Monitoring metabolic energy expenditure, health, and fitness with a breath analyzer

The U.S. military has great interest in more comprehensive measurement and tracking of metabolism, both for optimizing the performance of warfighters under demanding physical conditions and for maintaining the health and wellness of forces during and after their military careers. While sensors for making metabolic measurements have existed for decades, they are expensive, cumbersome instruments primarily intended for clinical or professional use. MIT Lincoln Laboratory, in collaboration with the U.S. Army Research Institute for Environmental Medicine (USARIEM), has undertaken a research effort to create a low-cost personal metabolic sensor and an associated metabolic fuel model. The Carbon dioxide/Oxygen Breath and Respiration Analyzer (COBRA) enables individuals to make on-demand metabolic measurements simply by breathing into it.

“Besides assessing performance of soldiers in the field, the COBRA can be applied to broader purposes, such as training athletes for high-endurance activities, guiding weight loss by quantifying the impact of dietary and exercise regimens, or identifying nutritional imbalances,” says Kyle Thompson, a member of the development team from Lincoln Laboratory’s Mechanical Engineering Group.

Since the early 20th century, scientists have been using indirect calorimetry (IC) to calculate individual energy expenditure and metabolic rates. This method measures the ratio of carbon dioxide to oxygen in exhaled breath, which can be used to measure the levels of carbohydrates and fats being used by the body to meet metabolic energy needs. Information about energy expenditure rates is valuable for setting reasonable physical standards within the military. For example, limits on the distance and speed of foot marches can best be established by quantifying metabolic workloads of soldiers. The Soldier 2020 program is currently employing metabolic energy measurement to help establish job-related fitness requirements.

“For high-performance athletes or active-duty soldiers, optimally matching nutritional intake to the demands of a specific activity can improve performance and increase the likelihood of successful mission completion,” says Gary Shaw, principal investigator on the laboratory’s COBRA team. Physically demanding tasks can lead to glycogen depletion, which has a negative impact on performance. By tracking energy expenditure in real-time, soldiers could detect and avoid the onset of low glucose levels associated with glycogen depletion as well as other metabolic complications, such as heat stress.

While existing mobile IC sensors can make physiological measurements, they are expensive and complex to calibrate since their application has largely been limited to clinical studies, high-performance athletics, and field testing with small groups of subjects over limited periods of time. The COBRA sensor is smaller, simpler to use, and less costly to manufacture than existing IC sensors, enabling the measurement of individual energy expenditure for dozens of soldiers in a military field unit throughout the day. Lincoln Laboratory researchers hope to use such measurements to refine the personalized metabolic fuel model for individuals, track nutritional needs, and assess the impact of training on the individual’s metabolic efficiency and endurance.

“The COBRA system is a breakthrough technology that promises to provide performance comparable to $30,000-$40,000 sensors at a fraction of the cost and with ease of use that makes personal ownership feasible,” Shaw says.

USARIEM is currently testing and evaluating the COBRA sensor by comparing the COBRA measurements against those collected by laboratory-grade instruments. Once the sensor performance has been benchmarked in the laboratory, USARIEM will conduct small field studies to measure energy expenditure and nutrient consumption associated with different training exercises. Following successful field measurements, low-rate production of the COBRA sensor may be pursued in order to study energy expenditure and performance across dozens of soldiers  over days of activity.

Beyond its use in studies of the performance of soldiers and athletes, the COBRA sensor and associated metabolic model can be applied to the management of the general population’s metabolic health. It is anticipated that the COBRA sensor and metabolic model can be used to tailor dietary and exercise regimens for managing weight, inferring blood glucose and glycogen storage levels, and creating public databases on metabolic wellness and trends. This information could be used by clinicians and patients to aid in controlling obesity, which affects over one-third of Americans, and to provide a non-invasive indication of chronically high blood glucose, which is associated with the development of type-2 diabetes. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly half of the adult population in the United States is either diabetic or pre-diabetic.

There are several promising avenues for the COBRA sensor’s future. The researchers have applied for a patent and plan to conduct single-subject experiments to demonstrate how the sensor can be used in assessing nutritional imbalances. The laboratory will also seek opportunities to collaborate with other researchers interested in using COBRA as a tool in clinical studies, including those concerned with weight loss and endurance training.

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Talk science to me

In the spring of 2015, graduate students communicated a clear message to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS): They needed help communicating.

Specifically, they wanted to give better pitches for research and startup ideas and make presentations that wowed their colleagues and senior scientists. They also wanted to impress recruiters, who saw plenty of candidates with technical skills, but it was always the applicants with strong communication skills who really stood out from the pack.

Samantha Dale Strasser, a PhD candidate in EECS, says students were particularly stressed during conferences, when they realized their talks weren’t what they could be.

“Coming from MIT, we really want to be not only at the forefront of science, but also the forefront of communicating that science,” says Strasser, who was among the graduate students who provided the 2015 feedback.

In response, the department launched two initiatives: the EECS Communication Lab, a peer-coaching resource, and a new lab-supported class, 6.S977 (Technical Communication). By all accounts, both initiatives have succeeded, resulting not only in improved pitches and posters, but in a stronger department-wide awareness of power of effective communication as well.

The Comm Lab, as it’s affectionately known, employs graduate students and postdocs from across EECS to serve as peer coaches. The coaches have been trained in how to strengthen their own communication skills, including how to consider their audiences and purposes, how to generate excitement about their research, and how to create narrative rather than litanies. As a result, the communication advisors are ready to provide one-to-one help to virtually anyone in the department, including undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs.

“The Comm Lab is a great resource,” says Priyanka Raina, a PhD candidate in EECS who consulted the lab for a wide range of assignments including a conference paper, a presentation, her resumé, and a faculty package. “It helped me a great deal. All the assignments that I worked on with the lab were accepted or saw positive results. I even got an interview with a top university.”

The EECS Comm Lab is the latest installment of the Communication Lab program, a School of Engineering resource. The departments of Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Nuclear Science and Engineering also have their own communication labs, as does the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. The model has expanded quickly because it serves students at the time when they need it most, says Jaime Goldstein, the program’s former director.

“Early scientists need to get funding, get a job, go to conferences, and meet collaborators,” she says. “We insert ourselves at just that right moment with just the right information. And peer coaches know how to ask the right questions because they're insiders in the field. It’s a real recipe for success.”

Faculty members agree. In addition to that first Technical Communication class, the Comm Lab has hosted workshops and supported other courses. In January of this year, the Comm Lab provided a training session for graduate students presenting at the Microsystems Technology Laboratories’ Microsystems Annual Research Conference.

“Industry members and faculty commented that the quality of pitches showed marked improvement this year,” says Ujwal Radhakrishna, the EECS postdoc who organized the conference.

Research abstracts and presentations in 6.336 (Introduction to Numerical Simulation) have also been notably clearer than in the past, says Luca Daniel, an EECS professor who instructs the Comm Lab-supported class.

“The abstracts felt a lot better organized, with engaging motivations, detailed concise methods and results descriptions, and thoughtful considerations at the end,” Daniel says. “The presentations were also more accessible to a wider audience. My class has students from 12 different departments, so that’s essential.”

Daniel wasn’t the only one enthusiastic about the Comm Lab results in his course. Asked whether he should again use the resource in his course, he says his students also responded with an emphatic “yes.” Students also suggested adding midterm deadlines, in addition to deadlines for final abstracts and presentations, to encourage even earlier visits to the Comm Lab.

“They love the fact that it is other students helping them,” Daniel says.

Diana Chien, the current director of the school-wide Communication Lab program, understands the appeal. “In technical communication, you really can't separate the science or engineering from the communication, so our advisors are ready to tackle both at once,” she says. When EECS clients visit the Comm Lab to work on conference presentations with communication advisors, they’re really connecting with peers. The advisors are “as ready to parse details about the design of a machine-learning algorithm as they are to ask strategic questions about audience and storytelling,” Chien says.

Chien and the communication advisors also created an online resource, the CommKit, to guide students through several common communication tasks, such as a cover letter or a National Science Foundation application. If an impending deadline precludes students from meeting an advisor in person, help is still just a click away.

The Comm Lab’s popularity is growing. Since September 2016, advisors have scheduled more than 300 appointments with 180-plus advisees. More than 270 students attended workshops on posters, pitches, thesis proposals, and the Research Qualifying Exam (RQE). Feedback from the Comm Lab’s first annual survey remarkably showed that of the respondents who had visited the lab, all of them would recommend it to a friend. And while many students and postdocs haven’t yet used the lab, more than three quarters of non-users surveyed indicated they were still glad that EECS offers the service.

School of Engineering Dean Anantha Chandrakasan says the enthusiastic and sustained interest from students and faculty "tells us the program’s doing exceptionally well.”

“I expect the Comm Lab will become a staple resource in the department,” says Chandrakasan, who is also the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a former EECS department head.

Chris Foy, a PhD candidate in EECS who took the communication course and is now a peer coach, says skills taught in the Comm Lab have a clear professional impact. He ranks the Technical Communication class as one of his favorites at MIT, in part because it taught him how to focus on building a rationale or a narrative about his research.

“Being able to do this is crucial as a scientist because there are so many problems that are, in theory, worth solving,” he says. “But if you can’t construct a story around why you chose this problem,” he adds pointedly, “then why are you solving it?”

Joel Jean PhD '17, who received a doctorate in electrical engineering in May, credits his communication-advisor training with helping him clearly explain his vision for working on thin-film solar cells to help address climate change. That effort paid off: Jean won one of MIT’s most prestigious graduate awards, the Hugh Hampton Young Fellowship.

“My return on investment from working with the EECS Comm Lab as an advisor has been extraordinarily high,” he says. “And I expect its value, both for me and for students in the department, to keep growing.”

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Letter regarding timeline of the Senior House decision

The following letter was submitted to the Tech by Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart today.

To the editor,

Given the high level of interest in facts surrounding the Senior House decision, I thought it might help to lay out the milestone events of the last year and share my thinking. I’ve also posted a detailed set of FAQs.

One note: Since last summer, at the request of Senior House residents, we have not been publically sharing details about issues in the house. This has left many people wondering why our communications seem deliberately vague. While respecting student privacy, I will be as specific as I can.

The milestones:

June 2016 – Our initial decision

Looking at data from the MIT registrar, we discovered that the percentage of Senior House students who were never graduating was much higher than for the student body as a whole (21.1% vs. 7.7%). Among a constellation of concerning issues, this prompted us to close the house to the incoming freshman class, and to launch an effort to promote each Senior House resident’s well-being and personal and intellectual growth. We called this the turnaround. Through the summer, we worked with Senior House students to design the turnaround process.

Fall 2016 – Launch of the turnaround

I appointed a turnaround team of 47 people, including 28 residents and several Senior House alums. Beginning in the fall, we met frequently, as a group and in subcommittees. MIT has a distinctive tradition of involving students in many important decisions about how the Institute is run; in designing the turnaround, this spirit of mutual respect and trust is exactly what we had in mind. We wanted student self-governance to prevail, and we were hopeful that it could produce a healthy result. In fact, as The Tech reported last December, I told house residents that I believed they were on a positive trajectory to have freshmen in the house in September 2017.

Spring 2017 – Progress derailed

Unfortunately, in the spring we received highly credible reports of unsafe and illegal behavior in Senior House. To understand the situation better, we began a formal review, consisting of interviews with house residents as well as extensive ongoing conversations that Dean Nelson and I had with both residents and house leaders.

April-May 2017 – The review

The review made clear that multiple students had engaged in unsafe, illegal behavior, on multiple occasions. Importantly, it revealed a prevailing environment that enabled and even encouraged such behavior. We also learned that some students who were troubled by the illegal behavior felt silenced by members of the Senior House community. Together these signs told us that Senior House self-governance was broken. We concluded that the turnaround had failed. We thought it might still be possible to restore self-governance and allow members of the Senior House community who were not involved in or accepting of the troubling behavior to create a fresh version of the house: a reset.

June 12, 2017 – The reset

Because a subset of residents was determined to keep Senior House unchanged, the only hope for a reset to succeed was to ask everyone to leave and reapply. So on June 12th, we did. However, as the process began, prospective new residents reported facing personal pressure from some Senior House residents and alumni about how they should behave, as well as an intensive campaign to reconstitute the Senior House status quo. Undermined in this way, the reset was bound to fail, too.

July 7, 2017 – Our decision to use the building as graduate housing

Our fundamental obligations to student safety and well-being forced us to choose a new path. Judging that a community of graduate students would be better able to withstand outside pressure and create a new culture of their own, we decided to use the building to house graduate students only. As I explained in a July 11 letter to undergraduates, we had run out of workable and realistic options. We had to close the house and start again.

Both students and alumni have raised questions about whether a residential community should be disrupted because some of its members behaved badly. But I hope you can see that the issues ran deeper than that. This was not about any single incident, or just a couple of students who broke the rules. And it was certainly not a verdict on east side culture. More broadly, it was about a house environment that made it impossible for us to move forward constructively, even with those residents willing to work with us in good faith. And it was about a loss of trust, including with individuals we thought were committed to the turnaround.

I know this decision has caused deep distress for many people. And it was not the outcome we spent a year striving to achieve. One of its painful consequences is the elimination of a space on campus that has been very important to our LBGTQ+ students. We are working actively with all residents to make sure they each find a welcoming living situation and to ensure that the staff in every residence is trained to understand issues they may face. We are also starting work with LBGTQ+ student leaders to find new ways to support their community.

One final note: I have not referred to the 2015 Healthy Minds study. It was not relevant to any of our decisions this year. If you have questions about it, you can read more in the FAQs. I am certain some in the MIT community disagree with our conclusions. But I hope it is clear to everyone that we take to heart our responsibility for student well-being, pay close attention to all the input we receive, seek and weigh every available option, and make our best judgments – with our students at the center of the process, and at the center of our thoughts.

Respectfully,

Cynthia Barnhart PhD ’88

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Ultracold molecules hold promise for quantum computing

Researchers have taken an important step toward the long-sought goal of a quantum computer, which in theory should be capable of vastly faster computations than conventional computers, for certain kinds of problems. The new work shows that collections of ultracold molecules can retain the information stored in them, for hundreds of times longer than researchers have previously achieved in these materials.

These two-atom molecules are made of sodium and potassium and were cooled to temperatures just a few ten-millionths of a degree above absolute zero (measured in hundreds of nanokelvins, or nK). The results are described in a report this week in Science, by Martin Zwierlein, an MIT professor of physics; Jee Woo Park, a former MIT graduate student; Sebastian Will, a former research scientist at MIT and now an assistant professor at Columbia University, and two others, all at the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms.

Many different approaches are being studied as possible ways of creating qubits, the basic building blocks of long-theorized but not yet fully realized quantum computers. Researchers have tried using superconducting materials, ions held in ion traps, or individual neutral atoms, as well as molecules of varying complexity. The new approach uses a cluster of very simple molecules made of just two atoms.

“Molecules have more ‘handles’ than atoms,” Zwierlein says, meaning more ways to interact with each other and with outside influences. “They can vibrate, they can rotate, and in fact they can strongly interact with each other, which atoms have a hard time doing. Typically, atoms have to really meet each other, be on top of each other almost, before they see that there's another atom there to interact with, whereas molecules can see each other” over relatively long ranges. “In order to make these qubits talk to each other and perform calculations, using molecules is a much better idea than using atoms,” he says.

Using this kind of two-atom molecules for quantum information processing “had been suggested some time ago,” says Park, “and this work demonstrates the first experimental step toward realizing this new platform, which is that quantum information can be stored in dipolar molecules for extended times.”

“The most amazing thing is that [these] molecules are a system which may allow realizing both storage and processing of quantum information, using the very same physical system,” Will says. “That is actually a pretty rare feature that is not typical at all among the qubit systems that are mostly considered today.”

In the team’s initial proof-of-principle lab tests, a few thousand of the simple molecules were contained in a microscopic puff of gas, trapped at the intersection of two laser beams and cooled to ultracold temperatures of about 300 nanokelvins. “The more atoms you have in a molecule the harder it gets to cool them,” Zwierlein says, so they chose this simple two-atom structure.  

The molecules have three key characteristics: rotation, vibration, and the spin direction of the nuclei of the two individual atoms. For these experiments, the researchers got the molecules under perfect control in terms of all three characteristics — that is, into the lowest state of vibration, rotation, and nuclear spin alignment.

“We have been able to trap molecules for a long time, and also demonstrate that they can carry quantum information and hold onto it for a long time,” Zwierlein says. And that, he says, is “one of the key breakthroughs or milestones one has to have before hoping to build a quantum computer, which is a much more complicated endeavor.”

The use of sodium-potassium molecules provides a number of advantages, Zwierlein says. For one thing, “the molecule is chemically stable, so if one of these molecules meets another one they don't break apart.”

In the context of quantum computing, the “long time” Zwierlein refers to is one second — which is “in fact on the order of a thousand times longer than a comparable experiment that has been done” using rotation to encode the qubit, he says. “Without additional measures, that experiment gave a millisecond, but this was great already.” With this team’s method, the system’s inherent stability means “you get a full second for free.”

That suggests, though it remains to be proven, that such a system would be able to carry out thousands of quantum computations, known as gates, in sequence within that second of coherence. The final results could then be “read” optically through a microscope, revealing the final state of the molecules.

“We have strong hopes that we can do one so-called gate — that's an operation between two of these qubits, like addition, subtraction, or that sort of equivalent — in a fraction of a millisecond,” Zwierlein says. “If you look at the ratio, you could hope to do 10,000 to 100,000 gate operations in the time that we have the coherence in the sample. That has been stated as one of the requirements for a quantum computer, to have that sort of ratio of gate operations to coherence times.”

“The next great goal will be to ‘talk’ to individual molecules. Then we are really talking quantum information,” Will says. “If we can trap one molecule, we can trap two. And then we can think about implementing a ‘quantum gate operation’ — an elementary calculation — between two molecular qubits that sit next to each other,” he says.

Using an array of perhaps 1,000 such molecules, Zwierlein says, would make it possible to carry out calculations so complex that no existing computer could even begin to check the possibilities. Though he stresses that this is still an early step and that such computers could be a decade or more away, in principle such a device could quickly solve currently intractable problems such as factoring very large numbers — a process whose difficulty forms the basis of today’s best encryption systems for financial transactions.

Besides quantum computing, the new system also offers the potential for a new way of carrying out precision measurements and quantum chemistry, Zwierlein says.

“These results are truly state of the art,” says Simon Cornish, a professor of physics at Durham University in the U.K., who was not involved in this work. The findings “beautifully reveal the potential of exploiting nuclear spin states in ultracold molecules for applications in quantum information processing, as quantum memories and as a means to probe dipolar interactions and ultracold collisions in polar molecules,” he says. “I think the results constitute a major step forward in the field of ultracold molecules and will be of broad interest to the large community of researchers exploring related aspects of quantum science, coherence, quantum information, and quantum simulation.”

The team also included MIT graduate student Zoe Yan and postdoc Huanqian Loh. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

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SproutsIO aims to power a “Personal Produce” movement

MIT Media Lab alumna Jennifer Broutin Farah SM ’13, CEO and co-founder of SproutsIO, has spent nearly a decade innovating in urban farming, designing small- and large-scale gardening systems that let anyone grow food, anywhere, at any time.

All this work will soon culminate with the commercial release of her startup’s smart, app-controlled microgarden that lets consumers optimize, customize, and monitor the growth of certain fruits, vegetables, and herbs year-round. Moreover, the soil-free system uses only 2 percent of the water and 40 percent of the nutrients typically used for soil-grown plants.

After piloting the system in Boston homes and restaurants, and following a successful Kickstarter campaign last fall, SproutsIO is ramping up production and hitting the shelves in a few months. Philosophically, the aim is to power a “personal produce” movement, Farah says, in which more people grow their own food, encouraging healthier eating and cutting down on waste.

“Over the last 60 years, we’ve gotten out of touch with growing our food,” Farah says. “But when you grow your own food, you care more about what happens to it. You’re not going to throw it away, you’re going to know exactly what’s going into your plants, you’re going to share your food with friends and family. It gives a new meaning to produce.”

Customized plants

Tailoring plants for taste preferences may not be well-known outside of the wine-making world, where grapes are grown under specific climatic conditions to produce specific flavors. But produce and herbs have similar peculiarities. Even within a given species or variety, individual plants can have different characteristics and growing needs.

“Most of that is dependent on the environment,” Farah says. “If you can customize the lighting, the water, and the nutrients, you can really optimize certain variations in the plants, according to how you want them to taste. SproutsIO can reproduce these specific climatic conditions to a very precise degree.”

SproutsIO consists of a growing device, which is a large basin with a curving, overhead adjustable lamp attached; a replaceable and compostable “sIO” seed refill with growing media, seeds, and nutrients, that’s dropped into the growing device; and “SproutsIOGrow” software that includes a mobile app that collects and analyzes growth data and controls the system. Currently, the system supports basil, kale, wheatgrass, arugula, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, tea, and a variety of plants from root vegetables to fruiting plants.

The SproutsIO system has a number of innovations developed by the startup, stemming from early research at MIT. The hybrid hydroculture system, for instance, consists of “hydroponic” and “aeroponic” growing, where roots are submerged in or misted with water and nutrients. Varying the watering process optimizes water and nutrient use while supporting the growth of different plants at different phases. A tomato plant, for instance, grows large roots during the fruiting stage. The system can lift the plant up at that time to let the roots grow larger, but still deliver water and nutrients by misting.

There’s also a custom LED light that automatically adjusts, depending on need. If the device is located near a window, where sunlight is plentiful, the light will dim; if the sunlight diminishes or if the device is placed in darker areas, the light shines brighter. The system uses about half the electricity of a 60-watt incandescent light bulb.

Sensors monitor plant growth and transmit data to what Farah calls the “backbone” of the system: SproutsIOGrow. The app lets users customize their plants and monitor the plant’s growth in real-time. Depending on light and nutrients added, for instance, tomatoes can be grown to taste sweeter or more savory.

The app also provides predictive growth cycles and connects to personal activity trackers, meal planners, and calendars to help with meal scheduling. A built-in camera takes regular snapshots of growing plants for health diagnostics and to create time-lapse images for users on the app.

Growing plants in such a controlled environment boosts growth efficiency by six times and cuts the length of growth cycles by 50 percent over traditional gardening, according to the startup.

Farah says people often ask her if all the technology tends to remove people from the growing process. It’s the exact opposite, she says: “Technology creates a whole new lens on the growing process. Most of us don’t understand how plants grow because they exist on a totally different time scale. But we show people how the plants grow over time and how they react to certain changes. That’s really eye-opening.”

Shrinking greenhouses

Today’s SproutsIO system is the product of years of refinement for mass adoption. In 2009, while working for New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation, Farah designed a “vertically integrated greenhouse” system, called the Façade Farm. The system consisted of a large metal frame that could be affixed to the side of a building. Long metal planters were installed inside like shelves, and a pump system was installed on the floor. The boxes could be placed up and down a building like gardening balconies.

Though never fully realized, the system got Farah thinking about bringing growing systems to urban areas — a concept that’s popular now but was fairly novel at the time. Building massive structures, however, was a time-consuming and complex process. In 2011, Farah enrolled in the Media Lab, in the Changing Places Group, to develop the idea on a smaller scale.

For her master’s thesis, she built a slightly smaller indoor aeroponic system, called SeedPod, that consisted of modular planters made of inflatable plastic and suspended in three tiers by steel rods. The planters were equipped with sensors for monitoring the plants. An automated pump provided water and nutrients to each planter.

Partnering with Boston Public Schools, Farah installed the system in a middle school in Roxbury. Students started growing plants to eat, and teachers incorporated the gardening into their lessons. “It clicked that the more involved people are with growing food, the more they cared about what happened to it,” she says.

In 2012, Farah shrunk the system further, developing a microgardening “station” that could be used in homes. A number of growing pods — moving toward today’s SproutsIO device — were attached to a vertical pole at different levels, resembling a tree of pods. Included were early versions of the misting system, lighting, and sensors viewed through an app.

In 2013, Farah launched SproutsIO and entered the project into the $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, where she was a semifinalist, and a Founders.org entrepreneurship competition, which she won. Through MIT Sloan School of Management and Media Lab venture-based classes, she honed the business idea and fleshed out her startup’s larger “personal produce” mission. “Those courses were very inspiring classes that helped to get students thinking about how their ideas apply to larger world context,” she says.

Years of user feedback and research and development helped the startup refine the product into today’s SproutsIO system. Early prototypes, in fact, were sent to Barbara Lynch, a renowned Boston chef who is now advisor to the startup. “What better way to really understand how well the system can perform than putting it in a professional chef’s kitchen?” Farah says. SproutsIO continues to work with a number of professional chefs across the nation.

Ultimately, however, what benefit does a smart microgarden offer over simply growing potted plants at home? “At a base level, we make it easier for people to start growing,” Farah says. But she also believes the system is “a small-scale solution that can have a big impact.”

Individual SproutsIO units can save consumers water, energy, and resources, while easing them into growing their own food. If enough people adopt the system, she says, it could save significant amounts of water and encourage local, efficient growing. But the concept of optimized watering systems, if designed at scale, could also benefit a world where around 70 percent of fresh water is used for industrial agricultural, she adds.

“We need to be considering different solutions for growing that start to optimize the needs of the plant, rather than just pouring tons of water and nutrients on them,” she says.

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Featured video: A self-driving wheelchair

Singapore and MIT have been at the forefront of autonomous vehicle development. First, there were self-driving golf buggies. Then, an autonomous electric car. Now, leveraging similar technology, MIT and Singaporean researchers have developed and deployed a self-driving wheelchair at a hospital. 

Spearheaded by Daniela Rus, the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, this autonomous wheelchair is an extension of the self-driving scooter that launched at MIT last year — and it is a testament to the success of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, or SMART – a collaboration between researchers at MIT and in Singapore.

Rus, who is also the principal investigator of the SMART Future Urban Mobility research group, says this newest innovation can help nurses focus more on patient care as they can get relief from logistics work which includes searching for wheelchairs and wheeling patients in the complex hospital network.

"When we visited several retirement communities, we realized that the quality of life is dependent on mobility. We want to make it really easy for people to move around," Rus says.

Submitted by: Pauline Teo/SMART | Video by: SMART | 3 min, 3 sec

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El nuevo aeropuerto internacional de Pekín toma forma

Las batallas por los mejores y más grandes aeropuertos continúan en el mundo de la aviación con la coronación hace unos días de la estructura de acero de la terminal principal del nuevo aeropuerto internacional de Pekín. 

Este impresionante aeropuerto ha sido diseñado por el estudio Zaha Hadid Architects y la empresa francesa especializada en ingeniería aeroportuaria ADP Ingénierie. 

Actualmente, la enorme estructura de acero cuenta con 313.000 metros cuadrados y ha sido diseñado para soportar un volumen anual de 620.000 vuelos el tráfico, 100 millones de pasajeros y 4 millones de toneladas de carga. Así mismo, contará con siete pistas de aterrizaje, 78 puertas e incluirá un hotel.

A la hora de desarrollar este proyecto se ha contado que sea un aeropuerto adaptable y sostenible, además de instalarse lo último en tecnología ecointeligente como paneles solares, transportación eléctrica en su interior y un sistema de reciclaje de agua y desechos.

Esta megaconstrucción con forma de estrella será un centro clave dentro de la creciente red de transporte de Beijing al contar con un centro de transporte de 80.000 metros cuadrados con enlaces directos a los servicios ferroviarios locales y nacionales, incluyendo el tren de alta velocidad Gaotie.

Con lo que respecta al diseño de las cinco alas del aeropuerto, en la cultura china representa a la seda, al té, a la porcelana, a la tierra de labranza y el jardín chino.

Además el recinto incluirá jardines y áreas separadas para pasajeros de vuelos internacionales y nacionales en un intento por reducir las filas de espera y crear un espacio más compacto.

Una de las características únicas que tendrá este aeropuerto, es la corta distancia que habrá en cada una de las alas al edificio central sin superar los 600 metros. Este diseño se diferencia de otros grandes aeropuertos internacionales del mundo porque estos obligan a caminar largas distancias a los pasajeros.

El aeropuerto se sitúa a 46 kilómetros al sur del centro de la capital china y se está construyendo allí para aliviar la presión sobre el abarrotado Aeropuerto Internacional de Capital de Beijing, localizado en el noreste de la urbe.

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