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Daniel Dunaief

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Photo from SBUH

In response to an easing of state regulations and their approach to patient care, area hospitals are relaxing restrictions about patient visitors.

Cheryl Miranda, director of Patient Experience at Huntington Hospital, has been planning the new visitation policy since the beginning of the month. Photo from Huntington Hospital

Starting this past Monday, Huntington Hospital will allow patients who do not have COVID-19 to have one visitor per day, between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. St. Charles and St. Catherine of Siena hospitals also allow one COVID-19 negative visitor per day during those same hours.

Huntington Hospital is responding to the medical, emotional and personal need its patients have for the support of family and friends during whatever health challenges they face.

“There is nothing like having your loved one at your bedside, holding your hand,” said Cheryl Miranda, director of Patient Experience at Huntington Hospital, which is a part of Northwell Health.

Family also provides helpful information, helping medical professionals know whether a patient’s behavior is different from normal

“As a nurse, I’ve always felt that family is part of the caregiving circle,” Miranda said. “The family knows their loved one better than anyone. They will help us provide better care.”

St. Charles Hospital and St. Catherine of Siena started allowing one hospital visitor per COVID-negative patient per day starting about four weeks ago.

Stony Brook is making several changes to its visitation policy.

As of April 1, the hospital is allowing two visitors for patients in labor and delivery, for pediatric patients and for patients in end-of-life situations. This will increase from one to two.

Patients receiving same day surgical procedures will also be allowed a patient visitor until a procedure begins. The visitor is required to wait outside during the procedure and then can return during the patient’s release from the hospital.

Inpatient child psychiatry will also allow a visitor, as will cancer center and outpatient offices.

Approved visitors to Stony Brook must wear a mask that covers their nose and mouth the entire time, will have symptom checks, including thermal scanning, will not be allowed outside the patient’s room, must maintain six feet of distance and must wash their hands on entering and leaving the room.

Hospitals had generally restricted most or all patient visitors over various periods in the last year amid the pandemic to limit the spread of COVID-19. Nurses throughout Long Island and the world have used tablets, phones and other technology to help their patients connect with family members, enabling them to see spouses, siblings, children, grandchildren and friends from hospital beds that often had them feeling isolated during their health battles.

Allowing visitors, who are still required to wear masks, will help hospitalized patients feel more normal and receive the kind of support that can brighten their day while shortening their hospital visit.

A hospital employee will screen patients on their way into the hospital, asking them questions about any possible symptoms and taking their temperature.

Visitors who are COVID-19 positive can’t enter. Additionally, visitors who come in from out of the state or whom they believe necessitates a screening will have a rapid swab.

“We are not asking everyone to be tested,” Miranda said.

The hospital is spreading the word about its new patient visitor policy by changing its on-hold messages, is sharing information on TV sets and is telling families directly during virtual visits that one person at a time can come to the hospital.

Patients can determine who visits, which includes family members and friends.

“There is nothing like having your loved one at your bedside, holding your hand.”

— Cheryl Miranda

Miranda said the medical staff is well-prepared for an increase in visitors through the hospital.

“I don’t have to tell anybody in this building to follow precautions,” Miranda said. “We’ve all been through this for 13 months now and there isn’t anyone” who needs reminding about personal protective equipment, hand washing or social distancing.

Initially, Huntington Hospital workers will escort visitors to patient rooms, reminding them about safety policies.

During visits, patients and visitors are expected to wear masks. If a family member comes during mealtime or brings food, the patient can eat, but should do so at a safe distance.

Miranda, who has been at Huntington Hospital for 20 years, realizes the suffering patients and their families have endured during the pandemic.

“To tell someone they can’t be here is an awful, awful thing,” Miranda said. “My heart goes out to the families that haven’t been allowed to be here” and to the patients who “haven’t been able to have their loved ones at their side.”

Miranda has been planning this new visitation policy since the beginning of the month.

The hospital has learned numerous lessons about health care, including by providing virtual support for patients.

In addition to bereavement support groups, which have been particularly busy as families mark the one-year anniversary of the loss of a loved one, the hospital is adding a long-haul support group.

Starting on Thursday, April 8 at 2 p.m., Huntington Hospital will offer support to people who have a lingering cough, ongoing debilitating fatigue, body aches, joint pain, shortness of breath, loss of taste and smell, difficulty sleeping, headaches and brain fog.

People interested in joining that group can email Kacey Farber at [email protected].

Dr. Jean Cacciabaudo, associate medical director at Huntington Hospital and a cardiologist, will sit on the long haulers support meeting. Cacciabaudo, who had COVID-19 and has some long haulers symptoms, will attend not just for herself, but to provide the physician’s perspective.

Miranda said the bereavement support groups have helped family members amid a loss.

“It’s the beauty of humanity, when we reach out and help each other,” Miranda said. “There’s no magic solution for grief and loss. For some people, it’s just about remembering all the wonderful things they had when they had that person and sharing that with other people. It’s about not being isolated. That’s a big key.”

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Photo from Pexels

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

When I was in college, I learned an important lesson in class that had nothing to do with the subject I was studying. Many years ago, I attended an early morning anthropology lecture.

Pacing at the front and bottom of a semicircular stage, the professor shared details about the hungry ghost festival. In various parts of Asia and India, people practice a ritual in which they relieve the suffering of their deceased relatives by providing food. During this time, the professor said, people prepare meals and leave empty seats for ghosts, who ritualistically consume the food.

Seated next to a friend from our dorm, I was busily taking notes, not only because I wanted to do well on a future test, but because I also found the description fascinating.

That’s when the professor became distracted. Someone from the audio visual department was quietly packing up equipment at the back of the room.

“Excuse me,” the professor yelled to the man. “What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry,” the man said.

“Well, you should be,” the professor barked back.

The man continued to try to pack up the materials quietly. The noise, which I barely heard from a seat that was much closer to the back of the room, was still too much for my professor.

“You’re sorry, but you’re still disrupting my class!” he shouted.

“I’m packing up the material. I work for the university. One of the other classes needs it now,” the man replied. “I’ll keep it down.”

“No, this is ridiculous,” the professor said through gritted teeth. “I won’t tolerate this. You will leave.”

The man stood still, unsure of what to do. In that moment, I felt like I had a choice: I could either say something to support the man in the back of the room or walk out of the class. By doing and saying nothing, which is what I did, I felt like I was accepting the professor’s behavior.

When the man spent one more minute doing his work, the professor demanded to know where he worked so he could show up and bother him while he was trying to concentrate.

All these years later, I still think of that small moment. These types of incidents require a readiness to think, speak or act, especially to something that disturbs or distresses us. It’s akin to what coaches say all the time in sports: know what you’re going to do with the ball before it comes to you. If you have to think too much about your next move, it’s going to be too late.

A recent anti-Asian incident in New York City, in which security guards watched as a man knocked down and kicked a 65-year-old woman on her way to church, reminded me of the need to be prepared to do the right thing, even when someone wrongs someone else.

We are more likely to act when we are prepared to help, even if the moment creates discomfort for us.

Nowadays, we all have an opportunity to support each other, particularly amid anti-American attacks on members of the Asian American community. These cowardly verbal and physical assaults will become less prevalent if perpetrators know we’re all prepared to stand up for our friends and neighbors who have become the target for random anger during the pandemic. Asian Americans are not an enemy of the rest of us any more than our heart is the enemy of our body. We should stand with, and for, each other.

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Peter Koo Photo from CSHL

By Daniel Dunaief

The goal sounds like a dystopian version of a future in which computers make critical decisions that may or may not help humanity.

Peter Koo, Assistant Professor and Cancer Center Member at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, would like to learn how to design neural networks so they are more interpretable, which will help build trust in the networks.

The neural networks he’s describing are artificial intelligence programs designed to link a molecular function to DNA sequences, which can then inform how mutations to the DNA sequences alter the molecular function. This can help “propose a potential mechanism that plays a causal role” for a mutation in a given disease, he explained in an email.

Researchers have created numerous programs that learn a range of tasks. Indeed, scientists can and have developed neural networks in computer vision that can perform a range of tasks, including object recognition that might differentiate between a wolf and a dog.

Koo when he received a COVID vaccination.

With the pictures, people can double check the accuracy of these programs by comparing the program’s results to their own observations about different objects they see.

While the artificial intelligence might get most or even all of the head-to-head comparisons between dogs and wolves correct, the program might arrive at the right answer for the wrong reason. The pictures of wolves, for example, might have all been taken during the winter, with snow in the background The photos of dogs, on the other hand, might have cues that include green grass.

The neural network program can arrive at the right answer for the wrong reason if it is focused on snow and grass rather than on the features of the animal in a picture.

Extending this example to the world of disease, researchers would like computer programs to process information at a pace far quicker than the human brain as it looks for mutations or genetic variability that suggests a predisposition for a disease.

The problem is that the programs are learning in the same way as their programmers, developing an understanding of patterns based on so-called black box thinking. Even when people have designed the programs, they don’t necessarily know how the machine learned to emphasize one alteration over another, which might mean that the machine is focused on the snow instead of the wolf.

Koo, however, would like to understand the artificial intelligence processes that lead to these conclusions.

In research presented in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, Koo provides a way to access one level of information learned by the network, particularly DNA patterns called motifs, which are sites associated with proteins. It also makes the current tools that look inside black boxes more reliable.

“My research shows that just because the model’s predictions are good doesn’t mean that you should trust the network,” Koo said. “When you start adding mutations, it can give you wildly different results, even though its predictions were good on some benchmark test set.”

Indeed, a performance benchmark is usually how scientists evaluate networks. Some of the data is held out so the network has never seen these during training. This allows researchers to evaluate how well the network can generalize to data it’s never seen before.

When Koo tests how well the predictions do with mutations, they can “vary significantly,” he said. They are “given arbitrary DNA positions important scores, but those aren’t [necessarily] important. They are just really noisy.”

Through something Koo calls an “exponential activation trick,” he reduces the network’s false positive predictions, cutting back the noise dramatically.

“What it’s showing you is that you can’t only use performance metrics like how accurate you are on examples that you’ve never seen before as a way to evaluate the model’s ability to predict the importance of mutations,” he explained.

Like using the snow to choose between a wolf and a dog, some models are using shortcuts to make predictions.

“While these shortcuts can help them make predictions that [seem more] accurate, like with the data you trained it on, it may not necessarily have learned the true essence of what the underlying biology is,” Koo said.

By learning the essence of the underlying biology, the predictions become more reliable, which means that the neural networks will be making predictions for the right reason.

The exponential activation is a noise suppressor, allowing the artificial intelligence program to focus on the biological signal.

The data Koo trains the program on come from ENCODE, which is the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements.

“In my lab, we want to use these deep neural networks on cancer,” Koo said. “This is one of the major goals of my lab’s research at the early stages: to develop methods to interpret these things to trust their predictions so we can apply them in a cancer setting.”

At this point, the work he’s doing is more theoretical than practical.

“We’re still looking at developing further tools to help us interpret these networks down the road so there are additional ways we can perform quality control checks,” he said.

Koo feels well-supported by others who want to understand what these networks are learning and why they are making a prediction.

From here, Koo would like to move to the next stage of looking into specific human diseases, such as breast cancer and autism spectrum disorder, using techniques his lab has developed.

He hopes to link disease-associated variance with a molecular function, which can help understand the disease and provide potential therapeutic targets.

While he’s not a doctor and doesn’t conduct clinical experiments, Koo hopes his impact will involve enabling more trustworthy and useful artificial intelligence programs.

Artificial intelligence is “becoming bigger and it’s undoubtedly impactful already,” he said. “Moving forward, we want to have transparent artificial intelligence we can trust. That’s what my research is working towards.”

He hopes the methods he develops in making the models for artificial intelligence more interpretable and trustworthy will help doctors learn more about diseases.

Koo has increased the size and scope of his lab amid the pandemic. He current has eight people in his lab who are postdoctoral students, graduate students, undergraduates and a master’s candidate.

Some people in his lab have never met in person, Koo said. “I am definitely looking forward to a normal life.”

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Photo from SBU (copyright ©2013 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.) by Drew Fellman

Stony Brook University Distinguished Professor Patricia Wright wants you to visit Madagascar, virtually for now and in person in the future. Wright, an award-winning scientist who has spent over 30 years studying the lemurs of the island nation of Madagascar, has been encouraging virtual ecotourism to the island nation, which has been struggling economically amid a pandemic that halted tourism. Wright recently raised money to support continuing operations for Centre ValBio, a research station she built in a national park she helped create. She has also helped secure money to create the nation’s first canopy walkway. The award-winning professor discussed COVID-19, conservation and science in Madagascar.

TBR: How has Covid affected Madagascar?

Wright: I flew back in January just after New Year’s. The Madagascar I saw was a lot different from New York. They have been able to stave off Covid by not allowing people into the country. It’s an island nation. There’s only one international airport. It was in some ways, a little bit better than in New York because there was less Covid. However, economically, it was a disaster because much of the gross national product for Madagascar is tourism and there has been absolutely no tourists there, and no researchers, either.

TBR: Has the government provided some support to bridge the gap?

Wright: It’s a real problem, because it’s the third poorest country in the world. The government doesn’t have a lot of funding. We’ve been asking for funding from the United Nations, from the World Health Organization, from the international agencies and they’ve been able to give some stop gap funding.

TBR: Does this crisis become worse with each passing week?

Wright: This is what I worry about because families were telling me when I was in Madagascar that they don’t have money to buy the seeds to plant their crops. That means that it’s not only right now that they don’t have enough money, but if they don’t plant the rice, they’re not going to have enough rice to eat. It’s reaching a crisis. Stony Brook has really pitched in … We have virtual wildlife tours, where people can go to Madagascar and our tourist guides will take you to Ranomafana. That’s adding income. People are taking their families to Madagascar by just doing zoom.

TBR: Does it look like tourists will return to Madagascar soon?

Wright: We’re hoping that that will occur in June or July of this year. That’s what the hope is, that this will start. The international airport right now is closed. That’s a good thing because that means that there’s not as much Covid coming in … When enough people get vaccinated, you’ll probably have to show your vaccination card if you want to get on a plane.

TBR: Are people booking trips?

Wright: I have a ticket to go at the end of May. Air France and Ethiopian Airlines are booking tickets for May, June and July. There’s hope.

TBR: You mentioned the virtual tours that people are taking. How many people are taking those tours?

Wright: A couple of hundred a week, and particularly because we’re also tapping into schools. A teacher can bring a class to Madagascar … Families can have a family reunion going to Madagascar all together. It’s interactive.

TBR: Are people seeing the same things they would see if they were on site?

Wright: They have some really great footage. They can get much closer to lemurs than if you were underneath them looking up in real life.

TBR: Do you hope people will follow up with an in person visit?

Wright: I’m hoping we’ll get a big increase in tourism once everything opens up

TBR: What about conservation?

Wright: It’s really difficult because people think that because the nation is shut down from the outside world, they can just go in and hunt. They can go back into protected areas because there’s not tourists there. There’s a real threat. We’ve been able to continue our programs in education and health and reforestation.

TBR: Are you concerned that some of these species might become extinct?

Wright: I really worry about that. There are some species of lemurs where there’s only 50 left. … We have 113 species of lemurs. They are in every part of Madagascar. It’s hard to protect them all, each one is so individually different. Lemurs have been evolving for 55 million, 60 million years. They’re only found on Madagascar. If we lose them, we really lose a part of our primate history that is very precious.

TBR: Is there any thought about capturing them and protecting them in an enclosed space?

Wright: We have thought about that. There has to be a long term program, though. If you bring that many animals into captivity, you have to be sure you have the funding to keep them fed and well protected. We have been thinking about that. We’ve been doing some translocations, where we take them from a place where they’re really threatened and they’re eating crops and farmers don’t like that. We take them out of that very dangerous situation and bring them into a protected area.

TBR: Are there funders that recognize this is a time where they can do the most good?

Wright: We do have some foundations that are stepping up, but we need more to step up … I just received a grant from the Leakey Foundation, which is out of San Francisco, and they just gave us money to keep the lights on for another three months. We are working hard to keep going.

TBR: How can people help?

Wright: I’ve already mentioned virtual tours [which cost about] $30 a person. For donating, we have a donation button at Centre ValBio. This is through Stony Brook and Stony Brook is very good about making sure the money goes straight to Centre ValBio, which is the name of the research station.

TBR: What about the science side?

Wright: I just got off a Zoom call with the sifaka guys … With the Covid year, we have a beautiful database, now we’re able to mine that, which consists of the plants and animals that are in Ranomafana. We’re making a relational database [that has over] 35 years of data that we’ve been taking from all over the region. It’s one of the few long term databases that there are in the tropics and we’re very proud of that.

TBR: Will the public be able to access some of that data?

Wright: Yes, we’re not at that point yet, but that what’s what we’re hoping for … We just heard news that we’re going to have a canopy walkway, which we have been wanting to put into Ranomafana National Park for over a decade and the funding has just been found. And so, we are going over to Ranomafana in May/ June with a designer to put in that canopy, so we’ll be ready for the tourists when they come, so they can go up in the canopy and see the lemurs eye to eye, to be able to see those chameleons and birds and everything in a new way.

TBR: Who provided the funding?

Wright: It’s called Mission Green and the organization is raising money just for canopy walkways, there will be 20 canopy walkways. This will be the only one in Madagascar.

TBR: As far as the sifaka call you mentioned earlier, is there any news?

Wright: So far, we know that all the babies from last year have survived. We’re kind of at that stage right now. That’s very exciting. The babies will be born in May and June.

TBR: What did you notice that was different in the Covid world of Madagascar?

Wright: When we went out there without being there for six months, because the national parks were closed. When we did get to go out there, I couldn’t believe it. They came down and were [practically] saying, ‘Where have you been?”

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Photo from Pixabay

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

No matter how much uncertainty and anxiety clouds our lives, the passion that inspires us can  penetrate the haze.

My retired neighbors, whom I see regularly on our walks, have shared their lives with us over the last year, offering news updates about their two grown children as well as their pursuit of vaccinations. Amid all the other news, they shared a development in their backyard that has completely captivated their attention.

Andrea and Bob said they were doing their usual gardening, trimming their bushes and reseeding their lawn, when they noticed something new next to their grill. Two mallards had decided to nest in a nearby bush.

The presence of this nest has captivated them to such a degree that it’s clear that the first place they look when they return from their walks is in the direction of the nest. They are eager to see whether their visitors, whom they assure us will take about the same 28 days to hatch that it takes between each of the two Moderna vaccinations for COVID, have pushed their way out of their eggs.

Each day, the parent mallards swim in their pool, taking short breaks from their early parenting duties to wade back and forth in a water body that Andrea and Bob assure us won’t have any chemicals or even salt until later in the summer.

They seem so thrilled to host their new guests that the bird droppings or other germs that might clog their filter or encourage bacterial growth don’t seem to concern them.

Indeed, they are so focused on these duck eggs that they have told anyone who ventures in their backyard, including insect control experts, not to spray or go near the nest.

Just to make sure the nest remains undisturbed from human activities, they have also put sawhorses — the kinds of temporary fencing police use to control crowds and building managers use to keep people away from exclusive entrances and exits to buildings — on either side of the nest.

Once the ducks hatch, they plan to take pictures from their window or around their yard, sharing them with friends and family.

The excitement this nest has created not only speaks to the Groundhog Day nature of our lives, but also to the core passion some people feel for nature.

When the right kind of animals appear, and I suspect a young raccoon or a nest of vultures wouldn’t make the cut, people will go well out of their way to support those creatures and to encourage the safety of their young.

Perhaps the arrival of spring and the renewal and hope it brings offers a fitting backdrop for the affection and appreciation of this collection of eggs.

After all, this spring in particular is unlike any other, as people hope to get vaccinated, emerge from their versions of hibernations and plan, tentatively, for the next steps over the next few months and year.

We will hopefully see friends and family we haven’t seen in months or even a year and, in some cases, will also visit with extended friends and family fortunate enough to have added new life to their ranks as well. Despite the baby bust, two sisters in my wife’s extended family gave birth to baby girls within weeks of each other. They will have their own stories to tell, passed down to them from their parents and extended family, about the unusual and challenging environment into which they were born.

In the meantime, however, Andrea and Bob can plan for something in the next few weeks that is unexpected, unplanned and wonderful: the hatching of new ducklings.

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Sen. Gaughran in his office in August. Photo from Gaughrans office

State Sen. James Gaughran (D-Northport), chair of the Local Government Committee and member of several other committees, spoke with TBR News Media newspapers on Friday, March 12, to discuss his concerns about allegations of a cover-up of nursing home deaths from COVID by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), vaccinations, bodycam usage by police and a full return to school in the fall. Please find below an abridged and edited version of the discussion.

TBR: Are the nursing home issues [related to Cuomo] worrisome to you?

Gaughran: Oh, absolutely. We are very concerned about them. The State Senate is actually going to be holding hearings. In addition to hearings that already have been held, we are absolutely going to get to the bottom line of what happened with the administration and what happened in the nursing homes. It is very disturbing, the reports of changes to records of misrepresentations. It is obviously being reviewed by the United State’s Attorney’s Office. It is very serious. There needs to be a full investigation there. Without interfering with their investigation, we are going to continue to, as a Senate, look as deeply and carefully as possible, making sure that people are held accountable who need to be held accountable.

TBR: What about reports of a possible cover-up by the governor and his office?

Gaughran: That’s going to be, has been and will continue to be a major part of our investigations moving forward. The first priority is making sure we are fixing the problem moving forward. The second part is making sure everybody is being held responsible … You have the other issue that there were reports that were submitted by the Health Department concerning some of the nursing home numbers that were then amended or tweaked by the executive branch before they were released. That is being investigated as well … They are saying that’s part of the normal process [that the] executive branch always before a report is finally issued will review it and make tweaks. That’s fine if we’re talking about grammar and language and even tone perhaps. Based on the circumstance.

TBR: What is it about now that has produced sufficient evidence to give people like you who are part of the Democratic party the initiative to say, ‘It’s time.’ What brought this critical mass to democrats to ask Cuomo to step aside?

Gaughran: The nursing home issue has been extremely disturbing and we have been addressing that for quite a while. The numerous allegations that have come out from a variety of individuals, women, and these are credible and very serious and very disturbing allegations. I believe it is vitally important that they be treated that way. I have the utmost confidence in New York State Attorney General [Letitia] James to make sure that, number one, she is giving every single person coming forward the opportunity to be heard … [she will] obviously follow the facts and whatever the final determination is and recommendations are, that will come out of her report. Simultaneously now, we have the New York State Assembly, through the judiciary committee, which happens to be chaired by my colleague [Charles] Lavine who represents part of my district, they have an obligation under the New York State Constitution to conduct the investigation, because the impeachment process begins with the state Assembly … Whether or not they decide to issue articles of impeachment, that will be up to them … In the event they do, it then goes to the state Senate, where members of the state Senate will serve as jurors, alongside nine members of the New York State Court of Appeals.

TBR: With the government focused on Cuomo, is there any concern that politicians aren’t protecting people in New York?

Gaughran: The big issue is we have to adopt the budget … That impacts everything we’re doing as it relates to Covid, including rolling out the vaccines, making sure as much money as possible [gets] the economy moving again, [providing] assistance to small business, [and] implementing the federal funds, the unrestricted funds that are coming to the state. We have to implement those funds through the budgetary process. We also have to supplement them to some extent because not everything is covered by federal money.

TBR: Gov. Cuomo was present at your first swearing in as a state senator. You’ve worked with him in the past. Is this a difficult position for you to be in to ask him to step aside?

Gaughran: Obviously, it is difficult because I’ve known the governor for quite a while, and the governor has done a lot of great things for this state. I knew his father very well. He was one of our greatest governors. It is extremely difficult, but you know, my obligation is to the people I represent in the district and the people of this state to try to do what is in the best interests of everybody moving forward. It is not something that doesn’t bring me a lot of pain … The allegations that have been made that are very credible from members of the executive chamber and others have to be fully reviewed.

TBR: Have you scheduled your own vaccination?

Gaughran: I did make the cut in the people who have preexisting medical conditions because I do have severe asthma. [I’ve] been treated for [it] since I was a teenager. I take three different medications a day for that. I went online and it took me about a week. I was able to get my vaccine in Utica, which is about an hour and a half outside of Albany.

TBR: Have you seen County Executive Steve Bellone’s (D) report and recommendations about policing?

Gaughran: I have not read the report. I have seen some news accounts of it. I believe that this whole process is a very healthy process … Having some very difficult conversations, I think that’s good. On the issue of bodycams, I voted to require bodycams for all members of the New York State police … Many police officers said to me that they like wearing them as well, it gives them protection as to what the events were that took place to the extent that the bodycam is able to show that it’s obviously an important tool

TBR: How do you think education will look this fall?

Gaughran: I fully expect us to have everybody back in the classroom in the fall.

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Joel Hurowitz

By Daniel Dunaief

February 18th marked an end and a beginning.

On that day, the Mars Perseverance rover descended through the atmosphere with considerable fanfare back on Earth. Using some of the 23 cameras on Perseverance, engineers took pictures and videos of the landing.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration not only shared the video of the rover descending into the Jezero crater which held water and, perhaps, life three billion years ago, but also offered a view of the elated engineers who had spent years planning this mission.

 

In a calm, but excited voice, a female narrator counted down the height and speed of the rover, which weighs about a ton on Earth and closer to 800 pounds in the lower gravity of Mars. The NASA video showed staff jumping out of their seats, cheering for the achievement.

Launched from Cape Canaveral, the rover took 233 days to reach Mars, which is about the gestation period for a chimpanzee.

Some of the engineers “who got us there have reached the end of their marathon,” said Joel Hurowitz, Associate Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook University and Deputy Principal Investigator for one of the seven scientific instruments aboard the Perseverance. 

With ongoing support from other engineers who helped design and build the rover, the scientists “get the keys to the vehicle and we get to start using these things.”

Indeed, Hurowitz and Scott McLennan, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook University are part of teams of scientists who will gather information to answer basic questions about Mars, from whether life existed, to searching for evidence of ancient habitable environments, to seeking evidence about the changing environment.

Both Stony Brook scientists were riveted by the recordings of the landing.

Scott McLennan

Hurowitz marveled at the cloud of dust that formed as the rover approached the surface.“You could see these chunks of rock flying back up at the sky crane cameras,” he said. “I was amazed at the amount of debris that was kicked up in the landing process.”

Hurowitz had seen pieces of rock on top of the Curiosity rover after it landed, but he felt he understood more about the process from the new video. “To see it happening, I realized how violent that final stage of the landing is,” he said.

McLennan said this has been his sixth Mars mission and he “never tires of it. It’s always exciting, especially when there is a landing involved.”

Like Hurowitz, who earned his PhD in McLennan’s lab at Stony Brook, McLennan was impressed by the dust cloud. “I understood that a lot of dust and surface debris was displaced, but it was quite remarkable to see the rover disappear into the dust for a short while,” he wrote in an email.

While previous missions and orbiting satellites have provided plenty of information about Mars, the Perseverance has the potential to beam pictures and detailed analysis of the elements inside rocks.

Hurowitz, who helped build the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, or PIXL, said the team, led by Abigail Allwood at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has conducted its first successful instrument check, which involves turning everything on and making sure it works. Around April, the PIXL team will start collecting its first scientific data.

In addition to searching for evidence of previous life on Mars, Hurowitz will test a model for climate variation.

The SuperCam on the Perseverance Rover. Photo by Gregory M. Waigand

From measurements of the chemistry and mineralogy of sedimentary rock, the scientists can deduce whether the rocks formed in an environment that was oxygen-rich or oxygen-poor. Additionally, they can make inferences about temperature conditions based on their chemical compositions.

Looking at variations in each layer, they can see whether Mars cycled back and forth between cold and warm climates.

Warmer periods could have lasted for hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of years, depending on how much greenhouse gas was injected at any time, Hurowitz explained. “Whether this is long enough to enable biological development is probably one of the great questions in the field of pre-biotic chemistry,” he said.

The Martian atmosphere could have had dramatic swings between warm and oxygen-poor conditions and cold and oxygen-rich conditions. “This has not really been predicted before and provides a hypothesis we can test with the rover payload for how climate might have varied on Mars,” he added.

Tempering the expectation of confirming the existence of life, Hurowitz said he would be “shocked if we woke one morning and a picture in the rover image downlink [included] a fossil,” he said. “It’s going to take time for us to build up our understanding of the geology of the site well enough.” The process could take months or even years.

Using information from orbiters, scientists have seen minerals in the Jezero crater that are only found when water and rock interact.

With the 11-minute time lag between when a signal from Earth reaches Perseverance, Hurowitz said scientific teams send daily codes up to the rover and its instrument. Hurowitz will be involved in uploading the signals for PIXL.

A Martian day is 40 minutes longer than the Earth day, which is why the Matt Damon movie “The Martian” used the word “sol,” which represents the time between sunrises on Mars.

McLennan, who works on three teams, said PIXL and the SuperCam provide complementary skill sets. With its laser, the SuperCam can measure the chemical composition of rocks at under seven meters away. Up close, PIXL can measure sub millimeter spot sizes for chemistry.

SuperCam will then find areas of interest, enabling PIXL to focus on a postage-stamp sized area.

As a member of the Returned Sample Science Working Group, McLennan, who is a specialist in studying the chemical composition of sedimentary rocks, helps choose which rocks to collect and set aside to bring back to Earth. The rocks could return on a mission some time in the 2030s.

The scientists will collect up to 43 samples, including some that are completely empty. The empty tubes will monitor the history of contamination that the other rock samples experienced. 

For McLennan, the involvement of his former student is especially rewarding. Hurowitz “didn’t just help build the instrument, he’s one of the leaders,” McLennan said. “That’s really fabulous.”

For Hurowitz, any data that supports or refutes the idea about the potential presence of life on Mars is encouraging.

He is “cautiously optimistic” about finding evidence of past life on Mars. “We’ve done everything we can as a scientific community to maximize the chance that we’ve landed some place that might preserve signs of life.”

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U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm joined scientists from DOE national laboratories for a round table conversation on COVID-19 on March 4. Photo from the Department of Energy.

By Daniel Dunaief

Jennifer Granholm, the new secretary of the Department of Energy, is pleased with the role the 17 national laboratories has played in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic over the last year and is hopeful research from these facilities will aid in the response to any future potential pandemics.

There are “70,000 people who are spread out across America solving problems,” Granholm said in a recent press conference that highlighted the effort and achievement of labs that redirected their resources to tackle the public health threat. 

The DOE is “the solutions department” and has “some of the greatest problem solvers.”

“It is super exciting to talk about this particular issue, the issue of the day, the COVID, and what the lab has been doing about it,” she added.

Granholm, who was confirmed by a Senate vote of 64-35 and was sworn in as secretary on February 25th, had previously been the Attorney General in Michigan and was the first female governor of Michigan, serving two terms from 2003 to 2011.

The press conference included three research leaders from national labs across the country, including Kerstin Kleese van Dam, Director of the Computational Science Initiative at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton.

Kleese van Dam was the BNL lead for one of the five DOE teams that tackled some of the scientific challenges caused by the virus. She led the effort to inform therapeutics related to COVID-19.

The other four teams involved manufacturing issues, testing, virus fate and transport, which includes airflow monitoring, and epidemiology.

The public discussion was intended to give people a look at some of the “amazing work that you all are doing,” Granholm said.

The Department of Energy formed the National Virtual Biotechnology Laboratory, or NVBL, to benefit from DOE user facilities, such as the light and neutron sources, nanoscience centers, sequencing, and high-performance computer facilities to respond to the threat posed by COVID-19.

Funding for NVBL enabled BNL scientists to pivot from what they were doing to address the challenge created by the pandemic, John Hill, Director of the National Synchrotron Light Source II, explained in an email.

BNL had been constructing a new facility, called the Laboratory for Biomolecular Structures, prior to the pandemic. The public health threat created by the virus, however, accelerated the time table by two months for the completion of the structure. 

The lab has new cryo-electron microscopes that allow scientists to study complex proteins and the architecture of cells and tissues. The cryo-EM facility contributed to work on the “envelope” protein for the SARS-CoV2 virus, which causes COVID-19.

“We at BNL built a new facility which gives further capabilities to look at the virus during the pandemic,” Kleese van Dam said during the press conference. The lab prepared the facility “as quickly as possible so we could help in the effort.”

Kleese van Dam said the three light sources around the country, including the National Synchrotron Light Source II at BNL, have been working throughout the crisis with the pharmaceutical industry, helping them “refine and improve their medications.”

Indeed, Pfizer scientists used the NSLS-II facility to research certain structural properties of their vaccine. At the same time, researchers have worked on a number of promising antivirals, none of which has yet made it into clinical use.

The national laboratories, including BNL, immediately tackled some of the basic and most important questions about the virus soon after the shutdown last spring.

“There was a period last year, in the depths of the first lockdown in New York, when [the National Synchrotron Lightsource-II] was only open to COVID research,” Hill wrote in an email. “That was done both by BNL scientists and others working with our facility remotely. All other research was on hold.”

The facility reopened to other experiments in May for remote experiments, Hill continued.

Kleese van Dan explained that other projects also had delays.

“These [delays] were up front discussed with collaborators and funders and all whole heartedly supported our shift in research,” said Kleese van Dam. “Many of them joined us in this work.”

Hill said the NSLS-II continues to work on COVID-19 and that much of the work the lab has conducted will be useful in future pandemics. “We are also exploring ways to maintain preparedness going forward,” he continued.

BNL is collaborating with other groups, including private companies, to enable a robust and rapid response to future threats.

“BNL is part of a multi-lab consortium  — ATOM (Accelerating Therapeutics for Opportunities in Medicine) — that aims to pursue the therapeutics work in collaboration with other agencies, foundations and industry,” Kleese van Dam wrote in an email.

In response to a question from Granholm about the safety of schools and the study of airflow, Kleese van Dam explained that national labs like BNL regularly study the way aerosols move in various spaces.

“As a national lab, we study pollution and smoke and things like that,” Kleese van Dam said during the press conference.

The lab tested the virus in the same way, exploring how particles move to understand infections.

“When we think about this, we think about how air moves through small and confined spaces,” Kleese van Dam said. “What I breathe out will be all around you. If we were outside, the air I’m breathing out is mixed with clean and healthy air. The load of the virus particles that arrive are much smaller.”

Using that knowledge, BNL and other national laboratories did quite a few studies, including exploring the effect of using masks on the viral load.

People at numerous labs used computer simulations and practical tests to get a clearer picture of how to reduce the virus load in the air.

Granholm pledged to help share information about minimizing the spread of the virus.

“We’re going to continue to focus on getting the word out,” Granholm said. The labs are doing “great work” and the administration hopes to “make the best use of it.”

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Photo by Pexels

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

I would like to cancel some things from my past and my own life. Here are some things I’d put on my cancel list:

Self doubt: Movies (remember when we used to go out to movies, pay way too much money for popcorn, candy and enjoy previews for upcoming films that looked better than the one we were about to watch?) often encourage us to overcome self doubt. What if we never had those doubts in the first place? We might become arrogant and insufferable, but we also might truly become our own versions of “The Little Engine that Could.” Wait, that hasn’t been canceled, has it? Well, if it has, I’m going to ignore the latest cultural eraser.

Self stuffing: When self doubt crept into our minds, how often did we reach for the kind of comfort food that just didn’t do us any favors? Sure, those cupcakes, cookies and sugar cereal might have tasted good in the moment, but was the momentary satisfaction really worth it? Did the eight vitamins and four minerals do us any good? Let’s cancel that urge and impulse, making it impossible to continue unfortunate patterns.

Self loathing: I admit that the self loathing that has crept in at times in my life has helped me get off the couch and do some sit-ups and push-ups, has driven me to be more productive and has put me on more of the “right track,” to borrow from that Little Engine. Still, maybe all that energy would have been more effective if I used it earlier.

The 2004 Red Sox: Yeah, I know you can’t cancel a team or sports history, but that would be one of the first teams I’d erase from my memory. The Yankees were winning 3-0 in the series and no team had ever come back from such a deficit, plus we had the curse of the Bambino. None of that mattered, as the Sawx not only took the next four games, but then went on to win the World Series. Blech! Now I know how all those New Englanders felt about Bucky Dent, which probably stings a lot less. Bucky Dent is like trying to tease your younger brother with something that makes him smile even more broadly than you do.

Mirrors: We should cancel mirrors. After all, they keep showing how much older and more exhausted we’re getting. Sometimes, like when we conquer the self stuffing and the self doubt, we see the version of ourselves we’d like to be. Other times, though, the mirror tells us, albeit in a backwards way, that we aren’t who we’d like to be and that we need to climb back onto that train car to get to our desired destination.

Report cards: Students, parents and teachers can’t win. If a teacher gives everyone A’s, the teacher will be popular, but the students probably wouldn’t learn as much as they could or should. The teacher who has more of a bell-shaped distribution of grades may reflect the reality of the class as a whole, but he or she may put someone who belongs on the right side of the curve on the left and vice versa. Let’s cancel report cards and let the students prove what they know in some other way. The great thing about this version of cancel culture is that it doesn’t require me to replace it with something that works. 

Bad parenting: We’ve had moments when we have the right intention, but the wrong result. Let’s cancel those unfortunate parenting errors. If kids can get a do-over on the playground, we should get to cancel one or two of our mistakes.

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A rendering of Beelzebufo, a mammoth-sized ancient frog discovered in 2008 by David Krause of Stony Brook University, by Luci Betti-Nash
Luci Betti-Nash drawing warblers
A rendering of Rahonavis, a bird-like feathered dinosaur discovered in Madagascar
Trans Saharan Seaway
Vintana sertichi reconstruction

By Daniel Dunaief

It started over four decades ago, with a “help wanted” advertisement.

Luci Betti-Nash needed money for art supplies. She answered an ad from the Stony Brook University Department of Anatomical Sciences that sought artists who could draw bones. She found the work interesting and realized that she could “do it fairly easily. I could not have imagined a more fulfilling career.”

Betti-Nash spent 41 years responding to requests to provide illustrations for a wide range of scientific papers, contributing images that became a part of charts and graphs and drawing everything from single-celled organisms to dinosaurs. She retired last April.

Her coworkers at Stony Brook, many of whom collaborated with her for decades, appreciated her contributions and her passion and precision for her job.

Maureen O’Leary, Professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences, said Betti-Nash’s work enhanced her professional efforts. “I couldn’t have had the same career without her,” O’Leary wrote in an email. “Artists are true partners.”

O’Leary appreciated how Betti-Nash noticed parts of the work that scientists miss. 

“I think the most important thing is figuring out together what to put in and what to leave out of a figure,” O’Leary explained. “A photograph shows everything and it can be a blizzard of detail, really too much, and it will not focus the eye. The artist-scientist collaboration is about simplifying the detail to show what is important and how to show it clearly.”

One of O’Leary’s favorite illustrations from Betti-Nash was a pull-out, color figure that envisioned the ancient Trans-Saharan Seaway from about 75 million years ago. The shallow sea, which was described in the movie “Aquaman,” supported numerous species that are currently extinct. Betti-Nash created a figure that showed these creatures in the sea and how water drained from nearby mountains, all superimposed over the geology.

“It told the story of how ancient life turned into rocks and fossils,” O’Leary explained.

Betti-Nash, who continues to sketch from her home office and plans to be selective about taking on future assignments, has numerous stories to tell about her work.

For starters, the world of science is rife with jargon. When she was starting out, she didn’t always stop researchers who tossed around the terms that populate their life as if they were a part of everyone’s vocabulary.

“Some [scientists] would come in and assume you knew exactly what they were talking about,” Betti-Nash said. “It was something they were studying for years. They would assume you knew all the terminology.”

Each discipline, from cell biology to gross anatomy to dinosaur taxonomy had its own terminology, some of which “was way over my head,” she said. 

Early in her career, Betti-Nash felt she didn’t know details she thought she should.

“The older I got, the bolder I got about asking” scientists to explain what they meant in terms she could understand, she said, adding that she felt fortunate to have scientists who were “more than willing and eager to answer my questions when I was bold enough to ask. That was one of the many life lessons I learned … don’t be afraid to ask questions.”

Betti-Nash sometimes had to work under intense time pressure. Collaborating with David Krause, who was at Stony Brook and is now Senior Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Denver Museum of Science, Betti-Nash illustrated the largest frog ever discovered, which lived in Madagascar over 65 million years ago. Called the Beelzebufo, this frog weighed in at a hefty 10 pounds and was 16 inches. Ribbit!

A short time before going to press, the scientific team decided they needed a common object as a frame of reference to compare the size of this ancient amphibian and the largest living frog in Madagascar.

“We scrambled,” Betti-Nash recalled. “We decided on a pencil.” 

She didn’t have time to draw the pencil, so she put it on her scanner, did some quick painting in Photoshop, put a shadow in, added it to the scan of the painting, saved it in the format required for the journal and sent it off.

“Adding the pencil was one of those typical strokes of genius that [Betti-Nash] routinely added to artwork,” explained Krause in an email. “Everyone knows the size of a number 2 pencil.”

Even though she hadn’t sculpted in 32 years, she had to create a sculpture of the frog that students could touch. The sculpture had to be non-toxic, dry and ready within three days.

Betti-Nash turned to the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, asking for help with ideas for the materials. She also asked Joseph Groenke from Krause’s lab to contribute his fossil preparing experience. She used an epoxy clay that she massaged into shape, and then colored it with acrylic, non-toxic paints.

That sculpture was featured as a part of a display at Stony Brook Hospital for years and has since traveled with Krause to Denver where “kids especially love it, in part because it is touchable,” Krause wrote.

Krause was grateful for a partnership with Betti-Nash that spanned almost 40 years.

“There is no doubt in my mind that [Betti-Nash] made me a better scientist and there is also no doubt that my science is better” because of her, he explained. Krause described her stipple drawings as “incredibly painstaking to execute.” His favorite is of a large fossil crocodile found in Madagascar from the Late Cretaceous called Mahajangasuchus. 

Betti-Nash urges artists considering entering the field of scientific illustrating to attend graduate school or even to take undergraduate courses, which would provide time to learn skills and terminology before working in the field.

She also suggests artists remain “interested in what you’re drawing at that moment, no matter what it is,” she said, adding that drawing skills provide a solid foundation for a career in science illustrating. Computer skills, which help with animation and videos, are good tools to learn as well.

Growing up in Eastchester, Betti-Nash often found herself doodling patterns in her notebooks. When she worked on graph paper, she colored in the squares. She also received artistic guidance from her father, the late John Betti.

A graphic designer, Betti worked for a company in Westchester, where he designed the town seal for Tuckahoe as well as the small airplane wings children used to get when they flew on planes.

During World War II, Betti, who grew up in Corona, Queens, used his artistic skills to create three-dimensional models from aerial photographs. Stationed close to the residence of his extended family in Italy during part of the war, Betti also created watercolor paintings of the Italian landscape.

When she was growing up, Betti-Nash had the “best model-making teacher in my dad,” who taught her to create paper maché.

Married to fellow illustrator Stephen Nash, Betti-Nash plans to remain active as an artist, doing her own illustrations involving nature and the relationship between birds and the environment. 

She currently leads Second Saturday Bird Walks at Avalon Nature Preserve in Stony Brook and Frank Melville Memorial Park in Setauket through the Four Harbors Audubon Society (4HAS.org)

Betti-Nash is pleased with a career that all started with a response to an ad in the paper. “I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to work as a scientific illustrator,” she said. “I hope I was able to help communicate the science behind the discoveries that the amazing scientists at Stony Brook made during my time there.”

All photos courtesy of Luci Betti-Nash

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