[Editors] MIT Research Digest, January 2009

[Elizabeth Thomson]

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MIT Research Digest, January 2009
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For Immediate Release
TUESDAY, JAN. 6, 2009

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: Gravity Fingers * Civic-Minded Software * Dancing Bees  
* Wave Energy * Therapeutic Antibodies * Superstar Scientists * 3-D  
Cell Growth * Insights On Fusion * Tainted Heparin * Dark Matter  
Detector * Alzheimer’s Mystery * Robotic Weather Forecasting *  
Nanotube Sensors * The Faintest Stars * Copying Dna * Humans In Space  
* Tiny Ecosystem * Cystic Fibrosis Finding * Getting Organized *  
Climate Change & Water * Fluid Trampoline * Fighting Malaria *  
Metallic Glass * Hybrid Cells * ‘Golden’ Drug Delivery

GRAVITY FINGERS
MIT researchers have found an elegant solution to a sticky scientific  
problem in basic fluid mechanics: Why water doesn't soak into soil at  
an even rate, but instead forms what looks like fingers of fluid  
flowing downward. Scientists call these rivulets "gravity fingers,"  
and the explanation for their formation has to do with the surface  
tension where the water -- or any liquid -- meets the soil (or other  
medium). Knowing how to account for this phenomenon mathematically  
will have wide-ranging impact on science problems and engineering  
applications, including the recovery of oil from reservoirs and the  
sequestration of carbon underground. The solution, reported in a Dec.  
issue of Physical Review Letters, involves borrowing a mathematical  
phrase from the mathematical description of a similar problem -- a  
solution both simple and elegant that had escaped the notice of many  
researchers in earlier attempts to describe the phenomenon. Co-authors  
Luis Cueto-Felgueroso and Professor Ruben Juanes of the MIT Department  
of Civil and Environmental Engineering discovered the solution while  
studying the larger question of how water displaces oil in underground  
reservoirs (petroleum engineers commonly flush oil reservoirs with  
water to enhance oil recovery). The work was supported by the Italian  
energy company, Eni.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/gravity-fingers-1212.html
GRAPHIC AVAILABLE

CIVIC-MINDED SOFTWARE
When representatives from natural gas companies knock on doors in  
rural areas to try to lock up deals for drilling rights, they  
typically hold most of the cards. They have the knowledge and  
experience about the process, while the landowner often has little or  
no information about what kinds of deals other residents in the area  
have agreed to — or about such issues as toxic chemicals that have  
been used in other drilling sites and the health effects residents say  
they have experienced. Currently, there is no easy way to find such  
information. A team of MIT researchers hopes to remedy that. They are  
developing a suite of software applications to extract information  
from government and corporate databases, along with input from  
citizens in the affected areas, and make it all available in a clear,  
easy-to-navigate form. “This is an experiment to see if we can develop  
new tools to help communities self-organize,” says Chris  
Csikszentmihályi, co-director of MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media.  
The MIT team recently began tests of one of their new software tools,  
Landman Report Card (LRC), with small groups of landowners in Colorado  
and Ohio, and eventually will extend the tests to New York,  
Pennsylvania and West Virginia, all of which are experiencing new  
booms in natural gas exploration. The research was partly funded by  
the Knight Foundation.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/mobilizecms-1202.html

DANCING BEES
What do dancing honeybees and stock markets have in common? At first  
glance, not much. But both are complicated dynamic systems that are  
extremely difficult to model — until now. An MIT graduate student has  
developed a methodology for automatically constructing computer models  
that can accurately describe the behavior of such complex systems with  
very little background information. The work has numerous potential  
applications, from enabling oil companies to get a clearer picture of  
where oil might be located underground to allowing port operators to  
spot suspicious behaviors. Graduate student Emily Fox, of MIT’s  
Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, presented her new  
model at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Dec.  
The methodology is designed to build models for complicated systems  
whose behavior is characterized by abrupt changes. These complex  
dynamic systems include stock markets and dancing bees: Honeybees  
switch between several dances in seemingly random fashion, and stock  
markets are notoriously unpredictable. “It’s quite exciting that even  
when you remove the shackles of putting in prior information, there’s  
a lot you can discover about a complex system,” said Fox’s advisor,  
Professor of Electrical Engineering Alan Willsky. Additional authors  
of the NIPS paper are from the University of California at Berkeley.  
The research was funded by the Army Research Office and the Air Force  
Office of Scientific Research.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/dancing-bees-tt1210.html
PHOTO AND VIDEO AVAILABLE

WAVE ENERGY
MIT researchers are working with Portuguese colleagues to design a  
pilot-scale device that will capture significantly more of the energy  
in ocean waves than existing systems, and use it to power an  
electricity-generating turbine. Wave energy is a large, widespread  
renewable resource that is environmentally benign and readily  
scalable. In some locations — the northwestern coasts of the United  
States, the western coast of Scotland, and the southern tips of South  
America, Africa and Australia, for example — a wave-absorbing device  
could theoretically generate 100 to 200 megawatts of electricity per  
kilometer of coastline. But designing a wave-capture system that can  
deal with the harsh, corrosive seawater environment, handle hourly,  
daily and seasonal variations in wave intensity, and continue to  
operate safely in stormy weather is difficult. Chiang Mei, the Ford  
Professor of Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental  
Engineering, has been a believer in wave energy since the late 1970s.  
After the recent oil-price spike, there has been renewed interest in  
harnessing the energy in ocean waves. To help engineers design such  
devices, Mei and his colleagues developed numerical simulations that  
can predict wave forces on a given device and the motion of the device  
that will result. The simulations guide design decisions that will  
maximize energy capture and provide data to experts looking for  
efficient ways to convert the captured mechanical energy to electrical  
energy. This research was supported by the MIT-Portugal Program.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/waves-portugal-tt1217.html
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THERAPEUTIC ANTIBODIES
MIT engineers have found that antibodies do not need a particular  
sugar attachment long believed to be essential to their function, a  
discovery that could make producing therapeutic antibodies much easier  
and cheaper in the future. Therapeutic antibodies are a promising new  
type of treatment for cancer and other diseases, but their  
practicality has been limited by the fact that only mammalian cells  
have the right machinery to build the sugar attachment. "To date,  
people have faced limitations in how they were going to make these  
antibodies because they appeared to require these (sugar) structures,"  
said Dane Wittrup, the C.P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering,  
Biological Engineering, member of the Koch Institute for Integrative  
Cancer Research, and senior author of a paper on the work that  
appeared in a Dec. online edition of the Proceedings of the National  
Academy of Sciences. Wittrup and biological engineering graduate  
student Stephen Sazinsky, co-lead author of the paper, found that  
antibodies don't need the sugar normally found attached to a certain  
region of antibody when the sequence is slightly mutated. Antibodies  
are a key part of the immune system, roaming around the body to detect  
invaders such as bacteria and viruses. Other authors of the paper are  
from MIT and Rockefeller University. The research was funded by the NIH.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/antibodies-1222.html

SUPERSTAR SCIENTISTS
When "superstar" academic scientists die, their collaborators  
experience a significant and permanent decline in productivity,  
according to a recent paper coauthored by MIT Sloan School of  
Management Professor Pierre Azoulay. Studying the role of  
collaboration in spurring the creation of new scientific knowledge, he  
found that the more the collaborators' areas of study overlapped with  
the superstar, the sharper the decline in output. The study was  
conducted with a panel of 8,220 scientists who had coauthored papers  
with a superstar scientist who subsequently died prematurely. The  
authors measured how collaborators' scientific output -- determined by  
publications, citations, and National Institutes of Health (NIH)  
grants -- changed after the "extinction" of the star. Superstardom was  
assessed on the basis of several criteria, including funding,  
citations, and membership in the National Academy of Science. "Our  
results reveal a 5 to 10 percent decrease in the quality-adjusted  
publication output of coauthors in response to the sudden and  
unexpected loss of a superstar," wrote the authors in a working paper  
titled, "Superstar Extinction," published by the National Bureau of  
Economic Research. Azoulay’s coauthors are Professor Joshua Graff  
Zivin of the University of California, San Diego and the National  
Bureau of Economic Research; and MIT Sloan PhD student Jialan Wang.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/superstar-1218.html

3-D CELL GROWTH
MIT engineers have built a device that gives them an unprecedented  
view of three-dimensional cell growth and migration, including the  
formation of blood vessels and the spread of tumor cells. The  
microfluidic device, imprinted on a square inch of plastic, could be  
used to evaluate the potential side effects of drugs in development,  
or to test the effectiveness of cancer drugs in individual patients.  
Roger Kamm, MIT professor of biological and mechanical engineering,  
and colleagues reported their observations of angiogenesis -- the  
process by which blood vessels are formed -- in the journal Lab on a  
Chip. Microfluidic devices have been widely used in recent years to  
study cells, but most only allow for the study of cells growing on a  
flat (two-dimensional) surface, or else lack the ability to observe  
and control cell behavior. With the new device, researchers can  
observe cells in real time as they grow in a three-dimensional  
collagen scaffold under precisely controlled chemical or physical  
conditions. Observing angiogenesis and other types of cell growth in  
three dimensions is critical because that is how such growth normally  
occurs, said Kamm. The research was funded by Draper Laboratory.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/microfluidic-1216.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

INSIGHTS ON FUSION
Research carried out at MIT’s Alcator C-Mod fusion reactor may have  
brought the promise of fusion as a future power source a bit closer to  
reality, though scientists caution that a practical fusion powerplant  
is still decades away. Fusion, the reaction that produces the sun’s  
energy, is thought to have enormous potential for future power  
generation because fusion plant operation produces no emissions, fuel  
sources are potentially abundant, and it produces relatively little  
(and short-lived) radioactive waste. But it still faces great hurdles.  
“There’s been a lot of progress,” says physicist Earl Marmar, division  
head of the Alcator Project at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion  
Center. “We’re learning a lot more about the details of how these  
things work.” The Alcator C-Mod reactor, in operation since 1993, has  
the highest magnetic field and the highest plasma pressure of any  
fusion reactor in the world, and is the largest fusion reactor  
operated by any university. One of the most vexing issues facing those  
trying to construct a fusion plant that produces more power than it  
consumes (something never achieved yet experimentally) is how to  
propel the hot plasma (an electrically charged gas) around inside the  
donut-shaped reactor chamber. This is necessary to keep it from losing  
its heat of millions of degrees to the cooler vessel walls. Now, the  
MIT scientists think they may have found a way. Physicist Yijun Lin  
and principal research scientist John Rice have led experiments that  
demonstrate a very efficient method for using radio-frequency waves to  
push the plasma around inside the vessel, not only keeping it from  
losing heat to the walls but also preventing internal turbulence that  
can reduce the efficiency of fusion reactions. These results were  
published in Physical Review Letters in Dec. The work was sponsored by  
the DOE.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/fusion-results-tt1203.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

TAINTED HEPARIN
A team of researchers led by MIT has confirmed that a contaminant  
found in several batches of the blood-thinner heparin is linked with  
severe allergic reactions in patients, dozens of whom died after  
receiving the tainted drug. A study conducted by the researchers  
provides epidemiological evidence that contaminated batches of heparin  
produced in China sickened hundreds of people, said MIT Professor Ram  
Sasisekharan. Sasisekharan is the senior author of the study, which  
appears in a Dec. online edition of the New England Journal of  
Medicine. The tainted heparin scandal is among several recent  
contamination incidents involving products from China. It unfolded  
between November and January, when hundreds of patients in the United  
States and several other countries suffered allergic reactions after  
receiving the drug, often administered during dialysis or heart  
surgery. The tainted heparin came from factories in China that  
manufacture the drug for Baxter International, which recalled its  
heparin in February. In April, an international team led by  
Sasisekharan identified the chemical structure of the contaminant,  
oversulfated chondroitin sulfate (OSCS), and demonstrated the  
biological mechanism for how it could cause severe allergic reactions  
in humans. The new NEJM study epidemiologically connects the adverse  
reactions to the OSCS-contaminated heparin. This work was supported in  
part by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The team  
also included researchers from the FDA, the CDC, Brigham and Women’s  
Hospital and Harvard Medical School, St. Louis Children’s Hospital,  
BJC Healthcare, Momenta Pharmaceuticals and the Missouri Department of  
Health and Senior Services.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/heparin-1203.html

DARK MATTER DETECTOR
Several research projects are underway to try to detect particles that  
may make up the mysterious “dark matter” believed to dominate the  
universe’s mass. But the existing detectors have a problem: They also  
pick up particles of ordinary matter — hurtling neutrons that  
masquerade as the elusive dark-matter particles the instruments are  
designed to find. MIT physicist Jocelyn Monroe has a solution. A new  
detector she and her students have built just finished its initial  
testing at Los Alamos National Laboratory. When deployed in the next  
few months alongside one of the existing dark-matter detectors, the  
new device should identify all of the ordinary neutrons that come  
along, leaving anything else that the other detector picks up as a  
strong candidate for the elusive dark matter. “Dark matter experiments  
are very hard,” explains Monroe. “They are looking for a tiny signal,  
from a phenomenon that happens very rarely,” namely the collision of a  
dark-matter particle with one of ordinary matter, producing a tiny,  
brief flash of light. The research is partly funded by the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/dark-matter-tt1210.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

ALZHEIMER’S MYSTERY
In work that could lead to new drugs to target Alzheimer’s disease,  
MIT researchers and colleagues have shed light on one of the molecular  
mysteries surrounding this common form of dementia. The work, reported  
in a Dec. issue of Neuron, helps explain the perplexing behavior of  
some cells in the hippocampus, thought to be the center of learning  
and memory in the brain. In Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and other  
neurodegenerative conditions, some neurons suddenly start to replicate  
their DNA as if they were about to divide. This causes them to die. It  
is thought that most of the neurons within our brains have formed and  
exited the cell cycle during gestation and the early postnatal period.  
No one knows why this sudden reprisal of the cell cycle occurs in  
adult neurons in Alzheimer’s patients. Now, researchers led by Li-Huei  
Tsai, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience, are starting to  
understand the events that precede the death of the cells. Tsai and  
colleagues found that these aberrant events occur when an enzyme  
called HDAC1, which configures chromatin, the structural component of  
chromosomes, is blocked. Conversely, “increasing levels of this enzyme  
protects neurons from re-entering the cell cycle, losing genomic  
integrity and dying,” said Tsai, who has appointments in MIT’s  
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Picower Institute  
for Learning and Memory and who is also an investigator for the Howard  
Hughes Medical Institute. “Our findings provide insight into how  
neurons die in neurodegenerative diseases and offer a new therapeutic  
strategy for countering neuronal death.” This work is supported by the  
NIH and the American Heart Association.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/alzheimer-mystery-1210.html

ROBOTIC WEATHER FORECASTING
At MIT, planning for bad weather involves far more than remembering an  
umbrella. Researchers in the Department of Aeronautics and  
Astronautics are trying to improve weather forecasting using robotic  
aircraft and advanced flight plans that consider millions of  
variables. “Weather affects huge sectors of our economy, such as  
agriculture and transportation,” said Nicholas Roy, an assistant  
professor and one of the researchers who worked on the project. The  
more time to prepare for a storm and evacuate the area, the better.  
The researchers hope to gain some lead-time by improving the way data  
about current weather conditions are collected. Existing forecasting  
systems depend on pressure, temperature, and other sensors aboard a  
single piloted airplane that flies scripted routes. But the data that  
are collected can’t be processed fast enough to alter the flight plan  
if a storm starts brewing. “Today’s flight path is based on  
yesterday’s weather,” said Professor Jonathan How, the principal  
investigator. Ideally, teams of unmanned aircraft would be used to  
gather data. Current sensor readings from one plane would be used to  
guide the deployment of additional planes to areas with especially  
interesting weather. The key challenge was creating a new algorithm  
that could develop an effective flight plan quickly, based on millions  
of variables. After three years of research using computerized weather  
simulations, the team believes their algorithm can quickly and  
efficiently determine where aircraft should be sent to take the most  
important measurements. The work was described at the IEEE Conference  
on Decision and Control in Dec. It was funded by the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/aerial-weather-tt1210.html

NANOTUBE SENSORS
MIT engineers have developed carbon nanotubes into sensors for cancer  
drugs and other DNA-damaging agents inside living cells. The sensors,  
made of carbon nanotubes wrapped in DNA, can detect chemotherapy drugs  
such as cisplatin as well as environmental toxins and free radicals  
that damage DNA. “We’ve made a sensor that can be placed in living  
cells, healthy or malignant, and actually detect several different  
classes of molecules that damage DNA,” said Michael Strano, associate  
professor of chemical engineering and senior author of a paper on the  
work appearing in a Dec. online edition of Nature Nanotechnology. Such  
sensors could be used to monitor chemotherapy patients to ensure the  
drugs are effectively battling tumors. Many chemotherapy drugs are  
very powerful DNA disruptors and can cause serious side effects, so it  
is important to make sure that the drugs are reaching their intended  
targets. “Researchers from MIT and the University of Illinois at  
Urbana-Champaign also contributed to the work, which was funded by the  
NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/nano-sensor-1214.html
PHOTO AND VIDEO AVAILABLE

THE FAINTEST STARS
The two faintest star-like objects ever found, a pair of twin “brown  
dwarfs” each just a millionth as bright as the sun, have been spotted  
by a team led by MIT physicist Adam Burgasser. “These brown dwarfs are  
the lowest-power stellar light bulbs in the sky that we know of,” said  
Burgasser. And these extra-dim brown dwarfs may be the first  
discoveries of the predominant type in space. “In this regime [of  
faintness] we expect to find the bulk of the brown dwarfs that have  
formed over the lifetime of the galaxy,” he said. “So in that sense  
these objects are the first of these ‘most common’ brown dwarfs, which  
haven’t been found yet because they are simply really faint.”  
Burgasser, an assistant professor of physics at MIT, said “both of  
these objects are the first to break the barrier of one millionth the  
total light-emitting power of the sun.” He is lead author of a paper  
about the discovery in the Astrophysical Journal Letters in Dec.  
Coauthors are from MIT, the University of New South Wales, Australia;  
the University of Hawaii, Manoa; Los Alamos National Laboratory, and  
NASA Ames Research Center. The work was funded in part by NASA.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/dimmest-stars-tt1210.html
PHOTO AND GRAPHIC AVAILABLE

COPYING DNA
The copying of DNA’s master instructions into messenger molecules of  
RNA, a process known as DNA transcription, has always been thought to  
be a unidirectional process whereby a copying machine starts and moves  
in one direction. But in work that represents a fundamental shift in  
scientists’ understanding of the phenomenon, MIT researchers have  
found evidence that two DNA copying machines frequently start from the  
same site and move in different directions. MIT Institute Professor  
Phillip Sharp and his colleagues, who report the results in a Dec.  
early online edition of Science, believe this new mechanism may play a  
role in keeping genes poised for transcription. “People have been  
studying transcription for a long time and never seen this kind of  
transcription before,” said Amy Seila, a postdoctoral associate in  
Sharp’s lab and lead author of the paper. Coauthors are from MIT, the  
Whitehead Institute, and the University of California at San Diego.  
The research was funded by the NIH and the Crick-Jacobs Center for  
Computational Biology.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/reverse-dna-1204.html

HUMANS IN SPACE
A team led by MIT researchers has released the most comprehensive  
independent review of the future of the nation’s human spaceflight  
program undertaken in many years. The report recommends setting  
loftier goals for humans in space, focusing research more clearly  
toward those goals, and increasing cooperation with other nations and  
private industry. After conducting preliminary briefings with various  
stakeholders in Washington, team members say it has been  
enthusiastically received by political leaders, a National Research  
Council panel, and the Obama transition team, among others. “We need  
to rethink the rationales for human spaceflight,” says the report’s  
lead author David Mindell, professor of engineering systems and  
director of the program in Science, Technology and Society at MIT. He  
says that after the Washington briefings, “we sensed a great deal of  
uncertainty in DC about how to proceed with the Bush vision and human  
spaceflight in general. Our paper speaks to those problems in a clear  
way and offers some new ideas.”
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/mindell-space-1216.html

TINY ECOSYSTEM
MIT researchers have created a microbial ecosystem smaller than a  
stick of gum that sheds new light on the plankton-eat-plankton world  
at the bottom of the aquatic food chain. The work, reported in the  
January print issue of American Naturalist, may lead to better  
predictions of marine microbes’ global-scale influence on climate.  
Through photosynthesis and uptake of carbon compounds, diverse  
planktonic marine microorganisms — too small to be seen with the naked  
eye — help regulate carbon flux in the oceans. Carbon flux refers to  
the rate at which energy and carbon are transferred from lower to  
higher levels of the marine food web, and it may have implications for  
commercial fisheries and other ocean-dependent industries. The MIT  
study is one of the first detailed explorations of how sea creatures  
so small — 500,000 can fit on the head of a pin — find food in an  
ocean-size environment. Besides showing that microbes’ swimming and  
foraging is much more sophisticated and complex than previously  
thought, the work also indicates that organic materials may move  
through the oceans’ microbial food web at higher-than-expected rates.  
Using the new technology of microfluidics, a group led by Roman  
Stocker, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and  
Environmental Engineering, devised a clear plastic device about the  
size and shape of a microscope slide. This work was supported by the  
NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/mini-ecosystem-1215.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

CYSTIC FIBROSIS FINDING
MIT researchers have found that the pigments responsible for the blue- 
green stain of the mucus that clogs the lungs of cystic fibrosis (CF)  
patients are primarily signaling molecules that allow large clusters  
of the opportunistic infection agent, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, to  
organize themselves into structured communities. This new insight  
about the leading cause of death of people with CF suggests that the  
phenazine-processing machinery could become a potential target for  
drugs to treat P. aeruginosa infections in CF patients, according to  
the research team, led by Dianne K. Newman, the John and Dorothy  
Wilson Professor of Biology and Geobiology. Newman and a colleague  
reported the findings at the American Society for Cell Biology annual  
meeting in San Francisco. P. aeruginosa appears as a classic  
opportunistic infection, easily shrugged off by healthy people but a  
grave threat to those with CF, which chokes the lungs of its victims  
with sticky mucus. For decades, the blue-green pigments known as  
phenazines have been wrongly regarded as antibiotics, generated by P.  
aeruginosa to kill off the microbe’s bacterial competitors in the  
lungs. "We have a long way to go before being able to test this idea,  
but the hope is that if survival in the lung is influenced by  
phenazine — or some other electron-shuttling molecule or molecules —  
tampering with phenazine trafficking might be a potential way to make  
antibiotics more effective," said Newman, whose lab investigates how  
ancestral bacteria on the early Earth evolved the ability to  
metabolize minerals.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/ancient-bacteria-1216.html

GETTING ORGANIZED
Everyone has them — little squares of paper stuck on monitors,  
business cards strewn across desks, and countless to-do lists. These  
information scraps feature critical phone numbers, meeting dates and  
shopping lists — and they have an alarming tendency to vanish just  
when you need them. Now an MIT computer science professor, David  
Karger, has taken a crack at helping people get organized. Karger, a  
member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab,  
has created List.it, a simple yet useful software to capture all kinds  
of information scraps and to-do lists. The beta version of this web- 
based note-taking software allows you to easily enter, store and  
retrieve all kinds of information, from e-mail addresses to web urls,  
to grocery lists. List.it allows users to jot down short notes and  
easily search them for later retrieval. List.it, which focuses  
entirely on minimizing the time and effort needed to capture  
information, was developed not by looking at how people organize  
information, but what kind of information they keep and make lists of.  
“I would never make the claim that we’re trying to replace Post-its,”  
says Michael Bernstein, a graduate student in Karger’s lab. “We want  
to understand the classes of things people do with Post-its and see if  
we can help users do more of what they wanted to do in the first  
place.” The work is funded by the Nokia Research Center Cambridge, the  
NSF, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Web Science Research  
Initiative and Quanta Computer.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/info-scraps-tt1210.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

CLIMATE CHANGE & WATER
It’s no simple matter to figure out how regional changes in  
precipitation, expected to result from global climate change, may  
affect water supplies. Now, a new analysis led by MIT researchers has  
found that the changes in groundwater may actually be much greater  
than the precipitation changes themselves. For example, in places  
where annual rainfall may increase by 20 percent as a result of  
climate change, the groundwater might increase as much as 40 percent.  
Conversely, the analysis showed in some cases just a 20 percent  
decrease in rainfall could lead to a 70 percent decrease in the  
recharging of local aquifers — a potentially devastating blow in semi- 
arid and arid regions. But the exact effects depend on a complex mix  
of factors, the study found — including soil type, vegetation, and the  
exact timing and duration of rainfall events — so detailed studies  
will be required for each local region in order to predict the  
possible range of outcomes. The research was conducted by Gene-Hua  
Crystal Ng, now a postdoctoral researcher in MIT’s Department of Civil  
and Environmental Engineering (CEE), along with King Bhumipol  
Professor Dennis McLaughlin and Bacardi Stockholm Water Foundations  
Professor Dara Entekhabi, both of CEE, and Bridget Scanlon, a senior  
researcher at the University of Texas. The results were presented at a  
meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The work was funded by the  
NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/agu-groundwater-1218.html

FLUID TRAMPOLINE
A water drop placed on a soap film that vibrates up and down may  
bounce as if on a trampoline — but it’s much more than that, according  
to MIT mathematicians who say the ”fluid trampoline” is the simplest  
fluid system yet explored that exhibits chaotic behavior. MIT math  
professor John Bush and visiting student Tristan Gilet built the  
system in the Applied Math Laboratory, then demonstrated that the drop  
bouncing may be accurately described with a single simple equation.  
They report their findings in the Dec. 29 online edition of Physical  
Review Letters. Their study builds upon the pioneering work of the  
late Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who in 1963 discovered chaos  
in a simplified mathematical model of the atmosphere, now called the  
Lorenz equations. Known as the father of chaos theory, Lorenz passed  
away in April 2008 after a distinguished career in MIT’s Department of  
Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. This work was supported by  
FNRS/FRIA and the Belgian government.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/fluid-trampoline-tt1203.html
PHOTO, VIDEO AND GRAPHIC AVAILABLE

FIGHTING MALARIA
Modifying the environment by using everything from shovels and plows  
to plant-derived pesticides may be as important as mosquito nets and  
vaccinations in the fight against malaria, according to a computerized  
analysis by MIT researchers. The researchers have developed a new  
computer model for analyzing different methods of trying to control  
the spread of malaria, one of the world’s most-devastating diseases.  
Among their findings using the model is that environmental measures  
such as leveling the land to eliminate depressions where pools can  
form can be an important part of the strategy for controlling the  
disease. Reports on the work, led by Professor of Civil and  
Environmental Engineering Elfatih Eltahir, were presented at a meeting  
of the American Geophysical Union. Malaria, Eltahir explained, is “a  
significant global health challenge” that accounts for one-third of  
all deaths of children under 5 worldwide. By developing new software  
to analyze the impacts of different methods of attempting to limit  
malaria’s spread, which involves a complex chain of transmission  
between larvae, mosquitoes and humans, “we have made significant  
progress” toward better control of the disease, he said. This project  
has been funded by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric  
Administration (NOAA), and the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/agu-malaria-1219.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

METALLIC GLASS
Researchers at MIT and the National University of Singapore have made  
significant progress in understanding a class of materials that has  
resisted analysis for decades. Their findings could lead to the rapid  
discovery of a variety of useful new kinds of glass made of metallic  
alloys with potentially significant mechanical, chemical and magnetic  
applications. The first examples of metallic alloys that could be made  
into glass were discovered back in the late 1950s and led to a flurry  
of research activity, but, despite intense study, so far nobody had  
solved the riddle of why some specific alloys could form glasses and  
others could not, or how to identify the promising candidates, said  
Carl. V. Thompson, the Stavros Salapatas Professor of Materials  
Science & Engineering and director of the Materials Processing Center  
at MIT. A report on the new work, which describes a way to  
systematically find the promising mixes from among dozens of  
candidates, was published in Science. The research was supported by  
the Singapore-MIT Alliance and the German Alexander Von Humboldt  
Foundation.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/metallic-glass-1218.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

HYBRID CELLS
MIT engineers have developed a new, highly efficient way to pair up  
cells so they can be fused together into a hybrid cell. The new  
technique should make it much easier for scientists to study what  
happens when two cells are combined. For example, fusing an adult cell  
and an embryonic stem cell allows researchers to study the genetic  
reprogramming that occurs in such hybrids. The researchers, led by a  
collaboration between Joel Voldman, associate professor of electrical  
engineering and computer science, and Rudolf Jaenisch, professor of  
biology and a member of the Whitehead Institute, report the new  
technique in the Jan. 4 online edition of Nature Methods. The team’s  
simple but ingenious sorting method increases the rate of successful  
cell fusion from around 10 percent to about 50 percent, and allows  
thousands of cell pairings at once. Though cell fusion techniques have  
been around for a long time, there are many technical limitations,  
said Voldman. The research was funded by NASA and the NIH.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/cell-fusion-0104.html
VIDEO AND GRAPHIC AVAILABLE

‘GOLDEN’ DRUG DELIVERY
Using tiny gold particles and infrared light, MIT researchers have  
developed a drug-delivery system that allows multiple drugs to be  
released in a controlled fashion. Such a system could one day be used  
to provide more control when battling diseases commonly treated with  
more than one drug, according to the researchers. “With a lot of  
diseases, especially cancer and AIDS, you get a synergistic effect  
with more than one drug,” said Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli, assistant  
professor of biological and mechanical engineering and senior author  
of a paper on the work that recently appeared in the journal ACS Nano.  
Delivery devices already exist that can release two drugs, but the  
timing of the release must be built into the device — it cannot be  
controlled from outside the body. The new system is controlled  
externally and theoretically could deliver up to three or four drugs.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/nanorods-1230.html

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