The Emory Bio-inspired Renewable Energy Center (EBREC), aims to duplicate natural processes of photosynthesis, to generate clean, sustainable sources of solar fuel.Photo by Carol Clark.
“It’s a very fast-moving field,” says Emory inorganic chemist Craig Hill, co-chair of the new conference. “Things are moving so quickly, that the other major conferences aren’t frequent enough to keep up with the key technical advances.”
Hill is a leading developer of water oxidation catalysts, a crucial component to split water into oxygen and protons for the production of solar fuels. Other Emory chemists presenting at the conference include Tim Lian, who is researching quantum technology to absorb light and drive reactions; and Brian Dyer, who is researching microbial catalysis by the protein hydrogenase, to convert protons into hydrogen.
“It’s an extremely exciting time for solar fuels research,” says Hill, an internationally known pioneer of green chemistry. “Interest in solar energy is growing all over the world, and it’s becoming a priority for funding in almost every country that has a research establishment.”
The movement from fossil fuels to cleaner and more sustainable forms of energy “is not going to be a dramatic, abrupt event,” Hill adds. “It’s incremental change.”
The burners are on high for Marshall Scholar Shivani Jain, whether she's cooking for the homeless in Atlanta or using art to teach environmental education in Africa.
“My father always told me that you should burn with passion and love for the rest of the world. You should take what you learn outside of yourself and apply it,” says Shivani Jain. The Emory senior is taking that advice to heart, planting seeds of change from Atlanta to Africa as she blazes through a degree in sociology.
Jain recently received a Marshall Scholarship for advanced studies in Britain. She plans to study global health and economic development at University College London, health policy at Cambridge University, and infectious disease control at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
“I still can’t believe I got it,” Jain says of the highly competitive, all-inclusive scholarship. “It’s starting to sink in.”
Jain grew up in greater New Orleans. Her father came from Punjab, India, and her mother is from Calcutta. She was a junior at an all-girl’s Catholic high school when Hurricane Katrina hit, sending her off to boarding school in northern Louisiana.
“It didn’t make sense for me to be at home anymore,” Jain says. “My school was closed and the city was like a war zone.”
Being uprooted and sent to the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts “turned out to be a blessing in disguise,” Jain says. “I was exposed to much more diversity, in terms of the students’ varied religious and ethnic backgrounds.”
Jain began her Emory career at Oxford College, thinking she would major in political science, until she enrolled in a class taught by sociologist Michael McQuaide. The course on globalization and the developing world included a trip to a remote village in Ecuador. “It changed my world view,” Jain says. “The people there are much more connected to their natural environment. Their health system is rooted in shamanistic ideology.” Trying on Kente cloth in Ghana. Jain's field work in Ghana inspired her to create a non-profit organization, RISE Glocal.
Her love of cooking led Jain to help organize the Emory Culinary Club, which feeds the homeless and assists organic farmers. Her interest in women’s issues and theater inspired her to direct, produce and act in “The Vagina Monologues,” aimed at preventing sexual violence. Her involvement with the Barkley Forum debate team moved her to teach debating skills to teens in inner-city Atlanta.
“I like to use what I’m learning in the classroom,” Jain says.
Under the guidance of Emory sociologist Tracy Scott, Jain interned at hospital wards in greater London, and did comparative studies of health systems in the U.S and the U.K. Last year, she traveled to Ghana, to assist in a study of water sanitation policies in the capitol of Accra. She interviewed people who lived in slums, without latrines or running water.
“Many people didn’t see a problem with their children wading in the gutter water, even though they knew it was dirty,” Jain says.
Staggering deficits in education, infrastructure and policies may seem hopeless to some, but to Jain, they signal a call to action. So Jain and Neema Iyer, a graduate student in the Rollins School of Public Health, founded a non-government organization, RISE Glocal. It uses creative arts to bypass culture and language barriers and connect people to health and environmental education through their own music, poetry and drama. Based in the United States, RISE Glocal now operates in Ghana, Sierra Leone, Jordan and Mexico.
“I’m pretty busy,” Jain concedes. “In general, my thoughts are racing. Sometimes being so involved means you sacrifice other things, but I enjoy what I do and wouldn’t have it any other way.”
What is synthetic biology? The field is so new, and so complex, that even those working at its frontiers cannot give a single definition.
“Synthetic biology represents only the latest link in a long chain of scientific innovation,” said Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania and the chair of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
The creation of the first self-replicating synthetic cell last May prompted President Obama to seek the commission’s advice on the rapidly advancing field. Last week, Emory hosted the third and final meeting of the commission on synthetic biology, before the panel submits its recommendations in December.
“Imagine programmable, biological micro-factories, producing fuels and pharmaceuticals and fertilizers and food, materials and hormones and enzymes. Imagine the prospects even for genetic vaccinations,” said Emory President James Wagner, vice chair of the commission. “Of course, in addition to the excitement, there is a good deal of concern.”
What if organisms produced in laboratories are more robust than ones found in nature? Could we be interfering in the natural order of life? Could this new technology be used for malevolent purposes?
Over the course of the two-day meeting, the commission heard from experts, and members of the public, as it debated 19 provisional recommendations. One calls for an independent body to correct sensational claims in the media around synthetic biology. Another calls for federal agencies to regularly assess security and safety risks as the science advances.
Josh Keller, hiking in Austria, loves exploring the outdoors, as well as different scientific fields.
“As long as I can remember, I’ve enjoyed working on analytical puzzles,” says Josh Keller, an Emory senior majoring in math and linguistics and a Rhodes Scholar finalist. He hopes to spend his career solving health puzzles at the intersection of math and biology, and also help others understand those results.
“Many people don’t have the familiarity with numbers that comes naturally to me,” he says, “but numeracy is a critical ability for everyone in modern society.”
Keller spent part of his freshman year conducting research in a chemistry lab. “I was deliberate about exploring a lot of different areas,” he says, explaining how he expanded upon his interest in math and discovered his passions for language, ecology and the environment, and human health.
In his junior year, Keller joined a project modeling the transmission patterns of dengue fever. For his honors thesis, he is applying partial differential equations to epidemiological data, to try to improve models for tracking the spread of rabies in raccoons.
Building bridges between math, epidemiology and ecology can help control the spread of all kinds of infectious diseases, from rabies to deadly strains of influenza, he says. “I want to investigate and model practical biological issues with profound detail. But I also plan to be an instructor and a public figure who can relay that information in a helpful and meaningful way.”
Keller has served as a math tutor, a teacher’s assistant for linguistics, a freshman peer advisor and a leader of Bible study groups. He is president of Emory’s Wesley Fellowship and has participated in the Ethics and Servant Leadership Forum and the Open Door Community, which provides assistance to the homeless.
A Goldwater Scholar, Keller was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa his sophomore year. He has received high departmental awards in math and computer science, as well as in German – a rare honor for a non-major.
With the help of babies and more than 5,000 of their diapers, Emory researchers have developed an accurate, noninvasive way to determine estrogen levels in infants. The method, described in the journal Frontiers in Systems Biology, will allow comparisons of estrogen levels in human infants and their long-term reproductive development as well as the development of sex-specific behaviors, such as toy preference or cognitive differences.
What’s more, the method will allow researchers to look at how early disruption of the endocrine system affects long-term maturation, a growing concern among physicians.
Surprisingly little is known about hormone levels during human infancy. Previous human research has focused on the measurement of hormones in blood, urine and saliva. The new data are the result of using fecal samples collected from cotton diapers. With this novel approach, the researchers successfully measured the fecal levels of estradiol, a type of estrogen.
The well-known importance of estradiol’s role in postnatal development of the body, brain and behavior has in recent years raised specific concerns about how exogenous estrogens, or environmental estrogens, such as those found in soy, fruits and vegetables, plastics and common household items, affect lifelong health.
“The development of robust, noninvasive methods to measure these hormones in infants allows us to further investigate the association between postnatal hormone production and the development of sex-specific biology and behavior,” says Emory anthropologist Michelle Lampl, senior author of the paper.
“The development of an assay to measure estrogen from diapers might initially strike one as unnecessary or strange, but the need is real,” says Sara Berga, chair of gynecology and obstetrics at Emory’s School of Medicine. “We understand very little about the hormonal dynamics that occur during early development precisely because we lack a reliable way to track hormones in neonates and very young children. Having a way to track this critical hormone that influences behavior and the development of many important tissues, including the brain, will allow us to understand normal. This really is a great leap forward.”
The paper’s authors include anthropologist Amanda Thompson at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Emory anthropologist Patricia Whitten; and Michael Johnson of the University of Virginia Health System.
Previous studies in primates have shown a close parallel between fecal levels of estradiol and serum values. Likewise, a comparison of fecal steroid levels between the study infants and previous studies of human adults shows an overlapping pattern, a pattern that is also seen in infant serum when compared with adult serum.
“These observations are the first report of human infant fecal estradiol levels and they provide a new tool for investigating early human development,” Lampl say, who also serves as associate director of the Emory/Georgia Tech Predictive Health Institute. “Because infant diapers are plentiful, fecal samples can be collected frequently and over a long period of time. Future longitudinal studies will allow the association between fecal levels of steroids and physiological measures to be assessed, and expand our understanding independent of serum measures.”
Artist's impression of the Herschel space telescope, which is revealing a surprising array of activity in cold, dark regions where interstellar material condenses. Credit: ESA, D. Ducros.
Emory astrochemist Susanna Widicus Weaver will soon begin one of the first broad spectral surveys of small organic molecules in deep space. Her lab’s research proposal – to search for the raw materials of life in star-forming regions – recently won 42 hours of observing time on the Herschel Space Observatory.
“The process for applying is incredibly competitive, and 42 hours is a huge amount of time, so we’re ecstatic,” Weaver said. “I actually watched the Herschel instrument evolve over the past 10 years, so I have to pinch myself that this is actually happening.”
Astrochemistry draws on astronomy, laboratory spectroscopy and chemical modeling to study chemical mechanisms in space. Weaver is skilled in all three of these specialized areas.
Weaver studies chemical mechanisms in space.
As a graduate student at Caltech, she would visit the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and marvel at the technology going into building the Herschel instruments. Headed by the European Space Agency, Herschel became the largest telescope in space when it launched last year. The scope’s 3.5 meter-diameter mirror offers an unprecedented view of the “cool universe,” the domain of objects like tiny stars and molecular clouds that barely emit light. It may not seem as glamorous as looking for new planets, but scientists believe that the cool universe holds secrets for how life forms. Herschel operates in the far-infrared range, penetrating the veil of gas and dust shrouding these cooler realms by bridging the gap between infrared and radio astronomy.
Weaver’s research is focused on that gap, in the terahertz frequency range. At Emory, she is developing the technology to search for the building blocks of life in this largely unexplored area of deep space. Students are helping her build a high-sensitivity spectrometer to record the terahertz transmission frequency of transient molecules that are key building blocks to forming simple molecules of sugars and amino acids.
Weaver theorizes that these transient molecules are present in deep space. On Earth, however, they are unstable, existing only for the blink of an eye. So Weaver is developing methods to make the molecules and keep them stable in a laboratory environment. Using spectroscopy to record the spectral “fingerprints” of the molecules gives the lab a guide to search for them in space. Stellar pregnancy and birth in the Milky Way. Credit: ESA/HiGAL Cosortium.
Weaver and her students are frequent visitors to the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory on the Mauna Kea volcano of the Big Island of Hawaii, where they acquire terahertz spectra with a 10.4-meter radio astronomy dish. This dish is a powerful device, situated in a high, dry and dark location, but observations are still hampered by the Earth’s atmosphere, which blocks most far-infrared wavelengths, while also producing its own far-infrared radiation. Observing terahertz radiation from the ground is like trying to see stars on a cloudy night.
“That’s the reason that the Herschel telescope is so incredible. This is the first time we can observe molecules in the terahertz range from space,” Weaver says.
Weaver and her students will use their time on the Herschel observatory to search for a range of simple molecules that they have identified as key to prebiotic pathways in interstellar chemistry, such as acetic acid, methyl formate, glycolaldehyde and methanol.
“Most previous observations have targeted a few specific molecules, but we want to open that up and get a better idea of the average composition of the clouds in star-forming regions,” Weaver explains.
The objective will be to bring in bigwig scientists like psychologist Frans de Waal from the school's Yerkes National Primate Research Center to marshal a body of basic research on social bonding and translate it into drugs or behavioral interventions that can help autistic children and those suffering from the kinds of social deficits that can occur with schizophrenia. These studies will also shed light on how the normal social brain works.
"The overall goal is to foster collaboration between people trying figure to out how to treat autism patients and people who are working with animals who can come up with clever ways of stimulating the social brain and bring these people together to make translation happen," says Larry Young, the center's director, who uses prairie voles (unusual because they are monogamous mammals—see photo) to study social relationships.
Emory scientists are among those working at the forefront of synthetic biology – the engineering of biological functions and systems not found in nature. This rapidly accelerating field holds tremendous promise, but raises challenging questions about ethics, security and safety.
Have an interest or concern about synthetic biology? Now is the time to express it. On Nov. 16-17, Emory is hosting a public meeting of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. (Watch videos of the event by clicking here.) It’s the third and final meeting of the commission before it issues recommendations to President Obama on synthetic biology.
“We look for a good turnout from interested members of the public, as well as teachers, students and practitioners in fields that touch on synthetic biology,” said Emory President James Wagner, vice chair of the commission.
If you are unable to attend, you can still have your say. Written comments on the topic can be emailed to info@bioethics.gov.
It’s a gripping premise: “1 million tons of steel. 100,000 lives. 100 miles to impact.”
The new movie “Unstoppable,” features a runaway train, loaded with toxic chemicals, speeding towards a town with a bend in the tracks. It’s actually loosely based on a 2001 incident when a renegade locomotive was halted just short of Kenton, Ohio.
But is the science in “Unstoppable” accurate? Could the train’s impact decimate a town?
Emory physicist Sidney Perkowitz applies the basic formula of kinetic energy – one-half the mass times the speed squared – to compare the impact of the “Unstoppable” train to nuclear bombs and an asteroid.
A hydrogen bomb carries energy equivalent to 20 million tons of TNT. A train weighing one million tons, traveling at 50 miles per hour, as the movie’s publicity describes it, would carry the equivalent of 60 tons of TNT. “That would be a major explosion,” Perkowitz says.
But can a train really weigh 1 million tons?
“I think whoever wrote the publicity forgot the difference between tons and pounds,” Perkowitz says. If the train had a weight of 1 million pounds, then it would only have the energy of 60 pounds of TNT.
“That’s certainly enough to take out a building,” he says. “It would turn an SUV into molecules and it would be a terrible crash, but not enough to take out a whole city block.”
Interesting science, but not likely to stop movie goers in their tracks. “It sounds like a fun film,” Perkowitz says. “I would sit back and munch some popcorn and let the train run over me, and not worry too much about the math.” Check out this video of Perkowitz talking about the physics in the movie “Iron Man,” and how it has some basis for reality in the U.S. military.
Sound too far-fetched? Watch this news video from CNN, below, about a half-man, half-robot contraption developed by the defense contractor Raytheon:
Researchers from Emory's Winship Cancer Institute and the Medical College of Georgia are launching a new cancer research initiative – into space.
NASA awarded a team of investigators from both institutions $7.6 million to study how space radiation may induce lung cancer. The award establishes a NASA Specialized Center of Research (NSCOR), consisting of a team of scientists with complementary skills.
Interplanetary space travel could expose astronauts to conditions where they are chronically exposed to types of radiation not normally encountered on earth. One of these is high energy charged particles (HZE), which results in complex damage to DNA and a broader stress response by the affected cells and tissues.
There is no epidemiological data for human exposure to HZE particles, although some estimates have been made studying uranium miners and Japanese atomic bomb survivors, says Ya Wang, a radiation oncologist and director of the NSCOR at Emory.
Animal experiments show that HZE particle exposure induces more tumors than other forms of radiation such as X-rays or gamma rays. Because it is a leading form of cancer, lung cancer can be expected to be prominent among increased risks from radiation even though astronauts do not smoke. However, the risk for astronauts remains unclear because the dose of HZE astronauts are expected to receive is very low, Wang says.
Mary Loftus, associate editor of Emory Magazine, describes the top 10 things that religious leaders say about happiness in the Huffington Post:
One of the things that most irritated me about Sunday school -- and there were many, including the fact that I had to wear tights, keep quiet and not ask why God wasn't a girl -- is that we were told, however covertly, that happiness was selfish.
Religion, I came to believe, was all about self-sacrifice. How could we be happy when babies in Angola were starving (or being sent to purgatory by the Pope)? How could we be happy when already we bent so readily toward sin? How could we be happy when we had to constantly be on guard against greed, pride, sloth, lust and gluttony (i.e., cool stuff, bragging, hanging around, casual sex and cookies)?
Can I really ditch the guilt and go for the gusto?
According to spiritual leaders from the Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist traditions, the answer is yes -- with a few conditions.
His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, the star of the show, has said that the very purpose of life is to be happy, so long as "one person or group does not seek happiness or glory at the expense of others." He didn't disappoint at the summit, sticking up for happiness as well as world peace at every opportunity, and laughing or chuckling fairly consistently throughout the event.
The Dalai Lama was joined on the panel by Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth and Islamic scholar Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr of George Washington University.
Was it the evolution of the hand, or of the brain, that enabled prehistoric toolmakers to make the leap from simple flakes of rock to a sophisticated hand axe?
A new study finds that the ability to plan complex tasks was key. The research, published today in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, is the first to use a cyber data glove to precisely measure the hand movements of stone tool making, and compare the results to brain activation.
“Making a hand axe appears to require higher-order cognition in a part of the brain commonly known as Broca’s area,” said Emory anthropologist Dietrich Stout, co-author of the study. It’s an area associated with hierarchical planning and language processing, he noted, further suggesting links between tool-making and language evolution.
“The leap from stone flakes to intentionally shaped hand axes has been seen as a watershed in human prehistory, providing our first evidence for the imposition of preconceived, human designs on the natural world,” he said. "For the past two million years, stone tool making has been the most common and consistent human technology," Stout says. Photo by Carol Clark.
Stout is an experimental archeologist who recreates prehistoric tool making to study the evolution of the human brain and mind. Subjects actually knap tools from stone as activity in their brains is recorded. (Watch the video, above, to see how Stone Age tools were made.)
“Changes in the hand and grip were probably what made it possible to make the first stone tools,” Stout said. “Increasingly we’re finding that the earliest tools required visual and motor skills, but were conceptually simple.”
For this study, Stout used a data glove to record the exact hand postures of the research subject across a range of prehistoric technologies. He teamed with Aldo Faisal, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London, and archeologists Jan Apel of Gotland University College in Sweden and Bruce Bradley of Exeter University in Devon, England.
The researchers compared the manual dexterity for the tasks involved in making two types of tools: Oldowan flakes and Late Acheulean hand axes. Simple Oldowan stone flakes are the earliest known tools, dating back 2.6 million years. The Late Acheulean hand axe, going back 500,000 years, embodies a higher level of refinement and standardization.
“I assumed that the manual dexterity was going to be greater for making the hand axe,” Stout said. “But we found that the hand gestures were so similar that we couldn’t distinguish them.” The leap from stone flakes to a hand axe was "a watershed in human prehistory," Stout says. Photo by Carol Clark.
A previous study by Stout found differences in the brain activation associated with Oldowan versus Acheulean technologies. It was unclear, however, whether the difference was due to higher-level behavior organization or lower-level differences in manipulative complexity.
The results of the data glove study point to higher cognition. “The advances of Late Acheulean technology were not about increased dexterity. They were about the ability to plan complex action sequences,” Stout said.
A hand axe requires the maker to begin with a precise, symmetrical end in mind. A variety of tools are involved, from a large rock to rough out the basic shape of the axe, to a softer implement, such as an antler billet, to thin and sharpen the edges.
The ongoing research could lead to new understanding of the modern human brain. “For the past two million years, stone tool-making has been the most common and consistent human technology, done by virtually every society,” Stout said. "It’s an important human behavior that probably helped shape our brains.”
The color mosaic of the Orion Nebula and nearby star-forming region. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space telescope Science Institute) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team.
Discover Magazine writes about how scientists are searching for the origins of life in deep space by teasing out different strands of the story of prebiotic chemistry:
Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and other atoms knock about in nebulas, sometimes freely and sometimes bound up with ice and dust. They arrange themselves into elaborate molecular structures. Meteorites abound with organic compounds, which rain down on any nearby planets.
Helping to weave all those strands into a single, elegant narrative is an Emory University astrochemist with a providential name: Susanna Widicus Weaver. Through a series of models and experiments, she has demonstrated that ultraviolet radiation can break chemical bonds and split molecules into highly reactive fragments called radicals. It is difficult for radicals to do much at -440 degrees F, but when the temperature warms even slightly (as when a star begins to form), the radicals merge to form larger molecules …. In a major 2008 paper, Weaver predicted an abundance of such radicals in dust clouds. A thorough search of interstellar ice grains by infrared astronomers should determine whether radicals indeed play a primary role in constructing prebiotic molecules. …
We know that meteorites contain amino acids and even nucleobases, but not whether they scooped up those molecules from dust clouds or created them later, on their interplanetary course. “We really don’t know where the chemistry in the dust cloud stops and where the chemistry in meteorites starts up,” Weaver says. She notes that the answer has tremendous implications for one of science’s most fundamental questions: How common is life throughout the universe?
The Emory Bio-inspired Renewable Energy Center (EBREC), aims to duplicate natural processes of photosynthesis, to generate clean, sustainable sources of solar fuel. Photo by Carol Clark.
