See CNN’s health pages for the full story.

Ayr Muir, Course III ’00 and SM ’01, is following his dream of opening a restaurant, and the first step has been launching the Clover Food Lab truck, parked near the MIT Medical Center. Clover Food Lab offers a vegetarian menu, made from local and organic ingredients. The lunch business has been successful enough that the truck began offering breakfast at the beginning of December. Enthusiastic response from customers has even brought visitors from outside the local area.

They have announced plans to take time off over the holidays and MIT’s IAP.  Check their website for information about their hours, the menu, the truck, and even the music they play.

At #74 in Discover Magazine’s Top 100 Stories of 2008 (in the magazine’s December issue) is a paper by professors Paula Hammond, Yet-Ming Chiang, and Angela Belcher describing a way to use viruses to build and install microbatteries. The team reported the method in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in August.

Two MIT professors, Klavs Jensen and Mehmet Yanik, have been named finalists in the Association for Laboratory Automation’s (ALA) $10,000 Innovation Award at LabAutomation2009, which will take place Jan. 24-28.

Jensen, the Warren K. Lewis Professor and department head of chemical engineering and a professor of materials science and engineering, is up for his work on “Microfluidic Synthesis of NanoMaterials at High Pressures and Temperatures.”

Yanik, the Robert J. Shillman Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, was named a finalist for his work on “High Performance Magnetic Separation in Microfluidic Channels.”

The ALA Innovation Award recognizes LabAutomation2009 podium presenters whose work demonstrates outstanding innovation and contributes to the exploration of automation technologies in the laboratory. The winner will be announced Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2009, at 12:30 p.m.

Researchers at MIT have made significant progress in understanding a class of materials that has resisted analysis for decades. Their findings could lead to the rapid discovery of a variety of useful new kinds of glass made of metallic alloys with potentially significant mechanical, chemical and magnetic applications.

The first examples of metallic alloys that could be made into glass were discovered back in the late 1950s and led to a flurry of research activity, but, despite intense study, so far nobody had solved the riddle of why some specific alloys could form glasses and others could not, or how to identify the promising candidates, said Carl. V. Thompson, the Stavros Salapatas Professor of Materials Science & Engineering and director of the Materials Processing Center at MIT. A report on the new work, which describes a way to systematically find the promising mixes from among dozens of candidates, is being published this week in Science.

See the MIT News Office for further details on the story.

To compare different alloy compositions for their glass-forming ability, the researchers deposited slightly different blends of two metals on each one of an array of many microscopic fingers, or cantilevers, two of which are seen here, so that their properties could be compared side by side. Image courtesy / Carl V. Thompson