Friday, October 4th, 2013

Time	Event
4:00a	New position aims to strengthen MIT’s sustainability Julie Newman, MIT’s first director of sustainability, brings to her new post a portfolio as one of the nation’s most experienced leaders on sustainability in higher education. Newman, who assumed her role in mid-August, came to MIT from a similar position at Yale University, where she led a sustainability initiative for the last nine years. MIT Executive Vice President and Treasurer Israel Ruiz initiated the creation of the new post — and simultaneously created an Office of Sustainability to serve as a catalyst for advancing sustainable approaches and practices across campus, and beyond. “Julie brings an unparalleled level of energy and enthusiasm to the work of integrating sustainable processes into all aspects of the Institute,” Ruiz says. “Her presence on campus brings us one step closer to realizing our vision of the campus as a living laboratory where we test new ideas. Julie will be key to advancing MIT’s work with both the city of Cambridge and the city of Boston.” Julie Newman Photo: Dominick Reuter Starting in 1997, Newman spent seven years establishing an office of sustainability at the University of New Hampshire — “one of the first offices of sustainability in the country,” she says. After receiving her doctorate in natural resources and environmental studies from UNH in 2004, she moved to Yale, as founding director of its Office of Sustainability.  To begin the process, Newman has engaged in a “listening tour,” involving MIT students, faculty, staff and administrators, to learn and understand “how MIT functions as an institution, what their vision of a sustainable MIT is, and how best to catalyze the innovation and development of solutions to the complex challenges that are raised from building a sustainable campus.” “What I get excited about in this field, and thus this position, is the opportunity to work as a catalyst to ensure the integration of sustainability principles across all the operational units of the Institute,” Newman says. She will examine “what the underlying goals are, ranging from capital construction to small-project renovations, energy systems, transportation systems, operations and maintenance, waste management, recycling, water management, procurement and land management.” Her analysis will also examine novel opportunities of financing, organizing and planning such projects. Newman aims to position MIT’s campus “as a living and learning laboratory for sustainability. When successful, our campus sustainability work will make direct and meaningful contributions to the core teaching and research mission of the Institute.” The opportunities, she says, “may range from testing new technologies currently being developed in labs on campus to studying the organizational behavior that enables a sustainable campus.” To begin her new role at MIT, Newman will start by “assessing where the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities are now.” That will include work with many of MIT’s department directors and staff to assess current best practices and identify areas for additional leadership. Newman will work closely with Richard Amster and John DiFava of MIT Facilities to ensure that all new construction, renovation and maintenance projects make the best use of lessons learned from past projects — such as the success of Building E62 at the MIT Sloan School of Management, which has exceeded its initial targets for efficiency. She will also work with Bill VanSchalkwyk, managing director of environment, health and safety (EHS) programs, to ensure integration of sustainable practices in EHS activities. Newman will also help build upon MIT’s past sustainability accomplishments: For more than 10 years, MIT has taken steps to reduce its energy and environmental impact while actively contributing to local, regional and global initiatives. For example, Building E62 consumes 45 percent less energy than some comparable buildings. MIT has retrofitted more than 90 percent of its existing buildings for energy efficiency, and supported alternative modes of commuting so that 80 percent of MIT staff and students do not drive to campus alone — a figure that is significantly above the state average. MIT is also a founding member of the Cambridge Community Compact for a Sustainable Future, an innovative, community-based partnership on sustainability with the city of Cambridge, Harvard University and other local organizations. In June, MIT and NSTAR successfully concluded the first phase of MIT Efficiency Forward, renewing the program through 2015. The Institute is also actively engaged in the Boston Green Ribbon Commission, an organization dedicated to developing shared strategies for fighting climate change. In addition, MIT works closely with the city of Cambridge on a range of sustainability initiatives, including sponsorship of Hubway and electric vehicle charging stations. Faculty members and graduate students are partnering with the city on topics such as solar mapping, infrared imaging, wind and solar analyses and climate preparedness. Currently, MIT is working with the city to explore “ecodistricts” — a new model of public-private partnership that emphasizes deployment of district-scale best practices on sustainability — and the proposed implementation of a building energy-use disclosure ordinance.  John Sterman, the Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management at MIT Sloan and a longtime member of MIT’s Campus Energy Task Force, says that the creation of this new position “will help us accelerate the progress we’ve been making to become more efficient, and to promote sustainability more broadly.” He applauds the selection of Newman, calling her “knowledgeable, experienced and energetic.” While MIT has already done much to improve energy-efficiency, Sterman says, such efforts “haven’t been as fully integrated and coordinated” as they could be, so “there is still a lot of low-hanging fruit.” The creation of this new role, reporting to the Office of the Executive Vice President and Treasurer, “is no less than the issue deserves,” Sterman adds. “The integrated approach this position enables will not only improve campus sustainability, it will also enhance our ability to achieve our educational and research mission.” Harvey Michaels, a research scientist and lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning who teaches a class on sustainability, adds, “It says that the decisions being made on campus policy and development are going to be made with sustainability having a top-level place.” “It’s going to take a community to make this work,” Newman emphasizes, so finding ways to engage students, staff and faculty in these efforts will be crucial. “People are poised and wanting to do more, but they are seeking direction and guidance on how to do so. Moreover, we have the opportunity at MIT to draw upon the unique expertise of our faculty, staff and students to create scalable solutions to complex sustainability challenges.” “It’s critical that MIT, being who we are, certainly should be setting a good example,” says Leon Glicksman, a professor of building technology and mechanical engineering who currently co-chairs MIT’s Campus Energy Task Force with Ruiz. He points to the success of MIT Efficiency Forward, which has made significant cuts in the campus use of electricity, as an example. “MIT was the first large institution that started a program like that,” Glicksman says, “and it’s now being duplicated by others. But there are a lot more opportunities along those lines.” Newman’s arrival should go a long way toward making that happen, Glicksman says. “She’s certainly a leader in that field. I really am excited about having her here.” Joining Newman in the Office of Sustainability are deputy director Steven Lanou, who previously led sustainability programs in MIT’s Environment, Health and Safety Headquarters Office, and sustainability projects coordinator Susy Jones. (Comment on this)
4:00a	New kind of microscope uses neutrons Researchers at MIT, working with partners at NASA, have developed a new concept for a microscope that would use neutrons — subatomic particles with no electrical charge — instead of beams of light or electrons to create high-resolution images. Among other features, neutron-based instruments have the ability to probe inside metal objects — such as fuel cells, batteries, and engines, even when in use — to learn details of their internal structure. Neutron instruments are also uniquely sensitive to magnetic properties and to lighter elements that are important in biological materials. The new concept has been outlined in a series of research papers this year, including one published this week in Nature Communications by MIT postdoc Dazhi Liu, research scientist Boris Khaykovich, professor David Moncton, and four others. Moncton, an adjunct professor of physics and director of MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory, says that Khaykovich first proposed the idea of adapting a 60-year-old concept for a way of focusing X-rays using mirrors to the challenge of building a high-performing neutron microscope. Until now, most neutron instruments have been akin to pinhole cameras: crude imaging systems that simply let light through a tiny opening. Without efficient optical components, such devices produce weak images with poor resolution. Beyond the pinhole “For neutrons, there have been no high-quality focusing devices,” Moncton says. “Essentially all of the neutron instruments developed over a half-century are effectively pinhole cameras.” But with this new advance, he says, “We are turning the field of neutron imaging from the era of pinhole cameras to an era of genuine optics.” “The new mirror device acts like the image-forming lens of an optical microscope,” Liu adds. Because neutrons interact only minimally with matter, it’s difficult to focus beams of them to create a telescope or microscope. But a basic concept was proposed, for X-rays, by Hans Wolter in 1952 and later developed, under the auspices of NASA, for telescopes such as the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory (which was designed and is managed by scientists at MIT). Neutron beams interact weakly, much like X-rays, and can be focused by a similar optical system. It’s well known that light can be reflected by normally nonreflective surfaces, so long as it strikes that surface at a shallow angle; this is the basic physics of a desert mirage. Using the same principle, mirrors with certain coatings can reflect neutrons at shallow angles. A sharper, smaller device The actual instrument uses several reflective cylinders nested one inside the other, so as to increase the surface area available for reflection. The resulting device could improve the performance of existing neutron imaging systems by a factor of about 50, the researchers say — allowing for much sharper images, much smaller instruments, or both. The team initially designed and optimized the concept digitally, then fabricated a small test instrument as a proof-of-principle and demonstrated its performance using a neutron beam facility at MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory. Later work, requiring a different spectrum of neutron energies, was carried out at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Such a new instrument could be used to observe and characterize many kinds of materials and biological samples; other nonimaging methods that exploit the scattering of neutrons might benefit as well. Because the neutron beams are relatively low-energy, they are “a much more sensitive scattering probe,” Moncton says, for phenomena such as “how atoms or magnetic moments move in a material.” The researchers next plan to build an optimized neutron-microscopy system in collaboration with NIST, which already has a major neutron-beam research facility. This new instrument is expected to cost a few million dollars. Moncton points out that a recent major advance in the field was the construction of a $1.4 billion facility that provides a tenfold increase in neutron flux. “Given the cost of producing the neutron beams, it is essential to equip them with the most efficient optics possible,” he says.  Roger Pynn, a materials scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who was not involved in this research, says, “I expect it to lead to a number of breakthroughs in neutron imaging. … It offers the potential for some really new applications of neutron scattering — something that we haven’t seen for quite a while.” In addition to the researchers at MIT, the team included Mikhail Gubarev and Brian Ramsey of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Lee Robertson and Lowell Crow of ORNL. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. (Comment on this)
4:00a	Surprisingly simple scheme for self-assembling robots In 2011, when an MIT senior named John Romanishin proposed a new design for modular robots to his robotics professor, Daniela Rus, she said, “That can’t be done.” Two years later, Rus showed her colleague Hod Lipson, a robotics researcher at Cornell University, a video of prototype robots, based on Romanishin’s design, in action. “That can’t be done,” Lipson said. In November, Romanishin — now a research scientist in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) — Rus, and postdoc Kyle Gilpin will establish once and for all that it can be done, when they present a paper describing their new robots at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Known as M-Blocks, the robots are cubes with no external moving parts. Nonetheless, they’re able to climb over and around one another, leap through the air, roll across the ground, and even move while suspended upside down from metallic surfaces.  Inside each M-Block is a flywheel that can reach speeds of 20,000 revolutions per minute; when the flywheel is braked, it imparts its angular momentum to the cube. On each edge of an M-Block, and on every face, are cleverly arranged permanent magnets that allow any two cubes to attach to each other. “It’s one of these things that the [modular-robotics] community has been trying to do for a long time,” says Rus, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of CSAIL. “We just needed a creative insight and somebody who was passionate enough to keep coming at it — despite being discouraged.” Embodied abstraction As Rus explains, researchers studying reconfigurable robots have long used an abstraction called the sliding-cube model. In this model, if two cubes are face to face, one of them can slide up the side of the other and, without changing orientation, slide across its top. The sliding-cube model simplifies the development of self-assembly algorithms, but the robots that implement them tend to be much more complex devices. Rus’ group, for instance, previously developed a modular robot called the Molecule, which consisted of two cubes connected by an angled bar and had 18 separate motors. “We were quite proud of it at the time,” Rus says. According to Gilpin, existing modular-robot systems are also “statically stable,” meaning that “you can pause the motion at any point, and they’ll stay where they are.” What enabled the MIT researchers to drastically simplify their robots’ design was giving up on the principle of static stability. “There’s a point in time when the cube is essentially flying through the air,” Gilpin says. “And you are depending on the magnets to bring it into alignment when it lands. That’s something that’s totally unique to this system.” That’s also what made Rus skeptical about Romanishin’s initial proposal. “I asked him build a prototype,” Rus says. “Then I said, ‘OK, maybe I was wrong.’” Sticking the landing To compensate for its static instability, the researchers’ robot relies on some ingenious engineering. On each edge of a cube are two cylindrical magnets, mounted like rolling pins. When two cubes approach each other, the magnets naturally rotate, so that north poles align with south, and vice versa. Any face of any cube can thus attach to any face of any other. The cubes’ edges are also beveled, so when two cubes are face to face, there’s a slight gap between their magnets. When one cube begins to flip on top of another, the bevels, and thus the magnets, touch. The connection between the cubes becomes much stronger, anchoring the pivot. On each face of a cube are four more pairs of smaller magnets, arranged symmetrically, which help snap a moving cube into place when it lands on top of another. As with any modular-robot system, the hope is that the modules can be miniaturized: the ultimate aim of most such research is hordes of swarming microbots that can self-assemble, like the “liquid steel” androids in the movie “Terminator II.” And the simplicity of the cubes’ design makes miniaturization promising. But the researchers believe that a more refined version of their system could prove useful even at something like its current scale. Armies of mobile cubes could temporarily repair bridges or buildings during emergencies, or raise and reconfigure scaffolding for building projects. They could assemble into different types of furniture or heavy equipment as needed. And they could swarm into environments hostile or inaccessible to humans, diagnose problems, and reorganize themselves to provide solutions. Strength in diversity The researchers also imagine that among the mobile cubes could be special-purpose cubes, containing cameras, or lights, or battery packs, or other equipment, which the mobile cubes could transport. “In the vast majority of other modular systems, an individual module cannot move on its own,” Gilpin says. “If you drop one of these along the way, or something goes wrong, it can rejoin the group, no problem.” “It’s one of those things that you kick yourself for not thinking of,” Cornell’s Lipson says. “It’s a low-tech solution to a problem that people have been trying to solve with extraordinarily high-tech approaches.” “What they did that was very interesting is they showed several modes of locomotion,” Lipson adds. “Not just one cube flipping around, but multiple cubes working together, multiple cubes moving other cubes — a lot of other modes of motion that really open the door to many, many applications, much beyond what people usually consider when they talk about self-assembly. They rarely think about parts dragging other parts — this kind of cooperative group behavior.” In ongoing work, the MIT researchers are building an army of 100 cubes, each of which can move in any direction, and designing algorithms to guide them. “We want hundreds of cubes, scattered randomly across the floor, to be able to identify each other, coalesce, and autonomously transform into a chair, or a ladder, or a desk, on demand,” Romanishin says. (Comment on this)

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