How an MIT graduate student helped a team of young scientists test their experiment at CERN

This past spring, MIT physics graduate student Manu Srivastava opened an email from a group of high school students in India he had never met.

They were hoping to enter Beamline for Schools, an international competition that gives secondary school students the chance to design and carry out experiments using particle accelerator beams. And they were looking for a mentor.

Srivastava, who studies quantum gravity as a PhD student in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics – a Leinweber Institute, with Professor Hong Liu, gets other requests to mentor students, often through companies charging families for access to scientists or students at prestigious universities. He usually declines, but this message came directly from the students.

“I've also cold-emailed a lot in my early career, and it usually never works,” he says. “But this email seemed very genuine. They wanted to do something nice and they just needed some guidance.”

Many months and many more emails and calls later, the students secured a place with Srivastava to attend CERN, in Geneva, where they spent two weeks turning their proposed idea into a real experiment. 

Finding an experiment worth doing

Calling themselves Team attoPION, the students are one of five teams selected in the 13th annual Beamline for Schools competition from a record 712 teams representing 89 countries and more than 4,500 students. The six high schoolers met through a combination of science competitions and mutual friends, and attend four schools in four cities across India.

When they first met with Srivastava, the students already had several experimental ideas. His role, he says, was to help determine which directions were practical and scientifically interesting.

They settled on measuring pion charge exchange. Pions are short-lived subatomic particles that can carry positive, negative, or neutral charge. In the process the students want to study, a positively charged pion interacts with a neutron in a target material, producing a neutral pion and a positively charged proton. The team wants to characterize how often that reaction occurs.

Srivastava suspected such a measurement could have relevance to the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, a major international experiment designed to study neutrinos.

Dave Newbold, a co-spokesperson for DUNE, says understanding how pions interact with matter helps researchers quantify uncertainties in DUNE’s measurements. In particular, pion interactions can affect estimates of a neutrino’s flavor and energy, which researchers need to measure accurately to determine whether they have observed something new.

And although Beamline for Schools has an educational mission, Newbold says the students aren't simply reproducing a classroom demonstration. “The proposal is real experimental particle physics!” he notes.

If successful, Newbold believes the work could improve scientists' understanding of this particular interaction and potentially lead to a publishable result. Similar “test beam” experiments remain important tools in particle physics: DUNE's detector designs were themselves demonstrated using the (albeit much larger) ProtoDUNE experiments at CERN.

“This [proposal] stands out because of the work the students have put into motivating their measurement, and demonstrating that the experiment is feasible,” Newbold says. “It's certainly at a level far above anything I was thinking about at high school.”

Learning to navigate uncertainty

At CERN, the students worked hands-on with detectors and data-acquisition systems, collected and analyze data, and attended talks by CERN scientists.

In advance of the trip, the team worked with Berare Göktürk, one of the support scientists for Beamline for Schools. In their preparation sessions for the experiment, they realized that the charge-exchange process they hope to observe is extremely rare, forcing them to think through how they might reliably detect it.

With just a few months months to prepare and only 12 days of test-beam time, Göktürk cautioned that producing a result useful to a much larger experiment would be an ambitious outcome.

“We prepare in the best way possible, but we also stay humble and we are aware of the limitations we have,” she says. Her priority is for the students to “understand the journey of a scientist” as they encounter technical problems and work together to solve them.

For Srivastava, mentoring an experiment has also taken him well outside his own specialty. A theoretical physicist, he credits MIT's culture with encouraging him to follow questions beyond the boundaries of his research, including by attending seminars, colloquia, and research meetings across physics.

The experience has been personally meaningful for Srivastava, who grew up in India and sees the mentorship as a way to encourage young people there to pursue fundamental science. 

“I didn't even know what CERN was in high school,” he says. “But these students, they are just that good. They deserve all the credit.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/Yx1FOIr

How MIT Sandbox has turned student ideas into $8.7 billion in global impact

Although Jacob Becraft had two swings and two misses when he first tried to become an entrepreneur as a graduate student, the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program allowed him to keep at it. This especially benefited cancer patients, as Becraft went on to co-found Strand Therapeutics: a $550-million firm whose programmable mRNA drug has shrunk tumors in patients who had exhausted all other treatment options.

Stories like Becraft’s took center stage at the recent 10-year anniversary celebration of the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program, where student founders, alumni, mentors, and university leaders gathered to reflect on a decade of empowering student entrepreneurs. Speaking at the event, Becraft referred to Strand as "our third swing at the plate," explaining that the Sandbox model gave him "the freedom and ability to fail fast" — letting previous venture ideas "blow up in our faces" before moving on.

For Strand, Becraft says, MIT Sandbox helped him and his co-founder, Tasuku Kitada, to "get out, do some travel, some market research, meet with experts in the field, meet with mentors who could help us build the company — and eventually find investors who were going to back this big vision to transform medicine."

MIT Sandbox was launched in 2016 by Ian Waitz, then-dean of the School of Engineering and now MIT's vice president for research, to lower the barrier for students to try entrepreneurship. The concept of a new program focused on student-led entrepreneurship was developed in consultation with internal MIT leaders and supporters of MIT, including Alan Spoon, a life member emeritus of the MIT Corporation. From its inception, MIT Sandbox has been open to all MIT students, from undergraduates to PhD students. Teams are awarded between $500 and $5,000 to begin their process, and they are matched with two mentors and connected with other expert advisors. 

As they make progress, students can go before the program’s funding board to ask for up to $25,000. Supported entirely by alumni, corporate sponsors, entrepreneurs, and investors, the program has grown to include about 350 teams each semester, some of which are new and some continuing their participation according to their own timelines.

Anantha P. Chandrakasan, MIT provost, explained in the program's decade-in-review report: "Since its inception 10 years ago, MIT Sandbox has been a defining part of MIT's innovation ecosystem, ensuring that every student with the curiosity to explore entrepreneurship has the resources, mentorship, and community to take their first steps."

MIT Sandbox is a "home," where students can "explore, seriously test assumptions, talk to customers, build prototypes, fail, pivot, learn, and grow," says Jinane Abounadi, founding executive director of Sandbox. "And they can do that with a lot of support — and I don't just mean financial support. I mean a lot of support from a lot of people."

For Samuel Udotong, co-founder and CTO of Fireflies.ai, early funding was the difference between an idea and a company. "I think largely because we had gotten a little bit of Sandbox funding, we were actually able to take the risk to move out to San Francisco and try to build the company," he says. "But it would have been really a money barrier if we hadn't gotten the initial $5,000 from Sandbox."

Startup investor and advisor Sophie V. Vandebroek says, "MIT has extraordinary students from around the globe as well as faculty who are top experts in their fields. What’s often lacking," she says, "is confidence. That is where Sandbox plays a vital role. Sandbox enables every individual student to believe that they can be an entrepreneur."

At the anniversary celebration, Fred Parietti, co-founder and CEO of Multiply Labs, recounted how his early product prototypes were developed on his kitchen table and had to be moved regularly according to the dictates of his grad school housemates. Those prototypes wouldn't have been built at all, he said, without MIT Sandbox.

The first funding he received was minimal, "but it wasn't zero, and zero represented my resources as a student. That belief in us and the possibility to build a prototype were game-changers," Parietti said.

Multiply Labs, with 60-plus employees, has raised $36 million and develops robotics technology to manufacture biological drugs safely and economically. The firm supplies pharmaceutical customers including AstraZeneca and Kyverna Therapeutics, whose chief medical and development officer, Naji Gehchan, is an MIT Sandbox mentor.

That same willingness to back an unconventional approach helped AeroShield get off the ground. "One of the things that enables me to stand here today is that Sandbox created a safe environment where it was encouraged to look at this problem backwards, rather than from the nanostructure up," says Elise Strobach, CEO and founder of AeroShield.

The anniversary celebration speakers also included Ross Finman, CEO and founder of Augmodo; Laureen Meroueh, CEO and founder of Hertha Metals; and Daris Bunadar, chief scientist at Lightmatter. All were working on their PhDs when they started exploring commercial applications of their research. All recognize the critical role that MIT Sandbox, in addition to other programs — such as the MIT I-Corps Program, the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS), and the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program — played in their development as entrepreneurs. These programs offered the space to explore the possibility of not only founding a deep tech company, but also taking on an executive role as their ventures raised venture capital and grew into substantial companies. Today they all have big ambitions for the growth and impact of their companies — ambitions that are made possible only thanks to innovative technologies and an entrepreneurial drive. 

Over its decade of existence, MIT Sandbox has supported over 4,000 teams, representing 8,000 participants associated with a wide range of industries and nonprofit endeavors. It has disbursed more than $11 million in non-dilutive funding, meaning the program takes no stake in the resulting ventures. MIT Sandbox has been involved in the creation of 475 companies in more than 30 countries, and companies that were started in the program have raised $8.7 billion in venture funding.

MIT Sandbox collaborates with other programs across MIT — including the Martin Trust Center, VMS, Kuo Sharp Center, MITdesignX, the PKG Center for Social Impact, the MIT Climate Project, I-Corps, and others — and its teams have excelled in innovation accelerators and competitions. Nine out of 10 winners of MIT's $100K Entrepreneurship Competition have been MIT Sandbox participants.

Apart from the program's impressive results, MIT Sandbox aims to first and foremost serve as a great educational tool, developing the innovators themselves.

"From an educator's perspective, this is just another incredible way to teach," said Abounadi at the anniversary celebration. "MIT Sandbox is a place where students can start seeing themselves as people who can create a meaningful impact in the world," she said, "and that is really what innovation and entrepreneurship are all about."

Paula T. Hammond, School of Engineering dean and Institute Professor, echoed the same sentiments: "What I find most compelling, year after year, is not only what students build, but how they change. They gain confidence, learn to refine before they scale, and begin to see themselves as people who can create meaningful impact, strengthening not only their own trajectories, but the broader MIT community."

de MIT News https://ift.tt/pQovDsu

Gage Coon: An Earth scientist exploring the power of microbes

Growing up in Waverly, Tennessee, Gage Coon spent much of his childhood outside. His family had everything from chickens to horses and even an emu named Big Bird. Coon and his cousins would explore the woods surrounding their home, and his father, a mechanic, taught him how to build and repair things around the house. His mother, a secretary at the local high school’s vocational school who loves gardening and birdwatching, encouraged him to experience as much of the world around him as he could.

That hands-on upbringing, which taught Coon to appreciate the natural world and the processes that sustain it, continues to influence how he approaches science today.

Now entering his third year as a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Coon studies some of the smallest organisms on Earth: microbes. His research focuses on how microorganisms cycle carbon and sulfur through the environment and how to leverage those processes to help address climate change. Though he studies organisms too small to see with the naked eye, the experimental nature of his work — whether in the lab or on a research vessel in the open ocean — is especially satisfying.

“I think I enjoy that physicality of seeing what I’m working with, seeing its change, and being able to touch it,” Coon says.

Coon did not initially set out to study microbiology. His interest in science began with chemistry. A high school chemistry teacher and a summer program introduced him to the subject. But later, at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, he joined a lab focused on microbial biogeochemistry and was delighted to find a field that brought together the different areas that interested him: chemistry, the environment, and the larger climate processes shaping our Earth.

The transition from rural Tennessee to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and MIT has been a significant one. As a first-generation student, he did not learn about PhD programs until several years into college.

Once he discovered academic research, however, Coon was drawn to the possibility of spending his career learning.

“I discovered this world of academia, and so I was really excited when I learned about it,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, constant learning. That is exactly what I want to do forever.’”

Coon began studying the microbes that drive carbon and sulfur cycling in marine sediments as an undergraduate, eventually joining research cruises to investigate these processes firsthand.

His first research cruise, in 2022 after his second year of college, took him to the Atlantic continental slope to study methane seeps and how microbes prevent this methane from escaping to our atmosphere. For Coon, experiencing the ocean up close changed the way he understood the microscopic organisms he was studying.

“It is very powerful seeing yourself in the middle of the ocean, with a whole other world of complex life beneath you,” he says.

At MIT, working with his advisor Tanja Bosak, a professor of geobiology, Coon has continued studying microbial carbon and sulfur cycling, but with a greater emphasis on the applications. One of his major projects explores how microbes could be used to reduce methane emissions from wastewater treatment.

When wastewater is treated, microbes break down organic material in large tanks called anaerobic digesters. One of the final products of this process is the powerful greenhouse gas methane. However, Coon and his colleagues found a way to change what the microbes produce by adding gypsum, a waste product that is created from fertilizer manufacturing

The system uses the added gypsum to turn the methane into carbonate, which can be used to make cement, agriculture, and pharmaceuticals. The process also produces elemental sulfur, necessary for global fertilizer production, which is currently sources from oil and gas refinement. The approach effectively turns two waste products, sewage and waste gypsum, into useful materials while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

For Coon, the possibility of creating a system that is both environmentally beneficial and economically useful is central to the project. Now that the laboratory experiments have ended, the researchers are looking toward conducting pilot-scale testing. Coon and his advisors have been communicating with companies interested in adapting the system to larger facilities, and hope the technology can eventually move beyond the laboratory.

“If enough small places start doing their pilot-scale studies, then hopefully you could convince some place like Boston or another big city to do this and really make a contribution to our global goal to decrease emissions on the gigaton scale,” he says.

The wastewater project is only one part of Coon’s PhD research. He also studies geological processes that could produce molecular hydrogen, a potential carbon-free energy source. His work examines how iron-rich rocks break down and generate hydrogen underground. He is continuing his thesis work by focusing on microbial competition for acetate, and what this means for global methane emissions from coastal wetlands. This work could improve future climate predictions and support engineered mitigation efforts to decrease emissions from these wetlands. 

Across these projects, Coon is interested in the connection between the microscopic and the massive. But Coon’s PhD has also given him an opportunity to think about science beyond his own research.

One of the parts of graduate school he has enjoyed most is mentoring younger researchers. He has worked with a handful of students through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and from Tufts University, teaching them laboratory techniques and experimental geobiology.

Outside the lab, Coon maintains some of the same connection to the natural world that characterized his childhood in Tennessee. He spends time hiking to explore local geology, playing bluegrass guitar, and speed-solving Rubik’s Cubes. 

Looking ahead, Coon sees himself continuing in academia, working in government, or helping to bring environmental technologies into practice.

What matters most, he says, is continuing to produce knowledge that can help people understand and potentially improve the world around them.

“I do think, no matter what,” he says, “I’ll be somewhere thinking about how microscopic life connects to the global ecosystem and carbon emissions.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/9r8TPyw

Looking beyond natural sequences

A protein’s function is determined by its structure, and structure — the way a protein folds — is determined by its sequence of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. 

Many methods for designing novel proteins, including examples that could bind to a disease-causing molecule in our cells, involve a two-step process: The structure comes first, and then a machine-learning framework generates a repertoire of sequences that could potentially adopt that structure. 

In nature, many different amino acid sequences can fold into the same structure. At the same time, one amino acid sequence can potentially adopt different structures depending on the protein’s flexibility or a functional trigger. Therefore, when researchers use artificial intelligence to design new proteins, the challenge is to guide AI to “see” that there are many potentially useful answers — that many sequences can adopt the same fold

“For years, the field has measured success by asking whether a model can reproduce the protein sequence that evolution happened to select — our work shows that this isn’t the best metric for protein design,” says Amy E. Keating, Department of Biology head, Jay A. Stein (1968) Professor of Biology, professor of biological engineering, and senior author of a paper recently published in PNAS. 

PottsMPNN, a new machine-learning framework developed in the Department of Biology, incorporates the physical principles that govern protein structure and stability, improving sequence generation and the ability to predict how mutations will affect a protein’s stability. In other words, the model has a better understanding of the sequence-energy landscape, meaning the relationship between the identity of each amino acid and the stability of the protein.

Adding this framework to a protein design pipeline will allow researchers to design structurally feasible proteins with sequences that don’t resemble those of any native protein. 

“If we’re thinking about a completely novel, designed structure, there would be no native sequence to compare it to,” says graduate student and lead author Foster Birnbaum. “What we actually care about is how likely the generated sequences are to fold into the desired structures, how well the model understands the sequence-energy landscape, and how well it can predict the effect of mutations on the stability of the protein.” 

Beyond the noise 

In the same way that AI has recently powered some dramatic social changes, so too has machine learning impacted the pace and breadth of fundamental biological research. Only recently has it become possible to reliably use a computational model to generate a protein structure or sequence. Perhaps the most widely used model today, however, was released in 2022. 

“For a field that’s moving as fast as machine learning in biology, that model has not been surpassed — we’ve been trying to understand why that is, and what it is about that model that makes it so useful,” Birnbaum says. 

Birnbaum was first interested in strategic applications of something researchers call “noise,” or adding variations to a protein structure during training. Noise decreases the tendency of the model to overly mimic native sequences, increasing the diversity of structures for which it’s able to generate sequences.

PottsMPNN also uses a pairwise distribution to capture interactions between amino acids. The ability to account for the physical interactions between all 20 possible sequence options at a pair of positions in the protein is a key reason that PottsMPNN more accurately models the sequence-energy landscape than other methods. 

Finally, Birnbaum says, they introduced sets of evolutionarily related sequences into training the PottsMPNN framework to teach the model how different sequences can adopt the same folded structure.

Birnbaum acknowledges that in trying to shift away from adhering to native sequences, incorporating evolutionary information is, in some ways, still a reliance on them. But PottsMPNN succeeded in demonstrating that as the model depends less and less on native sequences, structural compatibility and energy prediction, including for novel proteins, improve. 

Protein design in the age of AI

“Once we can design any protein we want, that enables us to do a potentially scary amount of biological engineering,” Birnbaum says. “It’s a difficult task, but I’m really optimistic about this century’s progress in biology.”

Birnbaum hopes that the model could be further improved and fine-tuned for a specific task, which has in the past led to better predictions, for example, on the outcome or consequence of a particular mutation. 

Ultimately, according to Keating, “Our methods move the field toward designing useful new-to-nature proteins for diverse applications while providing a stronger foundation for future advances.” 

de MIT News https://ift.tt/iqm60BM

New type of attack can slip past the defenses in your computer’s processor

Modern processors are fast, in part, because they guess. Rather than waiting to find out which way a program will branch, a chip predicts the likely path and races ahead. When the guess is right, time is saved. When it's wrong, the work is discarded, but traces of it linger. Since the Spectre vulnerability was disclosed in 2018, attackers have known how to read those traces to pull secrets out of memory they should never see.

Chipmakers and operating system developers have spent years building defenses. A new study from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) shows that a key assumption behind many of them doesn't hold.

The defenses work by wiping or isolating the processor's prediction machinery, removing anything an attacker might have planted. The catch, as PhD student Daniël Trujillo and MIT Assistant Professor Mengjia Yan point out, is that the wipe and the moment the predictions get used can't happen at the same instant. There is always a gap — sometimes only a handful of instructions wide. Anything that runs in that gap can dirty the machinery all over again. The researchers call this class of attack "TONTOU."

Mind the gap

Their contribution is a reliable way to get code into that gap. Computers constantly pause whatever they're doing to handle interrupts: small, routine tasks triggered by timers, network traffic, and hardware. Ordinary programs can set those timers themselves. By tuning a timer with enough precision, Trujillo and Yan can make the processor take its detour at exactly the wrong moment, and the interrupt execution does the contaminating. They call the technique "interrupt injection."

The team tested four processor generations from Intel and AMD, and got mispredictions on both. On Intel chips, the attack defeated two different protections, one built in software for older parts, one built into the silicon of newer ones. Curiously, the newer protection held firm on one Intel generation and failed on another, suggesting chipmakers implement the same nominal defense in meaningfully different ways.

AMD's defense, called saferet, cleans the prediction machinery immediately before each use, leaving a vulnerable window just two instructions wide, which typically execute within tens of nanoseconds. The researchers hit it anyway, by slowing down the processor at that exact spot to make the target easier to strike.

From a bad guess to a password file

To show what this means in practice, the team built a working exploit on an AMD system running a current Linux kernel. They first stripped away a defense that scrambles where the operating system sits in memory, succeeding in all 10 tries in about nine minutes each. That helped them read protected memory at roughly five bytes per second — slow, but fast enough to locate and copy "/etc/shadow," the file storing the system's root password hash, in half their attempts.

The paper suggests cleaning the prediction machinery a second time, when the interrupt finishes. That looks workable on AMD. On Intel it may backfire: Because the attack relies on the interrupt leaving behind a consistent state rather than any particular one, the standard fix could make the attack more reliable, not less. Newer Intel chips include a dedicated instruction that appears to help.

The other option, blocking interrupts during the vulnerable window, would likely cost too much performance to be practical.

Trujillo and Yan notified AMD and Intel in early February and reached Linux kernel maintainers in March, coordinating with AMD to warn cloud providers and other downstream customers. AMD then released a patch that mitigates the attack, which can be obtained by updating your operating system. Their code is publicly available.

The research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research under an award made through the U.S. Department of War, and ACE, one of the seven centers in JUMP 2.0, a program sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It was presented at both Black Hat USA and USENIX Security this month.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/GPv0rsg

MIT engineers create a system for building shape-changing smart devices

A new set of modular components allows users to create reconfigurable smart devices with electrical connections that keep working no matter which shape the structure forms.

This electrical modularity can enable engineers to design interactive devices that can sense which shape they have taken, without the need for external wires. For instance, the modular components, which the researchers call “bifur-circuits,” could be used to rapidly design and prototype adaptable smart devices, like assistive furniture that helps individuals change body positions while recovering from injuries or reconfigurable robotic grippers that remain electrically connected when they change shapes for different applications. 

Developed by MIT researchers, these 3D-printed building blocks, which are a type of structure known as a mechanical metamaterial, can be combined to form many more possible configurations than traditional metamaterial structures. 

In a study presenting the new system, the researchers demonstrated several interactive objects, including a chair that converts to a table with storage and can also flatten for stowing. The structure senses its configuration and sends corresponding messages to an electronic display. 

These new metamaterials could also be used to design antennas for communications and sensing that form new shapes to adjust their frequencies in changing environmental conditions, without bulky mechanical parts. 

“Metamaterials can make complex mechanical assemblies easy to manufacture just by using repeating units. Our work expands on this design space. If we think of mechanical metamaterials as building blocks, then our work is one way to take advantage of their geometry to embed intrinsic intelligence into hardware, which could open many possibilities,” says Marwa AlAlawi, a mechanical engineering graduate student and lead author of a paper on the devices.

AlAlawi is joined on the paper by co-senior authors Ticha Sethapakdi, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student at MIT; and Stefanie Mueller, an associate professor in MIT’s departments of EECS and Mechanical Engineering and leader of the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). Their co-authors include others at MIT, the University of Tokyo, and the University of Michigan. The research will be presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.

Shape-changing interactive structures

Mechanical metamaterials are programmable, three-dimensional structures of repeating units that can form complex shapes due to their geometries. When squeezed, pushed, or pulled, metamaterials can bend or twist in precise ways. 

For instance, “auxetic” metamaterials get wider when stretched, instead of narrowing.

In prior work, the MIT researchers used auxetic metamaterials to build reconfigurable antennas that formed three shapes depending on how the structure was stretched. This allowed the antenna to dynamically adjust its frequency range without complex, moving parts.

Next, the team wanted to expand the number of antenna configurations but were limited because the auxetic metamaterials could only form three fixed states.

In this work they created “bifur-circuits,” which are auxetic metamaterials that can form many more shapes based on how the modular units are connected and rotated. 

The units are also designed to be electrically modular. Due to the way conductive material is integrated into the bifur-circuits, electrical connections throughout the structure are maintained no matter how the object is rotated, pressed, or twisted to form new shapes. 

To create interactive objects with many possible configurations, bifur-circuits leverage a property known as mechanical bifurcation. 

Mechanical bifurcation is a sudden change in how a mechanism behaves when a force exerted on it passes a tipping point. For instance, when you gently bend the ends of a plastic ruler, once that force reaches a critical threshold, the ruler buckles.

In bifur-circuits, this bifurcation occurs when connected blocks are rotated in certain ways around a pivot point. The property allows connected blocks to form more stable configurations than one block could on its own.

Adding more bifur-circuits to a structure exponentially increases the number of potential configurations.

“Bifurcation allow us to significantly expand on this reconfigurability space. Just adding one extra unit gives us so many more combinations out of the same structure,” says AlAlawi.

Connecting and rotating components activates a unique circuit between adjacent units. This interactivity allows the units to communicate with one another, enabling the structure to sense its configuration.   

One of the biggest challenges the researchers faced was incorporating a conductive material that was flexible enough to bend, but still offered enough efficiency in the flow of electricity.

“The conductive material was a constraint we had to work around in the design process, and it dictated how the sensing between blocks would happen,” AlAlawi says.

Once they perfected the design, the researchers tested the durability of reconfigurable structures by compressing them more than 10,000 times. The structures showed no degradation in electrical connectivity.

The researchers also developed a user-friendly construction and simulation tool to simplify the bifur-circuit design process. The software generates instructions for a multimaterial 3D printer, which can fabricate the reconfigurable objects in one pass.

They demonstrated the versatility of bifur-circuits by fabricating a chair that can sense its geometry when its shape is changed to a tea table, as well as a shape-shifting controller that will launch one of several video games based on its configuration.

Bifur-circuits could someday be used in applications like interactive rehabilitation tools, shape-changing grippers for modular soft robots, or reconfigurable shelters that could respond to changing environmental conditions after a natural disaster.

In the future, the researchers want to explore more applications for bifur-circuits. They also want to add more interactivity into the structures and investigate additional metamaterial shapes.

“Bifur-circuits are one step toward developing mechanical building blocks with integrated intelligence. It would be interesting to build on this work and come up with building blocks that allow us to create a structure with any form or shape we want, and which are structurally stable and can be actuated,” AlAlawi says. 

This work was funded, in part, by Japan’s Science and Technology Agency and the Bahrain Crown Prince International Scholarship Program.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/qVpwElx

MIT student leaders: Q&A with McCormick Hall co-president Sydney Baller

A Colorado native who originally planned to attend college close to home, Sydney Baller decided to come to MIT for the strong academic community. She knew she had found a new home in McCormick Hall after attending its Campus Preview Weekend (CPW) events in 2023. 

McCormick Hall opened in 1963 as MIT’s first women’s residence — a move that provided women the first real opportunity to attend the Institute in significant numbers. To support continuity of the McCormick community through its first renovation in its 63-year existence, MIT has established a dedicated McCormick lounge in the Stratton Student Center (Building W20), funded efforts to maintain dorm traditions, and more.

Now a rising senior in mechanical engineering, Baller is a year-round athlete (basketball and outdoor track), crafting enthusiast, and co-president of McCormick’s student government. With construction underway to renovate the residence, Baller is taking time to help support future MIT women so they can have the same powerful residential experience she’s had.

McCormick is scheduled to open again in August 2028 — well after Baller graduates. In this interview, she describes her thoughts on the transition and how she is working to maintain a sense of community among the dorm’s residents and incoming first-year students while updates are ongoing.

Q: Why did you choose to live in McCormick? 

A: I was recruited to play basketball in college, and other schools were pressing me for a decision. MIT was like, “Well, you got in. It’s up to you what you want to do.”  

So I came to CPW to find out what the campus is like. I stayed in [co-ed] Baker with one of my teammates. It was weird for me. I could have probably adjusted to being in a living space with men, but I guess I just bristled at the concept. I grew up in a Christian household, so I was used to certain things. I shared a bathroom with my sister, not my brother. 

What really set it in stone was going to the other CPW events at McCormick. They were like — “We’re an all-women’s community. The dorm is quieter. Everyone’s super nice. We like to do crafts.” Then they showed us the craft room. A whole room dedicated to crafts? I was sold.

Q: How would you describe the community in McCormick?

A: On the day my dad helped me move in, we had three suitcases I brought from Denver. He and I sorted out my stuff, and then we went down to the laundry room. I thought I saw a big spider or something, and a girl who was standing there asked, “Are you talking about Despereaux?” I had never even talked to this girl before. Even this was a way to bond! 

There’s a lot to love. Our heads of house are amazing. After the last day of class every semester, they have a tea and churro study break. They make the churros themselves. So we just come down, drink tea, chat with our friends, and eat churros and little tea sandwiches. That’s very McCormick — a little break with some good chatting. 

The heads of house also run something called “karao-cake.” When I first heard about it, I was like — “I’ll go for the cake.” They have a karaoke machine with a bunch of microphones attached, and we all sing songs together. And if they pick a song we don’t like, we all yell “No!” Everyone's on the same page. It gives really good sisterhood vibes. 

Also, I personally loved our all-women’s gym. As someone who has been an athlete for many years, I can say: We had amazing equipment in there. I’d rather work out where I don’t have to fight for a rack. I can just go and lift and do my workout.

Overall, the McCormick community is what you make of it. You can choose to be invested and have a great time. You can also just choose for it to be the place you come back to every night. I was in the same room sophomore and junior year, and so were a lot of the girls around me. By the end of last year it was like that scene from the “Barbie” movie — when they’re all in their houses, and say “Good night, Barbie! Good night, Barbie!”

Q: How did you get involved in the renovation project? 

A: I originally joined house government to be the craft chair and athletic chair. Later, I decided to run for co-president because McCormick was my first home away from home. I had honestly planned to go to college close to home, or where my friends were going. The thought of going to another state and being on my own just seemed too out of the ordinary. When I came here, I knew one person. 

When MIT first told us the dorm was being renovated, I was pretty excited to see what they were going to do. They held all-dorm events, brought donuts, and asked us to come and talk about what we envisioned for renovation. I said I wanted the biggest craft room you can imagine, pianos in every corner, and to get rid of the study cubicles in the penthouse no one uses. We really got to dream, right? 

But then MIT announced a one-year delay in the renovation, and you have the emotions. McCormick was home — and then they say it’s going to get renovated, then they say it will be next year. When my friend and I decided to run to become co-presidents, the rest of the dorm really didn’t want to talk anymore. We started meeting with [the Division of] Student Life on Zoom, but it was hard to get resident engagement. I appreciate that we’re in the conversations. We get to hear the numbers before other people do, but that’s just information.

Q: What’s the role of house government while the residence is being renovated? 

A: We do things that keep the energy alive. McCormick is more than just a building. The housing office just told us more than 300 incoming students expressed interest in the McCormick community, even though the dorm is being renovated.

To bring momentum into the renovation, we held an end-of-semester party where we dropped nice crewnecks, got a food truck, and had popcorn, cotton candy, a DJ, games, face paint — all the stuff. We also enjoy dorm movie outings, which would be a great tradition to continue. When the Taylor Swift “Eras Tour” movie was in theaters, we all got to have the experience of going over on the T together, and then sitting together singing Taylor Swift songs. We also saw “Wicked” and “Wicked for Good.” We have chill events, too, like crochet, painting, and eating pastries. All of this is about being together. Even if we’re not sitting there having a conversation, we’re existing together. That feels like home.

I’m also trying to help people who are dealing with the transition. It can be hard. You can’t have our heads of house move with you, or the craft room. You can’t have the cute merch that one of our students designs. If someone who has been moved to Maseeh doesn’t know anyone else on their floor, they don't get to have that Barbie moment. But maybe McCormick is holding a study break where they can hang out — a throwback to the old days, where we can craft, or drink boba, or whatever. 

Q: Has the effort been worth it? 

A: It’s worth it to me because I get to keep the momentum going, but I won’t know for sure until the dorm is open again and a freshman checks into their room and experiences the community.

They took our feedback doing the donuts and stuff, and they put a lot of our ideas into the design, but now I’ve got to see the finished product. I know MIT has to balance a lot of things, so they’re not necessarily going to do everything just because we asked. 

Q: What are your goals for when the renovation’s finished? 

A: The building won’t reopen before I graduate, so I guess there’s two things.

When I graduate, I would hope to see a house government team that’s excited to continue the traditions. It’s different to be affiliated with a community than to be living in it. I would love to graduate and leave here knowing McCormick is in good hands and the momentum our generation started helped drive us through to reopening. 

And when the dorm reopens, I want to come back and get a tour. I would just love to see the excitement around being back in the dorm. I’ll buy my own plane ticket!

de MIT News https://ift.tt/Js6TKQR