[Editors] MIT Research Digest, May 2009
Elizabeth Thomson
thomson at MIT.EDU
Fri May 1 15:27:00 EDT 2009
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MIT Research Digest, May 2009
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For Immediate Release
5/1/2009
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: Dialect Detectives * Blood Pressure Sensor * Cell
Evolution * Novel Needle * Insights Into Perception * Virus-Built
Battery * Microbes & Drugs * Important Synthesis * Brain Waves *
Nanopatterning * Cooperative Behavior * Making Picky Proteins * Cells’
Inner Workings
DIALECT DETECTIVES
A law enforcement agency intercepts an international phone call
alerting a suspected drug dealer to a new shipment. While the
translator listening to the message is confident the caller's Spanish
carries a South American accent, he cannot pinpoint a more specific
region for agents to put under surveillance. But technology under
development by Pedro Torres-Carrasquillo and his colleagues at MIT’s
Lincoln Laboratory may lead to a dialect identification system that
compensates for a translator's inexperience with multiple variants of
a spoken language. Language identification systems that can recognize
as many as 29 languages from written text are already marketed, and
systems that can identify a spoken language from a prescribed range of
choices also exist. So far, however, no system that automatically
discriminates one spoken dialect from another is available. "We are
not looking for the types of data linguists deal with - larger units
such as phonemes and words," Torres-Carrasquillo says. "We're looking
at the statistical distributions of basic frequency spectra of small
pieces of sounds."
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/speech-processing-0416.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
BLOOD PRESSURE SENSOR
High blood pressure is a common risk factor for heart attacks, strokes
and aneurysms, so diagnosing and monitoring it are critically
important. However, getting reliable blood pressure readings is not
always easy. Visits to the doctor's office can provoke anxiety that
distorts blood pressure readings, and even when accurate, such visits
provide only one-time snapshots of the patient's condition. To
overcome these obstacles, MIT engineers have built a wearable blood
pressure sensor that can provide continuous, 24-hour monitoring. Blood
pressure can change from minute to minute, so continuous monitoring
offers a much broader picture of cardiovascular health. The new
monitor, which loops around the wrist and the index finger, is just as
accurate as traditional cuff devices but much less cumbersome,
allowing it to be worn for hours or days at a time. “The human body is
so complex, but the cuff gives only snapshot data,” says Harry Asada,
an MIT mechanical engineer who led the development of the new monitor.
“If you get signals all of the time you can see the trends and capture
the physical condition quite well.” Such devices could be used to keep
tabs on hypertension as well as sleep apnea, which causes sufferers to
stop breathing many times throughout the night. The project was funded
by the NIH, NSF and the Sharp Corporation.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/blood-pressure-tt0408.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
CELL EVOLUTION
Understanding how living cells originated and evolved into their
present forms remains a fundamental research area in biology, one
boosted in recent years by the introduction of new tools for genomic
analysis. Now, researchers at MIT and Boston University have used such
tools to put what they say is "the last nail in the coffin" for one
theory about the origin of a basic structure in the cell. In the
process, by illuminating a key step in the initial evolution of a
basic structure that still exists in most cells in the human body, it
may help researchers understand how some of these components work.
These include parts of the neurons that make up our brains, sperm
cells that determine fertility, and basic elements of cellular
reproduction. The new analysis, published in the April issue of Cell
Motility and the Cytoskeleton, was conducted by Hyman Hartman,
visiting scientist in MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering, and a
Boston University colleague.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/origin-of-cells-0422.html
NOVEL NEEDLE
Each year, hundreds of thousands of people suffer medical
complications from hypodermic needles that penetrate too far under
their skin. A new device developed by MIT engineers and colleagues
aims to prevent this from happening by keeping needles on target. The
device, which is purely mechanical, is based on concepts borrowed from
the oil industry. It involves a hollow S-shaped needle containing a
filament that acts as a guide wire. When a physician pushes the device
against a tissue, she is actually applying force only to the filament,
not the needle itself, thanks to a special clutch. When the filament,
which moves through the tip of the needle, encounters resistance from
a firm tissue, it begins to buckle within the S-shaped tube. Due to
the combined buckling and interactions with the walls of the tube, the
filament locks into place “and the needle and wire advance as a single
unit,” said Jeffrey Karp, an affiliate faculty member of the Harvard-
MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and co-corresponding
author of a paper on the work in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences. The needle and wire proceed through the firm
tissue. But once they reach the target cavity (for example, a blood
vessel) there is no more resistance on the wire, and it quickly
advances forward while the needle remains stationary. Because the
needle is no longer moving, it cannot proceed past the cavity into the
wrong tissue. Karp’s coauthors are from MIT, Massachusetts General
Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital
(Karp is also affiliated with the latter two). The work was funded by
the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT and the
Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT).
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/novel-needle-0406.html
GRAPHIC AVAILABLE
INSIGHTS INTO PERCEPTION
In the classic waterfall illusion, if you stare at the downward motion
of a waterfall for some period of time, stationary objects — such as
rocks — appear to drift upward. MIT neuroscientists have found that
this phenomenon occurs not only in our visual perception but also in
our tactile perception, and that these senses actually influence one
another. Put another way, how you feel the world can actually change
how you see it — and vice versa. In a paper published in an April
issue of Current Biology, researchers found that people who were
exposed to visual motion in a given direction perceived tactile motion
in the opposite direction. Conversely, tactile motion in one direction
gave rise to the illusion of visual motion in the opposite direction.
“Our discovery suggests that the sensory processing of visual and
tactile motion use overlapping neural circuits,” explained Christopher
Moore of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and senior
author of the paper. “The way something looks or feels can be
influenced by a stimulus in the other sensory modality.” The research
was supported by the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT,
Mitsui Foundation, National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate
Fellowship, Eric L. Adler Fellowship, Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/illusion-0409.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
VIRUS-BUILT BATTERY
For the first time, MIT researchers have shown they can genetically
engineer viruses to build both the positively and negatively charged
ends of a lithium-ion battery. The new virus-produced batteries have
the same energy capacity and power performance as state-of-the-art
rechargeable batteries being considered to power plug-in hybrid cars,
and they could also be used to power a range of personal electronic
devices, said Angela Belcher, the MIT materials scientist who led the
research team. The new batteries, described in an April issue of
Science, could be manufactured with a cheap and environmentally benign
process. The research was funded by the Army Research Office Institute
and the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/virus-battery-0402.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MICROBES & DRUGS
Scientists at MIT and Brown University studying how marine bacteria
move recently discovered that a sharp variation in water current
segregates right-handed bacteria from their left-handed brethren,
impelling the microbes in opposite directions. This finding and the
possibility of quickly and cheaply implementing the segregation of two-
handed objects in the laboratory could have a big impact on the
pharmaceutical industry, for example, for which the separation of
right-handed from left-handed molecules can be crucial to a drug’s
safety. While single-celled bacteria do not have hands, their helical-
shaped flagella spiral either clockwise or counter-clockwise, making
opposite-turning flagella similar to human hands in that they create
mirror images of one another that cannot be superimposed. This two-
handed quality is called chirality, and in a molecule, it can make the
difference between healing and harming the human body. “This discovery
could impact our understanding of how water currents affect ocean
microbes, particularly with respect to their ability to forage for
food, since chiral effects make them drift off-course. But it is also
important for several industries that rely upon the ability to
separate two-handed molecules,” said Roman Stocker, the Doherty
Assistant Professor of Ocean Utilization in the MIT Department of
Civil and Environmental Engineering, and a principal investigator of
the research. The work, reported in an April issue of Physical Review
Letters, was partially supported by the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/chiral-microbes-0417.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
IMPORTANT SYNTHESIS
Ten years ago, William Fenical of the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography isolated from an ocean-living fungus a compound that has
since shown the ability to kill cancer cells in the lab. Now, for the
first time, MIT chemists have synthesized the compound, an advance
that could open the door to new drug treatments for cancer. The
compound, known as (+)-11,11'-Dideoxyverticillin A, is one of the most
structurally complex members of a family of naturally occurring
alkaloids. Mohammad Movassaghi, associate professor of chemistry, and
colleagues reported the synthesis in an April issue of Science. The
research was supported in part by Amgen, AstraZeneca, Boehringer
Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Lilly.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/synthesis-0424.html
GRAPHIC AVAILABLE
BRAIN WAVES
Scientists have studied high-frequency brain waves, known as gamma
oscillations, for more than 50 years, believing them crucial to
consciousness, attention, learning and memory. Now, for the first
time, MIT researchers and colleagues have found a way to induce these
waves by shining laser light directly onto the brains of mice. The
work takes advantage of a newly developed technology known as
optogenetics, which combines genetic engineering with light to
manipulate the activity of individual nerve cells. The research helps
explain how the brain produces gamma waves and provides new evidence
of the role they play in regulating brain functions — insights that
could someday lead to new treatments for a range of brain-related
disorders. “Gamma waves are known to be [disrupted] in people with
schizophrenia and other psychiatric and neurological diseases,” says
Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience and a Howard Hughes
Medical Institute investigator. “This new tool will give us a great
chance to probe the function of these circuits.” Tsai co-authored a
paper about the work in an April issue of Nature. This work was
supported by NARSAD, the NIH, the NSF, the Thomas F. Peterson fund,
the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative and the Knut and
Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/gamma-0426.html
NANOPATTERNING
Researchers at MIT have found a novel method for etching extremely
narrow lines on a microchip, using a material that can be switched
from transparent to opaque, and vice versa, just by exposing it to
certain wavelengths of light. Such materials are not new, but the
researchers found a novel way of harnessing that property to create a
mask with exceptionally fine lines of transparency. This mask can then
be used to create a correspondingly fine line on the underlying
material. Producing such fine lines is crucial to many new
technologies, from microchip manufacturing that is constantly seeking
ways to cram more components onto a single chip, to a whole host of
emerging fields based on nano-scale patterns. But these technologies
have faced fundamental limits because they tend to rely on light to
produce these patterns, and most techniques cannot produce patterns
much smaller than the wavelengths of light itself. This method is a
way of overcoming that limit. The research was carried out by research
engineer Rajesh Menon of the Research Laboratory of Electronics and
colleagues from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science. It was reported in a paper published in an April issue of
Science. The work was partly funded by grants from LumArray Inc.,
where Menon is co-founder, the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological
Innovation, and DARPA.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/nanopatterning-0409.html
COOPERATIVE BEHAVIOR
One of the perplexing questions raised by evolutionary theory is how
cooperative behavior, which benefits other members of a species at a
cost to the individual, came to exist. Cooperative behavior has
puzzled biologists because if only the fittest survive, genes for a
behavior that benefits everybody in a population should not last and
cooperative behavior should die out, says Jeff Gore, a Pappalardo
postdoctoral fellow in MIT’s Department of Physics. Gore is part of a
team of MIT researchers that has used game theory to understand one
solution yeast use to get around this problem. The team’s findings,
published in an April edition of Nature, indicate that if an
individual can benefit even slightly by cooperating, it can survive
even when surrounded by individuals that don’t cooperate. In short,
the study offers a concrete example of how cooperative behaviors can
be compatible with evolutionary theory. Gore’s colleague on the work
is MIT physics professor Alexander van Oudenaarden. This research was
funded by the NIH and the NSF.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/yeast-games-0406.html
PHOTO AVAILABLE
MAKING PICKY PROTEINS
Interactions between proteins underlie nearly everything that happens
inside a cell — from reading DNA to communicating with the outside
world. Many of those proteins have very similar structures, yet
somehow they locate and interact with only their specific partner. For
years, scientists have been trying to model and design such
interactions, with limited success. Now, MIT researchers have
developed a model that can be used to design new protein interactions
and could help scientists create proteins for use in developing new
drugs. “The proteins we design now are not likely to become drugs or
therapeutics, but can be used in order to figure out the basic
mechanisms of these interactions, which could be extremely valuable,”
said Amy Keating, associate professor of biology and senior author of
a paper published in an April issue of Nature. This work was funded by
the NIH.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/designer-protein-0415.html
CELLS’ INNER WORKINGS
Living cells are bombarded with messages from the outside world --
hormones and other chemicals tell them to grow, migrate, die or do
nothing. Inside the cell, complex signaling networks interpret these
cues and make life-and-death decisions. Unraveling these networks is
critical to understanding human diseases, especially cancer, and to
predicting how cells will react to potential treatments. Using a
"fuzzy logic" approach, a team of MIT biological engineers has created
a new model that reveals different and novel information about these
inner cell workings than traditional computational models. The team,
led by Doug Lauffenburger, head of MIT's Department of Biological
Engineering, reports its findings in an April issue of the journal
Public Library of Science (PLoS) Computational Biology. Funding was
provided by the NIH and the DOD.
MORE: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/fuzzy-logic-0403.html
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