[Editors] MIT Research Digest, March 2008
Elizabeth Thomson
thomson at MIT.EDU
Fri Feb 29 16:30:05 EST 2008
MIT News Office
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room 11-400
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
Phone: 617-253-2700
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MIT Research Digest, March 2008
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For Immediate Release
FRIDAY, FEB. 29, 2008
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
IN THIS ISSUE: Cancer Media Briefing * Energy-Efficient Microchip
New York Talk Exchange * Commercial Real Estate * Funky Physics
Gecko-inspired Bandage * Complex Biological Systems * Autistic Savants
Micro Pharmacy * Superconducting Surprise * 1918 Flu
Lunar Telescopes * Whiskers: The Movie * Bacterial Battle
'Mars' on Utah * High-Tech Snapshots * Solar in Africa
Bacteria Beware * Quarks & Gluons * Evolution of Speech
Future of Biofuels * Toward Tougher Treaties * Brains & Computers
CANCER MEDIA BRIEFING
MIT will be hosting a media briefing on Thurs., March 6 called The
Future of Cancer Research: Closing the Gap in the War on Cancer, with
talks, lab tours and demos by MIT's foremost cancer researchers
(including Angela Belcher, Tyler Jacks, Bob Langer, and Phil Sharp).
The briefing will focus on new ways of detecting and treating the
disease that combine 21st century technology with an ever-expanding
understanding of the molecular underpinnings of the disease. We
invite reporters to join us at the briefing. To RSVP, and for more
information, contact: Patti Richards, MIT News Office,
prichards at mit.edu or 617.253.8923.
COMPLETE AGENDA:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/cancer-briefing-0221.html
ENERGY-EFFICIENT MICROCHIP
Researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments have unveiled a new chip
design for portable electronics that can be up to 10 times more
energy-efficient than present technology. The design could lead to
cell phones, implantable medical devices and sensors that last far
longer when running from a battery. The innovative design was
presented in February at the International Solid-State Circuits
Conference in San Francisco by Joyce Kwong, a graduate student in
MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
(EECS). Kwong's MIT colleagues include Anantha Chandrakasan, the
Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering
and director of MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories, where the
work was conducted. The key to the improvement in energy efficiency
was to find ways of making the circuits on the chip work at a voltage
level much lower than usual, Chandrakasan explains. While most
current chips operate at around one volt, the new design works at
just 0.3 volts. The research was funded in part by the U.S. Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/energy-chip-0205.html
NEW YORK TALK EXCHANGE
What does the telecommunications traffic flowing in and out of New
York City reveal about the city that never sleeps? To find out,
researchers from the senseable city laboratory at MIT have created a
novel project that reveals the complex dynamics of talk that exist
between New York and other cities around the globe. The project,
called New York Talk Exchange (NYTE), is based around an analysis of
telecommunications traffic flowing to and from New York City and made
its debut Feb. 24 as part of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
exhibition, "Design and the Elastic Mind." "It is like showing how
the heart of New York pulsates in real time and how it connects with
the global network of cities," said Carlo Ratti, director of the
senseable city laboratory and associate professor of the practice of
urban technologies at MIT. The work is sponsored by AT&T.
IMAGES AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/nyte-0218.html
COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE
The value of U.S. commercial real estate owned by big pension funds
fell another 5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007, according to an
index produced by the MIT Center for Real Estate. The drop in the
quarterly transaction-based index (TBI), which tracks the price at
which big pension funds buy and sell properties like shopping malls,
apartment complexes and office towers, was the second straight
quarterly decline. It was deeper than the 2.5 percent drop in the
third quarter, and it means the cumulative fall since last year's
midsummer peak is now more than 7 percent. "This is evidence that the
commercial property market continued to fall, and at an accelerated
rate, through the last quarter of 2007, no doubt due to the effects
of the credit crunch," said MIT Center for Real Estate Director David
Geltner.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/cre-0205.html
FUNKY PHYSICS
The strange world of quantum mechanics can provide a way to surpass
limits in speed, efficiency and accuracy of computing, communications
and measurement, according to research by MIT scientist Seth Lloyd.
Quantum mechanics is the set of physical theories that explain the
behavior of matter and energy at the scale of atoms and subatomic
particles. It includes a number of strange properties that differ
significantly from the way things work at sizes that people can
observe directly, which are governed by classical physics. "There are
limits, if you think classically," said Lloyd, a professor in MIT's
Research Laboratory of Electronics and Department of Mechanical
Engineering. But while classical physics imposes limits that are
already beginning to constrain things like computer chip development
and precision measuring systems, "once you think quantum mechanically
you can start to surpass those limits," he said. Lloyd spoke about
this research at the American Association for the Advancement of
Science annual meeting last month. What Lloyd refers to as the "funky
effects" of quantum theory, such as squeezing and entanglement, could
ultimately be harnessed to make measurements of time and distance
more precise and computers more efficient. "Once you open your eyes
to the quantum world, you see a whole lot of things you simply cannot
do classically," he said.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/aaas-quantum-0216.html
GECKO-INSPIRED BANDAGE
MIT researchers and colleagues have created a waterproof adhesive
bandage inspired by gecko lizards that may soon join sutures and
staples as a basic operating room tool for patching up surgical
wounds or internal injuries. Drawing on some of the principles that
make gecko feet unique, the surface of the bandage has the same kind
of nanoscale hills and valleys that allow the lizards to cling to
walls and ceilings. Layered over this landscape is a thin coating of
glue that helps the bandage stick in wet environments, such as to
heart, bladder or lung tissue. And because the bandage is
biodegradable, it dissolves over time and does not have to be
removed. The team is led by MIT Institute Professor Robert Langer and
Jeff Karp, an instructor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital
and Harvard Medical School. Both are also faculty members at the
Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Their
colleagues include several other researchers from MIT, as well as
from Draper Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the
University of Basel, Switzerland. The work was funded by the NIH,
the NSF, and the MIT-Portugal program.
PHOTOS, GRAPHIC AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/adhesive-0218.html
COMPLEX BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS
An MIT team has used an engineering approach to show that complex
biological systems can be studied with simple models developed by
measuring what goes into and out of the system. Such an approach can
give researchers an alternative way to look at the inner workings of
a complicated biological system--such as a pathway in a cell--and
allow them to study systems in their natural state. The MIT
researchers focused on a pathway in yeast that controls cells'
response to a specific change in the environment. The resulting model
is "the simplest model you can ever reduce these systems to," said
Alexander van Oudenaarden, W.M. Keck Career Development Professor in
Biomedical Engineering and Associate Professor of Physics and senior
author of a paper describing the work in Science. The research was
funded by the NSF and the NIH.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/cells-0206.html
AUTISTIC SAVANTS
Mice lacking a certain brain protein learn some tasks better but also
forget faster, according to new research from MIT that may explain
the phenomenon of autistic savants in humans. The work could also
result in future treatments for autism and other brain development
disorders. Researchers at the Picower Institute for Learning and
Memory at MIT report in a Feb. issue of the Journal of Neuroscience
that mice genetically engineered to lack a key protein used for
building synapses--the junctions through which brain cells
communicate--actually learned a spatial memory task faster and better
than normal mice. But when tested weeks later, they couldn't remember
what they had learned as well as normal mice, and they had trouble
remembering contexts that should have provoked fear. The work was led
by Morgan H. Sheng, MIT's Menicon Professor of Neuroscience. It was
funded by the RIKEN-MIT Neuroscience Research Center, the NIH and the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/savants-0212.html
MICRO PHARMACY
A new thin-film coating developed at MIT can deliver controlled drug
doses to specific targets in the body following implantation,
essentially serving as a "micro pharmacy." The film could eventually
be used to deliver drugs for cancer, epilepsy, diabetes and other
diseases. It is among the first drug-delivery coatings that can be
remotely activated by applying a small electric field. "You can mete
out what is needed, exactly when it's needed, in a systematic
fashion," said Paula Hammond, the Bayer Professor of Chemical
Engineering and senior author of a paper on the work appearing in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was
funded by the NSF, the Office of Naval Research and MIT's Institute
for Soldier Nanotechnologies.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/drug-delivery-0211.html
SUPERCONDUCTING SURPRISE
MIT physicists have taken a step toward understanding the puzzling
nature of high-temperature superconductors, materials that conduct
electricity with no resistance at temperatures well above absolute
zero. If superconductors could be made to work at temperatures as
high as room temperature, they could have potentially limitless
applications. But first, scientists need to learn much more about how
such materials work. Using a new method, the MIT team made a
surprising discovery that may overturn theories about the state of
matter in which superconducting materials exist just before they
start to superconduct. The findings are reported in the February
issue of Nature Physics. Understanding high-temperature
superconductors is one of the biggest challenges in physics today,
according to Eric Hudson, MIT assistant professor of physics and
senior author of the paper. The research was funded by the NSF and
the Research Corporation.
PHOTO, IMAGE AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/superconducting-0212.html
1918 FLU
MIT researchers have explained why two mutations in the H1N1 avian
flu virus were critical for viral transmission in humans during the
1918 pandemic outbreak that killed at least 50 million people. The
team showed that the 1918 influenza strain developed two mutations in
a surface molecule called hemagglutinin (HA), which allowed it to
bind tightly to receptors in the human upper respiratory tract. "Two
mutations dramatically change the HA binding affinity to receptors
found in the human upper airways," said Ram Sasisekharan, the
Underwood Prescott Professor of Biological Engineering and Health
Sciences and Technology. Sasisekharan is the senior author of a paper
on the work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The research was funded by the National Institute of General Medical
Sciences and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology
(SMART).
IMAGE AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/birdflu-1918-0218.html
LUNAR TELESCOPES
NASA has selected a proposal by an MIT-led team to develop plans for
an array of radio telescopes on the far side of the moon that would
probe the earliest formation of the basic structures of the universe.
The agency announced the selection and 18 others related to future
observatories in February. The new MIT telescopes would explore one
of the greatest unknown realms of astronomy, the so-called "Dark
Ages" near the beginning of the universe when stars, star clusters
and galaxies first came into existence. This period of roughly a
billion years, beginning shortly after the Big Bang, closely followed
the time when cosmic background radiation, which has been mapped
using satellites, filled all of space. Learning about this unobserved
era is considered essential to filling in our understanding of how
the earliest structures in the universe came into being. The Lunar
Array for Radio Cosmology (LARC) project is headed by Jacqueline
Hewitt, a professor of physics and director of MIT's Kavli Center for
Astrophysics and Space Science. LARC includes nine other MIT
scientists as well as several from other institutions. It is planned
as a huge array of hundreds of telescope modules designed to pick up
very-low-frequency radio emissions. The array will cover an area of
up to two square kilometers; the modules would be moved into place on
the lunar surface by automated vehicles.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/moonscope-0215.html
WHISKERS: THE MOVIE
Rats use their whiskers in a way that is closely related to the human
sense of touch: Just as humans move their fingertips across a surface
to perceive shapes and textures, rats twitch their whiskers to
achieve the same goal. Now, in a finding that could help further
understanding of perception across species, MIT neuroscientists have
used high-speed video to reveal rat whiskers in action and show the
tiny movements that underlie the rat's perception of its tactile
environment. Rats rely on whiskers to find their way in the dark, and
they devote large areas of their brains to decoding the incoming
signals, explains Christopher Moore, a member of the McGovern
Institute for Brain Research at MIT and senior author of a study in
the Feb. 28th issue of Neuron. Neuroscientists interested in
perception have studied the whisker system intensively, but the
information conveyed to the brain by whisker motions has remained a
mystery--until now."Now that we can see what the rat's whiskers are
telling the brain, we can start to understand better how this amazing
perceptual system works," says Moore, who is also an assistant
professor in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. "This
understanding is relevant not only to the human sense of touch, but
to all forms of perception, because every sensory organ is an
interface between the mind and the external world." This study was
supported by the NIH, the NSF, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute,
and Burroughs Wellcome.
VIDEO, IMAGE AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/whiskers-0227.html
BACTERIAL BATTLE
MIT biologists have provoked soil-dwelling bacteria into producing a
new type of antibiotic by pitting them against another strain of
bacteria in a battle for survival. The antibiotic holds promise for
treatment of Helicobacter pylori, which causes stomach ulcers in
humans. Also, figuring out the still murky explanation for how the
new antibiotic was produced could help scientists develop strategies
for finding other new antibiotics. The work is reported in the
February issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. A
combination of luck, patience and good detective work contributed to
the discovery of the new antibiotic, according to Philip Lessard,
research scientist in Professor Anthony Sinskey's laboratory at MIT
in the Department of Biology.
PHOTOS AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/antibiotics-0226.html
'MARS' ON UTAH
In late February, two MIT students began living, working and
communicating with the outside world as if they were on a mission to
Mars. Whenever they went outside their small, round habitat they
donned spacesuits and passed through an airlock. When they sent
e-mail, it took 20 minutes before the recipient could see it--the
time it takes for radio waves to travel to and from the red planet.
They're not really on Mars, of course--human missions there are not
yet even in NASA's long-term schedule and are not expected to take
place for at least two decades. So, to begin understanding the
logistical, mechanical, scientific and psychological issues that a
real crew of Mars explorers will someday face, teams have been
practicing the details of Mars exploration in several Mars-base
simulators in some of Earth's most Mars-like places. The most heavily
used simulation is the Mars Society Desert Research Station, near
Hanksville, Utah, which was built in 2002 by the Mars Society.
GRAPHICS AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/mars-desert-0225.html
HIGH-TECH 'SNAPSHOTS'
Physicists at MIT and the University of Rochester have devised a new
way to take "snapshots" of the high-energy, high-temperature
reactions seen as key to achieving the long-held dream of controlled
nuclear fusion. The work, reported in the Feb. 28 issue of Science,
could one day help scientists harness nuclear fusion as an energy
source. It could also shed light on basic questions about the physics
of stars. Nuclear fusion--the process by which atomic particles clump
together to form a heavier nucleus--releases an enormous amount of
energy (roughly one million times that of a chemical reaction). When
nuclear fusion occurs in an uncontrolled chain reaction, it can
result in a thermonuclear blast--such as the one generated by
hydrogen bombs. Achieving controlled nuclear fusion, which could be a
safe and reliable source of nearly limitless energy, is one of the
"holy grails" of high-energy-density physics, according to Richard
Petrasso, senior research scientist at MIT's Plasma Science and
Fusion Center and an author of the Science paper. The research was
funded by the Fusion Science Center for Extreme States of Matter and
Fast Ignition at the University of Rochester and the DOE.
PHOTO, IMAGE AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/fusion-0228.html
SOLAR IN AFRICA
Bethel High School is a rural school in the tiny landlocked nation of
Lesotho, which was once part of South Africa. The school draws
students from many surrounding villages, and they live in dormitories
during the school year. Though the winter temperatures often drop
well below freezing, students in the dormitories only rarely have
access to hot water, and the only power in the school comes from a
diesel generator which runs for about four hours a day to power a
small computer lab, thanks to diesel fuel provided by the state. The
girls' dorm, however, now has an extra amenity, thanks to work that
some MIT students carried out during an 11-month stay last year. Amy
Mueller and Matt Orosz, both graduate students in the Department of
Civil and Environmental Engineering, designed and installed a
concentrating solar array that provides the girls with plenty of hot
water. The system was built last year at MIT's D-Lab, with a lot of
help from the D-Lab students. The project got some early funding by
twice winning MIT's IDEAS competition and receiving grants from the
MIT Public Service Center as well as from the World Bank.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/itw-lesotho-tt0227.html
BACTERIA BEWARE
MIT graduate student and synthetic biologist Timothy Lu is passionate
about tackling problems that pose threats to human health. His
current mission: to destroy antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Now the
27-year-old M.D. candidate and Ph.D. in the Harvard-MIT Division of
Health Sciences and Technology has received the prestigious $30,000
Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for inventing processes that promise to
combat bacterial infections by enhancing the effectiveness of
antibiotics at killing bacteria and helping to eradicate biofilm -
bacterial layers that resist antimicrobial treatment and breed on
surfaces, such as those of medical, industrial and food-processing
equipment.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/lemelson-student-0227.html
QUARKS & GLUONS
One of the great theoretical challenges facing physicists is
understanding how the tiniest elementary particles give rise to most
of the mass in the visible universe. Tiny particles called quarks and
gluons are the building blocks for larger particles such as protons
and neutrons, which in turn form atoms. However, quarks and gluons
behave very differently than those larger particles, making them more
difficult to study. John Negele, the W.A. Coolidge Professor of
Physics at MIT, talked about the theory that governs interactions of
quarks and gluons, known as quantum chromodynamics (QCD), during a
February presentation at the American Association for the Advancement
of Science's annual meeting. Negele described how scientists are
using supercomputers and a concept called lattice field theory to
figure out the behavior of quarks and gluons, the smallest known
particles. "The quest to understand the fundamental building blocks
of nature has led to the exploration of successive layers of worlds
within worlds," says Negele, who also holds an appointment in MIT's
Laboratory for Nuclear Science.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/aaas-quarks-0217.html
EVOLUTION OF SPEECH
The evolution of human speech was far more complex than is implied by
some recent attempts to link it to a specific gene, says Robert
Berwick, professor of computational linguistics at MIT. Berwick
described his ideas about language in a session at the annual meeting
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science last
month. The session, called "Mind of a Toolmaker," explored the use of
evolutionary research in understanding human abilities. Some
researchers in recent years have speculated that mutations in a gene
called Foxp2 might have played a fundamental role in the evolution of
human language. That was based on research showing that the gene
seems to be connected to language ability because some mutations to
that gene produce specific impairments to language use, and because
our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, lack both these gene
mutations and the capacity for language. But the claim that the gene
mutation is directly connected to the development of language is very
unlikely to be right, says Berwick, who holds appointments in MIT's
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/aaas-language-0217.html
FUTURE OF BIOFUELS
High oil prices, energy security considerations and fears about
global warming have helped revive interest in renewable energy
sources like biofuels, which burn cleanly and can be produced from
plants. But there are a few catches, particularly regarding biofuels
like corn-based ethanol: the more corn is used in ethanol production,
the less is available for food--a reality that partly accounts for
the recent run-up in world food prices. Moreover, most of the 6
billion gallons of ethanol produced annually in the United States
comes from corn, but there's not enough corn available to make it a
viable long-term source. MIT Professor Gregory Stephanopoulos led a
discussion of the various ways scientists and energy policymakers are
seeking to overcome these limitations and make biofuels from
renewable biomass feedstocks a significant part of the U.S. energy
supply during a symposium in February at the annual meeting of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/aaas-biofuels-0216.html
TOWARD TOUGHER TREATIES
The Kyoto Protocol is one of more than 100 global environmental
treaties negotiated over the past 40 years to address pollution,
fisheries management, ocean dumping and other problems. But according
to MIT Professor Lawrence Susskind, an expert in resolving complex
environmental disputes, few of the agreements have done more than
slow the pace of ecological damage, due to lack of ratification by
key countries, insufficient enforcement and inadequate financial
support. To give the pacts bite--not just bark--Susskind is proposing
a series of reforms that include economic penalties for countries
that fail to meet the treaties' targets. Susskind outlined a program
to make global environmental treaties more effective and
treaty-makers more accountable in a presentation at February's annual
meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/aaas-treaties-0216.html
BRAINS & COMPUTERS
For many years, Tomaso Poggio's lab at MIT ran two parallel lines of
research. Some projects were aimed at understanding how the brain
works, using complex computational models. Others were aimed at
improving the abilities of computers to perform tasks that our brains
do with ease, such as making sense of complex visual images. But
recently Poggio has found that the work has progressed so far, and
the two tasks have begun to overlap to such a degree, that it's now
time to combine the two lines of research. He described his lab's
change in approach, and the research that led up to it, at the
American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting
last month. Poggio is the Eugene McDermott Professor in MIT's
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is also an investigator at the
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/aaas-brain-0216.html
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