"I've really been into bones since I was little. I don't know why," says Emory University senior Alexandra Davis, an anthropology major. "Not fresh bodies, though. No soft tissues or blood. Just bones."
In fact, Davis loves bones so much that she was willing to spend seven weeks in Malawi with Emory anthropologist Jessica Thompson and four more of her students last summer, excavating bones and other artifacts in ancient hunter-gatherer sites, assisted by a team of locals.
Thompson will return to Malawi in July with another team of students to continue excavation of two sites that were started last summer. "We want to get into the deeper layers, because in both cases we did not come close to reaching the bottom of the sites," Thompson says. "Then, we want to find out how old they are."
"I want to help Native American tribes to reclaim knowledge of their very ancient evolutionary histories — histories that have been largely wiped away because of colonialism," says Emory geneticist John Lindo. Photo by Kay Hinton, Emory Photo/Video.
By Carol Clark
The ancient genomes of the Tsimshian indigenous people left tell-tale markers on the trail of their past, revealing that at least 6,000 years ago their population size was on a slow but steady decline.
The American Journal of Human Genetics published the findings, which draw from the first population-level nuclear DNA analysis of a Native American group from ancient to modern times.
“The finding contradicts a popular notion,” says John Lindo, a geneticist in Emory University’s Department of Anthropology and first author on the paper. “There is this idea that after Native Americans came in through the Bering Strait that they were all expanding in population size until Europeans showed up. At least for this one population, we’ve shown that was not the case.”
A boon in next-generation DNA sequencing technology has opened the possibility to explore the evolutionary history of different populations. “Ancient nuclear DNA analysis is a relatively new field,” Lindo says. “Not until recently have we had methods to sequence an entire genome quickly and inexpensively.”
Nuclear DNA provides information on an individual’s lineages going back hundreds of thousands of years. Lindo is one of the few geneticists looking at ancient whole genomes of Native Americans. He is especially interested in understanding how the genomes of their different populations evolved over time.
“Their evolutionary histories are radically different,” Lindo says. “Over thousands of years, various Native American populations have adapted to living in every ecology throughout North and South America, from the Arctic to the Amazon. That’s about as an extreme as you can get for differences in environments.”
The Tsimshian people historically lived in longhouses in coastal British Columbia and southern Alaska where they harvested the abundant sea life. Lindo and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of 25 living Tsimshian people and 25 ancient individuals who lived in the same region between 6,000 and 500 years ago, and confirmed that they were a continuous population through time.
Members of the Tsimshian Native American tribe hold a tea party near Fort Simpson, British Columbia, in 1889. Image from the Library and Archives Canada.
In a previous paper, drawing from the same data set, they found a dramatic shift between the two time periods in a class of genes associated with the immune system, suggesting a strong evolutionary pressure on the population to adapt to pathogens. A demographic model indicated a crash in the Tsimshian population size of about 57 percent during the early-to-mid 19th century. That finding fitted with historical accounts for how smallpox, introduced by European colonization, devastated the Tsimshian population during two epidemics within that time-frame.
The current paper looked at broader genetic variations between the ancient and modern DNA. An analysis showed both how the variation declined slowly in the ancient population before the collapse, but has since recovered.
“After a population collapse, only a subset of the genetic diversity remains,” Lindo says. “We find a more nuanced story, that despite the population collapse, the genetic diversity of modern Tsimshian people varies significantly.”
Intermarriage with other Native American groups and non-native populations increased the genetic diversity of some of the modern-day Tsimshian people so that it is near the levels prior to their population collapse, the analysis showed.
“A population with relatively high genetic diversity has a greater potential to fight off pathogens and avoid recessive traits,” Lindo says. “It exemplifies the benefits of gene flow between populations, especially following catastrophic events such as the small pox epidemics that the Tsimshian endured.”
Senior authors on the paper are Michael DeGiorgio from Pennsylvania State University and Ripan Malhi from the University of Illinois. The paper’s coauthors include Tsimshian representatives Joycelynn Mitchell and Barbara Petzelt from the Metlakatla Treaty Office in Prince Rupert, Canada.
Malhi, a leader in forging trusting relationships between genetic researchers and indigenous people, was a mentor to Lindo, who earned his PhD at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
Lindo is continuing that tradition of building trust and working closely with indigenous populations. His ancient DNA research at Emory integrates the approaches of ancient whole genomes, statistical modeling and functional methods.
One of his projects is focused on genetic fluctuations to help understand ancient adaptions in various Native American populations. He is currently working with 10 different tribes from throughout North America.
“Community engagement is essential when working with indigenous communities,” says Lindo, explaining that he first meets personally with a tribal community to talk about how a genetic study might add to their knowledge of their own history.
“I listen to their stories and how they are working to keep their cultures alive,” he says. “One elder from a southwestern tribe told me that his grandfather was taken away in the early 1900s because he was a shaman and Christianity was swelling through the area. Each tribe’s stories are different but they are all powerful, and sometimes difficult, stories to hear.”
Most ancient DNA analyses have come out of Europe, where more ancient DNA labs are based and cold temperatures have helped preserve specimens.
Lindo wants to bring some of the same insights that those of European ancestry are gaining about their past to Native Americans.
“I’d like to disentangle this idea that Native Americans are part of a singular race,” he says. “I want to help Native American tribes to reclaim knowledge of their very ancient evolutionary histories — histories that have been largely wiped away because of colonialism.”
Art by Emory senior Pamela Romero, Science.Art.Wonder. founder and president, portrays how aphids can develop wings in response to environmental changes. The DNA painted along the edges of the canvases is the same, except that different genes are switched on. Photo by Ann Watson, Emory Photo/Video
By Carol Clark
A small crowd gathers in Emory’s White Hall before the menacing sight: Large rubber worms arrayed on triangular red spikes. The jagged spikes, from a few inches to more than a foot tall, lean crazily in all directions. Some of the worms — suspended on near-invisible fishing line — appear to rise off the spikes, escaping to a circular mirror hanging from above.
“This is how evolution works!” says Ethan Mock, a sophomore majoring in ancient history, who created the sculpture, titled "The Crucible." He looks dapper in a leather vest and tweed cap and speaks with theatrical flair to the crowd. “The spikes represent the trials and tribulations of the worms’ struggles. Most are trapped in the spikes but a few climb out, not realizing that they are simply climbing into a new trial, a new test.”
The onlookers include a mix of college students, children and their parents, brought together by campus events during the recent Atlanta Science Festival. Joining the regular attractions of Physics Live! and Chemistry Carnival is the debut of an art exhibit by a new, student-run program called Science.Art.Wonder., or S.A.W. Just over 100 artists — most of them untrained college students — teamed with scientists from Emory and Georgia Tech to translate their research into art.
Ethan Mock and his art, "The Crucible"
Mock worked with the lab of Levi Morran, an assistant professor in Emory’s Department of Biology who studies co-evolutionary dynamics by experimenting with a host (a microscopic worm called C. elegans) and a parasite (a bright red species of bacteria called Serratia marcescens that is lethal to C. elegans upon consumption).
“This is so cool!” says Pareena Sharma, a first-year biochemistry major at Emory, as she snaps a photo of the sculpture. “It’s so relatable to me. I’ve been doing this same experiment since the first of the semester in Biology 142.”
Two young boys draw near the spikes. “Look up into the mirror,” Mock encourages them. “Now tell me what you see.”
“The same thing,” one of the boys replies.
“That’s right!” Mock says. “The process of evolution keeps repeating, going in a loop.”
Morran, arriving with his eight-year-old daughter, Maggie, is impressed. “You could see the light come on in those boys’ eyes,” he says. “They understood what Ethan is trying to convey. And it’s not an easy concept to grasp — the continual evolutionary struggle.”
Both artists and researchers engage with visitors as they peruse more than 140 works of art, set up on the Quad, in White Hall, the Math and Science Center and the Atwood Chemistry Center during the festival.
“This artwork gives you a snapshot of how much research is being done in Atlanta. I’m taken aback by how cutting edge and varied it is,” says Pamela Romero, president of S.A.W. The program is the brainchild of Romero, a senior majoring in neuroscience and behavioral biology and minoring in computer science.
Young visitors to the Emory campus peruse science-inspired art on the Quad. Photo by Ann Watson, Emory Photo/Video
The Emory S.A.W. contributions span labs across the University and beyond. The artists picked their mediums, from acrylic to watercolor and everything in between.
Emily Isaac, a first-year Emory student majoring in environmental sciences and theater, stands on the Quad next to a large watercolor she painted. “Art can help scientists make a point without using any scientific jargon,” she says.
She teamed with Robert Wallace from Georgia Tech’s Agricultural Technology Research Program. One of Wallace’s projects gave plots of farmland to women in India who had been victims of an acid attack. Isaac did a portrait of a woman with a scarred face. The woman’s head is partially wrapped in strips of bandages that Isaac painted to look like rows of newly sprouting plants.
“I wanted to show hope, and how connecting with the environment can help people,” Isaac says.
This year’s 36 Emory S.A.W. artists are mainly undergraduates — many of them science majors — but they also include a few graduate students, faculty and staff members. Georgia Tech makes up the bulk of other contributing artists and researchers in this year’s S.A.W., although 10 independent artists also got involved, along with Georgia State University undergraduates and the Atlanta campus of SCAD.
“S.A.W. is collaborative, not only across disciplines and institutions, but also across students, faculty, staff and members of the Atlanta community,” Romero says. “We even have one international artist, from Puerto Rico.”
A painting by Georgia Tech student Bianca Guerrero portrays a virtual reality game used to measure players' perception of time as well as eye movement. The art is based on research by Georgia Tech psychologist Malia Crane. Photo by Ann Watson, Emory Photo/Video.
As long as she can remember, everyone thought Romero would become an artist, or maybe an architect. She began taking art classes at the age of three in her home town of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She continued making and studying art, developing a surrealist style.
In ninth grade, however, a psychology course sparked a fascination for neurobiology. Romero took online classes and started reading up on subjects like optogenetics and deep-brain stimulation.
By the time she was accepted to Emory, she had decided to forge a career as a scientist. “A lot of people told me that if I chose neuroscience I would have to forsake art, because I would be a bad scientist if I tried to do both,” she recalls. “I was determined to prove them wrong.”
Romero sought out kindred spirits like Nicole Gerardo, associate professor of biology, who also grew up with twin passions for science and art. Gerardo once had students create artwork using microbes in her lab under the direction of Nancy Lowe — a former lab technician at Emory who went on to create a retreat center in North Carolina called AS.IF: Art and Science in the Field.
Gerardo later paired students with labs to create ceramic representations of research under the direction of Diane Kempler, who formerly taught visual arts at Emory.
“Art provides a way to reach people who may be intimidated by science,” Gerardo says. “And working with an artist lets scientists see their own work in a different way. That could lead to new scientific approaches.”
When Romero first joined forces with Gerardo it was simply to produce art for her lab, which focuses on evolutionary ecology. “We were test subjects for S.A.W.,” Romero says.
Emory senior Maureen Ascona, a neuroscience and behavioral biology major, discusses her art with visitors to the Quad. Ascona teamed with Helen Mayberg, from the Emory School of Medicine, who uses deep-brain stimulation to help patients with treatment-resistant depression. Photo by Ann Watson, Emory Photo/Video.
One of the pieces Romero created consists of triangular canvases that can be shifted into different positions. The acrylic painting depicts how aphids develop wings in the presence of predators, like ladybugs, or if food becomes scarce. “When Dr. Gerardo explains her work to people, she can move the canvases to show how the aphids change in response to their environment,” Romero says.
Romero wanted to give other students the chance to enter research labs and experiment with art.
“Pamela is an amazing woman, a force of nature,” says Gerardo, who is the faculty mentor for S.A.W. “What she has done with the support of her fellow students is incredible. I had envisioned maybe 20 pairings of scientists and artists. I’m still surprised by how big it became.”
Connections from across the University helped S.A.W. grow. Wei Wei Chen and John Wang, student leaders of Emory Arts Underground, provided the platform for Romero to launch S.A.W. and encouraged her to form a charter, bylaws and an executive team. That team includes Emory undergraduates Alex Nazzari (vice-president), Aila Jiang, Veronica Paltaraskaya, Anne Pizzini, Deborah Seong and John Wang, along with Georgia Tech students Olivia Cox, Siyan Li and Iris Liu.
The students’ efforts paid off with S.A.W.’s smash debut at the Atlanta Science Festival.
“One of my favorite parts was guiding artists through the process of disentangling the science, reassuring them that they could do it,” Romero says. “Many of them felt overwhelmed after first talking to a scientist. Some of them were first-year students who hadn’t even had introductory biology or chemistry.”
A piece by Alice Yang, a first-year Emory student majoring in neuroscience and behavioral biology who teamed with researchers of human genetics in the Emory 3q29 Project. Photo courtesy of S.A.W.
Exploring a lab through an art project allows students to develop a relationship with a researcher and often find a mentor, Romero says.
Alice Yang, a first-year Emory student majoring in neuroscience and behavioral biology, teamed with Jennifer Mulle, assistant professor at Rollins School of Public Health. Mulle is co-principal investigator of the Emory 3q29 Project, which seeks to understand a genetic deletion associated with an increased risk for schizophrenia.
“I’m so grateful for the experience,” Yang says of spending time with the 3q29 Project team. “I learned what it’s like to actually do science. And I caught their passion. People are just now realizing how genetics can be involved in mental illness. It’s a very new field.”
To create her art pieces, Yang ordered special scratch-off paper from her native China. “This paper’s easy to work with and it’s great for showing patterns and textures,” she says. She explains how she carefully cut slices from the black top layer of the paper to reveal the glowing, rainbow colors beneath. Her pictures portray the nanomapping of fluorescent-labeled alleles from the 3q29 lab while also paying tribute to Salvador Dali’s surrealism.
Even those who are not aspiring scientists can catch the science-art bug. Independent artist Aaron Artrip teamed with scientists Matthew Jackson and Dan Cook at Georgia Tech to demonstrate interaction with sound.
A group of children buzzes around Artrip’s exhibit in White Hall. A piece of paper sprinkled with powdered black ink is taped to a wooden speaker, which is plugged into an electronic synthesizer. As Artrip taps a keyboard, the powder moves across the page, creating patterns.
“I’m making drawings with vibrations. Forcing sound through the ink causes it to move,” he explains.
“Would you like to try?” he asks a young girl watching him.
She doesn’t have to be asked twice.
A painting by Georgia Tech student Kate Bernart, "Connecting the Cycle," portrays Austin Ladshaw's research at Georgia Tech's School of Environmental Engineering on the nuclear fuel cycle and ways to prevent excessive accumulations of radioactive waste. Photo by Ann Watson, Emory Photo/Video
Ultimately, S.A.W. hopes to find ways to integrate its art-science model into grades K-12.
“We would like to have artists and researchers go into K-12 classrooms to talk about the art and the research together,” Romero says.
She presented S.A.W. at the recent Georgia Tech STEAM Leadership Conference, which brought together educators and policymakers to explore new ways to teach science, technology, engineering, art and math, or STEAM.
S.A.W. is now working to put together an anthology of its art into a booklet, to include descriptions of the science. The booklet will be aimed at high school students “to give them a glimpse of some of the possible fields available to them in college,” Romero says.
S.A.W. is also creating a web site where the art will be accessible in digital form, including videos of some of the interactive art pieces, along with other resources for K-12 teachers.
After graduating this spring, Romero plans to take a gap year, then go on to graduate school with the aim of becoming a professor with a research lab. “S.A.W. has an incredible executive team and I’m making sure that the program continues after I leave Emory,” she says. “I would also like to stay involved with it in some way.”
As she prepares for graduation, Romero is working on an art narrative piece funded by the Emory Center for Creativity and Arts. The work will combine acrylic painting and sculpture to represent the element Vanadium, discovered by Mexican mineralogist Andrews Manuel del Rio in 1801. A series of circular canvases will each represent an atom in Vanadium. Each canvas will also represent a country or group of countries in Latin America, on which Romero will depict the research of a scientist from that area.
“My main goal with this piece is to celebrate and encourage more Latin American science,” Romero says. She is calling the piece “Elementally Latino,” to describe how Latinos are an elemental, or basic, part of science and how they also embody an elemental force. “Latinos are such a passionate people that I can only adequately describe them as a force of nature,” she says.
Emory's Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library holds an 1881 original edition of "Frankenstein" and an 1831 edition, above, with a depiction of the "creature" and a prologue by Mary Shelley.
It’s the 200th anniversary year of “Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus,” an enduring novel at the nexus of major questions of our time. Emory faculty explore many of them in a newly published anthology, “Frankenstein: How a Monster Became an Icon, the Science and Enduring Allure of Mary Shelley’s Creation.”
“When you see a contemporary film about androids, like ‘Blade Runner 2049,’ you’re seeing the ‘Frankenstein’ story in a 21st-century guise,” says Sidney Perkowitz, Emory emeritus physicist and co-editor of the new anthology. “The androids are sleek and modern instead of the shambling, stitched-together creature in ‘Frankenstein,’ but they have the same questions swirling around them. Even as we’re on the verge of artificially generating life, we’re no closer to knowing whether we should.”
Hair-raising, spine-tingling fun: A young visitor to the Emory campus during last year's Atlanta Science Festival experiences the thrill of static electricity.
By Carol Clark
From the lumbering, 200-year-old Frankenstein to sleek, modern-day robots, this year’s Atlanta Science Festival — set for March 9 to 24 — highlights creations that spark wonder and fun, giving glimpses of the past and the future.
The five-year-old festival expanded to more than two weeks, encompassing 120 events sponsored by 90 different partners at 70 venues across metro Atlanta, including many on the Emory campus. The festival culminates with a day-long “Exploration Expo” on Saturday, March 24, set in Piedmont Park.
“Rise Up, Robots!” kicks off the festival on the evening of Friday, March 9 at the Ferst Center, when three robots and their inventors will take the stage.
“We thought about how we could possibly top last year’s featured speaker, astronaut Mark Kelly — someone so inspirational to children and adults all over the planet,” says Meisa Salaita, co-director of the Atlanta Science Festival. “We finally realized that no human could match him, and we would have to resort to artificial intelligence.”
Heather Knight, professor of robotics at Oregon State University, will demonstrate the interactive quips of “Data,” the world’s first robotic comedian. Georgia Tech’s Gil Weinberg will jam with “Shimon,” a marimba playing robotic musician. And Stewart Coulter, from DEKA Research and Development, will show how a bionic arm named LUKE (Life Under Kinetic Evolution) changed an amputee’s life.
Tickets are required for the event, which starts at 7 pm. Door open early with an Interactive Robotic Petting Zoo, starting at 6 pm.
Frankenstein rises up on the Emory campus on Thursday, March 22. Three Atlanta playwrights will reanimate Mary Shelley’s creation, which turns 200 this year, in the context of scientific research ongoing at Emory. Following the short plays join ethicists, scientists and the playwrights to discuss the work over refreshments. The event, titled “Frankenstein Goes Back to the Lab,” begins at 5:30 pm in Emory’s Science Commons.
On Friday, March 23, from 3:30 to 7 pm, Emory will host “Chemistry Carnival,” where visitors can join scientists in carnival games like Peptide Jenga and Bacterial Telepathy, in the Atwood Chemistry Center. On the same day and time, the ever-popular “Physics Live!” will again feature giant soap bubbles and liquid nitrogen ice cream, among other treats in the Math and Science Center.
A new Emory event this year, “Science.Art.Wonder,” will run concurrently with the chemistry and physics events, on the Emory Quadrangle and in nearby buildings, including White Hall and the Atwood Chemistry Center. For the past year, the program has paired local artists and scientists to explore ideas of research through the visual arts. You can stroll through an exhibit of the resulting artwork and meet some of the artists and scientists involved in the project.
Adult fare is featured on Monday, March 19, including “The Science of ‘Motherese,’” an overview of early vocal development in infants at the Marcus Autism Center, and “CDC in the Scene,” which features CDC scientists sorting fact from fiction surrounding movies like “Outbreak,” in the Mathematics and Science Center.
During “Unveiling the Internet,” on Wednesday, March 21, Emory computer scientists will give interactive lessons on everything from the workings of YouTube to Snapchat.
“STEM Gems: Giving Girls Role Models in STEM Careers,” on Saturday, March 10, is an interactive discussion where panelists offer advice and guidance specific to girls and young women intrigued by science, technology, engineering and math. “Women and Minorities in STEM: Surprises, Setbacks and Successes,” set for the evening of Thursday, March 22 at the Oxford campus, is a panel discussion with voices from a diverse set of scientific fields who will share their stories and take questions.
Click here for more details of Emory campus events, and events throughout the city featuring members of the Emory community.
Among the dozen Emory booths at “Exploration Expo” will be chemistry students running their non-Newtonian fluid dance pit. The Center for the Study of Human Health will explore the human gut microbiome in a booth called “Your Hundred Trillion Best Friends.” And the “Science.Art.Wonder” team will display art from the program and invite you to help create a mural.
The Atlanta Science Festival was founded by Emory, Georgia Tech and the Metro Atlanta Chamber and is a collaboration among diverse community partners and sponsors.
“In ancient Egypt, cats and dogs were gods, and they have not forgotten this!” says Melinda Hartwig, curator of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern Art at the Michael C. Carlos Museum.
That exalted stature is illuminated in the exhibition “Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt,” which opened Feb. 10 at the museum and will be on view through Nov. 11.
The exhibit showcases cats and lions, plus dogs and jackals, as domesticated pets, creatures of the wild or mythic symbols of divinities, in ancient Egyptian mythology, kingship and everyday life. Animal burial practices and luxury items decorated with feline and canine features are also on display.
“Cats and dogs reveal so much about ancient Egyptian culture,” says Hartwig. “These animals were just as important to the ancient Egyptians as they are to us today.”
The kings of Egypt were associated with the lion, thus, the human head on the lion’s body or the sphinx.
“Cats were first domesticated in Egypt around 4000 BC. They were lovable pets, hunters of vermin and divine embodiments of fertility and protection. Lions and jungle cats were admired for their power, and were linked with royalty and divinity,” Hartwig continues. “Dogs were also kept as pets. Their loyalty and hunting abilities were keenly valued. Often found roaming the ancient necropolises, dogs and jackals became embodiments of the gods who protected the dead.”
Clusters of holes, such as those of a lotus seed pod, may be evolutionarily
indicative of contamination and disease — visual cues for rotten or
moldy food or skin marred by an infection. (Photo by Peripitus/Wikipedia Commons.)
By Carol Clark
Trypophobia, commonly known as “fear of holes,” is linked to a physiological response more associated with disgust than fear, finds a new study published in PeerJ.
Trypophobia is not officially recognized in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders (DSM). Many people, however, report feeling an aversion to clusters of holes — such as those of a honeycomb, a lotus seed pod or even aerated chocolate.
“Some people are so intensely bothered by the sight of these objects that they can’t stand to be around them,” says Stella Lourenco, a psychologist at Emory University whose lab conducted the study. “The phenomenon, which likely has an evolutionary basis, may be more common than we realize.”
Previous research linked trypophobic reactions to some of the same visual spectral properties shared by images of evolutionarily threatening animals, such as snakes and spiders. The repeating pattern of high contrast seen in clusters of holes, for example, is similar to the pattern on the skin of many snakes and the pattern made by a spider’s dark legs against a lighter background.
“We’re an incredibly visual species,” says Vladislav Ayzenberg, a graduate student in the Lourenco lab and lead author of the PeerJ study. “Low-level visual properties can convey a lot of meaningful information. These visual cues allow us to make immediate inferences — whether we see part of a snake in the grass or a whole snake — and react quickly to potential danger.”
It is well-established that viewing images of threatening animals generally elicits a fear reaction in viewers, associated with the sympathetic nervous system. The heart and breathing rate goes up and the pupils dilate. This hyperarousal to potential danger is known as the fight-or-flight response.
The researchers wanted to test whether this same physiological response was associated with seemingly innocuous images of holes.
They used eye-tracking technology that measured changes in pupil size to differentiate the responses of study subjects to images of clusters of holes, images of threatening animals and neutral images.
Unlike images of snakes and spiders, images of holes elicited greater constriction of the pupils — a response associated with the parasympathetic nervous system and feelings of disgust.
“On the surface, images of threatening animals and clusters of holes both elicit an aversive reaction,” Ayzenberg says. “Our findings, however, suggest that the physiological underpinnings for these reactions are different, even though the general aversion may be rooted in shared visual-spectral properties.”
In contrast to a fight-or-flight response, gearing the body up for action, a parasympathetic response slows heart rate and breathing and constricts the pupils.
“These visual cues signal the body to be cautious, while also closing off the body, as if to limit its exposure to something that could be harmful,” Ayzenberg says.
The authors theorize that clusters of holes may be evolutionarily indicative of contamination and disease — visual cues for rotten or moldy food or skin marred by an infection.
The subjects involved in the experiments were college students who did not report having trypophobia. “The fact that we found effects in this population suggests a quite primitive and pervasive visual mechanism underlying an aversion to holes,” Lourenco says.
Since the time of Darwin, scientists have debated the relation between fear and disgust. The current paper adds to the growing evidence that — while the two emotions are on continuums and occasionally overlap — they have distinct neural and physiological underpinnings.
“Our findings not only enhance our understanding of the visual system but also how visual processing may contribute to a range of other phobic reactions,” Ayzenberg says.
A third co-author of the study is Meghan Hickey. She worked on the experiments as an undergraduate psychology major, through the Scholarly Inquiry and Research at Emory (SIRE) program, and is now a medical student at the University of Massachusetts.
"Anthropological genetics is a huge and growing field," says Kendra Sirak. The Emory graduate student has developed a specialized technique for drilling into ancient skulls to remove DNA samples. (Photo by Kristin Stewardson.)
By Carol Clark
“Wherever I travel, I take my bone drill with me,” says Kendra Sirak.
An Emory PhD candidate in anthropology, Sirak has developed a specialized technique for drilling into ancient skulls to remove DNA samples. She’s flown to more than a dozen countries and drilled more than 1,000 skulls, perfecting the technique.
“No one at customs has ever questioned me about why I’m carrying a gigantic drill in my suitcase,” she notes.
Sirak has the distinction of being the last graduate student of the late George Armelagos, Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology. Armelagos, who died in 2014 at the age of 77, was one of the founders of the field of paleopathology.
He spent decades working with graduate students to study the bones of ancient Sudanese Nubians to learn about patterns of health, illness and death in the past. The only piece missing in studies of this population was genetic analysis. So in 2013, Armelagos sent Sirak to one of the best ancient DNA labs in the world, University College Dublin, with samples of the Nubian bones.
“I had no interest in genetics,” says Sirak, who was passionate about studying human bones and paleopathology. “But George believed DNA was going to become a critical part of anthropological research.”
Sirak drills the base of an ancient skull.
Sirak soon became hooked when she saw how she could combine her interest in ancient bones with insights from DNA. She formed collaborations not just in Dublin but at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Genetics and elsewhere, working on unsolved mysteries surrounding deaths going back anywhere from decades to ancient times.
As genetic sequencing techniques keep improving, anthropology and DNA analysis are becoming increasingly complementary. In 2015, another breakthrough occurred when researchers realized that the petrous bone consistently yielded the most DNA from ancient skeletons. This pyramid-shaped bone houses several parts of the inner ear related to hearing and balance.
But the way the petrous bone is wedged into the skull makes it difficult to access without shattering the cranium. Understandably, museum curators were reluctant to allow DNA researchers to tamper with rare, fragile ancient skulls.
So Sirak set about developing a technique to drill into a skull and reach the petrous bone in the most non-invasive way possible, while also getting enough bone powder for DNA analysis. The journal Biotechniques recently published her method, which involves drilling through the cranial base, where the spinal cord enters the skull.
“Hopefully, it will become the gold standard for both anthropology stewardship as well as DNA analysis,” Sirak says.
Sirak herself has the most experience in using the technique and her services have been in demand, as researchers seek to unlock secrets of ancient skeletons in museums and other collections.
Sirak’s trusty bone drill is a more modern version of the electric drill her father kept in the garage for household projects. Hers, however, has a foot pedal giving her precision control over the drill’s speed, and a flexible extension cord similar to what you might encounter in a dentist’s chair. The drill bits she uses range from 3.4 to 4.8 millimeters in diameter.
“Drilling an ancient skull can be nerve wracking,” Sirak says, “because you don’t want to be responsible for ruining a specimen. I’ve had museum curators watch me over my shoulder. Sometimes they are so close you can feel their breath on your neck.”
Besides drilling for DNA, she speaks at conferences, gives demonstrations and trains other researchers in her technique. “It’s a lot of fun to work with others who want to learn,” says Sirak, who has helped set up ancient DNA labs in India and China.
She is now finishing up her dissertation, a bioethnography of the ancient Nubians, and expects to graduate from Emory in June.
“Anthropological genetics is a huge and growing field,” Sirak says, acknowledging Armelagos for setting her on the path. “He was a good mentor. He introduced me to something that I didn’t know existed and let me run with it.”
The Lying Conference will unmask the many factors involved in deception, including evolution, culture and the human affinity for storytelling and make believe.
By Carol Clark
We grow up with this notion that we should always tell the truth. But can we live without lying?
That’s one of the questions to be explored in a day-long event, “The Lying Conference,” on Friday, November 17, from 8:30 am to 6:30 pm at Emory Conference Center. Emory’s Department of Psychology is bringing together scientists from psychology, neuroscience and anthropology — along with a leading journalist, a theater director and a professional magician — to discuss their insights into lying and deception. The conference is free and open to the public, but registration is requested.
Topics to be covered include: The deep, evolutionary roots of lying. How children learn to tell lies. Cultural differences in lying. How we decide whether someone is trustworthy. How technology and the changing media and political landscapes are affecting our collective beliefs. The role of deception in the arts and entertainment.
“Lying is kind of a hot topic right now, with all the buzz about fake news and accusations of cover-ups and deception,” says Emory developmental psychologist Philippe Rochat, lead organizer of the event. “When we talk about lying, what we are indirectly trying to understand is, what is the truth? It can be a profound question.”
Science uses probabilities to approximate the truth, Rochat notes. “It’s a never-ending journey and you keep trying to get closer.”
In day-to-day interactions, we regularly negotiate the truth with one another, trying to convince others of a point of view. “People put on makeup to exaggerate their features,” Rochat says. “We amplify some things about ourselves and hide others. We make believe. We seduce.”
People can lie maliciously, in an anti-social way. Or they can tell white lies, to be polite and avoid hurting another person’s feelings.
Rochat is particularly interested in the developmental trajectory of lying. Between the ages of two and three, children begin to engage in pretend play. By around age four, when children start to have ideas about what other people are thinking, lying emerges. “They can be explicit at this stage, because they can understand that someone can be deceived,” Rochat says. “But they still cannot lie very well. They tend to leak the truth.” By the age of six or seven, he adds, “we become much better at concealing the truth and keeping a secret tight.”
Whatever the reasons for lying, one thing is clear: “We’ve evolved to lie,” Rochat says. “It’s deeply rooted in our nature and somehow important to our survival.”
Following are the seven speakers of the conference and brief summaries of their topics.
“Perspective-taking and Dishonest Communication in Primates and Other Animals,” by Emory primatologist Frans de Waal: While there is plenty of evidence for functional deception in animals — such as the way a butterfly might use mimicry as camouflage — but tactical deception requires anticipating the reaction of others. Tactical deception is clearly more developed in apes than most other species, although there is also evidence for corvids.
“Lying, American Style,” by Emory anthropologist Bradd Shore: He will discuss the role of culture in lying and how it differs across cultures. Shore will also touch on the some of the ways the American cultural model has been politically deployed and manipulated in recent decades.
“Little Liars — How Children Learn to Tell Lies,” by Kang Lee a developmental psychologist from the University of Toronto: Lee will use scientific evidence from his lab to show how lying begins early in life, what factors contribute to the development of lying, why children lie and whether adults can easily detect children’s lies. He will also discuss recent developments in technology that may help in detecting lies.
“Face Value — The Irresistible (and Misleading) Influence of First Impressions,” by neuroscientist Alexander Todorov from Princeton University: People form instantaneous impressions from faces and act on these impressions. In the last 10 years, data-driven computational methods allow scientists to visualize the configurations of face features leading to specific impressions such as trustworthiness. But these appearance stereotypes are not often accurate. So why do we form first impressions?
“What Happened to the News? Technology, Politics and the Vanishing Truth,” by Johnathan Mann, former CNN International anchor: Many American believe that the news media intentionally lie to them. President Donald Trump is the best-known detractor of “fake news,” though he himself has been accused of lying more than any other public figure in recent memory. Mann will address the overlapping changes to technology, politics and business that have crippled our national conversation with deception and distrust.
“Onions and Identities — Theater and the True Self,” by Emory dramatist Tim McDonough: Drama is densely populated by duplicitous schemers, by power figures whose lies maintain the sociopolitical status quo, and by characters in search of themselves, who mirror to us our confusions and self-deceptions. Theater provides a template for understanding identity and insight into existentially and socially necessary forms of deceit.
“The Science of Magic and the Art of Deception,” by professional magician Alex Stone: Magicians trick our brains into seeing what isn’t real, and for whatever reason our brains let them get away with it. Through a mix of psychology, storytelling and sleight-of-hand, Stone will explore the cognitive underpinnings of misdirection, illusion, scams and secrecy, pulling back the curtain on the many curious and powerful ways our brains deceive us not just when we’re watching a magician but throughout our everyday lives.
Emory anthropologist Jessica Thompson next to Malawi rock art paintings, likely made by hunter-gatherers. Thompson's work in Malawi is part of a major new paper in the journal Cell, filling in thousands of years of human prehistory of hunter-gatherers in Africa. (Photo by Suzanne Kunitz)
By Carol Clark
Emory anthropologist Jessica Thompson was at a human origins conference years ago when she heard a presenter lament: “Of course, there is no ancient DNA from Africa because of the poor preservation there.”
That’s when it clicked in Thompson’s mind: She had visited a place in Africa — the highlands of northern Malawi — that had neither extremes of heat or wetness — two main environmental factors that degrade DNA. She also knew that scant archaeological research had been done in the region, although a team had unearthed several ancient skeletons there decades ago.
“It’s a strange and fascinating landscape,” says Thompson, who made that 2005 visit as a tourist and was struck by the surreal beauty of the high mountain grassland.
It’s also remote and off the radar of most of the world. “We saw maybe three other tourists while we were there,” she recalls.
That fateful trip laid the groundwork for discoveries of the oldest-known DNA from Africa. The journal Cell just published an analysis of the new discoveries, filling in thousands of years of human prehistory of hunter-gatherers in Africa, led by Harvard geneticist David Reich.
Thompson is second author of the paper. She contributed and described the cultural context for nearly half of the 15 new DNA finds, including the oldest samples. Her fieldwork in Malawi uncovered human remains that yielded DNA ranging in age from about 2,500 to 6,100 years old. And her work is ongoing at a site where a skeleton recovered in 1950 was just dated to 8,100 years old and also yielded DNA.
The other DNA in the Cell paper ranges in age from 3,000-to-500 years ago and comes from South Africa, Tanzania and Kenya.
“Malawi is positioned in between where living hunter-gatherers survive,” Thompson says. “For the first time, we can see the distribution of ancient hunter-gatherer DNA across Africa, showing how these populations were connected in the past.”
Ancient hunter-gatherers do not have a lot of living representatives in Africa today, and they occur as remnants of people scattered across the continent. The remains of Malawi hunter-gatherers that Thompson is studying may represent a population that was once thriving but subsequently pushed into marginal areas during the expansion of agriculturalists and pastoralists during the past 3,000 years.
Some of this population may have survived until much more recently.
“There are legends in Malawi of the original people who came there, passed down through oral histories,” Thompson says. “They are described as hunters and little people, short in stature. There is also a story of a last, epic battle — that occurred about 200 years ago — when these people got eradicated.”
Mount Hora, where the oldest DNA included in the Cell paper was obtained, from a woman who lived more than 8,000 years ago. (Photo by Jessica Thompson)
Malawi captivated Thompson during that first visit as a tourist, in 2005. She was a graduate student when she spent a summer working on a dig in the Serengeti. She and two companions decided to make a road trip before returning to the United States, including a stop in Malawi.
The landlocked country is located in southeast Africa, bordered by Zambia, Tanzania and Mozambique. It is one of the least-developed and smallest countries in Africa, about the size of the state of Tennessee, and runs north to south along the Rift Valley. An enormous body of water, Lake Malawi, makes up about one-third of the country.
“My traveling companies wanted to relax by the lake in the lowlands,” Thompson recalls. “I had read about the Malawi highlands and really wanted to see this unique ecosystem, so I convinced them to go there instead.”
Her companions complained of the cold — it’s windy and regularly freezes in the highlands of Malawi and summer temperatures peak at around 65 or 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite the cold, Thompson admired the rugged, isolated beauty of rocky outcrops and grasslands studded with orchids and fairy ferns where zebra and shaggy antelope grazed.
Thompson, who joined Emory as an assistant professor of anthropology in 2015, dug through the archaeological literature surrounding Malawi and started making exploratory trips there in 2009. She learned of two digs in the Malawi highlands — in 1950 and 1966 — that revealed human skeletons alongside rich cultural evidence of an extinct hunting-and-gathering lifeway.
Dancers at a festival in Malawi. The people living in the country today are the descendants of the Iron Age agriculturalists and pastoralists who swept across the African continent about 3,000 years ago. (Photo by Jessica Thompson)
The 1950 dig turned out to be led by the renowned archaeologist J. Desmond Clark, who Thompson calls her “academic grandfather.” Although Clark died before Thompson could meet him, he served as the mentor to her mentor, Curtis Marean.
On the slopes of Mount Hora — a striking 1,500-meter peak and a major landmark in the highlands — Clark uncovered two skeletons: A woman who had died at around age 22 and a nearby male, who had died in his 40s. The skeletons had been taken out of the country, to the Livingstone Museum in Zambia, and were never dated.
“It was impossible to accurately do radiocarbon dating on bone in 1950,” Thompson explains. “The skeletons became, quite frankly, forgotten over time.”
Guided by the clues from the previous excavations, Thompson began heading digs in the Malawi highlands. A site at a landmark outcrop, known as Fingira Rock, is particularly isolated, requiring the team to hike up a mountainside to more than 2,000 meters on the Nyika Plateau. “Working there you feel the wind, you feel the chill,” Thompson says.
Poachers are a hazard in the area, along with the occasional black mamba — one of the world’s deadliest snakes.
The Fingira site had not been excavated since 1966. “We were appalled to discover that it had been heavily disturbed since then,” Thompson says. Her team uncovered two human leg bones, from two different adult males, which yielded DNA that was about 6,100 years old.
The leg bone of a hunter-gatherer that lived 6,100 years ago, found at the Fingira Rock site. (Photo by Jessica Thompson)
In the back of a cave, they found fragments of a child’s skull in a termite mound. A tiny leg bone next to it indicated that the remains were from a baby younger than age one. DNA analysis revealed that she had been a girl and radiocarbon dating showed that she had died about 2,500 years ago. The analysis also showed that the bones from the infant and the two men were from the same hunter-gatherer population — even though they were separated by thousands of years of time.
The archaeological sediments suggest that Fingira was a place where the dead were buried, although the skeletal material has become scattered over time. Human bones are mixed with the bones of animals that they hunted and ate, as well as with stone tools and shell beads that they used for ornaments.
“When you visit the site,” Thompson says, “you wonder, why were these people living up here when it’s not the most comfortable conditions you can imagine? What was bringing them here? Why were they burying their dead, over and over again, for many thousands of years, in the same place?”
Meanwhile, Thompson tracked down the skeletons that Clark had discovered at Mount Hora in 1950. She learned they had been moved from Zambia to the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Here’s where Emory graduate student Kendra Ann Sirak enters the story. Sirak had the distinction of being the last graduate student of Emory anthropologist George Armelagos, one of the founders of the field of paleopathology. He spent decades working with graduate students to study the bones of ancient Sudanese Nubians to learn about patterns of health, illness and death in the past. Armelagos sent Sirak to one of the best ancient DNA labs in the world, at University College Dublin (UCD), in Ireland, with samples of the Nubian bones.
After Armelagos died in 2014, at age 77, Thompson stepped in as one of Sirak’s mentors.
Thompson,
left, examines fragments of artifacts from the Malawi excavations in her
lab with Emory graduate student Kendra Ann Sirak. Sirak helped with the
radiocarbon dating and DNA extraction of the "forgotten" 8,100-year-old
skeleton from Mount Hora. (Photo by Ann Borden, Emory Photo/Video)
Thompson contacted the curator of the two skeletons from Mount Hora, to ask about the possibility of getting DNA from them. Alan Morris, now Professor Emeritus at the University of Cape Town, had had the same idea. A sample from the female skeleton was already slated to be sent to the UCD lab where Sirak was working. So Thompson, Morris and Sirak teamed up on the quest.
The petrous bone, which contains components of the inner ear, is the most promising site to drill for ancient DNA. The skeleton's petrous bone had already broken away from the skull, so only this tiny, triangular-shaped piece of the skeleton was sent to Dublin.
"It was extremely fragile," says Sirak, whose job was to drill into the petrous bone and get about 200 millimeters of bone powder without shattering the specimen.
She drank a cope of coffee, donned a hair cover, overalls, a face mask, two pairs of gloves and shoe covers, then entered a small, sterile room where the petrous bone awaited. "I said to myself, 'Here we go, I've got this!'" Sirak recalls.
Sirak was successful. Her colleagues in Dublin processed the sample and then sent it to the genetics team at Harvard Medical School for DNA analysis, which was also successful.
Meanwhile, radiocarbon dating revealed that the skeleton was 8,100 years old.
"It was like Christmas," Sirak says, "knowing that we had DNA data on such an ancient specimen."
The skeleton's genetics connected her to the same population of hunter-gatherers who died thousands of years later and were found 70 kilometers away at Fingira.
Another surprise revealed by the genetic analysis of the Malawi hunter-gatherers: They did not contribute any detectable ancestry to the people living in Malawi today, the descendants of the Iron Age agriculturalists and pastoralists who began sweeping across the African continent about 3,000 years ago.
“In most parts of Africa, you see quite a bit of admixture,” Thompson says. “When you take genetic samples from modern people who are living today, you find that they are a combination of the folks who were expanding into a region and also the folks who were living there before. In Malawi we see that’s not the case. It appears that there was a complete replacement of the original hunter-gatherer people. They are not just gone as a lifeway, they are actually gone as a people as well.”
One of the mysteries Thompson hopes to solve is how that replacement happened. Was it violent? Was it a sudden or a slow process? Did the entrance of strange new technologies, like pottery and iron working, play a role?
“We can’t use genetics to answer these questions,” Thompson says. “We have to use the archaeology.”
Emory anthropology undergraduates assisting with the Malawi excavations this past summer included, from left: Alexa Rome, Alexandra Davis, Suzanne Kunitz and Aditi Majoe. Graduate student Grace Veatch is on the far right.
She continues to excavate in Malawi, aided by local technicians and other collaborators. This summer, five Emory anthropology students accompanied her in the field: Graduate student Grace Veatch, senior Alexandra Davis, juniors Aditi Majoe and Suzanne Kunitz, and sophomore Alexa Rome. They uncovered more human remains at Mount Hora — a charred bone from a human arm and parts of two legs. These bones, recently dated to between 9,500 and 9,300 years old, show that the Hora site still has many secrets to reveal.
While radiocarbon dating of charcoal samples from just above and below the bones establishes their age, it is not clear whether they will yield DNA. “We don’t have high hopes,” Thompson says, “as they were burned and that tends to create even more preservation problems.”
The students assisted in the tedious work of carefully sifting through grey dust and ash, marking coordinates through GPS and other surveying tools, and recording the data into a computer.
Back in her lab at Emory, Thompson uses the data to generate three-dimensional images of the digs and pinpoint where each bone fragment, shell bead or stone tool was found. Her digital model for the this summer’s Mount Hora dig uses different-colored dots to give a glimpse of how hunter-gatherers were depositing both human remains and ordinary objects from their day-to-day lives over time.
“And then at this point,” Thompson says as she moves her cursor on her computer screen, “you see the introduction of pottery and iron technology. And right after that you see this fundamental change in the way that the site was used. People are no longer going there frequently. They’re no longer making these big bonfires. And they’re no longer interring their dead there.”
Thompson and her students are also sorting through hundreds of gallon-sized Ziploc plastic bags containing fragments from the Malawi sites. “As you excavate,” she explains, “you clean away the dirt and you’re left with all these tiny pieces of stone and bone artifacts. The bones are mostly animals. But every once in a while you find something that looks like it might be human. Any one one of them could be a new individual, a new piece to the story.”
She pulls out a small plastic bag labeled “Human distal phalanx.” It contains a piece of bone about the size of a Tic-Tac. “In this case, we think we have a finger bone, most likely from a child,” Thompson says.
Ultimately, Thompson seeks to understand how and when the earliest members of our species — Stone Age Homo sapiens — interacted with one another and with their environments in Africa.
“One thing that’s really easy to forget, when we look at the way people live today, is that for most of our evolution we lived as hunter-gatherers,” she says. “So if we want to understand our own origins as a species, we have to know what those lifeways looked like in the past.”
"I can't imagine not living with dogs. That would be really sad for me," says Emory neuroscientist Gregory Berns, with Callie (left) and Cato. His latest book is called "What It's Like to Be a Dog."
Five years ago, Emory neuroscientist Gregory Berns became the first to capture images of actual canine thought processes. To explore the minds of the oldest domesticated species, the Berns lab trained dogs to remain still and alert while undergoing functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) — the same tool that is unlocking secrets of the human brain. The project opened a new door into canine cognition and social cognition of other species.
Berns went on to conduct a series of experiments on dogs, gathering both behavioral and fMRI data on questions such as: How capable are dogs of self-restraint? Do dogs prefer praise from their owners or food? How do dogs process faces in their brains? What’s going on in a dog’s brain when it smells the scent of its owner?
In 2013, Berns wrote a New York Times bestseller called “How Dogs Love Us.” He described how the death of his beloved pug Newton planted the seeds for his eventual switch from the studying the human brain to focus on non-invasive studies of the cognition of dogs and other animals.
In the following Q&A, Berns talks about his new book, “What It’s Like to Be a Dog: And Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience,” just published by Basic Books. The book focuses on his hopes that understanding how animals think will revolution how we treat them.
Question: Can you talk about all the dogs you’ve had as pets during your life?
Gregory Berns: When I was a child growing up in Southern California we had two golden retrievers, Pretzel and Popcorn. It’s embarrassing, but my parents always named their dogs after food. I’m not sure why. Most of the children in the area had dogs and horses and we would go traipsing around the hills. Kids and dogs go together.
Berns and Callie
After I was done with medical school and stopped moving around, my wife and I had three pugs, Simon, Newton and Dexter, and then a golden retriever, Lyra.
We now live with our two daughters and have three dogs: Callie, a Feist, which is a Southern squirrel hunting dog; Cato, a Plott hound, which is the state dog of North Carolina; and Argo, a yellow dog of some kind of mix. We also have two bearded dragons and a chameleon.
I can’t imagine not living with dogs. That would be really sad for me.
Q: “What It’s Like to Be a Dog” describes all the experimental work you have done so far with canine cognition. What’s the biggest surprise to come out of your research?
GB: If you take language out of the picture, what we’re finding is that we see a lot of similarities between dogs and humans. In one study, for instance, we used fMRI to measure the relative value of food versus praise to the dogs and found that almost all the dogs’ brains responded to praise as much, and sometimes more, than to food. We ourselves know how it feels when someone praises us, there’s a positive feeling associated with it. That’s perhaps similar to what dogs are feeling.
We also did a study on dogs and delayed gratification. We found that part of the prefrontal cortex is more active in dogs during self-control. And, just like experiments with humans have found, we showed that the dogs who are better at this task use more of their prefrontal lobes.
Now that we are gaining a basic understanding of canine cognition, we are starting to focus more on the individuality of dogs — what it’s like to be this dog, as opposed to that dog.
Q: You’re also using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to study the brains of other mammals, mapping the neural pathways in brains from animals that are long deceased and stored in museum collections. How did this project come about?
GB: It started in 2015 when we gained access to the brains of two dolphins that had died, and we showed that we could use DTI to map their sensory and motor systems. Dolphins are incredibly intelligent, social animals but they’ve remained relatively mysterious. We provided the first picture of the entire dolphin brain and all the white matter connections inside of it.
Through a project I call the Brain Ark we’re collecting a digital archive of high-resolution, three-dimensional brain structures of megafauna. It’s publicly available to other researchers to contribute to and draw data from.
Q: What is the ultimate goal of your animal neuroscience research?
GB: The Brain Ark is an attempt to catalog and study brains of large mammal species before they are gone. Or, as in the case of the Tasmanian tiger, after they’re gone. Many megafauna are in danger of extinction because their habitats are being chopped up in ways that don’t allow them to sustain themselves or to migrate.
In the grand scheme of things, I’d also like to explore the commonalities that we have with other animals. That has important ethical implications for how we treat them and for their right to exist in the first place.
Animal welfare laws cover things like abuse — pain and suffering. I think we should go beyond that and acknowledge that animals also have a right to lead a good life — whatever that means for that animal.
“It’s a strange coincidence that the moon at its distance
and size almost perfectly covers the sun at its distance and size,”
says Emory physicist Sidney Perkowitz. “It makes you stop and wonder — is it just a
coincidence? Some people call an eclipse a religious experience. I call
it cosmic.” (NASA photo)
By Carol Clark
The Emory University class of 2021 already has a unique distinction: The campus orientation day for the first-year students will occur beneath a nearly total solar eclipse. From about 2:38 to 2:41 pm on Monday, August 21, the moon will cover 97.7 percent of the sun over Atlanta.
A couple of solar telescopes will be set up on the roof of the Mathematics and Science Building between 1 and 4 pm for staff, faculty, students and their family members who want to observe the sun through them — weather permitting. But a pair of certified solar eclipse glasses, a simple pinhole camera — or even the leaves of a tree — will also make it possible to safely view the eclipse anywhere on campus where the sun is visible.
Emory first-year students plan to gather on the Quad between 2:15 and 3 pm for eclipse watching. At the Oxford campus, first-year students will gather in front of the Oxford Science Building starting at 2 pm where there will be music, a solar telescope and sun-themed snacks and drinks. The Emory Police Department will also host group eclipse viewing on the field of the Student Activity and Academic Center at the Clairmont Campus. All students, faculty and staff are welcome to attend these events.
A total solar eclipse will sweep across a 70-mile-wide area of the United States, starting on the Pacific coast of Oregon and continuing all the way to South Carolina and the Atlantic Ocean. Even though Atlanta lies just beyond the path of totality, if the weather is clear the near-total eclipse will be worth pausing from work or school to go outside and experience.
To begin with, it’s rare. The last time the sun over Atlanta was nearly obscured by the moon was on May 31, 1984, when it was 99.7 percent covered. The New York Times described what happened as the skies began to darken about 20 minutes after noon: “The temperature dropped six degrees, flowers closed their petals, dogs howled, pigeons tucked their heads under their wings as if to sleep and the whole city was bathed in a kind of diffused light, not unlike that accompanying the approach of a severe storm.”
Emory senior Raveena Chhibber
tests out a pair of solar eclipse glasses. The neuroscience and
behavioral biology major is on campus this summer working in a
psychology lab and plans to take a break to witness the celestial event.
Sidney Perkowitz, Emory emeritus professor of physics, was on campus that day in 1984. He stood outside near the old physics building, now Callaway Hall, beneath a large white oak on the Quad.
“I remember a lot of people came out on the Quad, particularly around this tree,” he says. “It was a joint social experience.”
The darkening effect as the moon began to cover the sun was “eerie,” he says. “It didn’t feel exactly like twilight, it felt like something weirder was going on. It just seemed abnormal.”
Perkowitz watched the light as it passed through the leaves of the tree. “As the ambient light gets reduced, you begin to see multiple images of the crescent sun on the ground below,” Perkowitz says, explaining that each tiny space between the leaves acted as a pinhole-like opening, similar to a camera. “It’s spectacular because you see dozens and dozens of the images, filtered through the leaves.”
Aristotle observed this same phenomenon beneath a tree during a solar eclipse in the fourth century BC. The Greeks were debating at the time whether light moves in straight lines. The projection of the image of the sun through the leaves was evidence that it does, although the principles behind it would remained unresolved for nearly 2,000 years.
The white oak that Perkowitz stood beneath 33 years ago was struck by lightning in 2016 and is no longer there. There are plenty of other trees on campus, however, where eclipse watchers can stand to experience the event.
"An eclipse is a chance to stop and perceive and reflect," says Emory astronomer Erin Bonning. "It proceeds slowly and deliberately, which is not exactly the pace of modern society." (NASA graphic)
Or you can make your own pinhole projector by poking a hole in a piece of cardboard. NASA provides directions and some templates. During the eclipse, you stand with your back to the sun and hold up the cardboard so that light passes through it and hits a wall, the ground or a piece of paper that you hold up to capture a projection of the image of the sun.
Horace Dale, director of the Emory Observatory, will have a limited number of solar-viewing glasses available and will set up two solar telescopes between 1 and 4 pm on the roof of the Mathematics and Science Center — if the weather holds. Take the elevator to the fifth floor of the building and follow the signs to get to the rooftop.
“If it’s just partly cloudy, we should be able to see through the breaks in the clouds,” Dale says. But even the threat of a storm, he adds, will mean having to pack up the expensive equipment to avoid it getting damaged by rain.
The special filters on the solar telescopes will make it possible to directly view the sun safely. “You’ll be able to see the filamentary structure of the sun and any flare activity on the edge of the sun,” Dale says. “There might even be a few planets that pop out.”
An Atlanta native, Dale experienced a partial eclipse here in 1970 when he was six. “I remember my dad telling me not to look at the sun,” he says. “It was a really interesting experience for me.”
Which is why Dale has already explained to the teachers of his son Joey, six, and his daughter Emma, five, that his children will not attend school on August 21. Instead they will be getting an eclipse lesson from their father. Their mother, Jessica, will also be present. A dental hygienist, she has the day off since the dentist is heading for the path of totality and will close the office.
Psychology graduate student Katy Renfroe will pause from working on her thesis to observe the partial eclipse on campus.
Astronomer Erin Bonning, director of the Emory Planetarium, will be in Clayton, Georgia — in the path of totality — during the eclipse. She will be giving a presentation for Goizueta Business School’s orientation of incoming Emory juniors at a retreat center in north Georgia. The BBA class of 2019 not only holds the distinction of being Goizueta Business School’s 100th-anniversary class — it enjoys the bonus of entering orientation with great timing in a great location.
“This will be my first total solar eclipse and I’m excited,” Bonning says. She quickly adds: “I’m cautiously excited because all astronomers know that when something really big is about to happen you don’t want the clouds to hear you talking about it. Clouds are the great enemies of astronomers.”
When Bonning was in fifth grade, in Maryland, she had fervently anticipated a near total-eclipse event. When the big moment finally arrived, it was cloudy and rainy.
She did get to witness a lunar eclipse in Atlanta around 5 am on October 8, 2014. “I got up early and walked around downtown to find a good view,” she says. “It’s breathtaking to see the Earth cast a shadow in space and the moon pass through it. It’s one thing to write down an equation for curving space time, but when you see a visual illustration of these facts it’s so much more moving. It made me feel connected to the universe.”
A woman standing near her during the lunar eclipse had a different reaction. “She said, ‘Huh. I thought it would be more impressive than that,’” Bonning recalls. “I took a deep breath and held my tongue.”
The August 21 solar eclipse is particularly special since the path of totality will stretch from sea to shining sea, across the United States. “It’s unusual because it’s taking place over such a large inhabited stretch of land,” Bonning says. “The last time we had such a grand solar eclipse across America was a century ago.”
Following are Bonning’s tips for observing the solar eclipse, whether you stay in Atlanta or travel to totality.
Plan your activity. “Don’t just hop in the car on August 21 and spontaneously head for the path of totality, or you’re going to see a partial eclipse in a traffic jam,” Bonning says. You can read more about traffic predictions here.
Don’t worry about height. “You don’t need to go to the top of a mountain or the top of a building,” Bonning says. “If you can see the sun, you can see the eclipse. It’s not like getting closer to it will give you a better view.”
Manage your expectations. “While it will be extremely cool to see the eclipse, it’s not going to look like a dragon came out of the sky and devoured the sun. That’s a myth,” Bonning says. “An eclipse is a chance to stop and perceive and reflect. It proceeds slowly and deliberately, which is not exactly the pace of modern society.”
Be in the moment. If you’re not an expert at photographing eclipses, forget trying to get the perfect selfie for social media. “You’ll be better off being open to the experience,” Bonning says. “Observe shifts in the light. Feel the temperature drop. You may notice animals behaving differently.”
Make it a fun, educational experience for kids. While you need to emphasize to young children the importance of not staring directly at the sun with the naked eye during the eclipse, you can do so in a fun way that helps them understand why. Bonning recommends parents visit this Planetary Society site, which includes directions for how to make pinhole projectors, including ones in fancy, pinhole-punched shapes.
“We’re very lucky on Earth,” Perkowitz says. “We have the largest moon of all the planets and it has all kinds of connections to love and romance and poetry. And on top of that, it has this amazing alignment with the sun that provides this incredible sight every so often.”
The moon is only a quarter of a million miles away and much smaller than Earth, he notes, while the sun is 93 million miles distant and is huge — far bigger than all of the planets in the solar system put together.
“It’s a strange coincidence that the moon at its distance and size almost perfectly covers the sun at its distance and size,” Perkowitz says. “It makes you stop and wonder — is it just a coincidence? Some people call an eclipse a religious experience. I call it cosmic.”
