Peachtree to Paris: Emory delegation headed to U.N. climate talks

On a recent Saturday, 30 students represented a country, or block of countries, to simulate the U.N. talks. Naomi Maisel, right, made the case for India. "You have to rethink your reality based on all the countries involved and figure out how to make it work," she says. (Beckysteinphotography.com)

By Carol Clark

More than 40,000 people from around the world are expected to descend on Paris, France, from November 30 to December 11, for what many see as the best chance yet for a universal climate agreement. The goal of the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21) is to keep global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Everyone from President Obama to Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed will be on the ground in Paris for high-stakes conversations about the fate of the planet. Ten Emory undergraduates and two faculty are also joining the historic event with the status of official U.N. observers.

“This is an unprecedented time,” says Taylor McNair, a senior majoring in environmental sciences and business. “People are coming into this conference with a mindset they have never had before. I’m optimistic that there will be some progress coming out of Paris, and that we will see some serious change during the next few years.”

McNair and three other Emory students will actually spend part of COP21 inside the main hall where delegates from 195 countries will negotiate reductions of their greenhouse gas emissions. And all 10 of the students will be gathering information from the milieu of related conferences, demonstrations, exhibits and informal discussions that will be humming around the main COP21 meeting.

The students will post photos and dispatches on a special web site they are creating for the event (http://climate.emorydomains.org), through the Emory Writing Program's Domain of One's Own. And they will use social media to further connect Emory and the Atlanta community to what’s happening in Paris, as it happens. You can follow their conversations on their Twitter handle @EmoryinParis, and via their hash tag: #PeachtreeToParis. Senior Tyler Stern is helping develop the team's social media platforms, which also include Instagram (EmoryParis15) and Snapchat (EmoryInParis).

After four hours of tense negotiations, students participating in simulated U.N. talks were only able to achieve caps on greenhouse gas emissions for a temperature rise of 3.5 degrees Celsius, short of the 2 degrees goal. 

“Climate change is not an issue that is coming in 100 years. It’s happening now,” says Naomi Maisel, a junior majoring in anthropology who will be making the trip. “We want to convey the sentiments of the people that we meet and give Emory students a sense of how the rest of the world is thinking about and dealing with climate change."

The students plan to also bring back lessons for what everyone can do to get involved. They will help organize an Emory “Climate Week” and a series of COP21 related events on campus in the Spring – including art exhibits, panel discussions and special lectures – in conjunction with the Climate@Emory initiative.

Debating the fate of the planet.

“I’m optimistic that some kind of meaningful deal will be reached in Paris,” says Mae Bowen, a senior majoring in environmental sciences and political science, who is headed for COP21. “But once a deal is made, that’s when the real work starts, making that deal come to fruition.”

The Paris trip is the capstone to a Coalition of the Liberal Arts (CoLA) course, aimed at integrating the liberal arts experience across the humanities and sciences. The course, “Paris is an Explanation: Understanding Climate Change at the 2015 United Nations Meeting in France,” was developed and taught by three faculty: Wesley Longhofer, an expert in organization and management at Goizueta Business School; Eri Saikawa, an expert in climate science in the department of environmental sciences and Rollins School of Public Health; and Sheila Tefft, senior lecturer in the Emory Writing Program. Bowen and another undergraduate, Adam Goldstein, also helped develop the course.

Both Longhofer and Saikawa will accompany the students on the trip to Paris.

Throughout the fall, the students are exploring climate change from environmental, business, media and political perspectives. Saikawa led discussions about the complex atmospheric science surrounding emissions. Longhofer organized mock UN negotiations so that the students could better understand perspectives of the various countries involved. Tefft focused on issues of communications and trained the students in journalistic techniques and technology, including podcasting and social media.

The Emory students have a range of research interests that they plan to hone in on as COP21 is underway. Below are brief bios, and a guide to their plans for Paris.

Taylor McNair

BUSINESS: Taylor McNair is a senior from West Port, Connecticut, majoring in business and environmental sciences. “I have a big interest in renewable energy,” he says. “I’ve had some work experience in that field and it’s helped shape what I think will be the defining challenge of the future: How will we switch from cheap fossil fuels and power our lives and economies with renewable energy?”

He notes that major companies like Google and Facebook have already announced they will be moving toward renewable energy sources for their datasets.

“We need more market-based solutions for addressing climate change,” he says. “It’s beginning to make economic sense to make investments in energy efficiency and renewable fuel sources. I think more people are waking up to the fact that this transition can not only be beneficial from an environmental and health aspect, but also from a financial aspect.”

POLICYMAKING: Mae Bowen is a senior majoring in environmental sciences and political science. Bowen, who is from Panama City, Florida, personally experienced the social and ecological impacts of hurricanes and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Even after the beaches near her home were cleaned and declared safe following the spill, tourists did not return for years due to public perceptions and media coverage.

Mae Bowen

“I was fascinated and frustrated by that,” Bowen says. “I’ve been thinking about the best ways to communicate environmental issues ever since.”

Bowen’s other passion is policymaking. She is a member of the Emory International Relations Association – a team of students that travels to universities across the country to participate in simulations of U.N. negotiations, based on real-world situations and research. While these exercises help Bowen see the challenges of policymaking, they have not made her cynical. “The fact that we have people from different countries and cultures coming together to try and solve a global problem like climate change – that’s kind of awesome,” she says. “I’m just so excited to go to COP21 and get to hear the actual deliberations over the issue I care most about.”

The Paris talks may not achieve the goal of reducing emissions to reach the goal of 2 degrees, “but it’s going to take us forward,” Bowen says. “I’m a big picture person. I would rather have a deal that goes part of the way than to have nothing at all. You have to take things one step at a time.”

Savannah Miller

EMORY AND ATLANTA: Savannah Miller, a senior majoring in environmental sciences and creative writing is focused on climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts at the local level. She is currently an intern for the city of Atlanta, working with the team developing a major climate action plan. “Emory was an early supporter of the Atlanta Better Buildings Challenge,” Miller says. “The university has been a leader in sustainability for years and our efforts keep gaining momentum.”

While at the Paris talks, she will be researching how other communities from around the world are implementing adaptive technologies and strategies for increasing energy efficiency. “One of our biggest goals is to bring back information about environmental policies and communicate them in a way that reaches our generation,” Miller says.

In addition to contributing to the Emory group web site for COP21, Miller has developed her own site, sustainable-directions.com, for communicating environmental issues. Her first post looked at the connections between climate change and recent historic flooding in her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina.

Naomi Maisel

AGRICULTURE: Naomi Maisel, a junior majoring in anthropology, is researching the impact of climate change on agriculture and food security. “Farmers are starting to see effects faster and more intensely, especially in the developing world,” Maiesel says. “We don’t know if a lot of food systems can withstand more or less rainfall, more or less heat, and higher concentrations of carbon dioxide.”

Maisel contacted a farmer outside of Paris who has agreed to give the students a tour of his farm and explain his experience of climate change.

While growing up in San Diego, Maisel recalls that many discussions about climate change were debates about whether it was happening. “Now, most of the conversations I’m hearing revolve around questions like, how bad is it going to be and what are we doing about it,” she says. “People are finally starting to take it seriously. And they realize that it is not just a science problem. It’s an economic issue, a security issue and a public health issue. Everybody is going to be affected, so everybody needs to be involved.”

Clara Perez, a junior majoring in sociology and sustainability, is focused on how climate change will disproportionately impact lower socio-economic groups.

Caiwei Huang (a junior majoring in interdisciplinary studies and political science) and Siyue Zong (a senior environmental sciences major) both want to follow the crucial negotiations of the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters: The United States and China. (Huang is developing a web site to introduce students to the fundamentals of Chinese politics: thecapitalc.org.)

Samuel Budnyk, a junior majoring in comparative literature and music, is especially interested in communicating to the general public and hopes to write a post a day for the Emory Wheel during the talks.

Adam Goldstein and Mark Leone (both seniors majoring in business) will be focused on gathering information about climate finance – the move toward investing in low-carbon and more resilient economies.

BRAIN Initiative grant to fund study of sensory-motor circuitry

"We hope that our project will lead to an algorithm for basal ganglia and motor control circuits involved in movement control," says Emory neuroscientist Dieter Jaeger. (Emory Photo/Video)

To move or not to move. That is the question the brain grapples with routinely as it receives a stimulus, decides whether to direct the body to respond with an action, then sends the appropriate signals to control the behavior. It is a common and fundamental process, but we know little about how the brain actually does it.

“New technology allows us to monitor brain activity at high spatial and temporal resolution, and do so over long periods of time,” says Dieter Jaeger, a neuroscientist in Emory University’s Department of Biology. “This technology is finally opening the door to address questions related to the circuits involved in coordinating the relationship between neural sensing and physical action.”

Jaeger recently received a grant from the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative to explore these questions about neural circuitry. He shares the $1.7 million award with Garrett Stanley, a neuroscientist in the Emory-Georgia Tech Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME). The BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) was launched by President Obama in 2014 as part of a widespread effort to gain fundamental insights for treating a range of brain disorders.

Areas of the brain involved in sensory input and movement include the basal ganglia, the thalamus and the cortex. What’s less clear is how neural activity flows through these areas, connecting a sensation to a decision to make a movement. Debilitating and difficult to treat neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and dystonia are caused by dysfunction of this circuitry.

The Stanley lab specializes in tactile sensing and information processing, while the Jaeger lab is focused on motor and muscle coordination and control.

Image from the cover of the NIH brochure, "The BRAIN Initiative."

For their BRAIN project, Stanley and Jaeger are combining their two areas of expertise and experimenting with a mouse model. Techniques such as genetic voltage sensing will allow them to gain images of cortical electrical activity, with millisecond precision.

“We understand a lot about the biology of the brain,” Jaeger says. “The challenge now is to move beyond biology to algorithm. We hope that our project will lead to an algorithm for basal ganglia and motor cortical circuits involved in movement control.”

Such an algorithm could generate a computer program to simulate activity of the brain. “We could use this computer program to make predictions and run simulations,” Jaeger says. “It would be a great tool to test our understanding and compare against data. It’s important, because without such a tool, many clinical approaches to brain malfunction are groping in the dark.”

“Gaining basic insights into motor circuit function may reveal new possibilities for the treatment of neural diseases, as well as a better understanding of deep brain stimulation treatments already in use,” adds Stanley.

The project grew out of another collaboration between Jaeger and Stanley. They are also co-principal investigators of an NIH-sponsored training grant in computational neuroscience, which targets a new generation of scientists bound together through questions about how the brain computes.

 “Through this interaction, Dieter and I got to know each other better, started to talk more science, and eventually came up with this project,” Stanley says.

Mathematicians find 'magic key' to drive Ramanujan's taxi-cab number

A British taxi numbered 1729 sparked the most famous anecdote in math and led to the origin of "taxi-cab numbers." The incident is included in an upcoming biopic of Ramanujan, "The Man Who Knew Infinity," featuring Dev Patel in the lead role. Above is a still from the movie. (Pressman Films.)

By Carol Clark

Taxi-cab numbers, among the most beloved integers in math, trace their origins to 1918 and what seemed like a casual insight by the Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan. Now mathematicians at Emory University have discovered that Ramanujan did not just identify the first taxi-cab number – 1729 – and its quirky properties. He showed how the number relates to elliptic curves and K3 surfaces – objects important today in string theory and quantum physics.

“We’ve found that Ramanujan actually discovered a K3 surface more than 30 years before others started studying K3 surfaces and they were even named,” says Ken Ono, a number theorist at Emory. “It turns out that Ramanujan’s work anticipated deep structures that have become fundamental objects in arithmetic geometry, number theory and physics.”

Ono and his graduate student Sarah Trebat-Leder are publishing a paper about these new insights in the journal Research in Number Theory. Their paper also demonstrates how one of Ramanujan’s formulas associated with the taxi-cab number can reveal secrets of elliptic curves.

“We were able to tie the record for finding certain elliptic curves with an unexpected number of points, or solutions, without doing any heavy lifting at all,” Ono says. “Ramanujan’s formula, which he wrote on his deathbed in 1919, is that ingenious. It’s as though he left a magic key for the mathematicians of the future. All we had to do was recognize the key’s power and use it to drive solutions in a modern context.”

“This paper adds yet another truly beautiful story to the list of spectacular recent discoveries involving Ramanujan’s notebooks,” says Manjul Bhargava, a number theorist at Princeton University. “Elliptic curves and K3 surfaces form an important next frontier in mathematics, and Ramanujan gave remarkable examples illustrating some of their features that we didn’t know before. He identified a very special K3 surface, which we can use to understand a certain special family of elliptic curves. These new examples and insights are certain to spawn further work that will take mathematics forward.”

A close-up of the taxi-cab plate, in a scene from the upcoming movie, "The Man Who Knew Infinity." (Pressman Films.)

Ramanujan, a largely self-taught mathematician, seemed to solve problems instinctively and said his formulas came to him in the form of visions from a Hindu goddess. During the height of British colonialism, he left his native India to become a protégé of mathematician G.H. Hardy at Cambridge University in England.

By 1918, the British climate and war-time rationing had taken their toll on Ramanujan, who was suffering from tuberculosis. He lay ailing in a clinic near London when Hardy came to visit.

Wanting to cheer up Ramanujan, Hardy said that he had arrived in taxi number 1729 and described the number “as rather a dull one.” To Hardy’s surprise, Ramanujan sat up in bed and replied, “No, Hardy, it’s a very interesting number! It’s the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”

Ramanujan, who had an uncanny sense for the idiosyncratic properties of numbers, somehow knew that 1729 can be represented as 1 cubed + 12 cubed and 9 cubed + 10 cubed, and no smaller positive number can be written in two such ways.

This incident launched the “Hardy-Ramanujan number,” or “taxi-cab number,” into the world of math. To date, only six taxi-cab numbers have been discovered that share the properties of 1729. (These are the smallest numbers which are the sum of cubes in n different ways. For n=2 the number is 1729.)

The original taxi-cab number 1729 is a favorite nerdy allusion in television sitcoms by Matt Groening. The number shows up frequently as an inside joke in episodes of “Futurama” and the “The Simpsons.”

But like much of Ramanujan’s discoveries, 1729 turned out to contain hidden meanings that make it much more than a charming mathematical oddity.

“This is the ultimate example of how Ramanujan anticipated theories,” Ono says. “When looking through his notes, you may see what appears to be just a simple formula. But if you look closer, you can often uncover much deeper implications that reveal Ramanujan’s true powers.”

Jeremy Irons portrays G. H. Hardy and Dev Patel plays Ramanujan in "The Man Who Knew Infinity." (Pressman Films.)

Much of Ono’s career is focused on unraveling Ramanujan mysteries. In 2013, during a trip to England to visit number theorists Andrew Granville and John Coates, Ono rummaged through the Ramanujan archive at Cambridge. He came across a page of formulas that Ramanujan wrote a year after he first pointed out the special qualities of the number 1729 to Hardy. By then, the 32-year-old Ramanujan was back in India but he was still ailing and near death.

“From the bottom of one of the boxes in the archive, I pulled out one of Ramanujan’s deathbed notes,” Ono recalls. “The page mentioned 1729 along with some notes about it. Andrew and I realized that he had found infinitely near misses for Fermat’s Last Theorem for exponent 3. We were shocked by that, and actually started laughing. That was the first tip-off that Ramanujan had discovered something much larger.”

Fermat’s Last Theorem is the idea that certain simple equations have no solutions – the sum of two cubes can never be a cube. Ramanujan used an elliptic curve – a cubic equation and two variables where the largest degree is 3 – to produce infinitely many solutions that were nearly counter examples to Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Elliptic curves have been studied for thousands of years, but only during the last 50 years have applications been found for them outside of mathematics. They are important, for example, for Internet cryptography systems that protect information like bank account numbers.

Ono had worked with K3 surfaces before and he also realized that Ramanujan had found a K3 surface, long before they were officially identified and named by mathematician André Weil during the 1950s. Weil named them in honor of three algebraic masters – Kummer, Kähler and Kodaira – and the mountain K2 in Kashmir.

Just as K2 is an extraordinarily difficult mountain to climb, the process of generalizing elliptic curves to find a K3 surface is considered an exceedingly difficult math problem.

Ono and Trebat-Leder put all the pieces in Ramanujan’s notes together to produce the current paper, illuminating his finds and translating them into a modern framework.

“Ramanujan was using 1729 and elliptic curves to develop formulas for a K3 surface,” Ono says. “Mathematicians today still struggle to manipulate and calculate with K3 surfaces. So it comes as a major surprise that Ramanujan had this intuition all along.”

Ramanujan is well-known in India, and among mathematicians worldwide. He may soon become more familiar to wider audiences through an upcoming movie, “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” by Pressman Films. Ono served as a math consultant for the movie, which stars Dev Patel as Ramanujan and Jeremy Irons as Hardy. (Both Ono and Bhargava are associate producers for the film.)

“Ramanujan’s life and work are both a great human story and a great math story,” Ono says. “And I’m glad that more people are finally going to get to enjoy it.”

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Why women rule, and other hot science topics at the Decatur Book Festival

Illustration: Don Morris

Women can forget about equality with men, warns Emory anthropologist Mel Konner.

It’s even better than that. Why should women embrace mere equality when their movement is toward superiority? It is maleness that has Konner worried in his latest book, “Women After All: Sex, Evolution and the End of Male Supremacy,” which looks at the history and future of gender and power dynamics.

Konner will be one of the featured authors in the ever-popular Science track of the Decatur Book Festival this weekend. He’ll take the stage at 3 pm on Saturday, September 5, at the Marriot Conference Center.

The last line of Konner’s book jacket reads: “Provocative and richly informed, ‘Women After All’ is bound to be controversial across the sexes.”

As Konner acknowledges on his personal web site, the first murmurings came about after a short adaptation of the book ran in the Wall Street Journal. Hundreds of angry men responded within a couple of days. His wife, home alone during that period, double-locked the door. Konner’s editor at the Wall Street Journal apologized for failing to instruct him not to read the comments.

For his part, Konner is hiding in plain sight, saying “Clearly, I’ve touched a nerve, and I’m happy about that.”

Konner talks about a future that his grandson will inhabit, a “new world” that “will be better for him because women help run it.”

You can read more about Konner’s book in the latest issue of Emory Magazine.

Another provocative issue at the intersection of science and society is explored in “Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationships with Immunization,” by Emory historian Elena Conis. She will discuss her book at 4:15 pm on Saturday at the Marriott Conference Center.

Biophysicists take small step in quest for 'robot scientist'

The researchers dubbed their algorithm "Sir Isaac," in a nod to one of the greatest scientists of all time, Sir Isaac Newton. 

By Carol Clark

Biophysicists have taken another small step forward in the quest for an automated method to infer models describing a system’s dynamics – a so-called robot scientist. Nature Communications published the finding – a practical algorithm for inferring laws of nature from time-series data of dynamical systems.

“Our algorithm is a small step,” says Ilya Nemenman, lead author of the study and a professor of physics and biology at Emory University. “It could be described as a toy version of a robot scientist, but even so it may have practical applications. For the first time, we’ve taught a computer how to efficiently search for the laws that underlie arbitrary, natural dynamical systems, including complex, non-linear biological systems.”

Nemenman’s co-author on the paper is Bryan Daniels, a biophysicist at the University of Wisconsin.

Everything that is changing around us and within us – from the relatively simple motion of celestial bodies, to weather and complex biological processes – is a dynamical system. A large part of science is guessing the laws of nature that underlie such systems, summarizing them in mathematical equations that can be used to make predictions, and then testing those equations and predictions through experiments.

“The long-term dream is to harness large-scale computing to make the guesses for us and speed up the process of discovery,” Nemenman says.

Isaac Newton contemplates gravity beneath an apple tree. The intuition of a genius like Newton is one quality that distinguishes human intelligence from even the highest-powered computer and algorithmic program.

While the quest for a true robot scientist, or computerized general intelligence, remains elusive, this latest algorithm represents a new approach to the problem. “We think we have beaten any automated-inference algorithm that currently exists because we focus on getting an approximate solution to a problem, which we can get with much less data,” Nemenman says.

In previous research, John Wikswo, a biophysicist at Vanderbilt University, along with colleagues at Cornell University, applied a software system to automate the scientific process for biological systems.

“We came up with a way to derive a model of cell behavior, but the approach is complicated and slow, and it is limited in the number of variables that it can track – it can’t be scaled to more complicated systems,” Wikswo says. “This new algorithm increases the speed of the necessary calculation by a factor of 100 or more. It provides an elegant method to generate compact and effective models that should allow prediction and control of complex systems.”

Nemenman and Daniels dubbed their new algorithm “Sir Issac.”

The real Sir Isaac Newton serves as a classic example of how the scientific method involves forming hypotheses, then testing them by looking at data and experiments. Newton guessed that the same rules of gravity applied to a falling apple and to the moon in orbit. He used data to test and refine his guess and generated the law of universal gravitation.

To test their algorithm, Nemenman and Daniels created an artificial, model solar system by generating numerical trajectories of planets and comets that move around a sun. In this simplified solar system, only the sun attracted the planets and comets.

Images of the moon by NASA's Galileo spacecraft. Everything that is changing around us and within us – from the relatively simple motion of celestial bodies, to weather and complex biological processes – is a dynamical system.

“We trained our algorithm how to search through a group of laws which were limited enough to be practical, but also flexible enough to explain many different dynamics,” Nemenman explains. “We then gave the algorithm some simulated planetary trajectories, and asked it what makes these planets move. It gave us the universal gravitational force. Not perfectly, but with very good accuracy. The error was just a few percent.”

The algorithm also figured out that force changes velocity, not the position directly. “It gets Newton’s First Law,” Nemenman says, “the fact that in order to predict the possible trajectory of a planet, whether it stays near the sun or flies off into infinity, just knowing its initial position is not enough. The algorithm understands that you also need to know the velocity.”

While most modern-day high school student know Newton’s First Law, it took humanity 2,000 years beyond the time of Aristotle to discover it.

One limitation of the algorithm is inexactness. Getting an approximate model, however, is beneficial as long as the approximation is close enough to make good predictions, Nemenman says.

“Newton’s laws are also approximate, but they have been remarkably beneficial for 350 years,” he says. “We’re still using them to control everything from electron microscopes to rockets.”

Getting an exact description of any complex dynamical system requires large amounts of data, he adds. “In contrast, with our algorithm, we can get an approximate description by using just a few measurements of a system. That makes our method practical.”

The researchers demonstrated, for example, that the algorithm can infer the dynamics of a caricature of an immune receptor in a leukocyte. This type of model could lead to a better understanding of the time-course for the response to an infection or a drug.

In another experiment, the researchers fed the algorithm data on concentrations of just three different species of chemicals involved in glycolysis in yeast. The algorithm generated a model that makes accurate predictions for the full system of this basic metabolic process to consume glucose, which involves seven chemical species.

“If you applied other methods of automatic inference to this system it would typically take tens of thousands of examples to reliably generate the laws that drive these chemical transformations,” Nemenman says. “With our algorithm, we were able to do it with fewer than 100 examples.”

With their experimental collaborators, the researchers are now exploring whether the algorithm can model more complex biological processes, such as the dynamics of insulin secretion in the pancreas and its relationship to the onset of a disease like diabetes. “The biology of insulin secreting cells is extremely complex. Understanding their dynamics on multiple scales is going to be difficult, and may not be possible for years with traditional methods,” Nemenman says. “But we want to see if we can get a good enough approximation with our method to deliver a practical result.”

The intuition of a genius mind like that of Isaac Newton is one quality that distinguishes human intelligence from even the highest-powered computer and algorithmic program.

“You can’t give a machine intuition – at least for now,” Nemenman says. “What we’re hoping we can do is get our computer algorithm to spit out models of phenomena so that we, as scientists, can use them and our intuition to make useful generalizations. It’s easier to generalize from models of specific systems then it is to generalize from various data sets directly.”

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Math shines with the stars in 'The Man Who Knew Infinity'

By Carol Clark

Call it a math bromance. Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy’s collaboration with the obscure, self-taught Indian Srinivasa Ramanujan – during the height of British colonialism – changed math and science forever. The story is finally going mainstream through a major motion picture, “The Man Who Knew Infinity," starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons.

“It’s the story of a man who overcame incredible obstacles to become one of the most important mathematicians of his day,” says Emory mathematician Ken Ono, who served as a consultant for the film. “It’s a great human story. It’s true. And I’m glad that the world is finally going to get to enjoy it.”

The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) will feature a sneak peak of “The Man Who Knew Infinity” on August 6, as part of its centennial celebration, MathFest 2015, in Washington D.C. Ono, a leading expert on Ramanujan’s theories, will lead a panel discussion at the screening event, which begins at 5 pm at the Marriott Wardman Park. Panelists will include Princeton mathematician Manjul Bhargava; Robert Kanigel, who wrote the 1991 book that the movie is based on; and Matt Brown, the screenwriter and director of the movie.

The movie’s world premier is set for September at the Toronto International Film Festival.

In 1913, Ramanujan wrote a letter to Hardy, including creative formulas that clearly showed his brilliance. Hardy invited Ramanujan to come to Cambridge to study and collaborate, a daring move during a time of deep prejudice.

“Together, they produced phenomenal results,” Ono says. “They changed mathematics and they changed the course of science.”

Ken Ono on the set with Jeremy Irons, who plays Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy. (Photo by Sam Pressman.)

A relatively unknown director, Matt Brown spent eight years trying to get the movie project off the ground. He eventually found backing from the producer Ed Pressman of Pressman Films.

“This is not your typical Hollywood film,” Brown says of the final product. “A lot of movies that deal with scientific subjects just mention the science and go straight to the human story. We wanted to honor the math in this film, so that mathematicians could appreciate it as well as other audience members. One way we tried to do that was to show the passion the characters have for the subject.”

When Brown called Ono out of the blue last August and asked him to help with the math on the film, Ono did not hesitate. He was soon on a plane from Atlanta to London to begin putting in 16-hour days on the set at Pinewood Studios with the cast and crew.

“I’ve never met anybody with more energy and enthusiasm for his work than Ken,” Brown says. “It was invaluable to me as a director to have him go over the script and make sure that the math was accurate. He was incredibly kind and patient. It gave me confidence.”

Ono also worked closely with the art department, to get details of the math visuals right, and coached the stars, Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons. “Ken helped the actors understand philosophically what was behind the mathematics,” Brown says. “He gave them a little window into it. That’s important because when an actor grasps the meaning of the lines, he can add nuance and subtext to a performance.”

Ultimately, the film is about the relationship between Hardy and Ramanujan, Brown says. “Hardy fought really hard to get Ramanujan honored and bring him into the elite of Trinity College at Cambridge. Hardy basically staked his career on him.”

It was especially risky since Ramanujan did not work like a traditional academic. He did not see the need of providing proofs for his fantastic formulas, and believed that they came to him as visions from a goddess.

“Ramanujan saw the world, and math, in a spiritual way,” Brown says. “It’s incredible that he wound up at Cambridge with Hardy, an atheist, as his mentor.”

Unfortunately, while Hardy proved a great academic mentor for Ramanujan, it took longer for their friendship to evolve. “This movie tells a story about the cost that comes when people wait out of fear to connect more deeply in their relationships,” Brown says.

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Emory's Ken Ono trumpets U.S. win at International Math Olympiad in Thailand

Elphie selfie: Ono stopped in at an elephant sanctuary and snapped this photo during his visit to Thailand for the International Math Olympiad.

Emory mathematician Ken Ono delivered a special lecture recently at the International Mathematical Olympiad, an annual world championship for high school students from more than 100 countries. The trip to Chiang Mai, Thailand, for the event proved more than worthwhile when the six-member U.S. team took first place.

“This is a super big deal,” Ono says. “It has been 20 years since the USA has won the IMO. We should be super proud of the great work done by these six high schoolers under their coach, Po-Shen Loh.”

In addition to his talk, Ono treated the math Olympians to clips from an upcoming film about Indian math genius Srinavasa Ramanujan. Ono served as the math consultant for the film, titled “The Man Who Knew Infinity.”

Watch a highlight reel of the IMO event below. (Ono is the one wearing the Hawaiian shirt.)


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The math of shark skin

July is shark month at Emory. We’re celebrating the science surrounding our fascination with sharks – creatures that have evolved extraordinary abilities during 450 million years of swimming in the oceans.

By Carol Clark

“Sharks are almost perfectly evolved animals. We can learn a lot from studying them,” says Emory mathematician Alessandro Veneziani.

As an expert in fluid dynamics, Veneziani is particularly interested in the skin of sharks, which is not smooth – as might be expected for such a streamlined, efficient swimmer – but irregular and rough. “It’s counterintuitive,” Veneziani says. “One would expect that smooth skin would make a shark faster in the water but it’s not true, and there is a mathematical reason.”

The ridges, or riblets, on shark skin break up vortexes of water and reduce drag, a phenomena known as the riblet effect. Using differential equations, mathematicians have duplicated this effect so it can be applied to industry. Aircraft, for instance, are painted with special finishes to create a riblet effect.

Veneziani once worked on a project for a European swimwear company. They used the math of shark skin to create swimsuit fabric for competitive swimmers. Tests showed that these swimsuits could significantly reduce drag in the water, to the point that they were banned from the Olympics in 2008.

“In the Olympics, you are not allowed to swim like a shark,” Veneziani says.

The time spent studying the math of shark skin was not wasted effort for Veneziani. He now applies similar principles of fluid dynamics to study how blood flows through human arteries. His lab creates computer simulations to help doctors decide on the best course of action for patients with cardiovascular disease.

“One of the great things about mathematics is that you can gain experience in one specialty, like shark skin, and use it in a completely different area, like blood dynamics,” Veneziani says. “Math is the common language of nature.”

Related:
The math of your heart

Calving icebergs fall back, spring forward, causing glacial earthquakes

"We've provided an unprecedented understanding of how a glacial earthquake evolves," says Emory physicist Justin Burton. The research focused on Helheim Glacier in Greenland, above. Photo by NASA/Jim Yungel.

By Carol Clark

When a massive iceberg breaks off from the front of a glacier it can fall backwards, slamming into the glacier with such force that it reverses the ice flow for several minutes and causes it to drop, producing an earthquake that can be measured across the globe.

The journal Science is publishing the discovery, including detailed documentation of the forces involved in these iceberg calving events and an explanation for the causes of glacial earthquakes. The research marks a major step toward the ability to measure the size of iceberg calving events in near real-time and from anywhere in the world.

“Glaciers are extremely sensitive indicators of climate change,” says co-author Justin Burton, a physicist at Emory University who specializes in laboratory modeling of glacial forces. “Having a quantitative understanding of how our polar regions are losing ice is crucial to any forecasting related to climate change, in particular sea-level rise and its environmental and economic impacts.”

Placing a GPS sensor. (Swansea)

The study, which focused on Helheim Glacier in the Greenland Ice Sheet, also included scientists from the universities of Swansea, Newcastle and Sheffield in the UK and the universities of Columbia and Michigan in the U.S.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is disappearing at a faster rate than Antarctica, and shows no sign of slowing down. As much as half of that loss is due not to melting, but to icebergs breaking off and discharging into the sea, a process known as calving. As sheets of ice taller than a New York skyscraper fall over and collapse into the water they release energy equivalent to several nuclear bombs.

In 2003, scientists discovered the existence of glacial earthquakes. They knew that iceberg calving caused these quakes, but it was unclear why. A regular earthquake originates from stress building up from deep within the Earth, which then gets released suddenly. A glacial earthquake, however, originates on the surface and happens in relative slow motion, during the 10 to 15 minutes it takes an iceberg to flip 90 degrees, collapse into the sea and generate waves of energy.

The study authors wanted to gain a better understanding of the processes involved in collapsing icebergs and how they cause glacial earthquakes.

Tavi Murray, a glaciologist from Swansea University, led the field portion of the study. During the summer of 2013, researchers from Swansea, Newcastle and Sheffield universities flew over Helheim Glacier in helicopters. They installed a sophisticated network of Global Positioning System (GPS) devices on the glacier’s surface to record movements of the glacier in the minutes surrounding calving events.

The Greenland Ice Sheet is getting smaller. If it melts entirely, scientists estimate that sea level will rise about 6 meters (20 feet). Photo of Helheim Glacier by Nick Selmes, Swansea University.

One of the surprises revealed by the resulting data was that some of the calving events actually reversed the flow of the glacier during a glacial earthquake.

“That’s really strange,” Burton says, “because a glacier is an enormous mass that is always moving towards the sea. What could possibly reverse that?”

Burton led a laboratory modeling portion of the study, along with Mac Cathles, who is now at the University of Michigan. They built a rectangular, Plexiglas water tank as a scaled-down version of a fjord. Rectangular plastic blocks that have the same density as icebergs are tipped in the water tank and the resulting hydrodynamics are recorded.

The analysis phase also drew from the expertise of co-author Meredith Nettles, a seismologist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and data in the Global Seismographic Network. The collaborative analyses and experimental modeling allowed the researchers to tease apart all the forces responsible for the motion of the glacier, recreate them in the lab, and solve the mystery of how glacial earthquakes work.

Watch a video of the Burton lab's model of a backwards falling iceberg, based on the data from Helheim Glacier:


“We were able to explain the motion of the GPS sensors by tracking all the forces that affect the glacier during iceberg calving, providing an unprecedented understanding of how a glacial earthquake evolves,” Burton says.

They found that many of the calving icebergs are falling backwards, slamming into the face of the glacier before they collapse into the sea. The front of the glacier gets compressed like a spring, temporarily reversing the motion of the glacier and generating the horizontal force of a glacial earthquake.

As the iceberg hits the water, it rapidly reduces pressure behind the rotating iceberg. This dramatic drop in water pressure draws the glacier down about 10 centimeters, while pulling the Earth upwards, creating the vertical force seen in the seismic signature of a glacier earthquake.

“This research required the combined efforts of glaciology, seismology and physics,” Burton says. “It was great to work hand-in-hand with field researchers, while also showing that lab research is crucial to understanding what’s happening on the surface of the Earth.”

Glacial earthquakes are globally detectable seismic events. The researchers hope their detailed documentation of the forces at play will help interpret the remote sensing of calving events, which are increasingly occurring at tidewater-terminating glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.

Related:
The physics of falling icebergs

How flu viruses use transportation networks in the U.S.

Emory biologists analyzed transportation data and flu cases from across the United States. The graphic of the U.S. interstate commuter network shows the number of people traveling daily between states for work. Credit: Brooke Bozick.

By Carol Clark

To predict how a seasonal influenza epidemic will spread across the United States, one should focus more on the mobility of people than on their geographic proximity, a new study suggests.

PLOS Pathogens published the analysis of transportation data and flu cases conducted by Emory University biologists. Their results mark the first time genetic patterns for the spread of flu have been detected at the scale of the continental United States.

“We found that the spread of a flu epidemic is somewhat predictable by looking at transportation data, especially ground commuter networks and H1N1,” says Brooke Bozick, who led the study as a graduate student in Emory’s Population Biology, Ecology and Evolution program. “Finding these kinds of patterns is the first step in being able to develop targeted surveillance and control strategies.”

The co-author of the study is Leslie Real, Emory professor of biology and Bozick’s PhD adviser.

One of the fundamental ideas in ecology is isolation by distance: The further apart things are geographically, the more distant they tend to be genetically.

This idea applies to disease ecology in the cases of animals that do not travel far from where they are born. Rabies spread by raccoons, for instance, tends to generate a wave-like pattern of transmission across a geographic space.

People, however, are much more mobile, often traveling by rail, road and air. The human mobility effect of an epidemic stands out starkly on the global scale. For instance, during the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), airline travel clearly connected cases in people from Asia and Canada.

Map shows an example of how commuting communities can differ from state boundaries. Credit: Brooke Bozick.

The researchers wanted to see if they could detect a correlation to mobility and the genetic structure of seasonal flu cases on a national scale for the United States.

The study tapped Genbank, an online, public repository of genetic flu data, to analyze U.S. cases from 2003 to 2013 for two different subtypes of seasonal flu: H3N2 and H1N1. Transportation data for that decade was drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, to map out networks of air travel and ground commutes, and the number of people moving along them during the flu season.

The researchers compared genetic distance of the flu subtypes with their geographic distance and the measures of distance defined by airline and commuter transportation networks.

They found some correlations in both subtypes for all the distance metrics used. The correlations were seen a greater proportion of the time, however, when looking at commuter movements and the H1N1 subtype.

“H1N1 tends to be a milder subtype of flu that spreads slower, so that may make it easier to pick up the pattern across shorter-distance commutes,” Bozick says. “We think that a similar pattern for H3N2 may exist. The pattern may just be harder to detect, since H3N2 tends to be more virulent and spread faster, from coast-to-coast.”

The study shows that there are underlying spatial patterns in the genetic data, and that they are dependent on how the “distance” between locations is being measured, she adds.

“Humans can move long distances very rapidly so the idea that geographic proximity is key to determining disease spread doesn’t always hold,” Bozick says. “The patterns we found are likely influenced by states with many commuters, and the identification of these states, as well as network pathways that contribute substantially to influenza spread, is an important next step for epidemiological research.”

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Dengue mosquitos hitch rides on Amazon river boats
Human mobility data may help curb epidemics

For spider monkeys, social grooming comes at a cost

Spider monkeys are fission-fusion socializers, meaning they often break up into smaller groups and then rejoin the larger community. "They basically hang out with whoever they want, and that changes often," says Thomas Gillespie, an Emory disease ecologist. (Photos by Rebecca Rimbach)

By Carol Clark

Social grooming, or helping others to stay clean and free of lice and other ecto-parasites, has long been associated with hygiene and good health in wild primates. In the process of picking out ecto-parasites, however, the groomers may be picking up internal ones, a new study finds.

The journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B published the results of the study on critically endangered brown spider monkeys, showing that physical contact is associated with the spread of several common gastrointestinal parasites.

“Previously, it was generally assumed that animals are more likely to pick up these parasites from feces or other environmental sources,” says Thomas Gillespie, a disease ecologist at Emory University whose lab led the study. “Our research shows that the external surfaces of animals can serve as viable locations for development to infective stages of such parasites.”

Living in groups comes with costs and benefits. The benefits include more eyes, ears, noses and collective knowledge to hunt food sources and to avoid predators. The costs are competition for food and for mates. And growing evidence is revealing how group interactions affect the dynamics of disease transmission among social animals.

“Breakthroughs in technology are allowing for more detailed network analyses, so that we can study the connection between sociality and health in ways that we couldn’t in the past,” Gillespie says. “We are working on models of health risk factors for different species of endangered primates, to try to ensure that disease does not finish them off, but our data could also have implications for people.”

The current study centered on a community of 16 brown spider monkeys in Hacienda San Juan, a patch of tropical rainforest in central Columbia.

Watch a data visualization of the day-to-day movements of the spider monkeys, created by study co-author Donal Bisanzio, who was an Emory post-doctoral fellow.


Spider monkeys are arboreal, spending most of their time in the trees. They swing from branch to branch through the canopy by their prehensile tails. Their communities split into smaller groups that later reconvene, a trait known as fission-fusion.

“They basically hang out with whoever they want, and that changes often,” Gillespie says. This fission-fusion trait is associated with intelligence, he adds, and is also seen in chimpanzees, dolphins and humans.

While humans are far more complex, subdividing into groups bound by their families, churches, schools and workplaces, brown spider monkeys split into smaller groups primarily to search for food. “That enables them to cover more ground,” Gillespie explains. “They spend most of their day looking for ripe fruit, in between mating and playing.”

The monkeys keep in contact with other members of the group through loud vocalizations. “They can really put on a show when they’ve found a fig tree full of fruit,” Gillespie says.

Spider monkeys are arboreal, spending most of their time in trees.

The interactions of fission-fusion animals are difficult to study in the wild because they are often on the move. For this study, the research team followed 12 individual spider monkeys of the community, collecting about 160 hours of data for each of them over the course of two years. The researchers recorded all social interactions that involved physical contact – including grooming, resting, embracing, mating and social play – and the duration of each interaction. They also collected a total of 166 fecal samples from the study group during the two-year period of the study and tested them for a variety of parasites.

The researchers used the data to diagram the contact and proximity networks, along with the levels of parasite infections, for each individual.

The results showed no correlation between mere proximity and parasite infection, but a strong correlation between physical contact and infection. Specifically, infections with the roundworms Strongyloides and Trichostrongylus were associated with grooming interactions.

“Our findings suggest that social grooming is the biggest risk for parasite transmission among this community of spider monkeys,” Gillespie says. “The groomer is removing matted fur and debris from another monkey, and some of that debris can contain active life stages of parasites that are not visible to the naked eye.”

In addition to Gillespie and Bisanzio, the study authors include Rebecca Rimbach of the German Primate Center and Fundación Proyecto Primates Colombia; Nelson Galvis and Andrés Link, of the Funación Proyect Primates and the Universidad de Los Andes; and Anthony Di Fiore of the Fundación Proyecto Primates and the University of Texas at Austin.

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Disease poses risk to chimpanzee conservation, Gombe study finds
Ebola's back story: How germs jump species
Sanctuary chimps show high rates of drug-resistant staph

Umbral Moonshine glimmers on 'The Big Bang Theory'

The precise statement of the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture can be seen on Sheldon's white board.

The proof of the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture has been making news in math and science circles in recent months, including stories in Qanta Magazine and Scientific American. The conjecture was proved by Emory mathematicians Ken Ono and Michael Griffin, and Case Western's John Duncan. The conjecture draws on everything from mock modular forms to string theory and quantum gravity, making it difficult to state. But it has still managed to find its way into pop culture.

A recent episode of “The Big Bang Theory,” titled “The Hofstader Insufficiency,” gave the conjecture a cameo of sorts. During one scene, the white board in apartment 4A, where Sheldon and Leonard live, was covered in the mathematical formulas of the Dynkin diagrams and the McKay-Thompson series of the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture. And the screenshot, above, shows the precise statement of the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture by Ono and his collaborators.

So remember to watch the white board in future “Big Bang” episodes. It may have news of some pretty cool discoveries.

Related:
Mathematicians prove the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture

'BEINGS' set to generate global biotech guidelines

By Carol Clark

The recent news that China is trying to “edit” the genes of human embryos, in a way that would permanently alter their DNA, was met with alarm by many in the scientific community. Researchers from the United States were among those who called for a halt to such experiments until the safety and ethical implications are fully considered.

“We’re at the point where we can manipulate life in ways that have great promise to cure some of our most dreaded diseases, expand agriculture and clean up the environment,” says Paul Root Wolpe, director of Emory’s Center for Ethics. “But the ability to create new forms of life also holds the potential to cause disease or create organisms that could be environmentally toxic. So we need to be really careful when we’re trying to change some of these basic building blocks of life that we do so thoughtfully. We need to have boundaries around what should and shouldn’t be done.”

The Center for Ethics is hosting a major international summit in Atlanta May 17 to 19, to discuss both aspirations and guidelines for the era of synthetic biology. Biotechnology and the Ethical Imagination: A Global Summit (BEINGS), will bring together delegates from the top 30 biotechnology producing countries of the world.

Heading up the discussions will be a faculty of 25 distinguished scholars, including leaders in science, law, ethics, industry, philosophy, religion and the arts and humanities. Among the luminaries: Novelist Margaret Atwood, synthetic biologist George Church and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker.

The public is also encouraged to register and attend BEINGS. “The kinds of decisions that we need to make about biotechnology should not just be made by scientists,” Wolpe says. “I think it’s everybody’s responsibility to participate in this conversation.”

Regulations have not kept pace with rapid advances in biotechnology, he says. “We are currently dealing with a kind of regulatory chaos, not only among different countries but even within the United States. Different states, for example, have different standards for how to use stem-cell research.”

BEINGS 2015 will kick off with a key question: What are the major goals of biotechnology?

“We want to articulate the most important aspirational principles of biotechnology and how it can contribute to human flourishing,” Wolpe says. “Once we agree on where we want to go, then I think it becomes easier to talk about how we create boundaries to get there safely.”

In the months following the summit, the delegates will work on developing an international consensus document for biotechnology guidelines, the first of its kind. “Our hope is that it will serve as a kind of touchstone, and a model for ethical principles and policy standards worldwide,” Wolpe says.

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'Omic astronauts' blast off into a new genetic era
Blurring the lines between life forms

Her father’s trip to the moon showed her the power of evidence

Commander David Scott emerges from a hatch during the Apollo 9 mission. The 10-day flight in 1969 provided vital information on the operational performance, stability and reliability of lunar module propulsion and life support systems. NASA photo.

“When I was a kid, I didn’t think flying into space was a big deal. All my friends’ dads went into space,” says Tracy Scott, senior lecturer in sociology and director of Emory’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP).

The goal of Emory’s QEP topic, “The Nature of Evidence,” is to empower students as independent scholars capable of supporting arguments with different types of evidence. Scott’s interest in the topic was formed while growing up immersed in the culture of NASA.

Her father, Commander David Scott, was an astronaut who flew on Gemini 8, Apollo 9 and Apollo 15. He’s one of only 12 people who’ve ever set foot on the moon.



“The thing that was exciting for me was the chance to discover new evidence on the moon,” Scott recalls of her father’s lunar trip. “Here was a new environment that humans had never experienced before and there was a huge amount of knowledge to be gained. My dad took a lot of time before the Apollo 15 mission to explain the scientific goals to me. And particularly the experiment he was going to do on the moon. He helped to find new evidence to confirm a very old theory.”

Watch the video, above, to see Commander Scott conduct his famous hammer and feather experiment while standing on the moon. In a vacuous space, without air resistance, they fell at the same rate, just as Galileo predicted in 1589. It was a striking visual demonstration of what we now know as the equivalence principle: The influence of gravity and the influence of inertia are exactly the same.

“I thought it was really cool that my dad was able to do an experiment that linked all the way back to Galileo,” Scott says. “Learning about the power of evidence when I was a child inspired me. I developed a keen sense of seeking out evidence to deepen what I was being taught, and to support my own arguments and to create new knowledge.”

Atlanta Science Festival offers formula for fun

Emory chemist Doug Mulford gets kids fired up for science during a demonstration at last year's Atlanta Science Festival. Emory Photo/Video

By Carol Clark

Start with a beaker as big as metro Atlanta. Add scientists, artists, music, dance, robots, games, movies, lab tours and chances to try new technology and conduct fun experiments. Throw in some liquid nitrogen ice cream, giant soap bubbles and Tibetan momos. Now mix with hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers and thousands of curious people of all ages. Finally, jump in yourself.

The Atlanta Science Festival is back, March 21-28, with its ever-evolving formula for fascination and fun. The eight-day celebration of local science and technology encompasses more than 120 events at 70 venues throughout Atlanta, including many on the Emory campus. The festival culminates in the Exploration Expo at Centennial Park on Saturday, March 28.

“We want to help our community become proud of the resources, research and discoveries happening here, and all the opportunities for careers,” says Jordan Rose, co-director of the festival and associate director of the Emory College Center for Science Education. “The more we can connect people to local scientists and their innovations, the more people can get excited about science in general.”

Last year, 30,000 people attended the week-long inaugural Atlanta Science Festival, including 16,000 who came to the Exploration Expo, which was chaired by Emory chemist Monya Ruffin. "It’s hard to predict attendance this year for all of the events over eight days, but we’re expecting at least 20,000 people for the Expo alone,” Rose says. “It’s going to be a busy day at the park.”

About 20 booths at the Expo will feature Emory science faculty and students. ChEmory, for example — the outreach group made up of Emory chemistry undergraduates — will return with its popular dance pit. Kids can kick their shoes off and experience moving to music through a non-Newtonian fluid.

Several events are scheduled on the Emory campus on Saturday, March 21, targeting both adults and children. You can find details about all the Emory events here.

Read more in Emory Report.

Emory math ranks second in Discover Magazine's 'People's Choice' awards

The people have spoken: An Emory discovery, “Mother Lode of Mathematical Identities,” is Discover Magazine’s second most popular science story for 2014, based on readers’ votes.

Emory mathematician Ken Ono, working with Michael Griffin and Ole Warnaar, found a framework for the celebrated Rogers-Ramanujan identities and their arithmetic properties, yielding a treasure trove of algebraic numbers and formulas to access them. The editors of Discover had previously ranked the find 15th on their list of the 100 most important stories for 2014.

The editors opened up the top 16 stories to a “People’s Choice” contest, allowing people to pick their favorites through several rounds of voting. A social media campaign by the Emory community and others helped the math discovery garner second place, just behind a Harvard story about stem cell therapies.

“Michael, Ole and I were pleased just to be among the final 15,” Ono says. “All of these scientific breakthroughs were important. We were honored that so many people wanted to support math. We’re especially grateful to members of the Emory Community and the University of Chicago, my alma mater, for participating and spreading the word.”

Ono’s newest discovery, “Mathematicians prove the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture,” will be generating buzz in 2015. Ono will be presenting the proof of the conjecture, including the work of collaborators, on January 11 at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Antonio, the largest mathematics meeting in the world.

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Mathematicians find algebraic gold
Mathematicians prove the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture

A clear, molecular view of the evolution of human color vision

By around 30 million years ago, our ancestors had evolved the ability to see the full-color spectrum of visible light, except for UV light.

By Carol Clark

Many genetic mutations in visual pigments, spread over millions of years, were required for humans to evolve from a primitive mammal with a dim, shadowy view of the world into a greater ape able to see all the colors in a rainbow.

Now, after more than two decades of painstaking research, scientists have finished a detailed and complete picture of the evolution of human color vision. PLOS Genetics published the final pieces of this picture: The process for how humans switched from ultraviolet (UV) vision to violet vision, or the ability to see blue light.

“We have now traced all of the evolutionary pathways, going back 90 million years, that led to human color vision,” says lead author Shozo Yokoyama, a biologist at Emory University. “We’ve clarified these molecular pathways at the chemical level, the genetic level and the functional level.”

Co-authors of the PLOS Genetics paper include Emory biologists Jinyi Xing, Yang Liu and Davide Faggionato; Syracuse University biologist William Starmer; and Ahmet Altun, a chemist and former post-doc at Emory who is now at Fatih University in Istanbul, Turkey.

Yokoyama and various collaborators over the years have teased out secrets of the adaptive evolution of vision in humans and other vertebrates by studying ancestral molecules. The lengthy process involves first estimating and synthesizing ancestral proteins and pigments of a species, then conducting experiments on them. The technique combines microbiology with theoretical computation, biophysics, quantum chemistry and genetic engineering.

Five classes of opsin genes encode visual pigments for dim-light and color vision. Bits and pieces of the opsin genes change and vision adapts as the environment of a species changes.

“Gorillas and chimpanzees have human color vision,” Yokoyama says. “Or perhaps we should say that humans have gorilla and chimpanzee vision.”

Around 90 million years ago, our primitive mammalian ancestors were nocturnal and had UV-sensitive and red-sensitive color, giving them a bi-chromatic view of the world. By around 30 million years ago, our ancestors had evolved four classes of opsin genes, giving them the ability to see the full-color spectrum of visible light, except for UV.

“Gorillas and chimpanzees have human color vision,” Yokoyama says. “Or perhaps we should say that humans have gorilla and chimpanzee vision.”

For the PLOS Genetics paper, the researchers focused on the seven genetic mutations involved in losing UV vision and achieving the current function of a blue-sensitive pigment. They traced this progression from 90-to-30 million years ago.

The researchers identified 5,040 possible pathways for the amino acid changes required to bring about the genetic changes. “We did experiments for every one of these 5,040 possibilities,” Yokoyama says. “We found that of the seven genetic changes required, each of them individually has no effect. It is only when several of the changes combine in a particular order that the evolutionary pathway can be completed.”

In other words, just as an animal’s external environment drives natural selection, so do changes in the animal’s molecular environment.

Mice are nocturnal and, like the primitive human ancestor of 90 million years ago, have UV vision and limited ability to see colors.

In previous research, Yokoyama showed how the scabbardfish, which today spends much of its life at depths of 25 to 100 meters, needed just one genetic mutation to switch from UV to blue-light vision. Human ancestors, however, needed seven changes and these changes were spread over millions of years. “The evolution for our ancestors’ vision was very slow, compared to this fish, probably because their environment changed much more slowly,” Yokoyama says.

About 80 percent of the 5,040 pathways the researchers traced stopped in the middle, because a protein became non-functional. Chemist Ahmet Altun solved the mystery of why the protein got knocked out. It needs water to function, and if one mutation occurs before the other, it blocks the two water channels extending through the vision pigment’s membrane.

“The remaining 20 percent of the pathways remained possible pathways, but our ancestors used only one,” Yokoyama says. “We identified that path.”

In 1990, Yokoyama identified the three specific amino acid changes that led to human ancestors developing a green-sensitive pigment. In 2008, he led an effort to construct the most extensive evolutionary tree for dim-light vision, including animals from eels to humans. At key branches of the tree, Yokoyama’s lab engineered ancestral gene functions, in order to connect changes in the living environment to the molecular changes.

The PLOS Genetics paper completes the project for the evolution of human color vision. “We have no more ambiguities, down to the level of the expression of amino acids, for the mechanisms involved in this evolutionary pathway,” Yokoyama says.

Images: Thinkstock

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Evolutionary biologists urged to adapt their research methods
Fish vision makes waves in natural selection

Emory math in finals for Discover Magazine's "People's Choice" award

Much of the work of number theorist Ken Ono, above, involves solving long-standing mysteries stemming from the work of Indian math genius Srinivasa Ramanujan.

By Carol Clark

An Emory math breakthrough, “Mother Lode of Mathematical Identities,” is down to the final two in voting for Discover Magazine’s “People’s Choice” for top science story of 2014. The final round will continue through December 24, and you can cast your vote by clicking here.

The editors of Discover Magazine sifted through all their science stories of the year and selected the 100 most important ones for 2014. They ranked the find by Emory mathematician Ken Ono and collaborators 15th.

Since the magazine opened up these stories for “People’s Choice” voting in November, the math breakthrough has kept moving up in the rankings.

Last summer, Ono and his collaborators Michael Griffin and Ole Warnaar found a framework for the celebrated Rogers-Ramanujan identities and their arithmetic properties, yielding a treasure trove of algebraic numbers and formulas to access them.

“Ole found this huge vein of gold, and we then figured out a way to mine the gold,” Ono said of the discovery. “We went to work and showed how to come full circle and make use of the formulas. Now we can extract infinitely any functions whose values are these beautiful algebraic numbers.”

And Ono’s newest discovery, “Mathematicians prove the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture,” will be generating buzz in 2015. Ono will be presenting the proof of the conjecture, including the work of collaborators, on January 11 at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Antonio, the largest mathematics meeting in the world.

Related:
Mathematicians find algebraic gold
Mathematicians prove the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture