The power of perceptions

For all the fact-checking and objective reporting produced by major media outlets, U.S. voters are more likely to believe information when it comes from a candidate those voters support — and vice versa, according to a new study co-authored by MIT scholars.

The study, conducted during the U.S. presidential primaries for the 2016 election, uses a series of statements by President Donald J. Trump — then one of many candidates in the Republican field — to see how partisanship and prior beliefs interact with evaluations of objective fact.

The researchers presented study participants with both true and false statements Trump made, surveying voters from both parties about their responses. They found participants’ opinions of Trump influenced how plausible people assumed the information to be. For instance, when Trump falsely suggested vaccines cause autism, a claim rejected by scientists, Republicans who supported Trump were more likely to believe the claim when it was attributed to Trump than they were when the claim was presented without attribution.

On the other hand, when Trump correctly stated the financial cost of the Iraq War, Democrats (and Republicans who did not support Trump) were less likely to believe his claim than they were when the same claim was presented in unattributed form.

“It wasn’t just the case that misinformation attributed to Trump was less likely to be rejected by Republicans,” says Adam Berinsky, a professor of political science at MIT and a co-author of the new paper. “The things Trump said that were true, if attributed to Trump, [made] Democrats less likely to believe [them]. … Trump really does polarize people’s views of reality.”

Overall, self-identified Republicans who were surveyed gave Trump’s false statements a collective “belief score” of about six, on a scale of 0-10, when those statements were attributed to him. Without attribution, the belief score fell to about 4.5 out of 10.

Self-identified Democrats, on the other hand, gave Trump’s true statements a belief score of about seven out of 10 when those statements were unattributed. When the statements were attributed to Trump, the aggregate belief score fell to about six out of 10.

“People are currently presented with a vast quantity of information, and the onus is on the individual to sort fact from fiction,” says Briony Swire, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Western Australia, in Perth, and a co-author of the study. “Using trust — or distrust — of a political figure is one shortcut we all use when it comes to assessing the validity of information.”

The paper, “Processing Political Information,” is being published today in the journal Royal Society Open Science. The co-authors are Swire; Berinsky; Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Western Australia and the University of Bristol, and Ullrich K.H. Ecker of the University of Western Australia. Swire helped develop the study as a researcher at MIT in 2015.

In conducting the study, the researchers surveyed 3,042 U.S. citizens during the fall of 2015, presenting them with four true statements from Trump as well as four false ones.

After correcting the false statements, the scholars also asked the survey’s respondents if they were less likely to support Trump as a result — but found the matter was largely irrelevant to the respondents’ voting choices.

“It just doesn’t have an effect on support for him,” Berinsky says. “It’s not that saying things that are incorrect is garnering support for him, but it’s not costing him support either.”

The latest study is one in a series of papers Berinsky has published on political rumors, facticity, and partisan beliefs. His previous work has shown that, for instance, corrections of political rumors tend to be ineffective unless made by people within the same political party as the intended audience. That is, rumors about Democrats that are popular among Republican voters are most effectively shot down by other Republicans, and vice versa.

In a related sense, Berinsky thinks, solutions to matters of truth and falsehood in the current — and highly polarized — political moment may need to have a similar partisan structure, due to the blizzard of claims and counterclaims about truth, falsehoods, “fake news,” and more.

“In a partisan time, the solution to misinformation has to be partisan, because there just aren’t authorities that will be recognized by both sides of the aisle,” he says.

“This is a tough nut to crack, this question of misinformation and how to correct it,” he adds. “Anybody who tells you there’s an easy solution, like, ‘three easy things you can do to correct misinformation,’ don’t listen to them. If it were that easy, it would be solved by now.”

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Hong Sio: On the road for fusion

Graduate student Hong Sio has gotten used to being somewhere else. His research as part of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) High-Energy-Density Physics (HEDP) team has rotated him from his Albany Street home facilities in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to projects on the OMEGA laser at the University of Rochester in New York, to collaborations on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

“I spent 120 days in hotel rooms last year,” he laughs. “Four months on the road.” All this travel has been necessary to support the kind of research that recently earned his fusion diagnostic a spot on the cover of an American Institute of Physics journal.

Sio has been taking significant journeys since the age of 10, when his family emigrated from Macau to the U.S., settling in southern California. Sio credits a high school summer program at the University of California at Irvine with cementing his interest in science and specifically fusion, a potential source of abundant energy that has been an elusive goal of scientists for decades.

“UCI has an underground, research-grade nuclear reactor for producing medical isotopes — not meant to produce power, but still a really nice reactor. Touring that facility made an impression on me. It made me think about how we generate electricity. It made me think about how we are going to generate electricity 30, 50 years from now.”

Sio continued his interest in energy research as a physics major at Harvey Mudd College. He worked at the department’s high-intensity laser lab, which deepened his interest in lasers, fusion, and graduate study in physics. When he interviewed at MIT with HEDP division head Richard Petrasso, Sio had found a situation, and a research group, that “checked off all the boxes.”

“I thought, ‘Well, this group shoots lasers at things; this group works on fusion. What’s there to think about?’”  And his decision was made.

The decision immersed him in inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research and has led to his particle X-ray temporal diagnostic (PTXD) being featured on the cover of the AIP Review of Scientific Instruments (from the Proceedings of the 21st Topical Conference on High-Temperature Plasma Diagnostics). Sio describes the ICF process:

“At the simplest level, we fill a tiny capsule with fusion fuel and fire many lasers at it simultaneously, compressing and heating the fuel. The hotter and more dense the fuel becomes, the more fusion reactions are generated.”

Researchers measure the nuclear products from these fusion reactions with special diagnostics in order to understand what is happening in the capsule and improve performance. In experiments on OMEGA, Sio’s PXTD has made it possible for the first time to take simultaneous measurements of X-rays and nuclear reactions during the energy-intense implosions of fusion fuel that characterize ICF fusion. The PXTD provides nuclear reaction history information during the “shock-burn” phase of the implosion, when the plasma fuel is particularly kinetic, characterized by high temperature and low density.

“We want to better understand this initial stage of ICF implosion and what affect it has later on in the implosion when the shell finally collapses. And to understand whether current simulation tools are sufficient,” he says.

Sio is also responsible for the magnetic particle time-of-flight (magPTOF) diagnostic on the NIF. A project worked on by MIT graduate Hans Rinderknecht when he was part of the HEDP team, the diagnostic simultaneously measures shock- and compression-bang times — the moments of peak thermonuclear burn during ICF implosions. Being able to directly measure the shock-bang and compression-bang times helps researchers understand the physics involved in ICF implosions and provides necessary feedback for the next experiments.

 “NIF is the most energetic laser facility in the world. OMEGA is the second largest laser facility in the U.S. The opportunity to be so deeply involved at these world-class facilities as a graduate student is nothing short of remarkable,” Sio says.

Both his diagnostic and physics projects on OMEGA and the NIF support reaching ignition and a path to fusion energy. Sio recognizes that fusion energy is an immense physics and engineering challenge. He sees inertial confinement fusion as an integral part of the international fusion program, as one of several diverse approaches to making fusion work.

A recipient of the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration Stewardship Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE NNSA SSGF), Sio will present his most recent research at the NNSA headquarters in Washington, D.C. on May 9, 2017.

Sio anticipates graduating from MIT in the fall of 2017 and hopes to continue contributing to ICF fusion research, possibly as a postdoc at MIT, or at other national ICF facilities such as OMEGA or NIF, where his time on the road has already made him a familiar and welcome addition.

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Climate science takes to the streets

A dozen MIT students and community members clamber into a van on a bright morning in late January. There’s palpable excitement as the van drives down Main Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and crosses onto Portland Street. The chilly weather and light snow does nothing to dampen the group’s spirits. They’re on a hunt — for gas leaks, quiet but potent accelerators of climate change.

A passerby can easily smell a major gas leak; gas producers add a chemical called mercaptan, which smells like rotting eggs, as a safety measure. But our noses are crude instruments, says Audrey Schulman, the president of the Massachusetts nonprofit Home Energy Efficiency Team (HEET). That’s why the day’s activity — dubbed a gas leak safari — which trains citizens to be scientists who can wield data collection tools, is so valuable.

Outfitted with a $60,000 GPS-linked spectrometer, the van can “sniff out” tiny amounts of airborne natural gas close to the ground. As the van winds through the streets of Cambridge, it registers specifically the values of methane, which constitutes 95 percent of natural gas. When the number climbs past the background of 0.002 percent, they stop for a closer look. “Uh-oh,” someone in the van says as the methane level reaches 0.003 percent, indicating a small leak.

The measurements near MIT are mere mole hills, says Schulman. Out toward Somerville’s Pearl and Franklin streets, she says, “you get Swiss Alps.”

The excursion was part of a hands-on citizen science climate workshop co-organized by MIT’s ClimateX, MIT Alumni for Climate Action Leadership (MITACAL), Fossil Free MIT, and HEET. It was one of a number of climate change-related activities offered during MIT’s Independent Activities Period, which ran from Jan. 3 to Feb. 9.

Gas problem

When people hear “gas leaks,” they often think “potential explosions.” Leaks confined in small spaces or near a building foundation can build up enough to become life-threatening, so utility companies fix them immediately. But leaks that gush from the center of a street into the open, which are what this group is looking for, can go undealt with indefinitely.

These persistent leaks present a different kind of threat to the public. First, they have nontrivial economic consequences (as much as $90 million of gas is simply wasted through them every year). And their long-term consequences for climate stability are even more dire. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period; a little methane goes a long way toward warming the atmosphere.

As the van nears the intersection of Pearl and Cross streets in Somerville, the methane readings leap to new heights. Before long, the concentration has reached 0.0065 percent. “Oh, boy,” says Nathan Phillips, a professor at Boston University who’s coauthored numerous studies on urban gas leaks and is the day’s driver.

He parks and the occupants tumble out, eager to find the leak’s source.

Beep! A leak

Phillips takes out a handheld methane monitoring device: a “sniffer.” It looks like a large calculator, but acts like a small, noisy vacuum, sucking in air through a plastic nozzle. He pokes it between slabs of the sidewalk to see if he can find the leak’s source. Meanwhile, the rest of the group tries to uses their own, biological sniffers.

The device suddenly beeps. “That’s 0.85 percent methane,” Phillip says — more than a thousand times what the car detected wafting in the air. “But this is right at the surface,” he says. “If I went down further [just a few inches], this could be 90 percent gas.”

It was a leak, alright, potentially coming from a main line or even a service line branching to someone’s home. But the leak’s not an incendiary one. “If it were 4 percent [at the surface], then that would be a grade one explosive hazard,” Phillips says. “We would call it in, and [the utility] would come out immediately.” More than 15 percent, though, and there’s not enough oxygen for the gas to combust, he explains.

When the bough breaks

Another indicator of gas leaks, Phillips tells the group, is sick or dead trees. Walking along boulevards, “it's not what you see, but often what you don't see that matters,” he says. Near the gas leak he’s just found, he points out a square patch that looks like it once held a tree, but has been filled in with concrete. Because gas lacks oxygen, a leak could have suffocated a tree, he explains.

Another ominous sign right next to the leak is a young cherry tree that looks to be only a few years old; the rest of the street’s towering red maples are closer to 20 years and older. One of the participants asks whether another tree might have died here.

Phillips doesn’t know, but next to the sapling is an alarming clue to the gas leak’s past: a small mound of misshapen concrete, like a scab on the sidewalk’s skin. “That’s a sign the gas company came out here at some point to monitor [this leak],” Phillips says. It’s unclear why, if that’s the case, the street is still leaking methane.

Phillips puts the sniffer on top of the concrete blemish and the device blares its highest numbers yet: 1.2 percent methane. “This leak is too close to be good for this tree,” Phillips says. A tree physiologist, he gives a twig a test snap. “Look how it's breaking off. This tree's not in good health,” he says. “These tips are dead.”

People power

HEET is working with The Sierra Club, for which Phillips is an executive board member, to develop a program to train more citizen scientists. It’s still early days, but one vision of the program is to show people how to spot the signs of a leak — such as sick trees — and provide methane sniffers to the public via a lending library.

“HEET hopes to make these available … to do what we're doing. To use your nose, to use your eyes,” Phillips says. “For example, people might walk by, and say, ‘Ooh, I smell a leak.’” Then you could go and check out this instrument to investigate, he says, find where the leak is, and report it. This ability “empowers people to find out more.” 

Citizen science can also help keep utilities accountable. In 2014, Massachusetts passed a law requiring companies to map their leaks. “But the utilities get it wrong sometimes,” Phillips says. Leaks can also appear to go missing. According to work that was done by HEET and reported in the Boston Globe, about 30 percent of leaks came off the books on Dec. 31 in 2014, he says; “It doesn't make sense.” By working independently, citizen scientists could essentially audit gas companies.

That ability appeals to Laurel Regibeau-Rockett, a junior in physics, who reveled in the day’s experience. “This was awesome,” she says. “I didn't expect it to be as exciting as it was to find leaks – and they’re much bigger than I expected.”

Teaching people how to become citizen scientists is an exciting part of a shifting policy landscape, says Amanda Giang, a PhD candidate in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and one of the day’s leak hunters. “Many of the environmental challenges we're facing have a lot of uncertainty associated with them,” she says. “I think citizen science is this fantastic way of, one, bringing in this huge new data set, and, two, providing an avenue for democratic participation in environmental decision making.”

Both Regibeau-Rockett and Giang intend to use their new methane-sleuthing skills in the future.

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Eastgate, Warehouse graduate communities seek new heads of house

In 1933, Avery Allen Ashdown PhD ’24 was named the first housemaster in MIT’s residential system. He took up residence in a complex of buildings dubbed Graduate House (later renamed Senior House), and shaped the burgeoning community by identifying 46 graduate students to live in the dorm. So began the MIT tradition of faculty heads of house.

More than 80 years later, faculty heads of house still live in undergraduate and graduate residence halls. Like Ashdown, they play a big role in shaping their residents’ experiences. Long-serving heads of house in two communities — Ayida Mthembu in the Eastgate Apartments (Building E55), and John Ochsendorf and Anne Carney in the Warehouse (Building NW30) — will step down this year, creating opportunities for faculty to apply for one of the most rewarding leadership positions in the MIT community.

“I’m grateful to Ayida, John, and Anne for their years of leadership in their respective communities,” says Suzy Nelson, vice president and dean for student life. “Thousands of MIT graduate students lived side-by-side with them in Eastgate and the Warehouse over many years, and had a better MIT experience thanks to their support.”

Who are heads of house? And what do they do? Heads of house are faculty members who influence all areas of student development in their communities, acting as advisors and mentors to their residents. They work closely with their house’s student government and staff from the Division of Student Life (DSL) to foster their community’s culture. On a practical level, each head of house lives in an apartment in their respective residence hall and receives a stipend. But the main incentive for becoming a head of house is the intangible, immensely gratifying impact faculty can have on the lives of MIT students.

“And,” Ochsendorf is quick to point out, “you don’t have to shovel snow!”

Ochsendorf, the Class of 1942 Professor of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Carney have been heads of the Warehouse graduate community for seven years. Recently, the couple announced that they were stepping down as heads of house, a decision that he described as bittersweet. “We love the students in the Warehouse,” Ochsendorf says. “As much as we have enjoyed helping to acclimate them to MIT, they have enriched our lives immensely.”

The choice to become a head of house was personal for Ochsendorf and Carney. “It was really about community,” Ochsendorf says. “We don’t have family in the Boston area, and we were excited to enhance what was already a strong community in the Warehouse.”

The Warehouse was built in 1904 and has housed a pipe-organ builder, a library technology company, a U.S. Air Force research facility, and finally, MIT’s Instrumentation Lab. After extensive renovations, it opened as a 120-bed dorm in 2001, and has been home ever since to first-year graduate students, many of whom come to Cambridge from abroad. “Anne and I studied abroad, so working with international students in particular and helping them get acclimated to MIT was especially interesting to us," Ochsendorf says.
 
Eastgate, on the other hand, is home to as many as 201 graduate students and their families, and is known for its proximity to Kendall Square, “million-dollar” views of Greater Boston, and unique bike-rental program that has fostered a community of cyclists. Residents are also strongly influenced by the presence of spouses and children. Mthembu, a recently retired assistant dean in Student Support Services and head of house in three MIT dorms since 1989, will fully retire from MIT at the end of this academic year. In a December letter announcing her retirement, DSL’s Senior Associate Dean for Student Support and Wellbeing David Randall said, “(Ayida) has helped countless students navigate MIT’s challenging environment, and many have expressed the sentiment that they would not have made it through without her support and guidance.”

Ochsendorf described life in residence as a “two-way street,” in which the heads of house learn invaluable lessons from their residents, and vice versa. In addition to supporting students and working with house government to set the tone for life in their communities, heads of house have a unique vantage point on the lives of students. “After teaching for more than a decade, I thought I had a good handle on the student experience,” he says, “but now I have an even deeper appreciation.” Additionally, the heads of house themselves have a strong connection. “We’ve made a number of close friends among the other heads of house. It’s a great community of people, and we’ll miss that.”
 
For more information on becoming a head of house, contact Judy Robinson, senior associate dean for residential education. An informational reception will be held on March 8 from 7-9 p.m. in the Warehouse, where interested faculty can meet current heads of house and staff to discuss these singular opportunities. Please email Kaye Gaskins at kgaskins@mit.edu to RSVP. If you cannot attend the dinner but would still like to apply, email a current CV and cover letter explaining why you would like to be a head of house to Dean Robinson.

The search committee for the heads of house will be chaired by Head of Ashdown House Adam Berinsky, a professor of political science. Other committee members include Head of Sidney Pacific Julie Shah, Associate Heads of Ashdown House Yuriy and Katie Roman, Dean Robinson, and residents of Eastgate and the Warehouse. The committee will review candidate qualifications, vet potential finalists with staff and graduate students in those residences, and make recommendations to Nelson and Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart. The final selections will be made by Chancellor Barnhart in time for the appointees to make preparations to relocate into their new homes before the fall term.
 
Ultimately, the choice to become a head of house is personal, as it was for Ochsendorf and Carney. “But, I would recommend it for every faculty member,” Ochsendorf adds. “I wish all faculty members could live on-campus for even a few years. Students are excited to see faculty outside the lab and classroom, and there's a lot of learning that goes in both directions when that happens.”

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3 Questions: How history helps us solve today's issues

Science and technology are essential tools for innovation, and to reap their full potential, we also need to articulate and solve the many aspects of today’s global issues that are rooted in the political, cultural, and economic realities of the human world. With that mission in mind, MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences has launched The Human Factor — an ongoing series of stories and interviews that highlight research on the human dimensions of global challenges. Contributors to this series also share ideas for cultivating the multidisciplinary collaborations needed to solve the major civilizational issues of our time.

Malick Ghachem is an attorney and a professor of history at MIT who explores questions of slavery and abolition, criminal law, and constitutional history. He is the author of  "The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution" (Cambridge University Press, 2012), a history of the law of slavery in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) between 1685 and 1804. He teaches courses on the Age of Revolution, slavery and abolition, American criminal justice, and other topics. MIT SHASS Communications recently asked him to share his thoughts on how history can help people craft more effective public policies for today's world. 

Q: Your new research focuses on economic globalization and political protest in Haiti, a country with a complex social, political, and economic history. What lessons can we learn from Haiti's history that can inform more effective public policies?

A: I think the most important lesson for public policy may be that we cannot ignore the distant past — and in the case of Haiti, by "distant past" I mean only so far back as the 18th century. (With apologies to colleagues who study the yet more distant centuries of ancient and medieval history!) Public policy has a short-term memory, however, and this is especially true of economic policy, which tends to look back only so far as the early 20th century to understand, for example, how a financial crisis comes about and what it entails.

Haiti showcases the decisive present-day impact and legacies of a history that goes back more than 300 years, to the rise of the slave plantation system. My current work tells the story of a planter rebellion in the 1720s against the French Indies Company, an event that ended the era of slave-trading monopolies in Saint-Domingue (as Haiti was known under French rule) and left large-scale sugar planters in effective control of the colony.

Some of the key political and social cleavages that have characterized Haitian life ever since date back to this period. A history of Haiti that begins with the revolutionary years leading up to Haitian independence in 1804, or any period thereafter, will necessarily lack a handle on just how deeply rooted are Haiti’s current circumstances.

We can see this on any number of levels. Colonial history continues to hamper prospects for broad-based education in Haiti, as my colleague Michel DeGraff’s work on the linguistic politics of French vs. Haitian Kreyòl powerfully demonstrates. The environment is another example. Part of the resistance to accepting the reality of climate change (whether in Haiti or elsewhere) is a reluctance to acknowledge that history in this deep sense matters. Yet it is clear that deforestation in Haiti begins no later than the 17th century, when French settlers began using trees for purposes of lumber and fuel. By the time of Haiti’s independence, the lack of forest cover had already left many parts of the country vulnerable to flooding.

That historical perspective, in turn, suggests one of the difficulties that besets even the most well-intentioned relief work in Haiti today. Such work tends to focus on repairing the immediate damage caused by the latest “natural” catastrophe, whether an earthquake, a hurricane-induced flood, or an outbreak of contagious disease. These tragedies rightly call upon the generous aid of first-responders, but after the sense of emergency passes, the eyes of the world often turn elsewhere.

An understanding of how these tragedies draw on the full weight of Haitian history encourages and even demands a longer-term commitment to the problems at hand. And it suggests that effective responses to what seem like essentially medical, environmental, or legal problems must cut across conventional categories of policy analysis and understandings of responsibility. Take the case of United Nations liability for the cholera outbreak in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

The natural impulse of human rights lawyers in that context was to file suit against the U.N., which then spent several years digging in its heels and denying its role in the outbreak. But the U.N.’s position in Haiti is a legacy of the much deeper impact that individual nations/states — most notably, France and the United States — have had on Haitian affairs over the course of three centuries. Framing responsibility in narrowly legal or chronological terms runs head-on into this reality and limits rather than expands our sense of the potential remedies.

Q: What connections do you see between economic conditions (including globalization and monetary policy) and the ability of a people or a culture to make innovations in science, technology, and public policy?

A: Waking up hungry each morning does not leave one with great deal of energy for scientific (or any other kind of) work during the day. The resources that make possible scientific and technological innovation are the same ones that sustain the relatively high standard of daily living many of us enjoy in the United States.

Haiti’s economy has long existed in a state of colonial dependency upon one or another foreign power; today it is the United States. The country’s economy is also beset by many woes, among them an ongoing currency crisis that makes the Haitian gourde an increasingly ineffective form of money. This fact places a premium on access to U.S. dollars, which elites and companies enjoy at the expense of workers paid in the local currency.

This is a crisis of sovereignty that takes the form of a monetary crisis. The earliest such currency crisis dates back (again) to the 1720s, and it’s one dimension of my current research. One of the two key triggers of the revolt against the Indies Company was a suspicion that the Company intended to eliminate the use of local Spanish silver coins, on which most colonists depended for their livelihood. The lack of a reliable and stable currency remained a problem throughout the colonial period and continues to severely constrict the economic horizons of many Haitians today.

Q: As MIT President Reif has said, solving the great challenges of our time will require multidisciplinary problem-solving — bringing together expertise and ideas from the sciences, technology, the social sciences, arts, and humanities. Can you share why you believe it is critical for any effort to address the well-being of human populations, and the planet itself, to incorporate tools and perspectives from the field of history? Also, what challenges do you see to multi-disciplinary collaborations — and how can we overcome them?

A: President Reif’s observation is correct and important. We also need to appreciate that, even within the world of the social sciences and the humanities, there are deep and abiding differences about how best to understand and implement public policy.

Let’s take the case of development economics. There is a growing literature, associated mostly with political economy and the new institutional economics, that seeks to explain the disparities in wealth and income between more and less “developed” nations. These works tend to suggest that there is a unifying model, theory, or historical pattern that accounts for the disparities: political corruption, institutional competence, the rule of law, protection of private property, etc. These phenomena are all important, but the particular forms they take can really only be understood on a case-by-case basis.

It’s important to do the unglamorous, nitty-gritty, heavily historical work of understanding the local and the particular — which requires much more patience that even those social scientists who speak of “path dependence” tend to exhibit. I believe that this kind of sustained patience for understanding the local in historical contexts is itself a tool of public policy, a way of seeing and talking about the world, and (if wielded correctly) an instrument of power and justice.

One of the principal ways historians can contribute to problem-solving work at MIT and elsewhere is by helping to identify what the real problem is in the first place. When we can understand and articulate the roots and sources of a problem, we have a much better chance of solving it.

Interview prepared by MIT SHASS Communications
Editorial team: Kathryn O'Neill, Emily Hiestand (series editor)

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Infografía de los rascacielos más altos de España

El ser humano se ha caracterizado siempre por querer superarse constantemente. En los rascacielos podemos ver un claro ejemplo viendo, además, cómo compiten las ciudades más poderosas por contar con el edificio más alto del mundo: el Burkj Khalifa, la Torre de Shanghái, o la futura torre de Dubai Creek Harbour (que superará al Burj Khalifa en altura).

En lo que se refiere a España, los rascacielos empezaron a construirse en los años 50 y en la actualidad nos encontramos con 68 edificios que superan los 100 metros de altura. Además, desde el año 2008, somos el país de la UE que más rascacielos ha inaugurado y el cuarto en número total de edificios de gran altura, centrando los más altos en Madrid como las Cuatro Torres Business Area (CTBA) y llegando a tener un total de 14 rascacielos. Le sigue Benidorm en altura pero esta población es la que más edificios de gran altura cuenta en España y Europa, al poseer 25 rascacielos. Le  sigue Barcelona con 8 en su área metropolitana y L'Hospitalet de Llobregat con 7.

 

Con estos datos, hemos realizado una infografía donde resume el skyline de los rascacielos más altos de España:

Para finalizar, os dejamos con los datos del rascacielos más alto de España:

Torre de Cristal

El mayor rascacielos de España corresponde al arquitecto César Pelli, al frente de la oficina internacional Pelli Clarke Pelli en colaboración con el estudio madrileño de Ortiz León Arquitectos.

Este rascacielos tuvo un coste estimado de 220.000.000 € y cuenta con 250 metros de altura repartido en 52 plantas, 2 niveles de instalaciones, 6 plantas de aparcamiento con capacidad para 1.250 vehículos y una una superficie total de 57.579 m².

El gran atrio de la entrada cuenta con una altura libre de 12 metros cerrado por un acristalamiento de suelo a techo que lo hace acogedor, imponente y elegante. La planta de piso es de forma rectangular achaflanada, midiendo 51 metros por 33 metros y en la última planta de oficinas consta del Jardín vertical más alto de Europa con 30 metros de altura que dejan al descubierto una gran variedad de árboles y vegetación.

El edificio consta de tres grupos de ascensores que suman 26 ascensores y con  tiempos de esperaque no superan los 30 segundos.

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Lisa Su, Advanced Micro Devices president and CEO, to speak at 2017 Investiture of Doctoral Hoods

Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart announced today that Lisa Su ’90 SM ’91 PhD ’94, president and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), will be the guest speaker at MIT’s 2017 Investiture of Doctoral Hoods.

The custom of a guest speaker at the Investiture of Doctoral Hoods began in 2015. The motivation behind the selection of a guest speaker, a process that engages MIT faculty and doctoral students in the selection, is to invite an MIT alum who can elucidate a path for new PhDs and ScDs as they begin their careers. “We are delighted that Dr. Su will return to MIT this June,” said Chancellor Barnhart, host of the ceremony. “As an industry leader with a technical background, her perspective will resonate deeply with our doctoral candidates.”

Eric Grimson, chancellor for academic advancement, chairs the Commencement Committee. “It has been a terrific experience to collaborate with our faculty and students over the last three seasons to identify inspirational alumni to speak at hooding,” he said. “Dr. Su honors us with her participation, which continues what we hope will grow to be a rich MIT tradition.”

Su moved with her family to the United States from Taiwan as a young child. After her early education in New York City, she matriculated at MIT to study electrical engineering. Su manufactured test silicon wafers as part of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, in addition to working during the summer at Analog Devices, on whose board she now serves and where she developed a passion for semiconductors and began to see their potential to change the world. The focus of her doctoral research was silicon-on-insulator technology.

After beginning her career as a technical staff member in the Semiconductor Process and Device Center at Texas Instruments, Su spent 13 years at IBM. There, she directed engineering and business operations in multiple roles that included vice president of the Semiconductor Research and Development Center, which was responsible for the strategic direction of IBM’s silicon technologies, joint development alliances, and semiconductor research and development operations. She then led technology roadmap and research and development efforts at Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. as chief technology officer, later serving as senior vice president and general manager for networking and multimedia. This latter role comprised responsibility for global strategy, marketing, and engineering for Freescale’s embedded communications and applications processor business.

Su joined AMD in 2012 as senior vice president and general manager for global business units, responsible for driving end-to-end business execution of AMD’s products and solutions. In 2014, she became chief operating officer, charged to integrate AMD’s business units, sales, global operations, and infrastructure enablement teams into a single market-facing organization responsible for all aspects of product strategy and execution. Today, as CEO, Su is credited for leadership that has sharpened AMD’s focus and restored market performance.

The announcement of Su as the 2017 hooding speaker was met with great enthusiasm in her home department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Anantha Chandrakasan, the Vannevar Bush Professor and department head, said, “We are thrilled that Dr. Lisa Su will be the guest speaker at this year’s ceremony. She has held the highest leadership positions in major semiconductor companies and is a tremendous role model for our students. Dr. Su has had an impact in a broad range of technologies, from semiconductor devices and computing architectures to embedded systems and cloud computing. We look forward to hearing her perspectives and advice to the doctoral candidates.”

Su has published more than 40 technical articles and was named a fellow of the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers in 2009. She was named a Top Semiconductor CEO on Institutional Investor magazine’s All-America Executive Team 2017 and, in 2016, received the Pinnacle Award as an Outstanding 50 Asian American in Business from the Asian American Business Development Center. Su was named “2014 Executive of the Year” at the Electrical Engineering Times and EDN 2014 Annual Creativity in Electronics Awards and was honored in Technology Review’s Top 100 Young Innovators in 2002. She serves on the board of directors for Analog Devices, the Global Semiconductor Alliance, and the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association.

The 2017 Investiture of Doctoral Hoods will take place on June 8 at 10 a.m. in the Johnson Athletics Center Ice Rink. The ceremony is open to family and friends of doctoral candidates; no tickets are required.

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Climate@MIT

A new online publication, Climate@MIT, reports on cutting-edge climate science research on campus and in the field. Co-sponsored by MIT’s Lorenz Center and the MIT Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate (PAOC) in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), Climate@MIT unifies crosscutting research at MIT aimed at tackling some of the biggest questions and issues of our time into one platform. Further, it disseminates issues that MIT climate scientists confront and demystifies the complexities that they navigate while conducting their research. While focusing on climate as a fundamental science, Climate@MIT will occasionally also comment on climate action and policy.

Researchers participating in Climate@MIT are dedicated to uncovering the causes and implications of climate changes for our past, present, and future world. Using observations, theory, and models, contributors aim to unite algorithmic, computational, physical, biogeochemical, and technological innovations to illustrate how the climate has been and is being modified through time. Elements of computational fluid dynamics, statistics, meteorology, oceanography, cryospheric and land surface processes, and computer science add definition to the larger picture of Earth’s changes. Researchers also investigate interactions between organisms, human activities, and ecosystems, which provide additional levels of feedback on natural processes affecting Earth’s climate and its changes over time.

While the field of climate science is ever-evolving as new facets are discovered, a key goal of Climate@MIT is to provide current, accurate, and relevant climate research and reporting to governments, industries, and citizens — all while helping foster an informed society, aware of the intricacies involved with climate research and armed with information to understand our changing planet.

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Hundreds turn out for first “Building 7 Block Party”

Building 7 is most known for the soaring four-story lobby that greets visitors who enter the campus from Massachusetts Avenue. Not as widely recognized is that the building is home to four galleries that feature regular exhibitions of art, architecture, and design.

After the first-ever “Building 7 Block Party and Gallery Walk” last week, however, the secret may be out: Hundreds of people from the MIT community and public filled the hallways and galleries throughout the building to celebrate the start of the spring semester and view new exhibitions of photography, drawing, and architecture.

Co-hosted by the MIT Libraries, the Department of Architecture, the MIT Museum, and the Dean for the School of Architecture and Planning — the four “neighbors” on the block — the event included food and refreshments at every gallery, a raffle of signed books by MIT authors, and a pop-up exhibit of drawings from a team of recent alumni and graduate students.

“As a place dedicated to exhibiting creative work by the community, Rotch Library was a natural partner for the event,” said Chris Bourg, the director of MIT Libraries. “This is a great example of the libraries realizing our potential as vibrant gathering places for the MIT community.”

Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, said the Gallery Walk produced a record turnout for the galleries. “Art is everywhere at MIT, if you know where to look,” he said. “We’re delighted that so many people responded to our invitation to take a look with us.”

The four exhibitions will remain on view throughout the semester. They are:

Rotch Library Gallery (Second floor, Room 7-238)

“Book Marks: Photographs by Thomas Gearty"

SA+P Dean’s Gallery (Second floor, Room 7-231)

"Space of Learning"

Wolk Gallery (Third floor, Room 7-338)

“Reinterpreting Gropius: New Architecture for the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin"

Keller Gallery (Fourth floor, Room 7-408)

"Some Evidence of Real Alternatives: 2017 Master of Architecture Graduate Thesis Exhibition"

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3Q: Leora Cooper on the legacy of her grandmother, Mildred Dresselhaus

When Institute Professor Emerita Mildred Dresselhaus passed away on Feb. 20, MIT and the national science community lost a leader, not only in terms of her remarkable personal achievements as a nanoscience pioneer, but also her considerable effort to encourage women to seek careers in science. Dresselhaus’ achievements have inspired a great many women to follow in her footsteps — including her granddaughter, Leora Cooper, who is currently pursuing her PhD in physical chemistry with Professor Keith Nelson at MIT.

As part of a campaign to promote women’s careers in science, GE recently released a video that asks, “What if Millie Dresselhaus, female scientist, was treated like a celebrity?” In the spot, little girls play with Dresselhaus dolls and dress up in her signature braids and sweaters, parents name their daughters after her, and Dresselhaus gives celebrity interviews. As part of this campaign, GE also invited Dresselhaus to walk the red carpet at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles. Following Dresselhaus’ death, it was decided that Cooper and her cousin, Clara Dresselhaus, would attend the Academy Awards in the late Institute Professor emerita's place, representing both their grandmother and future generations of female scientists.

Q: How did growing up with one of the great female celebrities in science as a role model affect you, and what advice can you impart upon young girls who aspire to follow in your and your grandmother’s footsteps by seeking careers in STEM fields?

A: Math and science have been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember. Millie was always very modest and never wanted to impose her ideas on anyone, but science was such a large part of her life that it spilled into everything else she did. As young girls, my sister and I went on science adventures together with our mother or grandmother. We were always encouraged to be curious about our surroundings and to try to learn how things worked. The highlight of many days were my morning rides to school where my father explained how something in science or engineering worked. In family and in mentoring, Millie always led by example. I’m certain that she inspired the family spirit that science holds answers to the world around us. It wasn’t until later in my life that I started to understand that other young girls got very different childhood messages.

As I have progressed through college and now graduate school, I see inequalities that I didn’t notice as a child. I see minorities having difficulty receiving the opportunities they deserve, I see honest immigrants being turned away at the border, and I have watched women get discouraged from pursuing careers in all walks of life. I came to understand that Millie’s success story was an anomaly and not the norm. As I started struggling with many of these same issues, I started speaking with her about how changes should be made, but I always assumed that change would need to come from others. During her career, Millie gave talks in at least 30 countries, and she had advisory capacities in numerous universities, foundations, and even government agencies across the world. By example, she showed me that a career in STEM can give a voice to the issues that surround us. In my years with Millie at MIT, we began talking about ideas for changes that could help women to succeed, but in our last year together she showed me how to stand up and start seeing those ideas through to reality. She has shown me that a STEM career can give you a voice to see these changes become a reality.

My cousin, Clara, is the next generation. She is thinking of going into STEM now, and will have to be strong enough to get through these same issues that generations before her have contend with. Her grandmother gave her a wonderful role model, but not a guide as she begins to face these difficulties. Like other women in STEM, she will need to build her own support group to get the support and mentorship she needs to continue. But if scientists in our generation follow Millie’s example and push, we can make this easier in future.

For young girls, my advice is to keep asking questions, even if you need to work to find the answers. Don’t ever let yourself say “I must not be good at this”; instead, ask yourself, “what did I miss here?” But from Millie, I have learned that inspiring young girls to pursue STEM is only the first hurdle. The advice should never stop. We all benefit from having a base of people to advise us and help us continue to achieve our dreams. My advice to women, from young girls to established women, is to stand up when you see something that isn’t right, and start working to make these changes happen in the world around us.

Q: What does appearing on the Academy Awards’ red carpet in your grandmother’s stead mean to you?

A: This experience honors Millie in more ways than you would expect. As a poor girl growing up in the Bronx, Millie didn’t have the money she needed to see the movies like her friends. To join them, she took a job reviewing movies for a local newspaper, which gave her free tickets. Millie always said that this job first taught her how to write clearly and succinctly. Even at the end of her life, she wrote papers longhand on her lap, as she learned from those days.

For my part, I have seen the red carpet at the Academy Awards as a mythical place that just wasn’t for people like me. I always saw the society and science as versions of “cool” that rarely overlapped. Going into science has isolated me a lot from pop culture, but getting to bring the two together is a special opportunity. As a high school student, Clara Dresselhaus has watched more movies and followed the actors more than I have. Her connection to popular culture gives her a better understanding of how the younger generation responds to science and technology and how to get them excited by it. Clara and I can make a team that understands how to bring the important issues in science and pop culture together, just as Millie always encouraged in scientific collaborations across fields.

When GE first gave Millie the script for the Real Heroes commercial, she was extremely hesitant to let it take her away from her students, as she didn’t understand the point. She showed it to me and asked what I thought she should do. The script described scenes that painted a picture of her as a modern celebrity because of her scientific achievements, inspiring even young girls who couldn’t yet understand her contributions. With the help of her assistant, Read Schusky, I explained to her that being part of the commercial would allow her to inspire a new demographic that can be hard to reach as scientists. The commercial aired shortly before her death, and Millie never got a chance to see the impact that it will make. 

GE’s invitation to attend the Academy Awards on her behalf is almost the very definition of bittersweet. Millie’s invitation gives me hope that society is learning how to value female scientists for their achievements and contributions. Millie always loved having interdisciplinary projects bring seemingly unrelated fields together. I wish she could have laughed and enjoyed seeing science and entertainment come together in this wonderful way. Millie always knew when her students needed a little push to be able to achieve something new. In walking the red carpet, I see Millie giving me that push she knew I needed to learn how to reach out to the women of the next generation. For me, the red carpet represents both the loss of my grandmother and mentor, and the opportunity to continue her legacy of encouraging society to value science.

Q: What positive impact will the Hollywood representation of female pioneers in science like your grandmother and the women whose stories are featured in the Oscar-nominated film “Hidden Figures” have on the future of women in STEM fields?

A: Science and Hollywood both spread new information to wide groups of people across the world, but they access different venues. While films reach a general demographic, science is still widely viewed as unintelligible. At MIT, most of us are familiar with trying to explain our work to a non-technical person only to have them respond, “don’t bother, I won’t understand it.” Even the most general of science talks and events have trouble reaching these non-technical people. Hollywood gives science a voice that can be heard by the non-technical. This allows people from non-technical parts of the world to see a life that they do not know or understand.

Without being accustomed to the struggles female scientists often face, non-technical people who see films like “Hidden Figures” can see injustices they weren’t aware of. This allows us to celebrate people who have overcome these injustices in much the way that Millie and the stars of “Hidden Figures” have at MIT and NASA respectively. These are often injustices that go unnoticed by people within STEM because the ubiquity of it causes us to become accustomed to it. Women’s suffrage and the civil rights movements have shown us that society better addresses issues that have a common voice. The Hollywood representation of female scientists as underrepresented heroes can help the world recognize the importance of encouraging women in STEM. 

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Foliage-penetrating ladar technology may improve border surveillance

The United States shares 5,525 miles of land border with Canada and 1,989 miles with Mexico. Monitoring these borders, which is the responsibility of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), is an enormous task. Detecting, and responding to, illegal activity while facilitating lawful commerce and travel is made more difficult by the expansive, rugged, diverse, and thickly vegetated geography that spans both often-crossed borders. To help mitigate the challenges to border surveillance, a group of researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory is investigating whether an airborne ladar system capable of imaging objects under a canopy of foliage could aid in the maintenance of border security by remotely detecting illegal activities. Their work will be presented at the 16th Annual IEEE Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security to be held April 25-26 in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Requisite for effective border protection is timely, actionable information on areas of interest. Leveraging the laboratory’s long experience in building imaging systems that exploit microchip lasers and Geiger-mode avalanche photodiodes, the research team developed and tested two concepts of operations (CONOPS) for using airborne ladar systems to detect human activity in wooded regions.

"For any new technology to be effectively used by CBP, an emerging sensor must bring with it a sensible deployment architecture and concept of operation," said John Aldridge, a technical staff member from the Laboratory's Homeland Protection Systems Group, who has been working with a multidisciplinary, cross-divisional team that includes Marius Albota, Brittany Baker, Daniel Dumanis, Rajan Gurjar, and Lily Lee. The CONOPS that the engineering team focused on were cued examination of a localized area and uncued surveillance of a large area. To demonstrate the approach, the engineering team conducted proof-of-concept experiments with the laboratory's Airborne Optical Systems Testbed (AOSTB), a Twin Otter aircraft outfitted with an onboard ladar sensor.

For cued surveillance, the use of an airborne ladar sensor platform (whether a piloted or unpiloted aircraft system) might be prompted by another persistent sensor that indicates the presence of activity in a localized area at or near the border. "The area of coverage for cued surveillance may be in the 1 km² to 10 km² range, and the laboratory has already developed and demonstrated sensor technology that can achieve this coverage in minutes," Albota said.

Uncued wide-area surveillance sorties might be flown long distances and over timelines of days or weeks to establish typical activity patterns and to discover emerging paths and structures in high-interest regions. "The area coverage required under such a CONOPS may reach as high as 300 to 800 km of border, depending on the Border Patrol Sector and vegetation density," Aldridge explained, adding, "Although the current AOSTB's area coverage rate is limited by the aircraft's airspeed, the sensor can image such a region in a matter of hours in a single sortie."

As a start to their field tests to assess their CONOPS, the team flew data collection runs over several local sites identified as representative of the northern U.S. border environment. The sites contained a variety of low-growing brush, thin ground vegetation, very tall coniferous-trees, and leafy deciduous trees. For the tests, the team positioned vehicles, tents, and other camp equipment in the woods to serve as the targets of interest. "We made 40 passes at an altitude of 7,500 feet to allow for a spatial resolution of about 25 centimeters," Dumanis said. "In between each pass, we moved the concealed items so that we could perform post-process analysis for change and motion detection," Baker added.

In this post-processing stage, the team members enhanced the data captured during the flights so that human analysts could then inspect the ladar imagery. They digitally removed ground-height data to reveal the three-dimensional ladar point cloud above ground and then digitally thresholded the height (erased 3-D points above a certain height) to eliminate the foliage cover. The resulting images gave analysts Gurjar and Lee a starting point for approximating the locations of both the planted objects as well as objects that were already on scene.

Searching through vast quantities of ladar data to spot areas for careful inspection is a labor intensive task even for experienced analysts who can recognize subtle cues that direct them to the possible presence of objects in the imagery. For the ladar data to be efficiently mined, an automated method of identifying areas of interest is needed. "One of the ways to alert analysts to potential targets is to track changes in the 3-D temporal data," Lee explained. "Changes caused by vehicle movements or alterations in a customary scene can indicate uncharacteristic activity."

To begin a change detection approach to the discovery of potential targets of interest, the research team registered the before and after ladar data and then subtracted the before data from the after dataset. This process allowed some improvement in the visual identification of vehicles that appeared where there had been none before; however, even a skilled human analyst would find it difficult to spot the small changes that signaled the presence of a vehicle.

A change detection approach, therefore, must compensate for the challenge posed by clutter in the ladar data. This clutter comes from the nature of ladar collection in densely foliated environment. As light travels through gaps between foliage, it bounces off a surface of leaves, ground, or human-made objects. The returned light is collected by the ladar sensor to form the 3-D point cloud. Because the motion induced by a flying platform causes each ladar scan to travel through different configurations of gaps between leaves, different parts of the canopy and shrubbery are sensed by the ladar. "Much of the clutter in our change detection output is from the different levels of canopy detected from different ladar scans," explained Gurjar.

To make the ladar change detection data easier for analysts to search, the team looked to automated object detection, a well-established field in computer vision that has been applied to images and radar data. Since ladar data presents in three dimensions and has unique noise characteristics, the team had to enhance the established automated detection approach with a sum of absolute difference (SAD) technique that factors in the height differences used to construct 3-D ladar imagery. Trials of the SAD technique applied to simulated vehicles in a foliated environment demonstrated that the approach yielded high detection rates and has potential as an automated method for reducing the huge amount of ladar data analysts would have to scrutinize to discover objects of interest.

"Looking forward, we hope to improve the capabilities of automated 3-D change detection to be more robust to natural temporal changes in foliage, expand the number of automatically detected object classes, and extend automated detection capability to full 3-D point clouds," said Lee, with Aldridge adding that they are also interested in exploring alternative aircraft for hosting the ladar system.

In its strategic plan "Vision and Strategy 2020," the CBP has expressed the need to apply advanced technology solutions for border management. Continued development of Lincoln Laboratory's automated approach to using a low-cost ladar system for surveillance of foliated regions may in the future offer another tool that the Department of Homeland Security's CBP can deploy to monitor the growing volume of land border activity.

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Taking aim at a key malaria molecule

The iron-containing molecule heme is necessary for life. Cells require heme to perform the chemical reactions that produce energy, among other critical tasks.

Scientists who study the malaria parasite are particularly interested in heme because many malaria drugs interact with this molecule, also known as a cofactor. However, until now researchers have lacked good ways to measure heme levels inside the parasite.

A team of MIT biological engineers has developed a method to do just that. Using a genetically encoded fluorescent protein that interacts with heme, the researchers can image heme within cells and measure how much is present. This could eventually help scientists develop better drugs to combat malaria, says Jacquin Niles, an MIT associate professor of biological engineering.

“One of our long-term goals is to use insights from these studies to understand the pathways that regulate heme and to target these for antimalarial drug discovery purposes,” says Niles, the senior author of the study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Feb. 27.

James Abshire, a recent MIT PhD recipient, is the paper’s lead author. Other authors are former postdocs Christopher Rowlands and Suresh Ganesan, and professor of biological and mechanical engineering Peter So.

Heme control

Heme is found in nearly all cells and is especially plentiful in red blood cells, which use it to carry oxygen. However, cells need to keep tight control over the cofactor because it is reactive and can damage other molecules in cells. Heme is usually embedded within other proteins that carefully control its activity. If heme levels get too high, the molecule is either broken down by enzymes or put into a storage compartment where it can’t cause cellular damage.

“There’s always a balance between how much of it you make or acquire, and how much of it you need to execute critical functions,” Niles says.

Niles was motivated to explore how the parasite Plasmodium falciparum controls heme levels because of the known interactions between this cofactor and the antimalarial drugs known as quinolones, which include chloroquine. Until recently, when the parasite became resistant to chloroquine, this drug was used widely to treat malaria.

“Many successful antimalarial compounds seem to exert their antimalarial effect through interacting with or somehow disrupting heme homeostasis within the parasite,” Niles says.

As he started to think about investigating those interactions, he realized that not much was known about how the parasite controls its heme levels. This is a particularly important task for these organisms because they spend part of their life cycle inside red blood cells, where they take up and degrade substantial quantities of hemoglobin and release heme in the process.

“The first step was to figure out how much labile heme parasites maintain in their cytosolic compartment as they develop within red blood cells, and how those levels might change with certain environmental perturbations — such as exposure to heme-interacting antimalarial drugs,” Niles says.

To achieve this, Niles and his colleagues developed a heme-sensing protein whose fluorescence dims when it binds to heme. This sensor protein can be expressed in the parasite, allowing the researchers to measure heme levels in parasites by measuring changes in fluorescence.

Daniel Goldberg, co-director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Washington University School of Medicine, described this as an “elegant” approach to sensing heme.

“It works beautifully and allows measurement of cytoplasmic heme in malaria parasites. This is crucial for understanding parasite metabolism and antimalarial drug mechanism,” says Goldberg, who was not involved in the research.

Drug interactions

Using this sensor, the researchers found that malaria parasites maintain higher labile heme levels than previously estimated. Most scientists studying the parasite had assumed that heme levels would be lower due to the cofactor’s potential to damage cells.

“At this time, we don’t really know the physiological role of these observed labile heme levels in the parasite,” he says. “But what this might do is set the parasite up to be particularly vulnerable to antimalarial drugs that interact with heme.”

One possibility is that drugs such as chloroquine somehow increase heme levels to the point where damage to parts of the cell (such as the cell membrane) cause parasite death. Artemisinin, another potent antimalarial drug, also seems to be dependent on heme within the parasite for its effectiveness. Thus, finding out more about the role of heme in causing parasite toxicity could help researchers develop new drugs that exploit these mechanisms.

“This could provide insights into alternate ways by which we can disrupt heme homeostasis for therapeutic purposes — ideally in a way that circumvents the mechanisms of resistance that parasites have developed to drugs like chloroquine,” Niles says.

Once widely used, chloroquine is now mostly ineffective due to widespread resistance. Artemesinin-based combinations are now standard treatment, but resistance is emerging in parts of Southeast Asia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In future studies, Niles plans to adapt the heme sensors so they can be targeted to different compartments of the cell to measure how heme is distributed within the parasite. He also plans to study the sources of heme — whether parasites synthesize it on their own or scavenge most of it from red blood cells — and how those processes might be affected as the parasite moves into later stages of its life cycle.

The research was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, and the Wellcome Trust.

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3Q: Suzy Nelson on protections for transgender students at MIT

Vice President and Dean for Student Life Suzy Nelson arrived at the Division of Student Life (DSL) on July 1, 2016, bringing with her 32 years of experience building open, effective partnerships with students through her work at Colgate, Harvard, Cornell, and Syracuse. Nelson’s commitment to enhancing all aspects of the student life experience is evident in her recent work to renew residence halls and student spaces, promote student wellbeing, and make MIT a welcoming campus for everyone. Following last week’s federal action related to protections for transgender students, Nelson sat down to reaffirm MIT’s support for all students, reflect on how they give her “hope” in the current political climate, and update the community on efforts to promote diversity and inclusion.

Q: Last week, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education withdrew guidelines from the Obama administration designed to ensure "transgender students enjoy a supportive and nondiscriminatory school environment.” Will this decision impact MIT students or policies?

A: This is an important question because I know the action has created anxiety for members of our transgender community and their friends and allies. I want them to hear directly from me that we are steadfast in our support for them.

The short answer to whether this decision will impact MIT students or policies is no, it absolutely will not. Our commitment to providing an inclusive, welcoming, and respectful educational, living, and working environment has not changed, and it will not change. Gender identity for students and employees is protected under MIT’s nondiscrimination policies as well as under Massachusetts state law. Additionally, regardless of the federal Departments’ interpretation of Title IX, MIT believes that transgender students’ gender identities should be respected, including when it comes to restroom access. We are also working to streamline the process so that students can more easily change their name and gender in MIT official records.

I want students who have questions or concerns about this federal action to know they can come to me and the members of the LBGTQ@MIT and Title IX teams. We are ready to answer any questions they may have and to support them in any way we can.

Q: Changes in federal policies have prompted strong responses from the MIT student community. What are your impressions of how they have been organizing and speaking out?

A: Many students are speaking out about issues that affect them and others whom they know. In a respectful and thoughtful way, MIT’s students have raised up their concerns about social issues and the recent executive orders. I have been impressed by students’ openness to dialogue, especially when there is profound disagreement and division within our country.

This is the type of level-headed thinking that gives me hope because coming together is what we need to do right now. Moreover, our actions need to be guided by critical thinking and our ability to listen and to empathize with each other. In the end, it is the bond of humanity that unites us. And it’s that bond that often helps us find common ground when we disagree.

Even before the change in administrations, I was impressed by how engaged and involved MIT students are. Students here see the world through a critical lens, and want to make it better. That’s the core of the MIT mission too, and it’s great to see them apply the same lens to their own experience and environment. Their voices are definitely making a difference in the student experience.

Q: A specific example of where MIT students’ voices are making a difference is in efforts to advance diversity and inclusion, issues that are key priorities for you as well. Can you talk about the ways DSL is working with students, faculty, and staff to make MIT a welcoming campus for all?

A: Issues of social justice and equity are important to me personally, and they are part of the reason I wanted to work in higher education. When I came to MIT, one of the first things I did was to learn more about the recommendations outlined by the Black Students’ Union (BSU), Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA), and many others, and the work being done to implement them.

All students who were involved in developing the recommendations deserve to be commended for their leadership. They applied their critical lens to our environment and developed thoughtful, constructive, and specific solutions to make things better. I also admire how they were careful and purposeful about incorporating the views of all underrepresented students into their recommendations. And I am grateful for their willingness to partner with faculty and staff throughout the implementation process.

I am a member of the Academic Council Working Group President Reif established to help make these recommendations a reality, so I am fortunate to have a front row seat to the progress underway.

DSL was very involved in responding to the recommendation calling for a diversity session at orientation for undergraduates. I was one of the 30 faculty and staff who were trained to help facilitate this session for incoming students last August, and it was very thought-provoking and educational for everyone involved. Student feedback on the session was very positive. I am very pleased that this will be an annual event going forward.

Additionally, MIT has doubled down on its commitment to affordability and accessibility. The financial aid budget rose by 10.4 percent in 2016-17 alone.

Dr. Karen Singleton, a recognized leader in providing multicultural mental healthcare, is now leading Mental Health and Counseling Service and, in the last year, MIT Medical has hired three clinicians with expertise in race-based trauma.

Nearly all of our academic departments have responded to the students’ calls for the development and posting of statements that highlight each department’s commitment to health, diversity, and inclusion. And new diversity-related data is being gathered and posted so that we can measure our progress and make informed decisions about next steps.

At DSL, we have identified making a welcoming campus for everyone as a key priority — it’s part of our new mission and agenda. We’ve been approaching this goal from a few different angles:

• First, we formed a committee to look at diversity and inclusion in our division, and between staff and students. This group is drafting a DSL diversity and inclusion statement, and getting input from a range of people. We expect we will have a final draft by the end of the spring term. As important as the result of this work is, the process itself helps us examine our values and expectations about engaging others in a respectful and caring way.
• In the community, DSL and the Institute Community and Equity Office hosted an event last semester with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji from Harvard, who studies hidden bias and co-authored the book, "Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People." The main room in Walker Memorial was almost filled, which I found very encouraging.
• But, because real change comes from sustained education, we are exploring a series of learning opportunities, including unconscious bias training, that will help DSL staff develop the knowledge, skills, and awareness for cultivating a respectful and welcoming campus community for all.

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New technology offers fast peptide synthesis

Manufacturing small proteins known as peptides is usually very time-consuming, which has slowed development of new peptide drugs for diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and bacterial infections.

To help speed up the manufacturing process, MIT researchers have designed a machine that can rapidly produce large quantities of customized peptides. Their new tabletop machine can form links between amino acids, the buildings blocks of proteins, in about 37 seconds, and it takes less than an hour to generate complete peptide molecules containing up to 60 amino acids.

“You can dial in whatever amino acids you want, and the machine starts printing off these peptides faster than any machine in the world,” says Bradley Pentelute, the Pfizer-Laubach Career Development Associate Professor of Chemistry at MIT.

This technology could help researchers rapidly generate new peptide drugs to test on a variety of diseases, and it also raises the possibility of easily producing customized cancer vaccines for individual patients.

Pentelute is the senior author of a paper describing the new system in the Feb. 27 issue of Nature Chemical Biology. The paper’s lead authors are graduate students Alexander Mijalis and Dale Thomas; other authors are graduate student Mark Simon, research associate Andrea Adamo, Ryan Beaumont, and Warren K. Lewis Professor of Chemical Engineering Klavs Jensen.

Fast flow

Using traditional peptide manufacturing techniques, which were developed more than 20 years ago, it takes about an hour to perform the chemical reactions needed to add each amino acid to a peptide chain.

Pentelute, Jensen, and their colleagues set out several years ago to devise a faster method based on a newer manufacturing approach known as flow chemistry. Under this strategy, chemicals flow through a series of modules that each perform one step of the overall synthesis.

The team’s first version of a flow-based peptide synthesis machine, reported in 2014, sped up the process to about three minutes per peptide bond. In their latest effort, the researchers hoped to make the synthesis even faster by automating more of the process. In the earlier version, the person running the machine had to manually pump amino acids out of their storage bottles, but the new machine automates that step as well.

“Our focus when we were setting out to design the automated machine was to have all the steps controlled by computer, and that would eliminate a lot of the human error and unreliability that’s associated with someone doing this process by hand,” Mijalis says.

Once a user enters the desired amino acid sequence, the amino acids are pumped, in the correct order, into a module where they are briefly heated to about 90 degrees Celsius to make them more chemically reactive. After being activated, the amino acids flow into a chamber where they are added to the growing peptide chains.

“It’s a very iterative process, where you’re building up this molecular chain, one piece by one piece,” Mijalis says.

As each amino acid is added to the chain, the researchers can measure how much was correctly incorporated by analyzing the waste products that flow into the final chamber of the device. The current machine attaches each amino acid to the chain with about 99 percent efficiency.

“In my view, this approach opens up the field to the generation of peptide libraries that enable more complete structure-activity relationships of bioactive peptides in a matter of days, as well as extending this chemical approach to the synthesis of small proteins and protein domains,” says Paul Alewood, a research group leader in chemistry and structural biology at the University of Queensland Institute for Molecular Bioscience.

“It will be used in both academia and industry when commercially available instruments for this chemistry become widely available,” says Alewood, who was not involved in the research.

Personalized chemistry

Once synthesized, small peptides can be joined together to form larger proteins. So far, the researchers have made proteins produced by HIV, a fragment of an antifreeze protein (which helps organisms survive extreme cold), and a toxin secreted by snails. They are also working on replicating toxins from other animals, which have potential uses as painkillers, blood thinners, or blood clotting agents. They have also made antimicrobial peptides, which scientists are exploring as a possible new class of antibiotic drugs.

Another possible application for the new machine is generating peptides that could be used as personalized cancer vaccines targeting unique proteins found in individual patients’ tumors. “That’s exactly what our machine makes, and it makes them at scales that are all ready to meet this demand for personalized cancer vaccines,” Pentelute says.

The MIT team is also interested in adapting this technology to make other molecules in which building blocks are strung together in long chains, such as polymers and oligonucleotides (strands of RNA or DNA).

“We can start thinking about a personalized chemistry machine,” Pentelute says. “It’s modular and it’s adaptable to all sorts of other chemistries.”

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2lOkNXI

3Q: Maria Zuber, daughter of coal country

Maria T. Zuber, vice president for research and the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics, recently published an op-ed in The Washington Post that described her personal history growing up in eastern Pennsylvania’s coal country and argued for a strategy to support coal industry workers as the world transitions to new, clean energy sources. Zuber spoke with MIT News to share her thoughts on how we can address climate change while also improving the economic fortunes of coal communities.

Q: You grew up in Carbon County, Pennsylvania, a place that got its name because of the discovery of anthracite coal there in the late 18th century. Can you tell us about your experience growing up in coal country and what inspired you to write about it?

A: Both of my grandfathers were coal miners. They both contracted black lung disease, one dying much too young and the other living longer but suffering mightily from both health problems and underemployment. My grandfathers worked in the mines at a time when the coal industry in eastern Pennsylvania was in the midst of a long decline. My home town, Summit Hill, Pennsylvania, was a place where prosperity and economic opportunity vanished with the decline of the anthracite industry.

During the recent presidential campaign and subsequent to the election, I’ve read a lot about how the intellectual elite doesn’t understand the plight of blue collar workers who have lost well-paying jobs and, with that, their hope for the future. And I thought, “Wait a minute, that’s the story of my family.” The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was in a position to shine a light on this issue and maybe even contribute to improving the situation.

Q: How does this personal history you’ve described affect the way that you think about climate change?

A: On the one hand, I can really understand why we hear so much about the “war on coal.” That’s a product of the deep anxiety that people feel when they experience such seismic changes caused by things like changes in the global supply and demand for coal, or automation in mining that makes it possible to get more coal with fewer workers. People do feel like they are under attack, that their way of life is under attack. We need to really try to recognize that.

On the other hand, my life’s passion, and my career focus, has been science. And as I’ve said many times, the scientific evidence is overwhelming: If we keep emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, then global temperatures are going to continue to rise, and that carries with it unacceptable risks — disruptions to food and water supplies, rising sea levels that could put coastal cities at risk, and so on. 

So the way I look at it is that we have two responsibilities: We need to take urgent action to address climate change by moving to clean energy, and we also need to take care of the people who do difficult and dangerous work so that we can power our modern economy and enjoy our standard of living.

Q: With this dual challenge in mind, what do you think we should we do for coal communities?

A: The good news is that, in the long run, transforming our energy system so that it emits zero carbon will create more jobs than it destroys. But if we don’t plan this transformation in an orderly way, then we will see avoidable negative economic impacts on coal communities.

As a start, I propose three things we can do. First, we should aggressively pursue carbon capture and storage technology, which catches carbon dioxide from coal power plants before it is released into the atmosphere and stores it underground. We’ll need to improve capture efficiency, lower the deployment costs, and better understand the environmental impacts. The MIT Energy Initiative has launched a low-carbon energy center focused on these challenges.

Second, we should expand the use of coal for things that, unlike combustion and steel production, do not produce significant carbon emissions. About nine-tenths of coal production is used for electric power. But researchers here at MIT and at other research institutions around the country are exploring whether coal can be used more widely as a material for the production of carbon fiber, batteries, electronics, and even solar panels.

Third, though, we have to recognize that even if carbon capture becomes practicable and we expand other uses for coal, the industry’s fortunes will never fully revive, because of factors like cheap natural gas and the rapidly declining costs of wind and solar energy. So we need to support policies that would promote economic development; help coal workers find employment in other industries, including renewables; and preserve healthcare and retirement benefits for retired coal miners. Fortunately, these are all policies with bipartisan support.

The risks of climate change make it clear that we have to stop burning fossil fuels, especially without the use of carbon capture and storage technologies. But we do have choices to make about how we transition to clean energy. We can choose to do it fast enough to head off some of the worst risks of climate change, and we can choose to do it as fairly as possible for communities that have long depended on fossil fuels. These are not impossible challenges, but they do require that we all work together. I think this is the kind of problem that we at MIT are attracted to tackle. We won’t solve the climate change problem without solving the jobs problem.

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2lM8ugu

From football to physics

Zachary Hulcher was once set on becoming a lawyer. In high school, he took part in mock trials and competed in youth judicial, playing the role of legal counsel and presenting cases in front of a student jury. He says his inspiration came partly from the television show Law and Order: “There’s drama, there’s action, you send people to jail, and you get to argue with people — and I loved arguing with people.”

But all that changed one day, sometime during his junior year, when he happened to flip through his physics textbook. In an idle moment at school, he turned to the very back of the book and started to read the chapter about special relativity.

Physics, he discovered, put mathematics and science into an almost fantastical perspective. “Ideas that come out of that one chapter are time travel, atomic bombs, things warping when they go really fast, and all these things that shouldn’t be real, but are,” Hulcher says.

Hulcher is currently a senior at MIT, majoring in physics as well as computer science and electrical engineering, with a minor in math. “I love the creative process and figuring out how elegant solutions to real problems arise out of seeming chaos,” he says.

He is a recipient of the 2017 Marshall Scholarship, awarded each year to up to 40 U.S. students who will pursue graduate degrees at universities in the United Kingdom. Next year, Hulcher will be working toward a PhD in high energy physics at Cambridge University, where he hopes to work on both experimental and theoretical problems of the Standard Model of particle physics, which governs every aspect of the known universe except for gravity.

“Beautiful math”

Hulcher was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama. His mother and father are managers for Alabama’s environmental management agency. Hulcher grew up playing basketball with his younger brother in the family’s backyard. The brothers, who towered over their classmates — Hulcher is 6 feet 4 inches tall and his “little” brother, Jacob, is 6 feet 8 inches — joined their church league, and eventually played for their middle and high school teams.  

Along with basketball, Hulcher played football and was on the track and field team, balancing an unrelenting schedule of games and practices with an increasingly challenging course load. Hulcher attended the Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School System from kindergarten through high school in Montgomery, where he was valedictorian and a National Merit Scholar. In his freshman year he began taking math and physics classes with Joe Profio, a teacher who, recognizing that Hulcher was one of the top students in his class, urged him to join the school’s math teams.

Hulcher soon found himself taking long drives to math competitions across the state with Profio and his classmates. During those drives, Profio would talk about math at a deeper level than he could present in class, and Hulcher credits his passion for physics and math to these inspiring talks.

“Our conversations obliterated the idea that the only beauty in the world is found in an imaginary place in a book — beauty was all around me, if I would only look through the right lens,” Hulcher says.

It was around that time that Hulcher says “the wheels started cranking to do science.” The answer to how and where to direct this newfound momentum came from an unlikely source, another TV show.

“I was watching NCIS one day, and one of the characters is from MIT, and I thought, ‘I’m starting to like more science. I should apply there,’ and I did,” Hulcher recalls.

Computing, a physics problem

When Hulcher set foot on the campus for the first time — also the first time he had been anywhere north of Washington, D.C. — he was immediately drawn to the physics seminars held during Campus Preview Weekend.

“I remember an event called something like ‘physics til you drop,’ and two students were standing at a blackboard, doing physics until 5 or 6 am, long past when I could stay awake,” Hulcher says. “People would ask them questions about quantum mechanics, string theory, general relativity, anything, and they would try to answer them on the board. I was pretty hooked.”

He quickly landed on physics as a major but also chose computer science and electrical engineering, a decision based largely on conversations with his roommate, who was also majoring in the subject. When Hulcher took classes that explored quantum computing — the idea that quantum elements such as elementary particles can perform certain calculations vastly more efficiently than classical computers — he realized “all of computing is not just a computer science problem. It’s a physics problem. That’s just cool.”

Seeing through plasma

In the summer following his sophomore year, Hulcher traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, to work at the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment (CMS) at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. There, he helped to implement an alarm system that monitors the accelerator’s major systems and distributes information to key people in the event of a failure.

He returned again the following summer, this time as a theorist. The LHC uses giant magnets to steer beams of atoms, such as lead ions, toward each other at close to the speed of light. Hulcher, working as a research assistant with Krishna Rajagopal of MIT's Department of Physics and the Center for Theoretical Physics, was interested in the hot plasma of quarks and gluons produced when two lead ions collide.

“The plasma doesn’t last very long before it returns to some other state of matter,” Hulcher says. “You don’t even have time to blast it with light to see it; it would just disappear before the light got there. So you need to use events inside it to study it.”

Those events involve jets of particles that spew out from the plasma following a collision between two lead ions. Hulcher worked with Rajagopal and Daniel Pablos, a University of Barcelona graduate student, to help implement a model for how these jets of particles propagate through the resulting plasma. Hulcher recently helped to present the team’s results at a workshop in Paris and is finishing up a paper to submit to a journal — his first publication.

The prism of physics

In addition to his research work, Hulcher has racked up a good amount of teaching experience. As a teaching assistant for MIT’s Department of Physics, he has graded weekly problem sets for classes in classical mechanics and electricity and magnetism. He tutors fellow students in electrical engineering and computer science subjects, and he has spent the last year as eligibles chair of the MIT chapter of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi. Through the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), Hulcher has traveled around the world, to Italy, Mexico, and most recently, Israel, teaching students subjects including physics, electrical engineering, and entrepreneurship.

Of all the relationships he’s developed through his time at MIT, he counts those with most of his teammates as some of the strongest. Hulcher joined MIT’s football team as a freshman offensive lineman; he says he will remember hanging out on long nights, p-setting with his friends from the football team. He will also remember MIT as a really long rollercoaster, he says.

As for what’s next, Hulcher says the plan for now is “to keep liking physics.” If that happens, he hopes to become a researcher and professor, to help students see the world through physics.

“I fell in love with physics,” Hulcher says. “I appreciate light bouncing off a mirror, and smoke billowing up, and light moving through it in a different way. I appreciate looking up at the stars and thinking about what’s out there. The small things I took for granted when I didn’t know much about them, I appreciate now. Everything is just a little prettier.”

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2m0RDHm

Participamos en los Premios 20 Blogs 2016

Ya han llegado los Premios 20blogs y un año más la participación ha sido masiva al superar la cifra de los 8.000 blogs inscritos en su undécima edición. Actualmente está abierta la fecha para realizar las votaciones a los blogs participantes que durará hasta el próximo 10 de marzo. Será difícil ganar al haber tanto nivel; pero MOSingenieros intentará ganar al menos la categoría y por eso os pedimos a todos nuestros lectores, como simpatizantes, el voto para que seamos el referente en la categoría Blogosfera.

Los premios a los que podemos optar son: 

- Mejor blog 2016: Mejor blog 2016, elegido por los miembros del jurado.

- Mejor blog por votación: Será determinado por los votos de los usuarios de 20minutos.

- Mejor blog por categoría: Los ganadores de cada una de las categorías recibirán una estatuilla del concurso. Nosotros participamos en BLOGOSFERA.

El proceso de votar es muy sencillo y rápido. Tenéis que registraros en “20 minutos” ya que si accedéis por primera vez os dirá:

"Debes identificarte como usuario de 20minutos.es para participar en la votación".

Hay dos posibilidades de registrarse:

- Clásica: rellenar los campos obligatorios

- Facebook, Twitter o Google: en el que tu nombre, correo y datos serán completados de forma automática, rápida y fácil.

Puedes acceder al registro desde aquí:

- PINCHA EN LA IMAGEN -

Una vez finalizado los campos requeridos... 

                                      

¡¡ YA PUEDES VOTAR !!

Pero, para hacerlo más rápido, te facilito el enlace donde puedes votar a MOSingenieros:

- PINCHA EN LA IMAGEN PARA ACCEDER A LA PÁGINA -

Ya lo sabes, si decides votarnos, estaremos muy agradecidos porque esto sería una gran recompensa al esfuerzo de tener activo tantos años el blog y seguir trabajando duro para mejorarlo día a día.

Muchas gracias.
Jorge Sánchez Mosquete

de MOS INGENIEROS - BLOG DE INGENIERÍA http://ift.tt/2lQZM0D