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Professor Helen Benveniste. File photo from SBU

Sleeping doesn’t just provide a break from the daily grind, prevent you from chowing down on more Oreo cookies, or keep you out of trouble when it gets dark. It may also serve an important brain-cleaning function, getting rid of tau and beta amyloid proteins.

Merely shutting your eyes and letting the sandman sprinkle dust on your forehead may not be enough. You might actually help your brain, over the long term, with the way you sleep.

Helene Benveniste, a professor of anesthesiology and radiology and vice chair for research in the Department of Anesthesiology at Stony Brook University, recently conducted research on anesthetized rodents, tracking how the glymphatic system worked in various sleep positions. The animals were better at flushing tau and beta amyloid proteins from their brains when they slept laterally, or on their sides, than when they slept on their stomachs. Resting on their backs wasn’t as efficient as sleeping on their sides, although it was better than face down.

These proteins aren’t just a part of everyday maintenance. They likely play a role in the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and other age-related neurological problems, Benveniste said.

Since Benveniste published her study in the Journal of Neuroscience in early August, she has received a flood of emails from around the world, including from Brazil, France and Colombia, with people asking about various sleep positions and neurological disorders.

The Stony Brook professor said it is too soon after this study to come to any conclusions about sleep or preventing cognitive disorders. For starters, she and a research team that included scientists at the University of Rochester, NYU Langone Medical Center and Stony Brook conducted the studies on animal models, rather than on humans.

“In general, the rodent is a pretty good model for core aspects of human brain function,” said Dennis Choi, the chairman of the Neurology Department at Stony Brook. The specifics, however, can differ from one species to another. As a result, Benveniste said, “I don’t think anybody should panic” about the way he or she sleeps.

Scientists know that in the glymphatic pathway, cerebrospinal fluid moves through the brain and exchanges with interstitial fluid to get rid of waste. In the studies with rodents, the face down position seemed to divert the cerebrospinal fluid away from the brain, Benveniste said.

The research could be another step toward understanding how sleep might help with the human glymphatic system.

An anesthesiologist who does clinical work one day a week, Benveniste said she started thinking about conducting this kind of study a few years ago. Benveniste is a “good example of a physician/scientist,” Choi said.

Two years ago, a study by a co-author on the paper, Maiken Nedergaard from the University of Rochester, showed that sleep or general anesthesia enhances the clearance of waste from the brain of rodents.

“Since I am an anesthesiologist, I immediately thought about how body/head positions during anesthesia might affect clearance,” Benveniste said. The data took over a year and a half to collect and analyze.

“The quantitative aspect of this system should not be overlooked. To find out how these [proteins] are moving through the brain is a huge issue,” she said. The collaboration with Jean Logan, senior research scientist in the Department of Radiology at NYU “enabled us to move forward.”

Benveniste used a dynamic contrast MRI method to calculate the exchange rates between the cerebrospinal fluid and the interstitial fluid. The next step in these studies is to move toward the human brain. Benveniste said she is working with colleagues at the National Institutes of Health.

Just from observing wildlife outside the lab, Benveniste said many animals tend to sleep in what she and her team found was the optimum position for clearing waste in rodents: on their sides. “Even elephants lie down in recumbent, lateral positions,” she added.

As for Benveniste, she said she naturally sleeps on her right side. She said she’s well aware of how well she slept during the night. If she wakes up after getting enough rest, she said she thinks, “this was a good night’s sleep. This was good for my brain.”

Benveniste, who lives in Northport with her husband, Peter Huttemeier, is also an advocate of exercise for brain health, although she doesn’t suggest marathon running. “I do think this may be affecting the cerebrospinal fluid flow dynamics,” she said, adding that she wants to take up yoga.

Benveniste is eager to continue to build on this sleep study. “The workings of this system so far has been an amazing exploratory adventure,” she said.

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Paul Friley and James Forward serve meals to the homeless as a part of a group called the Rogue Saints. Photo from Friley

Paul Friley traveled the world when he was young. His family moved from Tokyo to Hong Kong to London to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, changing countries whenever his father, Charles, who worked for Phillips Petroleum and later for North American Coal, got a new assignment.

He absorbed quite a bit about his father’s life and work from listening to discussions about energy at home. “The conversations at Thanksgiving dinners were useful later in life,” Friley said.

Indeed, Friley now works for Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he is the leader of the Energy Policy and Technology Group. He regularly travels to Korea, Taiwan and India. He has also visited Hong Kong, Mexico, Columbia, the Philippines, Sweden, Italy, Japan, South Africa and France.

He shares the analytical work he and his team do with a range of energy projects, from coal sequestration to solar power to wind turbines. The job, he said, is rewarding not only in collecting information but in helping to share it with decision makers.

“We’re over there trying to improve their capacity to do all the analysis,” Friley said. He speaks with people from different ministries, including some in nonprofits and academia, to “figure out where we can make a difference.”

J. Patrick Looney, the chair of the Sustainable Energy Technologies Department at BNL, explained that Friley’s analysis “provides decision makers with insights on the options available” as they explore energy policy decisions.

Friley, who reports to Looney, is “known for his work on the impacts of federal funding on our energy future,” Looney continued.

Friley specifically works on a USAID project called Enhancing Capacity for Low Emission Development Strategies. In this program, USAID, the State Department and other agencies work with partner countries to develop knowledge, tools and analyses to estimate greenhouse gas emissions and identify and put into use ways to grow while minimizing emissions.

Friley spent the last year working with about 100 other energy professionals, including some from five other national laboratories, on the 2015 “Quadrennial Technology Review” (QTR). Due for release this month, the review will be over 500 pages, with a lengthy appendix. It will analyze the state of technology and will suggest areas where the Department of Energy should focus its research and development.

The review “will detail where we are and where we can go,” Friley explained. It will examine technologies ranging from power generation and smart grids to buildings, manufacturing, clean fuels production and transportation.

Looney described the QTR as playing “an important and growing role in setting priorities for federal investments to catalyze the development of advanced, scalable, clean energy technologies.”

Looney said the QTR can and does have wide-ranging implications in the world of energy policy and decisions.

“To be a part of something that touches so many and has such importance to U.S. energy policy is really an honor,” Looney said.

Officials in Congress, the Department of Energy and Department of State can “use it as a guide book,” Friley said. “It’s written as a document that any layperson could read and understand” and will be available online. Once the review is published, Friley, who currently works in Washington, D.C., will return as a full-time employee of BNL.

He said his work involves looking at policy and technology impacts relative to a baseline projection. He recognizes the many unknowns in
his work.

“Weather patterns, recessions, booming economic growth, wars, hurricanes and many other factors … are not predictable over a 40- to 50-year time frame,” he explained.

He runs a model in which he sees how much of a reduction in consumer bills people would see if the country can hit its goals at cost and performance, he said.

Friley is married to Kate Miller, an independent life coach. The couple have a six-year-old daughter, Lilly, and a three-year-old daughter, Ivy.

When he’s not analyzing energy alternatives, Friley works with a group called the Rogue Saints, which cooks meals once or twice a month for the homeless. It also is looking to provide meals for veterans every three months.

As for his work, he said he tries to “present an unbiased projection of the potential impacts of potential energy policy or technology improvements.”

Looney said Friley’s work “helps us all understand better our potential energy futures, and the inevitable myriad trade-offs we have to consider.”

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Barbara Chapman on the side of a pyramid during her trip to Egypt. Photo from Chapman

If the smartest people in the world gathered in a room, they might struggle to collaborate. An Australian astrophysicist might have a different way of solving problems from the Spanish sociologist. That doesn’t even address language barriers.

Similar principles hold true for the world’s best super computers. While each may have an ability to perform numerous calculations, gather information, and extrapolate from patterns too complicated to discover with a pencil and paper, they can be limited in their ability to work together efficiently.

That’s where a leader in the field of parallel computing comes in. Barbara Chapman, who has been at the University of Houston since 1999, has taught rising stars in the field, written textbooks and enabled the combination of supercomputers to become more than the proverbial sum of their parts.

And, this week, she is bringing her talents to Long Island, where she’s starting the next step in her career as a professor of Applied Math and Statistics, and Computer Science at Stony Brook, as part of the Institute for Advanced Computational Science and as an affiliate at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Calling Chapman a “pioneer in the world of parallel computing,” Sunita Chandrasekaran, who was a post-doctoral researcher in Chapman’s lab, predicted Chapman would “attract top graduate students from across the globe. Many students would love to do research under Chapman’s supervision.”

Lei Huang, an assistant professor in the computer science department at Prairie View A&M University in Texas, considers Chapman his “mentor,” and said she is “always patient with students,” making her a “valuable asset” to Stony Brook. Huang, who did his Ph.D. and worked as a post doc in Chapman’s lab, added that she proposed and implemented innovative language features to improve performance and productivity of programming on supercomputers.

Chapman, who grew up in New Zealand, said she left the more temperate region of Houston driven, in part, by the intelligence and personality of Robert J. Harrison, Stony Brook’s director for the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. Additionally, Chapman sees opportunities to work with local collaborators.

Chapman works to make it easier for scientists and other users to get computers to solve their problems and gain insights from massive amounts of data. She strives to get high-powered computers to work together efficiently.

Scientists need to give computers a way of telling the cores how to interact and collaborate. Dividing up the work and ensuring that these computers share data are among the challenges of her role.

The new Stony Brook scientist helped develop OpenMP, which can be used to program multicores and is an industry standard used in cell phones, among other things.

President Obama unveiled plans to build an exascale computer, which might be capable of performing a billion billion operations per second. Building this computer will have numerous challenges, including hardware, power, memory, data movement, resilience and programming.

Chandrasekaran, who recently joined the University of Delaware as an assistant professor, said software programming needs to be more intuitive, portable across platforms and adaptable without any compromise in performance. Chapman, she said, is a leader in these fields, bringing together national laboratories, vendors and academia.

As a part of a group of researchers asked to identify opportunities for collaborations between the United States and Egypt, Chapman also journeyed to Egypt. While it was a “wonderful experience,” Chapman said the efforts were put on hold indefinitely after the revolution.

Applications that exploit supercomputers range from astrophysics to the automotive industry to analyzing old texts, to determine if the works of classical scholars were written or translated by the same person, Chapman said.

Chapman and her colleagues work to design features to support the next generation of computers. In the next few years, Chapman expects computers to have more complex memory, while the cores will be more heterogeneous.

At the same time, hardware manufacturers are focused on green computing, enabling the same computing power while using less energy.

Chapman enjoys working in an academic setting, where she can inspire the next generation of computer scientists. She will start teaching at Stony Brook in 2016.

While Chapman’s work centers around helping computers get the most from their collaborations, she also believes the workforce would benefit from attracting, training and supporting people from a broader range of backgrounds, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and women.

“If we had a much more diverse group of people, how would our use of computers change?” she asks. “Would we find other uses of computers?”

Chapman is encouraged that her concern about diversity is a matter numerous people in Washington are discussing. “I chaired a small study on this last year for the Department of Energy,” she said. “There’s a lot of buy-in to the notion that it’s important to change that.”

Chapman said an early experience working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ignited her interest in computer science. She worked with people who were exploring what happens when a spacecraft re-enters Earth’s atmosphere. They were designing materials that are better able to withstand the heat and speed of returning to Earth.

“People can use machines for finding out what’s going on in the universe in the big picture,” she said. “That got me hooked.”

This version corrects the title of Sunita Chandrasekaran.

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Professor Allen Tannenbaum. Photo from Stony Brook University

It’s a dangerous enemy that often turns deadly. Worse than its potentially lethal nature, however, cancer has an ability to work around any roadblocks scientists and doctors put in its path, rendering some solutions that bring hope ineffective.

Researchers around the world are eagerly searching for ways to stay one, two or three moves ahead of cancer, anticipating how the many forms of this disease take medicine’s best shot and then go back to the business of jeopardizing human health.

Allen Tannenbaum, a professor of computer science and applied mathematics and statistics at Stony Brook University, has added a field called graph theory to some of the tools he knows well from his work in medical imaging and computer vision.

A normal, healthy cell is like a factory, with genes sending signals through proteins, enzymes and catalysts, moving reactions forward or stopping them, and the genetic machinery indicating when and how hard the parts should work.

Cancer, however, is like a hostile takeover of that factory, producing the factory equivalent of M16s that damage the cell and the individual instead of baby toys, Tannebaum suggested.

By analyzing how proteins or transcription networks interact, Tannenbaum and his colleagues can develop a model for the so-called curvature of interactions.

Looking at the interactions among parts of the genetic factory, Tannenbaum can determine and quantify the parts of the cell that are following cancer commands, rather than doing their original task.

Curvature isn’t so much a bending of a physical space as it is a change in the way the different proteins or transcription factors function in the discrete networks Tannenbaum uses in cancer and biology.

“The parts are not doing their job the same way,” Tannenbaum said. “We can look and see graphically how different things compare.” He and his collaborators recently published their findings in the journal Scientific Reports.

Using mathematical formulas to define a range of interactions, Tannenbaum can determine how quickly a cancer or normal cell can return to its original state after a disturbance. This ability is called its robustness.

The study “brings to light a new way to understand and quantify the ability of cancer cells to adapt and develop resistance,” explained Tryphon T. Georgiou, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota, who has known Tannenbaum for over 30 years and collaborated on this study. “It also provides ways to identify potential targets for
drug development.”

Tannenbaum studied cells from six different tumor types and supplemented the study with networks that contain about 500 cancer-related genes from the Cosmic Cancer Gene Census.

In treatments for cancers, including sarcomas, researchers and doctors sometimes try to pull the plug on cancer’s energy network. This method can slow cancer down, but cancer often resumes its harmful operations.

Using models of cancer on a computer, Tannenbaum and the five graduate students and four postdoctoral fellows can run virtual experiments. He can hand off his results to biologists, who can then run tests. Once those scientists collect data, they can offer information back to Tannenbaum.

“This is a team effort,” said Tannenbaum, who works with scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Georgiou described Tannenbaum as a “brilliant scholar” and a “mathematician with unparalleled creativity,” who has been a “pioneer in many fields,” including computer vision. Indeed, a computer vision program could assist nurses in the intensive care unit on different shifts assess the level of pain from someone who might not otherwise be able to communicate it.

Georgiou called Tannenbaum’s work on cancer a “mission” and said Tannenbaum is “absolutely determined to use his remarkable skills as a mathematician and as a scientist” to defeat it.

Tannenbaum, who recently took his grandchild to a Mets win at CitiField, said coming to Stony Brook in 2013 was a homecoming, bringing him closer to his native Queens. He cited two famous graduates from Far Rockaway High School: the physicist Richard Feynman, who helped develop the atomic bomb, and Bernie Madoff.

He and his wife Rina, who is a professor in materials science and engineering at Stony Brook, live in Long Island City.

Tannenbaum hopes to continue to build on his work applying math to solving cancer.

“There’s a lot of mathematical play left and then testing the predictions in a biological/medical setting,” he said.

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Fernando Camino works on a physics problem at home with his 16-year-old daughter Amelia and 7-year-old daughter Fernanda, with his wife Patricia in the background. Photo from BNL

An ant’s hair might one day cool you off. The Saharan silver ant, which searches for food in such extreme heat that a predator, the desert lizard, often can’t pursue it, may hold the key for builders, designers and manufacturers looking to make the summer heat more bearable.

An international team led by Columbia University’s Nanfang Yu and Norman Nan Shi discovered how these ants, which are 3/8 of an inch in length, cope in temperatures that reach as high as 158 degrees Fahrenheit. To keep their body temperatures below their critical thermal maximum of 128 degrees, the ants use silver hairs to reflect visible and near-infrared light. In the mid-infrared range, they also help the ant’s body give up heat to the sky.

To help understand how these hairs might help, the Columbia researchers submitted a proposal to the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Fernando Camino helped reveal their cross-sectional structure while Matthew Sfeir measured the reflectivity of the hairs.

Camino worked with Nan Shi to get a closer look at hairs that are on the top and sides of the ant’s body. Using ion beam milling, Camino and Nan Shi found that the hair has a triangular cross section that is reflective under visible and near-infrared light, which includes the spectrum that has maximum solar radiation. The hair also serves as an anti-reflection layer in the mid-infrared region.

Without this hair, the ants would be 5 to 10 degrees hotter. The scientists reported their results in Science Express online in June. “The results of this [research] could lead to applications that could benefit society,” said Camino.

Camino said the ion beam is like the equivalent of sun blasting with a hose of water, except on a much finer level. “Once you direct the water on the dirt, it starts making a hole,” he said. “That’s what the [focused ion beam] does on a nanoscale.”

Fernando Camino views a scanning electron microscope image of a few ant hairs, which were cut using focused ion beam milling to show their triangular structure. Photo from BNL
Fernando Camino views a scanning electron microscope image of a few ant hairs, which were cut using focused ion beam milling to show their triangular structure. Photo from BNL

For uses in the field of electronics, the ion beam blasts through dense structures like silicon to see individual layers. With the Saharan silver ant hair, however, the beam required adjustments to avoid melting the hair.

“That was my contribution, to find the best parameters to achieve this purpose of exposing the structure without damaging it,” he said.

Chuck Black, the group leader in Materials Synthesis and Characterization at BNL, said the work Camino and Sfeir contributed underscores the importance of the facility.

“This project is a great example of the value of Department of Energy user facilities such as the Center for Functional Nanomaterials,” said Black, who is Camino’s boss. Black said researchers “appreciate [Camino’s] technical abilities and his interest in tackling difficult measurements.”

Camino mixes his time between helping other scientists achieve their goals and pursuing his own research.

Camino’s own research includes working on how to improve the efficiency of organic solar cells. By putting a thin layer of metal on the surface of a solar cell, researchers can create an intense electric field that has the potential to enhance the collection of solar energy.

The focused ion beam enables Camino and his colleagues to pattern this metal layer, using small holes that can focus the energy. This is an ongoing project with challenges including reducing the reflectivity of the metal.

Camino’s specialty is in plasmonics, where he is trying to find other energy applications.

A resident of Port Jefferson Station, Camino lives with his wife Patricia, their 16-year-old daughter Amelia and their 7-year-old daughter Fernanda. Camino and his wife were born in Peru and came to Long Island, sight unseen, in 1996, when Camino pursued his Ph.D in physics at Stony Brook University.

Camino’s father Josue, who was a doctor, told his son not to pursue a career in medicine because of the long professional journey. Camino started working in electrical engineering, where he developed an interest in the basic principles behind the formulas he memorized.Ironically, his physics path proved longer than it would have been in medicine.

When he told his parents he was pursuing his interest in physics, they asked what he could do when he finished studying. The answer lay in the United States. “I’m very grateful for this country for the path it gave me,” he said. “This is a great opportunity.”

As for Camino’s work, Black offered positive reviews. “[Camino] works extremely hard and tries to give time for everyone.”

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Chelsea Coenraads photo from Monica Coenraads

Chelsea Coenraads speaks through her eyes. She shows her family how much she loves them with slight changes in her expression. Her family “tries to get her to smile all the time, because her smile can make the darkest situations be okay,” said her mother, Monica Coenraads.

At 18 years old, Chelsea, who lives with her parents in Trumbull, Connecticut, has spoken only one word, when she was a toddler, “duck.” Carrying a disorder that occurs in one out of every 10,000 live female births, Chelsea has Rett Syndrome. Under constant supervision, she has no hand function, spends her days in a wheelchair and is fed through a feeding tube.

But, “she’s so much more than her laundry list of symptoms,” her mother said.

Recently, Monica Coenraads, who cofounded the Rett Syndrome Research Trust, became aware of research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Professor Nicholas Tonks and his postdoctoral student, Navasona Krishnan, published a study in the Journal of Clinical Investigation in which they inhibited an enzyme Tonks called PTP1B, for protein tyrosine phosphatase.

Tonks and Krishnan demonstrated that male mice with a disorder that comes from an X-linked mutation in a gene called MECP2 lived 75 days, compared with the typical 50 days without the inhibitor. Meanwhile, female mice stopped doing paw gestures that are a model for hand gestures often encountered in patients with Rett.

“We now have a new tool for manipulating a molecular signaling pathway which we already know is deficient in mice models of Rett Syndrome and, we believe, in human patients as well,” said David Katz, a professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine who has spent more than a decade studying Rett. Katz started collaborating with Tonks last month.

Professor Nicholas Tonks photo from CSHL
Professor Nicholas Tonks photo from CSHL

“We believe there are multiple pathways that make promising targets for drug therapy,” said Katz, who completed his Ph.D. at Stony Brook in 1981. By combining a series of treatments, scientists and doctors might be able to offer those with Rett Syndrome a drug cocktail, Katz suggested.

Tonks cautioned that the results are an encouraging step, but there is considerable work to do before this promising result can lead to a possible therapy.

“We are a long way from a treatment for the disease,” Tonks said “A lot more work needs to be done to define more precisely how inhibiting PTP1B would impact Rett patients.”

Tonks’ interest in Rett Syndrome started a few years ago, when Krishnan attended a lecture from another postdoc at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Krishnan “proposed the experiments in the first place,” Tonks said. “He is responsible for performing the studies.” Tonks credited the other co-authors on the paper for making important contributions, including Keerthi Krishnan, who gave the lecture several years ago that triggered Tonks’s interest. Keerthi and Navasona are not related.

The inhibitor used in these studies was something Tonks and his partners developed several years ago to treat diabetes and obesity at a company called CEPTYR Inc. that has since halted its operations.

As the first to purify protein tyrosine phosphatase, Tonks has generated interest in this family of about 100 proteins among other scientists.

“Before [Tonks’s] initial work, the nature of the enzymes that took phosphates off was obscure,” explained Dr. Benjamin Neel, director of the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Medical Center.

Neel, who described Tonks’ reputation as “stellar,” was a postdoc when Tonks purified the first member of this family. “When I saw that paper, I immediately decided this was going to be a major area and I needed to work on it.”

Tonks, who was born and raised in the United Kingdom, came to the United States to work with the pioneers in the signaling field, he said.

Tonks is married to Catriona Simpson, who also has a Ph.D. in biochemistry and works at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as an editor. The couple, who live in Huntington, have a 23-year old daughter, Clare, who is getting her master’s degree at Columbia University in English and History, a 19-year old son, Nicholas, who is interested in aviation management, and a 16-year old daughter, Caroline, who wants to become a ballet dancer.

Tonks expressed cautious optimism that he, Krishnan and his lab could help make a difference for the lives of people with Rett Syndrome.

Katz shared a quote from Andreas Rett, a physician from Vienna, Austria, who first recognized the disease.

“Their eyes are trying to tell me something,” Rett said. “I just don’t know what it is.” Katz said that is one of the factors that inspires him to search for effective treatments.

Those would like to learn more about Rett, or donate to research, can do so through www.rsrt.org.

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Above, Sergio Almécija sandwiches his own hand between skeletons of a chimpanzee and a human. The chimpanzee hand has evolved more than the human hand from a bone structure that predates human’s use of tools, altering the story about the evolution of the human hand. Photo by Ashley Hammond

He’s at it again.

Sergio Almécija ruffled feathers in 2013 when he looked at the femur bone of an ape that lived six million years ago and suggested that this leg bone might have been like that of a fossil ape, which upset the usual human evolution story. Almécija, who left his post as research instructor at Stony Brook University this summer and joined George Washington University in Washington D.C. as an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, recently compared the hands of humans with chimps and apes. His findings and possible conclusions have, once again, challenged some conventional wisdom.

In looking at hand bones, Almécija, working with Jeroen Smaers and William Jungers at Stony Brook, analyzed the length of thumbs compared with fingers. He discovered that human hands haven’t changed that dramatically over the last several million years, while those of chimpanzees have shown considerably more variation, with the length of their fingers getting longer relative to their thumbs. He published this research recently in the journal Nature Communications.

“The generally accepted hypothesis is that our hand proportions went through dramatic changes, starting from a chimp-like hand with long digits and relatively short thumb by means of selective pressure,” Almécija explained. This process would have started about three million years ago, when humans produced stone tools in a systematic way. Almécija’s analysis, however, suggests the most likely scenario is one in which humans changed little, with our fingers slightly shorter and thumbs slightly longer, than our ancestors, while chimps have had elongated digits to help them move around in trees.

“Humans are very good at using their hands to manipulate things and little hand evolution was necessary to allow this” because the likely starting point was “already pretty good,” he said.

This process is at odds with the usual evolutionary story of humans — who use their longer thumbs to build tools to conduct research, write about their findings and grasp and manipulate fine objects like an iPhone.

“It appears from our work that the human hand, not unlike that of a gorilla’s, is actually preserving many aspects of primitive, ancient hominoid proportions,” said Jungers, a distinguished teaching professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook.

The critical evolutionary process may not have been the development of a hand that could already create tools but rather the cognitive machinery that made it possible for early humans to create these tools.

“Rethinking the details of human evolution happens frequently when new fossils and new analytical methods appear,” Jungers explained. “It’s one of the exciting aspects of paleoanthropology and the hallmark of good science.”

In some respects, chimps have evolved more in their hands than humans.

Jungers, however, cautions that “more” doesn’t mean better. “The chimpanzee hand departs more from the primitive condition than does that of humans in overall proportions,” Jungers said. “Other details of the hand, for example, some of the wrist bones, are similar in chimpanzees and the earliest human relatives and it’s modern humans who have changed ‘more’ from the primitive carpal condition.”

To do this kind of analysis, Almécija said he collected and measured bones from existing fossils. He has also gone out on digs, where he hopes to unearth new fossils that will continue to help clarify the story of human evolution.

Indeed, years ago, Almécija had some success on a dig that helped fuel his interest in the field.

When Almécija was in college in Spain, in his first day at a site, he and his colleagues found an entire fossil ape face from a species previously unknown to science. The next year, he recalls, he spent 10 hours a day in a hot sun looking for fossils but wasn’t able to match the exciting find from that first excavation. By then, however, he was already hooked on anthropology.

Almécija and his wife Ashley Hammond, who also worked at Stony Brook, recently made the move to George Washington University together.

“We really loved being at Stony Brook,” he said. The faculty in Anatomical Sciences are “great scholars and better people.”

Almécija said he plans to continue to collaborate with those same staff members.

Jungers and Almécija are co-principal investigators on an active National Science Foundation grant. “I look forward to many more years of fruitful collaboration,” Jungers said.

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Daniel Madigan with a yellowfin tuna. Photo by Maile Madigan

When Daniel Madigan is out working, he sometimes has no access to a computer, an iPhone or email and that’s just fine by him. Instead of searching for parking spaces, waiting for traffic lights and standing in line at a grocery store, he rocks back and forth on the ocean, seeking answers to questions deep below the surface.

An NSF postdoctoral fellow at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, Madigan said the typical month he has spent over the last four years on the Pacific Ocean has given him a “sense that this is where I want to be. You see something you’ve never seen before, every time.”

He’s watched a killer whale feeding on tuna and has witnessed a school of yellowtail jack beating with their tails on a blue shark. Fin whales, killer whales and blue whales have dotted the landscape on his research trips.

Recently, Madigan completed work on a study of tuna. Knowing that the bluefin tuna has a metabolism that enables it to remain warmer in colder waters than the albacore and yellowfin tuna, Madigan explored whether the bluefin’s greater range gave it a more varied diet.

It turns out that the bluefin is more selective than its more temperature-limited tuna cousins. “We expected a broader habitat use would lead to more access to more food,” Madigan said. “That would be a straightforward benefit to the expansion they get” from being warm-bodied.

In a way, this finding also “makes sense,” he said, because fish that can “access more space can also pick the best thing to specialize in.” The bluefin can not only dive deeper but it can also travel further north to colder waters.

Bluefin tuna face considerable competition for sardines, a primary food source. Humans also consume this fish, and it is a staple of aquaculture-raised fish. Competition for sardines leads to questions about ecosystem-based management.

“When people form policies, they want to know things like, ‘If we limit the sardines in the ocean, how many metric tons of bluefin tuna will that save us?” Madigan asked. “If you can’t give those answers, it becomes more difficult to make concrete estimates.”

At this point, Madigan and other scientists are still in the recognition rather than the implementation stage, which means researchers are developing a greater awareness of the dynamic between the preferred foods for bluefin and measures such as the fish’s fertility and growth rates.

To be sure, Madigan said the population of these warmer-bodied tuna were unlikely to go into deep decline amid a drop in the number of sardines because the bluefin can feed on whatever is abundant to survive.

Still, understanding the life history of these fish with different habitat ranges can enable scientists and policy makers to recognize the complexity of interactions in the marine ecosystem, as well as any possible effect of fisheries policies.

Sardines, anchovy and herring are considered forage fish, which are used in aquaculture and are also popular with sharks, seabirds and marine mammals.

To track the fish in the study, Madigan and his colleagues collected all three types of tuna, put tags on them, sent them back in the ocean and retrieved and downloaded the information from the tags.

Heidi Dewar, a fisheries research biologist at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in California who has worked with Madigan for six years, described her colleague as an “innovator.” She praised Madigan’s work with chemical tracers to understand large-scale migrations. Madigan has used the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, to quantify the migration of bluefin tuna from west to east. His work can have a “long-term application,” she added.

Dewar agreed that working on and in the ocean provides opportunities to make new discoveries. “There is nothing like getting up close and personal with sharks, giant bluefin tuna, manta rays or opah,” Dewar described. “Unlocking the mysteries of their various adaptations either using electronic tags or by examining their physiology and morphology makes me feel like an early explorer mapping new territory.”

Madigan, who grew up in Garden City, lives in Port Jefferson with his wife Maile, who is a school administrator for a charter school in Riverhead.

Madigan said the broader goal for his research is that “these animals will still be here in 100, 200 years” and will be in “even greater numbers and surviving to even greater sizes.”

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This view, from 478,000 miles, shows that Pluto is home to huge, 11,000-foot tall mountains, most likely composed of ice and frozen methane and nitrogen. The lack of impact craters suggests that Pluto’s surface is young, probably less than 100 million years old. Courtesy of NASA/APL/SwRI

When Alan Calder was young, his father used to share the world of the planets and stars with him through telescopes in their backyard. Peter Tarr, meanwhile, drew pictures in his teenage notebooks of Saturn and Jupiter and saved enough money to travel to Africa aboard a ship with Neil Armstrong to view a solar eclipse.

This past week, Calder, Tarr, and many others who have craned their necks skyward received the first set of clear images from Pluto, a dwarf planet located more than three billion miles from Earth.

The New Horizons space probe, which the National Aeronautics and Space Administration blasted off from Earth in 2006, beamed back the first pictures of a dwarf planet that had, up until recently, been considered something of a gray, icy blob.

Traveling at the speed of light, the images took four and a half hours to reach the eager eyes of astronomers and scientists around the world. Long Islanders shared the excitement surrounding these first close-up views of a planet named, by then 11-year old Venetia Burney, more than eight decades ago.

“Our imaginations tend to fail us” when anticipating what’s around the corner or, more precisely, billions of miles away, said Frederick Walter, a professor of astronomy who specializes in stars and teaches a solar system course at Stony Brook. Pluto “doesn’t look like any of the worlds we know.”

Astronomers have zeroed in on the 11,000 foot high ice mountains, which, NASA scientists said, are likely made of a combination of ice and frozen methane and nitrogen.

The show stopper in these early images, however, was the lack of something many of them were sure would be there: impact craters. These craters are like the ones that riddle the surface of Earth’s moon and that have also affected the geology of our planet.

New Horizons captured this stunning image, on July 13, of one of Pluto’s most dominant features, the “heart.” It’s estimated to be 1,000 miles across at its widest point and rests just above the equator. The heart’s diameter is about the same distance as from Denver to Chicago. Courtesy of NASA/APL/SwRI
New Horizons captured this stunning image, on July 13, of one of Pluto’s most dominant features, the “heart.” It’s estimated to be 1,000 miles across at its widest point and rests just above the equator. The heart’s diameter is about the same distance as from Denver to Chicago. Courtesy of NASA/APL/SwRI

“Some process has been resurfacing this planet, to smooth it out and get rid of whatever craters it should have,” said Deanne Rogers, an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook. “That was a real surprise for me.”

At this point, any explanation of the process that might melt and smooth out the surface of a planet that takes 248 years to orbit the sun is speculation, Rogers added.

One such possibility is the presence of radioactive elements, researchers said.

Calder, who is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook, said he, too, is “intrigued by what seems to be the smooth surface of the planet. That implies an active geology.”

Calder’s research is in the field of star explosions. He said the images and information from Pluto wouldn’t impact his work too directly, unless scientists were able to show an interesting ratio of unexpected isotopes.

Calder said he’s looking forward to watching the textbooks change and seeing an alteration in the curriculum of classes on the solar system in light of the new images from the New Horizons satellite that are returning at such a slow pace that it will take 16 months for NASA to collect them all.

The active geology of this distant dwarf planet suggests that “even a small cold body that far out has activity on it,” Calder said.

For Tarr, a senior science writer at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, his interest in the planets date back to his teens. Traveling aboard a boat toward Africa to observe a solar eclipse, Tarr rubbed elbows with author Isaac Asimov, astronaut Armstrong, thousands of others interested in astronomy and fellow teenager Neil deGrasse Tyson, who would become an astrophysicist, author and director of the Hayden Planetarium.

For Tarr, some of the heroes of the Pluto images are the scientists who figured out, more than a decade ago, how to plot a course from Earth that would take the New Horizons spacecraft within 7,800 miles of Pluto.

“The calculation that goes into the launch is an incredible achievement,” Tarr said.

For Walter, part of the excitement of seeing these images comes from interpreting and understanding the unexpected parts of the picture.

“If you anticipated everything, you’d be doing the wrong thing,” Walter said. “Now that they’ve got these images” some of the old ideas will get “tossed out, and they’ll bring in something new” to explain the lack of craters, he added.

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Lee Michel on a Blackhawk helicopter during a training exercise in 2011. Photo by Roger Stoutenburgh

He has been to the Super Bowl, the Boston Marathon, a presidential inauguration, the Baltimore Grand Prix, the Rockefeller Tree Lighting and the ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Lee Michel is neither a politician nor an athlete: He is part of a national, first-response team, called the Radiological Assistant Program.

The program is a unit of the Department of Energy, which assists local, state and federal agencies to characterize the environment, assess the impact to the local population and support decision makers on steps to minimize the hazards of a radiological incident.

Michel is the training and outreach coordinator in Region 1 of the program. He works with partner agencies around the country to deal with everything from the discovery of radiological material that someone might have accidentally brought home from a work site to an intentional detonation of a dirty bomb.

His job is a “full soup-to-nuts response to radiological material that shouldn’t be wherever it is,” Michel said.

He trains people at facilities around the country to understand “how to detect [radiation], how to contain it, how to identify it and how to mitigate it,” Michel said.

Kathleen McIntyre, the contractor operations manager for RAP Region 1, said her group is the first on-scene emergency response team representing the Department of Energy. One of nine programs around the country, the BNL team is responsible for a region that stretches from Maine to Maryland and to the Pennsylvania-Ohio border.

In addition to sports events and conventions, the team also assists with other high-profile events. In late September, the BNL RAP team will work with other agencies during Pope Francis’s visit to the United States.

In his job, Michel often travels to ensure he’s appropriately trained so he can teach other first-responder agencies. In the last several months, he’s been to Chicago, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Boston, Connecticut and New Jersey.

These trips are necessary to create effective collaborations with local partners, said McIntyre. “Part of the thing that [Michel] does and does well is coordinate with our first-responder partners,” McIntyre said. The training and outreach ensure “if we are ever in a situation where we need to work together, this isn’t the first time we’ve met each other.”

At left, Lee Michel’s uncle, Morton Rosen, was a photographer at BNL for more than 35 years. At right, his grandfather, Isadore Rosen, was stationed at Camp Upton during WWI. Photo left from BNL Archives; right from Lee Michel
At left, Lee Michel’s uncle, Morton Rosen, was a photographer at BNL for more than 35 years. At right, his grandfather, Isadore Rosen, was stationed at Camp Upton during WWI. Photo left from BNL Archives; right from Lee Michel

While the mission hasn’t changed for the five years Michel has been in his role, the mechanisms have evolved.

“The equipment we’re using is much more sophisticated than what we had,” Michel said. “The software that runs the system or is used in conjunction with the system is much more advanced.”

Indeed, McIntyre said Michel regularly has to remain updated on the latest software and equipment, in the same way an owner of a laptop has to remain current on electronic updates.

Michel “has to be conversant with all these” systems, she said. “He has to hit the ground running. We don’t own every piece of radiological equipment out there. He needs to understand whatever he’s going to teach.”

McIntyre gives Michel “great kudos” for “rolling up his sleeves” as he tries to stay abreast of the changing technology.

In addition to training, Michel does exercises and drills with response teams, keeping the groups prepared to react to a wide range of potential radiological problems or events.

While the Radiological Assistance Program only has three full-time employees at BNL, the facility includes 26 volunteers.

Michel has been dealing with radiation for over 30 years, starting with eight years in the navy from 1981 to 1989 when he was a nuclear power operator.

Born and raised on Long Island, Michel is the third generation in his family to work at the Upton facility. His grandfather, Isadore Rosen, was stationed at Camp Upton during World War I. His uncle, Morton Rosen, took pictures for BNL for over 35 years. Michel, who lives in Holtsville, has two daughters, 26-year old Heather and 22-year old Michelle.

As for a fourth generation at BNL, Michel holds out some hope. “I would love to have one of them work here,” he said. He’s even entertained the idea of his seven-month old granddaughter Jemma one day contributing to BNL.

While the work involves traveling to high-profile events, it’s sometimes tough to soak in the atmosphere.

The 2009 inauguration involved working 14-hour shifts in single digits, McIntyre said. After their work, they come back for more assignments. These contractors and volunteers “who serve on the RAP teams are dedicated professionals.”

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