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It used to be that only a select few scientists could train to become an astronaut, and then even fewer were chosen to venture into space. But now, with the declining influence of NASA and the rise of the commercial space industry, seemingly every private citizen and their mother wants to go into space one day.

Life on Mars, so far visited only by robotic rovers, would be no day at the beach.

(Credit: NASA/JPL)

For two students at MIT, that day is already here--in Utah. Engineering graduate students Zahra Khan and Phillip Cunio--both from MIT's department of Aeronautics and Astronautics--have set up a site in the Utah desert near Hanksville that simulates conditions on Mars. They've been living in a footlocker-sized container, wearing spacesuits, recycling their own water and eating freeze-dried food since Feb. 17.

Everything is outfitted with radio-frequency ID tags, so that their system can alert them if supplies run low or are misplaced. The two have even sent e-mail, but there's a lag of 20 minutes before it reaches the recipient. That's the time it takes for radio waves to travel to and from the Red Planet.

The goal of the project, which will last two weeks, is to develop a "smart" carrier for use in fieldwork research in remote expeditions, including planetary exploration.

"The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) is an analog simulation facility. This means it's in a place that's a lot like Mars and so we pretend we're actually on Mars in order to practice living and working there," according to Cunio, who's keeping a blog on the project.

Yet it's not quite like Mars. His partner Khan aborted the mission halfway through to fly to Amsterdam for a job interview with the European Space Agency.

Find reports on the mission via the MDRS Webcam and on Cunio's blog.

Timothy Lu, who is trying to bring back a method for fighting bacterial infections that fell out of favor in the West decades ago, has won the prestigious $30,000 Lemelson-MIT student prize for 2008.

Lu and J.J. Collins, professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, created two bacteriophages that target E. coli. Bacteriophages are viruses that attack bacteria. The idea is to combine bacteriophage with antibiotics to better stamp out infectious diseases. Bacteriophage can also be used in food processing to prevent E. coli from infecting meat or vegetables. (Remember the 2006 spinach recall?)

Administered together, a genetically enhanced bacteriophage and antibiotics can potentially kill 30,000 times more bacteria than antibiotics alone. One of the bacteriophages were shown to be 99.997 percent effective against biofilms, a slime that can cover medical equipment.

Timothy Lu studies a biofilm. He has created bacteriophages that can wipe them out.

(Credit: MIT)

More importantly, the two have created a relatively simple synthetic biology platform for creating new bacteriophages. Synthetic biology involves manipulating the genetic makeup of an organism or creating entirely new organisms out of lab-created strands of genes. Most companies, such as Synthetic Genomics, are developing relatively complex organisms that can turn wood into ethanol or other tasks. Lu's organisms require less engineering. Lu and Collins will next conduct research with the Center for Disease control on the concept. Companies have also approached them about licensing.

"We can find any type of phage, modify it, and combine it with an enzyme," Lu said.

Bacteriophages were used to combat diseases in the early part of the 20th century, Lu said in an interview. Bacteriophages, however, are very specific: a single species may target only one species of bacteria. Scientists back then didn't fully appreciate this, and didn't have the computers and others tools to scan all the different species to find the specific ones needed to fight a particular disease.

When antibiotics came around in the '20s and '30s, scientists gravitated toward them. Developing antibiotics, however, has become complicated and risky. Developing a new drug can cost around $930 million, according to a study from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. Bacteria also develop resistance.

Although bacteriophage therapy dropped out of favor in the West, scientists in the old Eastern bloc continued to conduct research in the area.

Lu said he also went with a relatively simple application of synthetic biology to win more public acceptance for the idea. When many people hear the term, they immediately begin to think of Frankenbugs or worry about new types of laboratory-created diseases.

"We want to avoid that kind of battle," he said.

A biofilm. It needs to be killed.

(Credit: MIT)

An undergraduate in electrical engineering, Lu got into biology after working on an MIT project to build a cochlear implant designed to allow deaf people to hear. He was intrigued by biomedical engineering--and one thing led to another. Lu's not alone, of course. Biology has been the most rapidly developing science in the past several years, and many universities are building up their bioengineering departments to capitalize on the expected rush of companies and innovations in the area.

The Lemelson-MIT program awards its annual student prize to MIT students who have invented a noteworthy new process or device. Previous winners include Nathan Ball, who came up with a small device that can pull a human being up a 30-story building in 30 seconds, and Carl Dietrich, who is working on a flying car (or, as Dietrich prefers to call it, a "roadable aircraft") called the Terrafugia.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a bandage that won't come off until it dissolves.

The bandage consists of a "biorubber" substrate carved into microscopic pillars and valleys with the same sort of equipment used to make semiconductors. It is then coated with a sugar-based glue which helps the bandage hold on in wet environments.

The patterned adhesive bandages bond twice as strongly as un-patterned adhesives when tested on the intestinal tissue of pigs. On living rats, the MIT researchers found that the patterned bandages had 100 percent more adhesive strength even without the sugar-based glue.

Together, the patterning and the sugar-based glue open up the opportunity to develop bandages that can be placed on heart or lung tissue without falling off. Patients won't remove it. Instead, it will biodegrade over time. It's mostly for hospitals, but who knows? You may see these with Betty and Wilma on them someday in your medicine cabinet.

The pillars measure less than a micron in diameter and are 3 microns wide. A micron is a millionth of a meter. While that's big for today's chips, it's the size of a lot of components in medical devices. (Fluidigm, for instance, has created a chip that consists of tiny rubber hoses.) The pillars are spaced wide enough to grip and interlock with the underlying tissue. The team was "inspired" by how geckos climb.

You've heard of the New York Stock Exchange. Now there's the New York Talk Exchange.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a new kind of map for the city of New York to show how its residents are connected to the rest of the world. MIT "Senseable City Laboratory"--or a team of researchers focused on charting technology's effects on cities--has taken real-time data from AT&T on the phone and Internet traffic to and from New York to show the communication patterns of residents with other people around the globe. (The study solely reflected traffic and not the content of phone calls or Internet activities, according to MIT.)

Manhattan-ites, for example, are often on the phone to Frankfurt, Tokyo, and London; while residents of Queens are much more likely communicating with people in the Dominican Republic, according to MIT's map.

"The striking piece of evidence coming out of this project is that global talk happens both at the top of the economy and at its lower end. The vast middle layers of our society are far less global; the middle talks mostly nationally and locally," according to Columbia University Professor Saskia Sassen, author of the book "Global Cities," who examined the data.

Graphical interpretations of the data will be on display at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York beginning February 24 through May 12, in an exhibition called "Design and the Elastic Mind." They're also available online at MIT's site.

The project, which is sponsored by AT&T, was led by Carlo Ratti, director of MIT's Senseable City Laboratory and associate professor of the practice of urban technologies. "The aim of the project is to reveal some hidden structure of the city that wasn't possible to see before."

Ratti said that he and his team started the project 18 months ago to explore New York as a global hub of communication. They sought to analyze how New Yorkers' connections with the rest of the world change by neighborhood, throughout the day, and in comparison with London, New York's rival on the global stage.

The team came up with three maps of the data. One is Globe Encounters, a 3D animation of New York's ties to other cities in real time. Pulse of the Planet is a second map depicting how those links change over the course of the day, through different time zones, and truly shows how New York is a 24-hour city. The third map shows the global connections inside of New York's five boroughs.

Toronto is the most popular place for Manhattan residents to call during the day, but it accounts for only 1 percent of outbound calls from the Bronx, according to MIT's findings. In contrast, Mumbai is much lower on the speed-dial list (24th) for people in Manhattan vs. residents of Queens (11th).

The project also showed that New York is a larger global hub than London, based on a wider reach of communications from New York to places like Beijing, Bogotá, and Riyadh. MIT, which analyzed high-level data from British Telecom, showed that London has much more reach into Europe and the United States.

"The AT&T and BT data comparison hints at an interesting parallel: in an age of globalization, perhaps London's relationship to Europe is analogous to what is conventionally believed to be New York's relationship to the whole of the United States," Ratti said.

He added: "Our visualizations demonstrate that in the Information Age, urban life is as global as it is local."

Henry Jenkins, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who is perhaps academia's leading fanboy, spent part of January in Shanghai and has been posting observations on his blog. I want to highlight one of his better contributions: on social responsibility in Chinese video game culture.

Video games, "freedom," and "addiction"

Jenkins was attending the International Games and Learning Forum, organized by MIT and Beijing University. There, the focus was on "serious games," those that might potentially be used to promote learning. His most frequently repeated observation was that, while U.S. experts on game learning tend to focus on pedagogy in game play, the Chinese experts he heard from focused mostly on creating historically accurate spaces for games to take place in.

Jenkins writes that some people were concerned that Chinese gamers would miss some measure of socialization in Chinese history when exposed to foreign-designed gaming spaces, and he contrasts the online gaming experience mostly concentrated in Internet cafes where there is minimal face-to-face contact between players with the commonplace sight of usually older Chinese playing chess, mahjong, and card games in the street or in homes. The older games happen face-to-face and often come with a small crowd of spectators remarking on strategy and shooting the breeze. Online games include a large amount of interaction through chat, but most of the non-text interaction is absent.

He also writes of concerns that game addiction, or hype about addiction, should require game designers to tread with caution, lest they be marked as unwelcome cultural influences. Jenkins is not a longtime student of China, but his observation is interesting, if not particularly well-supported by data. (He doesn't claim hard evidence.) He writes:

The addiction rhetoric, though, carries force within China where it is connected to a number of concerns which the Chinese have about their children's culture. First, at a time when aspects of capitalism are reshaping Chinese society (especially in Shanghai), addiction rhetoric gives the Chinese a way to talk about the impact of leisure culture and consumer capitalism on their lives. Playing games is problematic precisely because it is unproductive (or seen as such).

If corporate social responsibility were extended to the point of asking corporations not to contribute to unproductive activities, otherwise known as recreation or entertainment, I suspect corporate heads would fall nationwide. I'm also skeptical that this concern goes much beyond the realm of the rhetorical. Far more consequential to social change in China, in my view, are two factors: (1) the proliferation of direct and near-anonymous interaction online, including in gaming environments, among some Chinese youth; and (2) the divide between those Chinese with access to this sort of high-intensity Internet use and those with little or no online time.

Jenkins notes the latter concern as a challenge to using games as an educational tool: If you're not frequently in front of a computer, it's difficult to engage in learning with one. Research on the "digital divide" in China is at an early stage, but I suspect it will be of growing importance as times passes.

Rice University and the University of Texas, in conjunction with some of the world's largest energy companies, have banded together to form the Advanced Energy Consortium, which will try to exploit material science and natural gas to expand oil and gas production.

One of the decades-long problems in the oil industry has been getting the stuff out of the ground. The underground pressure is relieved relatively quickly; although oil drillers can artificially increase pressure by injecting gases underground and other techniques, it only improves yields incrementally. Typically, more than 60 percent of the oil in a given deposit stays in the ground. In many fields, the amount of recovered oil is even less.

Rice brings nanotechnology expertise while Texas has one of the leading geosciences departments. Participating companies include Baker Hughes, ConocoPhillips, Halliburton, Marathon Oil, and Occidental. (BP and Synthetic Genomics, meanwhile, have a similar project. Those two will try to identify microbes inside wells that can help increase extraction.) These aren't exactly clean energy projects, but oil will likely remain a staple of the energy picture for some time.

Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Italian energy company Eni said they will collaborate on energy research, including improving solar cell efficiency. Eni, which will also join the MIT Energy Initiative, will give the school $50 million over five years.

Although the government has increased the amount of money it will put into energy research, leading universities are increasingly partnering with private sector companies to fund research. Some activists complain that these partnerships could compromise research, but there is little evidence to support this theory, at least according to several academics who have studied it.

Other partnerships include a $500 million collaboration between BP, the University of California, and the University of Illinois and Stanford's energy program, which is partly underwritten by ExxonMobil and Toyota.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is taking on the issue of inadequate education for youth by extending its OpenCourseWare (OCW) program to include secondary level students.

Susan Hockfield, MIT's president, announced the initiative at an event to celebrate OpenCourseWare's fifth anniversary Wednesday evening.

MIT's OpenCourseWare, which has the motto "unlocking knowledge, empowering minds," has offered free access to MIT course syllabi, assigned readings, and lecture notes since its pilot program in 2002 and official opening in 2003.

MIT President Susan Hockfield

(Credit: Candace Lombardi/CNET News.com)

"The new initiative, Highlights for High School, will be a customized portal into OCW designed to specially meet the needs of high school students and teachers who have interest in and hunger for these materials," said Hockfield.

MIT was inspired to introduce the initiative after it found surprising statistics. About 15,000 high school students per month download OCW MIT course work.

"Remember OpenCourseWare is MIT course work. And it was a bit surprising to us to learn about the use by high school students and high school teachers. But many schools have cut back on the 'Gifted and Talented' programs, and we've heard that high school teachers are using it to supplement their gifted students who are missing out," said Hockfield.

MIT believes there is a need for these materials. Educators in the U.S. and around the world struggle with low budgets and cut programs. Students hungry for information often don't have access to it.

"In the eyes of many, including myself, this is a national crisis," said Hockfield.

Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist, and author of the best seller The World Is Flat who gave the keynote at the event, agreed with Hockfield's sentiment but was more optimistic.

Thomas Friedman at MIT's OpenCourseWare anniversary event

(Credit: Candace Lombardi/CNET News.com)

While our country may be suffering from a "dumb as we want to be" Congress, in Friedman's words, the stacks of letters from educators, students, and companies asking the Times columnist to come see their latest innovations and collaborations points to a story of people inspired.

"How an institute or school empowers the individual imagination will be the single most competitive edge," he said.

"This era of globalization is based around individuals...I'm not sure economics has fully been able to capture far below the firm level. I call it gross individual product," Friedman said.

The Highlights for High School program seeks to help gifted students, but also inspire more high school students to pursue careers in science and engineering without intimidation, according to Hockfield.

OCW was originally designed to share MIT course work--there are MIT groups that have even translated the content into other languages--to make it accessible to the world.

Since the start of the initiative, the OCW site has received 40 million visits by 30 million unique visitors from around the world. About 60 percent of OCW users come from outside the U.S., and 50 percent describe themselves as "independent learners."

"As with anything at MIT, the faculty are really the stars of the show. Over 90 percent have contributed voluntarily to OCW," said Hockfield.

The courses that can be accessed are what you would expect from one of the leading science and technology institutions in the world. Linear algebra, differential equations, microelectronic devices and circuits, and computer system engineering are among the most popular. But OCW also has a wide collection of courses on topics like anthropology, women's studies, and literature.

Two scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found a way to use light beams for picking up, holding, and moving around cellular and microscopic objects on a microchip, MIT announced Tuesday.

Matthew J. Lang, assistant professor of MIT's biological and mechanical engineering departments, and David C. Appleyard, graduate student in the biological engineering department, determined that using infrared light on select silicon wafers is a way to use optical tweezers as a tool for manipulating objects on microchips.

The breakthrough could have applications in both the biology and electronics industry, according to Lang.

While the idea of optical tweezers has been around for about 30 years, it has necessitated a transparent glass surface in order to work and was, therefore, not applicable to opaque silicon chips. Lang and Appleyard hypothesized that silicon wafers are transparent to infrared wavelengths of light and thought that might be a way to solve the dilemma. The only problem was that the two were initially unsure which types of silicon wafers might work with the new method.

As silicon wafers are expensive and usually only available in bulk, the scientists posted help-wanted signs around MIT. They were able to initially test their theory on used silicon wafers discarded by scientists working on other projects. Once they determined which ones worked best, they then ordered them for the next phase of the project.

The system can work on cells within the nanometer-to-micrometers range, the common range of all living cells, according to Appleyard. The scientists have also been able to move a hollow object that was 20 micrometers and manipulate 16 E. coli cells on a microchip to spell out the letters "MIT."

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The Boston area has become a leading robotics hub, with a larger cluster of related companies than any other area in the U.S., according to a group of panelists assembled for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Enterprise Forum on Robotics Wednesday night.

The Stata Center, where the MIT Enterprise Forum on Robotics was held Wednesday night, houses MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

(Credit: Candace Lombardi/CNET News.com)

The group, which consisted of executives from ABB Robotics, Brooks Automation, iRobot, Kiva Systems, North End Technologies and Vecna Technologies, said robotics companies are drawn to the university-rich New England area because of their unique need for highly educated employees from a multitude of disciplines.

While there are some great robots, the panelists said, they are not yet user-friendly enough to be viable as consumer products. Part of that is due to a lack of quality designed interfaces, something that will come from hiring people in disciplines other than just software and engineering.

"Here's a little thing for you engineers out there. Engineers make the suckiest interfaces ever," said Rod Brooks, the director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the chief technology officer of iRobot.

After field soldiers had trouble figuring out how to control the PackBots iRobot initially made for the military, one iRobot engineer suggested that the robots needed better trained people to work them, not 19-year-old soldiers, according to Brooks.

"Now we ship (PackBots) with a game controller and have instant usage. Know your market user," he said.

iRobot's PackBot with a video game style-controller.

(Credit: iRobot)

Robotics is an interdisciplinary industry, but also one that's wide open to new methods and business models, according to Debra Theobald, chief executive officer of Vecna Instustries, the maker of the BEAR (Battlefield Extraction and Retrieval Robot).

Some robotics companies, like Vecna, are beginning to follow the software company model and sell services as well as products. Vecna , for example, customizes and implements the open-source JAUS robotic platform to fit the specific needs of customers. (Note: We've fixed that JAUS reference from an earlier misspelling.)

Since robotics is such an interdisciplinary field, its enhancement will largely be dependent on the breakthroughs in other tech industries. Specifically, the panelists said, it comes down to better sensors, renewable or rechargeable power sources and better real-time computational power.

Storage is no longer an issue, as the iPod has shown. Improved computational power will come as software developers learn to better capitalize on quad-core chips through parallel computing. Sensors are a technology that will have to come down in cost, as well as improve in performance in order for robots to improve.

"I was at DARPA. I saw Stanley. While that's very exciting what they don't tell you is that they made sure it would win," said Tom Ryden, CEO of North End Industries, who is also a former iRobot employee.

"It was a beautiful sunny day and there was no wind. What would have happened if it was raining? That car wouldn't have made it ten feet. Sensors are really the area that need a lot of improvement...We need sensors that can provide instant feedback and at an affordable cost," he said.

The BEAR (Battlefield Extraction and Retrieval Robot) from Vecna Technologies.

(Credit: Candace Lombardi/CNET News.com)

Nintendo is one example of a non-robotic company helping the robotic industry with its technology developments. Accelerometers such as those used in the Wii game controller have come down in price since their introduction into such a high volume product.

"We just need to be the benefactors of other industries that are going out and pushing the limits," said Theobald.

"Power is an issue, whether it's making renewable or rechargeable, that will be driven by other technologies. We see battery power improving in our computers and communication devices," she said.

With these improvements already on the way, and an anticipated need for more automation in manufacturing, robotics will go through a revolution similar to the one that took place with software, communications and the Internet. And it will happen just as the world begins to need more robots.

With Chinese wages growing by as much as 35 percent per year within the last few years in some regions and an expected growth in its older population, China will not be the cheap labor haven it is right now for U.S. companies 50 years from now, said Brooks.

"People think it may jump to Africa, but there are a lot of structural needs there, so I think it's going to go to robotics," he said.