Tag: MIT

To Help Young Girls, This MIT Student Brings Together Two Unlikely Disciplines

Posted on by robbie

The words “don’t” and “can’t” mean two drastically different things.
Yet, when Kirin Sinha, a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), tutored younger students, she noticed that boys often used one word, while girls used another in the same scenario.
Boys said that they don’t understand fractions, whereas the girls said they can’t.
That subtle discernment combined with Sinha’s love for dance led to an idea that’s rethinking the way in which we approach STEM (that’s science, technology, engineering, and math to the uninitiated) learning among females. About a year and a half ago, the theoretical math and computer science and electrical engineering major founded SHINE, an eight-week-long after-school program for middle school girls combining dance classes with a tailored math curriculum.
Sinha, who began taking tap, ballet, and jazz at age three, realized that her self-confidence and discipline came not from her love of math — but from her years of dance training.

“You’re taught to work really hard and work through the sheer sweat and grit,” Sinha, now also a professional dancer, told the Boston Globe. “That stuck with me through math.”

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Struck by the thought that perhaps it was dancing that built certain skills that were left out of math curriculums, she launched the after-school program in hopes to encourage more young females to be confident and interested in math.
The Boston and Cambridge-area program begins with dance class followed by time spent solving math problems. Sinha also designed the program to convey math through games — using movement and dancing to work out a problem that typically is reasoned in silence in the classroom.
“And when they go upstairs and they have a mental block about — ‘I don’t understand how to solve this equation,’ we can say, ‘Well, think about what you did at the dance studio downstairs,'” Sinha told CBS.
For example, the girls solve algebra problems by assigning dance moves to different parts of an equation or play a game of Simon Says to formulate a geometric shape.
The program, which is slated to expand to a selection of New York public schools next year, has not only encouraged more young females to be comfortable doing math but also to feel confident. Sinha has tested some of her students at the beginning and the end of the program to measure gains and has found up to a 273 percent improvement, CBS reports.
This summer Sinha is working toward expanding the program nationally and plans to attend the University of Cambridge in the fall on a Marshall scholarship, where she hopes to launch an international version.
While she’s aiming to attract more female STEM students, Sinha’s hope is to teach young women that they shouldn’t feel boxed in by a stereotype.

“What we really want to teach these girls is that those boxes that they feel they might be in are completely imaginary,” she added.

Meet the Engineer Who Got a Boston Marathon Bombing Survivor Dancing Again

Posted on by robbie

Adrianne Haslet-Davis, a professional ballroom dancer, suffered a devastating and potentially career-ending injury in the Boston Marathon bombing. Haslet-Davis and her husband, Adam Davis, a U.S. airman, were on the sidelines watching the marathon when the bomb went off. “We sat up and I said, ‘Wait, my foot hurts,’” Haslet-Davis recalled to ABC News a week after the tragedy. The blast from the bomb had torn off her left foot, and as a result, her leg needed to be amputated at mid-calf.

Despite the devastating loss, Haslet-Davis, a ballroom instructor at Boston’s Arthur Murray Studios, was determined to dance again. And last week, less than a year after the tragic bombing, she did.

During a TED2014 Talk by Hugh Herr, director of the Biomechatronics Group at the MIT Media Lab, Haslet-Davis was invited on stage, along with her dance partner Christian Lightner. She wore a short, white, flowing dress, but her best accessory was her new, state-of-the-art bionic limb designed and created especially for her by MIT researchers.

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Haslet-Davis and Lightner performed an intricate rumba to the tune of Enrique Iglesias’s “Ring My Bells.” She moved perfectly, unhindered by her prosthetic. And that was the point. Herr — a double-amputee himself — met Haslet-Davis at a Boston rehab hospital and immediately wanted to use his knowledge of prosthetics to build her a bionic limb. For 200 days, Herr’s team studied the dynamics of dance and tweaked the prosthetic so that it would move seamlessly during performance. ““Bionics are not only about making people stronger and faster,” he said. “Our expression, our humanity can be embedded into our electromechanics.”

Herr lost both of his legs after getting frostbite during a rock climbing accident in 1982, but even then, he didn’t view his body as broken. “I thought: Technology is broken. Technology is inadequate,” he said. “This simple but powerful idea was a call to arms to advance technology to the elimination of my own disability, and ultimately the disabilities of others.”

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Through his work at the Center for Extreme Bionics at the MIT Media Lab, Herr and his team have developed prosthetics that allowed him to return to rock climbing. He boasts that he’s even better at it now than he was before. They’ve focused on addressing three areas of improvement: mechanical, dynamic and electrical. They’ve reengineered how prosthetics attach to the body, how to make them “move like flesh and bone”, and how to connect them to the nervous system. The result has been the most innovative prosthetics out there. Now, Herr’s greatest challenge is getting his creations to the masses — and at an affordable cost.

“The basic levels of physiological function should be part of basic human rights,” Herr said. “It’s not well appreciated, but over half the world’s population suffers from some kind of cognitive, emotional, sensory or motor condition. Every person should have the right to live without disability, if they choose to.”

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A Drug That Makes Mice Fearless Could Help Veterans

Posted on by robbie

For people suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), distressing memories repeat in an endless loop. Thus far, one of the best treatments found for PTSD is exposure therapy, in which suffers relive or re-visualize their traumas in a controlled environment until they are no longer haunted by them.
Unfortunately, this therapy helps only half of the patients that try it, Melissa Pandika writes for Ozy Magazine. And since 7.7 million Americans suffer from PTSD (according to the National Institutes of Health), many of them veterans (according to several studies, at least 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans experience PTSD), researchers are looking for ways to make this treatment more effective.
MIT neuroscientists have high hopes for a new drug — CI-994 — which could strip the negative emotions out of traumatic memory.
Neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai, who leads the MIT team conducting trials of the drug, discovered that a certain enzyme was present in large quantities in mice showing symptoms of dementia. She wondered if the same enzyme that causes mice to lose their memories could play a role in how traumatic memories are locked into place. She trained mice to fear a specific chamber of their enclosure by administering a shock to them when they entered. She reintroduced some mice to the chamber the next day, teaching them that it was now safe, and these mice no longer reacted in fear. The mice that weren’t reintroduced to that chamber until 30 days after they’d been shocked retained the fearful memory and could not be retrained. This situation might be analogous to a veteran who waits for months or years before seeking treatment for PTSD.
Next Tsai administered the CI-994 drug to the mice who had 30-day traumatic memories of the shock chamber. The CI-994 drug suppresses the dementia-associated enzyme she’d discovered earlier. After one treatment, the mice were no longer afraid. They retained all their other memories and the associated emotional responses to them except the traumatic one.
There’s still a long way to go before determining whether CI-994 can be effective in humans. The Navy is currently preparing a clinical trial of the drug. But if the drug proves promising, it might entice some of the estimated 50 percent of veteran PTSD sufferers who don’t seek treatment to give therapy a try.
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Need Clean Water? Find the Nearest Evergreen

Posted on by robbie

What if someone told you that a small piece of sapwood from a pine tree could be used as an effect water filter — no pumps, batteries, or chemicals needed. Would you believe them or think that the story was a giant whopper?
Well, it’s no fib, as a team at MIT did just that. To make the filter, the team stripped the bark off white pine branches and placed it into a plastic tube. The porous tissue in the branch, called xylem, naturally filtered out the contaminants in water. “Today’s filtration membranes have nanoscale pores that are not something you can manufacture in a garage very easily,” said Rohit Karnik, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “The idea here is that we don’t need to fabricate a membrane, because it’s easily available. You can just take a piece of wood and make a filter out of it.”
According to a study published in the journal PLoS One, this makeshift filter can purify up to four liters of water a day and remove up to 99 percent of E. coli. The filter has the potential to be a game-changer in water-pinched communities around the world and in emergency situations.
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The team is trying to find other types of natural filters. “There’s huge variation between plants. There could be much better plants out there that are suitable for this process,” said Karnik. “Ideally, a filter would be a thin slice of wood you could use for a few days, then throw it away and replace at almost no cost.” Maybe one day creating clean water could come be done right in your own backyard.