Cooking with acorns, painting with moss

Heather Buzzard says she likes to "hack away at the barriers between the indoors and outdoors."

By Mary Loftus, Emory Magazine

At Indie Fixx's TreeHouseHold, Emory graduate Heather Buzzard has written how-to pieces on making seed paper, cooking with acorns, and making moss spray paint—all of which might come in handy during her upcoming stint as artist in residence at the Hostel in the Forest, a spiritual sustainability and environmental education retreat center in Brunswick, Georgia.

Buzzard studied sociology, creative writing, religion, and environmental science at Emory. She cites a course called CORE, on religion and ecology, as particularly influential. “I’ve always been drawn intimately to the natural world,” Buzzard says, “but prior to the class, I hadn’t focused much on sharing that with others, being mindful of sacred space, and incorporating a sense of place and roots into how I live daily.”

At the Hostel in the Forest, she will be applying her understanding of sawdust composting toilets, solar panel water heaters, vegetable oil–powered lighting, organic gardening, and living off the grid.

“I like to take specific elements of the outdoors and integrate them into our everyday lives through sustainable art, design, and food, while focusing on the beauty and magic of the natural world,” she says.

And if you’re wondering if you really can cook with acorns, try her recipe.

Acorn Molasses Cakes

1/2 cup acorn flour

1/2 cup cashews, chopped


1/2 cup pecans or walnuts, chopped

1/2 cup raisins or dates

1 cup cooked brown rice

molasses (or honey) to taste

agave to taste

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp ginger
a
pinch brown sugar or sucanat

Mix all ingredients together in large mixing bowl. Add enough molasses/honey so that concoction clumps together nicely without falling apart. Prepare a cookie sheet with parchment paper or a thin spread of butter, and ball the mixture together into smallish round cakes. Sprinkle the tops with brown sugar or sucanat. Bake at 325 for 10–15 minutes.

Related:
The physics of a philodentrist

Image credits: Top, courtesy of Heather Buzzard; bottom, iStockphoto.com. 

How a natural leader bloomed

"Ultimately, the goal is to help prepare students to be leaders in a different world," says anthropology professor Peggy Barlett.

By Carol Clark

Peggy Barlett has this advice for graduates: "Don't listen to the people who say ‘conform to the rules and stay practical.' Listen to your inner wisdom about where this country needs to be and what you can do to help it get there."

Barlett, the Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology and faculty liaison for the Office of Sustainability Initiatives, embodies that advice. She is the recipient of this year's Thomas Jefferson Award, the University's premier honor for significant service to the institution through personal activities, influence and leadership.

Barlett joined the Emory faculty in 1976. The campus, the city and the world had a much different mindset. Many people appreciated natural beauty and worked to maintain it. But broad-based approaches to sustainability were largely confined to specialists like Barlett, who studied the intersection of economic, ecological and demographic change among farmers.

Entering the 21st century, amid growing awareness of the greenhouse effect, attitudes began shifting. A pivotal moment at Emory occurred in 1999, when the decision to build a shuttle route in Lullwater forest sparked controversy. "I began to see more energy on campus around environmental concerns," Barlett recalls. "I decided to take a year off from research and spend that time seeing if we could galvanize some of that momentum."

It was a risky move, since sustainability work on campus didn't fit into the conventional role of faculty. "I thought I was going to run into a brick wall," Barlett recalls. "One person urged me, ‘Just keep calling the meetings, Peggy. Things will change.' To my surprise, people started showing up and expressing interest, at all levels. A lot of people who love Emory wanted to help create a better future."

Barlett began serving as the sustainability point person for faculty, staff, administrators, students and alumni, planting the seeds for Emory to become a nationally recognized green campus. The Piedmont Project, for example, infuses sustainability into the curriculum across disciplines, and has become a model for the country, inspiring hundreds of others.

Meanwhile, she published prolifically. "Sustainability on Campus: Stories and Strategies for Change," co-edited by Barlett, offers firsthand accounts, both inspiring and practical.

Barlett also helped develop the Sustainability Vision for Emory, adopted by the President's Cabinet in 2005 as a core principle of the University's strategic plan. The vision called for an Office of Sustainability Initiatives, and laid out clear and ambitious goals to achieve by 2015. Among them: Reduce average campus energy use by 25 percent, reduce the total waste stream by 65 percent, and procure 75 percent of the food for campus dining facilities from local or sustainably grown sources.

"Ultimately, the goal is to help prepare students to be leaders in a different world," says Barlett, who doesn't take a pessimistic view of the sustainability challenges they face. "This is an exciting time to be part of change, so much is happening. Businesses, governments and nonprofits are moving dynamically. Whole new professions are emerging around sustainability."

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Primatologist says humans may be nice by nature

Hugs, and our capacity for empathy, go way back in our evolutionary history, says primatologist Frans de Waal.

In the decades following the devastation of World War II, the idea that humans are naturally “killer apes,” with a stronger tendency toward aggression than pacifism, gained credence and became a dominant theme in behavioral research.

“Although it is far from my intention to depict us as angels of peace, this literature is now recognized as one-sided,” writes Emory primatologist Frans de Waal in the journal Science. His article, “The Antiquity of Empathy,” is part of a special issue on human conflict.

Humans are biologically geared to find pleasure in eating, sex, nursing and socializing. “If warfare were truly in our DNA, we should happily engage in it,” de Waal writes. “Yet soldiers report a deep revulsion to killing, and only shoot at the enemy under pressure. Many end up with haunting memories and disturbed social lives. Far from being a recent phenomenon, combat trauma was already known to the ancient Greeks, such as Sophocles, who described Ajax’s “divine madness,” now known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).”

Read the whole article here.

Image: istockphoto.com

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A glimpse of world's most elusive gorillas

Using camera traps, the Wildlife Conservation Society recently captured the above video of rare Cross River gorillas, in their habitat of Cameroon’s Kagwene Gorilla Sanctuary. They are the world’s rarest and least observed gorilla species: Fewer than 250 of them are left.

While poaching and habitat loss are taking the biggest toll on the gorillas, they are also threatened by viruses and bacteria carried by people. They share 95 to 99 percent of our DNA, raising the potential for pathogen exchange, says Tom Gillespie, associate professor of global health and biodiversity conversation at Emory University.

Gillespie, a leading primate disease ecologist, researches ways to understand, and minimize, the exchange of pathogens between humans and apes. HIV, for example, originated from apes.

Gillespie’s lab, together with partners at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, is analyzing fecal samples from the Cross River gorillas, to monitor for evidence of disease or parasites. Ebola, polio, gastrointestinal parasites and respiratory diseases are examples of human diseases that have also impacted gorillas.

Midway through the video a male silverback thumps his chest and charges toward the camera. “It’s a very humbling experience” to get charged by a gorilla, says Gillespie, who often encounters them face-to-face in the wild. Although gorillas are generally peaceful animals, and do not resort to violence unless provoked, Gillespie says they put on an impressive display. Click here to read more.

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The physics of a philodendrist

 A love of nature led Jed Brody to technology, to try to save nature. Photo by Carol Clark.

How many people do you know who care about the environment so much they don’t drive a car? Meet Jed Brody, an Emory physics senior lecturer who loves trees and let his driver’s license expire when he was 21. Brody, who lives about two miles from campus, gets around Atlanta on foot, bicycle, public transit and through occasional rides from friends. To further reduce his footprint, he keeps his condo at 58 degrees in the winter and does not use air-conditioning.

Brody joined Emory in 2003 and focuses on teaching in the small, but elite, physics department. Two out of the current class of 15 seniors are going on to graduate school at Harvard.

In his spare time, Brody volunteers with Trees Atlanta, reads, and writes fiction. His short story “The Kid Who Ate Paste” placed second in a Creative Loafing writing contest. His science-fiction novel, “The Philodentrist Heresy,” was just published by Moon Willow Press. “Philodentrist” means “tree lover.”

eScienceCommons interviewed Brody in his office.

eScienceCommons: You grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, but I’m guessing it wasn’t a typical suburban childhood.

Jed Brody: My dad had hair down to his shoulders and did Kripalu yoga. Every weekend we went to an ashram where the adults dressed all in white, called each other brother and sister, and crawled on their knees a lot. That seemed normal to me.

eSC: How long have you been writing?

JB: A long time. When I was 10, I wrote a poem called My Perfect World:

Way up on the mountaintop

with all the world below
no factory, no toy, no shop,

just natural things that grow.

eSC: What got you into physics?

JB: In fourth grade, we went on a field trip to a big General Electric plant. During the tour, they showed us these solar panels and talked about the efforts of science to improve energy efficiency. Love of nature led me to technology, to try to save nature.

I went to graduate school in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, because it had been a world leader in making multi-crystalline silicon solar cells. All my solar cells came out crummy. I don't know why, I just wasn't good at making them. It turns out that ideological drive does not confer technical aptitude. I realized that I'm more of a theorist by nature.

eSC: You served in the Peace Corps in Benin in West Africa. What was that like?

A street scene in Benin.

JB: I taught high school physics and chemistry. I learned a lot, teaching 50 to 60 students in classes that were two to three hours

long. It also helped me overcome my adolescent immortality syndrome. I had diarrhea pretty much every day. It was rare when I didn’t have intestinal pain. The Beninese seemed like happy, healthy people and appeared to be mostly immune to the bugs that I had. Many of them are incredibly buff. They use these giant cement tiles to pave their roads and the laborers would hurl them to each other across 30 feet. Their muscles would be working like pistons.

eSC: You’ve published six papers on teaching in science journals. What are they about?

JB: In the most recent one, for the American Journal of Physics, I developed an experiment and an equation for how water oscillates in a tube. The frequency of oscillation is lowest when the tube is about half-full of water. So you have these beautiful, U-shaped curves. It’s a way to teach a variety of physics concepts, including the basic Newtonian mechanics of oscillating motion.

In a previous paper, I described a novel way to determine atmospheric pressure with a similar apparatus. Unlike a conventional barometer, there’s air, not vacuum, above the fluid in the tube. In a way, I invented a kind of barometer for pedagogy. The idea for it grew out of experiences I had teaching in Benin, when I had to demonstrate complex concepts using local materials.

eSC: You also go to India every summer to teach physics to monks as part of the Emory Tibet Science Initiative. How is that going?

JB: It’s challenging, because the monks don’t have a lot of math, but they are great students. They ask some really outlandish questions. I was talking about the gravitational force between the Earth and the moon and a monk said, “What would happen if the moon was shaped like a cone and not a sphere?” That gave me the chance to talk about how gravitational force depends on the distance between the centers of two masses.

The Dalai Lama says that if the ancient Buddhist scholars were alive today they would study science, because Buddhist philosophy is studying what is reality, as opposed to illusion.

eSC: How do you personally reconcile science and religion?

JB: I’m Daoist. I meditate and do tai chi daily, and I consider myself deeply religious. I believe that spirit permeates everything. So to me, studying the laws of physics is a way of communing with spirit.

eSC: What is your novel, “The Philodendrist Heresy,” about?

JB: It’s about a dystopian underground society, where people have been living so long that they have no knowledge of the surface and things like trees, the moon and the sun. The food is recycled glop that comes out of machines, and everyone experiences gastric pain while eating. The heroine, Danielle Gasket, is trying to reach the surface. She’s racing from one clue to the next while being chased by warring factions that want to kill her. It’s kind of a science fiction version of “The Da Vinci Code.”

I’m donating my royalties from the book to Sustainable Harvest International. It’s a charity involved with restoring forests founded by a fellow Peace Corps member.

eSC: Will you ever break down and get a car?

JB: Last night, I actually had a dream that I found my perfect home, in the middle of a forest. So, who knows, I might have to get a car if I lived there. Meanwhile, I don’t feel the need for one. I don’t really believe in sacrifice. I love the way I live. It’s a celebration of the Earth and all of my values.

Related:
Monks + scientists = a new body of thought

Medical mistakes, in fact and fiction

Keeping up with Sanjay Gupta, an Emory neurosurgeon, best-selling author, and CNN’s chief medical correspondent, is “not for the weak of heart, or the weak of anything,” writes Craig Wilson, who interviewed Gupta about his new novel for USA Today. Following is an excerpt of the article:

“The book's title, 'Monday Mornings,' refers to when physicians at ‘Chelsea General’ in suburban Detroit gather for their weekly ‘Morbidity and Mortality’ (M&M) meeting — a time to discuss and analyze what went wrong in recent surgeries, a private meeting Gupta says is held at most hospitals. That operation on the wrong side of the brain? It's discussed there. It's like going before a jury of your peers, not a fun outing for the erring physician.

“’It's unsettling to surgeons to realize they're not infallible. Operating on the wrong side of the head? It happens,’ he says, adding that no one is harder on themselves than doctors. …

“Deb Futter, Gutpa's editor at Grand Central Publishing, praises Gupta for the way he blends medical facts and storytelling.

“’Everyone is fascinated, and terrified, by what goes on behind the scenes at a hospital. Dr. Gupta's novel takes you right to the heart of the medical world,’ Futter says. ‘He manages to make the doctors real people with real problems and also marries medical information with a riveting plot.’”

Read the whole article in USA Today.

Monkeys, mankind and morality

Watch a video, above, of primatologist Frans de Waal's TedxPeachtree talk on "Morality without Religion."

Monkeys and mankind have a lot in common when it comes to moral outrage over inequities, and the need to reconcile the conflicts that arise from these differences. On his Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle writes a great summary of a talk on this topic by Emory primatologist Frans de Waal at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Among the nuggets he gathered:

"Different primate species express signs of reconciliation in different ways. For example, stumptail monkeys make up by inspecting each other's rear ends, without ever looking each other in the eye. In contrast, chimps and other apes (including us hairless apes) 'need eye contact' when they reconcile their differences, de Waal said."

Read the whole article on the Cosmic Log.

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Hugs go way back in evolution

Metaphors activate sensory areas of brain

Regions of the brain activated by hearing textural metaphors are shown in green. Yellow and red show regions activated by sensory experience of textures visually and through touch.

By Quinn Eastman, Woodruff Health Sciences Center

When a friend tells you she had a rough day, do you feel sandpaper under your fingers? The brain may be replaying sensory experiences to help understand common metaphors, new research suggests.

Linguists and psychologists have debated how much the parts of the brain that mediate direct sensory experience are involved in understanding metaphors. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their landmark work "Metaphors we live by," pointed out that our daily language is full of metaphors, some of which are so familiar (like "rough day") that they may not seem especially novel or striking. They argued that metaphor comprehension is grounded in our sensory and motor experiences.

New brain imaging research reveals that a region of the brain important for sensing texture through touch, the parietal operculum, is also activated when someone listens to a sentence with a textural metaphor. The same region is not activated when a similar sentence expressing the meaning of the metaphor is heard.

The results were published online this week in the journal Brain & Language.

"We see that metaphors are engaging the areas of the cerebral cortex involved in sensory responses even though the metaphors are quite familiar," says senior author Krish Sathian, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine and psychology at Emory University. "This result illustrates how we draw upon sensory experiences to achieve understanding of metaphorical language."

Seven college students who volunteered for the study were asked to listen to sentences containing textural metaphors as well as sentences that were matched for meaning and structure, and to press a button as soon as they understood each sentence. Blood flow in their brains was monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging. On average, response to a sentence containing a metaphor took slightly longer (0.84 vs 0.63 seconds).

In a previous study, the researchers had already mapped out, for each of these individuals, which parts of the students' brains were involved in processing actual textures by touch and sight. This allowed them to establish with confidence the link within the brain between metaphors involving texture and the sensory experience of texture itself.

"Interestingly, visual cortical regions were not activated by textural metaphors, which fits with other evidence for the primacy of touch in texture perception," says research associate Simon Lacey, the first author of the paper.

The researchers did not find metaphor-specific differences in cortical regions well known to be involved in generating and processing language, such as Broca's or Wernicke's areas. However, this result doesn't rule out a role for these regions in processing metaphors, Sathian says. Also, other neurologists have seen that injury to various areas of the brain can interfere with patients' understanding of metaphors.

"I don't think that there's only one area responsible for metaphor processing," Sathian says. "Actually, several recent lines of research indicate that engagement with abstract concepts is distributed around the brain."

"I think our research highlights the role of neural networks, rather than a single area of the brain, in these processes. What could be happening is that the brain is conducting an internal simulation as a way to understand the metaphor, and that's why the regions associated with touch get involved. This also demonstrates how complex processes involving symbols, such as appreciating a painting or understanding a metaphor, do not depend just on evolutionarily new parts of the brain, but also on adaptations of older parts of the brain."

Sathian's future plans include asking whether similar relationships exist for other senses, such as vision. The researchers also plan to probe whether magnetic stimulation of the brain in regions associated with sensory experience can interfere with understanding metaphors.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

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African-Americans and the toll of AIDS

HIV-AIDS is the third leading cause of death among African-American men and women between the ages of 35 and 44. Today is National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, which aims to lower that tragic statistic through education, testing, involvement and treatment of the disease.

African Americans face the most severe burden of HIV of all racial groups in the United States. They disproportionately represent both new infections and fatalities, says Drenna Waldrop-Valverde, an investigator with Emory's Center for AIDS Research, and a professor in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing.

"Unfortunately, in this country, race and socio-economic status are very closely tied together," says Waldrop-Valverde. She is conducting an NIH-funded study of the effects of health literacy on drug compliance in African Americans living with HIV-AIDS.

"Taking medications just as the doctor tells you to take them, day in and day out, can have a greater benefit on the health of those with HIV than nearly any other factor," Waldrop-Valverde says.

How is HIV/AIDS affecting your community? Click here to see an interactive AIDS map of the United States.

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On the trail of black flies and river blindness

The parasite that causes river blindness, Onchocerca volvulus, is transmitted through the bite of the black fly. In the above photo, the parasite can be seen emerging from the antenna of a black fly. (Credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture.)

Onchocerciasis, better known as “river blindness,” is one of the leading causes of preventable blindness in the world. More than 18 million people suffer from river blindness, the vast majority of them in Africa.

The disease is caused by parasitic worms that are spread to humans through the bite of the black fly. The symptoms include itching so severe that those infected have been known to claw their skin off – or even commit suicide. The disease can also harden the eye tissue, leading to permanent blindness.

A documentary called “Dark Forest Black Fly” is tracking the efforts of the Carter Center and its partners to wipe out river blindness in Uganda. If successful, Uganda may become the model for eliminating river blindness Africa-wide. (Watch the film's trailer, below.)

The filmmakers and scientists involved will describe their on-the-ground experiences of this historic public health effort on Tuesday, February 7, at the Carter Center in Atlanta. The program will include exclusive footage from “Dark Forest Black Fly,” to be completed this year. Click here for details of the event.

And click here to visit the Science Scene, where you can learn about more great science events at Emory and in metro Atlanta.

Does science need a universal symbol?

Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics, sparked a debate with his proposal in New Scientist to develop a unifying symbol for science: A sort of bumper sticker for passionate nerds, and those who support their mission. Wolpe writes:

"A single, unified symbol would have many uses. It could be displayed to represent a position: opposition to the politicizing of science in government, support for increased research spending, or concern about global warming and species loss. It could be displayed by an astronomer or geologist or sociologist or teacher as a symbol of their allegiance to science. It could be used on car bumpers and web pages, and in public venues. ...

"Perhaps it could even accommodate a cross or star of David or some other symbol to state: 'I am a Christian (or Jew or Muslim) and support science as an enterprise.'"

You can read the full New Scientist article here.

Do you agree with Wolpe? You can send your ideas for a symbol to sciencesymbol@emory.edu, or join the discussion via a special science symbol Facebook page Wolpe set up.

Graphic: iStockphoto.com.

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Trees and reality TV drive discovery in 2011

In 2011, flashes of inspiration made fundamental science at Emory seem almost easy. A hike in the woods sparked a breakthrough in number theory, while an episode of “American Idol” led to an insight about the human brain.

Actually, it takes a certain brilliance to find big ideas hiding amid trees and reality TV. To paraphrase Louis Pasteur, whether you are an athlete or a couch potato, chance favors a prepared mind.

Here’s a roundup of the hottest topics on eScienceCommons for 2011.

New theories reveal the nature of numbers: For centuries, some of the greatest names in math have tried to make sense of partition numbers, the basis for adding and counting. The eureka moment finally occurred when mathematicians were hiking through the fall foliage in north Georgia and noticed patterns in the trees and the switchback trail. Partition numbers are fractal, repeating in an infinite pattern, they suddenly realized.

Teen brains can predict pop song success: A neuroeconomist was watching “American Idol” with his two young daughters when a contestant started singing “Apologize” by One Republic. The song sounded familiar, and the scientist realized that he had used it in a study. That led to a re-analysis of brain-response data of teens listening to obscure songs. The results show that teen brain activity may help predict the popularity of music.

Dawn of agriculture took toll on health: Anthropologists confirmed that when populations around the globe started turning to agriculture around 10,000 years ago, regardless of the location or the types of crops, a similar trend occurred: The height and the health of the people declined. In modern times, the stature trend has reversed: The average human height is increasing, as food becomes increasingly commercialized and abundant. But is our health improving, in an era of obesity?

Anxious kids confuse ‘mad’ and ‘sad’: Psychologists found that children suffering from extreme social anxiety are trapped in a nightmare of misinterpreted facial expressions: They confuse angry faces with sad ones. Non-verbal communication is a critical, but often overlooked, aspect of child development. The good news is that non-verbal communication skills can be improved at any age.

Chimps, bonobos yield clues to social brain: It’s been a puzzle why our two closest living primate relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, have widely different social traits, despite belonging to the same genus. Now, a comparative analysis of their brains shows neuroanatomical differences that may be responsible for these behaviors, from the aggression more typical of chimpanzees to the social tolerance of bonobos.

Chemists reveal the force within you: A new method for visualizing mechanical forces on the surface of a cell provides the first detailed view of those forces, as they occur in real-time. Mapping such forces may help to diagnose and treat diseases related to cellular mechanics. Cancer cells, for instance, move differently from normal cells, and it is unclear whether that difference is a cause or an effect of the disease.

Hominid skull hints at later brain evolution: An analysis of a skull from the most complete early hominid fossils ever found suggests that the large and complex human brain may have evolved more rapidly than previously realized, and at a later time than some other human characteristics. While some features of Australopithecus sediba were more human-like, most notably the precision-grip hand, the brain was more ape-like.

Biochemical cell signals quantified for first time: Just as cell phones and computers transmit data through electronic networks, the cells of your body send and receive chemical messages through molecular pathways. The term “cell signaling” was coined more than 30 years ago to describe this process. Now, for the first time, physicists have quantified the data capacity of a biochemical signaling pathway and found a surprise – it’s way lower than even an old-fashioned, dial-up modem.


Mummies tell history of a modern plague: Mummies from along the Nile are revealing how age-old irrigation techniques may have boosted the plague of schistosomiasis, a water-borne parasitic disease that infects an estimated 200 million people today. An analysis of the mummies provides details about the prevalence of the disease across populations in ancient times, and how human alteration of the environment may have contributed to its spread.

Polar dinosaur tracks open new trail to past: Paleontologists discovered a group of more than 20 polar dinosaur tracks on the coast of Victoria, Australia, offering a rare glimpse into animal behavior during the last period of pronounced global warming, about 105 million years ago. The discovery is the largest and best collection of polar dinosaur tracks ever found in the Southern Hemisphere.


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2010: A science odyssey

Skeletons point to Columbus voyage for syphilis origins

"The evidence keeps accumulating that a progenitor of syphilis came from the New World with Columbus' crew and rapidly evolved," says anthropologist George Armelagos.

By Carol Clark

Skeletons don’t lie. But sometimes they may mislead, as in the case of bones that reputedly showed evidence of syphilis in Europe and other parts of the Old World before Christopher Columbus made his historic voyage in 1492.

None of this skeletal evidence, including 54 published reports, holds up when subjected to standardized analyses for both diagnosis and dating, according to an appraisal in the current Yearbook of Physical Anthropology. In fact, the skeletal data bolsters the case that syphilis did not exist in Europe before Columbus set sail.

“This is the first time that all 54 of these cases have been evaluated systematically,” says George Armelagos, an anthropologist at Emory University and co-author of the appraisal. “The evidence keeps accumulating that a progenitor of syphilis came from the New World with Columbus’ crew and rapidly evolved into the venereal disease that remains with us today.”

The appraisal was led by two of Armelagos’ former graduate students at Emory: Molly Zuckerman, who is now an assistant professor at Mississippi State University, and Kristin Harper, currently a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University. Additional authors include Emory anthropologist John Kingston and Megan Harper from the University of Missouri.

“Syphilis has been around for 500 years,” Zuckerman says. “People started debating where it came from shortly afterwards, and they haven’t stopped since. It was one of the first global diseases, and understanding where it came from and how it spread may help us combat diseases today.”

The history of syphilis, and society's reactions to the disease, have eerie parallels to the more modern story of HIV/AIDS.

"Syphilis was a by-product of two different populations meeting and exchanging a pathogen," says anthropologist Molly Zuckerman. "It was an adaptive event, the natural selection of a disease, independent of morality or blame."

The treponemal family of bacteria causes syphilis and related diseases that share some symptoms but spread differently. Syphilis is sexually transmitted. Yaws and bejel, which occurred in early New World populations, are tropical diseases that are transmitted through skin-to-skin contact or oral contact.

The first recorded epidemic of venereal syphilis occurred in Europe in 1495. One hypothesis is that a subspecies of Treponema from the warm, moist climate of the tropical New World mutated into the venereal subspecies to survive in the cooler and relatively more hygienic European environment.

The fact that syphilis is a stigmatized, sexual disease has added to the controversy over its origins, Zuckerman says.

“In reality, it appears that venereal syphilis was the by-product of two different populations meeting and exchanging a pathogen,” she says. “It was an adaptive event, the natural selection of a disease, independent of morality or blame.”

 A biopsy of Treponema pallidum spirochetes in tissue. In 2008, anthropologist Kristin Harper completed a comprehensive comparative genetic analysis of syphilis's family of bacteria. The results further supported the Columbus theory for its origins. (Image courtesy of CDC.)

Armelagos, a pioneer of the field of bioarcheology, was one of the doubters decades ago, when he first heard the Columbus theory for syphilis. “I laughed at the idea that a small group of sailors brought back this disease that caused this major European epidemic,” he recalls.

While teaching at the University of Massachusetts, he and graduate student Brenda Baker decided to investigate the matter and got a shock: All of the available evidence at the time actually supported the Columbus theory. “It was a paradigm shift,” Armelagos says. The pair published their results in 1988.

In 2008, Harper and Armelagos published the most comprehensive comparative genetic analysis ever conducted on syphilis’s family of bacteria. The results again supported the hypothesis that syphilis, or some progenitor, came from the New World.

A series of 18th-century prints called "A Harlot's Progress" begins with innocent country girl Molly, left, arriving in London, where she is immediately procured by a madame. The lesions on the madame's face are the tell-tale signs of syphilis, which Molly tragically dies of in the last print of the series. Read more about this morality tale here.

But reports of pre-Columbian skeletons showing the lesions of chronic syphilis have kept cropping up in the Old World. For this latest appraisal of the skeletal evidence, the researchers gathered all of the published reports.

They found that most of the skeletal material did not meet at least one of the standardized, diagnostic criteria for chronic syphilis, including pitting on the skull known as caries sicca and pitting and swelling of the long bones.

The few published cases that did meet the criteria tended to come from coastal regions where seafood was a big part of the diet. The so-called “marine reservoir effect,” caused by eating seafood which contains “old carbon” from upwelling, deep ocean waters, can throw off radiocarbon dating of a skeleton by hundreds, or even thousands, of years. Analyzing the collagen levels of the skeletal material enabled the researchers to estimate the seafood consumption and factor that result into the radiocarbon dating.

“Once we adjusted for the marine signature, all of the skeletons that showed definite signs of treponemal disease appeared to be dated to after Columbus returned to Europe,” Harper says.

“The origin of syphilis is a fascinating, compelling question,” Zuckerman says. “The current evidence is pretty definitive, but we shouldn’t close the book and say we’re done with the subject. The great thing about science is constantly being able to understand things in a new light.”

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Putting teeth into the Barker hypothesis
Dawn of agriculture took toll on health
Ancient beer brewers tapped antibiotic secrets

An idea that shifts with wind, water and light

Art meets science on the Emory Quad, in the form of "Piedmont Divide."

By Carol Clark

As you approach the Emory Quadrangle on a sunny afternoon, you see what looks like a giant crystal chandelier floating amid the canopy of the oak trees. As you walk beneath it, the swaying “chandelier” appears as ephemeral as a cloud, or a seeding dandelion.

One thing that Emory’s new sculpture, called “Piedmont Divide,” does not resemble is the thousands of recycled plastic bottles that comprise it.

“I didn’t expect the sort of precious quality of the material, just how much the sunlight and wind would do this,” says the sculpture’s creator, environmental artist John Grade (pronounced “grotty”).

“It was remarkable to see the plastic bottles change from trash into these things that look so organic,” says Julia Kjelgaard, chair of the visual arts department.



The visual arts department invited Grade (pronounced “grotty”), a Seattle-based artist who draws from science and nature, to create a piece for Emory. After a whirlwind two-day visit, and many meetings with faculty, Grade decided to do a piece that would reflect the campus environment, as well as Emory’s research into West Nile virus and global water sustainability.

Grade returned to his Seattle studio to ponder what material he should use to tie all of those themes together. “It was an ‘aha’ moment,” Grade says of the idea of recycling plastic drinking bottles. “I realized that there was this relationship with Coca-Cola supporting the university, and I thought about how to use that product and transform it in some way for this environment.”

In November, Grade returned to Emory with two assistants: Seattle sculptor Dilyara Maganya and civil engineer Travis Stanley. Over 13 days, the three enlisted volunteers from across campus to melt down thousands of discarded drinking bottles and help assemble “Piedmont Divide.”

John Grade at work on the Emory Quad.

“I’ve had this desire to make something with many people,” he says of the group effort. “So I don’t have full control, and you actually have a social contract, a group of people crafting something together and figuring it out along the way. Your end result may not be perfectly made, but you have all these interesting decisions from different people along the way that completely change it.”

Each plastic bottle was cut into a spiral and melted into a long, curving stalk that curled into a dainty little cup at the end. The cups are designed to hold a few drops of rainwater. Click here to see a video of how the sculpture was made.

A tornado siren went off as Grade was standing on a 20-foot platform on the Quad, putting the final touches on the piece. He watched as a gentle rain began filling the thousands of little cups, and the ephemeral character of the sculpture shifted slightly as it took on the weight of the water. The tiny pools of water suspended by the sculpture are an allusion to incubators for mosquitoes.

On a far side of campus from the Quad’s floating chandelier, the second half of “Piedmont Divide” is set in the lake of Lullwater woods. There, the plastic stalks rise from the water like crystal reeds.



Grade says he wants “Piedmont Divide” to help people make connections, between different environments and between different water systems, and how both nature and man use them.

One of Grade’s greatest strengths as an environmental artist may be that he is not afraid of failure. He actually enjoys fielding the curve balls that nature throws at him.

He describes a sculpture he made in Arizona, elevated amid trees and made of edible bits that birds could eat. “The idea came to me because I feel like there’s a lot of ego involved inputting an object out into a landscape, when a lot of times the landscape is very interesting in and of itself,” Grade says. “So I liked the fact that these birds would pick apart this form that I made, and then just shit it all across the mesa.”

After the piece was installed, however, rodents crawled onto the sculpture’s guy wires and annoyed the birds to the point that they wouldn’t eat. “I thought, ‘Do I roll with what the environment comes back to me with, or try to change this,’” Grade recalls. In the end, a birder suggested that he spread a liquid form of jalapeno over the piece, which would thwart mammals but not birds.

As the “Piedmont Divide” shimmers on the Emory campus through spring, it will be interesting to see how the vision keeps shifting in the wind, water, light and creative spirit of a university.

Hal Jacobs contributed to this story through his video reports.

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How far is Mars? It depends when you ask

To mark the recent liftoff of the space rover Curiosity, the 39th mission to Mars, Matthew Bell pulled together 39 interesting facts about the Red Planet for “The Independent” newspaper.

Here’s his fact number 13:

“Mars's distance from Earth changes by the second because the two planets are on different elliptical orbits. The distance between them ranges from 36 million miles to more than 250 million miles.”

Which leads to Bell’s fact number 14:

“You can see exactly how far Mars is from Earth in real time thanks to the physics department of Emory University in Atlanta, which has it displayed second-by-second on its website.”

Here’s a link to the Mars real-time distance calculator. It was created by Emory astronomer Horace Dale, to counter the crazy rumors that swirl around about Mars every August. You can read about the Mars rumor here.

The Curiosity is scheduled to land on Mars in August of 2012. The rover contains a seven-foot-long robotic arm, which will allow it to drill into Martian rocks to take samples, and explore the geographic history of Mars. Check out the video (at the top of this post) featuring animations of how the 1-ton rover will touch down when it arrives at Mars, and how the robot will look as it goes about its mission.

The first manned mission to Mars is likely to be a one-way trip. An artist rendition, above, of what the first Martian outpost could look like. (Image by NASA.)

For Bell’s final fact, he notes that the U.S. plans the first manned mission to Mars for 2030: “President Barack Obama gave his support last year, saying he expected to see it happen in his lifetime. But, because of the expense of sending astronauts there and back, it's been proposed that whoever goes to Mars should stay there indefinitely.”

That means that the first people to call the Red Planet home, the first Martians, could be walking the Earth right now.

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From Atlanta to Accra: The growing sewage problem

Christine Moe shows the above video, produced by WaterAid, to first-year medical students at Emory. "I want students to think more about sanitation, and to understand why they should care about the enormous problems surrounding it," she says.

By Carol Clark

Christine Moe began researching human waste disposal during the 1980s, as a VISTA volunteer. She was sent to rural West Virginia to assist in coal mining towns that lacked sewage treatment plants.

“The valleys were incredibly steep and narrow, and septic tanks need to have flat land for the drain field,” Moe recalls. “So the septic tank pipes just emptied straight into the creeks. You could see toilet paper in the brush lining the water.”

Moe now works on sanitation projects around the world as a professor at the Rollins School of Public Health and the director of Emory’s Center for Global Safe Water.

November 19 is World Toilet Day, which aims to build awareness that 40 percent of the people on the planet use unsafe toilets or defecate in the open. It’s a fact of growing concern, to both human health and diginity, and to the environment: The developing world is rapidly urbanizing, and raw sewage is building up in high-population centers.

“When I walk through the slums of Accra, Ghana, I get really outraged at the conditions that I see people living in,” Moe says. “That passion motivates me to want to find solutions.”

World Toilet Day may finally gain momentum in the United States, since actor Matt Damon became a celebrity spokesperson for the cause, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation began awarding major grants addressing sanitation.



The Center for Global Safe Water recently received $2.5 million from the Gates Foundation to study ways that people are exposed to human waste in cities of the developing world. The first phase of the research is focusing on Accra, which is typical of many rapidly growing cities in sub-Saharan Africa in its lack of sewage treatment plants. Tanker trucks suck up excreta from latrines and dump it into the coastal ocean.

“You have people literally surrounded by shit,” Moe says.

Public latrines in Accra are squat plates with a trench underneath, shared by hundreds of people. The latrines lack sinks, running water and soap.

People who can’t make it to a latrine may resort to squatting over a plastic bag, then tying up the excreta and tossing it into the household trash, or simply flinging it out a window. This method is known as the “flying toilet.”

Open drains line the unpaved streets where children play. “You’ll see children kicking a ball, and if the ball lands in the drain, one of the kids will climb in, get the ball out and they’ll just keep playing with it,” Moe says, pointing to a photo of a little boy rummaging amid raw sewage in a drain (see above).

Urban agriculture pops up in the slums wherever people can find a spot to grow a few vegetables. For irrigation, they dip containers into the drains and pour the water over the plants.

“There are so many ways that people can be exposed to fecal material, it’s hard to know how to prioritize an intervention,” Moe says. “In our study, we’re trying to get information that will help policy makers develop the most effective solutions.”



The sub-human conditions that Accra slum residents must endure are hard to imagine without seeing them, Moe says. She wants people in Atlanta to not only grasp the terrible toll of poor sanitation in the developing world, but to also understand the growing problem of sewage in the United States.

One-third of the water in a typical U.S. household is used to flush toilets. “We are using drinking water to remove excreta from our homes,” Moe says. “In a city like Atlanta, faced with water shortages every couple of years, I don’t think our system is sustainable.”

The Gates Foundation has launched a campaign called “Reinventing the Toilet.” The idea is to spur innovative toilet designs that do not require massive amounts of water and infrastructure.

China, for instance, is promoting the use of anaerobic digester systems to process waste in rural areas. Household toilets feed into the odorless digesters, which convert the waste into biogas used as an energy source.

“We really need to start getting more creative when it comes to toilets,” Moe says.

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East meets West, at the cellular level

Prayer flags fly over a field in Dharamsala, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas. iStockPhoto.com.

Following is an excerpt from an article written by Emory biologist Arri Eisen, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

To teach my biology class today, I took three planes for a total of 9,000 miles nearly halfway around the world. My students have left their sandals at the door. As I walk in, they sit, maroon-robed and expectant, cross-legged on the floor. My body clock registers 11:30 p.m. the day before. I write on the board: "Are bacteria sentient beings?"

This is my fourth year coming to Dharamsala, India, home of the Tibetan government in exile, in the foothills of the Himalayas, as part of an unusual collaboration—the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative—between the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives and Emory University. About seven years ago, the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the Tibetans, invited Emory to develop and teach a contemporary science curriculum for the more than 20,000 Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in exile. …

Over the years, I've come a long way from thinking that teaching science to Tibetan monks and nuns is just a cool thing to do. The monastics, on the whole, are astoundingly open-minded and approach problems with a thoughtful rationality that is, ironically, often missing from my Western colleagues' approach to science and the world. An ancient Zen koan goes something like: If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. That is, destroy preconceptions, question everything—especially if you think you've figured it all out. Most of the monastics in my classroom embody that attitude.

They are busy integrating East and West at the cellular level, re-examining everything they thought they knew. For them, the question of whether bacteria are sentient has serious karmic implications. If these single-celled organisms are, indeed, sentient beings, then any other sentient being could be reincarnated as a bacterium. They face this question with calm, engaged clarity, ready to rethink and integrate whatever they may discover.

Read the whole article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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Add environmental artist to your resume

By Carol Clark

Take an empty plastic bottle out of the trash. Slash the label and the top off with a knife, then use scissors to cut the base into a spiraling ribbon. Now clamp the plastic ribbon down and blast it with 1,000 degrees F. from a heat gun.

Voila! The plastic bottle becomes a long, slender stalk curving into a dainty little cup at one end, like a pitcher plant. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t done it myself.

Environmental artist John Grade glanced at my handiwork and noted that the cup at the end of the stalk is “to hold the mosquito larvae.”

Something unusual is under way on the Emory campus. And I mean unusual even by academia standards.

Grade (pronounced “grotty”) is a visiting artist at Emory, heading up a monumental public art project called “Piedmont Divide.” During the next 10 days, 20,000 plastic water bottles are being transformed into two massive sculptures. One of the sculptures will hang from the trees on the Quadrangle; the other will be suspended over the lake at Lullwater Preserve.



The results are bound to be interesting. Grade is internationally known for his immense installations. His piece “Seeps of Winter” was influenced by his curiosity about the remains of humans found in Irish bogs, and a beached humpback whale he came across one day walking on the Washington coast. His sculpture “The Elephant Bed” centered on Ice Age algae that forms the geographical bedrock of Brighton, England.

John Grade's sketch for "Piedmont Divide" on the campus Quadrangle.

For “Piedmont Divide” Grade is drawing his inspiration from Emory’s work on West Nile virus and global water sustainability.

"Piedmont Divide" needs volunteers daily through Saturday, Nov. 19, to help with the construction. If you love art and/or science, you don’t want to miss this chance to become an environmental sculptor, even if it’s just for a few hours. Click here for volunteer details.

Taking pieces of trash and changing them into pieces for a major artwork can alter your perspective. I will never look at a plastic bottle the same way.

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Science meets art in the park: Come and play

Soon clouds won’t be the only thing hovering over the lake in Emory’s Lullwater Preserve. Photo by Jon Martinson.

Environmental artist John Grade arrived on the Emory campus this week to begin orchestrating “Piedmont Divide.” A large-scale art installation in two parts, “Piedmont Divide” will reflect the university’s research into West Nile virus and global water sustainability.

“This is a creative project where everyone can play,” said Julia Kjelgaard, chair of the Visual Arts Department, during a welcome reception for Grade, a visiting artist at Emory.

Grade is soliciting volunteers to help in the building of the two large outdoor sculptures: One to be located amid the trees on the campus Quadrangle, and the other above the lake at the Lullwater park. The work will continue through Saturday, November 19. Click here for details of how to join in the effort.

“The plans are more or less free-form, like a jazz performance,” Grade said, adding that everyone who works on the project may influence the end result. “I hope that the work will mature and develop beyond what my vision is.”

A studio at the Emory Visual Arts Gallery is filling up with giant bags of clear plastic water bottles, the raw material for the sculptures. If you have some clear plastic bottles to recycle, drop them off at the gallery, which is still short of the 20,000 needed.

Rather than distinct masses, the two sculptures will be “cloud-like forms,” Grade said. “The clouds will start taking shape from center, where they will be most dense, and then spiral outward. The pieces will expand in an organic way. It’s a bit more risky to work this way, but I’m confident that the results will be interesting.”

The installation on the Quad will be suspended in the tree canopy in a spider-web-like network of lines. A pulley system will allow the sculpture to be lowered and raised.

The Lullwater piece will be suspended over the lake. A scaffold just below the water line will support the structure. Grade envisions dancers performing beneath the sculpture. “They will look like they're walking on water,” he says.

In addition to lending a hand in building the sculptures, the public is invited to a Creativity Conversation with Grade and Kjelgaard, on Wednesday, Nov. 16 at 5 p.m. in the Carlos Museum Reception Hall.

On Thursday, Nov. 17 at 6:30 p.m., Grade will discuss the intersection of art, science and sustainability with Uriel Kitron, chair of environmental studies, and Christine Moe, director of the Center for Safe Water at Emory. Pizza will be served during the free public event, at the Visual Arts Gallery.

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Dalai Lama leads talks on ecology and ethics

“The slow meltdown of Earth’s capacity to sustain much of life, as we know it, poses an urgent challenge for both spiritual traditions and science.”

That’s the introductory statement to the conference on Ecology, Ethics and Interdependence, held Oct. 17-21 in Dharamsala, India. The Dalai Lama, Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory, led the meeting, hosted by the Mind and Life Institute.

Emory religion scholar John Dunne moderated a session called “A Role for Theology," which is summed up on the conference web site:

“If our world view is one based on contemporary science as well as the deepest wisdom of many religions, a world view that claims we are radically interrelated and interdependent with all other forms of life, then we will, or should, respond to our present crisis with similarly radical changes in our thinking and behavior. But do we? This is the critical question for all fields of concern with climate change, including the religions – and it is a very difficult one. What causes people to change at a deep enough level so their behavior changes as well? The shock of climate change may be the catalyst to awaken us from the lie of the current world view of individual fulfillment through consumerism, to the reality of fulfillment by sharing with needy fellow creatures and the Earth itself, through religious understandings of limitation, detachment and self-emptying.”

The video of the session is above. Here's a link to videos of all the sessions of the conference.

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