[Editors] MIT Research Digest, July 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, July 2006
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For Immediate Release
SATURDAY, JULY 15, 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: Namib Desert Beetle * iLabs in China
Viral Clues * Rebuilding New Orleans * Seafood Advisory
How Tumors Form * Novel Telescopes
Cancer in 3D * Oceans & CO2 * Parkinson's Advance
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NAMIB DESERT BEETLE
The Namib Desert, one of the driest regions in the world, gets less 
than half an inch of rain per year. But early in the morning, a light 
fog drifts over the desert, offering the plants and animals living in 
that harsh environment their only chance for a life-sustaining drink. 
When that fog rolls in, the Namib Desert beetle is ready with a 
moisture-collection system exquisitely adapted to its desert habitat. 
Inspired by this dime-sized beetle, MIT researchers have produced a 
new material that can capture and control tiny amounts of water. The 
material combines a superhydrophobic (water-repelling) surface with 
superhydrophilic (water-attracting) bumps that trap water droplets 
and control water flow. Potential applications for the new material 
include harvesting water, making a lab on a chip (for diagnostics and 
DNA screening) and creating microfluidic devices and cooling devices, 
according to lead researchers Robert Cohen, a professor of chemical 
engineering, and Michael Rubner, a professor of materials science and 
engineering. The work, published in the online version of Nano 
Letters, was funded by DARPA and the NSF.
PHOTOS AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/beetles-0614.html

iLABS IN CHINA
Undergraduates are at the forefront of MIT's latest efforts to share 
educational technology with China. In June, students joined MIT 
faculty at the first Asian MIT-iCampus Conference, an unprecedented 
effort to introduce China's top universities to iLabs, MIT's free 
online remote laboratory initiative. iLabs allows students and 
educators anywhere to access MIT equipment to conduct science and 
engineering experiments. "Universities can share what would 
ordinarily be extraordinarily expensive equipment, just using the 
Internet," said Hal Abelson, co-director of the MIT-Microsoft 
Research Alliance for Educational Technology and professor of 
electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Thousands of 
students in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East have used iLabs 
in their studies, using such equipment as a heat exchanger (which is 
important in the chemical engineering curriculum) to a shake table 
(which engineering students can use to study earthquakes). At the 
Beijing conference, the MIT faculty who invented iLabs demonstrated 
how the shared online laboratories can be integrated in the 
classroom, and representatives from the MIT-China Program explained 
the key role MIT students play in internationalizing iLabs.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/misti-china.html

VIRAL CLUES
Since many viruses have spent hundreds of thousands of years 
fine-tuning their abilities to hijack the cellular processes of other 
organisms, scientists have been able to learn a great deal about how 
human cells operate by studying these pathogens. Investigating one 
form of the herpes virus, researchers in the lab of Whitehead member 
and MIT Professor of Biology Hidde Ploegh have now discovered a key 
component in the machinery that cells use to dispose of misfolded 
proteins. The accumulation of such proteins can lead to conditions 
such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. "Viruses and other pathogens are 
simply mirror images of our immune system," said Ploegh, senior 
author on an article published in Nature. "The two have really 
co-evolved. By studying one, we learn about the other." The research 
was supported by the NIH.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/virus-proteins.html

REBUILDING NEW ORLEANS
The AFL-CIO has pledged $1 billion toward efforts to rebuild New 
Orleans, which will include implementing a housing plan developed by 
a team from MIT. Recently, in New Orleans, Associate Professor J. 
Phillip Thompson of MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning 
joined AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin 
and others in announcing a seven-year Gulf Coast Revitalization 
Program designed to produce affordable housing, promote homeownership 
and create good jobs with good wages for New Orleans and other 
coastal communities ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. In the spring, 
Thompson, Professor Ceasar McDowell and Assistant Professor JoAnn 
Carmin taught a course during which more than 20 MIT students worked 
with local groups in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans to create 
a housing redevelopment plan. According to Thompson, the AFL-CIO 
contacted him for help in planning their intervention in New Orleans, 
and the MIT group invited the labor union to Treme, which led to the 
union's adoption of the team's housing plan.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/katrina-dusp.html

SEAFOOD ADVISORY
In its latest outreach campaign, MIT Sea Grant has developed an 
educational pamphlet to encourage people not to release or dump live 
and fresh seafood and seafood waste into the wild. "Live and Fresh 
Seafood: Into the Pan, Not Into the Wild," provides details about 
proper handling and disposal of live seafood and seafood waste and is 
designed to prevent the introduction of marine and freshwater 
invasive seafood, such as finfish, crabs, oysters, and any animals or 
plants that may travel on seafood and seafood products. Invasive 
species are animals and plants that are introduced to new ecosystems, 
where they cause economic or environmental damage, or harm to human 
health. Each year, the United States spends an estimated $120 billion 
managing introduced species in terrestrial, freshwater and marine 
environments. This includes $1 billion trying to eradicate zebra 
mussels and quagga mussels and $100 million for green crabs. Invasive 
species are a problem everywhere in the world. In Southeast Asia, 
South American apple snails now threaten rice and taro crops. In 
Ecuador, Asia, Europe and Kenya, Louisiana crayfish are devouring 
local vegetation and damaging dams. Made possible by a grant from the 
National Sea Grant Program, the pamphlet is available in Chinese, 
Vietnamese, Khmer, Korean, Spanish and English. For more information 
or to download the free pamphlet, visit 
http://massbay.mit.edu/seafood.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/invasive.html

HOW TUMORS FORM
MIT cancer researchers have discovered a process that may explain how 
some tumor cells form, a discovery that could one day lead to new 
therapies that prevent defective cells from growing and spreading. 
The work was reported in the advance online issue of The EMBO 
Journal, a publication of the European Molecular Biology Organization 
(EMBO). Tumor cells that grow aggressively often have an irregular 
number of chromosomes, the structures in cells that carry genetic 
information. The normal number of chromosomes in a human cell is 46, 
or 23 pairs. Aggressive tumor cells often have fewer or more than 23 
pairs of chromosomes, a condition called aneuploidy. To date it has 
not been clear how tumor cells become aneuploid. "Checkpoint 
proteins" within cells work to prevent cells from dividing with an 
abnormal number of chromosomes, but scientists have been puzzled by 
evidence that aneuploidy can result even when these proteins appear 
to be normal. What MIT researchers have discovered is a reason these 
checkpoint proteins may be unable to sense the defective cells. The 
work was led by Viji Draviam, a research scientist in MIT's 
Department of Biology. It was funded by the NIH.
IMAGE AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/tumor-cells.html

NOVEL TELESCOPE
A novel telescope that will aid the understanding of the early 
universe is moving closer to full-scale construction thanks to a $4.9 
million award from the National Science Foundation to a U.S. 
consortium led by MIT. The Mileura Widefield Array - Low Frequency 
Demonstrator (LFD), which is being built in Australia by the United 
States and Australian Partners, will also allow scientists to better 
predict solar bursts of superheated gas that can play havoc with 
satellites, communication links and power grids.  In support of the 
solar observations, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research also 
recently made a $0.3M award to MIT. "The design of the new telescope 
is tightly focused on frontier experiments in astrophysics and 
heliospheric science. We plan to harness the enormous computing power 
of modern digital electronic devices, turning thousands of small, 
simple, cheap antennas into one of the most potent and unique 
astronomical instruments in the world," said Colin Lonsdale, the 
project's leader at MIT's Haystack Observatory. LFD collaborators in 
the United States are Haystack, the MIT Kavli Institute for 
Astrophysics and Space Research and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center 
for Astrophysics. Australian partners include the CSIRO Australia 
Telescope National Facility and an Australian university consortium 
led by the University of Melbourne.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/telescope.html

CANCER IN 3D
New research at MIT may lead the pharmaceutical industry to take a 
whole new approach to battling the spread of cancer. Cancer spreads 
when a cell breaks away from a primary tumor, settles in a new 
location and once again divides -- a process known as metastasis. 
Pharmaceutical companies evaluating anti-cancer therapeutics 
typically use simplistic two-dimensional assays, or tests, to measure 
success in stopping metastasis. In these assays, cells crawl across 
the surface of a matrix, traveling in a single plane. A new MIT study 
indicates that this common approach for evaluating anti-cancer 
therapeutics misses some crucial phenomena. Working in the labs of 
Whitehead member and MIT Professor Paul Matsudaira and MIT Professor 
Douglas Lauffenburger, postdoctoral researcher Muhammad Zaman 
discovered that cells move quite differently in three dimensions. His 
study, which focused on human prostate tumor cells, appeared the week 
of July 10 in the online early edition of Proceedings of the National 
Academy of Sciences. "Two-dimensional assays ignore the obstacles 
that cells face in their natural contexts," said Zaman, who recently 
became an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. 
"In 3-D, cells move through a thick jungle of fibers, or 'vines,' 
that hinder forward progress." The research was funded by the NIH, 
the NSF and the Sokol Foundation for Cancer Research.
IMAGES AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/3d-whitehead.html

OCEANS & CO2
Circulation in the waters near the Antarctic coast may be one of the 
planet's critical means of regulating levels of carbon dioxide in the 
Earth's atmosphere, according to researchers from MIT, Princeton and 
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Though climate 
scientists have long debated why atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide 
vary over lengthy periods in Earth's history, researchers now appear 
to have found a clue. In a recent issue of the journal Nature, the 
team reports that computer modeling has revealed that the waters in 
the Southern Ocean below 60 degrees south latitude -- the region that 
hugs the continent of Antarctica -- play a far more significant role 
than was previously thought in regulating atmospheric carbon. The 
waters north of this region do comparably little to regulate it, 
confuting past theories, the team found. "Cold water that wells up 
regularly from the depths of the Southern Ocean spreads out on the 
ocean's surface along both sides of this dividing line, and we have 
found that the water performs two very different functions depending 
on which side of the line it flows toward," said Irina Marinov, the 
study's lead author and a postdoctoral fellow in MIT's Department of 
Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. This research was 
sponsored in part by the DOE and NOAA.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/oceans.html

PARKINSON'S ADVANCE
More than a million Americans suffer from Parkinson's disease -- a 
number that is expected to soar over the next few decades as the 
population ages. No current therapies alter the fundamental clinical 
course of the condition. Now, scientists at MIT and the Whitehead 
Institute, in collaboration with colleagues at several research 
centers including the University of Missouri, have identified a key 
biological pathway that, when obstructed, causes Parkinson's 
symptoms. Even more importantly, they have figured out how to repair 
that pathway and restore normal neurological function in certain 
animal models. "For the first time we've been able to repair 
dopaminergic neurons, the specific cells that are damaged in 
Parkinson's disease," said MIT biology professor, Whitehead member 
and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Susan Lindquist, 
senior author on a paper published June 22 online in Science. This 
work was supported by the NIH.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/parkinsons.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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