[Editors] MIT Research Digest, September 2008
Elizabeth Thomson
thomson at MIT.EDU
Tue Sep 2 17:24:08 EDT 2008
For Immediate Release
TUESDAY, SEP. 2, 2008
Contact: Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office -- Phone: 617-258-5402
-- Email: thomson at mit.edu
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MIT Research Digest, September 2008
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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: Smarter Hurricane Evacuations * Thwarting Cyber Hackers
Computer Data-Sorting *New Uses for Gold * Alzheimer's Structures
Climate Change Complacency * Self-Assembling Microchips
Low-energy Fertilizers * Cell-Sized Batteries * Meteorite-Asteroid
Puzzle
6-D Images *Commercial Property Sales * Superfund & Housing
Toward Slashing Gas Use * Geobiology * Space Surveillance
SMARTER HURRICANE EVACUATIONS
Hundreds of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars could
potentially be saved if emergency managers could make better and more
timely critical decisions when faced with an approaching hurricane.
Now, an MIT graduate student has developed a computer model that could
help do just that. Michael Metzger's software tool, created as part of
the research for his PhD dissertation, could allow emergency managers
to better decide early on whether and when to order evacuations --
and, crucially, to do so more efficiently by clearing out people in
stages. The tool could also help planners optimize the location of
relief supplies before a hurricane hits. By analyzing data from 50
years of hurricanes and detailed information on several major ones,
and by comparing the information available at various times as a
hurricane approached with data from the actual storm's passage,
Metzger said he was able to produce software that provides a
scientifically consistent framework to plan for an oncoming hurricane.
His approach uses the best available hurricane track models developed
over the years, but even these can be wrong half of the time -- a
degree of uncertainty that further complicates the job for local
emergency managers.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/hurricanes-0828.html
THWARTING CYBER HACKERS
In response to the chronic cyber threat of hackers, MIT Lincoln
Laboratory researchers are developing a software tool to identify the
most vulnerable points in a computer network. The tool aims to make it
possible for system administrators to focus on parts of a network that
are most prone to attack, instead of securing all parts of the
network. U.S. government and defense computer networks are attacked
all the time, says Richard Lippmann, leader of the work and a senior
staff member in Lincoln's Information Systems Technology Group. In an
attack known as Titan Rain, between 2003 and 2005 a series of breaches
of U.S. government computers may have captured sensitive information
about military readiness. NetSPA (for Network Security Planning
Architecture) uses information about networks and the individual
machines and programs running on them to create a graph that shows how
hackers could infiltrate them. System administrators can examine
visualizations of the graph themselves to decide what action to take,
but NetSPA also analyzes the graph and offers recommendations about
how to quickly fix the most important weaknesses.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/security-0827.html
COMPUTER DATA-SORTING
Humans have a natural tendency to find order in sets of information, a
skill that has proven difficult to replicate in computers. Faced with
a large set of data, computers don't know where to begin -- unless
they're programmed to look for a specific structure, such as a
hierarchy, linear order, or a set of clusters. Now, in an advance that
may impact the field of artificial intelligence, a new model developed
at MIT can help computers recognize patterns the same way that humans
do. The model, reported earlier this month in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, can analyze a set of data and figure out
which type of organizational structure best fits it. "Instead of
looking for a particular kind of structure, we came up with a broader
algorithm that is able to look for all of these structures and weigh
them against each other," said Josh Tenenbaum, an associate professor
of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and senior author of the paper.
The research was funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation Causal
Learning Research Collaborative, the Air Force Office of Scientific
Research, and the NTT Communication Sciences Laboratory.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/brain-data-0825.html
IMAGE AVAILABLE
NEW USES FOR GOLD
The glitter of gold may hold more than just beauty, or so says a team
of MIT researchers that is working on ways to use tiny gold rods to
fight cancer, deliver drugs and more. But before gold nanorods can
live up to their potential, scientists must figure out how to overcome
one major difficulty: The surfaces of the tiny particles are coated
with an uncooperative molecule (a byproduct of the synthesis process)
that prevents researchers from creating nanorods with the features
they want. "The surface chemistry is really key to everything," said
Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli, assistant professor of biological and
mechanical engineering at MIT. "For all of these nifty applications to
work, someone's got to sit down and do the dirty work of understanding
the surface." Hamad-Schifferli and colleagues published two papers in
August describing ways to manipulate the nanorods' surface, which
could allow researchers to design nanorods with specific useful
functions. The work was funded by the Norwegian Research Council, the
Ford-MIT Alliance and the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/nanorod-0822.html
PHOTO, IMAGE AVAILABLE
ALZHEIMER'S STRUCTURES
MIT engineers report a new approach to identifying protein structures
key to Alzheimer's disease, an important step toward the development
of new drugs that could prevent such structures from forming. In the
Aug. 22 issue of PLoS (Public Library of Science) Computational
Biology, the researchers describe one such structure uncovered using a
new computer-based technique. Collin M. Stultz, the leader of the work
and the W.M. Keck Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, noted that
the same general approach could also be applied to certain proteins
associated with cancer. Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of
dementia, affecting some five million Americans, according to the
Alzheimer's Association. And due to the growing elderly population,
that number "is expected to reach a staggering 13.2 million by 2050,"
said Stultz, who is also affiliated with the Harvard-MIT Division of
Health Sciences and Technology and MIT's Research Laboratory of
Electronics. This work was sponsored by a Jonathan Allen Junior
Faculty Award.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/alzheimers-protein-0821.html
PHOTO, VIDEO AVAILABLE
CLIMATE CHANGE COMPLACENCY
Why is the general public not more concerned about the potential
consequences of climate change? For many risks, such as the risk of a
plane crash, the public is far more fearful than the evidence shows,
observes John Sterman, the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management at
the MIT Sloan School of Management. But on the issue of climate, he
notes, the situation is just the opposite. "The science is unequivocal
now. It's urgent that we reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions," he
says. "That debate is basically over." However, Sterman adds, the
public at large remains complacent. What's behind this puzzling
complacency? Sterman's research suggests some clues. In experiments
conducted with Linda Booth Sweeney, an educator who received her
doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Sterman,
director of the System Dynamics Group at MIT Sloan, found that even
highly educated people have a poor understanding of the basic dynamics
of climate change, underestimating how much GHG emissions must
decrease to limit the risks of severe climate change.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/climate-sterman-0820.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
SELF-ASSEMBLING MICROCHIPS
Using a novel system based on molecules that can assemble themselves
into precise patterns, MIT researchers have come up with a way of
beating size limitations that would otherwise crimp improvements in
data-storage media and electronic microchips. Such self-assembling
molecular systems, called block copolymers, have been known for many
years, but the problem was that the regular patterns they produced
were well ordered only over very small areas. The MIT researchers
found a way to combine this self-assembly with conventional
lithographic chip-making technology, so that the lithographic patterns
provide a set of "anchors" to hold the structure in place, while the
self-assembling molecules fill in the fine detail between the anchors.
The work, carried out by three MIT professors and three graduate
students, is reported in the journal Science. Karl Berggren, the
Emanuel E. Landsman Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering in
MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
explains that without the lithographed "pillars" to anchor the
pattern, the self-assembling molecules "would be a mess of randomly
arranged lattices." But with the pillars, "the block copolymer lattice
is sort of fooled by these pillars, and forms its array around them.
They form a nice, ordered pattern around the pillars." The work was
funded by the NSF, the Semiconductor Research Corp., the
Nanoelectronics Research Initiative, King Abdulaziz City for Science
and Technology and Alfaisal University, and the Singapore-MIT Alliance.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/self-assembly-0814.html
VIDEO AVAILABLE
LOW-ENERGY FERTILIZERS
One of the reasons food prices have risen sharply is the cost of
fertilizer: Nearly 2 percent of the world's energy goes into
fertilizer production, which is becoming ever more costly as fuel
prices rise. For decades, chemists have sought less energy-intensive
ways to produce ammonia, the main component of fertilizer. The task
has proven difficult, however, and only a handful of researchers are
still pursuing it. One of those is MIT's Richard Schrock, a Nobel
laureate who has been working on the problem for nearly 30 years. In
2003, he reported the first and only catalytic productions of ammonia
from nitrogen gas, using the metal molybdenum as a catalyst. Schrock,
the Frederick G. Keyes Professor of Chemistry, and several of his
students are now trying to refine the 12-step reaction to make it more
efficient. Their current catalyst can only perform the reaction a few
times before it stops working. "It's not practical yet," said Schrock.
He says it may not become practical during his lifetime or beyond, but
if it does, the impact on agriculture could be considerable.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/fertilizer-0813.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
CELL-SIZED BATTERIES
Forget 9-volts, AAs, AAAs or D batteries: The energy for tomorrow's
miniature electronic devices could come from tiny microbatteries about
half the size of a human cell and built with viruses. MIT engineers
have developed a way to at once create and install such microbatteries
-- which could one day power a range of miniature devices, from labs-
on-a-chip to implantable medical sensors -- by stamping them onto a
variety of surfaces. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences the week of Aug. 18, the team describes assembling and
successfully testing two of the three key components of a battery. A
complete battery is on its way. "To our knowledge, this is the first
instance in which microcontact printing has been used to fabricate and
position microbattery electrodes and the first use of virus-based
assembly in such a process," wrote MIT professors Paula T. Hammond,
Angela M. Belcher, Yet-Ming Chiang and colleagues. This work was
funded by the Army Research Office Institute of Collaborative
Biotechnologies, the Army Research Office Institute of Soldier
Nanotechnologies, and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/virus-battery-0820.html
PHOTOS AVAILABLE
METEORITE-ASTEROID PUZZLE
For the last few years, astronomers have faced a puzzle: The vast
majority of asteroids that come near the Earth are of a type that
matches only a tiny fraction of the meteorites that most frequently
hit our planet. Since meteorites are mostly pieces of asteroids, this
discrepancy was hard to explain, but a team from MIT and other
institutions has now found what it believes is the answer to the
puzzle. The smaller rocks that most often fall to Earth, it seems,
come straight in from the main asteroid belt out between Mars and
Jupiter, rather than from the near-Earth asteroid population. The
puzzle gradually emerged from a long-term study of the properties of
asteroids carried out by MIT professor of planetary science Richard
Binzel and his students, along with postdoctoral researcher P.
Vernazza, who is now with the European Space Agency, and A.T.
Tokunaga, director of the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility. The
research was reported in the journal Nature. It was supported by NASA
and the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/meteorites-0813.html
IMAGE AVAILABLE
6-D IMAGES
By producing "6-D" images, an MIT professor and colleagues are
creating unusually realistic pictures that not only have a full three-
dimensional appearance, but also respond to their environment,
producing natural shadows and highlights depending on the direction
and intensity of the illumination around them. The process can also be
used to create images that change over time as the illumination
changes, resulting in animated pictures that move just from changes in
the sun's position, with no electronics or active control. To create
"the ultimate synthetic display," says Ramesh Raskar, an associate
professor at the MIT Media Lab, "the display should respond not just
to a change in viewpoint, but to changes in the surrounding light."
Raskar and his colleagues described the system, which is based
entirely on an arrangement of lenses and screens, on Aug. 11 at the
annual SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive
Techniques) conference of the Association for Computing Machinery. The
research was done in collaboration with researchers at MPI Informatik.
The work was partly funded by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/camera-0807.html
VIDEO, IMAGE AVAILABLE
COMMERCIAL PROPERTY SALES
Transaction sale prices of commercial property sold by major
institutional investors declined 2.7 percent overall in the second
quarter of 2008 with prices for office properties declining 5.5
percent, according to an index produced by the MIT Center for Real
Estate (CRE). The office sector encountered the largest drop in the
quarterly transaction-based index (TBI) in a single quarter since
1994, following minor declines in the past two quarters. The decline
reduces office property prices to their early 2007 level.__The 2.7
percent decline in the overall quarterly TBI means that prices for
properties such as shopping malls, apartment complexes, office
buildings and warehouses are now more than 9 percent below peak values
attained in mid-2007. "The down movement this quarter in the overall
prices represents the third down quarter out of the last four quarters
in the index. This represents a continuation of the correction in
commercial property market prices that began last fall -- a correction
triggered by the credit crunch caused by the subprime housing mortgage
crisis and fueled by concerns about a recession," said Professor David
Geltner, research director of the MIT/CRE.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/cre-0806.html
SUPERFUND & HOUSING
Superfund-sponsored clean-ups of hazardous waste sites should improve
the housing market in nearby neighborhoods, right? Not so says Michael
Greenstone, the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics at MIT. In a
paper published in the August issue of the Quarterly Journal of
Economics, Greenstone and a colleague compared housing markets
surrounding hazardous waste sites chosen for Superfund clean-ups to
those surrounding sites that narrowly missed qualifying for Superfund
remediation. Greenstone's hypothesis was that people living nearby
value the clean-ups. He tested whether neighborhoods adjacent to
Superfund sites became more desirable after clean-ups. Superfund is a
federal government program that cleans up the largest and most
dangerous hazardous waste sites in the US. Almost 1600 sites have been
identified and made eligible for federally led cleanups. Cleanup
activities have been concluded at approximately two-thirds of these
sites. The average cost of a completed cleanup is estimated at more
than $55 million. The expected cost to clean up the remaining sites is
an additional $30 billion. Greenstone finds that the cleanups failed
to cause increases in house prices or rental rates. Indeed, the
changes in prices and rental rates are equal to the changes in the
neighborhoods surrounding the hazardous waste sites where cleanups did
not take place. In addition, the populations of the neighborhoods and
rate of new home construction remained at their pre cleanup levels.
This work was funded in part by the Center for Energy and
Environmental Policy Research at MIT. Greenstone's co-author, Justin
Gallagher, is a graduate student at UC Berkeley.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/superfund-0805.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
TOWARD SLASHING GAS USE
How much gasoline would the nation save in the year 2035 if
lightweight hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles dominated the
marketplace? More than 68 billion gallons, or about half the fuel
currently used each year by today's vehicles. Such detailed analyses
in a new MIT report published in August conclude that over the next 25
years, the fuel consumption of new vehicles could be reduced by 30-50
percent and total U.S. fuel use for vehicles could be cut to year 2000
levels, with greenhouse gas emissions cut by almost as much. But it
will be challenging to meet those demands. It will require not just
developing improved and new engines, vehicles and fuels, but also
convincing people that they don't need to buy bigger, faster cars.
Each step will be difficult, yet all must be pursued with an equal
sense of urgency. "We've got to get out of the habit of thinking that
we only need to focus on improving the technology--that we can invent
our way out of this situation," said John B. Heywood, the Sun Jae
Professor of Mechanical Engineering, who led the research. "We've got
to do everything we can think of, including reducing the size of the
task by real conservation." The research was supported by Concawe, Eni
S.p.A., Environmental Defense, Ford Motor Company, the Alliance for
Global Sustainability, the MIT-Portugal Program and Shell Oil Company.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/cars2035-0805.html
GEOBIOLOGY
When most people look at a rock, they see a lifeless slab. When Dianne
Newman looks at one, she sees clues to the history of life on Earth--
and potential answers to some of today's medical mysteries. "You have
to look at what we have today and use it to figure out what happened
long ago," says Newman, a professor of biology at MIT. "In studying
Earth's history, it's very common to look at ancient rocks to infer
something about the processes that led to their formation." Newman, a
geobiologist who joined MIT's faculty last year after seven years at
Caltech, studies the co-evolution of life and Earth. By focusing on
traces left behind by bacteria billions of years ago, she hopes to
learn something about ancient Earth and its life forms.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/newman-0804.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
SPACE SURVEILLANCE
A mammoth MIT antenna installed in 1957 as the first radar system to
conduct space surveillance (it observed the Sputnik satellite) is
poised for many more years of key observations thanks to a recently
completed renovation. Lincoln Laboratory's Millstone Hill Radar (MHR)
antenna is one of the world's principal tools for maintaining the Deep
Space Catalog--the listing of the more than 3000 objects circling the
Earth 40,000 kilometers away in geosynchronous earth orbit. Together
with two other surveillance radars--ARPA Long-Range Tracking and
Instrumentation Radar (ALTAIR, in the Marshall Islands) and Globus II
(in Norway), it monitors the increasingly cluttered geosynchronous
orbit to reduce the probability of collisions. The three also monitor
satellite and spacecraft launches. But the venerable MHR system was
showing its age. The motors and motor generators replaced in this
renovation were original 1950s era equipment. "They were past their
end of life. The motors were worn from years of use and regular
rebuilds, and the inefficient motor generators were failing
frequently," says Paula Ward of Lincoln's Control Systems Engineering
group. Each failure would shut down the antenna for a significant
period of time. Now the system, which consists of an 84-foot-diameter
(25 m) reflector supported by a tower a little over 85 feet high (26
m), is easier to troubleshoot, and downtime can be kept to a minimum.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/antenna-0807.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
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