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Authors Posts by Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

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Alice Cialella during the Muddy Tire Mountain Bike Race in Wading River in 2015/Photo by Mark Wiggins

Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory have traveled the world, placed their scientific instruments aboard commercial ships, or gathered information from satellites, aircraft and ground-based facilities to study the atmosphere, the environment and the weather.

Chemist Arthur Sedlacek, whose work was featured last week in the Times Beacon Record, has journeyed in a plane above wildfires in the western United States to collect information about aerosolized particles, while atmospheric scientist Ernie Lewis has gathered data from commercial ships that trek back and forth from Los Angeles to Hawaii to determine how clouds change along the route through the Pacific.

Assistant ecologist Shawn Serbin, meanwhile, has studied the spectroscopic properties of forests to determine how an area responds to different temperature, precipitation and atmospheric conditions.

These are all part of the mission of the Environmental and Climate Sciences Department at BNL, explained Alice Cialella, the interim chair of the department and also the manager of the DOE ARM Climate Research Facility External Data Center.

The Environmental and Climate Sciences Department, which includes over 50 scientific, professional and technical staff, is also engaging in several new efforts, including a collaboration with Stony Brook University. Using several mobile radar systems donated by companies and the military, these two local institutions will gather a wealth of data about the local and regional climate and environment.

“The unprecedented array of radars will help us better understand pre-storm conditions before high impact weather events, provide detailed wind data for modeling energy and pollution flow through cities and better process level understanding of precipitation and cloud formation,” Cialella explained in an email.

To be sure, the initiative is so new that the weather satellites, which can be loaded on a truck and moved to different parts of a city, haven’t arrived yet. “There are many more details to work out,” she said.

This is just one of several initiatives that are all a part of the DOE-funded facility’s efforts to gain a better understanding of the local and global environment and how it might be changing over time.

Recently, Cialella’s department participated in a study to look at how air particles circulate through New York City subway stations for the Department of Homeland Security. Separately, atmospheric scientist Andrew Vogelmann is collaborating with a multi-institution study to connect ARM Climate Research Facility’s observations to climate modeling efforts.

Alice Cialella in her office at Brookhaven National Laboratory/Photo by Roger Stoutenburgh
Alice Cialella in her office at Brookhaven National Laboratory/Photo by Roger Stoutenburgh

Cialella, who has served as the interim chair of the department for six months, said this effort will “create more synergy between weather observational data sets and climate modelers.”

Martin Schoonen, the associate laboratory director for  the Environment, Biology, Nuclear Science and Nonproliferation Directorate at BNL, said he chose her as interim chair because “she has proven to be a very effective group leader, growing her group significantly over the last few years and taking on a leadership role within the DOE-Atmospheric Radiation Measurement and Climate Research Facility.”

Schoonen called her a “consensus builder” who “listens well to people and takes time to get to know all perspectives.” Cialella is “absolutely” in contention for the full-time role in the Environmental and Climate Sciences Department, Schoonen said.

Cialella said she sees opportunities to encourage scientific partnerships. “I look for a high level understanding of the science and try to identify common themes that aren’t being fully utilized or appreciated,” she said. The department is in two buildings and she tries to ensure that she assists with any potential collaborations among researchers in the same department but at different locations.

Serbin said he appreciates how Cialella has encouraged collaborations among researchers who study different elements of the environment.

Hired at first for her software engineering skills and her master’s degree in physical geography, one of her initial jobs was to create maps for the ARM sites using Geographic Information Systems software.

In her work as the manager of the data center, which represents about half her time, Cialella and Laurie Gregory supervise a team of eight. They identify new sources of data that are external to the ARM Climate Research Facility and that augment the ARM facility, such as weather forecast model data. The group has been creating ARM databases and Web data applications for ARM for over 20 years.

While she hasn’t worked on a computer program in a number of years, Cialella’s work allows her to engage in “more broad-thinking and strategic planning.” Over time, the focus of the ARM Climate Research Facility has shifted from gathering information through observations to using that information to inform global climate models. “In the last couple of years, the move has been to provide the data for the modeling component of the program much more directly,” she said.

A resident of Poquott, Cialella lives with her husband John Robinson, who is a professor in integrative neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook. Using mouse models, Robinson hopes to understand the function and dysfunction of the human central nervous system.

The couple has a daughter Zoe, who is a senior at Ward Melville High School and is planning to attend the University of Vermont in the fall.

Cialella said she enjoys anything that gets her moving. She runs, bikes, swims and does triathlons in the summer. Exercise is a great “stress reliever,” she said. She also enjoys being a part of a book group. She recently read “Tinkers” by Paul Harding.

Cialella grew up in Maryland, the fourth of five children. Her late father, Carmen, was a physicist at Aberdeen Proving Grounds.

As for her work, Cialella said she continues to plan for the future. “You always want to be thinking at least three to five years out and what the next area of research might be,” she said. “The next area may well be high-resolution atmospheric modeling for urban and regional studies.”

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All the world’s a stage.

I read those words long ago, but didn’t appreciate the stage itself until recently. As a child, I struggled to wade through school books rife with flowing descriptions. Who cares what kinds of trees are outside the house, if there is a swing set near someone’s first kiss or if a fog sits heavy on a town?

When I was my son’s age, I found those details as relevant as the cars that drove by me on my walk to junior high school. Action and dialogue meant so much more. I wanted to hear what people said or know what they were thinking.

I now appreciate the stage more than ever. In fact, I’d like to go back to Ward Melville High School and thank the stage crew for building sets that turned the stage into the Upper West Side in the 1950s or a yellow brick road.

My appreciation for a setting, however, extends beyond the actual stage. It’s in the seats of an auditorium, where a shared armrest becomes the location for the first tentative effort to hold hands.

The setting continues through the wooden doors that, like eyes focusing from a distance, have opened simultaneously, allowing an appreciative audience its first glimpse of the land that awaits. It’s a part of the marble hallway, where the chatter of birds on nearby trees supplants the chitchat of children, who seem to race out through a revolving glass door that allows the nearby rays of the sun to pour inside.

We can shift our attention to blades of grass on the playground, where an undersized third-grade transfer student catches a fly ball for the first time and suddenly feels as if everything will be OK in his new town. That same blade of grass can provide cover for an earthworm as it looks to go back underground after a heavy rainstorm, lest the birds circling overhead stop to bring the worm back to a nest of hungry birds waiting at the top of an awning on a boarded-up house the children believe is haunted.

A setting can become altered the way a police siren appears to change from the Doppler effect. Even though the alarm wails at the same frequency, its pitch seems different as the sound approaches. The basketball net that appeared to be impossibly high when we were in first grade is remarkably close to our hands as we age, making us feel as if we’ve become Gulliver in our own lives.

Nostalgia can imbue a setting with emotion. I recently drove down my old block. I saw a version of me that was younger than my children are now. I could see myself staring out the side window of my room across a row of evergreens, letting my eyes become blurry to soften the colors of the red, green, purple, yellow and white Christmas lights down the block. If we were lucky some evenings, the snow would cause the lights to flicker.

Down below those tall evergreens and just outside my front window were several bushes. During the fall, with a full moon and a violent wind, the needles on those bushes transformed into a man with a mohawk hairstyle swaying back and forth.

One morning, those bushes disappeared. I tentatively pulled back the shade, where a dump truck of snow buried my menacing friend. The bushes bent over double, as if the man with the mohawk had taken a hard punch to the gut.

As I squinted at the scene, I knew that I had aged but the man with the mohawk hadn’t.

Yes, each setting is alive with possibilities.

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An image from the Biomass Burn Observation Project. Photo from Arthur Sedlacek

The search for small particles has taken Arthur Sedlacek to places like thick plumes of smoke above wildfires raging in the western United States to picturesque vistas on Ascension Island, a staging area for the Allies for antisubmarine activities during World War II.

A chemist in the Environmental and Climate Sciences Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Sedlacek is studying aerosols, which are tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere. These particles can form the nuclei of clouds. Depending on their color, they can also either heat or cool the atmosphere.

“White” aerosols, as Sedlacek put it, such as sulfate- or nitrate-based particles, reflect solar radiation, while “black” aerosols, such as soot, absorb the sun’s light and help trap that energy in the atmosphere. By absorbing heat, darker aerosols increase the temperature, while lighter particles reflect some of that heat back into space.

“When you talk about climate change, you identify greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide, which is responsible for warming,” Sedlacek said. “When you run through the model calculations, the models overpredict what we should see. Either something is wrong with the models or something else is counterbalancing the warming effect.”

Arthur Sedlacek photo from Sedlacek
Arthur Sedlacek photo from Sedlacek

Indeed, aerosols represent part of that something else. “We need to incorporate them into our models to better understand what we actually observe in the field,” Sedlacek said. He studies the types of particles, how they age, their color, changes in their color and whether they can act as cloud condensation nuclei.

“We want to understand what’s being produced and how it changes as the plume dilutes and gets older,” Sedlacek said. “How this aging alters the microphysical and optical [properties are] very important to quantifying the contribution of aerosol to climate change.”

During the summer and fall of 2013, Sedlacek was a part of a study called the Biomass Burn Observation Project, which included 14 scientists from seven institutions. Other BNL scientists included his co-principal investigator and chemist Larry Kleinman, atmospheric scientist Ernie Lewis, chemist Stephen Springston and tenured scientist Jian Wang.

Sedlacek spent several hours preparing the equipment that would gather data above these raging fires.

The planes flew into the smoke and then moved in the direction of the smoke, measuring the changes in these aerosols an hour, two hours and more away from the fire. These measurements showed how these aerosols changed over time.

While the study was conducted several years ago, Sedlacek and his colleagues are still working to put together the information.

They have learned that the particles in the air change dramatically in the first few hours. Biomass burning events produce aerosols that are considered “brown carbon” because they are not black, like soot, but they aren’t white like a sulfate- or nitrate-containing aerosol.

Brown carbon is known to evolve. They also observed a particle type referred to as “tar balls.” While others have seen these, Sedlacek and his colleagues are the first to show that they behave like secondary organic aerosols.

The description of these tar balls isn’t meant to suggest boulder-sized pieces of tar hiding somewhere in the clouds: They are about 250 nanometers in diameter, which makes them about 240 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair.

The group is trying to understand how these tar balls form. These tar balls may help clarify a sampling mystery. The top-down view, from satellites, suggests something different than the bottom-up view, from collecting data from particles. The satellite views indicate there should be more “stuff” in the air.

The bottom-up view may not take these tar balls into account. Not all wildfires produce tar balls, but the data Sedlacek and his collaborators collected suggest that they could represent 20 to 30 percent of the particulate mass in the plume.

In addition to flying above wildfires, Sedlacek also jets to places around the world including Brazil and Ascension Island.

He is also a mentor for two instruments, which means he is responsible for making sure they are functioning. He works with single-particle soot photometers, which measure the amount of black carbon in the air, and the aethalometer, which uses light transmission to determine the concentration of black carbon particles collected on a filter.

With the single-particle soot photometer, Sedlacek looked “at the data in a new way and from that gained insight into the morphology — the shape — of the individual particles, something that nobody had thought to do previously,” Lewis explained in an email. Lewis, who has known Sedlacek for over 10 years and has collaborated on numerous projects, said that Sedlacek is “wonderful to work with” and is a “very careful scientist with keen insight and great attention to detail.”

On Ascension Island, Sedlacek was a mentor in support of another scientist’s field campaign. That effort is exploring how biomass burning aerosols produced in Africa interact with marine clouds as the air mass moves from the west coast of Africa in the general direction of the island.

A photographer and bicyclist, Sedlacek takes numerous pictures of his work.

Sedlacek describes himself as an experimentalist and an observationist. He does not do any of the climate models. His data, however, informs those models and enables other scientists to include more details about the climate and atmosphere.

“Those of us who love to fly get to fly into these plumes,” where they are in an unpressurized cabin, so the outside air makes its way into the plane, he said. They experience considerable turbulence above these fires.

“When we see our instruments and our senses respond at the same time,” he said, “it makes for an unforgettable experience.”

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Before we can tackle the complexities of weight loss, we have to understand that there are a number of misconceptions. Therefore, “synonymous” is the word of the day. According to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, synonymous means, “similar in meaning or significance” (1).

At this point, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with weight loss. Essentially, our weight loss lexicon is full of erroneous synonymous statements.

When we think of weight loss, “obesity” is often the first thing that comes to mind; however, someone who needs to lose weight is not the same as someone who is obese. Weight loss can be important for not just the obese population but also for the overweight and, yes, even for “normal” weight individuals.

Our second erroneously synonymous relationship is between having a normal body-mass index (BMI) and being fit. If I am within the ideal range of BMI (18-25 kg/m2), then I am fit. BMI is a measurement that involves only height and weight, not body fat or lean muscle mass. Body fat and muscle mass are much more important components to being truly fit than BMI. They are more closely related to achieving better health.

Weight loss is also thought of as being synonymous with better health. While it can be the case, this is not necessarily true. Some patients lose weight unintentionally with a chronic illness or even with sarcopenia (muscle wasting), which is actually unhealthy.

Yet, another mistaken interpretation is based on the presumption that if the body burns 3,500 calories, then you should lose roughly one pound. The problem with this is that there is a multitude of factors involved with weight loss, including metabolism, medications, diet composition, exercise or calorie expenditure, stress and the hormones leptin and ghrelin.

Weight loss misconceptions can impact our results.

Finally, the last faulty synonymous relationship that I will mention is that of carbohydrates and grains. Though grains are carbohydrates, not all carbohydrates are grains. In fact, starchy vegetables, dark green leafy vegetables, fruits, beans and legumes are all carbohydrates.

Where am I going with this? Well, let’s look at the research.

The disappointment of ‘The Biggest Loser’

No, I am not talking about the reality TV show’s ratings. Instead, I’m referring to a recently completed study that followed season 8 contestants. The study’s results show that resting metabolic rate, better known as metabolism while relaxing, decreases with significant weight loss and does not seem to return to baseline levels even after reducing exercise and diet restrictions (2). In other words, the body may have a set point to which it struggles to return. Most of the participants in the study gained back most of the weight lost or even more than what they had lost, except for one participant. This is not surprising; participants exercised enormous amounts of time per day, treating exercise as a full time job. One contestant said that he was exercising seven hours a day and burning 8,000 to 9,000 kcal/day.

While the actual weight loss competition was over 30 weeks, or approximately seven months, the researchers looked at the contestants six years after the program. The findings were disheartening. According to a New York Times opinion piece entitled, “Why you can’t lose weight on a diet” by a neuroscientist, we should stop dieting and focus on exercise and mindful eating (3). Though I would agree that exercise and mindful eating are very important, so is your diet or lifestyle modification as a whole.

Believe it or not, there were still positives that came from this study. Although the participants could not maintain the diet restrictions or strenuous exercise, there was still a significant improvement in fat mass six years later.

However, the study did have its weaknesses. There was no control group, and the study was very small, with only 14 out of 16 participants evaluated at six years. There were only three data points, one at baseline, one at 30 weeks and one at six years, so we have no idea what happened between seven months and six years. Also, it is not clear from the study what participants were eating during the first 30 weeks or thereafter, nor how much exercise they were getting. This description was obfuscated at best in the study.

Exercise: It’s all in the timing

While exercise has recently gotten a bum rap for its low effectiveness with weight loss, there may be hope yet! In a recent small randomized controlled trial, the results showed that athletes who were given the same amount of carbohydrates but consumed them only at breakfast and lunch — but not dinner — performed significantly better and had more lean muscle mass than a traditional diet where carbohydrates are distributed throughout the day (4).

This modification of timing with the carbs was referred to as the “sleep-low” diet. The athletes on the sleep-low diet performed especially well in the morning, when they were mostly relying on fat as a source of fuel, not carbs. Previous studies that had reduced carbs rather than change their timing had mixed results. Though this study involved athletes, there could be some benefit to you and me in terms of fat loss and lean muscle development.

Why BMI is less relevant

People tend to be obsessed with BMI. BMI defines whether someone is obese, overweight or in the “ideal” weight range. However, we should never be defined by our weight. BMI is also not the most accurate reading. This next study is an example of this point. Here, results showed that those who had a BMI of 27, considered to be overweight, were the least likely to die prematurely (5).

This means that being overweight is better than ideal weight, right? Not so fast! For one thing, the population was Danish, not American. For another, it was unclear whether the researchers took into account unintentional weight loss, such as from sarcopenia (loss of muscle mass that occurs in the elderly who don’t exercise) or chronic diseases, such as autoimmune diseases. Thus, BMI does not give a complete picture of someone’s health status.

Fruits and vegetables to the rescue

The good news is that taking diet composition into account may help an individual prevent weight gain. In a meta-analysis (a group of three observational studies), results showed that fruit and vegetable consumption was inversely associated with weight gain (6). Fruits and vegetables included dark leafy green vegetables, any type of berries, pears and apples. These are considered to have higher fiber and a lower glycemic load.

The exception to the inverse association was with starchy vegetables, which are considered to have lower fiber and higher glycemic load. Examples include corn and potatoes. These contributed to weight gain.

The takeaway from this is that doing extreme things to try to lose weight rapidly is not sustainable and could ultimately result in detrimental long-term effects. Also, one should not focus on BMI, but rather on body composition, especially fat percentage and fat mass. Exercise before eating carbohydrates, such as grains and starchy vegetables, is more likely to burn fat and produce lean muscle mass. And, finally, concentrating on diet composition, especially fruits and vegetables, is likely to result in healthy weight loss and a favorable change in body composition.

References

(1) merriam-webster.com. (2) Obesity (Silver Spring). Online May 2, 2016. (3) https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday. (4) Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2016 Apr;48(4):663-672. (5) JAMA. 2016;315(18):1989-1996. (6) PLoS Med 13(1): e1001956.

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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Above, Johanna Jarcho holds a model of a brain in her lab at SBU. Photo from Jarcho

Ever stare at the head of an anxious adolescent — wait, is that a redundant phrase? — and wonder, “What’s going on inside that head?” While Johanna Jarcho can’t read their minds, she can see areas of the brain that are active during different simulated social situations using a functional-MRI brain scan.

Through her work, she found some areas of the brain are more active, or light up, with children who are isolated or feel socially withdrawn, compared with the same areas of children who are more socially comfortable.

“The goal is to identify what is it about certain kids that are at risk that makes them resilient and what it is about those that develop the symptoms” of anxiety disorders, said Jarcho, who is an assistant professor of psychology at Stony Brook University, with joint appointments in the clinical area as well as the social and health areas. “If we can identify those kids who might be at risk, we can specifically target treatments for them,” she said.

Jarcho, who was part of a study that followed the same group of children from the time they were 2 until they were 11, published her research in the journal Psychological Science. She participated in this ongoing effort for the last four years. “One of the amazing thing about having this long-term data is that we’re still following these kids,” she said. “They are being evaluated now.” The children participating in the study are now 14.

While they are being monitered, Johanna Jarcho asks children to create their own avatar, a cartoon version of themselves. Photo from Jarcho
While they are being monitered, Johanna Jarcho asks children to create their own avatar, a cartoon version of themselves. Photo from Jarcho

Understanding any signature activity in the brain could help with diagnosis, treatment or prevention of anxiety disorders, Jarcho said.

Adolescence is rife with the kind of stresses that can create long-term anxieties. “Social anxiety disorder in particular has a very specific developmental trajectory,” Jarcho said. “If you don’t develop it by the time you’re in your early 20s, your probability of developing it is low.” She said 80 to 90 percent of those who experience social anxiety disorder develop it when they’re adolescents.

Typical clinical measures, including self-reports from adolescents, aren’t good predictors for the development of anxiety disorders said Jarcho, who along with a host of scientists are using other biological measures, like MRI scans, in connection with clinical observations.

Collaborators applauded Jarcho’s efforts and see clinical potential down the road from this type of study. “These findings definitely contribute to our understanding of the etiology of anxiety disorders,” Amanda Guyer, an associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of California, Davis, explained in an email. “This type of longitudinal work is critical to moving the field forward in understanding the etiology of disorders as they unfold over time” for some adolescents.

Gathering information about anxiety and social interactions while children are in MRI machines required some creativity. The children are on their backs, laying perfectly still in a dark, metal tube, which aren’t conditions conducive to social interactions.

Tapping into the next generation’s comfort with modern technology, Jarcho and her colleagues asked the children to create their own avatar, a cartoon version of themselves. While they are in the machine that monitors their minds, their avatars go through a range of social interactions.

“This is one of the first studies where we were able to utilize a lot of different social nuances that we experience,” Jarcho said. “Using this, we are able to bring a good slice of the social world into this constrained environment.”

These kinds of studies are in the early stages of development, said Jarcho, who made an avatar of herself. Researchers are using the latest technology to gather new insights about what patterns might lead to a range of longer-term emotional outcomes.

Numerous factors contribute to the mental health of developing children, Jarcho said, which could make the interpretation or predictive value of any biological information difficult.“You have to collect a huge amount of data to identify complex patterns to make these meaningful clinical classifications,” she said, including the type of parenting a child receives.

In the bigger picture, Jarcho is interested in understanding the mechanisms associated with having positive social interactions. She said she would like to know how neurobiology of normal social competence develops and what contributes to deficits in social competence.

Johanna Jarcho with her husband, Charles Best, and their rescue dog Tosh. Photo by Best
Johanna Jarcho with her husband, Charles Best, and their rescue dog Tosh. Photo by Best

Jarcho, who joined Stony Brook last August, is also interested in pursuing other research goals, including determining what other people are picking up from someone who has a clinical disorder. She wants to find the subtle signals that people use to interpret someone else’s behavior. She has tracked the eye movements of people observing others with clinical diagnoses to determine if there was something the socially anxious person was doing that signals an anxiety.

Jarcho has added a few undergraduates to her lab and plans to start working with her first graduate student in August.

Guyer, who has known Jarcho for five years and collaborated with her on writing research papers and grants, highlighted Jarcho’s dedication.

“She cares deeply about conducting rigorous research that can have a positive impact on youth,” Guyer said.

Jarcho and her husband Charles Best live in Port Jefferson with their rescue dog Tosh. A mathematician and software developer who was a researcher at Apple, Best is working with Jarcho on a startup effort called RSRCHR, which will provide neuroimaging researchers with a cloud-based platform to help maintain an infrastructure for fMRI data storage, management and analysis.

They have a prototype Jarcho uses and are seeking funding to support their work.

Starting in September, Jarcho plans to collaborate with Stony Brook Psychology Professor Greg Hajcak to look for a neural signature on how children react to their own errors. These signatures may suggest an increased risk for anxiety.

Jarcho said she feels comfortable at Stony Brook. “The longer I’m at Stony Brook, the more I realize what a truly unique place it is,” she said. “The faculty in the Psychology Department has a tremendous interest and willingness to collaborate.”

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Peter Weyl as a young man in the 1940s. Photo from the Weyl family

A founder of the Marine Sciences Research Center at Stony Brook, which is now the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Peter Weyl died on Sunday, May 22 at the age of 92.

Weyl, who retired from Stony Brook in 1995, was surrounded by friends and family.

Peter Weyl as a young man in the 1940s. Photo from Malcolm Bowman
Peter Weyl as a young man in the 1940s. Photo from the Weyl family

Weyl is survived by his wife Muriel, their son Stephen, their daughters Ruth and Lisa, five grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Known for extensive research in a range of oceanography disciplines and for writing the first oceanography textbook, Weyl’s life and academic career took several dramatic turns.

Born in Germany on May 6, 1924, Weyl and his family, who were Jewish, left their native country in 1938 amid the build up to World War II. They moved to England, where Weyl was confined to an internment camp when he was 16. Amid modest living conditions, Weyl and a cousin heard the complaints about the fish that their fellow campmates didn’t enjoy eating.

The two of them smoked the fish, making some money along the way.

This effort reflected an enterprising nature for Weyl, who his family said loved smoking herring throughout his life.

During the war, Weyl and his family moved to the United States, where Weyl attended Stuyvesant High School. He joined the army, where he served in military intelligence, putting his knowledge of German to work. He marched into Paris when it was liberated and eventually returned to Germany.

He came back to the United States in 1946 and entered college at the University of New Hampshire. It was there that he met Muriel, a woman who made a point of speaking to him twice. The first time, she was in a library, trying to choose a picture to critique for a class.

“When he came in, he looked very cute,” she recalled. She figured it was an easy connection for her, so she asked him if she should choose one particular picture.

He said he wouldn’t pick the one she pointed out and kept walking.

Three months later, the two of them were at a dance and were the only ones dressed more casually than their peers. Muriel wore her saddle shoes and a sweater she knitted, while he had “simple clothing,” as she put it.

She walked across the room and touched his shoulder.

He turned around, looked her in the eye, and said, “You and I don’t belong here. Let’s leave,” she said. That was the first of many steps along the way to their 69-year marriage.

Noticing that her husband, who she knew was brilliant, was bored with his studies at college, she encouraged him to take an exam that would allow him to study nuclear physics for a Ph.D. At that time, the country was locked in the beginning of a scientific battle with the Soviet Union.

She gave him $100 and told him to take the test and “show me you’re smart.”

A month later, Weyl was in Chicago, where his wife would eventually join him after she graduated from college. He studied with some of the biggest names in nuclear science, including Enrico Fermi, whom Weyl considered the greatest teacher in history. He also interacted with the father of the Manhattan Project, which built the world’s first atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer.

Along the way, Weyl saw an opportunity to do important work in other sciences that weren’t getting that kind of attention, Stephen said. He turned his attention to the ocean.

Informed by a different scientific background, Weyl took a multidisciplinary approach to basic questions ranging from how life evolved in the ocean to how the oceans were changing, said Malcolm Bowman, distinguished service professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, who considered Weyl his mentor.

Bowman said Weyl focused on climate change and the ice ages 50 years before concerns about global warming heated up.

Weyl authored numerous scientific papers and wrote the first major textbook on physical oceanography, called “Oceanography: Introduction to the Marine Environment” in 1970. That book was translated into five languages, Muriel said. He also wrote a children’s book called “Men, Ants & Elephants: Size in the Animal World.”

Muriel recalled how they got calls from professors at Harvard, who appreciated how Weyl explained science.

Bowman said Weyl was the first to realize the essential contribution of New York City sewage discharges into the upper East River as the prime source of eutrophication in the Western sound. In eutrophication, nutrients cause excessive growth of algae. When the algae die, they sink to the bottom and decompose, robbing a water body of oxygen, which can lead to fish kills.

On the lookout for opportunities to fill a need, Weyl invented the main form of desalination that is used throughout the world, said Stephen Weyl. He created the original patent in which desalination uses reverse osmosis.

In a celebration of his life and their memories of a remarkable man, the Weyl family recalled how he “always had a sense of humor and saw the positive side of life,” said Lisa. That sense of humor included the liberal use of puns. He would say, “I have to say, ‘Goodbye, so I can rest a Weyl.’”

The family created the Peter K. Weyl Memorial Scholarship for students studying climate change at Stony Brook. In lieu of flowers, the family asked for contributions to the scholarship.

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You’ve got a friend in me.

You ain’t never had a friend like me.

You want a friend in this town? Get a dog.

You’re not my friend anymore.

And, perhaps, one of history’s deepest friend cuts, “Et tu, Brute?” Then again, I’m not sure how much Julius Caesar considered Brutus his friend on that fateful day.

We’ve all heard about or had unusual, spectacular and backstabbing friends. These people, who aren’t our relatives but with whom we voluntarily spend time, are in a category of people that distinguishes them from strangers who push past us on the freeway, along the sidewalk or the line at the cafeteria.

And while we’re certainly aware of the dangers of unrequited love from literature and history, are there unrequited friendships?

If you believe a recent study out of Tel Aviv University in Israel, the answer is a resounding “yes,” and it happens more often than we might hope. This research found that only half of those other people called their friends returned the favor. That means if you like John and Joe, chances are John might like you, but Joe could be somewhere between indifferent to you or annoyed at the way you tap his arm each time you say something too insignificant to break physical boundaries to share.

So, that left me in a quandary. How do I know who I want to be my friends and who wants me to be his or her friend?

Maybe, I thought, as my wife and I went out to dinner for the first time with another couple, we would become friends with two people at once. Could this, like that famous line in “Casablanca,” be “the beginning of a beautiful friendship?”

I had no such dramatic hopes, focusing instead on the little stuff: What should I wear, what would we discuss, did we have anything in common — and should I try to order quietly with the waiter while my wife distracted the couple so they didn’t know I was lactose intolerant?

A few moments after we sat down, I realized I didn’t have to speed read through the menu looking for items that my children would tolerate.

The woman from the other couple did the equivalent of shooting layups, as the rest of us listened. She shared stories about the academic and extracurricular interests of her children. That, I thought as I nodded politely at everything she said, was friendly enough.

Gradually we worked into a comfortable rhythm, even venturing into the potentially treacherous area of national politics. When I brought it up, I knew I ran the risk of talking with someone with incredibly strong opinions that conflicted with my own. Within seconds, however, it was clear that all four of us held similar political views.

When the evening ended, the men shook hands and gave social air kisses to the wives. The evening went well; I don’t think I embarrassed myself, my children or my wife. Now, are these people our friends? Not yet, I suppose, but the four of us are, perhaps, friendlier.

As we drove to pick up our son, who was at a late-night party with around 100 of his closest friends that would undoubtedly make him irrational and irascible the next day, I recalled the warnings about the dangers of becoming friends with our kids. They don’t need friends. Rather, what they need are authority figures who can tell them what they don’t want to hear, or so the advice goes.

But, wait, like a good movie where the solution is right in front of my face, I recalled a friendly tip from long ago: It’s important to be friends with the person you are dating. That, I realized, was excellent advice. It’s much easier to share a life with the one out of two people who reciprocates a friendship.

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After signing the memorandum of understanding, SBU President Samuel L. Stanley shakes hands with Monique Rasoazananera, the minister of Higher Education, while Patricia Wright, distinguished professor of anthropology, far right, and Zina Adrianarivelo-Razaly, Madagascar’s ambassador to the United Nations, look on. Photo by Leah Dunaief

It was a celebration and a ceremony that recognized the past and set ambitious goals for the future. A quarter of a century ago, Stony Brook helped establish Ranomafana National Park in Madagascar, home to the island nation’s lemurs and a favorite destination for scientists and ecotourists.

On Monday at the Old Field Club, Stony Brook President Samuel L. Stanley, distinguished professor of Anthropology Patricia Wright, Director of the SBU Global Health Institute Peter Small, along with the Dean of the medical school Kenneth Kaushansky and several other Stony Brook deans, welcomed a delegation of distinguished guests from Madagascar.

The relationship between Stony Brook and Madagascar has been “of great benefit to both sides,” Stanley said in opening remarks. He suggested Stony Brook was seeking “new ways to engage together” because he was confident that the school “could do more.”

Indeed, after short speeches by Zina Andrianarivelo-Razaly, Madagascar’s ambassador to the United Nations and Monique Rasoazananera, minister of Higher Education in Madagascar, Stanley and his distinguished guests signed a memorandum of understanding to expand and broaden opportunities for Stony Brook in the island nation.

Rasoazananera hopes that Stony Brook will develop relationships with the five university research centers in Madagascar.

“For the students and faculty, this is a win-win,” Rasoazananera said. She spoke in French to Onja Razafindratsima, who served as a translator and was trained by Wright’s former graduate student Amy Dunham. Razafindratsima will begin the Sara and Daniel Hardy Conservation Biology Fellowship at Harvard this year.

While celebrating the relationship with Madagascar, Stanley also highlighted the ongoing affiliations in Kenya and South Korea. In Kenya, Stony Brook’s Richard, Meave and Louise Leakey conduct groundbreaking work on fossils at the Turkana Basin. Like Wright, they are involved in outreach programs in education, health, and food.

Wright was optimistic that more departments at Stony Brook would find partners in Madagascar, where she not only helped create Ranomafana, but where she also inaugurated NamanaBe Hall, a state-of-the-art research center adjacent to Ranomafana.

Stanley attended the opening ceremony for NamanaBe in 2012 and called his visit to Madagascar a “transformative” experience.

Several deans, including Kaushansky and Mary Truhlar, dean of the School of Dental Medicine at Stony Brook, plan to travel to Madagascar in July. Wright believes these visits could trigger future joint efforts.

Elise Lauterbur, a fourth year graduate student in Wright’s lab, believes this kind of memorandum could expedite the process of receiving the permits to conduct research.

Lauterbur studies three species of bamboo lemurs, two of which are critically endangered because of a loss of habitat. These lemurs eat bamboo that contains cyanide. Each day, they consume 12 times as much cyanide as the amount that would kill other mammals of their size, and yet they continue to search for their favorite meal.

Surrounded by passed appetizers of lamb chops, baked clams and scallops wrapped with bacon at the Old Field Club, Lauterbur described how she is trying to figure out what enables these lemurs to survive after ingesting such high dosages of an element that would kill many other species.

To understand how the lemurs might be removing the toxicity of cyanide, Lauterbur has attached a funnel and a cup to a stick or vine. When the lemurs urinate, she catches the specimen and analyzes it to explore their physiology and genetics. Compounding the challenge of being in the right place at the right time, Lauterbur has to navigate through dense underbrush, while the lemurs in the trees overhead can move or change direction.

For future research, this memorandum of understanding broadens the field of future research partners, Lauterbur said.

“It’s always beneficial to have local collaborators — it improves the research and it gives them access to additional resources,” Lauterbur explained in an email.

Broadening the relationship between Madagascar and Stony Brook holds promise not only for researchers who are already there, but also for many departments, students and faculty members who have yet to experience the wonder of a nation rich in biodiversity.

The diverse array of vegetation in Madagascar may offer alternative medical remedies, Wright said.

The opportunity for students and faculty “is tremendous,” Stanley added.

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I can’t see anything up close with my glasses on and I can’t see anything at a distance with my glasses off. I know, I know, welcome to getting old. Well, I’d like to give that aging process a big fat Bronx cheer.

But, wait, technology can come to the rescue. No, I’m not talking about laser surgery and I’m not looking for a special blended form of bifocal, trifocal or whatever. No, you see, technology makes it possible for me to use my state-of-the-art smartphone without needing to see it.

“Siri, send a text message to my wife,” I can say.

To which the automatic voice activation feature will reply, “What is your wife’s name?” And then, when I don’t reply in time, the voice will say, “I’m not sure what you said there.”

But assuming Siri and I can get on the same page about the desired recipient of my intended message, I can start talking into the phone and she will take dictation. No need for an administrative assistant like Mrs. Wiggins, courtesy of Carol Burnett, to take a memo.

Except that, like Mrs. Wiggins, there are some potential comedic kinks in the system. For one thing, whenever I start a text or email with the word Hi, Siri only seems to hear the letter “I.” My texts start out with “I Dr. Smith.” It’s a poor start to have a missing letter at the beginning of a text or email that I can’t check because I can’t see well with my glasses on and I can’t take my glasses off in that moment.

While Siri gets most of the words right, sometimes she struggles with grammar and words that are pronounced alike — such as to, too and two. Or what I mumble. I admit that I don’t always speak clearly. In fact, when I say, “This is Dan,” people sometimes hear, “This is Stan,” because I don’t pause long enough before saying my name.

I was discussing this problem with a friend of mine, who spends a considerable number of hours in the car each week, traveling from one job to another. He said he dictates emails and text messages on his phone constantly to make use of his travel time.

“Hey, be careful when you’re dictating, particularly when you’re driving,” he cautioned.

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, you know that thing picks up everything you say, right?”

“Yeah?” I asked, tilting my head to the side and waiting for a punch line.

“The other day I was driving and I sent an email that went something like this:

“Dear Mr. Jones, I got your response to my invoice and … oh, so you thought cutting me off in my lane was a good idea? And you didn’t even use your blinker. Where’d you get your license? … I was wondering if we might discuss the additional cost of gas which, as you know, is … that’s how I would drive if I had a death wish, too … climbing. Anyway, I’m happy to discuss by phone or at a … thanks for sharing your music with us. That’s what we all want to hear when we’re at a traffic light, your music. Isn’t that how we got some dictators to surrender, by playing that kind of music outside their presidential estates? … meeting. OK, so give me a call when you have a chance.”

While he said that was a slight exaggeration, he realized something was amiss when someone wrote back, “OK, next time I’ll use my blinker.”

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Above, from left, Lorna Role, Li Jiang and David Talmage, members of a Stony Brook University research team that has developed a method to control memory in mice. Photo from Stony Brook University

Not all memories are created equal. Some moments, like the time we first hold our child tower in the memory landscape over the moments we clip our toenails.

Focused on how we hold onto some of these more important memories, Lorna Role, SUNY distinguished professor and chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior who is also a professor at the Neurosciences Institute at Stony Brook Medicine, used an animal model to test the way a neurotransmitter she’s studied for years, called acetylcholine, might affect memories of a recent, fear-inducing event.

Collaborating with several other scientists, including her husband David Talmage, a professor of pharmacological sciences at Stony Brook University, Role found that stimulating the axons of nerves in the amygdala region of the brain to release acetylcholine during a traumatic event affected the mouse’s behavior for a longer period of time.

On the other hand, reducing acetylcholine in that region during a traumatic event reduced the response. They recently published their work in the journal Neuron.

This research may have applications for conditions such as post traumatic stress disorder. In PTSD, memories of a traumatic event may be significant and painful enough to reduce the quality of life.

To be sure, Role recognizes that there’s a long way to go between what she’s discovered and any potential human therapy. “There are a lot of steps between the basic science set of observations and the applications,” she said. “I don’t have an answer for how it will be done.”

Still, she hopes this type of information could lead to an approach to treating PTSD with nonpharmacological therapies. It also might provide a better target for drug therapies. The results are also consistent with prior work suggesting that cigarette smoking can worsen PTSD. Nicotine is a drug form of acetylcholine.

Role targeted the release of acetylcholine by the cholinergic neurons. Along with Talmage and several other collaborators, Role used the relatively new molecular biology technique of optogenetics. With light, they can activate a select class of neurons without affecting other neurons nearby.

The group went to the axons, which extend far from the cell body, and activated them. “We wanted to go into a particular region associated with a kind of memory and activate the cholinergic terminals,” said Role. They were only releasing acetylcholine in the amygdala.

The group played a tone at the same time the mouse had an unpleasant experience. If the animal had a higher level of acetylcholine for a brief time during that experience, the mouse continued to react in fear in response to the tone even when the sound didn’t occur at the same time as something unpleasant.

“It made the memory essentially indelible. It was much harder to eradicate the memory,” Role said.

When the animal’s acetylcholine levels were lower during the combination of a negative event and the tone, the animal didn’t exhibit fear in response to the sound. “We didn’t expect we could block the recollection of this pairing” of the tone and the unpleasant experience, she said.

One of the next experiments will involve exploring how to decrease the effect of these traumatic experiences after they’ve already occurred.

Talmage, who has a shared lab with Role, said the idea for this set of experiments originated during a meeting in Chicago. The concept was a compelling idea, but “everybody has ideas. It’s what you do with having a crazy idea” that matters. He credits Role with “putting together the team that’s willing to take a risk” to do work that may not pan out as they had hoped. He suggested she spearheaded the research “exceedingly well.”

Role’s broader research interest is in slowing down or reversing memory loss. She is aware of the difficulties families endure when a member has a cognitive decline where that person can’t recognize a loved one.

“It is my hope that not only will we be able to use some of these techniques to strengthen memories that have been diminished, but also to strengthen positive emotionally salient memories,” she said.

Role can envision increasing acetylcholine in these key areas that are important for memory recollection. Cognitive declines can affect the quality of life for people with diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Memories that are critical to Role include moments with her daughters, Lindsay Standeven, who is a psychiatrist and resident at Johns Hopkins, and Masha Role, who is receiving her training as a clinical psychologist.

Role and Talmage, whose descendants include the founding families in Southampton and Bridgehampton and members of the Setauket spy ring during the American Revolution, live in Port Jefferson.

To continue with her research and serve as the chairman of her department, Role wakes up at 4 in the morning and is most productive between 4 a.m. and 9 a.m. She recognizes that collaborating with her doesn’t involve producing numerous papers with incremental results. She’s looking for a broad understanding of what she has discovered before publishing the results and said she discusses the results all the time, because the more feedback she can get, the better.

“Everything I’ve published has been a labor of love over a long time course,” Role said. Her collaborators recognize her need to put all the pieces together before publishing. “I’ve been at this neuroscience research for more than 35 years. I prefer to work to publish as complete a story as possible.”

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