[Editors] MIT Research Digest, June 2006
Elizabeth Thomson
thomson at MIT.EDU
Tue Jun 6 09:59:30 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
======================================
MIT Research Digest, June 2006
======================================
For Immediate Release
TUESDAY, JUNE 6, 2006
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
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
IN THIS ISSUE: Detecting Tumors * Seeing Machine
Revamped Energy System * Oil Recovery
Human Activity & Hurricanes * Spintronics
Fluorescent Sensor * Eco-Friendly Buildings
Drug Database * Biological Cloaking Device
Humans & Chimps * Monkey Business * Acquiring Language
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
DETECTING TUMORS
A new technique devised by MIT engineers may one
day help physicians detect cancerous tumors
during early stages of growth. The technique
allows nanoparticles to group together inside
tumors, creating masses with enough of a magnetic
signal to be detectable by a magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI) machine. The work appears as the
cover feature in the May issue of Angewandte
Chemie. The research, which is just moving into
animal testing, involves injecting nanoparticles
(billionths of a meter in size) made of iron
oxide into the body, where they flow through the
bloodstream and enter tumors. The work is led by
Professor Sangeeta Bhatia of the Harvard-MIT
Division of Health Sciences & Technology, MIT's
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, and the MIT-Harvard Center of Cancer
Nanotechnology Excellence. It was supported by
the National Cancer Institute, NASA and the
Whitaker Foundation.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/cancer-imaging.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
SEEING MACHINE
An MIT poet has developed a small, relatively
inexpensive "seeing machine" that can allow
people who are blind, or visually challenged like
her, to access the Internet, view the face of a
friend, "previsit" unfamiliar buildings and more.
Recently the machine received positive feedback
from 10 visually challenged people with a range
of causes for their vision loss who tested it in
a pilot clinical trial. The work was reported in
Optometry, the Journal of the American Optometric
Association. It is led by Elizabeth Goldring, a
senior fellow at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual
Studies (CAVS). She developed the machine over
the last 10 years, in collaboration with more
than 3O MIT students and some of her personal eye
doctors. The new device costs about $4,000, low
compared to the $100,000 price tag of its
inspiration, a machine Goldring discovered
through her eye doctor. This work was supported
by NASA and by MIT's School of Architecture and
Planning, CAVS, Undergraduate Research
Opportunities Program and Council for the Arts.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/seeing-machine.html
PHOTOS, VIDEO AVAILABLE
REVAMPED ENERGY SYSTEM
MIT researchers are trying to unleash the promise
of an old idea by converting light into
electricity more efficiently than ever before.
The research is applying new materials, new
technologies and new ideas to radically improve
an old concept -- thermophotovoltaic (TPV)
conversion of light into electricity. Rather than
using the engine to turn a generator or
alternator in a car, for example, the new TPV
system would burn a little fuel to create
super-bright light. Efficient photo diodes (which
are similar to solar cells) would then harvest
the energy and send the electricity off to run
the various lighting, electrical and electronic
systems in the car. Such a light-based system
would not replace the car's engine. Instead it
would supply enough electricity to run
subsystems, consuming far less fuel than is
needed to keep a heavy, multi-cylinder engine
running, even at low speed. The work is led by
Professor John Kassakian, director of the
Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic
Systems. It is presently funded in part by
Toyota, but Toyota has made no decision to
develop this technology for automobiles.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/tpv.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
OIL RECOVERY
Work in an MIT lab may help energy companies
withdraw millions of additional barrels of oil
from beneath the sea floor. Typically, companies
recover only 30 percent to 40 percent of the oil
in a given reservoir. Since a single reservoir
may contain a billion barrels total, increasing
that "recovery efficiency" by even a single
percentage point would mean a lot of additional
oil. Toward that end, Professor David Mohrig of
earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences and
Carlos Pirmez of Shell International Exploration
and Production Inc., have been examining one type
of geological formation of interest to industry
-- channels filled with highly permeable and
porous sedimentary deposits that extend deep
below the sea floor. Over the past 20 years,
energy companies have withdrawn significant
amounts of oil from such buried channels. But
they could extract even more if they understood
the channels' internal structure. This research
was supported by Shell through the MIT Department
of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/sandtable.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
HUMAN ACTIVITY & HURRICANES
Human-induced climate change, rather than
naturally occurring ocean cycles, may be
responsible for the recent increases in the
frequency and strength of North Atlantic
hurricanes, according to MIT and Penn State
researchers. From data going back to the 19th
century, scientists have found a correlation
between the temperature of the sea surface in the
tropical Atlantic and tropical cyclone activity.
Warmer surface temperatures are associated with
increases in strength and duration of cyclones.
But what is causing the increased surface
temperatures? Some scientists believe
human-induced climate change is behind the trend.
Others cite a natural cause, the so-called
Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation-- an ocean
cycle similar to the El Niño/La Niña cycle. Kerry
Emanuel, professor of atmospheric sciences at
MIT, and Professor Michael Mann at Penn State
used a statistical method to separate the
influences of one from the other. "The important
result of this work is that the tropical North
Atlantic sea surface temperature appears to be
controlled largely by radiative forcing, which
has changed over the past century mainly owing to
sulfate aerosol pollution and greenhouse gas
increases," Emanuel said. The work, which will be
reported in an upcoming issue of Eos, was
sponsored by the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/hurricanes.html
SPINTRONICS
Researchers at MIT's Francis Bitter Magnet Lab
have developed a novel magnetic semiconductor
that may greatly increase the computing power and
flexibility of future electronic devices while
dramatically reducing their power consumption.
The new material is a significant step forward in
the field of spin-based electronics -- or
"spintronics" -- where the spin state of
electrons is exploited to carry, manipulate and
store information. Conventional electronic
circuits use only the charge state (current on or
off) of an electron, but these tiny particles
also have a spin direction (up or down). Devices
such as laptops and iPods already employ
spintronics to store information in their
super-high-capacity magnetic hard drives, but
using electron spin states to process information
through circuits would be a dramatic advance in
computing. "We can carry information in two ways
at once, and this will allow us to further reduce
the size of electronic circuits," says Jagadeesh
Moodera, a senior research scientist at the
Magnet Lab and leader of the team. The research,
reported in Nature Materials, is a collaborative
effort among MIT, Boise State University (Idaho)
and the Korea Institute of Science and Technology
(KIST). It is supported by the KIST-MIT project,
the NSF and the ONR.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/spintronics-0524.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
FLUORESCENT SENSOR
MIT scientists have discovered a way to monitor a
crucial molecule as it goes about its business
within living cells. The molecule, nitric oxide
(NO), plays critical roles in the human body -
from the destruction of invading microorganisms
to the relaying of neural signals. But catching
NO at work has long eluded scientists because it
often exists in minute concentrations and for
only short periods of time. Now, MIT chemists
have developed a bright fluorescent sensor that,
in conjunction with microscopy, captures and
illuminates NO in living, functioning cells. The
work, reported May 28 in the online issue of
Nature Chemical Biology, will aid scientists'
understanding of how and when NO operates.
Funding was from the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/sensor.html
PHOTO, IMAGE AVAILABLE
ECO-FRIENDLY BUILDINGS
Operating commercial buildings consumes a sixth
of all the energy used in the Western world.
Getting rid of air conditioning could cut that
consumption by as much as a third -- but people
don't like to work in sweltering heat. So MIT and
Cambridge University researchers are making
computer-based tools to help architects design
commercial buildings that cool occupants with
natural breezes. Buildings can be designed to
encourage airflow and maintain temperatures that
minimize or eliminate the need for conventional
air-conditioning systems. "That approach improves
air quality, ensures good ventilation and saves
both energy and money," said Professor Leon
Glicksman, director of MIT's Building Technology
Program. Yet few commercial buildings now use
natural ventilation. "The approach is new, and
architects worry it won't work in the buildings
they're designing," said Glicksman, who has
appointments in the Department of Architecture
and the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
This research was supported by the Cambridge-MIT
Institute with funding from BP and the
Permasteelisa Group.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/buildings.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
DRUG DATABASE
Researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and
Harvard have released a major upgrade of
ChemBank, a publicly available database created
to help drug hunters discover new and effective
medicines. The web-based ChemBank includes data
on drug candidates and their behavior in cells
selected to serve as models of human disease,
especially cancer. Using ChemBank's analysis
tools, investigators can analyze these freely
available data and even export the raw
information to perform their own analyses. As a
result, the database enables researchers to gain
new knowledge of human disease and to identify
new drug candidates for novel therapeutics. "By
connecting many aspects of biology and medicine
with many drug candidates, ChemBank helps the
drug-hunting community become more than the sum
of its parts," said Stuart Schreiber, director of
the Initiative for Chemical Genetics, the
National Cancer Institute program that supports
the research and is housed at the Broad.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/chembank.html
BIOLOGICAL CLOAKING DEVICE
Why does our immune system easily identify many
bacterial and viral infections yet sometimes miss
other invaders, such as pathogenic fungi? This
question has troubled biologists for decades.
Now, Whitehead Institute and MIT researchers have
discovered a biological "cloaking device" that
may help pathogenic fungi hide from the immune
system. When this network of genes is disabled,
these virulent fungal invaders are suddenly
rendered vulnerable to the body's defenses. "This
network may very well be one more tactic in the
ongoing hide-and-seek game between our immune
systems and pathogenic fungi," says Gerald Fink,
a member of the Whitehead and an MIT professor of
biology. The work, which appeared in a recent
issue of the journal PLoS Pathogen, was supported
by the Bushrod H. Campbell and Adah F. Hall
Charity Fund, and the NIH.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/immune.html
HUMANS & CHIMPS
The evolutionary split between humans and
chimpanzees is much more recent -- and more
complicated -- than previously thought, according
to a new study by scientists at the Broad
Institute of MIT and Harvard and colleagues. The
work was published in the May 17 online edition
of Nature. The results show that the two species
split no more than 6.3 million years ago and
probably less than 5.4 million years ago. This is
about 1 million to 2 million years more recent
than previous estimates. Moreover, the time from
the beginning to the completion of divergence
between the two species ranges over more than 4
million years. This range is much larger than
expected. The study also indicates that the
separation of the two species was unusual --
possibly involving an initial split followed by
later interbreeding before a final separation.
"The genome analysis revealed big surprises, with
major implications for human evolution," said
Eric Lander, director of the Broad Institute and
an MIT biology professor. This work was funded in
part by the NIH, the National Human Genome
Research Institute and Burroughs-Wellcome.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/humans-chimps.html
IMAGE AVAILABLE
MONKEY BUSINESS
Rachel Kern's office in the MIT Media Lab is
quiet when visitors drop by to hear about Monkey
Business, her master's thesis and the latest
research phase in the lab's Speech Interface
Group. Then Kern sits down and begins to talk,
and soon two plush monkeys hanging by their tails
from little stands also begin to talk. The
chatter starts with a naturalistic "Squee!" from
the monkey on Kern's desk, followed at once by a
slightly different, equally natural little shriek
from the monkey on a second desk. Little monkey
faces go up and down. Invisible sensors sense.
Tiny motors whir. Fuzzy arms reach out. "They're
reacting to each other," Kern explains, as the
electronic duet escalates, then ebbs. "My goal is
to facilitate informal communication among
distributed group members -- people who work
together, but in different locations. The monkeys
alert people in one office of activity or
gathering in another place," she said. The
monkeys in Kern's office are not only responsive
to Kern and to each other, but also to monkeys in
the offices of other members of the Speech
Interface Group. Motion and proximity sensors and
individualized "speech" programming identify the
office where the fun is under way.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/monkeys-0517.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
ACQUIRING LANGUAGE
Many people preserve their babies' priceless
first smiles, words or steps on video, but
Associate Professor Deb Roy, head of the MIT
Media Lab's Cognitive Machines research group, is
taking parental attentiveness to a whole new
level. Roy is recording nearly all of his new
son's waking hours in an ambitious attempt to use
these data to unravel the mystery of how humans
naturally acquire language within the context of
their primary social setting. He will pay
particular attention to the role of physical and
social context in how his son, nine months old,
learns early words and early grammatical
constructions. Roy's vast recording and analysis
effort, known as "The Human Speechome Project"
(speech + home), will yield some 400,000 hours of
audio and video data over three years. Roy will
present a paper on the Speechome Project at the
28th Annual Cognitive Science Conference in July.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/minding-baby.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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