These brief summaries of MIT research are drawn
from several sources and are issued throughout the year. More
information on any of these stories can be obtained by
contacting
the MIT News Office. In some
cases, photos may be available for news organizations.
Monitoring Heavy Weather
From the Mouths of Babes
Tren Urbano
Surgical Robot
Robotics Contest
Toward Exceptional Materials
Getting the Lead Out
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From the Mouths of Babes. What does a toddler who is barely putting words together know about convoluted rules of grammar that govern our mother tongue? What does a 2-year-old know about sentence structure? A lot, it turns out. Kenneth Wexler, MIT professor of psychology and lingusitics, spoke about knowledge of grammar in very young children at the 1998 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Philadelphia in February. Pairing the fact that children use grammar correctly at a very early age with the knowledge that this usage unfolds at a predictable rate, Wexler and a colleague at the University of Kansas have come up with a way to diagnose a disorder called Specific Language Impairment (SLI) that affects as many as 5 percent of American children. Wexler says that the consistent inability to match tense by a certain age could be used as a marker to identify and treat children with SLI. Wexler's work is supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders.
Tren Urbano. Snarled traffic and air pollution are the bane of many large metropolitan areas. But lack of money and political will aren't the only things preventing the overhaul of these metropolitan transportation networks. For many of the cities that could benefit most, this kind of project demands another commodity they just don't have -- technical expertise. A joint MIT/University of Puerto Rico program created to tackle one such project -- designing, building and maintaining Tren Urbano, an urban rail transit system in San Juan -- has been so successful that the Federal Transit Authority recently designated it as a model project for its new national technology transfer program. MIT research under the Tren Urbano project has run from civil engineering, like underground tunneling, to marketing approaches aimed at luring commuters out of their cars and onto trains. But the undercurrent of the research is really teaching a generation of Puerto Ricans who will manage the new rail system and plan future projects. The project is run by Professor Nigel Wilson of civil and environmental engineering and Frederick Salvucci, a lecturer in the Center for Transportation Studies who was Massachusetts secretary of transportation for 12 years. MIT research on the project is sponsored by F.R. Harris.
Surgical Robot. The winner of the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize said he got the idea for his surgical robot, dubbed Black Falcon, when he saw a video of a teleoperated surgical robot that allowed surgeons in a MASH unit to operate on wounded soldiers miles away on a battlefield. While that device looked spectacular, Akhil Madhani believed that a better and more useful task for telemedicine would be to improve the tools of minimally invasive surgery (MIS), a surgical method used on thousands of people every day in the US. The major improvement Black Falcon offers over current MIS tools is increased dexterity. The device is so maneuverable that surgeons will be able to perform more complicated surgical tasks like suturing vessels and tying knots while performing MIS. Black Falcon acts like an extension of the surgeon's hand and fingers, able to reach around organs and grasp tissue. Using it, surgeons will also be able to hold their arms and hands in more comfortable positions, which should cut down on fatigue. Madhani, MIT PhD '97, created Black Falcon as his thesis project while working with Dr. J. Kenneth Salisbury, a principal research scientist in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Funding was from DARPA.
Robotics Contest. Students from MIT and Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School (CRLS) have teamed up to design and build a robot for The FIRST Competition, a national robotics and engineering contest that culminates in April at Disney World. FIRST -- For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology -- teams high school students with engineers from companies and universities in an intense 6 week design competition involving more than 150 teams from around the country. FIRST's regional competition in New Hampshire is March 12-14. National trials will be held at Epcot in Florida on April 2-4. Planning for the 1998 competition started in April 1997. Students from MIT taught a class at CRLS during the fall semester introducing the high school students to basic engineering concepts and prepping them for the 6 intense weeks of design and implementation ahead. In 1997 the MIT/CRLS team came in 71st out of 141 entrants. The new FIRST team, called "Onslaught," is determined to win. The faculty advisor for MIT students on the team is Professor David Wallace of Mechanical Engineering. FIRST sponsors include NASA, Motorola, AT&T, Honeywell, and LEGO.
Toward Exceptional Materials. The solution to a mathematical problem MIT engineers originally tackled as a "theoretical curiosity" could lead to dental implants that won't crack and tank armor that's more resistant to missiles. It could also radically change the way automotive companies inspect the gears in car transmissions, saving time on the factory floor. "It was so much fun playing with the problem from a scientific point of view," said Professor Subra Suresh of the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. "Unbeknownst to us, its solution had many applications." The researchers' achievement was to develop a mathematical theory to describe a ubiquitous class of materials. They are now using that theory to create new materials with exceptional properties. The work has also led to a new machine and a more efficient way of testing the quality of components made of these materials. In graded materials--the focus of the research--two or more different materials are mixed together such that the proportion of one is greater at the surface but is gradually replaced by another with depth. The gear teeth in car transmissions, human teeth, and the Earth itself are graded materials. The work was sponsored by DOE, ONR, and NSF.
Getting the Lead Out. The good news is that 18 years after the Clean Air Act banned lead from gasoline, concentrations of lead in the Atlantic Ocean had dropped dramatically, an MIT scientist said at the 1998 ocean sciences meeting of the American Geophysical Union and the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography in February. The bad news is that since those measurements were made in the 1980s, the decline slowed in the 1990s, leaving present lead concentrations more than twice their pre-industrial levels. In a recent study--the first to document the decline in ocean lead over the past two decades--Edward Boyle, MIT professor of chemical oceanography, provides scientific proof that lead in the ocean comes from people's use of substances such as leaded gasoline. Since unleaded gasoline was first introduced in the early 1930s, the use of leaded gas in the United States has dropped, hitting a low point at the end of the 1980s and causing a corresponding drop in ocean lead levels. "We suspect a lot of the lead that is in the Atlantic Ocean now comes from high-temperature industrial activities such as smelting, coal combustion and cement production," Boyle said. The research was funded by NSF and ONR.
