Peter Gloor a researcher in the Center for Collective Intelligence was using surveys of employees at a German bank where the marketing division was split into four teams located across 10 rooms on two floors.
These tools have opened a window into the balance of human cells and the bacteria viruses and fungi that colonize
or sometimes even economically feasible, to build taller towers, with shipping constraints on tower diameters and the expense involved in construction.
Now Keystone Tower Systems co-founded by Eric Smith 1, SM 7, Rosalind Takata 0, SM 6,
and Alexander Slocum, the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical engineering at MIT is developing a novel system that adapts a traditional pipe-making technology to churn out wind turbines on location,
at wind farms, making taller towers more economically feasible. Keystone system is a modification of spiral welding,
to create a conical tower. The system is automated highly using about one-tenth the labor of traditional construction
and uses steel to make the whole tower, instead of concrete. his makes it much more cost-effective to build much taller towers,
says Smith, Keystone CEO. With Keystone onsite fabrication, Smith says, manufactures can make towers that reach more than 400 feet.
Wind that high can be up to 50 percent stronger and, moreover, isn blocked by trees,
A 460-foot tower, for instance, could increase energy capture by 10 to 50 percent, compared with today more common 260-foot towers. hat site-dependent,
Smith adds. f you go somewhere in the Midwest where there open plains, but no trees, youe going to see a benefit,
Towers are made in segments to be shipped to wind farms for assembly. But theye restricted to diameters of about 14 feet
so trucks can safely haul them on highways and under bridges. This means that in the United states, most towers for 2-or 3-megawatt turbines are limited to about 260 feet.
In Europe, taller towers (up to about 460 feet) are becoming common, but these require significant structural or manufacturing compromises:
Theye built using very thick steel walls at the base (requiring more than 100 tons of excess steel),
or with the lower half of the tower needing more than 1, 000 tons of concrete blocks,
or pieced together with many steel elements using thousands of bolts. f you were to design a 500-foot tower to get strong winds,
Smith explains. ut there no way to weld together a tower in a factory that 20 feet in diameter and ship it to the wind farm.
If you laid all the sheets flat, edge-to-edge, they form an involute spiral.)Welding their edges assembles the sheets into a conical shape.
The machine can make about one tower per day. Any diameter is possible, Smith says.
For 450-foot, 3-megawatt towers, a base 20 feet in diameter will suffice. Increasing diameters by even a few feet, he says,
can make towers almost twice as strong to handle stress.)Smith compares the process to today at home installation of rain gutters:
For that process, professionals drive to a house and feed aluminum coils into one end of a specialized machine that shapes the metal into a seamless gutter. t a better alternative to buying individual sections
Opening up the country Keystone is now conducting structural validation of towers created by its system in collaboration with structural engineers at Northeastern University and Johns hopkins university.
and Sweden where taller wind towers are built more frequently, but using more expensive traditional methods Smith says he hopes to sell the system in the United states,
where shorter towers (around 260 feet) are still the norm. The earliest adopters in the United states
taller towers are needed to reach the strong winds that make wind energy economically feasible. nce youe at the heights wee looking at,
As part of the Mediated Matter Group, he focused on converting a robotic arm to a computer controlled arm, capable of printing projects, like houses.
Outside the box Ordinarily, 3-D printing occurs inside a box limiting the size of printable objects to that of the printer housing.
printing objects as large as walls, layer by layer. It analogous to how an office printer cartridge runs back and forth,
An aim of the group's research was not only to print walls, but to do so with considerable mobility, enabling immediate transport to a construction site, streamlining delivery and increasing construction efficiency.
The printed object, in this case, is actually a mold made of insulation that becomes a full-on wall once filled with concrete.
however, the molds have their own functionality beyond providing the external shape for a wall:
They don have to be removed once the concrete is poured, since they can act as embedded insulation for the house.
Because of the scale of the work, Spielberg and Keating encountered some obstacles. For instance, Spielberg says,
and to build something that looks like a functional house, which is really hard to do with a construction crane.
From walls to nanoscale chips This fall Spielberg jumped to the other end of the 3-D printing spectrum, moving from walls to nanoscale fluidic chips.
He is now working in the lab of A. John Hart, the Mitsui Career development Associate professor of Mechanical engineering,
hangar-like space inside MIT Building 41, a small, Roomba-like robot is trying to make up its mind.
we can terminate the code before it hits the wall, or breaks. The system was developed by Shayegan Omidshafiei, a graduate student,
similar to zoomed-in perspectives on Google maps. magine we can project a bunch of apartments in Cambridge,
and help to conserve energy in cell towers. The primary culprit in smartphone battery drain is an inefficient power amplifier a component that is designed to push the radio signal out through the phones antennas.
laughing. remember Heejin came into my office thinking his thesis was about to go out the window.
such as intraperitoneal chemotherapy delivery to treat ovarian cancer, funded in part by the Bridge Project
Christopher Murray a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania who was connected not with this research says This work exemplifies the power of using nanocrystals as building blocks for multiscale and multifunctional structures.
We often use the term artificial atoms in the community to describe how we are exploiting a new periodic table of fundamental building blocks to design materials
an associate professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering at MIT. e have a description that applies to many systems.
For example, an understanding of such relationships from an engineering standpoint may improve the animation of phenomena such as hair blowing in the wind. think what we now have is a bridge between these two fields,
It s a very specific window that you want to absorb in he says. We built this structure
These are among the 20 amino acids the building blocks for proteins normally found in the human body.
It really opens a window of possibility for labs to try to determine the mechanism of this metabolic breakdown.
Indeed Bhattacharyya built the main structural components of the robot using a 3-D printer in Asada s lab. Half of the robot the half with the flattened panel is waterproof and houses the electronics.
The other half is permeable and houses the propulsion system which consists of six pumps that expel water through rubber tubes.
and holds a joint appointment with the Department of Civil and Environmental engineering, says the new material is essentially a layer of electro-active elastomer that could be adapted quite easily to standard manufacturing processes
or wireless gloves to seamlessly scroll through and manipulate visual data on a wall-sized, panoramic screen.
and a collaborative-conferencing system called Mezzanine that allows multiple users to simultaneously share and control digital content across multiple screens,
whose meeting rooms may remain open all day, every day. f you can make those meetings synthetically productive not just times for people to check in, produce status reports,
Mezzanine surrounds a conference room with multiple screens, as well as the rainsof the system (a small server) that controls and syncs everything.
a type of operating system or a so-called patial operating environmentused by developers to create their own programs that run like Mezzanine.
Putting pixels in the room G-speak has its roots in a 1999 MIT Media Lab project co-invented by Underkoffler in Professor Hiroshi Ishii Tangible Media Group called uminous Room,
These initial concepts using the whole room as a digital workplace became the foundation for g-speak. really wanted to get the ideas out into the world in a form that everyone could use,
with nine other offices and demo rooms in cities including Boston, New york, and London. t might have been the world largest focus group,
and multiple-user capabilities into Mezzanine. t was the first killer application we could write on top of g-speak,
But how far away are we from a consumer model of Mezzanine? It could take years,
We think that with the potential of a 30 percent reduction in operational costs there is plenty of room for redistributing these benefits to customers
Making the entire data set available on a queryable basis does seem like a significantly larger lift.
Two days later the mice were placed into a large rectangular arena. For three minutes the researchers recorded which half of the arena the mice naturally preferred.
Then for mice that had received the fear conditioning the researchers stimulated the labeled cells in the dentate gyrus with light
Next the researchers again put the mice in the large two-zone arena. This time the mice that had originally been conditioned with fear
Used for mapping out large-scale structures such as mining equipment, buildings, and oil rigs these simulations require intensive computation done by powerful computers over many hours, costing engineering firms much time and money.
The startup is also providing software for an MITX course on structural engineering. With its technology, Akselos aims to make 3-D simulations more accessible worldwide to promote efficient engineering design,
The research was funded by the National Institute of General Medical sciences the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences the National Science Foundation the National institutes of health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation n
but also light much as window blinds tilt to filter the sun. Researchers say the work could lead to waterproofing and anti-glare applications such as smart windows for buildings and cars.
For example human nasal passages are lined with cilia small hairs that sway back and forth to remove dust and other foreign particles.
when the researchers stood the array against a wall: Through a combination of surface tension and tilting pillars water climbed up the array following the direction of the pillars.
Ten years ago finding the biological causes of psychiatric disorders was like trying to climb a wall with no footholds says Hyman who Is distinguished also the Service Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology at Harvard.
If this is a wall we ve put toeholds into it. Now we have to start climbing.
As a first step they plan to carry out comprehensive analysis of all genes that specify the protein building blocks of cells from 100000 samples in the next two years.
insulating material structure that floats on water. When sunlight hits the structure surface, it creates a hotspot in the graphite,
Primarily this means consumers need not carry wires and power bricks. But it could also lead to benefits such as smaller batteries and less hardware
If an opera singer belts out a note inside that room the glass with the corresponding frequency accumulates enough energy to shatter
You can have a charging surface wherever you go from a kitchen counter to your workplace to airport lounge
The membranes combine a very thin layer of nanopores with a thicker layer of micropores to limit the passage of unwanted material
says Garret Stuber, an assistant professor of psychiatry and cell biology and physiology at the University of North carolina at Chapel hill. n animals with larger brains,
an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering. ess is known about what happens when you curve the surface.
#A new way to detect leaks in pipes Explosions caused by leaking gas pipes under city streets have made frequently headlines in recent years,
including one that leveled an apartment building in New york this spring. But while the problem of old and failing pipes has garnered much attention,
#Diagnosing broken buildings to make them greener The cofounders of MIT spinout KGS Buildings have a saying:
ll buildings are broken. Energy wasted through faulty or inefficient equipment, they say, can lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in avoidable annual costs.
That why KGS aims to ake buildings betterwith cloud-based software, called Clockworks, that collects existing data on a building equipment specifically in HVAC (heating, ventilation,
to cool rooms. he idea is to make buildings better, by helping people save time, energy,
Phd 0. The software is now operating in more than 300 buildings across nine countries, collecting more than 2 billion data points monthly.
The company estimates these buildings will save an average of 7 to 9 percent in avoidable costs per year;
if it a poor-performing building, it could be much higher, maybe 15 to 20 percent, says Gayeski,
who graduated from MIT Building Technology Program, along with his two cofounders. Last month, MIT commissioned the software for more than 60 of its own buildings, monitoring more than 7, 000 pieces of equipment over 10 million square feet.
Previously, in a yearlong trial for one MIT building, the software saved MIT $286, 000. Benefits, however, extend beyond financial savings,
Gayeski says. here are people in those buildings: What their quality of life? There are people who work on those buildings.
We can provide them with better information to do their jobs, he says. The software can also help buildings earn additional incentives by participating in utility programs. e have major opportunities in some utility territories,
where energy-efficiency has been incentivized. We can help buildings meet energy-efficiency goals that are significant in many states,
including Massachusetts, says Alex Grace, director of business development for KGS. Other customers include universities, health-care and life-science facilities, schools,
and retail buildings. Equipment-level detection Fault-detection and diagnostics research spans about 50 years with contributions by early KGS advisors
and MIT professors of architecture Les Norford and Leon Glicksman and about a dozen companies now operate in the field.
For example, Clockworks may detect specific leaky valves or stuck dampers on air handlers in HVAC units that cause excessive heating or cooling.
and boilers that can be tailored to specific equipment that varies greatly from building to building.
After the competition, the cofounders started a company with a broad goal of making buildings better through energy savings.
Seeing building data as an emerging tool for fault-detection and diagnostics, however, they turned to Samouhosphd dissertation,
About 180 new buildings were added to Clockworks in the past year; by the end of 2014, KGS projects it could deploy its software to 800 buildings. arger companies are starting to catch on,
Gayeski says. ajor health-care institutions, global pharmaceuticals, universities, and others are starting to see the value
Data on HVAC systems have been connected through building automation for some time. KGS however, can connect that data to cloud-based analytics and extract eally rich informationabout equipment,
as technology to monitor houses such as automated thermostats and other sensors begins to nlock the data in the residential scale,
#The incredible shrinking power brick While laptops continue to shrink in size and weight, the ower bricksthat charge them remain heavy and bulky.
But now, MIT spinout FINSIX has invented an adapter that roughly one-quarter the size and one-sixth the weight of a conventional brick,
and weight of power bricks during the conversion process, and that yields reduced size, Sagneri explains.
In traditional adapters, an array of switches flip to one state and take in AC voltage from a wall outlet,
The findings are published this week in the journal Nature Communications by graduate students Chun-Teh Chen and Chern Chuang, professor of civil and environmental engineering Markus Buehler,
Bridge technology Passing light through two modulators can also heighten the contrast of ordinary 2-D video.
Proven to produce double the energy of similarly sized tower-mounted turbines the system called Buoyant Air Turbine
and sails the BAT hovers 1000 to 2000 feet above ground where winds blow five to eight times stronger as well as more consistently than winds at tower level (roughly 100 to 300 feet).
But despite its efficiency the BAT is designed not to replace conventional tower-mounted turbines Rein says.
Instead its purpose is to bring wind power to remote off-grid areas where towers aren t practically or economically feasible.
Conventional turbine construction for instance requires tons of concrete and the use of cranes which can be difficult to maneuver around certain sites.
and can just be inflated out and self-lift into the air for installation. Target sites include areas where large diesel generators provide power such as military bases and industrial sites as well as island and rural communities in Hawaii northern Canada India Brazil and parts of Australia.
and you re much higher than you d get with a traditional tower. That would allow you to cover six to eight times the area you would with a tower.
Prototype to productglass first conceived of the BAT while working at MIT toward his master s degree in aeronautics and astronautics.
and knowing that traditional towers could never reach high-altitude winds he designed the BAT in his free time receiving technical guidance from Institute Professor Sheila Widnall and other faculty.
offering a new window on brain function, says Jasanoff, who is also an associate member of MIT Mcgovern Institute for Brain Research.
Solar panels on residential rooftops that are shaded partially by clouds or trees sacrifice as much as 30 percent of their energy potential over a year.
which houses computers for automation and control, and expandable 20,000-gallon treatment units. In these units, microbes called xoelectrogensexecute a unique process, electromethanogenesis which is being used for the first time ever in treating wastewater.
But for applications where heat is desired the output whether for heating buildings, cooking, or powering heat-based industrial processes this could provide an opportunity for the expansion of solar power into new realms. t could change the game,
This approach allows shapes to be imprinted onto parallel flowing streams of liquid monomers chemical building blocks that can form longer chains called polymers.
ecause it is a very fundamental building block in our ability to control light. The new structure consists of a stack of ultrathin layers of two alternating materials where the thickness of each layer is controlled precisely. hen you have two materials
These dendrites form clusters called arbors which were the key to the researchersclassification system. After each neuron arbor was diagrammed,
the researchers used a computer program to align and condense each one so that the arbors were represented by smaller,
but still distinctive, shapes. By comparing these shapes, the computer program correctly classified all of the known neurons.
Accelerated manufacturing Therapeutic peptides usually consist of a chain of 30 to 40 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
If you re in a world that is not which to be honest is everywhere outside a factory situation then you start to lose some of your advantage.
tumors failed to spread. his elegant study sheds new light into the extracellular matrix proteins involved in various steps of the metastatic cascade,
Over the past year XL Hybrids co-founded by Clay Siegert SM 09 and Justin Ashton GM 08 who Hynes met through MIT s entrepreneurial network has seen its revenue grow twentyfold.
University) and Roman Stocker an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT. Their results are published in the journal Nature Physics.
One prominent location is near the walls of tubes where the result is a strong enhancement of the bacteria s tendency to adhere to those walls and form biofilms.
For example the program has produced the first of a planned series of science centers a simple concrete building outfitted with computers
It a window into processes happening at the millisecond and millimeter scale, says Aude Oliva, a principal research scientist in MIT Computer science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL.
But Daher says the code is written in a way that should make it potentially expandable to other products such as Mac and Windows operating systems.
she has also been examining housing prices in urban neighborhoods in Kenya, and the impact of new technologies on voter mobilization
the APA is now being used by all four military branches on the battlefield and in training to climb mountains, buildings, and ships.
the team completed a working prototype that achieved a 50-foot lift in seven seconds.
or over edge of a wall, going that fast could mean crashes and injuries. So for some customers that operate in dangerous terrain,
hoists for workers at dams, buildings, bridges, and massive wind turbines; as well as for first responders. here a broad spectrum of users people who use rope access as part of their work for
that sheds empirical light on the inner workings of health care in the U s. The study takes advantage of Oregon recent use of a lottery to assign access to Medicaid, the government-backed health-care plan for low-income
#Creating synthetic antibodies MIT chemical engineers have developed a novel way to generate nanoparticles that can recognize specific molecules, opening up a new approach to building durable sensors for many different compounds
it has strong hydrodynamic interactions with both the confining walls and any neighboring particles. These interactions,
As a particle approaches the wall, the perturbation it creates in the fluid is reflected back by the wall,
just as waves in a pool reflect from its wall. This reflection forces the particle to flip its orientation and move toward the center of the channel.
Slightly asymmetrical particles will overshoot the center and move toward the other wall, then come back toward the center again until they gradually achieve a straight path.
Very asymmetrical particles will approach the center without crossing it, but very slowly. But with just the right amount of asymmetry, a particle will move directly to the centerline in the shortest possible time. ow that we understand how the asymmetry plays a role,
the researchers shine ultraviolet light through a mask onto a stream of flowing building blocks, or oligomers.
leaving little room for patients to move on their own. asically you can fall asleep in these machines,
Armies of mobile cubes could temporarily repair bridges or buildings during emergencies, or raise and reconfigure scaffolding for building projects.
and serve as a bridge between my country and the demand coming from all around the world.
and Melinda Gates Foundation has backed since with $100, 000. The product design is led by currently alumnus Elliot Avila 4
#Drive-by heat mapping In 2007, Google unleashed a fleet of cars with roof-mounted cameras to provide street-level images of roads around the world.
The startup deploys cars with thermal-imaging rooftop rigs that create heat maps of thousands of homes and buildings per hour, detecting fixable leaks in uilding envelopeswindows, doors, walls,
But the startup also works with the U s. Department of defense to help identify energy-wasting buildings on their bases.
since more than 4 million homes and buildings in cities across the United states for military, commercial,
ouldn it be easier to just throw it on a car and drive by the house??
for instance, which zip codes have homes with the most leaky attics and, among those, which owners are most likely to install attic insulation.
and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, which eat up about 50 percent of energy used in homes and buildings.
HVAC system efficiency is affected by the system itself, by household behavioral factors such as thermostat and window usage and
finally, by the building envelope. But companies measuring HVAC efficiency today, by reading meters and using other data,
have no building-envelope scans, so they can really determine if the envelope is indeed the culprit.
Essess, on the other hand, has all that information. f we see high meter usage that corresponds to really high HVAC load,
and has to be addressed by an HVAC contractor, Scaramellino says. Reality: A tough customer While Essess was Sarma third startup,
and realize there a tree in front of the building and, in the image, it hard to figure out where the tree is
and where the building is, Sarma says. That when they had to install the Lidar system,
The researchers found that a sealant they had developed previously worked much differently in cancerous colon tissue than in colon tissue inflamed with colitis. The finding suggests that for this sealant
The MIT team now hopes to move the sealant into clinical trials and has founded a company to help that process along. t something that we want to do as rapidly as possible,
The completed set of 10 3-D models of mortar, artillery, and bomb fuses have been received well in the humanitarian EOD community.
#Vanishing friction Friction is all around us, working against the motion of tires on pavement, the scrawl of a pen across paper,
much like two complementary Lego bricks. The team observed that when atoms are spaced so that each occupies a trough in the optical lattice,
Vuletic says. here force building up, and then there suddenly a catastrophic release of energy. he group continued to stretch
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