Research Briefs
Rollercoaster Climate
While some say global warming could boost temperatures as much as 5 degrees C., MIT’s Maureen Raymo suggests rapid temperature swings up to twice that level may have been common for at least the last 1.5 million years. Using sediments brought up from deep beneath the ocean floor, Raymo and her colleagues from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution checked fossils dating back many eons. These remnants of tiny creatures yielded a surprising discovery: that abrupt changes in surface temperatures and iceberg formation in the North Atlantic, along with similarly fast alterations in deep-ocean chemistry, have been a routine occurrence for hundreds of thousands of years. Raymo, an associate professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, says that in the parts of Europe whose climate is most heavily influenced by the North Atlantic, such changes would translate into temperature shifts of up to 10 C. That would be equivalent to bringing Miami-like weather to Boston–and having it happen over spans as short as 25 years.
Sense of Place
One of many impressive feats performed effortlessly by our brains is orienting us more or less instantaneously when we enter a room, an outdoor locale, or some other setting. How does the organ perform this vital task? Two MIT scientists report that a sugar cube-sized brain region seems to be responsible. The pair found that this brain locus, the parahippocampal cortex, got very active when they showed volunteer subjects pictures of a city neighborhood, a room, or other such locales. Images of objects like faces or furniture, meanwhile, elicited little or no response. Nancy Kanwisher, an associate professor of brain and cognitive studies, did the research with postdoctoral fellow Russell Epstein. Few would have predicted, notes Kanwisher, that perceiving the appearance of places “would have its own special-purpose bit of brain devoted to it.”
Unleashing Electric Cars
Though electric vehicles have environmental advantages over their gas-powered counterparts, the short distances they cover between rechargings have helped keep a lid on demand. Thanks to an unusual collaboration, though, four MIT faculty, their students and other researchers may be on the road to a solution. The group designed a battery made of lithium, aluminum and other materials that’s markedly more powerful, pound-for-pound, than traditional electric-car batteries. And its largest component is a flexible solid, meaning elements of such a battery could conceivably fit into unconventional spaces like that behind a car’s dash. The group’s ultimate goal is a battery that will take a vehicle 200 miles or more between rechargings. “The only technology that has a prayer of propelling a car that far is the solid-state lithium battery,” says Donald Sadoway, professor of materials chemistry and one of the project’s initiators. The other faculty involved are Gerbrand Ceder, Yet-Ming Chiang and Anne Mayes, all of the materials science and engineering department.
Honey-Coil Math
We’re all familiar with the satisfying coils honey makes as it drains off a spoon onto a dish or piece of toast. Now, MIT’s Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan has calculated how and why such gooey stuff acts that way. Using sophisticated mathematics, Mahadevan, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Harvard grad students William Ryu and Aravinthan Samuel found they could predict the number and radius of the coils created by specified flows of honey and similar substances. Originally, the group did the work as a theoretical exercise. The group later learned, however, that their work may have industrial relevance. The glass industry, for example, may apply it to improve its method of creating fibers from melted glass.
On Topic: brain+cognitive sciences, earth+atmospheric sciences, materials science+engineering, mathematics
