[Editors] MIT Research Digest, August 2006
Elizabeth Thomson
thomson at MIT.EDU
Tue Aug 8 15:27:03 EDT 2006
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, August 2006
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For Immediate Release
TUESDAY, AUG. 8, 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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
IN THIS ISSUE: Exploring Anesthesia * Superfluidity
The Brain in Action * Inflammation, Disease Link
Synthetic Biology * Crystal Structures * Mars Probes
Cell-Shaped Building * Robopsy * Hyperbow
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
EXPLORING ANESTHESIA
Raise your hand if you are more afraid of the prospect of general
anesthesia than of surgery itself. If you raised your hand, you are
not alone, according to Dr. Emery Brown, who explores what happens to
the brain during anesthesia. "Anesthesia has taken on a mythical
quality; it's not perceived as a neuro-physiological phenomenon,"
said Brown, who has appointments in the Harvard-MIT Division of
Health Sciences and Technology and MIT's Department of Brain and
Cognitive Sciences. He describes the motivation behind his current
research focus: "For many years, I was practicing anesthesiology,
learning clinical skills in order to take care of patients, not
thinking about how anesthesia affects patients. Then 10 years ago,
when HST alum Dr. Greg Koski was the head of human studies at
Massachusetts General Hospital, he said, 'It would be interesting to
see an image, to see what happens when someone is under anesthesia.'"
Brown was hooked. "Anesthesiology is being practiced today in much
the same way it was when it was first developed at MGH 160 years ago
(this October)," he said. "To me, anesthesiology is one of the most
exciting frontiers in medicine. If you look at the deep question --
where did this person go under anesthesia -- we can get insights
about consciousness, about sleep, about meditation."
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/brown.html
SUPERFLUIDITY
For the first time, MIT scientists have directly observed the
transition of a gas to a superfluid, a form of matter closely related
to the superconductors that allow electrical currents to travel
without resistance. Observations of superfluids may help solve
lingering questions about high-temperature superconductivity, which
has widespread applications for magnets, sensors and energy-efficient
transport of electricity. The superfluid gas created at MIT can also
serve as an easily controlled model system to study properties of
neutron stars or the quark-gluon plasma that existed in the early
universe. The work, reported in Nature and in Physical Review
Letters, was led by Nobel laureate Wolfgang Ketterle, a professor of
physics and a principal investigator in MIT's Research Laboratory of
Electronics. It was supported by the NSF, the ONR and NASA.
IMAGE AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/superfluidity.html
THE BRAIN IN ACTION
For the first time, scientists have been able to watch neurons within
the brain of a living animal change in response to experience. Thanks
to a new imaging system, researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for
Learning and Memory have gotten an unprecedented look into how genes
shape the brain in response to the environment. Their work is
reported in the July 28 issue of Cell. "This is the first study that
demonstrates the ability to directly visualize the molecular activity
of individual neurons in the brain of live animals at a single-cell
resolution, and to observe the changes in the activity in the same
neurons in response to the changes of the environment on a daily
basis for a week," said first author Kuan Hong Wang, a research
scientist at the Picower Institute. This advance, coupled with other
brain disease models, could "offer unparalleled advantages in
understanding pathological processes in real time, leading to
potential new drugs and treatments for a host of neurological
diseases and mental disorders," said Nobel laureate and MIT Professor
Susumu Tonegawa, a co-author of the study. The work was supported by
the NIH, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the RIKEN-MIT
Neuroscience Research Center.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/neuron.html
INFLAMMATION, DISEASE LINK
MIT research may help scientists better understand the chemical
associations between chronic inflammation and diseases such as cancer
and atherosclerosis. The work could lead to drugs that break the link
between the two. When an infection occurs, immune cells flock to the
area and secrete large amounts of chemicals to combat the invader.
But, these inflammatory chemicals also attack normal tissue
surrounding the infection and damage critical components of cells,
including DNA. During chronic inflammation, that damage may lead to
mutations or cell death and even to cancer and other diseases. MIT
researchers in the lab of Peter Dedon, professor of toxicology and
biological engineering and associate director of MIT's Biological
Engineering Division, have discovered that the DNA damage produced by
one of these chemicals occurs at unexpected locations along the DNA
helix. The finding counters the prevailing theory about where the DNA
damage occurs. "We need to understand the mechanisms of inflammation
in order to make new drugs that will break the link between
inflammation and disease and to develop predictive biomarkers," Dedon
said. The work, reported in Nature Chemical Biology, was funded by
the National Cancer Institute.
PHOTO, GRAPHIC AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/dna-damage.html
SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY
Five MIT researchers are among the pioneers behind a new research
center in synthetic biology, a precocious field whose primary
long-term goal is to make it easier to design and build useful
organisms. Current work includes refining pieces of DNA into standard
biological parts that researchers could then mix and match to produce
novel biological systems -- such as bacteria that synthesize rare
cancer drugs. The Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center
(SynBERC) is funded largely by the NSF. In addition to MIT,
participating universities are the University of California at
Berkeley; Harvard University; University of California at San
Francisco; and Prairie View A&M University. The center is managed via
the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research and
directed by Professor Jay Keasling of UC Berkeley. The work of the
center will be distributed, with major nodes in Cambridge and San
Francisco. "SynBERC is the first time we've had long-term support to
improve the technical foundations that underlie the engineering of
biology," said Andrew Endy, an assistant professor in MIT's Division
of Biological Engineering and a co-investigator in the new center.
IMAGE AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/synthetic.html
CRYSTAL STRUCTURES
The same computer methods used by online sales sites to suggest books
to customers can help predict the crystal structures of materials,
MIT researchers have found. These structures are key to designing new
materials and improving existing ones, which means that everything
from batteries to airplane wings could be influenced by the new
method. The scientists reported their findings in the July 9 online
edition of Nature Materials. Using a technique called data mining,
the MIT team preloaded the entire body of historical knowledge of
crystal structures into a computer algorithm, or program, which they
had designed to make correlations among the data based on the
underlying rules of physics. Harnessing this knowledge, the program
then delivers a list of possible crystal structures for any mixture
of elements whose structure is unknown. The team can then run that
list of possibilities through a second algorithm to calculate
precisely which structure is the most stable. Professor Gerbrand
Ceder of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering led the
research team. This work was funded by the NSF and MIT's Institute
for Soldier Nanotechnologies.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/materials.html
MARS PROBES
MIT engineers and colleagues have a new vision for the future of Mars
exploration: a swarm of probes, each the size of a baseball,
spreading out across the planet in every direction. Thousands of
probes, powered by fuel cells, could cover a vast area now beyond the
reach of today's rovers, including remote and rocky terrain that
large rovers cannot navigate. "They would start to hop, bounce and
roll and distribute themselves across the surface of the planet,
exploring as they go, taking scientific data samples," said Steven
Dubowsky, the MIT professor of mechanical engineering who is leading
the work. Dubowsky's team plans to test prototypes on Earth this fall
and estimates that a trip to Mars is about 10 years away. He is
working with Penelope Boston, director of the cave research program
at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, to create
probes that can handle the rough terrain of Mars. The work is funded
by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts.
IMAGE, VIDEO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/microbots.html
CELL-SHAPED BUILDING
An innovative cell-shaped building will house a new biomedical
research institute in China, thanks to an unusual crossdisciplinary
collaboration between Shuguang Zhang, a world-renowned bioengineer at
MIT, his former student, architecture major Sloan Kulper, and
computer science and electrical engineering major Audrey Roy. Kulper
(MIT S.B. 2003) and Roy (MIT S.B. 2005) designed the cell-shaped
building for the Institute for Nanobiomedical Technology and Membrane
Biology in Chengdu, China. The proposed new facility will contain
170,000 square feet of laboratory, research and meeting spaces; it is
slated for construction over the next three years. The building is
intended to look like a cell from the outside and to include an
assortment of forms inspired by molecular biology inside. Zhang,
associate director of MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering, will
serve as founding advisor of the new Nanobiomedical Institute, to be
sited at Chengdu's Sichuan University, where Zhang received his
undergraduate degree in biochemistry.
IMAGES AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/cellbuilding.html
ROBOPSY
Two MIT graduate students have helped design a machine that may make
needle biopsies less invasive and less prone to complications for
lung cancer patients. Working with Professor of Mechanical
Engineering Alexander Slocum and Massachusetts General Hospital
radiologist Rajiv Gupta, MIT mechanical engineering graduate students
Conor Walsh and Nevan Hanumara, along with graduate student Steven
Barrett of the University of Cambridge, have come up with a machine
they call Robopsy -- a lightweight, plastic, dome-shaped device that
holds a biopsy needle and can sit on a patient's chest during a CT
scan. The team hopes the invention will cut both time and
complications from a typical lung biopsy. Currently, doctors use a CT
scan to find a suspect mass in a patient -- but they cannot be in the
room during the scan because the scan uses radiation. They therefore
watch the scan through a computer monitor and then return to the room
to find the right spot for the biopsy manually. The process can be
very complicated and may require more than one puncture. "We are
trying to make it just one poke," Walsh said.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/robopsy.html
HYPERBOW
A Ph.D. candidate in the Hyperinstruments Group of the MIT Media Lab
has developed a new electronic sensing system to measure minute
changes in the position, acceleration and strain of a violin bow. The
system can be used to evaluate different bowing techniques and may
expand the expressive possibilities of the violin by electronic
means, according to Diana Young, who built the gesture-sensing system
for the Hyperbow. Young recently spoke about her work at a meeting of
the Acoustical Society of America and at the International Conference
on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. The Hyperbow is an enhanced
bow, used in conjunction with a Hyperviolin. The latter, another
product of the MIT Media Lab, is an instrument that makes no sound
but creates an electronic output when played. The Hyperviolin can
readily be played by anyone used to an acoustic violin.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/violin.html
--END--
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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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