[Editors] MIT Research Digest, Nov. 2008

[Elizabeth Thomson]

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MIT Research Digest, Nov. 2008
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For Immediate Release
SUNDAY, NOV. 2, 2008

Contact: Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office
E: thomson at mit.edu, T: 617-258-5402


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: Mending Broken Hearts * Personalized Commuting
Greenhouse Gas Increase * Gene Splicing
Unconscious Communication * Extra Chromosomes & Cancer
Smart Bikes * Cells’ Inner Workings
Hot Young Planets * China Energy Myth


MENDING BROKEN HEARTS
Broken hearts could one day be mended using a novel scaffold developed  
by MIT researchers and colleagues. The idea is that living heart cells  
or stem cells seeded onto such a scaffold would develop into a patch  
of cardiac tissue that could be used to treat congenital heart  
defects, or aid the recovery of tissue damaged by a heart attack. The  
biodegradable scaffold would be gradually absorbed into the body,  
leaving behind new tissue. The accordion-like honeycomb scaffold,  
reported in the Nov. 2 online edition of Nature Materials, is the  
first to be explicitly designed to match the structural and mechanical  
properties of native heart tissue. As a result, it has several  
advantages over previous cardiac tissue engineering scaffolds.  
Further, the MIT team’s general approach has applications to other  
types of engineered tissues. “In the long term we’d like to have a  
whole library of scaffolds for different tissues in need of repair,”  
said Lisa E. Freed, corresponding author of the paper and a principal  
research scientist in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and  
Technology (HST). Each scaffold could be tailor-made with specific  
structural and mechanical properties. Lead author of the paper is  
George C. Engelmayr Jr., an HST postdoctoral fellow. Other authors are  
from MIT and the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. This work was  
sponsored by the NIH, NASA, and Draper Laboratory.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/heart-1102.html
PHOTOS, VIDEO AVAILABLE


PERSONALIZED COMMUTING
Dozens of cars in the Boston area are testing the latest generation of  
an MIT mobile-sensor network for traffic analysis that could help  
drivers cut their commuting time, alert them to potential engine  
problems and more. In the CarTel project, Professor Hari Balakrishnan  
and Associate Professor Samuel Madden of MIT's Department of  
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science use automobiles to monitor  
their environment by sending data from an onboard computer about the  
size of a cell phone to a web server where the data can be visualized  
and browsed. They do so via pre-existing WiFi networks passed during a  
trip. The resulting data, accessible from the web or a cell phone, not  
only helps a driver track conditions specific to their own car, but  
when combined with everyone else's can indicate historical and real- 
time traffic conditions at different times of the day. "Everybody's  
data is contributing to collective views of what congestion looks  
like," Madden said. "Our goal," Balakrishnan said, "is to make the  
data behind CarTel available to help you plan and organize your  
commute and drives. We want to minimize the amount of time spent in  
your car." This work is funded by the NSF and the T-Party Project, a  
joint research program between MIT and Quanta Computer Inc.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/car-sensors-tt1008.html
IMAGE AVAILABLE

GREENHOUSE GAS INCREASE
The amount of methane in Earth's atmosphere shot up in 2007, bringing  
to an end a period of about a decade in which atmospheric levels of  
the potent greenhouse gas were essentially stable, according to a team  
led by MIT researchers. Methane levels in the atmosphere have more  
than tripled since pre-industrial times, accounting for around one- 
fifth of the human contribution to greenhouse gas-driven global  
warming. Until recently, the leveling off of methane levels had  
suggested that the rate of its emission from the Earth's surface was  
approximately balanced by the rate of its destruction in the  
atmosphere. However, since early 2007 the balance has been upset,  
according to a paper on the new findings published in Geophysical  
Review Letters. The paper's lead authors, postdoctoral researcher  
Matthew Rigby and Ronald Prinn, the TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric  
Chemistry in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary  
Sciences, say this imbalance has resulted in several million metric  
tons of additional methane in the atmosphere. In addition to Rigby and  
Prinn, the study was carried out by researchers at Commonwealth  
Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Georgia  
Institute of Technology, University of Bristol and Scripps Institution  
of Oceanography. These methane measurements come from the Advanced  
Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment that is supported by NASA and the  
CSIRO network.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/methane-tt1029.html
PHOTOS AVAILABLE

GENE SPLICING
Scientists have long known that it's possible for one gene to produce  
slightly different forms of the same protein by skipping or including  
certain sequences from the messenger RNA. Now, an MIT team has shown  
that this phenomenon, known as alternative splicing, is both far more  
prevalent and varies more between tissues than was previously  
believed. Nearly all human genes, about 94 percent, generate more than  
one form of their protein products, the team reports in the Nov. 2  
online edition of Nature. Scientists' previous estimates ranged from a  
few percent 10 years ago to 50-plus percent more recently. "A decade  
ago, alternative splicing of a gene was considered unusual, exotic …  
but it turns out that's not true at all -- it's a nearly universal  
feature of human genes," said Christopher Burge, senior author of the  
paper and the Whitehead Career Development Associate Professor of  
Biology and Biological Engineering at MIT. The research was funded by  
the NIH, the Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation and the Swedish  
Foundation for Strategic Research.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/splice-1102.html
PHOTOS AVAILABLE

UNCONSCIOUS COMMUNICATION
What you say in a conversation -- whether it's on a first date, a job  
interview or pitching an idea -- may be less important than how you  
say it. But the cues that may decide the outcome can be so subtle that  
neither person in the conversation is consciously aware of them.  
Whether or not you get the job, or the other person's phone number, is  
very strongly influenced by unconscious factors such as the way one  
person's speech patterns match the other's, the level of physical  
activity as people talk, and the degree to which one person sets the  
tone -- literally -- of the conversation. These subtle cues provide  
"honest signals" about what's really going on and strongly predict the  
outcome, according to research by the MIT Media Lab's Alex (Sandy)  
Pentland and colleagues. "Honest Signals" is also the title of  
Pentland's new book about the research, being published this month by  
MIT Press. The research was based on tens of thousands of hours of  
data from devices about the size of a credit card that record  
movements and voices, which Pentland has dubbed "sociometers." Using  
just this data, with no knowledge of what was said, Pentland could  
predict the outcome -- whether a job offer, a second date, or  
investment in a business plan -- more accurately than by using any  
other single factor.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/signals-1021.html
PHOTOS AVAILABLE

EXTRA CHROMOSOMES & CANCER
Mammalian cells with extra chromosomes share some common traits that  
could be exploited to develop cancer treatments, according to MIT  
biologists. Having too many chromosomes, a condition known as  
aneuploidy, wreaks havoc on an organism, usually resulting in birth  
defects or death. However, it seems to confer an advantage on tumor  
cells, which are nearly always aneuploid. "Now we can look for  
compounds that specifically kill aneuploid cells, or look for genes  
that when you knock them down, kill aneuploid cells," said Angelika  
Amon, professor of biology and senior author of a paper describing the  
work in the Oct. 31 issue of Science. Amon and colleagues have started  
screening such compounds and already identified one promising  
candidate. The research was funded by the Howard Hughes Medical  
Institute, the Curt W. and Kathy Marble Cancer Research Fund, a David  
Koch Research Award and a David Koch Graduate Fellowship.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/chromosome-1030.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

SMART BIKES
MIT researchers unveiled a major new project on Oct. 10 in Copenhagen  
aimed at transforming bicycle use in Denmark's largest city, promoting  
urban sustainability and building new connections between the city's  
cyclists. The project, called SmartBiking, will utilize a novel self- 
organizing smart-tag system that will allow the city's residents to  
exchange basic information and share their relative positioning with  
each other. The project will be implemented citywide in time for the  
November 2009 U.N. Climate Change Conference, which Copenhagen will  
host. "One of the most striking aspects of Copenhagen is that it is  
already a very sustainable city," said Carlo Ratti, Director of MIT's  
SENSEable City Lab, which is overseeing the Smart Biking project. "So  
our challenge was, 'How can we enhance these dynamics of  
sustainability? And how can we use technology to make them more  
widespread?'"
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/biking-1010.html
IMAGES AVAILABLE

CELLS’ INNER WORKINGS
After spending years developing a computational model to help  
illuminate cell signaling pathways, a team of MIT researchers decided  
to see what would happen if they "broke" the model. The results,  
reported in the Oct. 17 issue of the journal Cell, reveal new ways in  
which cells process chemical information and could indicate how to  
maximize the effectiveness of disease treatments such as chemotherapy.  
A couple of years ago, MIT faculty member Michael Yaffe and colleagues  
reported a data-driven computational model that allows them to  
simultaneously investigate the relationships between several cell  
signaling pathways, which control the cell's response to inflammation,  
growth factors, DNA damage and other events. This research was funded  
by the NIH, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the David H. Koch  
Fund, the Edgerly Innovation Fund and the American Cancer Society.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/cell-signal-1016.html

HOT YOUNG PLANETS
Young planets around other stars may be easier to spot because they  
stay hotter way longer than astronomers have thought, according to new  
work by MIT planetary scientist Linda Elkins-Tanton. For a few million  
years after their initial formation, planets like Earth may maintain a  
hot surface of molten rock that would glow brightly enough to make  
them stand out as they orbit neighboring stars. Elkins-Tanton, Mitsui  
Career Development Professor of Geology in the Department of Earth,  
Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, says the "magma ocean" stage for  
Earth-sized planets may last a few million years, much longer than  
previously estimated. "That means we may actually see them elsewhere,  
as detection systems get better," she said. She presented her findings  
Oct. 14 at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's  
Division for Planetary Sciences. The research shows that even after  
the surface magma solidifies, it could stay hot enough to glow  
brightly in infrared light for tens of millions of years, providing a  
relatively long window for detectability. The research was funded by  
the NSF and NASA.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/hot-planets-1014.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

CHINA ENERGY MYTH
A detailed analysis of power plants in China by MIT researchers  
debunks the widespread notion that outmoded energy technology or the  
utter absence of government regulation is to blame for that country's  
notorious air-pollution problems. The real issue, the study found,  
involves complicated interactions between new market forces, new  
commercial pressures and new types of governmental regulation. China's  
power sector has been expanding at a rate roughly equivalent to three  
to four new coal-fired, 500 megawatt plants coming on line every week,  
said Edward S. Steinfeld, associate professor of political science at  
MIT. After detailed survey and field research involving dozens of  
managers at 85 power plants across 14 Chinese provinces, Steinfeld and  
his co-authors, Richard Lester (professor, nuclear science and  
engineering and director of the MIT Industrial Performance Center) and  
Edward Cunningham (doctoral candidate, political science) found that  
in fact most of the new plants have been built to very high technical  
standards, using some of the most modern technologies available. The  
problem has to do with the way that energy infrastructure is being  
operated and the types of coals being burned. The three co-authors of  
the study are members of the Industrial Performance Center's China  
Energy Group. The research was supported by Shell, the MIT Energy  
Initiative, and the MIT Sloan School of Management China Program.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/china-energy-1006.html

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