[Editors] MIT Research Digest, April 2009

[Elizabeth Thomson]

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MIT Research Digest, April 2009
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For Immediate Release
3/31/2009

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: Nanostitching * Robotic Gardening * New Greenhouse Gas  
* Drug Delivery Gel * Climate Change & The Poor * Recognizing Faces *  
Toward Faster Microchips * Breast Cancer Test * Current Economic  
Crisis * Re-Engineered Battery Material * Older Workers * Harmless  
Intruder * Energy-Inefficient Manufacturing * Schizophrenia Advance *  
Transportation at Mit * Insights Into Blindness * Toward Engineering  
Tissues * Stem Cells * Mass Migrations

NANOSTITCHING
MIT engineers are using carbon nanotubes only billionths of a meter  
thick to stitch together aerospace materials in work that could make  
airplane skins and other products some 10 times stronger at a nominal  
increase in cost. Moreover, advanced composites reinforced with  
nanotubes are also more than one million times more electrically  
conductive than their counterparts without nanotubes, meaning aircraft  
built with such materials would have greater protection against damage  
from lightning, said Brian L. Wardle, the Charles Stark Draper  
Assistant Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.  
Wardle is lead author of a theoretical paper on the new nanotube- 
reinforced composites that will appear in the Journal of Composite  
Materials. He also described the work as keynote speaker at a recent  
Society of Plastics Engineers conference. This research was sponsored  
by MIT’s Nano-Engineered Composite aerospace STructures (NECST)  
Consortium.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/nanostitching-0305.html
PHOTO AND GRAPHIC AVAILABLE

ROBOTIC GARDENING
In the middle of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence  
Lab sits a platform of fake grass with tomato plants nestled in terra  
cotta pots, growing under the light of an artificial sun. But this  
urban, indoor garden has a twist: the caretakers of the plants are  
entirely robotic. The idea for tending to a garden without human hands  
came from work done by Nikolaus Correll, a postdoctoral assistant  
working in MIT Professor Daniela Rus’ Distributed Robotics Lab.  
Correll saw the possible applications of swarm robotics to an  
agricultural environment and thus the idea grew into a course in which  
students created robots capable of tending a small garden of tomatoes.  
Each robot is outfitted with a robotic arm and a watering pump, while  
the plants themselves are equipped with local soil sensing, networking  
and computation. This affords them the ability to communicate: plants  
can request water or nutrients and keep track of their conditions,  
including fruit produced; robots are able to minister to their  
charges, locate and pick a specific tomato, and even pollinate the  
plants.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/robotic-garden-0318.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

NEW GREENHOUSE GAS
A gas used for fumigation has the potential to contribute  
significantly to future greenhouse warming, but because its production  
has not yet reached high levels there is still time to nip this  
potential contributor in the bud, according to an international team  
of researchers. Scientists at MIT, the Scripps Institution of  
Oceanography in San Diego and other institutions report the results of  
their study of the gas, sulfuryl fluoride, in the Journal of  
Geophysical Research. The researchers have measured the levels of the  
gas in the atmosphere, and determined its emissions and lifetime to  
help gauge its potential future effects on climate. Sulfuryl fluoride  
was introduced as a replacement for methyl bromide, a widely used  
fumigant that is being phased out under the Montreal Protocol because  
of its ozone-destroying chemistry. Methyl bromide has been widely used  
for insect control in grain-storage facilities, and in intensive  
agriculture in arid lands where drip irrigation is combined with  
covering of the land with plastic sheets to control evaporation. “Such  
fumigants are very important for controlling pests in the agricultural  
and building sectors,” says Professor Ron Prinn, director of MIT’s  
Center for Global Change Science and a co-author on the new paper. But  
with methyl bromide being phased out, “industry had to find  
alternatives, so sulfuryl fluoride has evolved to fill the role,” he  
says. Until the new work, nobody knew accurately how long the gas  
would last in the atmosphere after it leaked out of buildings or grain  
silos. “Our analysis has shown that the lifetime is about 36 years, or  
eight times greater than previously thought, with the ocean being its  
dominant sink,” Prinn says.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/prinn-greenhouse-tt0311.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

DRUG DELIVERY GEL
MIT researchers have demonstrated that a gel composed of small, woven  
protein fragments can successfully carry and release proteins of  
different sizes, potentially enabling delivery of drugs such as  
insulin and trastuzumab (Herceptin). Furthermore, the researchers can  
control the rate of release by changing the density of the gel,  
allowing for continuous drug delivery over a specific period of time.  
The team, led by Shuguang Zhang, associate director of MIT’s Center  
for Biomedical Engineering, reports its findings in the Proceedings of  
the National Academy of Sciences. The gel, known as a “nanofiber  
hydrogel scaffold,” enables, over hours, days or even months, a  
gradual release of the proteins from the gel, and the gel itself is  
eventually broken down into harmless amino acids — the building blocks  
of proteins. Traditional drug delivery systems are based on either  
synthetic polymer materials, which may contain residual chemicals and  
other cross-linking agents that are toxic for humans, or animal- 
derived collagen, which may contain residual growth and/or viruses  
from animal tissues. Peptide hydrogels are ideally suited for drug  
delivery as they are pure, easy to design and use, non-toxic, non- 
immunogenic, bio-absorbable, and can be locally applied to a  
particular tissue. The research was funded in part by the NIH and the  
HighQ Foundation.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/drug-delivery-0309.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

CLIMATE CHANGE & THE POOR
A rising tide is said to lift all boats. Rising global temperatures,  
however, may lead to increased disparities between rich and poor  
countries, according to a recent MIT economic analysis of the impact  
of climate change on growth. After examining worldwide climate and  
economic data from 1950 to 2003, Benjamin A. Olken, associate  
professor in the Department of Economics, concludes that a 1 degree  
Celsius rise in temperature in a given year reduces economic growth by  
an average of 1.1 percentage points in the world’s poor countries but  
has no measurable effect in rich countries. Olken says his research  
suggests higher temperatures will be disproportionately bad for the  
economic growth of poor countries compared to rich countries. The  
precise reasons why higher temperatures lower economic output are  
likely to be complex, but Olken’s results suggest the importance of  
temperature's impact on agricultural output. His data also provide  
evidence for a relationship between temperature and industrial output,  
investment, research productivity and political stability. “The  
potential impacts of an increase in temperature on poor countries are  
much larger than existing estimates have suggested,” Olken says.  
“Although historical estimates don’t necessarily predict the future,  
our results suggest that one should be particularly attentive to the  
potential impact of climate change on poorer countries.” Olken’s  
analysis is contained in “Climate Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence  
from the Last Half Century,” a paper co-authored by MIT economics  
graduate student Melissa Dell and Benjamin F. Jones, associate  
management professor at Northwestern University.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/climate-shock-0313.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

RECOGNIZING FACES
Humans excel at recognizing faces, but how we do this has been an  
abiding mystery in neuroscience and psychology. In an effort to  
explain our success in this area, researchers are taking a closer look  
at how and why we fail. A new study from MIT looks at a particularly  
striking instance of failure: our impaired ability to recognize faces  
in photographic negatives. The study, which appears in the Proceedings  
of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that a large part of the  
answer might lie in the brain's reliance on a certain kind of image  
feature. The work could potentially lead to computer vision systems,  
for settings as diverse as industrial quality control or object and  
face detection. On a different front, the results and methodologies  
could help researchers probe face-perception skills in children with  
autism, who are often reported to experience difficulties analyzing  
facial information. The work was led by Pawan Sinha, an associate  
professor of brain and cognitive sciences and senior author of the  
study. It was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Jim and  
Marilyn Simons Foundation.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/brain-photo-0313.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

TOWARD FASTER MICROCHIPS
New research findings at MIT could lead to microchips that operate at  
much higher speeds than is possible with today’s standard silicon  
chips, leading to cell phones and other communications systems that  
can transmit data much faster. The key to the superfast chips is the  
use of a material called graphene, a form of pure carbon that was  
first identified in 2004. Researchers at other institutions have  
already used the one-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms to make  
prototype transistors and other simple devices, but the latest MIT  
results could open up a range of new applications. The MIT researchers  
built an experimental graphene chip known as a frequency multiplier,  
meaning it is capable of taking an incoming electrical signal of a  
certain frequency — for example, the clock speed that determines how  
fast a computer chip can carry out its computations — and producing an  
output signal that is a multiple of that frequency. In this case, the  
MIT graphene chip can double the frequency of an electromagnetic  
signal. Frequency multipliers are widely used in radio communications  
and other applications. But existing systems require multiple  
components, produce “noisy” signals that require filtering and consume  
large power, whereas the new graphene system has just a single  
transistor and produces, in a highly efficient manner, a clean output  
that needs no filtering. The findings are being reported in the May  
issue of Electron Device Letters and were also reported recently at an  
American Physical Society meeting by Tomás Palacios, assistant  
professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer  
Science and a core member of the Microsystems Technology  
Laboratories.This project is partially funded by the MIT Institute for  
Soldier Nanotechnologies and by the Interconnect Focus Center program.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/graphene-palacios-0319.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

BREAST CANCER TEST
Scientists at MIT, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Weill  
Cornell Medical School have developed a test that could help doctors  
precisely identify which breast cancer patients should receive  
aggressive therapy, thereby sparing many women at low risk for  
metastatic disease from undergoing unnecessary and potentially  
dangerous treatment. The researchers, including MIT biology professor  
Frank Gertler, developed the test based on an earlier finding that the  
co-mingling of three cell types can predict whether localized breast  
cancer will metastasize, or spread throughout the body. The findings  
are published March 24 in the online version of Clinical Cancer  
Research. “This is the first marker that can reliably predict  
metastatic breast cancer,” says study co-author John S. Condeelis,  
professor and co-chair of anatomy and structural biology at Yeshiva  
University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “It could  
dramatically change the way we approach the care of women with breast  
cancer.”
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/cancer-test-0324.html

CURRENT ECONOMIC CRISIS
Economists and policy-makers alike are trying to assess why risk- 
management systems and regulatory constraints didn't kick in before  
the global economy became so weak. To most, this situation is a shock.  
Economist Andrew Lo is less surprised. A professor at the MIT Sloan  
School of Management, Lo has studied the connections between financial  
decision-making, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. His ideas  
about human behavior in financial markets have attracted the attention  
of policymakers in Washington who want not only to sort out the  
current crisis but also to head off future destructive events.  
Testifying before the House Oversight Committee last November, Lo  
discussed how credit crises have been regular occurrences over the  
past 35 years. "Financial crises are an unfortunate but necessary  
consequence of modern capitalism," he explained. Financial losses, he  
added, are a byproduct of innovation, "but disruptions and  
dislocations are greatly magnified when risks have been incorrectly  
assessed and incorrectly assigned." Lo believes that "behavioral blind  
spots" -- evolutionarily hardwired reactions to perceived risks and  
rewards -- are particularly dangerous during periods of economic  
extreme. That is, during both bubbles and crashes.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/lo-interview-0323.html

RE-ENGINEERED BATTERY MATERIAL
MIT engineers have created a kind of beltway that allows for the rapid  
transit of electrical energy through a well-known battery material, an  
advance that could usher in smaller, lighter batteries — for cell  
phones and other devices — that could recharge in seconds rather than  
hours. The work could also allow for the quick recharging of batteries  
in electric cars, although that particular application would be  
limited by the amount of power available to a homeowner through the  
electric grid. The work, led by Gerbrand Ceder, the Richard P. Simmons  
Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, is reported in the  
March 12 issue of Nature. Because the material involved is not new —  
the researchers have simply changed the way they make it — Ceder  
believes the work could make it into the marketplace within two to  
three years. This work was supported by the NSF and the DOE.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/battery-material-0311.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

OLDER WORKERS
If long-term job market trends continue, the person asking, “Do you  
want fries with that?” will be increasingly likely to have a college  
education, an MIT analysis finds. Dramatic shifts in the U.S. labor  
market in the last 25 years are relegating older workers — even those  
with a college education — to lower-wage jobs, according to research  
by MIT Economics Professor David Autor. This trend appears likely to  
steepen in the current recession, as employers accelerate the rate at  
which they shed nonessential positions. In a paper co-authored with  
graduate student David Dorn, “This Job is ‘Getting Old’: Measuring  
Change in Job Opportunities using Occupational Age Structure,” which  
was presented recently at the American Economics Association  
conference, Autor analyzes a phenomenon that he refers to as the  
“hollowing out” of the U.S. job market from 1980 to 2005. “One of the  
most remarkable developments in the U.S. labor market of the past two  
and a half decades has been the rapid, simultaneous growth of  
employment in both the highest- and lowest-skilled jobs,” Autor says.  
European labor markets echo this shift.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/oldjobs-0310.html

HARMLESS INTRUDER
On March 2, an asteroid whizzed past the Earth at a distance of just  
41,000 miles -- a near miss by cosmic standards (most communications  
satellites orbit at a distance of about 22,300 miles from Earth).  
Headlines around the world proclaimed that Earth had dodged a bullet,  
and many mentioned that if the space rock had hit our planet, it might  
have packed a punch comparable to the Tunguska impact in 1908 that  
flattened trees over an 800-square-mile area in Siberia. But some fast- 
tracking observations by MIT Professor of Planetary Sciences Richard  
Binzel proved that this rock was actually much smaller than that.  
Likely just 19 meters (about 60 feet) across, it would probably have  
disintegrated high in the atmosphere, with only a few small fragments  
making it to the ground. Discovered just two days before its closest  
approach to Earth, the asteroid, called 2009 DD45, was initially  
estimated as between 20 and 40 meters across. At the high end, that  
would have made it comparable to the devastating Tunguska bolide.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/harmless-intruder-0316.html

ENERGY-INEFFICIENT MANUFACTURING
Modern manufacturing methods are spectacularly inefficient in their  
use of energy and materials, according to a detailed MIT analysis of  
the energy use of 20 major manufacturing processes. Overall, new  
manufacturing systems are anywhere from 1,000 to one million times  
bigger consumers of energy, per pound of output, than more traditional  
industries. In short, pound for pound, making microchips uses up  
orders of magnitude more energy than making manhole covers. At first  
glance, it may seem strange to make comparisons between such widely  
disparate processes as metal casting and chip making. But Professor  
Timothy Gutowski of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, who  
led the analysis, explains that such a broad comparison of energy  
efficiency is an essential first step toward optimizing these newer  
manufacturing methods as they gear up for ever-larger production. “The  
seemingly extravagant use of materials and energy resources by many  
newer manufacturing processes is alarming and needs to be addressed  
alongside claims of improved sustainability from products manufactured  
by these means,” Gutowksi and colleagues say in their conclusion to  
the study, which was recently published in the journal Environmental  
Science and Technology. The work was funded by the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/energy-manufacturing-0317.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

SCHIZOPHRENIA ADVANCE
Researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have  
found that inhibiting a key brain enzyme in mice reversed  
schizophrenia-like symptoms. The finding, reported in the March 20  
issue of Cell, identified how a particular gene controls this brain  
enzyme. Better understanding of the relationship could lead to new  
drug treatments for schizophrenia, the severe brain disorder that  
affects about 1 percent of the population and is characterized by  
hallucinations, delusions, poor social and emotional functioning and  
disorganized thoughts. The Picower research focused on a gene known as  
DISC1 (short for “disrupted in schizophrenia 1”). DISC1 has since been  
shown to help brain neuronal cells migrate to their correct positions  
and to help new neurons grow in the developing brain, but its role was  
not well understood. Now, Li-Huei Tsai, the Picower Professor of  
Neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and  
colleagues have shown for the first time that DISC1 directly inhibits  
the activity of a brain enzyme called glycogen synthase kinase 3 beta,  
also known as GSK3B. Lithium chloride, the mood-stabilizing drug often  
prescribed for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, also acts on GSK3B.  
“This work for the first time provides a detailed explanation of how  
DISC1 functions normally in our brains,” said Tsai, a Howard Hughes  
Medical Institute investigator and director of the neurobiology  
program of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad  
Institute of Harvard and MIT.This work was supported by the NIH, the  
Stanley Center, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia  
and Depression (NARSAD) and the Human Frontier Science Program.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/disc1-0319.html

TRANSPORTATION at MIT
MIT has launched Transportation at MIT, a coordinated effort to address  
one of civilization’s most pressing challenges: the environmental  
impact of the world’s ever-increasing demand for transportation.  
Building on MIT’s rich tradition of engineering research and  
interdisciplinary collaboration, the new initiative will knit together  
the wide-ranging, robust research already under way at the Institute  
and create new opportunities for education and innovation. The  
program’s creation comes as the global movement of people and things  
becomes increasingly unsustainable — a problem that cannot be pinned  
on any one mode of transport. Two-thirds of the world’s petroleum  
consumption is taken up by transportation-related needs. Projections  
indicate that demand for petroleum, if unchecked, may outstrip supply  
within a few decades, while carbon dioxide output across the globe  
could triple by 2050. “The global transportation challenge is as multi- 
faceted as a problem could be, and it is hard to think of an  
institution better equipped to tackle it than MIT,” said Dean of  
Engineering Subra Suresh.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/transportation-0304.html

INSIGHTS INTO BLINDNESS
In macular degeneration, the most common form of adult blindness,  
patients progressively lose vision in the center of their visual  
field, thereby depriving the corresponding part of the visual cortex  
of input. Previously, researchers discovered that the deprived neurons  
begin responding to visual input from another spot on the retina —  
evidence of plasticity in the adult cortex. Just how such plasticity  
occurred was unknown, but a new MIT study sheds light on the  
underlying neural mechanism. “This study shows us one way that the  
brain changes when its inputs change. Neurons seem to ‘want’ to  
receive input: when their usual input disappears, they start  
responding to the next best thing,” said Nancy Kanwisher of the  
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and senior author of the  
study appearing in a March issue of the Journal of Neuroscience. “Our  
study shows that the changes we see in neural response in people with  
MD are probably driven by the lack of input to a population of  
neurons, not by a change in visual information processing strategy,”  
said Kanwisher, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Cognitive  
Neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. This  
work was supported by the NIH, Kirschstein-NRSA, and Dr. and Mrs.  
Joseph Byrne.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/macular-degen-0303.html
PHOTO AND GRAPHIC AVAILABLE

TOWARD ENGINEERING TISSUES
As a high school sophomore, Asad Moten read a news story about  
engineering new organs for patients waiting for a transplant, and  
decided to start his own tissue-engineering project. His efforts led  
to the invention of a scaffold that can help regenerate tissue and  
that may one day be able to help patients with spinal cord injuries,  
serious burns, nerve defects and other chronic wounds. The invention,  
known as a protein printboard, may also lead to methods to engineer  
transplantable organs, which could help some of the 80,000 people in  
the United States waiting for donated organs. "Twenty of these  
patients die every day due to a lack of replacement organs and tissues  
for them," says Moten, who is forming a startup, ECMatrix Inc., to  
develop tissue replacement scaffolds. Moten's invention has won him  
numerous awards and accolades, the most recent being an induction into  
the Young Inventor's International Hall of Fame. He was also a  
regional finalist in the 2006-2007 Siemens Westinghouse Competition.  
He is now a sophomore at MIT majoring in brain and cognitive sciences  
and biological engineering.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/wound-heal-0304.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

STEM CELLS
MIT and Whitehead Institute researchers have developed a novel method  
of removing potential cancer-causing genes during the reprogramming of  
skin cells from Parkinson's disease patients into an embryonic-stem- 
cell-like state. Scientists were then able to use the resulting  
induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to derive dopamine-producing  
neurons, the cell type that degenerates in Parkinson's disease  
patients. The work marks the first time researchers have generated  
human iPS cells that have maintained their embryonic stem-cell-like  
properties after the removal of reprogramming genes. The findings are  
published in the March 6 edition of the journal Cell. "Until this  
point, it was not completely clear that when you take out the  
reprogramming genes from human cells, the reprogrammed cells would  
actually maintain the iPS state and be self-perpetuating," says Frank  
Soldner, a postdoctoral researcher in Whitehead Member and MIT  
Professor Rudolf Jaenisch's laboratory and co-author of the article.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/parkinsons-stem-0305.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE

MASS MIGRATIONS
For the first time, MIT engineers and colleagues have observed the  
initiation of a mass gathering and subsequent migration of hundreds of  
millions of animals — in this case, fish. The work, conducted using a  
novel imaging technique, “provides information essential to the  
conservation of marine ecosystems that vast oceanic fish shoals  
inhabit,” the team writes in the March 27 issue of Science. It also  
confirms theories about the behavior of large groups of animals in  
general, from bird flocks to locust swarms. Until now those theories  
had only been predicted through theoretical investigations, computer  
simulations and laboratory experiments. For example, the team found  
that once a group of fish reaches a critical population density, it  
triggers a kind of chain reaction resulting in the synchronized  
movement of millions of individuals over a large area. The phenomenon  
is akin to a human “wave” moving around a sports stadium. “As far as  
we know, this is the first time we’ve quantified this behavior in  
nature and over such a huge ecosystem,” said Nicholas C. Makris,  
leader of the work and a professor of mechanical and ocean  
engineering. The work was sponsored by the National Oceanographic  
Partnership Program, the Office of Naval Research, and the Alfred P.  
Sloan Foundation, and is a contribution to the Census of Marine Life.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/animal-behavior-0326.html
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