Free Republic

A new analysis by a leading MIT economist provides new ammunition for Democrats as the Senate begins formally debating the historic health-reform bill being pushed by President Barack Obama. The report concludes that under the Senate’s health-reform bill, Americans buying individual coverage will pay less than they do for today's typical individual market coverage, and would be protected from high out-of-pocket costs. So Democrats will argue that under the Senate bill, Americans would pay less for more.

A Pakistan native who was trained as a scientist in the US and suspected of being an al-Qaida operative has promised to boycott her January trial in New York. Aafia Siddiqui interrupted lawyers to announce in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday that she did not plan to participate in her trial. Then, during a break, she told US marshals she did not want to return to the courtroom when they led her out as she continued talking. Siddiqui faces charges after US authorities said she grabbed a gun and fired it at a police station in Afghanistan in July...

.. and all he got was an MIT t-shirt hpotomop.

Locating unidentified homosexual men on Facebook? There's an app for that. It was created by two students at MIT, who discovered that gay men tend to have more male Facebook friends of their own orientation. The students, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree, ran the program on 10 men who were gay, but didn't reveal that information on their profiles. The software predicted that all ten were gay. The software apparent does not work for bisexual people or lesbians. No word on when it will be available for the iPhone.

It started as a simple term project for an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier. Two students partnered up to take on the latest Internet fad: the online social networks that were exploding into the mainstream. With people signing up in droves to reconnect with classmates and old crushes from high school, and even becoming online “friends” with their family members, the two wondered what the online masses were unknowingly telling the world about themselves. The pair weren’t interested in the embarrassing photos or overripe profiles that attract so much consternation from parents and potential employers....

Monday, July 13, 2009 How to Stage a Revolution A new mathematical model reveals the tactics that a small number of interlopers can use to seize power. How is it possible for a small number of newcomers to displace a well-established group of leaders? That's not just a question for military organizations wanting to overthrow governments; it's a question for political parties controlling national debates, new products displacing well-established market leaders, and flocking birds following leaders to new food sources. Social scientists have studied the nature of effective leadership for centuries with limited success. Physicists, on the other hand, are...

According to an MIT study, cap and trade could cost the average household more than $3,900 per year.It's just another inconvenient truth: If Americans want any of the government remedies that would supposedly save a planet allegedly imperiled by global warming, it's going to cost them. Just how much it will cost them has been a point of contention lately. Many congressional Republicans, including members of the GOP leadership, have claimed that the plan to limit carbon emissions through cap and trade would cost the average household more than $3,100 per year. According to an MIT study, between 2015 and...

I was surprised to learn that there has been a small vandalism wave targeted towards specific advocacy groups along the Infinite Corridor. In the past two months, a display about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was removed, a Martin Luther King display was vandalized twice, the United Christian Organization (UCO) bulletin board was torn down and pro-life ads were completely taken down along with the entire pro-life Bulletin Board. It made me particularly upset to see the pro-life bulletin board be taken apart, not only because I personally helped to maintain it, but also because MIT has a commitment to diversity and...

Viral Batteries: A Case for Evolution? by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Researchers at MIT have invented a “greener” battery with the help of viruses. Three years ago, they engineered a virus that coats itself with material that serves as an anode, a structure within a battery that attracts positive ions. They have now engineered a virus (bacteriophage) that serves as a cathode, which indirectly links to the anode to help make the battery functional. The result is a battery with little impact on the environment. National Public Radio (NPR) ran a report on its Morning Edition that compared the development of...

I'll have this as link only.

Powered up: An amorphous layer (light-colored band at the right) on a crystalline battery material improves its performance. Credit: Byoungwoo Kang, MIT A lithium-ion battery electrode described this week in the journal Nature can deliver electricity several times faster than other such batteries. It could be particularly useful where rapid power bursts are needed, such as for laser weapons or hybrid race cars. Test batteries based on the new electrode--developed by Gerbrand Ceder, a professor of materials science at MIT--can be discharged in 10 seconds. In comparison, the best high-power lithium-ion batteries today discharge in a minute and a...

It might be easier to work up a proper sense of dread at a scary new “climate change model” if the group doing the scaring didn’t use a roulette wheel for illustration. And “The Greenhouse Gamble” graphics only make the Washington Post’s one-sided report on the model more laughable. On the Feb. 23 “Capital Weather Gang” Web site, the Post’s Andrew Freedman reported that MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change revised its predictions about just how hot the Earth will become in this century. Not surprisingly, the MIT group said that if governments don’t institute...

Despite medicine's inestimable progress over the past century, surgery can still leave scars that look more appropriate to Frankenstein's monster than to the beneficiary of a precise, modern operation. But in the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, Irene Kochevar and Robert Redmond have developed a method that has the potential to replace the surgeon's needle and thread. Using surgical lasers and a light-activated dye, the researchers are prompting tissue to heal itself. Laser-bonded healing is not a new idea. For years, scientists have been trying to find ways to use the heat generated by lasers to weld...

Boston (MA) - Scientists at MIT have recorded a nearly simultaneous world-wide increase in methane levels. This is the first increase in ten years, and what baffles science is that this data contradicts theories stating man is the primary source of increase for this greenhouse gas. It takes about one full year for gases generated in the highly industrial northern hemisphere to cycle through and reach the southern hemisphere. However, since all worldwide levels rose simultaneously throughout the same year, it is now believed this may be part of a natural cycle in mother nature - and not the direct...

Sony Robots bust a move! holy cow. the japanese are taking things to a whole new level. this is awesome, if not for much more than entertainment value.

It’s not often that an incoming college freshman is already starting his own multimillion dollar business. But that’s what’s happening to Ben Gulak. He’s a 19-year-old Canadian who’s just starting at MIT. Gulak’s was inspired by the overwhelming smog he saw on a trip to China two years ago. He thought there should be something better than all the polluting scooters. He spent two years tinkering and came up with a contraption he calls the Uno. It’s an electric vehicle that looks like a cross between a motorcycle and a unicycle. There are actually two wheels, but they’re side by...

The power of solar is not on the grand scale of collectors spread over square acres in the west desert, says Daniel Nocera, a widely cited chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is scheduled to speak at Utah State University this week. "Each household could be its own little power station," Nocera said Sunday. Using the principle of photosynthesis and more precisely duplicating the storage process that plants use to stay healthy at night when they're not being fed directly by the sun, Nocera's research published this past July appears to have answered the abiding problem with solar...

WASHINGTON: One of the most perplexing mysteries in the war on terror returned centerstage on Monday with the announcement by US authorities of the arrest in Kabul of a Pakistani-American woman scientist whose sudden disappearance in 2003 caused many to think she was in American or Pakistani custody and underscored the disturbingly clandestine nature of the war. Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT alumna with a doctorate in neurosciences, and a mother of three children, vanished while on a visit to Karachi nearly five years ago. She was believed to have been taken into custody by Pakistani and/or US intelligence agencies because...

It has long been the Holy Grail of environmental scientists, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are confident they have found an inexpensive way of producing hydrogen from water, paving the way for the widespread adoption of zero carbon fuel cells capable of powering buildings and cars. The technique is similar to the way photosynthesis works in plants and is based on a new catalyst that can split water at room temperature to create hydrogen and oxygen. The catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode that is placed into water. When electricity runs through the...

<p>The Peruvian village of Compone lies 11,000 ft. above sea level in El Valle Sagrado de los Incas, the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Flat but ringed by mountains, the tallest capped year-round in snow and ice, the valley is graced with a mild climate and mineral-rich soil that for centuries has produced what the Incas called sara—corn.</p>

A good-sized asteroid sailing past our planet right now turns out to be two giant rocks doing a celestial jig. The setup, catalogued as 2008 BT18, was thought to be nearly a half-mile wide after its discovery by MIT's LINEAR search program in January. Nothing else was known about it. Now seen as two objects orbiting each other, the pair will be closest to Earth on July 14, at about 1.4 million miles (2 million kilometers) away. That's nearly six times as far from us as the moon... Radar observations from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico on July 6...

Hey! Let’s all go to MIT!I should have gone to MIT. OK, I shouldn’t have done the pub crawl the night before the SAT’s…and I might have focused on my grades a little more. But never mind that. Our time has come. MIT is now free and many of its lectures are on the internet. Well, sort of. Check out this link to OpenCourseWare.com. I listened to two physics lectures last week (video lectures) by Professor Walter Lewin. Here’s the link to Prof Lewin’s first lecture (LINK HERE)…I even understood what he was saying. Friends of mine will remember when...

Tim Fofonoff, a 31-year-old grad student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stands at the base of a 50-foot-tall, graffiti-covered rock wall just south of Boston. He´s clipped into the Atlas Powered Rope Ascender, a toaster-size battery-driven device that he and his three co-inventors built themselves. With it, he´s about to do something no one outside of a Hollywood script has done before: rappel up a wall at an astonishing 10 feet per second. He stares hesitantly for a moment at the craggy rock face, presses a small button, and darts off the ground as if he were wearing a...

Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who tried to explain why it is so hard to make good weather forecasts and wound up unleashing a scientific revolution called chaos theory, died April 16 of cancer at his home in Cambridge. He was 90.A professor at MIT, Lorenz was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems. In the early 1960s, Lorenz realized that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere--or a model of the atmosphere--could trigger vast and often unsuspected results. These observations ultimately led him to formulate what...

Contribute to the first collaboratively authored computer game and earn Game Designer credit! The Restaurant Game is a research project at the MIT Media Lab that will algorithmically combine the gameplay experiences of thousands of players to create a new game. In a few months, we will apply machine learning algorithms to data collected through the multiplayer Restaurant Game, and produce a new single-player game that we will enter into the 2008 Independent Games Festival. Everyone who plays The Restaurant Game will be credited as a Game Designer. It's never been easier to earn Game Designer credentials! All contributions are...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Sometimes the cliché fits: It looks like a bomb went off—not necessarily in this lab, but somewhere, with the aftermath seemingly carted here. The gutted remains of a sedan, its engine exposed, the seats ripped out of the frame, sits encased in cables. At other workstations the focus is a single part—an isolated camshaft, an alternator hooked up to test apparatus. It would be easy to misinterpret this place and think that researchers at MIT’s Lab for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems (LEES) are either piecing back together some shattered car or entering the Automotive X Prize. In...

Spread Of 1918 Flu Pandemic ExplainedThis transmission electron micrograph of an ultra-thin specimen revealed some of the ultra-structural morphologic features seen in 1918 influenza virus virions. The prominent surface projections on the virions are composed of either the hemagglutinin, or neuraminidase type of glycoproteins. (Credit: Cynthia Goldsmith) ScienceDaily (Feb. 19, 2008) — MIT researchers have explained why two mutations in the H1N1 avian flu virus were critical for viral transmission in humans during the 1918 pandemic outbreak that killed at least 50 million people. The team showed that the 1918 influenza strain developed two mutations in a surface molecule called...

of 1941 Professor of Economics, shows that a return to 1970s-style gas lines and stagflation isn't in the cards.Blanchard's paper, "The Macroeconomic Effects of Oil Price Shocks: Why are the 2000s so different from the 1970s?" outlines changes in U.S. and global economic policies between the two eras. Cited in The Economist (Nov. 17) as an explainer for the current situation, the paper was co-written by Blanchard's colleague Jordi Gali (Ph.D. 1989) of the Center for International Economic Research in Barcelona.Blanchard discussed the differences between the oil shocks in the 1970s and in the 2000s during a recent interview with...

Gilbert Strang is a quiet man with a rare talent: helping others understand linear algebra. He's written a half-dozen popular college textbooks, and for years a few hundred students at the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been privileged to take his course. Recently, with the growth of computer science, demand to understand linear algebra has surged. But so has the number of students Strang can teach. An MIT initiative called "OpenCourseWare" makes virtually all the school's courses available online for free — lecture notes, readings, tests and often video lectures. Strang's Math 18.06 course is among the most popular,...

Lawyers for accused Logan airport bomb prankster Star Simpson have asked that a judge, not a jury of her peers, decide the MIT sophomore’s fate. But they’re also hoping Simpson’s Dec. 3 bench trial date in the East Boston Division of Boston Municipal Court won’t be necessary. Defense attorney Thomas Dwyer Jr. this morning filed a motion to dismiss the single charge of possession of a hoax device Simpson, 19, faces. He argued that no reasonable person could have believed the getup that nearly got his client killed by state police on Sept. 21 “could function as such a machine.”...

The computer circuit board on Star Simpson's sweatshirt that security thought may have been a bomb at a Boston airport isn't out of character for her, according to the Maui woman's background, school affiliations and online supporters. But her mother, Stephanie Simpson, said it may have been a mistake because Star used the shirt the day before on career day at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and when she went to pick up her boyfriend at the airport. "It was just sleepyheads. She must have been just asleep to the fact of where she was going," Stephanie Simpson said.

http://home.peoplepc.com/psp/newsstory.asp?cat=TopStories&referrer=welcome&id=20070922/46f49340_3ca6_1552620070922-1497302150 Lawyer: Fake Bomb Charge an Overreaction BOSTON - The MIT student who walked into Logan International Airport wearing a computer circuit board and wiring on her sweat shirt claimed it was harmless artwork. But to troopers who arrested her at gunpoint, it was a fake bomb. Nineteen-year-old Star Simpson was charged Friday with possessing a hoax device. Her attorney described the charge as offbase and "almost paranoid," arguing at a court hearing that she did not act in a suspicious manner and had told an airport worker that the device was art.

"I have no idea what a real bomb looks like," writes a blogger at machinist.salon.com, "but I don't think it’s a plastic board with a 9-volt battery on it." 19 year old M.I.T. student, Star Simpson showed up at Logan International Airport Friday to pick up a friend. Such an event would not normally kick up an international news storm, but Simpson had not taken the general stupidity index into account; something we're apparently required to do now.She was wearing a black sweat shirt with a white plastic board attached. The board itself, known as a socket or bread-board, is...

(WBZ) BOSTON An MIT student with a fake bomb strapped to her chest was arrested at gunpoint Friday at Logan International Airport and later claimed it was artwork, officials said. Star Simpson, 19, had a computer circuit board and wiring in plain view over a black hooded sweat shirt she was wearing, said State Police Maj. Scott Pare, the commanding officer at the airport. "She said that it was a piece of art and she wanted to stand out on career day," Pare said at a news conference. "She claims that it was just art, and that she was proud...

(AP) BOSTON An MIT student has been arrested at gunpoint after allegedly walking into Logan International Airport with a fake bomb strapped to her chest this morning. State police say 19-year-old Star Simpson, a sophomore from Hawaii, had a computer circuit board, wiring and a putty that later turned out to be Play-Doh in plain view over a black hooded sweatshirt she was wearing. Stay with wbztv.com and WBZ-TV for the latest on this developing story.

A woman who walked into Logan International Airport allegedly wearing a fake bomb strapped to chest was arrested at gunpoint Friday, officials said. Star Simpson, 19, had a computer circuit board, wiring and a putty that later turned out to be Play-Doh in plain view over a black hooded sweatshirt she was wearing, said State Police Maj. Scott Pare, the commanding officer at the airport. After a Massachusetts Port Authority official notified State Police about 8 a.m., troopers tracked Simpson down outside Terminal C, where they arrested her and later determined the device was a fake.

Beneath the bustling “infinite corridor” linking buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just past a boiler room, an assemblage of tinkerers from 16 countries welded, stitched and hammered, working on rough-hewn inventions aimed at saving the world, one village at a time. (snip) This summer, it played host to a four-week International Development Design Summit to identify problems, cobble together prototype solutions and winnow the results to see which might work in the real world. (snip) The summit (www.iddsummit.org) was the brainchild mainly of Amy Smith, a lecturer at M.I.T. who received her master’s there in 1995 and in...

In the 40 years that humans have been traveling into space, the suits they wear have changed very little. The bulky, gas-pressurized outfits give astronauts a bubble of protection, but their significant mass and the pressure itself severely limit mobility. Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, wants to change that. Newman is working on a sleek, advanced suit designed to allow superior mobility when humans eventually reach Mars or return to the moon. Her spandex and nylon BioSuit is not your grandfather's spacesuit--think more Spiderman, less John Glenn. Traditional bulky spacesuits "do...

MIT biochemists have identified a molecular mechanism behind fear, and successfully cured it in mice, according to an article in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Researchers from MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory hope that their work could lead to the first drug to treat the millions of adults who suffer each year from persistent, debilitating fears - including hundreds of soldiers returning from conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. Inhibiting a kinase, an enzyme that change proteins, called Cdk5 facilitates the extinction of fear learned in a particular context, Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain...

ESPN's Chris Berman likes to say "no one circles the wagons like the Buffalo Bills." He might add "or the Boston Globe." Its editorial of today, A telling admission, heaps of paeans of praise on Marilee Jones, who resigned her position as MIT Dean of Admissions after an investigation revealed that she earned none of the academic degrees she had claimed. The Globe quickly gets out of the way its acknowledgement that "no doubt, Marilee Jones did the wrong thing." But you'd hardly know it from the rest of editorial: "I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to...

Her railing against the harmful pressure on youngsters to bolster their resumes and applications when applying to college made Marilee Jones one of the nation’s best known deans of admissions. But the college crusader was forced to quit her prestigious post at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this week when the school learned she embellished her own resume and lied about her college degrees. “This is a very sad and disappointing story. She really is a quite competent person, a leader in her field,” said Chancellor Phil Clay. “But this is a case where integrity and honesty trumps everything.” For...

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology said Thursday that admissions dean Marilee Jones — a crusader for reducing the anxiety around college admissions — has resigned for misrepresenting her academic credentials to the university. Jones, dean since 1997, has been a highly visible campaigner for reforming the college admissions process. She issued a statement saying she had misrepresented her credentials when she first came to work at MIT 28 years ago and "did not have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job or at any time since.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - MIT edged out host and defending champion U.S. Military Academy by seven points (6,372-6,365) to secure the pistol program's fifth NRA Intercollegiate National Championship and second in three years. Despite falling to the Black Knights in free pistol by a margin of 26 points, the Engineers overcame the deficit with advantages of 25 and eight points in standard (second place) and air pistol (first place). In the open individual aggregate category, Daipan Lee placed third (1,614) while Eddie Huo finished four points behind him. On the women's side, the squad placed third (2,690) as Diana Nee earned...

San Francisco (IDGNS) - Future models of consumer goods, from digital cameras to MP3 players, could take a leap forward with a new type of analog circuit demonstrated at a trade show Thursday by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The MIT team showed a comparator-based switched capacitor (CBSC) circuit, which could be manufactured with smaller size and better power efficiency than traditional analog circuits using operational amplifiers. The team had presented a rougher version in 2006, and improved on the design this week by unveiling an 8-bit, 200 MHz analog-to-digital converter at the International Solid State Circuits...

BOSTON — A 23-year-old inventor has come up with a tool to give mere mortals the powers of a superhero: the ability to zoom up a rope as fast as 10 feet per second and scale the side of a building. The battery-powered, handheld gadget is envisioned as a tool for firefighters and soldiers, and helped earn Nate Ball of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, to be announced Wednesday. While he has practical applications in mind, Ball says it isn't a stretch to compare the tool to the gadgets fictional heroes use to quickly climb to...

BOSTON -- A black MIT professor began a hunger strike Monday to protest the university's decision to deny him tenure, which he claims was based on race. James Sherley, a stem cell scientist, said he tried for two years to persuade administrators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to reverse the department head's rejection of his tenure bid. "I'm not actually doing this to get tenured," Sherley said. "I'm doing this for the reason that I wasn't tenured -- which is racism -- and I want this institution to admit that that is the problem and make plans to do...

James Sherley, a biological engineer whose opposition to embryonic stem cell research has been controversial among his peers, charges he has been denied the same freedom to challenge scientific orthodoxy afforded his white colleagues.

A recent MIT analysis shows that the energy balance of corn ethanol is actually so close that several factors can easily change whether ethanol derived from that process ends up a net energy winner or loser. Further analysis shows that making ethanol from cellulosic sources such as switchgrass has far greater potential to reduce fossil energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. A graduate student in MIT’s Department of Engineering, Tiffany A. Groode, performed a life cycle analysis on the production of corn ethanol, as others have done. Groode, however, incorporated the uncertainty associated with the values of many of...

By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at one of the world's most prestigious universities will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won't have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted. The cost? It's all free of charge. The OpenCourseWare movement, begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002

Stem cells grew, multiplied and differentiated into brain cells on a new three-dimensional scaffold of tiny protein fragments designed to be more like a living body than any other cell culture system. An MIT engineer and Italian colleagues will report the invention--which may one day replace the ubiquitous Petri dish for growing cells--in the Dec. 27 issue of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) ONE. Shuguang Zhang, associate director of MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering, is a pioneer in coaxing tiny fragments of amino acids called self-assembling peptides to organize themselves into useful structures. Working with visiting graduate student Fabrizio...