How to help

High school bullying, whether it's an online spat or ostracism in the lunchroom, is fairly common. But despite its prevalence, bullying can be a difficult topic to discuss.

That's because kids usually don't tell adults that they're being bullied, said Robert Faris, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis.

"Kids just don't talk to adults about bullying, by and large," Faris told Live Science. "That includes their own parents, counselors, teachers and coaches. And so parents kind of have to become detectives." [Understanding the 10 Most Destructive Human Behaviors]

But all detectives need leads. Here are five ways parents can detect and discuss bullying with their children, including ways to figure out whether their child is the perpetrator or the target.

Look for signs

At any given time, approximately 30 percent of high school students are engaged in aggressive, bullying behavior, and another 30 percent (with some overlap between the two) are targeted by bullies, Faris told Live Science.

"The gist of bullying is that it's intentional harm doing, intentional cruelty against people who have a difficult time defending themselves," Faris said.

This malice can take a toll. Most children who are bullied show signs of withdrawal, bursts of emotion and changes in friendship, he said. They may also start skipping class or extracurricular activities, he added.

However, these are also signs that any typical, moody teenager might show. So if a parent notices these changes, it's important that they ask their child what's going on, Faris said.

Don't call it "bullying"

Parents shouldn't ask their child outright about bullying.

"It would be a mistake to dive right in and ask about being bullied," Faris said. "In fact, I wouldn't even use that term, because kids don't use that term. They're more likely to describe it as 'drama' or 'beef' or 'talking s---.'"

Even if the child is being bullied, acknowledging it using the word "bully" implies a powerlessness that he or she may not want to acknowledge, Faris said. Other words don't necessarily have that connotation, he said.

Instead, parents can ask their children indirect questions that may help them open up. For instance, "ask what's going on with the friend who's all of a sudden MIA," Faris said. Or, ask them why they're skipping an activity that they once enjoyed.

Alternatively, parents can ask their child's friends what's going on. If the friend feels comfortable, he or she can anonymously, or even in confidence, explain what is happening.

Build coping skills

Coping skills can help children deal with bullying situations. For instance, have your child make an appointment with a school counselor, who can keep a record of the bullying incident(s) and also help the child assess the situation and think of ways to deal with it, Faris said.

It helps if the child is involved in extracurricular activities and has friends outside school. "If things turn sour at school, kids can feel like the whole school is against them," Faris said. "If they have an outside school activity or friend, they can shift their energy into that." [10 Scientific Tips for Raising Happy Kids]

It's also important to remind the child that life exists after middle school and high school. Sometimes kids can be myopic, Faris said, and reminding them that life is a long journey will help them take a long-term view, he said.

If the bullying does not stop, and the school is not being supportive, it might be best to change schools, Faris said.

Understand why bullying happens

Some bullies are really social-ladder climbers in disguise. "They're often not picking on kids who are vulnerable or mentally disabled," Faris said. "They're picking on kids who are their rivals. It's not due to empathy deficits so much as the competition for status."

Much of Faris' academic work is a response to the idea that bullies are driven by psychological deficiencies, such as low empathy or high emotional reactivity (an intense reaction to a stimulus).

"Those are reasons, but they're not the only ones," Faris said. "What I found is, as kids increase their social status, their bullying behavior tends to increase as well, until they approach the very top."

Faris and his colleagues surveyed students at 19 schools, asking students about the kids they bullied and who bullied them. Then, the researchers assessed who was popular by looking at yearbooks, which includes homecoming royalty and who gets voted "the best" by their classmates, in categories such as best eyes or best hair. The most popular kids were at the 100th percentile, he said.

Aggressive, bullying behaviors in social climbers tended to peak when kids were at the 94th percentile in popularity, and then those behaviors plummeted, the researchers found. The most popular kids, who were often at the center of the school's social networks, were the least likely to engage in bullying, Faris said.

"Once they're at the top, they don't need those behaviors," he said. "They have the luxury to be kind, which solidifies the position." Moreover, these kids didn't necessarily have to get to the top by bullying. Sometimes, they were popular athletes or known for being kind and outgoing.

The research showed that bullying works, at least for social climbers, Faris said. Those who bullied their popular peers often wound up in elite social circles, he said. This explains why some bullies and targets have mercurial friendships — they're often targeting each other to climb the social ladder, he said. [How to Talk to Kids About Bullying and Abuse]

What if your child is the bully?

If a child is a bully, it's best to figure out what's driving that behavior, Faris said. For instance, a different approach will be needed depending on whether the child is bullying kids at the bottom of the pecking order or whether the child is targeting peers to climb the social ladder.

After talking with their children about the problem, parents can help by setting a good example, Faris said. For instance, "Are you gossiping about other parents in front of your kids? Do you covet your neighbor's new Honda Odyssey? Do you try to one-up your friends with your clothes, your plastic surgery or your career?" Faris asked.

If you are, try to re-evaluate your attitudes and behavior, and encourage your child to do the same, he said.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae because of their color, have endured for more than 2.5 billion years, providing ample time to adapt to changes in the Earth's biosphere. They live in water where a diet heavy in nitrogen and phosphorus, combined with global warming, can prompt them to produce slimy toxic blooms that make the water unfit for drinking, agriculture and recreation.

"Human activities have dramatically increased nitrogen and phosphorus inputs into many rivers and lakes, causing algal blooms that threaten economic and recreational uses of those waters," says Hans Paerl, professor of marine and environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Institute of Marine Sciences. "This nutrient over-enrichment in freshwater has led to a global proliferation of cyanobacterial blooms which foul the water, disrupt food webs, reduce oxygen, and produce metabolites toxic to fish, zooplankton, cattle, domestic pets and humans.''

Humans who drink the water or eat its fish or shellfish can suffer damage to the liver, intestines and nervous system. Moreover, while still unknown, the possibility exists that "using this water for irrigation of edible crops could potentially lead to toxins being transferred into consumable foods, since they don't break down easily," Paerl says.

The major sources of nitrogen and phosphorus that enter these water systems and feed the cyanobacteria include runoff from chemical fertilizers, factories, urban impervious surfaces and waste water treatment facilities, and air pollution from fossil fuel and automobile combustion to create "a perfect soup'' of noxious blooms, he says, adding: "We are now having to pay back Mother Nature for all those cultural advances."

Paerl currently is leading an international team of researchers working to better understand and help restore the ecosystem balance in Lake Taihu, the third largest lake in China, a once pristine lake where severe toxic blooms now grow regularly, and which serves as a major source of drinking water for more than 10 million people. "So, the stakes are huge," Paerl says.

Research with a Global Impact

Beyond China, however, insights gleaned from their research almost certainly will have an impact on the management of global waterways, including in the United States, where harmful cyanobacterial blooms resulting in tainted water cause an estimated annual loss of more than $2 billion, according to Paerl and his research colleagues. They threaten some of the world's largest lake ecosystems, including the Great Lakes, and Lakes Okeechobee and Pontchartrain in North America, as well as the large lakes of Africa, Asia and South America.

"Lake Taihu serves as a looking glass for large lake ecosystems threatened by proliferating cyanobacterial blooms,'' he says. "While events in China may seem half-way-around-the-world relative to local concerns, they are in fact a potential foreshadowing for North American waterways."

The Lake Taihu work includes two collaborative projects funded by grants from the National Science Foundation totaling about $2 million.

One major goal of the research is to determine a nutrient threshold, that is, the level of nutrients in a body of water that would prevent toxic blooms from developing. The aim is to know how much to reduce those nutrients, nitrogen in particular. "It turns out we've done a good job reducing phosphorus, but have not been paying enough attention to nitrogen,'' Paerl says. "We are now literally drowning in nitrogen entering our waterways from land and the atmosphere."

Climate Change is Making Things Worse

Climate change is complicating the calculations, since the microorganisms seem to thrive in warm temperatures. "Cyanobacteria love warm weather," Paerl says. "Many of the cyanobacterial blooms typically occur in summertime. Warmer weather will increase the probability that these blooms will become dominant."

Thus, nutrient thresholds likely will need to become lower as the weather becomes warmer. "If you get below a certain threshold, the chances for these blooms to dominate decreases," he says. "But if you increase the temperature at the same time, then the threshold will change too. So we might have to reduce the threshold even more. We are designing a nutrient reduction strategy for whatever the temperature is going to be now, but we may need to revisit the strategy and crank down on the nutrients even more in the future."

The scientists' experiments involve collecting lake water from different locations and adding nutrients in different concentrations to transparent containers, which vary in size from a few liters (microcosms) to more than 1,000 liters (mesocosms), while leaving others untouched to serve as controls for comparative purposes. "We compare the growth in the nutrient additions to the controls, then put the containers back into the lake," Paerl explains, adding that setting up the experiment occurs over several hours on the same day.

"Over time, we monitor algal growth and compare the stimulatory effects of nitrogen and phosphorus, taking into account all the other environmental factors that can control growth like light and temperature,'' he continues. "We conduct these experiments over periods ranging from a few days to several weeks. From that, we can estimate the growth potential of these nutrients over a range of concentrations reflecting varying levels of enrichment from the watershed."

The team also is conducting experiments "where, instead of adding nutrients, we remove them by adding artificial lake water that is missing the nutrients,'' he says. "The idea is to predict what will happen when we reduce nutrient inputs to the lake."

Finally, the researchers are also trying to characterize the organisms already in the water because "we want to know who the players are,'' he says. "The reason we are interested in that is because we need to know how the microbial diversity is changing in the lake.

We want to encourage the growth of good as opposed to bad players. It's not just that these blooms are ugly and discourage tourists, but they produce toxins and more than 10 million people use the lake for drinking water."

Bacteria Not Algae

Despite the misnomer "blue-green algae," cyanobacteria are not algae, but bacteria. They are prokaryotic, meaning they lack a nucleus, unlike traditional algae. Cyanobacteria perform photosynthesis just like traditional algae, but they prefer warm conditions, unlike true algae groups, which reach peak growth rates at lower temperatures.

 "Cyanobacteria are unique in that they are the only bacterial group capable of oxygen-evolving photosynthesis." Paerl says. "This has had major ramifications for evolution of life on Earth, in particular oxygenation of the atmosphere, starting some two billion years ago. This transformation has provided opportunities for higher plants and animals, including human, to inhabit our planet. So, the influence of cyanobacteria on Earth is two-sided from a human perspective — both good and bad."

The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. See the Behind the Scenes Archive. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

For the past few years, a team of engineers has spent long hours poring over data files and complex computer models. They weren't designing nuclear reactors or high-tech cars — they were using their technology and expertise to improve programs that feed the hungry.

Food banks are enormous enterprises, serving as a linchpin for hunger relief efforts across the United States. But they are as complex as the nation's food system itself, collecting food from sources ranging from local farmers to charitable donations and distributing it to myriad agencies that then share it with people in need. Their goal is to do this as fairly and efficiently as possible. But, like many complicated systems, this is easier said than done. That's where engineering comes in.

Julie Ivy is an industrial and systems engineer at North Carolina State University. Industrial and systems engineering (ISE) focuses on understanding processes (like those at a food bank) and using computational models to find ways to improve them.

In 2009, an ISE researcher at North Carolina A&T State University named Lauren Davis contacted Ivy with an idea. One of Davis's students was volunteering at an area food bank and had noticed inefficiencies in the system. What did Ivy think about working with food banks to make them run more smoothly?

That conversation launched a National Science Foundation-funded project that plunged Ivy, Davis, and a team of fellow researchers into the intricacies of how food banks operate.

To get a handle on food bank operations, the researchers teamed up with the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina (FBCENC), based in Raleigh, and the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina, based in Winston-Salem. Both food banks serve extremely large areas and work with many partners. For example, FBCENC alone works with more than 800 agencies to feed more than 550,000 people in 34 counties covering hundreds of square miles.

Each food bank is dedicated to providing its partner agencies with its "fair share" of the food that is available.

The fair share is determined with a formula designed to ensure each agency receives food in proportion to its overall need. For example, if a county has 17 percent of the need within FBCENC's service area, FBCENC wants to make sure that the agencies in the county receives 17 percent of the food.

"But, as we learned, it can be difficult to meet that 'fair share' standard," Ivy says.

"The supply is primarily generated from donations, which adds a degree of complexity not typically present in for-profit supply chains," Davis adds. "The uncertainty associated with both the supply and demand processes make food distribution challenging."

Furthermore, some agencies aren't able to retrieve all their food. These limitations may be due to financial pressures, constraints on the availability of personnel, lack of access to adequate transportation, or limited storage space.

"An agency's limitations on receiving food can in turn constrain a county's ability to receive food," Ivy says. "We call these 'bottleneck' counties, because their fair share might be 17 percent, but they might only be able to collect and distribute 14 percent of the available food."

With support from three-year NSF collaborative research grants, Ivy and Davis assembled a team to collect food bank data, analyze it, and create computational models of supply and distribution processes. The team included Reha Uzsoy and Irem Sengul at NC State, Steven Jiang and Luther Brock at NC A&T, and Charlie Hale and Earline Middleton of FBCENC — as well as a host of undergraduates.

Their efforts to make the distribution process more efficient could help limit waste in food distribution systems nationally.

First, the researchers were able to characterize the role that bottleneck counties play in preventing food banks from meeting their fair-share goals.

"Food banks have historically focused on demand, and our work made clear that the capacity of agencies to retrieve and store food is actually a key factor in reaching fair share targets," Ivy says.

Second, the research team developed tactics and policies to help food banks feed more people. For example, it identified ways to distribute food by targeting resources — such as mobile food pantries — for bottleneck counties and giving food banks increased flexibility on meeting fair share goals.

"If County A is unable to retrieve and distribute its fair share of the food, that food should not be wasted," Ivy says. "It makes sense to distribute that food in areas that have the capacity to make use of it. But then you need to help County A improve its capacity."

The research team demonstrated that food access for charitable agencies in remote parts of the service area can be improved using satellite delivery locations. The researchers also identified transportation schedules that incorporate both collection and delivery of donated food and take into consideration the unique constraints faced by food banks: perishability, quality control, distribution equity and capacity. [Warm Hands Make People Generous ]

Lastly, the researchers developed a dynamic modeling technique that provides a more accurate picture of demand at the county level — which would help to make fair share calculations more precise.

"These findings are new, and we're in the process of determining how to implement them with our food bank partners," Ivy says. "But when we do, we think our work could be useful almost anywhere in the United States. That's because FBCENC is part of Feeding America, the largest network of food banks in U.S. As a result, its processes are similar to the processes of food banks across the country."

The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. See the Behind the Scenes Archive. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Ushuaia and Fairbanks are cities near the tips of the world. 

The capital of Argentina's Tierra del Fuego province and the Alaskan metropolis don't share much in common. Except for a cluster of simple wood boxes on poles and the scientists and swallows who flock to them.

Both animals are part of Golondrinas de las Américas — the Swallows of the Americas, an international research project studying the slight, swift swallow to answer larger questions about biological patterns.

"Looking at these birds across this huge hemispheric span of habitats provides a broader opportunity to explore relationships between the environment, temperatures and breeding," says David Winkler, a professor in Cornell University's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He is the lead investigator for Golondrinas, funded through the National Science Foundation's Partnerships in International Research and Education (PIRE) program. 

PIRE brings together U.S. and foreign researchers across all fields of science and engineering, supporting research advances that depend upon international collaboration. 

This type of international collaboration is especially crucial for the Golondrinas project. The team is studying causes of variation in the life histories of one genus of swallows, Tachycineta, which live throughout the Americas. "We wanted to dig in with a really full-blown exploration of all aspects of their breeding biology and ecology," Winkler says.

And for the last seven years, that's exactly what they've done. The site map for the project, affectionately known as Golo, spans the entire western swath of Earth: The Pacific stretch of California and Mexico, a sprinkling in Canada, the Midwest and the North Atlantic coast, then down through Central America and the Caribbean before spreading into Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Chile and Argentina.

The Golo project has involved hundreds of students and interns — traveling in the U.S. and abroad – plus workshops, endless logistics, and collaborations with local residents and organizations. It's inspired graduate careers and supported conservation projects, and woven together an international swallow community. 

"We were very ambitious," says Winkler.

Researching "ever-ready bunnies"

There are nine species of swallows in the& Tachycineta genus. All are sleek white-breasted birds with a metallic-sheened back, like they're dressed for an evening at the theatre. 

Swallows are cavity dwellers, depending on other species to make homes for them. Woodpecker holes are a good choice for swallows, but so are the 5-by-5 inch nest boxes Golo makes available to them. Swallows will readily nest in these rough wood homes, especially if other natural cavities are limited. Which means you can pretty easily create your own swallow population — one reason they make such good study subjects, Winkler says. 

The other reason is that swallows are, for the most part, pretty resilient birds. "Once they find a cavity and start nesting, they're staying there," Winkler says. "I call them ever-ready bunnies … as long as the food holds up and the weather doesn't get too bad, they keep trying."

At the various Golo sites, the researchers catch and measure individual swallows, monitor all aspects of the breeding season — from nest-building to chick counts — and take insect samples, to keep tabs on the swallow's prey. Protocols are detailed in the Golondrinas handbook — "the Bible of how we do things," says Winkler — and results are loaded onto a shared database. [Citizen Science Programs That Are 'For the Birds' ]

All this data will help answer some big questions: How does weather affect bird breeding at different latitudes? How do the birds vary physiologically across different regions? How much do tropical and temperate ecosystems — and changes in them — affect the reproduction, and ultimately the survival, of these birds?

The project addressed such fundamental ecological questions "via a broad network of international researchers comprised of ornithologists, entomologists, physiologists, educators, and avid birders across the Americas," says John Tsapogas, NSF program coordinator for PIRE.

"These interactions created a sustainable and synergistic research collaboration that has helped us better understand climactic influences on these birds and their insect prey."

Golo members recently published a paper in the journal Ecography — using 16,000 nest records from seven species — showing a connection between clutch size (how many eggs a swallow lays) and lay date (when she lays them) dependent on geography (variations in latitude). 

"We're still analyzing a lot of data and I bet we will be for a while," Winkler says.

The growing Golo community

One of the strongest outcomes of Golo, however, might not be the swallow populations sparked by the project, but the human ones.

Maya Wilson started as a Golo intern the day after she graduated from Franklin and Marshall College, one of the project's partner institutions. She did field work in Alberta, Canada, then on to Argentina and upstate New York.

She credits her undergraduate advisor — Daniel Ardia, an associate professor of biology at Franklin and Marshall and a co-principal investigator on the PIRE — for introducing her to Golo. What made her stay in the program were the swallows. "I just love working with these birds. There's nothing like holding a wild bird in your hand, and really appreciating what they're doing to survive and reproduce."

This month, Wilson starts a PhD program at Virginia Tech, where she will focus her research on the little-known, endangered Bahama Swallow. Wilson wants to study the bird's population and breeding habitat, get a sense of what's threatening them, and work with the local government and community to protect the bird — a research track forged by her time with Golo.

"I think that was the goal … to teach people about science and to develop students into capable biologists," says Justin Proctor, another former Golo intern who is now a graduate student at Cornell. 

Proctor's Tachycineta specialty is the Golden Swallow, a bird endemic to the Dominican Republic and inching closer to "endangered” status. He's spent three years trying to not only unravel the mystery of why Golden Swallow populations are declining, but build sustainable scientific capacity around the bird.

"We've reached out to almost everybody in the country," Proctor says, from local residents hired to build nest boxes to established conservation nonprofits like BirdsCaribbean. Students from nearby South American countries have helped his research and honed their own scientific skills in the process. And after every field season, Proctor translates the season's research report into Spanish and distributes a it to members of the local communities involved in the project. "It's important that we make sure the information ends up back where it is needed most," he says. 

The effort has paid off. "Even rural farmers with no formal education in the sciences, they're walking through the fields pointing out swallows. It's had a pretty solid impact."

And one the Golo team intends to carry on, despite the recent end of PIRE funding (the Golondrinas project was supported through August 2014). The Golden Swallow slice of Golo is now funded and led mainly by Dominicans, according to Proctor. Many of the other sites are in good shape for continued research and monitoring, Winkler says. And the swallows certainly won't be moving out of their nest boxes any time soon.

"As long as people are pointing up in the sky and talking about the birds," Proctor says. "Whether they know what bird it is or not – that's what's important."

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

A second grader is about to start learning environmental science, along with a cute purple alien named Plum, and Plum’s friends. He goes online to a site where he can easily find these animated characters in “webisodes” and games. Within a few minutes, instead of being in front of the computer, he’s out in his yard — phone in hand — looking for signs of the change of seasons. This isn’t a child introduced to science through rote facts; it’s a child who is learning via a new multimedia project from PBS KIDS. 

“Plum Landing,” an all-digital production created by WGBH in Boston, uses animated webisodes, online games, a mobile app, live-action videos and hands-on activities to increase children’s understanding of the science and systems of the natural world. As the program, which is designed for children ages six to nine, introduces core science concepts  — particularly related to ecosystems — it models key habits of mind scientists and naturalists use when exploring the natural world. “Our goal was to give kids an understanding of the science underlying healthy ecosystems and sustainability, which we hope will lay the foundation needed for them to become caretakers of our planet later in life,” said executive producer Marisa Wolsky. [Kids and Science Good for More than Just a Grade ]

According to the narrative, Plum is a video game designer on the desolate Planet Blorb. She has landed on Earth to create games about nature for her fellow Blorbians. Many aspects of Earth, including plants, animals and clouds, fascinate Blorbians; they, including Plum, have been longing to experience nature on Earth. 

So, Plum commandeers a space ship and flies to Earth, where she meets and befriends Clem, Oliver, Gabi, Brad and Cooper. Soon she’s sending them on missions to four different ecosystems — the Australian desert, the Canadian Rockies, the Belizean mangrove swamp and the Bornean jungle. Over time, Plum and her friends experience many mesmerizing and insightful discoveries about the planet.

Getting Kids Outside

On the website, children can click around and learn about the biodiversity of the ecosystems  the animated characters are discovering. Children also are encouraged to investigate their real-world surroundings and document their progress using the web game Nature Sketchpad or the mobile app Plum’s Photo Hunt (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), allowing children to draw scenes or take photographs, explain their findings and submit them to the website.

“Plum Landing” also provides parents and educators environmental science activities and curricula. A flexible digital curriculum offers informal educators (those at after school programs, clubs and camps) hands-on activities and media resources (live-action videos, webisodes, games, the app and sketchpad) organized by theme and supplemented with background information, discussion questions and ideas for further exploration. In one activity and video, for example, children learn about evaporation and the water cycle by painting with water on outdoor surfaces. They are meant to discover there is faster evaporation painting water on hot metal versus, say, concrete, which has a lower temperature. Through time-lapse photography, viewers also can see evaporation happen at different rates in the shade and sun.

Since its debut last April, the website has garnered more than 8 million page views via 1.5 million separate website visits. Children are not only watching the webisodes and playing the games online, but also exploring different aspects of their own environments — to date, they’ve submitted about 70,000 photos and drawings.

In collecting these photograph and drawings, WGBH says, it strictly follows the Federal Trade Commission’s updated regulations on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), designed to safeguard children under the age of 13 who are online. WGBH approves children’s submissions before they are posted on the website and prevents personal information, including photographs of children, from being shared on the site. Additionally, the website does not collect trace data or any information identifying the child. The PBS login system also has no identifying information when a child logs into the site.

“The drawing submissions from the online Nature Sketchpad and the photographic submissions from Plum’s Photo Hunt app feed in an orderly way into a Django database for which we have a user-friendly, Cloud-based administration for review, editing and posting,” Wolsky said. “In other words, we can review all submissions easily on a web page and mark them for publication. The images generated by kids, drawing or photos, are automatically formatted to be at the correct size for display in whichever of the 96 galleries we feed them to, so no additional design or production work is needed to prepare them for display.”

Not on TV

Back in 2006, when WGBH first decided to create this multi-platform project, it envisioned a televised and digital production. The idea was to create a half-hour television series comprised of two shorter segments, 11 minutes each, accompanied by a robust website. However, WGBH decided that it wanted to break new ground by going all-digital. According to Senior Executive Producer Kate Taylor, the National Science Foundation, which supported this project through planning grants and a full-scale development award, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, another funder, were both interested in an innovative way to model and teach science concepts.

“We knew that the media habits of kids were changing and that short videos were an excellent tool for building awareness and reaching kids who are increasingly spending more of their time watching video online,” said Taylor. “So, it became very exciting for us to do a one of a kind, cutting edge foray into an all-digital series.” 

Up Ahead

WGBH is now working on a family engagement campaign for the fall, a national initiative designed to appeal directly to families to get outside, connect with nature and explore their surroundings. In July, an outside evaluator, the Concord Evaluation Group (CEG), will conduct an evaluation to measure the impact of “Plum Landing” resources on kids and their families.

“Parents want to investigate the outdoors with their children, but finding the time and giving them the guidance that they need is a challenge,” said Wolsky. “We are just starting to tackle that challenge, and I think we are going to learn a lot in the next few months.”

Evaluating the curriculum for informal educators is another step that WGBH plans to take. The CEG will be conducting another study with after-school programs in the fall. 

“At WGBH, we want to make sure that, when we produce media resources, we give educators the tools they need to enhance the impact they have on their students’ learning,” said Wolsky. “This includes not only aligning the resources to the standards, but also providing discussion questions, hands-on activities, ideas for further exploration of the science topics, and ways that educators can make connections between what they see in the media and things they are doing in their own world.”

WGBH is still looking to see what the future holds for the project. Plum may soon play a role in the museum setting. In fact, the Ecotarium Museum in Worcester, Mass., recently celebrated Earth Day with a “Plum Landing” screening, hands-on activities and giveaways. This fall, “Plum Landing” also plans to offer more games, a new app and additional resources that encourage indoor-outdoor science exploration.

“Many of us in public media are now creating projects that are much more focused on reaching increasingly mobile audiences. During this time, we have also seen an expansion of interest in projects that have environmental science curricula. There’s an urgent need here: Very few informal education projects are successfully teaching America’s children the science concepts underlying sustainability.” said Wolsky. “’Plum Landing’ promises to do that by creating an educational science experience for elementary-aged children that will enable them to think about the world in a new way.”

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

A virus lethal to wood frog tadpoles may be partly responsible for the alarming and widespread extinction of amphibians seen in recent decades.

The study from the NSF-funded National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) showed that ranavirus, a killer pathogen that causes frogs' internal organs to bleed profusely, could lead to the extinction of isolated populations of wood frogs. "We looked at isolated populations because we wanted to know if it was at all possible that ranavirus could cause extinctions, and isolated populations were the most likely," said lead researcher and NIMBioS postdoctoral fellow Julia Earl.

The results help fill out the picture of what is happening to the world's amphibians. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature — which evaluates species' vitality and threat levels in its Red List of Threatened Species — amphibians are the most imperiled of vertebrates, with one third of them classified as globally threatened or extinct. Scientists have linked the decline of amphibians to a fungal disease called chytridiomycosis, but the new study shows ranavirus may be a culprit as well.

Wood frogs, widely distributed throughout North America, are highly susceptible to ranavirus, especially as tadpoles. The new study used mathematical modeling to investigate how ranavirus affects isolated frog populations at different stages in their life cycles.

Earl and her team determined that the stage at which frogs were exposed to ranavirus was a critical factor in determining extinction and rates of decline. Extinction was most likely to occur when tadpoles and "metamorphs" — tadpoles metamorphosing into frogs — in small communities were exposed to ranavirus at frequent intervals. Small populations exposed every year could become extinct in five years; small populations exposed every two years could become extinct in 25-44 years.

Exposure at the egg stage was apparently not as dangerous, perhaps because of protection afforded by the membrane.

Once exposed to ranavirus, a wood frog can die within three days. It can catch the virus in the water, through direct contact with infected frogs and when scavenging dead and infected frogs. There is no cure or treatment for the disease.

The study appeared in the journal EcoHealth.

Earl is continuing to look at amphibian decline: She recently built mathematical models to investigate whether immigration of frogs into a population from other areas alters the probability of extinction and decline.

The National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis brings together researchers from around the world to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries to investigate solutions to basic and applied problems in the life sciences.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

In the classic 1967 movie, The Graduate, a newly minted college graduate played by Dustin Hoffman is told by an older friend that the future would be guided by "one word: plastics." Although the older man's prediction did not refer to the future of marine ecology, the state of the world's oceans has, ironically, borne it out. 

Most recently, footage of the Japanese tsunami of 2011 and the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 have vividly underscored the deterioration of some of the world's most remote seas, showing them to be veritable garbage soups, awash in chunks of junk including metals, glass, rubber, medical waste, fishing gear, but most of all, plastics.

Plastic debris of all sizes, including bottles, cups, bags, toothbrushes and grain-sized pieces, represents from 60 to 80 percent of the world's total marine debris, according to the EPA.

Garbage in; Garbage Out

Marine garbage comes from many sources, including galley waste and other trash from ships, recreational boaters, fishermen and offshore oil and gas facilities; boxes and merchandise from large containers ships; rivers that carry storm water-runoff and other waste; poorly maintained landfills; and beach litter.

Studies show that marine plastic harms 267 species worldwide, including species of sea turtles, seabirds and marine mammals — some of which are endangered. Animals are most likely to be hurt by marine garbage after becoming entangled in it or by mistaking it for prey and eating it. For example, sea turtles commonly eat indigestible, potentially gut-clogging plastic objects because these objects look so much like one of their favorite foods: jellyfish.

Another problem: unsightly beached marine debris that washes ashore may discourage income-generating tourism in coastal communities.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Due to varied oceanic and atmospheric forces, marine garbage is concentrated in five major gyres in the world's oceans. One of these is the North Pacific gyre — commonly called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — which occupies most of the northern Pacific Ocean, an area of about 10 million square miles. One study suggests that the total mass of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is six times that of plankton! Debris from the patch commonly washes up on beaches in Hawaii, along the Pacific Northwest coast and in Alaska.

Citizen Scientists Pitch In

In light of the sheer physical enormity of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the complexity of its causes, what can we possibility do about it?

Perhaps help protect some vulnerable populations of wildlife from marine garbage in coastal regions, according to the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST) — a citizen science group that monitors marine resources and ecosystem health at more than 350 beaches from northern California to Alaska. Although COASST, which receives funding from the National Science Foundation, has long focused on collecting data on beach-cast seabird carcasses as an indicator of coastal health, the group will soon also focus on collecting data on beached marine debris. Resulting data could be used to help support efforts to reduce the impacts of marine debris on coastal wildlife. 

Identifying Vulnerable Beaches 

Here's how COASST's marine debris program would work: on a monthly basis, COAAST volunteers would collect data on the locations and characteristics of beached marine debris. Debris data could be intersected with information about the location and abundance of coastal wildlife. Resulting analyses could be used to help prioritize the where, when and what of beach cleanups.

For example, suppose scientists identified as a particular threat the potential for seals to become entangled in marine debris with “loops" — discarded plastic holders for six packs, packing straps, boat line and fishing nets or anything else a seal could stick its head through. Volunteers could sift through the COASST marine debris database to identify the locations of large concentrations of "loopy" debris during periods when seals are also abundant. 

Kicking off the new COASST program

COASST is currently rigorously pilot testing its new marine debris program. The group plans to start recruiting into this new program volunteers from northern California to the Alaskan coast in spring 2015.

Watch the accompanying video TKTK

Learn more about marine garbage and how it is being addressed by COAAST in the accompanying video, Talking Trash.

The growing power of citizen science

The increasing importance of citizen science to scientific advancement and the many and varied citizen science programs supported by National Science Foundation are discussed in an article, Novel Answer to That Perennial "Earth Day" Question: "What Can I Do to Help?"

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

In ecology, as in many scientific fields, researchers like to develop general rules to explain why certain things happen in nature, and to make predictions. The reality, however, often is more complicated. For example, when trying to understand "communities" of species that make up biological systems, general rules don't always apply. 

The Uniqueness of Communities

"The predictive framework often has to be system specific," says Lisa Belden, a community ecologist who primarily studies disease ecology. "If we are going to make predictions about what's going to happen in a natural system as we lose species, we need to understand the natural history of the organisms that live there, the roles of the individual species within the community, and the way those species interact. Understanding each system is important." [Images: Endangered Species of the 'Red List' ]

Belden, associate professor of biological sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), is researching two such specific systems related to the ecological interactions that influence disease. The goal is to better understand how changes in biodiversity , in particular, species loss, effect disease outcome. 

Impacts on People

These are especially important in terms of disease because "we are seeing more and more zoonotic disease outbreaks every year, where pathogens move from other animals into humans" Belden says. "People are saying: where did this come from? More people are interacting with wildlife, and if we don't understand the wildlife component, we can't understand the human component — we won't be able to put those pieces together in order to control these pathogens and limit their impact on people."

One of her projects involves the complicated life cycle of freshwater trematodes, a diverse set of parasitic flatworms that typically infect three hosts — sometimes including humans — as part of their reproductive life cycles. Her second study is looking at the role of symbiotic skin microbes in preventing amphibian infection by chytrid , a lethalfungus that has driven many amphibian populations to extinction.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding both projects with grants totaling $1.5 million. 

The Importance of Interactions

"Historically, we've viewed disease from thinking, primarily, that there is one organism, a pathogen or parasite, that causes disease and a host that gets it, particularly from a human perspective," she says. "But in recent times, we've come to realize that interactions around the host and the pathogen are more complicated, and that environmental factors also can be important."

Both studies ask how "community structure" effects the function of the biological system, with community structure defined as the relative abundances of the different species in the system. "As you start taking species out of communities, what happens to the function of the communities?" she says. 

With amphibians, for example, "we already know that some of these skin bacteria do a good job of producing anti-fungal compounds," she says. "These are naturally occurring bacteria on the amphibians, but we don't know how they get them. We don't know whether they are derived from the environment, or whether they are passed from frog to frog. What we certainly do know is that these bacteria produce antifungal compounds and can inhibit the growth of the chytrid fungus." 

Thus, in studying these bacterial communities, "we are interested in disease resistance function," she adds. "Is the function linked to the presence of a particular [bacterial] species on the skin of the frog? What happens if you lose the species? Do you lose the function?"

How Does Diversity Help?

Alternatively, diversity in and of itself could be protective, that is, "the fact that you have a lot of species present and interacting on the skin, or the fact that they take up all the space and block other things from coming in," she says. "In that case, what would matter is the overall loss of species — not the loss of any particular species. It could be that these antifungal compounds are produced by many species."

Interestingly, her research parallels growing scientific interest in the human microbiome, where studies are examining how naturally occurring bacteria effect numerous aspects of human health. "The microbiome is bringing in this new age of how we think about medicine," she says. "It's interesting how all this research is coming together, and how we are starting to think of human medicine in this broader framework of how species interact with one another, and the role of these microbial passengers."

Experimenting to Identify Interactions

Her experiments involve exposing three different species of amphibians to the fungus after the researchers have surveyed the bacterial populations on their skin. "The idea is to see what happens, and track both the structure and function of those microbial communities," she says. Ultimately, "one of the things we are hoping to do at some point is treat vulnerable amphibians with probiotics to have a better defense against chytrid," she says.

With the flatworms, Belden's team is looking at similar questions relating to how different species within the complex communities where they live have an impact on their life cycles, for instance, what happens when a predator consumes potential hosts in the parasite life cycle.

"They have three hosts, and all must be present for the parasite to complete its life cycle," she explains. "First there is the adult worm, which reproduces in a vertebrate intestine — often a muskrat or duck for the parasites we study. The eggs are in feces. Then they have to go into an aquatic snail, where they reproduce asexually. They consume the gonads of the snail so the snail cannot reproduce — they take over the snail, like the invasion of the body snatchers. Then there is another free-living parasite stage that must infect another host — another snail, or a tadpole — where they form a little cyst and sit there until the snail, or tadpole, is consumed by another muskrat or a duck. Then they become adult worms, and it starts all over again."

Belden is interested in what happens when predators are present that prefer to consume one type of intermediate host, or what happens when the abundance of available hosts change in the system, which is likely to occur as overall biodiversity declines. 

"How do these species interactions influence disease outcomes for subsequent hosts? " she says. "These interactions and the transmission of the parasite from one host to the next, depends on who is in the system. Every predator and potential host species might have different impacts on this complex life cycle, so understanding ecological interactions and context is important for being able to predict how changes to systems, like biodiversity loss, are going to alter who gets infected and with how many parasites." 

Mimicking Nature

Her research team is raising adult flatworms, mimicking natural conditions, and then changing those conditions to see what happens. 

"We can actually work with all the life stages, and can manipulate the life cycle in experiments," she says. "We are using cattle watering tanks, setting up 1,000 liter ponds outside that are big enough to get realistic densities of organisms. We can set up controls, and do real experiments, such as adding in predators or manipulating the density of the hosts. We expect that as biodiversity declines, there will be changes in the abundance of the species that are left."

Big Challenges Ahead

Beyond disease ecology, however, she believes that the issue of biodiversity loss will have an overarching impact on almost all systems that society depends upon. 

"There are so many concurrent changes that we are trying to understand," she says, citing climate change and pollution as examples. " Understanding these natural systems and the species that live in them, and the roles and interactions of those species, is really important as we confront the challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change. These are big challenges, and if we want to mitigate the impacts, we have to understand what is changing. We can't do that unless we understand the systems." 

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Simon Kashchock-Marenda was in the sixth grade when he decided to study the effects of various sweeteners on the health of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) for a science fair project. With help and supplies from his father, Daniel Marenda, an assistant professor of biology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Penn., Simon began raising groups of flies — feeding each group a different store-bought sweetener. One of the sweeteners was Truvia® — an FDA-approved sweetener that contains erythritol, a sugar alcohol present in many plants and fruits.

After just six days, all of the flies raised on Truvia® had died.  Simon and his father — along with Sean O’Donnell, a Drexel biology professor with a background in insects — then replicated the experiment under stricter conditions, in a lab.

[Read news story on the sixth-grader's findings]

The results of the lab study were similar to Kaschock-Marenda’s original results:  The lab study showed that flies raised on food containing Truvia® lived for only 5.8 days on average, compared to 38.6 to 50.6 days for flies raised on foods without Truvia®. Flies raised on food containing Truvia® also showed noticeable motor impairments prior to death.

With more investigation, the research group found that erythritol provided the toxic effect, not a stevia plant extract also present in Truvia. More testing is needed to determine the specific physiological and molecular mechanisms of erythritol’s toxicity to fruit flies, the researchers said. 

The study also found that flies were drawn to erythritol-containing Truvia over Equal, Splenda, Sweet’n’Low, and PureVia, which they also tested.

These results suggest that erythritol may provide an additional use as a human-safe insecticide.

But just how erythritol might one day be used to fight insect pests is unclear. “We are not going to see the planet sprayed with erythritol and the chances for widespread crop application are slim,” O’Donnell said. “But on a small scale, in places where insects will come to a bait, consume it and die, this could be huge.” 

Value of STEM Education

The discovery came as a complete surprise, said O’Donnell. Everyone regarded the study Kashchock-Marenda initiated as a “standard middle school science project,” he said. “This is a great example of simple studies leading to real advances.”  But there is no way to know when payoffs of this kind will happen in basic research, he added. [What is STEM Education? ]

In June 2014, the results of the erythritol study were published in PLOS ONE — with Kashchock-Marenda, now in the ninth grade, Marenda and several other researchers cited as co-authors, and O’Donnell cited as a senior author.

“I think it’s hard to overemphasize [the benefit of] promoting curiosity and encouraging kids to get involved in science at a young age,” said O’Donnell. “The takeaway here is not that every science fair project can be a real discovery, but rather that you never know what it might lead to down the road. In general, having students engaged in and comfortable with science can enable them to make discoveries in future.”

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

If smiling for a video game could be, by itself, enough to make some people happy, then "Unicorb" — a video game controlled by a player's facial muscles — should be regarded as something akin to a cyber fountain of joy. Why? Because the object of the video game is to smile repeatedly in order to keep a unicorn in flight as it jumps through rainbows in a video. Players' facial expressions can be detected and translated into Unicorb controls because, while playing, they must wear Thalia — a wearable interactive system that captures telltale signals from facial expressions.

"Thalia is the muse of joy," said James Wu, a co-creator of Thalia and Unicorb and a graduate student in bioengineering  at the University of Washington. "Many studies have shown that just the physical act of smiling improves your overall mood and mental health."

Thalia and Unicorb were created by Wu, along with three other University of Washington students: Karl Marrett, a graduate student who has a research background in neurology, Tyler Maxfield, a bioengineering undergraduate and Tiffany Youngquist, a bioengineering graduate student. The students created Thalia and Unicorb for a 2014 competition called Tech Sandbox, which was held at the end of a course, also called "Tech Sandbox," offered at the University of Washington in 2014.

The purpose of Tech Sandbox was explained by Lise Johnson — the instructor of Tech Sandbox and the education manager of the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE), an Engineering Research Center funded by the National Science Foundation and based at the University of Washington: "Students are supposed to create projects that demonstrate the core principles of neural engineering, and they should also be things that can work as educational demos. We want them to be fun and interesting and maybe marketable, commercializable."

Also, the Tech Sandbox competition provides a mechanism for encouraging students and faculty to experiment with the CSNE's sophisticated equipment.

What's in a smile?

Initially, the creators of Thalia and Unicorb wanted to incorporate into their game an electroencephalogram (EEG), which measures signaling from the brain's occipital lobe, where visual information is processed. But because electrical signaling from muscles is more robust, the team instead ultimately incorporated into their game an electromyogram (EMG), which measures the electrical activity of resting and contracting muscles.

Although EMGs have previously been used extensively to study facial muscles, the use of EMGs in a video game is novel.

During a game, Thalia's EMG electrodes must be positioned on specific muscles located around each player's mouth, eyes, and other facial areas that move in characteristic ways when people express happiness or surprise. The electrodes capture the muscle player's signaling, which is then amplified and interpreted to control the height and speed of Unicorb's flying unicorn.

"The control signals are designed so you have to use your smiling muscles and surprise muscles," said Youngquist. "The idea is that through facial feedback, we can kind of enforce a state of happiness or positivity in the user."

The creators of Thalia and Unicorb hope that further development of Unicorb may eventually lead to its use as a depression therapy, particularly for young children.

An experiment in progress

The Tech Sandbox competition was first piloted in 2013 as an extracurricular activity. Then, in 2014, it was for the first time offered as part of the Tech Sandbox course. Groups of undergraduate and graduate students enroll in Tech Sandbox as teams and, at the end of the quarter, compete in the annual Tech Sandbox competition.

Although no prerequisites are required to enroll in the Tech Sandbox course, it has, so far, mainly attracted bioengineering students, along with a few students from other disciplines.

"It's kind of an experiment in progress," explained Johnson. "There are no lectures and there is no curriculum. One of the good things about offering it as a course is that there's some sort of incentive for people to do a good job."

Tech Sandbox Benefits

During the 2014 Tech Sandbox course, Johnson requested from each team progress reports so that she could advise them against bad ideas and keep them on track for finishing their devices.

"One of the greatest things you can learn when trying to build a technology in only 10 weeks is what ideas will work and what will not," said Marrett, who aimed to further his understanding of neural engineering through Tech Sandbox. 

"The winning project from last year (2013) has been used in tons and tons of educational and outreach demonstrations," said Johnson, referring to WrestleBrainia 3000 — a game that uses EMG signals from the arms of two human competitors to control arm-wrestling robots. "Everyone had a good time doing it, so we thought that it would be a good thing to continue."

Students in the 2014 Tech Sandbox course benefitted from guidance from Johnson, and advice on their project designs from their teaching assistant Dev Sarma, one of the creators of WrestleBrainia. Also, Tech Sandbox has provided opportunities for undergrads to receive mentoring from teammates who are graduate students; these graduate students, in turn, gain mentoring experience.

"This competition has allowed me to work with graduate students who are quite knowledgeable in their fields," said Maxfield. "It's been quite beneficial to have the group atmosphere and be able to come up with ideas and hash them out logistically."

In 2014, five teams enrolled in Tech Sandbox to win tablets and a chance to demonstrate their understanding of neural engineering. The winning project of the year was vHAB, a virtual reality game that helps stroke patients regain motor control of their hands. Responsive to even the smallest motions made by players, vHAb can be used to help tracks patients' progress and provide them with motivating feedback throughout recovery periods that may be long and excruciating.

The Future of Tech Sandbox

CSNE is currently expanding the unique Tech Sandbox model to partner institutions — MIT, Morehouse College and San Diego State University — to evaluate its potential scalability, particularly for institutions that may be constrained by limited resources or few grad students. Such efforts to improve the adaptability of Tech Sandbox would likely help encourage students from traditionally underrepresented groups to participate in science and engineering.

Keith Roper, an NSF program director who oversees CSNE, said, "The awareness drawn by the Tech Sandbox to cognitive, psychological, and wellness aspects of neural engineering is an outgrowth of interdisciplinary activity at the center, which engages medical and health professionals with engineers to use technology to both advance science and benefit society in important ways."

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

We boast when our infant finally sleeps through the night. We bemoan the teenager who requires a canon shot to arise from his bed before noon. And in our “golden” years, we wonder why sleep is so fleeting, yet napping seems to come as easily as breathing. Such are the mysteries of sleep.

Troubled Sleep

But the mysteries of sleep are more than just a source of passing wonder or inconvenience for many people. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that 70 million Americans suffer from chronic sleep problems that range from insomnia and sleep apnea  to narcolepsy, restless legs syndrome , and circadian rhythm disorders. In addition, “sleep deprivation is associated with injuries, chronic diseases, mental illnesses, poor quality of life and well-being, increased health care costs and lost work productivity,” according to CDC’s Sleep and Sleep Disorders Team, which evaluates the prevalence and impacts of sleep insufficiency and sleep disorders.

To help address such problems, biologists, behavioral scientists, neuroscientists and even mattress makers have, for years, been studying the mysteries of sleep and wakefulness and sleep disorders. But more recently, researchers have recognized that another necessary discipline that should be included in collaborative approaches to sleep-related issues is good ol’ fashioned mathematics. 

Working to Understand Sleep

Contributing to such collaborative approaches is Janet Best — a mathematician at Ohio State University whose research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Also affiliated with the University’s NSF-funded Mathematical Biosciences Institute, Best has spent the past 10 years studying sleep-wake cycles using mathematical models.

“To understand sleep, we try to reformulate biological questions in terms of mathematics, typically systems of differential equations,” she explained. “Sleep is both regular and random. It’s regular in that we go to sleep generally at the same time of day. The randomness occurs in infants who seem to have no pattern to their sleep cycles and in the variability of when we might wake up during the night. I’ve been investigating how neural structures in the brain affect the random and regular transitions between sleep and wake.”

By describing through equations the properties of neurons involved in sleep-wake brain circuitry, Best develops mathematical models that represent ways in which neurons interact and influence each other. She validates her models by checking their predictions against data that biologists gather in studies involving both humans and rats. (Surprisingly, baby rats’ sleep patterns go through similar changes as human infants’ sleep patterns, but it is not clear how similar adult rat sleep is to human sleep.) Once validated, Best’s models can be used to test ideas about sleep and wake patterns.

“The idea is to see how people sleep normally, so we can understand when things go wrong,” Best said. “Throughout the night we experience ‘bouts’ of sleep and wakefulness. There’s variability that we’re aware of, but actually even more variability is occurring – we only recall longer wake episodes. However, both short and long episodes occur, and that’s something I’m trying to understand. Experimentalists collect data on these wake/sleep bouts. Since the length of sleep and wake bouts and the transitions between them show some regular and some random behavior, the differential equations must capture both of these facets.”

A Personal Interest

Best became interested in studying sleep when — while working on her doctorate in mathematics — she was involved in a bike accident in which she sustained a serious head injury. After the accident, she began to experience simultaneous sleep and wakeful moments. In other words, while awake, she had dreams that were not daydreams. Also, after Best’s accident, her brain began to store memories and dreams in almost the same way, and so it became difficult for her to distinguish one from the other. The medical literature of the time, however, said her experience was impossible. 

“In 10 years, there have been a lot of changes in this field,” she said. “Ten years ago, the emphasis was on regular patterns. Now the random aspects of sleep are getting more attention. Models are now based on the real underlying physiology.”

Collaborative Approaches

Best and her collaborators work to develop such models based, in part, on collaborations with non-mathematicians. To this end, Best reads papers by biologists and neuroscientists that present new data and new ideas related to specific challenges in people’s sleep cycles. For example, a paper by a biologist or neuroscientist might present new data on a subgroup of people with a specific challenge in with their sleep cycles that Best may plug into her models. Best’s research also involves working directly with sleep/wake researchers who conduct experiments on rodents or who see patients clinically.

“You need a lot of interaction with biologists and medical scientists, and you have to have conversations with the people who generate the data,” Best said. “If I relied just on reading the papers, I would not be able to understand all of the underlying hypotheses and the ways in which the data was collected, and that could significantly affect how I formulate the mathematical models.”

Best’s research also benefits from her affiliation with Ohio State’s Mathematical Biosciences Institute, which hosts 12 workshops a year, drawing world-renowned bioscience experts and providing important opportunities for cross-fertilization between biologists and mathematicians.

Modeling the complexities of the brain

“The understanding of sleep-wake cycles can have enormous impact on developing a better knowledge of the dynamics of the brain and, in turn, how systems within an entire physiological organism interact and function,” said Mary Ann Horn, an NSF Division of Mathematical Sciences program director. “Research that involves collaboration between mathematical and biological scientists gives rise to results for which not only does the biology inform the modeling and analysis, but also spurs new mathematical developments as novel techniques are developed to address these challenging questions.”

 “It’s enormously difficult to figure out how the brain works,” Best said. “We’re talking about 200 million neurons, all this chemistry, hormones — so many variables. We have to infer how brains accomplish their tasks. And there are always multiple ways that a particular task can happen, so the challenge comes in teasing apart information, and in my case, building a good model that helps fill in the missing pieces.”

So far, models of sleep/wake cycles developed by Best and her collaborators indicate that the longer a “wake bout” lasts during the night, the less likely it is to be interrupted by sleep. But the models also indicate that the same pattern does not appear to apply to a “sleep bout” — which seems to be equally prone to interruption at any moment. In addition, the models have helped reveal the structure of the neuronal network affects the timing of the sleep/wake bouts. 

Findings such as these about quirky sleep phenomena may, bit by bit, help advance our understanding of the underlying sleep/wake mechanism — and thereby support the development of models of this mechanism. Ultimately, such models may help researchers develop insomnia treatments, effective remedies for medical condition-induced sleep disorders, or strategies to reduce jet lag more quickly. 

“There are a lot of data from sleep studies,” Best said, “but data by itself does not give understanding. To gain understanding, one must understand the underlying neural mechanisms. The sleep/wake field is growing very rapidly now and this is providing new data for us to interpret and understand. The mathematical analysis and the comparison with new data should enable us to formulate a new understanding of how sleep-wake functions.”

The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

If there were a competition for “best father” in the animal kingdom, owl monkeys might very well win.

Why? Because father owl monkeys provide most of the care needed by their young; they carry their young almost all the time, even when chased by predators. By contrast, caregiving from owl monkey mothers to their young is limited almost exclusively to nursing.

Devoted Dads

Considering the high prevalence of “deadbeat dads” and even “cannibal dads ” in the animal kingdom, why — of all creatures — are father owl monkeys so attentive and protective of their young? This question is answered by Patricia C. Wright of Stony Brook University in the accompanying video. 

Wright’s insights on owl monkeys are largely based on her many years of researching them in the rainforests of South America . Her research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

A renowned primate researcher and conservationist, Wright is the 2014 winner of the Indianapolis Prize, which is generally regarded as the Nobel Prize of conservation, and the author of High Moon over the Amazon: My Quest to Understand the Monkeys of the Night (Lantern Books: 2013).

Wild for Monogamy

Wright said that are owl monkeys are not only devoted fathers, but are also truly monogamous — another rarity in the wild. An owl monkey is faithful to its mate until its mate dies. The unflagging fidelity of owl monkeys has been verified by DNA fingerprinting, similar to the type of DNA fingerprinting used in the courts to prove human paternity.

By contrast, DNA fingerprinting has revealed that many animal species that were once thought to be truly monogamous are really social monogamous instead—meaning that a male and female form a long-term pair; mate and raise their young together; and spend time together, but may nevertheless occasionally mate with others. Amazingly, owl monkeys  are even more loyal to their mates than are those classic icons of love and fidelity—swans, which were recently revealed by DNA fingerprinting to be socially monogamous rather than truly monogamous.

Taking Back the Night

In addition to being good fathers and staunchly faithful mates, owl monkeys have another extraordinary trait: They are nocturnal — even though they were once daytime creatures, as indicated by certain characteristics of their eyes, said Wright. Lacking built-in flashlights, why would any species return to the night?

Wright’s field research suggests several potential reasons why owl monkeys may have joined the night life. For one thing, Wright observed families of owl monkeys snuggle and sleep together in protected tangles of vines or tree holes during the day, and then climb into the forest canopy to find their favorite tree fruits at night.

Wright speculates that owl monkeys, which are relatively small monkeys, hide and sleep during the day in order to avoid huge, day-hunting raptors, such as harpy eagles and hawks, which regularly swoop down from the skies and snatch even large monkeys that dangle and jump through the tall forest canopy during the day. Also, by only searching for tree fruits during the night, owl monkeys avoid competing with larger monkeys that spend their days hunting for the same foods. So by “time sharing” the canopy with larger monkeys in a day/night cycle, owl monkeys increase their potential for collecting food while reducing their risk from predators.

Learn More

NSF article and slide show: Animal Attraction: The Many Forms of Monogamy in the Animal Kingdom

WashingtonPost.com chat with a former NSF program director: From Devoted, to Deadbeat, to Cannibal: How Animal Fathers Survive in the Wild.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Compared to the monumental machines of science, such as the International Space Station  or the Large Hadron Collider , the human brain doesn't look like much. However, this three-pound amalgam of squishy cells is one of the most complicated and complex structures in the known universe.

Understanding the fundamental wiring of the brain, with its hundreds of billions of neurons, each with an inner world of organelles and molecular components, is a major undertaking — one that has received a commitment of at least $100 million worth of federal funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. 

Protecting or repairing this complicated machine and all of its interconnected structures means thinking like an engineer.

"The idea is really quite simple," says Vivek Shenoy, an NSF-supported professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science. "All of the mechanical properties of cells come from their cytoskeleton and the molecules within it. They're all reinforcing frames, like the frame in a building. Engineers design buildings and other structural objects to make sure they don't fail, so it's the same principle: structural engineering on a very, very small level."

Shenoy applies this approach to a problem very much in the public eye — traumatic brain injury (TBI). Even the mildest forms of TBI, better known as concussions, can do irreversible damage to the brain. More serious forms can be fatal.  [Concussions Deal Bigger Blow to Men Than Women ]

Shenoy has a background in mechanical engineering and materials science, but his method for addressing TBIs does not involve designing new helmets or other safety devices. Instead, he and his colleagues are uncovering the fundamental math and physics behind one of the core mechanisms of the injury: swelling in axons (the tendril-like offshoots of neurons) caused by damage to internal structures known as microtubules. These neural "train tracks" transport molecular cargo from one end of a neuron to another; when the tracks break, the cargo piles up and produces bulges in the axons that are the hallmark of fatal TBIs. 

Armed with a better understanding of the mechanical properties of these critical structures, Shenoy and his colleagues are laying the foundations for drugs that could one day bolster neurons' reinforcing frames, increasing their resilience to a TBI-inducing impact. 

Train Tracks and Crossties 

The first step toward achieving this improved understanding of neural "train tracks" was resolving a paradox: why were the microtubules, the stiffest elements of the axons, the parts that were breaking when loaded with the stress of a blow to the head? 

Shenoy's team showed that the answer rests with a critical brain protein known as tau, which is implicated is several neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's. If microtubules are like train tracks, tau proteins are the crossties that hold them together. The protein's elastic properties help explain why rapid movement of the brain, whether on a football field or a car crash, lead to TBI.

Shenoy's colleague Douglas Smith, professor of neurosurgery in Penn's Perelman School of Medicine and director of the Penn Center for Brain Injury and Repair, had previously studied the mechanical properties of axons, subjecting them to strains of different forces and speeds. 

"What we saw is that with slow loading rates, axons can stretch up to at least 100 percent with no signs of damage," Smith said. "But at faster rates, axons start displaying the same swellings you see in the TBI patients. This process occurs even with relatively short stretches at fast rates."

To explain this rate-dependent response, Shenoy and Smith had to delve deeper inside the structure of microtubules. Building on Smith's work, other biophysical modelers had previously accounted for the geometry and elastic properties of the axon during a stretching injury, but they did not have good data for representing tau's role. 

"You need to know the elastic properties of tau," Shenoy said, "because when you load the microtubules with stress, you load the tau as well. How these two parts distribute the stress between them is going to have major impact on the system as a whole."

Elastic Properties

Shenoy and his colleagues had a sense of tau's elastic properties but did not have hard numbers until 2011, when a Swiss and German research team physically stretched out lengths of tau, plucking it with the tip of an atomic force microscope.

"This experiment demonstrated that tau is viscoelastic," Shenoy said. "Like Silly Putty, when you add stress to it slowly, it stretches a lot. But if you add stress to it rapidly, like in an impact, it breaks."

This behavior is caused by the arrangement of the strands of tau protein: they are coiled up and bonded to themselves in different places. Pulled slowly, those bonds can come undone, lengthening the strand without breaking it. 

"The damage in traumatic brain injury occurs when the microtubules stretch but the tau doesn't, as they can't stretch as far," Shenoy said. "If you're in a situation where the tau doesn't stretch, such as what happens in fast strain rates, then all the strain will transfer to the microtubules and cause them to break."

With a comprehensive model of the tau-microtubule system, the researchers were able to boil down the outcome of rapid stress loading to equations with only a handful of variables. This mathematical understanding allowed the researchers to produce a phase diagram that shows the dividing line between strain rates that leave permanent damage versus ones that are safe and reversible.

Next Steps

Deriving this mathematical understanding of the interplay between tau and microtubules is only the beginning.

"Predicting what kind of impacts will cause these strain rates is still a complicated problem," Shenoy said. "I might be able to measure the force of the impact when it hits someone's head, but that force then has to make its way down to the axons, which depends on a lot of different things.

"You need a multiscale model, and our work will be an input to those models on the smallest scale."

In the longer term, identifying the parameters that lead to irreversible damage could lead to a better understanding of brain injuries and diseases and to new preventive measures. Eventually, it may even be possible to design drugs that alter microtubule stability and the elasticity of axons that have been involved in a traumatic brain injury; Smith's group has already demonstrated that treatment with the microtubule-stabilizing drug taxol reduced the extent of axon swellings and degeneration after injuries in which they are stretched. 

Ultimately, insights on the molecular level will contribute to a more comprehensive view of the brain and its many hierarchies of organizations. 

"When you're talking about something's mechanical properties, stiffness is what comes to mind," Shenoy said. "Biochemistry is what determines that stiffness in the brain's structures, but that's only at the molecular level. Once you build it up and formulate things at the appropriate scale, protecting the brain becomes more of a structural engineering problem." 

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Mudslides. Landslides. Volcanic debris flows. Avalanches. Falling rocks . . .

They may bury and destroy homes, roads and even towns with little or no warning. Recently, we've had dramatic reminders of the unpredictability and variability of these types of natural disasters: a mudslide in Oso, Wash. , that killed 41 people, an avalanche on Mt. Everest that killed 13 experienced Sherpas, and a non-fatal, but destructive, relatively slow-moving landslide that occurred in mid-April in Jackson, Wyoming.

Although ancient Pompeii is but one dramatic, historic reminder of Mother Nature's power of surprise, what has long seemed extraordinarily incalculable is becoming … well, calculable.

Adults may remember simple math story problems from elementary school, such as, "If an avalanche flow is moving at a rate of 50 meters per second, how long will it take to swallow up a village located 30 kilometers away?" Unfortunately, for geologists and others researching mudslides, landslides, volcanic debris flows, avalanches and rock falls, the particulars make the solution far from simple algebra.

After all, earthen, volcanic and snowy materials — all of which can move quickly downhill — do so at varying rates depending on their composition, the composition of the geological features over which they flow and the weather. Though it may be challenging to model the way rocks, ice, lava and volcanic gases are likely to move and where they are likely to go post-volcano or during a particularly wet spring, the results of such analyses may ultimately support policymaking, urban planning, insurance risk assessment and most importantly public safety.

One NSF-funded mathematician, E. Bruce Pitman from the University of Buffalo, has researched the dynamics of flowing granular materials modeling since 2001, when his engineering and geology colleagues came together to start estimating volcanic flow.

"You see these wonderful volcanic eruptions with the plumes, but gravity currents are going down the mountain even as all this stuff is going up into the air," Pitman said. "It can be very deadly. And depending on the mountain — if there's snow on the mountain — then you have this muddy sort of muck, so it can go even faster downhill." (Volcanic flows and mudslides are examples of what geoscientists call gravity currents.)

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, landslides and debris flows result in 25 to 50 deaths each year in the United States. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reports that "all 50 states and the U.S. territories experience landslides and other ground-failure problems," including 36 states with "moderate to highly severe landslide hazards," which include the Appalachian and Rocky mountains, Pacific Coast regions and Puerto Rico. USGS notes that areas denuded because of wildfires or overdevelopment are particularly vulnerable to the whims of what's termed generally as "ground failures."

Pitman has spent the past 13 years studying the flows of the Soufrière Hills volcano on Montserrat, the Colima volcano west of Mexico City, and the Ruapehu volcano in New Zealand, among other sites. Working with an engineer whose expertise is in high performance computing, statisticians, and several geologists, Pitman studies geophysical mass flows, specifically volcanic avalanches and pyroclastic (hot gas and rock) flows, which are "dry" flows.

"We started modeling volcanic flows as dry volcanic flows, so the equation described the material as each particle frictionally sliding over the next particle," Pitman said. "However, we knew it wasn't only solid particles. There could be air or water too, so we developed another model. This naturally makes the analysis harder. In mudslides, you have to factor in mud, which is a viscoplastic fluid—partly like a fluid but also able to deform like a plastic material and never rebound. In wet or dry materials, you can make some reasonable predictions because flow is more or less the same. It is much harder to do that with mud."

Pitman explained the way a mathematician works to develop a predictive model of a landslide.

"There are three questions," he said:

"First, is something going to happen? That is notoriously difficult — what's going on under the ground? Where's the water table? How much moisture is in the soil? What's the structure of the soil? Since we can't look under the ground, we have to make all kinds of assumptions about the ground, which poses difficulties.

"Secondly, if a slide were to occur, what areas are at risk? That's something that with a math model you can hope to explain. OK, is the east, west, north or south slope going to slip? How large a flow? Which areas downstream are at risk?

"Lastly, you have to ask what part of the model do you most care about. This helps you to simplify the modeling. Then you run the what-if scenarios to determine the greatest risk. Is it an area at risk and do mudslides happen regularly?"

We might be inclined to think that lava flows are far more complicated to model because of the issues of heat and explosive force, says Michael Steuerwalt, a National Science Foundation Division of Mathematical Sciences program director. However, a mix of dramatically different particle sizes and shapes — which range from dirt grains to people, cars, houses, boulders and trees — can considerably complicate a slide model.

"If you're trying to deduce, for example, where under this mudslide is the house that used to be way up there (along with its inhabitants), then the model is very complicated indeed," Steuerwalt said. "Math won't solve this problem alone, either. But with topographic data, soil data and predictions of precipitation, one could make assessments of where not to build and estimates of risk. This really is an opportunity for mathematicians coupled not only with statisticians, but also with geographers, geoscientists and engineers."

Ultimately, the process needs good data. But it is also about understanding where the model has simplified the equation and created "errors."

"This may sound odd, but it's not about developing the perfect model," Pitman said. "All models have errors in them because we make simplifications to wrap our brains around the physical processes at work. The key is quantifying those errors."

So, essentially the mathematician has to know where to simplify the equation, and that too comes with his collaborative approach and working with other experts, such as volcanologists, and then interfacing with public safety officials.

For a guy who "hated" math in the fifth grade and majored in physics initially in college, this work has turned into something he loves, but also something where he feels he makes a difference. "I love how this work stretches me and my ability to understand other fields," he said. "I get to explore what interests them and what just might be the little hook that allows me to pry apart a problem."

The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

One of Charles Darwin's lesser-known hypotheses posits that closely related species will compete for food and other resources more strongly with one another than with distant relatives, because they occupy similar ecological niches. Most biologists long have accepted this to be true.

Thus, three researchers were more than a little shaken to find that their experiments on fresh water green algae failed to support Darwin's theory — at least in one case.

"It was completely unexpected," says Bradley Cardinale, associate professor in the University of Michigan's school of natural resources & environment. "When we saw the results, we said 'this can't be."' We sat there banging our heads against the wall. Darwin's hypothesis has been with us for so long, how can it not be right?"

The researchers — who also included Charles Delwiche, professor of cell biology and molecular genetics at the University of Maryland, and Todd Oakley, a professor in the department of ecology, evolution and marine biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara — were so uncomfortable with their results that they spent the next several months trying to disprove their own work. But the research held up.

"The hypothesis is so intuitive that it was hard for us to give it up, but we are becoming more and more convinced that he wasn't right about the organisms we've been studying," Cardinale says. "It doesn't mean the hypothesis won't hold for other organisms, but it's enough that we want to get biologists to rethink the generality of Darwin's hypothesis."

Preserving species

The assumptions underlying Darwin's hypothesis are important for conservation policy, since they essentially encourage decision-makers to prioritize species preservation based on how evolutionarily or genetically unique they are. "We don't have enough time, people or resources to save everything," Cardinale says. "A large number of species will go extinct and we have to prioritize which ones we will save.

"Many biologists have argued that we should prioritize for conservation those species that are genetically unique, and focus less on those species that are genetically more similar," he adds. "The thinking is that you might be able to tolerate the loss of species that are redundant. In other words, if you lost a redundant species, you might not see a change."

But if scientists ultimately prove Darwin wrong on a larger scale, "then we need to stop using his hypothesis as a basis for conservation decisions," Cardinale says. "We risk conserving things that are the least important, and losing things that are the most important. This does bring up the question: How do we prioritize?"

The scientists did not set out to disprove Darwin, but, in fact, to learn more about the genetic and ecological uniqueness of fresh water green algae so they could provide conservationists with useful data for decision-making. "We went into it assuming Darwin to be right, and expecting to come up with some real numbers for conservationists," Cardinale says. "When we started coming up with numbers that showed he wasn't right, we were completely baffled." [Creationism vs. Evolution: 6 Big Battles ]

The National Science Foundation is supporting the work with $2 million over five years, awarded in 2010.

Experiments with green algae

The researchers sequenced 60 species of algae most common in North America and can describe with a high certainty their evolutionary relationships. "We know which ones are ancient and have become genetically unique, and which are new and recently diverged," he says.

Their experiments involved taking closely related species and competing them against one another, and taking evolutionarily ancient distantly related species and similarly pitting them against each other.

They also sent graduate students into natural lakes to gather samples, including one lake with "the most spectacular group of green algae, " as well as something else, prompting the nickname "Leech Lake." When the students stood in the water to collect their samples, "the entire bottom of the lake would start moving toward them, " Cardinale says. "They would congregate on their boots, and start crawling up their legs. The challenge was to get the samples before the leeches got into their waders. "

Samples obtained, they put crosses of species that have different evolutionary histories into bottles and measured how strongly they compete for essential resources such as nitrogen, phosphorus and light.

"If Darwin had been right, the older, more genetically unique species should have unique niches, and should compete less strongly, while the ones closely related should be ecologically similar and compete much more strongly — but that's not what happened," Cardinale says. "We didn't see any evidence of that at all. We found this to be so in field experiments, lab experiments and surveys in 1,200 lakes in North America where evolution cannot tell us which species co-exist in lakes in nature.

"If Darwin was right, we should've seen species that are genetically different and ecologically unique, doing unique things and not competing with other species," he adds. "But we didn't."

Traits and the quality of competition

Certain traits determine whether a species is a good competitor or a bad competitor, he says. "Evolution does not appear to predict which species have good traits and bad traits," he says. "We should be able to look at the Tree of Life, and evolution should make it clear who will win in competition and who will lose. But the traits that regulate competition can't be predicted from the Tree of Life."

The scientists have a few ideas of what may be going on, and why Darwin's hypothesis is incorrect, at least for this group of organisms.

"Organisms like algae can be plastic. Maybe they all have the same genes that do the same things and can turn them off and on at different times," he says. "Maybe they sometimes can flip a switch for nitrogen on or off, or all at the same time. If we are correct, and they are not diverging in the genes that control competition, maybe they are diverging in other genes."

Darwin "was obsessed with competition," Cardinale says. "He assumed the whole world was composed of species competing with each other, but we found that one-third of the species of algae we studied actually like each other. They don't grow as well unless you put them with another species. It may be that nature has a heck of a lot more mutualisms than we ever expected.

"Maybe species are co-evolving," he adds. "Maybe they are evolving together so they are more productive as a team than they are individually. We found that more than one-third of the time, that they like to be together. Maybe Darwin's presumption that the world may be dominated by competition is wrong."

Cardinale's broad research goal is to gain a better understanding of how human alteration of the environment affects the biotic diversity of communities and, in turn, the impact of this loss on fluxes of energy and matter required to sustain life. "I focus on this because I believe that global loss of biodiversity ranks among the most important and dramatic environmental problems in modern history," he says.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Every organism on Earth, from microbes to plants to large predators, has evolved unique survival mechanisms and distinct ecological roles. For decades, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded basic research on how these varied organisms — the Earth's biodiversity — functions.

Some of this research has serendipitously yielded unforeseen discoveries that provide important societal benefits. Many of these discoveries would probably not have been produced through mechanisms other than basic research.

For example, recent findings about how geckos climb vertical walls and walk across ceilings led to the development of new adhesives as well as wall-climbing robots that may one day be used to, for example, produce gravity-defying climbing boots and help collect space junk.

Kellar Autumn of Lewis & Clark College, who helped characterize the nanophysics of the gecko's Spider Man-like abilities, said, "Geckos, which evolved 160 million years ago, are so novel that engineers would never have developed nano-adhesive structures without them. It took 15 years and lots of NSF support to understand the basic physical principles of gecko adhesion and then to apply them to make them work. This suggests that there is a library of biodiversity that can be mined for valuable uses if we have enough resources and enough time — in light of high extinction rates — to really understand them." [10 Surprising Ways that Biodiversity Benefits the Economy]

The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

Extremophile kick-starts new industries:

After the discovery of a bacterium that lives at extremely high temperatures in Yellowstone National Park’s hot springs, scientists extracted a heat-resistant enzyme that helps copy DNA. This enzyme was used to develop a lab technique for rapidly duplicating DNA with the help of repeated heating and cooling cycles. Known as the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), this technique enables DNA fingerprinting, an essential forensics tool, and much of the biotechnology industry, worth more than $95 billion today.

Unlikely microbes advance brain research:

By illuminating light-sensitive proteins that have been inserted into a brain neuron (depicted here), scientists are able to turn on the neuron; the technique is called optogenetics. Scientists in laboratories all over the world use optogenetics to turn target neurons on and off, thus helping to identify the neurons’ functions. One goal is appropriate treatment targets for brain diseases ) — including schizophrenia and Parkinson’s, disorders such as anxiety, and traumatic brain injuries — which cumulatively cost the U.S. many billions of dollars annually. The development of optogenetics was made possible by earlier research on light-sensitive proteins in two microbes that don’t even have brains: an extremophile from super salty Saharan lakes and a common algae. Learn more here, here and here.

Geckos inspire more than car insurance:

Geckos can scamper up vertical walls and across ceilings because their feet have billions of tiny fibers that contact surfaces closely enough to form intermolecular bonds with them. The cumulative power of these fibers holds the foot in place. Made from tiny synthetic hairs that function like gecko bristles, gecko-inspired adhesives offer up to 100 times the gecko’s gripping power, and can be easily attached and detached from surfaces if manipulated correctly. Such adhesives may be used to improve medical equipment, climbing shoes and cell phones.

Walking in the gecko’s footsteps:

Wall-climbing robots are specially designed to walk and climb with gecko-inspired adhesives affixed to the bottom of their feet so that they can easily attach and detach their feet as they move. Potential applications for such robots include climbing on space structures, positioning sensors on high walls for monitoring air pollution, participating in search-and-rescue missions and finding cracks in bridges. Learn more here. Robots inspired by animals and insects represent the next wave of robotics. Why? Because of new ultra-sensitive tools for analyzing how organisms move and new materials for building bio-inspired robots that are resilient and tough enough to perform under real-world conditions.

Preventing bees from buzzing off:

Honeybees pollinate about $20 billion worth of U.S. farm products. But honeybee populations are threatened by factors including colony collapse disorder--the sudden disappearance and death of adults from hives. Marla Spivak of the University of Minnesota, shown here with a bee beard (Don’t try this at home!), is researching bee health to help combat these declines and “get bees back on their own six feet.” Learn more here.

Feeding and fueling the world:

Photosynthesizing organisms use sunlight and CO2 to produce sugars and oxygen. But photosynthesis is relatively inefficient. Nevertheless, some species of plants, algae and bacteria have evolved efficiency-boosting mechanisms that reduce energy loss or enhance CO2 delivery to cells during photosynthesis. Scientists are working to improve, combine and engineer such mechanisms. Their goal: to confer efficiency-boosting mechanisms on important crops to increase food production or possibly biofuels production.

Bats are farmers’ friends:

By eating insects, bats annually reduce pesticide costs for U.S. farmers by more than $22 billion. Bats are also essential pollinators of commercially valuable crops, including bananas. But a new, fast-spreading incurable disease — white nose syndrome — threatens the survival of some species. Researchers are racing to identify factors that promote disease susceptibility — information that could support management efforts. (Also note that the development of sonar for ships and ultrasound was partly inspired by bat echolocation--the navigation system used by most bats to find and follow quick-moving insect prey at night without crashing into trees or buildings.) Learn more here.

We need even “pesky” insects:

Research shows that, through evolution, evening primroses grown in insecticide-treated plots quickly lose defensive traits, such as their production of insect-deterring chemicals, which they no longer need in the absence of insects. The message: A loss of insects may yield unwelcome consequences such as the rapid loss of traits we value in plants, such as their good taste, which may have originally evolved to fight insects. Learn more here.

Are species losses sickening?

Studies show that loss of biodiversity harms the health of humans and other animals. Such studies yield information that is important for predicting and controlling many infectious diseases. For example, Lyme disease, primarily carried by white-footed mice, is transmitted to humans by ticks that become infected after biting a carrier. Studies indicate that when forests are degraded, mice thrive in the absence of their predators (which have disappeared from degraded forests). Furthermore, tick-eating opossums also vanish from degraded forests, so encounters between people and infected ticks become more likely. With about 300,000 Lyme diagnoses in the U.S. annually, the disease costs the nation billions of dollars annually. Learn more here and here.

Fighting invaders:

Since fire ants were introduced into the U.S. in the 1930s, they have been wreaking havoc. They now annually cause $5 billion in damages to agricultural and recreational resources by damaging farming fields and equipment with their nests and injuring people and animals with their painful stings. Because standard insecticides have not stopped them, researchers are taking new approaches. They recently identified genes that underlie social structure and communication within fire ant colonies. This will allow for the development of tools that would help destroy fire ant colonies by disrupting the chemical signals these insects use to communicate. Learn more here.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Somewhere out in the cosmos an ordinary galaxy spins, seemingly at slumber. Then all of a sudden, WHAM! A flash of light explodes from the galaxy's center. A star orbiting too close to the event horizon of the galaxy's central supermassive black hole has been torn apart by the force of gravity, heating up its gas and sending out a beacon to the far reaches of the Universe.

In a Universe with tens of billions of galaxies, how would we see it? What would such a beacon look like? And how would we distinguish it from other bright, monumental intergalactic events, such as supernovas?

"Black holes by themselves do not emit light," said Tamara Bogdanovic, assistant professor of physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "Our best chance to discover them in distant galaxies is if they interact with the stars and gas that are around them."

In recent decades, with improved telescopes and observational techniques designed to repeatedly survey the vast numbers of galaxies in the sky, scientists noticed that some galaxies that previously looked inactive would suddenly light up at their very center.

"This flare of light was found to have a characteristic behavior as a function of time. It starts very bright and its luminosity then decreases in time in a particular way," she explained. "Astronomers have identified those as galaxies where a central black hole just disrupted and 'ate' a star. It's like a black hole putting up a sign that says 'Here I am.'"

Using a mix of theoretical and computer-based approaches, Bogdanovic tries to predict the dynamics of events such as the black-hole-devouring-star scenario described above, also known as a "tidal disruption." Such events would have a distinct signature to someone analyzing data from a ground-based or space-based observatory.

Using National Science Foundation-funded supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (Stampede) and the National Institute for Computational Sciences (Kraken), Bogdanovic and her collaborators recently simulated the dynamics of these super powerful forces and charted their behavior using numerical models.

Tidal disruptions are relatively rare cosmic occurrences. Astrophysicists have calculated that a Milky Way-like galaxy stages the disruption of a star only once in about 10,000 years. The luminous flare of light, on the other hand, can fade away in only a few years. Because it is such a challenge to pinpoint tidal disruptions in the sky, astronomical surveys that monitor vast numbers of galaxies simultaneously are crucial.

Huge difference

So far, only a few dozen of these characteristic flare signatures have been observed and deemed "candidates" for tidal disruptions. But with data from PanSTARRS, Galex, the Palomar Transient Factory and other upcoming astronomical surveys becoming available to scientists, Bogdanovic believes this situation will change dramatically.

"As opposed to a few dozen that have been found over the past 10 years, now imagine hundreds per year — that's a huge difference!" she said. "It means that we will be able to build a varied sample of stars of different types being disrupted by supermassive black holes."

With hundreds of such events to explore, astrophysicists' understanding of black holes and the stars around them would advance by leaps and bounds, helping determine some key aspects of galactic physics.

"A diversity in the type of disrupted stars tells us something about the makeup of the star clusters in the centers of galaxies," Bodganovic said. "It may give us an idea about how many main sequence stars, how many red giants, or white dwarf stars are there on average."

Tidal disruptions also tell us something about the population and properties of supermassive black holes that are doing the disrupting.

"We use these observations as a window of opportunity to learn important things about the black holes and their host galaxies," she continued. "Once the tidal disruption flare dims below some threshold luminosity that can be seen in observations, the window closes for that particular galaxy."

Role of supercomputer

In a recent paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, Bogdanovic, working with Roseanne Cheng (Center for Relativistic Astrophysics at Georgia Tech) and Pau Amaro-Seoane (Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam, Germany), considered the tidal disruption of a red giant star by a supermassive black hole using computer modeling.

The paper comes on the heels of the discovery of a tidal disruption event in which a black hole disrupted a helium-rich stellar core, thought to be a remnant of a red giant star, named PS1-10jh, 2.7 billion light years from Earth.

The sequence of events they described aims to explain some unusual aspects of the observational signatures associated with this event, such as the absence of the hydrogen emission lines from the spectrum of PS1-10jh.

As a follow-up to this theoretical study, the team has been running simulations on Georgia Tech's Keeneland supercomputer, as well as Kraken and Stampede. The simulations reconstruct the chain of events by which a stellar core, similar to the remnant of a tidally disrupted red giant star, might evolve under the gravitational tides of a massive black hole.

"Calculating the messy interplay between hydrodynamics and gravity is feasible on a human timescale only with a supercomputer," Roseanne Cheng said. "Because we have control over this virtual experiment and can repeat it, fast forward, or rewind as needed, we can examine the tidal disruption process from many perspectives. This in turn allows us to determine and quantify the most important physical processes at play."

The research shows how supercomputer simulations complement and constrain theory and observation.

"There are many situations in astrophysics where we cannot get insight into a sequence of events that played out without simulations. We cannot stand next to the black hole and look at how it accretes gas. So we use simulations to learn about these distant and extreme environments," Bogdanovic said.

One of Bogdanovic's goals is to use the knowledge gained from simulations to decode the signatures of observed tidal disruption events.

"The most recent data on tidal disruption events is already outpacing theoretical understanding and calling for the development of a new generation of models," she explained. "The new, better quality data indicates that there is a great diversity among the tidal disruption candidates. This is contrary to our perception, based on earlier epochs of observation, that they are a relatively uniform class of events. We are yet to understand what causes these differences in observational appearance, and computer simulations are guaranteed to be an important part of this journey."

Other stories that might be of interest:

Modeling Protostellar Disks to Understand How Planets Are Born

Dense Cloud Breaks Rules of Star Formation

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

The American Brain Tumor Association says this year nearly 70,000 people in the United States will be diagnosed with tumors that form in blood vessels, cranial nerves, lymphatic tissue and other parts of the brain. Of those, nearly 12,000 people will be diagnosed with a particularly deadly form of brain cancer called glioblastoma multiforme (GBM).

GBMs hide behind a protective barrier in the brain and, among other things, attack white blood cells that serve as the body's defense. With some innovative science, National Science Foundation- (NSF) funded researchers are working to improve the ability of those same white blood cells to attack the cancers right back.

Stefan Bossmann and Deryl Troyer at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., are developing a new materials treatment method that uses a type of white blood cell called a neutrophil to slip medications past the brain's protective barrier and strike down malignant tumors directly.

"The goal of our research is to use cells as transport ships for anticancer drugs," explains Bossmann. "Defensive cells — essentially, white blood cells — have the ability of moving through [the blood-brain barrier], including bone tissue, to tumors and metastases."

In principle, using cells to carry drugs to intended targets is a pretty straightforward concept. However, creating a "cargo hold" within the cells that is sturdy enough to successfully carry a medicinal payload to a desired endpoint has been a challenge.

Previous efforts have resulted in cargo holds that leak, burst prematurely or fuse with the cells that carry them, causing the drugs to be released before reaching their target and killing the transport cells, not the tumors.

A new class of "cages"

To solve the problem, Bossmann and Troyer are developing a new type of caged liposome. Liposomes essentially are artificial bubbles created within cells that can be used as vessels to carry and administer therapeutic drugs. [Microbubbles Smuggle Drugs Transdermally]

The researchers are creating self-assembling"cages" that wrap around liposomes — turning them into more secure cargo-holds. Their process involves loading caged liposomes with anticancer medicine before up-take by neutrophils that will self-destruct and release the drugs when they reach tumors.

The PPCLs proposed by the researchers are designed to be more stable than classic liposomes, prevent systemic leaking during transport and activate only once they integrate into tumors. This should facilitate the killing of fast growing tumor cells and slow-growing cancer stem cells responsible for the reappearance of tumors and the formation of metastases that spread tumors to other parts of the body.

The proposed cell therapy method would work by taking whole blood from cancer patients, then loading redesigned cargo holds within the whole blood's neutrophils with anticancer drugs and afterwards re-injecting the modified neutrophils into the patient's blood stream.

If successful, the approach could deliver more than 50 percent of a prescribed anticancer drug dosage to a target, while leaving the patient's immune system intact. Traditional chemotherapy delivers only about 1-2 percent of a therapeutic drug dose, while nanotherapy delivers only about 10 percent.

"If they can actually do that and deliver the amount of drugs that they think they can, it could make a difference," says Mark Dewhirst, director of Duke University's Tumor Microcirculation Laboratory in Durham, N.C., "a big difference." Dewhirst, who has published more than 400 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and reviews, is one of a number of interested observers.

A new standard of care

The project, "Neutrophil Delivery of Apoptosis-Inducing Anticancer Drugs," is one of 40 projects funded in the first round of an NSF initiative thataddresses extremely complicated and pressing scientific problems. Called INSPIRE, the initiative funds potentially transformative research that does not fit neatly into any one, scientific field, but crosses disciplinary boundaries.

"The focus of this INSPIRE project is to develop basic scientific knowledge of the materials that are being studied," says Joseph Akkara, director of the Biomaterials program in MPS. "In a larger sense, biomedical applications are at present supported by the National Institutes of Health."

NSF's Biomaterials program in its Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) funds the research. It is also co-funded by NSF's Biophotonics program along with its Materials Surface Engineering program, both in the Directorate for Engineering.

"More than half of the patients with GBM will die within a year, and more than 90 percent within three years," says the Director of NSF's Biophotonics program Leon Esterowitz. "The results from this project will exploit patient-specific, tumor-homing cells for treatment delivery and could lead to a new standard of care for brain cancers."

If successful, the strategy could expand to targeting other cell types. The researchers believe the method's principles could evolve into targeted therapies for viral, bacterial and protozoal infections. However, they acknowledge there is still a ways to go.

"Brain tumors remain a disease for which there are many challenges because of the eloquence of the site where they are," says Henry Friedman, an internationally recognized neuro-oncologist and deputy director of Duke's Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center. "No one therapy is going to be the magic bullet, but the more different interventions we have, the more likely we're going to be successful."

This new treatment method "is not going to be the only intervention necessary, but it certainly is going to be part of the spectrum of different therapies that we use," he says. "It is going to be one of additional weapons that may find a place in the treatment of malignant brain tumors."

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

2014 is the year of Year of the Horse in China. But pandas, it turns out, aren't celebrating.

Why not? Because livestock, particularly horses, have been identified as a significant threat to panda survival. The reason: Horses have been beating pandas to the bamboo buffet. Michigan State University (MSU) panda habitat experts revealed the oft-hidden, yet significant, conservation conflict between pandas and horses in a recent article in the Journal for Nature Conservation.

"Across the world, people are struggling to survive in the same areas as endangered animals, and often trouble surfaces in areas we aren't anticipating," said Jianguo "Jack" Liu of MSU. "Creating and maintaining successful conservation policy means constantly looking for breakdowns in the system. In this case, something as innocuous as a horse can be a big problem."

Pandas have specific habitat needs — they live in gently sloping areas far from human populations. And they only eat bamboo . (Watch a panda bellying up to the bamboo buffet here.) China invests billions to protect its panda habitat and conserve the 1,600 remaining endangered supported by this habitat.

Panda in Wolong Nature Reserve eating lunch from CSIS at MSU on Vimeo.

For years, timber harvesting has been the panda's biggest threat. But conservation programs limiting timber harvesting have chalked up wins in preserving panda habitat.

Vanessa Hull, a doctoral student at MSU's Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability (CSIS), has been living off and on for seven years in the Wolong Nature Reserve, most recently tracking pandas that she has outfitted with GPS collars.

Over the years, she started noticing that uninvited guests had apparently been serving themselves at the bamboo buffet — and they were eating like horses … literally.

"It didn't take particular panda expertise to know that something was amiss when we'd come upon horse-affected bamboo patches. They were in the middle of nowhere and it looked like someone had been in there with a lawn mower," Hull said.

Alarmed by the increasing devastation, Hull learned that keeping a horses in this region serves a similar function as maintaining a bank account. Because horses are prohibited from grazing in designated grazing areas, to prevent them from competing for food with cattle, some farmers have been letting horses graze unattended in forests. When these horse-keeping farmers need cash, they track down their horses in the forest and sell them.

Eventually, some Wolong farmers, though not traditionally horse-keepers, learned from horse-keeping friends who lived outside of the reserve that they too could cash in by keeping horses — and letting them loose to graze unattended in Wolong. Where, unfortunately, they would compete for food with pandas.

Over time, the popularity of this practice soared. In 1998, only 25 horses lived in Wolong. By 2008, 350 horses lived there in 20 to 30 herds.

To understand the scope of the problem, Hull and her colleagues put the same type of GPS collars they were using to track pandas on one horse in each of four herds they studied. Then, over a year they compared the activity of the horses with that of three collared adult pandas in some of the same areas, and combined resulting data with habitat data.

The researchers discovered that the galloping gourmets are indeed big on bamboo — and are drawn to the same sunny, gently sloped spots as pandas. Pandas and horses eat about the same amount of bamboo, but a herd of more than 20 horses created veritable feeding frenzies, destroying areas that the reserve was established to protect.

The researchers presented their findings to Wolong's managers, who have since banned horses from the reserve. But Hull and Liu note that this work has shed light on how competitive livestock can be in sensitive habitat — an issue that is duplicated across the globe.

"Livestock affect most of the world's biodiversity hotspots," Liu said. "They make up 20 percent of all of the earth's land mammals and therefore monopolize key resources needed to maintain the earth's fragile ecosystems."

This research project received funding from the National Science Foundation.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

By the end of 2014, Earth will be home to more mobile electronic devices than people.

Smartphones, tablets, e-readers, not to mention wearable health and fitness trackers, smart glasses and navigation devices — today's population is more plugged in than ever before.

But our reliance on devices is not problem-free:

1. Wireless gadgets require regular recharging. While we may think we've cut the cord, we remain reliant on outlets and charging stations to keep our devices up and running.
2. According to a 2009 report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), consumer electronics and information and communication technologies currently account for nearly 15 percent of global residential electricity consumption. What's more, the IEA expects energy consumptions by these devices to double by 2022 and to triple by 2030 — thereby slowly but surely adding to the burden on our power infrastructure.

A team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology may have a solution to both problems: They're developing a new, portable, clean energy source that could change the way we power mobile electronics: human motion.

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

Smaller, lighter, more energy efficient

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

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

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

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

Charging on the go

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

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

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

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

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

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Cool brain facts

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

The human brain is the most complex and least understood biological structure in the known universe.

To advance brain science, President Obama in April 2012 announced the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, which is co-led by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

BRAIN, NSF invested in fundamental brain research that produced amazing discoveries related to humans and animals. Here are 10 recent findings from NSF-funded brain research, running the gamut from insights about the brains of dinosaurs and octopuses to discoveries involving Alzheimer's, brain-controlled machines and more.

Surprise! Some types of wrinkles are good

Our human brain is relatively large for our body size and more wrinkled than the brains of other animals. Brain size and wrinkle numbers correlate with intelligence across species.

The outer layer of the human brain is covered by wrinkles, and the more of them the better. Why? Because these wrinkles increase the surface area available for neurons (the functional units of information processing) without increasing head size, which is good for women during childbirth. Human brain wrinkles are thought to be almost as hereditary as human height.

Elizabeth Atkinson of Washington University in St. Louis recently identified chromosome segments and genes that correlate with wrinkle numbers in about 1,000 baboons, which are genetically similar to humans. The next step: pinpointing exactly where in these genetic regions folding patterns originate, which would provide insights into the evolution of the human brain.

Dinosaurs: Not big and dumb, after all — just big?

A new map of a generalized dinosaur brain suggests the possible existence of a cerebrum, a brain part that controls complex cognitive behaviors in mammals. Although scientists don't know what functions dinosaur cerebrums may have controlled, their existence would suggest that dinosaurs may have performed more complex behaviors than previously believed — such as forming social groups and possibly communicating.

The map is based on inferences from the genetics and organization of crocodile and bird brains. Crocodiles pre-date many dinosaurs and are their closest living relatives, while birds post-date dinosaurs.

Because crocodiles, dinosaurs and birds form an evolutionary chain, scientists believe that these animals' brain structures shared important traits, and so key features of dinosaur brains may be deduced from crocodile and bird brains.

The brain map is also based on fossilized dinosaur skull cavities, which yield implications about the shape of dinosaur brains. Such evidence provides the best clues to the dinosaur brain in the absence of any known fossilized brain tissue from dinosaurs. The dinosaur brain map was created by a team led by Erich Jarvis of Duke University.

A possible explanation for Einstein's intelligence

Studies of Einstein's brain conducted in the 1980s revealed that Einstein had an unusually large number of brain cells, called glia, in his cerebral cortex, and that one type of his glia was unusually large and complexly shaped. Though lacking statistical significance, these studies helped generate interest in glia.

Glia had long been dismissed as connective tissue that doesn't contribute to learning and memory, as do neurons. This idea had become entrenched because glia don't generate electrical signals — considered to be the core of brain function — as do neurons.

Harder evidence of the glia's influence on intelligence includes a 2013 study involving the injection of human glia into the brains of newborn mice. As adults, the injected mice became faster learners than control subjects.

Also, two recent papers promoted a new consensus among leading brain scientists about the importance of glia — which may even promote learning. How? Brain imaging indicates that when people learn new skills, from juggling to playing computer games, the structure of specific brain regions changes. These changes may be due to the glia's formation of myelin, a fatty insulating substance, around axons (nerve fibers), which speeds the transmission of electrical signals from axons.

In mind-computer melds, brains still important

A brain/computer connection is a partnership: A human brain tells a machine what to do and the machine responds accordingly.

When this type of partnership works, a brain and machine may accomplish amazing things together. For example, in experiments, students flew model helicopters using their thoughts via special head caps that were equipped with sensors that decoded their brain activity. In similar setups, people with physical disabilities used a robotic arm to grab cups of coffee.

But humans often struggle to control their mechanical partners, partly because it takes significant time to learn how to do so. One way to reduce this training time may be to improve mind/body awareness — as indicated by a recent study led by Bin He, Director of the Center for Neuroengineering at the University of Minnesota. His results showed that that training in mind/body awareness through practices such as yoga or meditation enabled people to master a brain-computer interface almost five times faster than untrained people did.

Even as brain/computer connections are made more user-friendly, He's results underscore the continuing importance of the human element for these systems.

Scientists may be able to predict when you'll be primed for risky business

Recent advances in brain imaging technology may allow researchers to predict whether someone will make a safe or a risky financial decision based on certain types of brain activity prior to deciding.

According to Brian Knutson and Charlene C. Wu of Stanford University, people who expect to win big show increased activity in certain brain regions, including the nucleus accumbens, which is associated with reward and pleasure, whereas those who expect to lose show increased activity in the anterior insula, which is linked to anxiety and disgust.

The more money at stake, the more activity is seen in those regions. But while more activity in the nucleus accumbens encouraged risk-taking, more activity in the anterior insula reduced risk taking.

These findings imply that when people are more excited, they will take bigger risks. In fact, long-shot wins (like potential lottery wins) powerfully increased both excitement and nucleus accumbens activity, encouraging people to take risks, even as they strayed from the choices of a "rational" person.

Studying people's brains while they consider their risk-taking options reveals insights about why people make certain financial decisions. These findings have implications for individual patterns of risk-taking — such as saving for a 401K — as well as for basic theories that describe group behavior.

Cell-based therapy may ultimately help beat back brain cancers

Brain tumors are the second-leading cause of U.S. cancer-related deaths, with 70,000 diagnoses of this invariably deadly disease made annually.

Now, Stefan Bossmann and Deryl Troyer of Kansas State University are working to improve a type of promising cell therapy that has yet to be used successfully. The researchers' therapy would work by collecting a cancer patient's blood; refurbishing selected white blood cells with "cargo holds" or closed cavities that would be filled with anticancer drugs; and then re-injecting the patient's blood to deliver drugs directly to tumors.

Previous efforts to develop this type of cell therapy produced weak, leaky medicinal cavities that killed carrier cells, not tumors. But the researchers are improving these cavities by developing a new type of material for them that forms something akin to a self-assembling artificial bubble — designed to be selectively absorbed by the right type of white blood cells, remain strong enough to hold medicine and naturally self-destruct upon reaching tumors.

Cell therapy delivers significantly more anticancer drugs to tumors than does conventional chemotherapy and nanotherapy, without damaging the body's immune system.

With preliminary experiments in mice competed, the therapy will soon be used to specifically target mice tumors for the first time, with the hope that this therapy will ultimately be able to be successfully used on human brain tumors.

The octopus: The eyes have it — literally

The octopus is a successful predator, partly because it has excellent eyesight — the best of any invertebrate — which enables it to visually zero in and focus on its prey.

What's more, each of the octopus's eight agile, boneless arms is equipped with about 44 million nerve cells almost 10 percent of all of its neurons). These arm neurons are connected to the animal's brain.

When an octopus spots a tasty-looking fish, resulting visual information travels from the animal's eye to its brain. This information then travels through its arm neurons to help these soft-bodied contortionists determine how to snatch the meal.

Conversely, tactile information, such as the feel of a crab's rough shell, travels back through the octopus's arm to its brain's learning and memory centers to help these clever animals improve their hunting skills.

A team led by Clifton Ragsale of the University of Chicago is the first to use modern molecular techniques to study how the octopus's unique nervous system processes visual information, and if the octopus's processing system significantly differs from that of vertebrates. If such differences are found, they may reveal alternative ways for brains to process visual information and learn. Resulting insights may yield important applications for robotics and image detection devices.

Birds' responses to climate change: It's all in their heads

Different bird species use different cues to determine when to migrate and to reproduce. Whether any particular species will be able to adjust its timing of such activities fast enough to keep up with climate change may partly depend on which cues it uses.

To varying degrees, all bird species use day length as a cue. They measure daylight and anticipate seasonal changes via light-activated receptors located deep in their brains. The light penetrates their skulls without even necessarily passing through their eyes.

Because day length is unaffected by climate change, some long-distance migrators, such as the pied-flycatcher, whose main migratory cue is day length, have maintained fairly consistent arrival times at their spring breeding grounds. Yet, spring temperatures now tend to increase earlier in the year because of climate change. So such migrators now tend to arrive at their breeding grounds late relative to premature springs — and therefore now miss insect population peaks upon which they previously feasted. With less to eat, such migrators are now producing fewer chicks, which may cause population declines.

Some bird species augment day length cues for migrating and/or breeding with other cues, like temperature changes, which are probably also processed in their brains. Changes in the timing of the migratory activities of some temperature-sensitive bird species correlate with climate change-related temperature changes.

But most studies of the processing of day length by birds have addressed only males. Now Nicole Perfito of the University of California, Berkeley is studying how females of two bird species process day length and other cues that influence the timing of egg laying — an important factor in their potential responses to climate change.

Still wanted: A complete parts list of the human brain

The human brain has about 100 billion neurons. But scientists don't yet have a complete inventory of the many types of brain cells that exist and their functions. They also don't understand how electrical and chemical signals from neurons produce thoughts, behaviors and actions.

Without such knowledge, scientists cannot yet explain how traumatic injuries and neurodegenerative diseases impair brain function or should be treated. By comparison, imagine a mechanic trying to fix a car engine without a complete parts list and/or an understanding of how its engine runs!

Yet, new types of brain cells are often being identified, partly because of new brain imaging techniques that can zoom in on the brain to reveal increasing detail, just as Google Maps can zoom in on neighborhoods.

But without a universal classification system, cell types that have already been discovered may have been named and classified according to inconsistent criteria, such as shape, function or location. Therefore, some newly "discovered" cell types may really be rediscovered, renamed cell types.

To standardize the naming of neurons and create a universally accepted inventory of neuron types, Edward Boyden of MIT and others are working with the Allen Institute for Brain Science to create the first comprehensive database of types of brain cells.

Designer antibodies may ultimately help fight Alzheimer's

Antibodies, which are proteins traditionally made by the body's immune system in response to invaders, are already established allies in our fight against the flu virus and other harmful entities. Now, they are being engineered to treat and possibly protect us against disease-linked proteins, such as those associated with Alzheimer's disease.

Such engineering requires designing antibodies that have extreme targeting capabilities so that they can be directed to go where and do exactly what is needed. Antibodies used for therapeutic or experimental reasons are usually taken from immunized animals or enormous antibody libraries. So it's difficult to custom-order them.

Peter Tessier of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York is working to engineer antibodies that have precise properties. By placing DNA sequences of the target protein within antibodies, Tessier may design antibodies to bind to select proteins, such as beta-amyloid plaques, a protein linked with Alzheimer's. Further research may lead to the development of antibodies that recognize and remove toxic particles before they do harm.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

With the help of blue light and special long-pass filters, scientists have uncovered more of the undersea world's secrets. A study published today describes more than 180 species of marine fishes that glow in different colors and patterns, via a process known as biofluorescence.

Scientists already knew that some marine organisms fluoresce, including corals and jellyfish, but this is the first reported evidence of widespread biofluorescence among fishes. "There's a whole light show going on down there, and people never see it," said one of the study's principal authors, John Sparks, a curator in the American Museum of Natural History's (AMNH) Department of Ichthyology.

The findings, published in PLOS ONE, will surely lead to new investigations of the function of biofluorescence as well as research related to the evolution and diversification of marine fishes. They could also lead to the discovery of new fluorescent proteins useful in cancer, brain and other biomedical research.

Biofluorescence is a natural process in which organisms absorb light at one intensity, or wavelength, and emit it at a different, usually lower, level — seen as a different color. In the ocean, the researchers found, fishes absorb the higher energy blue light around them and emit it in glowing greens, reds and oranges. [What Causes Bioluminescence? ]

How did the scientists make the discovery? While taking and processing images of biofluorescent coral for an NSF-funded traveling museum exhibit: Creatures of Light: Nature's Bioluminescence," Sparks and AMNH research associate David Gruber (CUNY) were amazed to see, in the background of one image, an eel glowing bright green. To further explore the phenomenon, they enlisted the help of other researchers and embarked on a series of dive expeditions. Deep underwater near the Bahamas and later the Solomon Islands, the divers shone blue lights on the ocean floor to stimulate intense biofluorescence in fishes. To filter out the obliterating veil of blue light, they wore green visors over their masks and equipped their underwater camera lenses with special long-pass filters. (The researchers note that many fishes have long-pass filters in their eyes, which would allow them to see fluorescent displays.)

With the resulting images, analyses of some 12,000 specimens the team collected over four expeditions, as well as studies after hours at public aquariums, the research team discovered that biofluorescence is common throughout the tree of life for fishes. The researchers identified biofluorescence in 16 orders, 50 families, 105 genera and more than 180 species of fishes. These include the two main fish groups: cartilaginous (sharks and rays) and bony fishes (eels, lizardfishes, gobies, flatfishes).

"We know now [biofluorescence] is considerably widespread and phenotypically variable in marine fishes," said Sparks. The findings "in essence give us a road map to do fine-scale studies within certain groups to learn more about function" of biofluorescence.

Form and function

Fish fluoresce in a wide range of patterns — from simple red/orange coloration to green eye rings to more complex, species-specific patterns of interspersed fluorescent elements on the head, jaws, fins, flank and ventrum. In some cases, the fish's entire body fluoresced, including internally. The patterns were most common and variable in fishes that had cryptic coloration, or camouflage, such as eels, gobies and lizardfishes. It was fascinating to observe major fluorescence pattern and color differences in closely-related species that otherwise look quite similar, said Sparks. Certain closely-related species of lizardfish and gobies, for example, look almost identical under white light, but strikingly different fluorescing under the filtered blue light.

Such findings could mean that fishes use biofluorescence to communicate with other species — differentiating themselves, for example — without signaling predators. This ability could be especially useful during mating rituals under a full moon, when fish are vulnerable to predators.

New protein source?

The AMNH research opens the door to new studies that could yield new proteins for use in biomedical research. "The discovery of green fluorescent protein in a hydrozoan jellyfish in the 1960s has provided a revolutionary tool for modern biologists, transforming our study of everything from the AIDS virus to the workings of the brain," said co-lead author Gruber. "This study suggests that fish biofluorescence might be another rich reservoir of new fluorescent proteins."

Fluorescent proteins can be injected and used to track cellular functions, neural activity and more.

The AMNH-led team included researchers from the University of Kansas, University of Haifa, Israel and Yale University.

Read the paper The Covert World of Fish Biofluorescence on PLOS One.

Watch a related video.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation,the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Nothing seems more universal than the truths of mathematics. It should not matter, most believe, where they are expounded and by whom. Mathematics today is the ultimate portable discipline, unconstrained by time, place, nation or ideology.

Or is it? We mostly take for granted that mathematicians and their truths can freely cross borders and transcend local idiosyncrasies. But at the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, this state of affairs was anything but obvious or inevitable. As a historian of modern mathematics, I spend my days poring over the ordinary details of mathematical life in order to uncover the big story about how and why modern mathematics appears as universal as it does, both in theory and in practice.

For three months this summer, this research took me to universities, libraries and other sites in the history-filled capital city of Paris, France. Thanks to a new partnership between the National Science Foundation and the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research — the Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide (GROW) program for National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows — I have been knee-deep in the memos, budgets, travel receipts, course notes and paper revisions of 60 years ago, in an attempt to explain the global mathematics we see today.

Sixty years ago, mathematicians in Paris were busily rebuilding a world-class system of education and research that had been battered by four years of German occupation during the Second World War a decade before. But these mathematicians did not just reproduce what they had before the war. Instead, they worked together (and competed with each other) to seize new opportunities for travel, collaboration and study made possible by new technologies and international organizations.

Today, in the back rooms of the prestigious Academy of Sciences and the École Polytechnique (Paris's elite two-century-old military academy), you can find centuries of letters, reports and debates about who and what made a good mathematician. Mathematicians in the 1950s argued, for example, over how important a mathematician's international reputation was for his teaching and research at home. They struggled, even, with how to measure such a thing as international reputation. Could a good theory be judged by how many people used it thousands of miles away? Could simply having users so far away, apart from other factors, make a theory better?

Leading Paris mathematicians of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s made regular trips across Europe, North America and sometimes also developing regions like Latin America, North Africa and South Asia. While abroad, they learned mathematics from their global colleagues (both local and visiting from other nations) as they promoted their own theories and methods.

But they also saw different ways of organizing research and teaching, and promoted their own ideas about how mathematics should be used, spread, and supported. Common features of mathematics, such as widely distributed lecture notes and research-oriented seminars led by medium-term visiting scholars, underwent lasting changes amidst the budgetary, logistical, linguistic and other challenges on the frontiers of postwar mathematics.

One leading French mathematician, Laurent Schwartz, had trouble receiving government permission to visit the United States because he was an outspoken communist at a time when the U.S. Department of State vigorously opposed those with his ideology. So instead of visiting the U.S., he toured a long list of other countries, including Brazil, Argentina, India, Vietnam and Algeria, winning passionate followers for his theories and sometimes also his political views, wherever he went. I spent days paging through the records of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which sponsored several of Schwartz's trips.

UNESCO's day-to-day records give a detailed picture of how mathematical scholarship at outposts in the developing world was more connected to well-known top institutions in Europe and America than one might expect. For example, the new regional mathematics center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, may have been dismissed by some as an insignificant backwater institution that should have been grateful for any attention it might receive from famous mathematicians from economic powerhouses. But UNESCO's files (and those elsewhere in Paris) show that the Buenos Aires mathematics center and others like it did more to shape their more famous peer institutions than has been widely recognized.

In particular, the center offered a point of contact for mathematicians on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain – one that forced them to refine and repackage their theories and organizational priorities for a sometimes challenging new setting. Ironically, this increasing interconnection allowed mathematicians to push ahead with increasingly esoteric theories, by assuring them a far-flung audience for their latest and greatest new ideas. In some ways, today's highly specialized mathematics is less universal than it was 50 or 100 years ago.

History is not often made in big dramatic events, but rather in the daily efforts and adaptations of many quiet individuals. My challenge as a historian is to assemble these little pieces into a bigger picture of a period in global history that profoundly shaped later mathematics, and much else besides.

Today's seemingly free flow of mathematical books and papers, as well as the abundance of regional and international meetings and collaborations for producing and sharing new research, are the outcome of years of invisible negotiations amongst individuals and institutions too numerous to name. To comprehend the modern global mathematician sometimes requires a very local perspective.

Editor's Notes: Michael J. Barany recently completed his tenure as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow (Grant No. DGE-0646086) in Princeton University's Program in History of Science. His writings on the history of science and mathematics can be found at http://www.princeton.edu/~mbarany

The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Physicist Daniel Goldman and his fellow researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology shed light on a relatively unexplored subject — how organisms such as sea turtles and lizards move on (or within) sand. If you've ever struggled to walk with even a modicum of grace on a soft, sandy beach, you may appreciate the question. The answers that Goldman's "CRAB lab" (Complex Rheology and Biomechanics Laboratory) uncovers — with the help of living animals and biologically inspired robots — deepen our understanding not only of animal survival, evolution and ecology, but also, potentially, the evolution of complex life forms on Earth. The lab's research also assists the design and engineering of robots that must traverse unstable, uneven terrain — those used in search and rescue operations at disaster sites, for example. 

Goldman first investigated the properties of sand, which can act like a solid, fluid or even a gas, when he was a doctoral student of physics at University of Texas at Austin. Later, as a postdoc in the University of California-Berkeley lab of biologist Robert J. Full (a leader in the field of nature-inspired robots), he helped investigate locomotion on complex terrain — cockroaches' climbing of vertical surfaces, for example, or spiders running over surfaces with few footholds. A fellow researcher, Wyatt Korrf, was interested in movement on a different kind of complex terrain — granular, shifting media. Goldman became hooked, and the two men started working together. "Some of the insights and tools we developed then were incredibly helpful in my early and current research, in particular, air fluidized beds as a way to control ground properties," Goldman says.

To a student or lover of critters, Goldman's job might seem like a dream. He has worked with a large variety of desert dwellers and other animals, including geckos, zebra-tailed lizards, sidewinders , ghost crabs, sandfish, wind scorpions, funnel weaver spiders and hatchling loggerhead sea turtles. In the lab and in the field, he and his colleagues observe these animals as they creep, crawl, walk, run, slither and otherwise transport themselves over or in granular matter. The researchers pin down precise details — the flexible spines on a spider's legs that appear to facilitate movement over a wire mesh, for example, or the way a snake flattens itself when climbing a slope. Then they design robots with the physical elements and movement patterns they want to know more about. With these tests as well as computer simulations and analyses, the team can develop, challenge and refine hypotheses related to physics principles inspired by the animals' movements.

The CRAB lab's cast of robot characters to date includes a robot modeled after baby sea turtles, as well as a sandfish robot.

Flipperbot

Recently, the team studied newly hatched sea turtles hurrying across the beach to the sea — a treacherous journey many of us have seen in nature TV shows. "The best robots people design and build can't out-compete a hatchling sea turtle whose life consists of swimming all the time and using these appendages on land only for half an hour, running from the nest. If a female makes it to adulthood she will use flippers again, of course, to lay eggs," Goldman said. For this study, CRAB lab researcher Nicole Mazouchova and research technician Andrei Savu traveled with a mobile lab to Jekyll Island in Georgia. They video-recorded hatchlings' movements on the beach and in a portable test bed. Analyzing the videos back at the lab, they saw that on more packed sand, the baby turtles used their flippers as rigid struts and to pivot. On looser sand, however, the turtles dug in deeper and bent their wrists. With the help of Flipperbot (you guessed it, a robot with flippers), a poppy seed-filled test bed, plus theoretical modeling by mechanical engineer Paul Umbanhowar of Northwestern University (who also helped make the 'bot), the team confirmed that the turtles' wrist bending helped them avoid slipping and kept their bodies above the sand, minimizing friction and drag. The model revealed how digging in deeper to more sand provided greater efficacy, keeping the substrate from yielding underfoot. "We found [the turtle] extremely sensitive to how deep it puts its flippers into the ground and that it did better when it bends its wrists," Goldman said. They also found the turtles (and Flipperbot) were seriously hindered when trying to navigate sand that had already been disturbed by movement.

Flipperbot — whose movements are surprisingly graceful— is the first robot modeled on sea turtles and tested on granular materials. Its work may someday help engineers make more agile robots as well as advance our understanding of evolution on Earth — especially those first walkers to emerge from the sea. "There is a lot of speculation about the mechanics which allowed early animals to walk on land," says Goldman. "They had hand-like fins or finlike feet and nobody knows in detail how they would have interacted with flowable substrates (like mud and sand)," he says. "We have an eye on biological questions of existing organisms but also those who could have lived in the past. If you look at gazelles, cheetahs — these animals are incredibly agile over terrestrial ground, and they came from things that had no concept of terrestrial ground."

The Flipperbot findings may be useful in other ways as well, such as informing sea turtle conservation strategies.

Sandfish robot

In various studies, Goldman's team has uncovered patterns that can help the engineering of search and rescue robots designed to move over and into debris piles and wreckage. It confirmed, for example, something scientists long suspected: that the chiseled head of the sandfish — a lizard found in north Africa — helps it dive underground. Robot tests showed that the angular head shape not only reduces drag but also generates greater lift forces. Using x-ray imaging to reveal how the sandfish moves under the surface, the researchers found that to escape predators the little lizard tucks its limbs close to its body and undulates through the sand — looking like a true swimmer. The sandfish uses a consistent wave pattern from head to tail that pushes its body against the sand and generates forward motion. This wave pattern optimizes speed and energy use.

In a more recent study involving a six-legged robot, the team used 3D printing technology to make legs of different shapes and physical orientations, and learned that convex robot legs made in the shape of the letter "C" worked out best.

Developing 'terradynamics'

It may be tempting to regard the CRAB lab's unique robots as the end rather than the means of research. But the machines are first a way to develop and confirm hypotheses, Goldman says. The lab, which is funded in part by the National Science Foundation's Physics of Living Systems and Dynamical Systems programs is steadily identifying basic principles that will significantly advance understanding of how objects move on or in granular media. "The idea is to begin to develop a terradynamics — equivalent to aero- and hydrodynamics — which will allow us to predict mobility of devices in these complex environments," Goldman says.

The lab has had recent success in terradynamics, publishing a paper in Science that describes a new approach to predicting how small-legged robots move on sand or other flowing materials. The approach uses the forces (such as drag) applied to independent elements of the robot legs to get a measure of the net force on a moving robot (or animal). "The lizard swimming in sand gives us a broad understanding behind all animals swimming in true fluids," Goldman says. "Analyzing sandfish turns out to be sufficiently simple so that we can use it as a baseline to understand other swimmers."

What specific studies are up ahead for the busy Georgia Tech lab? In the near future, the team will test and refine theoretical models as they apply to legs and wheels thrusting into flowing material. They also will be conducting experiments to learn more about wet sand versus dry. And thirdly, they will be looking at the physics involved when teams of organisms, such as fire ants, move and dig within complex terrain.

Learn more about the CRAB lab research

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Nearly everyone alive on the planet has drunk from, sat on, worn, washed up with or driven in something made from ethylene oxide. That's because all sorts of household items are made from this essential building block, including plastic soda bottles, polyester fibers, detergents and anti-freeze. Ethylene oxide, or EO for short, has a huge market — a whopping $30-billion-per-year market — that shows no signs of subsiding.

Over the years, methods for manufacturing EO have improved significantly. Still, the current process for making EO puts out about 3.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, more than most other manufactured chemicals and roughly the same emissions caused by 900,000 cars annually.

In 2007, Daryle Busch of the University of Kansas (KU) Center for Environmentally Beneficial Catalysis (CEBC) joined forces with CEBC director Bala Subramaniam to design a greener ethylene oxide process, with help from postdoctoral researcher Hyun-Jin Lee and chemical engineering PhD graduate Madhav Ghanta. "We knew it wasn't going to be easy to eliminate the carbon dioxide byproduct," said Busch, a distinguished professor emeritus of chemistry at KU. "But it was an opportunity to make an enormous difference."

No burning

The research team is developing a revolutionary new way to make EO using hydrogen peroxide as the oxidant instead of the usual oxygen gas.

It's no surprise that mixing oxygen gas with highly flammable ethylene at high temperatures could lead to unwanted burning and even a risk of explosion. Yet, this is how EO is currently made.

In contrast, the new CEBC technology dissolves ethylene in a liquid mixture of methanol, hydrogen peroxide and a catalyst at close to ambient temperatures. This method is more efficient. It completely eliminates the burning of ethylene and EO that typically occurs in the conventional process. No burning means no CO2 byproduct.

"Our new technology has the potential to save $2 billion worth of chemicals from going up in smoke each year," said Subramaniam.

The team also needed a catalyst that could help transfer an oxygen atom from hydrogen peroxide to ethylene. Surprisingly, they found that methyl trioxorhenium, which had been studied for years in other applications, could do the job. It works so well that more than 99 percent of ethylene molecules are converted to EO without decomposing hydrogen peroxide.

In 2010, the American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute recognized the novel ethylene oxide process by awarding Ghanta one of two Kenneth G. Hancock Memorial Student Awards.

How much does it cost?

The patented technology offers a cleaner alternative process for making an essential commodity chemical. But this greener approach must be more expensive, right? Not necessarily.

"We used state-of-the-art tools to estimate the cost of the new process and found that the economics are on par with the conventional process," said Subramaniam.

With funding from the National Science Foundation Accelerating Innovation Research program, Subramaniam's team now is searching for ways to further reduce the manufacturing costs of the new technology. They can cut costs by approximately 17 percent if they can overcome three barriers. First, they must demonstrate that they can selectively oxidize ethylene from a cheaper mixed ethylene/ethane feedstock. If so, they could save about 10 percent of costs by eliminating the need for purified ethylene. They also estimate 5 percent savings by improving peroxide efficiency and 2 percent savings by finding a cheaper, more durable catalyst.

"These advances will likely make our novel technology very attractive to chemical companies, especially those companies in the U.S. looking to utilize abundant natural gas feedstocks," said Subramaniam.

While the researchers originally targeted EO to shrink its super-sized carbon footprint, it looks as if their new technology could offer economic benefits as well.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

The poster child for basic research might well be a one-celled green algae found in ordinary lakes and ponds. Amazingly, this unassuming creature — called Chlamydomonas —is helping scientists solve one of the most complex and important mysteries of science: How billions of neurons in the brain interact with one another through electrochemical signals to produce thoughts, memories and behaviors and how malfunctioning neurons may contribute to brain diseases such as Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia.

It may seem counterintuitive that a tiny, relatively simple organism that doesn't even have a brain could help scientists understand how the brain works. But this algae's value to brain scientists is not based on its intellect. Rather, it is based on its light-sensitivity, i.e., the fact that this organism's movements are controlled by light.

Following the Light

Chlamydomonasis light sensitive because it must detect and move towards light to feed itself through photosynthesis. You've seen this type of light sensitivity in action if you've ever noticed algae accumulate in a lake or pond on a sunny day.

The secret to the Chlamydomonas's light-chasing success is a light-sensitive protein, known as a channelrhodopsin, which is located on the boundary of the algae's eye-like structure, called an eyespot.

When hit by light, this light-sensitive protein — acting much like a solar panel — converts light into an electric current. It does so by changing its shape to form a channel through the boundary of the eyespot. This channel allows positively charged particles to cross the boundary and enter the eyespot region. The resulting flow of charged particles generates an electric current that, through a cascade of events, forces the algae's two flagella — whip-like swimming structures — to steer the organism towards the light.

The light-sensing proteins of Chlamydomonasand their ability to generate electric currents for light chasing were discovered in 2002 by a research team at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston that was led by John Spudich and included Oleg SIneshchekov and Kwang-Hwan Jung; the team was funded by the National Science Foundation. This team's discoveries about the algal proteins followed decades of research by Spudich, a biophysical chemist, and his collaborators on how light-sensing receptors control swimmingbehavior in many types of microorganisms.

"My interest in Chlamydomonas was derived from my interest in the basic principles of vision. That is, the molecular mechanisms by which organisms use light to obtain information about their environment," says Spudich. "I have long been fascinated with how microorganisms 'see' the world and started with the simplest--bacteria with light-sensitive movements (phototaxis), followed by phototaxis in more complex algae. Our focus throughout has been on understanding the basic biology of these phenomena."

When Spudich's research on light sensing by Chlamydomonas was published, it significantly advanced the basic science of light sensing and signaling in microorganisms. But at the time, no one knew that it would eventually serendipitously catapult forward the seemingly far-flung field of brain research.

Identifying the Functions of Neurons

Nevertheless, Spudich's discovery of the light-sensitive algal proteins was a game-changer for an NSF-funded team of brain researchers at Stanford University that was comprised of Karl Deisseroth, Edward Boyden and Feng Zhang. Working together in a uniquely interdisciplinary team during the early 2000s, these researchers collectively offered expertise in neuroscience, electrical engineering, physiology, chemistry, genetics, synthetic biology and psychiatry. (Boyden and Zhang are now at MIT.)

A primary goal of this team was to develop a new technology for selectively turning on and off target neurons and circuits of neurons in the brains of laboratory animals, so that resulting behavioral changes could be observed in real time; this information could be used to help identify the functions of targeted neurons and circuits of neurons.

The strategy behind this technology — eventually dubbed optogenetics — is analogous to that used by someone who, one by one, systemically turns on and off the fuses (or circuit breakers) in a house to identify the contribution of each fuse (or circuit breaker) to the house's power output.

An On/Off Switch for Neurons

But unlike household fuses and circuit breakers, neurons don't have a user-friendly on/off switch. To develop a way to control neurons, the Stanford team had to create a new type of neuronal switch. With funding from NSF, the team developed a light-based switch that could be used to selectively turn on target neruons merely by exposing them to light.

Why did the team opt for a light-based strategy? Because light — an almost omnipresent force in nature — has the power to turn on and off many types of important electrical and chemical reactions that occur in nature including, for example, photosynthesis. The team therefore reasoned that light might, under certain conditions, also have the power to turn on and off electrochemical signaling from brain neurons.

But to create a light-based neuronal on/off switch, the team had to solve a big problem: Neurons are not naturally light sensitive. So the team had to find a way to impart a subset of neurons with light sensitivity (without altering non-target neurons), so that treated neurons would selectively respond to a light-based switch. One potential strategy: to install in target neurons some kind of light sensitive molecule that is not present elsewhere in the brain.

The team lacked the right type of light-sensitive molecule for the job until several important studies were announced. These studies included Spudich's discovery of the light-sensitive algal proteins, as well as research led by microbial biophysicists Peter Hegemann, Georg Nagel and Ernst Bamberg in Germany, which showed that these proteins can generate electrical currents in animal cells, not just in algae.

Flicking the Switch

These studies inspired the team to insert Spudich's light-sensitive algal proteins into cultured neurons from rats and mice via a pioneering genetic engineering method that developed by the team. When exposed to light in laboratory tests in 2004, these inserted proteins generated electric currents — just as they did in the light-sensitive algae from which they originated. But instead of turning on light-chasing behaviors as they did in the algae, these currents — when generated in target neurons — turned on the normal electrochemical signaling of the neurons, as desired.

In other words, the team showed that by selectively inserting light-sensitive proteins into target neurons, they could impart these neurons with light sensitivity so that they would be activated by light. The team thereby developed the basics of optogenetics — which is defined by Deisseroth as "the combination of genetics and optics to control well-defined events within specific cells of living tissue."

The members of the team (either working together or in other teams) also developed tools to:

• Turn off target neurons and stop their electrochemical signaling by manipulating light-sensing proteins.
• Deliver light to target neurons in laboratory animals via a laser attached to a fiber cable implanted in the brain.
• Insert light-sensitive proteins into various types of neurons so that their functions could be identified.
• Control the functioning of any gene in the body. Such control supports studies of how gene expression in the brain may influence neurochemical signaling and how changes in key genes in neurons may influence factors such as learning and memory.

"The brain is a mystery, and in order to solve it, we need to develop a great variety of new technologies," says Boyden. "In the case of optogenetics, we turned to the diversity of the natural world to find tools for activating and silencing neurons — and found, serendipitously, molecules that were ready to use."

The Power of Optogenetics

Thousands of research groups around the world are currently incorporating increasingly advanced techniques in optogenetics into studies of the brains of laboratory animals. Such studies are designed to reveal how healthy brains learn and create memories and to identify the neuronal bases of brain diseases and disorders such as Parkinson's disease, anxiety, schizophrenia, depression, strokes, pain, post-traumatic stress syndrome, drug addiction, obsessive-compulsive disease, aggression and some forms of blindness.

Deisseroth says, "What excites neuroscientists about optogenetics is control over defined events within defined cell types at defined times — a level of precision that is most crucial to biological understanding even beyond neuroscience. And milliscale-scale timing precision within behaving mammals has been essential for key insights into both normal brain function and into clinical problems, such as parkinsonism."

Indeed, optogenetics is now so important to brain research that it is considered one of the critical tools for the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, which was announced by President Obama in April 2013.

In addition, optogenetics is being applied to other organs besides the brain. For example, NSF-funded researchers are working to develop optogenetic techniques to treat cardiac arrhythmia.

The Laws of Unintended Consequences

As with many pivotal scientific advances, the development of optogenetics was built upon many basic-research studies that had been inspired by the intellectual curiosity of researchers who could not possibly have foreseen the important practical applications of their work. "The development of optogenetics is yet one more beautiful example of a revolutionary biotechnology growing out of purely basic research," says Spudich.

What's more, many of the varied disciplines that contributed to the invention of optogenetics — including electrical engineering, genetic engineering, physics and microbiology — may seem, on first blush, unrelated to one another and to brain science. But perhaps most surprising was the importance of basic research on algal proteins to the development of optogenetics.

Deisseroth said, "The story of optogenetics shows that hidden within the ground we have already traveled over or passed by, there may reside the essential tools, shouldered aside by modernity, that will allow us to map our way forward. Sometimes these neglected or archaic tools are those that are most needed--the old, the rare, the small and the weak."Food for thought for anyone tempted to dismiss the algae in a murky body of water as worthless pond scum!

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

When you peer through the smear on the screen of your smartphone, thousands of tiny microbes are staring back at you, waiting to hitch a ride on your fingertips.

Harmful microbes lurk everywhere — doorknobs and faucets, locker rooms and hospitals. It's enough to make a germophobe afraid to touch anything.

A new antimicrobial coating on the verge of being commercialized by a research team at the University of Florida, however, could change the landscape for surface-to-skin microbe transmission.

Healthcare facilities, including hospitals and assisted living facilities in particular, could benefit. Patients and visitors pick up 2 million infections each year in healthcare settings, and 90,000 patients die, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Treating healthcare-acquired infections costs $4.5 billion a year, the CDC says.

The new antimicrobial coating, called "PhotoProtect^TM," was developed at the University of Florida's Particle Engineering Research Center. It is designed to act as a barrier between microbes on surfaces and humans. The material, developed by researchers Vijay Krishna, Ben Koopman and Brij Moudgil, can be sprayed on any surface to form an invisible coating that is activated by indoor light and kills all microbes that come in contact with it. The coating uses ingredients such as titanium dioxide and polyhydroxy fullerenes, which are found in food and cosmetics, respectively, and last up to a year.

"Other [photocatalytic] coatings in use require such a thick coating that everything turns white," said Moudgil, distinguished professor of materials science and engineering and director of PERC. "PhotoProtect coating is so thin you won't even notice the coating is there."

A UF start-up company, NanoHygienix LLC, has taken an option to commercialize the technology.

The coating is designed to have advantages over other common antimicrobial products, which either do not kill all types of microbes or leave dead microbes on the surface, decreasing the lifetime of the coating. Furthermore, microbes can develop resistance, eventually rendering the coating useless.

PhotoProtect^TM, on the other hand, mineralizes microbes, turning them into carbon dioxide and water, making it impossible for microbes to develop resistance or leave a residue. The new product degrades even the hardiest microbes on earth — bacterial and fungal spores — the developers say.

Moudgil and Koopman credit a comment from a colleague in the UF School of Building Construction for piquing their interest in the research project, now nearly a decade in the making. The colleague mentioned that asthma in children in subsidized housing was increasing at a faster rate than asthma in children in other housing and asked them if an economical antimicrobial agent could be developed to keep the children from becoming infected with microbes that triggered asthma.

Moudgil's research group was one of a handful chosen to develop new technologies by the National Science Foundation's Accelerating Innovation Research program, and showcased at the NSF grantees meeting in May. The national showcase is designed to highlight research that is ready for commercialization.

The technology is one of several particle-based technologies that have been commercialized through discoveries at PERC, which was launched in 1994 and funded by NSF from 1994 through 2005.

Healthcare-acquired infections are an escalating problem. MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is a highly contagious staph bacterium that can be fatal. Moudgil said a recent study showed that up to 90 percent of MRSA remains on surfaces after a hospital room has been cleaned.

Other applications include fighting mold and mildew and boosting indoor air quality by killing bacteria, fungal spores and degrading volatile organic compounds, potentially reducing the $60 billion a year spent to alleviate sick building syndrome.

UF engineering students collaborated with UF business students in developing the new product.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

If I asked you to design a building to withstand unknown forces, what would you do?

You might either throw your hands up and walk away, the uncertainty too insurmountable, or proceed to build the strongest, heaviest structure you could. If I then told you specific forces to design for, say, 50 mph winds and magnitude 6.9 earthquakes, you might revisit your strong, heavy design and examine what parts are unnecessary. Do you really need walls that are three feet deep?

This is the essence of modern structural engineering. The more you know about your force demand, the better you can refine your structure's capacity to meet those demands. Less (when designed efficiently) is more.

Very broadly, this is what my research aims to accomplish: efficient structural design. My particular field is cold-formed steel, a building material that is formed by rolling steel into thin sheets, then folding it into efficient shapes to make beams and columns. Cold-formed steel, like all building materials, is designed via a set of rules referred to as building codes. These ensure that all buildings are designed to be safe for their occupants, whether a hospital, house or skyscraper.

Build your own earthquake

Obviously, safety is the most important factor in building design. Probably the second-most important factor is cost. If a good engineer can design a safe building that costs half the price, why pay more?

The cold-formed steel building code for earthquake forces is rather thin, and rife with conservatism, due to an overall a lack of information about how cold-formed steel buildings respond to earthquakes. One way to obtain more information about such responses would be to build a cold-formed steel building, and wait for an earthquake to come along.

However, thanks to the Structural Engineering and Earthquake Simulation Laboratory at the University at Buffalo, there is no need to wait for an earthquake — one can easily be created in the lab! These earthquake simulators, or shake tables as we call them, are large platforms on which full-scale buildings can be constructed and shaken. We took advantage of these shake tables and built a cold-formed steel building on top of them.

Crazy as this sounds, it worked.

It showed us how a cold-formed steel building behaves under a magnitude 6.9 earthquake, and provided us with information that enables us to determine how various parts of the building transfer forces, and how components such as drywall, interior walls, staircases and weatherproofing add to the building performance.

Designed for maximum safety

There are still reams of data to wade through, but one interesting outcome was how well our building performed. We shook the building with two earthquakes — one called a design basis earthquake that the building was designed to withstand with no or minimal damage, and the other called the maximum considered earthquake that the building was not designed to withstand.

What is the difference between the DBE and MCE? The MCE is significantly stronger than the DBE, and is quite rare. Typically, there is a significant amount of damage after an MCE, though no collapse; the structure remains upright so the occupants can safely evacuate.

But in our tests, the building exceeded expectations and sustained only a small amount of damage after the MCE. This is great! Safe structures for everyone!

However, this leads back to the idea of efficient design. Now that we know how a cold-formed steel building stands up to a strong earthquake, how can we improve design and make structures more efficient? The more you know…

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Some of the biggest questions facing science today ask how climate, the oceans and the Earth's ecosystems will change in the future. To predict what's going to come, scientists need a long-term view of past environmental conditions to provide context, a baseline and maybe even analogs for future global change. But how do we learn about the distant past, when we don't have man-made records?

One innovative solution: paleo proxies, or chemical and physical features preserved in the fossil record that contain evidence of ancient environments. Among the most common proxies used to study prehistoric climate and ocean conditions are foraminifera, or "forams" for short. Forams are a kind of plankton that have existed for millions of years, living in a wide range of marine environments. Their shells, commonly carbonate, record the chemistry of the ocean as they grow. This means that the information contained in fossil foram shells has the potential to reveal for certain time periods what the temperature of the ocean was, how much ice was on land, how the oceans were circulating and how acidic the ocean was — which points directly to the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere.

To use fossil forams as proxies, a precise understanding is needed of the relationships between foram shells and environmental factors such as temperature and acidity. That's where Howie Spero and the foraminifera culturing program come in.

In 1975, the National Science Foundation funded two researchers from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatoryto collect and grow (or culture) live forams in the lab for the first time. Spero joined them as a research assistant in 1979, and continued working with live forams throughout his PhD research. In 1989, he received an NSF grant to carry on this work at the Wrigley Marine Science Centeron Santa Catalina Island, Calif., and his UC-Davis research group has been culturing forams with NSF support ever since.

Culturing in the lab allows Spero and his team to manipulate the physical and chemical conditions under which forams grow and then observe the relationships between those conditions and the chemical make-up of foram shells. The relationships observed in the present-day lab can be used to develop a more refined, mathematical understanding of what fossil forams indicate about ancient environments. This practice is called "calibrating" paleo proxy relationships.

Over the years, the foram culturing program has led to a series of calibration breakthroughs that have helped to propel paleo proxy research to the cutting edge of modern science. The first Mg/Ca "paleothermometer," for instance — in which the ratio between magnesium and calcium in fossil foram shells is used to compute the ocean's temperature — was developed and calibrated by Spero and his team. They conducted the first experiments to determine the relationships between trace elements in foram shells (e.g., barium, cadmium, uranium, boron) and ocean conditions such as salinity, alkalinity, nutrients and pH. And they haven't just developed paleo proxy relationships in the lab: They've also applied them to the fossil record, linking past changes in tropical and subtropical environments to shifts in ocean circulation during glacial cycles and abrupt climate change events.

What's next for the foram culturing program? Its latest projects include investigating the mechanisms of shell formation and using new techniques to understand extremely fine-scale chemical variations within shells (across microns, or thousandths of a millimeter). Spero and his team are also expanding the paleothermometry toolbox to include the use of variant forms of oxygen atoms (or isotopes) in different species of forams.

As their work on present-day forams reveals more about the past, the past may reveal more about the present state of the ocean-climate system — and what's to come in the future.                  

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Near the southern tip of Taiwan lies the National Museum of Marine Biology & Aquarium, which is not only home to an amazing aquarium with everything from whale sharks to kelp forests, but also supports outstanding research facilities near the fringing coral reefs of Kenting. My previous field research focused on the ecology and physiology of reef-building corals. I was in the field at Palmyra Atoll, Line Islands and in the lab at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego. In particular, I focused on the relationship of corals with their "algal symbionts," which nourish them in nutrient-poor oceans.

A fellowship from the National Science Foundation East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program and Taiwan's National Science Council offered me the opportunity to perform research at a world-class laboratory while on a coral reef, one of only a handful of such sites in the world.

Although I have been scuba diving all around the world — in Panama, Mexico, the USA, French Polynesia, Fiji, the Line Islands and Japan to name a few — diving in Taiwan is unique. Before every voyage the Coast Guard comes aboard to check your boat and everyone's passport. I was fortunate to work with one of Taiwan's best divemasters, Wei-Chieh.

We recently collected fertilized adult coral colonies and brought them back to the NMMBA, where I maintained them in individual aquaria in either high- or low-light conditions, until they released their larvae about two weeks later. Light intensity is a central component of coral bleaching, one of the greatest threats to coral reefs today. Coral fluorescent proteins, similar to those produced by jellyfish (a discovery for which the Nobel Prize in 2008 was awarded), absorb specific wavelengths (colors) of light and re-emit them in a different color. The function of fluorescent proteins in corals is a hotly debated topic, although most data support a role in photoprotection.

The goal of this research was to study the relationship between fluorescent protein expression and light levels in coral parents and their larvae. The most surprising result was that parents and larvae expressed different fluorescent proteins, regardless of the parent environment, thus raising new questions for the biological role of fluorescent proteins. These experiments could only be conducted in a place like the NMMBA with high quality coral reefs, the infrastructure to support complicated aquaria experiments and the equipment necessary to measure coral fluorescence in live larvae.

With Dr. Tung-Yung Fan, a world expert on reproduction and larval ecology of brooding corals based at the NMMBA and my host for the summer, and my PhD advisor, Dr. Dimitri Deheyn, we published the findings from my EAPSI research in PLoS ONE.

The research took an abrupt turn when the deadliest typhoon in Taiwan's history, Typhoon Morakot, struck on August 7, 2009. Southern Taiwan was the hardest hit, and we were holed up for three days with the wind and rain ripping the roof tiling off, cracking a roof beam and causing minor flooding in our apartment at the NMMBA. But, we were very fortunate compared to most of our local neighbors who lost power, water and had significant amounts of damage. Overall, Typhoon Morakot brought nearly 10 feet of rain and caused more than $3 billion (in U.S. dollars) in damage in Taiwan. The ocean turned the color of chocolate milk for seven days, a large ship wrecked on the reefs just beside the NMMBA, nearby aquaculture fish ended up in the ocean and countless logs dotted the sea, the result of massive erosion tearing entire mountainsides downstream. The NMMBA had to shut off inflow of seawater to the aquarium, eventually ending my experiments. Fortunately, I was finished with the bulk of data collection.

To escape the typhoon-ravaged mainland, we headed to the island of Lanyu, famed for its unspoiled coral reefs and sea snakes. In genuine Taiwanese fashion, we piled scuba tanks onto scooters and headed off for dives. In the aftermath of the typhoon, we observed giant corals flipped over and blooms of cyanobacteria, but the reefs remained breathtaking and the sea snakes abundant. Lanyu is also home to a fascinating aboriginal culture centered on its most important food resource, flying fish.

After exploring Taiwan's underwater environment, I wanted to experience its rugged terrestrial terrain. Taiwan has more than 150 mountains over 10,000 feet tall! The high alpine meadows, lakes and bamboo forests make the scenery unforgettable. The Taiwanese are, by far, the friendliest and most generous people I have ever met. They would offer us rides, food and help everywhere we went, and parents would encourage their children to practice their English with us. Some of my favorite memories include a make-shift barbecue party with local friends (where the barbeque was made out of an old automobile wheel!), watching a family of six ride a scooter on the trails of Taroko Gorge, learning the monk history of Chung Tai Chan Monastery and hiking trails that go straight up mountainsides — no switchbacks here. I fell in love with the people, culture and natural beauty of Taiwan, where ancient and modern are everywhere side-by-side. I hope to return to discover more of its many hidden gems.

Editor's Note: This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Barely halfway into the summer of 2013, this year's wildfire season is already a record breaker. The Yarnell Hill wildfire, which started on June 28, was the deadliest fire in Arizona's history, killing 19 firefighters. The Black Forest wildfire, which started on June 11, was the most destructive wildfire in Colorado's history; it scorched more than 14,000 acres, destroyed more than 500 homes and killed two people.

The western U.S. has seen large, destructive wildfires on a daily basis this summer. Already in 2013, the acreage burned is more than three times the size of Rhode Island. What's more, the worst may be yet to come. Large swathes of the western U.S. will remain at risk of significant burning through September, according to the National Interagency Fire Center . The NIFC attributes this prolonged risk to long-term drought along with record high temperatures and dry weather.

Our flammable planet

"Wildfires are not new. They have continuously occurred on Earth for at least the last 400 million years," says Jennifer Balch of Penn State University. But, she adds, research shows that since the 1970s, the frequency of wildfires has increased at least four-fold.

According to this research — a study published in 2006 by a team led by A.L. Westerlingof the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California, Merced — the total size of burn areas in the western U.S. increased at least six-fold in the later part of the 20^th century. In addition, studies show that wildfires at high altitudes, which used to be rare, are increasing. (Thomas Swetnam of the University of Arizona discussed this finding during a 2009 National Science Foundation-sponsored teleconference.) This information means that large western wildfires are becoming more frequent and more intense.

Steadily rising, the cost of fighting U.S. wildfires totaled close to $2 billion in 2012, according to NIFC. According to Balch's most recent analysis, people started more than 80 percent of reported landscape fires that burned in the U.S. from 2001 to 2008.

Invasive Species Fan the Flames

Bigger and more frequent fires are linked to various types of human activities, including those that spread invasive species. A case in point: During the westward expansion, around 1880, settlers accidentally introduced to the west from Europe and Asia an invasive grass known as cheatgrass. Today, this plant covers more than 40,000 square kilometers of the western U.S., says Balch.

Scientists suspect that cheatgrass increases the number and severity of fires because it grows in arid lands and dries out before native vegetation does — a continuous carpet of fuel for fires.

An NSF-funded study conducted by Balch and other scientists shows that cheatgrass has been involved in a disproportionately large number of fires in the Great Basin, a 600,000-square kilometer area that includes parts of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, California and Oregon. "Over the past decade, cheatgrass fueled the majority of the largest fires, including 39 of the largest 50 fires, even though this species only dominates about 6 percent of the land in the Great Basin," said Balch. "In addition, cheatgrass burned twice as frequently as any other vegetation."

The Heat is On

Another factor promoting increased wildfires in the western U.S. is climate change, which is characterized by increased year-round temperatures, reduced precipitation and earlier springs. These changes:

• Create hot, dry conditions that are conducive to fires
• Increase the length of the wildfire season
• Generate fuel for wildfires by increasing infestations of mountain bark beetles that kill trees. Since the mid-2000s, mountain bark beetles have felled millions of acres of forests, from New Mexico to British Columbia.

Climate change promotes fire-friendly infestations of bark beetles via a double whammy: Milder winters enable populations of bark beetles to survive the winter, and thereby increase their numbers and amplify their killing power. By contrast, populations of these pests used to be thinned, and thereby neutralized, by the killing cold of winter.

At the same time, climate change increases the vulnerability of forests to bark beetle attacks. It does so by triggering droughts that subject trees to water stress, which reduces their resistance to bark beetle infestations — much the way that starvation reduces the resistance of people to infections.

Climate Change and Wildfires Reinforce Each Other

To make matters worse, the problem is not only that climate change promotes wildfires — but also that the reverse is true. That is, wildfires promote climate change. How? For one thing, wildfires char and darken the land. Darkened land absorbs more heat than non-charred, vegetated land. In addition, wildfires release carbon dioxide and methane — both of which are greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere and thereby help raise global temperatures. In fact, fires that people intentionally start to clear land of vegetation currently contribute up to one-fifth of human-caused increases in carbon dioxide emissions, according to a study conducted by Balch and other scientists.

The complex relationship between climate change and wildfires mean that areas that experience temperature increases and altered precipitation patterns may also experience more wildfires. And if wildfires occur more frequently across the globe, they will emit more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Fighting fire with fire

An upsurge in wildfires raises pressing questions about fire management, says Balch. One management option, she says, is to reduce fuel for intense fires through prescribed and controlled burns — a trend that began during recent decades following almost 100 years of widespread fire suppression. But efforts to increase prescribed and controlled burns face major obstacles, including funding shortages during these lean economic times and a lack of support from the public, which is generally fearful of fires.

After the fire. . .

NSF is continuing to support research that will improve our understanding wildfire behavior. This topic is important because wildfire characteristics can change with maddening capriciousness over short distances and short time periods. In fact, a single wildfire may devastate one particular area but leave a similar, nearby area relatively unscathed because of even slight changes in time and space involving weather conditions, local winds, landscape features, microclimates, day-to-night changes in atmospheric conditions, soil moisture and the types and distribution of vegetation.

To better define the influence of these and other factors on wildfire behavior, a study of the causes and impacts of the High Park wildfire in northern Colorado, which started on June 9, 2012, is being jointly conducted by Colorado State University and the NSF-funded National Ecological Observatory Network, headquartered in Boulder, Colo.

The High Park wildfire was selected for study because it was among the worst wildfires in Colorado history and because CSU researchers had fortuitously been studying the area before the fire started, and had thereby generated rare, pre-fire baseline data on area ecology.

Critical components of the High Park study are flyovers of the burn scar and adjacent areas by a Twin Otter airplane that collects ecological measurements with state-of-the-art remote-sensing instruments. These instruments can quickly collect high-resolution measurements down to 1 meter and capture data from much larger areas than can ground sensors or field crews. In fact, these instruments may measure the individual tree heights, leaf area and leaf chemistry of 15 million trees in a single flyover.

High Park data — which will offer unparalleled precision related to the extent and condition of surviving vegetation, plant species, ash cover, soil properties and other factors — are being incorporated into high-definition, 3-D images as well as other types of rich ecological data covering the study area. Release to the public of High Park data is slated to begin later in 2013.

Results from the High Park study may help scientists understand how preexisting conditions defined by the CSU data influenced the behavior and severity of the fire and how the fire's burn patterns are affecting recovery of vegetation, wildlife and water resources. They may also support regional recovery efforts conducted by the U.S. and state forest service and the cities of Fort Collins and Greeley, Colo. — both of which have water supplies that are likely to be affected by post-fire erosion. And they may ultimately be used to help refine models of fire behavior and help improve future firefighting and post-fire management decisions.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

If you want to cook up some environmentally friendly cement, just mix two cups of granulated garden limestone, one cup of ground granulated blast furnace slag and three tablespoons of soda ash (i.e, sodium carbonate). What results is a strong, sustainable and economical alternative to ordinary Portland cement (OPC), the industry leader in cement. Researchers in Michel Barsoum’s group at Drexel University have been cooking up this seemingly new technology over the last several years, but its origins go back much farther than one may realize.

To the Great Pyramids of Egypt, in fact. Barsoum’s group had conducted research that seemed to prove some of the stones in the pyramids were cast using an early form of cement, rather than carved out of limestone. If some of the materials used to build the pyramids were indeed cast, and have lasted for 4,500 years, why not use them in today’s building materials, he wondered? 

“OPC is responsible for 5 to 8 percent of the world’s COand consumes an enormous amount of energy,” says Alex Moseson, a colleague now taking the lead on bringing Barsoum’s alternative to market.

Greenstone cement ingredients

The difference between the Drexel-created “Greenstone” cement, as it is called, and ordinary Portland cement lies in the ingredients and methods used. Greenstone is an alkali-activated cement (AAC) that doesn’t require heating when made. Rather, the AAC relies on recycled ingredients that are readily available — mostly industry waste products that have already been heated. These include fly ash, chimney soot captured from coal-fired power plants and slag, which is a byproduct of the process that turns iron ore into iron.

As a result Greenstone’s environmental impact profile is dramatically different than OPC’s, showing 97 percent less energy consumed and also CO2 produced. Additionally, the ready availability of raw materials brings the cost of manufacture from $75 per ton to approximately $50 per ton. With anticipated carbon credits, Greenstone yields an additional $5-$20 per ton benefit. 

But how does it compare to OPC in performance? “Our results and the literature confirm that it performs as well or better than OPC,” says Barsoum. The group is close to seeing the cement pass industry tests that set benchmarks for strength, set time and volumetric stability.

As importantly, says Moseson, “We have always worked toward cement that works in the real world, not just the lab. That means shelf stability, workability, room-temperature curing, easy transport and more.” 

Moseson pursued such real world application while at IIT Bombay in Mumbai, conducting research for his dissertation. He worked with local researchers to develop an AAC that met the standards set out in India for cement and investigated how Greenstone production might empower people living in slums. Today, three products made of local materials, using local tools and labor, are currently under consideration by a major cement manufacturer there.

The group has taken Greenstone and formed a company, Greenstone Technologies, Inc. They began publishing scientific results about their findings in 2009 and a November 2011 publication in Cement and Concrete Composites discussed the Drexel green cement’s practical potential. The researchers are currently talking with investors and possible partners. With the claim to benefits of reduced cost, reduced pollution and enhanced performance, are there obstacles to putting the Drexel cement out on the market? “The challenges for getting this out into the market include the variation among feedstocks ... and the time it takes to validate a new material,” says Moseson. “While our research allows us to compensate for variation, it would help if processors think of fly ash and slag [feedstock] as co-products instead of by-products to help standardize these materials for use in the cement. 

“We also have to overcome powerful market forces. OPC is a $300 billion global market and convincing builders and industries to use something else is difficult. Convincing people that our cement will last as long as OPC when it is newer is also a challenge.” Additionally, their product is not patentable due to a great deal of prior art — or prior knowledge related to the technology — from as early as the 1950’s, which is sometimes a deterrent to investors. Despite these hurdles, interest in their work is increasing. 

Interestingly, AAC is not totally brand new. In the 1950s and 1960s, a form of AAC was successfully used in some buildings in the former Soviet Union. In addition to the Great Pyramids of Egypt, much of the inspiration for this research came from ancient Rome. “Everything that the Romans built was made of similar ingredients,” says Moseson. “Although we won’t know for 2,000 years if ours have the longevity of Roman buildings, it gives us an idea of the staying power of this stuff.” 

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation. 

Gotta love the Cubbies. Thanks to them, a database of U.S. Supreme Court audio recordings is now freely available to the public. Too much of a stretch? Not really, because the tool grew out of one man’s love of the Chicago Cubs, technology and the study of law.  

One sunny afternoon at Wrigley Field 20 years ago, Jerry Goldman, then a political science professor at Northwestern University, was sitting in the bleachers enjoying a game with a couple of students. They considered ways that baseball is a metaphor for the U.S. Supreme Court: nine players, nine justices. One game turns on great pitches and amazing catches; the other on oral arguments and thoughtful rulings. 

If baseball cards explained vital details about a player’s career, Goldman figured, why not create cards for the justices and add video and audio? The project seemed achievable, given the advent of HyperCard, an application and programming tool for early Apple computers. “My colleagues thought I was crazy [to pursue these technology projects],” says Goldman, now a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Chicago-Kent College of Law. “But I believed information technology was going to change the way the world worked.” 

Goldman’s quest to “really humanize the Supreme Court” led to the development of the NSF-funded Oyez Project, a multimedia archive that includes a searchable trove of oral arguments that the court has heard since 1955. An app for mobile devices, ISCOTUSnow is also available. 

“The principal objective was to take the court down from exalted status and bring it to the public,” says Goldman. “We also wanted to make available the vast amount of data associated with the court.”  

Creating searchable audio and video 

To bring the Supreme Court to life, Goldman first persuaded the National Archives, which stores the court’s audio files, to permit him to copy the tapes for transcription and digitization. To make the newly digitized audiotapes searchable, Goldman collaborated with Mark Liberman, a computational linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Liberman adapted an algorithm that can match sounds on audiotapes with written transcripts. This work eventually led to the development of the Penn Forced Aligner, a tool now commonly used to align spoken sounds with written text. 

“We essentially made a Google-like search engine for audio and video recordings,” says Liberman, who was drawn to the task because of the archives’ value for scholars and the public. He also welcomed the opportunity to create a search technique applicable to the growing collections of audio and video recordings available from a myriad of sources. 

“[W]e were able to set up a model for how to approach searches in a cost-effective way. This may seem like a large project, but it is small compared to what’s now available online and what will be in the future,” says Liberman. 

(Recently, Liberman’s colleagues at Oxford University and the British Library used the alignment tools to decipher recordings of the British National Corpus, an archive with a spoken portion of 100 million words gathered from participants who recorded their speech on Sony Walkmans.)

Analyzing the data 

Next, Goldman analyzed almost 14,000 hours of audio of oral arguments from the Supreme Court. “There are countless questions you can ask about the dataset,” he says. “However, this is an unusual dataset, because it has multiple speakers and is spontaneous.” One of the first tasks was identifying each speaker in each oral argument — a challenge, since roughly 11 speakers could be involved in an argument. In addition, for many years the transcripts did not tag questions with justice’s names.  

While taking on these challenges, Goldman and his collaborators — who included colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Minnesota — compiled a number of interesting facts about the court’s workings since 1955: 

• 32 justices over 58 years
• 8,600 advocates, 70 percent of whom appeared before the court only once
• 66 million words spoken
• More than 6,100 cases and more than 2,300 opinion announcements 
• Longest argument — 1300 minutes
• Shortest argument — 14 minutes

Justice Antonin Scalia, who has served 27 years on the court, holds the record for most talkative, with 7,200 minutes, while Felix Frankfurter, who served 23.5 years, comes in a close second at 7,000 minutes. The most restrained justices are Sherman Minton and Clarence Thomas. Although Minton served on the court for seven years, only his last year is on record. During his final term he is heard for just 17 minutes. Thomas, on the court since 1991, clocks in at 23 minutes. 

While the Oyez Project provides legal scholars with a wealth of material to mine, linguistics researchers also analyze the recordings for various studies. 

Taking the court to the people 

To ensure the public and academics can probe the data with ease, Goldman’s team continues to make refinements and develop the interface. In the fall of 2013, search capabilities will be added to the data system to help users delve more deeply into the material. This new search capability will, for example, enable users to “search on the term ‘strict scrutiny,’ see it in the transcript, listen to it, and then do whatever listeners want to do with it,” explains Goldman.  

Chicagoans are fond of saying, “Make no little plans.” Goldman is true to this statement. He wants to apply the tools developed in the Supreme Court project to all U.S. appellate courts. The plan is to develop web sites and mobile device applications. Recently, the Knight Foundation awarded the Oyez Project $600,000 to undertake this work for the state supreme courts in California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas.  

“The apps are the coolest part,” says Goldman. They will follow the design of ISCOTUSnow, which is a collaborative effort between Goldman and Caroline Shapiro, also a professor at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law. ISCOTUSnow provides access to everything on the current Supreme Court docket, and includes audio and transcripts. With a simple motion, a user can flip through a transcript, search it and share a section with colleagues. “The best part?” says Goldman. “All this information is free.”  

The scale of the Oyez project was one Goldman never imagined. “Without NSF support, we would still be struggling,” he says. “The NSF’s backing gave me the courage to think no little thoughts.”

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Because "she" spawns every fourth day, I knew she would spawn today. I rolled out of bed at the chime of my reliable Winnie the Pooh alarm clock, slid into my wetsuit, grabbed my underwater flashlight and stumbled into the kitchen at the Bellairs Research Institute in Barbados to make my coffee, proud to be awake even before the roosters announced the onset of dawn.

I kept a close eye on my watch because the time of first light changes each day, and if I arrived in the water even one second late, I would miss her.

A Morning Tryst

As usual, my arrival at the beach coincided with the ebb of the late night beach parties; dawn breaks too late for the night partiers and too early for most others — but just right for her and me. I swam out along the reef with my flashlight off, enjoying the sight of bright green bioluminescent plankton parties and patrols of hunting squid and squirrelfish.

Because I had visited this location during so many night-to-dawn transitions, I easily found her home: a section of reef about the size of the jump-ball circle in the middle of a basketball court. But she was out of sight — probably still asleep in one of her territory's caves.

But a few minutes after my arrival, the first hint of sunrise cast just enough light for me to discern her shape as she emerged. Even though her abode was generously coated with delicious turf algae, she skipped breakfast and quickly and carefully made her way along the reef to the home of her mate. When she arrived there, her mate greeted her with a series of dips and other maneuvers. She then began laying her eggs on a nest he had already prepared for her.

A pair of yellowtail damselfish was spawning. Typical of Caribbean damselfish, this pair spawned at dawn. And like all damselfish, the pair spawned in the male's territory.

A Damsel's Dilemma

To spawn in the male's territory, a female damselfish must leave her own territory. But, unlike a person, a female damselfish cannot prevent home invasions by locking the door behind her or relying on neighbors to watch her home during her absence.

Rather, while a female damselfish is away, her territory is completely undefended and vulnerable to invasions by other fish, including neighbors, who may scout it out for takeovers and steal her food. Therefore, the longer a female is gone, the more she risks losing "the house."

So it might be logical to assume that female damselfish would minimize their spawning time. But in Barbados, I observed the contrary: Female damselfish frequently interrupted their spawning activities to visit cleaning stations near their partners' territories.

A cleaning station is a reef location that harbors cleaning organisms such as gobies and shrimp, which remove other organisms from the bodies of fish. Fish know the locations of these stations and presumably visit them in order to clean their bodies of organisms that are irritating them in some way, similar to the way that ticks or fleas irritate people.

A spawning stopover at a cleaning station lengthens a damselfish's absence from her own territory and thereby increases its vulnerability to invasions. So, how in the world do female damselfish solve this dilemma and minimize their risk of losing their territories during spawning?

D.L. Kramer of McGill University and I ultimately answered that question,  but in the process I discovered new questions that, taunting me, also begged for answers.

For example, in addition to indicating that female damselfish visit cleaning stations on mornings when they spawn, my observations of damselfish in Barbados also indicated they visit cleaning stations (near their own territories) during non-spawning mornings. I wondered, what compels female damselfish to spend so much time during the morning at cleaning stations?

To answer that question, I had to identify what organisms are removed from the damselfish at cleaning stations. My efforts to do so led me to some generous colleagues — including George Benz, Alexandra Grutter, Isabelle Côtéand Nico Smit — who introduced me to the wonderful world of gnathiid isopods.

Parasites: Biological Champions

Gnathiid isopods are parasites . A parasite is an organism that lives on or inside a host organism without killing it and is dependent on its host for is survival.

Despite the negative connotation of the word parasite, parasites enjoy the world's most successful lifestyle! In fact, parasites account for the majority of inhabitants of coral reefs, which are the world's most diverse ecosystems. To truly understand coral reefs and how they will be impacted by environmental change, we must understand their parasites.

Gnathiids are particularly unusual parasites because they only feed as larvae, and the only thing that gnathiid larvae eat is blood. Amazingly, adult gnathiids don't feed at all. But in terms of my research, the most important thing about gnathiids is that they serve as the primary food for cleaner fish.

A Three-Way Relationship

Because of the dependence of cleaner fish on gnathiids, I knew that I needed to learn more about gnathiids in order to better understand the relationship between cleaner fish and damselfish.

I studied gnathiids by placing a group of fish on a section of a reef in little fish hotels (cages), and measuring their gnathiid loads every two hours over a 24-hour cycle. My results revealed that the fish carried the heaviest gnathiid loads at night and at dawn.

These results suggest that when damselfish wake up in the morning, they probably have relatively heavy gnathiid loads. Morning irritation from these loads probably drives the infested damselfish to cleaning stations, where cleaner fish — eager to feast on their favorite food — reduce their gnathiid loads. So to a damselfish, a morning visit to a cleaning fish probably feels much like a morning shower.

Innocent Parasite or Disease Carrier?

These results indicate that gnathiids exert a significant influence on the daily activities of reef fish and are therefore major players in reef ecology.

But gnathiids are also potentially important for other reasons. For example, their land-based counterparts are ticks and mosquitoes, which transmit microorganisms that cause Lyme disease and malaria. Likewise, gnathiids in Australia, South Africa and Europe appear to transmit various blood-borne parasites.

So after solving the mystery of the damselfish's morning cleanings, and still fascinated by gnathiid, I moved on to a new question: Do the gnathiids of the Caribbean transmit diseases? As you may imagine, hundreds of researchers are currently studying the biology of ticks and mosquitoes, but only a handful are studying the biology of gnathiids. So, the answer is … WDK (we don't know).

Even though the oceans occupy the majority of the planet, scientists know far less about environmental factors that cause disease transmission in oceans than on land. To increase our knowledge of this important topic, the National Science Foundation has generously supported my team's efforts to understand the links between changes in Caribbean reef environments and the spread of blood-borne parasites by gnathiids.

A Caribbean Treasure Hunt

When my research team and I started studying gnathiids, we knew that Caribbean gnathiids infest many types of fish. But we did not know whether all, or even any, gnathiid-infested fish in the Caribbean are infected with blood parasites that cause diseases. If our study revealed that these gnathiid-infested fish were free of blood parasites, it would help exonerate gnathiids as disease-spreaders. But if, on the other hand, our study revealed that some or all of these gnathiid-infested fish were carrying blood parasites, it would implicate gnathiids as possible disease-spreaders.

So the first step of our study was to determine whether gnathiid-infested fish in the Caribbean carry blood parasites. This part of the study was complicated by the fact that blood parasites are notoriously patchy. That is, one location may be teaming with blood parasites, while another location may be completely, or almost, devoid of blood parasites.

This meant that, to cover all of our bases, we had to sample fish from multiple locations. We were on a Caribbean treasure hunt ! All told, we collected more than 1,500 fish of varied species from five Caribbean islands.

Because the parasites we sought reside in … you guessed it … blood, we had to anesthetize each fish (without killing it), draw a little blood from it and preserve collected blood on a slide. We then shipped our samples to my collaborators, Nico Smit in South Africa and Angela Davies in the U.K. — both of whom have years of experience looking for blood parasites in fish, a complicated task.

Taking it to the Streets

My hardworking colleagues screened hundreds of slides of blood from Caribbean fish without detecting any blood parasites. I wondered whether we had sampled the wrong species of fish or had sampled the wrong sites?

I was about to leave for a session of Sea and Learn in Saba — a pristine Caribbean island. As a scientist, I appreciate the importance of sharing science and research with non-scientists, so I contribute to the Sea and Learnprogram, which regularly brings scientists to the island to deliver presentations to the community, conduct workshops with local K-12 students and involve non-scientists in research.

Just before my departure, I received a game-changing email from Nico. Nico's email said that — Hooray! — one of our slides had tested positive for blood parasites. So, who were the lucky infectees? You guessed it … damselfish. Also included in Nico's email were photographs that I could share with Sea and Learn. Stoked!

Science can take you on a wild roller coaster ride, with thrilling surprises and uncertainty around almost every turn.

The Treasure Hunt Continues

From Saba, I high-tailed it to nearby St. Maarten, which has a particularly large population of damselfish. I am currently the chair of an excellent St. Maarten-based environmental organization called Environmental Protection in the Caribbean, which helped arrange for me to work with Tadzio Bervoets of the St. Maarten Nature Foundation to collect blood samples from damselfish.

My research team and I are still collecting and analyzing blood samples from damselfish from several Caribbean islands in order to:

• Determine whether parasite-infected damselfish get their parasites from gnathiids
• Identify the effects of infections of blood parasites on fish
• Determine the prevalence of blood parasites among Caribbean damselfish

Our latest results reveal that damselfish from St. Maarten and Saba are infected with blood parasites. We hope that additional sampling will help us determine who is spreading these parasites.

In addition, my research team and I are collecting and analyzing blood samples from various types of Caribbean fish besides damselfish. In doing so, we have discovered many new species of blood parasites that have not yet been scientifically described and named. More grist for future research!

More LiveScience articles about Paul Sikkel's research.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

You think you have interesting work, and indeed you may, but chances are it doesn't involve hieroglyphs, fieldwork at a Belize geological site, a 2,000-year-old stalagmite or coordinating a team of diverse experts across oceans to help solve a centuries-old mystery that may hold important lessons for us today.

But if this work, which is that of environmental archaeologist Douglas Kennett, sounds a little bit like Indiana Jones, it is in fact, often a slog. For his late 2012 published research related to the role of climate in the collapse of the Classic Maya (300 to 1000 C.E.), his team extracted and analyzed thousands of samples from a 2,000-year-old stalagmite.

"It was intensive, intensive work," says the Penn State professor. "In my lab there were students drilling samples 20 to 30 hours a week for a year."

The students were drilling tiny trenches in a stalagmite Kennett's team harvested along with nine others in the Yok Balum cave in Belize. Stalagmites form when water drips onto cave floors and leaves mineral deposits, which build up over time into rock towers. The stalagmite used for Kennett's study was about 2 feet (56 cm) long and had grown in a spot 55 yards (50 m) or so inside the cave. Extracting it and nine others like it was not easy. Stalagmites are very solid and heavy, and the researchers had to carry their specimens by light of headlamp, through narrow, craggy passages. What's more, the team was working in a part of the cave that hadn't yet been mapped. [Images: Amazing Caves Around the World]

Stalagmites have stories to tell, with chemical signatures locked inside internal concentric rings. The chemical profiles can provide information about what was happening with the climate at a given time. For example, traces of a relatively rare, heavier oxygen isotope suggest drier conditions. (Isotopes are variants of chemical elements — they have the same number of protons and electrons, but their neutron numbers vary.) Kennett's team used uranium-thorium dating to determine the stalagmite's age and that it had grown continuously for 2,000 years, i.e., without interruptions due to non-climate environmental factors, which would have distorted the climate record.

In the lab

Drilling in .1 millimeter increments into a cross-section 50 centimeters (about 20") in length, Kennett's students ultimately delivered 4,000 samples of stalagmite powder. Their process entailed drilling the trench, carefully using a flat edge to collect the powder sample and tip it into a vial, and just as carefully marking the vial with accurate and thorough data. Then, the students used compressed air to thoroughly clean the cross-section surface before the next drilling. It was slow and tedious work.

But it yielded great results. The analysis of early samples came out "in much more spectacular fashion than I ever envisioned," said Kennett. A research partner, the Swiss Technological Institute, stepped in to analyze the remaining samples. In the end, Kennett's team had an annual rainfall record (showing "wet" and "dry" cycles) for a 2,000-year period. The group had produced the most detailed view to date of climate trends during the period of Classic Maya collapse. Scientists had debated the role of climate in the demise of the Classic Mayans; now, here was evidence that climate might very well have played a significant role.

Long dry spell

The evidence showed that the deterioration of this complex civilization coincided with a decades-long drought after a period of prosperity, which itself had been enabled by a long period of high rainfall.

"The main finding was that a prolonged drought contributed to the collapse of Classic Mayan civilization," Kennett says. "But the story isn't complete without recognizing the preceding period of high rainfall, which was followed by a population expansion and proliferation of political centers."

How did the researchers know what was going on socially and politically at the time? They relied in part on the work of anthropological linguist Martha Macri, a specialist in hieroglyphs who has been studying and translating hieroglyphs inscribed on Mayan monuments for decades and directs the Maya Hieroglyphic Database Project at the University of California, Davis.

Kennett's team used the hieroglyphic database to quantify three types of events that signal political instability — war, events related to war (e.g., taking war captives) and the rate at which Mayan rulers commissioned new monuments (Monuments were built to honor new rulers, royal marriages, etc.). The "war index" showed that increased status rivalry, shifting strategic alliances and more battles tended to follow periods of drought. The big picture showed that the entire trajectory toward collapse occurred during a drying of the Mayans' world. Specifically, there was a drying trend between 660 and 1000 C.E. and an extended drought between 1020 and 1100 C.E. [10 Weird Ways Weather Changed History]

"You can think about it almost as a trap. For 200-300 years there were conditions that promoted expansion of the population ... [Then] you see a gradual downturn towards drought that started stressing the complex system," Kennett said. "And that's where warfare indices come in. Some of the most remarkable amounts of writing come towards the end of the Classical period. ... The society was already in decline and it was stressed further by a gradual drying trend. Then at the end, there were several dramatic droughts."

Kennett and his colleagues see relevance to their study in a 16th-century drought that occurred in the upper Yucatan and discussed it in their paper. "Historical accounts link this [16th-century] drought to reduced agricultural productivity, famine, disease, death and population relocation," they wrote.

"Some estimates suggest that drought-related agricultural disaster caused nearly a million deaths in Mexico in 1535 C.E." The chain of events in Mexico provides a historic analog to the events in and around Belize, the researchers argue. This will be an area for future study, Kennett said, along with studies that can shed more light on how relevant the Belize stalagmite findings are for the Mayan lowlands in general.

Kennett and his colleagues theorize that shifts in climate related to the Mayan collapse may have been driven by the migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone — a broad band of low pressure near the equator — along with changes in El Nino frequency.

Concert master

It turns out that solving a 2,000-year old mystery can take the concerted efforts of many experts. The Yok Balum paper, published in Science in November 2012, had 18 authors. In all there were 25 or so researchers involved, Kennett said, plus their students, from nine institutions.

It wasn't always easy to coordinate and manage the work, schedules and agendas of a large and geographically widespread team, he said. But the clear upside is that there are so many scientists available to build upon the Yok Balum data and earlier datasets.

"In the Maya region there is a lot of opportunity to integrate records," Kennett says. "Because there have been a large number of long-term archaeological projects at many Maya cities ... there is a lot of data to start with."

The Yok Balum study has assumed a life of its own, with several researchers taking the investigation in new directions or using the data to inform their own studies, Kennett says. For example, James Baldini of Durham University in England incorporated the data into his five-year study, the HURRICANE Project, which seeks to build a detailed picture of Atlantic hurricanes over the last 500 years, as a way to help predict future hurricane activity in our own changing climate.

And in April, Kennett had a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports linking the Maya Long Count calendar with the European calendar, based on a study using carbon-14 dating of carved wooden door beams from the Maya city of Tikal in Guatemala.

Then and Now

Mainstream news outlets and the blogosphere took notice of Kennett's study when Science published it in November 2012. As you may recall, the Mayans were on people's minds around that time; it was hard to escape talk of predictions — supposedly based on the Mayan Long Count calendar — that the world would experience cataclysmic change on Dec. 21. But climate change is a source of more enduring anxiety and it is most significant that Kennett's research findings seemed to offer obvious parallels to our own climate crisis.

"There are cautionary tales there," Kennett said. "The Maya are not us. We have a much more complicated situation. If someone were a climate change denier, he would say, 'The Maya are completely different, we have technologies the Maya could never have imagined and we can more easily adapt.' And to a certain degree, that's true. But the interaction and articulation between the social and economic processes on the ground and environmental and climatic processes — looking at those relationships is valuable.

"You had people living in Maya region that were living day-by-day within the context of changing climatic conditions and trying to make decisions about when and how much to plant. This was difficult as climatic conditions changed at the end of the Classic Period. And that had major sociopolitical repercussions."

That's the lesson that is valuable for us today, he says.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Knowing glances may dot a room when listeners hear the line, "You say tomato, I say tomahto," from the popular Gershwin song "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." Whether you're from Philadelphia or Fresno, Winnetka or Waco, your dialect often identifies you with a particular locale.

Now using a powerful computer program, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania provide insights into a significant change in the dialect of Philadelphians. In a century's time, the sound of Philadelphia has shifted from a somewhat southern accent to a more northern one. And it's not just a few areas of Philadelphia. The entire city shifted. "The reversal indicates major changes in social patterns," says University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov.

Considered the northernmost of the southern cities, Philadelphia has continued to progress toward a more northern sounding dialect. "All those things that align Philadelphia with the south are disappearing," says Labov. "The South is receding, and language is very sensitive to profound social attitudes." Younger people are less likely to pick up or use southern inflections.

"When we study how language changes, we gain an understanding of what we're like as human beings," says Labov. "

Regional dialects in America are getting more and more different and carrying each region away from the other."

One Vowel at a Time

Labov and his colleagues developed their conclusions using a program called Forced Alignment & Vowel Extraction (FAVE). It allowed them to automatically analyze vowel sounds on recordings of interviews with speakers from 89 neighborhoods throughout the city whose birth years ranged from 1888 through 1991. The interviews were compiled yearly beginning in 1973 as part of a long-term language study undertaken by Labov and his students.

"We wanted to make automatic what, in the past, was a painfully slow hand process," says Labov of the computer analysis program. Previously, vowel analysis required listening to a digital recording on a computer and physically stopping the audio to make a measurement of a vowel sound. The few automated analysis programs available required quality checks to determine if the program had correctly identified the start and end of a vowel sound.

"When the original algorithm was working correctly, very few errors were found. However, when it was off, it was off by a lot and introduced numerous errors," says Josef Fruehwald, a doctoral student working with Labov. Older analysis programs were also unable to accurately sort through the extraneous noises introduced on the recordings by household sounds such as water running or a television playing in the background.

Two years in the making, the FAVE program follows every word on an interview transcript and looks up the each word's sounds in a pronunciation dictionary. For the word "bat," for instance, the algorithm marks the beginning and end of b, a, and t. It then provides analysis for vowels throughout the entire interview. The program is so efficient that in one hour it provides 7000 measurements for one interview. Before FAVE, an analysis could take 3 days and yield just 300 measurements.

"The program has really exploded the volume of data we get from each speaker," says Fruehwald. The researchers have measured about one million vowels in the study. The increased data improves the accuracy of language analysis and provides a higher level of confidence in the results.

Moving Data

Presenting such a large amount of data in a meaningful way was paramount for Fruehwald. So he created motion diagrams of how vowel sounds in the study changed over time. One data point on the diagram for the "aw" sound, for instance, moves up into a more southern pronunciation for about 75 years and then turns back toward a more northern pronunciation.

Fruehwald says that the software is finding a larger audience as evidenced by an increasing number of related presentations at professional conferences. "This is all going to be taking off," says Fruehwald. Linguists interested in using the FAVE suite can download it or use its online interface free of charge at the FAVE site.

The End Result

Sound changes such as those studied here remain a major obstacle to communication, especially when it comes to machine recognition of spontaneous speech. Companies engaged in creating speech recognition programs have used the Atlas of North American English, produced by Labov's research group, to define the range of dialects that must be represented in the data base of sounds used to "train" the speech recognition software. Philadelphia teachers are also using the group's results to refine their classroom plans so that they account for speech variations among students.

Future research by the Labov team will involve learning why accents in all of the study neighborhoods moved in the same direction at the same time and how minority participation impacts changing dialect patterns.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

When Sudipta Seal and his co-principal investigator Larry Hench applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation, their goal was to create a material that could remove large volumes of oil from seawater economically and using a process that would be completely green.

In July 2010, Seal and Hench received a Rapid Response Grant from NSF’s Division of Materials Research to develop a novel process for treating fly ash — a by-product of burning coal — to absorb oil.

RAPID awards are given to projects that address urgent challenges caused by natural or man-made disasters and similar unanticipated events.

Seal’s and Hench’s grant was one of several that NSF awarded to help with cleanup and environmental protection after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The foundation made more than 60 awards, totaling nearly $7 million, in geosciences, computer simulation, engineering and other fields.

In the months after the largest oil spill in U.S. history, scientists faced the challenge of how best to clean up the millions of barrels of oil polluting seawater, marshes and beaches. There were questions about the relative safety of the various absorbent materials, as well as their expense and disposal. Furthermore, some of the materials dispersed rather than removed the oil, which led to further challenges.

Power plant waste

Seal, who is the director of the NanoScience Technology Center and Advanced Materials Processing Analysis Center at the University of Central Florida, studies nanostructured materials such as carbon nanotubes, silica aerogels and graphene.

These advanced materials sport very high surface-to-volume ratios, giving them the capacity to absorb huge amounts of oil. However, mass-producing them for sopping up large-scale spills remains prohibitively expensive.

For more than a decade, Seal had been researching the effects of chemically treating fly ash, a dry, gray, powdery waste product captured from power plant flue gases, before they reach industrial smoke stacks. In fact, the name “fly ash” is derived from the words “flue ash.”

Fly ash contains a mix of calcium, silicon and aluminium, along with traces of other elements. Although it can be used to make bricks, concrete and road-building materials, millions of tons of fly ash end up in disposal ponds, mine pits or landfills, where it has the potential to contaminate groundwater.

Oil Optimized Particle Surfaces

In their natural state, fly ash particles do not absorb much oil because they have relatively small surface areas and pore sizes. Plus they contain hydrophilic, or water-loving, compounds that tend to soak up water rather than oil. This means a bulky, soggy mess is created when fly ash is placed in the characteristic oil-water mix resulting from wind and wave action on spilled oil.

Seal and his team had developed a method of treating fly ash to yield a product called OOPS, which stands for “oil optimized particle surfaces.”

Unlike untreated fly ash, OOPS attracts and absorbs the oil out of an oil-water mix. The resulting OOPS-oil mixture “turns into a glop, which floats on the water surface and can be scooped up very easily,” Seal says.

To make things even easier, OOPS can be contained within an oil-permeable mesh bag that can be plucked out of the water once it is replete with oil.

Recycling oil

“But the story doesn’t end there,” Seal says. “Now, the question becomes, ‘How do we dispose of this oil?’”

And that’s where the “green” comes in.

“Coal plants will be used to make electricity for at least the next two or three generations in this country and they will probably always be used in other countries,” Seal says.

“This means we can put the mesh bag of fly ash charged with oil right back into a coal-fired furnace,” he says. “That way we can get the heating value off the oil and get the fly ash back out on the other end, and it is a primarily green, cyclic process.”

Doing the two-step

With NSF’s RAPID grant, Seal and his team set about refining their method for making OOPS. They use two steps to treat the fly ash. First, they immerse the particles in a heated alkaline bath to make their surfaces more reactive. This also substantially increases the surface area and porosity of the particles.

This step is followed by a second chemical treatment during which tiny “strings” of hydrophobic molecule groups, such as sodium hydroxide, are attracted to and bond with the reactive fly ash surface.

These bonded strings radiate out 1 to 10 micrometers from the surface, like the tiny hairs on a tennis ball. The hydrophobic groups can selectively attract and absorb the long-chain hydrocarbons out of the oil-water mixture, then “store” or capture the hydrocarbons in the many porous surfaces of the treated particles.

Compared to other processes, OOPS is relatively straightforward and efficient: it takes place at low temperatures (around 100 degrees C), and uses very small amounts of chemicals, which can themselves be recycled once the treatment is finished.

Zeolite surprise

As they searched for ways to improve OOPS, the researchers began to realize that their treatment process was actually turning fly ash particles into zeolites — microcrystalline molecules with large surface areas and large pores.

Zeolites, which can be natural or man-made, are prized for many uses. For example, in the oil and gas industry they absorb and filter molecules and catalyze chemical reactions.

“We stumbled upon the fact that the first step in our fly ash treatment was making zeolites with a very high adsorbing characteristic, from a product which would have otherwise gone wasted,” Seal says. “This means our research may have other applications, because normally zeolites are quite expensive.”

500 percent more oil absorbed

Seal’s team found that fly ash particles treated to maximize the number of zeolites on the surface significantly increases their surface area and porosity, leading to a far greater capacity to absorb oil.

“The oil sorption capacity of the zeolitic fly ash was highly improved — up to 500 percent — by chemical modification,” the team reports in a recent article in Environmental Science and Technology.

“Unfortunately, oil spills of all sizes occur annually — it will be great if they can be handled in a safer and more cost-effective manner, while also re-capturing the oil,” said Lynnette Madsen, program director for NSF’s Ceramics Division, which funded the RAPID research grant.  

“The fly ash zeolites are a better alternative for widely used synthetic sorbent for oil spill cleanup due to its high oil sorption capacity, and high buoyancy,” the authors state. “This material significantly decreases the cost of oil spill cleanup and remediation of the oil contaminated environment.”

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Researchers are developing a device that they hope will allow real-time, onsite detection of water and air pollutants in an inexpensive and environmentally friendly manner.

Professors Juejun Hu and Chaoying Ni of the University of Delaware's Department of Materials Science and Engineering are creating small, highly sensitive devices that will be able to detect organic, inorganic and biological molecules at low levels in the environment. They are funded by a seed grant from the National Science Foundation's Delaware Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research.

"We're making nanostructures to detect chemical molecules in a very sensitive manner," said lead researcher Hu.

With further research and development, the devices could be integrated into portable, battery-powered sensor packages, replacing more traditional molecular detectors, which require bulky and expensive equipment. Deployed in a network in the field, an array of the small sensors could detect contamination in air, water and soil in real time and relay that information wirelessly to a computer.

A major obstacle preventing small sensors from becoming practical replacements for bulky machines is that the new technology is less sensitive and specific in its detection than the instruments currently in use. Hu and Ni's project aims to create sensors that overcome these obstacles.

"It's a new type of sensor," said Ni. "It is very small and, more importantly, it is very sensitive and very specific."

The researchers use a focused ion beam to punch holes into a thin strip of chalcogenide glass — glass composed of particular elements that give it special optical propertiesneeded to track pollutants and enhanced by the holes — that is a few micrometers thick, or about one-tenth the width of a hair. When light passes through the strip, molecules in the environment selectively absorb one or a few particular colors of the light — in this way, the molecules are, in effect, signaling their presence. The researchers can use these optical absorption signals to identify the presence and concentration of molecules of interest. The researchers plan to group several of the tiny, chip-sized devices together to create a sensor capable of detecting multiple types of molecules.

"In the end, the device will be very sensitive compared to current technology. We expect around two to four orders of magnitude improvement," said Hu. "It will also be small and leave a very small footprint. Once integrated, it will be the size of a hockey puck and can be placed discreetly in the environment."

Since the researchers began the project about a year ago, they have successfully created several chips, although they have encountered some problems along the way.

"Fabricating the device was difficult," said Ni. "The holes have to be punched with great precision. That's why we need the focused ion beam, which turned out to be perfect for this project."

Although the project is still in its early stages, with testing only having started this past fall, Hu is already looking ahead to the practical benefits the devices could have for the environment.

"We'll be able to continuously monitor environmental pollutants, so we'll know if water in a stream is getting polluted or if a chemical plant is leaking. We can also use it to detect toxic leaks in industrial plants," he said.

Hu added that once the technology is sensitive enough, chip-scale sensors could be useful in other fields, including biomedicine.

"We could use the devices to check for certain diseases by analyzing a patient's breath," he said. "The sensor would be able to detect trace molecules in the air they exhale."

Ni agreed that the devices could have a significant impact. "They could be a game-changing type of thing," he said.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Before graduate student Ed Boyden clicked the button that sent blue light pulsing across a dish of cultured brain cells in the wee hours of August 4, 2004, he knew that he would learn something, no matter what happened next. If the cultured brain cells continued to go about their business, undisturbed by the light, he would know that something hadn't gone as planned and he would pack up and head home for the night. Alternatively, if the cultured brain cells responded with a burst of electrical activity, as he intended, he would be in for another late night at the lab.

He was alright with either option.

"I'm a big fan of the 'give it a try' method. If you design an experiment to be a constructive failure, that is, if you design it so that it will still tell you something even if it doesn't work, it's a way to begin to figure out what's going on."

As it turned out, he was in for a very long night.

"We got lucky, it worked on the first try," says Boyden.

The successful experiment that night in 2004 ultimately led to the development of a revolutionary new research technique known as optogenetics. Optogenetics enables scientists to use light to precisely control the activity of neurons in the brain.

Now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boyden is being recognized for his contributions; he has been named by the Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Foundation as one of six recipients of the 2013 "Brain Prize," a prestigious 1 million Euro award created in 2010 to stimulate and reward outstanding brain research.

Engineering for brain discovery

From the time he began his graduate career at Stanford University in the fall of 1999, Boyden knew he wanted to apply his training in electrical engineering to understanding the brain. Today, he recalls the many late-night brainstorming sessions that he shared with fellow student Karl Deisseroth — also a recipient of this year's Brain Prize — about potential ways to determine how brain cells work together.

Boyden and Deisseroth knew that existing technologies, such as electrical stimulation, wouldn't cut it when it came to understanding the big picture of how the brain works.

For one thing, scientists didn't understand whether zapping the brain with electricity increased or decreased the activity of brain neurons.

What's more, electrical stimulation could not be used to target specific populations of neurons. Therefore, even when researchers jolted only a small area of the brain with electrical stimulation, they couldn't identify which of the many types of neurons in these areas caused resulting changes.

"We were trying to work backwards from the goal of understanding the brain as a whole," says Boyden. "We wanted to engineer the tools that would get us there."

Harnessing light as a tool for brain research

Francis Crick, of the DNA-discovering duo Watson and Crick, first proposed the idea of using light to control brain activity in 1999.

Crick reasoned that if specific populations of neurons could be compelled to respond to light while others remained immune to it, researchers could effectively turn targeted neurons "on" or "off" with light, and thereby identify the respective functions of these neurons.

But there was an important hurdle that had to be overcome first: Scientists didn't yet know how to compel neurons to respond to light.

But in 2002, scientist Gero Miesenböck showed that if a small fragment of DNA from a fruit fly were inserted into mammalian neurons, the neurons would respond to light with a flurry of electrical activity.

Boyden's groundbreaking light experiment in 2004 used Miesenböck's technique- — but with a twist. Instead of inserting Miesenböck's fruit fly-derived protein into the cultured neurons before he pulsed light through them, Boyden inserted a protein known as channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2).

That's because ChR2 supported much faster, more precise control of neurons than did Miesenböck's fruit fly derived protein. ChR2 was isolated from common pond algae by German scientists Ernst Bamberg, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel.

Advantages of Optogenetics

This new technique for studying the brain, dubbed "optogenetics," improves upon existing technologies in several critical ways. For example, investigators know that the neurons that express ChR2 are being activated, as opposed to silenced, by the light. This allows them to say with certainty that any effects they observe are related to an increase in activity in the targeted neurons.

Additionally, unlike electrical stimulation, which can damage the very cells targeted for manipulation, light itself apparently has few, if any, negative effects on targeted neurons and surrounding tissue. Importantly, investigators can express the protein in certain neurons, without affecting others, making it easier to tease out the role of specific subsets of brain cells.

Recent Improvements

Since 2004, Boyden and Deisseroth have identified proteins that can be used to activate or silence targeted neuronal populations. This advance enables researchers to choose whichever approach — either activation or silencing — is more useful for their particular research focus.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Boyden and Deisseroth have also generated advances in optogenetics technology that enable more precise manipulation of neuronal activity than had ever before been possible.

Shedding light on brain disorders

According to Boyden, optogenetics will not only shed light on how the healthy brain works, but will also provide insight into what happens when things go wrong.

"Optogenetics is a powerful tool that we can use to hunt down areas of the brain that are involved in brain disorders," says Boyden. "It can help us identify potential new targets for drug therapy or deep brain stimulation."

This could be particularly critical for brain diseases such as autism, post-traumatic stress disorder and epilepsy that are difficult to study because their underlying dysfunctions are often associated with functional, rather than structural, problems in the brain's circuitry.

But what Boyden sees as one of the most important contributions of technologies like optogenetics is the fact that they remove some of the mystery, and fear, about how the brain works.

"One thing technologies like optogenetics do is help show that brain disorders are understandable and oftentimes treatable," say Boyden. "This goes a long way when we think about removing the stigma of mental illness and psychiatric disorders."

Celebrating Collaboration

Boyden has received many well-deserved accolades for his work in the last several years. The Lundbeck Foundation's award, however, is particularly special to him because it celebrates collaborative science; he will share it with Deisseroth, as well as with other scientists — including Miesenböck, Bamberg, Hegemann and Nagel — who helped lay the groundwork for optogenetics.

"My hope is that this encourages more omni-disciplinary research, and greater recognition of this type of collaboration," says Boyden.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by theNational Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Maybe you've heard the old joke: What's the worst thing you can do to a boat?

Put it in the water.

Once a boat enters the water, microorganisms begin accumulating on its surfaces, creating a significant amount of drag and a big mess. This may not matter for a small fishing boat, but for giant container ships, the drag created by microorganisms — in particular single-celled, silica-shelled organisms called diatoms — results in a significant amount of fuel loss every year.

Diatoms are one of the most common types of phytoplankton and a major group of algae. They constitute a large percentage of all living matter in oceans, rivers and lakes. One species, Didymosphenia geminata, is responsible for creating thick blooms in mountain streams and ponds. It is colloquially known as didymo or rock snot. The species is a menace to hospitals as well, where it can coat moist surfaces and promote bacteria by secreting mucilage that supports all types of growth.

For researchers in the lab of Edward Theriot at The University of Texas at Austin, diatoms (and their snot) are rich objects of biological research.

"There are hundreds of thousands of species out there in every body of water you can think of in the world," said Matt Ashworth, a researcher in the lab. "They're a very successful group, a relatively young group, and we're interested in understanding how they've evolved and colonized different ecosystems."

For decades, diatoms resisted study. Their genome is notoriously difficult to analyze. Morphological studies, based on the shape of a species' shell or other features, often contradicted the results of molecular testing. However, next-generation sequencing methods, in combination with computational techniques and powerful supercomputers, are helping researchers better understand the biology, evolution and dispersion of the diatom.

Using these new tools, researchers are trying to answer a number of basic questions about diatom evolution: What were the earliest diatoms like? How has the organism moved from a single site to every body of water in the world? And how have some species developed the ability to produce prodigious amounts of snot?

The Search for the Ur-Diatom

Researchers have sought to understand what the diatom's original ancestor might have looked like. Though Theriot and his team are still in the early stages of their analysis, some of their results are consistent enough that they can start to paint a picture of how the so-called "ur-diatom" may have appeared.

"There's this idea that the early diatom was a small flagellate, but what we're finding at the base of the diatom tree are things that are long and tubular, much like the tube inside of a paper towel roll," said Edward Theriot, professor of molecular evolution at The University of Texas at Austin and director of its Texas Natural Science Center. "In the diatom world, this is a radical view, but it's exactly what the tree is telling us."

To come to this conclusion, the researchers analyzed ribosomal and chloroplast genes of more than 200 diatoms and Bolidomonas (a closely related genus). They wanted to test the prevailing understanding of where certain diatoms fall on the evolutionary tree, and included species used as models in genomic studies and diatoms whose placement in the diatom phylogeny has been problematic or controversial.

After generating massive amounts of data using next-generation gene sequencers, they used the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to align, organize and analyze the DNA data, and to run phylogenetic programs that sketched out the evolution of diatoms as a whole.

"There are a number of programs that compare DNA sequences and estimate how those DNA sequences evolved from each other, and some of these have very complex algorithms," Ashworth said. "Before we had access to Ranger it would take weeks and months to run. Ranger does the same analyses in hours. So it's been a very powerful tool to give us quick ideas about how different strains are related to each other."

The time that Ranger saves the researchers doesn't just get them to an answer faster. It also allows them to test many alternative hypotheses.

"Sometimes, the best tree from molecular data looks radically different from what morphology tells us to expect," Theriot explained. "With Ranger, we can redirect our time away from just finding the best tree for a dataset, towards asking how different that best tree is from what scholars thought about diatom evolution, say, 100 years ago."

Using a statistical comparative approach, the researchers arrived at a different tree of diatom evolution than traditionally conceived, and a different point of origin. They reported some of their early findings at the XXII International Diatom Colloquium in August 2012 and they continue to investigate the sequencing results in light of previous research.

So how does the didymo make all that mucus?

For some of the lab's more focused studies, like the evolution of the rock snot's mucus-producing capability, the researchers sequenced the transcriptomes (all of the messenger RNA molecules expressed from an organism's genes) of half a dozen species to identify the key genes for the molecular production of the mucilage.

"People have been trying to characterize that mucilage chemically for 20 years and haven't come up with much information," Ashworth said. "Taking a transcriptome approach, I can generate a lot of data very quickly and tackle the issue not at the end results — which is the sugar that is secreted — but at the very beginning, at the point of the molecular machinery that assembled and allowed for the secretion of that sugar in the first place."

Four of the taxa they sequenced produce visible mucilage, and the other three taxa do not, but are closely related to the mucilage producers. They believe that closely related diatoms should share similar transcriptomes, except for the mucilage-related genes.

There are hundreds of genes involved in the assembly, packaging and secretion of these products, Ashworth said. If he can find 10 genes that are definitively involved in this process, then he is 10 genes closer to understanding how this function occurs.

"Generating DNA sequences in itself isn't particularly exciting, but the way the sequences fit together, or the existence of certain sequences at all, tells us a lot about the biology of these organisms."

Theriot uses TACC to host a web portal that supports the research in the lab, called Protist Central. He and his team use the portal to manage images and information about all the diatoms that they're working on. They also use it to manage information from their collaboration with researchers in Guam on the diatom flora of the coral reefs of the Pacific. Want to explore the beautiful and microscopic world of diatoms? Check out the image gallery, Diatoms of the Texas Gulf Coast.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Manjul Bhargava, who has loved mathematics for as long as he can remember, created and solved his first algebra problem at age seven, stacking oranges into a triangular pyramid and trying to figure out how many he would need if he had n oranges on one side. "I still remember the answer," he says. "It's n (n + 1) (n + 2)/6."

While his solution might well mystify many of us, it nevertheless was an easy and auspicious start for Bhargava, a National Science Foundation-funded scientist and math whiz who, 10 years ago at age 28, became the second youngest full professor in the history of Princeton University, and who has solved math problems that have stymied some of the best mathematicians in the world.

He figured out, for example, the answer to a problem that had eluded the legendary Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), a German regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. In addition, Bhargava and one of his students have made progress on another problem, one of the seven "Millennium Problems" of the Clay Mathematics Institute, a privately funded organization that will provide $7 million for the solutions, or $1 million for each.

Bhargava, who specializes in number theory — which involves understanding whole numbers and how they relate to one another — thinks of his craft as art, rather than science.

"When you discover things about numbers, it's very beautiful," he says. "When mathematicians are thinking about their problems, we're not thinking about their various applications, but rather are pursuing beauty. That's how pure mathematicians think."

At the same time, he acknowledges that "mathematics plays a very important role in our society," and notes that often the applications surprise the very scientists who work on it.

"When mathematicians started working with prime numbers, they never imagined that primes could have any application in the real world, but they now have become of central importance, especially in cryptography — the science of encryption," he says. "Every time we give our credit card number over the Internet, we want it to be secure. The encryption schemes that ensure this all use prime numbers."

NSF has been funding Bhargava's work through its Division of Mathematical Sciences with about $100,000 a year for three years. He has just completed the final year of the grant.

He approaches equations looking for whole number solutions, and patterns in those solutions. "It's about understanding sequences of numbers, such as square numbers, or prime numbers," he says. "Sequences are fundamental to many areas of mathematics. If you can understand them and how they are distributed, it leads to the solution of many other questions."

The Clay problem he and his student have worked on recently is called the Birch and Swinnerton–Dyer conjecture, a question essentially about advanced calculus but with number theory implications, that involves understanding elliptic curves, or equations of the form y2 = x3+ax+b. "When you graph this equation, you get a curve," he says.

"Here, a and b are two whole numbers that are fixed, so you are trying to find solutions for x and y, and we're looking for solutions in which x and y are whole numbers," he continues. "We are also interested in rational numbers, which are ratios of whole numbers. The question is: given such an equation, are there just a handful of solutions in rational numbers, or are there infinitely many? There is no algorithm known to decide whether such an equation has finitely many or infinitely many solutions. The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture, if known, would give such an algorithm."

He and his student proved that "if you let a and b vary, then at least 10 percent of the time this equation has no solutions with x and y being rational numbers," he says. "That wasn't known before. As a consequence of that, we showed that the Birch and Swinnertown-Dyer conjecture is true at least 10 percent of the time."

Earlier, when he was a graduate student, Bhargava also figured out what the famous Gauss did not.

One of Gauss's major discoveries was called the composition of binary quadratic forms. A binary quadratic form is an expression which looks like ax2 +bxy+cy2, with a, b and c being whole numbers that are fixed, and x and y being the variables.

"Gauss discovered a tricky way of taking two of these forms and using them to make a third one – this is now known as Gauss Composition," Bhargava says. "It has all sorts of amazing properties. The question I addressed in my Ph.D. thesis was: is this something that works only for quadratic forms? Or were there analogues of this composition for other, higher degree forms?"

Bhargava showed that quadratic forms were not the only forms with such composition, but that there were other forms, for example, cubic forms, that have such composition. ``Gauss presented it only for quadratic forms and it was an open question as to whether it was isolated or part of a bigger theory. In my thesis, I showed that Gauss composition is in fact only one of at least 14 such laws."

Bhargava, who was born in Canada, grew up on Long Island and graduated from Harvard University, where he majored in math, also is an accomplished musician who plays the tabla, an Indian percussion instrument. For a time, he thought he might become a musician, but math prevailed. "I figured if I became a professional musician, I wouldn't have time to do math, but if I became a professional mathematician in academia, I could still make time for music," he says.

His father was a chemist and his mother, who raised him, is a professor of mathematics at Hofstra University. Bhargava's family believed strongly in the value of a regular public school education, and did not encourage him to skip grades.

He did, however, skip school — occasionally for months at a time. He took off half of 3rd grade, 7^th grade, 12^th grade and sophomore year in college, to visit his grandparents in Jaipur, India. While in India, he studied the tabla and learned Sanskrit from his grandfather. Also, rather than go to his own school, he attended his mother's college-level math classes whenever he could get away with it.

"I didn't go to school very often," he says. "Lots of times I would get up, and ask my mother if I could just go and sit in on her classes instead of going to school, and she let me," he says. "She was pretty cool about it."

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind The Scenes Archive.

Have you eaten a piece of Jell-O lately? It is a hydrogel. Have you ever worn a contact lens? Hydrogel. Changed a baby diaper and wondered how it held the liquid in? Yep, you guessed it! The lining in baby diapers also contains dried hydrogels.

Hydrogels are three-dimensional materials that are hydrophilic, or water loving. Fully swollen hydrogels typically contain more than 90 percent water. Since they are primarily water, their mechanical properties — such as brittleness or elasticity — are relatively poor, thus they tend to be soft and fracture easily.

For the last three years, I have studied hydrogels in the lab of Stevin Gehrke at the University of Kansas. Materials found in nature are superior to man-made ones; therefore, we use nature as a model. Specifically, we use proteins and polysaccharides found in the extracellular matrix. The ECM is a highly ordered and complex material found in tissues and organs, and has excellent toughness. Mimicking these tissues with synthetic hydrogels would advance tissue engineering for repair of damaged or diseased tissues. I have created strong biocompatible hydrogels that have the ability to encapsulate cells. These properties are important for the use of tissue engineering scaffolds.

In the summer of 2011, as a participant in NSF's East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes Program (EAPSI), I spent 90 days in Japan, most of the time at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Hokkaido. Sapporo, the fifth largest city in Japan, is densely populated with about 2 million people. But Hokkaido, second largest and northernmost island, is not very populated compared to the rest of Japan. Japan has beautiful sights, wonderfully deep cultural roots, delicious food and extremely hospitable people.

But this is not why I went to Japan. I went because pioneering work and one of the world's most renowned scientists in the area of hydrogels is at Hokkaido University. Professor Jian Ping Gong is known for her work on double-network hydrogels. These DN hydrogels were the first to be identified with mechanical properties resembling biological structures such as cartilage. Professor Gong and her laboratory group helped guide my project, which examined DN hydrogels of biological components.

At Hokkaido University I learned how to make DN hydrogels with minimal oxygen, since oxygen hinders hydrogels from forming. I learned how to use a gel cutting device, which reduces cracks that lead to premature failure. Also, the Japanese researchers taught me the techniques for measuring the mechanical properties of hydrogels, such as tear tests to calculate toughness and tensile tests to study fracture properties. I have adapted these techniques to my projects at Kansas University.

At Hokkaido University, the students had a work-hard-and-play-hard mentality. Many students worked 12-hour days, Monday to Saturday, plus several hours on Sundays. They also participated in sports, games and trips. Professor Gong's lab group treated me like family. We went on a trip together and played in a volleyball tournament (my team won!). On this trip I taught them the pop dance called the "cupid shuffle" and we even went to an onsen, a Japanese hot springs bath. On my birthday, the lab group bought me a birthday cake, and together we made gyoza (dumplings). The lab also dressed me in traditional attire. One of my favorite experiences with the lab group was the Mongolian style BBQ. We set up grills, added food to them and just ate off of the grills. There was so much food: beef, chicken, veggies, rice, seafood — yum! We made flowing "somen" — noodles that flowed down long bamboo flumes, which we caught with chopsticks at the bottom. Around Sapporo we went to festivals, beer gardens, baby showers, church, temples and had get-togethers. I made lifelong friends.

I traveled to many places in Hokkaido with other EAPSI students. We went to parks where we saw foxes, bears and other wildlife up close. We explored the city. We ate at so many delicious places, but my favorite was a little soup curry shop. Among the many different base flavors one could order, my favorite was coconut. It came with lots of fresh vegetables and your choice of meat.

On my own, I traveled by bullet and local trains exploring Nikko, Utsnomiya, Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, Saijo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Iojima Island, Unzen, Shimabara and Kumamoto. During my travels I tried unique food such as raw horse meat, sushi, ramen, curry and okonomiyaki (savory Japanese pancakes). I even located some distant family by going door-to-door in Hiroshima.

This research and cultural experience will pull me back to Japan in the very near future.

Editor's Note: This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Researchers at the University of Washington have demonstrated how peptides, or short chains of amino acids, assemble by themselves into nano-sized structures on solid surfaces such as graphite and other layered minerals.

These findings are expected to help researchers harness the power of molecular self-assembly — the process by which molecules form a defined, well-organized arrangement without interference from external sources.

Molecular self-assembly " . . . gives a tremendous power to the scientist to make controlled nanostructures — the hallmark of nanotechnology," said Mehmet Sarikaya, professor of materials science and engineering at the university and director of the NSF-funded Genetically Engineered Materials Science & Engineering Center.

Controlling Self-Assembly

Sarikaya's research involved observing selected amino acids arrange themselves into a linear form, and then fold and coil into a 3-D protein. These observations were conducted at regular intervals ranging from 10 seconds to 15 hours in order to capture the progression of events.

This research was conducted with atomic force microscopy. AFM involves using high-resolution microscopes to produce images down to the molecular and atomic levels.

Analyses of the Sarikaya's observations revealed which amino acids apparently control surface and inter-molecular interactions of peptides that led to their self-assembly. Based on these insights, Sarikaya was able to control the self-assembly and formation of specific biomolecular nanostructures on graphite surfaces; these nanostructures were dubbed as self-assembled peptides.

The results of Sarikaya's research will advance efforts to use molecular self-assembly to engineer nanoscale machinery and microelectronics that are incorporated into:

• Biomolecular nanosensors, which may be used in molecular probing for cancer targets.
• Nanophotonics devices, such as self-assembled Light-Emitting Diodes, which are light sources used in many applications ranging from general lighting to aviation lighting
• Biofuel cells, which mimic bacterial interactions in nature that produce electrical currents
• Bioelectronics, which use electrical stimuli to manipulate various biological systems

Additional research of protein self-assembly and protein interactions that are related to this research may also aid in drug design. "Big Pharma companies cannot easily design drugs because many of these interactions and the resultant structures are not known," said Sarikaya. "Short peptides assembling on solid surfaces … may be a way to overcome some of the design and assembly problems encountered ..."

Editor's Note:The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by theNational Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

In most wildlife documentaries, once a predator sees prey, it’s immediately “game over:” The prey will be swiftly and predictably mauled, killed and then devoured by the predator.

But research led by Rulon Clark of San Diego indicates that encounters between at least some predators and prey may be surprisingly intricate, with outcomes at least sometimes determined by subtle communications between the animals.

Squirrel vs. Rattlesnake

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Clark filmed interactions between rattlesnakes and California ground squirrels, which are among rattlesnakes’ favorite prey animals. Analyzing the footage, he found that when a California ground squirrel sees a rattlesnake, it may signal to the rattlesnake by wagging its raised tail back and forth.

Clark suspects that the squirrel’s tail signals tell the snake something akin to, “I see you, and, therefore, you have lost the crucial advantage of surprise. I am prepared to dodge and escape your attack. So don’t even bother wasting your precious energy on a potentially futile attack.” According to Clark’s research, such tail signaling may — as intended by the squirrel — inhibit the snake from attacking.

Talking Tails

Clark’s hypothesis about the purpose of squirrels’ tail wagging is supported by the results of his experiments involving encounters between live, wild rattlesnakes and a mechanical, life-like squirrel — built by Clark’s team — that can be manipulated by remote control to recreate key elements of squirrel behavior.

The video featured here shows two of Clark’s experiments with the mechanical squirrel:

• The first experiment begins with a rattlesnake hiding in an ambush position in tall grass. The mechanical squirrel approaches the snake and repeatedly wags its raised tail. The snake shows no apparent response to the squirrel’s actions, remaining immobile. These results suggest that a hungry snake may be inhibited from attacking a nearby squirrel if the squirrel wags its tail at it.
• The second experiment begins with a rattlesnake hiding in an ambush position in a new location. The mechanical squirrel approaches the snake—but without wagging its tail. The snake moves next, biting the squirrel in the head region. These results suggest that a hungry snake may respond to a nearby squirrel by attacking it when it is not inhibited by tail signals from the squirrel.

Benefits of Mechanical Animals

Note that these types of experiments cannot be conducted with live squirrels because their behavior can’t be manipulated on command, as required for controlled experiments. By contrast, the mechanical squirrel’s behavior can be easily manipulated to support comparisons, like those included in Clark’s video, of a snake’s response to varied squirrel behaviors.

Because mechanical animals are easy to control and because the costs of building such animals are decreasing, more and more life-like mechanical animals similar to the Clark’s robotic squirrel are currently being developed and included in scientific studies of animal behavior and other topics.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Learn more about Clark’s research by:

• Viewing more of Clark’s videos showing live and mechanical prey animals interacting with rattlesnakes at http://www.youtube.com/user.
• Reading an article about Clark’s research on NSF’s website.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Only about 1,590 giant pandas remain in the wild — distributed among a few mountain ranges in Central China. Because the giant panda, an endangered species, is among the world's rarest animals, the Chinese government has established more than 50 panda reserves. Nevertheless, only about 61 percent of China's surviving panda population is protected in these reserves.

Home at Last

Experts in China and Michigan State University are feverishly working together to increase the size of populations of wild, protected pandas. Their work includes breeding captive pandas via artificial insemination in veritable panda-ariums. It also includes re-introducing young, captive-born pandas into Southwestern China's Wolong Nature Reserve, where they are protected.

Once a young panda arrives at Wolong, it initially lives in a section of the reserve that has been converted into something like a survivalist boot camp for pandas. Expansive panda enclosures within the boot camp are located on steep, panda-friendly hills and are filled with trees and bamboo. With mother serving as drill sergeant, each new panda recruit learns survival skills, such as how to forage for food and avoid predators.

Dressed for panda success, keepers who monitor and care for the pandas wear panda suits as camouflage, to help the animals maintain a healthy fear of humans.

When deemed ready for "the real world," each young recruit in Wolong boot camp is released to the wild.

Habitat, Habitat, Habitat

With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Jianguo "Jack" Liu, who holds the Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability at Michigan State University, is contributing to the Wolong re-introduction program by helping to improve panda habitat in Wolong. He and his team are generating multi-disciplinary analyses of panda habitat that incorporate information about the habits of local villagers, demographic changes in the labor force, the current state and anticipated availability of bamboo and panda activity obtained by tracking collared pandas in the wild.

The successes of Liu and his students include laying the foundation for a policy to subsidize the cost of electricity used by the reserve's human residents; the goal is to discourage residents from chopping down trees in panda habitat for use as firewood. In addition, Liu recently discovered that reserve residents have been keeping horses in the reserve, mostly to bolster panda tourism. But these horses have been consuming large amounts of bamboo, and thereby destroying panda habitat.

"We have been focusing on identifying how panda habitat changes over time and across space," says Liu. "This is very important because when you release pandas, you need to know where the good places to release pandas are. We need to release pandas in good habitat so that pandas can survive and sustain themselves for a long time."

Black and White and Wanted All Over

Threats to panda survival include poaching and smuggling, which is promoted by the black market for panda fur. In addition, the panda's primary habitat is located in the forests of China's Yangtze Basin region — the capital of China's economic boom. As a result, panda habitat is increasingly being fragmented by roads and railroads that isolate panda populations and prevent mating across groups.

In addition, an adult panda must eat about 28 pounds of bamboo per day to fulfill its nutritional needs. Unfortunately, however, pandas must increasingly compete for their needed bamboo with people who use this plant as food for livestock, an ingredient for medicines and raw material for musical instruments. What's more, research conducted by a research team that includes Liu and is partially funded by NSF indicates that by the end of the 21^st century, climate change may kill off swaths of bamboo that pandas need to survive.

Another problem: the natural cycle of bamboo growth involves massive periodic die-offs. To cope with a die-off in any particular area, pandas must move to non-impacted areas. However, such movement is sometimes obstructed by the shrinkage and fragmentation of panda habitat.

An Online Panda-thon

For more information about pandas as well as videos and photos of pandas, see Michigan State University's Web site on pandas.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

When Kelly McNamara, a fifth-grade teacher in the Burrillville School District, Rhode Island, recently asked her students, "What is a common denominator for 4 and 7?," and they all instantly responded "28!," she smiled. "This was the first year that I could worry more about teaching the content rather than waiting for students to figure out their math facts," she says.

This year McNamara's class used Reflex, an online system from ExploreLearning that has students learning math facts within a game-based environment. Launched in 2011, the program has won a CODiE award for Best K-12 Instructional Solution. Hundreds of thousands of students across the U.S. are using the program each week.

Under the hood, the system's adaptive software applies data-driven pedagogy and technology that ExploreLearning pioneered with National Science Foundation (NSF) funding.

NSF funding enabled startup's research

"Generations of students are all too familiar with the traditional methods associated with math facts — a seemingly endless ritual of timed table drills, flashcards, timed worksheets, followed by more times table drills — repeated ad infinitum and ad nauseam," said Paul Cholmsky, ExploreLearning's head of R&D and principal investigator on the NSF-funded research. The problem, he says, is not just "the mind-numbing boredom" of these methods. "[S]tudies have also shown that they just don't work at all for many students," he says. When students labor in vain, it can seem like evidence to them that mathematical proficiency must be some kind of innate talent — one they just don't have, he said. This can become a self-limiting belief that individuals will hold throughout their schooling and into their careers.

Enter Reflex. Almost a decade ago, ExploreLearning began a research program to look at how it might use the wealth of data generated by students' interactions with online games and simulations, to continuously adapt the content and pedagogical methods to each student's specific needs. At that time, ExploreLearning was a small startup in Charlottesville, Va., with a growing reputation based on its award-winning library of online math and science simulations, Gizmos. To pursue a new line of research, it applied for and won a series of grants through the NSF's Small Business Innovation Research program. "The NSF's funding was critical to our being able to undertake the kind of speculative prototyping and experimentation required to go after this exciting new area in educational technology," Cholmsky said. ExploreLearning was subsequently acquired in 2006 and is now part of Cambium Learning.

Getting to automaticity

Cholmsky explained that the goal extends beyond getting students to correctly answer simple expressions in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Over the course of elementary school, students typically progress from methods like finger counting through a series of more advanced mental strategies that reflect their developing numeracy. For example, a student who is unsure of 5 x 7 but knows that 5 x 6 = 30 might find the answer by realizing that 5 x 7 is equivalent to 5 x 6 + 5. Thinking of multiplication as repeated addition in this way enables the student to correctly answer 35, albeit with some mental effort.

As they practice and evolve these mental strategies over time, elementary students are expected to ultimately develop automaticity with these basic facts, meaning they are retrieving answers from long-term memory without conscious effort or attention. Recent brain imaging studies have shown how this progression is reflected in the regions of the brain that are involved in mathematical computation. By achieving automaticity, students free up their working memory so that it can be devoted to problem-solving and learning new concepts and skills.

The challenge for math educators is that many children in the United States never attain adequate automaticity with basic math facts. Those who do develop automaticity tend to do so later than their peers in nations with higher math achievement. Students who continue to use effortful methods to answer math facts tax their working memory, impeding their ability to learn more advanced material such as fractions and algebraic equations. To address this issue, new national curriculum standards and research-based classroom guidelines have focused on automaticity as one of the critical benchmarks in elementary mathematics education.

High-speed game environment

Cholmsky explains how an adaptive system works in this context. "Reflex uses a range of data-gathering 'sensors' to monitor each student's developing fluency across the entire range of math facts, constantly looking for opportunities to leverage their current abilities to help them learn new facts more efficiently. A student who has begun confidently recalling 7 x 3 = 21, for example, can be coached to apply the commutative property to answer 3 x 7, and then given a series of practice environments that place increasing demands on them."

Ultimately, students enter a high-speed game environment whose elements place a load on their working memory. In one game, they might have to answer math facts to navigate through a maze and avoid pursuers; in another, they might answer facts to serve ice cream to space aliens or to fly a hot-air balloon. The goal is to develop their abilities to effortlessly retrieve facts from long-term memory while they are focused on a different, complex task. This is precisely what you want happening in the classroom when students are learning, say, how to add fractions with unlike denominators. "You want them focused on the new procedure they are learning, not on struggling to answer all the math facts required as part of applying it. Provided the game difficulty is accurately matched to their current ability with each fact, students can make tremendous progress in relatively short amounts of time."

The program also is designed to help students learn important concepts like the inverse relationship between multiplication and division, by actually applying the concept as a bridge from known to unknown. The data-driven, individualized process builds on each student's current proficiency, whatever it might be, and is designed to work for even the most struggling student. "It's the Goldilocks approach," said Cholmsky, "not too hard, not too easy, just the right difficulty at that point in time to challenge and engage the student without frustrating them."

Success for all

ExploreLearning wrapped the Reflex technology within addictive online games. Says Cholmsky, "Here's something else that's really exciting: Students are choosing to use the system in their free time. We've studied many schools where Reflex is assigned as homework, say, three times a week, and students go well beyond that, regularly logging on five, six or even seven days a week to play games and work on their fact fluency."

Teachers are pretty happy when the class average is to do more homework than assigned, he says.

"This past summer, we also saw summer school students who already use the system on an intensive basis every day in class choose to log in again from home during the evening or over the weekend. That's something I'm really pleased about, since many of these summer students have been struggling with mathematics in general and giving them a positive experience before the next school year is important. We're even getting fan mail, which is pretty cool. Remember that this is for a system for practicing math facts!"

Since its launch last year, students have already answered over a billion facts while playing Reflex games.

Teacher McNamara says, "I experienced amazing results with Reflex. I taught nearly 60 math students this year and all but eight students were 100 percent with the lowest fluency over 80 percent." The program has "changed my teaching life!"

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

With 3.5 billion years of research and development under her belt, Mother Nature could be considered the world 's most experienced biological engineer. Sure, her methods may appear haphazard at times, but her track record of developing organisms that are exquisitely adapted to the tasks required of them is nothing short of amazing.

One task she 's been particularly devoted to is finding ways to keep her creations clean of debris and contaminants. It 's therefore not surprising that today 's engineers are looking to nature for inspiration when it comes to dealing with "biofouling," or the unwanted build-up of biological material, which plagues a wide range of industries.

A recent study conducted by researchers at Ohio State University has found that rice leaves and butterfly wings make use of some unique surface characteristics that promote self-cleaning. The researchers believe that incorporating some of these features into man-made products might be key to tackling problems associated with biofouling.

"Living nature is full of engineering marvels, from the micro to the macro scale, that have inspired mankind for centuries," says Bharat Bhushan, senior author of the study and director of the Nanoprobe Laboratory for Bio- and Nanotechnology and Biomimetics at Ohio State University.

Consider, for example, that while a ship gets bogged down by barnacles as it crosses the ocean, a shark swimming in the same ocean remains clean as a whistle. One reason for this is that shark skin is composed of a special type of scale covered by riblets that reduce friction as the shark travels through the water. Reduced friction means that water flows more rapidly across the surface, making it difficult for microscopic hitchhikers to grab hold. This phenomenon is called the shark skin effect. The lotus leaf, on the other hand, maintains its squeaky clean reputation with a waxy surface structure that repels water, a property called superhydrophobicity. Combined with low adhesion, this is known as the lotus effect.

The September 2012 study, published in the journal Soft Matter by Dr. Bhushan and engineering graduate student Greg Bixler, shows that rice leaves and butterfly wings combine the low drag of shark skin with the superhydrophobicity of the lotus leaf, putting these surfaces at the top of the list of nature-made self-cleaners.

The idea to look at rice leaves and butterfly wings came to the investigators from observing these structures in their natural habitats.

"We noticed that water droplets on rice leaves and butterfly wings roll off effortlessly, and that each remains clean in their respective environment," says Bhushan.

This observation lead the investigators to suspect that, like shark skin and lotus leaves, rice leaves and butterfly wings have special properties that make them particularly resistant to fouling.

Before they could get started, they had to address the fact that both of these structures are incredibly delicate, making them difficult to work with in an experimental setting. For this reason, they began by creating replicas of both surfaces. Silicone was poured over actual leaves and wings, creating a "negative" mold they then used to create a urethane replica better suited to the rigorous tests the investigators had in mind. Some replicas also received a silica coating to replicate the superhydrophobic properties of the natural structures.

They then subjected the replicas to experiments designed to determine how efficiently they moved through air (drag), how well they got rid of contaminants (self-cleaning), how tightly contaminants stuck to the surface (adhesion), and how well they retained or repelled water (wettability). Like shark skin, rice leaves and butterfly wings exhibited low drag and self-cleaning properties. But both of these samples were special in an important way: They exhibited lotus-like properties including superhydrophobicity and low adhesion. This effect was magnified in coated samples, which outperformed uncoated samples in every test.

Bixler attributes these findings to the unique structure of each surface.

"Both rice leaves and butterfly wings contain micro- and nano-sized features that repel and direct water in one direction," says Bixler. "This is accomplished with a combination of grooves and bumps that are invisible to the naked eye."

By showing that rice leaves and butterfly wings combine anti-fouling properties of some of nature 's best self-cleaners, Bhushan and Bixler have identified new surfaces that can be used as engineering inspiration for a wide range of industries plagued by biofouling. Preventing the build-up of biological matter on a ship 's hull, for example, could increase the efficiency of the ship 's movement, ultimately leading to more efficient fuel usage. Also, reducing the accumulation of bacteria and other microbes in medical tubing could greatly reduce a patient 's risk of infection.

"We are investigating methods to fabricate rice leaf and butterfly wing-inspired films for applications requiring low drag, self-cleaning and anti-fouling," say Bhushan. The investigators hope that the use of such films in various industries, including health care, shipping and advanced manufacturing, will reduce costs and improve quality.

Bushan 's study on rice leaves and butterfly wings was titled "Bioinspired rice leaf and butterfly wing surface structures combining shark skin and lotus effects," and was published online in the journal Soft Matter on September 11, 2012. (DOI: 10.1039/c2sm26655e)

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

According to the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health, an estimated one in eight American women will develop breast cancer during her lifetime. Out of those women who develop breast cancer, many will have mastectomies and will undergo breast reconstruction. A report from the America Society of Plastic Surgeons says that 96,277 women had breast reconstruction in 2011.

The materials used for breast reconstruction, such as silicone, have improved over time, but according to a 2011 report from the FDA, “as many as ... 1 in 2 primary reconstruction patients — meaning those who have reconstruction performed at the same time as a mastectomy — require implant removal within 10 years of implantation” due to complications or poor outcomes.

What if there was a way to create safer breast implants and also fight cancer?

A team of researchers from the University of Akron bridged materials science and medicine to develop a new type of rubber material that can be used as the shell of a breast implant. Diagnostic agents that help reveal the presence of cancer cells, as well as cancer-fighting drugs, can be embedded into the shell and released into the body.

“We are trying to integrate breast reconstruction with cancer treatment,” said Judit E. Puskas, University of Akron professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, who is leading the project. “We don’t have enough research in areas related to women’s health.”

The new biocompatible materials are polyisobutylene-based, which means that they are similar to butyl rubber, or synthetic rubber. These new “biorubbers” are thermoplastic elastomers, or polymers with elasticity and the potential to become pliable and moldable above a certain temperature, as well as the ability to return to their initial state upon cooling. This material is lighter and stronger than silicone rubber. Compared to other rubbers, it is especially impermeable, preventing liquids from seeping through — essential for prevention of gel leakage in an implant. The material is also environmentally friendly and can be reprocessed.

A previously developed PIB-based material — a predecessor to the new biorubber — has successfully been used as the coating on drug-eluting coronary stents. These are tubes placed in coronary arteries that slowly release a drug to block cell proliferation that can block arteries. This material is currently used in clinical practice, with over 6 million stents implanted.

“Drug eluting stents reduced the incidence of [repetitive] blocking of the artery from 30 to 8 percent,” said Puskas.

Puskas and her team worked to improve the properties of this PIB-based material, and came up with the new biorubber. The unique qualities of this material offer a vehicle to fight and treat cancer, reduce the risk of inflammation, and transmit painkillers.

The polymer in the new material can be spun into a fiber mat; the fibers, which can be attached to the implant, encapsulate various cancer-fighting drugs. Over time, the drugs slowly release into the body. Delivering drugs directly to the cancer cells by embedding them into the fiber mat coating could reduce the amount of drugs needed for treatment, and thus lessen side effects.

Researchers can also encapsulate a diagnostic agent to reveal the presence of cancer cells and their location as well as help determine the efficiency of the drugs. Then, drugs could be administered to fight the cancer cells.

In addition, the implant can be coated with drugs that help reduce the risk of inflammation in the tissue surrounding the implant. Such an inflammation could result in tissue contraction, the shortening or other distortion of tissue, or even a ruptured implant.

In addition to breast prostheses, the new material has other applications, such as vascular grafts, which are transplanted or prosthetic blood vessels used in surgery. The material can also be used with implantable devices incorporating antimicrobials to kill or inhibit the growth of microorganisms, steroids and analgesics or painkillers.

In March, Puskas and her team received international recognition for their new material. It was one of the five winners of the General Electric healthymagination Breast Cancer Challenge. Their research was selected among 500 entries from 40 countries. Each winner received a $100,000 seed award and will be given access to additional funding for further research and development.

Learn more about Puskas and her research.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Researchers have developed a bacteria strain that is uniquely effective at degrading the toxic industrial chemicals known as PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls.

PCBs are toxic man-made organic chemicals that pose a threat to human health and to the environment.

The Environmental Protection Agency has classified PCBs as potential human carcinogens known to adversely affect the immune, reproductive, nervous and endocrine systems of humans and other animals. Used in U.S. industrial and commercial applications, PCBs were manufactured from 1929 until being banned in 1979. Because they are resistant to degradation, PCBs are still present in the environment.

Difficult to degrade

Cleaning up PCBs most often involves dredging PCB-laden soil and incinerating the soil or depositing it in a secure landfill. These remediation techniques are expensive. General Electric, for example, spent $561 million to dredge and pile 2.6 million cubic yards of Hudson River sediment contaminated with PCBs. Even after dredging, PCBs often remain embedded in surrounding rock.

The chlorine atoms in PCBs make these chemicals toxic and difficult to degrade. Even though there are naturally occurring PCB-degrading bacteria in the environment, they are slow to break down the chemical. Natural in situ dechlorination of highly chlorinated PCBs occurs under anaerobic conditions at the rate of approximately 5 percent per decade. This means that PCBs can persist in the environment for a very long time.

The Bioremediation Consulting Inc., with the support of the National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research Program, has been able to culture a robust PCB-degrading bacteria in large amounts, which could mitigate this public health problem.

The solution

Previously, researchers were unable to isolate these more robust bacteria because of their strong attachment to sediments.

However, Margaret Findlay, BCI President and lead scientist, and Dr. Samuel Fogel, BCI Vice President and project scientist, were able to develop a culture — a member of the Dehalococcoides genus — which they've since made commercially available. The researchers were able to tease away the bacteria from a groundwater sample from a site in New Jersey. The team used common minerals, such as sodium chloride, ammonium chloride, phosphate and trace elements, to form the growth media.

The bacteria grown in the culture are not pathogenic, and should not cause adverse effects in the natural environment, according to the researchers' assessments. The cultured bacteria also do not change the pH of the water, leaving the concentration of the residual hydrochloric acid that the bacteria produce at a 1- or 2-parts-per-million level.

With the NSF SBIR grant, BCI produced large quantities of the bacteria to test its effectiveness in neutralizing PCBs by removing chlorine atoms.

BCI's culture showed its ability to degrade Aroclor 1260, a common commercial mixture of about 60 chemically similar PCBs containing 6 to 8 chlorines per molecule. Within 18 weeks, 44 percent of the PCBs with 6 to 8 chlorines were converted to PCBs that had 4 to 6 chlorines. Similar results were seen with another PCB mixture, Aroclor 1254.

BCI's breakthrough has the potential to be a cost-effective replacement of dredging and transporting soil to landfills.

How it works

The PCB-degrading bacteria reduce the number of chlorines in the biphenyl molecule. Then, as conditions become more oxygenated, common aerobic bacteria can further dechlorinate the molecule, as well as break the carbon rings that hold biphenyl molecules together.

"The important thing is to be able to knock off chlorines on the highly chlorinated PCBs . . . because some of them have dioxin properties that are particularly toxic," said Fogel. Once you are down to two, three or four chlorines, he said, aerobic bacteria can metabolize the biphenyls.

The dechlorination process using the PCB-degrading bacteria is quite complex. The mechanism involves PCB's role as an electron acceptor.

"PCBs are electron acceptors," said Fogel. "In order to have electrons flowing, you need an electron donor. Typically, [the donor] is a sugar molecule or a material like lactic acid that bacteria can ferment. One of the fermentation products is molecular hydrogen, and molecular hydrogen turns out to be the ultimate electron donor that these bacteria use to knock chlorines off."

The bacteria use H2 gas, produced by other naturally occurring soil bacteria, as an energy source, while fermenting sugar or fat. H2 acts as an electron donor to PCB. The bacteria's enzymes, dehalogenases, have an active site with vitamin B12, which becomes a strong reducing agent. The hydrogen gas helps reduce cobalt in the dehalogenases, which in turn, catalyzes the breaking of the chlorine bonds in PCB, replacing the chlorine atom with a hydrogen atom.

Once reductive dechlorination occurs — the process in which the PCB gained electrons — the bacteria leave a substrate that aerobic bacteria can attack. The aerobic bacteria break the PCB's aromatic rings, and the end product is mineralized carbon dioxide and hydrochloric acid.

Research History

Findlay, Fogel, and their team have been involved in studying Dehalococcoides-like bacteria since 1993. The researchers observed that with the bacteria present, reductive dechlorination occurred in anaerobic groundwater that was contaminated with trichloroethylene.

Companies came to BCI requesting evaluation of contaminated groundwater to see if reductive dechlorination of TCE was possible. For clients who already had the necessary bacteria present in their groundwater, BCI could enhance the impact of the bacteria by adding the right electron donor and establishing optimal biochemical conditions. However, there were clients whose groundwater did not harbor the bacteria, so bacteria-initiated dechlorination did not occur.

BCI researchers solved this problem by growing Dehalococcoides under anaerobic conditions in a mineral salt media and supplying the bacteria commercially to clients whose groundwater lacked the organism.

The researchers soon realized that there was a Dehalococcoides strain able to dechlorinate aromatic compounds such as trichlorobenzenes.

Routine testing of groundwater containing TCB, TCE, and PCB led BCI researchers to believe that Dehalococcoides could dechlorinate PCBs in non-laboratory conditions, at real-world contaminated sites. Academic literature, especially that of S. H. Zinder and J. M. Gossett at Cornell University, and L. Adrian at Technische Universitat, Berlin, which demonstrated Dehalococcoides' limited ability to dechlorinate PCB, also supported this belief.

The researchers also knew that there were different strains of Dehalococcoides — the same genus and species, but different varieties.

"We became convinced from all the literature that Dehalococcoides would become the important organism to deal with, what we consider, the last frontier of bioremediation," said Fogel. "That is, PCBs are the final frontier, in the sense that, there is no other group of chlorinated compounds — or for that matter any chemical — that is more difficult to biodegrade than PCBs."

With a grant from the Electric Power Research Institute, BCI researchers tested client-supplied ground-water samples containing TCB, PCB, TCE, and Dehalococcoides to assess whether the strain of bacteria from these samples would be well suited to biodegrade the groundwater PCB. The bacteria efficiently removed chlorines.

With this success, BCI researchers shifted attention to growing a culture of this PCB-degrading organism.

Now, BCI can offer cultures of bacteria to treat PCB-contaminated groundwater or soil. The bacteria are expected to carry out reductive dechlorination both ex situ and in situ, which can potentially eliminate the need to dredge PCB-polluted soil.

BCI researchers are informing the public and the remediation community about their breakthrough, and pursuing new ways to tailor the engineering application of this finding.

BCI researchers have had a long journey with PCB, because they want to improve the environment.

"If you drive along the Hudson River today, you will see mounds of sediment . . . dredged from the bottom," said Fogel. But, ". . . perhaps [we] should use biological methods [to remediate them] . . . Here at BCI, we are environmental scientists who want to make a change, so we go through all the necessary steps."

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.