When Tomás Vega SM’19 was 5years old,he began to stutter.The experience gave him an appreciation for the adversity that can come with adisability.It also showed him the power of technology.“A keyboard and amouse were outlets,”Vega says.“They allowed me to be fluent in the things Idid.I was able to transcend my limitations in away,so Ibecame obsessed with human augmentation and with the concept of cyborgs.I also gained empathy.I think we all have empathy,but we apply it according to our own experiences.”Vega has been using technology to augment human capabilities ever since.He began programming when he was 12.In high school,he helped people manage disabilities including hand impairments and multiple sclerosis.In college,first at the University of California at Berkeley and then at MIT,Vega built technologies that helped people with disabilities live more independently.Today Vega is the co-founder and CEO of Augmental,a startup deploying technology that lets people with movement impairments seamlessly interact with their personal computational devices.Augmental’s first product is the MouthPad,which allows users to control their computer,smartphone,or tablet through tongue and head movements.The MouthPad’s pressure-sensitive touch pad sits on the roof of the mouth,and,working with apair of motion sensors,translates tongue and head gestures into cursor scrolling and clicks in real time via Bluetooth.“We have abig chunk of the brain that is devoted to controlling the position of the tongue,”Vega explains.“The tongue comprises eight muscles,and most of the muscle fibers are slow-twitch,which means they don’t fatigue as quickly.So,I thought why don’t we leverage all of that?”People with spinal cord injuries are already using the MouthPad every day to interact with their favorite devices independently.One of Augmental’s users,who is living with quadriplegia and studying math and computer science in college,says the device has helped her write math formulas and study in the library—use cases where other assistive speech-based devices weren’t appropriate.“She can now take notes in class,she can play games with her friends,she can watch movies or read books,”Vega says.“She is more independent.Her mom told us that getting the MouthPad was the most significant moment since her injury.”That’s the ultimate goal of Augmental:to improve the accessibility of technologies that have become an integral part of our lives.“We hope that aperson with asevere impairment can be as competent using aphone or tablet as somebody using their hands,”Vega says. 查看详细>>

Deep brain stimulation,by implanted electrodes that deliver electrical pulses to the brain,is often used to treat Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders.However,the electrodes used for this treatment can eventually corrode and accumulate scar tissue,requiring them to be removed.MIT researchers have now developed an alternative approach that uses ultrasound instead of electricity to perform deep brain stimulation,delivered by afiber about the thickness of ahuman hair.In astudy of mice,they showed that this stimulation can trigger neurons to release dopamine,in apart of the brain that is often targeted in patients with Parkinson’s disease.“By using ultrasonography,we can create anew way of stimulating neurons to fire in the deep brain,”says Canan Dagdeviren,an associate professor in the MIT Media Lab and the senior author of the new study.“This device is thinner than ahair fiber,so there will be negligible tissue damage,and it is easy for us to navigate this device in the deep brain.”In addition to offering apotentially safer way to deliver deep brain stimulation,this approach could also become avaluable tool for researchers seeking to learn more about how the brain works.MIT graduate student Jason Hou and MIT postdoc Md Osman Goni Nayeem are the lead authors of the paper,along with collaborators from MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research,Boston University,and Caltech.The study appears today in Nature Communications.Deep in the brain Dagdeviren’s lab has previously developed wearable ultrasound devices that can be used to deliver drugs through the skin or perform diagnostic imaging on various organs.However,ultrasound cannot penetrate deeply into the brain from adevice attached to the head or skull.“If we want to go into the deep brain,then it cannot be just wearable or attachable anymore.It has to be implantable,”Dagdeviren says.“We carefully customize the device so that it will be minimally invasive and avoid major blood vessels in the deep brain.”Deep brain stimulation with electrical impulses is FDA-approved to treat symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.This approach uses millimeter-thick electrodes to activate dopamine-producing cells in abrain region called the substantia nigra.However,once implanted in the brain,the devices eventually begin to corrode,and scar tissue that builds up surrounding the implant can interfere with the electrical impulses.The MIT team set out to see if they could overcome some of those drawbacks by replacing electrical stimulation with ultrasound.Most neurons have ion channels that are responsive to mechanical stimulation,such as the vibrations from sound waves,so ultrasound can be used to elicit activity in those cells.However,existing technologies for delivering ultrasound to the brain through the skull can’t reach deep into the brain with high precision because the skull itself can interfere with the ultrasound waves and cause off-target stimulation.“To precisely modulate neurons,we must go deeper,leading us to design anew kind of ultrasound-based implant that produces localized ultrasound fields,”Nayeem says.To safely reach those deep brain regions,the researchers designed ahair-thin fiber made from aflexible polymer.The tip of the fiber contains adrum-like ultrasound transducer with avibrating membrane.When this membrane,which encapsulates athin piezoelectric film,is driven by asmall electrical voltage,it generates ultrasonic waves that can be detected by nearby cells.“It’s tissue-safe,there’s no exposed electrode surface,and it’s very low-power,which bodes well for translation to patient use,”Hou says.In tests in mice,the researchers showed that this ultrasound device,which they call ImPULS(Implantable Piezoelectric Ultrasound Stimulator),can provoke activity in neurons of the hippocampus.Then,they implanted the fibers into the dopamine-producing substantia nigra and showed that they could stimulate neurons in the dorsal striatum to produce dopamine.“Brain stimulation has been one of the most effective,yet least understood,methods used to restore health to the brain.ImPULS gives us the ability to stimulate brain cells with exquisite spatial-temporal resolution and in amanner that doesn’t produce the kind of damage or inflammation as other methods.Seeing its effectiveness in areas like the hippocampus opened an entirely new way for us to deliver precise stimulation to targeted circuits in the brain,”says Steve Ramirez,an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University,and afaculty member at B.U.’s Center for Systems Neuroscience,who is also an author of the study. 查看详细>>

Geologists at MIT and Oxford University have uncovered ancient rocks in Greenland that bear the oldest remnants of Earth’s early magnetic field.The rocks appear to be exceptionally pristine,having preserved their properties for billions of years.The researchers determined that the rocks are about 3.7 billion years old and retain signatures of amagnetic field with astrength of at least 15 microtesla.The ancient field is similar in magnitude to the Earth’s magnetic field today.The open-access findings,appearing today in the Journal of Geophysical Research,represent some of the earliest evidence of amagnetic field surrounding the Earth.The results potentially extend the age of the Earth’s magnetic field by hundreds of millions of years,and may shed light on the planet’s early conditions that helped life take hold.“The magnetic field is,in theory,one of the reasons we think Earth is really unique as ahabitable planet,”says Claire Nichols,a former MIT postdoc who is now an associate professor of the geology of planetary processes at Oxford University.“It’s thought our magnetic field protects us from harmful radiation from space,and also helps us to have oceans and atmospheres that can be stable for long periods of time.”Previous studies have shown evidence for amagnetic field on Earth that is at least 3.5 billion years old.The new study is extending the magnetic field’s lifetime by another 200 million years. 查看详细>>

When cancer patients undergo chemotherapy,the dose of most drugs is calculated based on the patient’s body surface area.This is estimated by plugging the patient’s height and weight into an equation,dating to 1916,that was formulated from data on just nine patients.This simplistic dosing doesn’t take into account other factors and can lead to patients receiving either too much or too little of adrug.As aresult,some patients likely experience avoidable toxicity or insufficient benefit from the chemotherapy they receive.To make chemotherapy dosing more accurate,MIT engineers have come up with an alternative approach that can enable the dose to be personalized to the patient.Their system measures how much drug is in the patient’s system,and these measurements are fed into acontroller that can adjust the infusion rate accordingly.This approach could help to compensate for differences in drug pharmacokinetics caused by body composition,genetic makeup,chemotherapy-induced toxicity of the organs that metabolize the drugs,interactions with other medications being taken and foods consumed,and circadian fluctuations in the enzymes responsible for breaking down chemotherapy drugs,the researchers say.“Recognizing the advances in our understanding of how drugs are metabolized,and applying engineering tools to facilitate personalized dosing,we believe,can help transform the safety and efficacy of many drugs,”says Giovanni Traverso,an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT,a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital,and the senior author of the study.Louis DeRidder,an MIT graduate student,is the lead author of the paper,which appears today in the journal Med. 查看详细>>

The radiation detectors used today for applications like inspecting cargo ships for smuggled nuclear materials are expensive and cannot operate in harsh environments,among other disadvantages.Now,in work funded largely by the U.S.Department of Homeland Security with early support from the U.S.Department of Energy,MIT engineers have demonstrated afundamentally new way to detect radiation that could allow much cheaper detectors and aplethora of new applications.They are working with Radiation Monitoring Devices,a company in Watertown,Massachusetts,to transfer the research as quickly as possible into detector products.In a2022 paper in Nature Materials,many of the same engineers reported for the first time how ultraviolet light can significantly improve the performance of fuel cells and other devices based on the movement of charged atoms,rather than those atoms’constituent electrons.In the current work,published recently in Advanced Materials,the team shows that the same concept can be extended to anew application:the detection of gamma rays emitted by the radioactive decay of nuclear materials.“Our approach involves materials and mechanisms very different than those in presently used detectors,with potentially enormous benefits in terms of reduced cost,ability to operate under harsh conditions,and simplified processing,”says Harry L.Tuller,the R.P.Simmons Professor of Ceramics and Electronic Materials in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering(DMSE). 查看详细>>

“How do we get to making nanomaterials that haven’t been evolved before?”asked Angela Belcher at the 2023 Mildred S.Dresselhaus Lecture at MIT on Nov.20.“We can use elements that biology has already given us.”The combined in-person and virtual audience of over 300 was treated to alight-up,3D model of M13 bacteriophage,a virus that only infects bacteria,complete with apull-out strand of DNA.Belcher used the feather-boa-like model to show how her research group modifies the M13’s genes to add new DNA and peptide sequences to template inorganic materials.“I love controlling materials at the nanoscale using biology,”said Belcher,the James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering,materials science professor,and of the Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.“We all know if you control materials at the nanoscale and you can start to tune them,then you can have all kinds of different applications.”And the opportunities are indeed vast—from building batteries,fuel cells,and solar cells to carbon sequestration and storage,environmental remediation,catalysis,and medical diagnostics and imaging.Belcher sprinkled her talk with models and props,lined up on atable at the front of the 10-250 lecture hall,to demonstrate awide variety of concepts and projects made possible by the intersection of biology and nanotechnology. 查看详细>>

On Oct.5,the Department of Chemistry,funded by agenerous donation from Frank Laukien’94,hosted the GlycoMIT Symposium,an interdepartmental celebration of advancements in glycobiology research.Defined broadly by the National Institutes of Health,glycobiology is“the study of the structure,biosynthesis,biology,and evolution of saccharides(also called carbohydrates,sugar chains,or glycans)that are widely distributed in nature and of the proteins that recognize them.”Various applications for glycobiology research include neurobiology and aging,cancer,and infectious disease and the microbiome.“Of the three chemical motifs involved in the recognition of pathogens—nucleic acids,proteins,and glycans—glycans are by far the most diverse and poorly understood,”said department head and Haslam and Dewey Professor Troy Van Voorhis.“By breaking new ground in glycoscience,MIT can make new discoveries about the chemical building blocks of life and pioneer new therapeutics for human health.This field is inherently multidisciplinary—combining avariety of perspectives from the chemical,biological,and physical sciences to control and measure complex glycan assemblies in living systems.It is therefore crucial that this effort involves not just chemistry,but biology,physics,and computation.”More than 100 members of the MIT community and beyond gathered in the Bartos Theater for aseries of faculty presentations and akeynote speech from Richard D.Cummings,the S.Daniel Abraham Professor of Surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School.Faculty presented updates on their glycobiology findings,and how these advancements pertain to research across all fields,and to humanity in general.Following aluncheon with Laukien and School of Science dean Nergis Mavalvala,MIT faculty members Barbara Imperiali,Laura L.Kiessling,Tobi Oni,Katharina Ribbeck,Matthew D.Shoulders,and Jessica Stark each presented a20-minute talk about their research.After the faculty presentations concluded,attendees of the symposium gathered for areception to enjoy hors d‘oeuvres,drinks,and poster presentations on further glycobiology research from members of each of the speakers’groups,as well as others from across the Institute.Kiessling,who spearheaded the event alongside fellow professor of chemistry Matthew D.Shoulders,presented atalk entitled“Glycans in Health and Disease.”In the Department of Chemistry,the Kiessling Group uses chemical biology to elucidate the biological roles of carbohydrates,with afocus on learning new mechanistic concepts.Imperiali,the Class of 1922 Professor of Biology and Chemistry,holds adual appointment in both departments,and delivered atalk entitled“Bacterial Glycan Biology:Making Sense of the Madness.”Research in the Imperiali Group employs amultidisciplinary approach involving synthesis,state-of-the-art spectroscopy,molecular modeling,enzymology,and molecular biology to address fundamental problems at the interface of chemistry and biology.Oni,a fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research,presented atalk titled“Leveraging Glycan-Dependent Epitopes for Tumor Targeting and Detection.”The Oni Lab seeks new methods of understanding,detecting,and potentially treating pancreatic cancer.Ribbeck is the Andrew(1956)and Erna Viterbi Professor of Biological Engineering,and her talk was entitled“From Molecular Mysteries to Medicine:The Therapeutic Promise of Glycans.”Her research group’s focus is on basic mechanisms by which mucus barriers exclude or allow passage of different molecules and pathogens,and the mechanisms pathogens have evolved to penetrate mucus barriers.Her research provides the foundation for atheoretical framework that captures general principles governing selectivity in mucus,and likely other biological hydrogels,such as the extracellular matrix and bacterial biofilms. 查看详细>>

Researchers who have been working for years to understand electron arrangement,or topology,and magnetism in certain semimetals have been frustrated by the fact that the materials only display magnetic properties if they are cooled to just afew degrees above absolute zero.A new MIT study led by Mingda Li,associate professor of nuclear science and engineering,and co-authored by Nathan Drucker,a graduate research assistant in MIT’s Quantum Measurement Group and PhD student in applied physics at Harvard University,along with Thanh Nguyen and Phum Siriviboon,MIT graduate students working in the Quantum Measurement Group,is challenging that conventional wisdom.The open-access research,published in Nature Communications,for the first time shows evidence that topology can stabilize magnetic ordering,even well above the magnetic transition temperature—the point at which magnetism normally breaks down.“The analogy Ilike to use to describe why this works is to imagine ariver filled with logs,which represent the magnetic moments in the material,”says Drucker,who served as the first author of the paper.“For magnetism to work,you need all those logs pointing in the same direction,or to have acertain pattern to them.But at high temperatures,the magnetic moments are all oriented in different directions,like the logs would be in ariver,and magnetism breaks down.“But what’s important in this study is that it’s actually the water that’s changing,”he continues.“What we showed is that,if you change the properties of the water itself,rather than the logs,you can change how the logs interact with each other,which results in magnetism."A surprising connection between topology and magnetism In essence,Li says,the paper reveals how topological structures known as Weyl nodes found in CeAlGe—an exotic semi-metal composed of cerium,aluminum and germanium—can significantly increase the working temperature for magnetic devices,opening the door to awide range of applications.While they are already being used to build sensors,gyroscopes,and more,topological materials have been eyed for awide range of additional applications,from microelectronics to thermoelectric and catalytic devices.By demonstrating amethod for maintaining magnetism at significantly higher temperatures,the study opens the door to even more possibilities,Nguyen says.“There are so many opportunities people have demonstrated—in this material and other topological materials,”he says.“What this shows is ageneral way that can significantly improve the working temperature for these materials,”adds Siriviboon.That“quite surprising and counterintuitive”result will have substantial impact on future work on topological materials,adds Linda Ye,assistant professor of physics in Caltech’s Division of Physics,Mathematics and Astronomy.“The discovery by Drucker and collaborators is intriguing and important,”says Ye,who was not involved in the research.“Their work suggests that electronic topological nodes not only play arole in stabilizing static magnetic orders,but more broadly they can be at play in the generation of magnetic fluctuations.A natural implication from this is that influences from topological Weyl states on materials can extend far beyond what was previously believed.”Princeton University professor of physics Andrei Bernevig agrees,called the findings“puzzling and remarkable.”“Weyls nodes are known to be topologically protected,but the influence of this protection on the thermodynamic properties of aphase is not well understood,”says Andrei Bernevig,who was not involved in the work.“The paper by the MIT group shows that short-range order,above the ordering temperature,is governed by anesting wave vector between the Weyl fermions that appear in this system…possibly suggesting that the protection of the Weyl nodes somehow influences magnetic fluctuations!” 查看详细>>

Neuroscience discoveries ranging from the nature of memory to treatments for disease have depended on reading the minds of mice,so researchers need to truly understand what the rodents’behavior is telling them during experiments.In anew study that examines learning from reward,MIT researchers deciphered some initially mystifying mouse behavior,yielding new ideas about how mice think and amathematical tool to aid future research.The task the mice were supposed to master is simple:Turn awheel left or right to get areward and then recognize when the reward direction switches.When neurotypical people play such“reversal learning”games they quickly infer the optimal approach:stick with the direction that works until it doesn’t and then switch right away.Notably,people with schizophrenia struggle with the task.In the new open-access study in PLOS Computational Biology,mice surprised scientists by showing that while they were capable of learning the“win-stay,lose-shift”strategy,they nonetheless refused to fully adopt it.“It is not that mice cannot form an inference-based model of this environment—they can,”says corresponding author Mriganka Sur,the Newton Professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences(BCS).“The surprising thing is that they don’t persist with it.Even in asingle block of the game where you know the reward is 100 percent on one side,every so often they will try the other side.”While the mouse motif of departing from the optimal strategy could be due to afailure to hold it in memory,says lead author and Sur Lab graduate student Nhat Le,another possibility is that mice don’t commit to the“win-stay,lose-shift”approach because they don’t trust that their circumstances will remain stable or predictable.Instead,they might deviate from the optimal regime to test whether the rules have changed.Natural settings,after all,are rarely stable or predictable.“I’d like to think mice are smarter than we give them credit for,”Le says.But regardless of which reason may cause the mice to mix strategies,adds co-senior author Mehrdad Jazayeri,associate professor in BCS and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research,it is important for researchers to recognize that they do and to be able to tell when and how they are choosing one strategy or another.“This study highlights the fact that,unlike the accepted wisdom,mice doing lab tasks do not necessarily adopt astationary strategy,and it offers acomputationally rigorous approach to detect and quantify such non-stationarities,”he says.“This ability is important because when researchers record the neural activity,their interpretation of the underlying algorithms and mechanisms may be invalid when they do not take the animals’shifting strategies into account.” 查看详细>>

“As achild,I wished for arobot that would explain others’emotions to me”says Sharifa Alghowinem,a research scientist in the Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group(PRG).Growing up in Saudi Arabia,Alghowinem says she dreamed of coming to MIT one day to develop Arabic-based technologies,and of creating arobot that could help herself and others navigate acomplex world.In her early life,Alghowinem faced difficulties with understanding social cues and never scored well on standardized tests,but her dreams carried her through.She earned an undergraduate degree in computing before leaving home to pursue graduate education in Australia.At the Australian National University,she discovered affective computing for the first time and began working to help AI detect human emotions and moods,but it wasn’t until she came to MIT as apostdoc with the Ibn Khaldun Fellowship for Saudi Arabian Women,which is housed in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering,that she was finally able to work on atechnology with the potential to explain others’emotions in English and Arabic.Today,she says her work is so fun that she calls the lab“my playground.”Alghowinem can’t say no to an exciting project.She found one with great potential to make robots more helpful to people by working with Jibo,a friendly robot companion developed by the founder of the Personal Robots Group(PRG)and the social robot startup Jibo Inc.,MIT Professor and Dean for Digital Learning Cynthia Breazeal.Breazeal‘s research explores the potential for companion robots to go far beyond assistants who obey transactional commands,like requests for the daily weather,adding items to shopping lists,or controlling lighting.At the MIT Media Lab,the PRG team designs Jibo to make him an insightful coach and companion to advance social robotics technologies and research.Visitors to the MIT Museum can experience Jibo’s charming personality.Alghowinem’s research has focused on mental health care and education,often working with other graduate students and Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program students in the group.In one study,Jibo coached young and older adults via positive psychology.He adapted his interventions based on the verbal and non-verbal responses he observed in the participants.For example,Jibo takes in the verbal content of aparticipant’s speech and combines it with non-verbal information like prolonged pauses and self-hugs.If he concludes that deep emotions have been disclosed,Jibo responds with empathy.When the participant doesn’t disclose,Jibo asks agentle follow up question like,“Can you tell me more?”Another project studied how arobot can effectively support high-quality parent and child interactions while reading astorybook together.Multiple PRG studies work together to learn what types of data are needed for arobot to understand people’s social and emotional states.“I would like to see Jibo become acompanion for the whole household,”says Alghowinem.Jibo can take on different roles with different family members such as acompanion,reminding elders to take medication,or as aplaymate for children.Alghowinem is especially motivated by the unique role Jibo could play in emotional wellness,and playing apreventative role in depression or even suicide.Integrating Jibo into daily life provides the opportunity for Jibo to detect emerging concerns and intervene,acting as aconfidential resource or mental health coach. 查看详细>>