[Editors] MIT Research Digest, July 2007
Elizabeth Thomson
thomson at MIT.EDU
Mon Jul 9 13:26:40 EDT 2007
MIT News Office
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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MIT Research Digest, July 2007
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For Immediate Release
MONDAY, JULY 9, 2007
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.
Latest research news: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/research.html
RSS -- research feed: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/mitresearch-rss.xml
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IN THIS ISSUE: Deja Vu * Goodbye Wires * Aging and the Brain
Molecular Interactions * Analyzing Emissions Bills * Landslide!
Reversing Retardation, Autism * Understanding Protein Networks
Toward Affordable Housing * Cells' Career Paths * Robocar
China and Energy * Stem Cell Breakthrough * Electric Porsche
Noisy Learning
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DEJA VU
Neuroscientists at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
report in a June issue of Science that they have identified for the
first time a neuronal mechanism that helps us rapidly distinguish
similar, yet distinct, places. The discovery helps explain the
sensation of déjà vu. The work could lead to treatments for memory-
related disorders, as well as for the confusion and disorientation
that plague elderly individuals who have trouble distinguishing
between separate but similar places and experiences. Forming memories
of places and contexts in which episodes occur engages a part of the
brain called the hippocampus. Study co-author Susumu Tonegawa,
Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, and colleagues have
been exploring how each of the three hippocampal subregions--the
dentate gyrus, CA1 and CA3--contribute to different aspects of
learning and memory. This work was supported by the NIH.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/deja-vu-0607.html
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GOODBYE WIRES
Imagine a future in which wireless power transfer is feasible: cell
phones, household robots, mp3 players, laptop computers and other
portable electronics capable of charging themselves without ever
being plugged in, freeing us from that final, ubiquitous power wire.
Some of these devices might not even need their bulky batteries to
operate. Now a team from MIT's Department of Physics, Department of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Institute for
Soldier Nanotechnologies has experimentally demonstrated an important
step toward accomplishing this vision of the future. Realizing their
recent theoretical prediction, they were able to light a 60W light
bulb from a power source seven feet (more than two meters) away;
there was no physical connection between the source and the
appliance. The MIT team refers to its concept as "WiTricity" (as in
wireless electricity). The work was reported in a June issue of the
journal Science. The team was led by Professor Marin Soljacic of the
Department of Physics. This work was funded by the Army Research
Office, the NSF, and the DOE.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/wireless-0607.html
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AGING AND THE BRAIN
The link between calorie restriction and a longer, healthier life may
lie in the head, not in the gut, MIT biologists report. Dietary
restriction extends lifespan and retards age-related disease in many
species, although the phenomenon's underlying mechanisms remain a
mystery. Underfeeding an organism such as the ordinary roundworm
alters its endocrine function, which regulates hormones instrumental
in metabolism. But no connection between the longevity induced by
calorie restriction and the endocrine system has been found--until
now. In a recent issue of Nature, Leonard Guarente, Novartis
Professor of Biology, and postdoctoral associate Nicholas Bishop show
that a particular pair of neurons in the heads of underfed worms may
play an essential role in their lengthy lives. When these two
individual neurons were killed by a laser beam, the worms could not
enjoy the longevity normally associated with calorie
restriction."This study directs our attention to the brain as a
center for mediating the beneficial effects of calorie restriction in
higher organisms, potentially including us," Guarente said. "A
complete molecular understanding of calorie restriction may lead to
new drugs for the major diseases of aging." This work is supported by
the NIH and the Glenn Foundation.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/aging-0618.html
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MOLECULAR INTERACTIONS
MIT researchers have found a way to glimpse interactions between
molecules on the surface of a cell. By measuring the force generated
by these cell surface interactions, the MIT team was able to image
and measure the rate at which individual molecules join and separate
from receptors on the cell surface. These interactions are not
visible with traditional light microscopy. "We were able to measure
regions of strong intermolecular binding on the cell surfaces, which
enabled us to map the locations of the receptors," said Sunyoung Lee,
a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and
Engineering and lead author of a paper on the work in a June issue of
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The technique,
known as functionalized force imaging, could allow researchers to
better understand the strength and rates of interactions between
molecular ligands outside the cell and the molecular receptors on the
cell surface. These interactions play a critical role in cell growth,
proliferation and differentiation. It could also assist in the design
and testing of new drug molecules that bind strongly or quickly to
the target cell. The research was funded by the NSF, the Center for
the Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology, the Hugh
Hampton Young Memorial Foundation and the Beckman Foundation Young
Investigators Program.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/cell-receptor-0613.html
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ANALYZING EMISSIONS BILLS
While Congress considers seven bills that aim to limit America's
greenhouse gas emissions, MIT researchers have offered an analysis of
the legislation based on a powerful model they created. The MIT Joint
Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change applied its model
to the seven bills to determine how costs associated with each might
affect the domestic economy. While the program does not endorse any
individual bill, the analysis could lend insight into potential
climate consequences and the rough effects on prices and consumers,
said Henry Jacoby, co-director of the joint program and a professor
of management. "The objective of the assessment is to help policy-
makers move toward a consensus," he said. The current proposals span
a wide range of future emissions targets for the country. The
Bingaman-Specter and Udall-Petri bills, for instance, would keep U.S.
emissions near current levels, while others sponsored by McCain-
Lieberman, Kerry-Snowe, Waxman and Sanders-Boxer call for emissions
reductions of 50 to 80 percent below the 1990 level by 2050.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/congress-emissions-0626.html
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LANDSLIDE!
Engineers at MIT have devised a simple yet effective system for
determining an area's landslide risk, a tool that could help planners
improve building codes, determine zoning and strengthen mitigation
measures in mountainous tropical regions frequently hit by typhoons.
Devised originally for Baguio City, Philippines--a city that averages
five typhoons annually--the risk rating system relies on data
commonly available in developing countries. The engineers use
information about the history of landslides, the type of bedrock
underlying a slope, the inclination of the slope and the type of
vegetation to determine an area's hazard rating, which they then look
at in combination with land use and population density to determine
the overall risk rating."The system could be applied directly to any
country with similar topography, geology and climate, which would be
much of Southeast Asia," said Herbert Einstein, a professor in the
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He and Artessa
Saldivar-Sali, a Filipino who spent summers with her family in
Baguio, developed the system as part of her master's degree thesis
work. The two report the work in a recent issue of Engineering Geology.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/landslides-0625.html
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REVERSING RETARDATION, AUTISM
Researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have,
for the first time, reversed symptoms of mental retardation and
autism in mice. The work was reported in a June issue of the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The mice were
genetically manipulated to model Fragile X Syndrome (FXS), the
leading inherited cause of mental retardation and the most common
genetic cause of autism. The condition causes mild learning
disabilities to severe autism. According to the Centers for Disease
Control, FXS affects one in 4,000 males and one in 6,000 females of
all races and ethnic groups. The prevalence of autism ranges from one
in 500 to one in 166 children. There is no effective treatment for
FXS and other types of autism. "Our study suggests that inhibiting a
certain enzyme in the brain could be an effective therapy for
countering the debilitating symptoms of FXS in children, and possibly
in autistic kids as well," said co-author Mansuo Hayashi, a former
Picower Institute postdoctoral fellow currently at Merck Research
Laboratories in Boston. This work was supported by the FRAXA
Foundation, the Simons Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the NIH.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/fragilex-0625.html
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UNDERSTANDING PROTEIN NETWORKS
An international team of researchers, including several from MIT, has
developed a computational model that helps identify relationships
between proteins and the enzymes that regulate them. The work could
help researchers understand the complex protein networks that
influence human disease, including cancer. The researchers report
their findings in the cover story of the June 29 issue of Cell. The
new method, known as NetworKIN, can trawl through existing research
data and use it to illuminate protein networks that control cellular
processes. It focuses on enzymes called kinases, which are involved
in many cell signaling pathways, including repair of DNA damage that
can lead to cancer. NetworKIN "gives us the tools to take the
information we already have and begin to build a map of the kinase
signaling pathways within the cells," said Michael Yaffe, MIT
associate professor of biology and biological engineering and a
member of MIT's Center for Cancer Research. The model was developed
by researchers from MIT, the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of
Mount Sinai Hospital in Canada and the European Molecular Biology
Laboratory in Germany. The research was funded by the European
Commission FP6 Programme, the Danish Research Council for the Natural
Sciences, the Lundbeck Foundation, Genome Canada and the NIH.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/cancer-0625.html
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TOWARD AFFORDABLE HOUSING
A substantial majority of Chapter 40B zoning override cases in the
Boston area are approved by town zoning boards in a manner acceptable
to developers, but many of the 40 B projects are not being built,
according to a new study by the Housing Affordability Initiative at
the MIT Center for Real Estate. The MIT study casts fresh light on
how the process of permitting mixed-income housing actually works.
Key findings from this undertaking stem from an exhaustive effort to
follow requests for 40B overrides--comprehensive permit applications--
from birth to final outcome. Chapter 40B is the law that allows
developers to override local zoning if they agree to sell or rent 25
percent of the housing units at prices that are affordable to
moderate-income households. It is a process that can produce
multifamily housing in a strong housing market like that of 2000 to
2005, because the market-rate dwellings effectively subsidize the
modest-income ones. According to MIT lead author Professor Lynn
Fisher, "In an atmosphere in which developers are often seen as
making unreasonable demands and towns are often seen as resisting any
multifamily development, the Center for Real Estate's year-long
effort answers key questions and raises even more."
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/forty-b-0618.html
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CELLS' CAREER PATHS
As a fertilized egg develops into a full-grown adult, mammalian cells
adopt careers as different cell types, from liver cells to neurons.
One of the most fundamental mysteries in biomedicine is how cells
make such different career decisions. Now a team led by scientists at
the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Massachusetts General
Hospital has unveiled a special code--not within DNA, but rather
within the so-called "chromatin" proteins surrounding it--that could
unlock these mysterious choices underlying cell identity. One of the
most surprising findings of the study, published in a July issue of
Nature, is that this chromatin-based code may reveal the
developmental choices cells have already made as well as those
decisions that lie ahead. "If true, this would have enormous
implications for our understanding of developmental biology and for
guiding regenerative medicine," said Broad Institute Director Eric
Lander, MIT professor of biology and member of the Whitehead
Institute for Biomedical Research. This research was supported by the
National Human Genome Research Institute, the National Cancer
Institute, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Massachusetts General
Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/cell-code-0701.html
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ROBOCAR
A team of MIT faculty and researchers including 20 students are
working toward what could be the car of the future: a vehicle that
drives itself, with people as passengers. In June the team tested its
vehicle during a site visit by personnel from the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is funding the work through
the third DARPA Urban Challenge competition. DARPA will use the site
visit evaluation to whittle the current 53 teams to 30 semi-finalists
that will compete in a qualifying event in October. At that time all
teams will demonstrate their vehicle's ability to navigate through a
simple network of roads with other vehicles. In the final Urban
Challenge, set for Nov. 3, the vehicles will execute simulated
military supply missions safely in a mock urban area. DARPA will
award $2 million, $1 million and $500,000 awards to the top three
finishers that complete the course within the six-hour time limit.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/robocar-0628.html
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CHINA AND ENERGY
An MIT doctoral student in political science warns U.S. policy
analysts that placing Beijing in the driver's seat of China's energy
governance will lead at best to ineffective U.S. policies and, at
worst, to perilously inaccurate forecasting. The warning essay,
titled "China's Energy Governance: Perception and Reality," is by
Edward Cunningham, a research fellow at the MIT Industrial
Performance Center and Harvard's Asia Pacific Policy Program. Fluent
in Mandarin, Cunningham spent a year at Tsinghua University's School
of Public Policy and Management studying China's energy challenge as
a 2005 Fulbright Scholar. In "China's Energy Governance," he writes,
"As China's economic growth begins to transform international markets
as vital as energy, getting China policy 'right' has never been more
important. First, effective U.S. policy towards China requires
identifying and interacting with powerful sub-national governments,
not focusing exclusively on policy-makers in Beijing.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/china-energy-0625.html
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STEM CELL BREAKTHROUGH
Scientists have created embryonic stem cells in mice without
destroying embryos in the process, potentially removing the major
controversy over work in this field. Embryonic stem cells are special
because they can develop into virtually any kind of tissue type. They
therefore offer the promise of customized cells for therapy. The
work, which appears in a June issue of Nature, was led by Rudolf
Jaenisch, a member of the Whitehead Institute and a professor of
biology at MIT. His colleagues on the work are from Whitehead, MIT,
Massachusetts General Hospital, the Broad Institute of MIT and
Harvard, and Harvard Medical School. Somatic cell nuclear transfer
("therapeutic cloning") offers the hope of one day creating
customized embryonic stem cells with a patient's own DNA. In this
process, an individual's DNA would be placed into an egg, resulting
in a blastocyst that houses a supply of stem cells. But to access
these cells, researchers must destroy a viable embryo. Now, Jaenisch
and colleagues have demonstrated that embryonic stem cells can be
created without eggs. By genetically manipulating mature skin cells
taken from a mouse, the scientists transformed these cells back into
a state identical to that of an embryonic stem cell. No eggs were
used, and no embryos destroyed. This work was supported by the NIH.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/stemcells-0606.html
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ELECTRIC PORSCHE
For the past seven months a team of MIT students has spent hundreds
of hours converting a sleek Porsche 914 into an electric vehicle.
Their goal? To demonstrate the viability of advanced electric vehicle
technology and to help clarify what research and development has yet
to be done. The Porsche was donated by Professor Yang Shao-Horn of
mechanical engineering, who with her husband, Quinn Horn, bought it
off eBay and made it available to students interested in converting
it to an electric-powered vehicle. In addition to providing an
unusual opportunity for hands-on learning, the project will
ultimately yield information valuable to Shao-Horn's research on
advanced batteries. Specifically, she and her team in the
Electrochemical Energy Laboratory will be able to measure the
conditions that batteries encounter inside an operating vehicle.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/porsche-0605.html
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NOISY LEARNING
While most people need peace and quiet to cram for a test, the brain
itself may need noise to learn, a recent MIT study suggests. In
experiments with monkeys, the researchers found that neural
activities in the brain gradually change, even when nothing new is
being learned. Challenging the monkeys to adjust their task triggered
systematic changes in their neural activities on top of this
background "noise." The researchers said their findings suggest a new
theory of how the brain learns. "What surprised us most was that the
neural representation of movement seems to change even when behavior
doesn't seem to change at all," said Sebastian Seung, professor of
physics and computational neuroscience and a Howard Hughes Medical
Institute investigator. "This was a surprising degree of instability
in the brain's representation of the world." Seung and Institute
Professor Emilio Bizzi led the study, which was published in a recent
issue of the journal Neuron.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/noisy-brain-0604.html
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--MIT--
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