March 2011

Conquering Cancer: MIT’s 36 Years Bear Fruit

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on March 31, 2011

in Health,Research

The MIT150 symposium on MIT efforts to understand, prevent, and cure cancer reviewed the key discoveries and pointed to new solutions that can arise from the convergence of biology and engineering tools working together.

This graphic illustrates the convergence of life, physical and engineering sciences to solve problems. Graphic: Christine Daniloff.

This graphic illustrates the convergence of life, physical, and engineering sciences to solve problems. Graphic: Christine Daniloff.

Titled Conquering Cancer through the Convergence of Science and Engineering, the March 16 session include a bit of history. Before President Richard Nixon declared the War on Cancer in the early 1970s, “we really knew nothing about human cells and what controls their division,” Professor Nancy Hopkins recalled. These were major new discoveries: 1. Older people are most likely to have cancer. 2. Lifestyle decisions, such as smoking, influence who gets cancer. 3. Cancer appears when a single cell begins to divide inappropriately, invades other cells, and metastasizes.

Here are a few symposium highlights:

  • MIT scientists have made critical discoveries that resulted in new cancer drugs such as Gleevec and Herceptin.
  • More than 200 distinct diseases have been identified as cancers.
  • Two-thirds of cancers are preventable and many more are curable or manageable.
  • MIT’s Center for Cancer Research, founded 36 years ago, has been home to faculty who won four Nobel Prizes in cancer-related research.
  • In 2000, before the human genome sequencing was completed, scientists knew of about 80 genes that could cause solid tumors but, by 2010, 240 were known.
  • An MIT lab is creating iron oxide nanoparticles that can be tagged with small protein fragments that bind to tumor cells, which could help deliver drugs more efficiently. Today only about 1 percent of administered drugs reach the tumor.

Get emerging research insights from the newly opened David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, which houses biologists, who are uncovering what goes wrong inside cancer cells, and engineers, who are turning basic-science discoveries into clinical treatments and diagnostics.

You can watch the full symposium on TechTV.

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Choose a Wake-up Song for Alumni Astronauts

by Liv on March 30, 2011

in Modern Geekhood,Space

Astronaut Gregory Johnson rests in his sleeping bag on Atlantis during a 2009 mission. Credit: NASA

Imagine you’re an astronaut zipped in a sleeping bag and strapped to the wall of a space shuttle. (For the moment, put aside the question of how you fall asleep in the first place.) How do you wake up? Natural light? A maniacal alarm clock, or a swift poke in the ribs ? Nope, it’s the wake-up song, which has been a NASA tradition since the 1960s.

The wake-up selections are piped in via mission control to “promote a sense of camaraderie and esprit de corps among the astronauts and ground support personnel,” explains an entry on NASA’s website. Historically chosen by flight controllers or by crewmembers’ friends and family members, NASA recently started asking the public to take part–which means you, member of the public, can submit an original composition and/or help choose what mission crew members–including MIT alumni Mike Fincke and Greg Chamitoff–wake up to. Both Fincke ’89 and Chamitoff PhD ’92 are mission specialists for the upcoming STS-134 mission, set to launch April 19.

In anticipation of the mission, the NASA Space Rock Committee has narrowed a list of 1350 original songs to 10 finalists that you can vote on. They include:

Boogie Woogie Shuffle
“A playful road song and interpretation of a childhood dream of being an astronaut,” by Savannah College of Art & Design student Ryan McCullough.

Dreams You Give
A song that “outlines all the ways that NASA and the shuttle program have impacted the lives of different groups of Americans,” by members of the Missouri-based Plunkett family.

Endeavour, It’s a Brand New Day
A piece seemingly inspired by shuttle launches, by Cocoa Beach resident Susan Rose Simonetti.

Cast your vote by April 19 at https://songcontest.nasa.gov/toporig.aspx.

Learn more about mission STS-134: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts134/index.html

And read a somewhat dated NASA article about space sleep: Wide Awake in Outer Space

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Banish Awkward Moments—the Conversation Piece that Creates Conversation

by Amy Marcott on March 29, 2011

in Alumni Life,Arts,Modern Geekhood

ConversacubeHaving trouble interacting with other people? Can’t seem to master the art of small talk? Enter the Conversacube designed by Lauren McCarthy ’08. The device will prompt you what to say and do in a variety of social situations.

Simply put the box in the middle of all the conversants and follow the cues that appear on the screen. Microphones inside the box monitor each person’s speech to keep the conversation balanced and smooth, even indicating when to enliven your demeanor or mediate conflict. It will also detect when someone new joins the group and prompt them for a seamless introduction. See it in action below (and find other funny videos on the Conversacube website).

But is it for real, or is it art? McCarthy wants to keep people guessing. As she says on her website: “The intent is to create a tool that on one hand, explores the idea of an actual commercial product that uses technology to improve interactions and on the other hand, is critical of our dependence on technology and choreographed social routines, hinting at a dystopic future where we sacrifice our autonomy to avoid having to face anything uncomfortable.”

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Using Improv for Business

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on March 28, 2011

in Classroom,Management

Lakshmi Balachandra MBA ‘04

Lakshmi Balachandra MBA ’04

Improvisational comedy offers valuable lessons to business, says Lakshmi Balachandra MBA ’04. An improv comic before working in venture capital and finance, Balachandra brought her spontaneous theater skills into the classroom during her MIT years. She taught improvisational leadership classes at the MIT Sloan School and you can see her work on the OpenCourseWare offering Dynamic Leadership: Using Improvisation in Business.

Improv teaches you how to think on your feet, she says, to accept the facts, and then build on them. All these are excellent business and negotiation skills. In a CNN article, she offers her five rules of improv:

  1. “Yes, and.” Accept a situation and then deal with it.
  2. Avoid asking questions. Continually asking questions makes other people do all the work.
  3. Listening. Focused listening is a crucial skill.
  4. Add information. Contribute if you want to guide the conversation.
  5. Eye contact. In the workplace it’s important to pay attention to body language.

Get more details in the CNN article, “Why using improvisation to teach business skills is no joke.”

Balachandra is now a doctoral student at Boston College. She recently won a Kaufman Foundation grant to support work on her dissertation, Pitching Trustworthiness: Cues for Trust in Early-Stage Investment Decision-making.

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Photo of the Week by Owen Franken ’68—March 26, 2011

by Amy Marcott on March 26, 2011

in Franken Photo of the Week

A boy being fed pasta in Naples, Italy (© Owen Franken).A boy being fed pasta in Naples, Italy (© Owen Franken).

Curious about Owen Franken? View more of his work via the Franken Photo of the Week category, learn more in this profile, read a What Matters opinion column he wrote called “Life in Brownian Motion,” or visit his Web site.

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Video: Crossing Disciplines at MIT

by Liv on March 25, 2011

in Research

MIT EECS Professor Vladimir Bulović was profiled for a video about cross-disciplinary research at MIT

What does cross-disciplinary research at MIT look like?

To answer that question, the Institute profiled three prominent interdisciplinary researchers–including Maria Zuber, a geophysicist renowned for her research on planetary surfaces; Vladimir Bulović (right), an electrical engineer developing lightweight solar cells; and Paula Hammond, a materials scientist creating new nanomaterials for cancer treatment.

View the 16-minute documentary to see how MIT’s collaborative problem-solving culture often leads scientists to seek answers and ideas outside their own discipline.

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Where the Sun Shines, There Hack They

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on March 24, 2011

in Campus Culture,Hacks,Remember When...,Student Life

1980s hack pokes fun at campus overcrowding by putting a tiny dorm, 10-1000, on the Great Dome.

A 1980s hack pokes fun at campus overcrowding by putting a tiny dorm, 10-1000, on the Great Dome.

The MIT hacker is to be admired for pulling off the collegiate world’s cleverest and most elegant pranks, believes Professor Emeritus of Linguistics Jay Keyser. He told tales of MIT’s storied hacks March 23 on WGBH’s Callie Crossley Show in an episode titled “The Art of the Hack.”

Listen to the program or, for a longer take, watch the MIT World lecture he gave on the subject:  “Where the Sun Shines, There Hack They.”

In the video, Keyser describes some of his favorite hacks and burrows into the psychology of hack culture at MIT. Here’s how MIT World describes the video:

Even if the typical MIT hacker doesn’t qualify as a secret agent, he or she is to be admired for pulling off the collegiate world’s most surreptitious, elegant pranks, believes Jay Keyser. While Harvard students get a chuckle out of “putting panties over statues,” MIT students have placed a telephone booth and a police cruiser on top of the massive MIT dome and then safely exploded a weather balloon on the field of a Harvard-Yale game. Keyser is a fan of these generally anonymous and extremely clever technical pranks. And he’s burrowed into the psychology behind them. The students “are thumbing their nose at the Institute. ‘You want us to be engineers. You’re so damn hard on us. We’ll show you what we think of you.’ So they take us down a peg or two.” In fact, “hack culture is an important component of the mental health of the MIT student body,” Keyser claims. The difference between MIT and every other university, he says, is that MIT students “have bought into the value system of the university.” They’re under the constant burden of judgment and struggle every day with the knowledge that they’re among the best and the brightest. So hacks are “a coping mechanism, a way of putting on sunglasses on a very bright summer day.”

For more of Keyer’s insider views on the Institute, read his new MIT Press book, Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows.

Update:  Check out the April 1, 2011, hack: William Barton Rogers Visits Campus.

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MIT Student Hiking from Georgia to Maine

by Liv on March 23, 2011

in Athletics,Student Life

For the next few months, MIT sophomore Gabe Blanchet will be living a life much different from his fellow students: He’s through-hiking the Appalachian Trail–all 2,179 miles of it–by himself. And then he’s going to write a book about it.

Blanchet isn’t actually alone. In one of his first blog entries from the trail–made seven days after his late-February start–he said he had already met more than 100 other hikers who, like him, intended to walk from Georgia to Maine. Blanchet had befriended several and was already well-acquainted with some of the ups and downs of trail life. On three consecutive mornings he had awakened to unexpected snow, icy boots, a frozen camera, and searing pain in his heels. He had also experienced some of the best parts of the trail, showing up at his first trail hostel to find it stocked with food, laundry, a warm bed, and hot showers–plus an owner who accepted payment on the honor code.

Why Hike?

In some of his pre-hike blog posts, Blanchet described his reasons for wanting to undertake such a lengthy and strenuous adventure. For one thing, Blanchet is an athlete: At MIT he plays hockey and lacrosse, and from the looks of his blog, he does a fair amount of camping, skiing, and backpacking on the side.

He also likes to write. At a young age, his mother made him keep a journal that he was required to write in daily. He maintained that practice until he was in sixth grade, lapsed for a few years, and then resumed in ninth grade. Blanchet says he has also been inspired by adventure writers, including Bill Bryson.

I first read Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods about his journey along the Appalachian Trail (AT) three summers ago after graduating from high school, and immediately knew that I would someday have to hike the AT. I pulled out my journal and added the hike to my ever expanding bucket list.

Later this summer, after Blanchet completes the AT, he plans to meet with Bryson to discuss the author’s hiking and writing experiences. Blanchet also intends to enroll in a few writing workshops and will be seeking guidance from Andrea Walsh, a lecturer in MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies.

Yet another component of Blanchet’s interest in the AT is altruistic. His mother practices medicine in western Massachusetts, and on several occasions she talked to Blanchet about the need for increased support of juvenile diabetes research. So Blanchet is asking people to donate one cent per mile (or more) to support the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF). Half of what he raises will go to JDRF, and the other half will go to his most generous donor’s choice of charity.

Keeping Current

Even though Blanchet spends most of his time putting one foot in front of the other, news from the outside world eventually reaches the trail. In fact, Blanchet says that conversations about current events have made for some of the most interesting experiences so far.

Instead of reading news on Google about the earthquakes and tsunamis terrorizing Japan, someone will mention current events around a campfire as we all rest our sore feet after dinner. Non-rushed meaningful discussion ensues comparing and contrasting this disaster to Katrina and Haiti, examining efforts to aid Japan, discussing the safety of nuclear power plants etc. Fellow hikers have diverse backgrounds and bring fresh perspectives to each discussion. Although my friends and professors at MIT have a much deeper understanding of the science behind the disasters, I find Trail discussions to be refreshingly interdisciplinary and enlightening. Often other hikers turn to me for answers to the technical questions. It’s really fun to try to explain the basics by patching together information from the core science classes at MIT.

Want to Get Involved?

Read his blog: http://gabehikestheat.tumblr.com/

Donate to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation: http://gabehikestheat.tumblr.com/DONATIONPAGE

Send him snacks! Blanchet picked up his first mail drop at the Fontana Post Office in North Carolina. Sent by his mom, it contained brownies, dehydrated dinners, jelly beans, beef jerky and oatmeal–enough food to last him six days. You too can send Blanchet snacks. We at Slice will post the proper address and deadline as soon as the information is available. Stay tuned!!

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Mystery Science: Online Game for Kids Kicks Off April 4

by Amy Marcott on March 22, 2011

in Learning

Vanished logoResearchers at MIT’s Education Arcade and the Smithsonian are hoping to fuel middle-schoolers’ interest in science by adding a little intrigue to their lives. On April 4, they will launch a highly secretive, interactive game called Vanished, an environmental mystery with a science-fiction twist.

The game will unfold over the course of eight weeks. During that time, kids will receive clues about a fictitious environmental disaster and will work to discover the cause. Along the way, they’ll test, debate, and refine their hypotheses as well as collect data—such as the temperature in their backyards at certain times of the day—that will be entered into a database and used as part of the game. The idea is to make students ages 11-14 primary investigators and learn about the process of science. Certain activities will require participants to visit one of 17 Smithsonian-affiliated museums nationwide to find clues, which they can then share with players who don’t live near the museums.

Screen shot for a Vanished mini-game. Click the image to see a full-size version on the LiveScience website.

Screen shot for a Vanished mini-game. Click the image to see a full-size version on the LiveScience website.

According to LiveScience, game designers took inspiration from TV shows like CSI and Bones (though the science in Vanished will be real, not the Hollywood version).

Adults will curate the game: MIT undergrads will moderate an online forum where kids can offer their solutions to the mystery. Smithsonian researchers will hold video conferences with players to discuss their hypotheses. Kids can also play mini-games that teach the environmental themes of the story without advancing the larger plot and watch day-in-the-life videos explaining what Smithsonian scientists do at work.

But Vanished is also research. Creators are hoping to glean whether kids can learn scientific reasoning through an online game.

Know a kid who wants to try to solve the mystery? Registration started last night.

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MIT, Harvard Presidents Share a Historical View

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on March 21, 2011

in Campus Culture

MIT President Susan Hockfield and Harvard President Drew Faust co-authored a Boston Globe op-ed that takes a historical look at America’s ability to recovery from crises and points to the role of education in creating waves of innovation. Here are excerpts:

 

MIT President Susan Hockfield

MIT President Susan Hockfield

“‘THE FIRST step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation,’’ President Obama said to a concerned nation in his State of the Union address. Our nation has a remarkable record of rising from the ashes of crisis, and education and research in science and engineering have often led those revivals of prosperity and morale. Of the world’s top 20 research universities, the United States claims 17. As leaders of two, we know our institutions must play a central role in helping America to rebuild….

“To accelerate the next innovation wave, the United States must invest ambitiously in basic and applied research.

“Innovation requires innovators—and that demands an intense national focus on education. According to a recent study out of Harvard, Stanford and the University of Munich, Massachusetts’ fourth- and eighth-graders outperform those in every other US state in math.

“Massachusetts didn’t hold this lead 10 years ago, but a decade of education reform raised the bar for teachers and set high standards for students. We should replicate progress like this across the United States now. And we must aim higher still, because while Massachusetts students may lead the nation, they lag their peers in 16 other countries. For millions of Americans, education has been an elevator of opportunity—and we must ensure that the next generation has the same opportunities, whether through traditional models of education or new online options….”

Read the full text  of “Riding the innovation wave.”

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