Emily S. Finn

Researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Lab have developed new radar technology that provides real-time video of what’s going on behind solid walls.

A front view of the radar system, showing the eight receiving elements in the top row and 13 transmitting ones on the bottom row.

The ability to see through walls is no longer the stuff of science fiction, thanks to new radar technology developed at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory.

Much as humans and other animals see via waves of visible light that bounce off objects and then strike our eyes’ retinas, radar “sees” by sending out radio waves that bounce off targets and return to the radar’s receivers. But just as light can’t pass through solid objects in quantities large enough for the eye to detect, it’s hard to build radar that can penetrate walls well enough to show what’s happening behind. Now, Lincoln Lab researchers have built a system that can see through walls from some distance away, giving an instantaneous picture of the activity on the other side.

The researchers’ device is an unassuming array of antenna arranged into two rows — eight receiving elements on top, 13 transmitting ones below — and some computing equipment, all mounted onto a movable cart. But it has powerful implications for military operations, especially “urban combat situations,” says Gregory Charvat, technical staff at Lincoln Lab and the leader of the project.

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MIT undergraduate travels to Mexico in hopes of documenting and preserving ancient linguistic phenomena — and the culture behind them.

Along with its stunningly accurate calendar and majestic pyramidal architecture, the Mayan civilization deserves recognition for another unique feature: its language.

Mayan languages are a rich source of data for linguists aiming to develop a universal theory of language, but like many of the world’s tongues, their speakers are steadily dwindling in number. MIT undergraduate John Berman spent the past summer in a remote village in Mexico studying Chol — a Mayan language spoken in the southern state of Chiapas — in the hopes of capturing some important features of its grammar and vocabulary. Working first with a team of researchers led by Jessica Coon PhD ’10, and later for several weeks on his own, Berman immersed himself in a Chol-speaking community to document and understand some of the language’s unique attributes.

“With Native American languages, they’re dying fairly quickly — whole families of languages, even,” Berman says. “It’s important to do this research now before it’s too late.”

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New cardiac patch uses gold nanowires to enhance electrical signaling between cells, a promising step toward better treatment for heart-attack patients.

Image courtesy of the Disease Biophysics Group, Harvard University

A team of researchers at MIT and Children’s Hospital Boston has built cardiac patches studded with tiny gold wires that could be used to create pieces of tissue whose cells all beat in time, mimicking the dynamics of natural heart muscle. The development could someday help people who have suffered heart attacks.

The study, reported this week in Nature Nanotechnology, promises to improve on existing cardiac patches, which have difficulty achieving the level of conductivity necessary to ensure a smooth, continuous “beat” throughout a large piece of tissue.

“The heart is an electrically quite sophisticated piece of machinery,” says Daniel Kohane, a professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and senior author of the paper. “It is important that the cells beat together, or the tissue won’t function properly.”

The unique new approach uses gold nanowires scattered among cardiac cells as they’re grown in vitro, a technique that “markedly enhances the performance of the cardiac patch,” Kohane says. The researchers believe the technology may eventually result in implantable patches to replace tissue that’s been damaged in a heart attack.

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Brain-imaging study suggests that reading difficulties are the same regardless of overall intelligence — and that more children could benefit from support in school.

Photo: Patrick Gillooly

About 5 to 10 percent of American children are diagnosed as dyslexic. Historically, the label has been assigned to kids who are bright, even verbally articulate, but who struggle with reading — in short, whose high IQs mismatch their low reading scores. On the other hand, reading troubles in children with low IQs have traditionally been considered a byproduct of their general cognitive limitations, not a reading disorder in particular.

Now, a new brain-imaging study challenges this understanding of dyslexia. “We found that children who are poor readers have the same brain difficulty in processing the sounds of language whether they have a high or low IQ,” says John D. E. Gabrieli, MIT’s Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Cognitive Neuroscience, who performed the study with Fumiko Hoeft and colleagues at the Stanford University School of Medicine; Charles Hulme at York University in the U.K.; and Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, also at MIT. “Reading difficulty is independent of other cognitive abilities.”

The study, which is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, could change how educators diagnose dyslexia, opening up reading support to more children who could benefit from it.

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MIT and the Broad Institute open their doors to the judicial community for a workshop at the intersection of science and the law.

Graphic: Christine Daniloff

Last week, tucked away in a second-floor teaching space at the MIT Museum known as “the cell,” students huddled together in a dark corner of the room labeled “nucleus,” where they laboriously snapped together LEGOs — in this case representing nucleotides — to match a long chain of genetic material in front of them.

Then, clutching their strands of messenger RNA, they were ushered toward the center of the room by their instructor, Kathy Vandiver, who sat them at small tables marked “ribosome” and set them off building proteins out of additional toy bricks.

But these weren’t primary school students. They were judges from all over the country who had come to MIT for Judges’ Science School, a crash course in scientific information and methods for legal professionals.

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Anthropologist examines the ‘everyday ethics’ of everything from cheese making to motherhood.

Photo: Dominick Reuter

As a kid, Heather Paxson wouldn’t eat American cheese.

“I thought it was not real food and it was an insult,” she says of her youthful disdain for the processed stuff. As an elementary school student growing up in southern Illinois, Paxson insisted on cheddar or Swiss for her sandwiches instead.

Today, Paxson is a tenured professor in MIT’s Anthropology Program, where she does ethnographic research into artisanal cheese making in the United States. She studies several aspects of cheese production, from the cultural — who is behind the current renaissance in handmade cheeses? — to what she calls the “microbiopolitics” of raw-milk cheese on this side of the Atlantic.

Coincidence? Probably not, but Paxson’s scholarship took her through varied terrain before she circled back to her passion for dairy. “I’m interested in everyday ethics,” she says, an interest that, before her current focus on food and eating, first manifested as the study of a different bodily process: reproduction.

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New study pinpoints areas of the brain used exclusively for language, providing a partial answer to a longstanding debate in cognitive science.

Graphic courtesy of Ev Fedorenko

New research from MIT suggests that there are parts of our brain dedicated to language and only language, a finding that marks a major advance in the search for brain regions specialized for sophisticated mental functions.

Functional specificity, as it’s known to cognitive scientists, refers to the idea that discrete parts of the brain handle distinct tasks. Scientists have long known that functional specificity exists in certain domains: In the motor system, for example, there is one patch of neurons that controls the fingers of your left hand, and another that controls your tongue. But what about more complex functions such as recognizing faces, using language or doing math? Are there special brain regions for those activities, or do they use general-purpose areas that serve whatever task is at hand?

Language, a cognitive skill that is both unique to humans and universal to all human cultures, “seems like one of the first places one would look” for this kind of specificity, says Evelina Fedorenko, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and first author of the new study. But data from neuroimaging — especially functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity associated with cognitive tasks — has been frustratingly inconclusive. Though studies have largely converged on several areas important for language, it’s been hard to say whether those areas are exclusive to language. Many experiments have found that non-language tasks seemingly activate the same areas: Arithmetic, working memory and music are some of the most common culprits.

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Cognitive neuroscientists shed light on how the brain responds to scenes and their mirror-image reversals.

Graphic: Christine Daniloff

Picture a penny. You can probably recall its color (copper), which historical figure graces its front (Abraham Lincoln), and even the orientation of the portrait (profile, as opposed to straight on). But can you remember which way Lincoln is facing?

According to MIT research scientist Daniel D. Dilks, only about half of us get this right, meaning we’re performing no better than if we had simply guessed. This well-known phenomenon suggests that left-right distinctions are irrelevant to object recognition; in other words, our brains perceive an object and its mirror image as one and the same.

On the other hand, when people look at scenes, it has long been thought that the brainis sensitive to left-right orientation, since this information is crucial for navigation. (A road curving to the right must be negotiated differently than one curving to the left.)

However, in a recent study at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Dilks and his colleagues identified a part of the brain that appears to be an exception to this rule: It processes scenes, but doesn’t seem to distinguish left from right. The results highlight the cognitive differences between perception and action.

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The most recent global climate report fails to capture the reality of the changing Arctic seascape, according to MIT researchers.

Taken from the Canadian Research Icebreaker CCGS Amundsen, in the Beaufort Sea in September 2009. Photo: V. Dansereau

The Arctic — a mosaic of oceans, glaciers and the northernmost projections of several countries — is a place most of us will never see. We can imagine it, though, and our mental picture is dominated by one feature: ice.

Yet the Arctic sea ice is changing dramatically, and its presence shouldn’t be taken for granted, even over the course of our lifetimes.

According to new research from MIT, the most recent global climate report fails to capture trends in Arctic sea-ice thinning and drift, and in some cases substantially underestimates these trends. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, released in 2007, forecasts an ice-free Arctic summer by the year 2100, among other predictions. But Pierre Rampal, a postdoc in the Department of Earth, Atmosphere, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), and colleagues say it may happen several decades earlier.

Read the full article at MIT News