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Daniel Dunaief

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Salvatore Capotosto hugs his wife Federica Bove at Stony Brook Medicine Match Day 2024. Kristy Leibowitz

 

By Daniel Dunaief

A former professional soccer player from Italy, Salvatore Capotosto recently experienced a different kind of pressure, this time in front of his wife and her parents.

Joining the rest of the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University class of 2024, Capotosto awaited the countdown for Match Day to learn where he would serve his residency. 

Capotosto, who already knew he’d matched with one of the hospitals on his list for an orthopedic surgery residency, opened the same kind of envelopes medical students around the country were opening at noon Eastern Standard Time.

After the countdown, Capotosto learned he matched with his first choice, Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City.

“It’s a very great dream for us,” said Capotosto, referring both to the opportunity for him and his wife Federica Bove to live in the city and to the excitement his extended family in the small town of Itri felt. Reading where he was going was “an explosion of emotion.”

Capotosto and Bove shed tears of happiness as they pondered the next step in an American journey that began eight years ago when they started college at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. While Capotosto received medical training at Stony Brook, Bove earned her Master of Business Administration at Pace University.

The first member of his family to become a physician,  Capotosto said he spent considerable time explaining the lengthy residency and matching process to his family.

“It doesn’t matter how many millions of times” he shared the medical steps with them, he said, “they will still ask” about the next steps.

Humble origins

The son of cafe owner Luigi, the future orthopedic surgery resident didn’t always set his sights on either a high-powered athletic career or on becoming an American doctor.

“I used to walk to school and stop at my dad’s cafe and eat a croissant and drink cappuccino for breakfast and I would scream that I didn’t want to go to school and that I wanted to work at the cafe,”  Capotosto said. His father kicked him out of the cafe and told him to “go study.”

The Capotosto son said he learned his work ethic from his extended family, for whom work is a responsibility and a passion. Watching his father put time and effort into his work helped him put in 100 or more hours some weeks to meeting his responsibilities and mastering medical material.

Capotosto hasn’t been able to convince his father visit him in New York since he arrived on campus. This year, however, his parents booked a trip to see their son graduate.

Packages from home supported him through school and helped reduce the distance from his close family, who sent olives and olive oil every few months that were made from the 200 olive trees on his grandfather Pietro Mancini’s property.

A rising soccer star

Capotosto developed a passion for soccer when he first started playing the game at the age of six. He poured considerable energy into developing as a goalie.

He achieved considerable success, playing in front of crowds of over 4,000 people for professional and semi professional teams. In Naples, he trained with his idol, goalkeeper Morgan De Sanctis.

Capotosto was in the academy of the professional Napoli team for four years, including training with the first team.

When he played soccer, Capotosto suggested he was a “perfectionist,” honing his technique through hard work and preparation.

During his playing days, Capotosto sustained several injuries that took him off the field, including a scaphoid bone injury that ended his career.

Unsure of the next steps in his life, Capotosto appreciated not only the help and support of the doctors who came to his aid on the field, but also the career inspiration.

“I like to say that orthopedics saved my life,” Capotosto said. “Without the flame to push me to stand up and find a new purpose, I would have taken wrong turns in those dark moments. I’m really grateful to this field.”

Some of Capotosto’s mentors at Stony Brook, in turn, appreciate the considerable positive energy the former goalie brings to medicine and the way he relates to everyone from hospital staff to patients.

“He’s immediately disarming,” said Dr. James Penna, orthopedic surgeon and Chief of Sports Medicine at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. “Even patients who are scared or who are dealing with pain” relax when they are around him.

Dr. Edward Wang, Chief of Shoulder/Elbow Surgery and Clinical Professor in the Department of Orthopedics at the Renaissance School of Medicine, recalled that he offered Capotosto the opportunity to shadow him in the operating room early in his medical school career.

Capotosto picked up the do’s and don’ts of the operating room quickly, while the members of the team recognized his dedication and commitment.

“The staff took a real liking to him immediately,” Dr. Wang said. “Orthopedics is lucky he chose” the field.

In the last few months, Capotosto, who is 29 years old, has reached several milestones. He and Bove received green cards in February, which allow them to live and work permanently in the United States. The couple, who met when Capotosto was 18, also got married on April 22 in Central Park. They are planning a religious ceremony in Italy in May at Bove’s childhood church.

Sports and medicine

The field of orthopedics has attracted athletes from numerous sports, as former competitors have turned their focus and dedication towards preparing for games to the challenging world of helping people recover from injuries.

“A large percentage of applicants have some sorts of sports background,” with numerous doctors sharing stories about injuries such as a torn anterior cruciate ligament or about a relative who received knee replacement surgery, said Dr. Penna, who was not a college athlete.

“We have a lot of former athletes in our program,” added Dr. Wang, who swam competitively in a Division 1 program at the University of Miami. “Athletes like orthopedics because of the physicality and definitive nature and the exposure in the past.”

While Dr. Wang suggested that a range of character-defining elements helped shape Capotosto, he added that the former soccer star’s injuries enhanced his ability to connect.

“Being on the other side [as a patient] gives you empathy,” said Dr. Wang.

While Capotosto enjoyed his time in soccer, he is pleased with the current chapter in his life.

“Playing was a great opportunity, but, I think being an orthopedic surgeon is way better from my standpoint right now,” he said. “I believe in the mission.”

The Stony Brook medical staff, meanwhile, believes in him. 

“There will be a lot of disappointed attendees” when Capotosto leaves the school, said Dr. Penna. “The janitors knew who he was.”

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Pixabay photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

I was in between that state when I’m focused on how tired I am at the gym and when the endorphins kick in, enabling my body to push harder and for longer in the interests of physical fitness and mental health.

When my cell phone rang, I wasn’t sure whether to pick it up. I’ve been getting numerous annoying robocalls from pseudo-people who want to sell me something I don’t want or need. When I ask them to take my name off their lists, they hang up and someone else from the same organization calls me back the next day.

Unless I recognize the number or am expecting an important call, I tend to let voicemail pick up while I disconnect from everything but the rhythm of checking the number of calories I’ve burned and the distance I’ve traveled during each five minute segment on the elliptical machine.

This time, however, the name looked vaguely familiar, so I stopped moving, took out the airpods that don’t work too well and picked up the phone.

“Hi, this is Dan,” I said, trying to control my breathing.

“Who is this?” the person asked.

“Dan, why, who is this?” I thought, as I considered disconnecting and returning to my routine.

“I have a number that my wife wrote down on my desk and I wanted to know who this was,” he said.

That’s when it hit me. The name was familiar because I had written a story a few weeks ago and had reached out to the couple for a comment.

He understood my explanation and asked if I were related to several other Dunaiefs he knew.

“Yup, that’s my mother,” I said proudly, awaiting words of appreciation and praise for what she’s done since she started the newspapers over 47 years ago and become a visible presence in the community.

“And Ivan?” he asked, “That’s your father?”

“Indeed,” I said.

“Well, I knew him many years ago,” he offered. “We worked together.”

I nodded and looked around the room to see if anyone were waiting to use the elliptical machine. Fortunately, no one was hovering.

“So, how is he?” he asked.

“Excuse me?” I replied, not sure I heard him correctly.

“How is Ivan doing?”

I hadn’t been asked this question in decades.

“He died in 1987,” I said, flatly.

“Oh,” he said, “1987?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, we all have to go sometime,” he offered. “Some sooner than others, I suppose.”

After we ended the call, I resumed my exercise. That seemed like a surprisingly flippant thing to say. The older, current version of me was annoyed, while the younger version felt vulnerable.

Once I built up a solid sweat, a broad smile filled my face, leading at least one person to ponder why I looked unusually pleased during physical exertion.

While I knew the man was processing the not-so-new news, I also decided that the person who would have taken particular delight in this slightly absurd conversation was my father.

With my legs pumping away, I shared a laugh with my father, who could make me smile no matter how frustrated or annoyed I was as a teenager.

Over time, I have enjoyed any number of opportunities to connect with people I’ve had the privilege of knowing who have died, sometimes through dreams or by watching, hearing or experiencing something I know they’d appreciate.

Recently, after my mother-in-law died, my wife received a set of wind chimes with her mother’s name inscribed on them. Before we placed the chimes, we rarely had much wind. Now, amid a steady flow of unusual breezes that bring pleasant sounds to our backyard, my wife and I smile at each other.

If we look for it, we can take comfort in the things that help us feel connected to those we’ve lost.

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Georgios Moutsanidis, Photo by Ram Telikicherla

By Daniel Dunaief

In the best of times, water provides a serene background, offers an escape from searing summer heat, serves as a livelihood for the fishing industry, and supports a range of aquatic life that shimmers just below the surface.

In the worst of times, that same water can threaten communities that line coasts, bringing a powerful surge of destructive force that takes lives and destroys homes, buildings and infrastructure.

Recently, Georgios Moutsanidis, Stony Brook University Assistant Professor in the department of Civil Engineering, received a $500,000, five-year Faculty Early Career Development grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct research that could increase the resilience of coastal structures.

Rigoberto Burgueño, who is the chairman of the Civil Engineering department and who helped recruit Moutsanidis to Stony Brook in 2020, is pleased with the recognition from the NSF.

It is “one of the highest achievements for an individual investigator in terms of their potential as future leaders in their field and future mentors and teachers,” Burgueño said. The prestige from the award “will provide opportunities and bigger audiences to communicate his findings and his work.”

Amid climate change, the need for efforts to improve resilience from a range of water-driven forces increases, as rising sea levels encroach on coastlines and stronger storms driven by higher ocean temperatures threaten buildings and infrastructure.

“What we are trying to do with this project is to develop state-of-the-art computational tools that engineers and other researchers will use to incorporate in their work and study the resilience of structures against extreme hydrodynamic events” such as storm surges and tsunamis, said Moutsanidis.

Engineers, city planners and builders have used what Moutsanidis described as mostly outdated empirical models to test the resilience of structures. Moutsanidis, however, hopes to enhance those models by taking a physics-based numerical approach to understanding the damage a surge of water could do to various structures.

Moutsanidis is using established and well-known equations. He will contribute to solving them more accurately and efficiently.

Other models “could simulate water hitting a structure, but they were unable to capture the detailed response of the structure, with cracks, fractures, fragmentation and collapse,” Moutsanidis said. He hopes the new computational methods he will develop will predict the type and extent of damage more accurately.

The model he plans to create, with the help of graduate students he will hire who will use new high-performance computers he expects to use the funds to purchase, can address site-specific features of an area that would affect the likely speed, amount and force of any water surge.

Burgueño described Moutsanidis as being “at the forefront of very advanced computational simulations that take into account interactions of water with a structure.”  

By generating better estimates of the actual loads imposed on a structure, “we will be better prepared as engineers to either strengthen existing structures or to design future ones better,” Burgueño said.

Checking his work

While the information he’s using to construct these models relies on physics and deploys established equations, the Stony Brook Assistant Professor and his students will perform verification and validation. They will compare their results with existing experimental data and other computational approaches.

In addition, Moutsanidis’s lab will conduct experiments in a flume, which is a water tank in which he can vary the amount and speed of water approaching models of coastal communities. With a high-speed camera, he can evaluate how these simulated structures respond. In buildings that might collapse or fracture, he can test a slightly different fortified design, run a similar analysis and determine if the modifications led to a better outcome.

At this point, Moutsanidis has completed a proof of concept article in the journal Engineering with Computers, where he demonstrated the idea and the equations he’s solving. He hopes to produce a useful package that engineers and the public can use within the next four to five years, which he will release through an open source platform such as GitHub.

Moutsanidis is “very eager to start this work” as storm surges, flooding and tsunamis threaten coastal communities every year.

Larger context and other projects

In the bigger picture, Moutsanidis seeks to use computational methods and software to solve problems of engineering driven by physics. He has also worked in the aerospace community, studying the interaction of solids with hypersonic flow.

The goal is to “design more efficient aerospace vessels” that can withstand high temperatures and pressure as they travel five times the speed of sound or more, he said. The temperature is so high that the air undergoes a chemical reaction.

Moutsanidis has also worked with the impact of blast waves on structures, simulating the response to the shock wave or blast.

The goal is to make structures “more resilient or resistant to extreme events” such as a terrorist attack or an accident that triggers an explosion.

From Karditsa to Queens

Born and raised in a small town in the center of Greece called Karditsa, Moutsanidis is the son of two engineers. “In my early childhood, I was influenced by them, but I chose a different engineering path,” he said.

Moutsanidis, who completed postdoctoral research at Brown University before joining Stony Brook, lives in Queens. 

Moutsanidis is impressed with the students at Stony Brook, whom he described as “very engaged.” As for his work, he explained that his field is “quite competitive” and he was surprised and pleased to receive this award.

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METRO photo

By Daniel Dunaief

When we are born, the experience is passive, as we don’t suddenly decide, despite what our families might tell us later about how we couldn’t wait to see the world, that it’s time to leave the womb.

Similarly, once we’re outside, we don’t make many choices. We can’t say, “Milk? Again? You don’t have orange juice or maybe a chocolate milkshake?”

The people around us, the customs that define our days and years, the languages we speak and many other factors that shape who we are remain outside our control.

Definitions of normal vary by our circumstances. People who share a single room and one bathroom with four siblings and those with four dogs, three cats, and two parakeets typically accept the conditions around them.

“Everyone has a crazy Uncle Allen and a chatty Aunt Dorothy,” they think. Or, perhaps, “everyone shops for a new wardrobe each year before the start of a school year” or “doesn’t everyone run three miles before breakfast every morning?”

And then, in the journey through life, we get a window into the lives of other people.

When our daughter was about four years old, she visited a friend, who, our daughter reported, drank soda with breakfast and ate candy as a post breakfast snack. “I like soda,” our daughter declared after the playdate. “Why can’t I have it with breakfast, too?”

It’s not just visits to other homes that become eye-opening experiences: we read about people, watch dramas about their lives, and get a sense of what we think we might strive for or reject in our expanding world.

We and our children see our families in a completely different light when we have the opportunity to compare them to the world outside. Sometimes, we not only measure up, but we exceed the limitations of other people’s lives. Our children might, for example, spend time with parents who pay little to no attention to their sons and daughters, barely aware of their comings and goings.

At that point, our helicopter parenting, which made them gnash their teeth every time we asked for more details about the events of their day, upcoming tests, school dances, or tryouts for school plays, might seem considerably less unbearable or even, dare I say it, charming.

Other times, we fall short in ways that even our children recognize is well outside the experience of most people. Some of their friends’ parents might own private jets, have a spare house on the lake, or have season tickets near the front row to watch one of their favorite teams.

Despite the id-driven desire to have similar life amenities, our children, sooner or later, recognize that they shouldn’t expect such lavish luxuries, even if they secretly, or, perhaps, not so secretly, hope to attain them.

And then there are the times when the world outside the family seems like the kind of easy-going, light-hearted, jovial tv show in which they’d like to star as the plucky but successful child.

During those moments, we can ask some questions about what they want or wish for that they don’t have, or that, perhaps, they find too cumbersome. Yes, we tell them, we really are related to that wacky Uncle Allen, but that doesn’t mean our children are going to become like him or that he has no redeeming qualities. Indeed, the search for redeeming qualities in everyone, starting with our own extended family, may help re-inflate our disappointed children.

If the head-to-head match up leaves them wanting something else, we have other options. We can suggest that no one will ever love or appreciate them as much as we do.

We can also suggest that they can use their desire for something more or different to inspire them to work hard for it and to find it for themselves and, if they choose to have one, for their own families.

Hopefully, our children can recognize that, on balance, the things that they considered givens — material, cultural, ethical and otherwise — didn’t drop from the sky, but came from hard work and the best of intentions.

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Tadanori Koga is the third from the right, Maya Endoh is the fourth from the right (all in the front row). Photo courtesy Elena Stephanie.

By Daniel Dunaief

Hoping to take a page out of nature’s playbook, a married couple in the Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering at Stony Brook University is studying a structure that could prevent the spread of pathogens on the surface.

Before the pandemic started, Research Professor Maya Endoh and Associate Professor Tadanori Koga were exploring how anti microbial coatings controlled pathogens on the molecular scale. With the pandemic, they became more focused on ways to prevent pathogens from causing infections after people came into contact with contaminated surfaces.

Working with researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, the team received $12 million over three years as a part of the Department of Energy’s Biopreparedness Research Virtual Experiment initiative, which supports multidisciplinary research efforts designed to strengthen precautionary measures against infectious disease outbreaks. Koga and Endoh received a subcontract of $1.2 million from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory which runs until December 2026.

This kind of study, along with other funded research on the spread of pathogens, could be “important to prevent the next pandemic,” said Endoh. She added that this kind of work could not only help reduce the danger from another potential pandemic, but could also help cut down infections from other common health threats.

The research plans to explore the physical and chemical interactions that occur when bacteria come in contact with a material surface.

To develop surface coatings that might resist the spread of disease-carrying pathogens, Koga and Endoh are turning to an insect that will be even more abundant than usual this year. For the first time since 1803, the 13-year and 17-year cicadas will emerge at the same time.

Koga and Endoh, however, are less focused on their prevalence or their loud noises than they are on their wings, which resist bacteria and may also provide protection against viruses and fungi, as something about their nanostructure disables these pathogens.

“We want to learn from nature,” said Endoh. “As material scientists, we want to mimic this structure.”

Their method of killing bacteria is to facilitate bacterial attachment to nanopattern surfaces. They are targeting surfaces that are constantly and directly exposed to pathogens, such as medical devices, tools and sensors.

Their computational results suggest that a nanopatterned surface can puncture a bacterial outer membrane. These scientists can not specify the time range clearly, which is something they are pursuing with the awarded project.

“We are targeting the surfaces which are constantly and directly exposed to pathogens, such as medical devices, tools and sensors,” Koga and Endoh explained in an email.

Structural defense

The structure of the cicada wings have nanopillars that are about 100 nanometers tall and that are separated by about 100 nanometers from each other. The nanopillars they plan to use have a height of 10 nanometers, a diameter of 50 nanometers and a space between adjacent cylinders of 70 nanometers.

By creating a similar structure with polymers, the Stony Brook scientists will attempt to manufacture materials that provide the same resistance.

They will optimize the geometric parameters of the nanostructure, especially its height and interpillar spacing, to create different nano topographies, including nanopillars, nanowalls, nanospikes and nanodomes.

They are starting their work with the bacteria E. coli and will use computational approaches to optimize surface geometric parameters, bacteria-substrate interactions and bacterial wall stiffness to create a robust structure-guided antimicrobial surface.

They will use polystyrene block polymers and are planning to use different ingredients such as biopolymers. They believe the ingredients can be varied.

According to their recent molecular dynamics simulations mimicking experimental conditions, attractive interactions promote additional membrane attachment, pulling the membrane taut against the pillars and creating tension that ruptures the cell wall. The rupture occurs at the high curvature regions near the edge of the pillars.

Surfaces coated by polymers would likely require periodic coating applications. The scientists treat those polymers with a three-dimensional link to improve the mechanical property. They also apply atomic-thin scale metal layers to make the surface more durable.

In collaboration with Brookhaven National Laboratory, they are trying to determine how to make this kind of pattern with different substances.

“We don’t know what shape is the best [for various pathogens], what size is the best and what spacing is the best,” said Koga.

Benefits of collaboration

Koga and Endoh appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with a range of talented scientists at other institutions.

“Luckily, we have a lot of collaborators,” Endoh said.

Koga and Endoh became a part of a bigger collaboration when they worked with Jan-Michael Carrillo and Bobby Sumpter at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who started this project.

“This is a nice step, but it’s not the end,” said Koga. The next step is to “create a real material.”

Lifelong collaboration

Koga and Endoh met in their native Japan. Koga is from Kyushu, while Endoh grew up in Sendai, which was the epicenter of the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011, which created the tsunami at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

They came to the United States when Koga wanted to become a postdoctoral researcher for a two year assignment at Stony Brook. Over 27 years, and four children later, they are still at Stony Brook.

Over the years, Endoh juggled motherhood and a postponed PhD, which she eventually received from Kyoto University.

Koga enjoys watching Japanese players in Major League Baseball and is a fan of Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani. A “soccer mom,” Endoh enjoys cooking and playing the violin. The couple hikes in the summer and skis in the winter.

As for their own protective measures during the pandemic, Koga and Endoh regularly washed their hands, although they didn’t use Purell or other special wipes to clean any surfaces. 

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Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory neuroscientist Arkarup Banerjee is using singing mice, like the one shown here, to understand how our brains control timing and communication. Photo by Christopher Auger-Dominguez

By Daniel Dunaief

Animals don’t have clocks, telling them when and for how long to run on a treadmill, to eat whatever they catch or to call to each other from the tops of trees or the bottom of a forest.

Arkarup Banerjee

The Alston’s singing mouse, which lives in Costa Rica, has a distinctive call that people can hear and that, more importantly, conveys meaning to other members of the species.

Using equipment to monitor neurons when a mouse offers songs of different length, Cold Spring Harbor Assistant Professor Arkarup Banerjee showed that these unusual rodents exhibit a form a temporal scaling that is akin to stretching or relaxing a rubber band. This scaling suggests that their brains are bending their processing of time to produce songs of different lengths.

“People have shown this kind of time stretching phenomenon in monkeys,” said Banerjee. It was unexpected and surprising that the same algorithm was used in the rodent motor cortex to control the flexibility of a motor pattern and action during vocalization.

Using recordings of neuronal activity over many weeks, Banerjee focused on a part of the mouse brain called the orofacial motor cortex (or OMC). He searched for differences in songs with particular durations and tempo.

Banerjee had set up a system in which he played back the recordings of Alston’s singing mice to his test subjects, who then responded to those songs. Mice generally respond with songs that are variable durations compared to when they sing alone.

These mice can adjust duration and tempo of these 10-second long songs while engaged in social communication.

People “do that all the time,” said Banerjee. “We change the volume of how loud we are speaking and we can change the tempo.”

The mice showed some vocal flexibility similar to other animals, including people.

These mice are singing the same song, with varying rhythms over shorter or longer periods of time. It is as if the same person were to sing “Happy Birthday” in 10 seconds or in 15 seconds.

Banerjee would like to know what is it in the mouse’s brain that allows for such flexibility. He had previously shown that the motor cortex is involved in vocal behavior, which meant he knew of at least one region where he could look for clues about how these rodents were controlling the flexibility of their songs.

By tracking the firing pattern of neurons in the OMC, he was able to relate neural activity to what the mice were doing in real time.

Neural activity expands or contracts in time, almost as if time is running faster or slower. These animals are experiencing relative time when it comes to producing their songs as they change their songs through a wide range of durations.

Pre-song activity

Even before an animal sings, Banerjee speculates its brain could be preparing for the sounds it’s going to make, much as we think of the words we want to say in a conversation or our response to a question before we move our mouths to reply or type on a keyboard to respond.

Songs also track with intruder status. An animal in a home cage sings a shorter song than an animal brought into a new cage.

Vocalizations may scale with social rank, which might help attract mates or serve other social purposes.

Females in the lab, which presumably reflect similar trends in the wild, tend to prefer the male that produces a longer song with a higher tempo, which could reflect their physical fitness and their position in the social hierarchy, according to research from Steve Phelps, Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Integrative Biology.

Applications

While it’s a long way from the research he’s conducting to any potential human application, Banerjee could envision ways for these studies to shed light on communication processes and disorders.

The motor cortex in humans and primate is a larger region. Problems in these areas, from strokes or injuries, can result in aphasia, or the inability to articulate words properly. Banerjee plans to look at stroke models to see if the Alston’s singing mouse might provide clues about potential diagnostic or therapeutic clues.

“There are ways we can use this particular system to study cognitive deficits that show up” during articulation deficits such as those caused by strokes, said Banerjee.  While he said scientists know the parts list of the brain regions involved in speaking, they don’t yet know how they all interact.

“If we did, we’d have a much better chance of knowing where it fails,” Banerjee  explained. A challenge along this long process is learning how to generalize any finding in mice to humans. While difficult, this is not an impossible extrapolation, he suggested.

An effective model

Banerjee built a model prior to these experiments to connect neural activity with behavior.

“We had an extremely clear hypothesis about what should happen in the neural domain,” he said. “It was pretty gratifying to see that neurons change the way we predicted given the modeling.”

When the paper first came out about eight months ago in the scientific preprint bioRxiv, it received considerable attention from Banerjee’s colleagues working in similar fields. He went to India to give three talks and gave a recent talk at Emory University.

Outside of the lab, Banerjee and his wife Sanchari Ghosh, who live in Mineola, are enjoying watching the growth and development of their son Ahir, who was born a year and a half ago.

“It’s fascinating as a neuroscientist to watch his development and to see how a tiny human being learns about the world,” Banerjee said.

As for his work with this compelling mouse, Banerjee credited Phelps and his post doctoral advisor at New York University, Michael Long for doing important work on this mouse and for encouraging him to pursue research with this species. Long is a co-corresponding author on the paper. “It’s very gratifying to see that the expectation of what we can do with this species is starting to get fulfilled,” said Banerjee. “We can do these interesting and complex experiments and learn something about vocal interactions. I’m excited about the future.”

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SCIENCE ON SCREEN

The Cinema Arts Centre, 423 Park Ave., Huntington continues its Science on Screen series with a mind-expanding exploration of the mysteries of language and communication, featuring a lecture and Q&A with neuroscientist Arkarup Banerjee, of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and a rare big-screen showing of Denis Villeneuve’s profound 2016 drama ARRIVAL on Tuesday, March 26 at 7 p.m..

Dr. Banerjee’s work explores the theme of decoding messages and touches on the fundamental assumptions of reality which are unpacked in the film. Discover how every species and culture’s unique symbols and codes shape our understanding of the world around us, and uncover the intriguing ways in which our brains navigate the limits and possibilities of language.

Tickets are $16, $10 members. To purchase in advance, visit www.cinemaartscentre.org. 

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The Nova-C Class IM-1 Odysseus in preparation for launch. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

By Daniel Dunaief

The stars aligned for a group of engineers and scientists in Washington D.C. recently, as a meeting brought these experts together at exactly the same time NASA was landing a vehicle on the moon for the first time since the finale of the Apollo missions, over 50 years ago.

The Nova-C Class IM-1 Odysseus in preparation for launch. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

“I happened to be in DC for [NASA’s] annual Moon to Mars Architecture workshop on the day that the Intuitive Machines Odysseus spacecraft landed,” said Tim Glotch, Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook University and the Science Chair of the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, or LEAG. “The whole group I was with watched the live stream with excitement and nervousness.”

Attendees at the conference knew when NASA was supposed to receive a signal from the spacecraft. As they waited, Glotch said he could “feel people starting to think, ‘Uh oh, it started to happen again,’” raising the possibility of a problem with the landing. “A few minutes after the planned touchdown, everyone was relieved and overjoyed when the flight manager confirmed that they had a signal from the spacecraft,” he said.

Indeed, on February 22, the Odysseus lunar lander touched down about 185 miles from the moon’s south pole and within a mile of its target near the Malapert A crater. Glotch and the other scientists and engineers learned the next day at a press conference about some of the issues the spacecraft had when it landed, including the fact that it tipped over.

“From the standpoint of getting a soft touchdown on the moon in very challenging terrain near the south pole, this has to be considered a success,” he added.

Over the last few years, many attempts by companies and governments have demonstrated the challenges of landing on the moon, which is about 238,855 miles away, or the equivalent of over 9.5 times around the circumference of the Earth at the equator. Through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, private companies are trying to do what only a few governments had done, at considerably lower cost. 

“With every attempt, NASA’s commercial partners are learning the best ways to accomplish their goals of landing safely on the moon and successfully delivering NASA’s and other commercial partners’ payloads,” Glotch said. The Stony Brook professor described the overlap between the meeting and the landing as a “fun coincidence,” which created a “pretty big cheering section.”

Reflecting on the landing, Glotch shared his sense of pride in the space program, which is preparing to send people back to the moon through Artemis missions over the next five years.

“The fact that NASA was able to work with private corporations to develop the technology, not quite from scratch [but] to redevelop this capability is really impressive,” Glotch said. “It’s a great demonstration of ingenuity, determination and drive.” Engineers likely put in long days and nights making sure everything was ready, testing and retesting systems for this launch and landing, he said.

Lunar meeting

As for the gathering, Glotch said this second annual meeting provided an opportunity for scientists and engineers to discuss the future of travel to the moon and, potentially further in the future, a trip to Mars. 

The auditorium of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine building where Tim Glotch and the other engineers and scientists were watching the landing attempt. Photo by Tim Glitch

A group of scientists and engineers are working together to learn to do the things on the moon that it will eventually do on the Red Planet. The team is focusing on a few bigger items that will matter in a relatively shorter term. After the meeting last year, Glotch said he “really got the sense that the architecture team [at NASA] had been listening to input from scientists.”

One of the bigger questions involves the amount of samples astronauts will bring back from the moon. Researchers expect some of these samples to contain volatiles like water and ice in them.

The scientific community has urged NASA to develop a plan to bring those rocks back frozen in their natural state. When the ice melts, it can cause chemical reactions to occur that make it more challenging to analyze them.

“If they are changing on the way back, we can’t be sure we’re getting the right answer” about where the water originated, he said.

Still, Glotch suggested that examining these defrosted rocks would provide considerable information.

NASA isn’t going to be able to keep the rocks under cold conditions for the first manned American mission that will return people to the Earth, aboard Artemis 3, which is scheduled to launch in September of 2026.

Starting with Artemis 5, in September of 2029, NASA, however, intends to include freezers to keep samples in pristine shape.

As the Science Chair for LEAG, Glotch brought up the need for a new lunar orbiter to characterize the surface at higher spatial resolution. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been in space since 2009, has six or seven years of fuel left.

“Given that time frame, we need to develop a spacecraft and what type of instruments go on it,” said Glotch. NASA “really needs to think hard about funding a follow on orbiter.”

As for a manned journey to Mars, NASA plans to launch such a mission in the 2030s, according to the space agency’s website.

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Pixabay photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

A long time ago, I joined a Freshman Outdoor Program trip before the start of college. The venture provided us with a chance to meet other incoming college students, to enjoy hiking, and to ask upper class students who were leading the effort questions about classes, places to eat on campus, and anything else that crossed our minds.

I was excited and anxious about my trek along the trail, in part because I was unaccustomed to relieving myself anywhere other than on a porcelain throne.

Recognizing my trepidation, my father, who sensed an opportunity to tease me, asked in the weeks before my trip how I was going to “poop in the woods.” My fear of taking care of business out in nature was even greater than my concern about my class selection, my choice of major or the unfamiliar roommates I would meet upon my arrival on campus.

In the days leading up to the trip, which lasted about a week, I tried to cut back on my food intake and I planned to use a bathroom with indoor plumbing as often as possible before climbing aboard the Appalachian-trail bound bus. For more than a day, I successfully shut my system down, avoiding the normal routine. Somehow, for close to two days, I managed to eat, carry about 60 pounds on my back, hike up and down mountains, and avoid pooping in the woods.

Then, as if my body refused to obey my stubborn will, I couldn’t take another step. Seeing me freeze on the trail, one of our upper class guides asked me what was wrong. Did my feet hurt? No. Did I need some water or food? No and no. Was I in pain? Yes, but not in the way I wanted to discuss.

I indicated that I had to “use the bathroom.” The guide told the group to stop, at which point I removed my backpack, took the small shovel we used to create our own buried fertilizer, and raced off to the left. How far, I wondered, would I have to go to avoid being seen by my fellow students, but be close enough that I didn’t seem like I was reading the New York Times while awaiting the arrival of the number two train?

With each step, my system recognized that I was getting closer to relieving itself, which meant that I couldn’t go much further without risking soiling myself. I picked a spot that had what looked like poison ivy. Moving over, I found another place that looked nothing like the comforts of home, but would have to do. After I dug a small hole, I squatted. I immediately felt something brush against my right butt cheek.

I turned around quickly and realized, with relief, that it was just a branch.

Throughout the decades that followed, I have put considerable effort into finding a toilet and to avoiding unpleasant restrooms. The search for a relatively clean and manageable bathroom has involved walking into nice hotels in cities around the country and world. 

To my great surprise, the McDonald’s at the Spanish Steps in Rome, which has a surprisingly appetizing-looking pasta bar that we couldn’t get ourselves to sample while in Italy, had remarkably clean bathrooms, which my wife and I used many times while trekking around the historic city.

Central Park, which is improbably spacious and beautiful amid the concrete jungle of Manhattan, has a web page with the locations of public restrooms around the park, although, despite living there for over a decade, I rarely ever used.

Throughout Manhattan, I have searched for restaurants, museums and bars, where the bathrooms don’t become stadium-level sullied until well after happy hour begins.

With the advent of social media, which took off well after I left New York City, I have found several pages dedicated to the process of finding a bathroom, including one called @poopersguide, which has pictures of the facilities.

Recently, I went to a fancier restaurant outside the city. To set the mood, the lighting was fairly dim. An accommodating waiter even came over, took out his iPhone and smoothly shined his flashlight over the menu.

When I excused myself to use the restroom, I came back with a small smirk on my face and was met with expectant looks.

“Well, that was the cleanest restaurant bathroom I’ve ever used,” I laughed. “I was a little concerned about using it. Oh, and I know where we can read the menu next time. The lighting in there was brighter than anywhere in my house.”

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By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

Even if you haven’t read the books, the way I did with my son when he was considerably younger, you probably have heard of the series “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” right?

It occurred to me to ponder the possibility of a diary of an old(er) man. To that end, here’s my first installment and, no, I’m not going to start with “Dear Diary.”

I woke up this morning and I thought, hmm, my foot doesn’t hurt. What a delightful change! And then I stepped on the floor and I was wrong. My foot, which has been bothering me for a few weeks is still painful, despite the pleasant young doctor less than half my age examining it. The friendly technicians, who sent a jargon filled assessment to my electronic account, recognized that there was swelling and suggested a couple of possible options without a definitive diagnosis or conclusion.

Then, an assistant for my doctor called to schedule a time to review my results. She suggested he’d be available some time next week. Next week??? I gasped and tried not to become irrational or overwrought.

“But my foot hurts now. Is there anyone, like, maybe a nurse, who might be able to call me and tell me what to do for the pain or who can provide a first interpretation sooner than a week?”

I used the word “like” to sound younger, even as I was playing the older-man-in-pain card. Unfortunately, it didn’t teleport me to the front of the line.

“Oh, I’ll see what I can do,” she offered, transmitting a Mona Lisa-style tone through the phone line. Is that a smirk behind your voice? Is that the equivalent of a customer disservice line that says “we’re experiencing higher than normal call volumes and we’ll get to you when we can.”

The day passed without any calls from her, from a nurse, or from a doctor. Then, I thought about the people I used to be responsible for on an ongoing basis. How were they doing? Why hadn’t they called? Oh, right, they’re living their lives which is what my wife and I always wanted for them.

I hoped no news was good news, but no news is sometimes no news, until it makes a sudden transition to something that requires support and help or that merits cheerleading.

After reading through emails, I made some work calls. When reaching out to someone I didn’t know and leaving a message, I spelled my name, using the same “N” for Nancy, “E” for Edgar and “F” for Frank that I heard my father say so many times.

How much time in my life have I spent spelling my vowel-heavy name to someone? Realistically, the chance of the letters making it onto the paper in the right order or, more likely, into an electronic message is remote. More often than not, when someone says my name back to me, I say, “yes, that’s right,” even if they “dun arf” or “do vanoff.”

After I checked a few things off the personal and professional list, I scurried over to the gym, where people much younger than I lifted the weight of small Volkswagens, while others did the kind of abdominal exercises that I’d never attempted or considered. As I watched, trying not to let my jaw drop too far, my stomach hurt, signaling to my brain that I shouldn’t even think about trying those exercises … ever!

Later that night, my wife and I took a friend to a local sporting event, where it was cool enough to require a sweatshirt.

Following behind two people using canes as they walked, our friend asked if I thought a cane might help and, if so, whether he should take one from the men in front of us. I smiled and told him that wouldn’t be necessary.

As we approached our seats, a young woman said the two words associated with the name on the front of my sweatshirt, which advertised our son’s school. Three steps past her, I registered what she said and remembered what I was wearing. I considered turning around, but the moment had passed.

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A snail eating colubrid snake, Dipsas indica, from Peru.
Pascal Title with a semi-arborial colubrid snake, Chironius multiventris, from Peru.
A tree boar, Corallus hortulamus, which is an ambush predator, in Peru.
Pascal Title with a neotropical colubrine snake at the Los Amigos field station in Peru.
A false boa eating a lava lizard. Photo by Ivan Prates, University of Michigan
A CT scan of a cat-eyed snake that shows a frog (the blue skeleton) in its digestive tract. Photo by Ramon Nagesan, University of Michigan Museum of Zoology
An emerald tree boa in the amazonian rainforest, a specialized predator of small mammals. Photo by Dan Rabosky
an eyelash pitviper from the new world tropics. Photo by Alejandro Arteaga
Graham’s crayfish snake, a harmless semiaquatic species from central Noth America that feeds on crayfish. Photo by Tristan Schramer
A defensive display by a western ring necked snake native to the western United States. Photo by Alison Davis-Rabosky
A cat eyed snake in the Amazonian rainforest. Photo by Alison Davis-Rabosky

By Daniel Dunaief

Eating machines even more focused than teenagers approaching a stocked refrigerator, snakes slither towards foods other animals assiduously avoid.

In a recent and extensive study of snakes using the genetics, morphology and diet of snakes that included museums specimens and field observations, a team of scientists including Pascal Title, Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolution at Stony Brook University, showed that the foods skin-shedding creatures eat as a whole is much broader than the prey other lizards consume.

At the same time, the range of an individual snake’s diet tends to be narrower, marking individual species as more specialized predators, a paper recently released for the cover of the high-profile journal Science revealed.

“If there is an animal that can be eaten, it’s likely that some snake, somewhere, has evolved the ability to eat it,” Dan Rabosky, senior author on the paper and curator at the Museum of Zoology and Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the University of Michigan, explained in a statement.

The research, which explored the genetics and diets of snakes, suggested that snakes evolved up to three times faster than lizards, with shifts in traits associated with feeding, locomotion and sensory processing.

“This speed of evolution has let them take advantage of new opportunities that other lizards could not,” Rabosky added. “Fundamentally, this study is about what makes an evolutionary winner.”

No singular physical feature or characteristic has enabled snakes to specialize on foods that are untouchable to other animals.

“It seems to be a whole suite of things” that allows snakes to pursue their prey, Title speculates.

One unique aspect of many advanced snakes is that they have more mobile elements in their skulls. Rock pythons can stretch their jaw around enormous prey, making it possible for them to swallow an entire antelope. Garter snakes, meanwhile, can eat Pacific newts that have a high concentration of a neurotoxin. Snakes also can eat slugs and snails that have evolved a defensive ability to secrete toxins.

A change to textbooks

Title, who is the co-lead and first author on the paper, suggested that the comprehensive analysis of snakes, particularly when compared with lizards, will likely change the information that enters textbooks.

“I think the analysis of lizard and snake diets in particular could potentially enter herpetology textbooks because diet is such a fundamental axis of natural history and because the visuals are so clear,” Title said. He doesn’t believe an analysis of dietary resolution that encompasses snakes and lizards has been shown like this before.

With a few exceptions, the majority of lizards eat terrestrial arthropods. Snakes have expanded into eating not only invertebrates, but also aquatic, terrestrial and flying vertebrates.

“They have absolutely evolved the ability to prey on semi-aquatic and aquatic prey,” said Title.

Title and his collaborators gathered considerable amounts of sequence data from GenBank. They also collected data from samples and specimens in the literature.

“Our dataset involves specimen-based data from museum collections that span the globe over the better part of the last century,” he explained.

The project started with the realization that several authors were generating high-quality sequence data for separate projects from biodiversity hotspots for lizards and snakes, such as in Australia, Brazil and Peru. The researchers realized that combining their data provided unprecedented coverage.

After Title completed his PhD at the University of Michigan, he took a leading role in building the phylogeny and conducting many of the analyses.

Indeed, the list of coauthors on this study includes 19 other scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil and Finland.

As for his work, Title is broadly interested in the ecological/ environmental/ geographic/ evolutionary factors that lead to different species richness. He is not restricted to lizards and snakes.

“I do think snakes are unbelievable,” he said. “I’ve seen sidewinder rattlesnakes flip segments of their body forward across the sand in California, I’ve seen snakes climb straight up trees and walls, I’ve seen long, skinny snakes carefully navigate tree branches, and I’ve seen semi-aquatic snakes swim with their head above water. It’s mesmerizing.”

‘Snakes are cool’

Co-lead author Sonal Singhal, Assistant Professor in Biology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, met Title when she was a PhD student and he was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley.

Singhal is excited that readers can “learn cool facts about snakes from our paper,” she explained. “Research papers don’t always inspire a sense of wonder in the reader.” She hopes people “walk away from this study thinking that snakes are cool.”

Singhal suggested that Title is leading a group of collaborators to create a package that will enable other researchers to download the data from this paper quickly and easily and use it in their own work.

As a whole, snakes are moving around in their diet space at a much more rapid clip than lizards in general, Title suggested.

While snakes have evolved rapidly over short periods of time, it’s unclear how these creatures are responding to changes in the environment on smaller time scales, such as through what’s currently occurring amid climate change.

The scale, Title explained, is different, with climate changes affecting the world over decades and centuries, while snake evolution, particularly regarding specialized diets, transpired over the course of millions of years.

Grad school encounter

Title, who lives in East Setauket, met his wife Tara Smiley when both of them were graduate students.

An Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolution at Stony Brook University, Smiley is a paleoecologist specializing in small mammals.

The couple enjoys taking their son Micah, who is almost three years old, on camping trips and spending time outdoors.

As for the paper scoring the coveted spot on the cover of Science, Title suggested the exposure validates “that lizards and snakes, and their natural history, are inherently intriguing to all sorts of people, regardless of whether or not they are trained biologists.”

He hopes the work will not only inspire young scientists to learn more about snakes and lizards, but also to seek to quantify and explore the different axes of biodiversity and to “appreciate the value of supporting natural history museum collections.”

———————————————————————————–Within a day of snake research published on the cover of Science last week, reports surfaced about the discovery of what may be the largest snake in the world. Scientists from the University of Queensland found a northern green anaconda in the Ecuadorian Amazon that was close to 21 feet long.

Pacal Title, Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolution at Stony Brook University and first author on the recent Science paper, offered his thoughts in an emailed question and answer exchange about the anaconda, which was not a part of his recent research.

TBR: Is this a particularly compelling find?

Title: This is compelling as it provides an example of broadly distributed, large species of snakes having pretty significant genetic differentiation. There are quite a few examples, both within snakes and in other groups, where populations look superficially similar, but turn out to have been genetically independent of one another for quite a long time.

TBR: How does a discovery of what might be the largest snake in the world fit into the context (if at all) of your research? Does this species validate the radiative speciation you described?

Title: It shows that the number of known snake species is likely to be an under-estimate, although this is likely to be true for most groups out there. This fits well into the perspective that snakes have incredibly high global species diversity.

TBR: Do you have any guesses as to what the diet of this snake could be?

Title: The article describes anaconda diets as generally consisting of terrestrial vertebrate prey, despite the species being semi-aquatic.

TBR: What, if any, predators might pursue this snake?

Title: Jaguars have been known to prey on anacondas.

TBR: What scientific, life history, genetic or other questions would you address, if any, about this species?

Title: Now that the green anaconda is being considered as two separate species, all morphological, ecological and natural history attributes will need to be re-examined to evaluate whether or not the two species actually differ along any of these axes.

TBR: Is the ongoing attention snakes receive positive for the study of snakes?

Title: It is great that snakes are receiving positive attention. Such new studies are essential for conservation, and for the study of biodiversity and ecosystems.
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