[Editors] MIT Research Digest - November 2005

[Elizabeth Thomson]

MIT News Office
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room 11-400
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307
Phone: 617-253-2700
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MIT Research Digest - November 2005
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For Immediate Release
TUESDAY, NOV. 1, 2005
Contact: Elizabeth A. Thomson
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: Rammed Earth * Bugs on Water * HapMap 
Gamma-Ray Mystery * Engineering Metals...and Proteins  
X-Ray Vision * Avian Flu * Understanding Movement
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RAMMED EARTH
Architects looking for sustainable building materials might try the dirt under their feet, say a team of MIT architecture students, who built a garden wall using an ancient construction technique called "rammed earth" to test the method with New England soils. The team built its test wall behind the MIT Museum on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge using a combination of 30 percent Boston Blue Clay mixed with sand and gravel. "The wall will serve as a long-term test of rammed earth in New England, allowing us to observe the way various soil types used in construction stand up to the climate," said Joe Dahmen, a graduate student in architecture who is leading the project. 
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/rammedearth.html

BUGS ON WATER
MIT mathematicians have discovered how certain insects can climb what to them are steep, slippery slopes in the water's surface without moving their limbs - and do it at high speed. Welcome to the world of the tiny creatures that live on the surface of ponds, lakes and other standing bodies of water. There, "all the rules change," said David Hu, a graduate student in the Department of Mathematics and first author of a paper on the work in Nature. For the last four years, Hu and John Bush, an associate professor in the department, have been studying the novel strategies these insects use to navigate their environment. To do so, they took high-speed video of the creatures using a camera provided by MIT's Edgerton Center, then digitized and analyzed the images. This work was sponsored by the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/insects.html

GAMMA-RAY MYSTERY
An international team of astronomers led by MIT has solved the mystery of the origin of short gamma-ray bursts, violent cosmic events marking the explosive collision of two compact stars. In a paper in an Oct. issue of Nature, the scientists describe how they used NASA's High Energy Transient Explorer (HETE) satellite to make the initial discovery. Accompanying papers by Danish-led and Penn State University-led teams describe follow-up observations of the event. The MIT team was led by George Ricker, senior research scientist at MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A gamma-ray burst detected July 9 and lasting only 70 milliseconds "provides a long-sought nexus, enabling detection of the prompt emission and its afterglow, from the gamma-ray band to the optical, for the very first time," said Ricker. 
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/gamma-ray.html

ENGINEERING METALSŠAND PROTEINS
Scientists have discovered that a tool normally used to improve stainless steel and other metal alloys can be applied to a decidedly nonmetallic substance: protein. Researchers from MIT, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and DuPont reported their findings in Physical Review Letters. Scientists work with proteins just as they work with metals and other inorganic materials, designing new substances with enhanced properties. But doing so involves sorting through the nearly endless possible ways to rearrange a protein's components, called amino acids -- an extremely time-consuming and computer-intensive task. By applying a computational technique for alloy design called cluster expansion, the researchers were able to search through potential amino acid configurations up to 100 million times faster than with conventional techniques. The work was funded by the NIH and the Dupont-MIT Alliance.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/protein.html

HAPMAP
Researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and colleagues have published new papers that bring scientists closer to their ultimate goal -- to grasp the core mechanisms of human biology and disease -- by developing a comprehensive catalog of the genetic diversity in the human genome sequence across human populations. The first step towards grasping those core mechanisms was realized in 2001, with the completion of the human genome sequence. The Broad papers were published in journals including the Oct. 27 issue of Nature. They describe both the content and uses of a comprehensive genomic catalog, known as HapMap, that maps common human DNA sequence variations, enabling systematic testing of genetic variants for their association with disease and their place in human evolutionary history.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/hapmap.html

X-RAY VISION
X-ray cameras designed by physicists at MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research are a key component of a new instrument aboard an orbiting Japanese observatory that will probe the secrets of such phenomena as exploding stars. Recently MIT's team was overjoyed -- and relieved -- when the instrument, the X-ray Imaging Spectrometer (XIS), took its first pictures, flawlessly capturing the image of an exploded star in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Only a few weeks earlier, one of the other two instruments on the observatory, known as Suzaku, had failed. The XIS aboard Suzaku is composed of four cameras developed by MIT plus four telescopes developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center that focus the sky onto the cameras. The cameras send the images back to Earth. The Suzaku mission is a collaboration between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and NASA.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/observatory.html

BIRDS RESISTANT TO AVIAN FLU?
Creating a strain of avian flu-resistant chickens and exploring how canaries learn to sing are two of many potential uses for an MIT researcher's simple new way to create transgenic birds. The work appears between Oct. 31 and Nov. 4 in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Carlos Lois, assistant professor of neuroscience at MIT's Picower Institute of Learning and Memory, and a colleague came up with a way to transport genes directly into the genome of egg cells much more effectively than previously possible, creating transgenic birds with ease. In addition to the benefits of using transgenic bird models to advance developmental biology and neurobiology, manipulating the avian genome could lead to chickens that are resistant to avian flu. This work is supported by the Ellison Medical Foundation Aging Program.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/birds.html

UNDERSTANDING MOVEMENT
In work that could aid the development of robotic prostheses, MIT neuroscientists have gotten one step closer to understanding how the central nervous system solves a gigantic problem -- the production of voluntary movements. No existing computer can analyze the many variables involved in the movements of a multijointed limb. As a result, engineers designing robots and prosthetics hope to mimic the way that biological systems approach the challenge. Now MIT Institute Professor Emilio Bizzi, a principal investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, reports evidence that the central nervous system handles the daunting number of variables involved in a single movement by grouping sets of muscles and their innervating neurons into an integrated unit called a muscle synergy. The work was reported in the Journal of Neuroscience; it was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/movement.html