Research Briefs
Illuminating Tumors
An MIT group has created a potential alternative to x-ray and biopsy-based methods of probing for breast cancers. The Minimally Invasive Optical Biopsy System relies on injectable dyes that can be imaged using tissue-penetrating infrared light. “The accumulation of dye near malignant tissues is much greater than that near healthy tissues,” notes Robert Levine, a research scientist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. When employed with a customized computer program that boosts image clarity, the system may reveal the presence of malignant breast tumors without the need for the mammography-biopsy combination, which is not only invasive but can sometimes lead to inaccurate diagnoses. At this point, though, the new system is still developmental and thus not ready for clinical use. Levine and research scientist Matthew Braunstein, also of Lincoln Laboratory, developed the system with MIT senior Robert W. Chan.
Dragging Spacetime
Einstein’s relativity theory spurred predictions that heavy, spinning objects in space would distort space and time around them, like a four-dimensional version of a map that’s gotten caught in a whirlpool. It’s also been assumed the distortion would be greatest when the spinning object was both small and extremely dense. Now, an MIT team has turned up evidence of such an effect around black holes, among the densest objects in the cosmos. Though never actually observed, these mysterious entities are thought to pack several suns’ worth of mass into a body well under 100 miles across. While that makes them so gravitationally powerful even light can’t escape from them, events outside their boundaries are believed to trigger x-radiation, and the MIT group used x-ray measurements from five black holes to reach its conclusions. “We believe that spinning black holes do drag space and time around with them,” says research scientist and team leader Wei Cui of the MIT Center for Space Research. The team used measurements from the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite in its studies. The recently launched probe is named for the late Bruno Rossi of MIT, an x-ray astronomy pioneer.
Vegetable Power
An innovative device that would allow use of vegetable oil and similar products as fuel supplements in cars and trucks and that may yield sharp cuts in pollution emissions has been created by an MIT group. The soup can-sized device is called a plasmatron. When fuels of virtually any type, including those from plants, are pumped through it, the device produces a hydrogen-rich gas. If mixed with regular gasoline or diesel oil, this product leads to much lower nitrogen-oxide emissions than when fuels are burned without the gas as an additive. Plasmatrons as a class aren’t a new invention, says Daniel Cohn, a senior scientist at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center and one of the new device’s developers. But most existing devices are about the size of a car engine, and thus not practical for use in vehicles. “We’re the first to develop a compact, low-power plasmatron,” says Cohn.
Easing Internet Traffic
Experts predict that the exponential growth of traffic on the information superhighway will lead to further electronic congestion in the next few years. Bandwidth — a measure of transmission capacity — is part of the problem. Now, though, an MIT group has created a device that could expand the information-carrying capacity of optical communications fiber by a factor of 100. Such a boost would not only end congestion, but it would also make it possible to send television-quality video transmissions over the Internet, meaning people on the East Coast could “electronically” meet with people on the West Coast. The new device, a photonic band gap resonator, can select more than 100 wavelengths from the standard optical spectrum, each wavelength capable of carrying a separate information channel. “This is the Holy Grail of telecommunications system design,” says Lionel Kimerling, professor of materials science and engineering and a member of the team that developed the device.
On Topic: astronomy, computer science+technology, energy, health science+technology, physics
