Kiddovation: 6 Cool Inventions from High-Schoolers at MIT’s Eureka Fest 06-25

Innovation

Kiddovation: 6 Cool Inventions from High-Schoolers at MIT’s EurekaFest

Checking in on the next generation of innovators -- high-schoolers from around the country showcase their ideas at MIT's EurekaFest invention fair.

By Doug Aamot

DOUG AAMOTH / TIME.COM

Young inventors, their advisers, members of the media and more gather at MIT's 2013 EurekaFest invention fair.

The Lemelson-MIT Program wasestablished in 1994 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to “honor both established and rising inventors for their ingenuity, creativity and contribution to invention and innovation.”

Several grants are given out every year, including many to “InvenTeams” made up of high school students that have ideas about how to solve certain problems in their communities or around the world.

Every year, EurekaFest showcases the InvenTeams’ inventions. Many are still in the early stages of development and some may never make it to market, but here’s a glimpse at the inventions from this year’s program.

Automated robotic vehicular independence system — Beaver Country Day School (Chestnut Hill, Mass.)

This four-wheeled robot has been designed to replace wheelchair backpacks and tethered wheelchair trailers, following its owner around wirelessly and carrying up to 50 pounds on its platform. The team mentioned grocery shopping as a possible use-case. This alpha prototype cost $2,500 to put together.

Emotive aid for combating autism — Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (Alexandria, Va.)

This project consists of a watch-like device with an LCD screen meant to be worn by someone with autism. The device sports a microphone that analyzes others’ speech patterns, at which point a computer algorithm guesses (with 60% accuracy) whether whoever’s talking is happy, sad, angry or disgusted before relaying the appropriate icon to the watch’s screen. This prototype cost $150 to build.

Pedestrian alert system — Newton North High School (Newton, Mass.)

Ethiopia has some of the worst traffic fatality rates in the world, so Newton North High School paired with its sister school in Addis Ababa to create this pedestrian alert system. The system gauges the speed of oncoming cars and alerts pedestrians further down the road whether it’s safe to cross or not. Each system would cost $3,700 but costs could be driven down by using recycled parts.

Solar egg incubator — Henry M. Gunn High School (Palo Alto, Calif.)

Meant for developing countries, this system consists of a solar collector, incubator, and an automatic egg turner controlled by an Arduino microcontroller. Nicknamed the Cluck Bucket, the system can incubate a dozen eggs at a time and features a hatching detection system that alerts its owner about three days before the chickens are ready to emerge. All the parts cost roughly $300.

Drowning prevention device — Girls Leadership Academy of Arizona (Phoenix, Ariz.)

The adorably-named “Wata Wescue” is a high-tech, yet lightweight water safety shirt for small children designed to address the problem of child drownings in family pools. If a child wearing the shirt falls into the pool, the shirt inflates itself and sounds a wireless alert to a base station inside the house.

Ice search and rescue ROV — Natick High School (Natick, Mass.)

This remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) uses an underwater camera system to help search-and-rescue teams identify people or objects trapped under ice before deploying human divers. The total cost for all the finished parts comes to around $4,000.

Aside from the six inventions shown above, there were 10 other teams showing off their ideas as well. Here’s a list of those teams, with links to more information about each project:

ACTS Home Education Cooperative (Charlottesville, Va.): Wind turbine for highway airflow capture

Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders (Austin, Texas): Non-electric pressurized cooler

Colfax High School (Colfax, Calif.): Construction layout tool

Ella T. Grasso Southeastern Technical High School (Groton, Conn.): Compost water heating system

John P. Stevens High School (Edison, N.J.): Life jacket for prolonged search and rescue

LEARN Science and Math Club (Kansas City, Mo.): Life-saving, drug-tracking system

Los Alamitos High School (Los Alamitos, Calif.): High efficiency ozone water purification system

Nashua High School North (Nashua, N.H.): Bacteria powered battery

St. Ursula Academy (Toledo, Ohio): Pill dispensing organizational system

Sturgis West Charter Public School (Hyannis, Mass.): Marine mammal rescue transporter

And here’s more information about the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam initiative.

View at the original source

Surprising turns in magnetic thin films could lead to better data storage 06-24

Surprising turns in magnetic thin films could lead to better data storage

MIT researchers discover efficient control of magnetism in chiral ferromagnets.

A magnetic phenomenon newly discovered by MIT researchers could lead to much faster, denser and more energy-efficient chips for memory and computation.

The findings, reported in the journal Nature Materials, could reduce the energy needed to store and retrieve one bit of data by a factor of 10,000, says the paper’s senior author, Geoffrey Beach, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at MIT. The paper’s co-authors are graduate students Satoru Emori and Uwe Bauer, postdoc Sung-Min Ahn, and Eduardo Martinez of the University of Salamanca in Spain.

Beach says that hints of the new phenomenon have been reported for several years, but these had remained unexplained until now. The new results could overcome “a lot of what had seemed like fundamental limitations” in the control and use of magnetic materials, he says, adding: “It’s a whole new approach to the design of magnetic materials.”

It turns out the key to this phenomenon lies not in the magnetic materials themselves, but in what’s next to them: In this case, the team used very thin films of a ferromagnetic material, deposited on a metal base, and with a layer of an oxide material on top — a sort of ferromagnet sandwich. The behavior of the ferromagnetic layer, it turns out, depends on the metal that layer rests upon.

Ferromagnetic materials, including the familiar bar magnets, have a north and a south pole. When such materials are used for data storage, such as on a computer’s hard disk, separate tiny “domains” on their surface can have these poles pointing either up or down, representing ones and zeros. Normally, when a ferromagnetic material is exposed to a current, these domains are pushed along the surface in the same direction as the electron flow.

But previously, in rare cases, the movement was in the opposite direction, puzzling researchers. The MIT team found that when the thin ferromagnetic film was deposited on a slab of platinum, it exhibited this backward flow — which Beach likens to being dragged upwind.

But under circumstances that were identical, except that the film was deposited on the metal tantalum, the magnetic domains flowed in the normal direction — meaning that the key was not in the ferromagnet itself, but in its next-door neighbor. Both platinum and tantalum are nonmagnetic, so they would not ordinarily be expected to affect magnetic behavior.

It turns out that in either case, an unexpected effect alters how magnetic domains switch from one orientation to the other. Normally, when the spin orientation changes from one domain to the other (say, from “up” to “down”), the direction of that change is random. But in these thin-film sandwiches, spin rotations are aligned, consistently either turning clockwise or counterclockwise. The researchers showed that because of this peculiar effect, current can push domains with much more force than in conventional materials, and the direction that the domains move can be engineered simply by selecting the nonmagnetic metal underneath the magnet.

Such asymmetrical behavior is called a chiral effect; the researchers say this is the first demonstration of chiral behavior in magnetic domains.

“There are very few systems in nature that have this preferred way to rotate,” Beach says. Among the few are the molecules that form the basis for life, such as those that assemble into DNA molecules. Additionally, a few magnetic materials have shown this property, “but only in very exotic structures,” he says: at temperatures just slightly above absolute zero, and only in a perfect single crystal.

The new phenomenon, by contrast, is seen “at room temperature and well above room temperature, and in devices that are ideally suited for integration into electronic devices,” Beach says.

In the new ferromagnetic sandwiches, the forces pushing the magnetic domains are 100 times greater than in conventional ferromagnetic storage systems. Since the power needed to move the domains varies with the square of these forces, Beach says, such a system could be 10,000 times more efficient than existing technology.

With that, “all of a sudden these go from just looking interesting to being competitive even with very entrenched technology,” Beach says. And because these structures are compatible with existing manufacturing methods, he predicts, “these things are going to be out there and making a difference very soon.”

Emori, the paper’s lead author, says that there are now several kinds of memory systems, from the ones within a computer’s internal memory to those on hard disks or solid-state USB thumb drives. Theoretically, by harnessing these new effects, he says, “all of these could be satisfied by one material.”

This is “a very important, major advance,” says Robert Buhrman, a professor of engineering and senior vice provost for research at Cornell University. The MIT research, he says, is part of “a very intense effort worldwide to efficiently control the motion of ferromagnetic domain walls in thin-film nanostructures for future very high-performance data-storage and nonvolatile logic operations.”

Buhrman adds, “This work has answered several important questions raised by earlier studies as to how a current pulse can very rapidly move domain walls in a preferred direction.” Besides providing those answers, he says, it “raises new questions for follow-on work.”

“It’s really a whole new class of magnetic materials,” Beach says. “It opens up possibilities that it would have been difficult to even speculate about a couple of years ago.”

The work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

View at the original source

The link between circadian rhythms and aging 06-24

The link between circadian rhythms and aging

MIT study finds that a gene associated with longevity also regulates the body’s circadian clock.

Anne Trafton, MIT News Office

Human sleeping and waking patterns are largely governed by an internal circadian clock that corresponds closely with the 24-hour cycle of light and darkness. This circadian clock also controls other body functions, such as metabolism and temperature regulation.

Studies in animals have found that when that rhythm gets thrown off, health problems including obesity and metabolic disorders such as diabetes can arise. Studies of people who work night shifts have also revealed an increased susceptibility to diabetes. 

A new study from MIT shows that a gene called SIRT1, previously shown to protect against diseases of aging, plays a key role in controlling these circadian rhythms. The researchers found that circadian function decays with aging in normal mice, and that boosting their SIRT1 levels in the brain could prevent this decay. Conversely, loss of SIRT1 function impairs circadian control in young mice, mimicking what happens in normal aging.  

Leonard Guarente is the Novartis Professor of Biology at MITPHOTO: M. SCOTT BRAUER

Since the SIRT1 protein itself was found to decline with aging in the normal mice, the findings suggest that drugs that enhance SIRT1 activity in humans could have widespread health benefits, says Leonard Guarente, the Novartis Professor of Biology at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the findings in the June 20 issue of Cell.

“If we could keep SIRT1 as active as possible as we get older, then we’d be able to retard aging in the central clock in the brain, and health benefits would radiate from that,” Guarente says.

Staying on schedule

In humans and animals, circadian patterns follow a roughly 24-hour cycle, directed by the circadian control center of the brain, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), located in the hypothalamus.

“Just about everything that takes place physiologically is really staged along the circadian cycle,” Guarente says. “What’s now emerging is the idea that maintaining the circadian cycle is quite important in health maintenance, and if it gets broken, there’s a penalty to be paid in health and perhaps in aging.”

Last year, Guarente found that a robust circadian period correlated with longer lifespan in mice. That got him wondering what role SIRT1, which has been shown to prolong lifespan in many animals, might play in that phenomenon. SIRT1, which Guarente first linked with aging more than 15 years ago, is a master regulator of cell responses to stress, coordinating a variety of hormone networks, proteins and genes to help keep cells alive and healthy.

To investigate SIRT1’s role in circadian control, Guarente and his colleagues created genetically engineered mice that produce different amounts of SIRT1 in the brain. One group of mice had normal SIRT1 levels, another had no SIRT1, and two groups had extra SIRT1 — either twice or 10 times as much as normal.

Mice lacking SIRT1 had slightly longer circadian cycles (23.9 hours) than normal mice (23.6 hours), and mice with a 10-fold increase in SIRT1 had shorter cycles (23.1 hours). 

In mice with normal SIRT1 levels, the researchers confirmed previous findings that when the 12-hour light/dark cycle is interrupted, younger mice readjust their circadian cycles much more easily than older ones. However, they showed for the first time that mice with extra SIRT1 do not suffer the same decline in circadian control as they age. 

The researchers also found that SIRT1 exerts this control by regulating the genes BMAL and CLOCK, the two major keepers of the central circadian clock.

Enhancing circadian function

A growing body of evidence suggests that being able to respond to large or small disruptions of the light/dark cycle is important to maintaining healthy metabolic function, Guarente says.

“Essentially we experience a mini jet lag every day because the light cycle is constantly changing. The critical thing for us is to be able to adapt smoothly to these jolts,” Guarente says. “Many studies in mice say that while young mice do this perfectly well, it’s the old mice that have the problem. So that could well be true in humans.”

If so, it could be possible to treat or prevent diseases of aging by enhancing circadian function — either by delivering SIRT1 activators in the brain or developing drugs that enhance another part of the circadian control system, Guarente says.

“I think we should look at every aspect of the machinery of the circadian clock in the brain, and any intervention that can maintain that machinery with aging ought to be good,” he says. “One entry point would be SIRT1, because we’ve shown in mice that genetic maintenance of SIRT1 helps maintain circadian function.”

Some SIRT1 activators are now being tested against diabetes, inflammation and other diseases, but they are not designed to cross the blood-brain barrier and would likely not be able to reach the SCN. However, Guarente believes it could be possible to design SIRT1 activators that can get into the brain.

Roman Kondratov, an associate professor of biology at Cleveland State University, says the study raises several exciting questions regarding the potential to delay or reverse age-related changes in the brain through rejuvenation of the circadian clock with SIRT1 enhancement.

“The importance of this study is that it has both basic and potentially translational applications, taking into account the fact that pharmacological modulators of SIRT1 are currently under active study,” Kondratov says.

Researchers in Guarente’s lab are now investigating the relationship between health, circadian function and diet. They suspect that high-fat diets might throw the circadian clock out of whack, which could be counteracted by increased SIRT1 activation.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research.

View at the original source

Ferroelectric-graphene-based system could lead to improved information processing 06-24

Ferroelectric-graphene-based system could lead to improved information processing

New system uses two-dimensional structures to guide plasmonic waves at ultrashort wavelength, offering a new platform for memory and computer chips.

David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

Researchers at MIT have proposed a new system that combines ferroelectric materials — the kind often used for data storage — with graphene, a two-dimensional form of carbon known for its exceptional electronic and mechanical properties. The resulting hybrid technology could eventually lead to computer and data-storage chips that pack more components in a given area and are faster and less power-hungry.

The new system works by controlling waves called surface plasmons. These waves are oscillations of electrons confined at interfaces between materials; in the new system the waves operate at terahertz frequencies. Such frequencies lie between those of far-infrared light and microwave radio transmissions, and are considered ideal for next-generation computing devices.

The findings were reported in a paper in Applied Physics Letters by associate professor of mechanical engineering Nicholas Fang, postdoc Dafei Jin and three others.

The system would provide a new way to construct interconnected devices that use light waves, such as fiber-optic cables and photonic chips, with electronic wires and devices. Currently, such interconnection points often form a bottleneck that slows the transfer of data and adds to the number of components needed.

The team’s new system allows waves to be concentrated at much smaller length scales, which could lead to a tenfold gain in the density of components that could be placed in a given area of a chip, Fang says. 

The team’s initial proof-of-concept device uses a small piece of graphene sandwiched between two layers of the ferroelectric material to make simple, switchable plasmonic waveguides. This work used lithium niobate, but many other such materials could be used, the researchers say. 

Light can be confined in these waveguides down to one part in a few hundreds of the free-space wavelength, Jin says, which represents an order-of-magnitude improvement over any comparable waveguide system. “This opens up exciting areas for transmitting and processing optical signals,” he says.

Moreover, the work may provide a new way to read and write electronic data into ferroelectric memory devices at very high speed, the MIT researchers say. 

Dimitri Basov, a professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego who was not connected with this research, says the MIT team “proposed a very interesting plasmonic structure, suitable for operation in the technologically significant [terahertz] range. … I am confident that many research groups will try to implement these devices.” 

Basov cautions, however, “The key issue, as in all of plasmonics, is losses. Losses need to be thoroughly explored and understood.”

In addition to Fang and Jin, the research was carried out by graduate student Anshuman Kumar, former postdoc Kin Hung Fung (now at Hong Kong Polytechnic University), and research scientist Jun Xu. It was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

View at the original source