Self-transforming robot blocks jump, spin, flip, and identify each other

Swarms of simple, interacting robots have the potential to unlock stealthy abilities for accomplishing complex tasks. Getting these robots to achieve a true hive-like mind of coordination, though, has proved to be a hurdle.

In an effort to change this, a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) came up with a surprisingly simple scheme: self-assembling robotic cubes that can climb over and around one another, leap through the air, and roll across the ground.

Six years after the project’s first iteration, the robots can now “communicate” with each other using a barcode-like system on each face of the block that allows the modules to identify each other. The autonomous fleet of 16 blocks can now accomplish simple tasks or behaviors, such as forming a line, following arrows, or tracking light.

Inside each modular “M-Block” is a flywheel that moves at 20,000 revolutions per minute, using angular momentum when the flywheel is braked. On each edge and every face are permanent magnets that let any two cubes attach to each other.

While the cubes can’t be manipulated quite as easily as, say, those from the video game "Minecraft," the team envisions strong applications in disaster response and relief. Imagine a burning building where a staircase has disappeared. In the future, you might simply throw M-Blocks on the ground and watch them build out a temporary staircase for climbing up to the roof or down to the basement to rescue victims.

“M stands for motion, magnet, and magic,” says MIT Professor and CSAIL Director Daniela Rus. “'Motion,' because the cubes can move by jumping. 'Magnet,' because the cubes can connect to other cubes using magnets, and once connected they can move together and connect to assemble structures. 'Magic,' because we don’t see any moving parts, and the cube appears to be driven by magic.”

Beyond disaster relief, the researchers imagine using the blocks for things like gaming, manufacturing, and health care.

“The unique thing about our approach is that it’s inexpensive, robust, and potentially easier to scale to a million modules,'' says CSAIL PhD student John Romanishin, lead author on a new paper about the system. “M-Blocks can move in a general way. Other robotic systems have much more complicated movement mechanisms that require many steps, but our system is more scalable and cost-effective.”

Romanishin wrote the paper alongside Rus and undergraduate student John Mamish of the University of Michigan. They will present the paper on M-blocks at IEEE’s International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in November in Macau.

Previous modular robot systems typically tackle movement using unit modules with small robotic arms known as external actuators. These systems require a lot of coordination for even the simplest movements, with multiple commands for one jump or hop.

On the communication side, other attempts have involved the use of infrared light or radio waves, which can quickly get clunky: If you have lots of robots in a small area and they're all trying to send each other signals, it opens up a messy channel of conflict and confusion.

When a system uses radio signals to communicate, the signals can interfere with each other when there are many radios in a small volume.

Back in 2013, the team built out their mechanism for M-Blocks. They created six-faced cubes that move about using something called “inertial forces.” This means that, instead of using moving arms that help connect the structures, the blocks have a mass inside of them which they “throw” against the side of the module, which causes the block to rotate and move.

Each module can move in four cardinal directions when placed on any one of the six faces, which results in 24 different movement directions. Without little arms and appendages sticking out of the blocks, it’s a lot easier for them to stay free of damage and avoid collisions.

Knowing that the team had tackled the physical hurdles, the critical challenge still persisted: How to make these cubes communicate and reliably identify the configuration of neighboring modules?

Romanishin came up with algorithms designed to help the robots accomplish simple tasks, or "behaviors,” which led them to the idea of a barcode-like system where the robots can sense the identity and face of what other blocks they’re connected to.

In one experiment, the team had the modules turn into a line from a random structure, and they watched if the modules could determine the specific way that they were connected to each other. If they weren’t, they’d have to pick a direction and roll that way until they ended up on the end of the line.

Essentially, the blocks used the configuration of how they're connected to each other in order to guide the motion that they choose to move — and 90 percent of the M-Blocks succeeded in getting into a line.

The team notes that building out the electronics was very challenging, especially when trying to fit intricate hardware inside such a small package. To make the M-Block swarms a larger reality, the team wants just that — more and more robots to make bigger swarms with stronger capabilities for various structures.

The project was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation and Amazon Robotics.

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Practicing for a voyage to Mars

If you want to make the long voyage to Mars, you first have to train and rehearse, and MIT alumnus Barret Schlegelmilch SM ’18, MBA ’18 is doing just that. He recently commanded a 45-day practice mission living and working with three other would-be astronauts in a cramped simulated spaceship.

NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) analog mission “departed” last spring for a trip to Phobos, the larger of the two moons of Mars. It was the second of four planned missions to Phobos in the mock spacecraft located at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The goal is to study the physiological and psychological effects of extended isolation and confinement, team dynamics, and conflict resolution.

While on the mission, Schlegelmilch and three other crew members spent their time just as they would on a real trip to Phobos. They performed experiments, tended plants and shrimp, collected data, maintained equipment, and even communicated with kids in a classroom back home. Once they “arrived” at Phobos, two crew members did a virtual-reality spacewalk, and Schlegelmilch and a flight engineer flew a simulated shuttle craft to the surface.

“That was probably one of the most fun and rewarding things we did,” Schlegelmilch says.

The crew also had to deal with emergencies including fire, loss of pressure, and solar flares, which release a deadly bombardment of radiation. In another scenario, Mission Control secretly told one of the crew to pretend to have a serious injury or heart attack. The others had to draw on their training and the supplies they had on board, along with some advice from a flight surgeon back on Earth (though messages took several minutes each way due to the distance).

The average distance to Mars is about 225 million kilometers, which means that there will be on the order of a 10-minute delay from when any communication is sent and received between ground control on Earth and a crew near Mars. Over the course of the mission, “I saw our crew actually becoming more autonomous and relying on Mission Control less, just because it was so difficult to communicate with them through the time delays,” Schlegelmilch says.

This wasn’t Schlegelmilch’s first experience with working conditions like this. His long-term personal goal has always been spaceflight, so he joined the U.S. Navy after college and served as a diver and officer on nuclear submarines. “I thought subs would be a good analog for the astronaut program. It’s kind of like a spaceship — it’s a self-contained vessel where you carry your own food and make your drinking water and air,” he says. “And you’re not able to just walk outside at the end of the work day; you’re out there for months at a time.”

After his Navy service, Schlegelmilch joined the MIT Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program, earning an MBA and SM in aeronautics and astronautics in 2018. “I wanted to get a more technical foundation and learn how to translate some of my leadership skills from the Navy into the private sector, and LGO is the perfect fit for doing both of those things,” he says.

The HERA mission was actually more demanding than a submarine voyage in some ways, Schlegelmilch says. Instead of being on a 300-foot-long ship with 150 people, there were just four people crowded into a space half the size of a semi-truck trailer. His crew mates were Ana Mosquera, an astrophysicist and artificial intelligence researcher; Christian Clark, an accomplished cave diver and marine researcher; and Julie Mason, a rocket propulsion engineer at Boeing. The main thing they have in common? “Everyone’s been bitten by the space bug in one way or another,” he says.

Before the mission, the crew underwent extensive psychological testing, and NASA gave them “tool sets” — similar to those taught in LGO for “storming and norming” group development exercises — to help them work more effectively as a team to solve problems. “As a crew, we got along surprisingly well, which I attribute partly to those toolsets,” Schlegelmilch says. “A lot of LGO, and MIT in general, is about how to work with small groups of people on very intense assignments.”

After graduating from MIT, Schlegelmilch went to Blue Origin, a private firm founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to develop technologies to enable private human access to space. After taking a leave for the HERA mission, he returned to Blue Origin and is now head of integrated supply chain for the fluids and mechanical systems of the company’s New Glenn vehicle, a two-piece orbital rocket whose bottom portion autonomously lands itself on a barge at sea for reuse.

As he works on the technology to make space travel more feasible, Schlegelmilch is also working to qualify for the next astronaut class at NASA. Though his first application in 2015 ultimately wasn’t successful, he remains hopeful he’ll have the opportunity to visit space himself.

“I’ll keep applying. I think that’s the goal of a lot of people in this industry,” he says. “There’s a real possibility in our lifetime that spaceflight is something that’s going to be affordable and achievable for average people.”

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Students present mechanical engineering projects that have global impact

One event has become a hallmark of nearly every academic conference: the poster session. Posters summarizing research are tacked onto endless rows of bulletin boards. Leaders in any given field meander through the posters, asking presenters questions about their work on the spot. For junior researchers participating in poster sessions for the first time, the events can be daunting.

The Graduate Association of Mechanical Engineers (GAME) and MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering are working to remove the intimidation factor that surrounds poster sessions and presentations. For the sixth year in a row, they have organized the Mechanical Engineering Research Exhibition (MERE), which was held on Oct. 11 in MIT’s student center. Over 60 graduate students, postdocs, and Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) students presented their research projects to nearly 200 attendees in a poster session-style event. The event was organized by graduate students Crystal Owens and Maytee Chantharayukhonthorn.

“Providing students with a venue to practice presenting has been instrumental in boosting their confidence,” says Evelyn Wang, Gail E. Kendall Professor and department head in mechanical engineering. “Whether students pursue a career in academia, industry, or government, the ability to clearly communicate about their work will always be a crucial skill.”

Nicholas Fang, professor of mechanical engineering and GAME faculty advisor, has seen these skills of technical communication improve in students who participate in MERE year-to-year. He also sees the event as a great introduction to MIT for first-year graduate students and undergrads who are considering graduate study at MIT.

“Participation by first-year students is very important to this event,” he explains. “New students can’t take a seat in every single lab to learn about each other’s work, so MERE gives them the best opportunity to get to know the research in the department as a whole.”

Mechanical engineering research across MIT is incredibly diverse and touches upon a wide swath of disciplines, but one common theme united the research presented at MERE — every project offered solutions and insights that could one day have tangible impact on a global scale.

Solutions in human health

Two examples of projects that could impact human health took different approaches to improving our understanding of brain cancer. Cynthia Hajal is using microfluidic chips to grow blood vessels that mimic the human brain. A PhD candidate working with Roger Kamm, Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Biological and Mechanical Engineering, Hajal is using microfluidics to learn more about how cancer metastasizes in the brain.

“The idea is to rebuild human organs outside of the body to track and test different diseases,” explains Hajal. To track and test brain cancer, Hajal and her team place cells taken from a human brain into microfluidic channels that are pumped with nutrients and serum. About seven days later, the cells self-assemble into brain capillaries. The research team then places tumor cells into the channels and tracks their progression over time.

“Our process helps us image metastasis in short intervals of time so we can really slow down and find out what exactly is happening at every stage of the process,” Hajal adds.

Ali Daher, meanwhile, uses mathematical modelling in the hopes of one day helping doctors determine the best course of treatment for glioblastoma multiforme brain tumors. “When a doctor is in the process of coming up with a treatment plan for the patient, they are faced with many challenges,” says Daher, a senior studying mechanical engineering.

To help inform a doctor’s treatment plan, Daher is utilizing mathematical models to predict how a tumor might react to treatment plans. Using a reduced-order scheme developed for fluid systems by Pierre Lermusiaux, professor of mechanical engineering, Daher worked on an algorithm that could help doctors determine what therapies would be most effective.

Improving access to food and water

In addition to human health, another pervasive theme at MERE this year was how humans interact with the environment. Two projects in particular honed in on how we can improve access to food and water, especially in developing countries.

Sonal Thengane, a postdoc working with Ahmed Ghoniem, the Ronald C. Crane (1972) Professor, is developing fertilizers made of carbon-rich biochar to improve soil quality and crop yield. Biochar is made by torrefying (drying with fire) waste from farms or forests. “When it is mixed into the soil, the biochar is very porous and retains the moisture and nutrients for a longer time,” says Thengane.

Thengane’s work has already been tested on a farm in Kenya and will soon be tested in the United States and India with support from the Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab (J-WAFS). He and his team have also explored the possibility of repurposing the debris from forest fires and logging residues, and using it in biochar-based soil. “We are also working in California, which has had so many forest fires recently,” he explains. “California has many farms that could benefit from this soil.”

While Thengane is working on improving crop yield and increasing access to safer food, Hannah Varner is hoping to improve access to fresh water in India. A graduate student in MIT’s GEAR Lab, Varner is in the process of building a prototype system that desalinates brackish water in India.

“Groundwater holds a lot of potential for solving the water crisis in places like India and the southwestern United States,” says Varner, who works with Associate Professor Amos Winter. The problem with groundwater is it often is brackish — containing too much salt to be potable. Utilizing modeling and an understanding of fluid dynamics and electrochemical processes, Varner was able to design a system for point-of-use desalination of brackish water in India.

“The really exciting thing is I was able to design a system and then bring it to Bangalore this summer,” she says.

Award winners

Throughout MERE, participants like Varner spoke with judges who assessed their presentation skills. Awards were given to the following students:

First-place presentations: Erin Looney for “Accelerating Cleantech Hardware System Development;” John San Soucie for “Gaussian dirichlet Random Fields For Inference Over High Dimensional Categorical Observations;” Nick Selby for “Teachbot : An Education System For Workforce;” and Meghan Huber for “Visual Perception Of Stiffness From Multijoint Motion”

Best first-time presenter: Kuangye Lu for “Remote Epitaxy Of Gaas On Cvd Graphene For Wafer Re Usability And Flexible Electronics”

Best UROP: Helen Read for “Fracture Toughness Of Polyacrylamide Hydrogels”

Second-place runners-up include: Chinmay Kulkarni, Cynthia Hajal, Jongwoo Lee, Francesco Sigorato and Matteo Alberghini, Kiarash Gordiz, Nisha Chandramoorthy, Noam Buckman, Emily Rogers, and Sydney Sroka.

The following presenters were given honorable mentions: James Hermus, Yeongin Kim, ZhiYi Liang, Lauren Chai, Sanghoon Bae, Antoine Blanchard, Rabab Haider, Scott Tan, and Jaewoo Shim.

Making your own luck

After the conclusion of the exhibition, Helen Greiner '89, SM '90 delivered a keynote speech. An innovator in the field of robotics, Greiner traced her career path in front of an audience filled with mechanical engineering students. Inspired by the Star Wars character R2D2, Greiner took an early interest in robotics. In 1990, she co-founded iRobot.

After a decade of trial and error, iRobot found success with products such as the Roomba and PackBot. While the Roomba has cemented its place in popular culture, thanks in large part to a Pepsi advertisement featuring Dave Chappelle, the PackBot has made a huge impact on how military operations are executed.

“These robots were credited with saving the lives of hundreds of soldiers and thousands of civilians,” Greiner recalls.

Greiner encouraged students to “make their own luck.” With luck and determination, the students and postdocs who presented earlier in the day could someday see their products, designs, and theories have the kind of impact Greiner’s robot innovations have had. 

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High school teams receive 2019-20 Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam Grant for invention projects

The Lemelson-MIT Program has announced the 2019-20 InvenTeams, 14 teams of high school students from across the country who received up to $10,000 in grant funding to build a technological invention to solve problems of their own choosing. The problems stem from concerns the students recognized in their local communities, or from ones that they have a personal connection to, that exist in the world at large. This year’s proposed inventions include a wearable device to monitor symptoms of sepsis, an automated machine that cleans beach litter, a system to gauge the flow rate of maple sap, and a publicly accessible laundry machine for people experiencing homelessness. 

Now in its 16th year as a national grants initiative, InvenTeams inspire young people to invent technological solutions to real-world problems. The 2019-20 InvenTeams are comprised of students, teachers, and community mentors who will pursue year-long invention projects that involve creative thinking, problem-solving, and hands-on learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The students also gain knowledge of computer science while working on their projects, which is a critical skill for all young people, and especially helpful to their future work as inventors. InvenTeams apply their learnings and experiences to build an invention that will be showcased at a technical review within their home community in February 2020, and then again as a final prototype at EurekaFest — an invention celebration in June 2020 that will be held in Washington.

“I am impressed by this year’s InvenTeams and their commitment to solving important problems in society” says Stephanie Couch, executive director of the Lemelson-MIT Program. “By drawing on many different disciplines, the InvenTeam initiative helps shape well-rounded students who are better equipped to tackle the technological problems they will face in the modern workplace. Approximately 2,750 students have taken part in the InvenTeam experience, and 35 percent are girls, which is encouraging in a time when women represent only 10 percent of U.S. patent holders. The InvenTeam initiative fosters the ability to engage with others in order to develop understandings of problems and to envision solutions that take the views of end-users into account. The work supports students of all backgrounds in developing creative and inventive problem-solving skills that will be of benefit in their college and career endeavors, and in their personal lives.”

“This year’s projects demonstrate the dedication of young students to make a positive impact in the world through invention,” says Tony Perry, the Lemelson-MIT Program’s invention education coordinator, who will work with the teams throughout the year. “The InvenTeams will help solve major problems in areas such as environmental sustainability, regional food harvesting, and healthy living.” 

The InvenTeams hail from 12 different states, including South Dakota and Nevada, two states that have never had an InvenTeam prior to this year. The invention projects were selected by a respected panel from the Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, area, consisting of university professors, inventors, entrepreneurs, industry professionals, and college students who were on InvenTeams when they were in high school.

Solving problems in health and community

• Lower Brule High School (Lower Brule, S.D.): System to provide community entertainment at the outdoor basketball court
• Francis Tuttle Technology Center (Oklahoma City, Okla.): System to sanitize airport security bins
• Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative (Bronx, N.Y.): Wearable device to monitor physical surroundings and alert to danger
• Spanish River Community High School (Boca Raton, Fla.): Wearable device to monitor physiological symptoms of sepsis
• Baruch College Campus High School (New York, N.Y.): Publicly accessible laundry machine for people experiencing homelessness

Solving problems in environment and sustainability

• Greenon Local Schools (Springfield, Ohio): System to prevent humanmade debris from entering the sewer system
• Edward C. Reed High School (Sparks, Nev.): Device to remove cigarette butts from drain sewers
• Americas High School (El Paso, Texas): System to sort recycled plastics and create reusable PET flakes
• Williamston High School (Williamston, Mich.): Automated beach litter cleaning device
• Stockbridge Jr./Sr. High School (Stockbridge, Mich.): Device to remotely monitor aquatic life
• Colfax High School (Colfax, Calif.): Device to transform brush into biochar and electrical energy
• Billerica Memorial High School (Billerica, Mass.): System to monitor snow loads on commercial flat roofs

Solving problems in food and agriculture

• Patricia A. Hannaford Career Center (Middlebury, Vt.): System to monitor the flow rate of maple sap
• Gulfport High School (Gulfport, Miss.): Device to automatically flip oyster farm cages

The Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam application for the 2020-21 school year is now available. STEM teachers are encouraged to apply now through April 6, 2020.

K-12 teachers and school administrator who are not yet ready for a year-long invention experience with students may consider applying for an Excite Award to attend, free of charge, a three-day professional development workshop with other teachers on July 29-31, 2020, at MIT. Learn how others have implemented pathways for invention education in their schools and districts through classes, afterschool enrichment activities, and camps, as well as InvenTeams.

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J-PAL North America announces five new partnerships with state and local governments

J-PAL North America, a research center in MIT’s Department of Economics, announced new partnerships with five state and local governments across the United States.

The California Department of State Hospitals, Minnesota Board of Pharmacy, Minnesota State Court Administrator’s Office, Shasta County Superior Court, and Virginia Department of Social Services were selected to partner with J-PAL North America and its network of leading academic researchers through the J-PAL State and Local Innovation Initiative. These partnerships will develop randomized evaluations, also known as randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which have the potential to yield rigorous evidence about which programs and policies are most effective. 

“We are thrilled to partner with these five state and local governments to address pressing policy problems across the country through rigorous evaluation,” says Mary Ann Bates, J-PAL North America executive director and co-chair of the State and Local Innovation Initiative. “We are particularly excited about how many of these projects will build on evidence from prior randomized evaluations to test if similar interventions can be effective in different settings.”

These proposals will examine a wide variety of topics and intervention methods, including reducing over-prescription of opioids, reducing failures to appear for arraignment, addressing homelessness and housing instability, and increasing the take-up of federal tax credits for low-income families.

In California, individuals with serious mental illness who face felony charges and are likely to be found incompetent to stand trial are directed to the Department of State Hospitals (DSH) to receive treatments to regain competency. DSH has launched a new Pre-trial Felony Mental Health Diversion program, through which approximately 20 counties will receive funding to divert individuals who are incompetent to stand trial out of the criminal justice system and into wrap-around community treatment services. DSH is partnering with J-PAL North America to evaluate the effects of the Pre-Trial Felony Mental Health Diversion program. This evaluation will contribute significant insight into how diverting those found to be incompetent to stand trial due to mental health reasons to community mental health services may impact their individual well-being, as well as broader outcomes in the criminal justice and behavioral health systems.

“The California Department of State Hospitals is pleased to partner with J-PAL to evaluate how Felony Mental Health Diversion impacts individuals living with serious mental illness in California,” says Stephanie Clendenin, director of the California Department of State Hospitals. “The Felony Mental Health Diversion program seeks to provide long-term community mental health treatment and other services for individuals with serious mental illness so that they avoid criminalization and institutionalization and receive the critical mental health care and supportive services they need.”

While the opioid prescribing rate among physicians has declined in recent years, the number of opioids prescribed per person remains three times higher than in 1999. Many states are testing interventions to reduce the overprescription of opioids among physicians. The Minnesota Board of Pharmacy and Minnesota Management and Budget will partner with J-PAL North America to identify ways to increase the use of Minnesota’s prescription monitoring program (PMP) and measure the impact of that increased use on prescribers’ rate of controlled-substance prescriptions. The PMP database maintains a secure record of all controlled-substance prescriptions, and more frequent use of the database may help avoid prescribing to individuals misusing opioids and, instead, allow prescribers to make referrals to treatment services.

"We are excited about this innovative partnership that will help Minnesota use data to increase the use of Prescription Monitoring Programs and reduce overprescribing of opioids,” says Myron Frans, commissioner of Minnesota Management and Budget. “The opioid crisis has caused tremendous damage to our families and communities. To achieve better results, we will continue to collaborate and use evidence-based governing principles to combat this crisis.”

“The Minnesota Board of Pharmacy looks forward to working with Minnesota Management and Budget and J-PAL to evaluate our PMP, with the aim to increase use of the PMP and to analyze its impact on controlled substance prescription rates,” says Cody Wiberg, executive director of the Minnesota Board of Pharmacy.

In 2017, Minnesota’s largest county piloted a text reminder program for individuals with court hearings; after promising results suggested the reminders increased court appearances, the Minnesota Judicial Branch decided to make these e-reminders available statewide. The Minnesota State Court Administrator’s Office is now working with Minnesota Management and Budget and J-PAL North America to test the content and timing of different messages to determine which behavioral strategies are most effective in reducing failures to appear for court hearings. Previous research suggests that behavioral nudges, like text messages and redesigned summons, can reduce failure-to-appears for criminal hearings. This evaluation will measure the effectiveness of different message content and whether these reminders can also be effective for increasing court appearances among tenants facing eviction proceedings.

“Hearing eReminders are about keeping the justice system, and those within it, from incurring additional costs. We are focused on keeping the court process moving efficiently, because we know that justice delayed is justice denied,” says Minnesota State Court Administrator Jeff Shorba. “We have already seen from the 18-month pilot that parties who received some form of Hearing eReminder were 35 percent more likely to appear for their hearing. Rigorous evaluation of Hearing eReminder messages and sequencing will ensure we are delivering the most effective messages on the most impactful schedule.”

Similarly, in Shasta County, California, individuals who commit low-level offenses receive court summonses that require offenders to appear in court. Failure to appear in court results in the issuance of an arrest warrant, which is costly for the criminal justice system and recipients. The Shasta County Superior Court will partner with J-PAL North America to evaluate behavioral interventions to reduce defendants’ failure to appear at arraignments. This evaluation will expand the previous literature on reducing failures to appear and provide insight into the effectiveness of these interventions in a different setting.

“The Shasta County Superior Court is excited to join with J-PAL to analyze strategies that could help reduce the incidence of homeless individuals failing to appear to in court,” says Melissa Fowler-Bradley, court executive officer of the Shasta County Superior Court. “In Shasta County, about one-third of the people who fail to appear for their court cases are homeless, and similar statistics exist throughout the country. Unfortunately, a failure to appear has an added impact on those who are economically challenged. The Shasta County Superior Court’s goal is to reduce those failures to appear among the homeless population as much as possible using strategies that are proven effective through the rigorous evaluation made possible by J-PAL. A successful project created under this state and local initiative could have nationwide impact, improve the plight of the impoverished, and increase the efficiency of the criminal justice system.”

Millions of dollars of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a federal tax credit for low-income households, go unclaimed every year. Previous research suggests that behavioral interventions, like messages and simplified materials, can increase the uptake of the EITC. The Virginia Department of Social Services will partner with J-PAL North America to develop an evaluation of a text-messaging intervention to generate higher rates of tax filing and EITC claims. This evaluation will add to the growing body of literature on behavioral interventions to increase EITC claims.

“This new partnership with J-PAL is an opportunity to transform how we pursue our mission of triumphing over poverty, abuse, and neglect,” says Duke Storen, commissioner of the Virginia Department of Social Services. “We will gain valuable insight from the RCT about how to more effectively encourage eligible Virginians to claim the EITC, which has been found to be one of the most effective federal antipoverty programs. We anticipate the results of this work will not only improve how we communicate with our customers as it relates to the EITC and the full-spectrum of our programs and services, but will prove to benefit other states as well.” 

The California Department of State Hospitals, Minnesota Board of Pharmacy, Minnesota State Court Administrator’s Office, Shasta County Superior Court, and Virginia Department of Social Services join 13 state and local governments selected through previous rounds of the J-PAL State and Local Innovation Initiative: Baltimore, Maryland; King County, Washington; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Rochester, New York; Santa Clara, California; and Washington; the states of California, Washington, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and South Carolina; and the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. These state and local governments are part of a growing movement to use evidence to improve the effectiveness of policies and programs and ultimately the lives of people experiencing poverty.

Anyone wishing to learn more about the initiative or to receive updates about its progress is invited to visit online. The J-PAL contact for more information is Initiative Manager Rohit Naimpally.

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New synthesis method yields degradable polymers

MIT chemists have devised a way to synthesize polymers that can break down more readily in the body and in the environment.

A chemical reaction called ring-opening metathesis polymerization, or ROMP, is handy for building novel polymers for various uses such as nanofabrication, high-performance resins, and delivering drugs or imaging agents. However, one downside to this synthesis method is that the resulting polymers do not naturally break down in natural environments, such as inside the body.

The MIT research team has come up with a way to make those polymers more degradable by adding a novel type of building block to the backbone of the polymer. This new building block, or monomer, forms chemical bonds that can be broken down by weak acids, bases, and ions such as fluoride.

“We believe that this is the first general way to produce ROMP polymers with facile degradability under biologically relevant conditions,” says Jeremiah Johnson, an associate professor of chemistry at MIT and the senior author of the study. “The nice part is that it works using the standard ROMP workflow; you just need to sprinkle in the new monomer, making it very convenient.”

This building block could be incorporated into polymers for a wide variety of uses, including not only medical applications but also synthesis of industrial polymers that would break down more rapidly after use, the researchers say.

The lead author of the paper, which appears in Nature Chemistry today, is MIT postdoc Peyton Shieh. Postdoc Hung VanThanh Nguyen is also an author of the study.

Powerful polymerization

The most common building blocks of ROMP-generated polymers are molecules called norbornenes, which contain a ring structure that can be easily opened up and strung together to form polymers. Molecules such as drugs or imaging agents can be added to norbornenes before the polymerization occurs.

Johnson’s lab has used this synthesis approach to create polymers with many different structures, including linear polymers, bottlebrush polymers, and star-shaped polymers. These novel materials could be used for delivering many cancer drugs at once, or carrying imaging agents for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other types of imaging.

“It’s a very robust and powerful polymerization reaction,” Johnson says. “But one of the big downsides is that the backbone of the polymers produced entirely consists of carbon-carbon bonds, and as a result, the polymers are not readily degradable. That’s always been something we’ve kept in the backs of our minds when thinking about making polymers for the biomaterials space.”

To circumvent that issue, Johnson’s lab has focused on developing small polymers, on the order of about 10 nanometers in diameter, which could be cleared from the body more easily than larger particles. Other chemists have tried to make the polymers degradable by using building blocks other than norbornenes, but these building blocks don’t polymerize as efficiently. It’s also more difficult to attach drugs or other molecules to them, and they often require harsh conditions to degrade.

“We prefer to continue to use norbornene as the molecule that enables us to polymerize these complex monomers,” Johnson says. “The dream has been to identify another type of monomer and add it as a co-monomer into a polymerization that already uses norbornene.”

The researchers came upon a possible solution through work Shieh was doing on another project. He was looking for new ways to trigger drug release from polymers, when he synthesized a ring-containing molecule that is similar to norbornene but contains an oxygen-silicon-oxygen bond. The researchers discovered that this kind of ring, called a silyl ether, can also be opened up and polymerized with the ROMP reaction, leading to polymers with oxygen-silicon-oxygen bonds that degrade more easily. Thus, instead of using it for drug release, the researchers decided to try to incorporate it into the polymer backbone to make it degradable.

They found that by simply adding the silyl-ether monomer in a 1:1 ratio with norbornene monomers, they could create similar polymer structures to what they have previously made, with the new monomer incorporated fairly uniformly throughout the backbone. But now, when exposed to a slightly acidic pH, around 6.5, the polymer chain begins to break apart.

“It’s quite simple,” Johnson says. “It’s a monomer we can add to widely used polymers to make them degradable. But as simple as that is, examples of such an approach are surprisingly rare.”

Faster breakdown

In tests in mice, the researchers found that during the first week or two, the degradable polymers showed the same distribution through the body as the original polymers, but they began to break down soon after that. After six weeks, the concentrations of the new polymers in the body were between three and 10 times less than the concentrations of the original polymers, depending on the exact chemical composition of the silyl-ether monomers that the researchers used.

The findings suggest that adding this monomer to polymers for drug delivery or imaging could help them get cleared from the body more quickly.

“We are excited about the prospect of using this technology to precisely tune the breakdown of ROMP-based polymers in biological tissues, which we believe could be leveraged to control biodistribution, drug release kinetics, and many other features,” Johnson says.

The researchers have also started working on adding the new monomers to industrial resins, such as plastics or adhesives. They believe it would be economically feasible to incorporate these monomers into the manufacturing processes of industrial polymers, to make them more degradable, and they are working with Millipore-Sigma to commercialize this family of monomers and make them available for research.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the American Cancer Society, and the National Science Foundation.

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Collision course: a geological mystery in the Himalayas

According to Craig Martin, deciphering Earth’s geologic past is like an ant climbing over a car crash. “You’ve got to work out how the car crash happened, how fast the cars were going, at what angle they impacted,” explains Martin, a graduate student at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “You’re just a tiny ant wandering over this massive chaos,” he adds.

The crash site Martin is investigating is the Himalayas, a 1,400-mile mountain range that rose when the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates scrunched together. “The mainstream idea is: There was Eurasia; there was India; and they collided 50 million years ago,” says Oliver Jagoutz, an associate professor in EAPS and Martin’s advisor. “We think it was much more complicated than that, because it’s always more complicated.”

Detective work at 11,000 feet

Eighty million years ago, India and Eurasia were 4,000 miles apart, separated by an ancient body of water that geologists call the Neotethys Ocean, but Jagoutz believes there was more than just seawater between the two. He’s not alone. Many geologists agree on the existence of an arc of volcanic islands that formed on the boundary of a smaller tectonic plate, similar to the Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean. However, there is debate on whether these islands first collided with the Eurasian plate to the north or the Indian plate to the south. Jagoutz’s hypothesis is the latter. “If I’m right, the arc sits near the equator. If the others are right, the fragments should be 30 degrees north,” he explains. “That’s how simple it is.” But it can mean a world of difference in terms of explaining the paleoclimate — not just in the Himalayas, but globally as well.

To confirm this idea, Jagoutz and Martin turned to paleomagnetism. Some rock minerals, such as magnetite, contain iron and orient themselves along Earth’s magnetic field. At the equator, magnetite in newly formed rocks will be parallel to the ground, but the further north or south it is, the more inclined it will be. “We can measure, essentially, the latitude that a rock was formed at,” explains Martin.

If you were to take a slice of the Kohistan-Ladakh region of the Himalayas in northern India, you would see a succession of rock layers representing the India plate and the Eurasia plate, with the volcanic island arc sandwiched in between. “That’s why Ladakh is a really cool place to go to, because you can walk though this whole collision,” says Martin.

In summer 2018, Martin and Jade Fischer, a junior double-majoring in EAPS and physics, spent six weeks in Ladakh collecting samples from the volcanic rocks. Back at MIT, Martin measured the paleomagnetic signature of these rocks, and his results placed the Kohistan-Ladakh arc right at the equator, in agreement with Jagoutz’s theory.

A magnetic collaboration

Megan Guenther, a junior in EAPS, first heard about the opportunity to do field work in Ladakh when Martin gave a presentation about his research in her structural geology class last fall. “At the end, he told us he was probably going again and to let him know if we were interested,” Guenther explains. “I emailed him an hour later.”

Guenther had been looking for a chance to gain more field experience. She works on the compositions of lunar glasses with Tim Grove, the Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, where the research takes place entirely in the lab. “You can’t really do field work on the moon,” she jokes.

This past summer, Guenther and Martin spent six weeks in Ladakh collecting rock samples from the Eurasia plate to prove that this was not also further south, mapping the region and doing structural analyses. Both Guenther and Martin were supported by MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) and the MISTI Global Seed Fund.

MISTI and Jagoutz go back a long time, with MISTI funding class excursions, department field trips, and a number of Jagoutz’s students. “MISTI-India has been good to us,” he says. “They financed the workshop where we came up with the whole concept of this work.” And, says Jagoutz, the students really love the experience. “They get influenced by it, and a lot of people chose their career paths after it,” says Jagoutz. “Ultimately, that’s what MISTI is all about: an experience that tells students they want to get into science.”

For Guenther, the trip was an essential part of her education as a geologist. “I feel much more confident as a field geologist, which is exactly what I wanted,” she says. It also impressed on her the titanic scale of geology. “The scale of everything is so crazy,” says Guenther. “You’re already at 11,000 feet, minimum, the whole time, and then these huge mountains tower above that.”

By solving the story of the collision that resulted in the Himalayas, Jagoutz and his team also shed light on its global implications. Large-scale collisions, Jagoutz explains, don’t just have local effects, and in the case of the Himalayas they can also explain some of Earth’s past glaciation events. “That’s the good thing about geology: the dimensions,” says Jagoutz. “You look at a magnetite crystal in a rock, and it tells you how global cooling works.”

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