Contagion: The cough heard round the world

It all started with what seemed like a simple cold. The new movie “Contagion” vividly portrays how society could unravel in the face of a deadly pandemic.

Many health officials say a major pandemic in real life is more a matter of when, not if. We’ve been lucky in recent years, says Emory physician Phyllis Kozarsky, an infectious disease expert who specializes in travel medicine.

The H5N1 virus, more commonly known as bird flu, is one recent scare. The virus kills about 60 percent of infected people. “It’s a very serious disease, and we hope it doesn’t obtain the ability to be easily transmitted,” Kozarsky says.

Related: Wired blogger Maryn McKenna separates fact from fiction in "Contagion."

H5N1 is just one of many diseases on the radar of health officials concerned with pandemics. A critical aspect of controlling an outbreak will be getting out accurate information, making social media both a potential asset and nightmare.

Bursting media's bubble: Jude Law portrays a social media maverick in San Francisco who is obsessed with both freedom of information and conspiracy theories. Warner Brothers photo.

In “Contagion,” Jude Law plays crazed blogger Alan Krumwiede. The paranoid character is driven by conspiracy theories, and yet he uncovers some facts that journalists from traditional media miss, scooping them all. He later leverages his wide Internet following to hawk a "cure" for the disease and tell people not to take a government-made vaccine.

Elliot Gould plays a scientist who also goes a bit rogue, in his rush to isolate the virus. He brushes off Krumwiede with the line: “Blogging is not writing, it’s graffiti with punctuation.”

Law told Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Steven Rea that he researched the blogosphere to prepare for his role:

"I don't want to list anyone in particular," he says, asked to cite a couple of influential bloggers. "I'd rather people see it and draw on their own imagination, but yeah, I certainly looked at an awful lot of blogs, and bloggers who have been interviewed and who have made a bit of a name for themselves, who have become personalities. ... I drew on a few and tried to create someone that seemed to fit that particular persona.

"And yet, what was most exciting was that [director Steven Soderbergh] didn't want to judge him, he didn't want him to necessarily be a bad guy. ... Maybe this guy was correct all along, who knows?"

Some of the scenes from “Contagion” were shot around the Emory campus and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Click here to watch some of the videos of the crew and cast in action.

Hominid skull hints at later brain evolution

An endocast of the A. sediba skull was created using synchrotron radiation, giving scientists a high-resolution, 3-D view of life 2 million years ago. Photo courtesy of Kristian Carlson/University of the Witwatersrand.

By Carol Clark

An analysis of a skull from the most complete early hominid fossils ever found suggests that the large and complex human brain may have evolved more rapidly than previously realized, and at a later time than some other human characteristics.

While some features of Australopithecus sediba were more human-like, most notably the precision-grip hand, the brain was more ape-like, says Emory University anthropologist Dietrich Stout. “It’s basically a primitive brain that looks a lot like other austrolopiths, although you can see what could be the first glimmerings of a reorganization to a more human pattern.”

Stout is a member of the team that analyzed a virtual endocast of the skull, which dates back nearly 2 million years, to the pivotal period when the human family emerged. The resulting paper will be among those on A. sediba appearing in a special issue of Science on September 9.

If A. sediba is a human ancestor, as some have proposed, then its fossils could help resolve long-standing debates about human brain evolution, Stout says.

“The brain defines humanity, leading early anthropologists to expect that the brain changed first, and then the rest of the body followed,” Stout says. “More recently, it has been assumed that the brain and other human traits evolved together.”

The A. sediba find suggests a more “mosaic” pattern of evolution, he says. “The more modern hand paired with a primitive brain is a cautionary tale for what inferences can be drawn about a whole body from fossil fragments.”

A 60 Minutes video of Lee Berger, showing how the endocast was made:



The new species was discovered in a region of South Africa known as the Cradle of Humanity, by paleontologist Lee Berger of University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg. After announcing the find in 2010, Berger and colleagues began making the case that A. sediba may be the bridge between more primitive austropiths and the human genus, Homo. The debate over whether A. sediba is a human ancestor will likely continue, even as more material is excavated from a limestone cave called Malapa, one of the richest hominid fossil sites ever found.

“The site is especially exciting because the A. sediba skeletons are nearly complete,” Stout says. “We can relate the face to the hand and the body and the brain of a single individual. A. sediba is represented by the most complete hominid skeletons we have, until we get up to the Neanderthals.”

Stout studies the relationship between stone tools and brain evolution, and is an expert in functional adaptation of neuroanatomy. He was invited to assist in the analysis of the cranium of a young A. sediba male, estimated to be 12 to 13 years old at the time of death, with brain growth essentially complete. The research was led by Kristian Carlson of Wits and also included other researchers from Wits; Indiana University; the Georgian National Museum of Tibilisi, Georgia; the University of Zurich; Texas A&M University; and the European Synchroton Radiation Facility.

The brain of A. sediba can be seen in incredible detail, including blood vessels, in this transparent image of the virtual endocast. Photo courtesy of Kristian Carlson/University of Wits.

The virtual endocast gives a three-dimensional view of the surface features of the cranium, which was missing only part of the right side and the back. The high-resolution images reveal bumps and ridges and even impressions from blood vessels.

“You can actually see the morphology of the brain inside a skull,” Stout says. “Bone is a lot more alive and plastic than many people realize. It’s constantly being remodeled and shaped and the growing brain does a lot to shape the skull around it.”

The researchers estimate that the brain was 420 cubic centimeters, around the size of a grapefruit. “That’s tiny and about what you’d expect for a chimpanzee,” Stout says.

The face, however, of A. sediba was far less protruded than that of a chimpanzee. “We don’t fully understand how the human face got smaller and tucked under the brain case, although that may have a lot to do with diet and chewing,” Stout says. “That further complicates matters. The relationship of human brain evolution to cognitive changes and other biological and behavioral changes is something we have to keep looking at.”

Click here to see an artist's representation of the face of A. sediba.

The researchers took a band of measurements on the underside of the A. sediba frontal lobes and did a comparative analysis with humans, chimpanzees and other hominids.

While the A. sediba brain clearly was not a human configuration, a surface bump shows possible foreshadowing of Broca’s area, a region of the human brain associated with speech and language, Stout says. “It’s a big leap, however, to go from a surface bump to really understanding what the cells were doing beneath it,” he adds.

The researchers plan to expand the analysis, gathering data from more scans of chimpanzee skulls and more hominid fossil specimens from East and South Africa. “We want to put as many dots on a comparative graph as we can, to help show us where A. sediba fits in,” Stout says.

Use of simple stone tools by hominids began about 2.5 million years ago. Was A. sediba a toolmaker? Its hands appear associated with that activity, Stout says, but the evidence is still incomplete. “For now, A. sediba raises more questions than it answers.”

Related:
Brain trumps hand in Stone Age tool study
Brain expert explores realm of human dawn

West Nile virus up in Atlanta mosquitoes

The West Nile virus rate in mosquitoes is way up in metro Atlanta this summer compared to last year, and health officials are warning residents to take precautions.

Photo: iStockphoto.com/dabjola.
“The hot temperatures and relatively dry conditions probably contributed to the spike in infected mosquitoes,” says Rebecca Levine, a graduate student in Emory’s department of environmental studies. “This may be due to the fact that the heat allows the mosquitoes to develop faster and the lack of rain prevents developing larvae from being flushed out of the system, so they are more likely to
survive to adulthood.”

During Dekalb County’s entire 2010 May-to-October mosquito surveillance, 26 samples of mosquitoes tested positive for WNV, according to the Dekalb Board of Health. This year, with a month-and-a-half remaining for surveillance, the county already reports nearly 80 positive test results. “That’s a remarkable increase,” Levine says.

The peak season for WNV begins in August and continues until the weather gets cooler. Last week, Dekalb County reported the first human case of WNV this year, in a 79-year-old resident of Tucker.

Protect your peeps: Environmental studies students are doing the painstaking work of mist-netting birds and testing them for WNV, to track how the virus moves through an urban environment. Photos by Ryan Huang, above, and Rebecca Levine, below.

To reduce your risk, Levine advises wearing long sleeves and pants and using insect repellant if you are outdoors from dusk through dawn, when the species of mosquitoes that carry WNV are active. For more information about WNV and how to prevent it, call the Dekalb Board of Health, 404-508-7900, or visit its Web site.

The current soaking of metro Atlanta by the remnants of Hurricane Lee may dampen down the mosquito activity a bit, “but they’ll be back, for sure,” Levine says.

Emory’s department of environmental studies is studying the transmission risk of WNV in metro Atlanta. Mosquitoes are the vectors for WNV and birds are the amplifying hosts.

For her dissertation, Levine is monitoring how WNV moves among mosquitoes and birds in an urban environment. At nine different parks and forested areas in metro Atlanta, Emory researchers are capturing birds in mist nets, then tagging them and taking blood samples before releasing them.

“Our preliminary results are showing that the sites where humans are most active have significantly higher transmission rates in birds than in undisturbed urban forests and more secluded portions of parks,” Levine says.

Related:
Mosquito monitoring saves lives and money
Sewage raises West Nile virus risk

Opposable 'thumbs up' for ape animation

Anne Eisenberg writes in the New York Times about movie animation:

The chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans that star in the hit film “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” are all computer animations. But they look a lot like the real thing, even to a primatologist.

“It’s astonishing how far the technology has come,” said Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University in Atlanta and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory.

“We have the illusion we are looking at chimpanzees,” Dr. De Waal said of the computer-generated figures. “They are remarkably convincing.”

Producing computer-animated chimps that people will accept as realistic is a signal accomplishment, said Chris Bregler, an associate professor of computer science at New York University.

“It’s easier to fool us when you animate a dragon or another mythical or fairy tale creature,” Dr. Bregler said of characters created in earlier movies using the technology, called performance capture. “But humans or their closest relatives, chimps — that’s more difficult to do. Our human eyes are finely tuned to detecting problems with those depictions, and the illusion breaks down.”

Read the whole article in the New York Times.

Related:
A wild view of 'Planet of the Apes'
Computers breathe life into 'Toy Story'

Fantastic light, from science fiction to fact

By Carol Clark

Next time you switch on a light, consider the enormity of this everyday phenomenon. Light allows us to travel back in time to explore the origins of the universe. Even after thousands of years of study, we still don’t fully understand light, yet we are harnessing its powers in ways that transform our daily lives and turn science-fiction fantasies into real possibilities.

“The technology of light keeps getting more and more amazing,” says Emory physicist Sidney Perkowitz.

Perkowitz’ new book is called “Slow Light: Invisibility, Teleportation and other Mysteries of Light.”
NASA is using laser technology to map longitude and latitude positions on the moon. Credit: Tom Zagwordzki/Goddard Space Flight Center.

“Only three percent of your brain is needed to figure out what you’re hearing, while 30 percent is needed to figure out the meaning of what you’re seeing. So if you want one number to explain how important and complex light is, that’s it,” Perkowitz says.

He describes Isaac Newton’s use of a prism, to demonstrate that white light contains a spectrum of colors, as the single most important experiment in the history of light. By the end of the 19th century, it was clear that light is an electromagnetic wave defined by its wavelength.

Physics started getting more complicated when Albert Einstein showed that light comes in discrete packets or particles of energy, which were later named photons. That discovery helped give birth to quantum mechanics.
Beam me up! It seemed magical the way the crew from Star Trek was "teleported," but light photons also appear to travel via teleportation. Credit: Paramount Pictures.

“Like Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, Einstein’s creation was remarkable but troublesome to its creator and others,” Perkowitz says. The photon was at odds with the wave theory of light, and Einstein himself was baffled by it.

Light can travel the way Star Trek’s Captain Kirk did when he’d say, “Beam me up, Scotty.”

“You can take a particle of light and mysteriously transport it from point A to point B, apparently without it traveling through the space in between,” Perkowitz says. “I find that the weirdest single thing that we know about light.”

Related: The top 10 Star Trek technologies, now available in the real world, by Space.com.

Light's dual nature, as wave and particle, is one of the biggest mysteries in science. Infrared portrait of the Seven Sisters star cluster by NASA, JPL-Caltech, J. Stauffer.

Even though we don’t fully understand the quantum nature of light, we’re able to use it for remarkable technology, like lasers and optical fiber networks that channel photons around the world. When you communicate by Internet or phone, your message is carried by light, Perkowitz says. “If you stop and think about it, that’s truly amazing.”

Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak seemed like a child’s fantasy when the fictional character debuted in 1997. An actual cloak began taking shape about a decade later, however, when engineers at Duke University deflected microwave beams so they flowed around a small object, making it appear as if nothing was there. Since then, the race to perfect invisibility technology has heated up.

(Here's a related study, recently published by Science: Weird quantum effect can make materials transparent.)

Light lies at the heart of one of the biggest mysteries of science. If we could merge the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics into a so-called “theory of everything,” all kinds of things could break loose, Perkowitz says. “For instance, the fact that the speed of light is the ultimate speed limit might turn out to no longer be true. And if that were the case, then the universe opens up because you might be able to go to the furthest reaches in a reasonable time.”

Related:
Decatur Book Festival adds science track
Physics flies off the rails in 'Unstoppable'
Movies go under the microscope