CLOSE
Authors Posts by Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

1630 POSTS 0 COMMENTS

by -
0 3107
At the first meeting of the HiTOP consortium. Kotov is in the center. Photo from HiTOP consortium.

By Daniel Dunaief

Instead of lamenting the shortcomings of a system they felt didn’t work as well as it should, Roman Kotov and a growing group of collaborators whose numbers now exceed 50 decided to do something about it. An associate professor of psychiatry at Stony Brook University, Kotov and his collaborators are building their own mental health tool, which, they hope, will offer specific diagnoses for everything from anxiety to schizophrenia.

Roman Kotov. Photo from SBU School of Medicine

The current resource psychologists and psychiatrists use is called the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5,” which came out in 2013. The latest version of the DSM, as the manual that offers psychologists and psychiatrists a way to link a collection of symptoms to a diagnosis is called, “felt far too limited,” Kotov said. “Once we started discussing [an alternative], almost everyone was interested in the scientific community. They thought it was a good and necessary idea.”

Called the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology, or HiTOP, the developing classification system uses scientific evidence, illness symptoms and impaired functioning in its diagnoses. Another HiTOP co-creator, David Watson, the Andrew J. McKenna Family professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, recognized Kotov’s important early work on the project.

Kotov “deserves sole credit for the idea of putting all of our data together to provide the basis for an alternative model,” Watson explained in an email. “He did some preliminary work along these lines, which convinced us that this was a great idea that was worth pursuing.” Watson, who served as Kotov’s graduate adviser at the University of Iowa, said that his former student leads meetings and conference calls for the HiTOP group.

The HiTOP system, which was recently described in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, views mental disorders along a spectra, while also using empirical evidence to understand overlap among disorders and classify different symptoms within a given diagnosis. As an example, Kotov said that depression in the DSM is “treated as one thing. We know that depression is heterogeneous.”

Indeed, some people with depression may have lost their appetite and have trouble sleeping, while others may be eating and sleeping considerably more than they would if they weren’t depressed. “In some ways, these are opposite presentations, yet they get the same diagnosis” in the DSM, Kotov said.

HiTOP unpacks this variability into seven dimensions, which describe symptom types. That is helpful not only for a diagnosis but also for a treatment. HiTOP also goes beyond the binary description of the presence or absence of a particular symptom, offering clinicians a way of indicating the severity of a problem. At this point, HiTOP is a developing prototype and not a completed diagnostic tool. The scientists developing this tool have made inroads in four primary areas: anxiety and depression, substance use problems, personality problems and psychotic disorders.

“The HiTOP system currently is incomplete, as it primarily focuses on more common and widely studied forms of psychopathology,” Watson suggested, “but mental health professionals certainly could use it to assess/ diagnose a broad range of conditions.” Mental health professionals can view this new resource at the website https://medicine.stonybrookmedicine.edu/HITOP.

Kotov hopes this new paradigm will “focus on science and do everything we can to keep unpolitical, nonscientific considerations out of it,” he said. “We hope that it provides the most up-to-date alternative” to the DSM. The HiTOP approach, Kotov said, relies more heavily on scientific evidence, which can include genetic vulnerabilities, environmental risk factors and neurobiological abnormalities.

Kotov, who is working on several projects, said HiTOP takes about a quarter of his time. He is also involved with a long-term study of schizophrenia and bipolar disorders, which was started in the early 1990s, before he arrived at Stony Brook in 2006.

Kotov is following up on this cohort, looking at outcomes for treatment and analyzing risk factors and processes that determine the course of an illness. He is also leading a study on first responders to the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center, which is exploring the physical and emotional consequences of participating in the response to the unprecedented attack.

Kotov and his collaborators are investigating the health of responders in their daily life using mobile technology. They are also studying how personalities affect their health, which may soon help guide personalized treatment.

Another project involves the study of children who are 14 to 17 years old and explores the emotional growth and personality development. This study includes reports, surveys and interviews. During those years, “much happens as far as personality development,” Kotov said.

Colleagues at Stony Brook praised Kotov’s scientific contributions. Kotov is a “rising star” and is “perhaps best known for his work on the role of personality in psychopathology and, increasingly, for work on classification of psychiatric disorders,” Daniel Klein, a distinguished professor in the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook, wrote in an email.

A resident of Port Jefferson, Kotov lives with his wife Tatiana, who is a controller for a small company in Manhattan. The couple has two young daughters. Kotov grew up in Russia in a small town near Moscow. He was always interested in science and developed a particular curiosity about psychology when a high school psychology teacher sparked his interest when he was 15.

As for the HiTOP effort, Kotov is convinced this endeavor will offer the mental health community a valuable tool. “We believe that describing patients more accurately, precisely and reliably will help provide better and more personalized care,” he said.

by -
0 1450

He’s cold and he wants to go home.

He has to go to the bathroom and he can’t stand here another minute.

He’s way too hot under all that equipment and he wants to go swim somewhere.

Yes, these are just some of the sinister motives often attributed to umpires, referees or officials at games, as coaches and parents try to explain a call that they clearly saw the other way.

Yet if you ask most of the parents on the other team, including those who seem like eminently reasonable people, they would tell you that they thought the umpire made the right call.

Here we are again, with Little League baseball underway and with championship T-shirts, sweatshirts and trophies at stake.

Standing between the starting point for all those teams and the ultimate glory are the other teams, the weather which forces endless makeup games, huge parties that take half the team from a scheduled game and, of course, the umpires.

I have tremendous sympathy for those umpires because I was one decades ago. No, I didn’t call Derek Jeter out or ring up Alex Rodriguez. My brother and I signed up to umpire Little League games.

In several games, batter after batter would get into a full count. Invariably the hitter would take a pitch that was somewhere between the outside corner and just outside. With every eye on the field staring at me, I had to make a difficult choice.

Yes, of course, there is a strike zone, and in the strike zone is a strike and outside the zone is a ball, but what if the ball is squeezing along the edge of the plate, near the bottom of the strike zone?

I aimed for consistency, but I also became involved in “make good” calls. I’d call a borderline strike a ball on the first batter, disappointing the pitcher and catcher, and then I’d call the next borderline strike a strike, deflating the hitter and his teammates.

Numerous pitches were so close that I knew the groans would come even before my arm signaled for the hitter to go to first or return to the bench.

Once, before a game, a coach came up to me and told me that he was a bit of a hothead and that I should feel free to eject him from the game. Too bad I didn’t have the foresight then to ask him what he was doing coaching 8-year-olds in the first place if he felt the need to argue calls.

Sure enough, in the second inning, he screamed at me for a called strike. After I ejected him, he winked at me as if we had each played our defined roles. His players tried not to snicker as they watched him leave the field for what I understand was one of many such dismissals.

Nowadays, people complain about officiating in professional sports constantly, especially with endless video replays from angles no individual referee could possibly have at the same time, much less an umpire on a hot, dry baseball field.

I recognize that we live in a society where we have a right to express ourselves, but we also have a responsibility to accept the rule of law. Like it or not, the umpires on the field establish and enforce those rules.

Maybe, as we push our lawn chairs into the cars on our way to another game, we should remember that the umpire isn’t out to get anyone. The official is just trying to do his or her best to make sure both teams have an equal opportunity to succeed.

by -
0 463
Jun Wang in her laboratory with a transmission x-ray microscope. Photo from BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

The first time is most definitely not the charm. That’s what Jun Wang and her colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory discovered about sodium ion batteries.

Wang, a physicist and lead scientist at the facility, looked deep into the inner workings of a sodium ion battery to determine what causes structural defects as the battery functions. As it turns out, the first time a sodium ion battery charges and discharges, it develops changes in the microstructure and chemical composition of iron sulfide. These changes, which degrade the performance of the battery, are irreversible during the first charging cycle.

“We found that the cracks happened during the first cycle, then, after that, the structure kind of reached equilibrium,” said Wang, who published her research in the journal Advanced Energy Materials. “All these changes happen during the first cycle.”

Collaborators from Brookhaven’s Photon Sciences and Sustainable Energy Technologies groups stand behind the new transmission x-ray microscope (TXM) at BNL’s National Synchrotron Light Source. From left: Yu-chen Karen Chen-Wiegart, Can Erdonmez, Jun Wang (team leader), and Christopher Eng. Photo from BNL

Sodium ion batteries are considered an alternative to lithium ion batteries, which are typically found in most consumer electronics. Like lithium, sodium is an alkali metal, which means that it is in the same group in the periodic table. Sodium, however, is more abundant and, as a result, considerably less expensive than lithium.

Using a synchrotron-based hard X-ray full-field microscope, Wang was able to see what happened when sodium ions moved into and out of an iron sulfide electrode through 10 cycles. “We can see this microstructure evolution,” she said.

Wang monitored the evolution as a function of time while the battery is charging and discharging. The results are the first time anyone has studied a sodium-metal sulfide battery with these tools, which provides information that isn’t available through other methods. “It is challenging to prepare a working sodium ion battery for the in operandi/in situ TXM study to correlate the microstructural evolution with its electrochemical performance,” she said.

Other researchers suggested that Wang has developed a following in the scientific community for her ground-breaking research. “She has a very good reputation in the area of X-ray nanotomography, applied to a wide range of different materials,” Scott Barnett, a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, explained in an email. “I am most familiar with her work on fuel cell and battery electrodes — I think it is fair to say that this work has been some of the best pioneering research in this area,” he said.

Barnett, who started collaborating with Wang in 2010 on measuring fuel cell and battery electrodes with X-ray tomography, suggested that Wang’s work on capacity loss “could certainly lead to new breakthroughs in improved batteries.”

In her most recent work with sodium ion batteries, Wang found that the defects start at the surface of the iron sulfide particles and move inward toward the core, Wang said. The microstructure changes during the first cycle and is more severe during sodiation. The particles don’t return to their original volume and shape. After the first cycle, the particles reach a structural equilibrium with no further significant morphological changes, she said.

In other cycles, the material does not show further significant morphological changes, reach a structural equilibrium and electrochemical reversibility. Wang and her colleagues confirmed these observations with X-ray nanotomography, which creates a three-dimensional image of the battery material while recording the change in volume.

Wang suggested that a way to reduce these structural defects could be to reduce the size of the iron sulfide particles to create a one-phase reaction. She will work with other collaborators on modeling and simulations that will enhance the design of future battery materials.

In addition to conducting research on batteries, Wang is an industrial program coordinator in the Photon Science Directorate at BNL. She works with industrial researchers and beamline staff to find and explore new opportunities in industrial applications using synchrotron radiation. She leads the industrial research program, interacting with user groups through consultation, collaboration and outreach.

To manage her research, which includes a lab of three other researchers, and to accomplish her mission as manager of an industrial research program, Wang jokes that she “spends 100 percent of her time” with each responsibility. “I try to do my best for the different things” she needs to do with her time, she said.

Jun Wang with her husband Qun Shen and their 11-year old son Sam in Waikiki last year. Photo from Jun Wang

A native of Wuhu, China, Wang earned her bachelor’s degree in physics from Anhui University in China and her doctorate in physics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. She worked at the Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility, which was the first synchrotron light source in China. During her doctoral training, she studied multilayer films using X-ray diffraction and scattering.

A resident of Poquott, Wang is married to Qun Shen, who is the deputy director for science at the NSLS-II. The couple has an 11-year-old son, Sam, who is a sixth-grade student at Setauket Elementary School. Shen and Wang met at an international X-ray crystallography conference in the early 1990s.

Shen trained in the United States after he graduated from Beijing University in 1980, when he went to Purdue University for his doctorate through the China-US Physica Examination and Application Program. The couple have worked together a few times over the years, including publishing a paper in Nature Communications. Wang is hoping that her work with battery research will lead to improvements in the manufacture and design of sodium ion batteries.

by -
0 1532

It happens somewhere between midnight and 6 in the morning during most summer days. During those witching hours, when most people are resting before the challenges of the day ahead, automatic systems silently climb in synchronization from below ground and propel a precious resource. When the system is done, it silently submerges below ground.

These irrigation systems spread water on lawns all over Long Island and, indeed, the United States.

This year, the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation sent out a letter to the water departments throughout Nassau and Suffolk counties, asking them to reduce water usage by 15 percent within the next three to four years.

The 15 percent reduction is “an ambitious goal,” acknowledged Ty Fuller, director of strategic initiatives and lead hydrogeologist at the Suffolk County Water Authority, which is “attainable” but “it will not be easy.”

For consumers, reducing water usage offers several benefits. For starters, less water used means a lower water bill. Beyond that, however, lower water use conserves a valuable resource. Cutting back on water use also keeps water sources like SCWA and others from needing to drill more wells, upgrade pumps or develop more water systems to meet the increasing summertime demands of Long Islanders eager for lush, green lawns.

As Fuller pointed out, lowering water demand during those peak hours can also ensure that the water system can maintain a fire flow protection.

“That’s always a top priority,” Fuller said. “We want to make sure we can always meet” that demand. It is particularly important in the midst of a drought and as the threat of wildfires increases.

Yet changing consumer behavior on any level is challenging. After all, some of those who need to alter their watering habits are the same people who make New Year’s resolutions that barely last a week.

Fuller said SCWA has identified its top water users during the summer and is reaching out to them to advise on different conservation practices.

The authority is also holding regular water talks and has created a Water Wise Club, where some 382,000 account customers can qualify for credits if they purchase water savings devices. These items include low-flow shower heads and rain sensors, which turn off sprinkler systems after rainstorms when the lawns already have sufficient moisture. The rain sensor provides up to a $50 account credit.

SCWA is encouraging customers to adopt an odd/even system. If their street address is an odd number they water their lawns on odd days, while the even numbers only water lawns on even days.

SCWA rolled out the Water Wise CheckUp scheme with Brinkmann Hardware in Blue Point. Through a consultation with homeowners, an expert identifies each point of water use and provides a road map for savings. Customers requesting a checkup can call 631-292-6101. Customers can also receive information and print out a form at the website www.scwa.com/mobile/water_wise_checkup.

Consumers who become more informed about best practices for watering their lawns can help make this conservation initiative a reality.

“People have been led to believe that irrigating every day is a good thing,” Fuller said. “That can encourage fungal growth. If people see brown blades on their grass, they assume that’s not irrigated properly,” but that can be fungal growth. Adding more water to the lawn can exacerbate the problem.

Cutting back on water usage is a “win-win situation” for the customer and for the water system, Fuller said. “Why would people not want to play a role?”

by -
0 253

Beetles, which thrive in warmer temperatures, are threatening pine trees

Residents from Cutchogue work together to place sand bags at the edge of the Salt Air Farm before Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Photo by Prudence Heston

While surrounded by salt water, Long Island is in the midst of a drought that is heading into its third year. Amid a trend towards global warming, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation sent a letter to water district superintendents throughout Suffolk and Nassau County to ask them to lower their water consumption by 15 percent in the next three to four years.

“The primary area that is ripe for reduction is summertime watering,” said Bill Fonda, a spokesman for the DEC. The department has asked the water districts to reduce consumption, but it’s up to the districts to determine how they will reach those goals, he said.

The letter, written by Tony Leung, the regional water engineer, indicated that “results for 2015 show both Nassau and Suffolk County have exceeded the safe yield as cited in the 1986 Long Island Groundwater Management Program,” and that “a concerted effort is needed to reduce peak season water demand.”

The letter, which doesn’t cite global warming, indicates that salt water intrusion, contaminant plumes migration, salt water upconing and competing demand have raised concerns about a need to reduce peak season water demand.

Observers suggested the demand was likely rising for a host of reasons, including increased use of underground irrigation systems and a rise in the population of Long Island.

Water experts welcomed the DEC’s initiative, which is one of many steps Long Islanders can and are taking to respond to a changing environment.

“Most people have no clue how much water they use…They get their water bill, it is what it is, and then they write a check and send it in.”

— Sarah Meyland

Sarah Meyland, the director of the Center for Water Resources Management and associate professor at the New York Institute of Technology, commended the DEC for asserting control over water withdrawals.

“Most people have no clue how much water they use,” Meyland said. “They get their water bill, it is what it is, and then they write a check and send it in.”

She admitted changing consumer behavior will be challenging.

The first step in ensuring water suppliers meet this request, Meyland suggested, is to inform the public about the need for less water use, particularly during the summer months. One possible solution is for irrigation systems that turn off automatically after a rainstorm.

The change in climate has posed a threat to trees that commonly grow on Long Island.

Pine trees have faced an invasion from the southern pine beetle, which extended its range onto Long Island in 2014 and is now a pest that requires routine managing and monitoring.

Long the scourge of pine trees in southern states, the pine beetle, which is about the size of a grain of rice, has found Long Island’s warmer climate to its liking.

“We’re assuming either [Hurricane] Irene or Sandy brought it in,” said John Wernet, a supervising forester at the DEC. “Because it’s getting warmer, the beetle has been able to survive farther north than they have historically.”

Forestry professionals in the south have waged a battle against the beetle for years, trying to reduce the economic damage to the timber market. On Long Island, Wernet said, they threaten to reduce or destroy the rare Pine Barrens ecosystem.

The beetle can have three or four generations in a year and each generation can produce thousands of young.

The first step relies on surveying trees to find evidence of an infestation. Where they discover these unwanted pests, they cut down trees and score the bark, which creates an inhospitable environment for the beetle.

“If left alone, the beetle is like a wildfire and will keep going,” Wernet said. Without direct action, that would be bad news for the pine warbler, a yellow bird that lives near the tops of pine trees, he said.

Wernet added Long Island’s drought also increases the risk of
wildfires.

Farmers, meanwhile, have had to contend with warmer winters that trick their crops into growing too soon while also handling the curveballs created by unexpected cold snaps, frosts, and the occasional nor’easter.

Dan Heston and Tom Wickham survey waters that entered Salt Air Farm after Hurricane Sandy. Photo by Prudence Heston

Last year, the colored hydrangeas of Salt Air Farm in Cutchogue budded early amid warmer temperatures in March, only to perish amid two eight-degree nights.

“We lost [thousands of dollars] worth of hydrangeas in two nights,” said Dan Heston, who works on the farm with his wife Prudence, whose family has been farming on Long Island for 11 generations. “Our whole colored hydrangea season was done.”

Heston said he’s been a skeptic of climate change, but suggested he can see that there’s something happening with the climate on Long Island, including the destructive force of Hurricane Sandy, which flooded areas that were never flooded during large storms before.

“I think the climate is shifting on Long Island,” Prudence Heston explained in an email. “Farmers are constantly having to adapt to protect their crops. In the end, pretty much every adaptation a farmer makes boils down to climate.”

Changes on Long Island, however, haven’t all been for the worse. Warmer weather has allowed some residents to grow crops people don’t typically associate with Long Island, such as apricots and figs. For three generations, Heston’s family has grown apricots.

Other Long Islanders have attempted to grow figs, which are even more sensitive to Long Island winters, Heston said. This was not an economically viable option, as each plant required individual wrapping to survive. That hasn’t stopped some from trying.

“People are now finding our winters to be warm enough to make [figs] a fun back yard plant,” Prudence Heston said.

In other positive developments, the Long Island Sound has had a reduction in hypoxia — low oxygen conditions — over the last decade, according to Larry Swanson, the interim dean of the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University.

“The state and the Environmental Protection Agency have agreed to a nitrogen reduction program,” Swanson said. “It appears that the decline in nitrogen may be having a positive effect.”

Brookhaven Town took a similar step in 2016.

The town board approved a local law proposed by Supervisor Ed Romaine (R) last summer that established nitrogen protection zones within 500 feet of any body of water on or around Long Island. The zones prohibit new structures or dwellings being built in that range from installing cesspools or septic systems.

by -
0 579
Scientists, like those who work out of the Stony Brook University School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences’ Marine Sciences Center, are constantly asking questions, as the desire grows to find links between correlation and causation. File photo

Researchers often desire more data to help make the distinction between correlation — it rained the last three Tuesdays — and causation — dumping nitrogen into the lake caused the growth of algae that robbed the lake of oxygen.

Scientists don’t like to get ahead of their information, preferring to take the painstaking steps of going that extra mile to control for as many mitigating or confounding variables as they can.

Researchers are often “reluctant to say with certainty that they are correct,” Larry Swanson, the interim dean of the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University said.

This hesitation to indicate a certain conclusion can raise challenges for politicians, who would like to rely on scientific proof in developing plans for their constituents.

“Policy people want to create a law or regulation that is definitive and will have the desired outcome,” Swanson added.

File photo.

Since he began working in and around Long Island waters in 1960, he started his work collecting data at wetlands around New Haven, and has since studied hypoxia — the process through which oxygen levels are depleted in waterways.

Swanson urges a more extensive collection of data around Long Island.

“I believe we need to monitor the physical environment for changes not just for time series data, such as temperature, but in order to understand how ecological processes are being altered as a consequence of warming,” Swanson said.

Henry Bokuniewicz, a distinguished service professor of oceanography at Stony Brook, said there was a coastline monitoring program in place in 1995 after nor’easters and hurricanes in 1992, but that the effort petered out.

“This should be re-established if [New York State is] serious about coastal impact of shoreline changes,” he said.

Bokuniewicz also suggests measuring and recording waves that are close to shore, and water levels at the ocean coast and interior bays.

Stony Brook had an initiative for additional hires in a cluster for coastal engineering and management, but never completed the hires for budgetary reasons, Bokuniewicz said. “We could do much better with a new generation of scientists dedicated to the Long Island shore,” he said.

Scientists acknowledge that the study of climate change rarely involves establishing the kind of linear connection between action and reaction that turning up the thermostat in a house would provide.

Scientists distinguish between the weather — is it raining today, tomorrow or next week — and the climate — how does March in New York compare to March in North Carolina?

File photo

The climate, generally, remains consistent with a long-term outlook, even if Long Island might experience an unseasonably hot July, an unusually cool September and a heavier-than-normal snowfall in December.

With climate change, scientists collect as much data as they can to determine how the climate is shifting. That presents significant challenges: how do researchers pick data to feed into their models and the patterns to explore?

The broader trend in March could be that spring starts earlier, extending the growing season and creating opportunities for insects, plants or animals to affect the habitat. That could be slightly different this year, amid a cold snap that lasts more than a few days, or in the wake of an unexpected blizzard days before spring.

Indeed, until, and even after there is a scientific consensus, researchers debate long into the night about their interpretations, conclusions and simulation models.

More often than not, scientists crave more information to help them interpret evolving conditions.

“While we know in general why hypoxia will be bad, we can’t really predict it,” Swanson said. “When will it start? How long will it last? This is because we do not understand all the processes — things like the role of bacteria, phytoplankton and the blooming processes and water circulation.”

Science, as it turns out, is often more about collecting more information to ask better questions and developing more precise theories.

As researchers often point out, they can be wrong for the right reasons and right for the wrong ones, all of which, they hope, helps them understand more about the inevitable next set of questions. And, as scientists have offered, it’s a never-ending discussion, as the best answers lead to more questions.

by -
0 1282

Long ago, I wrote a column about vomit and education. No, I didn’t suggest that teachers should encourage vomiting or that education gets better amid the smell of vomit. Sorry to those of you who are gagging even at these words.

No, for those without an encyclopedic knowledge of my columns — OK, all of you — I wrote that my son, who was only 5 at the time, often came home with exactly the same answer to the question about what happened in school: “Nothing.” Then, one day, a classmate was in the middle of saying something when she vomited.

Suddenly, my son became the bard of vomit, describing in technicolor detail everything that poured out of his classmate’s mouth. It didn’t stop there. He recounted each of the steps the teacher took to clean it up and resettle the room and then, to my shock, he shared a few things about the next lessons she tried to teach.

While I’m not suggesting the value of vomit in the classroom, I did recognize something unusual that occurs during these high-energy moments: People pay more attention.

What triggered — bad word choice here, I know — my thinking about this observation is March Madness. The NCAA basketball tournament has 64 teams entering this bracket, all of whom have fans, family and friends hoping their journey can go just one more game all the way to the championship.

Now, these games can be — and often are — ridiculously exciting, with young players pushing themselves to the limits of their speed, endurance and coordination to make impossible game-winning shots that carry their fans to the next level of ecstasy.

The winners stand in front of a microphone at the end of the game and recount what we’ve just witnessed, taking us through the moment when they got the ball at the top of the key, faked left, passed it to a teammate, and then crashed the boards just in time to grab the rebound and slam home the game-winner.

We know what we saw and rarely, if ever, do these interviews produce much more than, “Yeah, it was great,” or “I’m so excited, I just don’t have words for this.”

So, this is where the vomit analogy comes in. Some of these players likely contribute to causes, believe in community service, have something to say about what they’ve overcome, can share the best advice they’ve ever gotten or remember a moment that still matters.

I realize it’s asking a lot of the reporters and the athletic superstar whose primary concern may be going to the bathroom, getting his uniform clean for the next game or getting to the bus on time to go to the airport.

Still, these moments, with the players, coaches and even fans could include some kind of life lesson. Players don’t need to preach, nor do they have to demand that we participate in their favorite charity. However, they can use the spotlight to inspire and encourage us with their incredible achievements off the field, their commitments to family or their contributions to a church group.

Now, I realize Olympic coverage often includes features about people who are dedicating their efforts to a relative or who volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters. And, I appreciate how sports purists may find the effort an intrusion in the cliché-riddled wide world of sports, where the players are just happy to help the team and they take everything one game at a time and they try not to do too much.

But some day, that athlete will no longer have the microphone and some day, the world will no longer be watching. While we’re inspired and moved by their magnificence on the court, how about if, to the extent possible, they also encourage us to follow their lead in other arenas. An energized audience may see this as a chance to turn a good game into a great achievement.

by -
0 4664
At the ribbon cutting of the Kavita and Lalit Bahl Center for Metabolomics and Imaging last December, from left, Lina Obeid; Yusuf Hannun; Kavita and Lalit Bahl; Samuel Stanley, President of Stony Brook University; and Kenneth Kaushansky, dean of Stony Brook University’s School of Medicine. Photo from SBU

By Daniel Dunaief

Many ways to kill cancer involve tapping into a cell’s own termination system. With several cancers, however, the treatment only works until it becomes resistant to the therapy, bringing back a life-threatening disease.

Collaborating with researchers at several other institutions, Dr. Lina Obeid, the director of research at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, has uncovered a way that cancer hides a cell-destroying lipid called ceramide from treatments. The ceramide “gets co-opted by fatty acids for a different species of fats, namely acylceramide, and gets stored side by side with the usual triglycerides,” Obeid explained in an email about her recent finding, which was published in the journal Cell Metabolism. “It makes the ceramide inaccessible and hence the novelty.” The ceramide gets stored as a lipid drop in the cell.

“We describe a completely new metabolic pathway and role in cell biology,” Obeid said. Other researchers suggested that this finding could be important in the battle against cancer. “That acylceramides are formed and deposited in lipid droplets is an amazing finding,” George Carman, the director of the Rutgers Center for Lipid Research, explained in an email. “By modifying the ceramide molecule with an acyl group for its deposit in a lipid droplet takes ceramide out of action and, thus, ineffective as an agent to cause death of cancer cells.”

Carman said Obeid, whom he has known for several years, visited his campus in New Jersey to share her results. “All of us at Rutgers were so excited to hear her story because we knew how important this discovery is to the field of lipid droplet biology as well as to cancer biology,” he said. Obeid conducted some of the work at the Kavita and Lalit Bahl Center for Metabolomics and Imaging at Stony Brook University. The center officially opened on Dec. 1 of last year on the 15th floor of the Health Sciences Center and will move to the Medical and Research Translation Building when it is completed next year. “This study is exactly the kind of major questions we are addressing in the center that [the Bahls] have generously made possible,” she explained.

Obeid discovered three proteins that are involved in this metabolic pathway: a ceramide synthesizing protein called CerS, a fatty acyl-CoA synthetase protein called ACSL and an enzyme that puts them together, called DGAT2, which is also used in fatty triglyceride synthesis. Her research team, which includes scientists from Columbia University, Northrop Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Mansoura University in Egypt is looking into implications for the role of this novel pathway as a target for cancer and obesity.

Indeed, obesity enables more frequent conversion of ceramide into acylceramide. “Fats in cells and in diets increase and predispose to obesity,” Obeid suggested. “This new pathway we found occurs when fatty acids are fed to cells or as high-fat diets are fed to mice.” In theory, this could explain why obesity may predispose people to cancer or make cancer resistance more prevalent for some people. According to Obeid, a high-fat diet can cause this collection of proteins to form in the liver of mice, and she would like to explore the same pathways in humans. Before she can begin any such studies, however, she would need numerous approvals from institutional review boards, among others.

Obeid and her collaborators hypothesize that a lower-fat diet could reduce the likelihood that this lipid would be able to evade cancer therapies.

These kinds of studies “provide the justification for looking at the effect of diet on acylceramide production,” Daniel Raben, a professor of biological chemistry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, explained in an email. Further research could include “isocaloric studies with [high-fat diets] and [low-fat diets] in animals that are age and gender matched.”

Obeid was a part of the first group to describe the lipid’s role in cancer cell death in 1993. “We have been studying its metabolism and looking at how it’s made and broken down,” she said. “We found recently that it associates with these proteins to metabolize it.”

While the lipid provides a way to tackle cancer’s resistance to chemotherapy, it also has other functions in cells, including as a membrane permeability barrier and in skin. A therapy that reduced acylceramide could affect these other areas but “as with hair loss [with chemotherapy treatment], this will likely be easily managed and reversible,” Raben explained.

Obeid and Yusuf Hannun, the director of the Cancer Center at Stony Brook, are searching for other scientists to work at the Kavita and Lalit Bahl Center for Metabolomics and Imaging. “We are actively recruiting for star scientists” at the center, Obeid said. Other researchers suggested that the history of the work Obeid and Hannun have done will attract other researchers.

Hannun and Obeid are “considered the absolute leaders in the area of sphingolipid biochemistry and their clinical implications,” Raben said. “Simply put, they are at the top of this academic pile. Not only are they terrific scientists, they also have an outstanding and well-recognized reputation for training and nurturing young investigators.” Carman asked, “Who wouldn’t want to be associated with a group that continues to make seminal contributions to cancer biology and make an impact on the lives of so many?”

As for the next steps in this particular effort, Carman foresaw some ways to extend this work into the clinical arena. “I can imagine the discovery of a drug that might be used to combat cancer growth,” Carman said. “I can imagine the discovery of a drug that might control the acylation of ceramide to make ceramide more available as a cancer cell inhibitor. Clearly, [Obeid’s] group, along with the outstanding colleagues and facilities at Stony Brook, are positioned to make such discoveries.”

by -
0 1322
Image courtesy of Disney Dan Stevens as the Beast and Emma Watson as Belle star in Disney’s ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ Image courtesy of Disney

By Daniel Dunaief

The latest version of “Beauty and the Beast,” which broke box office records when it opened last weekend, offers a visually stunning montage, as one magnificent set blends into the next in a familiar story that, not much of a spoiler here, tracks the well-known story.

The sets, cinematography and songs take center stage in this live-action remake, as Disney spared no expense to make the enchanted castle, the quiet village where every day is like the one before, and the journey through the forest between them as detailed and lavish as the animated version. The script and main actors, including Emma Watson as Belle and Dan Stevens as the Beast, are fine, but not extraordinary.

Disney may not have wanted to tinker too much with a classic film and its well-known dialog, leaving the original script largely unchanged. That is both for the better and the worse, as this current incarnation lacks a novel flavor, a new Disney humor and charm, or the opportunity to explore much more about the characters. There are a few welcome moments when the audience learns more about unfortunate events in Belle and the Beast’s past, but those are short-lived in a film that is over two hours.

Luke Evans does a serviceable job as Gaston, conveying the narcissistic brute who seems more in love with his own reflection than he is with Belle or anyone else. The charm or the irresistibility the villagers feel for him is not evident to Belle or to the audience.

Josh Gad provides welcome comic relief as Gaston’s companion LeFou, fawning over him and calming him down when things don’t go his way. Gad takes his character further than the animated version of LeFou, becoming impish and playful.

Like the Broadway version of the classic animated film “Aladdin” and its “Never Had a Friend Like Me” song, “Beauty and the Beast” somehow equals and, in some ways, exceeds the original film with its “Be Our Guest” feature. While Belle prepares for her meal, the creatures of the castle surround her with food, song and spectacle.

While the script and the characters stay true to the Broadway and animated versions of the story, the visual details truly make the film memorable. The finale in the castle looks like the kind of details an eager bride would include if she had an unlimited budget, with symmetrical floral arrangements, magnificent lighting, perfectly spaced dancers and a cast of characters delighted to share in the space.

For parents, the scenes of peril with the wolves outside the Beast’s castle are familiar and filled with the same kind of potential for danger. Young children will likely be as concerned for the welfare of Belle and the Beast in the wolf scenes of this film as they would be watching the animated version.

The fight scene between the Beast and Gaston also involves some peril, with Gaston displaying a combination of cowardice and villainy. At the same time, the fight scene between the villagers incited by Gaston to battle and the members of the enchanted castle who are defending themselves also contains some of the few moments of humor in a film that otherwise takes its tale and the retelling of it seriously.

Some of the other cast members, including Emma Thompson as Mrs. Potts, have a tough act to follow, repeating familiar phrases and songs from Angela Lansbury. Thompson holds her own, regaling the audience with the lyrics from a tale as old as time.

The three-dimensional version of the film included a few noticeable effects, including when Belle and the Beast engage in a snowball fight. It also adds some depth to the image of the castle and the trek through the woods. The additional expense, however, didn’t seem especially necessary, given an elaborate attention to other visual details.

by -
0 2107
Line Pouchard at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2013. Photo by Allan Miller

By Daniel Dunaief

They produce so much information that they can’t keep up with it. They use the latest technology to gather data. Somewhere, hidden inside the numbers, might be the answer to current questions as well as the clues that lead to future questions researchers don’t know how to ask yet.

Scientists in almost every facility, including at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Stony Brook University, are producing information at an unprecedented rate. The Center for Data-Driven Discovery at Brookhaven National Laboratory can help interpret and make sense of all that information.

Senior researcher Line Pouchard joined BNL’s data team early this year, after a career that included 15 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (another Department of Energy facility) and more than two-and-a-half years at Purdue University. “The collaborations at the [DOE] lab are highly effective,” she said. “They have a common purpose and a common structure for the scientist.” Pouchard’s efforts will involve working with metadata, which adds annotations to provide context and a history of a file, and machine learning, which explores large blocks of information for patterns. “As science grows and the facility grows, we are creating more data,” she said.

Scientists can share large quantities of information, passing files through various computer systems. “You may want to know how this data has been created, what the computer applications or codes are that have been used, who developed it and who the authors are,” she said.

Knowing where the information originated can help the researchers determine whether to trust the content and the way it came together, although there are other requirements to ensure that scientists can trust the data. If the metadata and documentation are done properly “this can tell you how you can use it and what kind of applications and programs you can use to continue working with it,” Pouchard said. Working in the Computational Science Initiative, Pouchard will divide her time between responding to requests for assistance and conducting her own research.

“At Purdue, [Pouchard] was quite adept at educating others in understanding metadata, and the growing interest and emphasis on big data in particular,” explained Jean-Pierre Herubel, a professor of library science at Purdue, in an email. Herubel and Pouchard were on the research council committee, and worked together with other members to shepherd their research agendas for the Purdue University library faculty.

Pouchard “has a capacity to participate well with colleagues; regarding national and international venues, she will be a strong participating member,” Herubel continued. “She does well working and integrating with others.”

Pouchard recently joined a team that submitted a proposal in the area of earth science and data preservation. She has also worked on something called the Semantic Web. The idea, which was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, is to allow the use of data items and natural language concepts in machine readable and machine actionable forms. As an example, this could include generating rules for computers that direct the machines to handle the multiple meanings of a word.

One use of the Semantic Web is through searches, which allows people to look for information and data and, once they’re collected, gives them a chance to sort through them. Combined with other technologies, the Semantic Web can allow machines to do the equivalent of searching through enormous troves of haystacks.

“When I first started talking about the Semantic Web, I was at Oak Ridge in the early days,” Pouchard said. Since then, there has been considerable progress, and the work and effort have received more support from scientists.

Pouchard was recently asked to “work with ontologies [a Semantic Web technology] in a proposal,” she said, which suggests they are getting more traction. She is looking forward to collaborating with several scientists at BNL, including Kerstin Kleese van Dam, the director of the Computational Sciences Initiative and the interim director of the Center for Data-Driven Discovery.

Kleese van Dam has “an incredible vision of what is needed in science in order to improve computational science,” said Pouchard, who met the director about a decade ago when van Dam was working in England. Pouchard has an interest in data repositories, which she explored when she worked at Purdue University.

Living temporarily in Wading River, Pouchard bought a home in Rocky Point and hopes to move in soon. Her partner Allan Miller, from Knoxville, Tennessee, owned and managed the Disc Exchange in Knoxville for 26 years. He is starting to help small business owners and non-profit organizations with advertising needs. Pouchard experienced Long Island when she was conducting her Ph.D. research at the City University of New York and took time out to visit a friend who lived in Port Jefferson.

When she’s not working on the computer, Pouchard, who is originally from Normandy, France, enjoys scuba diving, which she has done in the Caribbean, in Hawaii, in Mexico and a host of other places.

When Pouchard was young, she visited with her grandparents during the summer at the beach in Normandy, in the town of Barneville-Carteret. Her parents, and others in the area, lectured their children never to go near or touch metal objects they found in the dunes because unexploded World War II devices were still occasionally found in remote areas. The environment on Long Island, with the marshes, reminds her of her visits years ago.

Pouchard has an M.S. in information science from the University of Tennessee and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the City University of New York.

As for her work, Pouchard said she is “really interested in the Computational Science Initiative at BNL, which enables researchers to collaborate. Computational science is an integral part of the facilities,” at her new research home.

Prev1...126127128...163Next Page 127 of 163
TBR News Media is your local news and entertainment website.
We provide you with the latest breaking news and information for your community.
Contact us: [email protected]

Most Viewed

©