Boston Dynamics: Dedicated to the Science and Art of How Things Move.
Group project. Why We Help: The Evolution of Cooperation. Last april, as reactors at japan's fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant were melting down following a lethal earthquake and tsunami, a maintenance worker in his 20s was among those who volunteered to reenter the plant to try to help bring things back under control. He knew the air was poisoned and expected the choice would keep him from ever marrying or having children for fear of burdening them with health consequences. Yet he still walked back through Fukushima's gates into the plant's radiation-infused air and got to work—for no more compensation than his usual modest wages.
“There are only some of us who can do this job,” the worker, who wished to remain anonymous, told the Independent last July. “I'm single and young, and I feel it's my duty to help settle this problem.” Although they may not always play out on such an epic scale, examples of selfless behavior abound in nature.
Select an option below: Customer Sign In. University: Research News @ Tufts. A Window into the Origin of Species Erik Dopman, PhD, joined the Department of Biology in 2009. He uses his expertise in evolutionary biology (PhD, Cornell University) and genomics and bioinformatics (postdoctoral research, Harvard University) to explore how species originate. “The critical features that generate new species are called isolating barriers, which are traits that prevent the exchange of genetic information between organisms,” says Dopman.
“The organism we study is called the European corn borer [the moth Ostrinia nubilalis], which is a major economic pest of corn and many other crops. Dopman and his research group identified seven isolating barriers that limit gene flow between strains of the European corn borer (ECB). Another application of this work centers on the ECB as an agricultural pest that costs about a billion dollars each year to manage. Dopman breeds the E and Z strains of the ECB in his lab in Barnum Hall. Exploring the Thought Bubble. We’re all rational beings, right? When we talk, or write or make decisions, we pretty much assume that what we’re doing has been clearly thought out. But is that really true? Ray Jackendoff sets out to explore the notion of our rationality in his new book, A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning (Oxford University Press).
Instead of focusing on the psychology of how we process information, as writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and Daniel Kahneman have in recent years, Jackendoff peers through the lens of linguistics, using language to gain insight into the workings of the mind. His explorations draw him far afield into fundamental questions about visual experience, free will, consciousness and even music, art and education. “The form of the thought itself is not conscious, not available to introspection,” Jackendoff says.
He peppers the text with real-world examples that highlight the gap between the way we believe we process our thoughts and what actually happens. Robots @ tufts. Teaching Robots the Complexities of Human Social Interactions Matthias Scheutz, PhD, joined the Department of Computer Science in 2010. His main research areas are human–robot interactions and computational models/complex systems. He approaches these areas from his broad background in philosophy (PhD, University of Vienna), formal logic (MS, University of Vienna), computer engineering (MS, Vienna University of Technology), and cognitive science and computer science (joint PhD, Indiana University).
Scheutz is an associate professor of cognitive and computer science, director of the Human–Robot Interaction Laboratory, and program director for the joint PhD in cognitive science (approved by Tufts in May of 2011). Scheutz focuses on social robots, which recognize and respond to human social cues with appropriate behaviors. Once a robot can model a human behavior, researchers can use the robot as a tool to study that behavior.
“I’m always open to collaborators,” says Scheutz. Media Lab: Affective Computing Group. On the Trail of the Higgs Boson. Scientists at CERN, a multinational research center based in Geneva, Switzerland, announced on July 4 that they had found a new elementary subatomic particle that has properties consistent with the hypothesized Higgs boson, which supposedly gives mass to all other particles. The finding also appears to validate the Standard Model of particle physics, the overarching theory describing the dynamics of subatomic particles that has underpinned the field for a half-century. To create the conditions to find the elusive particle, scientists forced protons to smash into each other at extraordinarily high speeds in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and then had to sift through trillions of such collisions looking for evidence of the particle.
Tufts scientists were part of the large, international team that made the discovery, in particular working in the ATLAS group, one of two searching for evidence of the Higgs boson. Why was it so difficult to find this particle? Helping hunt for the Higgs. What, exactly, is a Higgs boson? Fundamentally speaking, explained Melissa Franklin, Physics Department chair and Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics, the Higgs boson is a subatomic particle, one of more than a dozen such particles, including quarks, electrons, muons, and neutrinos. This particle, however, is unique because its discovery acts as confirmation of the existence of the Higgs field.
An invisible area, similar to the electromagnetic field, that permeates all of space, the Higgs field explains how the elementary particles that form the building blocks of all matter have mass. The field works by imparting mass to particles as they move through it. Because some particles move through the field very quickly, they take on less mass. Others, which move more slowly, take on more. “We believe it is there, but we don’t know for sure that there is a Higgs field,” Franklin explained. The potential implications of the Higgs discovery, however, don’t end there. In the Beginning Was the Beginning. By now, there’s scientific consensus that our universe exploded into existence almost 14 billion years ago in an event known as the Big Bang. But that theory raises more questions about the universe’s origins than it answers, including the most basic one: what happened before the Big Bang? Some cosmologists have argued that a universe could have no beginning, but simply always was.
In 2003, Tufts cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin and his colleagues, Arvind Borde, now a senior professor of mathematics at Long Island University, and Alan Guth, a professor of physics at MIT, proved a mathematical theorem showing that, under very general assumptions, the universe must, in fact, have had a beginning. Since that discovery, others in the field have countered with alternate theories describing other kinds of universes where the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem, as it is called, would not apply.
Tufts Now: What are the main theories of the universe that you considered? And the cosmic egg? A Different Kind of Secret Code. Researchers have invented a new form of secret messaging using bacteria that make glowing proteins only under certain conditions. In addition to being useful to spies, the new technique could also allow companies to encode secret identifiers into crops, seeds, or other living commodities. The new glowing bacteria actually did grow out of a bit of cloak-and-dagger thinking.
Several years ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency asked researchers to submit ideas for ways to encode secret messages without the need for electronics. At the time David Walt, a chemist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, teamed up with his former adviser George Whitesides, a chemist at Harvard University. Together, they came up with a way to add a variety of metal salts to a fuse that, when lit, would give off a sequence of pulses of infrared light that encoded a message. That got them thinking about other ways to accomplish the same thing.
Physicists Slow Speed of Light. Physicists Slow Speed of Light By William J. Cromie Gazette Staff Light, which normally travels the 240,000 miles from the Moon to Earth in less than two seconds, has been slowed to the speed of a minivan in rush-hour traffic -- 38 miles an hour. An entirely new state of matter, first observed four years ago, has made this possible. Such an exotic medium can be engineered to slow a light beam 20 million-fold from 186,282 miles a second to a pokey 38 miles an hour.
"In this odd state of matter, light takes on a more human dimension; you can almost touch it," says Lene Hau, a Harvard University physicist. Hau led a team of scientists who did this experiment at the Rowland Institute for Science, a private, nonprofit research facility in Cambridge, Mass., endowed by Edwin Land, the inventor of instant photography. In the future, slowing light could have a number of practical consequences, including the potential to send data, sound, and pictures in less space and with less power.
Personal Genome Project - Homepage. A Reality Check for Personal Genomes. CHICAGO—Biomedical researchers talk about the day not too far off when DNA sequencing will be so cheap that everyone will have their genome sequenced and carry the results around on a flash drive. People will learn about their personal disease risks, helping their doctors and them prevent or treat these illnesses. But a new study throws cold water on the notion that whole-genome sequencing will be very useful for the average person. Hopes for genomic medicine have grown in the past few years as researchers raced to track down DNA behind common diseases. These so-called genome-wide association studies have turned up hundreds of genetic markers linked to diseases such as cancer and diabetes.
But the new study suggests that even if all the disease risk markers can be found, the genetic risk for most people will still be relatively low. This analysis showed that in a best-case scenario, most people will have a genometype giving them a significantly elevated risk of developing one disease. LMM Research | PCPGM. The Laboratory for Molecular Medicine (LMM) supports several research studies that are ongoing within the laboratory or in affiliation with other clinical research groups. For more information please click on the research study of interest. Noonan Syndrome/PTPN11 Gene Mutation Studies Investigators: Raju Kucherlapati, Ph.D., Amy Roberts, M.D.Contact: Amy Roberts, M.D. - aeroberts@partners.org or 617-525-5768Institutions: Brigham and Women's Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital and Children's Hospital Boston This study examines genotype-phenotype correlations for individuals and families (children and adults) with Noonan syndrome and related disorders.
Two groups will be examined: those that meet the diagnostic criteria for Noonan syndrome and those that do not quite meet the criteria but have a "Noonan-like" appearance or presentation. Participants in the study will have PTPN11 mutation analysis testing. For more information about Noonan syndrome, see Resources. Non-Affiliated Research. Science News Headlines from ScienceNOW- The latest news from the science world. A Breath of Fresh Microbubbles. John Kheir knows what it's like to lose a race against time with oxygen. In October 2006, the pediatric critical care doctor was treating a 9-month-old girl admitted to Boston Children's Hospital with viral pneumonia.
As her disease worsened, her lungs hemorrhaged, filling with blood and blocking her breathing. Kheir jumped into action, shoving a breathing tube down her windpipe to help get air to her lungs, performing CPR, and eventually putting the baby on a machine that took over for her heart and lungs. But in the minutes it took to restore the flow of air into the young girl's body, her brain had already suffered permanent damage because of the lack of oxygen. She died a few days later. Devastated, Kheir began looking for better ways to get oxygen into the body. Now, he's found one. "This is a potential breakthrough," says cardiac intensive care doctor Peter Laussen of Boston Children's Hospital, who was not involved in the work.
Study of the Day: An Incredible New Way to Breathe During an Emergency - Hans Villarica. A single intravenous injection of a lipid-based gas-filled solution brought 15 minutes worth of life-saving oxygen to rabbits with completely blocked airways. An injected oxygen microparticle encounters a red blood cell deprived of this vital gas. (D. Kunkel/Dennis Kunkel Microscopy, Inc.; D. Bell/Harvard University; J.
Kheir/Children's Hospital Boston; C. PROBLEM: Patients who can't breathe need oxygen quickly to avoid cardiac arrest and brain injury. METHODOLOGY: Researchers led by Harvard Medical School's John N. RESULTS: Within seconds, infusions of the microparticles restored the blood oxygen saturation of these mammals to near-normal levels. Unlike free gas, the microparticles didn't get stuck in the capillaries and cause embolisms. CONCLUSION: Injected gas-filled microparticles can rapidly deliver life-saving oxygen to animals with incapacitated respiratory systems.
A Shotgun for Blood Clots. Think of it as Liquid-Plumr for the circulatory system. Researchers have designed a clump of tiny particles that rides the current of the bloodstream, seeks out life-threatening blood clots, and obliterates them. The approach works in mice and could soon move on to human trials. Blood clots are bad news for the brain, heart, and other organs. These masses of blood cells can grow big enough to choke off veins and arteries, preventing oxygen from flowing to critical organs.
Looking for a better approach, biomedical engineer Donald Ingber of Harvard University and colleagues turned to nanoparticles. The researchers tested the approach on mice suffering from blood clots. "Making these particles so that they break apart at the right amount of force was a challenge," says Ingber. "The beauty of these nanoparticles is that they will not deliver this drug to any other place but the area of stress," says Heyu Ni, platelet biologist at St. New virus-built battery could power cars, electronic devices. For the first time, MIT researchers have shown they can genetically engineer viruses to build both the positively and negatively charged ends of a lithium-ion battery.
The new virus-produced batteries have the same energy capacity and power performance as state-of-the-art rechargeable batteries being considered to power plug-in hybrid cars, and they could also be used to power a range of personal electronic devices, said Angela Belcher, the MIT materials scientist who led the research team. The new batteries, described in the April 2 online edition of Science, could be manufactured with a cheap and environmentally benign process: The synthesis takes place at and below room temperature and requires no harmful organic solvents, and the materials that go into the battery are non-toxic. In a traditional lithium-ion battery, lithium ions flow between a negatively charged anode, usually graphite, and the positively charged cathode, usually cobalt oxide or lithium iron phosphate.