By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff

Listening is more than a matter of being "all ears." People can also hear with their skin, according to new research that deepens our understanding of the senses, showing they can work together but also override one another.

Strange though it seems, scientists are finding that multiple senses contribute to the simplest perceptions. People can see with their ears, hear with their eyes, or hear with a touch.

In the work published today in the journal Nature, researchers found they could influence what people hear by delivering puffs of air to the back of a hand or their neck. By demonstrating that the perception of speech is affected by touch, the experiment raises the possibility that one sense could be used as a substitute for another, creating new ways for deaf people to hear. In fact, researchers at MIT are already using this basic idea to develop technology that could one day assist people with hearing impairment.

"This study is part of us ... reconsidering how humans perceive the world, how humans interact with the world," said co-author Bryan Gick, a phonetician at the University of British Columbia and senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories, a speech research think tank in New Haven, Conn.

Harvard Medical School's publishing arm has a new iPhone application for all things swine flu, pulling information from local and national health specialists, its own medical and business schools, and an outbreak locator, all downloadable from the iTunes Store.

Called the HMSMobile Swine Flu Center, it offers video guides for preventing infection, interactive tools to determine if an illness is likely to be swine flu, and advice for businesses dealing with illness, according to Harvard Health Publications. It also includes access to HealthMap's “Outbreaks Near Me” program, a real-time map of disease outbreaks developed by John Brownstein of Children's Hospital Boston and Clark Freifeld of MIT's Media Lab.

Thirteen Massachusetts researchers and clinicians have been elected to the Institute of Medicine, a prestigious national body that makes recommendations on health and health-care policy.

The institute's 65 new members include:

Amy N. Finkelstein, professor of economics, MIT
Alfred L. Goldberg, professor of cell biology, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Sue J. Goldie, professor of public health, and director, Center for Health Decision Science, Harvard School of Public Health
Dr. Daniel A. Haber, professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, and director, Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center
Tyler E. Jacks, professor of biology, and director, David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, MIT
Dr. Ichiro Kawachi, professor and chair, department of society, human development, and health, Harvard School of Public Health
Dr. Isaac S. Kohane, professor of pediatrics and health sciences and technology, Harvard Medical School; and chair, informatics program, Children's Hospital Boston
Dr. Joan Y. Reede, dean for diversity and community partnership and associate professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School
Gary Ruvkun, professor of genetics, Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital
Dr. Clifford B. Saper, professor of neurology and neuroscience, Harvard Medical School, and professor and head, department of neurology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Dr. Megan Sykes, associate director, Transplantation Biology Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, and professor of surgery and professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Bruce D. Walker, director, Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT, and Harvard University
Dr. Ralph Weissleder, professor of systems biology and radiology, Harvard Medical School, and director, Center for Systems Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. Elena N. Bodnar couldn't be more serious about her research. The trauma and risk management specialist was in her native Ukraine during the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and helped children cope with its aftermath.

Tonight, as she accepts the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for public health, she won't mind laughter when she demonstrates "in a very elegant way, without removing any clothes," how an ordinary brassiere can be transformed into a pair of gas masks.

"I think the Ig Nobel is not just a funny thing," she said in an interview this afternoon. "If it makes people first laugh and then think, my discovery fits perfectly."

Massachusetts has made a strong showing in a $348 million federal grant program that encourages biomedical researchers to engage in high-risk projects with the potential to accelerate the translation of research discoveries into treatments.

Eleven of 42 Transformational R01 grants are flowing to scientists in the state and 12 of 55 New Innovator award winners are based here. One of 18 Pioneer Award recipients is from Massachusetts. All three programs from the National Institutes of Health are designed to spur exploration that may have been deemed too risky in past rounds.

Planning for the worst might not be the best when it comes to flu pandemics, an MIT doctoral student argues on the eve of a renewed swine flu outbreak expected in the fall.

Writing in today's British Medical Journal, Peter Doshi of MIT's program in history; anthropology; and science, technology and society, says that fears of a public health disaster on the order of the 1918 flu pandemic may do more harm than good when dealing with a different kind of threat.

If public health messages about the dangers of flu are ignored as alarmist, Doshi says, they may erode people's trust and make important warnings go unheeded. And if fears about the virus send unprecedented numbers of patients to seek flu tests, that could overwhelm the health care system. To complicate matters even more, the perceived prevalence of flu could be skewed because many people who wouldn't ordinarily get tested for seasonal flu would now be showing up.

"Predictions about pandemic flu were based on a disaster scenario," Doshi said in an interview. "The H1N1 outbreak shows just how wrong predictions can be."

The scientists who gained international attention in the spring when they brought a real-time map of swine flu outbreaks to the world are putting disease information about your neighborhood in the palm of your hand.

John Brownstein of Children's Hospital Boston and Clark Freifeld of MIT's Media Lab today announced Outbreaks Near Me, a free application designed for Apple's iPhone or iTouch devices that allows users to see information about infectious disease outbreaks where they are. The application, available here, is based on HealthMap, which gathers, evaluates, and maps data about emerging outbreaks based on Google searches, news reports, blogs, and chats in addition to traditional official sources.

"People have their cell phones with them at all times, and especially in other parts of the world, cell phones are much more used than PCs," Brownstein said. "Cell phones represent an extraordinary tool to provide location-based service. You can search for restaurants near you. Why not understand what is happening around you in public health?"

Outbreaks Near Me also lets users send their own reports, including photos, to the HealthMap team, which will review them for possible inclusion on its world map. The application will also send alerts about new outbreaks in the user's area, or tell them if they've just entered a new place where disease activity has been reported. Brownstein said they are looking at other devices where the application could be used.

Intended for both the general public and public health practitioners, HealthMap drew the most attention in its three years of existence in the spring, when a novel strain of flu known as H1N1 emerged in Mexico and quickly spread around the world.

"Historically what we have tried to do is to be accessible to everyday audiences, as opposed to being only a tool for epidemiologists," Freifeld said. "We've taken that a step farther and allow people to have HealthMap in the palms of their hands."

Dr. Frank L. Douglas (left), who resigned from a leadership role at MIT after a colleague's controversial tenure fight, has been named head of a biomedical research center in Ohio.

Douglas, the founder and former director of MIT’s Center of Biomedical Innovation, is the new president and CEO of the BioInnovation Institute in Akron, the center said today. It was established in October by a hospital, three universities, and two health care systems to promote biomedical research and business development.

Douglas resigned from MIT in June 2007 as James Sherley was ending his fight for tenure. Sherley, an African-American stem cell scientist, had gone on a 12-day hunger strike earlier that year to protest what he called racism in MIT's denial of tenure. MIT has denied his contention.

Douglas, who is also African-American, said he left because of MIT's "lack of will to deal with a problem that had clearly polarized minority faculty and the larger MIT community."

Since leaving MIT, Douglas has been a senior fellow at the Ewing M. Kauffman Foundation, a senior partner at Puretech Ventures, and chief scientific adviser at Bayer Healthcare.

(Photo from the BioInnovation Institute in Akron)

A research collaboration based in Boston has won a five-year, $15 million grant to study how the hepatitis C virus defies immune system efforts to defeat it.

The Cooperative Center for Translational Research in Human Immunology, which will be based at Massachusetts General Hospital, won the grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the hospital said. Dr. Raymond Chung, director of hepatology in the MGH Gastrointestinal Unit, will co-direct the new center with Dr. Paul Klenerman of Oxford University.

The center also includes researchers from MIT, Harvard, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the Wistar Institute, in Philadelphia.

Hepatitis C is a viral, blood-borne disease that can cause a life-threatening liver infection. Some people recover from the infection, but for most people the illness is chronic. The center will explore how the immune system fails to suppress and remove the virus.

Rhesus monkeys Canto (left) and Owen (right) are among the oldest subjects in a 20-year study that found calorie restriction can slow aging. Canto, 27, is on a restricted diet. Owen, 29, is on a normal diet.
CREDIT: University of Wisconsin-Madison, photo by Jeff Miller

By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff

Scientists have long known that dramatically cutting calories can extend the lives of yeast, flies, and rodents, discoveries that have sparked a fevered quest for a human fountain of youth.

In labs in Cambridge and elsewhere, researchers are searching for drugs that would mimic the effects of calorie restriction, and products based on this intriguing idea are already widely sold as anti-aging nostrums -- though there has been little evidence that they work in humans.

But today, researchers reported that rhesus monkeys on a low-calorie diet live longer and healthier lives, a finding two decades in the making that suggests, because monkeys and humans are genetic cousins, such diets might slow aging in people, too.

"For 70 years, people have been wondering whether this phenomenon that occurs in rats might also occur in humans," said David Sinclair, a pathology professor at Harvard Medical School who was not involved with the study. "What this paper says is while we don't know for sure, we've got one extra point on the side of the people who believe it will work in humans."