Can you identify these animal teeth and tusks?

Emory's Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL) contains a lot more than just old papers and books. For example, some unidentified animal tusks and teeth from the Congo (above). You can explore some of the unusual artifacts in the library through its blog, The Extraordinary World of MARBL.

Here's a post by Alyssa Stalsberg Canelli, a MARBL research services assistant and PhD candidate in English, about the Congo artifacts:

If you are researching the papers of Methodist minister and missionary Thomas Ellis Reeve, Sr. and his wife, Etha Mills Reeve, you might be a little surprised by the contents of Box 22. The Reeves were assigned to the Methodist Episcopal Congo Mission (South) at Wembo-Nyama, Tunda and Minga (1921-1929). Thomas Reeve wrote a book, In Wembo-Nyama's Land, detailing his experiences in the Congo—a book which was quite critical of the colonial Belgian government. When the Reeves returned to the United States, they also brought back artifacts which included a set of tusks, snake skins and animal teeth. Pictured here are the tusks and three of the largest teeth, all unidentified.  At MARBL, we are librarians, archivists and historians, not biologists—so if you have any ideas or tips about the identification of these items, please let us know!

Related:
The rare book that changed medicine
Objects of our afflictions
Digitizing the mind of Salman Rushdie

He took the psychedelic pop path to math

Robert Schneider in a promotional photo for The Apples in Stereo. "I love music, but I'm also really obsessed with math," he says. "That's my focus now." (Photo by Adam Cantor.)

By Carol Clark

By the numbers, Robert Schneider is not your average PhD student of math. He is 42 years old and just finished his first year of graduate school, working under Emory number theorist Ken Ono. Schneider didn’t even enroll in college math classes until 2004, when he was in his mid-30s.

“I’m rough around the edges. I’m an untamed mathematician,” he says, “but I’m working on that.”

Schneider’s bright blue eyeglasses, pink hoodie jacket and buoyant personality give further clues that he is not your typical academic.

In fact, Schneider is a well-known figure in the underground music scene as the co-founder of the Elephant Six Recording Company and the indie band The Apples in Stereo. He’s a composer, sound engineer, producer, singer, songwriter and musician. He played at the Democratic National Convention where Barack Obama was first nominated for president and has made guest appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and the Colbert Report. In addition to having a cult following, Schneider’s music has enjoyed broader commercial success, and can be heard on the sound tracks of dozens of commercials.



“The cheesiest thing was when the contestants on ‘American Idol’ sang my song ‘Energy,’” Schneider says. “That’s probably the thing that impressed my mom the most.”

It’s an understatement to call Schneider’s career “eclectic.”

A Powerpuff Girls character has been named after him (Robin Schneider, the one with an apple on her t-shirt) and The Apples in Stereo's music has been featured on the Cartoon Network series.

Actor Elijah Wood (best known for playing Frodo in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy) is among the fans of Schneider’s music. Wood founded a record label, Simian Records, and one of the label's albums is New Magnetic Wonder by The Apples in Stereo, released in 2007. Schneider and Wood are also friends, and have collaborated on a series of YouTube videos, including a few that feature Schneider as a musical mad scientist (see above).

Schneider has now put his music career on the back burner in order to get a PhD at Emory. Schneider the successful pop musician sits at a tiny cubicle, surrounded by other graduate students in their cubicles, and dreams of becoming a mathematician. He’s decorated his workspace with pictures of his idols, including Benjamin Franklin, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and pioneering Swiss mathematician Leonard Euler.

“I love music,” he says, “but I’m also really obsessed with math. That’s my focus now. I have a desk! It seems so romantic to me. As you walk down the hallways of the department, you can hear people talking loudly, almost arguing, about math. It’s all around me, ringing in the hallways!”

In the fall, Schneider looks forward to teaching freshman calculus. “I want to turn the students on to the magic and the history of the subject,” he says. “I plan to add some dramatic flourishes to accomplish that goal.”

Shortly after arriving at Emory, Schneider, above left, found himself riding an elephant in India with his math mentor Ken Ono. They were both speakers at conferences surrounding the 125th anniversary of mathematician Ramanujan's birth.

Schneider was born in South Africa. He moved to the small town of Ruston, Louisiana, when he was seven years old and his father took a job teaching architecture at Louisiana Tech.

“Ruston was like Mayberry,” Schneider recalls. “It’s a super square town, about 30 years behind the times.”

Schneider amused himself by writing songs, playing the guitar and tinkering with gadgetry. Although living in rhythm and blues country, he was into the Beach Boys, Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground.

Schneider found a few other musical kindred spirits and started helping them record their sounds, using a four-track tape machine and a synthesizer. His friendship with Jeff Mangum, who would gain fame with the indie rock band Neutral Milk Hotel, goes back to the second grade. Schneider’s other Ruston childhood friends included Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart, who formed the band Olivia Tremor Control.



Schneider attended Centenary College in Shreveport for a couple of years, focusing his studies on music composition, philosophy and poetry. He moved to Denver to continue his studies at the University of Colorado, but decided to take his junior year off to devote himself full-time to music.

Public transportation brought Schneider together with musician Jim McIntyre.

“We were always waiting at the same bus stop and I’m chatty,” Schneider says. McIntyre, however, wasn’t so chatty and when Schneider asked him what music he liked, McIntyre said the Beach Boys, thinking that would stop the conversation cold.

“It was super unhip to like the Beach Boys in the early 1990s,” Schneider explains, “but they were like my gurus. I had a religion and mythology based around them.”

Schneider and McIntyre, together with Hilarie Sidney and Chris Parfitt, launched The Apples, named after the Pink Floyd song “Apples and Oranges.”

“It wasn’t a commercial venture,” says Schneider, the lead singer and songwriter for the group. “We were just having fun and trying to blow people’s minds.”



He describes their early music as “raw and loud, distorted guitars,” that later became “more psychedelic and otherworldly.”

Schneider also loved producing music, so he co-founded the Elephant Six collective, along with his core group of childhood music friends from Ruston. The collective launched many notable psychedelic and experimental groups of the 1990s.

As a producer, Schneider may be best known for the Neutral Milk Hotel’s critically acclaimed record “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” for which he also played bass and keyboards and wrote many of the horn parts.

“My main goal was to not get mixed up in the music industry and become slick,” Schneider says. “I wanted to create songs that are musical and catchy but at the same time would be interesting to underground musicians, my own scene.”

An obsession with vintage recording equipment led Schneider to buy an early 1970s Ampex MM-1200. “It’s a legendary tape machine, the size of a washing machine and heavy as a piano,” he says. “It uses two-inch tape, shiny and thick, beautiful to look at. And the sound quality was fantastic.”

The downside to the Ampex, however, was its instability. “It blew out diodes all the time,” Schneider recalls. “I’d hear it go ‘pop,’ and it would shut down and have to be fixed again.” A repairman told Schneider that it was a fatal flaw of the machine, and he would have to learn to maintain it himself.



“Fixing this tape machine became a big part of my life,” he says. “The guts of it were often sprawled out on my floor. It had an instruction manual the size of a dictionary, filled with fold-out schematic drawings.”

Schneider started reading books about electronics, which is how he came across Ohm’s law. “It says,” he explains, “that the voltage, the current flow and the resistance are intimately connected in an electrical circuit.” The law is named after the German physicist Georg Ohm, who provided a mathematical equation to describe his discovery.

“I had this revelation,” Schneider says, “that all things in the universe that flow through electricity are tied to this equation. It was like the ceiling opened up and all this golden sunlight was pouring onto me. I realized that all the stuff that was important to me – synthesizers, microphones, the experience of listening to music, playing in a band, my relationships with my friends and band mates – all of these things somehow had this equation in the background. Even your brain itself is an electrical system of sorts. It blew my mind!”

The math bug had bitten Schneider. “My world view just changed,” he says. “I realized that math had all of this depth, beauty and poetry.”

He started teaching himself number theory, and reading up on famous mathematicians in history, like Euler and Ramanujan.

He eventually moved to Kentucky, where he met his wife, Marci Schneider, who runs the independent label Garden Gate Records.

Schneider continued his music career, while also finding a math mentor in David Leep, a professor at the University of Kentucky. “He was amused by me because I was self-taught and so enthusiastic,” Schneider says. “He let me come by every couple of weeks and share ideas with him.”

Schneider subsequently enrolled part-time at the University of Kentucky. He received a BS in mathematics in 2012 with departmental honors, on top of touring with his band and making records. “When I turned 40, I realized that, statistically, I had reached half of my life span,” he says. “I never really imagined my whole life would be about just one thing. I’m so into music, but I need to step away from being a full-time musician if I want to make real progress as a mathematician.”

He has managed, however, to incorporate some music into his math. One of his side projects was the invention of what he describes as “a Non-Pythagorean musical scale based on logarithms.” Watch an explanation of it in the video below:

He has also composed a score based on prime numbers for a play by number theorist Andrew Granville. (This month, he’s going to Banff, Canada as an artist-in-residence at the Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery where he will record the score with classical musicians for a documentary about the play.)

Schneider was mulling offers from several graduate schools to pursue his PhD in analytic number theory when he met Emory’s Ken Ono during a visit to Atlanta. The two immediately hit it off. Schneider enrolled in Emory, relocating to Atlanta with Marci and his son, Max, 12.

“Ken is so charged up about math, he’s electrified,” Schneider says. “It’s amazing to study under him. He’s teaching established knowledge in number theory, and almost in the same breath explaining his results from that day that aren’t known to anyone else yet.”

As he forges a new life path into math, Schneider hopes it will be as unusual and creative as his musical career. He describes Ono as an explorer who inspires him to follow him into new territory.

“Ken sees the wilderness of math and he wants to conquer it,” Schneider says. “Once he finds a beautiful, green pool in the mountains, he wants to swim in it and move on to find the next pool. I’m more like a naturalist. I want to camp out by the new pool to gaze into it and admire its beauty.”

Related:
How culture shaped a mathematician
New theories reveal the nature of numbers
Math theory gives new glimpse into the magical mind of Ramanujan

Bees ‘betray’ their flowers when pollinator species decline

The findings suggest that "global declines in pollinators could have a bigger impact on flowering plants and foods than previously realized," says ecologist Berry Brosi.

By Carol Clark

Remove even one bumblebee species from an ecosystem and the impact is swift and clear: Their floral “sweethearts” produce significantly fewer seeds, a new study finds.

The study, to be published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focused on the interactions between bumblebees and larkspur wildflowers in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The results show how reduced competition among pollinators disrupts floral fidelity, or specialization, among the remaining bees in the system, leading to less successful plant reproduction.

“We found that these wildflowers produce one-third fewer seeds in the absence of just one bumblebee species,” says Emory University ecologist Berry Brosi, who led the study. “That’s alarming, and suggests that global declines in pollinators could have a bigger impact on flowering plants and food crops than was previously realized.”

The National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the study, co-authored by ecologist Heather Briggs of the University of California-Santa Cruz.

About 90 percent of plants need animals, mostly insects, to transfer pollen between them so that they can fertilize and reproduce. Bees are by far the most important pollinators worldwide and have co-evolved with the floral resources they need for nutrition.

During the past decade, however, scientists have reported dramatic declines in populations of some bee species, sparking research into the potential impact of such declines.

Some studies have indicated that plants can tolerate losing most pollinator species in an ecosystem as long as other pollinators remain to take up the slack. Those studies, however, were based on theoretical computer modeling.

Emory University ecologist
Berry Brosi led the study.

Brosi and Briggs were curious whether this theoretical resilience would hold up in real-life scenarios. Their team conducted field experiments to learn how the removal of a single pollinator species would affect the plant-pollinator relationship.

“Most pollinators visit several plant species over their lifetime, but often they will display what we call floral fidelity over shorter time periods,” Brosi explains. “They’ll tend to focus on one plant while it’s in bloom, then a few weeks later move on to the next species in bloom. You might think of them as serial monogamists.”

Floral fidelity clearly benefits plants, because a pollinator visit will only lead to plant reproduction when the pollinator is carrying pollen from the same plant species.  “When bees are promiscuous, visiting plants of more than one species during a single foraging session, they are much less effective as pollinators,” Briggs says.

The experiments were done at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory near Crested Butte, Colorado. Located at 9,500 feet, the facility’s subalpine meadows are too high for honeybees, but they are buzzing during the summer months with bumblebees. The experiments focused on the interactions of the insects with larkspurs, dark-purple wildflowers that are visited by 10 of the of the 11 bumblebee species there.

Watch a video about the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory: 

 
The study included a series of 20-meter square wildflower plots. Each was evaluated in a control state, left in its natural condition, and in a manipulated state, in which bumblebees of just one species had been removed using nets.

“We’d literally follow around the bumblebees as they foraged,” Briggs says, describing how they observed the bee behavior. “It’s challenging because the bees can fly pretty fast.”

Sometimes the researchers could only record between five and 10 movements, while in other cases they could follow the bees to 100 or more flowers.

“Running around after bumblebees in these beautiful wildflower meadows was one of the most fun parts of the research,” Brosi says. Much of this “bee team” was made up of Emory undergraduate students, funded by the college’s Scholarly Inquiry and Research at Emory (SIRE) grants and NSF support via the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program.

The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory is exacting about using non-destructive methodologies so that researchers don’t have a negative impact on the bumblebee populations. “When we caught bees to remove target species from the system, or to swab their bodies for pollen, we released them unharmed when our experiments were over,” Brosi says. “They’re very robust little creatures.”

No researchers were harmed either, he adds. “Stings were very uncommon during the experiments. Bumblebees are quite gentle on the whole.”

Across the steps of the pollination process, from patterns of bumblebee visits to plants, to picking up pollen, to seed production, the researchers saw a cascading effect of removing one bee species. While about 78 percent of the bumblebees in the control groups were faithful to a single species of flower, only 66 percent of the bumblebees in the manipulated groups showed such floral fidelity. The reduced fidelity in manipulated plots meant that bees in the manipulated groups carried more different types of pollen on their bodies than those in the control groups.

These changes had direct implications for plant reproduction: Larkspurs produced about one-third fewer seeds when one of the bumblebee species was removed, compared to the larkspurs in the control groups.

“The small change in the level of competition made the remaining bees more likely to ‘cheat’ on the larkspur,” Briggs says.

While previous research has shown how competition drives specialization within a species, the bumblebee study is one of the first to link this mechanism back to the broader functioning of an ecosystem.

“Our work shows why biodiversity may be key to conservation of an entire ecosystem,” Brosi says. “It has the potential to open a whole new set of studies into the functional implications of interspecies interactions.”

Related:
Democracy works for Endangered Species Act 
The growing buzz on animal self-medication

Why the future of fuel lies in artificial photosynthesis

By Carol Clark

Most people, especially technical experts, may agree that we have an energy crisis, but it’s much harder to come to a consensus on how to solve it.

Fossil fuels, wind power, biofuels, geothermal power, nuclear energy and solar power are all pieces in the puzzle for how to keep Earth’s burgeoning civilization running, says Emory inorganic chemist Craig Hill.

He adds, however, that an energy source that will be essential to manage the crisis in the coming decades is the least developed: Artificial photosynthesis.

Hill and other top experts in the nascent field of artificial photosynthesis co-wrote an opinion piece on the topic published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science.

“Humanity is on the threshold of a technological revolution that will allow all human structures across the earth to undertake photosynthesis more efficiently than plants,” the authors write.

The 18 authors on the opinion piece, from leading research universities and national laboratories in the United States, Europe and Australia, represent the broad range of expertise, from chemistry to biology to engineering, working on the problem.

The aim of artificial photosynthesis is to use solar energy to split water, to generate hydrogen as a cheap and abundant source of carbon-free fuel.

“The development and global deployment of such artificial photosynthesis (AP) technology,” the authors write, “addresses three of humanity’s most urgent public policy challenges: to reduce anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, to increase fuel security and to provide a sustainable global economy and ecosystem. Yet, despite the considerable research being undertaken in this field … AP remains largely unknown in energy and climate change public policy debates.”

“Globally, our energy requirements our expected to double in the next 30 to 40 years, maybe less,” Hill says. “It’s a staggering problem that puts everything else in perspective. Everything derives from energy. If we don’t have enough energy, we’re not going to have enough food and water.”

Fracking has opened up new sources of fossil fuels in the United States, but ultimately fossil fuels are going to run out. Fossil fuel use is also coming at a rapidly escalating environmental cost, including rising global temperatures and acidification of the oceans.

The only energy source that can come close to sustainably powering our long-term needs is terrestrial sunlight, Hill says.

The solar power industry, which converts sunlight into electricity, continues to grow, but it has severe limitations, Hill says. A great deal of space is required for solar panels to collect the sun’s energy, and that energy must be stored in batteries.

“We’re at the point now where we have solar powered buildings and electric cars, but we are never going to be able to run airplanes and ships and most other forms of transportation on electricity,” Hill says. “That’s why we ultimately need artificial photosynthesis, which is just another way of saying solar fuel.”

The goal of artificial photosynthesis is to do what plants do, only better.

“Plants use sunlight, water and carbon dioxide to make fuel in the form of carbohydrates,” Hill explains. “The process, however, is incredibly inefficient. It works for plants because they don’t have to worry about finances.”

Scientists currently know how to mimic plant photosynthesis, but not in ways that are powerful and efficient enough for practical application. Breakthroughs are needed in both fundamental science and materials engineering, says Hill, who is working on perfecting a key aspect of the problem, a water oxidation catalyst. Hill’s lab has developed the fastest homogeneous water oxidation catalyst to date.

“Artificial photosynthesis is a tremendous challenge,” Hill says, “but it’s also tremendously exciting.”

Hill foresees that we will eventually make the necessary breakthroughs to generate solar fuel. We simply have no other choice, he adds, as the human population approaches 10 billion by 2050.

Meanwhile, Hill and the co-authors of the Energy and Environmental Science opinion piece are calling for a globalized approach to artificial photosynthesis, to help raise the field’s public policy profile, remove logistical and governmental hurdles to its development, and strengthen an international commitment to clean, sustainable energy.

They envision scenarios like a network of light capture facilities situated in coastal cities where seawater would be catalytically converted to hydrogen and oxygen.

“Photosynthesis is the great invention of life,” they write. “Like biodiversity, the atmosphere, the moon, outer-space, the human genome and the world’s cultural and natural heritage, it could be treated as subject to common heritage requirements under international law, perhaps through a specific UN or UNESCO declaration. Common heritage of humanity status putatively limits private or public appropriation; requires representatives from all nations to manage such resources on behalf of all, actively share the benefits, restrain from their militarization and preserve them for the benefit of future generations.”

Related:
Water oxidation advance aims at solar fuel
Bringing new energy to solar quest
Freshman friendship fuels bio-tech business

Images: iStockphoto.com

A voice for the science of sustainability

Emory anthropologist Peggy Barlett studies the intersection of economic, ecological and demographic change among farmers around the world. She is also a key player in moving higher education to the forefront of sustainability.

“There are so many ways that our culture right now is in transition,” she says. “As an anthropologist I see a whole shift in the challenges we face and the ways in which universities, governments and faith communities are trying to contribute. Higher education has so many tools and so many talents to offer, I think it’s incredibly important to make sure that what we know is available to the general public.”

Barlett is part of the Public Voices Thought Leadership Fellowship at Emory. A collaboration with The OpEd Project, the program is designed to cultivate a sense of social responsibility and to increase the number of women involved in public debate. Check out the web site of the program’s lead sponsor, the Center for Women at Emory, to learn more.

Related:
How a natural leader bloomed