[Editors] MIT Research Digest, October 2006
Elizabeth Thomson
thomson at MIT.EDU
Thu Oct 5 13:41:57 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, October 2006
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For Immediate Release
THURSDAY, OCT. 5, 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: Flying Robots * Eco-Friendly Iron
Reshaping Shakespeare * Preventing Seizures
'Invisible' Wind Turbines * Gas, Oil Exploration
Engine on a Chip * Quick-Change Artist * Molecular Sieve
Cloud Forest * Carbon Nanotubes * Cost-Estimation Tool
Complicated Knot * Better Nuclear Power * Brain Imaging
Ultra-Fast Reactions * Drugs & Disease
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FLYING ROBOTS
The U.S. military depends on small, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
to perform such tasks as serving as "eyes in the sky" for battalion
commanders planning maneuvers. While some of these UAVs can be easily
carried in a backpack and launched by hand, they typically require a
team of trained operators on the ground, and they perform only
short-term tasks individually rather than sustained missions in
coordinated groups. MIT researchers, in collaboration with Boeing's
advanced research and development arm, Phantom Works, are working to
change that. They have developed a multiple-UAV test platform that
could lay the groundwork for an intelligent airborne fleet that
requires little human supervision, covers a wide area, and
automatically maintains the "health" of its vehicles (for example,
vehicles anticipate when they need refueling, and new vehicles launch
to replace lost, damaged, or grounded ones). Aeronautics and
Astronautics Professor Jonathan How, who leads the team, believes it
is the first platform to publicly demonstrate sustained, coordinated,
autonomous flight with multiple UAVs. The work is sponsored by Boeing
Phantom Works.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/flyingrobots.html
PHOTOS AVAILABLE
ECO-FRIENDLY IRON
MIT engineers have demonstrated an eco-friendly way to make iron that
eliminates the greenhouse gases usually associated with its
production. The American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) announced
recently that the team, led by Donald Sadoway of the Department of
Materials Science and Engineering, has shown the technical viability
of producing iron by molten oxide electrolysis. "What sets molten
oxide electrolysis apart from other metal-producing technologies is
that it is totally carbon-free and hence generates no carbon dioxide
gases -- only oxygen," said Lawrence Kavanagh, AISI vice president of
manufacturing and technology. The work was funded by the
AISI/Department of Energy Technology Roadmap Program.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/iron.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
RESHAPING SHAKESPEARE
The works of William Shakespeare have a timeless quality, but it
would be a mistake to imagine these "classics" have retained their
adamantine purity despite the passage of time. As Diana Henderson,
MIT professor of literature, shows in her new book, "Collaborations
With the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media" (Cornell
University Press), even those trying "faithfully" to represent
Shakespeare cannot do so, because the context in which his works were
formed is gone for good. Instead, producers, writers and filmmakers
must engage in "Shake-shifting," a collaboration in which both
artists and the Bard give and take. In four case studies, Henderson
highlights "the rewards, choices and responsibilities of re-creating
culture across time and media, and the ingenuity and difficulties of
a collaborative model of artistic process. It is as much about art in
the modern world as it is about the figure, legacy and plays of
William Shakespeare."
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/henderson.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
PREVENTING SEIZURES
MIT researchers are developing a device that could detect and prevent
epileptic seizures before they become debilitating. Epilepsy affects
about 50 million people worldwide, and while anticonvulsant
medications can reduce the frequency of seizures, the drugs are
ineffective for as many as one in three patients. The new treatment
builds on an existing treatment for epilepsy, the Cyberonics Inc.
vagus nerve stimulator (VNS), which is often used in patients who do
not respond to drugs. A defibrillator typically implanted under the
patient's collarbone stimulates the left vagus nerve about every five
minutes, which has been shown to help reduce the frequency and
severity of seizures in many patients. The MIT researchers and
colleagues at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Children's
Hospital and Harvard Medical School seek to improve the treatment by
combining it with a detector that measures brain activity to predict
when a seizure is about to occur. The new device would sense the
oncoming seizure and then activate the VNS. "Our contribution is the
software that decides when to turn the stimulator on," said John
Guttag, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science. Guttag developed the system along with Ali Shoeb, a
graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and
Technology. This work was funded by the Center for Integration of
Medicine and Innovative Technology, the U.S. Army and MIT's Project
Oxygen.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/epilepsy.html
'INVISIBLE' WIND TURBINES
An MIT researcher has a vision: Four hundred huge offshore wind
turbines providing onshore customers with enough electricity to power
several hundred thousand homes, and nobody standing onshore can see
them. The trick? The turbines are floating on platforms a hundred
miles out to sea. Today's offshore wind turbines usually stand on
towers driven deep into the ocean floor. But that works only in water
depths of about 15 meters or less. Proposed installations are
therefore typically close enough to shore to arouse strong public
opposition. Paul Sclavounos, a professor of mechanical engineering
and naval architecture, has spent decades designing and analyzing
large floating structures for deep-sea oil and gas exploration.
Observing the wind-farm controversies, he thought, "Wait a minute.
Why can't we simply take those windmills and put them on floaters and
move them farther offshore?" So he and his MIT colleagues teamed up
with wind-turbine experts from the National Renewable Energy
Laboratory (NREL) to integrate a wind turbine with a floater. Their
design calls for a system in which long steel cables, or "tethers,"
connect the corners of the platform to a concrete-block or other
mooring system on the ocean floor. The platform and turbine are thus
supported not by an expensive tower but by buoyancy. Encouraged by
positive responses from wind, electric power, and oil companies,
Sclavounos hopes to install a half-scale prototype south of Cape Cod.
This research was supported by the NREL.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/wind.html
IMAGES AVAILABLE
GAS, OIL EXPLORATION
Just as doctors use ultrasound to image internal organs and unborn
babies, MIT Earth Resources Laboratory researchers listen to the
echoing language of rocks to map what's going on tens of thousands of
feet below the Earth's surface. With the help of a new $580,000 US
Department of Energy grant, the earth scientists will use their
skills at interpreting underground sound to seek out "sweet
spots"--pockets of natural gas and oil contained in fractured porous
rocks--in a Wyoming oil field. If the method proves effective at
determining where to drill wells, it could eventually be used at oil
and gas fields across the country.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/tightgas.html
IMAGE AVAILABLE
ENGINE ON A CHIP
MIT researchers are putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a
silicon chip about the size of a quarter. The resulting device could
run 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight can, powering
laptops, cell phones, radios and other electronic devices. It could
also dramatically lighten the load for people who can't connect to a
power grid, including soldiers who now must carry many pounds of
batteries for a three-day mission -- all at a reasonable price. The
researchers say that in the long term, mass-production could bring
the per-unit cost of power from microengines close to that for power
from today's large gas-turbine power plants. The work, led by
Professor Alan Epstein of the Department of Aeronautics and
Astronautics, is funded by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/microengines.html
PHOTOS AVAILABLE
QUICK-CHANGE ARTIST
It's taken 19 long years of painstaking, high-precision experiments,
but it's finally official: Physicists have announced the observation
of a subatomic particle known as the Bs (pronounced "B sub s") meson
switching between matter and antimatter states at a mind-boggling 3
trillion times per second. The work could lead to a better
understanding of the early universe, in which these particles were
present in great abundance. It will also help physicists refine
different theoretical models in high-energy physics. Christoph Paus,
a professor of physics at MIT, led the analysis of years' worth of
data from the world's highest-energy particle accelerator.
Representing the 700-member team of the Collider Detector at Fermilab
(CDF) collaboration, Paus presented the discovery to the scientific
community Sept. 22 at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. CDF
is supported by the DOE, the NSF and international funding agencies.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/antimatter-2.html
IMAGE, PHOTO AVAILABLE
MOLECULAR SIEVE
New MIT technology promises to speed up the accurate sorting of
proteins, work that may ultimately aid in the detection and treatment
of disease. Separating proteins from complex biological fluids such
as blood is becoming increasingly important for understanding
diseases and developing new treatments. The new molecular sieve is
more precise than conventional methods and has the potential to be
much faster. The team's results appear in recent issues of Physical
Review Letters, the Virtual Journal of Biological Physical Research
and the Virtual Journal of Nanoscale Science and Technology. The key
to the molecular sieve, which is made using microfabrication
technology, is the uniform size of the nanopores through which
proteins are separated from biological fluids. Millions of pores can
be spread across a microchip the size of a thumbnail. "No one has
been able to measure the gel pore sizes accurately," said Professor
Jongyoon Han of Electrical Engineering and Biological Engineering at
MIT. "With our nanopore system, we control the pore size precisely,
so we can control the sieving process of the protein molecules."
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/sieve.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
CLOUD FOREST
Trees that live in an odd desert forest in Oman have found an unusual
way to water themselves by extracting moisture from low-lying clouds,
MIT scientists report. In an area that is characterized mostly by
desert, the trees have preserved an ecological niche because they
exploit a wispy-thin source of water that only occurs seasonally,
said Elfatih A.B. Eltahir, professor of civil and environmental
engineering, and former MIT graduate student Anke Hildebrandt. After
studying the Oman site, they also expressed concern that the unusual
forest could be driven into extinction if hungry camels continue
eating too much of the foliage. As the greenery disappears it's
possible the trees will lose the ability to pull water from the mist
and recharge underground reservoirs. A report on their research was
published in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters. They are
also advising the Omani government on handling the problem.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/cloudforest.html
PHOTOS AVAILABLE
CARBON NANOTUBES
Based on a new theory, MIT scientists may be able to manipulate
carbon nanotubes -- one of the strongest known materials and one of
the trickiest to work with -- without destroying their extraordinary
electrical properties. The cylindrical carbon molecules 50,000 times
thinner than a human hair have properties that make them potentially
useful in many applications. The problem is working with them. There
is no reliable way to arrange the nanotubes into a circuit, partly
because growing them can result in a randomly oriented mess
resembling a bowl of spaghetti. Researchers have attached to the side
walls of the tiny tubes chemical molecules that work as "handles"
that allow the tubes to be assembled and manipulated. But these
molecular bonds also change the tubes' structure and destroy their
conductivity. Now a team led by Professor Nicola Marzari of the
Department of Materials Science and Engineering has identified a
class of chemical molecules that preserve the metallic properties of
carbon nanotubes and their near-perfect ability to conduct
electricity with little resistance. The work, reported in a Sept.
issue of Physical Review Letters, is supported by the MIT Institute
for Soldier Nanotechnologies and the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/nanotubes.html
IMAGE AVAILABLE
COST-ESTIMATION TOOL
Consider the following scenario: A project manager at an aerospace
company is about to bid on the development of a new air fighter for
the U.S. Air Force. The bid must bring the project in on time, on
budget and meet all the government's requirements. If the bid is too
low, the project will miss these markers; too high and the company
will be seen as wasteful or inefficient and may disqualify itself
from the competition. Now a new, first-of-its-kind systems
engineering cost-estimation model developed by an MIT researcher can
ensure that the bid is right on target. The model allows companies
and organizations to develop more accurate bid proposals, thereby
eliminating excess "cost overrun" padding that is often built into
these proposals. The Constructive Systems Engineering Cost Model
(COSYSMO), now available commercially, was developed by Ricardo
Valerdi, a researcher at MIT's Lean Aerospace Initiative.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/complex.html
COMPLICATED KNOT
An MIT team has discovered the most complicated knot ever seen in a
protein, and they believe it may be linked to the protein's function
as a rescue agent for proteins marked for destruction. "In proteins,
the three-dimensional structure is very important to the function,
and this is just one example," said Peter Virnau, a postdoctoral
fellow in physics and an author of a paper on the work that appeared
in a recent issue of the Public Library of Science, Computational
Biology. Coauthors are Professor Leonid Mirny of the MIT-Harvard
Division of Health Sciences and Technology and Professor Mehran
Kardar of physics. The research was funded by the NSF and the German
Research Foundation.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/knots-0920.html
IMAGE AVAILABLE
BETTER NUCLEAR POWER
MIT researchers are working on several innovations that could make
existing nuclear power plants more efficient and safer to run. In a
three-year project completed recently for the U.S. Department of
Energy, Pavel Hejzlar and Professor Mujid Kazimi of MIT's Department
of Nuclear Science and Engineering teamed up with Westinghouse and
other companies to look at how to make a fuel for one kind of
reactor, the pressurized water reactor (PWR), 30 percent or more
efficient while maintaining or improving safety margins. They changed
the shape of the fuel from solid cylinders to hollow tubes. This
added surface area that allows water to flow inside and outside the
pellets, increasing heat transfer. The new fuel proved to be easy to
manufacture and capable of boosting the plant power output of PWRs by
50 percent. In a second project, Professor Jacopo Buongiorno of the
same department has come up with a way to change water's thermal
properties that may contribute to plants' safety while boosting the
amount of energy they can pump out. Nanoparticles are key to his
work, which is funded by the Idaho National Laboratory, the nuclear
energy vendor AREVA and the MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/reactors-0920.html
PHOTOS AVAILABLE
BRAIN IMAGING
If you want to see precisely what the 10 billion neurons in a
person's brain are doing, a good way to start is to track calcium as
it flows into neurons when they fire. To that end, Professor Alan
Jasanoff at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research has developed
a new nano-sized calcium-sensing contrast agent that is detectable by
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, machines that can be used
for detailed noninvasive brain imaging. The new agent, which
incorporates extra-strength molecular-sized magnets, results in large
MRI contrast changes capable of producing very high-resolution
images. The work is reported in the early online edition of the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Sept.
25-29. It is supported by the Raymond & Beverly Sackler Foundation,
the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and a
McKnight Foundation Technological Innovations in Neuroscience award.
Jasanoff also holds appointments in MIT's Department of Nuclear
Science and Engineering, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences,
and Biological Engineering Division.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/imaging-neurons.html
IMAGES AVAILABLE
ULTRA-FAST REACTIONS
MIT researchers have made a fundamental advance in understanding how
different environments affect chemical reactions by devising a novel
way to observe ultrafast photochemical reactions--reactions induced
by a pulse of laser light--in crystals. The new MIT experiments show
that the reaction dynamics, including whether the product molecules
remain or recombine to reform the original compound, depend with
exquisite sensitivity on the local "cage" environment formed by
neighboring molecules in the crystal. Cage effects of this sort play
crucial roles in many natural and industrial chemical processes. The
method they have developed allows them to observe other light-induced
changes in solids, including those used to burn CDs and DVDs. For
some materials, these transitions may be reversible, allowing
information to be both written and erased. Keith Nelson, MIT
professor of chemistry, leads the team. The work, published in
Science, was partly funded by the Office of Naval Research.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/photochemistry-0927.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
DRUGS AND DISEASE
A team led by scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
has developed a new kind of genetic "roadmap" that can connect human
diseases with potential drugs to treat them, as well as predict how
new drugs work in human cells. Called the "Connectivity Map," the new
tool and its uses are described in the Sept. 29 issue of Science and
in separate papers in the Sept. 28 early edition of Cancer Cell. The
three papers show the map's ability to accurately predict the
molecular actions of novel therapeutic compounds and to suggest new
applications for existing drugs. Based on these initial results, the
researchers propose a public project to expand the Connectivity
Map--in the spirit of the Human Genome Project--to accelerate the
search for new drugs to treat disease.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/drugs.html
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Elizabeth A. Thomson
Senior Science and Engineering Editor
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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