MIT in Biological News

Tiny MIT ecosystem may shed light on climate change

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. MIT researchers have created a microbial ecosystem smaller than a stick of gum that sheds new light on the plankton-eat-plankton world at the bottom of the aquatic food chain. The work, reported in the January print issue of American Naturalist , may lead to better predictions...

Floating a big idea: MIT demos ancient use of rafts to transport goods

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Oceangoing sailing rafts plied the waters of the equatorial Pacific long before Europeans arrived in the Americas, and carried tradegoods for thousands of miles all the way from modern-day Chile to western Mexico, according to new findings by MIT researchers in the Department of ...

New MIT tool probes brain circuits

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Researchers at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT report in the Jan. 24 online edition of Science that they have created a way to see, for the first time, the effect of blocking and unblocking a single neural circuit in a living animal. This revolutionary me...

Eli and Edythe L. Broad make unprecedented gift to endow Broad Institute of Harvard & MIT

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 4, 2008 Declaring the success of an unprecedented experiment in science and philanthropy, Los Angeles-based philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad announced today that they have increased their total gift to the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT to $600 million. Adding to t...

One fish, two fish: New MIT sensor improves fish counts

Researchers at MIT have found a new way of looking beneath the ocean surface that could help definitively determine whether fish populations are shrinking. A remote sensor system developed by Associate Professor Nicholas Makris of mechanical engineering, along with others at MIT, Northeastern Uni...

Innerscope Research Adds to Its Advisory Board Two Pioneers in the Measurement and Application of Emotional Engagement

... mit professor Sandy Pentland, former Advertising Rese...g Research Foundation Chief Research Officer, and mit professor Sandy Pentland provide Innerscope with ...s Lab and oversees the Next Billion Network at the mit Media Lab. Among the most-cited computer scientist...

Study on keeping nuclear bombs from US ports shows misplaced fear over cargo scanning cost

...be presented at the INFORMS Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society, Service Management Special Interest Group Meeting taking place at mit in Cambridge, Massachusetts on June 28. http://mitsloan.mit.edu/omg/msom2009/ With continuing concern that Al Qaida or other terrorists will try t...

Innerscope Research Adds to Its Advisory Board Two Pioneers in the Measurement and Application of Emotional Engagement

... mit professor Sandy Pentland, former Advertising Rese...g Research Foundation Chief Research Officer, and mit professor Sandy Pentland provide Innerscope with ...s Lab and oversees the Next Billion Network at the mit Media Lab. Among the most-cited computer scientist...

American Society for Microbiology honors Deborah T. Hung

...S. Sigal Memorial Award is being presented to Deborah T. Hung, M.D., Ph.D., co-director of the Infectious Disease Initiative at the Broad Institute of mit and Harvard, and assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Sponsored by Merck Research Laboratories, the Merck Irvi...

Study finds genetic links to age of first menstrual period and menopause

...om Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the Broad Institute of Harvard and mit report that they have identified 10 genetic variants in two chromosomal regions associated with age at menarche (the first menstrual period), and 13 g...

MIT’s implantable device offers continuous cancer monitoring

...ng a tumor for weeks or months after the biopsy, tracking its growth and how it responds to treatment, would be much more valuable, says Michael Cima, mit professor of materials science and engineering, who has developed the first implantable device that can do just that. Cima and his colleagues recen...

MIT: Making waves in the brain

...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...

Laughing hyenas, wailing levees, the sound of cheese and blaring bagpipes

...aste sensation into everyday language. Can one do the same thing for a piece of music? What are the words most used in describing an aural experience? mit scientist Mihir Sarkar asked more than 800 people to listen to a battery of 64 sounds and then to match them up with a selection of 62 words to descri...

MIT: Jeremy Nathans to deliver Scolnick Prize lecture

...il 23, 2009, Cambridge, MA --- The McGovern Institute for Brain Research at mit will present the sixth annual Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience to J... Vision" at the McGovern Institute on Monday, April 27, 2009 at 4 pm in the mit Cognitive Sciences Complex, 43 Vassar Street (building 46, room 3002). The ...

Innerscope Research(R) Receives Three Great Minds Innovation Awards from the Advertising Research Foundation

... the impact of ads in shows through product placement. Brian Levine, mit scientist, president and cofounder of Innerscope Research, received a cert... with an unprecedented level of consumer insight. Founded by Harvard and mit scientists, Innerscope leverages the latest advances in biometrics, neuros...

Separating the good from the bad

... Scientists at mit and Brown University studying how marine bacteria ...ty Assistant Professor of Ocean Utilization in the mit Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,...ata they gathered, with their Brown colleagues the mit researchers also developed a rigorous mathematical...

MIT: How you feel the world impacts how you see it

...ome period of time, stationary objects like rocks appear to drift upward. mit neuroscientists have found that this phenomenon, called motion aftereffect,...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 in...

Innerscope Research(R) Receives Three Great Minds Innovation Awards from the Advertising Research Foundation

... the impact of ads in shows through product placement. Brian Levine, mit scientist, president and cofounder of Innerscope Research, received a cert... with an unprecedented level of consumer insight. Founded by Harvard and mit scientists, Innerscope leverages the latest advances in biometrics, neuros...

MIT: Novel needle could cut medical complications

... 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 nee..., now at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), developed the device for his mit master's thesis. He did so under Alexander Slocum, the Neil and Jane Pappal...

Team IDs genesis of mass migrations

... CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--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, f...

Whitehead member Peter Reddien named HHMI Early Career Scientist

...d discipline, is an ideal recipient of their support," says Whitehead Institute Director and HHMI Investigator David Page. "All of us at Whitehead and mit congratulate Peter on being named to HHMI's first class of Early Career Scientists." The selected scientists have been running their labs for betwe...

Innerscope Research(R) Appoints Digital Leader, Andre Marquis, as Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing

...ope accurately predicts consumer behaviors, providing Fortune 100 companies with an unprecedented level of consumer insight. Founded by Harvard and mit scientists, Innerscope leverages the latest advances in biometrics, neuroscience and eye tracking to measure moment-to-moment emotional engagement, t...

Innerscope Research(R) Uses Same-Day Results From Biometric Study to Identify Key Themes, Styles Behind Effective, Engaging Speaker Presentations

...ope accurately predicts consumer behaviors, providing Fortune 100 companies with an unprecedented level of consumer insight. Founded by Harvard and mit scientists, Innerscope leverages the latest advances in biometrics, neuroscience and eye tracking to measure moment-to-moment emotional engagement, t...

MIT: Why we have difficulty recognizing faces in photo negatives

...ce 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 t...

Innerscope Research(R) Appoints Digital Leader, Andre Marquis, as Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing

...ope accurately predicts consumer behaviors, providing Fortune 100 companies with an unprecedented level of consumer insight. Founded by Harvard and mit scientists, Innerscope leverages the latest advances in biometrics, neuroscience and eye tracking to measure moment-to-moment emotional engagement, t...

MIT student develops new innovations to selectively kill cancer cells

...3, 2009) When it comes to solving complex problems, Geoffrey von Maltzahn, mit graduate student and biomedical engineer, looks to nature for solutions. Fi...preneurship." Additional Inventions During von Maltzahn's time at mit he has also developed inventions outside of the polymer nano-rods and 'syst...

MIT: Using touch to help deaf people

...between vibratory patterns associated with different sound frequencies. The mit researchers are testing devices that have at least two vibration ranges, on...vibrations. Existing tactile aids have been in use for decades, but the mit team hopes to improve the devices by refining the acoustic signal processin...

International study identifies gene variants associated with early heart attack

...Myocardial Infarction Genetics Consortium along with David Altshuler, MD, PhD, of the MGH Center for Human Genetic Research and the Broad Institute of mit and Harvard, eventually involving six groups around the world that had collected samples on a total of about 3,000 early-onset heart attack patients ...

Simplicity is crucial to design optimization at nanoscale

... mit researchers who study the structure of protein-based materials with the aim... materials for different applications. In a follow-up study, Buehler and mit graduate students Zhao Qin and Steve Cranford ran similar tests using more ...

Scientists uncover new class of non-protein coding genes in mammals with key functions

... A research team at the Broad Institute of Harvard and mit and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has uncovered a vast new class of ...enomic marks revealed where these genes were hiding," said Mitch Guttman, a mit graduate student working at the Broad Institute. "Analysis of their sequenc...

MIT develops new way to fuse cells

... CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- mit engineers have developed a new, highly efficient way to pair up cells so they can be fused together into a hybrid cell. The new technique should ma...

Human connection to our nation's fisheries comes alive through oral history project

...les Thompson and oyster shucker Janice Richards, both from Apalachicola, Fla., have recently been added to the collection. Project partners include mit Sea Grant, Rutgers University, the Working Waterfront Festival in New Bedford, Mass., and the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississi...

Single virus used to convert adult cells to embryonic stem cell-like cells

...ith such viruses. This latest technique represents a significant advance in the quest to eliminate the potentially harmful viruses. Bryce Carey, an mit graduate student working in the lab of Whitehead Member Rudolf Jaenisch, spearheaded the effort by joining in tandem the four reprogramming genes thro...

MIT researchers explain mystery of gravity fingers

... Researchers at mit recently found an elegant solution to a sticky scientific problem in basic ...the phenomenon. Co-authors Luis Cueto-Felgueroso and Ruben Juanes of the mit Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering discovered the solution w...

MIT: A quicker, easier way to make coal cleaner

...arbon dioxide, an important greenhouse gas. But an mit analysis suggests an intermediate step that could ... costly changes in plant design and operation, the mit analysis shows. "Our approach 'partial capture...ward J. Herzog, principal research engineer at the mit Energy Initiative and chair of the conference orga...

MIT: Safe storage of greenhouse-gas carbon dioxide

...sted in a full-scale industrial operation. But now mit engineers have come up with a new software tool to...16-20 in Washington, D.C. According to the 2007 mit study, "The Future of Coal," and other sources, ca...e injected into the aquifers through wells. The mit model predicts how much a plume of CO 2 will migr...

MIT analysis shows how cap-and-trade plans can cut greenhouse emissions

...ly, and that the effects on affected industries are less than predicted," said A. Denny Ellerman, the study's lead author and a senior lecturer in the mit Sloan School of Management. The study found that the most controversial aspect of the European program was how to allocate the permitted emissions ...

MIT creates tiny backpacks for cells

... CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- mit engineers have outfitted cells with tiny "backpacks" that could allow them ...e," said Robert Cohen, the St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering at mit and an author of the paper. The researchers worked with B and T cells, t...

Acoustical Meeting, Nov. 10-14, 2008 in Miami, Florida

...and draws undesirable attention to the user -- all of which can limit communication and negatively impact quality of life. Researchers at Harvard, mit and Massachusetts General Hospital are working together to improve the sound quality of EL speech by creating an approach that can automatically add m...

Human genes sing different tunes in different tissues

...ssible for one gene to produce slightly different forms of the same protein by skipping or including certain sequences from the messenger RNA. Now, an mit team has shown that this phenomenon, known as alternative splicing, is both far more prevalent and varies more between tissues than was previously bel...