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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
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