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Daniel Dunaief

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The White House. METRO photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

Dear President Biden,

In an ideal world, everyone would be rooting for you. After all, as the leader of the country, your success is our success.

That’s certainly how the late George H.W. Bush (41, not 43) felt when he left a supportive note for Bill Clinton, the politician who defeated him.

We don’t live in that world. People are actively rooting against you, many of them American and many of them eager for power, influence and opportunity. Against that backdrop, I’m sure it’s challenging to get out in front of any story or narrative. You can’t control gas prices, right? You can’t control the weather, the global economy, the war in Ukraine or anything else that’s casting a pall over the nation and the world.

And yet, your job requires a certain level of messaging, communicating and leadership. You might not feel you can do much about the litany of problems you face — Republicans won’t let you, inflation is cutting everyone’s pay, and Covid continues to make people sick.

But here’s the thing: you need to get out in front of something. You need to step up and tell us how things will get better. We want to believe you because everyone wants happier days.

That starts with you. In the midst of some heated tension with the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan offered the country the kind of reassurance that you haven’t provided. Despite the collection of nuclear missiles pointed at us, Reagan suggested that we were safe and should sleep well.

Look, I get it. People pounce on every syllable you say that might be a bit hard to follow. You’ve had a long history of verbal gaffes. But you can’t let fear of saying the wrong thing keep you from saying anything. Americans see you periodically, but you rarely tell us anything memorable or offer us a digestible helping of hope.

Your administration as a whole seems to be following your lead. No one in your cabinet has given us the sense that things will get better soon or, for lack of a better phrase, “you got this.” You have the largest bully pulpit in the world. The press follows your every move. Use that to your advantage. Seize the narrative. Give us a Project Hope or a positive message. Celebrate Americans doing good for their country.

The talking heads on both sides have given Americans an enormous dose of anger every day. It’s become an outlet for their energy and a way to keep Americans glued to their screens, waiting for the latest outrage and the newest opportunity to be disgusted by the other side.

When you ran for office, you assured us that we would return to normalcy and that you’d bring some measure of civility and decency back to the oval office. Here we are, the clock is ticking, and the anger machines from our two parties are in full gear.

Show the kind of leadership the situations demand. You don’t have to solve everything at the same time, but give us a regular update or an idea of what you know will work.

We need you to show us you have ideas we can support and that you have a plan you’re putting into action.

I understand your plan is to run for office in 2024. Why? How would that help the country? We know Republicans in the house, outraged on behalf of the two impeachments of your predecessor, may launch a host of investigations into you and your son if, as expected, they take the majority in the upcoming midterms.

When that process starts, being angry and outraged will only throw your own fury on the fire. We, and you, need positive and effective leadership now. Talk to Americans, share your plan for a better today and tomorrow. We need you to succeed. While what you’ve done so far might be undervalued and undercovered, we need visible wins. Break this pattern and give us reasons to believe in you and in the future.

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In left photo, Zhiyang Zhai, on the right, with John Shanklin and Jantana Keereetaweep; in right photo, Zhiyang Zhai with Hui Liu. Photos courtesy of BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

In a highly competitive national award process, the Department of Energy provides $2.5 million to promising researchers through Early Career Research Funding.

Recently, the DOE announced that Zhiyang Zhai, an associate biologist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, was one of 83 scientists from around the country to receive this funding.

“Supporting talented researchers early in their career is key to fostering scientific creativity and ingenuity within the national research community,” DOE Office of Science Director Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, said in a statement.

Zhai, who has worked at BNL for 11 years, is studying a signaling protein called Target Of Rapamycin (TOR) kinase, which is important in the plant and animal kingdom.

He hopes to develop a basic understanding of the way this kinase reacts to different conditions, such as the presence of carbon, to trigger reactions in a plant, including producing oils through photosynthesis or making seeds.

Zhiyang Zhai. Photo from BNL

“Ancient systems like this evolve in different lineages (like plants and animals) to work differently and [Zhai] wants to find out the details of how it works in plants,” John Shanklin, chair of BNL’s Biology Department, explained in an email. 

Zhai is trying to define which upstream signals interact with TOR and what the effects of those interactions are on TOR to learn how the kinase works.

He is hoping to get a clear idea of how different nodes interact and how signaling through carbon, nutrients and sunlight affects TOR kinase levels and its configuration.

Researchers may eventually use the knowledge of upstream regulators to reprogram responses by introducing enzymes that would cause the synthesis, or degradation, of upstream regulatory metabolites, Shanklin suggested.

This could be a way to “tune” the sensor kinase activity to increase the synthesis of storage compounds like oil and starch.

In the bigger picture, this type of research could have implications and applications in basic science that could enhance the production of renewable resources that are part of a net-zero carbon fuel strategy.

The DOE sponsors “basic science programs to discover how plants and other organisms convert and store carbon that will enable a transition towards a net zero carbon economy to reduce the use of fossil fuels,” Shanklin said.

In applying for the award, Zhai paid “tremendous attention” to what the DOE’s mission is in this area, Shanklin said. Zhai picked out a project that, if successful, will directly contribute to some of the goals of the DOE.

Through an understanding of the way TOR kinase works, Zhai hopes to provide more details about metabolism.

Structure and function

Jen Sheen, Professor in the Department of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School, conducted pioneering work on how TOR kinase regulates cell growth in plants in 2013. Since then, TOR has attracted attention from an increasing number of biologists and has become “a hot and rapidly-developing research direction in plant biology,” Zhai explained.

He hopes to study the structure of TOR using BNL’s Laboratory of Biomolecular Structure at the National Synchrotron Lightsource II.

Zhai, who hopes to purify the plant version of TOR, plans to study how upstream signaling molecules interact with and modify the structure of the enzyme.

He will also use the cryo-electron microscope to get a structure. He is looking at molecular changes in TOR in the presence or absence of molecules or compounds that biochemically bind to it.

Through this funded research, Zhai hopes to explain how signals such as carbon supply, nutrients and sunlight regulates cell growth.

Once he’s conducted his studies on TOR, Zhai plans to make mutants of TOR and test them experimentally to see if a new version, which Zhai described as “TOR 2.0,” has the anticipated effects.

Zhai is building on his experience with another regulatory kinase, called SnRK1, which is involved in energy signaling.

“His expertise in defining SnRK1’s mechanism ideally positions him to perform this work,” Shanklin said.

At this point, Zhai is focused on basic science. Other researchers will apply what he learns to the development of plants for commercial use.

A seminal moment and a call home

Zhai described the award as “very significant” for him. He plans to continue with his passionate research to explore the unknown.

He will use the funds to hire new postdoctoral researchers to build up his research team. He also hopes this award gives him increased visibility and an opportunity to add collaborators at BNL and elsewhere.

The funding will support part of Zhai’s salary as well as that of his staff. He will also purchase some new lab instruments and tap into the award to attend conferences and publish papers.

When he learned he had won the award, Zhai called his mother Ruiming, who lives in his native China. “She is so proud of me and immediately spread the good news to my other relatives in China,” Zhai recalled.

When Shanklin spoke with Zhai after the two had learned of the award, he said he had “never seen Zhai look happier.”Shanklin suggested that this is a “seminal moment” in a career that he expects will have other such milestones in the future.

A resident of Mt. Sinai, Zhai lives with his wife Hui Liu, who is a Research Associate in Shanklin’s group specializing in plant transformation, fatty acids and lipidomics analysis.The couple has two sons, nine-year-old Terence and three-year-old Steven.

As for his work, Zhai hopes it has broader implications.

“The knowledge of TOR signaling will provide us [with] tools to achieve hyperaccumulation of lipids in plant vegetative tissues, which is a promising source for renewable energy,” he said.

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METRO photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

Even as I type this, I’m sure my mom, and the parents of people in their 40s and 50s, are going to laugh.

You see, my daughter turned 21 recently. For me, her age comes as a bit of a shock, a take-stock moment and a time warp enigma.

I get it. She’s lived 21 years, but, somehow, her reaching that age seems to have happened suddenly.

I know it’s not all about me, but it is in this column, so, hang with me for a few more minutes.

I don’t remember many of my birthdays when I was younger. At her third birthday, I’m pretty sure I didn’t stop and say to myself, “When I turned three, I was wishing with all my might for a Big Wheel.”

That probably was what I wanted, but I don’t remember thinking that. In fact, I don’t recall other landmark birthdays all that vividly, even though my parents invited my friends over, sang to me, and insisted that I make a “really good wish” before I blew out the candles.

What I remember from that age was my ambivalence. I was uncomfortable with all the attention, but I enjoyed the excitement of opening new presents. One year, all I wanted was basketballs, so I got three of them from my obliging social group.

So, back to our daughter. She earned this milestone birthday, leaving behind a trail of bread crumb memories.

On the day of our daughter’s birth, my wife insisted that I stay with her in the hospital no matter what was happening with my wife, so that we brought home the baby that had been “cooking” as we called it, for all those months.

It wasn’t hard to find our daughter, who has a distinctive birthmark and was exactly twice the weight of the baby next to her in the pediatric unit.

She went through numerous stages on the journey from that first miraculous day to now. When we moved out to a suburb from Manhattan, she took a walk through a nearby wooded path. An inchworm dangled from a tree and landed on her small, thin outstretched finger.

She carried it, slowly and carefully back to our house, offering to show this miracle to our new neighbors. Having lived their entire short lives in the suburbs, they didn’t relate to this city girl’s fascination with small samples of nature and returned to their driveway activities.

She took us with her on a journey that included brief visits to ballet studios (that ended abruptly) and to gymnastics floors (that also didn’t take). We spent considerably more time on hot softball fields and in confined volleyball gymnasiums, where ear-piercing whistles blended with teams celebrating the end of each point.

We also attended numerous concerts, including jazz bands, where she overcame stage fright to play a tenor saxophone solo.

We went through phases where nothing I said was right, funny or even worth sharing. The silent treatment, the lack of communication and the dubiousness with which she interacted with us helped prepare us for the moment when her younger brother exercised his own need to push us away and assert his independence.

So, here she is, at 21, driving a car, preparing for her senior year of college, making friends, gainfully employed during the summer, and filled with so much of the same wonder that defined her earlier years. In fact, these days, instead of carrying inchworms on her now manicured hands, she maintains several ecospheres filled with snails on a small table in her room.

When children act out, parents sometimes caution them that they may one day have a child just like them. In her case, I certainly hope so. I couldn’t wish anything better for our now 21-year-old.

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State Sen. James Gaughran (D-Northport) decided to end his four-year run as senator when he saw the boundaries of the fifth district.

“This was a decision I made pretty quickly once we got the final lines from the special master,” Gaughran said.

While Gaughran, who is also a practicing attorney, decided not to run, he is eager to embrace his duties for the remainder of the year. That includes figuring out ways to spend $350 million in an economic development grant program he helped put in place in the budget.

The grant program is earmarked for local governments and organizations for long-range improvements, including downtown revitalization and other development projects.

“One of the things I’m heavily focused on is working with the governor’s office and colleagues on how to spend that money” which will be authorized between now and the end of the year, he said.

Gaughan also said he plans to work with his staff for the remainder of the year to “help our constituents in as many ways as we can” with issues including unemployment.

He doesn’t have specific plans yet for his activities after he leaves office in January. As a citizen, he will get involved in community issues and speak out.

He said he has already spoken with Linda Beigel Schulman, whose son Scott Beigel, a teacher, was killed in the Parkland school shooting. He said he’d like to help Schulman in her efforts to “continue our fight to pass laws that are going to help us with gun safety.”

Schulman had publicly endorsed Gaughran’s candidacy for senate in 2020.

Partisanship concerns

The senator believes the biggest issue in politics at every level is polarization.

Gaughran suggested that bipartisanship is institutionalized in Albany.

“Republicans show up, feel that their sole responsibility is to be critics,” Gaughran said. He said that while criticism plays an important role in American society, he would have preferred to see more bipartisan efforts to work on legislation.

Republicans routinely voted against a capital budget that included money for improving roads and drainage and providing new sewer systems.

While they voted no, urging that the state couldn’t afford the debt, he said they still appeared at ribbon cuttings.

“I wish they could play more of a role to compromise and get things done,” he added.

Gaughran believes partisanship has prevented some people from speaking out about their own views.

“Just look at [Republican] Congressman [Chris] Jacobs,” Gaughran said.

Jacobs, who represents a heavily Republican district in Buffalo and who received the support of former President Donald Trump (R) and the National Rifle Association when he ran for office said he would back a federal assault weapons ban and place a limit on high-capacity magazines.

He made his comments after the attack in a Buffalo supermarket that killed mostly Black employees and shoppers.

Within a week of Jacobs’s remarks, “Republicans took away his nomination,” Gaughran added.

Reflecting on his role

Gaughran is pleased with several initiatives he supported or led, including election reform that made it easier for people to vote.

When he came into office, New York was ranked 44th in the nation in terms of voter turnout.

The climate change bill established a blueprint to get New York to use more renewable resources by 2030.

“When we passed the Reproductive Health Act in 2019, we were chastised by many Republicans” who thought such efforts were unnecessary in light of the protection offered by the landmark Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision.

After a draft of a Supreme Court decision that appears poised to overturn that decision, Gaughran said that law is “one of the most significant things we did.”

He is also proud of an environmental bill he wrote to protect drinking water and was gratified by the additional school funding he supported.

Lessons learned

One of the most significant lessons he learned occurred in the area of the budget process.

When he first arrived, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) would submit a proposed budget. He and others would spend numerous hours analyzing it. He and his staff would come up with proposals and amendments.

“All of a sudden, this is a final budget” and he had to vote up or down, he said.

After the first year, he learned the process better and when he needed to push to get something added to the budget.

He described Cuomo as being “much more difficult” and that the former governor would “veto things and not even give you the time of day.”

He has a better working relationship with Gov. Kathy Hochul (D).

“She’s doing a great job,” he said. “She inherited a very difficult period of time, not just coming in after Cuomo … but also having to deal with the height of COVID-19.”

As for mental health concerns, Gaughran recalls his first week in Albany. He met with a corrections officer representative who worked in the state prison system. The officer said that half of the incarcerated were there for mental health reasons.

The officer told him that the corrections staff weren’t trained as mental health professionals, even though their jobs forced them to be.

A big part of the problem is that “a lot of people are walking around who need help and can’t find it,” Gaughran said. “They are getting caught up in the criminal justice system.”

Society needs to react accordingly, he said.

As for his best days as a senator, Gaughran suggested it was when he was passing laws for the first time.

“That was pretty cool,” he said.

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The second in a two-part series, this article highlights the strain COVID-19 has placed on a mental health care system that was already resource-constrained. Mental health care workers, from social workers to psychologists, psychiatrists and emergency medical teams, have responded to the increasing need for their services, cutting back on vacation times and dealing with patients who threaten violence against themselves and others. During the pandemic, health care workers who focused on the emotional well-being of patients also sought balance in their own lives. To borrow from the TV show “Law & Order,” these are their stories.

For some, running half marathons, spending time with family, meditating and communing with nature helps. For others, staying connected and reaching out to the kinds of services they themselves provide also offsets the growing strains in their work.

Health care workers have shouldered the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic for more than two years, reaching out well beyond their job description to help patients amid a period of intense uncertainty that threatened their physical and emotional health.

The cost to health care workers, including those who work in behavioral or mental health, has been considerable, as time at the hospital and speaking with patients remotely cut into their personal lives and threatened their own sense of balance.

“It was very difficult to be a doctor through the storms of COVID,” said Dr. Stacy Eagle, director of Psychiatry at Port Jefferson-based St. Charles Hospital. Health care workers had to “deal with a lot of mental health issues” during the last few years.

Indeed, hospitals throughout the area offered varying levels of support while their staff were on-site, including meditation rooms and aroma therapy. They also suggested personal health checks and provided on-call services for employees who might be struggling amid concerns about their health and the well-being of family members and their patients.

While the general public has tried to push COVID into the back of their minds, attending sporting events and movies, going to restaurants and returning to patterns and activities that are reminiscent of life in 2019, health care workers have increasingly needed mental health support.

Employee Assistance

Over the last several months, Stony Brook University, which has an Employee Assistance Program, has seen a rise in the number of staff reaching out for help.

During the pandemic, Stony Brook launched an employee helpline for those who need mental health support, including psychotherapy and/or medication management. Compared to last year, Stony Brook is seeing a two-folded increase, or triple, the number of employees reaching out for services, according to Dr. Adam Gonzalez, director of Behavioral Health and associate professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Health at Stony University Renaissance School of Medicine.

“There are high concerns about employee burnout, resignations and departures from health care,” Gonzalez wrote in an email. “Most concerning is the risk for suicide — the ultimate consequence of burnout.”

Stony Brook has an employee support team that implements wellness initiatives, including daily mindfulness meditation sessions, yoga and stretching, and confidential one-on-one support by a faculty and staff care team and employee assistance program.

Dr. Poonamdeep Gill, director of the Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program at Stony Brook Hospital, said the mental health team is “seeing more patients who are sicker from a mental health standpoint. People are really struggling. It does take a toll on you.”

Gill said Stony Brook is proactive with staff, making sure they can access services. The university also encourages staff to check in with their leadership team if they are feeling burned out or struggling.

Dr. Michel Khlat, director of St. Catherine of Siena in Smithtown, said he has seen some of the same health care fatigue that has beset hospitals and other health care facilities throughout the country.

“Staff members have gotten overwhelmed with the volumes,” Khlat said. “Some are altering their occupations to see more outpatients. Some are reverting to part-time and per diem work.” He has had a few friends in Florida who are seeing the same phenomenon, with health care workers quitting or cutting back on hospital time and going into private practices.

Bounce forward

The Northwell Health System has been working on the support of all health care workers, including in mental health, said Dr. Vera Feuer, associate vice president in School Mental Health. Northwell has adopted a stress first aid response, peer support, and a resilience model to recover from stress and trauma.

The military developed stress first aid to deal with situations like the pandemic, in which there is ongoing stress with an uncertain ending. That, Feuer said, differs from a single event, like 9/11, where something traumatic occurs and survivors build back from it.

The pandemic has involved over two years of continuous stress and this feeling of uncertainty, she added.

Stress first aid teaches people to support each other in resilience and to “bounce forward,” Feuer said. “It is difficult to maintain in a busy, stressful environment.”

Finding balance

Doctors suggested they engaged in a wide range of activities to help with their own mental health.

A believer in the value of nutraceuticals and supplements, Dr. Jeffrey Wheeler, the director of the Emergency Room at St. Charles Hospital said he also works on focused breathing.

Eagle, his colleague at St. Charles, urges people to pursue some of their hobbies, such as reading or painting. She also recommends staying off of or limiting social media, particularly for younger children who might find the information and the reaction to postings unnerving.

Stony Brook’s Gill believes in physical activity and exercise. She ran a half marathon a few weeks ago on Long Island.

“I make sure I stay active,” she said. “We need to take care of ourselves before we can take care of other people.”

Stony Brook’s Gonzalez stays closely connected to family, friends and work colleagues.

“I also try to stay active and explore nature,” Gonzalez said. “I regularly practice mindfulness [which is] tuning into the present moment in a nonjudgmental way.”

Gonzalez enjoys a good TV show or movie to disconnect and unwind as well.

Northwell’s Feuer said she’s worked harder than she ever had, but, at the same time, she feels fulfilled by the hope and meaning in her work.

For Feuer, the silver lining is the attention to mental health, which “we know has been a problem for a long time. I’m hoping the right resources and interventions” will help those who need it.

To read the first of this two-part series, “Mental health strain for Long Islanders,” visit tbrnewsmedia.com.

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By Daniel Dunaief

Kelp, and other seaweed, may prove to be an oyster’s best friend. And, no, this isn’t a script for a new episode of SpongeBob SquarePants.

A thick, heavy leafy seaweed, kelp provides an environmentally friendly solution to several problems. Amid higher levels of carbon dioxide, the air has become warmer and oceans, including coastal regions, are more acidic. That’s because carbon dioxide mixes with water, producing negative hydrogen ions that lower the pH of the water.

Enter kelp.

A rapidly growing seaweed, kelp, which is endemic to the area, uses that carbon dioxide in the same way trees do, as a part of photosynthesis. By removing carbon dioxide, kelp raises the pH, which is helpful for the area’s shellfish.

The above graph shows pH scale measurements with and without kelp. The graph shows continuous pH (NBS scale) bubbling, and the addition of 4 x 104 cells mL-1 Isochrysis galbana added daily to simulate daily feedings of bivalves.  Image provided by Chris Gobler

That’s the conclusion of a recent study published in Frontiers in Marine Science by Stony Brook University Professor Christopher Gobler, Endowed Chair of Coastal Ecology and Conservation at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, and Mike Doall, Associate Director of Shellfish Restoration and Aquaculture at Stony Brook University.

In a series of five laboratory experiments and a field study, Gobler and Doall showed that kelp lowered acidification, enabling better growth for shellfish like oysters. “There was better oyster growth inside the kelp than 50 meters away” Doall said, in what he and Gobler describe as the “halo” effect.

Gobler was especially pleased with the implications of the field experiment.“While showing that  [result] in the lab was exciting, being able to improve the growth of oysters on an oyster farm experiencing coastal acidification proves this approach can have very broad implications,” Gobler said in a statement.

Doall estimates that kelp farmers can grow 72,000 pounds per acre of kelp in just six months, during the prime growing season from December through May.

Doall, whose primary role in the study was to grow the kelp and set up the field experiment, said he grew kelp at the Great Gun oyster farm in Moriches Bay that were up to 12 feet long. Over the last four years, he has grown kelp in 16 locations around Long Island, from the East River to Fishers Island.

This year, the team conducted kelp studies in nine locations. The best growth occurred in the East River and in Moriches Bay, Doall said. He harvested about 2,000 pounds each from those two sites this year and is primarily using the kelp in a host of fertilizer studies.

Gobler explained that using seaweed like kelp could enhance aquaculture.

“The intensification of ocean acidification now threatens bivalve aquaculture and has necessitated a solution,” Gobler said in a statement. “We believe our work is foundational to a solution.”

Above, Mike Doall during a recent kelp harvest in Moriches Bay. Photo by Cameron Provost

One of the challenges of using kelp to improve the local conditions for shellfish is that it grows during the winter through May, while the growing season for shellfish occurs during the summer.

“That is why we are now working on summer seaweeds,” Gobler explained in an email.

Gobler and Doall are looking for similar potential localized benefits from Ulva, a green sea lettuce, and Gracilaria, which is a red, branchy seaweed.

“Most water quality issues occur during summer, so it’s important to grow seaweed year round,” Doall said.

The Stony Brook scientists, who have worked together since the early 1990s when they were graduate students, are also exploring varieties of kelp that might be more heat tolerant and will try to use some of those on Long Island.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is leading a project to hybridize these heartier strains of kelp, Doall said. GreenWave, which supports regenerative ocean farming, is also participating in that effort.

Gobler explained that they also plan to start earlier, which will extend the growing season.

While the different growing seasons for kelp and oysters may make kelp only part of the solution for reducing ocean acidification for shellfish, the different growing seasons makes the seaweed a complementary companion crop for commercial shellfish diggers.

Summer laborers who work on oysters can transition to kelp harvesting in the fall and winter.

A resident of Rocky Point, Doall lives with his wife Nancy, who teaches at North Coleman Road Elementary School in the Middle Country School District.

The Doall’s 23-year old daughter Deanna, who is a graduate of the University of Tampa, is currently traveling in Guatemala, while their 20-year old daughter Annie is attending Florida Gulf Coast University.

Doall grew up in Massapequa Park. As a 12-year old, he pooled his lawn mowing money with a friend’s paper route funds to buy a small boat with a 1967 10-horsepower Evinrude engine. The pair went out on bays to fish and, periodically, to clam.

Doall, who loves gardening and being in the ocean, described the two of them as being “notorious” for needing tows back to the shore regularly when their engine died.

The former owner of an oyster farm, Doall also enjoys eating them. He particularly enjoys eating oysters in the winter and early spring, when they are plump. His favorite way to eat them is raw on the half shell, but he also appreciates his wife’s “killer Oysters Rockefeller,” as he described it.

As for kelp, the current supply in the area exceeds the demand. The excess kelp, which farmers harvest to prevent the release of carbon dioxide and nitrogen that the seaweed removed from the water, can be composted or used for fertilizer, explained Gobler.

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Wedding. Pixabay photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

We’re finally here.

These poor couples have had to wait for days, months and years to tie the knot in front of family and friends. It’s such a relief that we can all gather again, celebrating the love that binds two people forever and that may, if it hasn’t already, lead to children.

It seems that the list of dos and don’ts for weddings has changed, just as so many other parts of modern reality have altered the way we go about our lives.

Here are a few of the dos and don’ts, starting with the don’ts.

— Cough. Ever. If you have to cough, swallow it or make it sound like a strange laugh. No one wants to hear a cough, least of all at a wedding. Go outside to cough. Cough in the car. Cough into your hand like you’re saying something private and being discrete. Go to the edge of the parking lot and cough.

— Chew with your mouth open. No one wants to see the food you’re eating, especially not in the third year of COVID-19.

—  Point to the food and say how much better you could make it. Look, we know that you’ve lost a step on your social graces from being home so often. We know that you’ve spent a great deal of time cooking meals to your satisfaction. We know that you are a great admirer of your own food, your own voice, and your own way of doing things. Appreciate that someone else has made the food and will clean it up and that they do things differently than you do. You can have food you know you love as soon as you walk back into your fortress of solitude.

— Talk about politics. You’re not going to convince anyone who doesn’t agree with you already of your views. So, why bring it up? This isn’t the time to try to make a reasoned argument with relatives who only share genes and nothing else. Smile if they bring something up you find disagreeable.

— Complain about the weather. The bride, groom and the extended family have no control over the weather. If it’s too hot, get a drink. If it’s too cold, shift back and forth from one foot to the other or bring a sweater. The weather is either perfect, dramatic, lovely or dynamic.

— Talk about your own wedding. If people were there, they remember. If not, they don’t need you to compare what’s going on to what you did. Your wedding may have been lovely, but you’re not there right now.

— Point to someone else’s mask and ask them why they’re wearing it. Do whatever is comfortable for you. Don’t tell anyone else what to do because, well, that doesn’t work and it gets people angry. They do their thing, you do yours.

— Binge watch shows while you’re waiting for the ceremony to start. Yes, the invitation said the party would start at 7 p.m. and it’s now 7:18 p.m. So what? You’re there to celebrate other people and to witness this lovely moment. Netflix and other shows can wait. Live your life.

— Show pictures of your pet. Many of us added dogs, cats and fish, particularly during the pandemic.

Okay, so, here is a short list of dos:

— Give other people a chance to talk. Silence, periodically, is okay. You don’t need to fill every quiet moment, if there are any, with your opinions, thoughts and experiences.

— Ask someone to dance who seems eager for a partner. Grab your mother-in-law, your brother-in-law, or your something-in-law by the hand, lead him or her to the floor, smile, and appreciate the chance to dance.

— Remember that you won’t have to see many of these people until the next blessed event, whenever that is.

— Thank the bride, groom and their families for a lovely event. Even if you hated it, you’ve got some good stories to share and you gave your wonderful pets a short break from you.

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File photo

Even as the newer omicron subvariant of COVID-19 continues to spread throughout Long Island, hospitalizations and infections have been lower.

Hospitalizations, which had risen to 490 in mid-May from about 130 in early April, have been “slowly declining for the past week or two,” according to Dr. Gregson Pigott, commissioner of the Suffolk County Department of Health Service.

Area health care professionals suggested that the severity of symptoms also had eased up.

“COVID hospitalization rates are lower than in prior COVID waves,” Dr. Adrian Popp, chair of infection control at Huntington Hospital, explained in an email. Most of the patients have mild to moderate illnesses, although Huntington Hospital still does have some severe cases and/or a COVID-related death.

The average number of positive tests per 100,000 people in Suffolk County has declined from recent peaks. As of June 3, the 7-day average number of positive PCR and rapid tests per 100,000 people was 33, which is down from 52 on May 27 and 67.7 on May 20, according to New York State Department of Health data.

“If anything, Suffolk County rates are dropping,” said Dr. Michel Khlat, chief medical officer at St. Catherine of Siena in Smithtown. “We’re seeing a drop in inpatient cases.”

Many of the cases St. Catherine is finding are incidental, as the hospital tests for the virus in connection with other procedures.

At this point, the newer subvariant of omicron, called BA 2.12.1, accounted for 78.1% of the positive samples collected between May 22 and May 28 in New York, which is up from 593% in the prior two weeks, according to figures from the New York State Department of Health.

“Preliminary data suggest that Omicron may cause more mild disease, although some people may still have severe disease, need hospitalization, and could die from the infection with this variant,” Pigott added in an email.

Khlat suggested that hospitals aren’t tracking the type of variant. Even if they did, it wouldn’t alter the way they treated patients.

“It doesn’t make a difference” whether someone has one or another subtype of omicron, Khlat said. The treatment is identical.

Area doctors and medical care professionals continue to recommend that residents over 50 receive a second booster, particularly if they are immunocompromised or have other health complications.

“People over 50 should get the booster — it decreases the severity of COVID,” explained Popp.

Like much of the rest of the country, some Long Islanders have also contracted COVID more than once. The reinfection rate per 100,000 is currently 7.3%, according to New York State Department of Health figures.

“We are certainly seeing symptomatic COVID infections in persons who report having COVID at the beginning of this year or last year,” Dr. Susan Donelan, medical director of the Healthcare Epidemiology Department at Stony Brook Medicine, explained in an email. 

Popp explained that natural immunity from a COVID infection generally lasts about two to three months. Vaccine-related immunity generally lasts twice that duration, for about four to six months.

Doctors continue to urge caution during larger, poorly-ventilated indoor gatherings.

“Close crowds without masks, in an indoor setting with poor air flow, would be one version of a scenario with potential super-spreader potential,” Donelan explained.

Donelan said Stony Brook encouraged staff and patients to consider receiving boosters when they are eligible.

Popp believes wearing masks indoors while in a large gathering is a “reasonable” measure. That includes theaters, airplanes, buses and trains.

At Huntington Hospital, meetings continue to take place online.

“We decided as an organization that the risk of transmission is high enough to continue these measures,” Popp wrote. “We cannot afford to lose team members to COVID since it can negatively impact our operation.”

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This map shows of the status of marine protected areas in the United States. Credit: Sullivan-Stack et al., Frontiers in Marine Science 2022

By Daniel Dunaief

Time is not on our side.

That’s one of the messages, among others, from a recent paper in Frontiers in Marine Conservation that explored Marine Protected Areas around the United States.

In a study involving scientists at universities across the country, the researchers concluded that the current uneven distribution of MPAs do not offer sufficient protection for marine environments.

Left, Ellen Pikitch holds gooseneck barnacles in The Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary, an MPA in Washington State.

 

“The mainland of the United States is not well protected” with no region reaching the 10 percent target for 2020, said Ellen Pikitch, Endowed Professor of Ocean Conservation Sciences at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University and a co-author on the study. “The mid-Atlantic is one of the worst of the worst in that regard. We’re not well positioned and we have no time to waste.”

Indeed, the United States, through the administration of President Joe Biden (D), has committed to protecting 30 percent of the oceans by 2030. At this point, 26 percent of the oceans are in at least one kind of MPA. That, however, doesn’t reflect the uneven distribution of marine protection, Pikitch and the other authors suggested.

As much as 96 percent of the protection is in the Central Pacific Ocean, Pikitch explained. That compares with 1.9 percent of the mainland United States and 0.3 percent of the mid-Atlantic.

“We are denying the benefits of ocean protection to a huge portion of the U.S. population,” Pikitch said. “This needs to change if we want the full spectrum of marine life in U.S. ocean waters and to obtain the many benefits to human well-being that this would provide.”

The researchers in the study used a new science-based framework called “The MPA Guide,” which Pikitch helped create. This study represents the first application of this guide to the quantity and quality of marine protection around the United States.

The Guide, which was published in September in the journal Science, rates areas as fully, highly, lightly or minimally protected and is designed to bridge the gap between scientific research and government policies.

Jenna Sullivan-Stack, a research associate at Oregon State University and lead author on the paper, credits Pikitch with helping to create the guide.

Pikitch made “key contributions to this work, especially putting it in context relative to international work and also thinking about how it can be useful on a regional scale for the mid-Atlantic,” Sullivan-Stack explained in an email.

“These findings highlight an urgent need to improve the quality, quantity and representativeness of MPA protection across U.S. waters to bring benefits to human and marine communities,” Sullivan-Stack said in a statement.

Pikitch said MPAs enhance resilience to climate change, providing buffers along shorelines. Seagrasses, which Long Island has in its estuaries, are one of the “most powerful carbon sequesters” on the planet, she explained.

Pikitch suggested there was abundant evidence of the benefits of MPAs. This includes having fish that live longer, grow to a larger size and reproduce more. Some published, peer-reviewed papers also indicate the benefit for nearby waterways.

“I have seen the spillover effect in several MPAs I have studied,” Pikitch said.

To be sure, these benefits may not accrue in nearby waters. That depends on factors including if the area where fishing is allowed is downstream of the protected area and on the dispersal properties of the fished organism, among other things, Pikitch explained.

Lauren Wenzel, Director of NOAA’s Marine Protected Areas Center, said the government recognizes that the ocean is changing rapidly due to climate change and that MPAs are affected by warmer and more acidic water, intense storms and other impacts.

“We are now working to ensure that existing and new MPAs can help buffer climate impacts by protecting habitats that store carbon and by providing effective protection to areas important for climate resilience,” Wenzel said.

The researchers made several recommendations in the paper. They urged the creation of more, and more effective, MPAs, urging a reevaluation of areas with weak protection and an active management of these regions to generate desired results.

They also suggested establishment of new, networked MPAS with better representation of biodiversity, regions and habitats. The researchers urged policy makers to track areas that provide conservation benefits, such as military closed regions.

The paper calls for the reinstatement and empowerment of the MPA Federal Advisory Committee, which was canceled in 2019.

While the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has no plans to reinstate this committee, is it “considering ways to expand the dialogue and seek advice from outside the government on area-based management,” Wenzel said.

The paper also urges the country to revisit and update the National Ocean Policy and National Ocean Policy Committee, which were repealed in 2018 before plans were implemented.

Wenzel said that the United States recently joined the High-Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy, a multi-national effort to ensure the country commits to developing a national plan within five years to manage the ocean under national jurisdiction sustainably.

In terms of enforcing MPAs, the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries supports enforcement that fosters voluntary compliance through educating sanctuary users and promoting a sense of stewardship toward the living and cultural resources of the sanctuary, Wenzel added.

“The sanctuary system’s goal is to provide a law enforcement presence in order to deter and detect violations,” she said.

The Office of National Marine Sanctuaries works with the U.S. Coast Guard and the Department of the Interior.

In terms of the impact of the paper, Pikitch said she hopes the paper affects policies and ignites change.

“We need to ramp up the amount and quality of protection in U.S. ocean waters, particularly adjacent to the mainland U.S. and the mid-Atlantic region,” she said.

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METRO photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

Once upon a time, a girl named Fiona read the book “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

She thought it was funny and charming that a child could see what no one else admitted. But then, something strange happened: she thought she could also see things that no one else could.

“That’s sweet, Fiona, but focus on your school work and let your imagination run wild at other times,” her father told her that night.

Fiona did as she was told because she wanted to please her parents and her teachers. It was her teachers that caused problems for her.

It started with Mrs. Butler in her third grade class. A tall, thin woman with white hair and glasses, Mrs. Butler always wore high-heeled shoes. She looked directly in the eyes of every student. One day, her friend Simona fell and hit her head. When Mrs. Butler bent down and checked on her friend, Fiona saw the kind of coat doctors and nurses wear appear around her shoulders. Fiona rubbed her eyes, but the coat was still there. Mrs. Butler calmly told the class to go to their seats, sent Bill to get the nurse and kneeled on the floor near Simona.

When the nurse left with Simona, Mrs. Butler’s white coat disappeared.

The next day, Jeff couldn’t understand a math problem. He wrote numbers all over the paper, but he didn’t have the answer.

Fiona noticed a change again in Mrs. Butler’s clothing. Instead of her powder blue blouse, she had an orange vest and white gloves. With numbers on the smartboard, she directed Jeff away from all the dead ends.

When he got closer to the answer, Jeff smiled. Fiona looked back at Mrs. Butler, whose orange vest and white gloves disappeared.

Later, Doug and Andrew got into an argument near the stack of books at the back of the room. When Doug swung his arm to make a point, he knocked over several books.

Fiona saw Mrs. Butler’s clothing change again, this time into the kind of black and white stripes that referees wear in football games. She could even see a whistle dangling from her teacher’s neck.

The next morning, Jill and Amanda couldn’t agree on how to do a class project. Jill marched to the front of the classroom to complain. Amanda followed closely.

While Fiona couldn’t hear everything, she saw a black robe form around Mrs. Butler.

When the conversation ended, Mrs. Butler said something that made both girls happy. They shook hands and walked back to their desks, where they returned to work on their project.

One day, Fiona arrived early to class. She and her teacher were alone and she felt like she had to say something.

“Mrs. Butler?” Fiona asked.

“Yes?” Her teacher replied.

“I see all the clothing you wear,” Fiona said. “I don’t think anyone else sees it.”

Mrs. Butler narrowed her eyes and looked carefully at her student.

“What do you see?” Mrs. Butler asked.

She described the medical jacket, the orange vest, the referee’s coat and the judge’s robe.

“What do you think of all that?” Mrs. Butler asked.

“Is it real?” Fiona asked.

“Thank you for seeing,” Mrs. Butler grinned. Other students walked into the room and class started.

Just then, Fiona heard an alarm. Mrs. Butler reacted immediately. She held up a shield and directed everyone to the back of the room.

While they waited, Mrs. Butler told everyone to remain quiet. The class waited for the all clear.

“It was a drill,” Mrs. Butler said. “You can return to your desks.”

Fiona was the last to leave the classroom that day.

“Fiona?” Mrs. Butler asked. “Is everything okay?”

“Yes,” she said. “Thanks for … everything.”

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