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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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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Express your love of chemistry

Have you ever dreamed of dancing on the periodic table? Now you have your chance. The Emory chemistry club, ChEmory, is sponsoring "Transform Chemistry into Art," a contest in celebration of the International Year of Chemistry.

Members of the Emory community from across campus are invited to use drawing, photography, sculpture, film, song and dance to express their passion for chemistry. Entries are due by Wednesday, Nov. 16 to sarah.a.peterson@emory.edu or Atwood 308. The works will be on display, and the winners announced, on November 19. Prizes will be awarded.

For inspiration, watch the video below of FoSheng Hsu from Cornell, doing an interpretative dance of the the world of x-ray crystallography and a 3-dimensional protein structure. Hsu won the chemistry division for the 2011 "Dance Your Ph.D" contest, an international event sponsored by the journal Science. A record number of 55 dances were submitted to the contest this year, and you can check them out here.

The Holy Grail to X-ray crystal structure of human protein phosphatase from FoSheng Hsu on Vimeo.

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The spirit of Emory came from a lab

From Emory Magazine:

Does any other university have a biology lab skeleton as its mascot? We think it unlikely. As mascots go, Emory’s is on the eccentric side. Dooley made his first appearance in 1899 in the “Phoenix,” Emory’s literary journal at the time, with an essay titled “Reflections of the Skeleton.” Writing as a specimen from the Science Room, Dooley was a mournful character, complaining about the high spirits of the “college boys” who disturbed his rest.

He showed up again a decade later and remained a kind of campus commentator, but his physical presence was not observed until 1941, when the Board of Trustees first allowed dancing on campus. That seems to have cheered him up.

Now known as James W. Dooley (he takes his first name and middle initial from the current university president), Dooley is represented on campus by a student – whose identity is kept secret – dressed as a skeleton in a black cape, a black top hat, and white gloves.

He has become a Lord of Misrule, the instigator of the festive Dooley’s Week – traditionally ushered in by the skeleton himself – who has arrived by helicopter, motorcycle and vintage car, accompanied by his entourage of student bodyguards.

Dooley is part of the rich history that Emory is celebrating during its 175th anniversary year, including many major science milestones. During the past 10 years alone, Emory researchers have made 1,418 invention disclosures and applied for 968 patents. The university has seen 32 products reach the market and launched 55 start-up companies. Read more in Emory Magazine.

Happy Mole Day!

If you have to ask, chances are you are not celebrating Mole Day, an unofficial holiday for chemists, on October 23, between 6:02 AM and 6:02 PM. The time and date are based on Avogadro's number, which defines the number of particles in one mole of substance. Emory chemists celebrate in a big way. Their tradition involves a pinata, this year hand-crafted into an actual garden-variety mole by Charlene Chan and Yoshie Narui, and some initiation rites for new faculty members (see Chris Scarborough in action in the video below). Cheers to Avogadro, and to scientists everywhere today.

Opposable 'thumbs up' for ape animation

Anne Eisenberg writes in the New York Times about movie animation:

The chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans that star in the hit film “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” are all computer animations. But they look a lot like the real thing, even to a primatologist.

“It’s astonishing how far the technology has come,” said Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University in Atlanta and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory.

“We have the illusion we are looking at chimpanzees,” Dr. De Waal said of the computer-generated figures. “They are remarkably convincing.”

Producing computer-animated chimps that people will accept as realistic is a signal accomplishment, said Chris Bregler, an associate professor of computer science at New York University.

“It’s easier to fool us when you animate a dragon or another mythical or fairy tale creature,” Dr. Bregler said of characters created in earlier movies using the technology, called performance capture. “But humans or their closest relatives, chimps — that’s more difficult to do. Our human eyes are finely tuned to detecting problems with those depictions, and the illusion breaks down.”

Read the whole article in the New York Times.

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The iPhone is his instrument

What do you do with a major in math and computer science and a minor in music? Tim Soo, who graduated from Emory in 2010, used those degrees to create invisible musical instruments. He developed software that allows him to turn an iPhone and Wii remote into phantom orchestras, and play music in radical new ways.

It all started while Soo was at Emory and whipped up an invisible violin, using an I-Cube Touch Glove, a Wii-mote and a Max/MSP patch, because he had forgotten his actual violin and urgently needed to record a piece that he had composed for a music class.

Since then, Soo has advanced and polished the concept. His innovation brought him support from the Awesome Foundation and won him the top prize at this year’s Music Hack Day NYC and the MTV O Music Award.

Soo's web site, Invisible Instruments, invites visitors to tap his software for public and educational use, and to develop their own instruments.

The Invisible Instruments project is mainly a hobby, says Soo, and is currently on the back burner as he pursues a medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania. “My primary interests lie in patient-side medical technologies,” he writes on his blog.

One of his ongoing projects is a heartbeat app. The program ties a person’s heartbeat to the beats of a song to gradually lower the heart rate and reduce stress and mental pain.

A built-in brower searches for the top YouTube hits based on a playlist of songs entered by the user. “Should the heart rate become faster during a song, the subsequent song will have a slower tempo until the heart rate reaches an acceptable range,” Soo explains on his blog. “If the heart rate drops too low, Rick Astley sings ‘Never gonna give you up.’”

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Monkeys embrace 'friends with benefits'

When did the word “dating” start sounding dated?

The new romantic comedy “Friends with Benefits” features Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake, acting out the idea that men and women can be both friends and occasional sex partners, without any romantic rituals or messy emotions.

So is this concept a step forward or back on the evolutionary scale?

Rhesus monkeys, known for their brief and frequent sexual liaisons, appear way ahead of humans when it comes to having friends with benefits. The females are the ones in charge of this system.

“Because of the social structure, females essentially control what goes on in a rhesus monkey group,” says Emory psychology professor Kim Wallen, who studies the behavioral neuroendocrinology of sex. “The females control pretty much everything, including sex.”

Although rhesus monkeys don’t form committed sexual relationships, it is not a random free-for-all. They are still constrained by their social structure and social contexts, Wallen says.

“I think that a common theme of what we know from rhesus monkeys and what we know from humans is that sex is actually not a behavior that can be taken lightly. Even though rhesus monkeys may be promiscuous by human standards, sex is actually still a very difficult and challenging aspect of the social life of rhesus monkeys. It threatens the social structure, so they’ve had to develop behavioral ways of dealing with sex. And I think the same is true of humans.”

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Why robots should care about their looks

As one movie reviewer points out, the Autobots and Decepticons in Transformers: Dark of the Moon “drool, bleed, have whiskers and even go bald with age.”

But what's going on beneath the surface? As real-life robots become increasingly sophisticated, how will we decide if they have enough of a sense of themselves to deserve certain levels of rights?

“It will be an interesting question, and it won’t be just an intellectual one,” says bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics. “A whole series of experiments show that if you create a robot that moves, but just looks like a whole bunch of gears, and you give someone a sledgehammer and say, ‘Smash it,’ they’ll smash it. If you put a little furry cover on it, so now it moves but it looks organic, they won’t hit it.”

Whenever a robot is more humanoid or more animal-like in appearance, people are more reluctant to harm it.

“We already have robots that in one sense or another are being treated more like animals,” Wolpe says. “As soon as you begin to give robots the appearance of life, people begin to project onto it the feelings that they project onto life.”


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Kung Fu Cat? The nature of martial arts

Ever noticed how a startled cat reacts? It crouches low to the ground. The cat becomes a coiled spring, ready to move in any direction.

Kyle Albers, who graduated from Emory in May with a degree in environmental studies, notices these things. He holds a second-degree black belt in Taekwondo, studies To Shin Do, and is a student of Japanese swordsmanship.

For a senior project, Albers investigated the connections between martial arts and the natural world, and he has created a blog on the topic.

While a startled cat flexes into a crouch, or “grounds out,” he notes that humans in this situation tend to tense up and lock their knees, limiting their ability to react. The behaviors of cats and other animals are just one example of what nature can teach a martial arts practitioner.

“The adaptive cycle of a martial artist parallels to how an ecosystem adapts and evolves to changes,” Albers says. “Every attack that is successfully blocked opens paths for new counters that can be successful offensive techniques.”

The science and ethics of X-Men

“What really interests me in watching comic book super heroes move to the movie screen, 30 and 40 years after their origins, is the change in the way we portray the technology involved,” says bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe. The director of Emory’s Center for Ethics, Wolpe was a big comic book fan growing up.

In the original Spider Man story, Peter Parker gained super powers after he was bitten by a spider that was exposed to radiation.

At that time, Wolpe notes, there was an enormous fear that we were going to be “nuked” by nuclear weapons. “Radiation was the scientific phenomenon around which people had fear and mystery. That isn’t how we think about radiation anymore. Now it’s how we think about genetics.”

So when the first Spider Man movie came out in 2002, the spider that bit Parker had been genetically manipulated instead of radiated.

The X-Men movie series, about a group of genetically mutated super heroes, is a great example of a storyline that is on target with a technology that holds a sense of potential, along with fear and mystery, Wolpe says.

The latest in the series, “X-Men: First Class,” opens June 3.

“The story of the X-Men is really a dramatic representation about what happens when there is a minority group that’s feared by the majority,” Wolpe says. “They created that minority through genetics.”

The mutations portrayed in the series, such as the ability to shoot laser beams from your eyeballs, are implausible as sudden genetic mutations. But many enhanced powers are perfectly plausible as biotechnological developments, Wolpe says.

Bio-engineers are working on ways to improve things such as memory and strength that would mimic the best achievements of humans, and we might one day even be able to borrow traits from animals, Wolpe says.

“One of the great challenges for us is how do we resist the temptation to use genetic technology in humans beings for reasons that are less than life saving,” he says.


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Passionate ecologist seeks outdoorsy date

Emory biology student Tom Quigley wants a date, and he wants it bad. Can you recommend him?

He’s wooing the Sierra Club’s Best Internship on Earth. Quigley is among 25 semifinalists from across the country vying for $5,000 in gear and cash, and a summer job making videos of Sierra Club outings.

Check out his video application, above. (Don’t miss this bonus track of him playing acoustic guitar and singing "Little Lion Man.”)

If you think Quigley’s got what it takes to treat nature right, go to the Sierra Club site and leave a comment for him.

Sparking a love of chemistry in teens

“Somebody once asked me why I became a chemist. It’s because I get paid to blow things up,” said Doug Mulford, an Emory chemistry lecturer, as he set a flame to a hydrogen balloon. The explosion greeted more than 200 DeKalb County high school students who visited Emory recently to celebrate the International Year of Chemistry.

The teens were split into groups labeled “hydrogen,” “bromine” and “cobalt,” and treated to demonstrations by Emory chemistry students of how to make fake snow, turn a bouncy ball into glass and use a banana as a hammer.

“A lot of people tend to think that chemistry has nothing to do with their everyday lives, which is really interesting, because essentially you are a really big beaker of chemicals,” Mulford said.

The event was hosted by the Center for Chemical Evolution, a research and educational outreach program based at Emory and Georgia Tech, funded by the NSF and NASA.

“I love chemistry, and I think that it gets a really bad reputation,” said Meisa Salaita, education coordinator for the center. “To expose students to how fun chemistry can be is really important and sort of my life’s mission.”

Andre Smith, a junior at Redan High School, said he especially liked joining a theatrical performance of how molecules form more complex structures. “It’s fun how you can just put two things together and something amazing comes out.”

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Cultivating brains for science

Cultivating brains for science

By Carol Clark

When Jordan Rose began carrying buckets of brains to public school classrooms in metro Atlanta, he knew he had found his calling.

“I was having a great time, doing something that I was passionate about,” he recalls of introducing middle and high school students to a retinue of craniums, including those of rats, a manatee, rhesus macaques and a human.

It was 2000 and Rose had just graduated from Emory with a degree in neuroscience and behavioral biology. In an interlude before medical school, he joined Emory’s Center for Science Education (CSE) as outreach coordinator of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, a consortium of eight Atlanta universities. His job was to provide hands-on science to public school students in grades K-12, and to motivate them to pursue science careers.

Middle school kids who gloved up to touch a human brain for the first time were especially thrilled, Rose says. “They would put a finger into a ventricle and start firing off comments and questions: ‘I didn’t know the brain was hollow. What do all these wrinkles mean? Is it true you only use 10 percent of your brain?’”

After learning about the parts of the brain and their functions, students were told to draw an imaginary animal. Then they were asked to shape the animal’s brain in clay, based on the animal’s behaviors and interactions with its environment. “One kid said his animal had ESP,” Rose recalls. “He created a new part of the brain that stuck up from the middle.”

Around this time, Rose received acceptance letters from two medical schools. He turned them down. That fateful decision led him to his current role as assistant director of the CSE.

“I thought about what my job would be like as a physician, spending time in hospitals, and I realized that wasn’t for me,” Rose says. He leans back in his chair in his CSE office, located in an older home on the edge of campus. “I saw a niche that I could fill, where I could apply my passion for teaching, and for science.”

A loud snore comes from somewhere beneath his desk. Humphrey – the pug dog that accompanies Rose to work – groans, rolls over, and resumes snoring. Rose breaks into a wide grin: Smiling is clearly his natural state.

Soon after the Long Island native enrolled at Emory he joined a juggling troop: Emory’s Amazing Throwing-Up Society. The now defunct EAT-US (spelled in Greek letters and pronounced ehy-HA-toos) often performed to raise money for charity.
Rose, right, juggling for charity as an undergraduate, with a fellow member of Emory's Amazing Throwing-Up Society.

“I learned to juggle four balls, rings, clubs and flaming torches,” Rose says, recalling that he once set his pants on fire.

In biology lab he met his future wife, fellow student Laura Smith. “We fell in love over a fetal pig,” Rose says. “It might have been the intoxicating aroma of formaldehyde.” (Laura Rose now works for the CDC and the couple has a five-month-old son, Ryan.)

Pat Marsteller, director of the CSE and Rose’s senior advisor, recruited him to join the center, which is dedicated to transforming science education on the Emory campus and beyond. The idea is for students of all ages to actually investigate questions, by collecting information in a scientific manner and analyzing it themselves.

Rose currently heads up the CSE program called PRISM (Problems and Research to Integrate Science and Mathematics). Emory graduate students work with area K-12 teachers to develop problem-based learning for science classes. The result is lesson plans with gripping names, like “Dial M for Molecule,” “Adding Fuel to the Fire,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Sealed with a Kiss” and “Got Gas?”
Murder or a grisly accident? Psychology grad student Sabrina Sidaras (on floor) helps high school students learn to think like scientists, as part of the PRISM program.

“We want graduate students to influence a new generation of students, by gaining more confidence and skills to explain their research to non-scientists,” Rose says. “And we want Atlanta school kids to understand how science works.”

PRISM is also a boon to Atlanta teachers, giving them the time and resources to do their jobs better. “Teachers often aren’t treated like professionals,” Rose says. “They get no love, and that’s what we try to give them.”

While working, Rose pursued a master’s at the Rollins School of Public Health, graduating in 2006. For his thesis, he evaluated the science literacy of Emory freshmen. The students fared better than U.S. adults overall, but he found that they needed improvement in understanding how scientists use theories, laws and hypotheses. Science faculty told Rose that they want students to learn to interpret evidence in ways that helps them make better choices in life, a goal that defines the CSE’s mission.

“We don’t expect everyone to become a scientist,” Rose says, “but we think it’s important for future teachers, lawyers – and everyone who votes – to know how to interpret science.”

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How a hike in the woods led to a math 'Eureka!'

Where do “eureka” moments come from? Emory mathematician Ken Ono found his on a hiking trail in north Georgia.

He and post-doctoral fellow Zach Kent were on the way to Tallulah Falls last October when the patterns they noticed in the trees, the leaves and the switchbacks on the trail suddenly revealed the mystery of the fractal repeating structure for partition numbers.

“We realized the process of these numbers folding over on themselves is very much like what you see in the woods,” Ono says. “It was kind of a poetic moment,” he recalls of looking out on a mountainous valley, knowing that nature had helped them crack a mystery that had baffled some of the greatest minds in math.
While on a hike, far from their desks and daily distractions, the mathematicians noticed patterns in the woods that solved their problem. Photo by Carol Clark.

“It’s been, honestly, my lifelong passion, this one question of the divisibility properties of these numbers,” Ono says.

Last year, the American Institute of Mathematics and the National Science Foundation funded a team led by Ono to tackle the problem. Ono, Kent and Amanda Folsom spent months building a theory to explain these divisibility properties, developing a framework that seemed to match the data.

“The problem for a theoretical mathematician is you can observe some patterns, but how do you know these patterns go on forever? We were, frankly, completely stuck. We were stumped,” Ono says.

The hike had been intended as simply a way to enjoy a beautiful day. “Going into the woods, escaping from day-to-day tasks, is actually vital for me and my work,” Ono says. “It gives me an opportunity to really focus on really difficult little questions that may fit into a bigger theory.”

So what is an “aha” moment? “The way I see it, it’s not something that happens to you instantly,” Ono says. “It just happens to be the moment that you realize the fruits of all your hard work.”

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Wilderness trail leads to Emory stories

Life is like a Cliff shuttle: It tends to go full circle. Kim Urquhart's vacation took her back to her college years as an adventure guide in New Mexico, and around to her current role as editor of Emory Report.

By Carol Clark

During her college years, Emory Report editor Kim Urquhart spent her summers working at the Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico. A high-country wilderness spread over more than 200-square-miles, Philmont is rich in wildlife and history.

“Philmont is like Mecca for Boy Scouts,’” Urquhart says. “It was the ultimate summer job.”

Urquhart worked as a photographer, as a mountain-bike instructor at a backcountry camp, and as a guide to the petroglyphs and archeological sites of the ancient Pueblo people who inhabited the area as far back as 1200 BC.

One fall, she extended her stay to work as an Autumn Adventure guide. The Autumn Adventure program allows all-adult groups to experience Philmont, which is normally geared to teenaged Scouts.
A feisty Western hognose snake greets hikers on a Philmont trail. Photo by Kim Urquhart.

Urquhart recalls that her most memorable time was leading an all-woman crew, the mothers of Cub Scouts from Norman, Oklahoma, on a backpacking trip. Something about being out in the wilderness forges bonds with people, she says. “You’re experiencing all this beauty with people of different ages and interests, but you all share this love of the place.”

The group of women kept returning each year. They stayed in touch with Urquhart, and this fall, they asked if she would join them for the 15th anniversary of their Philmont adventures. So in late September, Urquhart spent her vacation with the women in her old stomping grounds: Philmont’s North Ponil Canyon.

She didn’t exactly get away from it all, however: The group was guided by Allison Vinson, who graduated from Emory in May with a degree in environmental studies.
Allison Vinson puts her environmental studies degree to good use as a wilderness guide. Photo by Kim Urquhart.

“I couldn’t help myself,” Urquhart says, explaining why she worked on a multi-media slide show of Vinson during her vacation (see below). “It was fun to find an Emory connection in this remote canyon.”

Vinson comes from a long line of Emory alumni, and counts environmental studies’ Lance Gunderson and Oxford College sociologist Mike McQuaide among her most influential teachers.

“Coming to Philmont was good for me right after graduation, because I’m able to use what I learned in college,” Vinson says. “My goal is to educate people about conservation through hands-on learning.”

In addition to guiding, Vinson has worked as an invasive species specialist at Philmont, and wrote a chapter in the Philmont field guide to flora and fauna.

Despite all the time she had spent in Philmont, Urquhart learned a lot of new things thanks to Vinson. “She talked about how in an Emory botany class she started a field notebook that she wrote in almost every day,” Urquhart says. “She had it with her and still uses it.”

Fire ecology was another topic Vinson knew well. “Fires had burned through where we hiked, changing the face of the canyon,” Urquhart says. “I’d go to a secret spot that I remembered, and it would be gone.”

In transit between Philmont and Atlanta, Urquhart had dinner in a Santa Fe restaurant. One of the eccentric locals started telling her about his home: A bus that he bought through a surplus sale and parked in the desert nearby.

“He showed me a picture on his cell phone, and it was a Cliff shuttle!” Urquhart says.

The man explained that he couldn’t drive the former shuttle bus because it runs on natural gas, and there are no local sources. But sometimes he pretends he’s going somewhere by flipping the signs from “Haygood Drive” to “Clifton Road.”

And with that irresistible Emory story, Urquhart’s vacation became a true busman’s holiday.

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Physics flies off the rails in 'Unstoppable'

It’s a gripping premise: “1 million tons of steel. 100,000 lives. 100 miles to impact.”

The new movie “Unstoppable,” features a runaway train, loaded with toxic chemicals, speeding towards a town with a bend in the tracks. It’s actually loosely based on a 2001 incident when a renegade locomotive was halted just short of Kenton, Ohio.

But is the science in “Unstoppable” accurate? Could the train’s impact decimate a town?

Emory physicist Sidney Perkowitz applies the basic formula of kinetic energy – one-half the mass times the speed squared – to compare the impact of the “Unstoppable” train to nuclear bombs and an asteroid.

A hydrogen bomb carries energy equivalent to 20 million tons of TNT. A train weighing one million tons, traveling at 50 miles per hour, as the movie’s publicity describes it, would carry the equivalent of 60 tons of TNT. “That would be a major explosion,” Perkowitz says.

But can a train really weigh 1 million tons?

“I think whoever wrote the publicity forgot the difference between tons and pounds,” Perkowitz says. If the train had a weight of 1 million pounds, then it would only have the energy of 60 pounds of TNT.

“That’s certainly enough to take out a building,” he says. “It would turn an SUV into molecules and it would be a terrible crash, but not enough to take out a whole city block.”

Interesting science, but not likely to stop movie goers in their tracks. “It sounds like a fun film,” Perkowitz says. “I would sit back and munch some popcorn and let the train run over me, and not worry too much about the math.”

Check out this video of Perkowitz talking about the physics in the movie “Iron Man,” and how it has some basis for reality in the U.S. military.

Sound too far-fetched? Watch this news video from CNN, below, about a half-man, half-robot contraption developed by the defense contractor Raytheon:

Ditch the guilt and be happy

Mary Loftus, associate editor of Emory Magazine, describes the top 10 things that religious leaders say about happiness in the Huffington Post:

One of the things that most irritated me about Sunday school -- and there were many, including the fact that I had to wear tights, keep quiet and not ask why God wasn't a girl -- is that we were told, however covertly, that happiness was selfish.

Religion, I came to believe, was all about self-sacrifice. How could we be happy when babies in Angola were starving (or being sent to purgatory by the Pope)? How could we be happy when already we bent so readily toward sin? How could we be happy when we had to constantly be on guard against greed, pride, sloth, lust and gluttony (i.e., cool stuff, bragging, hanging around, casual sex and cookies)?

Come to find out at a recent "Summit on Happiness," hosted by Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion, many of the world's religions have nothing against humans seeking to be happy.

Can I really ditch the guilt and go for the gusto?

According to spiritual leaders from the Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist traditions, the answer is yes -- with a few conditions.

His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, the star of the show, has said that the very purpose of life is to be happy, so long as "one person or group does not seek happiness or glory at the expense of others." He didn't disappoint at the summit, sticking up for happiness as well as world peace at every opportunity, and laughing or chuckling fairly consistently throughout the event.

The Dalai Lama was joined on the panel by Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth and Islamic scholar Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr of George Washington University.

They agreed wholeheartedly that faithfulness and happiness were not mutually exclusive.

Click here to read the top 10 things she learned about spiritual happiness.

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In praise of tiny, perfect moles

It’s far into the future and science can do pretty much anything. Rabbits are a luminous green, pigs have human brain tissue and lions have been genetically spliced with lambs. That’s the premise of Margaret Atwood’s latest book “The Year of the Flood.”

Adam One is the leader of a sect known as “God’s Gardeners,” devoted to the blending of science and religion. Most of human life has been obliterated, but God’s Gardeners believe in the healing power of song. As the world is ending, they sing the praises of Earth’s creatures, like the tiny, perfect mole. And the little carrion beetles “that seek unlikely places. We turn our husks to the elements and tidy up our spaces.”

You’ll get goose bumps and giggles watching these videos of Elizabeth Saliers, backed by Emory musicians, singing some of the hymns from the novel. The special performances were for Atwood herself, while she was at Emory recently to give a series of talks on science fiction.

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