathematical expressions that describe a given field. "It then pops out a visual representation of what the field looks like," he said. And the most striking image wins. MIT's undergraduate course "Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism," better known as 8.02, is part of the Institute's Technology-Enabled Active Learning Project (TEAL), which recasts physics learning by presenting familiar material in dramatically different ways. TEAL merges lectures and hands-on desktop experiments with cutting-edge visualizations and simulations.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/weird.html

BUILDING BRAINS
A tiny molecule is key to determining the size and shape of the developing brain, researchers from the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT reported in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience. This molecule may one day enable scientists to manipulate stem cells in the adult brain. A candidate plasticity gene and its growth-promoting protein, CPG15, could potentially be used to develop therapies for renewing damaged or diseased tissue. While stem cells regenerate neurons in only a few regions of the adult brain, researchers have speculated that a lack of adult stem cells may cause memory deficits and other disorders. Professor Elly Nedivi of MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences found that CPG15--one of many novel plasticity-related genes she has uncovered--is key to the survival of neural stem cells in early development. This work was supported by the National Eye Institute and the Ellison Medical Foundation.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/brainmolecule.html

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Elizabeth A. Thomson
Assistant Director, Science & Engineering News
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
News Office, Room 11-400
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307
617-258-5402 (ph); 617-258-8762 (fax)
<thomson at mit.edu> 

<http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/www>
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