MIT
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- If you've ever felt doomed to repeat your mistakes, researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory may have explained why: Brain cells may only learn from experience when we do something right and not when we fail.
SUMMARY: The target content of the global Open Access (OA) movement is the 2.5 million articles published yearly in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals. The natural and optimal locus to deposit these articles to make them OA is the author's institutional repository. That way deposit mandates from both institutions and research funders collaborate and converge, covering all research output. Unmandated central repositories are no more successful in getting themselves filled with their target content than unmandated institutional repositories. The critical variable is the mandate, not the repository's centrality or size. The denominator -- the total target content relative to which we are trying to calculate, for a given repository, what proportion of it is being deposited -- is far bigger for a central disciplinary repository than for an institutional repository.
(1) Repository size and "infrastructure" do not generate content.
(2) Empty repositories are useless.
(3) The only way to fill them is to mandate deposit.
(4) Not all or most research is funded.
(5) But all research originates from institutions.
(6) Institutions' interests are served by hosting and managing their own research assets.
(7) Hence both institutional and funder mandates should converge on institutional deposit.
(8) Any central collections can then be harvested from the global distributed of institutional repositories.
Scientists at MIT have figured out a key step toward the design of quantum information networks. The results are reported in the July 20th issue of Physical Review Letters and highlighted in APS's on-line journal Physics (physics.aps.org).
"Done right," biofuels can be produced in large quantities and have multiple benefits, but only if they come from feedstocks produced with low life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions, as well as minimal competition with food production. This consensus emerges in a new journal article by researchers from the University of Minnesota, Princeton, MIT and the University of California, Berkeley.
The human brain can adapt to changing demands even in adulthood, but MIT neuroscientists have now found evidence of it changing with unsuspected speed. Their findings suggest that the brain has a network of silent connections that underlie its plasticity.
One of the continuing mysteries of the HIV/AIDS epidemic is why women usually develop lower viral levels than men following acute HIV-1 infection but progress faster to AIDS than men with similar viral loads.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (July 13, 2009) -- Whitehead Institute scientists have developed a rapid, inexpensive drug-screening method that could be used to target diseases that until now have stymied drug developers, such as Parkinson's disease. This technique uses baker's yeast to synthesize and screen the molecules, cutting target discovery and preliminary testing time to a matter of weeks.
States that have passed privacy laws restricting the ability of hospitals to disclose patient information have seen the sharing of electronic medical records suffer by more than 24%, according to the Management Insights feature in the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).
A team of researchers from DuPont and Lehigh University has reported a breakthrough in the quest to produce carbon nanotubes (CNTs) that are suitable for use in electronics, medicine and other applications.
In an article published in the July 9 issue of Nature, the group says it has developed a DNA-based method that sorts and separates specific types of CNTs from a mixture.
Although the tiny roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans has only 302 neurons in its entire nervous system, studies of this simple animal have significantly advanced our understanding of human brain function because it shares many genes and neurochemical signaling molecules with humans. Now MIT researchers have found novel C.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Composite materials such as fiberglass, which take on a mix of properties of their constituent compounds, have been around for decades. Now, an MIT materials scientist is taking composites to the nanoscale, where entirely new properties, not found in any of the original compounds, can emerge.
A two-tiered scanning-protocol for inspecting all containers at international ports could be the most affordable approach to ensuring containers moving through the global transportation system are not carrying nuclear bombs, according to a paper being presented at a services special interest group meeting of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).
Thanks to an eminent Tufts cosmologist and his colleagues, Tufts University has received cuttings from an apple tree at MIT that traces its lineage to the English farm where Sir Isaac Newton lived in the 1600s.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (June 11, 2009) -- A low cellular level of a tiny fragment of RNA appears to increase the spread of breast cancer in mouse models of the disease, according to researchers at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- A study of stickers peeling from windows could lead to a new way to precisely control the fabrication of stretchable electronics, according to a team of researchers including one at MIT.
