Science Art Wonder: Students team with labs to bring research to life

Art by Emory senior Pamela Romero, Science.Art.Wonder. founder and president, portrays how aphids can develop wings in response to environmental changes. The DNA painted along the edges of the canvases is the same, except that different genes are switched on. Photo by Ann Watson, Emory Photo/Video

By Carol Clark

A small crowd gathers in Emory’s White Hall before the menacing sight: Large rubber worms arrayed on triangular red spikes. The jagged spikes, from a few inches to more than a foot tall, lean crazily in all directions. Some of the worms — suspended on near-invisible fishing line — appear to rise off the spikes, escaping to a circular mirror hanging from above.

“This is how evolution works!” says Ethan Mock, a sophomore majoring in ancient history, who created the sculpture, titled "The Crucible." He looks dapper in a leather vest and tweed cap and speaks with theatrical flair to the crowd. “The spikes represent the trials and tribulations of the worms’ struggles. Most are trapped in the spikes but a few climb out, not realizing that they are simply climbing into a new trial, a new test.”

The onlookers include a mix of college students, children and their parents, brought together by campus events during the recent Atlanta Science Festival. Joining the regular attractions of Physics Live! and Chemistry Carnival is the debut of an art exhibit by a new, student-run program called Science.Art.Wonder., or S.A.W. Just over 100 artists — most of them untrained college students — teamed with scientists from Emory and Georgia Tech to translate their research into art.

Ethan Mock and his art, "The Crucible"

Mock worked with the lab of Levi Morran, an assistant professor in Emory’s Department of Biology who studies co-evolutionary dynamics by experimenting with a host (a microscopic worm called C. elegans) and a parasite (a bright red species of bacteria called Serratia marcescens that is lethal to C. elegans upon consumption).

“This is so cool!” says Pareena Sharma, a first-year biochemistry major at Emory, as she snaps a photo of the sculpture. “It’s so relatable to me. I’ve been doing this same experiment since the first of the semester in Biology 142.”

Two young boys draw near the spikes. “Look up into the mirror,” Mock encourages them. “Now tell me what you see.”

“The same thing,” one of the boys replies.

“That’s right!” Mock says. “The process of evolution keeps repeating, going in a loop.”

Morran, arriving with his eight-year-old daughter, Maggie, is impressed. “You could see the light come on in those boys’ eyes,” he says. “They understood what Ethan is trying to convey. And it’s not an easy concept to grasp — the continual evolutionary struggle.”

Both artists and researchers engage with visitors as they peruse more than 140 works of art, set up on the Quad, in White Hall, the Math and Science Center and the Atwood Chemistry Center during the festival.

“This artwork gives you a snapshot of how much research is being done in Atlanta. I’m taken aback by how cutting edge and varied it is,” says Pamela Romero, president of S.A.W. The program is the brainchild of Romero, a senior majoring in neuroscience and behavioral biology and minoring in computer science.

Young visitors to the Emory campus peruse science-inspired art on the Quad. Photo by Ann Watson, Emory Photo/Video

The Emory S.A.W. contributions span labs across the University and beyond. The artists picked their mediums, from acrylic to watercolor and everything in between.

Emily Isaac, a first-year Emory student majoring in environmental sciences and theater, stands on the Quad next to a large watercolor she painted. “Art can help scientists make a point without using any scientific jargon,” she says.

She teamed with Robert Wallace from Georgia Tech’s Agricultural Technology Research Program. One of Wallace’s projects gave plots of farmland to women in India who had been victims of an acid attack. Isaac did a portrait of a woman with a scarred face. The woman’s head is partially wrapped in strips of bandages that Isaac painted to look like rows of newly sprouting plants. “I wanted to show hope, and how connecting with the environment can help people,” Isaac says.

This year’s 36 Emory S.A.W. artists are mainly undergraduates — many of them science majors — but they also include a few graduate students, faculty and staff members. Georgia Tech makes up the bulk of other contributing artists and researchers in this year’s S.A.W., although 10 independent artists also got involved, along with Georgia State University undergraduates and the Atlanta campus of SCAD.

“S.A.W. is collaborative, not only across disciplines and institutions, but also across students, faculty, staff and members of the Atlanta community,” Romero says. “We even have one international artist, from Puerto Rico.”

A painting by Georgia Tech student Bianca Guerrero portrays a virtual reality game used to measure players' perception of time as well as eye movement. The art is based on research by Georgia Tech psychologist Malia Crane. Photo by Ann Watson, Emory Photo/Video.

As long as she can remember, everyone thought Romero would become an artist, or maybe an architect. She began taking art classes at the age of three in her home town of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She continued making and studying art, developing a surrealist style.

In ninth grade, however, a psychology course sparked a fascination for neurobiology. Romero took online classes and started reading up on subjects like optogenetics and deep-brain stimulation.

By the time she was accepted to Emory, she had decided to forge a career as a scientist. “A lot of people told me that if I chose neuroscience I would have to forsake art, because I would be a bad scientist if I tried to do both,” she recalls. “I was determined to prove them wrong.”

Romero sought out kindred spirits like Nicole Gerardo, associate professor of biology, who also grew up with twin passions for science and art. Gerardo once had students create artwork using microbes in her lab under the direction of Nancy Lowe — a former lab technician at Emory who went on to create a retreat center in North Carolina called AS.IF: Art and Science in the Field.

Gerardo later paired students with labs to create ceramic representations of research under the direction of Diane Kempler, who formerly taught visual arts at Emory.

“Art provides a way to reach people who may be intimidated by science,” Gerardo says. “And working with an artist lets scientists see their own work in a different way. That could lead to new scientific approaches.”

When Romero first joined forces with Gerardo it was simply to produce art for her lab, which focuses on evolutionary ecology. “We were test subjects for S.A.W.,” Romero says.

Emory senior Maureen Ascona, a neuroscience and behavioral biology major, discusses her art with visitors to the Quad. Ascona teamed with Helen Mayberg, from the Emory School of Medicine, who uses deep-brain stimulation to help patients with treatment-resistant depression. Photo by Ann Watson, Emory Photo/Video.

One of the pieces Romero created consists of triangular canvases that can be shifted into different positions. The acrylic painting depicts how aphids develop wings in the presence of predators, like ladybugs, or if food becomes scarce. “When Dr. Gerardo explains her work to people, she can move the canvases to show how the aphids change in response to their environment,” Romero says.

Romero wanted to give other students the chance to enter research labs and experiment with art.

“Pamela is an amazing woman, a force of nature,” says Gerardo, who is the faculty mentor for S.A.W. “What she has done with the support of her fellow students is incredible. I had envisioned maybe 20 pairings of scientists and artists. I’m still surprised by how big it became.”

Connections from across the University helped S.A.W. grow. Wei Wei Chen and John Wang, student leaders of Emory Arts Underground, provided the platform for Romero to launch S.A.W. and encouraged her to form a charter, bylaws and an executive team. That team includes Emory undergraduates Alex Nazzari (vice-president), Aila Jiang, Veronica Paltaraskaya, Anne Pizzini, Deborah Seong and John Wang, along with Georgia Tech students Olivia Cox, Siyan Li and Iris Liu.

The students’ efforts paid off with S.A.W.’s smash debut at the Atlanta Science Festival.

“One of my favorite parts was guiding artists through the process of disentangling the science, reassuring them that they could do it,” Romero says. “Many of them felt overwhelmed after first talking to a scientist. Some of them were first-year students who hadn’t even had introductory biology or chemistry.”

A piece by Alice Yang, a first-year Emory student majoring in neuroscience and behavioral biology who teamed with researchers of human genetics in the Emory 3q29 Project. Photo courtesy of S.A.W.

Exploring a lab through an art project allows students to develop a relationship with a researcher and often find a mentor, Romero says.

Alice Yang, a first-year Emory student majoring in neuroscience and behavioral biology, teamed with Jennifer Mulle, assistant professor at Rollins School of Public Health. Mulle is co-principal investigator of the Emory 3q29 Project, which seeks to understand a genetic deletion associated with an increased risk for schizophrenia.

“I’m so grateful for the experience,” Yang says of spending time with the 3q29 Project team. “I learned what it’s like to actually do science. And I caught their passion. People are just now realizing how genetics can be involved in mental illness. It’s a very new field.”

To create her art pieces, Yang ordered special scratch-off paper from her native China. “This paper’s easy to work with and it’s great for showing patterns and textures,” she says. She explains how she carefully cut slices from the black top layer of the paper to reveal the glowing, rainbow colors beneath. Her pictures portray the nanomapping of fluorescent-labeled alleles from the 3q29 lab while also paying tribute to Salvador Dali’s surrealism.

Even those who are not aspiring scientists can catch the science-art bug. Independent artist Aaron Artrip teamed with scientists Matthew Jackson and Dan Cook at Georgia Tech to demonstrate interaction with sound. A group of children buzzes around Artrip’s exhibit in White Hall. A piece of paper sprinkled with powdered black ink is taped to a wooden speaker, which is plugged into an electronic synthesizer. As Artrip taps a keyboard, the powder moves across the page, creating patterns.

“I’m making drawings with vibrations. Forcing sound through the ink causes it to move,” he explains.

“Would you like to try?” he asks a young girl watching him.

She doesn’t have to be asked twice.

A painting by Georgia Tech student Kate Bernart, "Connecting the Cycle," portrays Austin Ladshaw's research at Georgia Tech's School of Environmental Engineering on the nuclear fuel cycle and ways to prevent excessive accumulations of radioactive waste. Photo by Ann Watson, Emory Photo/Video

Ultimately, S.A.W. hopes to find ways to integrate its art-science model into grades K-12. “We would like to have artists and researchers go into K-12 classrooms to talk about the art and the research together,” Romero says.

She presented S.A.W. at the recent Georgia Tech STEAM Leadership Conference, which brought together educators and policymakers to explore new ways to teach science, technology, engineering, art and math, or STEAM. S.A.W. is now working to put together an anthology of its art into a booklet, to include descriptions of the science. The booklet will be aimed at high school students “to give them a glimpse of some of the possible fields available to them in college,” Romero says.

S.A.W. is also creating a web site where the art will be accessible in digital form, including videos of some of the interactive art pieces, along with other resources for K-12 teachers.

After graduating this spring, Romero plans to take a gap year, then go on to graduate school with the aim of becoming a professor with a research lab. “S.A.W. has an incredible executive team and I’m making sure that the program continues after I leave Emory,” she says. “I would also like to stay involved with it in some way.”

As she prepares for graduation, Romero is working on an art narrative piece funded by the Emory Center for Creativity and Arts. The work will combine acrylic painting and sculpture to represent the element Vanadium, discovered by Mexican mineralogist Andrews Manuel del Rio in 1801. A series of circular canvases will each represent an atom in Vanadium. Each canvas will also represent a country or group of countries in Latin America, on which Romero will depict the research of a scientist from that area.

“My main goal with this piece is to celebrate and encourage more Latin American science,” Romero says. She is calling the piece “Elementally Latino,” to describe how Latinos are an elemental, or basic, part of science and how they also embody an elemental force. “Latinos are such a passionate people that I can only adequately describe them as a force of nature,” she says.

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Physicists show why it's hard to clog a drain with soft particles

Emory sophomore Mia Morrell conducted the experiments with hydrogel balls. "You can learn a lot from them because they provide a simple model for physics, kind of like fruit flies do for biology," she says.

By Carol Clark

For decades, scientists have studied how groups of solid objects — everything from falling grains of sand to a rushing crowd of panicked people — can get stuck as they try to pass through a small opening. The classic result is known as “faster is slower.” When the objects flow out, if an arch of the objects forms across the opening, then a large pressure can stabilize the arch and cause a clog.

Now scientists have shown that when the objects are squishy instead of solid, the reverse is true. The journal Physical Review E published the findings by physicists at Emory University, demonstrating that when soft particles feel a larger pressure, they squish together and the arch breaks, and so clogging is less likely.

“We’ve quantified the clogging dynamics of soft objects for the first time and identified the parameters that seem to explain why it’s completely opposite physics to that of hard objects,” says Emory physics professor Eric Weeks, whose lab conducted the research. “One surprising result is that, while friction is often suspected to be important for arch formation, our particles are frictionless and yet still form arches.”

Questions about how clogs form have implications for everything from improving highway design and the flow of traffic to avoiding jam-ups of people fleeing a burning building.

The dynamics of soft objects that the Weeks lab investigated could give insights into biological processes such as the flow of cells, bacteria and other “squishy” particles through blood vessels.

“It’s new physics and yet it’s so simple,” Weeks says. “We used tools such as a basic physics formula from 1882 and some cheap hydrogel balls that we ordered from Amazon.”

"Hydrogels have interesting properties and that makes them fun to work with," says Mia Morrell, a member of the Weeks lab.

Weeks, who specializes in the study of soft condensed materials, became intrigued by the growing number of studies on how solid objects clog. It sounds counterintuitive — after a rush of solid particles through an opening forms an arch, greater pressure behind them solidifies that arch. But the process appears to work similarly to a keystone arch in architecture: The pressure from the weight of stones above presses the stones in the arch below more firmly together.

Weeks and his students decided to explore the process of soft-particle clogging. Graduate students Xia Hong and Meghan Kohne worked on experiments involving tiny oil droplets and then computer simulations.

Motivated by those preliminary results, Emory senior Haoran Wang (who graduated in 2017) conducted early experiments with the marble-sized, water-filled hydrogel balls. They are sometimes called plant balls since they are commonly used to hold up stems in flower vases. Wang built a two-dimensional, Plexiglas hopper that allowed gravity to pull the hydrogel balls down through two triangular wedges that could be adjusted in width to change the size of the opening between them.

Mia Morrell, a sophomore, continued the work when she joined the Weeks lab last year.

“I loved doing the hydrogel experiments because it’s really hands-on — not just sitting at a desk,” Morrell says, adding that the project also required her to learn how to become handy with a drill and a laser cutter.

The hydrogel balls start out as deflated polymer husks. They are left in a tray of water until they swell up into squishy, slippery, plastic spheres that feel almost like living tissue.

“Hydrogels have interesting properties and that makes them fun to work with,” Morrell says. “You can learn a lot from them because they provide a simple model for physics, kind of like fruit flies do for biology.”

Morrell loaded the hydrogels into the two-dimensional hopper. She tilted the hopper to vary the effects of gravity and checked to see if the particles would clog as they flowed through it. This process required her to reload the hopper more than 400 times to investigate different conditions.

The Hertzian force law, an 1882 formula by Heinrich Hertz, allowed the researchers to measure the displacement and compression force of individual hydrogel spheres and compare the hydrogel results with the oil droplet experiments and the computer simulations. The comparison showed that these different systems all have the same physical behavior, apparently universal to soft particles.

“We quantified the dynamics of soft particles in a two-dimensional environment under the influence of gravity and what happens when you present them with an obstacle,” Morrell says. “What we learned from this single system may have many broader applications.”

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Biophysicists discover how small populations of bacteria survive treatment

"We showed that by tuning the growth and death rate of bacterial cells, you can clear small populations of even antibiotic-resistant bacteria using low antibiotic concentrations," says biophysicist Minsu Kim. His lab conducted experiments with E. coli bacteria (above).

By Carol Clark

Small populations of pathogenic bacteria may be harder to kill off than larger populations because they respond differently to antibiotics, a new study by Emory University finds.

The journal eLife published the research, showing that a population of bacteria containing 100 cells or less responds to antibiotics randomly — not homogeneously like a larger population.

“We’ve shown that there may be nothing special about bacterial cells that aren’t killed by drug therapy — they survive by random chance,” says senior author Minsu Kim, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and a member of Emory’s Antibiotic Resistance Center.

“This randomness is a double-edged sword,” Kim adds. “On the surface, it makes it more difficult to predict a treatment outcome. But we found a way to manipulate this inherent randomness in a way that clears a small population of bacteria with 100 percent probability. By tuning the growth and death rate of bacterial cells, you can clear small populations of even antibiotic-resistant bacteria using low antibiotic concentrations.”

Jessica Coates, as a graduate student at Emory, and Bo Ryoung Park, a research associate in the Kim lab, are co-first authors of the paper. Additional authors are graduate student Emrah Simsek and post-doctoral fellows Dai Le and Waqas Chaudry.

The researchers developed a treatment model using a cocktail of two different classes of antibiotic drugs. They first demonstrated the effectiveness of the model in laboratory experiments on a small population of E. coli bacteria without antibiotic-drug resistance. In later experiments, they found that the model also worked on a small population of clinically-isolated antibiotic-resistant E. coli.

“We hope that our model can help in the development of more sophisticated antibiotic drug protocols — making them more effective at lower doses for some infections,” Kim says. “It’s important because if you treat a bacterial infection and fail to kill it entirely, that can contribute to antibiotic resistance.”

Antibiotic resistance is projected to lead to 300 million premature deaths annually and a global healthcare burden of $100 trillion by 2050, according to the 2014 Review on Antimicrobial Resistance. The epidemic is partly driven by the inability to reliably eradicate infections of antibiotic-susceptible bacteria.

For decades, it was thought that simply reducing the population size of the bacteria to a few hundred cells would be sufficient because the immune system of an infected person can clear out the remaining bacteria.

“More recently, it became clear that small populations of bacteria really matter in the course of an infection,” Kim says. “The infectious dose — the number of bacterial cells needed to initiate an infection — turned out to be a few or tens of cells for some species of bacteria and, for others, as low as one cell.”

It was not well understood, however, why treatment of bacteria with antibiotics sometimes worked and sometimes failed. Contributing factors may include variations in the immune responses of infected people and possible mutations of bacterial cells to become more virulent.

Kim suspected that something more fundamental was a factor. Research has shown unexpected treatment failure for antibiotic-susceptible infections even in a simple organism like the C. celegans worm, a common model for the study of bacterial virulence.

By focusing on small bacteria populations, the Emory team discovered how the dynamics were different from large ones. Antibiotics induce the concentrations of bacterial cells to fluctuate. When the growth rate topped the death rate by random chance, clearance of the bacteria failed.

The researchers used this knowledge to develop a low-dose cocktail drug therapy of two different kinds of antibiotics. They combined a bactericide (which kills bacteria) and a bacteriostat (which slows the growth of bacteria) to manipulate the random fluctuation in the number of cells and boost the probability of the cell death rate topping the growth rate.

Not all antibiotics fit the model and more research is needed to refine the method for applications in a clinical setting.

 “We showed that the successful treatment of a bacterial infection with antibiotics is even more complicated than we thought,” Kim says. “We hope this knowledge leads to new strategies to fight against infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”

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Frankenstein and robots rise up for Atlanta Science Festival

Hair-raising, spine-tingling fun: A young visitor to the Emory campus during last year's Atlanta Science Festival experiences the thrill of static electricity.

By Carol Clark

From the lumbering, 200-year-old Frankenstein to sleek, modern-day robots, this year’s Atlanta Science Festival — set for March 9 to 24 — highlights creations that spark wonder and fun, giving glimpses of the past and the future.

The five-year-old festival expanded to more than two weeks, encompassing 120 events sponsored by 90 different partners at 70 venues across metro Atlanta, including many on the Emory campus. The festival culminates with a day-long “Exploration Expo” on Saturday, March 24, set in Piedmont Park.

“Rise Up, Robots!” kicks off the festival on the evening of Friday, March 9 at the Ferst Center, when three robots and their inventors will take the stage.

“We thought about how we could possibly top last year’s featured speaker, astronaut Mark Kelly — someone so inspirational to children and adults all over the planet,” says Meisa Salaita, co-director of the Atlanta Science Festival. “We finally realized that no human could match him, and we would have to resort to artificial intelligence.”

Heather Knight, professor of robotics at Oregon State University, will demonstrate the interactive quips of “Data,” the world’s first robotic comedian. Georgia Tech’s Gil Weinberg will jam with “Shimon,” a marimba playing robotic musician. And Stewart Coulter, from DEKA Research and Development, will show how a bionic arm named LUKE (Life Under Kinetic Evolution) changed an amputee’s life.

Tickets are required for the event, which starts at 7 pm. Door open early with an Interactive Robotic Petting Zoo, starting at 6 pm.

Frankenstein rises up on the Emory campus on Thursday, March 22. Three Atlanta playwrights will reanimate Mary Shelley’s creation, which turns 200 this year, in the context of scientific research ongoing at Emory. Following the short plays join ethicists, scientists and the playwrights to discuss the work over refreshments. The event, titled “Frankenstein Goes Back to the Lab,” begins at 5:30 pm in Emory’s Science Commons.

On Friday, March 23, from 3:30 to 7 pm, Emory will host “Chemistry Carnival,” where visitors can join scientists in carnival games like Peptide Jenga and Bacterial Telepathy, in the Atwood Chemistry Center. On the same day and time, the ever-popular “Physics Live!” will again feature giant soap bubbles and liquid nitrogen ice cream, among other treats in the Math and Science Center.

A new Emory event this year, “Science.Art.Wonder,” will run concurrently with the chemistry and physics events, on the Emory Quadrangle and in nearby buildings, including White Hall and the Atwood Chemistry Center. For the past year, the program has paired local artists and scientists to explore ideas of research through the visual arts. You can stroll through an exhibit of the resulting artwork and meet some of the artists and scientists involved in the project.

Adult fare is featured on Monday, March 19, including “The Science of ‘Motherese,’” an overview of early vocal development in infants at the Marcus Autism Center, and “CDC in the Scene,” which features CDC scientists sorting fact from fiction surrounding movies like “Outbreak,” in the Mathematics and Science Center.

On Tuesday, March 20, “Become an Archeologist” lets you in on secrets revealed by ancient skeletons and artifacts, while “Mock Climate Change Negotiation” turns you into an international policymaker for a day.

During “Unveiling the Internet,” on Wednesday, March 21, Emory computer scientists will give interactive lessons on everything from the workings of YouTube to Snapchat.

“STEM Gems: Giving Girls Role Models in STEM Careers,” on Saturday, March 10, is an interactive discussion where panelists offer advice and guidance specific to girls and young women intrigued by science, technology, engineering and math. “Women and Minorities in STEM: Surprises, Setbacks and Successes,” set for the evening of Thursday, March 22 at the Oxford campus, is a panel discussion with voices from a diverse set of scientific fields who will share their stories and take questions.

Click here for more details of Emory campus events, and events throughout the city featuring members of the Emory community.

Among the dozen Emory booths at “Exploration Expo” will be chemistry students running their non-Newtonian fluid dance pit. The Center for the Study of Human Health will explore the human gut microbiome in a booth called “Your Hundred Trillion Best Friends.” And the “Science.Art.Wonder” team will display art from the program and invite you to help create a mural.

The Atlanta Science Festival was founded by Emory, Georgia Tech and the Metro Atlanta Chamber and is a collaboration among diverse community partners and sponsors.

New method calculates equilibrium constant at the small scale

Mixing computational chemistry and theoretical math proved a winning formula for Emory chemist James Kindt (center), his graduate students (from left) Xiaokun Zhang and Lara Patel, and mathematics graduate students Olivia Beckwith and Robert Schneider. Photo by Stephen Nowland, Emory Photo/Video.

By Carol Clark

Computational chemists and mathematicians have developed a new, fast method to calculate equilibrium constants using small-scale simulations — even when the Law of Mass Action does not apply.

The Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation published the resulting algorithm and software, which the researchers have named PEACH — an acronym for “partition-enabled analysis of cluster histograms” and a nod to the method’s development in Georgia at Emory University.

“Our method will allow computational chemists to make better predictions in simulations for a wide range of complex reactions — from how aerosols form in the atmosphere to how proteins come together to form amyloid filaments implicated in Alzheimer’s disease,” says James Kindt, an Emory professor of computational chemistry, whose lab led the work.

Previously it would require at least a week of computing time to do the calculations needed for such predictions. The PEACH system reduces that time to seconds by using tricks derived from number theory.

“Our tool can use a small set of data and then extrapolate the results to a large-system case to predict the big picture,” Kindt says.

“What made this project so fun and interesting is the cross-cultural aspects of it,” he adds. “Computational chemists and theoretical mathematicians use different languages and don’t often speak to one another. By working together we’ve happened onto something that appears to be on the frontiers of both fields.”

The research team includes Lara Patel and Xiaokun Zhang, who are both PhD students of chemistry in the Kindt lab, and number theorists Olivia Beckwith and Robert Schneider, Emory PhD candidates in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. Chris Weeden, as an Emory undergraduate, contributed to early stages of the work.

The equilibrium constant is a basic concept taught in first-year college chemistry. According to the Law of Mass Action, at a given temperature, no matter how much of a product and a reactant are mixed together — as long as they are at equilibrium — a certain ratio of product to reactant will equal the equilibrium constant.

“That equation always holds true at equilibrium for huge numbers of molecules,” Kindt says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s applied to a bucket of water or to a single drop of water — which consists of about a billion trillion molecules.”

At much smaller scales of around dozens of molecules, however, the Law of Mass Action breaks down and does not apply.

The Kindt lab uses computers to simulate the behavior of molecules, in particular how they self-assemble into clusters. Sodium octyl sulfate, or SOS, is one of the compounds the lab uses as an experimental model. SOS is a surfactant that can act as a detergent. It forms little clusters in water that can encapsulate oil and grease. Simulations of how SOS molecules come together can predict the distribution of sizes of clusters formed under different conditions, in order to improve the design of soaps and detergents, and to better understand biological processes such as how bile salts break down globules of fat during the digestive process.

In a key test of their model, the lab needed to make sure that the equilibrium for the assembly reaction of SOS molecules into clusters matched up with experiments.

“If we were to run simulations with huge numbers of molecules, we could count the clusters that were formed of each size, count the molecules that remained free of the clusters, and use this information to calculate the equilibrium constant for forming each size cluster,” Kindt says. “The challenge we faced was that it would take too long for the computers to perform simulations of sufficiently huge numbers of molecules to get this to work, and for the numbers of clustering molecules we could practically handle — around 50 — the Law of Mass Action wouldn’t work.”

Kindt decided to approach the problem by considering all the different ways the molecules in a reaction could group into clusters of different sizes in order to arrive at an average. After doing some reading, he realized that these different ways of molecules grouping were what number theorists call integer partitions.

A partition of a number is a sequence of positive integers that add up to that number. For instance, there are five partitions of the number 4 (4 = 3+1 = 2+2 = 2+1+1 = 1+1+1+1). The partition numbers grow at an incredible rate. The amount of partitions for the number 10 is 42. For the number 100, the partitions explode to more than 190,000,000.

That same explosion of possibilities occurs for the ways that molecules can cluster.

Lara Patel and Xiaokun Zhang worked on a “brute force” method to get a computer to run through every single way to combine 10 molecules of one type with 10 molecules of another type. The problem was it took one computer working a couple of days to do a single analysis. And the computational time needed if just a few more molecules were added to the analysis went up exponentially.

The computational chemists had hit a wall.

Kindt reached out to Ken Ono, a world-renowned number theorist in Emory's Mathematics and Computer Science Department, to see if any of his graduate students would be interested in taking a crack at the problem.

Olivia Beckwith and Robert Schneider jumped at the chance.

“The Kindt lab’s computer simulations show that classical theorems from partition theory actually occur in nature, even for small numbers of molecules,” Schneider says. “It was surprising and felt very cosmic to me to learn that number theory determines real-world events.”

“It was definitely unexpected,” adds Beckwith. “In theoretical math we tend to work in isolation from physical phenomena like the interaction of molecules.”

The chemists and mathematicians began meeting regularly to discuss the problem and to learn one another’s terminology. “I had to pull out my son’s high school chemistry book and spend a weekend reading through it,” Schneider says.

“It happened so organically,” Patel says of the process of blending their two specialties. “Olivia and Robert would write equations on the board and as soon as a formula made sense to me I’d start thinking in my head, ‘How can we code this so that we can apply it?’”

The two mathematicians suggested a strategy that could make the problem much easier to calculate, based on a theorem known as Faà di Bruno’s Formula.

“It was surprising,” Zhang says, “because it was an idea that never would have occurred to me. They helped us get unstuck and to find a way to push our research forward.”

“They helped us find a shortcut so that we didn’t have to generate all the partitions for ways that the molecules could clump together,” Kindt adds. “Their algorithm is a much more elegant and simple way to find the entire average overall.”

Patel and Zhang used this new algorithm to put together a piece of software to analyze data from the computer simulations. The resulting system, PEACH, speeds up calculations that previously took two hours to just one second. After demonstrating how PEACH simplifies simulations of SOS assemblages, the research team is moving on to simulate this process for a range of other molecules.

“We’re interested in describing how molecular structures dictate assembly in any type of scenario, such as the early stages of crystal formation,” Kindt says. “We’re also working on quantifying just where the Law of Mass Action breaks down. We could then refine the PEACH strategy to make it even more efficient.”

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How lifeless particles can become 'life-like' by switching behaviors

Emory graduate student Guga Gogia slowly “salted” micron-sized particles into a vacuum chamber filled with plasma, creating a single layer of particles levitating above a charged electrode. He kept a low gas pressure, so the particles could move freely. “After a few minutes I could see with my naked eye that they were acting strangely," Gogia says.

By Carol Clark

Physicists have shown how a system of lifeless particles can become “life-like” by collectively switching back and forth between crystalline and fluid states — even when the environment remains stable.

Physical Review Letters recently published the findings, the first experimental realization of such dynamics.

“We’ve discovered perhaps the simplest physical system that can consistently keep changing behavior over time in a fixed environment,” says Justin Burton, Emory assistant professor of physics. “In fact, the system is so simple we never expected to see such a complex property emerge from it.”

Many living systems — from fireflies to neurons — switch behaviors collectively, firing on and then shutting off. The current paper, however, involved a non-living system: Plastic particles, tiny as dust specks, that have no “on” or “off” switches.

“The individual particles cannot change between crystalline and fluid states,” Burton says. “The switching emerges when there are collections of these particles — in fact, as few as 40. Our findings suggest that the ability for a system to switch behaviors over any time scale is more universal than previously thought.”

Watch a video to learn more and see the particles in action:


The Burton lab studies the tiny, plastic particles as a model for more complex systems. They can mimic the properties of real phenomena, such as the melting of a solid, and reveal how a system changes when it is driven by forces.

The particles are suspended in a vacuum chamber filled with a plasma — ionized argon gas. By altering the gas pressure inside the chamber, the lab members can study how the particles behave as they move between an excited, free-flowing state into a jammed, stable position.

The current discovery occurred after Emory graduate student Guram “Guga” Gogia tapped a shaker and slowly “salted” the particles into the vacuum chamber filled with the plasma, creating a single layer of particles levitating above a charged electrode. “I was just curious how the particles would behave over time if I set the parameters of the chamber at a low gas pressure, enabling them to move freely,” Gogia says. “After a few minutes I could see with my naked eye that they were acting strangely.”

From anywhere between tens of seconds to minutes, the particles would switch from moving in lockstep, or a rigid structure, to being in a melted gas-like state. It was surprising because the particles were not just melting and recrystallizing but going back and forth between the two states. 

“Imagine if you left a tray of ice out on your counter at room temperature,” Gogia says. “You wouldn’t be surprised if it melted. But if you kept the ice on the counter, you would be shocked if it kept turning back to ice and melting again.”

Gogia conducted experiments to confirm and quantify the phenomenon. The findings could serve as a simple model for the study of emerging properties in non-equillibrium systems.

“Switching is an ubiquitous part of our physical world,” Burton says. “Nothing stays in a steady state for long — from the Earth’s climate to the neurons in a human brain. Understanding how systems switch is a fundamental question in physics. Our model strips away the complexity of this behavior, providing the minimum ingredients necessary. That provides a base, a starting point, to help understand more complex systems.”

Related:
Physicists crack another piece of the glass puzzle
The physics of falling icebergs

$2 million NSF grant funds physicists' quest for optical transistors

"The ultimate goal is making it possible to devise all-optical computers and telecommunications," says Hayk Harutyunyan, left, with Ajit Srivastava. (Ann Borden, Emory Photo/Video)

By Carol Clark

The National Science Foundation awarded two Emory physicists a $2 million Emergent Frontiers grant, for development of miniaturized optical transistors to take computers and telecommunications into a new era.

“We are working to change some properties of light — such as making it travel in only one direction — by using atomically thin, two-dimensional materials,” says Ajit Srivastava, assistant professor of physics and principal investigator for the grant. “These novel materials are being touted as the next silicon. They could open the door to even smaller and more efficient electronics than are possible today.”

Srivastava’s co-investigators include Hayk Harutyunyan, also an assistant professor of physics at Emory, as well as scientists from Georgia State and Stanford universities.

“The ultimate goal is making it possible to devise all-optical computers and telecommunications,” Harutyunyan says.

A major revolution in telecommunications occurred in the 1950s, driven by the development of silicon semiconductors as miniature transistors to control the flow of electrical current. These transistors led to smaller, faster computers and paved the way for everything from flatscreen TVs to cell phones.

“They changed civilization,” Harutyunyan says. “Every year new computers would come out with faster processors as the transistors got tinier and more efficient. But about a decade ago this progress stopped, because these transistors cannot be made any smaller than about 15 nanometers and still function well.”

Meanwhile, the gradual replacement of copper wiring with fiber optics is speeding up transmissions between computers and other electronic devices and allowing for greater bandwidth. “When you send an email from Atlanta to Europe, the information is encoded into light and relayed by fiber optic cables running under the ocean,” Srivastava explains. “It’s super fast, because light is the fastest thing that you can imagine.”

Unlike in our everyday life, however, where the arrow of time moves in one direction, light photons operate at the quantum scale and can move back and forth. This lack of a fixed direction is called reciprocity. “Reciprocity in optics,” Srivastava says, “can best be described by a familiar observation: ‘If I can see you, you can see me.’”

Fiber optic cables use magnetic fields to break reciprocity and prevent light from reflecting off surfaces and creating “noise” in a signal. The required magnetic devices, known as optical isolators, are typically bulky and heavy because tiny magnets are not strong enough to do the job.

The Emory project aims to develop powerful nonreciprocal optical devices that are not based on magnets and can function at the nanoscale.

Srivastava’s lab is investigating the potential of transition metal dichalcogenides, or TMDs. TMDs are semiconductors within a new family of two-dimensional, extraordinarily thin materials. While the smallest feature of a current computer processor is 14 nanometers thick, a TMD monolayer is smaller than a single nanometer.

Harutyunyan’s lab, meanwhile, is exploring ways to make interactions between light and matter stronger through the use of metallic nano particles. Metals are shiny because of their free electrons that easily interact with light. The oscillations of these free electrons, called plasmons, allow metallic nano-particles to funnel large amounts of light into tiny dimensions.

A long-term goal of the project is to hybridize TMDs and metallic particles into nanomaterials that use laser fields to create the same light-guiding effects of magnetic fields. Such devices have the potential to be faster and cheaper and offer more precise control of the light-directing process. They would also be much smaller than existing optical isolators and transistors.

“Nano-science is an exciting area,” Srivastava says. “You can imagine the possibility of flexible cell phones or even wearable electronic membranes that would take the shape of your body.”

More powerful computers could also ramp up the ability of scientists to analyze massive datasets faster, Harutyunyan notes.

The Emory grant will also fund public outreach projects in Atlanta area schools. “We want people to understand the importance of fundamental science research,” Harutyunyan says. “And we want to inspire young people to think about science careers.

The math of doughnuts: 'Moonshine' sheds light on elliptic curves

In the simplest terms, an elliptic curve is a doughnut shape with carefully placed points, explain Emory University mathematicians Ken Ono, left, and John Duncan, right. “The whole game in the math of elliptic curves is determining whether the doughnut has sprinkles and, if so, where exactly the sprinkles are placed,” Duncan says. (Photos by Stephen Nowland, Emory Photo/Video)

By Carol Clark

Mathematicians have opened a new chapter in the theory of moonshine, one which begins to harness the power of the pariahs – sporadic simple groups that previously had no known application.

“We’ve found a new form of moonshine, which in math refers to an idea so farfetched as to sound like lunacy,” says Ken Ono, a number theorist at Emory University. “And we’ve used this moonshine to show the mathematical usefulness of the O’Nan pariah group in a way that moves it from theory to reality. It turns out that the O’Nan group knows deep information about elliptic curves.”

Nature Communications published the representation theory for the O’Nan group developed by Ono, John Duncan (also a number theorist at Emory) and Michael Mertens (a former post-doctoral fellow at Emory who is now at the University of Cologne).

“We’ve shown that the O’Nan group, a very large pariah group, actually organizes elliptic curves in a beautiful and systematic way,” Duncan says. “And not only does it organize them, it allows us to see some of their deepest properties. It sees infinitely many curves, which allows us to then use our moonshine to make predictions about their general behavior. That’s important, because these objects underlie some of the hardest questions at the very horizon of number theory.”

Elliptic curves may sound esoteric, but they are part of our day-to-day lives. They are used in cryptography – the creation of codes that are difficult to break. An elliptic curve is not an ellipse, rather it is a complex torus, or doughnut shape.

“You can think of it as a doughnut together with specific, delicate configurations of rational points that are very carefully placed,” Duncan says. “So, in the simplest of terms, it’s like a doughnut that you eat, that may have sprinkles on it. The whole game in the math of elliptic curves is determining whether the doughnut has sprinkles and, if so, where exactly the sprinkles are placed.”

Unlike an edible doughnut, however, these mathematical doughnuts are not visible.

“Imagine you are holding a doughnut in the dark,” Ono says. “You wouldn’t even be able to decide whether it has any sprinkles. But the information in our O’Nan moonshine allows us to ‘see’ our mathematical doughnuts clearly by giving us a wealth of information about the points on elliptic curves.”

The findings are especially surprising since none of the pariahs, as six of math’s sporadic simple groups are known, had previously appeared in moonshine theory, or anywhere else in science.

Math’s original moonshine theory dates to a 1979 paper called “Monstrous Moonshine” by John Conway and Simon Norton. The paper described a surprising connection between a massive algebraic object known as the monster group and the j-function, a key object in number theory. In 2015, a group of mathematicians – including Duncan and Ono – presented proof of the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture, which revealed 23 other moonshines, or mysterious connections between the dimensions of symmetry groups and coefficients of special functions.

In theoretical math, symmetry comes in groups. Symmetrical solutions are usually optimal, since they allow you to divide a large problem into equal parts and solve it faster.

The classification of the building blocks of groups is gathered in the ATLAS of Finite Groups, published in 1985. “The ATLAS is like math’s version of the periodic table of the elements, but for symmetry instead of atoms,” Duncan explains.

Both the ATLAS and the periodic table contain quirky characters that may – or may not – exist in nature.

Four super heavy elements with atomic numbers above 100, for example, were discovered in 2016 and added to the periodic table. “People have to work hard to produce these elements in particle accelerators and they vanish immediately after they are constructed,” Ono says. “So you have to wonder if they really are a part of our everyday chemistry.”

The pariah groups pose a similar question in math. Are they natural or simply theoretical constructs?

“Our work proves, for the first time, that a pariah is real,” Ono says. “We found the O’Nan group living in nature. Our theorem shows that it’s connected to elliptic curves, and whenever you find a correspondence between two objects that are seemingly not related, it opens the door to learning more about those objects.”

Related:
Mathematicians prove the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture

Solar eclipse adds cosmic spin to Emory orientation

“It’s a strange coincidence that the moon at its distance and size almost perfectly covers the sun at its distance and size,” says Emory physicist Sidney Perkowitz. “It makes you stop and wonder — is it just a coincidence? Some people call an eclipse a religious experience. I call it cosmic.” (NASA photo)

By Carol Clark

The Emory University class of 2021 already has a unique distinction: The campus orientation day for the first-year students will occur beneath a nearly total solar eclipse. From about 2:38 to 2:41 pm on Monday, August 21, the moon will cover 97.7 percent of the sun over Atlanta.

A couple of solar telescopes will be set up on the roof of the Mathematics and Science Building between 1 and 4 pm for staff, faculty, students and their family members who want to observe the sun through them — weather permitting. But a pair of certified solar eclipse glasses, a simple pinhole camera — or even the leaves of a tree — will also make it possible to safely view the eclipse anywhere on campus where the sun is visible.

Emory first-year students plan to gather on the Quad between 2:15 and 3 pm for eclipse watching. At the Oxford campus, first-year students will gather in front of the Oxford Science Building starting at 2 pm where there will be music, a solar telescope and sun-themed snacks and drinks. The Emory Police Department will also host group eclipse viewing on the field of the Student Activity and Academic Center at the Clairmont Campus. All students, faculty and staff are welcome to attend these events.

Atlanta Science Tavern has also compiled this list of solar eclipse events in and around Atlanta. 

A total solar eclipse will sweep across a 70-mile-wide area of the United States, starting on the Pacific coast of Oregon and continuing all the way to South Carolina and the Atlantic Ocean. Even though Atlanta lies just beyond the path of totality, if the weather is clear the near-total eclipse will be worth pausing from work or school to go outside and experience.

To begin with, it’s rare. The last time the sun over Atlanta was nearly obscured by the moon was on May 31, 1984, when it was 99.7 percent covered. The New York Times described what happened as the skies began to darken about 20 minutes after noon: “The temperature dropped six degrees, flowers closed their petals, dogs howled, pigeons tucked their heads under their wings as if to sleep and the whole city was bathed in a kind of diffused light, not unlike that accompanying the approach of a severe storm.”

Emory senior  Raveena Chhibber tests out a pair of solar eclipse glasses. The neuroscience and behavioral biology major is on campus this summer working in a psychology lab and plans to take a break to witness the celestial event.

Sidney Perkowitz, Emory emeritus professor of physics, was on campus that day in 1984. He stood outside near the old physics building, now Callaway Hall, beneath a large white oak on the Quad.

“I remember a lot of people came out on the Quad, particularly around this tree,” he says. “It was a joint social experience.”

The darkening effect as the moon began to cover the sun was “eerie,” he says. “It didn’t feel exactly like twilight, it felt like something weirder was going on. It just seemed abnormal.”

Perkowitz watched the light as it passed through the leaves of the tree. “As the ambient light gets reduced, you begin to see multiple images of the crescent sun on the ground below,” Perkowitz says, explaining that each tiny space between the leaves acted as a pinhole-like opening, similar to a camera. “It’s spectacular because you see dozens and dozens of the images, filtered through the leaves.”

Aristotle observed this same phenomenon beneath a tree during a solar eclipse in the fourth century BC. The Greeks were debating at the time whether light moves in straight lines. The projection of the image of the sun through the leaves was evidence that it does, although the principles behind it would remained unresolved for nearly 2,000 years.

The white oak that Perkowitz stood beneath 33 years ago was struck by lightning in 2016 and is no longer there. There are plenty of other trees on campus, however, where eclipse watchers can stand to experience the event.

"An eclipse is a chance to stop and perceive and reflect," says Emory astronomer Erin Bonning. "It proceeds slowly and deliberately, which is not exactly the pace of modern society." (NASA graphic)

Or you can make your own pinhole projector by poking a hole in a piece of cardboard. NASA provides directions and some templates. During the eclipse, you stand with your back to the sun and hold up the cardboard so that light passes through it and hits a wall, the ground or a piece of paper that you hold up to capture a projection of the image of the sun.

Sunglasses do not provide enough protection to look directly at the sun at any time during a partial eclipse. You need special solar viewing glasses, which are available free at Fulton County libraries or can be purchased online. Beware of fakes — the American Astronomical Society provides guidance to help ensure that solar glasses are certified and safe to wear.

Horace Dale, director of the Emory Observatory, will have a limited number of solar-viewing glasses available and will set up two solar telescopes between 1 and 4 pm on the roof of the Mathematics and Science Center — if the weather holds. Take the elevator to the fifth floor of the building and follow the signs to get to the rooftop.

“If it’s just partly cloudy, we should be able to see through the breaks in the clouds,” Dale says. But even the threat of a storm, he adds, will mean having to pack up the expensive equipment to avoid it getting damaged by rain.

The special filters on the solar telescopes will make it possible to directly view the sun safely. “You’ll be able to see the filamentary structure of the sun and any flare activity on the edge of the sun,” Dale says. “There might even be a few planets that pop out.”

An Atlanta native, Dale experienced a partial eclipse here in 1970 when he was six. “I remember my dad telling me not to look at the sun,” he says. “It was a really interesting experience for me.”

Which is why Dale has already explained to the teachers of his son Joey, six, and his daughter Emma, five, that his children will not attend school on August 21. Instead they will be getting an eclipse lesson from their father. Their mother, Jessica, will also be present. A dental hygienist, she has the day off since the dentist is heading for the path of totality and will close the office.

Psychology graduate student Katy Renfroe will pause from working on her thesis to observe the partial eclipse on campus.

Astronomer Erin Bonning, director of the Emory Planetarium, will be in Clayton, Georgia — in the path of totality — during the eclipse. She will be giving a presentation for Goizueta Business School’s orientation of incoming Emory juniors at a retreat center in north Georgia. The BBA class of 2019 not only holds the distinction of being Goizueta Business School’s 100th-anniversary class — it enjoys the bonus of entering orientation with great timing in a great location.

“This will be my first total solar eclipse and I’m excited,” Bonning says. She quickly adds: “I’m cautiously excited because all astronomers know that when something really big is about to happen you don’t want the clouds to hear you talking about it. Clouds are the great enemies of astronomers.”

When Bonning was in fifth grade, in Maryland, she had fervently anticipated a near total-eclipse event. When the big moment finally arrived, it was cloudy and rainy.

She did get to witness a lunar eclipse in Atlanta around 5 am on October 8, 2014. “I got up early and walked around downtown to find a good view,” she says. “It’s breathtaking to see the Earth cast a shadow in space and the moon pass through it. It’s one thing to write down an equation for curving space time, but when you see a visual illustration of these facts it’s so much more moving. It made me feel connected to the universe.”

A woman standing near her during the lunar eclipse had a different reaction. “She said, ‘Huh. I thought it would be more impressive than that,’” Bonning recalls. “I took a deep breath and held my tongue.”

The August 21 solar eclipse is particularly special since the path of totality will stretch from sea to shining sea, across the United States. “It’s unusual because it’s taking place over such a large inhabited stretch of land,” Bonning says. “The last time we had such a grand solar eclipse across America was a century ago.”

Following are Bonning’s tips for observing the solar eclipse, whether you stay in Atlanta or travel to totality.

Plan your activity. “Don’t just hop in the car on August 21 and spontaneously head for the path of totality, or you’re going to see a partial eclipse in a traffic jam,” Bonning says. You can read more about traffic predictions here.

Don’t worry about height. “You don’t need to go to the top of a mountain or the top of a building,” Bonning says. “If you can see the sun, you can see the eclipse. It’s not like getting closer to it will give you a better view.”

Manage your expectations. “While it will be extremely cool to see the eclipse, it’s not going to look like a dragon came out of the sky and devoured the sun. That’s a myth,” Bonning says. “An eclipse is a chance to stop and perceive and reflect. It proceeds slowly and deliberately, which is not exactly the pace of modern society.”

Be in the moment. If you’re not an expert at photographing eclipses, forget trying to get the perfect selfie for social media. “You’ll be better off being open to the experience,” Bonning says. “Observe shifts in the light. Feel the temperature drop. You may notice animals behaving differently.”

Make it a fun, educational experience for kids. While you need to emphasize to young children the importance of not staring directly at the sun with the naked eye during the eclipse, you can do so in a fun way that helps them understand why. Bonning recommends parents visit this Planetary Society site, which includes directions for how to make pinhole projectors, including ones in fancy, pinhole-punched shapes.

“We’re very lucky on Earth,” Perkowitz says. “We have the largest moon of all the planets and it has all kinds of connections to love and romance and poetry. And on top of that, it has this amazing alignment with the sun that provides this incredible sight every so often.”

The moon is only a quarter of a million miles away and much smaller than Earth, he notes, while the sun is 93 million miles distant and is huge — far bigger than all of the planets in the solar system put together.

“It’s a strange coincidence that the moon at its distance and size almost perfectly covers the sun at its distance and size,” Perkowitz says. “It makes you stop and wonder — is it just a coincidence? Some people call an eclipse a religious experience. I call it cosmic.”

What UFO conspiracy theories reveal about American culture

Last spring, historian Felix Harcourt taught a class at Emory on how conspiracy theories about UFOs have shaped American culture. He began the class with a question: “How many people believe alien life exists?”

Most people in the class raised their hand. “I think so, too,” Harcourt said. “Stephen Hawking thinks so. In a giant universe there is a distinct probability that somewhere alien life has evolved. It probably looks pretty different from us, but it might be out there.”

But what about the idea that aliens have visited Earth? And stories of human complicity in those visits — usually of government complicity?

The multitude of UFO conspiracy theories are considered laughable and serious discussion of them is labeled as a cultural taboo, Harcourt said. “Even as they are treated as laughable, they’re some of the most widely believed conspiracy theories. If we go back to the sixties, Gallup polls find 96 percent of Americans had heard of UFOs, 46 percent believed that they were real. By 1973, 57 percent believed that UFOs were real. By the nineties, 71 percent believed that the government was at least hiding information about UFOs: 'They may or may not be real, but there’s definitely more going on there than the government is letting us know.' And those numbers remain relatively stable.”

A 2015 poll showed that 56 percent of American believe that UFOs are real and 45 percent believe aliens have visited Earth. “To put that into context,” Harcourt said, “in that same survey, 57 percent said that the Big Bang theory was real.”

Harcourt goes on to discuss how various UFO conspiracy theories in the 20th century have changed, often paralleling societal anxieties at the time. Click here to watch the entire class on C-SPAN’s lectures in history series.

Harcourt taught the class as part of a course, “Politics and Paranoia,” while he was a post-doctoral fellow at Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry.

To boldly go where public health hasn't gone before

"Hopefully, Emory will make a mark in NASA history," says Yang Liu, associate professor of environmental health. (NASA photo)

From Rollins Magazine

Rollins School of Public Health researchers will soon take their research into orbit, partnering with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in a new satellite mission to study air pollution.

NASA chose Rollins as a joint recipient of its $100 million award — $2.3 million of which will come to Rollins — to study the effects of air pollution on the population through a satellite mission, according to Yang Liu, associate professor of environmental health. He noted that this is the first time a NASA space mission has incorporated a public health component.

"We're the scientific guinea pig," Liu said.

The Rollins research group, led by Liu, co-created the project idea with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The mission will construct and use a Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) device to record airborne particulate matter, which will collect data on the effects of pollution on public health from at least 10 locations with major metropolitan areas.

Once constructed by JPL, the MAIA device will be mounted on a compatible Earth-orbiting satellite. "Even though it's a small mission, it's actually the first ever in which we get to work with NASA engineers to build public health into the DNA of this instrument," Liu said.

The Rollins team will analyze the data to make predictions about public health issues such as birth outcomes and cardiovascular disease. The team will also serve as the public health liaison between JPL and other institutions in the complete research group. Recruited by Liu, the complete group has teams at University of California, Los Angeles, Harvard University, University of British Columbia, and University of Dalhousie.

Because the device will orbit via satellite, it will provide a more holistic view of air pollution data than the commonly used ground monitors.

"It's very difficult to cross to a completely different scientific community and convince them that this mission is not only worthwhile but also feasible," Liu said. "Hopefully, Emory will make a mark in NASA history."

Related:
Georgia Climate Project creates state 'climate research roadmap'

Students advocating for academic science

PhD candidates Crystal Grant, left, and Joshua Lewis are vocal advocates for scientific research at universities, but neither is ready to commit to academic careers due to uncertainty about good jobs. Last summer, they made their case to congressional aides from the Georgia delegation. (Kay Hinton)

By Hal Jacobs
Emory Magazine

Call it the 800-pound gorilla in the lab.

Crystal Grant, a graduate student in Emory's Genetics and Molecular Biology program in the Graduate Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (GDBBS), faced it while studying how people’s DNA changes with age.

Graduate student Joshua Lewis of the GDBBS Biochemistry, Cell and Developmental Biology program saw its shadow while researching how cells stick to neighbor cells— information that could lead to understanding how cancer cells metastasize.

The problem weighed so heavily on Chelsey Ruppersburg, who graduated with a PhD in 2016, that she changed career directions after racing to earn a doctorate in cell biology in only four years, rather than the usual six or seven.

The situation is readily apparent to anyone who works in an academic lab. Research is a slow, steady, incremental process; funding is erratic, inconsistent, boom and bust. Principal investigators must tear themselves away from working with students to chase fewer National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants. Hiring new students and staff is fraught because funding for their positions is a moving target.

Meanwhile, a steady stream of graduate students—vital to every academic lab—compete for rarer faculty positions while being tempted by more lucrative private industry jobs or opportunities abroad.
Postdoctoral fellowships, an important transitional step from student to professor, have become a port of call that may stretch into years of low pay and uncertainty for scientists who hoped to settle down after a decade-plus of intense schooling.

But as the challenge grows steeper, the same young scientists who are most affected are also trying to solve it.

Read more in Emory Magazine.

Astronaut Mark Kelly to launch Atlanta Science Festival at Emory

Captain Mark Kelly, who led NASA missions into space, will lead off the action-packed schedule of this year's Atlanta Science Festival on Tuesday, March 14. His talk is entitled "Endeavor to Succeed." (NASA photo)

By Carol Clark

The 2017 Atlanta Science Festival blasts off on Tuesday, March 14 with a talk by Captain Mark Kelly – commander of Space Shuttle Endeavour’s final mission – at 7 pm in Emory’s Glenn Memorial Auditorium.

“We wanted to start off this year with someone who appeals to people of all ages and who epitomizes science in action,” says Meisa Salaita, co-executive director of the Atlanta Science Festival, which will continue through March 25 with events throughout the metro area. “Who better than an astronaut to show us how science can take us to new and exciting places?”

The title of Kelly’s talk is “Endeavour to Succeed.” Tickets for the event can be bought in advance on the Atlanta Science Festival’s web site for $12 ($8 for children 12 and under). They will also be available at the door the day of the event for $15.

Starting at 5:30 pm, during the countdown to Kelly’s talk, the public is invited to join toy rocket launching activities on the Glenn Memorial lawn, led by members of the Georgia Tech Ramblin’ Rocket Club and the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers.

Kelly, who began his NASA career in 1996, commanded the Space Shuttle Discovery, as well as the Endeavour. He left the astronaut corps in the summer of 2011 to help his wife, former U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, recover from gunshot wounds she received in an assassination attempt on her life. The couple’s story captivated the nation, and they went on to found Americans for Responsible Solutions to advocate for gun control.

NASA is comparing biological data from the Earth-bound Kelly with his identical twin brother, Scott Kelly, who recently spent a year in space. The unique Twins Study may offer insights into how to prepare astronauts for a long-term mission to Mars.

Kelly is also a prolific author, including numerous children’s books with space themes, and he will be available for a book signing following his talk at Emory.

The 12-day Atlanta Science Festival features talks, lab tours, film screenings, participatory activities and science demonstrations — more than 100 events at dozens of different venues, including the Emory campus. “We’ve expanded the number of days at the festival of the year, to avoid scheduling conflicts and give people a chance to experience more of the festival,” Salaita says. (Click here for the full schedule of events.)

Physics Live (at the Emory Mathematics and Science Center) and a Chemistry Carnival (at the Atwood Chemistry Center) will be among the Emory campus highlights, featuring lab tours and science demonstrations from 3:30 to 7 pm on Friday, March 24. (Click here for a full listing of Emory-related events.)

New at the festival this year will be an appearance by New York rap artist Baba Brinkman. He will perform “Rap Guide to Climate Chaos” at 1:30 on Saturday, March 18 at the Drew Charter School. 

Also new this year is “The Art and Science of Cooking with Insects,” featuring free tastings, at 7:30 pm on Thursday, March 23 at Manuels Tavern.

About 20,000 visitors are expected for the festival’s culminating event, the Exploration Expo, from 11 am to 4 pm on Saturday, March 25 at Centennial Olympic Park. Around 100 interactive exhibits will delight curious minds of all ages, from Emory chemist’s Doug Mulford’s “Ping Pong Big Bang” to the immersive Google Village experience.

Leading sponsors of this year’s Atlanta Science Festival include Emory, Georgia Tech, the Metro Atlanta Chamber, Delta Airlines and Google.

BRAIN grant to fund study of how the mind learns

Biophysicist Ilya Nemenman, left, is developing theories about the brain that can be tested in the lab of biologist Sam Sober, right. (Emory Photo/Video).

By Carol Clark

How does the brain correct mistakes and guide the process of learning a skill? Why do some individuals learn faster than others?

Two Emory researchers – biophysicist Ilya Nemenman and biologist Sam Sober – recently received a $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative to explore these questions through a theoretical-experimental framework. Their research into how the sensory-motor loop controls and optimizes learning could lead to better protocols to help those dealing with major disruptions to their learned behaviors, such as when recovering from a stroke.

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.

Emory has received other grants from the BRAIN Initiative: In 2015, a $1.7 million award went to neuroscientists Dieter Jaeger (Department of Biology) and Garrett Stanley (Emory-Georgia Tech’s Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering). They will use the award to explore neural circuits related to sensing and physical action. In 2016, neurosurgeon Robert Gross in the School of Medicine received a $5 million grant to focus on optimizing neurostimulation therapies for epilepsy.

The grant received by Nemenman and Sober is part of a new cohort, opening another phase of the BRAIN Initiative: The development of theoretical, computational and statistical tools.

“Big data by itself is not useful,” Nemenman says. “We also need to come up with methods for understanding such data.”

Nemenman is working on a theory to help explain how the brain learns. “If you are learning something similar to something that you already know, it’s easier than if you are learning something entirely new,” he says. “We see this effect across the animal kingdom, including in humans. And this ability to learn something new changes with age.”

He gives the example that he will always speak English with an accent, since he is a native of Belarus and did not move to an English-speaking country until shortly before he became a student at Princeton. His children, however, will speak English without an accent since they were born in the United States and immersed in English from birth.

Nemenman is collaborating with Sober, who conducts experiments with Bengalese finches. “These songbirds are one of the best model systems available for studying how the brain learns to communicate,” Sober says.

The male songbirds sing to attract a mate, but they are not born with this ability, Sober explains. Instead, the young males learn to sing by memorizing, and then imitating, the singing of their fathers. When a young bird sings the wrong note, it tries to correct its mistake to match the memorized “target” sound.

In experiments, the Sober lab places tiny earphones on a songbird. When the bird sings, the researchers distort some of the notes slightly and play back the sound through the earphones. The bird is tricked into thinking it has sung a note incorrectly and tries to correct it.

Through this method, the lab has found that the birds are able to correct small distortions of sound, but they cannot correct large distortions.

“Many errors are distributed as a bell-shaped curve, but the distribution of singing errors in the birds is not bell-shaped,” Nemenman says. He is developing theories to explain how the difficulty of learning and correcting for large disturbances is related to this peculiar shape of the distribution of errors produced by the brain during learning.

“We can test the theories through experiments and learn more about the process,” he says. “The ultimate goal is to develop predictive models of how individuals learn from their errors that can be extended to other organisms, including humans.”

Nemenman also recently received a grant from the Kavli Foundation, to support workshops, symposiums and journal clubs that foster interdisciplinary theoretical and computational approaches to neuroscience, and bridge researchers at Emory and Georgia Tech.

It is important for physicists to share their expertise and collaborate with other scientists focused on understanding the brain, Nemenman says. As chair of the American Physical Society’s division of biological physics, he strives to establish programs that attract young physicists to neuroscience.

“Physicists are well posed to have a dramatic impact in this area,” he says. “We are trained to do science by combining theory and experiments. We can apply the same techniques to study the brain that we use to study other mysteries of the universe. Many graduate students in physics who came in intending to work on string theory, like I did, are coming out with a PhD focused on theoretical neuroscience.”

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