and oil rigs these simulations require intensive computation done by powerful computers over many hours, costing engineering firms much time and money.
This research was supported by grant funding from the National institutes of health and the National Cancer Institute e
This research was supported by funding from the Air force Office of Scientific research r
#Extracting audio from visual information Algorithm recovers speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag filmed through soundproof glass.
Commodity hardware In other experiments however, they used an ordinary digital camera. Because of a quirk in the design of most camerassensors, the researchers were able to infer information about high-frequency vibrations even from video recorded at a standard 60 frames per second.
The sensor of a digital camera consists of an array of photodetectors millions of them, even in commodity devices.
But it will take all of us philanthropists government funding agencies scientists patients and families working together to achieve it.
and the historic commitment of funding announced today stems in large part from the devotion of three extraordinary people
In practice audit servers could be maintained by a grassroots network much like the servers that host Bittorrent files or log Bitcoin transactions s
and money, while providing more comfort, enjoyment, and productivity, says Nicholas Gayeski SM 7, Phd 0, who co-founded KGS with Sian Kleindienst SM 6, Phd 0 and Stephen Samouhos 4, SM 7,
working through funding stages, and continuously returning to the customer. oing through the process there showed
The duo along with Harvard university grad student Alain Goubau and investor Alex Rohde then an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow soon formed Altaeros.
and finance problems whose solutions don appear in the back of the teacher edition of a textbook.
With the prize money, the team including students from MIT, the California Institute of technology, and Stanford university aims to further develop the technology and launch the company.
But a more cyclical approach where waste is used as an energy source could provide higher profit yields
and liminate the tension between the environment and economics, says CEO Matt Silver SM 5, Phd 0, who co-founded Cambrian with Justin Buck Phd 2,
Silver says. s our economy grows, water tables are dropping and wastewater pollution is rising, causing many companies to consider water risk in their overall strategy.
We are leveraging biotechnology to provide the highest return on investment for managing water. To that end, Cambrian is working on other projects that leverage exoelectrogenic microbes to treat wastewater.
and investment to get from bench to bedside Herr says. Starting a company is one way of enhancing that efficiency.
Today s Biom system has undergone more than 20 iterations funded by roughly $50 million of venture capital
#One currency one price? Economics has a aw of one price, which states that identical goods should, in theory,
sell for identical prices or else markets will even out the differences. Empirical work on the topic, however, has produced little evidence in support of this aw,
and many studies showing deviations from it. Now a newly published paper co-authored by two MIT economists,
along with a colleague from the University of Chicago, presents evidence of a strong convergence of prices within the Eurozone, the region of European countries sharing a common currency.
The divergence of product prices is 30 to 50 percent lower in Eurozone countries than it is even in neighboring countries
whose currencies are pegged to the Euro. hat is surprising about our paper is that we found the law of one price,
says Roberto Rigobon, the Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of management,
which the prices are quoted. Indeed, the unity of the currency seems to be a more powerful factor in determining prices than the characteristics of particular countries
or consumers. conomists tend to think what drives international price differences are things like transportation costs, information costs, tariffs, cultural differences, and other factors,
says Alberto Cavallo, a professor at MIT Sloan, and another co-author of the paper. ee finding those things don seem to matter relative to the retailer showing prices in the same currency.
The paper, urrency Unions, Product Introductions, and the Real Exchange rate, is being published by the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Along with Cavallo and Rigobon, the study was conducted by Brent Neiman, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of business.
The study covers prices of thousands of products, drawing on data from four major international firms:
Online pricing data was crapedusing a harvesting technique that Rigobon and Cavallo first developed for the illion Prices Project,
which provides real-time inflation estimates. All told, the researchers examined nearly 120,000 products sold in 85 countries from October 2008 to May 2013.
The researchers checked online and in store prices against each other, finding no significant divergences. Moreover, because the study dealt with international firms that often produce all their goods in a single location
the variation in prices observed in non-Euro countries most likely does not come from variations in production and distribution.
In evaluating the law of one price Rigobon observes, ne question has been, can you find the same item delivered to the consumer in the exact same way with the exact same retailer, with the exact same procedures?
More evidence for the idea that the common currency drives identical pricing is that in countries like Denmark,
prices diverge markedly from nearby Eurozone countries. The same holds for countries that do not use the U s. dollar,
or rigidity of the exchange rate that explains the differences. The research also uncovered nuances in pricing strategies.
For one thing international firms take country-specific taxes into account when setting prices, so that the pretax price in France,
which has a relatively high Value-added tax (VAT), will be lower than in other countries. After taxes,
however, the prices shown to consumers are uniform. One explanation for the price convergence, the researchers suggest,
is shaped consumer psychology by access to prices online: People who can see prices from country to country across the Eurozone would consider it unfair
if those prices diverged. hat possibly driving this, Cavallo says. r it could be that these firms just think about their pricing just in terms of currencies.
Whatever the benefits or flaws of the Eurozone, the research indicates that the common currency is delivering on one of the stated aims of its backers:
a more unified pricing system in Europe. However, as the researchers point out, unified pricing is a double-edged sword:
Relatively well-off consumers in some European countries may gain when prices equalize. But in a place such as Greece, currently suffering a severe recession with deep wage reductions,
unified Eurozone pricing reduces consumerspurchasing power. he companies are pricing Greece and Germany as if they are two neighborhoods of the same city,
Rigobon says, adding: aving one currency means implicitly that in good times, you are buying the price stability of Germany.
But that also means that in bad times, unfortunately, you are buying the price stability of Germany.
The study has attracted already considerable attention among economists. Gita Gopinath, an economics professor at Harvard university, calls the work terrific paperthat adds new information to the field. hat we did not know,
and what this paper shows, is that even when the volatility of the exchange rate is down to zero,
it matters a lot if this zero volatility has to do with countries being in a currency union,
versus if it is fixed because of a exchange rate, Gopinath says. However, she adds, the precise mechanism at work remains unclear:
his striking finding is need something we to understand better. Cavallo, Rigobon, and Neiman take the same view in the paper. uture work should focus on understanding
what determines when prices behave like those documented here and when they do not, they write.
They would also like to collect more data illuminating how companies set prices when new goods are introduced first.
The researchers are already pursuing follow-up studies: For instance, with the entrance of Latvia to the Eurozone, they are now comparing how that change in currency has affected prices in Latvia u
#Erasing a genetic mutation Using a new gene-editing system based on bacterial proteins MIT researchers have cured mice of a rare liver disorder caused by a single genetic mutation.
The findings described in the March 30 issue of Nature Biotechnology offer the first evidence that this gene-editing technique known as CRISPR can reverse disease symptoms in living animals.
Faced with the financial crisis and challenges in commercializing therapeutics, they pivoted to diagnostics. They shopped their phages to bacteria-plagued industries such as oil and water treatment,
In experiments Marchese found that the angle at which the fish changes direction which can be as extreme as 100 degrees is determined almost entirely by the duration of inflation
and Justin Ashton GM 08 who Hynes met through MIT s entrepreneurial network has seen its revenue grow twentyfold.
At the end of the day it s about making the economics work to compete against the price of fuel Hynes says adding We re able to do a lot with a little.
I believe that mix itself provides the highest value for all the stakeholders. The education is a two-way street Zaccagnini says with the MIT students
because they have spent so much money on developing drugs that don work. They end up focusing somewhere else.
the pharmaceutical company can continue investing in the trial with confidence that the drug will ultimately pass muster.
and money as computers and online services shut down sometimes for hours. To avoid downtime organizations will usually wait for low-traffic periods to update
#Mobile money helps Kenyans weather financial storms Only about one-fourth of Kenyans have access to a traditional bank,
But a new study co-authored by MIT economist Tavneet Suri shows that a growing form of electronic payments is helping Kenyans weather these financial problems by letting them informally borrow
and lend money more easily. The electronic payments system, known as M-PESA, was introduced in 2007
and is used now by at least 70 percent of households in the country In a new paper published in the American Economic Review,
That means the electronic money-transfers let people smooth out, as economists say, their spending meaning they are less likely ever to have to cut back on paying for essential needs. he people who use M-PESA have a smaller drop in consumption
when something bad happens, says Suri, an associate professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of management. heye more likely to get money from their friends and family,
and they receive from more different people. Informal insurance networks As Suri and Jack emphasize,
the agricultural nature of the Kenyan economy undergirds the sudden rise in M-PESA use.
as a result, they don know how much money they will make, and save, from season to season or month to month.
and the system lets people transfer money by text message. Moreover, as Suri and Jack have found, the average distance over
which means people are easily able to tap into money transfers from distant sources. Connecting everywhere, not just the capital Suri
And they uncovered additional geographic patterns about the electronic money transfers: Not only is the average distance between parties significant,
In short, money transfers are made not just from wealthier urban Kenyans to their poorer rural friends
and relatives. verybody assumes it just money going out from the capital, Nairobi, and that not true, Suri says. here are a lot of local transfers,
this is not just people in the big city sending money. Other scholars say the results are interesting,
an economist at Georgetown University who has read the paper. However, Vella adds, oving forward,
Suri has studied mobile money in Kenya extensively in recent years but some of her new research will take her in different directions.
Among other things, she is now studying the financing of small-scale distributed solar power in areas of Kenya without either a formal grid or established banking systems;
she has also been examining housing prices in urban neighborhoods in Kenya, and the impact of new technologies on voter mobilization
dubbed the APA-5 developed with funding from the Office of Naval Research Tech Solutions Program weighs roughly 20 pounds
co-authored by an MIT economist, 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
says Amy Finkelstein, the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT and a principal investigator of the study,
On one level, the results accord with a traditional economics framework suggesting that insurance, by lowering out-of-pocket costs, would increase the use of medical care.
f wee lowered the price of the emergency department, we would expect people to use it more.
Amitabh Chandra, an economist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School who has read the paper, praises the study as xemplary social science,
In a 2011 paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, they showed that Medicaid coverage increases doctor visits,
reduces out-of-pocket expenses or unpaid medical debt; and increases self-reported good health. In a 2013 paper published in the New england Journal of Medicine,
Co-founded with Harvard economist Lawrence Katz, the group is meant to encourage randomized evaluations on policies
which was founded in 2003 to support randomized trials in development economics globally. t relatively rare to have randomized this kind of controlled trial on a major policy issue,
or a tax on all carbon emissions. But a new study by researchers at MIT finds that a egmentalapproach involving separate targeting of energy choices
The paper shows that when accounting for infrastructural inertia, the carbon intensity of new plants built over the coming decade that is,
To get a sense of how the technique works imagine a graph that plotted say hours worked by an hourly worker against money earned.
Bhatia plans to launch a company to commercialize the technology with funding from MIT s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation.
by the MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition has earned millions of dollars in private and federal funding. In 2012, Semprus sold to a medical device-manufacturing giant for an amount that could reach $80 million.
Through MIT network of entrepreneurs, investors, and lawyers, e were able to assemble a great team of advisers to refine our plans
and do financing, Lucchino says. Under Lucchino stewardship, Semprus secured $28. 5 million in venture capital financing and $2. 4 million in federal funding, primarily from the National Science Foundation
and grew from two to 40 employees. Lucchino says he owes some of his business acumen to his education at MIT Sloan,
which taught him a broad set of entrepreneurial skills in finance, business, and operations strategies. t was continuing to fertilize my entrepreneurial soil to get
#Connecting Morocco#s artisans with the world Although tourism accounts for the second-largest industry within Morocco economy,
a Morocco native, was motivated to find innovative new ways to help his country craftsmen leverage the opportunities provided by a globalized economy.
These artisans often rely on microcredit loans with high interest rates to fund their initial production, and can expect to see an average return of only 5 to 20 percent of the retail price of their goods. he supply chain design behind Morocrafts is part of Zyad business strategy,
says Edgar E. Blanco, a research director at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics and a Morocrafts advisory board member. t provides not only more transparency but also a connection between consumers and artisans,
Morocrafts aims to increase artisan earnings by up to 70 percent of retail price through maintaining a"low-to-no"inventory model in
Additional funding came from multiple public and private sources, including Nieh NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the Integrative Neuronal Systems Fellowship,
Wu says. e win in terms of bringing in profits, consumers win because they have products that help them save costs,
and entrepreneurs are getting money to put food on the table. Wee doing good through business.
which are valuable commodities for Tanzanians. That when Wu engineered a solution. e were building this pedal-powered machine,
lawyers, and accountants also showed Wu some significant errors in her financial planning. y first executive plan said I needed $20,
along with information on the fixes that could offer the most return on investment. But the startup also works with the U s. Department of defense to help identify energy-wasting buildings on their bases.
To do so, Sarma helped develop software that brings in household and demographic data such as information on householdsmortgage payments
and proposal from the Golden West Humanitarian Foundation that they soon provided funding to design
24m has raised $50 million in financing from venture capital firms and a U s. Department of energy grant. The company is initially focusing on grid-scale installations,
so they require much larger initial capital expenditures. By 2020, Chiang estimates that 24m will be able to produce batteries for less than $100 per kilowatt-hour of capacity.
Teva paid $35 million up front, with additional milestone payments as the device goes through clinical trials before it hits the shelves. bviously,
whereby carbon-carbon bonds are broken in the heaviest fractions, including asphalt. They are quantifying the different rates at
funding, building a team, and other early startup challenges. t a great class for a student who has an idea,
Ensinger says that the price of gold is not a factor because the amounts that are required are small:"
The research team received funding for their study from the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology the European Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological sciences Research Council.
and history so fascinating and their trade weighs quite heavily in today's economies. In 2013 the global art market generated some EUR 47.42 billion according to the European Fine art Foundation.
and evenly porous said Tiziana Bond an LLNL engineer who is a member of the joint research team.
and can be done over many scales avoiding the lift off technique to remove metals with real-time quality control Bond said.
#Paper electronics could make health care more accessible Flexible electronic sensors based on paper an inexpensive material have the potential to some day cut the price of a wide range of medical tools from helpful robots
They plan to use these promising results to apply for federal funding. The technique that treats biochar electrodes for supercapacitors can also be used in making displays explained Fan who was a research scientist at Wintek more than 10 years ago.
With no interruption in the atomic bonds between nanotubes and graphene, the material's entire area, inside and out, becomes one large surface.
One of the biggest challenges in clinical medicine right now which also costs a lot of money is that we're living longer
In fuel cells these nanowire arrays can be used to lower production expenses by relying on more cost-efficient catalysts.
"While traditional equipment requires an investment of around $100, 000, the new mobile device would likely cost ten times less, around $10, 000.0
The grant money went towards testing the capacity of iron oxide nanoparticles, which helped to verify the efficacy of its application in a pilot 100 litre digester.
which would add greatly to the complexity and expense of a solar power system. This is the first device that is able to do all these things at the same time Chou says.
They want to offer consumers flexible touchscreen technology but at an affordable and realistic price. At the moment this market is limited severely in the materials to hand
Then nanoparticles were obtained by thermal evaporation techniques where the molecular bonds of the metals degraded as a powder
Even in nature, the bonds formed between molecules and nanomachines are fleeting. Thanks to the new method, it is now possible to explore such natural kinetics in greater detail,
and in particular our graphene petal technology called Folium#at production scales that provide tremendous pricing advantages.
is to acquire funding to build a prototype device.""We have enough know-how now. We can start building this device today,
but also how much energy is in their bonds. Each fluorine atom has so much electronic charge that you get tall peaks
and label-free detection of biomoleculesemoving the step and expense of labeling target molecules with florescent dye.
A request for an additional $7 million in funding from the U s army to conduct the next phase of vaccine development, including manufacturing
He suggests that reaching 5 percent power conversion efficiency would justify the investment for making small flexible solar panels to power devices such as smart phones.
Any biodegradable mechanism intended to release a drug over a long time period must be sturdy enough to limit hydrolysis a process by which the body's water breaks down the bonds in a drug molecule.
In the case of silicon oxygen breaks some of the silicon bonds of the first one
Materials are made up of systems of atoms that bond and vibrate in unique ways. Raman spectroscopy allows researchers to measure these bonds and vibrations.
Housed within the Center for Nanoscale Materials a DOE Office of Science User Facility the spectroscope allows researchers to use light to shift the position of one atom in a crystal lattice
or weak these bonds are in relation to the frequency at which the atoms vibrate. The researchers noticed something oddly familiar when looking at the vibrational signatures and frequencies of their sample.
However, limited resources and high expense have been stumbling blocks in its effective commercialization. Group leader Yung-Eun Sung of the Center for Nanoparticle Research at IBS,
The researchers fired pellets of randomly oriented multiwalled carbon nanotubes from a light gas gun built by the Rice lab of materials scientist Enrique Barrera with funding from NASA.
Ozden explained that the even distribution of stress along the belly-flopping nanotube which is many times longer than it is wide breaks carbon bonds in a line nearly simultaneously.
or bond, forming new classes of chemically and mechanically stable nanostructures that no longer need restraining surfaces.
Essential to this mechanism are the noncovalent bonds that loosely hold the supramolecular constructs together.
These weak bonds exist between molecules with complementary shapes and electronic properties. They are responsible for the ability of the supramolecules to assemble spontaneously in liquid environments.
and in offering a predictive model accounting for materials and conditions,"said Ilia Valov, principle investigator at the Electronic Materials Research Centre Jülich."
In that short time many atoms along the side of the nanotube become stressed due to the impact resulting in the breaking of the carbon bonds in a straight line along the side of the nanotube.
Many of these atoms ended up being ejected from the nanotube rather than having their bonds neatly broken as in the 0â°impact angle scenario.
which in terms of power output means getting two for the price of one. Carrier multiplication is inefficient in the bulk solids used in ordinary solar cells
It could change everything from the production of cell phones and televisions to counterfeit-proof money, improved solar energy systems or quick identification of troops in combat.
"The researchers said this should both save money and create technologies that work better. Improved LED lighting is one possibility,
it forms an extremely strong mechanical bond.""The biggest problem with designing load-bearing supercaps is preventing them from delaminating,
"Combining nanoporous material with the polymer electrolyte bonds the layers together tighter than superglue.""The use of silicon in structural supercapacitors is suited best for consumer electronics and solar cells,
In 2010 they successfully obtained funding for the project called SPEDOC (Surface Plasmon Early Detection of Circulating Heat shock proteins and Tumor Cells) under the 7th Framework Program (FP7) of the European commission.
#Watch A 3-D Printer Make A Pizza#This summer we heard about a 3-D printer for food developed with NASA funding
Engineer Alan Bond sees something more futuristic. We're looking at a revolution in transportation he says.
For Bond the engine represents the beginning of the world's first fully reusable spaceship a new kind of craft that promises to do
Bond's Synergistic Air-Breathing Rocket engine (Sabre) part chemical rocket part jet engine will make Skylon possible.
That price would even undercut the $50 million sum that private spaceflight company Spacex plans to charge to launch cargo on its two-stage Falcon 9 rocket.
The bigger challenge may be securing funding. While ESA and The british government have invested a combined $92 million in the project Bond
and his crew plan to turn to public and private investors for the remaining $3. 6 billion necessary to complete the engine
which they say could be ready for flight tests in the next four years. Building the craft itself would require a much heftier investment:
$14 billion. The quest for a single-stage-to-orbit spaceship or SSTO has bedeviled aerospace engineers for decades.
Bond's own exploration of the topic began in the early 1980s when he was a young engineer working with Rolls-royce as part of a team tasked with developing a reusable spacecraft for British aerospace.
and extremely difficult to compress Bond says. Rolls-royce and The british government doubtful that an easy and economical solution existed canceled the program's funding.
NASA and Lockheed martin meanwhile had their own plans for a fully reusable spacecraft the Venturestar intended as an affordable replacement for the partially reusable space shuttle.
which if true could in its first year recoup the money spent in R&d and construction leaving only expenses like fuel maintenance and overhead.
And Bond's engine technology aside from keeping a launch vehicle intact from start to finish offers another advantage:
supersonic aviation. It could enable an aircraft to fly anywhere in the world in under four hours says Bond.
When air strikes an engine at five times the speed of sound it can heat up to nearly 2000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Bond's solution is a heat exchanger that works by running cold liquid helium through an array of tubes with paper-thin metal walls.
Ya just got to adore a ben engine that can fly to space develop by an engineer with the last name of Bond!
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