NSF: BRAIN SYSTEM INTERACTION

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Complexity of eye-hand coordination

Research helps understand how brain systems interact to carry out cognitive processes

People not only use their eyes to see, but also to move. It takes less than a fraction of a second to execute the loop that travels from the brain to the eyes, and then to the hands and/or arms. Bijan Pesaran is trying to figure out what occurs in the brain during this process.

"Eye-hand coordination is the result of a complex interplay between two systems of the brain, but there are many regions where this interaction takes place," says Pesaran, an associate professor of neural science at New York University. "One of the things about the current state of knowledge is that it is focused on the different pieces of the brain and how each works individually. Relatively little work has been done to link how they work together at the cellular level."

The thrust of his research involves studying how neurons in these parts of the brain communicate with one another.

"The cerebral cortex contains a mosaic of brain areas that are connected to form distributed networks," says the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded scientist. "In the frontal and parietal cortex, these networks are specialized for movements such as saccadic (voluntary) eye movements and reaches, that is, hand and arm movements. Before each movement we decide to make, these areas contain specific patterns of neural activity which can be used to predict what we will do."

A more sophisticated understanding of the brain's role in eye-hand coordination can be an important model for discovering how brain systems interact to carry out cognitive processes in general, he says. Such insights could lead to new neural technologies that translate thoughts into actions, for example, to control a robotic arm or prompt speech.

"There is a whole new set of technologies called neural prostheses," Pesaran says. "In the future, there could be devices in the brain that will help people remember, to think more clearly, and to help them move."

Using eye movements to prompt hand and arm movements involves building a spatial representation, "which is improved by moving our eyes," he says. "The command that is sent to the eyes moves the eyes, which effectively measure space when they move, and that is used to improve the accuracy of the reach. We move our eyes to improve our movement, not just to see better."

He often describes the behavior of high level ping pong players to explain how it works.

"You keep your eye on the ball so you know where it is, so you can hit it," he says. "But right up until the minute you hit the ball, something important is happening, which is that your brain is sending a command to your arm to hit the ball. But the visual signals are delayed. At the time you hit the ball, the vision of the ball won't enter your brain for another fraction of a second, so there is no point in looking at the ball. You can look all you want, but your arm already has moved.

"When ping pong players are playing at a high level, they look at the ball up to the point where they hit it. As soon as the paddle makes contact with the ball, you can see their eyes and head turn to now look at their opponent. They think they are looking at their opponent when they are hitting the ball, but they are looking at ball. Their eyes are tracking the ball, even though they are aware of their opponent.

"This helps the brain keep a very high resolution of space to make the stroke more accurate," he continues. "It's not about seeing the ball, because by then it's too late. It's about moving the eyes with the ball so that the stroke is more accurate. And the brain orchestrates this complicated pattern of behavior."

Visual signals always are delayed. They enter the brain, converted into a movement, and then leave the brain for the arm muscles. "It's a loop that takes about 200 millisecond--about one-fifth of second--and in that time the ball is moved," he says.

Pesaran is conducting his research under an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, which he received in 2010. The award supports junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organization.

To prove his hypothesis that two regions in the brain (the parietal reach region and the parietal eye field, both in the parietal cortex) must talk to each other to prompt movement, Pesaran and his team are recording the activity of neurons, brain cells that send electrical signals to each other called "spikes." They do so by placing micro-electrodes into the brains of animals that look and reach, much like humans, and study the correlation and patterns in those signals.

"We think we can measure these signals when they are leaving one area, and coming into another," he says. "How does this show that this reflects communication between those two areas? Because something happens, something changes. We set up these movements in a particular way that requires communication between the eye and the arm centers, and we then made measurements in the brain from those centers. Then we linked the changes in the activity between the two areas to the changes in how the eyes and arm move."

As part of the grant's educational component, Pesaran is trying to show youngsters how far neuroscience has come, and encourage them to learn about it. He and his colleagues are working with middle school children in Brooklyn, and have presented demonstrations at the American Museum of Natural History about the field of brain science.

"We go into schools and teach children about what we know about the brain," he says. "We had a brain computer interface, where they had the chance to control the cursor on the screen with their minds. We placed an EEG sensor on their heads, which measures brain activity. When they concentrate, it changes the position of the ball, and moves it up or down."

School children typically are unaware of neuroscience as an emerging field "that involves medicine, biology, engineering, a whole range of disciplines that come together," he says. "Increasing their sophistication and tools in this discipline early will be a hallmark of the next generation of brain scientists."

-- Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
Investigators
Bijan Pesaran
Related Institutions/Organizations
New York University

NSF: "HELPING HEALTHCARE TECHNOLOGIES COMMUNICATE

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Helping healthcare technologies communicate

Doctor develops open-source software to link healthcare systems at home and in hospitals

Julian Goldman, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, knows better than most the frustrations that doctors face when they're confronted with computer systems and devices that just won't communicate with each other.

The research team at his lab has been a pioneer in developing open-source software and standards designed to integrate the various technologies used in homes and hospitals. Goldman's lab created a computing platform called Open ICE (Integrated Clinical Environment) to begin to address these problems.

The effort, in turn, led to the development of a community of like-minded researchers and manufacturers that would like to break barriers in healthcare through better information exchange, better communication among and between medical devices and electronic health records, and ultimately through smart apps designed to improve patient safety and decrease the cost of health care.

"Our involvement with Smart America has been an exciting, six-month, wild ride," said Goldman, who co-chaired the Closed Loop Healthcare team with Marge Skubic, director of the Center for Eldercare and Rehabilitation Technology at the University of Missouri.

"We've all learned a lot from each other," he said. "Our contact, and our work together, has influenced our perception of our work, including how to make our own work more accessible to collaborators. That is extremely valuable and typically very hard to do."

The Smart America Expo brought together leaders from academia, industry and government to demonstrate the ways that smarter cyber-physical systems--sometimes called the Internet of Things--can lead to improvements in healthcare, transportation, energy and emergency response, and other critical areas.

-- Aaron Dubrow, NSF
Investigators
Tracy Rausch
Julian Goldman
Related Institutions/Organizations
Massachusetts General Hospital

SCIENTISTS STUDY CHANGES IN MERCURY LEVELS IN OCEANS

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Mercury in the world's oceans: On the rise

New results show three times as much in upper oceans since Industrial Revolution times

Little was known about how much mercury in the environment was the result of human activities, or how much "bioavailable" mercury was in the world's oceans. Until now.

The first direct calculation of mercury pollution in the world's oceans, based on data from 12 oceanographic sampling cruises during the last eight years, is reported in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

The scientists involved are affiliated with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts, Wright State University in Ohio, the Observatoire Midi-Pyréneés in France and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research in the Netherlands.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the European Research Council. It was led by WHOI marine chemist Carl Lamborg. The results offer a look at the global distribution of mercury in the marine environment.

"Mercury is an environmental poison that's detectable wherever we look for it, including the ocean abyss," says Don Rice, director of the NSF's Chemical Oceanography Program.

"These scientists have reminded us that the problem is far from abatement, especially in regions of the world's oceans where the human fingerprint is most distinct."

Mercury is a naturally occurring element as well as a by-product of such human activities as burning coal and making cement.

"If we want to regulate mercury emissions into the environment and in the food we eat, we should first know how much is there and how much human activity is adding every year," says Lamborg.

"At the moment, however, there is no way to look at a water sample and tell the difference between mercury that came from pollution and mercury that came from natural sources. Now we at least have a way to separate the bulk contributions of natural and human sources over time."

The group started by looking at data that reveal details about ocean levels of phosphate, a substance that is better studied in the oceans than mercury and that behaves in much the same way as mercury.

Phosphate is a nutrient that, like mercury, is taken up into the marine food web by binding with organic material.

By determining the ratio of phosphate-to-mercury in water deeper than 1,000 meters (3,300 feet) that has not been in contact with Earth's atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, the researchers were able to estimate mercury in the oceans that originated from natural sources such as the breakdown, or weathering, of rocks on land.

Their findings agreed with what they would expect to see given the pattern of global ocean circulation.

North Atlantic waters, for example, showed the most obvious signs of mercury pollution because that's where surface waters sink to form deep and intermediate water flows.

The tropical and Northeast Pacific, on the other hand, were relatively unaffected; it takes centuries for deep ocean water to circulate to these regions.

Determining the contribution of mercury from human activity required another step.

To obtain estimates for shallower waters and to provide numbers for the amount of mercury in the oceans, the scientists needed a tracer--a substance that could be linked with major human activities that release mercury into the environment.

They found it in one of the most well-studied gases of the past 40 years: carbon dioxide. Databases containing information on carbon dioxide in ocean waters are extensive and readily available for every ocean at all depths.

Because much of the mercury and carbon dioxide from human sources comes from the same activities, the team was able to derive with an index relating the two.

The results show that the oceans contain about 60,000 to 80,000 tons of mercury pollution.

Ocean waters shallower than about 100 meters (300 feet) have tripled in mercury concentration since the Industrial Revolution. Mercury in the oceans as a whole has increased roughly 10 percent over pre-industrial times.

"The next 50 years could very well add the same amount we've seen in the past 150," says Lamborg.

"We don't know what that means for fish and marine mammals, but likely that some fish contain at least three times more mercury than 150 years ago. It could be more.

"The key is that now we have some solid numbers on which to base continued work."

-NSF-

Media Contacts
Cheryl Dybas, NSF

NSF ARTICLE ON THE SPREAD OF FIRE ANTS

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Border crossing: 10 things to know about invasive fire ants on the march

Are fire ants using natural corridors to advance the front?

Heading for a summer picnic or hike, or just out to mow your lawn? In the U.S. Southeast and beyond, you might want to watch where you walk.

Fire ants. Crossing the border from South America, they're on the march northward. How does habitat--in particular, corridors that connect one place with another--help the ants spread?

To find out, the National Science Foundation (NSF) talked with ecologist and program director Doug Levey of its Division of Environmental Biology, and researcher Julian Resasco, now of the University of Colorado, Boulder (formerly at the University of Florida, Gainesville).

This week Resasco, Levey and colleagues published a paper in the journal Ecology reporting new findings on habitat corridors and fire ants. They conducted their NSF-funded study in an experimental forest in South Carolina, at the USDA Forest Service - Savannah River site.

1. Where did fire ants come from, and where are they found now?

(Resasco) Fire ants are native to South America, where they're found from Western Amazonia to northeastern Argentina. Fire ants were accidentally introduced by humans to the southeastern U.S. almost a century ago. Now they're established in parts of the Caribbean, China, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand.

2. Why are fire ants a problem?

(Resasco) Fire ants are very aggressive, have painful stings, and can occur at high densities. They can displace native ants and other kinds of small animals, including reptiles, birds, and mammals. Because they have a broad diet that includes plants, they're a major economic problem in agriculture. The USDA estimates that fire ant control, property damage from the ants, and medical treatment from stings cost several billion dollars each year.

3. How do fire ants disperse?

(Resasco) Fire ants disperse during mating flights, also called nuptial flights, when winged, unmated queens and males emerge from nests to find mates. (Mated queens dig a small hole to lay their eggs, in the hope of establishing new colonies.)

There are two social forms of fire ants, and they disperse very differently. In the monogyne social form (named for having a single egg-laying queen), mated queens fly high in the air and establish new colonies--often miles away from their original colonies. In the polygyne social form (named for multiple egg-laying queens), mated queens disperse poorly, establishing new nests near their original colonies. Fire ants can also be accidentally transported over long distances by human commerce and travel.

4. Why are some types of fire ants worse than others?

(Resasco) Because polygyne fire ants establish new colonies near existing ones and are non-territorial, their densities are much higher than the densities of monogyne fire ants, which are spaced more widely apart because their colonies are territorial. The higher densities of polygyne fire ants make their effects greater.

5. What is a habitat corridor and why is it useful in conservation?

(Levey) Corridors are strips of habitat that join otherwise isolated patches of the same habitat type. They're important because they facilitate movement of plants and animals from one patch to another. By linking small populations to each other, corridors create larger populations that are more resistant to extinction.

6. Do habitat corridors help fire ants colonize new areas?

(Resasco) Yes, but in one situation. In areas already dominated by the polygyne form, we found that patches of habitat connected by corridors had higher fire ant densities than did unconnected patches. In areas dominated by the monogyne form, however, corridors had no effect on fire ant densities. This difference is likely because monogyne queens can easily colonize isolated patches. Polygyne queens, having more limited dispersal, appear to benefit from the connectivity that corridors provide.

7. Could habitat corridors help other invasive species disperse?

(Resasco) There is no evidence that habitat corridors assist in the spread of other invasive species. We think this is because invasive species are usually already good dispersers--the best example is the monogyne form of fire ants.

8. Can we figure out in advance when corridors will help species invade?

(Levey) We think the best way to predict which species will benefit from corridors is by considering their natural ability to disperse. Species that regularly disperse long distances, or are easily able to travel through or above hostile habitats, are unlikely to respond to the presence of corridors. Species that are poor dispersers and tightly linked to a particular type of habitat are most likely to depend on corridors when traveling from one patch to another.

9. Overall, are corridors beneficial or detrimental?

(Resasco) The balance of evidence strongly suggests that corridors are beneficial for conservation. Many studies have shown positive effects of corridors on dispersal and species diversity. The evidence of negative effects is much weaker. The more we understand about how corridors work, the better we can make informed decisions to maximize positive effects and minimize negative ones.

10. What surprised you the most in this study?

(Resasco) The age of habitat patches seemed to be important in determining whether corridors facilitated dispersal by polygyne fire ants. We only saw a corridor effect in the most recently created patches. We hope to determine whether this effect is transient, or if higher densities of polygyne fire ants and lower diversity of native ants persist in patches connected by corridors.

-- Cheryl Dybas, NSF

NSF REPORTS ON TELE-ROBOTICS

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Tele-robotics puts robot power at your fingertips

University of Washington research enables robot-assisted surgery and underwater spill prevention

At the Smart America Expo in Washington, D.C., in June, scientists showed off cyber-dogs and disaster drones, smart grids and smart healthcare systems, all intended to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

The event brought together leaders from academia, industry and government and demonstrated the ways that smarter cyber-physical systems (CPS)--sometimes called the Internet of Things--can lead to improvements in health care, transportation, energy and emergency response, and other critical areas.

This week and next, we'll feature examples of Nationals Science Foundation (NSF)-supported research from the Smart America Expo. Today: tele-robotics technology that puts robot power at your fingertips. (See Part 1 of the series.)

In the aftermath of an earthquake, every second counts. The teams behind the Smart Emergency Response System (SERS) are developing technology to locate people quickly and help first responders save more lives. The SERS demonstrations at the Smart America Expo incorporated several NSF-supported research projects.

Howard Chizeck, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington, showed a system he's helped develop where one can log in to a Wi-Fi network in order to tele-operate a robot working in a dangerous environment.

"We're looking to give a sense of touch to tele-robotic operators, so you can actually feel what the robot end-effector is doing," Chizeck said. "Maybe you're in an environment that's too dangerous for people. It's too hot, too radioactive, too toxic, too far away, too small, too big, then a robot can let you extend the reach of a human."

The device is being used to allow surgeons to perform remote surgeries from thousands of miles away. And through a start-up called BluHaptics--started by Chizeck and Fredrik Ryden and supported by a Small Business Investment Research grant from NSF--researchers are adapting the technology to allow a robot to work underwater and turn off a valve at the base of an off-shore oil rig to prevent a major spill.

"We're trying to develop tele-robotics for a wide range of opportunities," Chizeck said. "This is potentially a new industry, people operating in dangerous environments from a long distance."

-- Aaron Dubrow, NSF
Investigators
Fredrik Ryden
Howard Chizeck
Blake Hannaford
Tadayoshi Kohno
Related Institutions/Organizations
BluHaptics Inc
University of Washington

BEETLE INSPIRES NEW MATERIALS DEVELOPED TO TRAP AND CHANNEL SMALL AMOUNTS OF FLUIDS

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Quenching the world's water and energy crises, one tiny droplet at a time

In pursuit of beetle biomimicry, NSF-funded engineers develop new, textured materials to trap and channel small amounts of liquid

In the Namib Desert of Africa, the fog-filled morning wind carries the drinking water for a beetle called the Stenocara.

Tiny droplets collect on the beetle's bumpy back. The areas between the bumps are covered in a waxy substance that makes them water-repellant, or hydrophobic (water-fearing). Water accumulates on the water-loving, or hydrophilic, bumps, forming droplets that eventually grow too big to stay put, then roll down the waxy surface.

The beetle slakes its thirst by tilting its back end up and sipping from the accumulated droplets that fall into its mouth. Incredibly, the beetle gathers enough water through this method to drink 12 percent of its body weight each day.

More than a decade ago, news of this creature's efficient water collection system inspired engineers to try and reproduce these surfaces in the lab.

Small-scale advances in fluid physics, materials engineering and nanoscience since that time have brought them close to succeeding.

These tiny developments, however, have the prospect to lead to macro-scale changes. Understanding how liquids interact with different materials can lead to more efficient, inexpensive processes and products, and might even lead to airplane wings impervious to ice and self-cleaning windows.

Beetle bumps in the lab

Using various methods to create intricately patterned surfaces, engineers can make materials that closely mimic the beetle's back.

"Ten years ago no one had the ability to pattern surfaces like this at the nanoscale," says Sumanta Acharya, a National Science Foundation (NSF) program director. "We observed naturally hydrophobic surfaces like the lotus leaf for decades. But even if we understood it, what could we do about it?"

What researchers have done is create surfaces that so excel at repelling or attracting water they've added a "super" at the front of their description: superhydrophobic or superhydrophilic.

Many superhydrophobic surfaces created by chemical coatings are already in the marketplace (water-repellant shoes! shirts! iPhones!).

However, many researchers focus on materials with physical elements that make them superhydrophobic.

These materials have micro or nano-sized pillars, poles or other structures that alter the angles at which water droplets contact their surface. These contact angles determine whether a water droplet beads up like a teeny crystal ball or relaxes a bit and rests on the surface like a spilled milkshake.

By varying the layout of these surfaces, researchers can now trap, direct and repulse small amounts of water for a variety of new purposes.

"We can now do things with fluids we only imagined before," says mechanical engineer Constantine Megaridis at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Megaridis and his team have two NSF grants from the Engineering Directorate's Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental and Transport Systems.

"The developments have enabled us to create devices -- devices with the potential to help humanity -- that do things much better than have ever been done before," he says.

Megaridis has used his beetle-inspired designs to put precise, textured patterns on inexpensive materials, making microfluidic circuits.

Plastic strips with superhydrophilic centers and superhydrophobic surroundings that combine or separate fluids have the potential to serve as platforms for diagnostic tests (watch "The ride of the water droplets").

"Imagine you want to bring drops of blood or water or any liquid to a certain location," Megaridis explains. "Just like a highway, the road is the strip for the liquid to travel down, and it ends up collecting in a fluid storage tank on the surface." The storage tank could hold a reactive agent. Medical personnel could use the disposable strips to field-test water samples for E. coli, for example.

Devices such as these -- created in engineering labs -- are now working their way to the marketplace.

Water, water in the air

NBD Nanotechnologies, a Boston-based company funded by NSF's Small Business Technology Transfer program, aims to scale up the durability and functionality of surface coatings for industrial use.

One of the most impactful applications for superhydrophobic or hydrophobic research is improved condensation efficiency. When water vapor condenses to a liquid, it typically forms a film. That film is a barrier between the vapor and the surface, making it more difficult for other droplets to form. If that film can be prevented by whisking away droplets immediately after they condense--say, with a superhydrophobic surface--the rate of condensation increases.

Condensers are everywhere. They're in your refrigerator, car and air conditioner. More efficient condensation would let all this equipment function with less energy. Better efficiency is especially important in places where large-scale cooling is paramount, such as power plants.

"NBD makes more durable coatings that span large surface areas," says NBD Nanotechnologies senior scientist Sara Beaini. "Durability is an important factor, because when you're working on the micro level you depend on having a pristine surface structure. Any mechanical or chemical abrasion that distorts the surface structures can significantly reduce or eliminate the advantageous surface properties quickly."

NBD, which you might have guessed stands for Namib Beetle Design, has partnered with Megaridis and others to improve durability, the main challenge in commercializing superhydrophobic research. Power plant condensers with durable hydrophobic or superhydrophobic coatings could be more efficient. And with water and energy shortages looming, partnerships such as theirs that help to transfer this breakthrough from the lab to the outside world are increasingly valuable.

Other groups have applied hydrophobic patterning methods in clever ways.

Kripa Varanasi, mechanical engineer at MIT and NSF CAREER awardee, has applied superhydrophobic coatings to metal, ceramics and glass, including the insides of ketchup bottles. Julie Crockett and Daniel Maynes at Brigham Young University developed extreme waterproofing by etching microscopic ridges or posts onto CD-sized wafers.

With all these cross-country efforts, many are optimistic for a future where people in dry areas can harvest fresh water from a morning wind, and lower their energy needs dramatically.

"If someone comes up with a really cheap solution, then applications are waiting," said Rajesh Mehta, NSF Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer program director.
-- Sarah Bates
Investigators
Constantine Megaridis
Sara Beaini
Julie Crockett
Kripa Varanasi
Brent Webb
R Daniel Maynes
Related Institutions/Organizations
University of Illinois at Chicago
Iowa State University
Brigham Young University
NBD Nanotechnologies, Inc.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

PLASTICS AND COCONUTS: MATERIALS FOR HOMES AND AUTOMOBILES

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Transforming waste in order to transform people's lives

Essentium Materials converts coconut husk fibers into materials for cars and homes

When Elisa Teipel, and her collaborators began their research several years ago, their goal was to take an agricultural waste product of little value--in this case, fibers extracted from coconut husks--and turn it into an environmentally-friendly, valuable commodity.

Equally important, Teipel, along with colleagues Ryan Vano, husband Blake Teipel, and Matt Kirby wanted the project to help the local economies where they obtained the raw materials.

Today their new company, the College Station, Texas-based Essentium Materials, is turning out automotive trunk liners, load floors (battery pack covers in electric cars), and living wall planters, among other things, with technology they developed that produces a composite material made of coconut husks combined with recycled plastics.

The result is greener and cost neutral, as well as stronger and stiffer, than the traditional all-synthetic plastic fibers, and with natural anti-microbial properties due to a high lignin content.

"The coolest part is seeing something that was once just waste become a new resource," Teipel says. "Also, it is benefitting both the environment and the communities in developing nations where the coconuts are grown."

The researchers estimate that replacing synthetic polyester fibers with coconut husk fibers, known as coir, will reduce petroleum consumption by 2-4 million barrels and carbon dioxide emissions by 450,000 tons annually.

Also, the improved performance and lower weight of these materials will lead to cost savings through increased fuel economy, saving up to 3 million gallons of gasoline per year in the United States, according to Teipel.

Ninety-five percent of the 50 billion coconuts grown worldwide are owned by 10 million coconut farmers whose average income is less than $2 a day, she says. Moreover, about 85 percent of the coconut husks currently create pollution when they are treated like trash. "The successful adoption of these new composite materials within North American markets would in many cases double the annual income for these farmers," she says.

Essentium's work is supported by a $1,018,475 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) through its small business innovation research program (SBIR) in the directorate for engineering.

"Projects that use waste materials as a feedstock to create value-added products are a perfect fit for NSF SBIR because we look to support entrepreneurs who can 'do good by doing well,"' says Ben Schrag, the project's program director at NSF. "We believe that small businesses with innovative technology hold the key to solving many of the broader societal and environmental problems faced by the country and the world.

"New material concepts that incorporate waste materials are also becoming increasingly attractive to many consumers and businesses," he adds. "This is creating significant opportunities for shrewd and dedicated technologists and entrepreneurs."

The idea to use coconut husk material originated about seven years ago when Teipel was in graduate school.

"We were really interested in seeing how we could help people in other parts of the world with economic development work," she says. "Initially, we were looking in Papua New Guinea. A former professor of mine, Walter Bradley, who has since retired from Baylor University, suggested we look at available materials and what we could do with them, initially to produce electricity.

"Coconut was one of the most readily available materials that farmers and people in the community had access to," she adds. "So we took a look and wondered whether coconut was a viable engineering material, and what we could do with it."

At the time, farmers harvested coconuts only to produce coconut milk and coconut oil, while the husks and fiber were considered waste. Yet the students believed they could take the fibers and convert them into a usable product while "elevating both the dignity of the people and the dignity of the resources," she says.

It was a process of trial and error to develop the material in the lab, then try it in a production setting. "The initial phase of the research was to try to understand the inherent properties of these waste materials to determine viable applications," Teipel says. "We discovered that coconut fiber, for example, is a large, stiff fiber with a very high elongation (25-40 percent), making it a natural choice for molded automotive products."

The team then worked with several manufacturing companies to develop different material blends and densities, testing out material blends, such as experimenting with different binder fibers, and processing techniques. "During the commercial development phase, it was important to ensure that these materials with natural content could pass the strict automotive standards such as odor and flammability in order to be approved for use in vehicles," she says.

Today Essentium works in the Philippines with local community development groups to extract the fibers from the husks and shells, work conducted close to the plants where the coconut milk and meat processing occurs.

The fibers are separated from the husk then packed and shipped to the United States where they are combined with other fibers, often recycled and reclaimed fibers, and turned into a material that resembles felt. This nonwoven felt can then be molded or formed into parts that can go into a vehicle.

"The coconut fiber nonwoven material, the first product from the EssenTex™ line, was launched in the Ford Focus Electric vehicle in the load floor," Teipel says. "There are other parts that should be released in the next 12 months. Outside of automotive, the EssenTex™ line has found a home as a moisture mat absorber in the BrightGreen living wall planter available at Williams Sonoma and Home Depot nation-wide."

Essentium also has coconut waste products from the coconut shell in a bio-recycled part on the Ford F-250 Super Duty, and in a kitchen cutting board called "Coco-poly" available at Bed, Bath & Beyond, she adds.

"Our company was built from the idea that you can turn waste into resource," she says. "New materials provide opportunities for engineering applications worldwide and more importantly for farmers abroad waste can be new found treasure.

"As materials people, we understand the importance of selecting and developing the right materials for the job, and recognize that there are many waste streams that can be utilized to create new and better materials and products that have more benefits than just better performance," she adds. "Ultimately, our company is about transforming waste in order to transform people's lives. We want our engineering decisions to improve people's lives and make the world a better place."

-- Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
Investigators
Elisa Teipel
David Greer
Frederik Karssenberg
Related Institutions/Organizations
Essentium Materials LLC

RESEARCH USING SUPERCOMPUTER THAT COULD LINK GENES TO TRAITS AND DISEASES

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

"Bottom-up" proteomics

NSF-funded supercomputer helps researchers interpret genomes
Tandem protein mass spectrometry is one of the most widely used methods in proteomics, the large-scale study of proteins, particularly their structures and functions.

Researchers in the Marcotte group at the University of Texas at Austin are using the Stampede supercomputer to develop and test computer algorithms that let them more accurately and efficiently interpret proteomics mass spectrometry data.

The researchers are midway through a project that analyzes the largest animal proteomics dataset ever collected (data equivalent to roughly half of all currently existing shotgun proteomics data in the public domain). These samples span protein extracts from a wide variety of tissues and cell types sampled across the animal tree of life.

The analyses consume considerable computing cycles and require the use of Stampede's large memory nodes, but they allow the group to reconstruct the 'wiring diagrams' of cells by learning how all of the proteins encoded by a genome are associated into functional pathways, systems, and networks. Such models let scientists better define the functions of genes, and link genes to traits and diseases.

"Researchers would usually analyze these sorts of datasets one at a time," Edward Marcotte said. "TACC let us scale this to thousands."

AMPHIBIANS AND DEADLY FUNGUS

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Amphibians can acquire resistance to deadly fungus

Discovery will help conservation efforts

Emerging fungal pathogens pose a greater threat to biodiversity than any other parasitic group, scientists say, causing population declines of amphibians, bats, corals, bees and snakes.

Now research results published this week in the journal Nature reveal that amphibians can acquire behavioral or immunological resistance to a deadly chytrid fungus implicated in global amphibian population declines.

"Acquired resistance is important because it is the basis of vaccination campaigns based on 'herd immunity,' where immunization of a subset of individuals protects all from a pathogen," said Jason Rohr, a biologist at the University of South Florida (USF) who led the research team along with Taegan McMahon of the University of Tampa.

Experiments in the study revealed that after just one exposure to the chytrid fungus, frogs learned to avoid the deadly pathogen.

"The discovery of immunological resistance to this pathogenic fungus is an exciting fundamental breakthrough that offers hope and a critical tool for dealing with the global epidemic affecting wild amphibian populations," said Liz Blood, a program officer in the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Biological Sciences, which funded the research through its MacroSystems Biology Program.

In further experiments in which frogs could not avoid the fungus, frog immune responses improved with each fungal exposure and infection clearance, significantly reducing fungal growth and increasing the likelihood that the frogs would survive subsequent chytrid infections.

"The amphibian chytrid fungus suppresses the immune responses of amphibian hosts, so many researchers doubted that amphibians could acquire effective immunity against this pathogen," Rohr said.

"However, our results suggest that amphibians can acquire immunological resistance that overcomes chytrid-induced immunosuppression and increases survival."

Rohr also noted that "variation in the degree of acquired resistance might partly explain why fungal pathogens cause extinctions of some animal populations but not others."

Conservationists have collected hundreds of amphibian species threatened by the fungus and are maintaining them in captivity with the hope of re-establishing them in the wild.

But reintroduction efforts so far have failed because of the persistence of the fungus at collection sites.

"An exciting result from our research is that amphibian exposure to dead chytrid induced a similar magnitude of acquired resistance as exposure to the live fungus," McMahon said.

"This suggests that exposure of waterbodies or captive-bred amphibians to dead chytrid or chytrid antigens might offer a practical way to protect chytrid-naive amphibian populations and to facilitate the reintroduction of captive-bred amphibians to locations in the wild where the fungus persists."

Immune responses to fungi are similar across vertebrates, and many animals are capable of learning to avoid natural enemies, Rohr said.

"Our findings offer hope that amphibians and other wild animals threatened by fungal pathogens--such as bats, bees and snakes--might be capable of acquiring resistance to fungi and so might be rescued by management approaches based on herd immunity."

Rohr cautioned, however, that "although this approach is promising, more research is needed to determine the success of this strategy."

The study team also included: USF researchers Brittany Sears, Scott Bessler, Jenise Brown, Kaitlin Deutsch, Neal Halstead, Garrett Lentz, Nadia Tenouri, Suzanne Young, David Civitello and Nicole Ortega; Matthew Vensky of Allegheny College; J. Scott Fites, Laura Reinert and Louise Rollins-Smith of Vanderbilt University; and Thomas Raffel of Oakland University.

-NSF-
Media Contacts
Cheryl Dybas, NSF

NSF REPORTS OCEAN MICROBES HAVE DAILY CYCLES OF ACTIVITY

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Ocean's microbial megacity: Like humans, the sea's most abundant organisms have clear daily cycles

Coordinated timing may have implications for ocean food web

Imagine the open ocean as a microbial megacity, teeming with life too small to be seen.

In every drop of water, hundreds of types of bacteria can be found.

Now scientists have discovered that communities of these ocean microbes have their own daily cycles--not unlike the residents of a bustling city who tend to wake up, commute, work and eat at the same times.

Light-loving photoautotrophs--bacteria that need solar energy to help them photosynthesize food from inorganic substances--have been known to sun themselves on a regular schedule.

But in new research results published in this week's issue of the journal Science, researchers working at Station ALOHA, a deep ocean study site 100 kilometers north of Oahu, Hawaii, observed species of bacteria turning on cycling genes at slightly different times.

The switches suggest a wave of activity that passes through the microbial community.

"I like to say that they are singing in harmony," said Edward DeLong, a biological oceanographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and an author of this week's paper.

"For any given species, the gene transcripts for specific metabolic pathways turn on at the same time each day."

The observations were made possible by advanced microbial community RNA sequencing techniques, which allow for whole-genome profiling of multiple species at once.

DeLong and colleagues deployed a free-drifting robotic Environmental Sample Processor (ESP) as part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE) research expedition to Station ALOHA.

Riding the same ocean currents as the microbes it follows, the ESP is equipped to harvest the samples needed for this high-frequency, time-resolved analysis of microbial community dynamics.

What the scientists saw was intriguing: different species of bacteria expressing different types of genes in varying, but consistent, cycles--turning on, for example, restorative genes needed to rebuild solar-collecting powers at night, then ramping up with different gene activity to build new proteins during the day.

"It was almost like a shift of hourly workers punching in and out on a clock," DeLong said.

"This research is a major advance in understanding microbial communities through studies of gene expression in a dynamic environment," said Matt Kane, a program director in NSF's Directorate for Biological Sciences, which co-funds C-MORE with NSF's Directorate for Geosciences.

"It was accomplished by combining new instrumentation for remote sampling with state-of-the-art molecular biological techniques."

The coordinated timing of gene firing across different species of ocean microbes could have important implications for energy transformation in the sea.

"For decades, microbiologists have suspected that marine bacteria were actively responding to day-night cycles," said Mike Sieracki, a program director in NSF's Directorate for Geosciences.

"These researchers have shown that ocean bacteria are indeed very active and likely are synchronized with the sun."

The mechanisms that regulate this periodicity remain to be determined.

Can you set your watch by them?

DeLong said that you can, but it matters whether you're tracking the bacteria in the lab or at sea.

For example, maximum light levels at Station ALOHA are different than light conditions in experimental settings in the laboratory, which may have an effect on microbes' activity and daily cycles.

"That's part of why it's so important to conduct this research in the open ocean environment," said DeLong.

"There are some fundamental laws to be learned about how organisms interact to make the system work better as a whole and to be more efficient."

Co-authors of the paper are Elizabeth Ottesen, Curtis Young, Scott Gifford, John Eppley, Roman Marin III, Stephan Schuster and Christopher Scholin.

The research also was funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

-NSF-


Media Contacts
Cheryl Dybas,

NSF-FUNDED SCIENTIST LOOKS AT WHY GALAXIES CHANGE

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Exploring dramatic changes in galaxies

Scientist hopes to uncover physical process behind the changes, including cosmic webs and supermassive black holes

The evolution of galaxies over billions of years offers any number of tantalizing clues about the origins of the universe. Alison Coil is trying to solve some of these mysteries by studying how galaxies have been changing over time, and why.

"Galaxies have changed dramatically," says Coil, an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. "In the past, for example, they formed more stars, and had smaller supermassive black holes. These black holes were more active, brighter and gobbling up materials faster."

The National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded scientist is conducting three research projects with the goal of uncovering some of the physical processes underlying these dramatic changes.

"We are looking at large statistical samples of what galaxies are doing, including nearby galaxies and distant ones," she says.

These include looking at the stellar mass of both nearby and distant galaxies, comparing the properties of galaxies that still are forming stars with those that are not; studying the "clustering" behavior of distant galaxies, that is, the process by which they form a "cosmic web," a filamentary-like structure that resembles a sponge; and quantifying supermassive black holes among distant galaxies.

"This may help us discover if we live in a typical kind of galaxy, and how we came to be, and why we're here," she says. "It tells us something about where we came from. I'd like to understand the galaxy population as a whole, as it helps to put our own Milky Way into context."

Coil is conducting her research under an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, which she received in 2011. The award supports junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organization.

One project is looking halfway back to the Big Bang to compare galaxies still forming stars with those that have stopped. These include nearby galaxies, which formed later and are brighter, as well as distant galaxies, which developed when the universe was younger, and are faint.

"Within the population that is no longer forming stars, there's a lot of growth happening for the lower mass galaxies, they are still getting bigger and there is more of them," she says. "For the population still forming stars, the massive galaxies disappear, and are turning into the other population, those whose star formation has turned off.

"We don't know why," she adds. "We know that one kind turns into the other kind, but we don't know what is shutting off star formation."

Her team also is examining distant galaxies and how they form "cosmic webs," which are clusters of galaxies grouped together like foam, likely the result of gravitational pull.

"The thing that is interesting here is that if you look at the clustering in galaxies still forming stars, and those not forming stars, the clustering is different," she says.

Those galaxies no longer producing stars are more clustered together, and typically are located in the middle of the web, she says.

"Those that are still forming stars tend to be on the outskirts," she says. "We are trying to understand this, whether this has to do with when the galaxies are formed, how much mass they have and whether being near other galaxies shuts off star formation."

Finally, she and her colleagues also are studying supermassive black holes located in the centers of distant galaxies, trying to quantify them.

"We want to know how many galaxies have these super massive black holes, which seem to be fairly common," she says. "They have to be shining for us to see them, and they shine when they are accreting material, that is, when stars and gas fall into the black hole. When you see this light, you know there is a black hole actively accreting. But there are other black holes that exist that we can't see. We want to know why some are shining--accreting--and some aren't."

Much of her work uses data generated by the PRIsm Multi-object Survey (PRIMUS), the largest faint galaxy spectroscopic redshift (which refers to a shift in the spectra of very distant galaxies toward longer wavelengths, usually considered evidence that the universe is expanding) survey taken to date.

As part of the grant's educational component, Coil created and taught a new course during the fall 2013 semester on stars and black holes, and convinced her department to split a pre-existing course entitled "the universe" into two courses, including "stars and black holes," and "galaxies and cosmology."

"The new course is much more fun to teach, as we can spend more time on concepts and class discussions," she says. "I found that the students learned more, at a deeper level. I am very pleased with the new course and hope to attract more students to the lower division astrophysics survey courses as a result."

She also is developing a proposal to add an astrophysics doctoral track in her department, which currently has a physics and a biophysics track. "The astrophysics PhD track would allow students to take more graduate level courses in astrophysics and begin astrophysics research in their first year, a year earlier than the physics PhD track," she says. "I hope to recruit more astrophysics graduate students to UCSD as a result of the new track."

She also informally mentors several female undergraduate and graduate students in the department through individual meetings, and holds monthly meetings of the "women in physics" group she established for women graduate students and postdocs.

During the last year, among other things, the group sponsored two guest speakers--a female faculty in another department and a colloquium speaker who works in science policy--and discussed such topics as diversity in faculty hiring, maternity leave policies, and unconscious bias.

She also runs a one-day physics outreach program for the Reach for Tomorrow foundation, which targets underprivileged middle school youth. About 50 students are participating this year.

Finally, every June she leads a similar program with the Tech Trek program, which is aimed at middle school girls interested in math and science. About 25 girls participate in the physics portion of the program, which involves hands-on demonstrations, and a soldering lab, all run by graduate students and postdocs in the department.

"I specifically recruit mostly women students and postdocs to help run the event, so that the girls can meet and interact with many women who were actively pursuing physics careers," she says.

-- Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
Investigators
Alison Coil
Related Institutions/Organizations
University of California-San Diego

SUPERCOMPUTER USED FOR MATERIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Helping ideas gel

NSF-supported Stampede supercomputer powers innovations in materials science
Cornell University researchers are using the Stampede supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to help explain a nanoscale mystery: How can a colloidal gel--a smart material with promise in biomedicine--maintain its stability?

Colloidal gels are comprised of microscopic particles suspended in a solvent. They form networks of chained-together particles that support their own weight under gravity. For this reason, the soft solids form an emerging class of smart materials such as injectable pharmaceuticals and artificial tissue scaffolds. However, they are also beset by stability problems.

Using Stampede, researchers conducted the largest and longest simulation of a colloidal gel ever recorded. Their simulations helped answer several questions, including: What are the concentration and structure of the network strands? How does the gel restructure itself over time? And how does its structure affect a gel's mechanical properties?

"We have been absolutely happy with our entire experience on Stampede," said Roseanna N. Zia, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Cornell. "The support of the review panel in granting such a large series of requests was just fantastic. In addition, the help desk has been consistently outstanding, and our XSEDE [Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment] Campus Champion was a huge help in getting started. There is no way this study could have taken place without XSEDE's computational support."

XSEDE is the most advanced and robust collection of integrated advanced digital resources and services in the world. Thousands of scientists use XSEDE each year to interactively share computing resources, data and expertise. The five-year, $121-million project is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Zia presented the results on her colloidal gel research at the Society of Rheology annual meeting in October 2013. Her work was featured on the cover of the January 2014 Rheology Bulletin, and she was asked to contribute to an invitation-only special issue of the Journal of Rheology in 2014.

-- Aaron Dubrow, NSF
Investigators
Roseanna Zia
Daniel Stanzione

GETTING INTO THE GUTS OF BEES

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Bees from the inside out

Researchers work to save bees by studying the diversity of microbes that live in their guts and the impacts on these microbes of exposure to antibiotics

It is 1,825 miles from New Haven, Conn., to Austin, Tex., which typically means 30 hours of driving and three nights in motels, not an easy trip for anyone. But for researchers moving from Yale University to a new lab at the University of Texas last August, it proved especially challenging. They made the journey in a minivan with a pet cat and 100,000 bees.

"That was probably the most heroic event in our beekeeping saga to date," says evolutionary biologist Nancy Moran, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who studies symbiosis, particularly among multi-cellular hosts and microbes. "We didn't want to be without bees upon arrival in Texas, and it wasn't a good time of year to start new colonies."

The bees--chauffeured by graduate student Waldan Kwong and postdoctoral fellow Gordon Bennett--traveled in boxes nailed shut, with duct tape over the cracks between the boxes, so they couldn't fly around in the minivan, and wire mesh over the front, so they could cool themselves, but not escape. They also received wet sponges at regular intervals to keep them hydrated.

"They [Kwong and Bennett] just turned up the air conditioning all the way, and wore sweaters," Moran says. "Bees are less excitable when it's cooler. At night, they waited to park the minivan until after dark, and then opened the windows so the bees didn't overheat in the closed space. It seemed unlikely that anyone would try to steal something from a van full of bees."

The bees arrived in Austin with no problems, and now live on top of a building on campus, "where their main forage might be drops of soda on discarded cans around campus," says Moran, who for many years studied the maternally transmitted symbionts of aphids and other sap-feeding insects, but has expanded in recent years to bees. Symbionts are organisms that co-exist and depend on each other for survival.

"I've worked for many years on genomic evolution in bacteria, but also love insects and insect biology," she says. "So this is a system that has both."

Understanding the gut microbes in bees

Today, the broad aim of her research is to understand the diversity and function of the gut microbiota in honeybees and bumblebees, emphasizing genomic approaches, not unlike the current research interest in the human microbiome.

"It has a number of parallels with the gut microbiota of humans and other mammals, because it is a long co-evolved and specialized bacterial community, and because it impacts the health of the hosts," she says.

The gut microbiota is another dimension of animal biodiversity, particularly when the animals have distinctive and co-evolved bacterial species in their guts, Moran says.

"In insects, this doesn't always appear to be true--many seem to have a selected set of bacteria taken up from the environment, and the bacteria can live in a range of habitats outside the gut," she says. "But in honeybees and bumblebees, the gut is dominated by a small number of tightly related groups.

"Why? The primary reason seems to be that sociality--social interactions--gives a route for dependable transmission between individuals. Interactions within the bee colonies are the basis for transfer of the symbionts to newly emerged adult bees. This is where the system parallels that of humans and other mammals, all of which are social at least to the extent of having extended maternal care. Gut symbionts of mammals are specialized and transmitted via these social interactions."

Microbial gut symbionts are essential for the life of most animal species, but their diversity and functions in hosts and their responses to ecological disturbance are poorly understood, she says. Apis mellifera, the honeybee, has a distinctive set of about eight symbiotic bacterial species, some of which occur in other Apis species and in the related genus Bombus--bumblebees.

Bees, of course, are critically important ecologically and economically, particularly in agriculture, where honeybees pollinate an estimated $15 billion worth of agricultural products in the United States, including more than 130 fruits, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In recent years, however, there has been increasing concern over rampant bee colony losses, dubbed "Colony Collapse Disorder," and the overall health of bees in general. [Colony Collapse Disorder ]

While Moran and her colleagues are primarily trying to gain a basic understanding of biodiversity and function in the bee gut microbial community system, "some bumblebees are becoming rare and have shrunken ranges. Are we also losing diversity of their gut microbiota, and will this be a factor in trying to conserve these species?" she asks. "Are problems with gut microbiota part of the problem of honeybee health, or could microbiota be preserved in a way that helps bees thrive?

"A big part of the problem with bee health is undoubtedly the decreasing availability of diverse floral resources, and possibly nesting sites in the case of bumblebees," she adds. "But exposure to toxins and to diseases also play a part, based on numerous studies. Gut microbes very plausibly play a role in host resistance to these things, and also in improving nutrition. So we hope that we find something useful for bees."

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding her work with $2,006,416 over five years, awarded in 2010.

Antibiotic resistance

Moran's research has revealed that bacteria in the guts of honeybees are highly resistant to the preventive antibiotic tetracycline--probably the result of decades of exposure to it because of its use by beekeepers to prevent bacterial diseases. Moran's team identified eight different tetracycline resistance genes among U.S. honeybees that were exposed to the antibiotic, but the genes were largely absent in bees from countries where such antibiotic use is banned.

"In the bee system, even though transmission is mostly within colonies, the symbionts are much more likely to undergo horizontal transmission," she says, meaning transmission among members of the same species that are not parent and child. "This has massive consequences for patterns of genome evolution in the symbionts. Because they are undergoing recombination, and have larger genetic population sizes, they retain normal genome sizes, and have far more dynamic genomes.

"The antibiotic resistance study was an early hint about the dynamic nature of these genomes," she adds. "It turns out that in the United States, antibiotics have been used widely in beekeeping since the 1950s, mostly tetracycline. And the gut microbiota of U.S. honeybees is a treasure trove of tetracycline resistance genes that have been horizontally transferred from other bacteria. Now we are finding that strains of the bee gut microbiota show a large set of 'accessory' genes and functions. A given strain can have hundreds of genes that are not present in another strain of the same species, and that affect functions such as sugar metabolism, or ability to break down components of pollen cell walls."

Until recently, none of these bacterial species had been cultured in the lab, "but now all of them can be," she says, crediting the work of Kwong, and Philipp Engel, a postdoctoral fellow now in Switzerland.

"In fact, we have given official names to the bacterial species that are our main focus: Snodgrassella alvi, Gilliamella apical, and Frischella perrara," named after three biologists who made major contributions in honeybee biology, Robert Snodgrass, Martha Gilliam and Karl von Frisch.

"These three live together in one part of the honeybee ileum (part of the digestive tract), and two of them also live in bumblebees," she says. "But we are finding that there are diverse strains within each species, and that different bee species and different colonies within a species seem to have different strains of symbionts."

Another postdoctoral fellow in her lab, Hauke Koch, was the first to find that gut symbionts of bumblebees protect against protozoan parasites, "so we are trying to see if the same is true in honeybees, and also to extend the findings in bumblebees," she says.

She and her collaborators also conducted a survey of gut symbionts in three bumblebee species to determine whether environmental factors--especially agricultural management or geographic location--affected symbiont communities.

"And it turns out that different bumblebee species all have some of the same symbionts, particularlySnodgrassella and Gilliamella, but one bumble bee species seemed to sometimes miss being inoculated," she says. "The 'right' symbionts are simply absent from some individuals. This is very different from honeybees, where every worker bee has the main symbionts, and we think it might relate to their different life cycles and social lives."

This work provides a baseline for understanding how the gut microbiota of honeybees and bumblebees varies among colonies, and how this variation might affect colony health.

"By establishing methods for culturing and type strains that can be studied by different laboratories, we can start to untangle the mechanistic basis for colonizing hosts," she says. "And we can start to understand how the normal microbiota interacts with disease agents that infect bees."

The temperament of bees

When it's time to start new colonies, Moran's lab orders bees from different places around the country, but favors northern California bees because of their "very sweet personalities," meaning they stay calm when the hive is opened, and don't line up in an aggressive manner, preparing to attack, she says. "One can approach the hives without alarming them," she says. "Feisty bees are touchy and prone to attack when someone just gets close to the hive. We had some Texas bees, but they were a bit feisty, perhaps they did not like being plopped down in New England," before she moved to Austin.

Lab technician Kim Hammond cares for the bees and has developed into a master beekeeper, Moran says. "In fact, maybe she's too good –we can't recover the disease organisms that most beekeepers complain about, even when we would like to sample them in our colonies. She keeps the bee colonies very healthy, and we sometimes cannot detect pathogens that are generally common.

"The main ones are Nosema species, which are eukaryotic pathogens related to fungi, and RNA viruses, such as `Deformed Wing Virus,"' she adds. "In some of our experiments we want to infect bees with pathogens, to see if the microbiota protects against pathogens. In those cases we have to go to other beekeepers to try and find the disease organisms."

New to bee research and wanting to learn the basics of beekeeping, Moran actually kept several colonies in her own yard for several years.

"But I have to admit I am afraid of stings," she says. "Yes I did get stung a few times. In working directly with the colonies, it is usual to occasionally be stung. Of course we wear bee suits. In the lab, we mostly work with young worker bees, which do not sting much, plus we have them contained. If a student researcher is worried about stings, we just have them work on aspects that have no risk. But we do keep an epinephrine kit around for possible cases of a sting of someone allergic who might not realize the risk. So far we haven't had anything at all serious."

And, of course, there is at least one sweet fringe benefit of the research. "We get honey, which is very helpful as gifts to make people worry less about being stung," she says.

Editor's Note: This Behind the Scenes article was first provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

-- Marlene Cimons
Investigators
Nancy Moran
Related Institutions/Organizations
University of Texas at Austin

MATHEMATICS AND THE MODEL STRAWBERRY

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Strawberries with a thirst

Mathematicians help California drought-weary berry growers address water issues

t's just not summer without a piece of strawberry shortcake. Pinches of sugar release a flood of fragrant juices that pinken clouds of whipped cream and salty sweet cake on a sweltering day for a refreshing dessert that says, "Yes, summer has arrived."

Just as representative of this season's delights are those joys we associate with water: sparkling swimming pools, cooling mists of summer hoses and the scent of warm pavement suddenly accosted by raindrops.

As much as these two images fit snugly in sentimental minds, they do not coexist in California's berry farmlands, which reportedly produce 80 percent of the nation's strawberries.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, "In 119 years of recorded history, 2013 was the driest calendar year for the state of California." To be sure, California, and specifically coastal Central California, is never overflowing with water in any year, but recent, yearly water-supply needs caused serious concern.

In January 2014, California's snowpack, which normally provides about one-third of the water used by California's cities and farms, was measured at 12 percent, the lowest for January in more than a half-century of record keeping. Governor Jerry Brown declared a drought emergency for the state, long before the "dry season," which usually occurs during the summer months.

Then, on April 1, the California Department of Water Resources measured water content of statewide snowpack at 32 percent of normal expectations for that time of year. California's water managers saw the result as truly foreboding since April typically is considered the snowpack's peak when snow and ice begin to melt into streams and reservoirs, and conditions were only expected to worsen.

Drought conditions like these, occurring annually, prompted policymakers, conservationists, geologists, hydrologists, farmers and business owners to creatively address the state's water problems. And, in an interesting turn, mathematicians factored into this mix with one of the most unique perspectives of all.

The berry business

John Eiskamp, owner and president of JE Farms describes the Pajaro Valley in Central Coastal California as the "berry capital of the world." Strawberries reign supreme, followed by raspberries and then blackberries, but ultimately, it's a berry world in his Santa Cruz County.

"This is an agricultural area," he said. "It's the driver of the economy. It provides the majority of the jobs. It provides the majority of the support industries that are here for agriculture--the companies that sell the product, the supplies, and the inputs that we growers use to produce the crops."

So, water shortage issues--even for berries that aren't the thirstiest crops by a long shot--still need water to produce saleable, harvestable fruit. According to Eiskamp, agriculture represents 85 percent of the valley's water usage, but because of that the growers know they must be good stewards of the limited water supply. Not surprisingly, they already have explored various crop rotation and water conservation strategies. However, this problem only worsens as each year passes. So, in 2011, a National Science Foundation-funded math institute, the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) in Palo Alto, Calif., got involved in what they describe as an "optimization problem."

Math: It's not just for spreadsheets and bottomlines

One of eight NSF-funded math institutes, AIM brings 800 mathematicians from around the world to Palo Alto each year to study a "whole variety of programs," according to its deputy director Estelle Basor. Small research groups with "applied" objectives come for weeklong stints, modeling neural effects related to migraine headaches, more efficient medical imaging or, in this case, improved water use in drought-stricken areas. Additionally, the institute spends even more time on its initial focus of "pure math" research.

"I grew up in California. My father was an apple grower, and my mother's family was also involved in farming," mathematician Basor said. "So many aspects to farming are difficult. There are so many unknowns--weather, what other people are doing in other countries, pests, and supply and demand. I'm not sure that a lot of the public actually realize the risks involved. So, if we [mathematicians] can just help smooth out some of the decision-making process and help solve a few of the problems that growers might have, I think it's a really good step forward."

So, Basor talked to Driscoll Associates, familiar to many as purveyors of of Driscoll's berries, and invited them to participate in an institute workshop that brought together 30 mathematicians from around the world to discuss sustainability problems. Nine of the participants worked on the berry problem, and along with three industry representatives, got the ball rolling. These collaborators then formed a smaller group to focus on the water supply's confined aquifer and its chronic overdraft of water that had persisted over many years.

"We were given a list of possible changes that could happen in terms of crop rotation, fallowing land, looking at developing recharge areas to capture rainfall to reduce the amount of water that's being taken out of the aquifer or the ground water region," said Katie Fowler, an associate professor of mathematics at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., and member of this math team.

She explained how they could look at the problem simplistically by just considering crops' water consumption and different planting strategies. But, more sophisticated, elegant modeling included soil properties, precipitation data, topography and run-off measurements. With essentially two tiers of data, they could create a model that minimized aquifer impact and found ways to recharge it naturally.

"The approach is an example of 'multi-objective optimization,'" she said. "We've developed three performance metrics. A person is going to want to try to make as much profit as possible using the least amount of water while meeting market demands. And those [goals] are naturally competing. So our most recent work has been towards offering a set of possible solutions with a clear description of those trade-offs."

In fact, another researcher, Lea Jenkins, an associate professor in mathematical sciences at Clemson University, describes the model as "stochastic," which means values of variables are random, versus "deterministic," when a problem has parameters with fixed values.

"This problem is about math," said Dan Balbas, vice president of operations for Reiter Affiliated Companies, a grower for Driscoll's, and who attended the 2011 workshop. "You've got a given resource, so how do you maximize it to maintain sustainability and do the right thing from an economic and environmental standpoint, marrying the two. It's math. It really is math. I think the hard thing is getting the input numbers right because it's a tricky thing to quantify, but it's absolutely a mathematical situation. It's how much water do we have, and how do we best use it. It's numbers."

And it's involvement from growers that make this process work.

"Part of the reason we like to come out here is to get farmers to help us--to make sure that the models we use are reasonable or are somewhat accurate and represent a reality that they're living in," Jenkins said. "And the best we can do is give them possible solutions to a very complicated problem and then ask them how they can help us improve those solutions."

Interestingly enough, as the mathematicians talk about their process thus far, they admit that while they have collaborated with a variety of players in this issue, they still need to bring in sociologists and environmental economists to improve their model.

A better future for berries

So, this team of mathematicians has now created models that help identify which crops to plant where and when. With iPad in hand, growers like Eiskamp and Balbas can go to the fields connecting to wireless tensiometers in real time to essentially tell them when plants have been watered sufficiently, minimizing waste and ensuring fertilizers stay in the root zone where plants can most efficiently access them and keep from contaminating the water aquifer.

"The thing the math institute best did was shed light on per-unit of water--what is the best crop to grow?" Balbas said. "We found that raspberries--from a per-unit-of-water standpoint--were a better crop, so we've grown the raspberry program a little bit. Of course, that changed the economics. In fact we have so many more raspberries now, it would be good to do the analysis again. It's a moving target. There are a lot more raspberries in the valley, partly because of water, but partly because it was just good business."

Ultimately, this mathematical perspective to addressing irrigation, crop rotation and drought mitigation is something that can be applied elsewhere.

"You have a set of crops that you're planting where you are realizing a profit," Jenkins said. "The crops need certain resources to survive. It might be a berry farm here, but it might be a wheat farm in the Midwest. And it might be a soy bean or a corn farm in the Southeast."

The nuances that customize the models come with specific local or state government regulations or water management requirements.

"Water is a resource that needs to be conserved, and there are competing interests," Jenkins added. "There are environmental and ecological interests associated with keeping certain wetlands that might go dry if an underlying aquifer is overused. And the economy of a local region may depend on the economies of the farmers, so if the farmers aren't realizing the profit they need, then that impacts the economy of the whole region.

"There are not only ag users, but also urban users and recreational users. To get a unified perspective, ultimately everybody needs to get involved."

-- Ivy F. Kupec
Investigators
Lea Jenkins
David Farmer
Katie Fowler
Estelle Basor
J. Brian Conrey
Related Institutions/Organizations
American Institute of Mathematics

STAMPEDE SUPERCOMPUTER HELPS SCEINTISTS UNDERSTAND JET ENGINES AND THE HUMAN EAR

FROM:  THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

The aeroacoustics of jets

Simulations helps scientists understand and control turbulence in humans and machines

Aerospace engineers from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign are using the National Science Foundation-supported Stampede supercomputer to explore how jets in general, like those on modern aircraft and inside the human body, generate noise.

Jet engines generate intense sound waves that bother people who live near active airports. The noise can be so bothersome that limits are often placed on how loud aircraft can be and how many aircraft can fly over residential communities. Making jet aircraft quieter requires new engine designs; however, no simple explanation of how jets generate noise is available.

Daniel Bodony and his colleagues are trying to solve this problem. They are using Stampede to simulate the turbulent motion generated by air moving from the jet engines and then virtually testing the shape and location of actuators and acoustic liners that can reduce jet noise. This research has been published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics and Physics of Fluids.

In related research, Bodony is seeking to understand how the voice is created, which also relies on the research around the aeroacoustics of jets. However, this time the unsteady jet of air is created by vocal folds, or vocal chords, when a person speaks.

Once speech production is understood, Bodony and his team will use Stampede to determine how to design synthetic vocal chords to restore speech when it is lost due to strokes or other pathologies.

"Stampede has been a very easy platform on which to run our production simulations, and its more-than-two-times speed advantage over Ranger quickly made it a favorite," Bodony said. "It is our workhorse platform and enables our fundamental research that supports science and engineering objectives, including jet noise reduction, human voice prediction and control, and analysis of future high-speed aircraft systems."

-- Aaron Dubrow, NSF
Investigators
Daniel Bodony
Related Institutions/Organizations
University of Texas at Austin
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

STAMPEDE SUPERCOMPUTER AND DRIVING DNA THROUGH THE NANOPORE

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Blueprint for the affordable genome

Stampede supercomputer powers innovations in DNA sequencing technologies
Aleksei Aksimentiev, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, used the National Science Foundation-supported Stampede supercomputer to explore a cutting-edge method of DNA sequencing. The method uses an electric field to drive a strand of DNA through a small hole, or "nanopore," either in silicon or a biological membrane.

By controlling this process precisely and measuring the change in ionic current as the DNA strands move through the pore of the membrane, the sequencer can read each base pair in order.

"Stampede is by far the best computer system my group has used over the past 10 years," Aksimentiev said. "Being able to routinely obtain 40-80 nanoseconds of molecular dynamic simulations in 24 hours, regardless of the systems' size, has been essential for us to make progress with rapidly evolving projects."

Aksimentiev and his group showed that localized heating can be used to stretch DNA, which significantly increases the accuracy of nanopore DNA sequencing. In addition, he and his team used an all-atom molecular dynamics method to accurately describe DNA origami objects, making it possible to engineer materials for future applications in biosensing, drug delivery and nano-electronics. These results were published in ACS Nano and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

-- Aaron Dubrow, NSF
Investigators
Aleksei Aksimentiev
Related Institutions/Organizations
University of Texas at Austin
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

NSF ON WALKING FOR ENERGY

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Walking can recharge the spirit, but what about our phones?

Device captures energy from walking to recharge wireless gadgets
Smartphones, tablets, e-readers, not to mention wearable health and fitness trackers, smart glasses and navigation devices--today's population is more plugged in than ever before.

But our reliance on devices is not problem-free:

Wireless gadgets require regular recharging. While we may think we've cut the cord, we remain reliant on outlets and charging stations to keep our devices up and running.
According to a 2009 report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), consumer electronics and information and communication technologies currently account for nearly 15 percent of global residential electricity consumption. What's more, the IEA expects energy consumptions by these devices to double by 2022 and to triple by 2030--thereby slowly but surely adding to the burden on our power infrastructure.
With support from the National Science Foundation, a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology may have a solution to both problems: They're developing a new, portable, clean energy source that could change the way we power mobile electronics: human motion.

Led by material scientist Zhong Lin Wang, the team has created a backpack that captures mechanical energy from the natural vibration of human walking and converts it into electrical energy. This technology could revolutionize the way we charge small electronic devices, and thereby reduce the burden of these devices on non-renewable power sources and untether users from fixed charging stations.

Smaller, lighter, more energy efficient

Wearable generators that convert energy from the body's mechanical potential into electricity are not new, but traditional technologies rely on bulky or fragile materials. By contrast, Wang's backpack contains a device made from thin, lightweight plastic sheets, interlocked in a rhombic grid. (Think of the collapsible cardboard containers that separate a six pack of fancy soda bottles.)

As the wearer walks, the rhythmic movement that occurs as his/her weight shifts from side to side causes the inside surfaces of the plastic sheets to touch and then separate, touch and then separate. The periodic contact and separation drives electrons back and forth, producing an alternating electric current. This process, known as the triboelectrification effect, also underlies static electricity, a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has ever pulled a freshly laundered fleece jacket over his or her head in January.

But the key to Wang's technology is the addition of highly charged nanomaterials that maximize the contact between the two surfaces, pumping up the energy output of what Wang calls the triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG).

"The TENG is as efficient as the best electromagnetic generator, and is lighter and smaller than any other electric generators for mechanical energy conversion," says Wang. "The efficiency will only improve with the invention of new advanced materials."

Charging on the go

In the laboratory, Wang's team showed that natural human walking with a load of 2 kilograms, about the weight of a 2-liter bottle of soda, generated enough power to simultaneously light more than 40 commercial LEDs (which are the most efficient lights available).

Wang says that the maximum power output depends on the density of the surface electrostatic charge, but that the backpack will likely be able to generate between 2 and 5 watts of energy as the wearer walks--enough to charge a cell phone or other small electronic device.

The researchers anticipate that this will be welcome news to outdoor enthusiasts, field engineers, military personnel and emergency responders who work in remote areas.

As far as Wang and his colleagues are concerned however, human motion is only one potential source for clean and renewable energy. In 2013, the team demonstrated that it was possible to use TENGs to extract energy from ocean waves.

The research report, "Harvesting Energy from the Natural Vibration of Human Walking", was published in the journal ACS Nano on November 1, 2013.

-- Valerie Thompson, AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow
Investigators
Zhong Wang
Related Institutions/Organizations
Georgia Tech Research Corporation

SUPERCOMPUTERS AND THE WEATHER

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

Today's forecast: Better forecasts

Stampede supercomputer helps researchers design and test improved hurricane forecasting system

Working with researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Fuqing Zhang and a team of weather modelers at Penn State University have created an improved method of hurricane forecasting that incorporates high-resolution airborne radar observations from the inner core of the storms. This approach has shown great promise for hurricane systems, but requires significant additional computation.

Using the National Science Foundation-supported Stampede supercomputer, Zhang re-forecast the more than 100 tropical storms that occurred between 2008-2012, applying his new method. He showed that the new system reduces Day-2-to-Day-5 intensity forecast errors by 25 percent compared to the National Hurricane Center's official forecasts. The simulations are described in detail in a research paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

A more accurate prediction system will allow emergency management officials, the private sector, and the general public to make more informed decisions during major storms, minimizing the losses of life and property.

In order to assimilate large amounts of Doppler radar data and merge it with physical models of hurricane formation and information about historical precedents, Zhang made extensive use of Stampede and its advanced technologies.

"The increased computing power of Stampede has allowed us to run numerous sensitivity experiments for hurricane models at a higher resolution, allowing us to see details more clearly," Zhang said. "Especially for the hybrid data assimilation system, the improved computational performance of Stampede over previous supercomputer platforms gives us more flexibility in configuring the domain size and grid spacing that will be used."

The methodology of incorporating airborne Doppler measurements was fully adopted by NOAA's operational hurricane prediction model in 2013. This breakthrough in hurricane prediction recently received the 2014 Banner Miller Award bestowed by the American Meteorological Society.

-- Aaron Dubrow, NSF (703) 292-4489 adubrow@nsf.gov
Investigators
Fuqing Zhang
Related Institutions/Organizations
University of Texas at Austin
Pennsylvania State Univ University Park

DRIVERLESS VEHICLES

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Demonstrating a driverless future

Carnegie Mellon researchers bring NSF-funded autonomous vehicle to D.C. to show promise of driverless cars

In the coming decades, we will likely commute to work and explore the countryside in autonomous, or driverless, cars capable of communicating with the roads they are traveling on. A convergence of technological innovations in embedded sensors, computer vision, artificial intelligence, control and automation, and computer processing power is making this feat a reality.

This week, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) will mark a significant milestone, demonstrating one of the most advanced autonomous vehicles ever designed, capable of navigating on urban roads and highways without human intervention. The car was brought to Washington, D.C., at the request of Congressman Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania, who participated in a 33-mile drive in the autonomous vehicle between a Pittsburgh suburb and the city's airport last September.

Developed with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Transportation, DARPA and General Motors, the car is the result of more than a decade of research and development by scientists and engineers at CMU and elsewhere. Their work has advanced the underlying technologies--sensors, software, wireless communications and network integration--required to make sure a vehicle on the road is as safe--and ultimately safer--without a driver than with one. (In the case of the Washington, D.C., demonstration, an engineer will be on hand to take the wheel if required.)

"This technology has been enabled by remarkable advances in the seamless blend of computation, networking and control into physical objects--a field known as cyber-physical systems," said Cora Marrett, NSF deputy director. "The National Science Foundation has long supported fundamental research that has built a strong foundation to enable cyber-physical systems to become a reality--like Dr. Raj Rajkumar's autonomous car."

Raj Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and robotics at CMU, is a leader not just in autonomous vehicles, but in the broader field of cyber-physical systems, or CPS. Such systems are already in use in sectors such as agriculture, energy, healthcare and advanced manufacturing, and they are poised to make an impact in transportation as well.

"Federal funding has been critical to our work in dealing with the uncertainties of real-world operating conditions, making efficient real-time usage of on-board computers, enabling vehicular communications and ensuring safe driving behaviors," Rajkumar said.

In 2007, Carnegie Mellon's then state-of-the-art driverless car, BOSS, took home the $2 million grand prize in the DARPA Urban Challenge, which pitted the leading autonomous vehicles in the world against one another in a challenging, urban environment. The new vehicle that Rajkumar is demonstrating in Washington, D.C., is the successor to that vehicle.

Unlike BOSS, which was rigged with visible antennas and large sensors, CMU's new car--a Cadillac SRX--doesn't appear particularly "smart." In fact, it looks much like any other car on the road. However, top-of-the-line radar, cameras, sensors and other technologies are built into the body of the vehicle. The car's computers are tucked away under the floor.

The goal of CMU's researchers is simple but important: To develop a driverless car that can decrease injuries and fatalities on roads. Automotive accidents result in 1.2 million fatalities annually around the world and cost citizens and governments $518 billion. It is estimated that 90 percent of those accidents are caused by human error.

"Because computers don't get distracted, sleepy or angry, they can actually keep us much safer--that is the promise of this technology," Rajkumar said. "Over time, the technology will augment automotive safety significantly."

In addition to controlling the steering, speed and braking, the autonomous systems in the vehicle also detect and avoid obstacles in the road, including pedestrians and bicyclists.

In their demonstration in D.C., cameras in the vehicle will visually detect the status of traffic lights and respond appropriately. In collaboration with the D.C. Department of Transportation, the researchers have even added a technology that allows some of the traffic lights in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington to wirelessly communicate with the car, telling it the status of the lights ahead.

NSF has supported Rajkumar's work on autonomous vehicles since 2005, but it is not the only project of this kind that NSF supports. In addition to CMU's driverless car, NSF supports Sentry, an autonomous underwater vehicle deployed at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and several projects investigating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) including those in use in search and rescue and disaster recovery operations. Moreover, NSF supports numerous projects that advance the fundamental theories and applications that underlie all autonomous vehicles and other cyber-physical systems.

In the last five years, NSF has invested over $200 million in CPS research and education, building a foundation for the smart systems of the future.

-NSF-

Media Contacts
Aaron Dubrow, NSF
Byron Spice, Carnegie Mellon University
Principal Investigators
Raj Rajkumar, Carnegie Mellon University