[Editors] MIT Research Digest - February 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 - February 2006
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For Immediate Release
WEDNESDAY, FEB. 1, 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: Disappearing Act * Black Hole 'Dimple'
Cracks Cracks Cracks * Multiplying Stem Cells
American Teens & Tech * Cloned Stem Cells
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DISAPPEARING ACT
Scientists have found new evidence that black holes are performing the disappearing acts for which they are known. A team from MIT and Harvard has found that a certain type of X-ray explosion common on neutron stars is never seen around their black hole cousins, as if the gas that fuels these explosions has vanished into a void. This is strong evidence, the team said, for the existence of a theoretical border around a black hole called an event horizon, a point from beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. Ron Remillard of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT led the analysis and discussed his team's result at a January meeting of the American Astronomical Society. This work is funded by NASA.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/blackhole1.html
IMAGE AVAILABLE

BLACK HOLE 'DIMPLE'
MIT scientists and colleagues have found a black hole that has chiseled a remarkably stable indentation in the fabric of space and time, like a dimple in one's favorite spot on a sofa. The finding may help scientists measure a black hole's mass and how it spins, two long-sought measurements, by virtue of the extent of this indentation.  Using NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, the team saw identical patterns in the X-ray light emitted near the black hole over a nine-year period, as captured in archived data from 1996 and in a new observation from 2005. Black hole regions are notoriously chaotic, generating light at a range of frequencies. Similarities seen nine years apart imply something very fundamental is producing a pair of observed frequencies, namely the warping of space and time predicted by Einstein but rarely seen in such detail. Jeroen Homan of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT presented the work at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/blackhole2.html
IMAGE AVAILABLE

CRACKS CRACKS CRACKS
An MIT researcher's atom-by-atom simulation of cracks forming and spreading may help explain how materials fail in nanoscale devices, airplanes and even in the Earth itself during a quake. This work, which could impact a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines, appeared in the Jan. 19 issue of Nature. "Classical theories of crack dynamics are only valid in a small range of material behavior," said Markus Buehler, principal investigator in the Atomistic Mechanics Modeling Group in MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "Our results represent a major breakthrough in understanding how cracks propagate in a variety of brittle materials, and our theory helps explain experimental and computational observations that have been poorly understood so far." Buehler's coauthor on the work is Huajian Gao of the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/cracks.html
IMAGES AVAILABLE

MULTIPLYING STEM CELLS
MIT and Whitehead Institute researchers have discovered a way to multiply an adult stem cell 30 times, an expansion that offers tremendous promise for treatments such as bone marrow transplants and perhaps even gene therapy. "A 30-fold increase is 10 times higher than anyone's achieved before," says MIT professor of biology and Whitehead member Harvey Lodish, senior author on a paper published Jan. 22 online in Nature Medicine. Adult stem cells may be free of the ethical concerns that hamper embryonic stem cell research, but they pose formidable scientific challenges. Chief among these is the doggedness with which adult stem cells differentiate into mature tissue the moment they're isolated from the body. This makes it nearly impossible for researchers to multiply them in the laboratory. And because adult stem cells are so rare, it is difficult to use them to treat disease. This research was funded by the NIH and the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/blood.html

AMERICAN TEENS & TECH
Gasoline-powered automobiles, compact discs and desktop computers are headed toward the technology scrap heap, according to a recent survey of American teenagers. The 2006 Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, which gauges Americans' attitudes toward invention and innovation, found that a third of teens (33 percent) predict the demise of gasoline-powered cars by the year 2015. One in four teens (26 percent) expects compact discs to be obsolete within the next decade, and roughly another one in five (22 percent) predicts desktop computers will be a thing of the past. Teens are also optimistic that new inventions and innovations will be able to solve important global issues, such as clean water (91 percent), world hunger (89 percent), disease eradication (88 percent), pollution reduction (84 percent) and energy conservation (82 percent). 
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/lemelson-teens.html

CLONED STEM CELLS
Scientists generally agree that all cloned animals are biologically flawed. But they don't agree about what that means for stem cells derived from cloned embryos, the basis for therapeutic cloning. Also known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, therapeutic cloning is a promising approach to creating individually customized cellular therapies for treating certain disorders. Demonstrated in mice but not in humans, it begins with stem cells derived from a cloned embryo. But if cloned embryos can't produce normal organisms, how can they produce normal stem cells? Analyzing the complete gene-expression profiles of both cloned and fertilization-derived stem cells in mice, scientists at MIT and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research now have concluded that the two are, in fact, indistinguishable. "The work, funded by the NIH, was led by Whitehead member and MIT biology Professor Rudolf Jaenisch, senior author on a paper published online the week of Jan. 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/stemcells-clones.html