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Daniel Dunaief

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Ivan Bozovic. Photo courtesy of BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

How long and how much work does it take to defy conventional wisdom? Often, the prevailing belief about anything has backers who support the idea and aren’t eager to change or replace what they know with something new.

Recognizing this, Ivan Bozovic, the Oxide Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) group leader at Brookhaven National Laboratory, checked and rechecked his work, spending close to a decade for parts of it, repeating his steps and checking the accuracy of his data points to make sure his case, which flew in the face of what so many others believed, was airtight.

Engineers, researchers and corporations have known about so-called high-temperature superconductivity for over a century. Using objects called cuprates, which are oxides of copper, researchers have created substances that can conduct electricity with close to no resistance at temperatures that are well above the requirements for most superconductivity.

While the name high-temperature superconductivity might suggest materials that allow the passage of energy through them in a sauna, the reality is far from it, with the temperatures coming in closer to negative 163 degrees Fahrenheit. While cold by everyday standards, that is still well above the record critical temperature before cuprates, which stood at – 418 degrees F.

Up until Bozovic’s study, which was recently published in Nature, scientists believed superconductivity in these cuprates occurred because of the strength of electron pairing. Carefully and in great detail, Bozovic demonstrated that the key factor in leading to this important property was the density of electron pairs, which are negatively charged particles.

Other scientists suggested Bozovic’s study was an important result that flew against the prevailing explanation for a phenomenon that holds promise for basic science and, perhaps one day, for the transmission of energy in the future.

Bozovic’s study “shows that [the] standard picture fails quite astonishingly in copper oxides that show high temperature superconductivity,” Davor Pavuna, a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne, explained in an email. “We are only begining to grasp how dramatic” this latest discovery is.

Pavuna described how he was recently at an event in Corsica, France and that his colleagues believed “this is a clear signal that we will have to develop much more advanced theoretical framework for cooperative phenomena, like superconductivity.”

Bozovic’s work and his latest result “show that our physics understanding and models require some new physics framework,” Pavuna said.

Bozovic and his colleagues studied over 2,150 samples. He explained that cuprates are complex for standards of condensed matter physics because some of them have 20 to 50 atoms in unit cells. That means that when engineers synthesize them, cuprates can have a mixture of unwanted secondary phases that could “spoil the experiment.”

Ivan Bozovic with his granddaughter Vivien at Vivien’s first birthday party last year in California. PhotoPhoto by Julie Hopkins, cameracreations.net
Ivan Bozovic with his granddaughter Vivien at Vivien’s first birthday party last year in California. Photo by Julie Hopkins, cameracreations.net

The number of samples necessary to demonstrate this property is a matter of personal standards, Bozovic suggested. He made sure he kept “checking and double checking and triple checking to be sure that what we had closed all the loopholes,” Bozovic said. He wanted “no possibility of an alternative explanation.”

The way Bozovic and his colleagues approached the problem was to start with a cuprate composition. They then replaced one atom at a time by another, which provided a series of samples that were almost identical, but slightly different in chemical composition. He was able to show how the critical temperature changes with electron density in small increments.

“What’s really impressive here is [Bozovic’s] ability to use a molecular beam epitaxy system — that he designed — to place single atomic layers on to a substrate, layer by layer,” James Misewich, the associate lab director for Energy & Photon Sciences at BNL explained in an email.

Bozovic’s work is “an exciting finding that could have wide-ranging impacts on how we identify, design, and build new superconducting materials,” continued Misewich.

As with other science, Bozovic said the answer to one question leads to a series of follow up questions, which include why do small pairs of electrons form in cuprates and not in anything else.

A resident of Mount Sinai, Bozovic lives with his wife Natasha, who is a mathematician. The couple has two daughters, Dolores, a professor of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA and Marijeta, an assistant professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale, where Bozovic is an adjunct professor of Applied Physics.

Born and raised in the former Yugoslavia, Bozovic is the son of two medical doctors. His father, Bosislav Bozovic, was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for his work on the relation between cancer and the immune system. He was also a major general in the medical corp and the head of the Medical Division of the National Academy of Sciences.

His mother, Sasha Bozovic, wrote a best-selling memoir, devoted to a daughter she lost in World War II. His mother was also a colonel in the medical corps who worked in the army until she retired as the highest ranking woman in the army. “I had some big shoes to fill,” Bozovic acknowledges.

As a teenager, Bozovic played the lead guitar in a rock band. Nowadays, he strums nursery rhymes for his granddaughter Vivien using FaceTime.

A scientist who suggests a sense of humor is extremely important, especially in a field that can include disappointments and setbacks, Bozovic jokes that he speaks “zero” languages, a conclusion he reached after listening to an online description he gave of his recent work. In reality, he can read about four languages, although he has studied more.

As for his work, Bozovic is looking forward to discussing his recent results with theorists like Gabriel Kotliar, a Rutgers Professor of Physics and Astronomy who has a part time position at BNL. Kotliar is leading a new materials theory center at BNL.

“I hope that we’ve given them new pointers about where to look and what to calculate,” Bozovic said. “I’m pretty optimistic that there will be feedback from them.”

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Extended family has that wonderful yet terrible ring to it. When we gather with family we may not have seen in years, we get the chance to reminisce, to share details about our lives, and to face the horror of seeing someone who insists on reminding us of something we said or did that we’ve spent years working to forget.

Recently, we gathered with a large group of family and got to watch our children, who are now in middle and high schools, face the same treatment I recall all too well from my youth.

“He’s so grown up and handsome,” is one of the more innocuous statements about my son.

“He has your dimples,” another offered, which would be flattering except that I don’t have dimples. That lady insisted, however, that the laugh lines on the sides of my face were like dimples, to which my son and I blinked our long eyelashes, which he did get from me, and moved on.

“The last time I saw you,” one friend started, “you must have been no more than this high,” she suggested, holding her hand around mid-knee level. “Do you remember?”

No, how could he remember? When you’re that small, you barely remember your own name.

Back when I was a kid, older relatives used to approach my cheeks as if they were fruit they had to squeeze to make themselves prune juice. Between thumb and index finger, they’d grip tightly while spitting into my face something about how cute I’d become. I’d focus on not letting the tears spill down my sore cheeks as these distant relatives couldn’t keep their distance.

Other people’s kids grow up incredibly quickly because we don’t have to take care of them when they get sick at night, drive them to sports or music practices, or push them to do their homework. We don’t have to battle with them when they decide that everything anyone who is more than 20 years old says is absolute nonsense and that they don’t want to live by anyone else’s rules.

We can look at other people’s children as if they are a part of some longitudinal study or as if we are flipping through the pages of a picture book that spans several years.

When I see some of these children who drift in and out of my life every few years, I’m tempted to tell them stories that wouldn’t interest them, about how incredibly shy they were 10 years earlier, or how their laugh used to be like a bubble machine, filling the room with happy suds. For the giggling girl who became the taciturn teenager, those stories are as welcome as persistent questions about the boys in her grade or events that occurred during the day in school.

I can’t stop myself from commenting on how much taller the kids are getting, in large part because many of these teenagers, who I used to get on one knee to see eye to eye, are now towering over me. I even made one of them smile when I asked if he wouldn’t mind bending down to hug me.

At this recent gathering, I asked my son to go around the table and name as many of the relatives as he could. The relatives were aghast at my putting him on the spot but, thoroughly enjoying the day, he recognized the request was a playful prank.

No matter what I say to other people’s kids, I make sure I don’t pinch anyone’s cheeks. Even all these years later, I can still see those feral fingers and thumbs coming at me like talons.

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Tony Zador. Photo courtesy of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

By Daniel Dunaief

For some people, the frontier lies deep in space, further than the eye can see. For others, the frontier resides at tremendous pressure beneath the surface of the ocean. For Tony Zador, the chair of neuroscience and professor of biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the frontier is much closer to home, in the collection of signals in our brains that enable thought and direct our actions.

Recently, Zador and his research team helped explore that frontier, developing a technological innovation that allowed them to see where nervous system cells from one important region projected into other areas.

About six years ago, Zador came up with the idea to barcode the brain. Zador and his former graduate student Justus Kebschull explored the connections between the locus coeruleus (LC) and other parts of a rodent brain. The LC is responsible for reacting to stressful situations, allowing an animal to stimulate areas that might help save its life, including those responsible for visual or auditory processing.

Researchers believed that the intercom system that connected the LC to the rest of the brain could stimulate all areas at once, like a building-wide announcement coming over the public address system. What scientists didn’t know, however, was whether that communication system could send messages to individual areas.

“People knew before our work that neurons in the locus coeruleus broadcast their signals throughout the cortex,” Zador said. “What was not known was whether there was any specificity. It was always assumed.”

Zador found that individual neurons had precise connections to different parts of the brain. While this doesn’t prove that the LC can selectively activate one area, the way a superintendent might send a signal to one wing of a building, it demonstrates the specificity of the connections, which “raises the possibility” of selective signals.

Indeed, if each neuron diffusely spread out across the entire cortex, there would be no way to achieve localized control over cortical functions through the LC system. The visual cortex, for example, would be alerted at the same time as the auditory and frontal cortex.

Ultimately, Zador is interested in the brain’s neuronal network. The way nervous system cells communicate in our brains can help us understand how we process and interact with the world around us. Down the road, he is hoping to help create something called a connectome, which will provide a map of that network.

This information, at a basic level, could provide a better understanding of neurological conditions such as autism, schizophrenia, depression and addiction.

At this stage, however, Zador is building a network called the projectome, which provides a map of the specific regions neurons go in the brain. He collects this information by inserting a deactivated virus with a unique genetic code into the brain. These viruses act as a label, allowing Zador and his colleagues to trace the areas where individual neurons go. This technique, he said, doesn’t indicate whether neuron one is connected to neuron two, three or four, but, rather, it indicates whether neuron one is connected to a bunch of neurons in regions one and two but not in three and four.

Zador “had to develop a method of bar coding each neuron so that it is unique and a technique of detecting each bar code individually,” said Bruce Stillman, the president and chief executive officer of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. By collecting numerous samples of where these neurons go, Zador, his collaborators and other scientists can determine the natural range of variability for animal models of individuals with typical behaviors and reactions. Once they establish that range of typical wiring, they can compare that to animal models of neurological challenges, like autism. Zador wants to “create a baseline against which we can compare neuropsychiatric models of disease.”

Stillman explained that Zador’s focus at CSHL has been on cognition — how the brain makes decisions, retains memory and pays attention to tasks at hand. Zador, Stillman suggested, is “one of the pioneers in establishing the rodent cognition area.”

To understand cognition, however, Zador needed to see what regions of the brain are connected to other areas, providing a road map of the brain. Even though he didn’t have a background in molecular biology, Zador benefited from working with specialists at CSHL to create this bar coding, Stillman explained. Stillman described Zador as “bright” and “broad thinking.”

Zador said the next step in his work will be to relate the projections to the individual cells’ function in the brain. He would also like to see their neuron-to-neuron connectivity. He said he is pursuing both goals and hopes to submit a paper in the next month or two describing such a method for the first time.

“Although we can sequence the codes” from neighboring neurons, “we still have work to do to figure out connectivity,” Zador said. “That involves significant molecular tricks that we’re refining.”

Georgio Ascoli, a collaborator with Zador and the director of the Center for Neural Informatics at the Krasnow Institute of Advanced Study at George Mason University, described Zador as an “internationally renowned, highly respected scientist,” whose best known contributions relate to the challenge of understanding how the brain can seamlessly decide which stimuli in a varied environment like a cocktail party to listen to among numerous choices.

A resident of Laurel Hollow, Zador lives with his wife Kathy Shamoun, who practices Chinese medicine at CSHL and is a childbirth educator and doula. The couple has two sons, Ronin, 10, and Bowie, 6.

As for the benefits of this bar-coding approach, Ascoli explained that the technique is “potentially revolutionary because of its inherent scalability to full mammalian brain mapping, which is currently out of reach for alternative approaches.”

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When we need each other, we come together. That, as much as anything else, is the legacy of 9/11. Its 15th anniversary falls this Sunday.

Every year, we in the news business and, indeed, in society, struggle to know how to remember that terrible day in 2001. Years ago, the editor in chief at the New York Daily News, where I was working, asked me when we should stop running the names of the people who died that day, when 9/11 should no longer be on the front page, and when we should respect the day but give it less coverage. I told him I couldn’t imagine that day.

Those of us who knew people that died think about those people regularly, not just on an anniversary or at a memorial. They travel with us, the way others we’ve lost over the years do, in our hearts and in our minds.

Those first few days and months after the attacks, people in New York stopped taking things for granted and saw the things we share with each other as a source of strength.

This year, in particular, seems a good time not only to remember what makes us and this country great, but also a time to reflect on who we want to be and how we want to interact.

We have two candidates for the White House who seem intent on acting like impetuous Greek gods, shooting weapons at each other and describing each other’s faults and weaknesses to us.

Debate and disagreement are part of this country, just as they were in 1858, when Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas famously debated across Illinois. And yet, despite their disagreements and their passion for office, they held each other in considerably higher esteem than the two unpopular candidates who now want to be president.

How can the two parties that seem so intent on running in opposite directions today, and the two candidates who genuinely loathe each other, work together, come together, and inspire us when they are so obsessed with their animosity?

This Sunday, and maybe even this week, we should remind them — and ourselves — about all the things we Americans felt and did on those days after 9/11. Certainly, we mourned those we’d lost and we wondered aloud about our enemies.

But we also visited with each other, made calls to friends and family, checked on our neighbors, and offered support wherever and however we felt able. Some people donated to charities, while others gave blood, time or energy to helping the survivors and the families of those who lost loved ones.

Yes, we looked to protect ourselves and to understand who and what we were fighting, but we the people — the ones our government is supposed to protect, represent and reflect — became more patient in lines and became less upset over the little things. We looked out for each other.

It’s easy to imagine a boogeyman everywhere we go. Generations of Americans have pictured and envisioned monsters from within and without our borders, intent on destroying our way of life.

We can’t let fear and hatred dictate our actions. I don’t want to hear Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump shout about how unqualified each of them is for office. I want them to reflect a respect for all Americans, their opponents included, on this solemn day and during this solemn week. I don’t doubt that each of them loves America. Instead of telling us how they’ll be great leaders, demonstrate it to us by coming together.

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Trying to avoid triggers for migraines can be worse than navigating a minefield. Stock photo

By David Dunaief, M.D.

Migraines are a debilitating disorder. Symptoms typically include nausea, photophobia and phonophobia — sensitivity to light and to sound, respectively. The corresponding headache usually is unilateral and has a throbbing or pulsating feeling.

Migraines typically last anywhere from four to 72 hours, which is hard to imagine. Then, there is a postdrome recovery period, when the symptoms of fatigue can dog a patient for 24 hours after the original symptoms subside. Migraines are among the top reasons patients see a neurologist (1).

According to the American Migraine Foundation, there are approximately 36 million migraineurs, the medical community’s term for migraine sufferers. This has increased from 23.6 million in 1989. Women are three times more likely to be affected than men (2), and the most common age range for migraine attacks is 30 to 50 (3), although I have seen them in patients who are older.

What causes a migraine?

The theory was once simple: It was caused by vasodilation (enlargement) of the blood vessels. However, this may only be a symptom, and there are now other theories, such as inflammation of the meninges (membrane coverings of the brain and spinal cord). As one author commented, “Migraine continues to be an elephant in the room of medicine: massively common and a heavy burden on patients and their healthcare providers, yet the recipient of relatively little attention for research, education, and clinical resources” (4). There are many potential triggers for migraines, and trying to avoid them all can be worse than navigating a minefield. Triggers include stress, hormones, alcohol, caffeine, diet, exercise, weather, odor, etc. (5).

Focusing on prevention

There are many problems with treating acute migraine attacks beyond the obvious patient suffering. Eventually, patients may increase tolerance to drugs, needing more and more medication until they reach the maximum allowed. There are also rebound migraines that occur from using medication too frequently — more than 10 days in the month — including with acetaminophen (Tylenol) and NSAIDs (6). There are several options for preventive paradigms, some of which include medication, supplements, alternative therapies and dietary approaches.

Medication’s role

There are several classes of medications that act as a prophylaxis for episodic (less than 15 days per month) migraines. These include blood pressure and anti-seizure medications, botulinum toxin (botox) and antidepressants (7).

Blood pressure control itself reduces the occurrence of headaches (8). The data is strongest for beta blockers. Propranolol, a beta blocker, has shown significant results as a prophylaxis in a meta-analysis (group of studies) involving 58 studies where propranolol was compared to placebo or compared to other drugs (9). However, it showed only short-term effects. Also, there were a substantial number of dropouts from the studies.

Topiramate, an anti-seizure medication, showed a significant effect compared to placebo in reducing migraine frequency (10). In a randomized control trial (RCT) that lasted six months, there was a dose-response curve; the higher the dose, the greater the effect of the drug as a prophylaxis. However, drugs come with side effects: fatigue, nausea, numbness and tingling. The highest recommended dose is 100 mg because of side effects. As a result, almost one-third or 30 percent of patients cease therapy at the 200-mg dose because of side effects (11).

Botulinum toxin type A injection has not been shown to be beneficial for preventive treatment of episodic migraines but has been approved for use as a prophylaxis in chronic (greater than 15 days per month) migraines. However propranolol, mentioned already, has shown better results with fewer adverse reactions (12).

Alternative approaches

Butterbur, an herb from the butterbur (Petasites hybridus) root, was beneficial in a four-month RCT for the prevention of migraine (13). The 150-mg dose, given in two 75-mg increments, reduced the frequency of migraine attacks by almost twofold compared to placebo. This herb was well tolerated, with burping the most frequent side effect. Only Petasites’ commercial form should be ingested; the plant contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids, which may be a carcinogen and seriously damage the liver.

Feverfew, another herb, but this time the leaves are used for medicinal purposes, unfortunately, had mixed prophylaxis results. In a meta-analysis, study authors concluded that feverfew was not more beneficial than placebo (9). And, the most significant caveat with herbal medications is that their safety is not regulated by the FDA nor by any officially sanctioned regulatory body.

What about supplements?

High-dose riboflavin, also known as vitamin B2, may be an effective preventive measure. In a small RCT, 400 mg of riboflavin decreased the frequency of migraine attacks significantly more than placebo (14). The number of days patients had migraines also decreased. The side effects were mild for both placebo and riboflavin. Thus, this has potential as a prophylaxis, though the trial, like most of those mentioned above, was relatively short.

How about diet and exercise?

From my experience and those of other physicians, such as Dr. Joel Fuhrman and Dr. Neal Bernard, nutrient-dense foods are potentially important in substantially reducing the risk of migraine recurrence. I have seen many patients, both in my practice and in the three years I worked with Dr. Fuhrman, do much better, if not recover. There are a number of foods that are unlikely to cause migraine and reduce their occurrence, such as cooked green, orange and yellow vegetables, some fruits — though not citrus fruits — certain nuts, beans and brown rice. The number of foods can be expanded over time.

Interestingly, endogenous (from within the body) and exogenous (from outside the body, such as preservatives) toxins cause high levels of free fatty acids and blood lipids that are triggers for migraine (15). Higher fat diets and high levels of animal protein have been associated with more migraines. In addition, obesity may increase the frequency and severity of migraines (16).

Also, there was a small randomized controlled trial that showed exercise with 40 minutes of cycling three times a week may be comparable to medication for migraine prevention (17). Thus, there are several options for preventing migraines. The most well studied are medications; however, the most effective may be dietary changes and exercise, which don’t precipitate the rebound migraines that medication overuse may cause. And the herb butterbur may be an option as well.

References: (1) uptodate.com Sept. 2011. (2) Headache. 2001;41(7):646. (3) Medscape.com. (4) Annals of Neurology 2009;65(5):491. (5) Cephalalgia. 2007;27(5):394. (6) Headache. 2006;46 Suppl 4:S202. (7) uptodate.com. (8) Circulation. 2005;112(15):2301. (9) Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2004. (10) JAMA. 2004;291(8):965-973. (11) CMAJ. 2010;182(7):E269. (12) Prescrire Int. 2011;20(122):287-290. (13) Neurology. 2004;63(12):2240. (14) Neurology. 1998;50(2):466-470. (15) J Women’s Health Gend Based Med. 1999;8(5):623-630. (16) Obes Rev. 2011;12(5):e362-371. (17) Cephalalgia. 2011;31(14):1428-1438.

Dr. Dunaief is a speaker, author and local lifestyle medicine physician focusing on the integration of medicine, nutrition, fitness and stress management. For further information, visit www.medicalcompassmd.com or consult your personal physician.

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Maureen O’Leary on an expedition in Mali. Photo by Eric Roberts

By Daniel Dunaief

At their greatest depths, oceans hold onto their secrets. With layers of light-blocking water between the surface and the bottom, they hide the kind of clues that might reveal more about who, or what, lived or traveled through them.

What if a sea dried up millions of years ago? And, what if that sea left behind pieces of information — some of them small and subtle and others larger and easier to spot? That’s what happened in a part of Africa that long ago gave up any signs of flowing water. The Sahara desert was, millions of years ago, home to an inland sea called the trans-Saharan seaway.

Maureen O’Leary, a professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences in the School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, has been to Mali, a country in the northwest of Africa, three times on expeditions, most recently in 2008. There, she collected fossils that are members of extinct groups that are part of larger evolutionary units with living members today.

O’Leary has explored and cataloged a number of remnants from the region, including a turtle and crocodile skull. She and her collaborators have also discovered sting ray fossils. Originally considered likely residents after an asteroid hit Earth that caused a massive extinction, these fossils now suggest that these sting rays lived in the area earlier than previously believed.

“This suggests that the sting rays did survive” the asteroid impact, said O’Leary. “Often extinction events are described in very broad terms but specific studies like this help us” hone in on the kind of species that survived.

She also found intriguing deposits in fossilized feces. Invertebrates burrowed through these fossilized remains, leaving a cast of the shapes of their bodies. The group that left traces of their activities in fossilized feces includes Pholadidae, which has living members. “A careful inspection of a whole fauna of fossils allows you to find invertebrates you had no record of,” said O’Leary.

Leif Tapanila, the director of the Idaho Museum of Natural History and an associate professor of geosciences at Idaho State University, joined O’Leary on an expedition to Mali in 1999, where he was the invertebrate expert. Tapanila said the feces of sharks, crocodiles and turtles have bone fragments that tend to preserve well. Some of these fossilized feces can be four- to five-feet-thick deposits. A prehistoric diver from 30 million years ago would have found that the bottom of the seaway, which was probably 50 to 70 meters at its deepest points, was covered in these hard feces, Tapanila said.

Tapanila described O’Leary as an effective collaborator who ensured scientists formed effective partnerships. “She brings people together,” Tapanila said. “One of her biggest strengths is that she finds pieces of the puzzle that are needed for a particular scientific question. She sets up the infrastructure to make a research project work.”

In one of the blocks of limestone recovered in 1999, O’Leary found a crocodile skull with well-preserved ear bones. That level of detail is unusual in a fossil because of the relatively small and fine nature of those bones. Robert Hill, who was a doctoral student in O’Leary’s lab and is now a professor at Hofstra University, noticed that the ear bones had bite marks on them. A closer examination suggested that the marks were made by a shark, either during a prehistoric battle or after the crocodile had died.

O’Leary is currently working with Eric Roberts, the head of Geoscience at James Cook University in Australia, to write a review paper on Mali that would contain some reconstructions of the region and the species. The paper would emphasize a big picture story using the specialized details she and others collected. This will not only help people see the world as it was but also may help them see the Earth as a changing place, where rising sea levels could cause another transition in a dry and arid region.

While O’Leary would like to return to Mali, she and numerous other scientists have kept their distance amid the political instability in the area. In 2008, Canadian diplomat Robert Fowler was taken hostage for 60 days. “There were some diplomats there who seemed unflappable and serious” who suggested that O’Leary and her colleagues return home during their expedition. “The American Embassy was instrumental in leaning on me to leave.” O’Leary said the politics of these areas, despite the rich story they may have to tell about the past, “can play into whether science can even be done.”

In addition to her research in Mali, O’Leary raised the money and created an online system called MorphoBank, which enables scientists studying anatomy all over the world to collect their information in one place. MorphoBank encourages those interested in anatomy of any kind to find data in one place. Tapanila credits O’Leary for creating a valuable resource. For the time, MorphoBank was “totally new. It takes a lot of effort and vision to pull that off,” he said.

O’Leary is married to Michael Novacek, an author and senior vice president and curator in the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. He is one of the team leaders of the joint American Museum of Natural History/Mongolian Academy of Sciences ongoing expeditions to the Gobi Desert. The duo, who collaborated on an expedition in Morocco, have co-authored papers on the philosophy of science, placental mammal evolution and a team-based study of mammal evolution that was published in the journal Science.

O’Leary watches the political scene in and around Mali from afar.“I do keep an eye on it and would love to return,” she said.

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We are a step or two ahead of the dogs from that famous Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov, who discovered that his canines salivated when he entered the room, even if he wasn’t about to feed them.

We can and do anticipate all kinds of things, counting down the days until our wedding, the start of school, a winter vacation, a new dog’s arrival, the day we retire, the start or end of another sports season.

There’s an electricity in the air that changes the usual Sunday through Saturday routine, when we otherwise might just check the calendar to make sure we didn’t miss a dentist appointment, renew a registration for a car or pay a bill that’s coming due.

These bigger events — birthdays, surprise parties, New Year’s celebrations — are like larger waves on the ocean. We ride the regular waves up and down, but the bigger waves can give us a higher high, a lower low and take us further, generally, than every other wave.

What do we do to get ready for these big moments? If we’re anticipating a reunion, we might lose weight because we want to look as fit and trim as we did 25 years ago when we graduated from high school. We might make 100 calls to make sure that all the small details about the place settings for the wedding are exactly right, that everyone’s name is spelled correctly and that no one is sitting with an ex-husband she can’t stand.

We’re often aware of the date of these bigger occasions months or even years before they arrive. A mandatory retirement at the age of 60, for example, could be on the calendar for 15 years or more, as both a liberating experience and a journey into the unknown.

The training for these experiences starts early, when our parents describe how our birthday is coming next month, next week or even tomorrow. Sometimes, the anticipation is so great that sleep the night before is almost impossible, as our minds have already jumped ahead in time, putting us at the front of the room where we have to make a speech or torturing us with a range of what-if problems, as in, “What if my pants rip?” or “What if I forget what to say after slide three?” or “What if I don’t like anyone in my class this year?”

When we’re young, we read books that we know will end. We could tell that the ending was coming because we had only a few pages left before the characters we loved would leave us for the evening, until the next book, or until the next time we read about Horton and the Whos, those brave little folks he would not want to lose.

Our anticipation can magnify any of our senses, turning that orange leaf into a harbinger of a pumpkin carving competition; converting the sound of the shower into the calming splash of the ocean as it gently laps along the shore; or recasting the scent of freshly cut grass into the exultant shouts of parents and teammates amid a walk-off hit at the end of a tightly contested baseball game.

Surely, there are countdowns some of us dread, like the start of the new school year — I didn’t say it, I just wrote it, so I didn’t violate my promise to a few kids I know. While there are responsibilities to honor, burdens to bear and hurdles to jump, there are also joys and bigger moments, like a dance, a birthday celebration or a Thanksgiving with family, that all keep the carousel turning.

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Wei Zhu with a photo of her mother, Shenzhen Du. Photo by Joyce Ruan

By Daniel Dunaief

Wei Zhu’s long personal and professional journey began in China. Devoted to her mother, Shenzhen Du, Zhu watched her hero fight through a long illness with chronic kidney disease. Shortly before she died, her mother woke from a coma and suggested that her daughter become a doctor, like the people who were helping her in the hospital.

Driven to fulfill her mother’s request, Zhu attended college where, despite aspirations to become a writer like Charles Dickens or Charlotte Bronte, she studied math. She found the subject challenging but stuck with it. “Math was absolutely hard work,” she recalled. “We had to devote longer time to our study than many other majors. It all paid off in my case.”

Indeed, after she completed a one-year graduate program in math, she and her husband, Yeming Ma, came to the United States, where she used her experience in math to explore ways to understand how statistics can provide a perspective on everything from drug dosage to global warming to the causes of cancer.

“You can use math to improve people’s health,” said Zhu, who is now the deputy chair and professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics & Statistics at Stony Brook University.

Wei Zhu with her daughter, Merry Ma. Photo by Merry Ma
Wei Zhu with her daughter, Merry Ma. Photo by Merry Ma

At the beginning of the year, Yusuf Hannun, the director of the Stony Brook Cancer Center, emailed Zhu to ask her to pitch in to help understand a major question about cancer. In the prestigious journal Science, several researchers had concluded that the “bad luck” hypothesis suggested cancer was something that was written in a person’s genes. This scientific conclusion was akin to suggesting that a character’s fate in a play may have been written in the stars.

Hannun, Song Wu, an assistant professor in her department, Scott Powers, a professor in the Department of Pathology and Zhu came to a different conclusion, which they published in the equally prestigious magazine Nature.

Putting the data and the theory together, the group suggested that lifestyle choices and environmental exposure were also instrumental in this disease. The argument is the equivalent of nature versus nurture for a deadly disease.

“We were able to quantify what we observed,” Zhu said. For most cancers, the group concluded, the majority of the risk was due to lifestyle and environmental factors other than pure intrinsic genetic mutations. The disease debate, scientists recognize, doesn’t end there.

“The entire cancer research community still has a long way to go in order to perfectly understand the causes, prevention and treatments for each cancer, for each individual,” Zhu explained.

Hannun suggested that the direction cancer research is going requires advanced expertise in several areas of applied mathematics, physics and related disciplines. These are now needed for working with large data sets, for modeling pathways and events and for generating new hypotheses and organizing principles, Hannun wrote in a recent email. Hannun described Zhu as “terrific, highly dedicated and very collaborative” and suggested that the work has been “rewarding.”

Zhu is hoping that the recent Nature publication will trigger additional funding to support more research with this team of Stony Brook University scientists.

Wu, who was the first author on the Nature article, described Zhu as “well respected in the scientific community. She has done a lot of work on the analyses of brain image and proteomics data,” he wrote in an email.

Throughout her career, Zhu has sought to use statistics, bioinfomatics and other modern tools to enhance a scientific understanding of complex questions. She recently worked with Ellen Li, a professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, who wanted to understand the development of digestive diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and colon cancer. Putting the numbers together could provide the kind of information that offers an understanding of how lifestyle and food choices contribute to some diseases over time, Zhu said.

“We have published several papers together over the years,” Zhu said. “We are still in the data collecting stage for the diet analysis.” In her career, which spans 24 years, Zhu has worked on a wide range of topics. She has helped analyze data on the regions of the brain that are active in addiction and helped refine and enhance global climate models. In her early work, she also help pharmaceutical companies come up with optimal drug dosage. Numbers have been a part of Zhu’s life wherever she goes. “You do see numbers in the air,” she said. “When it’s getting hot,” she asks, “what does it have to do with my climate model? Does it fit the data?”

In more recent years, Zhu has struggled with the tension between contributing to larger projects and budgetary constraints. She worries that the “funding situation has changed the dynamics of the job market for the young generation of statisticians,” she said. “Now the majority of my doctoral students hope to focus their research on financial models, instead of biological models.”

Zhu and her husband Ma, who is a financial manager for GE, live in Setauket. Their son Victor, 24, recently earned his graduate degree in finance, while their daughter Merry, 11, attends Mount Elementary School. Zhu appreciates living on Long Island, where she can be close to the ocean.

As she looks back on the developments in her life that brought her to this point in her career, Zhu recognizes that the decision to learn more about math and statistics provided her with the kind of background that allowed her to fulfill her mother’s wish. “I can always honestly tell young students that it is a good idea to choose mathematics or statistics as their undergraduate majors,” she said. It will pave the way for them to have “a solid foundation for a variety of future graduate studies.”

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As we count down the days of summer on our hands and feet and we prepare for yet another tour around the academic merry-go-round, some of us are squeezing in leisure activities that become increasingly harder to do amidst trigonometry tests, English exams, soccer practices and musical rehearsals.

Some summer revelers go to amusement parks, where their bodies travel in directions that defy the typical linear motion from our beds to our cars to our offices.

What is it about those moments when we fly around the corner of a roller coaster, or when we tilt back and forth in a machine that moves incredibly quickly that people find so thrilling? Is it the feeling of our stomachs moving inside our bodies, the moment when we experience something completely new and more akin to that which another animal, like a bird, might feel — or is it something more basic?

The answers depend on who you are and what you consider fun. I think, however, at the base of these wild rides is something we share in different degrees and circumstances. We enjoy the moment between when we exercise what we feel is the usual level of control over our lives, and that instant which balances between thrill and terror when we give up control.

Yes, I know there are people who crave control to such a degree that almost all the decisions they make seem rooted in the power to influence each element or variable in their lives. To return to a scene from childhood, they are holding a crayon in their hand and carefully staying within the lines of life’s coloring book.

Maybe I wasn’t enough of an artist, or maybe I just enjoyed the entropy that comes from my universe which always seems to be moving toward a greater state of disorder, but those undirected marks outside the lines always seemed so liberating. The lines were the equivalent of someone instructing me to, “Do this, stay here, do that.” My squiggly and nonrepresentational lines were enshrined in my response: “No, thanks.”

Recently, my son, brother and I went sailing in a strong wind. My brother, who captained the small boat, delighted at the sudden surge of speed as we flew across Port Jefferson Harbor. We were flying through the water at speeds that rivaled nearby motorboats, leaving behind a bubbly, foamy water trail. After several trips back and forth, the wind picked up enough strength that it submerged half of the boat. We heeled so far that my brother and son were heading toward the water. Still planted on the higher side of the boat, I reached for my son’s life jacket and held on, trying to use our combined weight to keep us from capsizing.

Seconds before we reached that tipping point, however, my brother let the sails out, dumping the wind and righting the ship just in time. While the outing was enjoyable up to that point, it reached a whole new level of excitement, especially for my son, who couldn’t wait to tell his cousins about how we started to tip. Naturally, their reaction was to put on their bathing suits, grab their life jackets and head for the boat.

So, what is it about those out-of-control moments that are so enjoyable, particularly in the retelling? Maybe, it’s just that — for the precise instant when gravity seems optional, when our routine experiences aren’t enough to allow us to predict the future with certainty the way we can with so many other things — anything is possible. And our minds, like our bodies, jump into the excitement of the unknown.

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A drone carrying medicine and lab samples lands in a village in Madagascar. Photo courtesy of SBU

By Daniel Dunaief

Stony Brook University is taking to the skies to help people on the ground in Madagascar. Through its Global Health Institute, SBU plans to bring drones to the island nation off the southwest coast of Africa that will carry medical samples from hard-to-reach villages to its state-of-the-art research facility, Centre ValBio.

Late last month, Peter Small, the founding director at GHI, brought a drone to Madagascar, where it flew from the research station to a nearby village. The drones can fly like an airplane over 40 miles of terrain, while they take off and land like a helicopter, enabling a smooth ride to protect the samples inside the cargo area.

“Our challenge is to align the most pressing challenges that are amenable to supply chain and specimen transport and intervention,” Small said. Madagascar is dealing with “high rates of tuberculosis” among other health challenges, he said, adding that a university like Stony Brook can take complicated problems and find solutions in the real world.

The drones can provide two important functions for Madagascar: monitoring the outbreak of any unknown and potentially dangerous disease and offering health care for people who live in areas that are inaccessible by road, Small said.

A view of Madagascar from the SBU drone. Photo courtesy of SBU
A view of Madagascar from the SBU drone. Photo courtesy of SBU

“Diseases like Ebola and Zika frequently pop up in remote areas,” said Small, a medical doctor who worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation prior to joining Stony Brook University in 2015. Having sites where drones can land and collect specimens will allow village health workers to send off specimens for analysis, providing greater clarity on the incidence of specific diseases throughout the country.

Additionally, people in remote areas can send samples back to a lab to test for medical conditions, such as tuberculosis. After medical technicians run tests, the drones can return not only with drugs that can treat the condition but also with instructions on how to treat patients.

The drones can carry a special box to record whether a pill bottle is opened. The box also can carry a sound recorder that can recognize and count coughs, Small said. When the drone returns with another supply of medication, the previous medicine can make the return trip to the lab, where doctors can determine whether the cough is getting better and can see how much medicine the patient took.

Medicine is delivered to villages in Madagascar by way of drones. Photo courtesy of SBU
Medicine is delivered to villages in Madagascar by way of drones. Photo courtesy of SBU

Ideally, the drones will not require any specialized knowledge to fly. Once people in rural villages have a signal, they can request a drone, which can transport samples to a lab or bring medicine back to the village.

“We want to put these drones in the hands of the village health workers and the local health system,” said Small. He said those working with this project hoped people in the village would welcome this medical service but were unsure how it would be received. “We had no idea how people would respond to these” drones, Small said. The initial run, however, was successful. GHI plans to bring two more drones to Madagascar in the next few months.

A company in Michigan called Vayu manufactures the drones, which weigh 35 pounds, are about the size of a picnic table and can carry up to a 5-pound payload, said Daniel Pepper, the company’s chief executive officer. Using an electric, rechargeable battery, the drones can travel up to 40 miles. In the near future, Pepper hopes to increase that distance to as many as 65 miles.

Vayu has manufactured dozens of these drones. The recent Madagascar test was the first time they had used the unit in an international setting. Pepper is “speaking to partners and potential customers in over a dozen countries,” including the United States, where drones might offer a connection between medical centers in urban areas and harder-to-reach rural communities.

Pepper said the drone was the only one on the market that’s electric powered and can carry this payload over this range. “It takes off automatically and lands vertically,” he said and described the landing as “soft.”

According to Small, Madagascar could benefit from these drones, particularly in diagnosing the myriad health challenges of the area. “Madagascar is a remarkable area to start addressing some of these problems and bringing innovation,” he said.

In some villages, as many as 90 percent of people have intestinal parasites, which contributes to malnutrition and stunts growth, Small said. Small and Patricia Wright, the founder and executive director of Centre ValBio who has been working in the area for 30 years, are hoping to broaden and deepen the connection between Stony Brook and Madagascar.

The dental school has coordinated dental missions to treat hundreds of patients a day. Small said the dean of the dental school, Mary Truhlar, recently visited Madagascar to go beyond medical missions to “engage in improving the quality and training, care and health system issues.”

Small is excited with the way computational science and high-end mathematics are coming in to describe the complexities of health problems to the government of Madagascar. This will assist the government in generating medical priorities. Small has set some large goals for his role: “If life is not palpably better in five, 10 or 15 years” in Madagascar, “I will have failed at my job.”

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