How the universe got its magnetic field

When we look out into space, all of the astrophysical objects that we see are embedded in magnetic fields. This is true not only in the neighborhood of stars and planets, but also in the deep space between galaxies and galactic clusters. These fields are weak — typically much weaker than those of a refrigerator magnet — but they are dynamically significant in the sense that they have profound effects on the dynamics of the universe. Despite decades of intense interest and research, the origin of these cosmic magnetic fields remains one of the most profound mysteries in cosmology.

In previous research, scientists came to understand how turbulence, the churning motion common to fluids of all types, could amplify preexisting magnetic fields through the so-called dynamo process. But this remarkable discovery just pushed the mystery one step deeper. If a turbulent dynamo could only amplify an existing field, where did the “seed” magnetic field come from in the first place?

We wouldn’t have a complete and self-consistent answer to the origin of astrophysical magnetic fields until we understood how the seed fields arose. New work carried out by MIT graduate student Muni Zhou, her advisor Nuno Loureiro, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, and colleagues at Princeton University and the University of Colorado at Boulder provides an answer that shows the basic processes that generate a field from a completely unmagnetized state to the point where it is strong enough for the dynamo mechanism to take over and amplify the field to the magnitudes that we observe.

Magnetic fields are everywhere

Naturally occurring magnetic fields are seen everywhere in the universe. They were first observed on Earth thousands of years ago, through their interaction with magnetized minerals like lodestone, and used for navigation long before people had any understanding of their nature or origin. Magnetism on the sun was discovered at the beginning of the 20th century by its effects on the spectrum of light that the sun emitted. Since then, more powerful telescopes looking deep into space found that the fields were ubiquitous.

And while scientists had long learned how to make and use permanent magnets and electromagnets, which had all sorts of practical applications, the natural origins of magnetic fields in the universe remained a mystery. Recent work has provided part of the answer, but many aspects of this question are still under debate.

Amplifying magnetic fields — the dynamo effect

Scientists started thinking about this problem by considering the way that electric and magnetic fields were produced in the laboratory. When conductors, like copper wire, move in magnetic fields, electric fields are created. These fields, or voltages, can then drive electrical currents. This is how the electricity that we use every day is produced. Through this process of induction, large generators or “dynamos” convert mechanical energy into the electromagnetic energy that powers our homes and offices. A key feature of dynamos is that they need magnetic fields in order to work.

But out in the universe, there are no obvious wires or big steel structures, so how do the fields arise? Progress on this problem began about a century ago as scientists pondered the source of the Earth’s magnetic field. By then, studies of the propagation of seismic waves showed that much of the Earth, below the cooler surface layers of the mantle, was liquid, and that there was a core composed of molten nickel and iron. Researchers theorized that the convective motion of this hot, electrically conductive liquid and the rotation of the Earth combined in some way to generate the Earth’s field.

Eventually, models emerged that showed how the convective motion could amplify an existing field. This is an example of “self-organization” — a feature often seen in complex dynamical systems — where large-scale structures grow spontaneously from small-scale dynamics. But just like in a power station, you needed a magnetic field to make a magnetic field.

A similar process is at work all over the universe. However, in stars and galaxies and in the space between them, the electrically conducting fluid is not molten metal, but plasma — a state of matter that exists at extremely high temperatures where the electrons are ripped away from their atoms. On Earth, plasmas can be seen in lightning or neon lights. In such a medium, the dynamo effect can amplify an existing magnetic field, provided it starts at some minimal level.

Making the first magnetic fields

Where does this seed field come from? That’s where the recent work of Zhou and her colleagues, published May 5 in PNAS, comes in. Zhou developed the underlying theory and performed numerical simulations on powerful supercomputers that show how the seed field can be produced and what fundamental processes are at work. An important aspect of the plasma that exists between stars and galaxies is that it is extraordinarily diffuse — typically about one particle per cubic meter. That is a very different situation from the interior of stars, where the particle density is about 30 orders of magnitude higher. The low densities mean that the particles in cosmological plasmas never collide, which has important effects on their behavior that had to be included in the model that these researchers were developing.   

Calculations performed by the MIT researchers followed the dynamics in these plasmas, which developed from well-ordered waves but became turbulent as the amplitude grew and the interactions became strongly nonlinear. By including detailed effects of the plasma dynamics at small scales on macroscopic astrophysical processes, they demonstrated that the first magnetic fields can be spontaneously produced through generic large-scale motions as simple as sheared flows. Just like the terrestrial examples, mechanical energy was converted into magnetic energy.

An important output of their computation was the amplitude of the expected spontaneously generated magnetic field. What this showed was that the field amplitude could rise from zero to a level where the plasma is “magnetized” — that is, where the plasma dynamics are strongly affected by the presence of the field. At this point, the traditional dynamo mechanism can take over and raise the fields to the levels that are observed. Thus, their work represents a self-consistent model for the generation of magnetic fields at cosmological scale.

Professor Ellen Zweibel of the University of Wisconsin at Madison notes that “despite decades of remarkable progress in cosmology, the origin of magnetic fields in the universe remains unknown. It is wonderful to see state-of-the-art plasma physics theory and numerical simulation brought to bear on this fundamental problem.”

Zhou and co-workers will continue to refine their model and study the handoff from the generation of the seed field to the amplification phase of the dynamo. An important part of their future research will be to determine if the process can work on a time scale consistent with astronomical observations. To quote the researchers, “This work provides the first step in the building of a new paradigm for understanding magnetogenesis in the universe.”

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Future Investigators of NASA Earth and Space Science Technology (FINESST) grant.

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Toward customizable timber, grown in a lab

Each year, the world loses about 10 million hectares of forest — an area about the size of Iceland — because of deforestation. At that rate, some scientists predict the world’s forests could disappear in 100 to 200 years.

In an effort to provide an environmentally friendly and low-waste alternative, researchers at MIT have pioneered a tunable technique to generate wood-like plant material in a lab, which could enable someone to “grow” a wooden product like a table without needing to cut down trees, process lumber, etc.

These researchers have now demonstrated that, by adjusting certain chemicals used during the growth process, they can precisely control the physical and mechanical properties of the resulting plant material, such as its stiffness and density.

They also show that, using 3D bioprinting techniques, they can grow plant material in shapes, sizes, and forms that are not found in nature and that can’t be easily produced using traditional agricultural methods.

“The idea is that you can grow these plant materials in exactly the shape that you need, so you don’t need to do any subtractive manufacturing after the fact, which reduces the amount of energy and waste. There is a lot of potential to expand this and grow three-dimensional structures,” says lead author Ashley Beckwith, a recent PhD graduate.

Though still in its early days, this research demonstrates that lab-grown plant materials can be tuned to have specific characteristics, which could someday enable researchers to grow wood products with the exact features needed for a particular application, like high strength to support the walls of a house or certain thermal properties to more efficiently heat a room, explains senior author Luis Fernando Velásquez-García, a principal scientist in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories.

Joining Beckwith and Velásquez-García on the paper is Jeffrey Borenstein, a biomedical engineer and group leader at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. The research is published today in Materials Today.

Planting cells

To begin the process of growing plant material in the lab, the researchers first isolate cells from the leaves of young Zinnia elegans plants. The cells are cultured in liquid medium for two days, then transferred to a gel-based medium, which contains nutrients and two different hormones.

Adjusting the hormone levels at this stage in the process enables researchers to tune the physical and mechanical properties of the plant cells that grow in that nutrient-rich broth.

“In the human body, you have hormones that determine how your cells develop and how certain traits emerge. In the same way, by changing the hormone concentrations in the nutrient broth, the plant cells respond differently. Just by manipulating these tiny chemical quantities, we can elicit pretty dramatic changes in terms of the physical outcomes,” Beckwith says.

In a way, these growing plant cells behave almost like stem cells — researchers can give them cues to tell them what to become, Velásquez-García adds.

They use a 3D printer to extrude the cell culture gel solution into a specific structure in a petri dish, and let it incubate in the dark for three months. Even with this incubation period, the researchers’ process is about two orders of magnitude faster than the time it takes for a tree to grow to maturity, Velásquez-García says.

Following incubation, the resulting cell-based material is dehydrated, and then the researchers evaluate its properties.

Wood-like characteristics

They found that lower hormone levels yielded plant materials with more rounded, open cells that have lower density, while higher hormone levels led to the growth of plant materials with smaller, denser cell structures. Higher hormone levels also yielded plant material that was stiffer; the researchers were able to grow plant material with a storage modulus (stiffness) similar to that of some natural woods.

Another goal of this work is to study what is known as lignification in these lab-grown plant materials. Lignin is a polymer that is deposited in the cell walls of plants which makes them rigid and woody. They found that higher hormone levels in the growth medium causes more lignification, which would lead to plant material with more wood-like properties.

The researchers also demonstrated that, using a 3D bioprinting process, the plant material can be grown in a custom shape and size. Rather than using a mold, the process involves the use of a customizable computer-aided design file that is fed to a 3D bioprinter, which deposits the cell gel culture into a specific shape. For instance, they were able to grow plant material in the shape of a tiny evergreen tree.

Research of this kind is relatively new, Borenstein says.

“This work demonstrates the power that a technology at the interface between engineering and biology can bring to bear on an environmental challenge, leveraging advances originally developed for health care applications,” he adds.

The researchers also show that the cell cultures can survive and continue to grow for months after printing, and that using a thicker gel to produce thicker plant material structures does not impact the survival rate of the lab-grown cells.

“Amenable to customization”

“I think the real opportunity here is to be optimal with what you use and how you use it. If you want to create an object that is going to serve some purpose, there are mechanical expectations to consider. This process is really amenable to customization,” Velásquez-García says.

Now that they have demonstrated the effective tunability of this technique, the researchers want to continue experimenting so they can better understand and control cellular development. They also want to explore how other chemical and genetic factors can direct the growth of the cells.

They hope to evaluate how their method could be transferred to a new species. Zinnia plants don’t produce wood, but if this method were used to make a commercially important tree species, like pine, the process would need to be tailored to that species, Velásquez-García says.

Ultimately, he is hopeful this work can help to motivate other groups to dive into this area of research to help reduce deforestation.

“Trees and forests are an amazing tool for helping us manage climate change, so being as strategic as we can with these resources will be a societal necessity going forward,” Beckwith adds.

This research is funded, in part, by the Draper Scholars Program.

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Early sound exposure in the womb shapes the auditory system

Inside the womb, fetuses can begin to hear some sounds around 20 weeks of gestation. However, the input they are exposed to is limited to low-frequency sounds because of the muffling effect of the amniotic fluid and surrounding tissues.

A new MIT-led study suggests that this degraded sensory input is beneficial, and perhaps necessary, for auditory development. Using simple computer models of the human auditory processing, the researchers showed that initially limiting input to low-frequency sounds as the models learned to perform certain tasks actually improved their performance.

Along with an earlier study from the same team, which showed that early exposure to blurry faces improves computer models’ subsequent generalization ability to recognize faces, the findings suggest that receiving low-quality sensory input may be key to some aspects of brain development.

“Instead of thinking of the poor quality of the input as a limitation that biology is imposing on us, this work takes the standpoint that perhaps nature is being clever and giving us the right kind of impetus to develop the mechanisms that later prove to be very beneficial when we are asked to deal with challenging recognition tasks,” says Pawan Sinha, a professor of vision and computational neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, who led the research team.

In the new study, the researchers showed that exposing a computational model of the human auditory system to a full range of frequencies from the beginning led to worse generalization performance on tasks that require absorbing information over longer periods of time — for example, identifying emotions from a voice clip. From the applied perspective, the findings suggest that babies born prematurely may benefit from being exposed to lower-frequency sounds rather than the full spectrum of frequencies that they now hear in neonatal intensive care units, the researchers say.

Marin Vogelsang and Lukas Vogelsang, currently both students at EPFL Lausanne, are the lead authors of the study, which appears in the journal Developmental Science. Sidney Diamond, a retired neurologist and now an MIT research affiliate, is also an author of the paper.

Low-quality input

Several years ago, Sinha and his colleagues became interested in studying how low-quality sensory input affects the brain’s subsequent development. This question arose in part after the researchers had the opportunity to meet and study a young boy who had been born with cataracts that were not removed until he was four years old.

This boy, who was born in China, was later adopted by an American family and referred to Sinha’s lab at the age of 10. Studies revealed that his vision was nearly normal, with one notable exception: He performed very poorly in recognizing faces. Other studies of children born blind have also revealed deficits in face recognition after their sight was restored.

The researchers hypothesized that this impairment might be a result of missing out on some of the low-quality visual input that babies and young children normally receive. When babies are born, their visual acuity is very poor — around 20/800, 1/40 the strength of normal 20/20 vision. This is in part because of the lower packing density of photoreceptors in the newborn retina. As the baby grows, the receptors become more densely packed and visual acuity improves.

“The theory we proposed was that this initial period of blurry or degraded vision was very important. Because everything is so blurry, the brain needs to integrate over larger areas of the visual field,” Sinha says.

To explore this theory, the researchers used a type of computational model of vision known as a convolutional neural network. They trained the model to recognize faces, giving it either blurry input followed later by clear input, or clear input from the beginning. They found that the models that received fuzzy input early on showed superior generalization performance on facial recognition tasks. Additionally, the neural networks’ receptive fields — the size of the visual area that they cover — were larger than the receptive fields in models trained on the clear input from the beginning.

After that study was published in 2018, the researchers wanted to explore whether this phenomenon could also be seen in other types of sensory systems. For audition, the timeline of development is slightly different, as full-term babies are born with nearly normal hearing across the sound spectrum. However, during the prenatal period, while the auditory system is still developing, babies are exposed to degraded sound quality in the womb.

To examine the effects of that degraded input, the researchers trained a computational model of human audition to perform a task that requires integrating information over long time periods — identifying emotion from a voice clip. As the models learned the task, the researchers fed them one of four different types of auditory input: low frequency only, full frequency only, low frequency followed by full frequency, and full frequency followed by low frequency.

Low frequency followed by full frequency most closely mimics what developing infants are exposed to, and the researchers found that the computer models exposed to that scenario exhibited the most generalized performance profile on the emotion recognition task. Those models also generated larger temporal receptive fields, meaning that they were able to analyze sounds occurring over a longer time period.

This suggests, just like the vision study, that degraded input early in development actually promotes better sensory integration abilities later in life.

“It supports the idea that starting with very limited information, and then getting better and better over time might actually be a feature of the system rather than being a bug,” Lukas Vogelsang says.

Effects of premature birth

Previous research done by other labs has found that babies born prematurely do show impairments in processing low-frequency sounds. They perform worse than full-term babies on tests of emotion classification, later in life. The MIT team’s computational findings suggest that these impairments may be the result of missing out on some of the low-quality sensory input they would normally receive in the womb.

“If you provide full-frequency input right from the get-go, then you are taking away the impetus on the part of the brain to try to discover long range or extended temporal structure. It can get by with just local temporal structure,” Sinha says. “Presumably that is what immediate immersion in full-frequency soundscapes does to the brain of a prematurely born child.”

The researchers suggest that for babies born prematurely, it could be beneficial to expose them to primarily low-frequency sounds after birth, to mimic the womb-like conditions they’re missing out on.

The research team is now exploring other areas in which this kind of degraded input may be beneficial to brain development. These include aspects of vision, such as color perception, as well as qualitatively different domains such as linguistic development.

“We have been surprised by how consistent the narrative and the hypothesis of the experimental results are, to this idea of initial degradations being adaptive for developmental purposes,” Sinha says. “I feel that this work illustrates the gratifying surprises science offers us. We did not expect that the ideas which germinated from our work with congenitally blind children would have much bearing on our thinking about audition. But, in fact, there appears to be a beautiful conceptual commonality between the two domains. And, maybe that common thread goes even beyond these two sensory modalities. There are clearly a host of exciting research questions ahead of us.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

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New research center focused on brain-body relationship established at MIT

The inextricable link between our brains and our bodies has been gaining increasing recognition among researchers and clinicians over recent years. Studies have shown that the brain-body pathway is bidirectional — meaning that our mental state can influence our physical health and vice versa. But exactly how the two interact is less clear.   

A new research center at MIT, funded by a $38 million gift to the McGovern Institute for Brain Research from philanthropist K. Lisa Yang, aims to unlock this mystery by creating and applying novel tools to explore the multidirectional, multilevel interplay between the brain and other body organ systems. This gift expands Yang’s exceptional philanthropic support of human health and basic science research at MIT over the past five years.

“Lisa Yang’s visionary gift enables MIT scientists and engineers to pioneer revolutionary technologies and undertake rigorous investigations into the brain's complex relationship with other organ systems,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif.  “Lisa’s tremendous generosity empowers MIT scientists to make pivotal breakthroughs in brain and biomedical research and, collectively, improve human health on a grand scale.”

The K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center will be directed by Polina Anikeeva, professor of materials science and engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and an associate investigator at the McGovern Institute. The center will harness the power of MIT’s collaborative, interdisciplinary life sciences research and engineering community to focus on complex conditions and diseases affecting both the body and brain, with a goal of unearthing knowledge of biological mechanisms that will lead to promising therapeutic options.

“Under Professor Anikeeva's brilliant leadership, this wellspring of resources will encourage the very best work of MIT faculty, graduate fellows, and research — and ultimately make a real impact on the lives of many,” Reif adds.

Center goals  

Initial projects in the center will focus on four major lines of research:

• Gut-Brain: Anikeeva’s group will expand a toolbox of new technologies and apply these tools to examine major neurobiological questions about gut-brain pathways and connections in the context of autism spectrum disorders, Parkinson’s disease, and affective disorders.
• Aging: CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT and investigator at the McGovern Institute, will lead a group in developing molecular tools for precision epigenomic editing and erasing accumulated “errors” of time, injury, or disease in various types of cells and tissues.
• Pain: The lab of Fan Wang, investigator at the McGovern Institute and professor of brain and cognitive sciences, will design new tools and imaging methods to study autonomic responses, sympathetic-parasympathetic system balance, and brain-autonomic nervous system interactions, including how pain influences these interactions.
• Acupuncture: Wang will also collaborate with Hilda (“Scooter”) Holcombe, a veterinarian in MIT’s Division of Comparative Medicine, to advance techniques for documenting changes in brain and peripheral tissues induced by acupuncture in mouse models. If successful, these techniques could lay the groundwork for deeper understandings of the mechanisms of acupuncture, specifically how the treatment stimulates the nervous system and restores function.

A key component of the K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center will be a focus on educating and training the brightest young minds who aspire to make true breakthroughs for individuals living with complex and often devastating diseases. A portion of center funding will endow the new K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Fellows Program, which will support four annual fellowships for MIT graduate students and postdocs working to advance understanding of conditions that affect both the body and brain.

Mens sana in corpore sano

“A phrase I remember reading in secondary school has always stuck with me: 'mens sana in corpore sano' — 'a healthy mind in a healthy body,'” says Lisa Yang, a former investment banker committed to advocacy for individuals with visible and invisible disabilities. “When we look at how stress, nutrition, pain, immunity, and other complex factors impact our health, we truly see how inextricably linked our brains and bodies are. I am eager to help MIT scientists and engineers decode these links and make real headway in creating therapeutic strategies that result in longer, healthier lives.”

“This center marks a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for labs like mine to conduct bold and risky studies into the complexities of brain-body connections,” says Anikeeva, who works at the intersection of materials science, electronics, and neurobiology. “The K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center will offer a pathbreaking, holistic approach that bridges multiple fields of study. I have no doubt that the center will result in revolutionary strides in our understanding of the inextricable bonds between the brain and the body’s peripheral organ systems, and a bold new way of thinking in how we approach human health overall.”

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A helping hand for robotic manipulator design

MIT researchers have created an interactive design pipeline that streamlines and simplifies the process of crafting a customized robotic hand with tactile sensors.

Typically, a robotics expert may spend months manually designing a custom manipulator, largely through trial-and-error. Each iteration could require new parts that must be designed and tested from scratch. By contrast, this new pipeline doesn’t require any manual assembly or specialized knowledge.

Akin to building with digital LEGOs, a designer uses the interface to construct a robotic manipulator from a set of modular components that are guaranteed to be manufacturable. The user can adjust the palm and fingers of the robotic hand, tailoring it to a specific task, and then easily integrate tactile sensors into the final design.

Once the design is finished, the software automatically generates 3D printing and machine knitting files for manufacturing the manipulator. Tactile sensors are incorporated through a knitted glove that fits snugly over the robotic hand. These sensors enable the manipulator to perform complex tasks, such as picking up delicate items or using tools.

“One of the most exciting things about this pipeline is that it makes design accessible to a general audience. Rather than spending months or years working on a design, and putting a lot of money into prototypes, you can have a working prototype in minutes,” says lead author Lara Zlokapa, who will graduate this spring with her master’s degree in mechanical engineering.

Joining Zlokapa on the paper are her advisors Pulkit Agrawal, professor in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and Wojciech Matusik, professor of electrical engineering and computer science. Other co-authors include CSAIL graduate students Yiyue Luo and Jie Xu, mechanical engineer Michael Foshey, and Kui Wu, a senior research scientist at Tencent America. The research is being presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Mulling over modularity

Before she began work on the pipeline, Zlokapa paused to consider the concept of modularity. She wanted to create enough components that users could mix and match with flexibility, but not so many that they were overwhelmed by choices.

She thought creatively about component functions, rather than shapes, and came up with about 15 parts that can combine to make trillions of unique manipulators.

The researchers then focused on building an intuitive interface in which the user mixes and matches components in a 3D design space. A set of production rules, known as graph grammar, controls how users can combine pieces based on the way each component, such as a joint or finger shaft, fits together.

“If we think of this as a LEGO kit where you have different building blocks you can put together, then the grammar might be something like ‘red blocks can only go on top of blue blocks’ and ‘blue blocks can’t go on top of green blocks.’ Graph grammar is what enables us to ensure that each and every design is valid, meaning it makes physical sense and you can manufacture it,” she explains.

Once the user has created the manipulator structure, they can deform components to customize it for a specific task. For instance, perhaps the manipulator needs fingers with slimmer tips to handle office scissors or curved fingers that can grasp bottles.

During this deformation stage, the software surrounds each component with a digital cage. Users stretch or bend components by dragging the corners of each cage. The system automatically constrains those movements to ensure the pieces still connect properly and the finished design remains manufacturable.

Fits like a glove

After customization, the user identifies locations for tactile sensors. These sensors are integrated into a knitted glove that fits securely around the 3D-printed robotic manipulator. The glove is comprised of two fabric layers, one that contains horizontal piezoelectric fibers and another with vertical fibers. Piezoelectric material produces an electric signal when squeezed. Tactile sensors are formed where the horizontal and vertical piezoelectric fibers intersect; they convert pressure stimuli into electric signals that can be measured.

“We used gloves because they are easy to install, easy to replace, and easy to take off if we need to repair anything inside them,” Zlokapa explains.

Plus, with gloves, the user can cover the entire hand with tactile sensors, rather than embedding them in the palm or fingers, as is the case with other robotic manipulators (if they have tactile sensors at all).

With the design interface complete, the researchers produced custom manipulators for four complex tasks: picking up an egg, cutting paper with scissors, pouring water from a bottle, and screwing in a wing nut. The wing nut manipulator, for instance, had one lengthened and offset finger, which prevented the finger from colliding with the nut as it turned. That successful design required only two iterations.

The egg-grabbing manipulator never broke or dropped the egg during testing, and the paper-cutting manipulator could use a wider range of scissors than any existing robotic hand they could find in the literature.

But as they tested the manipulators, the researchers found that the sensors create a lot of noise due to the uneven weave of the knitted fibers, which hampers their accuracy. They are now working on more reliable sensors that could improve manipulator performance.

The researchers also want to explore the use of additional automation. Since the graph grammar rules are written in a way that a computer can understand, algorithms could search the design space to determine optimal configurations for a task-specific robotic hand. With autonomous manufacturing, the entire prototyping process could be done without human intervention, Zlokapa says.

“Now that we have a way for a computer to explore this design space, we can work on answering the question of, ‘Is the human hand the optimal shape for doing everyday tasks?’ Maybe there is a better shape? Or maybe we want more or fewer fingers, or fingers pointing in different directions? This research doesn’t fully answer that question, but it is a step in that direction,” she says.

“The paper presents an exciting idea and an elegant system design,” says Wenzhen Yuan, assistant professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, who was not involved with this research. “It provides a new way of thinking about robot design in this new era where customization and versatility of robots are of high importance. It made a good bridge between mechanical design, computer graphics, and computational fabrication. I can foresee many applications of the system and lots of potential in the methodology.”

This work was supported, in part, by the Toyota Research Institute, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and an Amazon Robotics Research Award.

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Emery Brown wins a share of 2022 Gruber Neuroscience Prize

The Gruber Foundation announced on May 17 that Emery N. Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT, has won the 2022 Gruber Neuroscience Prize along with neurophysicists Laurence Abbott of Columbia University, Terrence Sejnowski of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and Haim Sompolinsky of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The foundation says it honored the four recipients for their influential contributions to the fields of computational and theoretical neuroscience. As datasets have grown ever larger and more complex, these fields have increasingly helped scientists unravel the mysteries of how the brain functions in both health and disease. The prize, which includes a total $500,000 award, will be presented in San Diego, California, on Nov. 13 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

“These four remarkable scientists have applied their expertise in mathematical and statistical analysis, physics, and machine learning to create theories, mathematical models, and tools that have greatly advanced how we study and understand the brain,” says Joshua Sanes, professor of molecular and cellular biology and founding director of the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University and member of the selection advisory board to the prize. “Their insights and research have not only transformed how experimental neuroscientists do their research, but also are leading to promising new ways of providing clinical care.”

Brown, who is an investigator in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a professor at Harvard Medical School, says: “It is a pleasant surprise and tremendous honor to be named a co-recipient of the 2022 Gruber Prize in Neuroscience. I am especially honored to share this award with three luminaries in computational and theoretical neuroscience.”

Brown’s early groundbreaking findings in neuroscience included a novel algorithm that decodes the position of an animal by observing the activity of a small group of place cells in the animal’s brain, a discovery he made while working with fellow Picower Institute investigator Matt Wilson in the 1990s. The resulting state-space algorithm for point processes not only offered much better decoding with fewer neurons than previous approaches, but it also established a new framework for specifying dynamically the relationship between the spike trains (the timing sequence of firing neurons) in the brain and factors from the outside world.

“One of the basic questions at the time was whether an animal holds a representation of where it is in its mind — in the hippocampus,” Brown says. “We were able to show that it did, and we could show that with only 30 neurons.”

After introducing this state-space paradigm to neuroscience, Brown went on to refine the original idea and apply it to other dynamic situations — to simultaneously track neural activity and learning, for example, and to define with precision anesthesia-induced loss of consciousness, as well as its subsequent recovery. In the early 2000s, Brown put together a team to specifically study anesthesia’s effects on the brain.

Through experimental research and mathematical modeling, Brown and his team showed that the altered arousal states produced by the main classes of anesthesia medications can be characterized by analyzing the oscillatory patterns observed in the EEG along with the locations of their molecular targets, and the anatomy and physiology of the neural circuits that connect those locations. He has established, including in recent papers with Picower Professor Earl K. Miller, that a principal way in which anesthetics produce unconsciousness is by producing oscillations that impair how different brain regions communicate with each other.

The result of Brown’s research has been a new paradigm for brain monitoring during general anesthesia for surgery, one that allows an anesthesiologist to dose the patient based on EEG readouts (neural oscillations) of the patient’s anesthetic state rather than purely on vital sign responses. This pioneering approach promises to revolutionize how anesthesia medications are delivered to patients, and also shed light on other altered states of arousal such as sleep and coma.

To advance that vision, Brown recently discussed how he is working to develop a new research center at MIT and MGH to further integrate anesthesiology with neuroscience research. The Brain Arousal State Control Innovation Center, he said, would not only advance anesthesiology care but also harness insights gained from anesthesiology research to improve other aspects of clinical neuroscience.

“By demonstrating that physics and mathematics can make an enormous contribution to neuroscience, doctors Abbott, Brown, Sejnowski, and Sompolinsky have inspired an entire new generation of physicists and other quantitative scientists to follow in their footsteps,” says Frances Jensen, professor and chair of the Department of Neurology and co-director of the Penn Medicine Translational Neuroscience Center within the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and chair of the Selection Advisory Board to the prize. “The ramifications for neuroscience have been broad and profound. It is a great pleasure to be honoring each of them with this prestigious award.”

This report was adapted from materials provided by the Gruber Foundation.

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Bringing hope and transformation to the Democratic Republic of Congo

MIT graduate student Milain Fayulu is on a mission. Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Fayulu is telling, and selling, the story of his nation in the hope of aiding its people and transforming its economy.

For decades, the DRC has been hobbled by corruption and bloody civil conflicts. “I grew up with a sense of the DRC not being where it was supposed to be,” he says. “I wanted to know what it would take to make the country as wealthy and powerful as it once was.”  

For Fayulu, the answer involves creating companies that can be clearly identified with Congolese society and culture, and using revenue from these ventures to address critical needs in the DRC.

He has found a way of springboarding his ambitious undertaking at MIT. Since his arrival in September 2021, he has been simultaneously pursuing a master’s degree in political science and developing a new enterprise with the support of a fellowship at MIT’s Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship.

Interplay of business and politics

Fayulu’s new venture is not his first go-around with startups. Right after graduating with a degree in economics from the University of Miami in 2015, Fayulu began Eben Cosmetics, a skin care company for people of color — an underserved consumer niche, he believed. To pay the rent, and help get Eben off the ground (his first infusion of money came from a $17,000 Kickstarter campaign), Fayulu began Flashstay, a real estate technology platform for short-term rentals in Miami.

“I think of entrepreneurship as problem-solving,” he says. “With good ideas, you can provide opportunities for people and create tremendous wealth.”

But in 2019, a cataclysmic episode compelled Fayulu to put these ventures aside. His father, a former executive with Exxon Mobil, ran as a presidential candidate in DRC elections. According to the official vote count and independent observers, Martin Fayulu won by a commanding margin, yet was denied the win by the country’s electoral commission. The Financial Times wrote that Fayulu might “be the most wronged man in world politics.”

For the younger Fayulu, this represented a turning point. “I realized that at the end of the day, everything was contingent on politics,” he says. “It was clear that if you can’t fix politics, it really doesn’t matter what business you’re in.” With what he called a “fraudulent” president in power, Fayulu decided to get a “bigger picture of policymaking, and learn how to make sure the rules of the game are fair.” He began studying for the GRE, and applied to MIT.

Advised by Evan Lieberman, the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa, Fayulu has been immersing himself in political theory and methodology. He was particularly taken with Lieberman’s class on ethnic politics. “We explored relations between different groups, and the impact of ethnicity on society,” he says, asking for instance why two African tribes get along in one country, but not in another. “We looked at historical patterns, and I discovered a lot of things I’d had strong opinions about were based on superficial knowledge; now I know I have to dig deeper for understanding.”

Fayulu’s thesis investigates how U.S. venture capital investment in Africa has concentrated in just a handful of nations (Nigeria and South Africa top the list). He hypothesizes that the presence of students from these nations in elite American colleges has created an invaluable financial network for African businesses. “There’s a first-mover advantage that just keeps feeding on itself, and ballooning.”

Mission-driven clothing line

One of the most monstrous dimensions of the DRC’s complex strife is the widespread occurrence of sexual violence, wielded by combatants, foreign and local, to terrorize. (One study by the American Journal of Public Health found that 48 women are raped every hour.) In 2018, DRC gynecologist and human rights activist Denis Mukwege won the Nobel Peace Prize with a call to end the use of rape as a weapon of war, and to offer survivors a way forward. It was a call Fayulu could not ignore, and the inspiration for his current passion project, the Congo Clothing Company.

“I had a burning idea to help this man, a hero doing God’s work on Earth,” says Fayulu. Noting that concern for Mukwege’s cause was fading just a year after his award and “that nothing was getting better on the ground,” Fayulu determined to find an effective and long-term method for raising awareness of Mukwege’s work, and raising funds to aid his efforts on behalf of rape victims.

“This is where entrepreneurship comes into play,” he says. “I came up with the idea of a fashion brand — a denim clothing line incorporating Congo-based designs with universal, border-crossing appeal — that would give survivors income and tell their stories.”

Fayulu’s goal is to sell Congo Clothing on web-based platforms, and to funnel a percentage of the profits to train survivors and fund their ownership of individual sewing machines. Fayulu intends to give them a measure of independence and a sense of self sufficiency. These women are currently under the care of Mukwege’s Panzi Hospital in Eastern DRC, an area of active civil conflict.  

When customers receive their Congo Clothing package, they will learn the story of DRC’s violence but through a survivance framework, one of hope and resilience. “Buying this brand creates a narrative that can educate people,” says Fayulu. While he currently depends on a Colombian factory to produce the clothing line, he is currently partnering with an MIT D-LAB design project team to prototype future “made in Congo” items and he will be using his delta V opportunity this summer to move closer to his vision of manufacturing operation in the DRC. “I see this as a catalyst to building a robust textile industry in that part of the country,” he says.

The company is already on a high-velocity path: Fayulu’s startup team was invited to participate in the MIT delta v accelerator, a summer-long educational experience sponsored by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship that prepares early-stage firms for a full-fledged commercial launch.

“This is great validation for the entire team, because it means there are people who believe our project has the potential to be impactful,” says Fayulu. “Life as an entrepreneur has its ups and downs, and this stamp of approval from MIT gives me a chance to breathe a bit.”

Congolese to the core

After a childhood spent moving from one African country to another, and an education abroad, Fayulu’s loyalties have never strayed far from the DRC. Like his father, he believes his own story is inseparable from that of his country. Afflicted by decades (and centuries, if you count an era of Belgian rule) of governance by greed and brutal repression, the DRC needs a fresh start, politically and economically, says Fayulu. He hopes to champion this cause from Cambridge, and eventually from within Congo itself.

“I’m the only DRC citizen at MIT this year and I want to take advantage of this unique position, by serving as the first bridge between MIT and the DRC,” he says. Ultimately, he would like to erase the investment differential that favors more established African nations by recruiting more Congolese students to MIT and Harvard University. And with the mentorship and networking provided through the MIT delta v summer accelerator program, Fayulu envisions laying foundations not just for the Congo Clothing Company, but a flood of DRC-oriented businesses. “I would like to build a Congolese national conglomerate that provides jobs to local populations and that could be an ambassador for the country to the rest of the world,” he says.

He will also be fighting for a legitimate, representative government in the fast-approaching DRC elections, in the hope of banishing the kind of cronyism and self-dealing that defeats genuine economic revitalization. “This is an African story,” says Fayulu. “It’s going to be long and difficult, but that is the end goal.”

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