November/December 2009

Water Strider
Source: Biosurvey.ou.edu

Researchers have taken a healthy stride towards understanding the evolutionary role of the nice guy.

A recent study of water striders—insects found skimming the surfaces of ponds and streams around the world—showed that while aggressive males enjoy greater reproductive success as individuals, more gentlemanly striders gain an unexpected advantage in the bigger picture.

The problem for aggressive males is that female water striders quickly tire of their harassment and skate away to regions inhabited by more laid back individuals. “The key result is that this really affects the success of the males,” says Stuart Wigby, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford. With more females around, the laid back males have a greater shot at reproducing.

“Nice guys don’t always finish last,” says Omar Eldakar, the study’s principle investigator.

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LMNA Protein

In a dish in Maryland, human skin cells have been prodded to age prematurely—several times faster than normal, say researchers.

The scientists produced the super-aging cells as they were trying to understand the unusual disorder called Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria syndrome. Children born with this condition begin to lose hair early in childhood and develop visibly aged skin. Their arteries harden, and they fall easy prey to strokes and heart attacks. One child in every 4-8 million is born with progeria.

Now, scientists have succeeded in pushing cells to look as if they have aged several years in just a few days. It is thought that the super-aging in these cells is caused, in part, by the same cellular defect that causes super-aging in progeria.

In 2005, Tom Misteli’s lab at the National Institute of Health in Maryland discovered the source of super-aging in children affected by progeria. DNA carries the recipe for making essential proteins, and theirs was being misinterpreted. A specific chunk of their chromosome was consistently being misread, providing only partial directions for protein synthesis. This mutation in the protein-making pathway resulted in a shorter than normal version of a protein called lamin. At that time, no one knew why lamin was important to the cell. They did know that its mutant cousin was present in large quantities in children with progeria.

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The Chevy Volt

Electric vehicles that use electric power and gasoline separately have thrown a wrench into the EPA’s fuel-rating system.

The Volt, belonging to a new class of vehicles called “extended-range electric vehicles,” operates on electric power for up to forty miles, says Stanley Sullivan, an engineer at a large automobile manufacturing company. After the initial charge of the battery has been depleted, a gas engine kicks in to recharge the battery. Because the power sources of electric vehicles are different—your home electrical outlet and a gas engine—assessing their miles-per-gallon (MPG) rating will be difficult.

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Image: Cochlodinium Polykrikoides by Gert Hansen

A vicious species of algae whose massive blooms have caused millions of dollars in damage to commercial fisheries has arrived in the Arabian Gulf—evidence that the algae may be rapidly spreading through the world’s oceans.

The bloom, which began in August 2008 and persisted through May, was the first caused by the algal species, cochlodinium polykrikoides, to occur in the region. Turning the water a chocolate brown, it wiped out entire fish farms, killed more than 1,350 tons of fish, and suffocated coral reefs.

But more significantly, the bloom overwhelmed intake filters and purification membranes of five local desalination plants, forcing the plants to limit their operation or shut down completely for several days. Desalination plants are the primary source of freshwater for the region.

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In a test to see if doctors would report ethical conflicts, researchers found that nearly thirty percent of orthopedic surgeons failed to do so at a recent conference.

Researchers determined that 91 physicians at last year’s annual conference of the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons (AAOS) did not disclose recent payments from device manufacturers. Presenters and committee members at the conference failed to report 99 of 344 payments, at least 59 of which were related to their research. Undisclosed compensation totaled over $12 million.

“We were a bit surprised that the rate of non-disclosure was relatively high,” says Dr. Mininder Kocher, lead author of the study and orthopedic surgeon at Children’s Hospital Boston.

These findings call attention to an issue of ongoing importance to the research community. Conflict-of-interest disclosure policies are put in place to avoid bias in scientific research. “The idea of transparency is very important,” says Dr. Ruth Fischbach, Director of the Center for Bioethics at Columbia University. “The most important aspect of research is based on trust.”

To assess the accuracy of disclosures, Dr. Kocher and his colleagues compared those made at the conference with lists of payments published by five major device manufacturers. A legal settlement recently forced these companies to publish all payments to physicians.

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Television and newspapers encourage people to trust DNA evidence without necessarily improving individuals’ comprehension of DNA itself, a recent study concluded. The study expanded on previous work on the “CSI effect,” the possible consequence of television crime shows on the public’s perception of forensic science.

The show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation premiered on CBS in 2000, and the first “CSI effect” studies began appearing in 2006, says Paul Brewer, professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and coauthor of the study. Unlike previous work, he says, his study with Barbara Ley (also of UW Milwaukee) looked at DNA as a broader social phenomenon. Brewer and Ley found that people’s general patterns of media use—including reading newspapers and watching local news—correlate with what they think about DNA.

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Vibrotactile Suit
Image courtesy of Jeff Lieberman

When roboticists make the clothes, the clothes might improve the man. New vibrating robotic suits could teach wearers to perform complex movements faster and more accurately.

If you have ever struggled to learn a sport, you know that new motor skills don’t come easy. Your coach may shout commands or demonstrate her technique, but both oral and visual instructions require an awkward translation—a mapping of movements from the teacher’s body to your own. When all else fails, the coach might stand behind you, pushing and pulling your limbs through the proper motions. Research shows that this student-teacher puppetry is the most effective teaching method, but also the most difficult since no single instructor can steer all of your joints simultaneously.

Enter the robotic suit. Conforming to your body, it is a suit that can provide instantaneous feedback to every joint and help a variety of users—to tango or to recover from a stroke. “We have massage and we have sex—and basically that’s what people are used to for touch,” says Jeff Lieberman, the roboticist who envisioned this suit as a member of MIT’s Personal Robots Group. For Lieberman, the vibrotactile suit is an untapped learning tool. “It’s low-hanging fruit. It’s just waiting to be used,” he says.

Lieberman tested a suit sleeve with eight tactors—or vibration points. Wearers watched a video of a teacher’s arm performing a certain motion and then mimicked that motion. The sleeve created the equivalent of an invisible, vibration “force field.” Bending the arm too far down, for example, started a vibration on the sleeve’s bottom—too far up, started one on the sleeve’s top. At the end of test, those performing the motions with no mistakes felt no vibrations. “Here you are learning by definition,” Lieberman said. “When you are doing it right, the machine is off.”

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Human immunodeficiency virus on a human lymphocyte
Image courtesy CDC Public Health Image Library

A new protein aimed at preventing HIV infection in humans has proven itself in initial lab tests. The protein is a mash-up of two previously existing proteins that occur naturally in humans.

While existing HIV therapies target the virus after it has started to make itself a part of its host’s cells, the new protein acts on the virus at a much earlier stage, rendering the virus ineffective before it can do any harm.

“It’s a new approach,” says Martha Neagu, the lead author of the paper announcing the findings, “and it’s a very effective approach.”

The idea to create this protein came from a previous study of South American owl monkeys, in which a similar compound protein was identified as the mechanism behind the monkey’s immunity to HIV. Human cells don’t produce this compound protein, but they do produce its two constituents.

“This is a modular protein, and we have the tools in our human gene arsenal to make an equivalent,” said Neagu. She and her team at Columbia University constructed their own version of the monkey’s HIV inhibitor by splicing together the genetic codes of the components that are already found in humans, creating eleven potential blueprints for the compound protein.

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Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Whatevs, def, and ridic—abbreviations filling text-messages and Facebook walls—may be less related to new technologies than old ties between language and social identity, say researchers.

The link between technology’s limitations and lopping off word parts seems reasonable: if you write abbreviations like those above—instead of whatever, definitely, and ridiculous—you can send your IM faster and fit more words in each text-message.

“It’s not complete bunkum,” says Susan Herring of Indiana University. “When you send text-messages on mobile phones, you have a 160-character limit, so there is a very clear technological constraint.”

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Shrock and Edgerton
Image courtesy MIT Museum

A hundred meters in front of the Green Building, a metal giant rises from the red brick paving. Thirty-three tons of curved steel stand tall; five black plates touch at angles, then bloom outward. Forty feet high, this sculpture barricades the open mouth of the building behind, its wide plates shielding winds from the river. It is called The Big Sail.

Visitors to MIT walk by the Sail daily. They stop to take photographs, lean in to touch the cool metal and run their fingers over its black surface. Few know it stands guard over an MIT secret—a cylindrical sarcophagus, about the height and girth of a small person, buried just a few feet underground.

Forty-three years ago, on a sunny afternoon in May 1966, a small crowd gathered in front of The Big Sail. All eyes hovered on a cylindrical tube that hung from chains on a cantilever, suspended near the right corner of the sculpture.

The ceremony was short. MIT President Julius Adams Stratton spoke a few words. Robert Shrock, chair of the department of geology, read a letter to the gathering. He then invited a Mrs. McDermott, crisply attired in a dark colored coat, to step over to the column. She pressed a control button that began the movement of chains and machinery, ceremonially lowering the column into its underground crypt, where it lies to this day.

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Harold Edgerton with his deep-sea
underwater camera
Courtesy MIT Museum

When a technology comes along that revolutionizes the way we live, we often look back on the effort it took through the lens of its incredible significance. We unwittingly romanticize the act of invention.

In the summer of 1953, MIT professor and prolific inventor, Harold Edgerton, set sail on the research vessel Calypso with intrepid ocean explorer and co-developer of the aqua-lung, Jacques Cousteau. Funded by a small grant from the National Geographic Society, the two men had a mission—to use deep sea cameras Edgerton had just designed and built to investigate a strange layer of the ocean that, at the time, was a mystery to marine scientists as it appeared to rise and fall daily. This expedition marked the birth of underwater photography, but the small crew on board the Calypso that summer hardly knew it. To them, the experience was a tangle of euphoria and despair, the tedium and luck inherent in the testing of a new invention whose fate was not known.

Edgerton and his son, Bob, were welcomed warmly by Cousteau and his crew as the Calypso headed out into the Mediterranean Sea in late June. “[Cousteau] collected the entire crew and over glasses of pastis (the local drink of Marseilles with a licorice flavor) we were introduced to all,” wrote Edgerton in a letter to the National Geographic Society dated July 3. More than a week passed before the weather permitted a test with the cameras. Edgerton revealed his anxiety at that first lowering: “To me it was a dramatic thing to see the cable drum unwind…round and round it went…as the camera descended,” he recorded. “Although I had confidence in the design, I was rather fearful of what might be happening in the depths.”

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Control car of the USS Akron
Image courtesy of Hagley Digital Archives

He was a champion of aeronautics. He taught the first course on the subject at MIT in 1914 and built America’s first modern wind tunnel there two years later. He was responsible for the development of U.S. naval aviation during World War I, and in 1919 his NC-4 became the first aircraft to fly across the Atlantic. He designed an early communications system for airplanes, a landing system for aircraft carriers, and served as the chairman for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the precursor to NASA. As a pioneer of American aviation, it seemed Jerome C. Hunsaker could do no wrong.

In his eyes, however, a dark shadow hung on his career. More than a simple regret, it spanned two decades of his efforts and research. This shadow was cast by the American dirigible, by the years he spent championing its development and driving its evolution, by the resources that had been wasted and the lives that had been lost in a series of disastrous failures.

He spoke of his frustration in a 1960 interview, lamenting the men that had died in his dirigibles. “They thought I knew what was what, and they took my word for it,” he said. “We should have anticipated, as good engineers, [that] the rigid airship would become obsolete about the time it was established.”

But at the outbreak of World War I, a younger Hunsaker burgeoned with cautious optimism at the potential of airships, which could fly at night, in fog, at high altitudes, and over long distances. “Dirigibles may not revolutionize naval warfare,” he wrote in a 1914 letter to the Technology Review, “but may play an important, if auxiliary, part in it.”

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Dover Sun House
Image: Wide World Photo, the MIT News Office,
and the MIT Museum

Fifty years before the term “carbon footprint” came in vogue, MIT held a symposium titled “Space Heating with Solar Energy.” Three women were on the 98-person registration list.

Scientists at the August 1950 gathering warned of dire situations familiar to us today. Eugene Ayres, a solar expert with the Gulf Research and Development Company, wrote in his paper’s abstract, “We know that time will come when we shall require a consciously engineered plan for solar energy utilization instead of simply burning up everything we can burn as rapidly as we can find and produce it.” He went on to outline the peak of the United States’s coal production, forecast oil being depleted within a century, and noted the possibility of having to import our fuel needs from abroad.

Embedded in this conference was another revolution: the opening of the field to women. Clippings from newspapers covering the event point to the persons who most captured the public’s interest: the “woman scientist” and “woman architect” who built the Dover House, a $10,000 house heated entirely by the sun. The scientist and the architect were Maria Telkes, an MIT researcher in the department of metallurgy, and Eleanor Raymond, who was based in Boston.

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Van de Graaff Generator
Courtesy MIT Libraries

A metallic sphere in air with a 100-centimeter radius has a total charge of 250,000 electrostatic units. Deduce an expression for the sphere’s capacitance. Compute the potential gradient just outside the surface. What is the minimum radius a sphere can have to retain this charge?

Five minutes after noon on Wednesday, October 20, 1937, an MIT student in course 8.03, “Electricity,” had exactly fifty minutes to answer this and three other questions. Missing this one would have been embarrassing. 8.03’s professor was Robert J. Van de Graaff.

The Van de Graaff generator, the hair-raising electric charge experiment still popular in high school physics classrooms, had serious applications in the 1930s. Though today’s physics class prop may generate 350 thousand volts, Van de Graaff’s 40-foot tall version, an “atom smasher” built for MIT in a vacant dirigible hanger in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, generated 7 million.

“A tool of unequalled power for penetrating and investigating the atomic nucleus,” as Van de Graaff and coauthors described it in a project progress report, the generator found use in everything from military research to cancer treatments.

During its first test on November 28, 1933, the atom smasher could barely contain the charge that flooded its metal spheres. The device discharged in violent arcs of lightning, striking any metal surface nearby, including the trusses of the hangar’s 60-foot roof. “The most powerful man-made thunderbolt of its kind produced so far, was hurled here today from a man-made Olympus,” The New York Times reported.

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