Scientists zeroing in on psychosis risk factors

The onset of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders typically occurs at about 21 years of age, with warning signs beginning around age 17, on average.

By Carol Clark

During the first phase of a major national study, scientists have uncovered a new cluster of preclinical symptoms linked to a significant increase in the risk that a young person will go on to develop a psychotic illness, including schizophrenia. The consortium of researchers, from Emory and seven other universities, has also discovered several biological processes tied to the transition from subtle symptoms to clinical psychosis.

The onset of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders typically occurs at about 21 years of age, with warning signs, known as a prodromal syndrome, beginning around age 17, on average. About 30 to 40 percent of youth who meet current criteria for a prodromal syndrome will develop schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder.

“We are moving at an unprecedented pace towards identifying more precise predictors,” says Elaine Walker, an Emory professor of psychology and neuroscience. “By increasing our understanding of the factors that give rise to psychosis, we hope to ultimately improve the ability to provide preventive intervention.”

Walker is one of the principal investigators in the North American Prodrome Longitudinal Study (NAPLS). The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) funded the ongoing study, which unites the efforts of Emory, the University of North Carolina, Yale, Harvard, the University of Calgary, UCLA and UC San Diego, and the Feinstein Institute at Hillside Hospital.

“The only way we can do this research is by having a large consortium, combining a range of expertise, from genetics to neuro-endocrinology, psychology and psychiatry,” Walker says. “It is also difficult to identify individuals who are at risk for psychosis and in order to have enough statistical power, we need a large sample of study subjects.”

The consortium has published a flurry of 60 papers during the past four years, involving more than 800 adolescents and young adults who were showing clinical warning signs of impending psychosis and a group of 200 healthy youth.

Among the key findings: Prodromal youth with elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol and indicators of neuro-inflammation are more likely to become psychotic within a year.

“We’ve developed a risk-prediction algorithm, including measures of symptoms as well as biomarkers, that we have made available for clinicians,” Walker says. “In the future, they can take saliva samples from at-risk patients to check cortisol levels, and to monitor those levels over time. As we get more information, we keep adding to the algorithm to improve the sensitivity and specificity of prediction. It’s important because anti-psychotic medications have a lot of side effects. You don’t want to give them to young people unless you are fairly confident that they are on the way to a psychotic disorder.”

The researchers are now working on refining a blood-biomarker algorithm that clinicians could use to monitor at-risk patients for signs of neuro-inflammation, oxidative stress, hormones and metabolism.

In addition to medication, cognitive therapy and other interventions that reduce stress may be used to help an individual safely make it through the high-risk period, Walker says. “We’ve found that youth with the highest risk tend to be both exposed to more stress and more reactive to stress.”

The consortium of researchers also discovered that the brains of at-risk patients who later develop psychosis show a dramatic decline of gray matter in the year leading up to the diagnosis. And they found that the elevation in a patient’s cortisol level predicts the magnitude of the decline in brain volume.

In 2008, the NIMH awarded $25 million to the consortium for the first phase of the NAPLS project, which lasted five years.

The NAPLS project is now entering its second five-year phase through additional NIMH funding, including a $2.4 million award to Emory.

“We have better technology than ever before for studying the human brain and changes in the brain over time,” Walker says. “We’re at an especially fruitful time in terms of discoveries we can make.” 

During phase two, “we will be looking more closely at hormones, especially stress hormones and indicators of neuro-inflammatory processes,” Walker says. “And we’re going to be looking much more closely at changes in brain structure and function over time. We’re hoping to identify in real-time, with much greater clarity, what is causing what. In other words, the chain of neural mechanisms.” 

Schizophrenia, the most extreme psychosis, affects about 1 percent of the population and can have devastating consequences. Most people diagnosed with schizophrenia are unable to hold a job or live independently for most of their lives. Preventing the onset of schizophrenia and other psychoses has become a major area of emphasis at the NIMH.

“Psychosis is extremely complex, there is no doubt about it, and we’re learning that it’s even more complex than we previously realized,” Walker says. “But if we’re ever going to make progress in prevention and treatment, we’re going to have to come to grips with that complexity and fully understand it.”

For more information about the project, contact the Mental Health and Development Program at Emory: 404-727-7547.

Thinkstock photos by Brian McEntire (top) and Michael Blann (bottom).

Related:
Schizophrenia: What we know now
Study of psychosis risk and brain to track effects of Omega-3 pills
Daily pot smoking may hasten psychosis onset

Former Pres. Carter celebrates 90th birthday with butterfly garden dedication

Garden party: On his 90th birthday, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, celebrated in their new pollinator garden. Among the guests was Emory evolutionary ecologist Jaap de Roode, bottom right, and his children Jakob and Ella.

By Megan McRainey

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter celebrated his 90th birthday at The Carter Center today with a tour of a new butterfly garden created in his honor.

The Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Pollinator Garden created with the help of Emory University evolutionary ecologist Jaap de Roode, is filled with flowers and plants native to Georgia and is part of the Rosalynn Carter Butterfly Trail, developed by the former first lady to draw attention to the plight of diminishing numbers of migrating monarch butterflies. The garden is certified by Monarch Watch as an official monarch way station, and is listed as a certified wildlife habitat of the National Wildlife Federation.

De Roode and undergraduate students from his lab worked with volunteers from Trees Atlanta to provide seedlings for the garden and to plant them over the summer. They will continue to help monitor and maintain the plants.

The garden features two species of milkweed, the host plants monarch caterpillars need to complete their life cycle, and a variety of plants that can host Georgia’s state butterfly, the Tiger Swallowtail. An array of nectar plants also will appeal to other pollinator species, particularly bees and wasps, and to birds. Visitors are welcome to drop by the garden, which also features two Japanese-style arbors made by local artist Jesse Reep.

De Roode’s lab is one of only a few labs in the world devoted to the study of monarch butterflies and their parasites. In 2010, the lab discovered that monarchs use the toxic chemicals in certain species of milkweed to rid themselves of harmful parasites.

Jaap de Roode and his children at work in the garden last June, along with students from his lab, including, from left: Michelle Tsai, Kevin Hoang, Camden Gowler and Itai Doron.

Nature published de Roode's latest paper on monarchs today, involving the genomic analysis of monarch butterflies from around the world. The researchers traced the ancestral lineage of monarchs to a migratory population that likely originated in the southern United States or Mexico, instead of South America, as was previously hypothesized.

Every year, millions of monarchs from Canada and the United States fly south to overwinter in Mexico. Due to declining amounts of milkweed, from pesticide use and development of land, the number of monarchs making the migration has dropped dramatically, from an estimated180-900 million in 1996-1997 to an estimated 6.7-33 million in 2013-2014.

“The whole migrating population could be gone over the next decade,” de Roode says. “It’s an amazing natural phenomenon in danger of disappearing.”

Initiatives such as the Rosalynn Carter Butterfly Trail can help reverse the trend, he adds, and encourage individual gardeners to lend more support to monarchs by planting milkweed. The trail, which begins in Plains, Georgia, now includes registered sites extending as far as Canada.

Born on Oct. 1, 1924, Jimmy Carter served as the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981 and joined Emory’s faculty in 1982, the same year he established The Carter Center. He is the University Distinguished Professor at Emory.

Related:
Pumping wings: Muscles make migrating monarchs unique

Neuro-Interventions and the Law: Experts to explore ethics and efficacy

Atlanta's Neuro-Interventions and the Law Conference will grapple with thorny issues facing today's legal system. The case of British computer scientist Alan Turing, who submitted to chemical castration in 1952 to avoid imprisonment for homosexuality, exemplifies why a judicial system should take the long view before resorting to drugs or other medical means to alter a person's behavior and biology. Benedict Cumberbatch, above, portrays Turing in the upcoming movie "The Imitation Game."

By Carol Clark

Alan Turing was a hero. He was a mathematician who played a key role in the development of computer science and artificial intelligence and, during World War II, he led Britain’s German code-breaking team, cracking secret messages that gave the Allies an edge in critical battles against the Nazis.

Turing was also a homosexual. In 1952 he was prosecuted for having a sexual relationship with another man, a crime at that time in the United Kingdom. In order to avoid prison, Turing underwent chemical castration: Injections of a drug that took away his libido, while also causing him to have enlarged breasts. His death two years later from cyanide poisoning was ruled a suicide.

The Turing tragedy is just one of many examples of a legal neuro-intervention: The use of a drug or other medical means to change someone’s behavior – sometimes permanently. Despite a problematic past record, a range of such interventions are poised to expand within the legal system and could even become routine.

The conference Neruo-Interventions and the Law: Regulating Human Mental Capacity will gather leading legal scholars, judges, ethicists, neuroscientists and psychologists at Georgia State University September 12-14 to grapple with some of the thorny legal issues being spurred by advances in neuroscience. Registration is free, but there is limited seating.

“Techniques to diagnose and manipulate human behavior and the brain are becoming increasingly sophisticated,” says Paul Root Wolpe, a bioethicist and director of the Emory Center for Ethics, who will give the introductory remarks for the conference. “We need to develop processes and regulations for how we’re going to use these techniques because they are not going away. In fact, many of them are already in use in criminal proceedings.”

The conference is the first major event of the Atlanta Neuroethics Consortium. The Emory Center for Ethics spearheaded the formation of the consortium, which brings together a range of resources from metro-Atlanta’s universities, biotechnology sector and non-profit organizations to explore the implications as neuroscience is set to transform every aspect of our lives, from medicine, to law and civil society.

At least nine U.S. states, including Georgia, have incorporated versions of chemical castration into their laws for those convicted of child sex crimes. While pedophilia is an extreme taboo, critics of chemical castration have called it “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Even if convicted sex offenders are given a voluntary option of a drug treatment in lieu of imprisonment, the ethics are problematic, Wolpe says. “From a government perspective, it would be infinitely cheaper to use drugs instead of incarceration to fix a criminal problem. That kind of incentive would add to the risk of abuse of the power to drug people.”

Another problematic area that Wolpe cites: The practice of drugging criminal defendants suffering from schizophrenia or other mental illnesses so that they achieve a “synthetic competency” to stand trial and, if convicted, perhaps even be executed.

Attorneys are increasingly calling for brain scans as evidence in criminal trials. Traumatic brain injury, or TBI, for instance, is associated with impulsiveness, anger and aggression. Should people diagnosed with TBI receive special consideration if they commit a violent criminal offense?

About 12 percent of U.S. veterans returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from at least mild TBI, according to the Department of Defense. Should vets accused of violent acts be treated differently than other defendants with similar brain injuries?

These questions and dozens of others will be brought up in the conference talks, papers and panel discussions.

It’s important to involve a range of expertise to sort through the complicated neuroethics involved in all of these issues, Wolpe says. “History shows that, over and over again, society has allowed moral suppositions to infiltrate scientific thinking. Years from now, we don’t want to be looking back and saying, ‘How could they have done that?’”

Related:
Nazi medicine: A needle in history's side
Southern bodies: A review of 'Sex, Sickness and Slavery'
Nazi eugenics versus the American Dream

Curbing pesticide threats to bees

Berry Brosi, a bee biologist in Emory's department of environmental sciences, wrote an opinion piece for the Atlanta Journal Constitution on the importance of making informed choices about the use of pesticides. Following is an excerpt from the article:

"Bee populations are declining and several culprits contribute: parasites and diseases, pesticides, lack of flowering plants to feed on and management practices. Scientists, conservationists, government agencies and beekeepers are working hard to figure out ways to reduce these challenging problems.

"One concrete action we can take is to reduce exposure to pesticides that can harm bees and other pollinators. Recently, Emory University announced that it will take an important step toward protecting bees by banning a class of pesticides known as 'neonicotinoids.'

"Though relatively new on the market, neonicotinoids are the most used class of insecticides on Earth. ... Scientific evidence has been mounting from a range of studies that neonicotinoids are particularly damaging to bees. ... Even at low concentrations neonicotinoids can impair bee immune systems, learning, foraging and navigation."

Read the whole article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Related:
Emory to ban bee-harming pesticides, protect pollinators
Bees 'betray' their flowers when pollinator species decline
The growing buzz on animal self-medication

Photo: iStockphoto.com

Planting the seeds for healthier communities

"Being a woman of color, born and raised in the South, I want to dedicate my life to improve health in whatever way I can," says Leandra Lacy, an MPH student and intern at an inner-city garden. "I believe knowledge is power, and I want to spread as much knowledge as I can."

By Elaine Justice, Emory Report

The Super Giant Community Garden, run by the Emory Urban Health Initiative, aims to provide Northwest Atlanta with a more nutritious selection of foods. The area is considered a food desert, marked by limited access to grocery stores, fresh foods and convenient transportation.

The community garden is located in the parking lot of the Super Giant Foods grocery store, which is also working to expand healthy offerings. Organizers hope to eventually create a "Healthy Hub" for the area that will include a community kitchen, health clinic, childcare facilities and a laundromat.

"We have several regulars who come in," says DeJa Love, who became involved in the project as an undergraduate intern in Emory's Ethics and Servant Leadership Program. "We connect with them about nutrition and healthy living," Love says. "Being a listening ear, that's what my job has turned into."

"I live less than a mile away from a Kroger and a Publix," says Leandra Lacy, an MPH student working alongside Love at the urban garden. "To be in an area of Northwest Atlanta that's a food desert — besides the Super Giant and the garden in the parking lot, there isn't another grocery store within a 10 mile radius — was hard for me to fathom. I'm just glad that I'm in this place where I can be present and really get to know the people there and help open up access to healthy food." 

More than 30 Emory student interns are working with Atlanta non-profits this year while completing a non-credit ethics course on what it means to be not just a leader, but a servant leader.

Read more in Emory Report.

Tuberculosis: A rising concern on U.S. southern border

Cases of tuberculosis have been steadily decreasing in the United States – except along the southern border and within the Mexican-born population where cases are on the rise.

“Most alarming is the increase in multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis on both sides of the border,” says Polly Price, an Emory law professor and an expert on immigration. “Multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis is very expensive to treat. It’s a very debilitating disease, many people don’t survive. It’s a problem that needs to be addressed at the national level.”

Tuberculosis requires a long course of treatment, 12 months or more, so continuity of care is the primary issue along the border, Price says. She is developing a guide to U.S. laws pertaining to tuberculosis treatment for states along the border.

“California, Arizona, Mew Mexico and Texas all have slightly different procedures for how to treat tuberculosis, what do to with a non-compliant patient, how to follow that patient and make sure the treatment regimen is followed,” Price says. “So just coordinating laws on the U.S. side is something of a big task.”

Price is also working on a best-practices guide for health care workers dealing with the situation along the border. “The law should help in this situation, it should not hinder in the efforts to provide tuberculosis care,” Price says.

In Emory's Math Circle, bubbles are square and equations are cool

This summer, math graduate student Sarah Trebat-Leder is working with elementary-age children at the Children’s Museum of Atlanta (above) and with advanced college undergraduates on the Emory campus. And during the school year, she organizes the Emory Math Circle for middle school and high school students. (Photos by Tony Benner, Emory Photo/Video.)

By Carol Clark

Each June and July, the Emory math department gathers a hive of brilliant minds from around the country for Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU), a National Science Foundation initiative. The 13 participants at Emory this summer have come from Brown, Harvard, Indiana University, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Georgia and Yale. Number theorist Ken Ono heads up the Emory REU. He and the other instructors charge the group with problems relating to elliptic curves and Galois representations, mock modular and quantum modular forms, additive number theory and distribution of primes.

“This is one of the top REUs in the country, because of the research you get to do here,” says Sarah Trebat-Leder, an Emory NSF Graduate Fellow, who is an instructor for the group this summer.

Trebat-Leder, who graduated from Princeton in 2013, came to two of the Emory REU summer programs herself as an undergraduate. “I learned how to be a mathematician,” she says of the experience. “How to read technical math papers, how to give talks, how to write math and how to go about doing research.”

Ono put her to work on extending the findings of a major discovery in the area of partitions that he had just published with colleagues. “My first REU project was generalizing this major paper that a lot of people in the math world cared about,” Trebat-Leder says. “I had taken a lot of classes, but I had never worked on a problem that no one had solved. Ken is a great mentor because he knows how to develop projects that are accessible to students and yet important to math.”

Ever seen a square bubble? Emory graduate students are giving kids a new view of math, aiming to spark wonder and a desire to learn more.

Trebat-Leder is also devoted to making math accessible and inspiring, for everyone from young kids to adults. Her career goal is to become a college professor focused on teaching and community outreach. 

In January, Trebat-Leder launched the Emory Math Circle. The free program draws students from Atlanta middle schools and high schools to campus on Saturdays for challenging and fun math enrichment sessions led by Emory graduate students. This summer, in addition to teaching for the REU, she is spending several Saturday afternoons at the Children’s Museum of Atlanta alongside other Emory graduate students, including Amanda Clemm, a co-organizer of the Math Circle. They are immersing young children in math and physics through a hands-on activity they call “3D Boxes and Bubbles."

Trebat-Leder reshapes math education.

“Who doesn’t like bubbles?” says Trebat-Leder, explaining the activity’s appeal.

First the kids build a variety of geometric structures out of ZomeTools, interlocking plastic balls and tubes. Then they use the structures to create soap bubbles in crazy shapes: Squares, cubes, spirals, wormholes and parabolas.

While the kids are busy making bubbles, the graduate students are asking them questions about what they think is happening. The reason an odd-shaped bubble forms in the middle of a 3D geometic shape? "The bubble mix is kind of lazy," Trebat-Leder explains. "It wants to connect up without having to stretch a lot and it takes less stretch for it to connect in the middle than to stretch to the outside."

The idea is to strip out complex jargon and give kids glimpses into math and physics that help them to think both logically and creatively.

It’s a far different approach than multiplication drills.

Amanda Clemm is among the Emory graduate students who are volunteering their time to give kids positive early experiences with math.

“I was getting my hair cut the other day, and the hair dresser asked what I do. I told her and she said, ‘I hated math!’” Trebat-Leder says. “I get that reaction everywhere. Everyone is always telling me about their bad experiences with math. I’d like to change that, but it takes time.”

Trebat-Leder, who grew up in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, loved teaching even as a child. “It’s in my blood,” she says. By the time she was 11, she had earned her black belt in karate and was leading a karate class herself.

She also had an affinity for math. After her sophomore year in high school, she went to a summer math camp offered by Hampshire College in Massachusetts. “I spent six weeks doing nothing but math all day, and I got a strong sense of what it was all about,” Trebat-Leder says. “I love math because it’s both logical and creative. In science, you have a hypothesis and conduct an experiment that can strongly support your hypothesis. But math is more precise. You can actually prove something and be sure that it is true.”

During her Princeton undergraduate years, Trebat-Leder participated in a Boston University summer program called PROMYS, or Program in Mathematics for Young Scientists. PROMYS immerses both high school students and teachers in the creative aspects of math and original research.

CBS46 News

Trebat-Leder drew on all her varied experiences to launch the Emory Math Circle. More than a dozen Emory graduate students responded to her call to lead the free math enrichment sessions on Saturday afternoons, and about 30 middle school and high school students attended throughout the spring semester.

Math Circle is not free tutoring for students who are struggling in their classes, Trebat-Leder stresses. “We’re looking for kids who really want to be here and who enjoy our sessions,” she says. “Our aim is to get the students excited about math and let them see how interesting it can be by exposing them to things they don’t learn in school.”

The middle-school level sessions might introduce the students to graph theory by showing how it can be used to model Facebook networks or to play “Cops and Robbers,” a game that explores how many policemen you need to catch a criminal in different scenarios. Another popular game in the Math Circle requires students to keep four colors from touching one another. “The four-color theorem was one of the really deep problems in combinatorics,” Trebat-Leder says. “It took a lot of computers and people to prove it. But it’s also super visual and it doesn’t require a lot of technical language and symbols to convey.”

Kids grasp the idea of math hidden in shapes.

The students that attended the Math Circle sessions last spring came from a range of races and about half were girls, Trebat-Leder says. She notes that girls were the first- and second-place winners of a problem-solving contest organized for the Math Circle middle school students.

“The kids get to learn some really cool math and see what it’s like to actually discuss it themselves and not have it lectured to them,” Trebat-Leder says. “It’s really beneficial to have graduate students, who have studied a lot of math and understand it deeply, interact with kids.”

She cites an article she read recently comparing math to art. “If art classes consisted of just reproducing other people’s paintings, than the experience wouldn’t be nearly as fun or creative,” Trebat-Leder says. “And yet, that’s the way most schools teach math.”

She hopes to keep expanding her influence as an educator, and come up with more ways to improve the math experience of kids. “I think schools are emphasizing the wrong things in an era when computers drive a lot of the work,” she says. “We’re still having kids spend a lot of time practicing long division when we should be focusing more on concepts. Technology has changed so much, and I think that what we’re teaching should be adapting to that.”

Related:
The math of card tricks, games and gambling
How culture shaped a mathematician

Chikungunya virus spreads in Americas, enters U.S. via travelers

The aggressive tiger mosquito, distinguished by its white stripes, can spread chikungunya virus. This mosquito is native to Southeast Asia but has invaded other parts of the world in recent decades, including much of the United States. (Photo by James Gathany/CDC.)

By Carol Clark

As chikungunya virus moves into the Americas for the first time, causing a major outbreak throughout the Caribbean and parts of Central and South America, U.S. health officials are monitoring cases in travelers returning from the affected areas. Imported cases of the mosquito-borne virus have been confirmed in more than a dozen U.S. states, and that number is expected to keep growing.

“Early response is essential,” says Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, a disease ecologist in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences who studies how mosquito-borne pathogens move through urban populations. “We need to prepare the country to try to avoid what we suffered with the introduction of West Nile virus 10 years ago.”

Vazquez-Prokopec and Uriel Kitron, chair of Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences, have been studying the patterns of vector-borne disease epidemics for years and are currently working with public health officials in other parts of the Americas and Africa on chikungunya control efforts.

Kitron will be a featured speaker at a meeting of the NSF-sponsored Urban Climate Institute, hosted by Georgia Tech July 9-10. His talk is titled "Changing Urban Climate and Mosquito-borne Diseases."

The World Health Organization reported the first local transmission of chikungunya in the Western Hemisphere in December of 2013, on the island of Saint Martin. Local transmissions means that mosquitoes in the area have been infected with the virus and are spreading it to people by biting them. Since then, more than 150,000 cases of local transmission have been identified in 17 countries or territories in the Caribbean, Central and South America, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Puerto Rico is the only U.S. territory or state that has identified a case of local transmission, the CDC reports.

Chikungunya is rarely fatal but the symptoms can be severe and debilitating, including headache, fever, joint and muscle pain, and joint swelling or rash. While most patients recover within a week, in some people the joint pain can persist for months. Newborns, older adults and people with existing medical conditions are at higher risk for the more severe forms of chikungunya.

The foot of a chikungunya patient in the Philippines shows the characteristic swelling and rash. (Photo by Nsaa.)

There is no vaccine to prevent the disease or medicine to treat infections. The only way to avoid infection is to prevent mosquito bites by using repellent, window/door screens, and reducing the number of mosquitoes by emptying standing water from containers.

The virus is primarily spread to people by two types of day-time biting mosquitoes: Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. While the former is not common in Georgia, the Aedes albopictus, or Asian tiger mosquito, is pervasive. It is that tiny, infuriating, white-striped pest that crashes countless backyard barbecues, and turns many a relaxing summer session in a hammock into a bloody battle.

“They are like the cockroaches of mosquitoes,” Vazquez-Prokopec says, “perfectly adapted to living in urban areas in close proximity to humans. A house is like a microhabitat for both these species, which can breed in the little bit of water collected beneath an indoor flowerpot.”

The tiger mosquito bites not just people but a range of animals, including squirrels, dogs, deer and birds. The Aedes aegypti, however, which thrives in tropical climates like the Caribbean, feeds solely on human blood.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito is the primary spreader of chikungunya in the current outbreak in the tropical region of the Americas. This mosquito species is an especially efficient spreader of human disease since it only feeds on human blood. (Photo by Muhammed Mahdi Karim.)

“No one has immunity to chikungunya in in the Americas, causing it to spread like a fire and create a real problem for public health,” Vazquez-Prokopec says, noting that in poorer countries fewer homes have air-conditioning, or even window screens, to keep mosquitoes at bay.

Once a mosquito become infected, by taking a blood meal from an infected person, the mosquito can then spread the virus if it bites another person.

“The way the virus is propagating, we expect local transmission of chikungunya to make it to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula as early as this summer,” Vazquez-Prokopec says. “It’s just a matter of time.”

He is currently coordinating a chikungunya rapid-response effort for the Yucatan Peninusula. The effort involves health officials from the three states making up the peninsula (Yucatan, Campeche and Quintana Roo) as well as researchers from local universities. “We want to use our experience researching mosquito-borne disease propagation to help the local authorities try to predict when and where the virus will move,” Vazquez-Prokopec says. “There are two ways of attacking a fire: You try to contain the fire and you also look at where the fire is likely headed to create a buffer to help extinguish it. We know we are in front of a major challenge,” he adds, “but we hope our approach can reduce the chances of a major outbreak occurring in the peninsula.”

Brazil, which reports the highest number of dengue fever cases in the Americas, is another likely destination for serious outbreaks of chikungunya virus, adds Kitron. He is currently in Salvador, Brazil, a city where dengue is highly endemic, collaborating on an entomological study of Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, which are also vectors for dengue.

Chikungunya virus has long been endemic in Africa and parts of Asia. More recent outbreaks have occurred in Europe and countries in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Related:
Sewer upgrade flushes West Nile virus vector from Atlanta stream
Dengue study to focus on asymptomatic carriers

Anatomy of an economic meltdown

The 2007-2008 crisis wasn't due to "immoral, greedy bankers who created toxic assets for which they got inflated ratings and sold to stupid investors," Gorton said. "If banker greed causes crises, we'd have one every week." (Photo by Wilford Harewood.)

By Leslie King, Emory Report

What caused the financial crisis that began in 2007, that time of cutbacks, job losses and housing foreclosures? And how can another crisis be prevented?

Yale professor Gary Gorton discussed causes and effects of recessions in a workshop on financial and monetary history held May 21 at Goizueta Business School.

Gorton came to national attention in September 2010 when then-U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, testifying before a national commission on the fiscal crisis, referenced Gorton's work as recommended reading for understanding the crisis.

One small factor that set off the panic in 2007 was the news media, Gorton said.

"The press didn't really do a very good job of explaining what was happening. But it's hard to blame them. They called economists and economists had no idea. If you call the experts and the experts don't know, how are you supposed to know? And the press — they're never going to get it right because the people who know aren't going to talk and the people who talk don't know," he explained.

"And in Congress, these people have nine million things they have to be experts on; they can't be experts on everything. In a lot of ways, it was a failure of the economics profession to explain things apparently in a way that the public could understand and that will lead to good policy."

Read more of Gorton's analysis in Emory Report.

Gorton recommends Franklin Roosevelt's first radio address, in March 1933, to learn some of the mechanics behind both the Great Recession and the 2007-2008 crisis. Click on the YouTube video below to listen: 

Sewer upgrade flushes West Nile virus vector from Atlanta stream

About 50 Emory students, mostly undergraduates, worked in the field to gather data for the stream monitoring project.

By Carol Clark

Just 10 years ago, a heavy rain in Atlanta could turn Tanyard Creek into a river of raw sewage. “You would sometimes see toilet paper hanging from low branches along its banks,” recalls Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec, a disease ecologist in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences.

Few fish or turtles were evident in the stream, which flows alongside expensive Buckhead real estate. But larvae from the Culex quinquefasciatus mosquito, the main vector of West Nile virus in Atlanta, thrived in the polluted waters.

Today, that scene is largely reversed, following the remediation by the city of Atlanta of a combined sewage overflow (CSO) facility connected to Tanyard Creek. A five-year study led by Emory researchers gathered the before-and-after data to prove it.

“This is the first study that shows how the construction of a deep storage tunnel for a CSO system not only improves stream health and water quality but reduces the mosquitoes that spread West Nile virus,” Vazquez-Prokopec says.

The journal Environmental Research published the study’s results, which could help guide interventions for cities across the country dealing with problems of aging sewage systems and burgeoning populations.

“Our data provide evidence for how a particular cost-saving technology can work to significantly reduce both pollution and disease vectors,” Vazquez-Prokopec says.

About 50 Emory students, mostly undergraduates, worked in the field to help gather the data for the project. “I now use the research in my ‘Urban Ecology and Development Class’ to introduce students to the levels of impairment that urban streams can suffer,” Vazquez-Prokopec says.

In addition to Vazquez-Prokopec, the study’s co-authors include Andrea Lund, Joseph McMillan, Shirin Jabbarzadeh and Uriel Kitron (all from Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences); Rosmarie Kelly from the Georgia Department of Public Health; Daniel Mead from the University of Georgia; and Thomas Burkot from James Cook University in Australia.

Toilet paper hangs from the underbrush alongside Tanyard Creek, following a heavy rain in 2008.

Cities alter the natural environment in myriad ways, and one of the most obvious is water pollution. Sewage, chemicals and heavy metals wind up in creeks, streams and rivers.

More than a century ago, many cities in the United States combined their sewer lines from buildings with runoff from streets. When populations were smaller and fewer surfaces were paved, the sewage pipes were generally large enough to handle the combined flows, and the systems only rarely overflowed.

Today, however, many of the more than 700 cities across the country using CSO systems are facing an environmental crisis. During periods of heavy rain, the wastewater flows directly into natural waterways after only minimal chlorine treatment and sieving to remove large physical contaminants.

Congress had passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, calling for zero discharge of pollutants into fishable and swimmable waters by 1985. Atlanta was among the many cities that failed to achieve this goal even by the late 1990s. After heavy rains, federal water-quality monitoring stations along the Chattahoochee River have recorded as much as 20,000 colonies per liter of e-coli fecal chloroforms, essentially traces of human feces.

Under the pressure of lawsuits, and enforcement action by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Atlanta began remediation efforts. The city eventually won an extension to 2027 to complete the system upgrades.

In June 2008, when Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences began its water quality study, Tanyard Creek was one of the most polluted streams in the city. “Just one-quarter-inch of rain was enough to initiate a sewage overflow,” Vazquez-Prokopec says. “Tanyard Creek was subjected to more than 40 overflows per year, totaling about 150 million gallons of sewage.”

Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec shot this video of a sewer overflow after an Atlanta downpour:


Chemical analysis of water samples from the creek showed high levels of ammonia, nitrogen and phosphorus. Worms that thrive in this type of pollution were moving about Tanyard’s waters, but most of the fish the researchers encountered were dead. “Ammonia, in particular, is food for bacteria and algae, which had overgrown and depleted oxygen levels to the point that fish couldn’t breathe,” Vazquez-Prokopec explains.

The researchers also recorded the amount and types of mosquito larvae and pupae in the water. Culex mosquitos, which can carry the West Nile virus and transmit it between birds and other animals and humans, were teeming in the polluted waters. Cup-sized Tanyard Creek water samples typically had more than 1,000 Culex larvae and pupae, compared to almost none in samples from Peavine Creek. (Peavine, which flows through the Emory campus, is a healthy urban stream not subjected to CSOs, and was used as a control in the research.)

City of Atlanta graphic of deep storage tunnel

A new deep storage tunnel for the CSO facility connected to Tanyard Creek became operational in November of 2008. The tunnel was a less expensive fix than installing larger sewage pipes, and it is able to contain most of the CSOs coming from Midtown Atlanta. A total of 42 sewer discharges were recorded at the facility in 2008, none were recorded in 2009, and only one in 2011 and two in 2012. The total annual volume discharged from the CSO facility was reduced from 154 million gallons in 2008 to six million gallons in 2012.

The effects of the remediation effort were dramatic, Vazquez-Prokopec says. “From 2008 to 2009, it was like, ‘Boom!’”

The before-and-after data showed the water quality continued to improve through October of 2012 when the study was completed. “The ammonia and nitrate levels were down, and the oxygen levels went from really low to normal,” Vazquez-Prokopec says. “We’re seeing an urban stream as healthy as an urban stream can be, with wildlife coming back, including turtles, tadpoles, frogs and water snakes. And the main vector of West Nile virus is disappearing.”

A cup-sized dip of water from Tanyard Creek that previously contained hundreds of Culex mosquito larvae now may have 10 Culex larvae, Vazquez-Prokopec says.

Atlanta has about 40 different species of mosquitoes, he notes. The Culex is the main species that can carry the West Nile virus in the city, and it happens to prefer polluted waters, making the old CSO system and frequent heavy rains a perfect storm for an outbreak of the disease.

Rapid urban growth means rapid changes throughout an ecosystem, a fact that will increasingly present challenges to public health. “In 2007, the human world population shifted from primarily rural to more urban,” Vazquez-Prokopec says. “That’s a huge and important milestone in history. We have to understand that our own health is not separate from the health of the environment.”

Photos courtesy Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec

Related:
Sewage raises West Nile virus risk
Mosquito hunters invent better disease weapon

Are you a thrill seeker or a chill seeker? Join a psychologist's survey

"I don't want people to think that sensation seeking is a psychological disorder at all, but it can be linked to or exacerbate certain situations," says psychologist Ken Carter.

By Elaine Justice, Emory News Center

Whether you're a thrill seeker, or someone who'd rather be safe than sorry, clinical psychologist Ken Carter is looking for you. Carter, professor of psychology at Emory's Oxford College, is casting a wide net in gathering research for an upcoming book project on "high sensation seeking" people.

He's looking for people to visit his website, buzz.drkencarter.com, where they can complete a brief survey showing how much of a "sensation seeker" they are. The survey is a modified version of a sensation seeking scale personality test developed in the 1960s by Marvin Zuckerman of the University of Delaware. Zuckerman says that sensation seeking is "a personality trait expressed in behavior as a tendency to seek varied, novel, complex and intense sensations and experiences and to take physical risks for the sake of having such experiences."

Know anyone like that? One of the things Carter noticed in some of his friends, his clients and some of his students, too, is that there seem to be certain people who tend to have more chaotic lives than others. "I didn't know how much of that they were creating themselves or whether they just happened into these situations," he says. "I thought about them as 'chaos junkies,' as people who loved a chaotic life, who feed off that chaos. The concept of sensation seeking seemed to explain what I was seeing."

While there are people who get their thrills from really high sensation seeking activities, "it doesn't have to be jumping off a building or sky diving," says Carter. He cites the example of fire fighters or police officers, who have fairly routine activities during long stretches, punctuated by very high sensation activities that are part of the job. The sensation seeking test shows an overall score as well as sub-scores in four areas: thrill and adventure seeking, experience seeking, dis-inhibition, and boredom susceptibility.

"Different people can be high or low on different parts of the overall concept," says Carter, "and the high sensation seeking person can look very different in different situations." Carter says he plans to use not only the sensation seeking test results but people's stories as well. "When I did a workshop on sensation seeking recently, people's eyes light up, because they either know someone like this, or they themselves are like this," he says.

A psychologist approached Carter after the workshop and said he was an introverted high sensation seeking person. "You'd think that introversion and high sensation seeking would be an oxymoron, but introversion has a lot to do with being in your head and recharging yourself by being alone," says Carter. "There are high sensation activities you can do alone, such as rock climbing, which an introvert would really enjoy."

Carter says one of the great things about using social media to gather research material is that it gives him the ability to test his ideas and find out what's interesting to audiences before publishing the final product. Those wishing to share their stories can do so on Carter's Facebook page, and can follow him (@drkencarter) on Twitter as well. "I'm looking forward to collecting people's stories and experiences," he says. "For instance, sensation seeking tends to decrease as we get older, so I'm curious to see how individuals who were high sensation seeking when they were younger change as they get older."

His book is intended for three audiences and purposes: as a compendium of research on sensation seeking for academics; as a resource for counselors and therapists; and as an information tool for the public. For therapists, more information on sensation seeking could help them help clients. "Some people may seem to have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or be bipolar, but what it really may be is high sensation seeking, which requires a very different kind of intervention than a psychological disorder might."

"I don't want people to think that sensation seeking is a psychological disorder at all, but it can be linked to or exacerbate certain situations," says Carter. "I want to explain to people what this concept is, how them how it can manifest itself in different ways, but also help them get the most out of that awareness." For example, "some research indicates that people who are high sensation seeking have lower levels of stress and anxiety, that there's a protective factor for them," says Carter.

"You'd think they'd be more stressed out, but apparently they can tolerate a lot more chaos." While lower sensation seeking people may be more easily thrown off base, says Carter, "high sensation seeking people can more easily roll with the punches, so there are some great aspects of it, too."

Sky diving, anyone?

Related:
The math of rock climbing

Image by iStockphoto.com

'Math detective' analyzes odds for suspicious lottery wins

Emory mathematician Skip Garibaldi (above in a classroom) helped do the math for a Palm Beach Post investigation of suspicious wins in the Florida Lottery. Garibaldi has since started eyeing data from the Georgia Lottery. (Emory Photo/Video)

By Carol Clark

When investigative reporter Lawrence Mower decided to dig into public records for the winners of the Florida Lottery, he noticed an intriguing pattern. Over a decade, a few names kept popping up as winners of all kinds of games. The most prolific of these winners, according to the lottery data, was a man who claimed an incredible 252 prizes during six years, for a total take of $719,000.

“If you’re winning like this in Las Vegas, they’re going to take you into a back room and find out how you’re cracking the game,” Mower said.

But when Mower asked a Florida lottery official about what seemed like a suspicious number of repeat wins by some players he was told that they could just be lucky.

Mower and his colleagues at the Palm Beach Post wanted to find out exactly how lucky these dominant players were, but they needed help calculating the odds.

“I starting looking for a mathematician who had dealt with odds and the lottery,” Mower says. “That’s how I found Skip.”

Skip Garibaldi, a professor in Emory’s Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and associate director of UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, was happy to work on the project.

“It was like a dream come true,” says Garibaldi, whose previous research on lotteries received the Lester R. Ford Award for mathematics and is the subject of a chapter in the popular book “Brain Trust” by Garth Sundem. Garibaldi enjoys breaking down complex math for the general public and has appeared on 20/20, CNN and Fox & Friends.

“I get this call from Lawrence, and he says, ‘I have this huge database I’d like to feed you of everyone who has won more than a $600 prize in the Florida Lottery over a decade,” Garibaldi recalls.

Philip Stark, a statistician from the University of California, Berkeley, and Richard Arratia, a probabilist from the University of Southern California, were also recruited to work with Garibaldi on the project. The three mathematicians are now writing an academic paper that will explain their lottery findings in more technical detail.

Two of the underlying principles for the lottery analysis were probability theory and the law of large numbers, which both trace their beginnings to a 16th-century Italian mathematician, Gerolamo Cardano. In fact, it was his love of dice games and other forms of gambling that sparked Cardano to work on probability questions.

“The subtle point about probability or quantum mechanics,” Garibaldi says, “is that there are things that we know are possible and we can calculate the probability of them happening, but they are so unlikely that no one has seen them happen and likely no one ever will. For this lottery question, something that happens to fewer than one-in-20-trillion lottery gamblers is one of these utterly implausible events.” 

Using this generous bar for random luck, the analysis identified winners who were defying the odds during the past decade, and would have had to lose prodigious amounts of money to win so many times. The most prolific winner, for instance, would have had to spend an estimated minimum of $2.07 million to have a one-in-20-trillion shot at his 252 wins and winnings of $719,051, for a net loss of about $2.35 million.

“But even if every single citizen in the state of Florida spent $2 million on lottery tickets,” Garibaldi says, “the odds are less than one in a million that anybody would have won that many times.”

These kinds of figures “put us in pretty safe territory with our suspicions that something was amiss,” Garibaldi says.

The mathematical analysis was also able to identify winners of multiple prizes who appeared to be legitimate gamblers. “The fact that a person claims multiple prizes does not necessarily indicate that they are doing anything suspicious,” Garibaldi says. “A finer analysis and more inspection can show that some people are likely just spending a lot of money on tickets and occasionally getting lucky.”

“The math was the critical part of this story,” Mower says of the package of investigative pieces published on Sunday, March 30. “It’s been really valuable working with Skip because he’ll see something that I won’t.”

On Monday, March 31, the state legislature called for more oversight of the Florida Lottery. On Tuesday, the lottery announced that it would adopt safeguards, such as software to track frequent winners. By Wednesday, lottery officials began raiding stores and seizing lottery equipment associated with some of the top prize winners. (Six of the 10 top winners in the lottery records were store clerks and owners who sold lottery tickets.)

Meanwhile, Garibaldi started eyeing data for winners of the Georgia Lottery. “The data from the Georgia Lottery is not as good as from Florida, because Georgia only lists winners for prizes of $5,000 or more,” he says. “But just casually looking at the Georgia data since 2003, I see what may be suspicious numbers for repeat winners.”

Related:
Lottery study zeroes in on risk
Mathematicians add logic to the lottery
How culture shaped a mathematician

Sharing the 'wow' of science

Emory chemist Doug Mulford blows a fireball at the Atlanta Science Festival expo March 29. Emory Photo/Video.

By Megan Terraso, Emory Report

Rows of children sat with rapt attention, their mouths agape at what they were seeing at the Atlanta Science Festival.

"That look of wonder is why we do it," says Douglas Mulford, director of undergraduate studies of chemistry and senior lecturer at Emory. "We wanted to show the 'wow' of science and show how fascinating it can be."

Mulford was one of many Emory faculty, staff and students who participated in 25 Emory demonstrations and exhibits at the Atlanta Science Festival March 22-29. The massive weeklong festival included more than 100 events at nearly 35 venues and everything from tours and film screenings to trivia nights and flashy science demonstrations.

At the festival's science expo March 29 at the Georgia World Congress Center, Mulford and several Emory students put on a science stage show with bubbling beakers and exploding balloons to a packed room with an audience of around 1,000.

Mulford also oversaw the very popular "cornstarch dance pit," a three foot by three foot pit where visitors could dance or sink in the cornstarch and water mix. "As long as you dance, you stay up. When you stop, you sink. That was a lot of fun," Mulford says.

Other Emory exhibits at the expo, which attracted tens of thousands of visitors, included monarch butterflies, the opportunity to touch a real brain and a booth that allowed visitors to swab the bottom of their shoe or their ear and follow the growth of the bacteria they'd swabbed over a few hours or days via a website.

Read more at Emory Report.

For the love of lemurs and Madagascar

The IMAX movie “Island of Lemurs: Madagascar” opens nationwide on April 4, including Atlanta's Fernbank Museum of Natural History. Mouse lemurs, above, are among those featured in the film about the island, a bio-diversity hotspot.  (Photo by Frank Vassen)

By Carol Clark

“I smell props,” says Sarah Zohdy, a biologist in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences and the Rollins School of Public Health. She looks skyward, scanning a tangle of thick Tarzan vines, tree branches and leaves that weave the dense rainforest canopy 100 feet above.

“Do you smell that?” Zohdy asks a new arrival to Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park. “They have a scent like maple syrup.”

Then, whoosh! A wide-eyed, fur-covered acrobat, mostly arms, legs and tail, leaps out of one clump of leaves and disappears into another.

“Props!” Zohdy confirms, smiling at the comical effect of the creature. “Their legs are crazy long for their bodies.”

Propithecus edwardsi

Propithecus edwardsi, more commonly known as a sifaka, is one of nearly a hundred species of lemurs. These primitive primates, with large, round eyes and wet, dog-like noses, are unique to Madagascar, an island in the Indian Ocean, off the southeast coast of Africa.

Lemur ancestors arrived in Madagascar some 65 million years ago, perhaps floating over from mainland Africa on mats of vegetation. Isolated on the island, the Earth’s fourth largest, lemurs evolved independently from other primates, diverging into a striking cast of characters: From the teddy-bear cute black-and-white ruffed lemur to the creepy, bat-like aye-aye.

Zohdy’s favorite is the mouse lemur, the smallest primate in the world. “The adults weigh about as much as a fun-sized package of M&Ms and can fit into the palm of your hand,” she says. “The babies are no bigger than a Ping-Pong ball and, basically, all eyeballs.”

A new IMAX movie “Island of Lemurs: Madagascar,” opening nationwide on April 4, features the work in Ranomafana of famed primatologist Patricia Wright, one of Zohdy’s mentors. “The imagery in the film is so rich, it tugs on my heartstrings,” Zohdy says. “I hope the film makes more people around the world aware of the dire ecological situation in Madagascar.”

Watch the trailer for the IMAX movie:


Zohdy has been researching lemurs in Madagascar for seven years. Last summer, she broadened her focus and led an Emory infectious disease field team in Ranomafana, made up of students from a range of specialties. The Emory team is gathering baseline data for an ambitious “one health” intervention. The goal is to bolster the health of the rural poor around Ranomafana, who are struggling to stay fed, sheltered and alive, while also conserving the ecosystem of the World Heritage site.

Zohdy’s rubber boots make loud sucking sounds as she trudges through thick mud towards a wooden suspension bridge spanning the Namorona River, roaring and rushing over its rocky bed even during the dry season.

“Check out that spider web,” she says, as she leads the way across the bridge. She points up at gossamer threads hanging above the water, leading out of the forest on one side of the river and stretching 40 feet to connect with the trees on the opposite bank. The recently discovered Darwin’s bark spider, she notes, spins the largest webs in the world, and its silk is the toughest biological material ever studied, more than 10 times tougher than Kevlar.

Crested drongos – large black birds sporting what look like elegant coattails and fancy feather headdresses – chatter in the trees alongside the slick forest trail, which is now leading steeply up a lush hillside.

Zohdy pauses when she hears breaking leaves in the canopy and catches a whiff of a musky, zoo-like smell. “Golden bamboo lemurs. They are right above us,” she says softly. “Don’t open your mouth when you look up,” she quickly adds. “People have been peed on.”

A golden bamboo lemur, photographed in Ranomafana by Sarah Zohdy.

The dusky-gold creatures, which look like a cross between a Koala bear and a raccoon, are critically endangered. They are one of three species of lemurs in the park that subsist almost entirely on the tender leaves and shoots of bamboo.

The greater bamboo lemur is the rarest of them all. Just two remain in the 160-square-mile Ranomafana National Park – a father and his daughter – and only about 60 survive in the wild. Like the giant panda, the greater bamboo lemur has molars capable of slicing and crushing the tough trunk of bamboo.

“It’s a fascinating evolutionary adaption,” Zohdy says, that allows them to survive during the dry season, when the more tender bamboo shoots and leaves are not as readily available. Loss of habitat and shifts in climate, however, have lengthened the dry season. “That means the greater bamboo lemurs have to chew on the tough trunks longer, which wears down their teeth,” Zohdy says. “When their teeth go bad, they starve. It’s not like they can go to a bamboo lemur dentist and get dentures.”

Since humans began settling on the island, only about 2,000 years ago, bringing a rice-growing culture with them, much of the natural habitat and its wildlife has disappeared, including at least 17 species of lemurs.

“When I first came to Madagascar, I thought the whole island would look like a BBC nature special,” Zohdy recalls. Instead she was stunned during the ten-hour drive from the capital of Antananarivo to Ranomafana to see a largely treeless landscape of terraced rice paddies and the occasional smoke from slash-and-burn agriculture.

Watch a video about an Emory "one-health" project in Madagascar:


In the steep landscape of Ranomafana, the homes of villagers and their food crops and livestock bump up against the remaining patches of primordial wilderness. The crowding puts both people and animals at risk. “When you have humans encroaching on wildlife habitat you have huge potential for zoonotic diseases, and the emergence of new diseases,” Zohdy says. Pneumonic plague and virulent strains of flu are examples of deadly outbreaks that have occurred in Madagascar in recent years.

The “one health” approach of the Emory infectious disease team may be key to solving some of the complex problems facing the Malagasy people and the fragile Ranomafana ecosystem. “To really understand human health, animal health, and environmental health, you have to study all three at once,” Zohdy says.

During the summers, going back to 2011, Emory student-researchers have collected fecal samples of lemurs, people and their livestock. These samples, along with mosquitos and ticks the team is collecting, are sent back to Atlanta for analysis of pathogens they may contain.

The project is part of a large-scale effort of conservation and global health being coordinated by Thomas Gillespie, an Emory professor of Environmental Sciences and Environmental Health. The data the students are gathering will help guide a health care improvement effort through a new non-profit agency called PIVOT.

Madagascar is home to half the world's chameleon species. Photo by Sarah Zohdy.

One evening, Zohdy leads students on the team on a night hike up the side of a mountain. The forest is eerily silent. A thick mist snakes along the ground and drifts up through the silhouettes of trees.

The researchers’ headlamps slice like lasers across the understory, occasionally striking treasure. An iridescent green and blue chameleon looks like a jeweled dragon clinging to the branch of a sapling. A golden moth the size of a small bird fans its wings across a clump of eucalyptus leaves.

“Do you hear that high-pitched trill, like a tiny, far-away bell?” Zohdy asks. “That’s a mouse lemur.”

Tiny pairs of glowing eyes pop out of the darkness. Mouse lemurs are nocturnal, and their eyes shine due to the reflective effects of sensitive night vision. The eyes appear, then vanish in a flash, as the shy creatures dart amid the branches of small trees.

Zohdy instructs everyone to switch their headlamps from white light to red, so the lemurs don’t get blinded.

Seen in well-lit photographs, the brown mouse lemurs populating Ranomafana are charming. They have a beguiling gaze and tiny, elegant hands that look more human than animal, complete with delicate fingernails.

Moving through the dark forest, however, these miniature primates become like lemures, Latin for ghosts and the origin of the word lemurs. They flit through the trees alongside the trail, watching the humans with wide, curious eyes that reflect the red glow of the curious humans watching them back.

 Watch a video about the making of the IMAX movie:


Related:
In Madagascar: A health crisis of people and their ecosystem

If Carl Sagan had been a dancer

Theater Emory and the Emory Dance Program premiere their first collaboration, "Free/Fall: Explorations of Inner and Outer Space," on April 3 in the Mary Gray Munroe Theater.

"When astronomers talk about the cosmos, you often hear words or phrases that describe behaviors, moods, relationships, even arcs and journeys and sudden eruptions of 'emotion,'" says director Janice Akers, explaining the inspiration behind the production. "The language also has highly physical imagery: rotation, orbiting, colliding, intersecting, floating, coming towards, flying away."

Read more about the production here.

Festival gets all fired up for science

First-year chemistry students demonstrated the wonders of science in Emory labs last Saturday, to help launch the Atlanta Science Festival. More than 80 different organizations, including Emory, are collaborating on the week-long festival, made up of dozens of events throughout metro Atlanta, including many on the Emory campus. The festival culminates on Saturday, March 29 with a family friendly "Exploration Expo" in the Georgia World Congress Center.

Photo by Emory Photo/Video

Atlanta Science Festival to launch on March 22

Via Emory Alumni Association

Get in touch with your inner scientist at the Atlanta Science Festival (ASF), a weeklong celebration of local science and technology.

"From March 22-29 at more than 100 events throughout metro Atlanta, visitors will experience scientific innovation and transform their perspective on how science impacts nearly everything we do," says Sarah Peterson, a co-founder of the ASF and program coordinator for Laney Graduate School. 

Emory has been a partner in ASF from its beginning and is collaborating with more than 80 community partners on the interactive festival.

A variety of events will take place on and around the Emory campus including lab tours, panel discussions, film screenings, an opportunity to see the sun through a solar telescope, a celebration of the science of beer, and much more. Click here to see the complete list of Emory events, times and locations.

The festival will culminate Saturday, March 29 at Centennial Olympic Park with an Exploration Expo featuring family activities, experiments, pop-up interactive exhibits and games, including faculty, staff and students from Emory's science and math departments. The Exploration Expo will be from 11a.m. to 4 p.m., and admission is free.

"Whether you're a self-proclaimed science-lover or simply fascinated by the how the world works, we invite you to share in this celebration of 'the curious' in all of us," says Jordan Rose, associate director at the Emory College Center for Science Education. "There's something for everyone: comedy, art, poetry, food, lasers, stars, gardens, dinosaurs and more."

Photo courtesy San Diego Science and Engineering Festival.

Bringing to life 'Dinosaurs Without Bones'

Tony Martin investigates an outcrop in Australia. Photo by Ruth Schowalter.

Emory ichnologist Anthony Martin wants to shake up your view of dinosaurs by letting you follow them in their tracks. (Warning: Watch where you step.)

Martin is on a mission to bring ichnology to the masses. Long overshadowed by the bone specialists of paleontology, paleoichnologists focus on the fossils of tracks, nests, burrows, dung and other traces of life.

Martin’s new book, “Dinosaurs Without Bones: Dinosaur Lives Revealed by Their Trace Fossils” is published by Pegasus Books. In a review, Publisher’s Weekly says Martin’s writing “bubbles over with the joy of scientific discovery as he shares his natural enthusiasm for the blend of sleuthing and imagination that he brings to the field of ichnology.”

Martin also drew all of the illustrations for the book, and took most of the photos.

eScienceCommons interviewed the author in his office in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences.

eScienceCommons: Your previous five books have been geared more towards academics. Why did you decide to write this one for a general audience? 

Tony Martin: One of my goals is to help turn the term “ichnology” into a household word. And I want to help people see dinosaurs in a new way: Not just as skeletons in a museum, but with muscles and flesh, moving and making traces.

eSC: What sort of readers do you think will enjoy this book?

TM: Anyone who loves dinosaurs. But also people who love detective stories, which often involve the scientific method. Sherlock Holmes, who was a nerd long before it was hip, is making a comeback as a TV series. A lot of people enjoy watching him solve problems by making careful observations, and then forming hypotheses on the basis of those observations.

I’m writing about mysteries that, in some cases, go back more than 100 million years. Dinosaurs left behind many observable clues about what they did while they were alive.

You see a deserted plain. Here's what an ichnologist sees. Drawing by Tony Martin.

eSC: You open the book with a thrilling scene, of two big, male Triceratops charging across a floodplain, creating havoc among a group of feathered theropods and a flock of toothed birds and pterosaurs. It’s a bit like Jurassic Park without the humans. 

TM: Almost everything that happens in that opening scenario is based on real evidence. It’s creative non-fiction, describing behaviors as they may have happened, based on trace-fossil records. There is a lot of action in the book. It’s not just a mystery – it’s also a thriller.

eSC: I love it that one of your favorite trace fossils is of a dinosaur butt. 

TM: It is rare to see a dinosaur-resting trace. One of the best examples is from a small theropod, discovered in Utah. It’s intriguing to me to think of a dinosaur sitting down and leaving an impression. Why did it sit down? To digest a big meal? To survey a scene? Dinosaurs don’t always have to be running, eating machines.

eSC: You also write about dinosaurs belching, breaking wind, peeing, pooping and even puking. You seem almost shameless in your quest to appeal to the masses. 

TM: If there is anything that will get me on The Colbert Report, it’s my diagram of a Brachiosaurus projectile vomiting (see above), including the estimated impact velocity of the stream and the associated crater. I checked with (Emory physicist) Jed Brody to make sure I got the physics right. It’s a fantasy trace fossil – no one has found an undoubted trace fossil of dinosaur vomit yet – but that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there.

eSC: And, of course, you have included dinosaur violence and sex. 

TM: Trace fossils of fighting can tell you a lot about dinosaur behavior. For instance, we have evidence of a Tyrannosaurus taking a chunk out of the tail of an Edmontosaurus, which survived the damage. The trace fossil marks of the teeth row on the skeleton are more than a foot across, which narrows down the list of perpetrators to a tyrannosaur closely related to Tyrannosaurus rex, or T. rex itself.

Part of my inspiration for writing about dinosaur sex comes from a section in the book “My Beloved Brontosaurus,” by Brian Switek. He described the spikes on the tails of stegosaurs, and pondered how the males might have gotten past those.

I thought I’d take that idea a step further and imagine what kind of trace fossils dinosaurs might have made while mating.

"A cassowary really looks like something out of Jurassic Park," says Martin. Photo by Paul IJsendoorn/Wikipedia Commons. 

eSC: Your book chapters have some dynamite opening sentences. One of my favorites is, “The large theropod tracks were fresh, and so was its scat.” 

TM: We can observe dinosaur behavior by studying and tracking the traces of birds, which are living theropods. Those particular tracks were from a cassowary encounter I had during a field trip with Emory students in Queensland, Australia.

The sunlight was coming across this giant bird as it was crossing a stream. It was an amazing sight. Cassowaries can grow to more than six-feet tall. They’re among the tallest, heaviest birds alive. They are covered with black feathers, and their head is topped with a tall, bladed crest that looks as if it can saw through flesh. A cassowary really looks like something out of Jurassic Park.

eSC: How long did it take you to write this book? 

TM: In terms of experience, the book took 30 years of work in ichnology and geology. It took a while for me to develop the right combination of field experience, knowledge and writing ability to put it all together into something a reader would enjoy.

The actual writing of the book took just a little more than a year. It really flowed out of me. It was fun to write because I got to blend my scientific expertise with pop culture and other human-interest topics to tell a story that uses ichnology as a central theme.

Here in the United States we like to bemoan how we have a scientifically illiterate public, but people are interested in good science stories. I would encourage more scientists to think about writing in ways that are approachable to general audiences.

eSC: Who are your favorite science writers who appeal to general audiences?

TM: There are so many good science writers now. To name just a few that I enjoy: David Quammen, Virginia Hughes, Ed Yong, Brian Switek, Carl Zimmer, Virginia Morell and Annalee Newitz.

Related:
Dinosaur burrows yield clues to climate change
Polar dinosaur tracks open new trail to past
Lake-bed trails tell ancient fish story 
Tell-tale toes point to fossilized bird tracks