#Outside-the-box thinker When an aspiring mechanical engineer on a budget wants a top-of-the-line guitar,
3-D printing. Until recently, Spielberg worked in the MIT Media Lab with Neri Oxman, the Sony Corporation Career development Assistant professor of Media Arts and Sciences, graduate students Steven Keating and John Klein,
and other undergraduates. 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.
As Spielberg sees it, 3-D printing has two extremes: At one end is rapid prototyping,
which allows researchers to design, print, and experiment and then design, print, and experiment again many times faster than traditional manufacturing.
Outside the box Ordinarily, 3-D printing occurs inside a box limiting the size of printable objects to that of the printer housing.
They researched and implemented methods for controlling a large robotic arm out of that from a boom truck,
printing objects as large as walls, layer by layer. It analogous to how an office printer cartridge runs back and forth,
but on a much grander scale: 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.
being made of insulation, 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,
ou need really precise movement on the robotic arm end to get each layer exactly straight,
and to build something that looks like a functional house, which is really hard to do with a construction crane.
If youe ever seen someone working on the power lines, theye usually swaying in the wind. There are a lot of inherent engineering
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,
to manufacture what known as a ab on a chip. Currently, when a doctor wants to run a series of blood tests on a patient,
he or she collects several vials of blood and sends them to a hospital laboratory for dozens of individual tests.
Several hours or days later, the lab returns the results. Among other functions a lab on a chip can theoretically take a minuscule sample of blood,
run all of the required tests at once inside tiny channels embedded in the chip, and produce nearly instantaneous results.
Spielberg even sees the technology as a potential tool in military environments. t totally a convenience thing,
he says. magine if you were in the military and youe trying to screen for some disease,
but you don have a lab with you. You can pull out this device, take a quick sample of blood,
get almost instant feedback in a super-small form, and be on your way. Once again, Spielberg role in the lab is with optimizing the 3-D printer that makes the device.
The current method for creating labs on a chip is labor-intensive, and, much like manufacturing a standard computer chip, starts with creating silicon wafers,
which act as a template for the final product. Even though he is only a few months into his new lab position with Hart,
Spielberg is already working toward eliminating this clunky process, enabling the same type of efficient manufacturing he tackled at the Media Lab. An early introduction to research Growing up in Louisville,
Piggybacking on the fundraising bracelet trend of a few years ago, he sold silicone bracelets, raising $60, 000 to fund research on his brother disease.
Then, as a high-school student, Spielberg became involved in some of the research his fundraising supported;
ut it was really interesting to learn about how they were trying to solve this problem from a biological standpoint,
receiving pacemaker implants in his chest that could intercept aberrant signals from his brain before they reached his muscles.
Nonetheless, he a member of a recently formed rock band with a fellow mechanical engineering major and two computer science majors, keeping music
and music that offer a form of self-expression that sometimes hard to attain in other forms of work,
hangar-like space inside MIT Building 41, a small, Roomba-like robot is trying to make up its mind.
This new visualization system combines ceiling-mounted projectors with motion-capture technology and animation software to project a robot intentions in real time.
package-delivering drones, and other autonomous, route-planning vehicles. s designers, when we can compare the robot perceptions with how it acts,
we can find bugs in our code much faster, Agha-mohammadi says. or example, if we fly a quadrotor,
and see something go wrong in its mind, we can terminate the code before it hits the wall, or breaks.
The system was developed by Shayegan Omidshafiei, a graduate student, and Agha-mohammadi. They and their colleagues, including Jonathan How,
a professor of aeronautics and astronautics, will present details of the visualization system at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronauticsscitech conference in January.
Seeing into the mind of a robot The researchers initially conceived of the visualization system in response to feedback from visitors to their lab. During demonstrations of robotic missions
The engineers mounted 18 motion-capture cameras on the ceiling to track multiple robotic vehicles simultaneously.
They then developed computer software that visually renders iddeninformation, such as a robot possible routes, and its perception of an obstacle position.
they were able to spot problems in the underlying algorithms, and make improvements much faster than before. here are a lot of problems that pop up because of uncertainty in the real world,
or hardware issues, and that where our system can significantly reduce the amount of effort spent by researchers to pinpoint the causes,
or restructure your vision of how your algorithm works. You could see applications where you might cut down a whole month of work into a few days.
Bringing the outdoors in The group has explored a few such applications using the visualization system. In one scenario, the team is looking into the role of drones in fighting forest fires.
Such drones may one day be used both to survey and to squelch fires first observing a fire effect on various types of vegetation,
then identifying and putting out those fires that are most likely to spread. To make fire-fighting drones a reality
the team is first testing the possibility virtually. In addition to projecting a drone intentions, the researchers can also project landscapes to simulate an outdoor environment.
In test scenarios, the group has flown physical quadrotors over projections of forests, shown from an aerial perspective to simulate a drone view as
if it were flying over treetops. The researchers projected fire on various parts of the landscape,
and directed quadrotors to take images of the terrain images that could eventually be used to eachthe robots to recognize signs of a particularly dangerous fire.
Going forward, Agha-mohammadi says the team plans to use the system to test drone performance in package-delivery scenarios.
Toward this end, the researchers will simulate urban environments by creating street view projections of cities,
similar to zoomed-in perspectives on Google maps. magine we can project a bunch of apartments in Cambridge,
Agha-mohammadi says. epending on where the vehicle is, you can look at the environment from different angles,
and what it sees will be quite similar to what it would see if it were flying in reality.
Because the Federal aviation administration has placed restrictions on outdoor testing of quadrotors and other autonomous flying vehicles Omidshafiei points out that testing such robots in a virtual environment may be the next best thing.
In fact, the sky the limit as far as the types of virtual environments that the new system may project. ith this system,
you can design any environment you want, and can test and prototype your vehicles as if theye fully outdoors,
before you deploy them in the real world, Omidshafiei says. While the system will not serve as a substitute for experiments
and validation in the real environment, says Alberto Speranzon, staff research scientist at United technologies Research center,
he says testing autonomous systems in virtual environments could ready such designs for outdoor testing.
The system will enable faster prototyping and testing in closer-to-reality environments, says Speranzon,
who was involved not in the research. t will also enable the testing of decision-making algorithms in very harsh environments that are not readily available to scientists.
For example, with this technology, we could simulate clouds above an environment monitored by a high-flying vehicle
and have the video processing system dealing with semitransparent obstructions
#Beating battery drain Stream video on your smartphone or use its GPS for an hour or two and you ll probably see the battery drain significantly.
As data rates climb and smartphones adopt more power-hungry features battery life has become a concern.
Now a technology developed by MIT spinout Eta Devices could help a phone s battery last perhaps twice as long
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.
Similar larger modules are found in wireless base stations where they might use 10 or even 100 times the power.
Prepared to send sizeable chunks of data at any given time the amplifiers stay at maximum voltage eating away power more than any other smartphone component and about 75 percent of electricity consumption in base stations#and wasting
more than half of that power as heat. This means smartphone batteries lose longevity and base stations waste energy and lose money.
But Eta Devices has developed a chip (for smartphones) and a shoebox-size module (for base stations) based on nearly a decade of MIT research to essentially switch gears to adjust voltage supply to power amplifiers as needed cutting the waste.
You can look at our technology as a high-speed gearbox that every few nanoseconds modulates the amount of power that the power amplifier draws from the battery explains Joel Dawson Eta Devices chief technology officer
and a former associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science who co-invented the technology. That turns out to be the key to keeping the efficiency very high.
When trialed in a base station last year Eta Devices module became the first transmitter for 4G LTE networks to achieve an average efficiency greater than 70 percent Dawson says.
The highest number we ve heard before that was 45 percent #and that s probably being generous he says.
Backed by millions in funding Eta Devices co-founded by David Perreault an MIT professor of electrical engineering
and former MIT Sloan fellow Mattias Astrom has partnered with a large base-station manufacturer. The goal is to deploy the technology in live base stations by the end of 2015.
The savings could be substantial Dawson says noting that a large carrier could save $100 million in annual electricity costs.
Eta Devices has entered also conversations with major manufacturers of LTE-enabled smartphones to incorporate their chips by the end of next year.
Dawson says this could potentially double current smartphone battery life. Besides battery life Dawson adds there are many ways the telecommunications industry can take advantage of improved efficiency.
Eta Devices approach could lead to smaller handset batteries for example and even smaller handsets since there would be less dissipating heat.
The technology could also drive down operating costs for base stations in the developing world where these stations rely on expensive diesel fuel for power
And ultimately it could impact the environment: If all midsized carrier networks were to replace current radio amplifiers with Eta Devices technology he says the reduction in greenhouse gases would be equivalent to taking about 5 million cars off the road.
There are so many ways to leverage high efficiency if you have it Dawson says. In August the World Economic Forum named Eta Devices the 2015 Technology Pioneer a designation awarded previously to Dropbox Spotify
and Twitter to name a few. In the mobile marketeta Devices commercial success is in part a product of engineering ingenuity intersecting with business acumen at MIT.
In 2008 Dawson and Perreault who directs the Power Electronics Research Group submitted an early concept of the Eta technology then called asymmetrical multilevel outphasing (AMO) to an Innovation Teams
(i-Teams) class that brought together MIT students from across disciplines to develop commercial products.
The AMO technology was a new transmitter architecture where algorithms could choose from different voltages needed to transmit data in each power amplifier
and select the optimal choice for power conservation and do so roughly 20 million times per second.
This could be done on the transmitting and receiving end of data transfers. This caught the eye of Astrom who had come to MIT after working in the mobile industry for 10 years looking for the next big thing.
With help from Astrom the professors started designing the technology for the mobile market initially leaning toward base stations.
At the time I was suffering as everyone else was from my iphone running out of battery at lunchtime Astrom says.
The iphone was only a year old but you could see how much data traffic would explode.
Fleshing out a business plan from an i-Teams draft the two professors earned a Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation grant in 2009 allowing for the first demonstration of the hardware showing a 77 percent gain in efficiency over standard systems.
A paper detailing the technology was presented at that year s IEEE Radio frequency Integrated circuits Symposium. That Deshpande Center grant was big in terms of the funding
and connecting us with local venture capitalists and really helping with being in that business mindset Dawson says.
Eta Devices launched in 2010 with Astrom as its CEO. From there it s been all rapid prototyping at Eta Devices Cambridge and Stockholm offices as well as gathering customer feedback.#
#Spinning out a company has been the best way to validate the technology especially with novel power-electronics hardware Dawson says.
People in our industry take ideas a lot more seriously when there s a company behind it he says.
We had impressive performance at MIT but now we have a team of professionals working on the technology full-time.
When I was a professor I was going around the world trying to give the technology away Dawson says laughing.
Future-proofing technologytoday Eta Devices major advantage is that its technology is able to handle ever-increasing data bandwidths.
A few major smartphone manufacturers are now using envelope tracking (ET) which adjusts voltage to power amplifiers on the fly.
But by adjusting that voltage continuously ET efficiency falls apart for 4G LTE and 802. 11ac (Wifi) wireless standards even up to 20 MHZ bandwidth.
ETADVANCED in contrast already accommodates ultrahigh bandwidths used by newer communication standards such as LTE Advanced (up to 80#megahertz) and the next-generation Wifi standard (up to 160 megahertz).
) Prepping for future communication standards is one thing that s helped the company thrive Dawson says.
As a small company you ll lose a fair fight with another technology#you have to have some overpowering advantage that they can t match you on he says.
In introducing new hardware you not only have to be better than the product of today
but also have to make compelling case for being future-proof u
#Better chemotherapy through targeted delivery Every year about 100000 Americans are diagnosed with brain tumors that have spread from elsewhere in the body.
These tumors known as metastases are treated usually with surgery followed by chemotherapy but the cancer often returns.
A new study from MIT Brigham and Women s Hospital and Johns hopkins university suggests that delivering chemotherapy directly into the brain cavity may offer a better way to treat tumors that have metastasized to the brain.
Testing their new approach in mice the researchers found that the chemotherapy drug temozolomide (TMZ) was more effective
when delivered via tiny capsules implanted inside the skull. This suggests that a similar approach might be more effective in human patients says Michael Cima the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering at MIT
and a senior author of the study which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Metastatic disease should be sensitive to chemotherapy but systemic chemotherapy has not proven effective because it s not getting to the brain at a high enough dose for a long enough period of time says Cima who is also a member of MIT s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.
We re showing we get much higher degrees of tumor cell death when we deliver the drug locally.
The paper s other senior authors are Robert Langer the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT
and a member of the Koch Institute the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES and the Department of Chemical engineering and Henry Brem a professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. The lead author is Urvashi Upadhyay previously a neurosurgeon
at Brigham and Women s Hospital and now an assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Massachusetts Medical school.
Targeted deliverychemotherapy drugs are delivered usually via intravenous injection. To make sure that enough reaches a tumor very large quantities must be given often producing side effects.
For a few types of cancer doctors have developed more targeted approaches. With ovarian cancer the best results are achieved
when drugs are delivered directly into the abdominal cavity. However this is not widely done because it requires implanting a catheter in the patient for 12 weeks
which is difficult for the patients to tolerate. There are already established methods for improving patient care Cima says.
There just aren t good ways to do it. To overcome these delivery issues Cima s lab is working on small implantable devices to deliver drugs for ovarian cancer and bladder disease as well as brain cancer.
For the new brain study the researchers delivered chemotherapy drugs via implantable microcapsules made of a biocompatible material called liquid crystal polymer.
The capsules are small cylinders with a 1. 5-milliliter drug capacity; the drug diffuses out through a small hole.
but they were so effective in this study that Cima says they may end up being the most promising vehicle for potential human clinical trials.
TMZ which is a first-line treatment for brain metastasis and gliomas and doxorubicin a common treatment for breast cancer
Zone of influenceworking with mice implanted with tumors similar to human brain metastases the researchers found that TMZ delivered directly to the brain prolonged survival by several days compared with TMZ administered by injection.
They also found higher rates of apoptosis or programmed cell death in tumor cells near the capsules.
However doxorubicin delivered to the brain did not perform as well as systemic injection of doxorubicin. As an explanation for that discrepancy the researchers found that TMZ travels farther from the capsule after release allowing it to reach more tissue.
Doxorubicin appears to be broken down or cleared before it can kill as many cells Cima says.
This could be valuable information in designing future versions of this treatment for brain tumors or other cancers he adds.
The properties of the drug molecule have to be taken into account in the design of local therapy that s effective says Cima.
There s a zone around each one of these devices where it can work depending on the molecule.
Michael Lim an associate professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins says the new approach seems like a promising way to expand the range of treatments available for brain tumors
because it is so difficult to get chemotherapy drugs to cross the blood-brain barrier. This could potentially positively impact patients lives says Lim who was involved not in the study.
Although there are still many hurdles to developing this approach to treat human cancer Cima says he believes it is worth pursuing
because so many cancers particularly those of the breast and lung spread to the brain. The researchers are also working on using this approach to precisely deliver drugs to very small regions of the brain in hopes of developing better treatments for psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders.
The research was funded by the National institutes of health and the Brain science Foundation n
#Microscopic walkers find their way across cell surfaces Nature has developed a wide variety of methods for guiding particular cells enzymes and molecules to specific structures inside the body:
White blood cells can find their way to the site of an infection while scar-forming cells migrate to the site of a wound.
But finding ways of guiding artificial materials within the body has proven more difficult. Now a team of researchers at MIT led by Alfredo Alexander-Katz the Walter Henry Gale Associate professor of Materials science and engineering has demonstrated a new target-finding mechanism.
The new system allows microscopic devices to autonomously find their way to areas of a cell surface for example just by detecting an increase in surface friction in places where more cell receptors are concentrated.
The finding is described this week in a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters written by Alexander-Katz graduate student Joshua Steimel and postdoc Juan Aragones.
if we could create a synthetic active system that could sense gradients in biological receptors Alexander-Katz explains.
That s the method used by white blood cells for example to locate regions where pathogens are attacking body cells.
In the presence of a magnetic field the paired particles begin to tumble across a surface with first one particle
So far the work has been carried out on a model cell surface on a functionalized microscope slide
For example it could be developed as a method of locating tumor cells within the body by identifying their surface texture perhaps in combination with other characteristics.
This animation shows micro walkers tumbling across a surface under the influence of a rotating magnetic field until they find areas where friction is represented highest by the orange area.
Courtesy of Juan Aragones Josh Steimel and Alfredo Alexander-Katzfull Screen The next step is to test the approach in more complex settings.
The initial work was done with flat surfaces; the team now aims to conduct studies in complex 3-D settings to make sure the process works effectively in situations that more closely resemble a real cellular environment.
Ignacio Pagonabarraga a professor of fundamental physics at the University of Barcelona who was connected not with this research says This simple synthetic system may be valuable to gain more insight into basic physical principles associated with durotaxis the mechanical sensing mechanism by
which cells displace on a substrate. The use of a pattern that localizes particles may be useful to enhance the localization of particles with specific properties.
The research was supported by the U s. Department of energy the MIT Energy Initiative and the Chang family y
#Fast modeling of cancer mutations Sequencing the genomes of tumor cells has revealed thousands of genetic mutations linked with cancer.
However sifting through this deluge of information to figure out which of these mutations actually drive cancer growth has proven to be a tedious time-consuming process.
MIT researchers have developed now a new way to model the effects of these genetic mutations in mice.
Their approach based on the genome-editing technique known as CRISPR is much faster than existing strategies
which require genetically engineering mice that carry the cancerous mutations. It s a very rapid and very adaptable approach to make models says Thales Papagiannakopoulos a postdoc at MIT s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research
and one of the lead authors of the paper which appears in the Oct 22 online edition of Nature.
With a lot of these mutations we have no idea what their role is in tumor progression.
If we can actually understand the biology we can then go in and try targeted therapeutic approaches.
Led by Papagiannakopoulos graduate student Francisco Sanchez-Rivera the paper s other lead author and Koch Institute director Tyler Jacks the paper s senior author the team used CRISPR to accurately reproduce the effects of two well-known lung cancer genes.
They also modeled a gene called APC whose role in lung cancer was known not previously. This approach could be used to study nearly any gene in many different types of cancer the researchers say.
There has to be a functional way of assessing the role of these cancer-gene candidates as they appear in sequencing studies Sanchez-Rivera says.
The system we developed fills that gap immediately because you can do it very rapidly and very precisely.
Cutting out cancer genescrispr originally discovered by biologists studying the bacterial immune system involves a set of proteins that bacteria use to defend themselves against bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria.
One of these proteins a DNA-cutting enzyme called Cas9 binds to short RNA guide strands that target specific sequences telling Cas9 where to make its cuts.
Scientists have begun recently exploiting this system to make targeted mutations in the genomes of living animals either deleting genes
This process is much faster than generating mice with mutations inserted at the embryonic stem cell stage
In this study the researchers focused on a type of non-small cell lung cancer called lung adenocarcinoma
Jacks lab has engineered previously mice that conditionally express the Kras oncogene only in the lung leading them to develop lung adenocarcinoma.
The researchers administered these mice with lentiviruses targeting three different genes allowing them to see how each gene cooperates with Kras to influence tumor growth.
Once the tumors develop the researchers can study how aggressive they are how fast they grow
The researchers found that the mice in this study developed very similar tumors to those seen previously in mice with those genes deleted using traditional methods.
whose role in lung cancer is understood not as well revealed that APC loss also drives tumor progression.
Tumors without that gene became much less differentiated and more similar to embryonic cells. To verify these results the researchers also used mice with APC deleted by traditional methods
and found the same types of tumors. This is#a wonderful new example of the power of the CRISPR approach says Anton Berns a professor of molecular genetics at The netherlands Cancer Institute.
It also comes at the right time. The cancer genome sequence initiative provides us with numerous candidate genes that might modulate tumorigenesis
and we need a rapid method to test their contribution. This is precisely what this methodology provides.
Personalized treatmentsthis system could be used in combination with hundreds of existing mouse strains that have been engineered to express known cancer genes allowing researchers to study more thoroughly the interactions of multiple genes.
and brain to model tumors in those regions the researchers say. This method also offers new ways to seek personalized treatments for cancer patients depending on the types of mutations found in their tumors the researchers say.
They envision using this technique to create mice with tumors carrying the same genetic profile as a patient then testing different drugs on them to see which have the best effect.
This opens up a whole new field of being personalized able to do oncology where you can model human mutations
and start treating tumors based on these mutations Papagiannakopoulos says. The research was funded by the Howard hughes medical institute the Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology at MIT and the National Cancer Institute u
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011