[Editors] MIT Research Digest, April 2006

[Elizabeth Thomson]

MIT News Office
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room 11-400
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307
Phone: 617-253-2700
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/www

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MIT Research Digest, April 2006
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For Immediate Release
TUESDAY, APR. 4, 2006
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: Promise for Huntington's * Walkability
How Kids Think * Healing the Brain * Morphing Vehicles
Interplanetary Communications * Visual Insights
Keeping Soldiers Healthy * Whale Songs * Rat Whiskers
Toward a Better Wheelchair * Marine Swap-Meet
Children & Digital Culture * Cancer, Arthritis Link
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PROMISE FOR HUNTINGTON'S
MIT and Harvard Medical School researchers have identified a compound 
that interferes with the pathogenic effects of Huntington's disease, 
a discovery that could lead to development of a new treatment for the 
disease. There is no cure for Huntington's, a neurodegenerative 
disorder that now afflicts 30,000 Americans, with another 150,000 at 
risk. The fatal disease, which is genetically inherited, usually 
strikes in midlife and causes uncontrolled movements, loss of 
cognitive function and emotional disturbance. "There are now some 
drugs that can help with the symptoms, but we can't stop the course 
of the disease or its onset," said Ruth Bodner, lead author on a 
paper that appeared online the week of  Mar. 6 in the Proceedings of 
the National Academy of Sciences.  Bodner is a postdoctoral fellow in 
MIT's Center for Cancer Research. The compound developed by Bodner 
and others in the laboratories of MIT Professor of Biology David 
Housman, Harvard Medical School Assistant Professor Aleksey Kazantsev 
and HMS Professor Bradley Hyman might lead to a drug that could help 
stop the deadly sequence of cellular events that Huntington's 
unleashes. This work was funded by the Hereditary Disease Foundation, 
the Massachusetts Biotechnology Research Council, the NIH, the 
American Parkinson's Disease Association and the MassGeneral 
Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/huntington.html

WALKABILITY
Developing cities need to do more to address the needs of 
pedestrians, according to MIT graduate student Holly Krambeck, who is 
working on a walkability ranking system for cities. As such cities 
grow more congested with cars, changes are often made at the expense 
of pedestrians, even though walking is the most common means of 
transportation in developing countries, Krambeck said. She cited the 
example of New Delhi, India, which recently created a number of new 
roads without creating new space for walkers. A dual master's degree 
candidate in city planning and in science and transportation, 
Krambeck studied walkability as part of a two-year internship with 
the World Bank. The work eventually became her master's thesis, which 
she completed in February. "How well the pedestrian environment can 
service (walking) trips will impact the overall quality and 
efficiency of the urban transportation network, and in turn, overall 
mobility and accessibility for residents and visitors," Krambeck 
wrote in her thesis.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/walkability.html

HOW KIDS THINK
Even preschoolers approach the world much like scientists: They are 
convinced that perplexing and unpredictable events can be explained, 
according to an MIT brain researcher's study in the April issue of 
Child Development. The way kids play and explore suggests that 
children believe cause-and-effect relationships in the world are 
governed by fundamental laws rather than by mysterious forces, said 
Laura Schulz, assistant professor of cognitive science and co-author 
of the study with Jessica Sommerville of the University of 
Washington. "It's important to understand that kids are approaching 
the world with deep assumptions that affect their actions and their 
explanations and shape what they're able to learn next," Schulz said. 
"Kids' fundamental beliefs affect their learning. Their theoretical 
framework affects their understanding of evidence, just as it does 
for scientists." This work is supported by the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/children.html

HEALING THE BRAIN
Rodents blinded by a severed tract in their brains' visual system had 
their sight partially restored within weeks, thanks to a tiny 
biodegradable scaffold invented by MIT bioengineers and 
neuroscientists.  This technique, which involves giving brain cells 
an internal matrix on which to regrow, just as ivy grows on a 
trellis, may one day help patients with traumatic brain injuries, 
spinal cord injuries and stroke. The study, which appeared in the 
online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of 
Sciences the week of March 13-17, is the first that uses 
nanotechnology to repair and heal the brain and restore function of a 
damaged brain region. "If we can reconnect parts of the brain that 
were disconnected by a stroke, then we may be able to restore speech 
to an individual who is able to understand what is said but has lost 
the ability to speak," said co-author Rutledge G. Ellis-Behnke, 
research scientist in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive 
Sciences. This work is funded by the Whitaker Foundation, the 
Deshpande Center at MIT, the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong and 
private donations by Peter Kook and the late Mr. and Mrs. Ma Yip Seng.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/brainfix.html

MORPHING VEHICLES
Picture a bird, effortlessly adjusting its wings to catch every 
current of air. Airplanes that could do the same would have many 
advantages over today's flying machines, including increased fuel 
efficiency. Now MIT engineers report they may have found a way for 
structures -- and materials -- to move in this way, essentially 
morphing from one shape into another. The discovery could lead to an 
airplane that morphs on demand from the shape that is most energy 
efficient to another better suited to agility, or to a boat whose 
hull changes shape to allow more efficient movement in choppy, calm 
or shallow waters. This science-fiction outcome, in the works for 20 
years, has been unobtainable with such conventional devices as 
hydraulics, which aren't practical for a variety of reasons -- from 
cost to weight to ease of movement. MIT's work involves a new 
application of a familiar device: the rechargeable battery. Papers 
describing the team's progress appeared earlier this year in Advanced 
Functional Materials and Electrochemical and Solid-State Letters. The 
team is led by Professors Yet-Ming Chiang of the Department of 
Materials Science and Engineering and Steven Hall of the Department 
of Aeronautics and Astronautics This work was funded by DARPA.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/morphing.html

INTERPLANETARY COMMUNICATIONS
MIT researchers have developed a tiny light detector that may allow 
for super-fast broadband communications over interplanetary 
distances. Currently, even still images from other planets are 
difficult to retrieve. "It can take hours with the existing wireless 
radio frequency technology to get useful scientific information back 
from Mars to Earth. But an optical link can do that thousands of 
times faster," said Karl Berggren, assistant professor in the 
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The new 
detector improves the detection efficiency to 57 percent at a 
wavelength of 1,550 nanometers (billionths of a meter), the same 
wavelength used by optical fibers that carry broadband signals to 
offices and homes today. That's nearly three times the current 
detector efficiency of 20 percent. Berggren, who is also affiliated 
with the Research Laboratory of Electronics, developed the detector 
with colleagues from the RLE, MIT's Lincoln Laboratory and Moscow 
State Pedagogical University. This work was funded in part by the 
U.S. Air Force.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/nanowire.html

VISUAL INSIGHTS
For years, neural activity in the brain's visual cortex was thought 
to have only one job: to create visual perceptions. A new study by 
researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory shows 
that visual cortical activity can serve another purpose--connecting 
visual experience with non-visual events. The study, which appeared 
in the March 17 issue of Science, implies that sensory parts of the 
brain may be able to accomplish more complex tasks than previously 
imagined, according to co-authors Marshall Shuler, an MIT research 
affiliate, and Mark Bear, professor of brain and cognitive sciences. 
The findings have implications for understanding how our brains imbue 
sensory experience with behavioral meaning. This work was supported 
by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/flexible.html

KEEPING SOLDIERS HEALTHY
Keeping soldiers healthy and safe was the theme of the day for
competitors from MIT and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, who 
recently vied for the top prize in the third annual Soldier Design 
Competition sponsored by MIT's Institute for Soldier 
Nanotechnologies. The MIT team Radiant Flux took the first place 
award of $5,000 for designing and building a water purifier that 
sterilizes a liter of water in less than a minute using ultraviolet 
light. The portable device employs a hand crank to power the UV bulb. 
Team EVCO, also from MIT, took second place for its device that 
distills water by harnessing the waste heat from an automobile engine.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/soldier-0308.html

WHALE SONGS
The songs of the humpback whale are among the most complex in the 
animal kingdom. Researchers led by an MIT graduate student have now 
mathematically confirmed that whales have their own syntax that uses 
sound units to build phrases that can be combined to form songs that 
last for hours. Until now, the ability to use such a hierarchical 
structure of communication has been seen only in humans. The 
research, published online in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of 
the Acoustical Society of America, offers a new approach to studying 
animal communication, although the authors do not claim that humpback 
whale songs meet the linguistic rigor necessary for a true language. 
"Humpback songs are not like human language, but elements of language 
are seen in their songs," said Ryuji Suzuki, a graduate student in 
the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Suzuki, 
who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute predoctoral fellow in 
neuroscience at MIT, is first author of the paper.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/whales.html

RAT WHISKERS
Neuroscientists at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT 
have discovered an exquisite micro-map of the brain. It's the size of 
the period at the end of this sentence, and it's in a most unexpected 
place -- connected to the whiskers on a rat's face. Based on 
discoveries in primates and cats, scientists previously thought that 
highly refined maps representing the complexities of the external 
world were the exclusive domain of the visual cortex in mammals. This 
new map is a miniature schematic, representing the direction a 
whisker is moved when it brushes against an object. "This study is a 
great counter example to the prevailing view that only the visual 
cortex has beautiful, overlapping, multiplexed maps," said 
Christopher Moore, a principal investigator at the McGovern Institute 
and an assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive 
Sciences. A paper on the work appeared online in Nature Neuroscience 
on March 20. The work was funded by the NIH, the NSF and the Howard 
Hughes Medical Institute.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/whiskers.html

TOWARD A BETTER WHEELCHAIR
An MIT graduate student in mechanical engineering spent last summer 
assessing wheelchair technology and availability in a country where 
only 3 percent of those who need a wheelchair can get one. In June 
2005, Amos Winter traveled to Tanzania on a public service fellowship 
to gather information for the Tanzania Training Center for Orthopedic 
Technologies in collaboration with San Francisco-based Whirlwind 
Wheelchair International. "This is an area where I can make a real 
contribution," he said. During his time in Tanzania, Winter 
interviewed hundreds of wheelchair users about the challenges they 
face every day. One of Winter's goals is to educate those who 
manufacture wheelchairs in Tanzania. He plans to spend the coming 
summer working on a manual of basic mechanical engineering skills. 
This September, he will present the manual both to local technicians 
in Tanzania and at the 2006 African Wheelchair Congress.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/wheelchair.html

MARINE SWAP-MEET
New evidence from open sea experiments shows there's a constant 
shuffling of genetic endowments going on among tiny plankton, and the 
"coinage" they use seems to be a flood of viruses, MIT scientists 
report. The research, led by MIT Professor Sally Chisholm, is 
uncovering a challenging new facet of evolution, helping scientists 
see how photosynthesizing microbes manage to exploit changing 
conditions such as altered light, temperature and nutrients. The work 
was reported in two articles in the March 24 issue of Science. As a 
result of the new findings, "we are beginning to get a picture of 
gene diversity and gene flow in the most abundant photosynthetic cell 
on the planet, the Prochlorococcus group of planktonic microbes," 
said Chisholm, of the Departments of Civil and Environmental 
Engineering  and Biology. She notes that these photosynthesizing 
bacteria "form an important part of the food chain in the oceans, 
supply some of the oxygen we breathe, and even play a role in 
modulating climate. So it's very important that we understand what 
regulates their populations. Major support for this research came 
from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Marine Microbiology 
Program, the NSF and the DOE.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/plankton.html

CHILDREN & DIGITAL CULTURE
Children need to participate fully in digital culture in order to 
develop the "skills, knowledge, ethical frameworks and 
self-confidence needed to be full participants in the world around 
them," MIT Professor Henry Jenkins told members of the American 
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) recently. Jenkins, 
director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program (CMSP), presented 
a paper some of the early research findings from the CMSP's New Media 
Literacies project. He focused on 21st-century literacy, which is 
based on the ability to read and write and includes the digital 
skills to participate socially and collaboratively in the new media 
environment. Jenkins proposed that there is a high 21st-century 
literacy rate among teens -- measured by their skillful use of all 
things digital, including instant messaging, Myspace, sampling, 
zines, mashups, Wikipedia, gaming and spoiling -- that has far more 
meaning than "screen time" implies. Jenkins' new book, "Convergence 
Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide," will be published this 
summer by New York University Press.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/jenkins-0315.html

CANCER, ARTHRITIS LINK
The biological processes underlying diseases such as rheumatoid 
arthritis and cancer are fundamentally linked, and should be linked 
in how they are treated with drugs, a series of MIT studies 
indicates. Key to the work: The researchers applied an engineering 
approach to cell biology, using mathematical and numerical tools 
normally associated with the former discipline. In a series of three 
papers, the latest of which appeared in the March 24 issue of Cell, 
Professors Douglas Lauffenburger, Peter Sorger and Michael Yaffe, all 
members of MIT's Center for Cancer Research, led a team of scientists 
and engineers in looking at how cells make life-or-death decisions. 
Understanding what tips a cell toward survival or death is key to 
treating diseases and fighting cancer through radiation, drug therapy 
and chemotherapy. This work is supported by the NIH and the Whitaker 
Foundation.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/cancer-links.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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