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Research at Boston University 2006
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Mind Models at Work Outside the Lab
What does streamlining Boeing’s airplane manufacturing process have to do with satellite imaging? Both are engineering problems that require sorting through large amounts of data and applying specialized rules to interpret it. And both problems can be solved using the Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) neural model designed by Boston University professors Gail Carpenter and Stephen Grossberg. |
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Fighting Cancer With Cancer
Using the cancer cells invading your body to kill the cancer sounds like poetic justice. Jianlin Gong, a researcher in the immunotherapy unit at the School of Medicine, is working on just such a strategy. She is developing a vaccine for patients in remission from cancer that works by training cells in the patient’s immune system to attack any cancer cells lurking in the patient’s body. |
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Finding the Genetic Key to Blindness
BU geneticist Lindsay Farrer believes inflammation creates more trouble than most people think. A gene associated with inflammation also puts people at risk for age-related macular degeneration (AMD),says Farrer.AMD causes vision loss and even blindness. It currently afflicts nearly 10 million Americans. |
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Watching Life Unfold
After a rainstorm, when the sun finally breaks through the clouds, colors glimmer and swirl on the oily surfaces of puddles that have accumulated on the ground. For physicist Anna K. Swan, this simple phenomenon provides the basis for the new imaging technology she is developing to look at very small objects such as strands of DNA. |
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Raising the Cost of Spam
Someone, somewhere, must be buying what the spammers are selling. Otherwise, the trouble of sending volumes of spam simply wouldn’t be worth it. It is exactly that equation that information economist Marshall Van Alstyne wants to tilt in favor of those who would just as soon never get one more message about herbal Viagra. |
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Regrowing Bone
Lee Chou thinks that implants should provide a comfortable home for bone cells. However, he takes this idea one step further —biodegradable scaffold implants that grow bones where no bones have grown before. |
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Shape Changers
In the oceans of the world, golf-ball-sized blobs glide through the water gobbling up tiny zooplankton.Although native to the eastern coast of the United States, Mnemiopsis leidyi ctenophores— jellyfish-like creatures—have invaded the Baltic and Aegean seas,carried in the ballast water ships use for stabilization when their cargo holds are empty.With no natural enemies in their new homes,the ctenophores have flourished to the point that they have pushed out other native fish that also feed on the zooplankton, leading worried ecologists and fishermen to search for a way to control the burgeoning population. |
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