CDC REPORTS ON DOG-TO-HUMAN PNEUMONIC PLAGUE OUTBREAK IN COLORADO

FROM:   CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION
Outbreak of Human Pneumonic Plague with Dog-to-Human and Possible Human-to-Human Transmission — Colorado, June–July 2014

This outbreak highlights 1) the need to consider plague in the differential diagnosis of sick domestic animals from plague endemic areas, including dogs, 2) the limitations of automated diagnostic systems for identifying rare bacteria such as Yersinia pestis, and 3) the potential for milder forms of illness in patients taking antimicrobial agents. Hospital laboratories in plague-endemic areas should be aware of the limitations of current diagnostic methodologies in diagnosing rare diseases such as plague. In July 2014, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment Laboratory identified Yersinia pestis in a blood sample collected from a middle-aged man hospitalized with pneumonia. An investigation led by Tri-County Health Department revealed that the man’s dog had been ill and was euthanized. The dog later tested positive for Y. pestis. Three additional persons with contact with the dog and/or patient were ill and tested positive for Y. pestis. One of the cases may have resulted through person-to-person transmission from the index patient, potentially the first such event in North America since 1924. Human illness due to plague remains an ongoing risk in endemic areas. Early recognition of plague, especially the pneumonic form, is critical to clinical management and a timely public health response.

THE MILITARY SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY BUDGET DISCUSSED BY OFFICIALS FROM DOD

FROM:  U.S. DEFENSE DEPARTMENT DEFENSE

Right:  The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s research and development in stealth technology during the 1970s and 1980s led to the world’s most advanced radar-evading aircraft, providing strategic national security advantage to the United States. Today, hypersonic technologies have the potential to provide the dominance once afforded by stealth to support a range of future national security missions. DARPA photo.  

DoD Officials Discuss Science, Technology Budget
By Cheryl Pellerin
DoD News, Defense Media Activity

WASHINGTON, April 24, 2015 – The Defense Department has maintained a steady $12 billion investment in science and technology and is using new initiatives to boost innovation and military superiority, defense officials told a Senate panel April 22.

Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, testified before the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee on the DoD budget request for fiscal year 2016.

Joining him were Alan Shaffer, acting assistant secretary of defense for development, research and engineering, and Steven Walker, deputy director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

The department’s science and technology budget request for fiscal year 2016 is $12.2 billion, Kendall said.

Steady Investment

“Over the last several years we have maintained, despite all the budget fluctuations, a fairly steady investment in terms of technology,” he said.

The department is committed to pursuing innovation in all its dimensions, said Kendall, adding that Defense Secretary Ash Carter endorsed the Defense Innovation Initiative unveiled last fall, and yesterday at Stanford University the secretary announced steps the department will take to foster innovation.

Kendall’s efforts cover the broader DoD acquisition enterprise, and two weeks ago he announced final details and implementation guidance for Better Buying Power 3.0.

“The Better Buying Power label originated when Dr. Carter was undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics … but it's really a collection of initiatives that has evolved over time,” Kendall said.

Improving DoD Acquisition

The initiatives are designed to incrementally improve the acquisition system’s performance, he said.

The acquisition system includes not only major DoD programs, Kendall said, “but everything -- all the things we contract out for, all the things the department acquires … and services are more than half of the things we contract out for. And it certainly includes our science and technology investments.”

Kendall said the most recent version focuses on innovation, technical excellence and technological superiority, and on taking steps to spur innovation and get the greatest value from research and development and from new innovation sources.

The efforts, he added, include science and technology accounts, DARPA's budget, the work of DoD labs, contracted research and development,
reimbursable independent research and development conducted by industry, the Small Business Innovation Research Program, and others.

Incentivizing Industry

Several BBP 3.0 provisions are designed to incentivize industry, Kendall said.
“One of them is … to tell industry how much we're willing to pay for enhanced performance,” he said.

Normally when the department asks for a weapon system proposal, it sets a level of threshold performance that is the minimum it will accept, Kendall explained. DoD also sets an objective -– the performance it desires and that comes with a higher price, he said.

“Industry almost uniformly bids to the threshold level and ignores the objective because the threshold level is always cheaper,” he added, noting, “It's less capable and that goes with [the lower] cost.”

The undersecretary said the department is starting to communicate to industry “how much more we're willing to pay for that higher level of performance. Industry can then make an informed judgment about whether or not to invest in technology that will get to that level of performance.”

Without that information, Kendall said, there's no incentive for industry.
More Creative Products

“We're trying to involve industry earlier-on in concept definition and requirements formulation so we have an interaction with industry.” Kendall said. “We give industry a head start … to work on how they would satisfy our requirements.”

In general, he added, “we're trying to align our financial incentive structure with the things we want. In this case, what we want is innovation -- more creative, more capable products that we can get to the warfighter.”

In his remarks, Shaffer said his office has revised the way it plans and executes the science and technology program through Reliance 21.

Reliance 21 is “an oversight construct that has created communities of interest, bringing scientists working in specific technology areas together to jointly plan and execute their departmentwide program in a more effective way,” he said.

Defense Innovation

Shaffer said his office also is directly involved in the Defense Innovation Initiative and in many specific initiatives under BBP 3.0.

He said the DII is a departmentwide effort to identify and invest in novel ways to sustain and advance military superiority for the 21st century and improve business operations.

Under BBP 3.0, he said, “we are more tightly coupling acquisition requirements and the intelligence community to more dynamically adjust to changes in potential threats,” and addressing barriers to adopting commercial technology in systems and capabilities.

Shaffer said his office is increasing its use of prototypes and experimentation departmentwide to reduce technical risk early in a program cycle and to see how systems will operate. The office also is expanding the use of modular open-systems architecture to stimulate innovation.

Breakthrough Technologies

In his remarks to the panel, Walker said DARPA’s role is to make early pivotal investments that help develop breakthrough technologies for national security.
Walker highlighted two programs that DARPA is working on with the Air Force, both in hypersonics –- referring to a flow of air with a Mach number greater than five. This means the flow speed is more than five times the speed of sound, he explained.

One program is the Tactical Boost Glide system, Walker said.

This DARPA-Air Force effort will develop and demonstrate technologies to enable air-launched tactical-range hypersonic boost glide systems, including a flight demonstration.

Basically, Walker said, “you boost it with a rocket and glide the system to the target.”

Tactical Hypersonics

The second DARPA-Air Force effort is the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept, designed to enable transformational changes in responsive, long-range strike against time-critical or heavily defended targets.

“You also boost that concept,” Walker said, “that you then take over with the air-breathing scramjet engine on board and that also hits its target.”

This program, according to DARPA, seeks to advance air vehicle configurations capable of efficient hypersonic flight, enhance hydrocarbon scramjet-powered propulsion to enable sustained hypersonic cruise, develop affordable system designs and manufacturing approaches, and more.

“What [hypersonic speeds] buy you is a strike capability for time-critical targets from long-standoff ranges,” Walker said.

“If we can pull that hypersonic technology into a weapon-system concept … at the end of these programs the Air Force would be ready to go off into an acquisition program on those systems -- potentially, if we're successful. That's really the future,” he added.

The Sequestration Threat

During the hearing, Kendall told the panel that one threat to U.S. military superiority is “one of our own making. It is the threat of sequestration.”

In the fiscal year 2016 DoD budget request, the department is asking for funding that is well above sequestration levels, he said.

“We are trying to recover some of the readiness that was lost when sequestration was implemented in 2013. We are also trying to acquire some of the capability we need to maintain to remain competitive,” said Kendall, adding that the department is requesting increases in its investment accounts, research and development, and procurement, of about $20 billion.

“Sequestration would force us to prioritize pressing near-term needs at the expense of these investments, preserving capability now but increasing our risk in the future,” he said, adding that uncertainties about future budgets make effective planning nearly impossible.

“We urge you to permanently repeal the threat of sequestration,” Kendall told the senators. “Removing this specter would do more than any other single act to spur innovation and preserve our military technological superiority.”

THEORETICAL PHYSICIST LISA RANDALL

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
After the lecture: Extra dimensions, interacting dark matter, and the power of uncertainty
A conversation with theoretical physicist Lisa Randall

In her most recent book, physicist Lisa Randall--Harvard professor, libretto composer, Lego figurine, star in the world of theoretical physics--writes that the universe repeatedly reveals itself to be cleverer than we are. This is not a submission to the mysteries of the universe; rather, it's a recognition that the more we discover about the fundamental nuts and bolts of this world, the more questions we have.

Randall works to uncover those fundamental nuts and bolts. She studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology, and her research has advanced our understanding of supersymmetry, models of extra dimensions, dark matter and more. She's made a career out of sharing these discoveries--what they are, how we know them and why they matter--with the public.

Randall is the author of three books and has appeared in dozens of media outlets--from Charlie Rose and The New York Times to The Colbert Report and Vogue. We sat down with Randall after her lecture "New ideas about dark matter" as part of the National Science Foundation's Distinguished Lecture Series in Math and Physical Sciences.

I liked doing math. And I liked understanding how things work. I took a physics class in high school, and I didn't really know for sure that I would be doing it [long term], but I kept going. I enjoyed it. I like that you got answers. I kind of liked that it was challenging.

I think it's important to explain these theories are evolving and what it means for the world. Uncertainty in science isn't actually a bad thing. It actually drives you forward. You can have a lot of certainty even with uncertainty at the edges.

Sometimes it's a question not just of saying 'I'm going to figure this out,' but just with being smart enough to recognize something interesting when it happens. When we found this warped geometry we hadn't been looking for it, it just was a solution. Then we realized what kind of implications it could have. Both in terms of solving the hierarchy problem and explaining particle masses, but also in terms of having an infinite extra dimension.

There's usually a moment when you realize it. Then there are a lot of moments when you think you're wrong and you go back.

I think there's just a lot of ideas about creativity that people don't fully appreciate for scientists. I think there's a lot of ideas about right and wrong that people don't fully appreciate, and how science advances.

I'd just written a book where you try so hard to do everything in a liner order. I'd just written Warped Passages and it was kind of nice the idea of just introducing ideas without having to explain them. And just have different voices. You sort of realize the richness of operas and just expressing ideas and just getting people familiar with something. You have music, you have art, you have words. It's very exciting.

I don't think anyone should just set themselves up to be a role model. I think every person is different, and certainly there's a few enough women that we're all different. But it is true that one of the small advantages you have as a woman is that you are doing something important beyond your work, which is just establishing that women can be out there doing these things. And it is definitely true that when I wrote my book I thought it's good to have someone out there in the public eye, so that people know there are women physicists. And in terms of the response, I can say that--both negative and positive--people do not realize there are women out there sometimes. So it was really important. But it also means you have to put up with a lot of distracting comments and questions sometimes that you wouldn't otherwise.

-- Jessica Arriens,
Investigators
Lisa Randall
Related Institutions/Organizations
Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

EX-IM NAMES DROPLET MEASUREMENT TECHNOLOGIES AS SMALL BUSINESS EXPORTER OF THE YEAR

FROM:  U.S. EXPORT-IMPORT BANK
Export-Import Bank Names Droplet Measurement Technologies as Small Business Exporter of the Year
 Boulder, CO Company Employs a Team of 45 and Exports to Over 47 Countries

Washington, D.C. – Today, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), announced that Droplet Measurement Technologies (DMT), a Boulder, Colorado small business that manufactures cutting-edge cloud and aerosol measurement devices to customers around the globe, has been named its Small Business Exporter of the Year. An award will be presented to the company at the Bank's Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. on April 23rd.

“Equipping small businesses like Droplet Measurement Technologies to grow and successfully compete on the global stage is at the core of the Bank’s mission of reducing risk and unleashing opportunity,” said Ex-Im Bank Chairman and President Fred P. Hochberg. “When innovative American small businesses like DMT have a level playing field, they can enter new markets, sell their made-in-America goods and create jobs here at home.”

“Being named Small Business Exporter of the Year is an honor in that our small technical instruments company makes the tools scientists and researchers use to study the environment,” said Droplet Measurement Technologies CEO Robert McAllister. “This award is recognition of the global nature of the science we support. It supports our mission of providing scientists worldwide with the quality instruments they need to do the research we all rely on.”

Founded in 1987 by Dr. Darrel Baumgardner and Mr. Bill Dawson, DMT works with scientists and researchers around the world to expand research and development into new products that allow countries to measure the atmospheric changes taking place related to global warming, atmospheric ozone, and other areas of particle research. DMT produces the cloud probes that are utilized for climate and weather research, aircraft icing studies, and other atmospheric research.

As a leader in scientific cloud and aerosol measurements for more than 27 years, DMT began using Ex-Im’s insurance policy over four years ago to safeguard its international accounts receivable. The company’s export sales have risen 17.5 percent and their workforce has grown by 20 percent as a result. With 60 to 70 percent of their annual sales now exports, DMT relies heavily on the insurance provided by Ex-Im.

Ex-Im Bank's 2015 Annual Conference will feature remarks and panel discussions with some of the world’s leading voices in business and trade, including IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde; National Security Advisor Susan Rice; US Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker; Doug Oberhelman, chairman and CEO of Caterpillar Inc.; W. James McNerney, Jr., chairman and CEO of The Boeing Company; Steven Rattner, chairman of Willett Advisors LLC; Joe Kaeser, president and CEO of Siemens AG; Stephen S. Poloz, governor of the Bank of Canada; Jacqueline Hinman, chairman and CEO of CH2M Hill; Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the United States, Yousef Al Otaiba; and Dr. Mo Ibrahim, founder and chairman of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation.

NEW PARTICLE ACCELERATORS COULD EXPAND USE TO SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Smaller and cheaper particle accelerators?

Scientists developing technology that could expand use for medicine, national security, materials science, industry and high energy physics research
Traditionally, particle accelerators have relied on electric fields generated by radio waves to drive electrons and other particles close to the speed of light. But in radio-frequency machines there is an upper limit on the electric field before the walls of the accelerator "break down," causing it to not perform properly, and leading to equipment damage.

In recent years, however, scientists experimenting with so-called "plasma wakefields" have found that accelerating electrons on waves of plasma, or ionized gas, is not only more efficient, but also allows for the use of an electric field a thousand or more times higher than those of a conventional accelerator.

And most importantly, the technique, where electrons gain energy by "surfing" on a wave of electrons within the ionized gas, raises the potential for a new generation of smaller and less expensive particle accelerators.

"The big picture application is a future high energy physics collider," says Warren Mori, a professor of physics, astronomy and electrical engineering at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who has been working on this project. "Typically, these cost tens of billions of dollars to build. The motivation is to try to develop a technology that would reduce the size and the cost of the next collider."

The National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded scientist and his collaborators believe the next generation of smaller and cheaper accelerators could enhance their value, expanding their use in medicine, national security, materials science, industry and high-energy physics research.

"Accelerators are also used for sources of radiation. When a high energy particle wiggles up and down, it generates X-rays, so you could also use smaller accelerators to make smaller radiation sources to probe a container to see whether there is nuclear material inside, or to probe biological samples," Mori says. "Short bursts of X-rays are currently being used to watch chemical bonds form and to study the inner structure of proteins, and viruses."

Just as important, albeit on a more abstract level, "the goal of the future of high-energy physics is to understand the fundamental particles of matter," he says. "To have the field continue, we need these expensive, large, and complex tools for discovery."

NSF has supported basic research in a series of grants in recent years totaling $4 million, including computational resources. The Department of Energy (DOE) has provided the bulk of the funding for experimental facilities and experiments, and has contributed to theory and simulations support.

"Mori's work is the perfect example of an innovative approach to advancing the science and technology frontiers that can come about when the deep understanding of fundamental laws of nature, of the collective behavior of charged particles that we call a plasma, is combined with state-of-the-art numerical modeling algorithms and simulation tools," says Vyacheslav (Slava) Lukin, program director in NSF's physics division.

Using DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the scientists from SLAC and UCLA increased clusters of electrons to energies 400 to 500 times higher than what they could reach traveling the same distance in a conventional accelerator. Equally important, the energy transfer was much more efficient than that of earlier experiments, a first to show this combination of energy and efficiency using "plasma wakefields."

In the experiments, the scientists sent pairs of electron bunches containing 5 billion to 6 billion electrons each into a laser-generated column of plasma inside an oven of hot lithium gas. The first bunch in each pair was the "drive" bunch; it blasted all the free electrons away from the lithium atoms, leaving the positively charged lithium nuclei behind, a configuration known as the "blowout regime." The blasted electrons then fell back in behind the second bunch of electrons, known as the "trailing" bunch to form a "plasma wake" that thrust the trailer electrons to higher energy.

While earlier experiments had demonstrated high-field acceleration in plasma wakes, the SLAC/UCLA team was the first to demonstrate simultaneously high efficiency and high accelerating fields using a drive and trailer bunch combination in the strong "blowout" regime. Furthermore, the accelerated electrons ended up with a relatively small energy spread.

"Because it's a plasma, there is no breakdown field limit," Mori says. "The medium itself is fully ionized, so you don't have to worry about breakdown. Therefore, the electric field in a plasma device can be pushed to a thousand or more times higher amplitude than that in a conventional accelerator."

Chandrashekhar Joshi, UCLA professor of electrical engineering, led the team that developed the plasma source used in the experiment. Joshi, the director of the Neptune Facility for Advanced Accelerator Research at UCLA is the UCLA principal investigator for this research and is a long-time collaborator with the SLAC group. The team also is made up of SLAC accelerator physicists, including Mike Litos and Mark Hogan; Mori leads the group that developed the computer simulations used in the experiments. Their findings appeared last fall in the journal Nature.

"The near term goal of this research is to produce compact accelerators for use in universities and industry, while a longer term goal remains developing a high energy collider operating at the energy frontier of particle physics," Mori says.

-- Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
Investigators
Warren Mori
Frank Tsung
Viktor Decyk
Russel Caflisch
Michail Tzoufras
Philip Pritchett
Related Institutions/Organizations
University of California-Los Angeles

CYBERLEARNING SCIENCE

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Classroom as virtual phenomenon
University of Illinois professor uses cyberlearning to bring scientific processes to life

In the schools where Tom Moher works, classrooms are imbued with science through simulated earthquakes, virtual bugs in the walls and digital portholes to the solar system.

"I want to immerse students in the physical space and time of scientific phenomena," said Moher, an associate professor of computer science, learning sciences, and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "Sometimes I use the term 'marinating' the kids. Time affords me the opportunity for surprise. Nature happens when it happens, not just because it happens to be science period."

In his talk at the National Science Foundation (NSF) last spring as part of the "Designing Disruptive Learning Technologies" series, Moher showcased projects that use "embedded phenomena" to bring scientific processes into the classroom and to foster learning from those experiences.

One of the projects he described (supported by an award from NSF) was RoomQuake, an earthquake simulation system where the classroom itself becomes an active seismic area.

At unpredictable times throughout the unit, rumbles emanating from speakers attached to simulated seismographs signal to the class that an earthquake is occurring.

Students rush to terminals around the classroom, read the data from seismograms and use that information to determine the magnitude of the event, the distance of the event from the recording stations and eventually and the epicenter of the earthquake. Over the course of six weeks and dozens of earthquakes, students discover a "fault line" emerging.

Moher's immersive learning experiences bring technological richness and narrative drama to the classroom. This is true not only of RoomQuake, but also HelioRoom, where students are asked to imagine that the sun is located in the center of their classroom, and Wallcology, where tablets adjacent to the walls of classrooms serve as viewports into an imaginary space inside the walls filled with the virtual fauna.

The projects also highlight the role of computing and data analysis in domains from seismology to astronomy.

In Moher's most recent project, HungerGames, students learn about animal foraging behaviors using stuffed animals with embedded RFID tags that act as tangible avatars to represent their foraging among patches of food (with camouflaged RFID readers) distributed around a classroom.

During a two-period pilot enactment of the unit, Moher and his team demonstrated the feasibility of the design for classroom use, finding evidence of emotional relationships between learners and avatars, and the emergence of unanticipated behaviors that promoted new questions about the science phenomena. The results provisionally support the effectiveness of the activity as a science learning environment.

Moher's team presented their results at the Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction in 2014.

Whether it is students peering into a secret insect habitat or rushing to locate the epicenter of an earthquake, "the kids and teachers are our willing accomplices," Moher said.

"It's their imagination, along with a little bit of technology, that brings the room alive."

-- Aaron Dubrow, NSF
Investigators
Thomas Moher
Related Institutions/Organizations
University of Illinois at Chicago

ADVANCING AEROSERVOELATIC TECHNOLOGY

FROM NASA  

The X-56A Multi-Utility Technology Testbed (MUTT) is greeted on an Edwards Air Force Base runway by a U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) team member. NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center and the AFRL, along with participants from Langley Research Center and Glenn Research Center, and support from Lockheed Martin, are using the second X-56A (dubbed “Buckeye”) to check out aircraft systems, evaluate handling qualities, characterize and expand the airplane’s performance envelope, and verify pre-flight predictions regarding aircraft behavior. The 20-minute flight marked the beginning of a research effort designed to yield significant advances in aeroservoelastic technology using a low-cost, modular, remotely piloted aerial vehicle. Image Credit: NASA-Ken Ulbrich.

DOCTORS TRAIN WITH HUMAN PATIENT SIMULATOR

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
How robots can help build better doctors
Research seeks to make better 'human patient simulators'

A young doctor leans over a patient who has been in a serious car accident and invariably must be experiencing pain. The doctor's trauma team examines the patient's pelvis and rolls her onto her side to check her spine. They scan the patient's abdomen with a rapid ultrasound machine, finding fluid. They insert a tube in her nose. Throughout the procedure, the patient's face remains rigid, showing no signs of pain.

The patient's facial demeanor isn't a result of stoicism--it's a robot, not a person. The trauma team is training on a "human patient simulator," (HPS) a training tool which enables clinicians to practice their skills before treating real patients. HPS systems have evolved over the past several decades from mannequins into machines that can breathe, bleed and expel fluids. Some models have pupils that contract when hit by light. Others have entire physiologies that can change. They come in life-sized forms that resemble both children and adults.

But they could be better, said Laurel D. Riek, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of Notre Dame. As remarkable as modern patient simulators are, they have two major limitations.

"Their faces don't actually move, and they are unable to sense or respond to the environment," she said.

Riek, a roboticist, is designing the next generation of HPS systems. Her NSF-supported research explores new means for the robots to exhibit realistic, clinically relevant facial expressions and respond automatically to clinicians in real time.

"This work will enable hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, EMTs, firefighters and combat medics to practice their treatment and diagnostic skills extensively and safely on robots before treating real patients," she said.

One novel aspect of Riek's research is the development of new algorithms that use data from real patients to generate simulated facial characteristics. For example, Riek and her students have recently completed a pain simulation project and are the first research group to synthesize pain using patient data. This work won them best overall paper and best student paper at the International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare, the top medical simulation conference.

Riek's team is now working on an interactive stroke simulator that can automatically sense and respond to learners as they work through a case. Stroke is the fifth leading cause of death in the United States, yet many of these deaths could be prevented through faster diagnosis and treatment.

"With current technology, clinicians are sometimes not learning the right skills. They are not able to read diagnostic clues from the face," she said.

Yet learning to read those clues could yield lifesaving results. Preventable medical errors in hospitals are the third-leading cause of death in the United States.

"What's really striking about this is that these deaths are completely preventable," Riek said.

One factor contributing to those accidents is clinicians missing clues and going down incorrect diagnostic paths, using incorrect treatments or wasting time. Reading facial expressions, Riek said, can help doctors improve those diagnoses. It is important that their training reflects this.

In addition to modeling and synthesizing patient facial expressions, Riek and her team are building a new, fully-expressive robot head. By employing 3-D printing, they are working to produce a robot that is low-cost and will be one day available to both researchers and hobbyists in addition to clinicians.

The team has engineered the robot to have interchangeable skins, so that the robot's age, race and gender can be easily changed. This will enable researchers to explore social factors or "cultural competency" in new ways.

"Clinicians can create different patient histories and backgrounds and can look at subtle differences in how healthcare workers treat different kinds of patients," Riek said.

Riek's work has the potential to help address the patient safety problem, enabling clinicians to take part in simulations otherwise impossible with existing technology.

-- Rob Margetta,
Investigators
Laurel Riek
Related Institutions/Organizations
University of Notre Dame

USING 3-D DIGITAL LASER MICROSCOPY TO RECOVER DATA FROM DAMAGED OPTICAL MEDIA

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Restoring lost data

Researchers developing 3-D digital laser microscopy to create visual roadmap
It can be disheartening to learn that something precious, such as a one-of-a-kind family photo, has disappeared from a scratched or broken CD or DVD. It also can become serious, dangerous and potentially costly if it happens to a disc containing criminal forensic evidence, corporate records or scientific data.

But there may be a way in the future to bring the material back.

Optical media, that is, CDs and DVDs, have been in widespread use for the past two decades, and burners are in many homes and elsewhere, making it possible for consumers to create any number of their own personal discs. But the products have not turned out to be as durable as originally believed, a situation that can turn tragic if a disc containing the only available copy of important material has become damaged.

Although still a work-in-progress, researchers have developed a process with the potential to restore much of what was thought to be lost.

"While we haven't solved all of the challenges necessary for efficient data recovery from damaged optical media, we have moved forward in terms of refining what is possible," says Greg Gogolin, a professor of information security and intelligence at Michigan's Ferris State University, stressing that the work of his team at this point was aimed solely at demonstrating "proof of concept."

Equally important, the development of new security techniques to ensure that data is unrecoverable, similar to advances that now prevent the retrieval of information on destroyed paper documents.

"A common way to destroy a paper document used to be to burn it," Gogolin says. "Forensic techniques, however, were developed that allowed for the recovery of information that was on a burned document. Document destruction techniques were then improved."

The National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded researcher, in collaboration with colleagues James Jones, associate professor in the computer forensics program at George Mason University; Charles Bacon, a Ferris professor of physical science; Tracey Boncher, a Ferris associate professor of pharmacy; and Derek Brower, a Ferris graduate student at the time of the research, theorized that using three-dimensional digital laser microscopy to capture 3-D image of the disc could provide a visual roadmap of the data. This and a special computer algorithm capable of recognizing its patterns then could aid in recovering the vast majority of it.

"If a disc is broken in half, you've still got 99 percent of the data still there," Gogolin says. "The media is quite elastic and the data is pretty much intact up to the cut line. There is, of course, a region that is destroyed near where the disc has been cut. But for most part, you didn't destroy the data, you just made it unreadable because you can't spin the disc."

The researchers, funded by a $356,318 grant awarded in 2011 from NSF's Division of Computer and Network Systems, tested their idea by breaking a disc, putting it together and taking a picture of it using the high-powered 3-D digital laser microscope.

"It was like sticking it into a kind of copy machine," Gogolin says. "There are patterns to represent the data, that is, the different letters." After determining the data patterns, "we then read them with a computer program to determine what data was on the disc."

At this early stage of development, the computer program the scientists wrote contains and recognizes only simple alphabetic encoding.

But, "there are many different types of data that could be on there, including letters, numbers and special characters," he says. "There is a huge range of possible data elements, and we don't have recognition set up for all of them, only for a subset, part of the alphabet."

The ultimate goal is "to expand the capabilities of the recovery program to be able to recognize all the different types of data and encoding that could be present on an optical disc," he adds, stressing that big hurdles remain. "It's a huge deal in that there are many different combinations and variations of data that make it a significant challenge to be able to recognize everything that would be on an optical disc. You can have different types of discs and Blu Ray discs. Different manufacturers use different inks. You could have encryption. There are a lot of variables."

Also, the larger the file, the more difficult the recovery, he says.

"If it's a small file, the chances of recovering it are much better than if it's a large file, because the chances of the file running into that ‘destruction zone' are greater," he says. "If you need a complete file to affect the recovery, and it's a large file, it becomes a bigger issue."

The researchers now are trying to decide if they want to test their ideas on other types of memory, such as flash drives "like that in your phone," he says, or solid state drives, rather than hard drives. "That's where everything is going," he says. "Would time be better spent trying to perfect a way to recover material from a flash or finishing what is needed for optical?"

The team is a long way from making the process widely available. Nevertheless, "we wanted to prove the concept that it could be done, so that every time you see a broken disc, you won't necessarily think, 'oh, it's lost forever,"' Gogolin says.

-- Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
Investigators
Greg Gogolin
James Jones
Charles Bacon
Tracey Boncher
Barbara Ciaramitaro
Related Institutions/Organizations
Ferris State University

HIGH-SPEED NETWORKING IN FLINT, MICHIGAN

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Igniting change in Vehicle City
Kettering University leads effort to improve city services in Flint, Mich., through high-speed networking
March 24, 2015

Flint, Mich., the former home of General Motors, is on the rebound these days. Leaders there believe they have hit on a winning formula--connecting the city's institutions to high-speed networks that support new, game-changing capabilities.

Through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), Flint is beginning to lay the groundwork for an information technology-driven transformation.

In June 2012, Flint was one of 16 initial cities that were part of US Ignite, a public-private partnership designed to capitalize on the possibilities of ultra-fast broadband networks and "ignite" the development of next-generation Internet applications and services with societal benefits.

Kettering University--formerly General Motors Institute--was designated the lead research institution for the city.

High-speed networking wasn't really on the radar of John Geske, a professor of computer science at Kettering University, before Flint joined US Ignite.

"I was busy running a computer science department and the last thing on my mind was networking applications," Geske said.

But because of the US Ignite award, he started attending application summits and other meetings and realized the possibilities that were available at his doorstep.

"The community that you start to create and the contacts you make are just invaluable," he said.

Connected schools

Phase One of making the city a gigabit hotbed involved taking a step back and uncovering what was already available in the community.

Geske learned that the entire city school system, as well as the schools in 21 schools districts in neighboring Genesee County, had formed the GenNET consortium in 1995 and were already connected by a high-speed, fiber-optic network. Moreover, the schools were connected to the city's four higher education institutions via the Flint Area Network for Educational Telecommunications.

With these capabilities in place, students in the school district experienced unique learning opportunities. For instance, students were able to remotely control an exploratory submarine in real time near the Barrier Reef and communicate with astronauts on the space shuttle. Genesee County students were even able to dissect a sheep's brain via a telemedicine class remotely led by a doctor at Northern Michigan University.

"The GenNET fiber-optic network allows us to reduce the cost of technology services while providing a powerful platform for delivering virtual learning," said Luke Wittum, executive director of Technology and Media Services in the Genesee Intermediate School District.

US Ignite extended this already capable base and provided dedicated 10 gigabit-per-second network connections to the universities and libraries in Flint and to other gigabit cities around the nation, on unique, programmable hardware.

With ultra-high-speed, high-capability Information Technology in place, technology leaders hope to leverage the existing fiber-optic networks to provide immersive virtual reality learning to all students in Flint and Genesee County.

"What if a student could step inside of a human cell, stand at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, or visit a historical place?" Wittum asked. "This opportunity could make learning more engaging and also provide some students who may have never been outside of the county or state to visit another part of the world."

Safer, smarter neighborhoods

Flint areas schools aren't the only target for transformation through high-speed networks. Early meetings with city officials and university representatives determined that public safety could be a focus of the US Ignite networking projects, too.

Together with stakeholders in the Mayor's office and the university, they envisioned a university corridor where improved surveillance, responsive lighting and targeted policing could lower crime and encourage development.

"US Ignite provides the city of Flint with opportunities to make the community safer by automating utilities--turning on all lights in an area where a crime has been reported, for example, or by giving law enforcement access to high-speed, real-time, high-definition video on demand," said Kettering University President Robert K. McMahan.

"We may not be able to have a full smart city yet, but a smart neighborhood is entirely possible," noted Geske.

These forms of "smart policing" rely on networks of sensors, cameras and analytical tools that require fast networking and access to powerful computing. The Kettering project has these in the form of GENI hardware.

GENI is an NSF-funded experimental, ultra-high-speed, programmable networking testbed that allows researchers to test new networking ideas at-scale.

There are more than 180 GENI sites around the world--and Flint is one of a few cities that is already leveraging its GENI connections to advance application concepts and prototypes for public benefit and in support of the US Ignite initiative.

In part because of the strength of the existing resources and the community of stakeholders they had developed, Kettering University was awarded a $1 million grant in 2014 from the U.S. Department of Justice as part of DoJ's Byrne Criminal Justice Innovation Program. The grant helps Flint develop and implement sustainable crime prevention strategies in the University Avenue Corridor in order to convert the neighborhood into a vibrant region. One strategy is data-driven policing.

"There are lots of pockets of information and it's hard for a researcher to gather it all together to find out if there are certain patterns," said Geske. "Once you pinpoint that, you can look at the area, figure out what's going on and decide what to do."

In an early collaboration with Flint police, Kettering researchers identified a particular pattern of criminal activity along the corridor. In this case, using data analytics, the university identified a property as a magnet for robberies--and purchased and revamped it to reduce crime in the area.

Geske hopes to enable this kind of smart policing citywide by building a cloud computing platform that enables the city to amass crime statistics and provides public access to the data.

In the future, officials imagine the avenue wired with lighting, air quality sensors, smart lighting and even autonomous vehicles or drones connected to the high-speed network. The GENI equipment will be used as a testbed to explore some of these possibilities.

Networked care

A third focus area for Flint is medicine, where Kettering is spearheading a partnership with the University of Michigan-Flint and Mott Community College, as well as with three major medical centers near the city.

Through this partnership, students, faculty, clinicians and researchers in the Flint area will be able to collaborate with instructors from around the country and have direct access to new tools to provide exceptional patient care. Officials even hope to use high-speed networking technologies to bring specialists together in a virtual office to make diagnoses.

With such technology in place, President McMahan says "individual patients seeking medical care at our partners in Flint will always have access to the latest advancements in healthcare no matter where in our country they originate or reside."

With the city as a testbed for creative technological solutions to civic problems, it will be interesting to see how advanced IT can impact education, policing and health care in the city.

Said Erwin Gianchandani, deputy division director for computer and network systems at NSF, "Pilot projects like those in Flint and other cities across the country are demonstrating the value of ultra-high-speed, programmable networks in our communities and helping the nation envision the possibilities of a faster, safer, smarter future Internet."

-- Aaron Dubrow, NS

DROUGHT AND THE BABOONS

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Born during a drought: Bad news for baboons
Findings have implications for human health

The saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" may not hold up to scientific scrutiny.

After the plains of southern Kenya experienced a severe drought in 2009 that took a terrible toll on wildlife, researchers looked at how 50 wild baboons coped with the drought, and whether the conditions they faced in infancy played a role.

The semi-arid savanna of southern Kenya usually receives an average of 14 inches of rain a year--akin to much of Nebraska or Kansas--but in 2009 it fell to five inches, less than the Mojave Desert.

The year before wasn't much better: rainfall in 2008 dropped to half normal levels.

Grasslands withered

The grasslands the animals depend on for food dried up and watering holes disappeared, leaving many animals starving or weak from hunger.

"We lost 98 percent of the wildebeest population, 75 percent of the zebra population and 30 percent of the elephant population," said Susan Alberts, a biologist at Duke University. "It was impossible to go anywhere without smelling death."

Most baboons made it, but the drought left them underweight and many females stopped ovulating.

In a forthcoming paper in the journal American Naturalist, the researchers compared two groups of females--one group born during low rainfall years, the other born during normal rainfall years.

Born in a drought

All females in the study were adults by time of the 2009 drought, but those born in lean times fared worse in 2009 than those born in times of plenty, the researchers found.

"This study demonstrates lifetime fertility reductions for baboons born during stressful conditions or to low-ranking mothers," said George Gilchrist, program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research along with NSF's Divisions of Integrative Organismal Systems and Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences.

"These 'disadvantaged' early life experiences are linked with less resilience to stressful conditions experienced as adults."

During the 2009 drought, baboons born during low rainfall years were 60 percent less likely to become pregnant, whereas pregnancy rates dipped by only 10 percent for females born during normal rainfall years.

Drought babies born to higher-status mothers were less affected by the 2009 event.

"It might be that baboons born to higher-ranked moms have better access to food, or suffer lower levels of social stress," Alberts said.

Implications for human health

The findings also help explain why people who are malnourished in early childhood go on to have higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease as adults.

Some researchers argue that human babies conceived or born in lean times are programmed for food shortages later in life.

They develop a "thrifty metabolism," aimed at storing fat and conserving energy in order to survive starvation.

Things go awry, the thinking goes, only when the environments they experienced as infants and as adults don't match, such as when a child conceived in famine grows up and eats an excess of cheeseburgers, said paper co-author Amanda Lea, a biologist at Duke.

But the baboon fertility study lends support to another idea, namely that kids who don't get enough to eat during their first year of life are simply less resilient as adults than their counterparts.

"The data suggest that early adversity carries lifelong costs," said co-author Jenny Tung, a biologist at Duke.

"It's bad to be born in bad times, but with the right social or economic environment, that can be mitigated," Alberts added.

Jeanne Altmann of Princeton University is also a co-author of the paper.

In addition to NSF, the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Md.; Duke University; Princeton University; and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research supported the research.

-- Cheryl Dybas, NSF
-- Robin Ann Smith, Duke University
Investigators
Jenny Tung
Susan Alberts
Related Institutions/Organizations
Duke University

COMPARE AND CONTRAST AURORA SIGHTINGS

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Springtime night lights: Finding the aurora
Aurorasaurus project allows aurora-viewers around the world to compare sightings

Dance of the spirits, it's known by the Cree, one of North America's largest groups of Native Americans.

The phenomenon, called the aurora borealis in the Northern Hemisphere and aurora australis in the Southern Hemisphere, is indeed a dance of particles and magnetism between the sun and the Earth.

The sun continuously produces a solar wind of charged particles, or plasma. As that "breath" reaches Earth, it causes our planet's magnetic field to shapeshift from round to teardrop--with a long tail on the side farthest from the sun.

The teardrop-stretched field ultimately reconfigures into two parts, one controlled by Earth's magnetic field, the other by the solar wind.

The instability excites the solar-charged particles. They follow spiral paths along lines connecting Earth's north and south magnetic poles to its atmosphere.

"What happens next," says scientist Elizabeth MacDonald of the New Mexico Consortium in Los Alamos, "is one of nature's most spectacular sights: the aurora."

The light of the aurora is emitted when the charged particles collide with gases in Earth's upper atmosphere.

Glimpsing an aurora

How often the aurora is visible in an area, MacDonald says, depends upon a host of factors, including the intensity of the solar wind; the season--the aurora may be strongest around the spring and fall equinoxes; whether the sun is near the peak of its 11-year cycle; and how far someone is from what scientists call the auroral oval, the lights' ring-shaped display.

Knowing where and when an aurora is happening has been difficult to find out--until now. A new project called Aurorasaurus allows citizens around the world to track auroras and report on their progress.

Visitors to the Aurorasaurus website can see where an aurora is happening in real-time, let other Aurorasaurus visitors know of an aurora's existence, and receive "early warnings" when an aurora is likely to happen in their Earth-neighborhood.

Aurora-power

"Auroras are beautiful displays that have fascinated humans through the ages," says Therese Moretto Jorgensen, program director in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for Geosciences, which, along with NSF's Directorate for Education and Human Resources and Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering, funds Aurorasaurus through NSF's INSPIRE program.

INSPIRE supports projects whose scientific advances lie outside the scope of a single program or discipline, lines of research that promise transformational advances, and prospective discoveries at the interfaces of scientific boundaries.

"Auroras are of major interest," says Moretto Jorgensen, "because of their effects on Earth. There's a close relationship between auroras and the magnetic variations that pose a threat to the power grid.

"A better understanding of when and where auroras happen will help us develop models that can forecast these potentially hazardous events."

Amassing new data

Scientists hope that by amassing data from thousands of aurora-viewers, they'll learn more about the solar storms that can disrupt or destroy Earth's communications networks and affect the planet's navigation, pipeline, electrical and transportation systems.

During one solar storm in 1989, transformers in New Jersey melted and wiped out power all the way to Quebec, leaving millions of people in the dark.

The largest such solar storm in history, the Carrington Event, zapped Earth in 1859. It was so large it lit up the skies with auroras from the poles to the tropics. Electrical currents from the storm caused fires in telegraph systems and knocked out communications.

St. Patrick's Day magic in the skies

Could it happen again? Yes, if St. Patrick's Day this year is any guide.

On March 17, 2015, researchers and the public were treated to once-a-decade views. As people waited for glimpses of leprechauns, they saw something even more magical, viewers say.

Earth experienced the biggest solar storm to date of this 11-year sun cycle, sparking auroras around the world.

The St. Patrick's Day auroras, many of which were indeed green, were a fortuitous combination of events. Two days earlier, there was an explosion on the sun. The explosion, called a coronal mass ejection (CME), unleashed a blast of gas bubbles that created a strong disturbance as it collided with Earth's magnetic field.

The CME's magnetic field was directed southward, opposite to the Earth's magnetic field, and the solar wind whipped by very fast, says MacDonald.

"The storm's conditions led to a perfect environment for aurora-hunting," she says. On a scale of G1 (minor) to G5 (extreme), the storm reached a G4, or "severe" level.

The storm's Kp index, a global solar storm index, registered in the 6-8 range (9 is the highest).

Rare aurora-viewing--all the way to the southern U.S.

The strong solar wind blew for more than 24 hours, creating auroras visible as far south as the central and southern United States--a very rare occurrence.

The solar storm's peak hit during the daytime over most of the United States and Europe, but the storm persisted into the night and offered Americans and Europeans a brilliant nighttime light show.

Aurorasaurus reports came in from unusual regions: the south of England, Germany and Poland. In the United States, people spotted auroras in states such as Pennsylvania, Virginia and Colorado.

Data peak from Aurorasaurus users

Aurorasaurus participants logged more than 160 sightings during the St. Patrick's Day solar storm.

From midnight on March 17th through mid-day on March 18th, the number of registered users increased by 50 percent. Registering allows Aurorasaurus to communicate information in return, sending location-based sighting alerts.

"We combine reports to provide real-time alerts when auroras might be visible nearby," says MacDonald. "During this storm alone, we issued 361 such notifications.

"We're using Aurorasaurus data to improve auroral oval models, and to develop a better notification system using both satellite-based data and citizen science data."

Adds Moretto Jorgensen, "Auroras on a global scale are very difficult to capture using traditional scientific methods. Human observers linked through Aurorasaurus are a unique network for documenting them."

Whether on St. Patrick's Day or any other Earth-day, the aurora carries a message: take time to look up at one of the planet's most breathtaking sights.

Then look down, to be sure you can send photos of the event from your cell phone. Spirits dancing across the skies may have played havoc with its transmissions.

-- Cheryl Dybas, NSF
Investigators
Andrea Tapia
Michelle Hall
Elizabeth MacDonald

NSF SUPPORTS FITNET APP FOR EXERCISE PARTICIPANTS

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Fitness app connects exercisers to experts
NSF-supported Fitnet uses powerful computing and networking infrastructure to enable new capabilities
March 23, 2015

Can advanced networking and next-generation applications help solve some of our nation's most pressing health problems? Can mobile devices and high-speed Internet be used to improve our health and well-being? Showing a commitment that they can, in 2012 the National Science Foundation (NSF) launched the US Ignite initiative to demonstrate the power of apps for social good.

One outcome of the program is that today you can go to the Apple or Android app store and download Fitnet, a free exercise app supported by NSF that uses the camera on your phone to automatically assess the quality of the exercise and give you a score. Fitnet can also connect you to an online personal fitness trainer who can track this information and suggest routines to try based on an individual's health goal.

This mobile app is one of many fitness apps that are finding mass audiences of individuals eager to use technology to improve their health and well-being.

But what's unique about Fitnet is that, at the same time it is marketing its current app, it is also looking to a future of faster, programmable gigabit networks, according to Kevin Hill, Fitnet's "data czar".

In 2012, Fitnet (originally called KinectHealth 3D) was one of eight applications given the distinction of "App of the Future" in the brainstorming round of the NSF-supported Mozilla Ignite Challenge, and one of 22 apps whose development was funded through the program.

The idea behind Fitnet was to develop a new kind of tele-fitness app that could leverage deeply programmable and low latency fiber-optic networks. The award from Mozilla Ignite Challenge provided seed funding to build a prototype and to demonstrate a proof of concept.

In 2013, Fitnet received an additional NSF award to advance the project in partnership with Virginia Tech. Fitnet has also worked closely with US Ignite, a public-private partnership that promotes the development and deployment of gigabit applications, to identify critical use cases for its cutting edge technologies.

"Validation from the Mozilla Ignite Challenge, US Ignite and National Science Foundation was critical to this idea becoming a reality," said Bob Summers, chief geek and founder of Fitnet. "Our country has a health problem which advanced sensor, data and communication technology can help solve."

Part of the goal of US Ignite is to advance great ideas from the concept and prototype stage into commercial products, and Fitnet is one of the program's early successes. The app has been downloaded 280,000 times and has thousands of core users in all 50 states and over 200 countries.

Fitnet is one of a handful of fitness apps supported by Chromecast (the streaming media player developed by Google) and was among the first to be integrated into Apple's HealthKit, which allows health and fitness apps to work together for holistic monitoring.

Two key features differentiate Fitnet from other exercise apps on the market: the use of a phone's camera and image processing capabilities to interpret motion; and the ability to connect to a trainer who can monitor your progress, see how you're performing and personalize your workout plan as needed.

For now, the image processing is done locally on the phone and consequently, the assessments are not as complex as they could be. Likewise, the interactions with the trainer are asynchronous and do not include a live video feed--a function of the fact that most people don't have unfettered access to gigabit networks and unlimited data plans. But Fitnet is exploring improvements to both aspects.

"It would be a gamble to try to start a business that was focused only on gigabit Internet," Hill said. "But at the same time we know that's coming and that there are these great features that could be realized with high speed networks.

"The cool thing about the US Ignite community is the ability to do a little bit of both: to have our consumer-facing side but still push the envelope and do some really cool research."

Pushing the envelope means imagining new and better ways to automatically assess the quality of exercise using the cloud, and creating a network of remote "wired trainers" who can serve an entire community, adding jobs and helping thousands get healthier. They've begun to put the infrastructure together to test these concepts, using Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., as the testbed.

A virtual lab for next-generation networking

Virginia Tech has a unique confluence of resources that make it a great place to base their pilot, Hill says.

"We've got students who want to do exercise, we've got Virginia Tech Rec Sports [Department of Recreational Sports] that is interested in how technology can impact personal trainers, and we've got great computer resources," he said.

The resources Hill is referring to is the Global Environment for Networking Innovations, or GENI, an experimental, ultra-high-speed, programmable networking testbed, begun in 2007, that allows researchers to test new networking ideas at scale. Virginia Tech hosts one of GENI's 180 or so nodes.

"One of the big limits is just how much processing power we have available on today's mobile devices," said Hill. "We think we can make some significant progress by leveraging the power of a centralized server--that's where the GENI rack will be very helpful. With GENI we have access to the computer resources needed to throw the most sophisticated algorithms available at the problem."

The grant from NSF helped build the computing and networking infrastructure required to enable Fitnet and other apps with real-time analysis and interaction to work, and to run the experiment with students and professional trainers at Virginia Tech.

"Just as astronomers band together and build a telescope that the community uses as a discipline-wide research instrument, GENI is the networking equivalent of a national instrument," said Mark Gardner, network research manager in Information Technology at Virginia Tech, and the lead researcher on the GENI grant.

"As we add more nodes to GENI, the instrument becomes more powerful and more capable, and it's set up so that once you get an account on GENI, you can run experiments on hardware scattered across the world."

While GENI sounds a little like superfast Internet service, it's more than that. With GENI, researchers get a slice of network, storage and computing resources on-demand on which to run experiments or do specialized tasks.

"The GENI infrastructure predated clouds and software defined networking and yet it has features of both," Gardner said.

Unlike most clouds, with GENI, the experimenter can program the way the network functions to make sure that the time lag between a client and trainer is low, for instance, or that computations run concurrently on hundreds of virtual machines during times of high traffic.

"And when the fitness guys aren't using GENI, it may be used for some other experiment," Gardner added.

In fact, more than 3000 researchers have run over 100,000 experiments in the eight years since GENI was established.

Adding live interaction and real-time assessments

The future app the Fitnet team is envisioning will work something like this:

As individuals work out, the output of the exercise analysis algorithm, as well as the video of exercises, will be shipped in real-time to the web dashboard of a trainer, a fitness expert at Virginia Tech Rec Sports.
The trainer will work with many individuals at once, doing exercises particular to their needs and interests.
The automated exercise assessment tools will help the trainer figure out who needs help, who is bored and whose heart rate is increasing.
The trainer will use that information to interact with each of the exercisers, judge the impact of the training and make suggestions for future sessions.
In this model, trainers are able to effectively manage and provide feedback to up to 12 people simultaneously, which could lower the price, make the services more available and also make it extremely personalized.

"In a traditional exercise class, all the people need to be doing the exact same thing," Hill said. "Here we can have each person doing a personalized workout routine and the trainer can still manage and interact with all of them."

GENI allows Fitnet, and other apps, to bring these capabilities to life for students at Virginia Tech and eventually for the nation.

Engaged fitness for at-risk populations

As they were developing the Virginia Tech project, the Fitnet team was working with a different set of users: students in the Healthy Hawks treatment program, a comprehensive family-based behavioral program run by University of Kansas Medical Center.

Healthy Hawks helps children, adolescents and their families overcome issues related to weight. The University of Kansas team was interested in being able to interact with families in a digital fashion over the course of their twelve-week program, recalled Hill.

With support from the Mozilla Foundation's Gigabit Community Fund, also funded by NSF, the pilot program provided iPads, cellular data plans, and personalized children's exercise content from local Kansas City trainers to Kansas City families.

"Using Fitnet allowed us to increase our contact time with participating families very easily," said Ann Davis, a pediatric psychologist at the University of Kansas Medical Center, and director of both the Healthy Hawks program and the Center for Children's Healthy Lifestyles & Nutrition project.

Davis and her team not only encouraged the families to use the exercise app in their homes, but when they came to meet as a group, the doctors had information about the students' exercise at their fingertips and were able to give personalized feedback. The app also allowed the group's dedicated trainer to provide coaching prompts in real-time.

"With those features, we've been able to lower the drop out rate, and increase the students' fitness outcomes," Davis said.

The second group of Healthy Hawks is now going through the program, with encouraging results.

"We're excited to work with the Heathy Hawks to be on the leading edge of the mobile-health revolution," Hill said.

Fitnet is considering other possible partnerships too, including with physical therapists and other health professionals.

"We have this disconnected world right now where you've got step counters, heart rate monitors, exercise apps. You can look at that data, but it's very hard to make decisions based on that data," Hill said. "What we hope to do is be able to centralize, organize and pass that information over to experts."

With early access to emerging networking technologies and pilot projects underway with diverse audiences, the Fitnet team believes it will only be a few years before their gigabit app is ready for market--and before the nation's broadband network catches up to the capabilities of Fitnet.

"Applications are the essential driver of new technologies," said Summers. "And health applications such as Fitnet that leverage gigabit technologies are leading the way to answering the key question: 'Why does gig speed matter?'"

-- Aaron Dubrow, NSF
-- Robert Summers, Fitnet
Investigators
Robert Summers
Mark Gardner
Kevin Hill
Related Institutions/Organizations
GENI
US Ignite
Mozilla Foundation
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

NSF FUNDS STUDYING ECO-EPIDEMOLOGY OF LEPTOSPIROSIS

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Field fever, harvest fever, rat catcher's yellows: Leptospirosis by any name is a serious disease

Infection is more prevalent in lower-income tropical areas
Rat catcher's yellows, field fever, harvest fever, black jaundice.

All are names for the same disease, leptospirosis, an infection caused by corkscrew-shaped bacteria called Leptospira.

Symptoms range from mild--headaches, muscle aches, fever--to more severe conditions, such as meningitis and bleeding from the lungs.

Looking for leptospirosis

"Leptospira bacteria are maintained through a complex transmission cycle," write scientist Claudia Munoz-Zanzi of the University of Minnesota and colleagues in a 2014 paper in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine.

"Humans and other mammals, domestic and wild, become infected after contact with urine from an infected host, or Leptospira-contaminated water or damp soil."

Some 7 to 10 million people contract leptospirosis each year. The disease is most prevalent in tropical areas, but may be found almost anywhere that's warm and wet.

In the developed world, leptospirosis occurs in people involved in outdoor activities, such as canoeing and kayaking in warm places. In developing countries, the disease largely happens to farmers and poorer people who live in cities.

Infection with Leptospira is linked with agricultural practices, fouling of household or recreational water, poor housing and waste disposal, and changes in the density or proximity of infected animals such as rodents, domestic animals like dogs and wildlife.

Rodents most common carriers

Rodents are the most common reservoirs of Leptospira, says Munoz-Zanzi.

With a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF)-National Institutes of Health-U.S. Department of Agriculture Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases (EEID) program, Munoz-Zanzi is studying the eco-epidemiology of leptospirosis.

Awards through the EEID program fund scientists to study how large-scale environmental events--such as habitat destruction and climate variability--alter the risks of viral, parasitic and bacterial diseases.

Munoz-Zanzi's goal is to improve knowledge of the social, epidemiological and ecological factors influencing leptospirosis in South America. She and colleagues are working to identify intervention strategies to reduce the disease's effect on the health of humans and other animals.

South-central Chile: a perfect home for Leptospira?

The study is taking place in the Los Rios region of south-central Chile. The area's climate is moderate, with an economy that's based on farming, agriculture, forestry and tourism.

Most of the region's human population is concentrated in a few urban centers, with the rest scattered in small towns or villages and farm areas.

Munoz-Zanzi's research involves contrasting leptospirosis in three community types: urban slums, rural villages, and farms.

Initial findings from the research showed that 20 percent of leptospirosis starts with rodents, including rats and mice, inside households and in other environments in populated areas.

Leptospira-carrying rodents turned out to be more abundant in rural villages than slums and farms.

"Social factors can be important causes of diseases," says Sam Scheiner, NSF EEID program director. "This study shows that the type of community can determine the presence of rats and mice that are disease-carriers. The results have implications for the control of many infectious diseases."

Danger in a puddle

"Because Leptospira live in water and soil," Munoz-Zanzi says, "the environment plays a key role in transmission in household pets, farm animals and people."

When the scientists collected water from puddles, containers, animal troughs, rivers, canals and drinking water, all showed contamination with Leptospira.

In households where puddles were found along with signs of rodent infestations, leptospirosis was common.

"However," says Munoz-Zanzi, "that was true only in lower income houses."

Some 19 percent of samples from these households--most from locations with warmer temperatures, and many with dogs as pets--tested positive.

Community setting important

The scientists are now examining leptospirosis in dogs and livestock, as well as in humans. They're integrating molecular, epidemiological and other data to gain insights into patterns of infection in various community types.

"The more we understand about this disease," says Munoz-Zanzi, "the more we realize the importance of the local community setting."

Ongoing efforts, she says, include the use of mathematical models to develop recommendations for disease control that's locally relevant. The scientists hope to provide people living in the most affected areas with tools to decrease the effects of leptospirosis.

In the meantime, how can people avoid contracting the disease?

"Wear protective equipment to prevent contact with potentially infected animals and environments," says Munoz-Zanzi, "wash after any such contact, and reduce rodents in places where people live and work."

Crowded tropical conditions where rats and mice freely run from house to house may herald another unwanted guest: Leptospira.

-- Cheryl Dybas, NSF

STUDY SUGGESTS HABITAT FRAGMENTATION HAS WORLDWIDE NEGATIVE IMPACT

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Shrinking habitats have adverse effects on world ecosystems--and ultimately people

Extensive study of global habitat fragmentation points to major trouble ahead
An extensive study of global habitat fragmentation--the division of habitats into smaller and more isolated patches--points to major trouble for the world's ecosystems.

The study shows that 70 percent of existing forest lands are within a half-mile of forest edges, where encroaching urban, suburban and agricultural influences can cause harmful effects such as losses of plant and animal species.

Five continents of habitat fragmentation

The research also tracks seven major experiments on five continents that examine habitat fragmentation and finds that fragmented habitats reduce the diversity of plants and animals by 13 to 75 percent.

The largest effects are found in the smallest and most isolated fragments of habitat.

Results of the study, which involved two dozen researchers across the globe, are reported in a new paper published in Science Advances.

The work is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

"The results are stark," said Doug Levey, program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology and a co-author of the paper. "No matter the place, habitat or species, habitat fragmentation has large effects, which grow worse over time."

The scientists assembled a map of global forest cover and found very few forest lands unencumbered by some type of human development.

World's forests shrinking

"It's no secret that the world's forests are shrinking, so we asked about the effects of this habitat loss and fragmentation on the remaining forests," said Nick Haddad, a biologist at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the paper.

"The results were astounding," he said.

"Nearly 20 percent of the world's remaining forests are the distance of a football field--or about 100 meters--away from forest edges. Seventy percent of forest lands are within a half-mile of forest edges. That means almost no forests can really be considered wilderness."

Covering many ecosystems, from forests to savannahs to grasslands, the experiments combined to show a disturbing trend.

Fragmentation changes how ecosystems function, reduces the amounts of nutrients retained and the amount of carbon sequestered and has other deleterious effects.

Negative effects of fragmentation and help for the forest

"The initial effects were unsurprising," Haddad said. "But I was blown away by the fact that these negative effects became even more negative with time. Some results showed a 50 percent or higher decline in plant and animal species over an average of just 20 years.

"And the trajectory is still spiraling downward."

Haddad points to some possible ways of mitigating the effects of fragmentation: conserving and maintaining larger areas of habitat; using landscape corridors, or connected fragments that are effective in maintaining higher biodiversity and better ecosystem function; increasing agricultural efficiency; and focusing on urban design efficiencies.

"Ultimately, habitat fragmentation has harmful effects that will also hurt people," said Haddad.

"This study is a wake-up call to how much we're affecting ecosystems--including areas we think we're conserving."

-- Cheryl Dybas, NSF

VIRUSES IN THE DEEP

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
The 'intraterrestrials': New viruses discovered in ocean depths

Viruses infect methane-eating archaea beneath the seafloor
The intraterrestrials, they might be called.

Strange creatures live in the deep sea, but few are odder than the viruses that inhabit deep ocean methane seeps and prey on single-celled microorganisms called archaea.

The least understood of life's three primary domains, archaea thrive in the most extreme environments on the planet: near hot ocean rift vents, in acid mine drainage, in the saltiest of evaporation ponds and in petroleum deposits deep underground.

Virus in the deep blue sea

While searching the ocean's depths for evidence of viruses, scientists have found a remarkable new one, a virus that seemingly infects archaea that live beneath the ocean floor.

The researchers were surprised to discover that the virus selectively targets one of its own genes for mutation, and that this capacity is also shared by archaea themselves.

The findings appear today in a paper in the journal Nature Communications.

The project was supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Dimensions of Biodiversity grant to characterize microbial diversity in methane seep ecosystems. Dimensions of Biodiversity is supported by NSF's Directorates for Biological Sciences and Geosciences.

New information about life in ocean depths

"Life far beneath the Earth's subsurface is an enigma," said Matt Kane, program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology. "By probing deep into our planet, these scientists have discovered new information about Earth's microbes and how they evolve."

"Our study uncovers mechanisms by which viruses and archaea can adapt in this hostile environment," said David Valentine, a geoscientist at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and co-author of the paper.

The results, he said, raise new questions about the evolution and interaction of the microbes that call the planet's interior home.

"It's now thought that there's more biomass inside the Earth than anywhere else, just living very slowly in this dark, energy-limited environment," said paper co-author Sarah Bagby of UCSB.

Using the submersible Alvin, Valentine and colleagues collected samples from a deep-ocean methane seep by pushing tubes into the ocean floor and retrieving sediments.

The contents were brought back to the lab and fed methane gas, helping the methane-eating archaea in the samples to grow.

When the team assayed the samples for viral infection, they discovered a new virus with a distinctive genetic fingerprint that suggested its likely host was methane-eating archaea.

Genetic sequence of new virus holds the key

The researchers used the genetic sequence of the new virus to chart other occurrences in global databases.

"We found a partial genetic match from methane seeps off Norway and California," said lead author Blair Paul of UCSB. "The evidence suggests that this viral type is distributed around the globe in deep ocean methane seeps."

Further investigation revealed another unexpected finding: a small genetic element, known as a diversity-generating retroelement, that accelerates mutation of a specific section of the virus's genome.

Such elements had been previously identified in bacteria and their viruses, but never among archaea or the viruses that infect them.

"These researchers have shown that cutting-edge genomic approaches can help us understand how microbes function in remote and poorly known environments such as ocean depths," said David Garrison, program director in NSF's Division of Ocean Sciences.

While the self-guided mutation element in the archaea virus resembles known bacterial elements, the researchers found that it has a divergent evolutionary history.

"The target of guided mutation--the tips of the virus that make first contact when infecting a cell--is similar," said Paul.

"But the ability to mutate those tips is an offensive countermeasure against the cell's defenses, a move that resembles a molecular arms race."

Unusual genetic adaptations

Having found guided mutation in a virus-infecting archaea, the scientists reasoned that archaea themselves might use the same mechanism for genetic adaptation.

In an exhaustive search, they identified parallel features in the genomes of a subterranean group of archaea known as nanoarchaea.

Unlike the deep-ocean virus that uses guided mutation to alter a single gene, the nanoarchaea target at least four distinct genes.

"It's a new record," said Bagby.

"Bacteria had been observed to target two genes with this mechanism. That may not seem like a huge difference, but targeting four is extraordinary."

According to Valentine, the genetic mutation that fosters these potential variations may be key to the survival of archaea beneath the Earth's surface.

"The cell is choosing to modify certain proteins," he said. "It's doing its own protein engineering. While we don't yet know what those proteins are being used for, learning about the process can tell us something about the environment in which these organisms thrive."

Viral DNA sequencing was provided through a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant. The research team also included scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, San Diego; and the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute.

-NSF-
Media Contacts
Cheryl Dybas, NSF

RESEARCHERS USING METALLIC GLASS, OTHER MATERIALS AT CELL BREAKAGE

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Materials, like metallic glass, can help us understand how cells break

Research could lead to faster wound recovery and prove valuable in constructing buildings, producing golf clubs and more

"Disordered" materials are so-called because they are made up of objects that are in total disarray. Their composition, whether of atoms, molecules, grains or cells, do not lie in a neat, orderly pattern, but, instead, are all jumbled up.

"They're like sand on a beach, or mayonnaise," says M. Lisa Manning, an assistant professor of physics at Syracuse University. "When you mix up the oil and water for mayonnaise, the oil droplets sit unordered. That's what makes the mayonnaise stiff, all the little oil droplets packed together."

Many of these disordered materials, metallic glass, for example, are exceptionally strong, stronger than other metals, which offers potential for many industrial uses. But they also are prone to failure, and often break. Manning is studying these materials, searching for the defects in each that produce a crack-like fissure called a shear band.

"If we can find and identify these defects, then we can understand what causes the shear band," Manning says. "My goal is to figure out how they break. I am looking for defects in these materials. Once we figure out how they break, we can then figure out how to prevent them from breaking."

If successful, these materials--because of their inherent strength--could prove valuable in manufacturing, from constructing buildings to producing golf clubs, and "would be extremely good for making precision objects, because they don't change shape when they cool down," Manning says.

Insights from her research also could have important applications for biology, ultimately leading to possible future medical treatments, because disordered cells also exist in tissues, in developing embryos and in certain cancers.

"If you look at the cells in these tissues, they are disordered and look almost identical to pictures of foams, or emulsions," Manning says. "Embryos look like this, and so do healing wounds, and some cancer tissues too."

Biologists have a good understanding of what happens when a single cell migrates, or moves, she says. "But what is not well studied is how cells in this dense packing order move through tissues, which is important for wound healing," she says. "A cell has to push its way through its neighbors to move.

"If I can understand how non-biological particles move, this can provide new and exciting insights as to how a cell can move through tissues," she adds. "How stiff are the cells around it, for example? If I want a cell to move faster in tissue, should I make it softer or stiffer? The goal is to answer this, and test it."

Understanding this process could speed wound healing and "help repair embryonic defects when cells don't move to the correct places," she says.

In cancer, "recent work has shown that cancer cells are softer than other cells, and have different mechanical properties," she says. "One question I hope to answer: if a cancer cell is softer, does that make it easier to move through tissue and metastasize? If I could stiffen up that cell with a drug, maybe it wouldn't move anymore."

To find the defects, Manning creates computer simulations of the materials and studies sound modes that vibrate within the structure, much like a specific musical note vibrates inside an organ pipe. When the researchers find "localized" vibrations, that is, a mode where the structure vibrates a lot more in a certain place, "that's where the defect is located," she says.

Manning is conducting her research under an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, which she received in 2014. 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.

As part of the grant's educational component, Manning plans to develop tutorials for high school juniors and seniors in Syracuse University's Project Advance, a program that enables these students to earn college physics credits. Project Advance provides instructional materials to high school teachers, and sponsors extra training sessions for them at the university. Manning is designing teaching modules about current research in materials science that can be directly integrated into the introductory physics curriculum, as well as an online math tutorial to tune up students' math skills.

"The goal is to increase diversity and retention in STEM disciplines," she says, referring to science, technology, engineering and mathematics. "We need more engineers, and we want to keep the ones we have, and recruit a more diverse body of students."

-- Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
Investigators
M. Lisa Manning
Related Institutions/Organizations
Syracuse University

ORION SPACECRAFT SUIT BEING TESTED AT JOHNSON SPACE CENTER

FROM:  NASA

Engineers and technicians at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston are testing the spacesuit astronauts will wear in the agency’s Orion spacecraft on trips to deep space. On March 17, members of the Johnson team participated in a Vacuum Pressure Integrated Suit Test to verify enhancements to the suit will meet test and design standards for the Orion spacecraft.  During this test, the suit is connected to life support systems and then air is removed from Johnson’s 11-foot thermal vacuum chamber to evaluate the performance of the suits in conditions similar to a spacecraft. The suit, known as the Modified Advanced Crew Escape Suit, is a closed-loop version of the launch and entry suits worn by space shuttle astronauts. The suit will contain all the necessary functions to support life and is being designed to enable spacewalks and sustain the crew in the unlikely event the spacecraft loses pressure. This is the first in a series of four tests with people in the suits to evaluate the performance of the spacesuit systems in an environment similar to a spacecraft.  Image Credit: NASA/ Bill Stafford

LOOKING TO CURE ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Researcher studies how to prevent antibiotic resistance
Solution could be in bacterial protein called UmuD

The widespread and indiscriminate use of antibiotics has prompted many bacteria to mutate, an adaptation that often renders the drugs useless. The increasing threat of resistance worries infectious disease experts who fear that the era of public health successes brought by the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s is seriously eroding, or soon even may be at an end.

But what if science could improve existing antibiotics in such a way as to not only destroy bacteria, but prevent them from mutating?

At least one research team, in seeking to better understand bacterial mutation, may provide scientific answers that ultimately could lead to thwarting the organisms' ability to mutate, thus blunting the increasing threat of antibiotic resistance.

"The idea would be a one-two punch," says Penny Beuning, an associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern University's college of science. "We need a good therapeutic target that will both kill the bacteria and prevent mutagenesis."

To be sure, the approach almost certainly is years away. Still, the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded scientist thinks it may be possible. She and her colleagues are studying an important bacterial protein known as UmuD that regulates mutagenesis and may provide important clues about how to stop the process that eventually results in antimicrobial resistance.

Using the bacterium E. coli as a model, she has learned that UmuD interacts with the machinery that replicates DNA, and, when altered, may provide the switch that triggers mutation. UmuD exists in two forms, a full length version when first expressed, and later, if DNA is damaged, a much shorter form. It is this shorter version that allows bacteria to mutate.

Once there is DNA damage, "there is an SOS response, and the levels of some specific proteins go up," she says. "There is a massive stress response, and UmuD responds by cutting its arms off."

In cells where only the full-length version of the protein is present, the bacteria cannot mutate. "But when it forms its shorter self, the cells are mutable," she says.

The fact that UmuD is not present outside bacteria makes it a viable antibiotic target.

"The hope would be to find something that targets UmuD together with an existing antibiotic to prevent bacteria from mutating and developing a resistance to that particular drug," she says. "Among the things we have been looking at: how does UmuD work, and what controls the cleavage of the arms?"

Beuning is conducting her research under an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant awarded in 2009 under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. 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. NSF is funding her work with $994,655 over five years.

Beuning specifically is looking at the cleavage process of UmuD using gel electrophoresis, which separates proteins according to size.

"UmuD is a small protein--139 amino acids--which loses 24 amino acids from the arm. So it goes from 139 to 115," she says. "We can observe this difference with electrophoresis, allowing us to determine how different conditions or other proteins might affect UmuD cleavage."

The team is studying different UmuD protein interactions in the lab, using biochemistry to see when and how different proteins bind to one another. Essentially "we light up the proteins and measure how they change when other proteins bind, using a method called FRET, which stands for fluorescence resonance energy transfer," she says.

"This measures energy transfer between two proteins using light emission," she adds. "The proteins have to be close to each other for energy transfer to occur, so it's a way of detecting whether two things bind to each other. People often call the technique a molecular ruler, because it can be used to measure precise distances, but we use it simply to measure proximity."

Using FRET, they discovered that UmuD prevents specific protein interactions in the replication process. That is, it stops or slows down replication by keeping two proteins that need to interact for replication from binding to each other. "Protein-protein interactions are generally hard to target with drugs, but the approach has some potential," she says.

They also use another technique that measures how floppy or flexible proteins are by putting them in heavy water and measuring how much heavier the protein gets as it trades its regular hydrogens with heavy hydrogens from the heavy water. "The floppier parts swap out the hydrogens faster than the less floppy parts," she says.

As part of the grant's education component, she has up to ten undergraduates--as well as local high school students and teachers--working in her research lab. Several students have worked in her lab as part of Northeastern's signature co-op program, in which students work full-time for six months in positions related to their career goals.

Also, she teaches an upper level chemical biology class to undergraduates, and created a lab research project for the students that takes place during half of the semester that actually involves them directly in her mutagenesis research.

"A lot of these students had not yet conducted any research, so they were really motivated by the idea of doing something that someone would use as part of a bigger project," she says. "Particularly at Northeastern, where co-op is such a large part of the culture, it is fun to take advantage of the laboratory as the ultimate in experiential education.”

-- Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
Investigators
Penny Beuning
Related Institutions/Organizations