Atlanta Science Festival fosters 'small steps, big ideas'

Emory faculty and students are set to dazzle children with science demonstrations at "Physics Live!" The event will take place on Friday, March 25 from 3:30 to 7 pm in Emory's Math and Science Building. 

By Carol Clark

"Small steps, big ideas," is the theme of the third annual Atlanta Science Festival, which encourages all ages to step into a world of wonder and exploration through more than 100 events and hands-on activities in metro-Atlanta from March 19 to March 26. In fact, the party has already started via ongoing online activities, such as a chance to vote for Atlanta's favorite scientist and compose original "sci-ku" — or science-themed haiku.

About 50,000 people are expected to turn out during the eight-day festival for talks, lab tours, film screenings, participatory activities and science demonstrations. The events are set at more than 80 different venues, including the Emory campus.

"We've got a lot of fun and irreverent events, like 'The Science of Circus," and others that are more on the serious side, like a discussion on climate change," says Jordan Rose, who is executive co-director of the festival along with Meisa Salaita. "There is something for everyone, from little kids to teens, college students and adults."

A new event this year, "Sci-Cycle: A Competitive Scavenger Hunt on Two Wheels," will start things rolling on the opening day of the festival, Saturday, March 19. The Emory Spokes Council and the Emory Graduate Sustainability Group are organizing the bike adventure, to take place on the Atlanta Beltline. Participants will learn about materials science, urban foraging and sustainable practices through pedaling to various locations and performing tasks such as using a bicycle-powered blender to make a smoothie.

Also new this year is a "Science Parade," set for the final day of the festival, on Saturday, March 26, starting at the Centennial Academy in downtown Atlanta. "Everyone is welcome to join the parade," Rose says. "We're encouraging people to come dressed as their favorite scientist, or element or other science-themed character."

The half-mile parade, led by the Seed and Feed Marching Abominable band, will end at Centennial Olympic Park for the launch of the Exploration Expo, the culminating event of the Atlanta Science Festival. The free Expo includes stage performances and hands-on science activities at 100-plus exhibitor booths, including more than a dozen run by Emory faculty and students.

Highlights of this year's Expo will include a giant LEGO build of the city of Atlanta, which will be 40-feet wide upon completion. "Everyone can help assemble a bit of it throughout the Expo," Rose says.

A range of Atlanta Science Festival events will take place on the Emory and Oxford campuses, as well as the Carter Center.

"The Atlanta Science Festival is a great way to feature some of the research and discoveries that are coming out of Emory for the local community," Rose says. "It's also a great platform for Emory students and faculty to practice their communication skills for a general audience, and to engage the public in their science."

Click here for a full listing of Emory events, and details about how to join them.

A scientist's view from Earth's highest mountains

"As difficult and dangerous as mountain climbing can be, it's also an absolutely wonderful experience. You have to live it to understand it," says Stefan Lutz, chair of chemistry at Emory, shown during a Denali expedition.

By Carol Clark

In December of 2012, Stefan Lutz summited the 22,841-foot peak of Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Western hemisphere, located in western Argentina. “The view from the top was amazing. When you look to the horizon and see the curvature of the Earth, you realize that you’re in a pretty special place,” says Lutz, professor and chair of chemistry at Emory. He is also a dedicated mountaineer who will attempt to climb Mount Everest this spring.

After a few minutes spent admiring the view from atop Aconcagua, it was time to descend. Lutz and a guide maneuvered down a particularly steep section and sat down to wait for the rest of their group.

“It was a beautiful day. I remember drinking and eating a bit of food, just trying to re-energize myself,” Lutz says. “Then I noticed a man, a climber I didn’t know, standing alone, maybe 20 feet away. He just kept standing, still as a statue. It’s exhausting at that altitude and I wondered, ‘Why doesn’t he sit down?’”

Lutz mentioned it to the guide who then approached the man. “As soon as the guide put his hand on the guy’s shoulder, he collapsed,” Lutz recalls.

They gave him some water and asked, “Do you know where you are?”

“Yes,” the man replied, “I’m on Mount Fuji.”

It was clear that the confused mountaineer, a Japanese man climbing solo, was suffering acute mountain sickness. “He was in serious trouble,” Lutz says. “Luckily, some Argentine park rangers came along. They gave him bottled oxygen which helped him recover enough that he could be helped back down the mountain.”

Without the assistance of the rangers, the climber’s condition might have progressed to high altitude cerebral edema – a severe and, if untreated, fatal form of altitude sickness when capillary fluid leaks into the blood-brain barrier due to the effects of inadequate oxygen.

“That’s the highest I’ve climbed – 22,841 feet,” Lutz says. “It’s very humbling. Even a fit person moves like a turtle at that altitude.”

Bright sunshine at 3 a.m. during a Denali expedition in Alaska.

The experience was another stark reminder to Lutz, who is 46, that his passion for climbing comes with great risks along with the rewards. “It’s not about being a thrill seeker,” Lutz says, trying to explain why he climbs. “As difficult and dangerous as mountain climbing can be, it's also an absolutely wonderful experience. You have to live it to understand it. You get a high from it that stays with you.”

A native of Switzerland, Lutz grew up hiking and being in the mountains. Five years ago, he became more serious about his hobby and started a quest to climb the Seven Summits – the highest peak on each of the continents. He leaves March 26 for Nepal and a two-month expedition to climb Mount Everest. If his Everest bid is successful, it will mark the sixth of the Seven Summits for Lutz. You can follow his team’s progress on the web site of the expedition leader, International Mountain Guides.

As part of his physical conditioning, Lutz never takes the elevator as he roams around the Emory Chemistry Center. Instead, he climbs the stairs with his large, red, expedition backpack – loaded with 60 pounds of sand – strapped to his six-foot-four frame.

Lutz is a biomolecular chemist who uses protein engineering to develop catalysts for therapeutic and industrial applications. He also enjoys teaching, and takes examples from his climbing experiences into the classroom to convey some of the complex concepts in biochemistry. “Using my mountaineering experiences brings these concepts to life and gets students more engaged,” Lutz says. “Most of them have experienced at least a hint of what I talk about, like the feeling you get at higher altitudes when hiking or skiing, so they relate to it.”

Lutz’ scientific training deepens his understanding of extreme landscapes and the physical and mental processes a climber may experience. Following is a bit of Lutz’ perspective on mountaineering, in his words and photos.

Landing in Antarctica for an expedition up Mount Vinson, the most remote, and the least climbed, of the Seven Summits.

The environment of the southern polar region 

At 16,050 feet, Mount Vinson is the highest peak in Antarctica. To get there, you start with a five-hour flight on a jet plane from Punta Arenas on the southern tip of South America to an icy airfield in the center of Antarctica. Next, you get in a DC3 fitted with skis for a 45-minute flight that sets you down nearer Mount Vinson. From there, you take an even smaller propeller plan to reach the base camp.

Antarctica stores about 65 percent of all the fresh water in the world in the form of ice. You fly over an area of incredible beauty and realize that it looks the same as it did tens of thousands of years ago. No human being has touched it and many places have had no precipitation for more than 100,000 years – just snow drifts. Antarctica is the driest continent and is actually one of the marvelous, great deserts of Earth. Humidity is in the single digits and it feels like you are in an evaporator, turning into dried fruit. The temperature routinely drops to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. You look to the horizon and all you see is snow, and more snow, and a few rocks. It’s beautiful in its simplicity.

We were there in December, which is mid-summer in the southern hemisphere. Since we were only about 700 miles from the South Pole, bright sunshine streamed into our tents even at 2 a.m. The snow is like a mirror. You have to wear glacier sunglasses all the time or you can go snow blind within 15 minutes. Every speck of exposed skin has to be covered with a thick layer of sunblock to avoid massive sunburn. We had one team member who forgot to put sunblock on the bottom of his nose and ended up with a really painful burn of his nostrils.

Above the clouds: Lutz makes his way up the West Buttress Ridge of Denali, with Mount Foraker in the background.

The physiology of extreme cold 

Denali in Alaska is North America’s highest peak at 20,310 feet. It’s at about 63 degrees northern latitude. To reach base camp, you fly in a single-prop plane between snow-covered peaks and land on a glacier. The plane takes off and you and your teammates are now about 70 miles away from any human habitation and, basically, living in a freezer for three weeks. The average temperature is around 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Everything that you need to climb and to survive for the next 20 days is loaded into a 60-pound pack that you carry on your back and on a sled that you pull behind you, which holds another 50 pounds.

As you work your way up the mountain, your metabolism goes into overdrive to provide sufficient muscle energy and maintain body heat in the cold. That turns climbing into an all-you-can-eat contest. I switched from my normal 2000-calorie-per-day diet to about 12,000 calories per day. And I still lost 12 pounds during my three weeks climbing the mountain! Believe it or not, it’s not easy consuming this amount of calories. At higher elevations, your appetite diminishes. Food that tastes delicious at sea level suddenly becomes unappealing as your taste perception changes. Experience has taught me to leave behind my beloved salami when climbing and instead stuff my pockets with Snickers bars and chocolate-covered raisins. I ate about 25 pounds of candy during the Denali trip. 

Burning calories to generate energy and heat is an oxidation process, and the higher you go, the less oxygen in the atmosphere. To manage the extreme altitude of Mount Everest, which is 29,035 feet, most climbers use supplemental oxygen to stay warm. You can wear lots of insulating gear but if you are not getting enough oxygen to burn fuel, you still start shivering. And if shivering is not enough to warm you up, you can develop hypothermia. At the same time, you are at risk for frostbite – the result of your body saying, “I can live without my fingers and toes, arms and legs.” It pulls your blood into your core to make sure your critical organs have sufficient blood supply. That process can happen faster at higher altitude.

Roped together on Denali. "You form a unique bond with the people that you climb with, the people on the same rope as you," Lutz says.

The biochemistry of altitude sickness

The summit of Denali has 50 percent less oxygen than at sea level. Atop Everest that percentage drops to 30 percent. Even without exercising these low oxygen levels can make you feel like you’re suffocating. You start to breathe faster to take in more oxygen but with each breath, you also exhale carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide is part of a buffer system in the bloodstream that prevents the pH level in cells to fluctuate. All the proteins in our cells rely on steady acidity. But if you pump out too much carbon dioxide from your body, the buffer system goes haywire and you can develop a condition called alkalosis.

Respiratory alkalosis, which is a result of blood pH rising beyond the normal range, starts off as a mild headache but can quickly progress to severe head pain and nausea. Worst of all, it has little to do with fitness. I’ve seen very strong athletes crumple up with these symptoms. If untreated, you start vomiting violently, leading to more dehydration. The condition can progress to where cellular fluid starts leading from your brain, known as cerebral edema, or your lungs, known as pulmonary edema. 

Medication such as Diamox can help the body more quickly adjust to higher altitude but the best approach is to slowly and gradually hike to higher elevations. That gives your body time to acclimatize to the thin air. It’s the reason that climbers spend nearly two months at the Everest base camp before attempting to reach the summit.

Navigating ice crevices of Denali. "Fear can become your ally by keeping you focused and alert," Lutz says.

The psychology of endurance and fear 

Mountaineering is an endurance sport but only part of that is physical endurance. A majority of it comes from your head. It can take sheer willpower to keep you going when you are cold and exhausted. Your mind has to convince your body to take the next step, hour after hour, as you work your way towards a summit. On the flip side, you can have a sunny day, blue sky and no wind and know that you are going to make it. Psychologically, it’s a breakthrough moment: A feeling that no money can buy.

The summit, however, is only the halfway point. A majority of mountaineering accidents happen during the descent. People are euphoric, but also exhausted physically and mentally. You can never let down your inner guard because you’re operating in an environment with little room for error. All it takes is one misstep.

Fear can become your ally by keeping you focused and alert. I remember traversing a narrow section on Denali called the Windy Corner. To one side of you is a rock wall. On the other side are ice crevices big enough to swallow a school bus. Rocks the size of fists fall from that rock wall and you have to dodge them almost like you are in a computer game. If a rock hits your lower body it can shatter a bone. If one hits you on the head, it can kill you. Getting through there only took a few minutes but it’s an experience that I won’t forget.

Fear can also give you strength. While climbing in the Denali range, we were roped together in groups of four as a safety precaution due to all of the crevices. One moment we were moving through a snowy glacier landscape. The next moment, one of our team members in the group just ahead of mine simply disappeared. There was no sound, just the sight of the rope running. His body had broken through a bridge of thin snow and was plummeting into a dark abyss in the ice. The team members he was roped to immediately dropped to the ground and anchored their axes into the ice to stop the fall. They then used the rope and their gear to quickly build a pulley system and extract our comrade from the crevice. After about 20 minutes of hard work by the team he was back on the glacier surface, shaken but unhurt. You would think they would be too fatigued from climbing to respond so quickly and energetically, but in a situation like that your heart rate spikes and your adrenaline level goes through the roof.

Lutz, in yellow parka, enjoys a brief celebration with teammates after they reached the summit of Denali. "These are the kinds of friendships that last forever," he says.

The sociology of bonding during intense experiences 

You forge a unique bond with the people that you climb with, the people on the same rope as you. You’re putting your lives in one another’s hands.

On Aconcagua, two of my teammates and I were crammed into our small tent one night when a ferocious blizzard hit, with winds up to 80 miles-per-hour. Nobody wants to be out in that kind of weather. Yet, every hour or so, one of us had to crawl out and dig out the tent so we would not get buried in snow. We took turns shoveling. Meanwhile, the two inside the tent made sure they had a hot drink ready when the other one finished a round.

Pulling together as a team to overcome tremendous challenges, in spite of everyone being mentally and physically exhausted, builds deep camaraderie. These are the kinds of friendships that last forever.

Related:
How a hike in the woods led to a math 'Aha!'
The math of rock climbing
Proving math is good for endurance sports

All photos by Stefan Lutz or courtesy of Stefan Lutz.

A beginner's guide to sex differences in the brain

By Donna Maney, Emory Professor of Psychology

Asking whether there are sex differences in the human brain is a bit like asking whether coffee is good for you – scientists can’t seem to make up their minds about the answer. In 2013, for example, news stories proclaimed differences in the brain so dramatic that men and women “might almost be separate species.” Then in 2015, headlines announced that there are in fact no sex differences in the brain at all. Even as I write this, more findings of differences are coming out.

So which is it? Are there differences between men’s and women’s brains – or not? To clear up the confusion, we need to consider what the term “sex difference” really means in the scientific literature.

To illustrate the concept, I’ve used a web-based tool I helped develop, SexDifference.org, to plot some actual data. The three graphs below show how measurements from a sample of people are distributed along a scale. Women are represented in pink, and men in blue. Most people are close to the average for their sex, so that’s the peak of each “bump.” People on the left or right side of the peak are below or above average, respectively, for their sex. I’ve added individual data points for three hypothetical study subjects Sue, Ann and Bob. Not real people, just examples. Their data points are superimposed on the larger data set of hundreds of people.

Before we get into the brain, let’s look at a couple of familiar sex differences outside the brain. Many of us, if asked to describe how men’s bodies differ from women’s, would first mention the sex difference in external genitalia. The graph below depicts the number of nontransgender adults that have a “genital tubercle derivative” (clitoris or penis) of a given size.

Size of human genitalia. Data from Wallen and Lloyd, 2008. (Graphic by Donna Maney.)

All of the women in this sample, including our hypothetical Sue and Ann, fall within a certain range. All of the men, including Bob, fall into a different range. With relatively rare exceptions, humans can be accurately categorized into sexes based on this measure.

Sex differences in human height. Data from Sperrin, et al., 2015. Graphic by Donna Maney. 

Next, let’s consider another difference that we can all see and understand: the sex difference in height. Here, we see overlap, depicted in purple. Unless a person is very tall or very short, knowing only that person’s height will not allow us to categorize that person as male or female with much certainty. Yet, even though we all know that some women are taller than some men, we would probably all call this a sex difference.

A typical sex difference in the human brain. Data from Tunc et al., 2016. (Graphic by Donna Maney.) 

Now let’s consider a typical sex difference inside the human brain. This graph depicts a sex difference in structural connectivity, or the degree to which networks of brain areas are interconnected, as reported in a recent study (the median effect size from the study is shown). The distributions of values for men and women are essentially the same; they overlap by 90 percent. Sue and Bob have fairly similar values, and Ann’s value is higher than the average man’s. We can see that this sex difference in the brain is quite different from the sex difference in genital measurements. With only the measurement of brain connectivity, the odds of correctly guessing a person’s sex might be as low as 51 out of 100. Since the odds aren’t perfectly 50:50, this is technically a sex difference. The term means that sex explains a portion of the variability in a trait, not that men take one form and women another. There may be a few more women at one end of the range and a few more men at the other, but for the majority, the trait is not that related to sex.

Small differences such as this one are important. The discovery of any sex difference is valuable for scientists and physicians because it points to other, more meaningful sources of variation. Because the sexes differ according to factors such as genes, hormones, and environment, a sex difference in the brain provides clues about the impact of these other factors on the brain. Following up on those clues helps us understand why susceptibility to disease, efficacy of drugs and even the course of normal development are different among all individuals, not just between men and women.

Despite their relevance to human health, the scientific value of sex differences is rarely discussed in the news media. Instead, sex differences become clickbait for promoting stereotypes. Small differences in the brain have been reported to explain a wide variety of presumably sex-typical behaviors, from hunting to cleaning the house. Although it makes intuitive sense that a difference in the brain must translate to a difference in behavior, there is very little evidence linking any sex difference in the human brain directly to a particular function or behavioral outcome. So think twice before you assume that greater brain connectivity confers better multitasking or map-reading skills.

The graphs above are meant to illustrate why it’s not particularly informative to ask a yes-or-no question like “Do the sexes differ?” We need to ask more sophisticated questions: to what extent do the sexes differ? How much do they overlap?

Any decent scientific report of a sex difference contains all of the information needed to answer these questions. But not many journalists look at the actual report; they often rely on press releases, which may misrepresent the nature and meaning of a difference. As a result, the headlines can turn out to be wrong. For example, in the 2013 study reportedly showing that men and women differ profoundly, the sexes overlapped by an average of more than 86 percent. And the 2015 study that supposedly showed no sex differences in the brain? The authors never actually made such a claim. In fact, they provided a long list of bona-fide sex differences.

The next time you read about a sex difference, if you have access to the research report you can graph the difference yourself on SexDifference.org. Enter the average value (reported as the “mean”) and variance (reported as the “standard deviation”) for each sex. The tool will automatically draw a graph and calculate the degree of overlap. You can then see for yourself the extent to which the trait is related to sex.

Don’t be surprised if you can’t find the values you need to graph the difference. The authors may not report them, or they may not have actually compared the sexes. Take, for example, the report last year on thermal comfort in office buildings. The media were aflutter for days, explaining why women are always cold at the office. A quick look at the scientific paper itself shows that there were no men in the study at all! This makes calculating the overlap a bit problematic.

Overlap between the sexes may seem so obvious that it needs no discussion. But its underappreciation is leading educators to separate boys and girls into single-sex classrooms in order to accommodate their different brains, and physicians to consider sex, instead of more relevant factors such as body weight, when prescribing drugs. Although well-intentioned, these practices amount to stereotyping because they assume the distribution looks like the top graph above when it may look more like the bottom one.

Nearly every day, new research is published that, if overinterpreted, could be used to promote sex stereotypes. Most neuroscientists are not interested in doing that. The few neuroscientists who do overinterpret their data, often to the great delight of the media and the public, provide fuel for discriminatory practices and cast the entire field in a negative light. The best way to deal with dubious interpretations is to examine the data and draw our own conclusions. The data will speak for themselves.

This article was first published in The Conversation.

Top image: Thinkstock.com

Beauty and brains: Best-in-breed show dog assists with Emory neuroscience on the side

Emory alum Lindsay Fetters and her best-in-breed winning vizsla, Eli, enjoy their moment at the Westminster Kennel Club. (Photos by Teddy Lei.)

By Carol Clark

The crowd applauded as Atlanta resident and Emory alum Lindsay Fetters, clad in a powder-blue suit dress, dashed into the ring with Eli, a graceful, spirited vizsla with a golden-brown coat. It was the recent Westminster Kennel Club’s best sporting dog competition. Fetters and Eli had just won a best-in-breed event at the show – making Eli the top vizsla in the country. Fresh from this victory, the pair seemed to glow as they glided across the green carpet.

Dog lovers around the country were watching the TV broadcast from Madison Square Garden as the announcer gave a bit of backstory: “Eli’s a participant in the Dog Project at Emory University, which is where dogs go into MRIs fully awake and unrestrained so we can learn a little more about their intellectual and emotional abilities.”

That’s right. While Eli did not take the prize for best sporting dog, he did get a nod for being the only Westminster show dog that assists with neuroscience research in his spare time.

“After we won best in breed and moved on to the sporting event, I had to fill out a card for the announcer to say some unique things about Eli, so I put down the Dog Project,” says Fetters, who is the owner, breeder and handler of Eli. “The general public watches the show and I wanted people to know that these dogs are much more than just pretty faces. Many of these dogs do therapy work and other important things.

Celebrating with a high five

“Also, I love Emory, so I wanted to plug it as much as I could,” adds Fetters, who received her MBA from Goizueta Business School in 2014.

Emory neuroscientist Gregory Berns watched the Westminster show from Atlanta. Berns is the director of Emory’s Center for Neuropolicy and also heads up the Dog Project, which is researching evolutionary questions surrounding humans’ best, and oldest, friend. The project, which began with two dogs and has since expanded to 80, was the first to train dogs to voluntarily enter a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and remain motionless during scanning, without restraint or sedation. The Dog Project has already identified regions of the canine brain associated with reward and processing faces and scents.

“Lindsay and Eli have been part of the Dog Project almost since the beginning and they have participated in four experiments,” Berns says. “Now that Eli’s won best in breed, I worry that maybe he will be having too much fun fulfilling his stud duties to stay involved in our research.”

Fetters was introduced to dog shows early by her mother, who specialized in Irish setters. “I started showing her Irish setters when I was four years old,” Fetters says.

By the time she was 15, she wanted her own dog to show, and chose the Hungarian vizsla, a medium-sized canine bred for hunting and pointing birds, known for its energy and intelligence. “I named my first vizsla Traitor, because I was cheating on the Irish setters,” Fetters recalls. (Eli, now six-and-a-half-years-old, is the offspring of Traitor.)

While she was still in high school, Fetters began working part-time at a non-profit in Alpharetta called Canine Assistants, which trains service dogs for people with disabilities. She continued working there throughout her undergraduate years at the University of North Georgia, and even after she graduated.

“It was a great job,” Fetters says. “I trained the dogs, and I loved being with them. And then I trained the people how to use the dogs. It was really rewarding to know you were enriching someone’s life. People with disabilities are often used to having a caregiver. But having these dogs makes them a caregiver, in a sense, which is empowering. I saw some people who previously rarely left their house find a sense of purpose when they got the dog. They would start getting up to care for their dog and go for walks and then decide to start school or find a job.”

"It’s hard to explain the feeling of being recognized on a national level with a dog that you raised and trained," Fetters says.

By 2013, Fetters decided that, after 15 years at Canine Assistants, she wanted dogs to just be her passion and not her job. She had already started looking at MBA programs. She was studying for her GMAT at a coffee shop when another customer noticed her Canine Assistants t-shirt and told her about the Dog Project.

“I thought it was really fascinating,” Fetters says. “I like the science behind the Dog Project, and also the challenge of getting a dog to be still in an MRI machine with all the noise and distractions.”

Plus, Eli needed a job, she says. “He’s very task-oriented and needs a lot of interaction. He’s really energetic so staying very still in an MRI is difficult for him but he loves a challenge. He especially likes the treats he gets afterwards.”

During high school and her undergraduate years, Fetters had worked so she wanted to quit her job and devote herself fully to enjoying the student life while getting an MBA. She found her match at the Goizueta one-year MBA program, where she focused on business management.

“When I toured Emory, I knew it was for me,” Fetters says. “I immediately felt at home there: I love the Emory culture and the sense of community, especially within the business school.”

A highlight was her experience in the Gouizeta Advanced Leadership Academy. “For spring break, we went sailing in the British Virgin Islands,” Fetters says. “We worked in teams and were given new challenges every day.” One day she was a navigator and the next day the captain.

“The year at Goizueta changed my whole life,” Fetters says. “I met friends that I will have forever, along with top professors and alumni that I can learn from and call on for advice. It opened my eyes to all the opportunities out there.”

Fetters found a great job as an asset manager at the Goddard Investment Group, a commercial real estate investment firm. Eli is part of the team.

“He goes to work with me every day and sits at my feet in my office,” Fetters says. “My boss is a great dog person and all my co-workers love Eli. He sometimes delivers mail to people because he loves to carry things around. He also enjoys just visiting peoples’ offices to get a treat.”

Every workday, Eli stops in at the convenience store in the office building where the owner gives him a boiled egg. “He doesn’t even have to pay for his egg like everyone else,” Fetters says. “She peels it for him and breaks it into little pieces and hands it to him. His nickname is Prince Eli and he definitely lives up to that.”

When he’s not raising office spirits or assisting in neuroscience, Eli dabbles in acting. Watch for his subtle performances in the Sundance Original TV series, “The Red Road.” Going against type, Eli acted sad while sitting next to a tombstone and afraid as a policeman chased him off a porch.

When they returned to work, Eli and Fetters were greeted with flowers and a party. (Courtesy Lindsay Fetters.)

Eli already had a huge fan base as he set off to compete at the Westminster Kennel Club, the most prestigious dog show in the United States and one of the oldest of any sporting events, now in its 140th year. Fetters and Eli had spent many weekends during the past year competing at dog shows across the country. Eli ranked among the top five vizslas, earning him an invitation to Westminster.

He did not disappoint. “He was kind of a super star the day he won best of breed, happy and outgoing and just wagging his tail the whole time,” Fetters says. “He’s just a heck of a show dog and embodies the ideal vizsla: Light-footed, graceful, smooth and really muscled. He looks like a dog that could go out into the field and hunt all day.”

Fetters is no slacker herself. “Winning best of breed at the Westminster Kennel Club is the thrill of a lifetime, something I’ve dreamt of since I was old enough to watch TV,” she says. “I’m not a professional, but I was showing against professionals in that venue, so to win was a huge honor. It’s hard to explain the feeling of being recognized on a national level with a dog that you raised and trained.”

Fetters’ cell phone and email were soon flooded with messages of congratulations. The Wall Street Journal ran a photo of Eli giving Fetters a high five and the Denver Post ran of a photo of him holding his best-of-breed ribbon.

When Fetters and Eli finally returned to the humdrum work-a-day world of their office, they were greeted with a surprise celebration party.

You will be glad to learn that Eli remains grounded. Yes, he’s in demand for stud services. To Eli, however, sex is not as important as relationships.

“We plan to keep doing the Dog Project,” Fetters says. “Both of us are at our best when we’re busy and interacting with others. And Eli enjoys learning the tasks and getting the attention from the people involved. He’s a little bit of a ham.”

Related:
What is your dog thinking? Brain scans unleash canine secrets
Scent of the familiar: You may linger like perfume in your dog's brain
Dogs process faces in specialized brain area, study reveals

Pioneering work on the causes of crime

"Climate change will impact most of the leading causes of crime," says criminologist Robert Agnew. (Emory Photo/Video)

By April Hunt, Emory Report

Robert Agnew, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Sociology, recently won the American Society of Criminology’s highest honor, the 2015 Edwin H. Sutherland Award, for his pioneering work on the causes of crime. Agnew developed General Strain Theory (GST) — one of the leading explanations of crime and its causes. GST states that certain strains or stressors, such as economic problems and peer abuse, increase the likelihood of crime. These strains create negative emotions, including anger and frustration. Individuals sometimes cope with these strains and negative emotions through crime as a way to reduce or escape from them. Examples include crimes such as theft to obtain money, revenge against the source of strain or related targets (such as assaulting abusive peers), or use and abuse of illicit drugs to alleviate negative emotions.

Agnew, who served as president of the American Society of Criminology in 2012-2013, is currently working on a book exploring the social consequences of climate change, including the effects of climate change on crime.

In this interview, Agnew explains the basics of GST and why climate change is the greatest threat of our time.

What are the major causes of crime in General Strain Theory?

GST does not state that all strains or stressors increase crime, only some do. Those strains most likely to increase crime have several features. Among other things, they are high in magnitude, seen as unjust, associated with low social control, and readily resolved through crime. Let me give an example. Many professors face a good deal of strain; they work long hours, their research papers are rejected, and their grant applications are denied. But these strains typically do not lead to crime, partly because they are associated with high social control. These professors have prestigious jobs and they have worked very hard for a good many years to get these jobs. So they have much to lose by engaging in crime. But other strains do increase the likelihood of crime. These strains include parental rejection, child abuse, abusive peer relations, severe economic problems including chronic unemployment, criminal victimization, homelessness, discrimination and the inability to achieve certain goals. I detail and explain all of these strains in my book, “Pressured Into Crime: An Overview of General Strain Theory” (Oxford, 2006).

Not everyone who experiences something like a violent childhood or poverty reacts to that strain with crime. Does your research indicate what factors account for this? 

Most people do not cope with strains through crime; they cope in a legal manner. For example, they cope with economic problems by cutting back on expenses, working longer hours or borrowing money from others. Criminal coping is more likely when people lack the ability to cope in a legal manner. For example, they lack problem-solving skills and have no one they can turn to for support. Criminal coping is more likely when the costs of crime are low. For example, people are in environments where the likelihood of being sanctioned for crime is low and they have little to lose if sanctioned. And criminal coping is more likely when people are disposed to crime. For example, they believe that violence is justified if you are insulted, they associate with others who encourage criminal coping, and their personalities are such that they are quick to anger and tend to act without thinking.

You have argued that climate change is likely to become one of the major drivers of crime. How would that work? 

Climate change will impact most of the leading causes of crime. It will increase strain, reduce social control, weaken social support, foster beliefs favorable to crime, contribute to traits conducive to crime, increase certain opportunities for crime, and create social conflict. Climate change will increase exposure to strains, including extreme weather events (such as heat waves, flooding, droughts), food and freshwater shortages, the loss of livelihood, health problems, forced migration, poverty and inequality, and exposure to armed conflict. We are already starting to see many of these effects, and research suggests that these strains will increase the likelihood of crime. I plan to further examine the negative social effects of climate change, including the effects on crime, in a book project. Indeed, I feel a special obligation to do so. I have no doubt that climate change is the greatest threat to confront humanity, with the lives and well-being of billions at stake, especially the poor and those in developing countries.

Related:
Gritty childhood shapes criminologist

Not all psychopaths are criminals: Some of their traits are tied to success

Tom Skeyhill made grandiose claims about his combat experience during the World War I battle of Gallipoli.

By Emory psychologist Scott Lilienfeld and Emory Ph.D. candidate Ashley Watts

Tom Skeyhill was an acclaimed Australian war hero, known as “the blind solider-poet.” During the monumental World War I battle of Gallipoli, he was a flag signaler, among the most dangerous of all positions. After being blinded when a bomb shell detonated at his feet, he was transferred out.

After the war he penned a popular book of poetry about his combat experience. He toured Australia and the United States, reciting his poetry to rapt audiences. President Theodore Roosevelt appeared on stage with him and said, “I am prouder to be on the stage with Tom Skeyhill than with any other man I know.” His blindness suddenly disappeared following a medical procedure in America.

But, according to biographer Jeff Brownrigg, Skeyhill wasn’t what he seemed. The poet had, in fact, faked his blindness to escape danger.

That’s not all. After a drunken performance, he blamed his slurred speech on an unverifiable war injury. He claimed to have met Lenin and Mussolini (there is no evidence that he did), and spoke of his extensive battle experience at Gallipoli, when he had been there for only eight days.



You have to be pretty bold to spin those kinds of self-aggrandizing lies and to carry it off as long as Skeyhill did. Although he never received a formal psychological examination (at least to our knowledge), we suspect that most contemporary researchers would have little trouble recognizing him as a classic case of psychopathic personality, or psychopathy. What’s more, Skeyhill embodied many elements of a controversial condition sometimes called successful psychopathy.

Despite the popular perception, most psychopaths aren’t coldblooded or psychotic killers. Many of them live successfully among the rest of us, using their personality traits to get what they want in life, often at the expense of others.

Psychopathy is not easily defined, but most psychologists view it as a personality disorder characterized by superficial charm conjoined with profound dishonesty, callousness, guiltlessness and poor impulse control. According to some estimates, psychopathy is found in about one percent of the general population, and for reasons that are poorly understood, most psychopaths are male.

That number probably doesn’t capture the full number of people with some degree of psychopathy. Data suggest that psychopathic traits lie on a continuum, so some individuals possess marked psychopathic traits but don’t fulfill the criteria for full-blown psychopathy.

Not surprisingly, psychopathic individuals are more likely than other people to commit crimes. They almost always understand that their actions are morally wrong – it just doesn’t bother them. Contrary to popular belief, only a minority are violent.

Read the whole story in The Conversation. 

Related:
Psychopathic boldness tied to presidential success

Study shows how algal toxin damages sea lions' brains and behavior

Neuroscientist Peter Cook with one of the sea lions that served as a control during the study. (Photos courtesy of the Marine Mammal Center.)

By Carol Clark

A study of wild California sea lions provides the first neurobiological evidence for how a naturally occurring algal toxin affects both the brains and behavior of the animals, leading to significant deficits in spatial memory. The journal Science is publishing the findings, showing how domoic acid damages the sea lions’ hippocampus and disrupts an important neural network.

“We were able to correlate the extent of the hippocampal damage to specific behavioral impairments relevant to the animals’ survival in the wild,” says lead author Peter Cook, a post-doctoral fellow in the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University. Cook conducted the sea lion research while a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and he is continuing to expand on it at Emory.

“Our research provides a way to model the behavioral and biological effects of this toxin in a large-brain mammal,” Cook says. “Better understanding of these effects may also help us identify subtle effects in humans that may be at risk.”

Although cases of fatal human domoic acid poisoning are rare, due to careful monitoring of fisheries, it is unclear if there are effects that go undetected in communities that eat unmonitored seafood.

"Sea lions are like sentinels of ocean health," Cook says, "because when they are in distress, they will almost always swim to shore."

Warming oceans and agricultural runoff may be two factors contributing to an increase in harmful algae blooms, including the planktonic algae Pseudo-nitzschia. The algae produces domoic acid, a potent neurotoxin. During large blooms, the acid can become concentrated in the tissues of shellfish and in fish that feed on the algae. Sea birds and marine mammals that consume these marine organisms can then become poisoned.

Whales and dolphins are also likely impacted by domoic acid, Cook says, although they are more difficult to study than sea lions. “Sea lions are like sentinels of ocean health,” he says, “because when they are in distress, they will almost always swim to shore. We can measure their neurobiology in ways that we can’t in other animals that may also be in distress.”

Wildlife suffering from domoic acid toxicity can display a range of odd behaviors, including seizures, lethargy, disorientation, excessive friendliness or aggressiveness. The condition is often fatal.

Poisoned birds spawned a film.

In 1961, Monterey Bay summer resident Alfred Hitchcock was captivated by reports of frenzied sooty shearwaters. It was a mystery why flocks of the birds were seen regurgitating anchovies, flying into objects and dying in the streets. The incident inspired one of Hitchcock’s most famous films, “The Birds.”

Scientists did not connect domoic acid toxicity to strange behavior by wildlife in the region until the 1990s, when masses of brown pelicans became disoriented and died.

This year, the west coast experienced a massive algae bloom, the largest ever recorded. It extended from Southern California to Alaska, prompting numerous closures of shellfish fisheries.

Large algae blooms attract large schools of fish that feed on them, such as anchovies and sardines. That, in turn, attracts the sea lions. “They are opportunistic feeders and they like to gorge themselves when they have the chance,” Cook says.

Prior research has characterized some of the clinical effects of domoic acid poisoning, but Cook wanted to assess the behavioral effects in wild animals and measure the correlation between the biological changes.

During a three-year period, the research team studied 30 California sea lions undergoing veterinary care and rehabilitation at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito. The study included animals with and without symptoms of brain damage caused by exposure to domoic acid.

The sea lions underwent behavioral tests to assess their spatial memory and brain imaging (MRI). The results documented impaired performance on short- and long-term spatial memory tasks in animals with lesions on the right side of the hippocampus. The lesions appear similar to those seen in humans with medial temporal lobe epilepsy.

While acute poisoning can cause seizures and disorientation in sea lions, brain lesions develop over time, likely as a result of the chronic epileptic condition caused by one or more exposures to the toxin, Cook says. “We don’t know how heavy the exposure needs to be, or how often repeated, to cause this kind of brain damage, and we don’t know the effects of repeated low-dose exposure.”

The team also used functional MRI to look at the effects of domoic acid exposure on important brain networks. They found that sea lions with symptoms of toxic exposure had greatly reduced connectivity between the hippocampus and the thalamus, a pathway known to be essential for the formation of episodic memory – memories of events and experiences.

“This is the first evidence of changes to brain networks in exposed sea lions, and suggests that these animals may be suffering a broad disruption of memory, not just spatial memory deficits,” Cook says.

The sea lion study provides rare experimental evidence linking a naturally occurring neurotoxic effect to behavioral impairment in a wild animal. “Nature was doing the dosing. Our study was a natural experiment, giving it ecological validity,” Cook says. “Animals are complicated and they live in complicated environments that are changing really fast in ways that can have a negative impact on a wide range of species.”

Co-authors of the study also include researchers from the University of California, Davis, AnimalScan Advanced Veterinary Imaging, Pennington Biomedical Research Center; the Marine Mammal Center and the Shedd Aquarium. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Lucile Packard Foundation.

Related:
A sea lion that bops to a musical beat

Babies have logical reasoning before age one, study finds

Deductive problem solving was previously thought to be beyond the reach of babies, says Emory psychologist Stella Lourenco.

By Carol Clark

Human infants are capable of deductive problem solving as early as 10 months of age, a new study finds. The journal Developmental Science is publishing the research, showing that babies can make transitive inferences about a social hierarchy of dominance.

“We found that within the first year of life, children can engage in this type of logical reasoning, which was previously thought to be beyond their reach until the age of about four or five years,” says Stella Lourenco, the Emory University psychologist who led the study.

The researchers designed a non-verbal experiment using puppet characters. The experiment created scenarios among the puppets to test transitive inference, or the ability to deduce which character should dominate another character, even when the babies had not seen the two characters directly interact with one another. A majority of the babies in the experiment, who were ages 10 to 13 months, showed a pattern consistent with transitive inference.

“Everybody knows that babies learn rapidly, like little sponges that soak in incredible amounts of knowledge,” Lourenco says. “This finding tells us about how humans learn. If you can reason deductively, you can make generalizations without having to experience the world directly. This ability could be a crucial tool for making sense of the social relationships around us, and perhaps complex non-social interactions.”

During the 1960s, developmental psychologist Jean Piaget showed that children could solve transitive inference problems around the age of seven or eight. For example, if you know that Paul is taller than Mary, and that Mary is taller than Jack, then you can infer indirectly that Paul must be taller than Jack. You don’t need to see Paul and Jack standing side-by-side to draw this conclusion.

For years, the prevailing philosophy in cognitive psychology was that children younger than seven were mostly illogical and incapable of transitive inference. Then, during the late 1970s, researchers found that by reducing the complexity of transitive inference problems, children as young as four could solve them.

Lourenco, whose research has shown that babies have numerical reasoning and can understand relationships of magnitude, suspected that infants were also capable of transitive inference.

A screen shot of a video from one of the experiments shows a subject watching the puppets interact.

For the current study, Lourenco teamed up with co-authors Robert Hampton, an Emory psychologist whose lab at Yerkes National Primate Research Center has demonstrated that monkeys can engage in transitive inference, and Regina Paxton Gazes, a former graduate student in the Hampton lab and post-doctoral fellow at Zoo Atlanta. Gazes, who is now on the psychology faculty at Bucknell University, designed the non-verbal experiments for the human infants.

In the first experiment, the babies were shown a video of three puppets arranged in a row. The puppets – an elephant, a bear and a hippopotamus, were similar in size but arranged in a left to right social hierarchy. The elephant is holding a toy, but the bear reaches over and forcibly takes the toy from the elephant. Next, the hippopotamus takes the toy from the bear. These scenarios suggested that the bear is more dominant than the elephant, and the hippo is more dominant than the bear.

Finally, the babies were shown a scenario where the elephant takes the toy from the hippo. This scenario held the gaze of most the babies in the experiment for longer than the other scenarios.

“Dominance by the elephant violates the expected transitive-inference relationship, since the bear took the toy from the elephant and the hippo took the toy from the bear,” Lourenco explains. “The babies look longer and pay greater attention to the scenario that violates the transitive inference as they try to figure out why it is different from what they would have predicted.”

In a second experiment, the researchers introduced a fourth character, a giraffe, that had not yet interacted with the others in the familiarization phase. The giraffe was novel and had not previously displayed dominance behavior. The infants did not pay more attention to scenarios involving the giraffe, whether or not it displayed dominance.

The researchers also conducted control experiments with infants. For the controls, the hippo always displayed dominant behavior and the elephant always displayed subordinate behavior.

The data supported that the majority of the infants who were shown unexpected dominance behaviors, or 23 out of 32, were engaging in transitive inference when they gazed at scenarios of unexpected behavior by the puppets, compared to other scenarios. The researchers hypothesize that transitive inference for social dominance is evolutionarily important, so the mechanisms to support this type of logical reasoning are in place early.

“It’s remarkable that the infants could make these inferences about social dominance with minimal presentation,” Gazes says. “It suggests an early emerging, and perhaps evolutionary ancient ability, that is shared with other animals.”

In addition to exploring important science questions about how the mind develops, the findings could aid in determining whether infants are on track in the learning process. “Since a majority of babies show the ability to engage in this kind of logical problem solving, our paradigm could certainly become an important tool for assessing normative cognitive development,” Lourenco says.

Related:
How babies use numbers space and time

Top image: Thinkstockphoto

Hope your Halloween is a 'real' scream

Janet Leigh belts one out during the famous shower scene in "Psycho."

Ben Guarino writes about the mysteries of screaming for Inverse. Below is an excerpt:

"We scream when we're excited or happy; we scream when we're fearful or in pain; we scream when we are exasperated; we scream when we're charging into battle; we scream during sex. But we rarely stop to wonder what those screams, even the ones that erupt from us, signify or if they can be differentiated. Emory University psychologist Harold Gouzoules thinks in those terms, but despite being probably the world's foremost expert on screaming, he doesn't speak in absolutes. For decades, Gouzoules studied screams in macaques and other nonhuman primates. He's only worked with Homo sapiens for three years and answers to even the most basic research questions remain elusive."

Read Guarino's interview with Gouzoules in Inverse.

Many species scream, but humans are the masters of the craft, notes Alistair Gee in the New Yorker. Gouzoules "speculates that this is because we humans are more sophisticated communicators in general: if our brains can grasp the fifteen or so cases in the Finnish language, high-level screaming ought to be a breeze."

Read the New Yorker story here.

Related:
The psychology of screams

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.

How close are we to living on Mars?

Matt Damon portrays an astronaut stranded on Mars in "The Martian." The movie opens this week, on the heels of NASA's discovery of liquid water on the Red Planet.

By Sidney Perkowitz, Emeritus Candler Professor of Physics at Emory

Like any long-distance relationship, our love affair with Mars has had its ups and downs. The planet’s red tint made it a distinctive – but ominous – nighttime presence to the ancients, who gazed at it with the naked eye. Later we got closer views through telescopes, but the planet still remained a mystery, ripe for speculation.

A century ago, the American astronomer Percival Lowell mistakenly interpreted Martian surface features as canals that intelligent beings had built to distribute water across a dry world. This was just one example in a long history of imagining life on Mars, from H G Wells portraying Martians as bloodthirsty invaders of Earth, to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Kim Stanley Robinson and others wondering how we could visit Mars and meet the Martians.

Drawing of Mars via NASA

The latest entry in this long tradition is the sci-fi flick The Martian, to be released on October 2. Directed by Ridley Scott and based on Andy Weir’s self-published novel, it tells the story of an astronaut (played by Matt Damon) stranded on Mars. Both book and movie try to be as true to the science as possible – and, in fact, the science and the fiction around missions to Mars are rapidly converging.

NASA’s Curiosity rover and other instruments have shown that Mars once had oceans of liquid water, a tantalizing hint that life was once present.

And now NASA has just reported the electrifying news that liquid water is flowing on Mars.

This discovery increases the odds that there is currently life on Mars – picture microbes, not little green men – while heightening interest in NASA’s proposal to send astronauts there by the 2030s as the next great exploration of space and alien life.

So how close are we to actually sending people to Mars and having them survive on an inhospitable planet? First we have to get there.

Making it to Mars won’t be easy. It’s the next planet out from the sun, but a daunting 140 million miles away from us, on average – far beyond the Earth’s moon, which, at nearly 250,000 miles away, is the only other celestial body human beings have set foot on.

Nevertheless, NASA and several private ventures believe that by further developing existing propulsion methods, they can send a manned spacecraft to Mars.
 


One NASA scenario would, over several years, pre-position supplies on the Martian moon Phobos, shipped there by unmanned spacecraft; land four astronauts on Phobos after an eight-month trip from Earth; and ferry them and their supplies down to Mars for a 10-month stay, before returning the astronauts to Earth.

We know less, though, about how a long voyage inside a cramped metal box would affect crew health and morale. Extended time in space under essentially zero gravity has adverse effects, including loss of bone density and muscle strength, which astronauts experienced after months aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

There are psychological factors, too. ISS astronauts in Earth orbit can see and communicate with their home planet, and could reach it in an escape craft, if necessary. For the isolated Mars team, home would be a distant dot in the sky; contact would be made difficult by the long time lag for radio signals. Even at the closest approach of Mars to the Earth, 36 million miles, nearly seven minutes would go by before anything said over a radio link could receive a response.

To cope with all this, the crew would have to be carefully screened and trained. NASA is now simulating the psychological and physiological effects of such a journey in an experiment that is isolating six people for a year within a small structure in Hawaii.

Engineers and technicians are already testing the spacesuit astronauts will wear in the Orion spacecraft on trips to deep space, including Mars. (NASA/Bill Stafford)

These concerns would continue during the astronauts' stay on Mars, which is a harsh world. With temperatures that average -80 Fahrenheit (-62 Celsius) and can drop to -100F (-73C) at night, it is cold beyond anything we encounter on Earth; its thin atmosphere, mostly carbon dioxide (CO₂), is unbreathable and supports huge dust storms; it is subject to ultraviolet radiation from the sun that may be harmful; and its size and mass give it a gravitational pull that is only 38% of the Earth’s – which astronauts exploring the surface in heavy protective suits would welcome, but could also further exacerbate bone and muscle problems.

As the astronauts establish their base, NASA is planning to use Mars' own resources to overcome some of these obstacles.

Fortunately, water and oxygen should be available. NASA had planned to try a form of mining to retrieve water existing just below the Martian surface, but the new finding of surface water may provide an easier solution for the astronauts. Mars also has considerable oxygen bound up in its atmospheric CO₂. In the MOXIE process (Mars Oxygen In situ resource utilization Experiment), electricity breaks up CO₂ molecules into carbon monoxide and breathable oxygen. NASA proposes to test this oxygen factory aboard a new Mars rover in 2020 and then scale it up for the manned mission.

There is also potential to produce the compound methane from Martian sources as rocket fuel for the return to Earth. The astronauts should be able to grow food, too, using techniques that recently allowed the ISS astronauts to taste the first lettuce grown in space.

Without utilizing some of Mars' raw materials, NASA would have to ship every scrap of what the astronauts would need: equipment, their habitation, food, water, oxygen and rocket fuel for the return trip. Every extra pound that has to be hauled up from Earth makes the project that much more difficult. “Living off the land” on Mars, though it might affect the local environment, would hugely improve the odds for success of the initial mission – and for eventual settlements there.

NASA will continue to learn about Mars and hone its planning over the next 15 years. Of course, there are formidable difficulties ahead; but it’s key that the effort does not require any major scientific breakthroughs, which, by their nature, are unpredictable. Instead, all the necessary elements depend on known science being applied via enhanced technology.

Yes, we’re closer to Mars than many may think. And a successful manned mission could be the signature human achievement of our century.

(This article first appeared in The Conversation.)

In U.S. politics, does narcissism trump all?

Donald Trump at a recent campaign rally. Photo by Michael Vadon.

Emory psychologist Scott Lilienfeld and his graduate student Ashley Watts recently co-authored an opinion piece for the New York Times entitled "The Narcissist in Chief." Below is an excerpt:

"The political rise of Donald J. Trump has drawn attention to one personality trait in particular: narcissism. Although narcissism does not lend itself to a precise definition, most psychologists agree that it comprises self-centeredness, boastfulness, feelings of entitlement and a need for admiration. We have never met Mr. Trump, let alone examined him, so it would be inappropriate of us to offer a formal assessment of his level of narcissism. And in all fairness, today’s constant media attention makes a sizable ego a virtual job requirement for public office. Still, the Trump phenomenon raises the question of what kinds of leaders narcissists make. Fortunately, a recent body of research has suggested some answers.

"In a 2013 article in Psychological Science, we and our colleagues approached this question by studying the 42 United States presidents up to and including George W. Bush. ...

"We found that narcissism, specifically 'grandiose narcissism' — an amalgam of flamboyance, immodesty and dominance — was associated with greater overall presidential success. (This relation was small to moderate in magnitude.) The two highest scorers on grandiose narcissism were Lyndon B. Johnson and Theodore Roosevelt, the two lowest James Monroe and Millard Fillmore."

Read the whole article in the New York Times.

If you'd like to hear more on the topic, Ashley Watts will be giving a talk titled "Should We Worry about a Narcissist in the Oval Office?" on Thursday, September 17, as part of this month's Nerd Nite Atlanta. The line-up of three speakers starts at 8 pm at Manuel's Tavern.

Related:
Grandiose narcissism reflects U.S. presidents light and dark sides
Psychopathic boldness tied to U.S. presidential success

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.

Dogs process faces in specialized brain area, study reveals

The dogs were trained to view both video images and static images on a screen while undergoing fMRI. Photo by Gregory Berns.

By Carol Clark

Dogs have a specialized region in their brains for processing faces, a new study finds. PeerJ published the research, which provides the first evidence for a face-selective region in the temporal cortex of dogs.

“Our findings show that dogs have an innate way to process faces in their brains, a quality that has previously only been well-documented in humans and other primates,” says Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University and the senior author of the study.

Having neural machinery dedicated to face processing suggests that this ability is hard-wired through cognitive evolution, Berns says, and may help explain dogs’ extreme sensitivity to human social cues.

Berns heads up the Dog Project in Emory’s Department of Psychology, which is researching evolutionary questions surrounding man’s best, and oldest, friend. The project was the first to train dogs to voluntarily enter a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and remain motionless during scanning, without restraint or sedation. In previous research, the Dog Project identified the caudate region of the canine brain as a reward center. It also showed how that region of a dog’s brain responds more strongly to the scents of familiar humans than to the scents of other humans, or even to those of familiar dogs.

For the current study, the researchers focused on how dogs respond to faces versus everyday objects. “Dogs are obviously highly social animals,” Berns says, “so it makes sense that they would respond to faces. We wanted to know whether that response is learned or innate.”

Dogs are hard-wired to respond to faces through cognitive evolution, the study suggests.

The study involved dogs viewing both static images and video images on a screen while undergoing fMRI. It was a particularly challenging experiment since dogs do not normally interact with two-dimensional images, and they had to undergo training to learn to pay attention to the screen.

A limitation of the study was the small sample size: Only six of the eight dogs enrolled in the study were able to hold a gaze for at least 30 seconds on each of the images to meet the experimental criteria.

The results were clear, however, for the six subjects able to complete the experiment. A region in their temporal lobe responded significantly more to movies of human faces than to movies of everyday objects. This same region responded similarly to still images of human faces and dog faces, yet significantly more to both human and dog faces than to images of everyday objects.

If the dogs’ response to faces was learned – by associating a human face with food, for example – you would expect to see a response in the reward system of their brains, but that was not the case, Berns says.

A previous study, decades ago, using electrophysiology, found several face-selective neurons in sheep.

“That study identified only a few face-selective cells and not an entire region of the cortex,” says Daniel Dilks, an Emory assistant professor of psychology and the first author of the current dog study.

The researchers have dubbed the canine face-processing region they identified the dog face area, or DFA.

Humans have at least three face processing regions in the brain, including the fusiform face area, or FFA, which is associated with distinguishing faces from other objects. “We can predict what parts of your brain are going to be activated when you’re looking at faces,” Dilks says. “This is incredibly reliable across people.”

One hypothesis is that distinguishing faces is important for any social creature.

“Dogs have been cohabitating with humans for longer than any other animal,” Dilks says. “They are incredibly social, not just with other members of their pack, but across species. Understanding more about canine cognition and perception may tell us more about social cognition and perception in general.”

Related:
What is your dog thinking?
Scent of the familiar: You may linger like perfume in your dog's brain