Archaeopteryx, a dinosaur the size of a turkey, has often been viewed as the Kitty Hawk of bird flight. Around 150 million years ago, this early bird changed the way dinosaurs moved around in the world, from running, climbing, slithering, leaping or swimming to soaring through the air.

This celebrated species glided above the spike-backed Stegosaurus and the long-necked Brachiosaurus of the Jurassic period.

Feathers, hollow bones and a brain capable of processing information to make flight possible all came together, distinguishing Archaeopteryx from its land-limited cousins.

And yet, recent research suggests that while this creature may have been among the first to fly, it was likely not the first to have the brain power to make flight possible.

Led by Stony Brook University research instructor Amy Balanoff, a team of scientists used CT scanners to examine the brains of older dinosaurs that are considered the distant cousins of Archaeopteryx, modern birds and Archaeopteryx itself.

While the researchers weren’t able to look at the brains themselves, they were able to study the relative size of different areas by looking at the skulls. It is like examining the outline of a hard suitcase stuffed to capacity. By looking at different compartments, scientists could see what was there and how much space it filled. In the scientists’ case, they used CT scanners to determine the volume of different brain regions.

Archaeopteryx, it seems, wasn’t alone among its contemporaries and even, in some cases, its predecessors in having a bird-like brain capable of flight.

“This feature that we thought was more restricted in its nature now needs to be expanded to include more groups,” said Balanoff, who is also a research associate in paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History.

Creatures that have an enlarged or hyperinflated forebrain, which is important in providing superior vision and the coordination necessary for flight, include oviraptorosaurs and troodontids.

This study “establishes that the evolutionary origin of the relatively large brain of Archaeopteryx was not the result of nature selecting for flight capability,” explained Gabriel Bever, an assistant professor of anatomy at the New York Institute of Technology, a co-author on the study and Balanoff’s husband. “Large brains evolved prior to flight and were simply inherited by Archaeopteryx and other early birds.”

This, Bever, continued, is an important example of evolution taking existing structures and assembling them in a way that moves the group along its evolutionary trajectory.

The forebrain is what really expanded along bird lineage, Balanoff added. That part of the brain is larger among species with stronger cognition.

“A lot of characteristics that we’ve associated with flying birds are not unique to flying birds,” she said. “They show up much earlier with nonavian dinosaurs.”

Balanoff described the finding as further evidence of a random process, rather than being directional.

She said the result wasn’t surprising, given that other bird-like features, like feathers and hollow bones, were present before Archaeopteryx. One of the first-known dinosaurs capable of powered flight, Archaeopteryx was discovered only two years after Darwin predicted in “The Origin of Species” that there should be “transitional fossils,” Balanoff said.

The latest findings were published in the journal Nature in July of this year.

Balanoff joined SBU this summer and will be one of several teachers in a gross anatomy class for medical students this fall. “Paleontologists in general are often found in anatomy departments, teaching human gross anatomy,” she said.

Balanoff and Bever met when they were at the University of Texas, when Balanoff was working on her master’s degree and Bever was conducting research for his doctorate.

Balanoff didn’t grow up in Texas with a burning desire to uncover more information about dinosaurs or dinosaur brains.

“My father [Howard Balanoff, a professor at Texas State] is a political scientist. I was thinking more along the lines of politics,” she said.

As a freshman in college at the University of Texas, however, she took a course with Timothy Rowe — a collaborator on the Nature article — and switched her major to geology.

Going forward, Balanoff plans to focus on an area of the modern bird brain called the wulst, which may have a similarity to a structure in the brain in the Archaeopteryx.

“The scientific importance of the wulst to our understanding of neurological evolution,” predicted Bever, “will eventually far outweigh its importance as a systematic character supporting Archaeopteryx as an early bird.”

The brain is like an enormous orchestra, as neurological signals from different regions work together to create a symphony of thought, emotion and behavior. When some of those signals are out of tune or come at the wrong time, the melody, and indeed the thought process, can become difficult to follow.

Pavel Osten, an associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, has helped develop ways to compare the signals from mouse brains that are functioning within the range of normal with those that have wiring or signaling problems because of mouse models of disorders like schizophrenia or autism.

“There are disorders linked to brain development that are, in a way, subtle,” he said. “There is nothing dramatically wrong with the brains of patients” on a larger scale. Autism and schizophrenia are likely caused by different wirings of brain connections, without dramatic changes, such as the cell loss in neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, Osten explained.

To understand what happens in the brains of people with schizophrenia and autism, Osten worked with TissueVision, a Cambridge, Mass., company, to develop an imaging system called serial two-photon tomography. In the past, scientists would take one to two months to image the entire brain at the same resolution that this technique can now do in a day.

It works by integrating automated images of thin parts of the brain, starting with the top. By looking at which regions of a brain are active, scientists can see how the communication among circuits may be disrupted in disease and can look at what drugs might correct these problems.

“When we got to that point, we realized that we have a really good drug-screening method,” he said. This process can map out how drugs affect different regions of the brain.

Indeed, Osten and MIT professor Sebastian Seung started a company called Certerra, which provides a rapid analysis of brain activity at different times. Based at Cold Spring Harbor, the company employs three people. Osten hopes to increase that to 10 to 15 staff members in the next few years.

Osten works one day a week at that company, named for the “territory of the brain,” while he spends the rest of a work week that often exceeds five days in his lab. Osten said tomography can reveal unexpected benefits of drugs by suggesting ways medicines affect the brain.

Many drugs used for depression were “prescribed for something else,” he said. When patients took them, however, they got better. By seeing the effect of a wide range of remedies, researchers can depend “less on serendipity. They can see the clinical effect.”

The CSHL scientist said that seeing which regions of the brain are active doesn’t necessarily reveal every cellular and molecular detail linked to a specific disorder.

“We focus on the large picture,” he explained.

Peter Seeburg, a professor in the Department of Molecular Neurobiology at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Germany, who has known Osten since 1999, described serial two-photon tomography as a “promising way to determine the brain circuitry. Whether it will allow [researchers] to see differences in schizophrenia or autism is at this point unclear.” He explained that the key to its effectiveness lies in the ability to see how the circuitry determined by tomography differed from “normal” individuals which, he contended, was still a “huge amount of work.”

Seeburg described Osten as a driven scientist with an excellent reputation and an international renown, adding, “He has a passion for medically relevant science and a nose for excellent projects.”

A scientist at CSHL for five years, Osten lives in Huntington with his wife, Julia Kuhl, a fine and graphic artist who works part-time at Cold Spring Harbor. The gallery Frosch & Portmann in New York has exhibited her work, which is available at the website www.juliakuhl.com. This year, she had a solo exhibit at the gallery.

The couple, who also have a residence on the lower East Side, enjoy viewing the countryside on Long Island and in the area from their 1967 butternut-yellow Camaro Convertible.

Osten, who grew up in Czechoslovakia, is pleased with his decision to join Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he feels the collaborations with colleagues in the neuroscience department make it a “pretty spectacular place to work.”

Coming from an international team of researchers out of Japan, physicists confirmed a small, but potentially powerful, quirk in the world of matter. If, as they believe it may, those small details don’t behave in the same way with antimatter, this finding could help explain how tables, chairs, lions and bears all exist.

They are focusing on neutrinos, which are so small that 50 billion of them pass through a finger in a second. Most neutrinos come from the sun, although scientists can produce them in a lab and shoot them underground to a detector miles away. In the case of T2K, scientists sent neutrinos 185 miles from Tokai village along the east coast of Japan to Kamioka, near the west coast of Japan.

Neutrinos come in three types: tau, muon and electron. The scientists shot muon neutrinos across Japan and expected, for the most part, to find tau neutrinos. Confirming with a much higher degree of accuracy a discovery from 2011, scientists found that 5% of those neutrinos became electron neutrinos.

“Nature was kind to us,” said Chang Kee Jung, a co-spokesman for T2K and a physics professor at Stony Brook. The oscillation to electron neutrinos “came out much earlier” than expected. So far, the scientists have only examined about 8% of the data they proposed to generate.

The next step in this long-term project is to collect considerably more data to explore on a larger scale the oscillations between muon and electron neutrinos.

Later, in Japan and elsewhere, scientists plan to conduct the same experiment with antineutrinos, to see if the transformation from one type of antineutrino to another follows the same pattern.

Like the conservation of energy, charge parity suggests the laws of physics would be the same if a particle were swapped for its antiparticle. In 1956, however, this was violated when several scientists showed that some reactions did not occur as often as their mirror images.

Scientists who work with particle physics were buzzing about the recent findings in Japan. “We at BNL are extremely thrilled at the T2K results,” offered Milind Diwan, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, who described Jung as “well recognized as a leader in our community.”

Jung marveled at the predictive ability of the science of physics. “When we observe certain things, we put all our observations and experimental data into mathematical equations,” he said. “Those equations will predict things we haven’t seen. We are almost the only science that has a predictable power using math.”

The Higgs particle, he said, was one such prediction physicists had been seeking for over 40 years. This particle provided something of an explanation for how particles with considerable energy acquired mass.

Jung expects to continue the T2K experiments for another five to 10 years.

At the same time, scientists including Diwan are working to turn the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment into a reality. The LBNE will shoot neutrinos 800 miles from the Fermilab near Chicago to a former gold mine in Lead, S.D. The experiment hopes to begin producing data in 2022.

An adventurer in his earlier years, Jung climbed mountains and went skydiving. In a physics of sports course he teaches at Stony Brook, he shows a video of himself on a tandem skydive in Florida with an instructor.

Jung also takes a close look at former Mets ace R.A. Dickey’s knuckleball, Usain Bolt’s 100-meter dash and the hang time of NBA basketball players.

An avid baseball fan who would choose the Mets over the Yankees because he loves the underdog, Jung considers himself a “hard-core Knicks fan.”

Jung is a resident of Setauket, where he lives with his wife, Vivan Piccone-Jung, who teaches Pilates and does video/film production and Web page design. The couple have three children, Daldeze, who attends Stony Brook, Wainabi, who will matriculate at SUNY New Paltz in the fall and Heoliny, who will be a ninth-grader at Murphy in September.

Jung has a picture in his office and on his website of him standing with the late Maurice Goldhaber, who was the director of BNL in the 1960s. A physicist in the generation immediately after Albert Einstein, Goldhaber visited Jung at his house on a day when it was raining. Standing in similar tan trench coats, the physicists are holding pink and red umbrellas, which they borrowed from Jung’s daughters.

“He’s willing to be silly and I have a similar spirit,” Jung said.

As for his work, Jung recognizes that there is “no guarantee” that scientists will discover CP violation when they look at antineutrinos, although he is “confident” it is there. Still, he doesn’t think he should “bet on this. I lost a few bets by betting on my New York Knicks, so my track record is not perfect.”

Eating and sleeping. Sleeping and eating. They may be linked in more than making it onto the list of life’s necessities.

Among teenagers from 13 to 18 years old, those who slept fewer than seven hours also tended to eat unhealthier foods, according to a recent study. Even further, though, those same sleep-deprived teens were less likely to have eaten a fruit and vegetable in the prior day.

“We are showing that there are patterns that vary by sleep duration,” said Lauren Hale, an associate professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University. The recommendation for teenagers is at least nine hours of sleep, she said.

The information for the study came from a survey conducted on teens in 1996 and was the second wave of a health study. In the questionnaire, teenagers were asked how many times they had eaten at a fast food restaurant in the past week. The study didn’t specifically request information on what they ate.

In this sample, 70% of the teenagers reported less than the recommended hours of sleep. Hale said even more of today’s teenagers are probably in that category as well.

By looking at a collection of data that included over 13,000 teenagers, Hale and her associates could break the information apart to seek answers to other questions, such as whether there were any differences among boys and girls.

“There was a similar pattern for both,” she concluded. “Being a regular short sleeper was associated with increased unhealthy and decreased healthy [food] choices.”

The main benefit to this study, she said, is that the sample size is so large that it allows for generalizability, she said. The data from this study are publicly available, although Hale paid for some restricted data.

“We used the best available data set for answering this question, using nationally representative data,” she said.

Hale, who is a few years older than some of the original teenagers sampled in the study (she graduated from high school in 1994), said there are some elements to this study and analysis that reflect other research.

Hale said she is interested in the determinants and consequences of sleep in the entire population. Adolescence, she continued, is an important period in which teens make their own choices. Some of the decisions teens make can set them on health trajectories that last into adulthood, she said.

Teens “are developing [and] they might not be making the best choices,” of what to eat, she said. “Kids who are sleep deprived are not making decisions that have their long run interests in mind. Maybe not all kids are interested in their long run health: they are interested in short run outcomes, like the pleasure of eating, fitting in with other kids, or [choosing] what’s easy, what’s fast and what’s cheap.”

Additionally, snacking teenagers don’t tend to raid the refrigerator for something healthy at 1 am. They are more likely to choose something gooey and sweet, she said.

Hale cautioned that the data, while compelling, doesn’t claim a causal link. The information correlates insufficient sleep with poor eating habits, but it is possible that the link could go in the other direction: poor eating habits may affect sleep. Poor eating choices and below recommended rest could also be by products of other health-related issues, including depression.

In her next study, she is planning to collect week-long sleep and physical activity data on 1,000 15-year-olds. During that week, she will be asking participants to fill out a diary about their food consumption.

Hale, who joined Stony Brook in 2005, is one of the first founding faculty members of the Program in Public Health at SBU. She is chair of the admissions committee. The Master’s in Public Health program has a class size of around 30.

Hale lives in Northport with her husband, Matt Aibel, a psychotherapist with offices in Manhattan and Stony Brook, and their two-year-old son, Isaac.

She said the couple feel like they “live in a vacation town.” They enjoy the access to water harbors, playgrounds, parks and beaches. They go to the Lewis Oliver Farm in Northport with Isaac.

She said it’s difficult for her, a sleep researcher, to overcome the fact that her son has some bedtime resistance.

As for her work, Hale said teenagers are “naturally staying up later, but they are going to schools that start earlier.”