[Editors] MIT Research Digest, February 2008
Elizabeth Thomson
thomson at MIT.EDU
Thu Jan 31 18:38:33 EST 2008
MIT News Office
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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MIT Research Digest, February 2008
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For Immediate Release
THURSDAY, JAN. 31, 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: DNA Surprise * The Price of Oil * Tiny Sensor
Culture & Brain Function * Men & Liver Cancer * Computer Vision
Anthrax Weakness * Brain Circuits * Iraq: The Human Cost
Aquatic Plants * Bacterial Surprise
DNA SURPRISE
MIT scientists have found a new way that DNA can carry out its work
that is about as surprising as discovering that a mold used to cast a
metal tool can also serve as a tool itself, with two complementary
shapes each showing distinct functional roles. Professor Manolis
Kellis and a colleague report in the journal Genes & Development that
in certain DNA sequences, both strands of a DNA segment can perform
useful functions, each encoding a distinct molecule that helps
control cell functions. “This represents a new phase in genomics-
making biological discoveries sitting not at the lab bench, but at
the computer terminal,” says Kellis, a professor in the Department of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an associate member
of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The work was supported by
the NIH, the NSF, and the Human Frontier Science Program.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/micro-rna-0109.html
THE PRICE OF OIL
As the price of oil doubled over the last year, it may have looked
like 1973 all over again to some observers. But research by MIT
macroeconomist Olivier Blanchard shows that a return to 1970s-style
gas lines and stagflation--the grim mix of inflation and stagnant
growth--isn't in the cards. In a paper titled "The Macroeconomic
Effects of Oil Price Shocks: Why are the 2000s so different from the
1970s?" Blanchard and a colleague show how changes in U.S. and global
economic policies have reduced the impact of oil price shocks. Co-
written with Jordi Gali of the Center for International Economic
Research in Barcelona, the work was published as an MIT Economics
Working Paper and is available online at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/
papers.cfm?abstract_id=1008395.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/blanchard-0102.html
TINY SENSOR
Engineers at MIT are developing a tiny sensor that could be used to
detect minute quantities of hazardous gases, including toxic
industrial chemicals and chemical warfare agents, much more quickly
than current devices. The researchers have taken the common
techniques of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry and shrunk
them to fit in a device the size of a computer mouse. Eventually, the
team, led by MIT Professor Akintunde Ibitayo Akinwande, plans to
build a detector about the size of a matchbox. "Everything we're
doing has been done on a macro scale. We are just scaling it down,"
said Akinwande, a professor of electrical engineering and computer
science and member of MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories
(MTL). Akinwande and a colleague presented the work at the Micro
Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) 2008 conference in January. The
research is funded by DARPA and the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center
in Natick, Mass.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/micro-analyzer-0110.html
CULTURE & BRAIN FUNCTION
People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve
the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues
report in the first brain imaging study of its kind. Psychological
research has established that American culture, which values the
individual, emphasizes the independence of objects from their
contexts, while East Asian societies emphasize the collective and the
contextual interdependence of objects. Behavioral studies have shown
that these cultural differences can influence memory and even
perception. But are they reflected in brain activity patterns? To
find out, a team led by John Gabrieli, a professor at the McGovern
Institute for Brain Research at MIT, asked 10 East Asians recently
arrived in the United States and 10 Americans to make quick
perceptual judgments while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) scanner--a technology that maps blood flow changes in the
brain that correspond to mental operations. The results are reported
in the January issue of Psychological Science. This study was funded
by the NIH and the McGovern Institute.
PHOTO, IMAGE AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/psychology-0111.html
MEN & LIVER CANCER
A fundamental difference in the way men and women respond to chronic
liver disease at the genetic level helps explain why men are more
prone to liver cancer, according to MIT researchers. “This is the
first genome-wide study that helps explain why there is such a gender
effect in a cancer of a nonreproductive organ, where you wouldn't
expect to see one,” said Arlin Rogers, an MIT experimental
pathologist and lead author of a paper that appeared in the journal
Cancer Research. Men develop liver cancer at twice the rate of women
in the United States. In other countries, especially in Asia, the
rate for men can be eight or 10 times that for women. Liver cancer is
the fifth most common cancer in the world and the third-biggest
killer. Rates in the United States are lower than those in other
countries but are rising rapidly, in part due to high hepatitis C
infection rates during the 1970s from blood transfusions and IV drug
abuse. Obesity and type 2 diabetes are additional risk factors of
current concern. “It's an epidemic waiting to happen,” said Rogers, a
principal research scientist in MIT's Division of Comparative
Medicine. The research was funded by the NIH.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/liver-cancer-0115.html
COMPUTER VISION
For years, scientists have been trying to teach computers how to see
like humans, and recent research has seemed to show computers making
progress in recognizing visual objects. A new MIT study, however,
cautions that this apparent success may be misleading because the
tests being used are inadvertently stacked in favor of computers.
Computer vision is important for applications ranging from
“intelligent” cars to visual prosthetics for the blind. Recent
computational models show apparently impressive progress, boasting 60-
percent success rates in classifying natural photographic image sets.
These include the widely used Caltech101 database, intended to test
computer vision algorithms against the variety of images seen in the
real world. However, James DiCarlo, a professor in the McGovern
Institute for Brain Research at MIT, and colleagues argue that these
image sets have design flaws that enable computers to succeed where
they would fail with more authentically varied images. A paper on the
work appeared in the online Jan. 25 PLoS Computational Biology. This
study was supported by the National Eye Institute, The Pew Charitable
Trust and The McKnight Foundation.
IMAGE AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/computer-vision-0124.html
ANTHRAX WEAKNESS
MIT and New York University researchers have identified a weakness in
the defenses of the anthrax bacterium that could be exploited to
produce new antibiotics. The researchers found that nitric oxide (NO)
is a critical part of Bacillus anthracis's defense against the immune
response launched by cells infected with the bacterium. Anthrax
bacteria that cannot produce NO succumb to the immune system's
attack. Stephen Lippard, a professor of chemistry at MIT, said
antibiotics developed to capitalize on this vulnerability could be
effective against other bacteria that employ the same defense system.
Those bacteria include Staphylococcus aureus, which commonly causes
infections in hospitals and can be extremely drug-resistant. The
paper appears in the Jan. 21 online edition of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences. The research was funded by the NIH and
the NSF.
IMAGE AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/anthrax-0122.html
BRAIN CIRCUITS
Researchers at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT
reported in the Jan. 24 online edition of Science that they have
created a way to see, for the first time, the effect of blocking and
unblocking a single neural circuit in a living animal. This
revolutionary method allowed Susumu Tonegawa, Picower Professor of
Biology and Neuroscience, and colleagues to see how bypassing a major
memory-forming circuit in the brain affected learning and memory in
mice. Combining several cutting-edge genetic engineering techniques,
Tonegawa's laboratory invented a method called doxycycline-inhibited
circuit exocytosis-knockdown, or DICE-K-an acronym that also reflects
Tonegawa's admiration of ace Boston Red Sox pitcher Daisuke
Matsuzaka. DICE-K allows researchers for the first time to induce and
reverse a blockade of synaptic transmission in specific neural
circuits in the hippocampus. This work is supported by the NIH and
the RIKEN Brain Science Institute.
IMAGE AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/learning-0124.html
IRAQ: THE HUMAN COST
As the war in Iraq approaches its fifth anniversary, a new web site
from MIT's Center for International Studies aims to provide an
accurate account of living conditions, as well as civilian injuries
and deaths due to political violence, throughout the Middle Eastern
state. The site, Iraq: the Human Cost, focuses on tracing the Iraqi
death toll and on portraying political violence accurately. It offers
links to a mortality study commissioned by the Center for
International Studies (CIS) that set Iraqi deaths due to the war's
violence at 600,000 as of July 2006 and to several updated
humanitarian agency field reports of death and distress. "It's
remarkable how few sources provide information about refugees, the
status of women, and the numbers of people injured and killed," said
John Tirman, the center's executive director and an expert on
international security and human rights. "Most journalists are in
Baghdad--and even relying on morgue reports there means you don't
know what, or who, you're not counting."
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/iraq-cis-0118.html
AQUATIC PLANTS
Aquatic plants in rivers and streams may play a major role in the
health of large areas of ocean coastal waters, according to recent
research from MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental
Engineering. This work, which appeared in the Journal of Fluid
Mechanics, describes the physics of water flow around aquatic plants
and demonstrates the importance of basic research to environmental
engineering. This new understanding can be used to guide restoration
work in rivers, wetlands and coastal zones by helping ecologists
determine the vegetation patch length and planting density necessary
to damp storm surge, lower nutrient levels, or promote sediment
accumulation and make the new patch stable against erosion. Professor
Heidi Nepf was principal investigator on the research, which was
funded by the NSF.
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/riverplants-0131.html
BACTERIAL SURPRISE
MIT researchers have discovered why an unusually short bacterial
protein can have many more interactions than would normally be
expected of something its size. The team, led by biology professor
Graham Walker, found that the protein, UmuD, belongs to a recently
discovered class of proteins called intrinsically disordered
proteins. Walker said the fundamental principles discovered in the
research should help scientists understand the control of human
translesion DNA polymerases, enzymes that help with DNA replication.
The enzymes are important because some help to prevent cancer and
others contribute to the disease. The work, which appeared in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was funded by the
National Cancer Institute and a Cleo and Paul Schimmel Fellowship.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/protein-1017.html
--END--
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