he lab focuses on how to bring computer science to our physical world, how to program our physical world to assemble itself
and research scientist in the MIT Department of Architecture. very material responds to some sort of energy source,
so that they can act as sensors, actuators, or logic. Tibbits gives an example of a project,
in collaboration with aircraft manufacturer Airbus, involving a jet engine air inlet that traditionally causes drag during flight.
and complex controls. e developed a piece of carbon fiber that completely programmable and can automatically open
altitude, or pressure as the plane leaves the ground and flies, he says. Such an adaptable component could minimize weight,
who points to many illustrations in biology and chemistry. e propose that you can use processes of self-assembly for large-scale applications like manufacturing
He also points to potential applications in other harsh environments and in components created on very small scales.
Moving forward with 4-D printing Another active area of investigation for the lab is-D printing,
and the software firm Autodesk to print customizable smart materials. raditional smart materials are exciting,
or they go from strands or fibers into 2-D sheets or 3-D objects.
They really showed that we could customize our smart materials to respond to different energy sources
After demonstrating the 4-D printing concept, the lab soon found itself pursuing a number of intriguing applications with several companies.
Advancing everyday materials The plastics employed for 4-D printing represented a small subset of materials that might be transformed,
wee used to massive amounts of metal, sensors, electronics and actuators, he points out. ee interested in streamlining that,
or property if a certain energy or environmental condition is around. We can have sensors, actuators, decision-making,
or logic in the material itself. I think the future is not hard industrial machine robotics but robotics that is soft
One example comes from a project with Briggs Automotive to adjust a rear spoiler a wing on race cars
and many street cars that can rotate upwards to increase traction on the tires by increasing drag
or rotate down to increase aerodynamics. et say that if it rains, you want to increase traction on the tires,
Tibbits posits. ou can actually transform the wing panels on the car so that when they meet moisture they change
and put more traction on the car. When they dry out they become more aerodynamic and you can go faster.
Other programmable materials could pay off in improved building environments. e want materials that transform themselves, depending on sunlight, moisture, humidity levels,
or sound, he suggests. or instance, acoustic panels are static, but the acoustics in the room are completely dynamic.
Your acoustic panels could adapt to the noise levels in the room to help amplify the noise
or help dampen it. Commercializing collaborations Self-Assembly Lab researchers may have certain applications in mind as they develop new concepts such as 4-D printing.
But their first corporate partners may bring quite different ideas Tibbits says: heyl say, an we do it in sportswear?
an we do it in the medical space??Industry partnerships work best hen we can actually collaborate to invent the future,
to think of something that no one is doing in that space and that can radically change an industry,
#Silicon photonics meets the foundry Advances in microprocessors have transferred the computation bottleneck away from CPUS to better communications between components.
now moving from systems to boards to chip packages to chips themselves. A related issue with input-output
(I/O)- intensive applications such as server farms is required the energy consumption to transport bits of data around.
and reduce energy consumption. But to be commercially viable these photonic I/O devices must leverage the vast existing silicon infrastructure
That means these components can directly follow the spectacular successes of the optical fiber systems that run the Internet, cautions Lionel Kimerling,
MIT professor of materials science and engineering and director of the MIT Microphotonics Center. e don look at this the way we still look at fiber,
which is to stuff as much bandwidth as we can onto the fiber and send it as far as we can,
Instead, developers working to integrate optics tightly with silicon electronics must address not only bandwidth but packaging and cost issues.
And with funding from the National Institute for Standards and Technology, the Microphotonics Center joined with the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative to create the Photonics System Manufacturing Consortium,
Cutting costs to shed lightright now the optical transceiver is moving onto the circuit board; next it will move inside the chip package,
and then it will be inside the chip itself, says Kimerling. here are significant challenges for each one of those steps.
Cost, bandwidth density, and power efficiency are the big three, and cost is the one that really controlling the entry of photonics into the system.?
The more photonics components go into a system, the cheaper they have to be in order for the system to be affordable,
First, semiconductor systems engineers who design for electrical interconnection typically lack the skill set to add optical components.
on the photonics side, is the difference in design paradigms between computing and optics. In computers, Kimerling explains,
engineers design a Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) circuit and can expect it to work.
But in optical devices, hen I start to make something I have to figure out what kind of materials do I want,
where solder-bumping the photonic subsystem onto the electronic control chip will be the early packaging solution.
It solves the problem of trying to integrate two disparate processes with nanometer transistors and micron optics.?
The hope with silicon photonics is that we can take the best from silicon integrated circuits including that design discipline to establish a process design kit that includes all the rules as to how to build a component,
wel be able to make these integrated devices and make them in volume. He notes that IBM is creating such a kit for its semiconductor foundry in Burlington, Vermont.
Into the microprocessor foundryadvances in microprocessor performance increasingly are limited by the ability to feed data into the microprocessor
and the energy cost of getting the data, says Rajeev Ram, professor of electrical engineering at MIT.
His group develops energy-efficient photonics, nd the way we do that is to miniaturize the devices,
he says. y the time wee embedded them into these circuits, the photonics occupy a negligible footprint on the chip. e
and his colleagues are now working to demonstrate full-scale multi-core computing with an entire computer that uses only photons to communicate with memory,
and to show that such a computer should be much more energy-efficient and offer potentially higher performance.
In order to achieve this goal Ram lab aims to overcome major hurdles in integrating optical interconnection for microprocessors within existing manufacturing systems. typical microprocessor fab costs between 1 and 3 billion dollars,
he points out. t unlikely that if we want to demonstrate a new architecture that wel be allowed to manipulate the factory in any way.
So we gave ourselves the challenge of taking a state-of-the-art microprocessor manufacturing process, and using the same layers
and materials for the photonics. ne offshoot of this is intellectual property that will make it possible for any company with a great application for photonics
and accompanying high-performance circuit design to walk into a foundry and get an optical design to work in that foundry,
Ram says. Making material progressover time, new materials and devices will provide far more powerful integration of photonics on silicon.
growing germanium crystals on amorphous substances at temperatures low enough for fabricating electronics as well. Such approaches, focused on the long term, will achieve monolithic integration for chips with an electronic front end with optics embedded in the back end
he says. Overall, the MIT patent portfolio in silicon photonics has grown to more than 60 patents that cover functions such as on-chip lasers, modulators and demodulators, and sensors.
Applications range from data processing and communications to sensors on a chip n
#A new molecular design approach For decades, materials scientists have worked to infuse the lessons learned from natural proteins into the design of new materials.
However, as the self-assembly process of many proteins remains unclear, our understanding of a material properties at a fundamental level and ways it can be translated into real-world use has provided a challenge.
a team of MIT researchers developed a domain-specific programming language for generating custom materials based on a set of design specifications.
The software, dubbed Matriarch for aterials Architecture allows users to combine and rearrange material building blocks in almost any conceivable shape.
The work suggests that engineers will be able to reach the next stage of materials design through fundamental control of a protein final assembled structure. atriarch could very well be the core of a new molecular design process,
where engineering decisions can be made at arbitrary scales, says Department of Civil and Environmental engineering (CEE) postdoc Tristan Giesa 5, co-author of the study. he idea is to start at ground level.
If engineers require a polymer material to have specific properties strength, resilience, size to name a few then we need to question
what must be done at a fundamental level to achieve these properties. With Matriarch engineers can explore what happens to a material properties when its architecture changes.
Accessible as an open source Python library the program will ultimately be used as a tool for engineers to quickly discover new materials
Category theory is a fairly new field of mathematics, focused on structural relationships and compositionality.
who collaborated as a high school student while enrolled in MIT's Research Science Institute (RSI) program.
Jagadeesan, writer of the majority of the software library, explained the code follows the mathematics very closely.
and CEE department head Professor Markus Buehler, the study senior author published their findings In ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering.
A bottom-up design process Given a few basic building blocks and instructions, Matriarch builds hierarchical structures of proteins
From these configurations, the program creates Protein Data Bank (PDB) files to be passed to molecular dynamics software.
thus use Matriarch to perform building block substitutions, and structural changes, to study their effect on the functionality of a material. ur program is specialized on protein-based materials,
The team tested their program on collagen protein one of the most common building materials found in mammals, with a range of potential applications in synthetic design.
Mechanical tests on several mutations suggested that natural collagen could be optimized for stiffness and stability.
To perform this study with existing software would have been nearly impossible and time-intensive, says the team.
such as collagen mutations, is currently quite challenging, especially in the chemistry lab. Massively parallel simulation has opened new pathways for materials discovery,
and how their subsequences organize themselves as building blocks on a variety of scales. Ultimately, they hope to create an extensible database of structures for engineers to estimate the final configuration that a new material
or sequence will have. he more this program is used, the more it will gain in efficiency and accuracy,
The self learning database, after running a stream of simulations, will record the protein preferred conformations and store the final structures. ith this program,
Spivak acknowledges support by the Air force Office of Scientific research and the Office of Naval Research.
Buehler and Giesa acknowledge support by the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office,
including plastics and metals. Simultaneously, the cost of 3-D printers has fallen sufficiently to make them household consumer items.
Now a team of MIT researchers has opened up a new frontier in 3-D printing:
the ability to print optically transparent glass objects. The new system, described in the Journal of 3d printing and Additive manufacturing, was developed by Neri Oxman, an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab;
Peter Houk, director of the MIT Glass Lab; MIT researchers John Klein and Michael Stern;
Like other 3-D printers now on the market, the device can print designs created in a computer-assisted design program,
producing a finished product with little human intervention. In the present version, molten glass is loaded into a hopper in the top of the device after being gathered from a conventional glassblowing kiln.
When completed, the finished piece must be cut away from the moving platform on which it is assembled.
far higher than the temperatures used for other 3-D printing. The stream of glowing molten glass from the nozzle resembles honey as it coils onto a platform,
with a lot of trial-and-error. lass is inherently a very difficult material to work with, Klein says:
e can control solar transmittance. Unlike a pressed or blown-glass part, which necessarily has a smooth internal surface,
and generate an all-in-one building skin that is at once structural and transparent? she asks. ecause glass is at once structural and transparent,
Additional work will focus on the use of colors in the glass, which the team has demonstrated already in limited testing.
Klein says the printing system is an example of multidisciplinary work facilitated by MIT flexible departmental boundaries in this case
which is part of the Department of Materials science and engineering. At MIT, members of the research team also included Markus Kayser, Chikara Inamura,
They were joined by James Weaver of Harvard university Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Giorgia Franchin and Paolo Colombo of the University of Padova in Italy f
By tweaking the genomes of these viruses, known as bacteriophages, researchers hope to customize them to target any type of pathogenic bacteria.
MIT biological engineers have devised a new mix-and-match system to genetically engineer viruses that target specific bacteria.
This approach could generate new weapons against bacteria for which there are no effective antibiotics, says Timothy Lu,
an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and biological engineering. hese bacteriophages are designed in a way that relatively modular.
the senior author of a paper describing this work in the Sept. 23 edition of the journal Cell Systems.
and while many of these are beneficial, some can cause disease. For example, some reports have linked Crohn disease to the presence of certain strains of E coli. e like to be able to remove specific members of the bacterial population
and see what their function is in the microbiome, Lu says. n the longer term you could design a specific phage that kills that bug
but more information about the microbiome is needed to effectively design such therapies. The paper lead author is Hiroki Ando, an MIT research scientist.
Other authors are MIT research scientist Sebastien Lemire and Diana Pires, a research fellow at the University of Minho in Portugal.
but efforts to harness them for medical use have been hampered because isolating useful phages from soil
Also, each family of bacteriophages can have a different genome organization and life cycle, making it difficult to engineer them
By swapping in different genes for the tail fiber they generated phages that target several types of bacteria. ou keep the majority of the phage the same and all youe changing is the tail region,
the researchers combed through databases of phage genomes looking for sequences that appear to code for the key tail fiber section, known as gp17.
they had to create a new system for performing the genetic engineering. Existing techniques for editing viral genomes are fairly laborious
so the researchers came up with an efficient approach in which they insert the phage genome into a yeast cell,
where it exists as an rtificial chromosomeseparate from the yeast cell own genome. During this process the researchers can easily swap genes in
and out of the phage genome. nce we had that method, it allowed us very easily to identify the genes that code for the tails
and engineer them or swap them in and out from other phages, Lu says. ou can use the same engineering strategy over and over,
so that simplifies that workflow in the lab. The new approach also overcomes an important hurdle in using bacteriophages to treat disease,
a microbiologist at the Institut pasteur in Paris. hages tend to infect only a very limited number of bacterial strains,
which makes it difficult to choose the right phage for the right infection, if such a phage is available at all,
who was involved not in the research. his is a big step in the development of phage therapies with predictable outcomes and a good demonstration of
what synthetic biology approaches will bring to medicine in the near future. A targeted strike In this study,
the researchers engineered phages that can target pathogenic Yersinia and Klebsiella bacteria, as well as several strains of E coli.
and gastrointestinal infections, including pneumonia, sepsis, gastritis, and Legionnairesdisease. One advantage of the engineered phages is that unlike many antibiotics,
Lu says. e aim to create effective and narrow-spectrum methods for targeting pathogens. Lu and his colleagues are now designing phages that can target other strains of harmful bacteria
which could have applications such as spraying on crops or disinfecting food, as well as treating human disease.
Another advantage of this approach is that all of the phages are based on an identical genetic scaffold,
#New system for human genome editing has potential to increase power and precision of genome engineering A team including the scientist who first harnessed the CRISPR-Cas9 system for mammalian genome editing has identified now a different CRISPR system with the potential for even simpler and more precise genome engineering.
In a study published today in Cell, Feng Zhang and his colleagues at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Mcgovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT,
and John van der Oost at Wageningen University, describe the unexpected biological features of this new system
and demonstrate that it can be engineered to edit the genomes of human cells. his has dramatic potential to advance genetic engineering,
but also shows that Cpf1 can be harnessed for human genome editing and has remarkable and powerful features.
The Cpf1 system represents a new generation of genome editing technology. CRISPR sequences were described first in 1987
and their natural biological function was described initially in 2010 and 2011. The application of the CRISPR-Cas9 system for mammalian genome editing was reported first in 2013, by Zhang and separately by George Church at Harvard university.
In the new study, Zhang and his collaborators searched through hundreds of CRISPR systems in different types of bacteria,
says Zhang, the W. M. Keck Assistant professor in Biomedical engineering in MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive sciences.
The newly described Cpf1 system differs in several important ways from the previously described Cas9, with significant implications for research and therapeutics,
leaving lunt endsthat often undergo mutations as they are rejoined. With the Cpf1 complex the cuts in the two strands are offset, leaving short overhangs on the exposed ends.
Cpf1 cuts far away from the recognition site, meaning that even if the targeted gene becomes mutated at the cut site,
it can likely still be recut, allowing multiple opportunities for correct editing to occur. Fourth:
The Cpf1 system provides new flexibility in choosing target sites. Like Cas9, the Cpf1 complex must first attach to a short sequence known as a PAM,
This could be an advantage in targeting some genomes, such as in the malaria parasite as well as in humans. he unexpected properties of Cpf1 and more precise editing open the door to all sorts of applications,
including in cancer research, says Levi Garraway, an institute member of the Broad Institute, and the inaugural director of the Joint Center for Cancer Precision Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women Hospital,
and the Broad Institute. Garraway was involved not in the research. An open approach to empower research Zhang,
As with earlier Cas9 tools, these groups will make this technology freely available for academic research via the Zhang lab page on the plasmid-sharing website Addgene, through
The Zhang lab also offers free online tools and resources for researchers through its website.
These groups plan to offer licenses that best support rapid and safe development for appropriate and important therapeutic uses. e are committed to making the CRISPR-Cpf1 technology widely accessible,
Zhang says. ur goal is to develop tools that can accelerate research and eventually lead to new therapeutic applications.
with other enzymes that may be repurposed for further genome editing advances. e
#Bubble, bubble, at the flick of a switch Boiling water, with its commotion of bubbles that rise from a surface as water comes to a boil,
is central to most electric power plants, heating and cooling systems, and desalination plants. Now, for the first time, researchers at MIT have found a way to control this process, literally with the flick of an electrical switch.
The system, which could improve the efficiency of electric power generation and other processes, is described in a paper by Department of Mechanical engineering Professor Evelyn Wang, graduate student Jeremy Cho,
and recent graduate Jordan Mizerak 4, published in the journal Nature Communications. This degree of control over the boiling process, independent of temperature, Wang says,
has not previously been demonstrated despite the ubiquity of boiling in industrial processes. Other systems have been developed to control boiling using electric fields,
but these have required special fluids rather than water, and a thousandfold higher voltages, making them economically impractical for most uses.
The new feat was accomplished by adding surfactants to water essentially creating a soapy liquid. The surfactant molecules,
or repelled by, a metal surface by changing the polarity of the voltage applied to the metal.
which rely on the creation of precise kinds of nanoscale textures on the surface, this system makes use of the tiny irregularities that naturally exist on a metal surface
in turn, allows control over the rate of heat transfer between the metal and the liquid.
That could make it possible to make more efficient boilers for powerplants or other applications, since present designs require a substantial safety margin to avoid the possibility of hot spots that could seriously damage the equipment.
While most such power plants operate at a steady rate most of the time being able to control the heat transfer rates dynamically could improve their efficiency
liquid cooling for high-performance electronics also could be made more efficient by being able to control the rate of bubbling to prevent overheating in hotspots,
he says. aving a boiler that can respond to quick changescould provide extra flexibility to the electric grid,
Wang says this work has demonstrated hat you can actively modify the rate of nucleation. It has not been shown previously that this is possible.
Power plant operators are rightly conservative about making changes, Cho says, since people depend on their output,
But don think there are any huge barriersto building such a demonstration, he says. n theory,
says Satish Kandlikar, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Rochester Institute of technology, who was involved not in this research. uch control strategies will dramatically alter the heat transfer paradigm in many applications,
especially in the electronics cooling industry to cool hot spots. Such strategies can be applied effectively through simple electric controls using the new technology.
and Hollywood A team of researchers at MIT Computer science and Artificial intelligence Lab (CSAIL) has believed long that wireless signals like Wifi can be used to see things that are invisible to the naked eye.
and body movements as subtle as the rise and fall of a person chest from the other side of a house, allowing a mother to monitor a baby breathing
the team presents a new technology called RF Capture that picks up wireless reflections off the human body to see the silhouette of a human standing behind a wall.
and even distinguish between 15 different people through a wall with nearly 90 percent accuracy.
From heating bills to Hollywood Researchers say the technology could have major implications for everything from gaming and filmmaking to emergency response and eldercare.
and move in a specific room full of cameras, says Phd student Fadel Adib, who is lead author on the new paper.
F Capture would enable motion capture without body sensors and could track actorsmovements even if they are behind furniture or walls.
The device's motion-capturing technology makes it equally valuable for smart homes, according to MIT professor and paper co-author Dina Katabi. ee working to turn this technology into an in-home device that can call 911
if it detects that a family member has fallen unconscious, says Katabi, director of the Wireless@MIT center. ou could also imagine it being used to operate your lights and TVS,
or to adjust your heating by monitoring where you are in the house. Future versions could be integrated into gaming interfaces,
allowing you to interact with a game from different rooms or even trigger distinct actions based on
which hand you move. he possibilities are vast, says Adib, whose other co-authors include MIT professor Frédo Durand, Phd student Chen-Yu Hsu,
and undergraduate intern Hongzi Mao. ee just at the beginning of thinking about the different ways to use these technologies.
How it works The device works by transmitting wireless signals that traverse the wall and reflect off a person body back to the device.
The emitted radiation is approximately 1/10,000 the amount given off by a standard cellphone.
The device captures these reflections and analyzes them in order to see the person silhouette. The key challenge,
however, is that different individuals and, for that matter, different body parts all reflect the same signal. Which raises the question:
he data you get back from these reflections are very minimal, says Katabi. owever, we can extract meaningful signals through a series of algorithms we developed that minimize the random noise produced by the reflections.
The technology operates in two stages: First, it scans 3-D space to capture wireless reflections off objects in the environment,
including the human body. However, since only a subset of body parts reflect the signal back at any given point in time,
the device then monitors how these reflections vary as someone moves in the environment and intelligently stitches the person reflections across time to reconstruct his silhouette into a single image.
Team members are in the process of spinning out a product called Emerald that aims to detect, predict and prevent falls among the elderly.
In August the team presented Emerald to President Obama as part of the White house first annual Demo Day. n the same way that cellphones and Wifi routers have become indispensable parts
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