Folded DNA templates allow researchers to precisely cut out graphene shapes, which could be used in electronic circuits.
DNA’s unique structure is ideal for carrying genetic information, but scientists have recently found ways to exploit this versatile molecule for other purposes: By controlling DNA sequences, they can manipulate the molecule to ...
Patterning Graphene With DNA
Posted On Wednesday, April 10, 2013 By USA Education News. Under MASSACHUSETTS Tags: Chih-Jen Shih, Harvard University, metallized DNA, Michael Strano, MIT postdoc Zhong Jin, nanoscale shapes
Folded DNA templates allow researchers to precisely cut out graphene shapes, which could be used in electronic circuits.
DNA’s unique structure is ideal for carrying genetic information, but scientists have recently found ways to exploit this versatile molecule for other purposes: By controlling DNA sequences, they can manipulate the molecule to ...
Sorting Out The Structure of A Parkinson’s Protein
Posted On Wednesday, April 3, 2013 By USA Education News. Under MASSACHUSETTS Tags: American Chemical Society, Collin Stultz, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, MIT computational scientists
Clumps of proteins that accumulate in brain cells are a hallmark of neurological diseases such as dementia, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Over the past several years, there has been much controversy over the structure of one of those proteins, known as alpha synuclein.
MIT computational scientists have now modeled the ...
New Solar-Cell Design Based On Dots And Wires
Posted On Tuesday, March 26, 2013 By USA Education News. Under MASSACHUSETTS Tags: electrodes, paper to be published, PV materials, Scanning Electron Microscope, solar cell
Using exotic particles called quantum dots as the basis for a photovoltaic cell is not a new idea, but attempts to make such devices have not yet achieved sufficiently high efficiency in converting sunlight to power. A new wrinkle added by a team of researchers at MIT — embedding the ...
Fostering An Innovation Ecosystem
Posted On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 By USA Education News. Under MASSACHUSETTS Tags: John A. Volpe, Kendall Square, Kendall Square Association’s, L. Rafael Reif, LabCentral, Tim Rowe
MIT President L. Rafael Reif and others discuss ways to support Kendall Square’s burgeoning innovation culture.
As Kendall Square gains altitude as a tech and biotech epicenter, its neighbors — including MIT — are finding educational and entrepreneurial opportunities there.
The Kendall Square Association’s (KSA) annual meeting on Wednesday — which included ...
Mapping The Early History Of The Moon
Posted On Tuesday, March 12, 2013 By USA Education News. Under MASSACHUSETTS Tags: 41st annual Killian Award Lecture, E.A. Griswold Professor, GRAIL, Maria Zuber, terrestrial planets
In 41st annual Killian Lecture, Maria Zuber describes looking deep into the moon’s interior to chart its early history.
For much of human history, the moon has been a familiar, yet remote, presence in the night sky. Only recently have humans been able to explore the lunar surface to look for ...
How Numbers Can Reveal Hidden Truths About Sports
Posted On Monday, March 4, 2013 By USA Education News. Under MASSACHUSETTS Tags: clutch, field-goal kicker, National Football League, Sports Analytics Conference
When a field-goal kicker lines up for an attempt in a football game, television viewers will typically be presented with the kicker’s record from that distance — on all attempts from 40 to 49 yards, for instance. Meanwhile, if the kick in question is a crucial last-second attempt, the opposing ...
MIT Report Identifies Keys To New American Innovation
Posted On Monday, February 25, 2013 By USA Education News. Under MASSACHUSETTS Tags: American innovation, Innovation Economy, L. Rafael Reif, Martin Schmidt, Raphael Dorman-Helen
What kinds of industrial production can bring innovation to the American economy? An intensive, long-term study by a group of MIT scholars suggests that a renewed commitment to research and development in manufacturing, sometimes through creative new forms of collaboration, can spur innovation and growth in the United States as ...
Beefing Up Public-Key Encryption
Posted On Monday, February 18, 2013 By USA Education News. Under MASSACHUSETTS Tags: chosen-ciphertext attacks, financial transactions, Internet, mathematically, public-key encryption
Most financial transactions on the Internet are safeguarded by a cryptographic technique called public-key encryption. Where traditional encryption relies on a single secret key, shared by both sender and recipient, public-key encryption uses two keys that are mathematically related. One, the public key, is published on the Internet, and any ...
Cell Circuits Remember Their History
Posted On Tuesday, February 12, 2013 By USA Education News. Under MASSACHUSETTS Tags: John Yazbek, MIT postdoc Piro Siuti, Nature Biotechnology, synthetic biology
MIT engineers design new synthetic biology circuits that combine memory and logic.
MIT engineers have created genetic circuits in bacterial cells that not only perform logic functions, but also remember the results, which are encoded in the cell’s DNA and passed on for dozens of generations.
The circuits, described in the Feb. ...
Charles Stewart Ranks The Voting Systems In The 50 States
Posted On Thursday, February 7, 2013 By USA Education News. Under MASSACHUSETTS Tags: breathless worries, Caltech-MIT Voting Technology, Election Day, Election Initiatives
Do you live in a state that runs its elections particularly well, or poorly? And how would you know? Until recently, says Charles Stewart III, the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at MIT, questions on election performance have inhabited a “data desert” — so while it has been ...
MIT Researchers Improve Quantum-Dot Performance
Posted On Monday, February 4, 2013 By USA Education News. Under MASSACHUSETTS Tags: biological system, Lester Wolfe Professor of Chemistry, MIT chemistry postdoc Ou Chen, Moungi Bawendi, Quantum dots
New production method could enable everything from more efficient computer displays to enhanced biomedical testing.
Quantum dots — tiny particles that emit light in a dazzling array of glowing colors — have the potential for many applications, but have faced a series of hurdles to improved performance. But an MIT team ...
Duflo, Lander, Lewin to Lead Spring-Semester MITx Courses
Posted On Saturday, February 2, 2013 By USA Education News. Under MASSACHUSETTS Tags: Development Economics, Electricity and Magnetism, Eric Lander, Esther Duflo, MITx courses, The Challenges of Global Poverty, Walter Lewin
MIT professors Esther Duflo, Eric Lander and Walter Lewin will lead three new MITx courses this spring, joining three existing MITx courses that will be offered again this semester.
The new MITx courses were announced recently by edX, the free online-education platform created last May by MIT and Harvard University. EdX ...
Cardiac Development Needs More Than Protein-Coding Genes
Posted On Monday, January 28, 2013 By USA Education News. Under MASSACHUSETTS Tags: Braveheart, Cardiac development, lncRNA, protein-coding genes, RNA molecules
When the human genome was sequenced, biologists were surprised to find that very little of the genome — less than 3 percent — corresponds to protein-coding genes. What, they wondered, was all the rest of that DNA doing?
It turns out that much of it codes for genetic snippets known as ...
Research Update: Multiple Steps Toward The ‘Quantum Singularity’
Posted On Monday, January 21, 2013 By USA Education News. Under MASSACHUSETTS Tags: Alex Arkhipov, computing researcher, Imperial College London, optical experiment, quantum singularity, Scott Aaronson
In early 2011, a pair of theoretical computer scientists at MIT proposed an optical experiment that would harness the weird laws of quantum mechanics to perform a computation impossible on conventional computers. Commenting at the time, a quantum-computing researcher at Imperial College London said that the experiment “has the potential ...
Study Finds A New Culprit For Epileptic Seizures
Posted On Friday, January 18, 2013 By USA Education News. Under MASSACHUSETTS Tags: Epileptic seizures, glial-cell mutation, MIT neuroscientists, non-neuronal cells, Troy Littleton
Epileptic seizures occur when neurons in the brain become excessively active. However, a new study from MIT neuroscientists suggests that some seizures may originate in non-neuronal cells known as glia, which were long believed to play a mere supporting role in brain function.
In a study of fruit flies, the researchers ...
