In Taiwan and Balkan countries, Arthur Grollman has seen first hand how Aristolochia, a popular ingredient in herbal remedies, can be anything but helpful.

The plant, which includes over 800 species, was a part of herbal medicine in ancient Greece and Rome, where it was used to expel the placenta. It has also been a remedy for gout, arthritis, stomach pain and female disorders. Called birthwort in herbal remedies, Aristolochia grows in temperate climates throughout the world.

“This is the most potent human carcinogen ever reported,” said Grollman, distinguished professor in pharmacological sciences at Stony Brook and the Evelyn Glick Professor of Experimental Medicine. Aristolochia causes chronic kidney disease and, over time, also causes urothelial cancers of the upper urinary tract. Symptoms of cancers of the urothelium, which lines the renal pelvis and the upper ureter, often include bleeding.

“If [a patient] comes in with bleeding, doctors can do the appropriate X-ray and see a tumor and remove the single kidney,” he said. The carcinogenic properties of the plant, however, are unlikely confined to one kidney. “What usually happens,” he said, “is anywhere from one to five years later, the other kidney develops it.”

The United States, most European countries and many Asian countries have banned importation of any Aristolochia herb. Consumer Reports put it at the top of their list of dangerous herbs sold as dietary supplements.

Grollman has been “involved in integrating much of this” research, said Francis Johnson, a professor in pharmacological sciences at Stony Brook, who has known Grollman since 1965. Grollman is a researcher who “can take a bird’s-eye view.”

In 2004, Grollman went to the Balkans with his wife Annette, where he spoke with farmers in a dialysis clinic through an interpreter about whether they took herbal remedies. The farmers insisted they hadn’t consumed them. Still, while he was there, he went to a library, where he found an article in German that indicated that horses in the area that had ingested Aristolochia weeds also had kidney problems.

Grollman traveled with one of the farmers to his farm, where he noticed Aristolochia growing in the wheat fields.

Grollman deduced later on that seeds from Aristolochia contaminated the wheat. A staple of the diet of many farmers in these villages, bread contains wheat which, in this case, also had toxic seeds. Over time, “only a few seeds was enough” to damage their kidneys since the toxin/carcinogen binds to DNA in renal and urothelial tissue and remains there for many years.

He held his first symposium on the subject in 2007. Most of the scientists believed the data, but the public had heard before about possible causes of the disease, called Balkan endemic nephropathy, that didn’t work out and remained skeptical.

One of the biggest challenges in sharing his lab’s conclusion about BEN was that the country had just gone through a civil war, which minimized cooperation among Bosnians, Serbians and Croatians. He arranged a scientific conference in each capital city, showing results of studies from their own country.

Grollman has been “very much involved in the epidemiology, the biochemistry and biology of this situation,” said Johnson. In Asia, herbal remedies that include Aristolochia have been a part of Chinese herbal medicines for 2,000 years.

Except for a few scientists, the Asian communities were “very skeptical” of the dangers of Aristolochia at first. Based on the frequency of use of this plant as a part of herbal remedies, there could be as many as 100 million people in China suffering from kidney problems, Grollman estimates.

In his own lab, Grollman discovered a genetic fingerprint in a tumor suppressor gene that shows exposure to Aristolochia. The next step, he said, is to develop a cost-effective test that will show not only who has taken it but who is at risk of developing health problems as a result.

A resident of Setauket, Grollman, who is traveling in Taiwan this week as one of the main outside speakers in a symposium on cancer in Taiwan, said he has a keen appreciation for Long Island each time he travels.

“Wherever I go in the world, when I come back, I know I’m living in a great place,” he said. That’s helped over the years because it’s “awfully easy to recruit faculty to Stony Brook.”

Some objects are like closed boxes. They have some observable properties but scientists don’t know exactly what is happening inside or why.

That’s where experimental physicists like Mark Dean and his colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory enter the picture. Dean fires X-rays with a specific energy level at copper oxide-containing materials (compounds that have copper and oxygen). To determine what’s going on inside, he sees how the X-rays change in energy and direction.

“We try to understand materials at a fairly fundamental level,” Dean said. “We think of that as a recipe that can be used for future technology.”

Copper oxide materials have magnetic properties and act as superconductors. Typical conductors have resistance, which reduces the amount of electricity received.

Superconductors, however, don’t have any resistance, which makes them potentially more efficient materials to send electricity. The catch, however, is that most superconductors require temperatures at near absolute zero — the universe’s coldest possible temperature — which makes them less practical. The energy required to cool the superconductors can be higher than the cost savings from avoiding the resistance of typical conductors.

Dean is focused on understanding the relationship between magnetism and superconductivity in these copper oxide substances.

The X-rays he fires into a material kick an electron out of the core of an atom, sending it up into a higher energy state where that electron can interact magnetically. That makes the X-rays sensitive to the magnetic properties of the material, he explained.

When a new electron replaces the one that was kicked out, it emits an X-ray photon. Dean measures the direction and energy loss of the photon in a process called resonant inelastic X-ray scattering.

Dean studies flat planes of compounds with copper and oxygen that are stacked on top of each other. These objects have superconducting properties at a relatively high temperature — about 90 Celsius degrees above absolute zero. That is still incredibly cold by human standards: about 300 degrees below zero on the Fahrenheit scale.

In the world of superconductors, that is considered “very warm,” or about a factor of 10 higher temperature than most normal superconductors, he said.

In terms of the energy trade-off between benefiting from the properties of a superconducting material and keeping that object cold enough to function, it is “becoming closer and closer to break-even,” Dean said. In five to 10 years, “we might hope to see some more areas where it’s economic” to use superconductors instead of conventional wiring.

Researchers discovered objects with copper and oxygen that had superconducting properties about 25 years ago and have been studying them extensively. To this point, they have “yet to find a satisfactory explanation of this phenomenon,” Dean said.

Dean is eager to refine the experiments when the National Synchrotron Light Source II comes online in 2015. At the NSLS-II, researchers will produce X-rays that are 10,000 times brighter than the current NSLS, enabling researchers to analyze the structure of new materials.

Chris Howard, a lecturer in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University College in London, U.K., has confidence that Dean, with whom he has collaborated since 2007, will build on his success.

Dean is “currently proving his ability with a string of important and far-reaching publications in superconductivity and materials physics,” Howard offered. He called Dean a “real doer” and observed that he “is rapidly gaining the respect of the community he works in.” Howard appreciates the combination of Dean’s technical expertise, scientific discipline, writing skills, analytical skills and experimentation abilities.

Growing up in Broadstairs, Kent, a coastal town in southeast England, Dean developed an interest in science when he was young, where nature, through insects and wildlife documentaries and trips to zoos, appealed to him.

“As I grew older, the elegance of physics is what caught me,” he said. “The idea to conceptualize something and write down a formula: it’s such a beautifully efficient way of explaining something. You can convey a spectacular amount of information if you know how to write down the formula to describe it.”

A resident of Rocky Point, Dean came to the United States immediately after earning his doctorate. He enjoys mountain biking.

As for his work, Dean said the first semiconductor transistor was made at Bell Labs without any thought for its possible connection to the computer. It was made by scientists who were working to understand the properties of semiconductors. They didn’t realize this would lead to a semiconductor-based computer.

In a similar way, he said, by studying materials with novel properties, scientists will create “opportunities to make interesting new devices.”

That self-described slow jogger who makes his way back and forth along Old Field Road five days a week — when he’s not in high-level meetings in Austria or Japan — just might be making everyone safer. That’s especially true for those people who live or work near nuclear power plants.

A condensed-matter physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Robert Bari specializes in the kinds of “what if” scenarios scientists, policymakers and government officials need to consider when building, maintaining, and running the country’s nuclear power plants.

Bari is one of 22 people on a committee studying the lessons learned from the Fukushima power plant meltdown, which occurred two years ago in March following an earthquake that triggered a deadly tsunami. The committee, created by the National Academy of Sciences, will present its findings to Congress next spring.

“I visited Fukushima last November and talked with officials from the plant, from government and with the public,” Bari said. “We had open and closed meetings as appropriate.”

A physicist at Brookhaven since 1971 (with a year at Stony Brook as a visiting professor), Bari brings his expertise in nuclear power reactor safety, security and proliferation resistance to the committee.

Recently elected as a fellow of the prestigious American Physical Society, Bari has developed a career around probabilistic risk assessment and methods for analyzing proliferation resistance. He does severe accident analysis, mainly for nuclear power plants, but also for other nuclear fuel cycle facilities. He has also performed analyses of ship safety for the Navy and electrical grid performance for the Department of Energy.

In the immediate aftermath of Fukushima, he spoke with officials at the DOE at least weekly. He contributed as a part of a briefing for the Secretary of Energy and the president’s science adviser, who attended at least two presentations.

Robert Budnitz, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, said Bari’s role on the NAS committee is well-deserved and earned.

Bari is “an analyst who is more likely than most to come up with an imaginative answer,” Budnitz added. Bari can consider a design problem and, more effectively than most, figure it out, Budnitz said.

Bari gained experience in March of 1979, after the Three Mile Island accident. He built a risk-assessment capability for other plants. He eventually led a division of 60 people who specialized in “what can go wrong in a U.S.-type facility; what are the consequences, physical parameters and human factors involved in those types of activities,” he said.

Through his career, he said he’s been involved in studying nuclear safety and nuclear reactors through a range of responsibilities, from managing large teams to serving as associate lab director and department chair.

Budnitz said nuclear power plants are safer today than they were when many of them were built in the 1970s. The reason is that there a few dozen people worldwide who have worked to improve their design. “[Bari’s] in the middle” of that group and is “one of the most respected” contributors, Budnitz said.

A decade ago, the U.S. and 12 other countries got together to discuss the design of the next set of nuclear facilities, called Generation IV reactors. The Generation IV members discussed design plans for the commercial introduction of new nuclear plants from 2015 to 2030 and beyond.

As the co-chairman of the proliferation-resistance and physical protection group, Bari is responsible for increasing the assurance that the reactors are unattractive and the least desirable route for diversion or theft of weapons-usable materials, and to provide increased physical protection against acts of terrorism.

The Generation IV discussions started before 9/11, but took on a different urgency and design component when potential terrorism became a concern.

Bari lives in Setauket with his wife, Angela Bari, who is an instructor at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Stony Brook, where she teaches courses in physics and on the history and holdings of the Metropolitan Museum. The couple have two children, Robin Sanchez, who works in a media company, and Robert Bari, who is an agent for Aflac Insurance.

As for his work, Bari recognizes that his scientific approach isn’t the typical “publish or perish” paradigm. “I like to think at the end of the day that we’re doing something that is for the public good and also creating new knowledge. I always ask myself ‘Have I created new knowledge?’”

By Daniel Dunaief

While plants don’t generally reach for a glass of milk, crouch down to stalk their prey or seek higher ground in a storm, they do respond to changes around them. They compete for sunlight, water and territory. They also have ways of turning on or off their own genes in response to stressful conditions.

Qiong Alison Liu, a principal investigator and research assistant professor at Stony Brook University, recently revealed how microRNA, which is involved in gene expression, changes in response to elevated carbon dioxide levels and higher temperatures.

These conditions are likely to continue to increase as a result of global warming.

In a research paper published in the journal Nature Communications, Liu is the “first to show greenhouse gas can function quite similarly as other stressors,” she said. “This opens up many questions.” Other greenhouse gases, like ozone, methane and nitrous oxide, could possibly have a similar impact on small RNA expression, she said.

She explored how a change of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius alters miRNA, Liu said.

While scientists have known that higher temperatures and carbon dioxide have opposite effects on plant growth, Liu showed that they have competing characteristics in miRNA.

The next step, Liu suggested, is to understand which influence is dominant.

If higher temperatures prevail, leading to photorespiration, plants may produce less biomass and become less productive. Scientists can potentially lend a hand, Liu suggested, through genetic engineering.

These altered plants can be “made to mask miRNAs effects by simply introducing mutations in miRNA target genes to block” their activity, she said.

The Stony Brook researcher cautioned, however, that such engineering, especially with economically important plant species, would need to await a better understanding of how “all the factors work together.” The information in model plants, like the Arabidopsis in Liu’s studies, could be used as a guide to study higher and more complex plants.

Liu explained that the study of miRNA is relatively new. Scientists recognized their role as biological regulators with conserved functions in the early 2000s.

The reason she took this approach relates to her indirect path to plants. From 1985 to 1987, she was enrolled in the first environmental program at Beijing University, where she studied environmental law and environmental biology and ecology.

When she worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Michael Hengartner’s lab, she conducted her research in the shadow of Barbara McClintock, a Nobel Prize winner who had occupied the same lab space at CSHL. Indeed, she saw a portrait of McClintock holding a magnifying glass observing corn on the wall next to the entrance to the lab.

“My idea that elevated carbon dioxide and elevated temperature will lead to epigenetic changes in 2007 was inspired by [McClintock’s] ‘dynamic genome’ theory,” Liu explained. McClintock’s theory gave Liu the initial confidence that there would be epigenetic responses, although there weren’t any previous reports suggesting that.

“The climate changes slowly,” said Vitaly Citovsky, a professor of biochemistry and cell biology at Stony Brook. “We want to know the effect on all different organisms, including plants. This is an important step in understanding that effect.”

Citovsky, who has known Liu for three years and provides space in his lab for her research, described her as “very dedicated” and “committed to her career.”

On Long Island, Liu feels like a part of an international community. That group includes her husband, BNL scientist Andrew Gifford, who is originally from England. The couple live in Brookhaven with their 11-year-old daughter Helena.

While Liu feels at home on Long Island, she said she “satisfies myself by eating what I like to eat,” at home with her parents in China. She is especially fond of a cold rice noodle dish.

When she’s out bicycling or walking on the beach, Liu feels as if she can see through the surface of nature.

“I can imagine, when I see the forests, trees and flowers, something on a molecular level happening to them,” she said. “I can see the secret behind” their response to changes in the environment.

She has already received several requests for her manuscript and is excited about the potential future direction of these studies.

“People are interested in looking at the [effects of] climate change,” she said. This work on microRNA “adds something new” to the research direction.

Archaeopteryx, a dinosaur the size of a turkey, has often been viewed as the Kitty Hawk of bird flight. Around 150 million years ago, this early bird changed the way dinosaurs moved around in the world, from running, climbing, slithering, leaping or swimming to soaring through the air.

This celebrated species glided above the spike-backed Stegosaurus and the long-necked Brachiosaurus of the Jurassic period.

Feathers, hollow bones and a brain capable of processing information to make flight possible all came together, distinguishing Archaeopteryx from its land-limited cousins.

And yet, recent research suggests that while this creature may have been among the first to fly, it was likely not the first to have the brain power to make flight possible.

Led by Stony Brook University research instructor Amy Balanoff, a team of scientists used CT scanners to examine the brains of older dinosaurs that are considered the distant cousins of Archaeopteryx, modern birds and Archaeopteryx itself.

While the researchers weren’t able to look at the brains themselves, they were able to study the relative size of different areas by looking at the skulls. It is like examining the outline of a hard suitcase stuffed to capacity. By looking at different compartments, scientists could see what was there and how much space it filled. In the scientists’ case, they used CT scanners to determine the volume of different brain regions.

Archaeopteryx, it seems, wasn’t alone among its contemporaries and even, in some cases, its predecessors in having a bird-like brain capable of flight.

“This feature that we thought was more restricted in its nature now needs to be expanded to include more groups,” said Balanoff, who is also a research associate in paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History.

Creatures that have an enlarged or hyperinflated forebrain, which is important in providing superior vision and the coordination necessary for flight, include oviraptorosaurs and troodontids.

This study “establishes that the evolutionary origin of the relatively large brain of Archaeopteryx was not the result of nature selecting for flight capability,” explained Gabriel Bever, an assistant professor of anatomy at the New York Institute of Technology, a co-author on the study and Balanoff’s husband. “Large brains evolved prior to flight and were simply inherited by Archaeopteryx and other early birds.”

This, Bever, continued, is an important example of evolution taking existing structures and assembling them in a way that moves the group along its evolutionary trajectory.

The forebrain is what really expanded along bird lineage, Balanoff added. That part of the brain is larger among species with stronger cognition.

“A lot of characteristics that we’ve associated with flying birds are not unique to flying birds,” she said. “They show up much earlier with nonavian dinosaurs.”

Balanoff described the finding as further evidence of a random process, rather than being directional.

She said the result wasn’t surprising, given that other bird-like features, like feathers and hollow bones, were present before Archaeopteryx. One of the first-known dinosaurs capable of powered flight, Archaeopteryx was discovered only two years after Darwin predicted in “The Origin of Species” that there should be “transitional fossils,” Balanoff said.

The latest findings were published in the journal Nature in July of this year.

Balanoff joined SBU this summer and will be one of several teachers in a gross anatomy class for medical students this fall. “Paleontologists in general are often found in anatomy departments, teaching human gross anatomy,” she said.

Balanoff and Bever met when they were at the University of Texas, when Balanoff was working on her master’s degree and Bever was conducting research for his doctorate.

Balanoff didn’t grow up in Texas with a burning desire to uncover more information about dinosaurs or dinosaur brains.

“My father [Howard Balanoff, a professor at Texas State] is a political scientist. I was thinking more along the lines of politics,” she said.

As a freshman in college at the University of Texas, however, she took a course with Timothy Rowe — a collaborator on the Nature article — and switched her major to geology.

Going forward, Balanoff plans to focus on an area of the modern bird brain called the wulst, which may have a similarity to a structure in the brain in the Archaeopteryx.

“The scientific importance of the wulst to our understanding of neurological evolution,” predicted Bever, “will eventually far outweigh its importance as a systematic character supporting Archaeopteryx as an early bird.”

The brain is like an enormous orchestra, as neurological signals from different regions work together to create a symphony of thought, emotion and behavior. When some of those signals are out of tune or come at the wrong time, the melody, and indeed the thought process, can become difficult to follow.

Pavel Osten, an associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, has helped develop ways to compare the signals from mouse brains that are functioning within the range of normal with those that have wiring or signaling problems because of mouse models of disorders like schizophrenia or autism.

“There are disorders linked to brain development that are, in a way, subtle,” he said. “There is nothing dramatically wrong with the brains of patients” on a larger scale. Autism and schizophrenia are likely caused by different wirings of brain connections, without dramatic changes, such as the cell loss in neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, Osten explained.

To understand what happens in the brains of people with schizophrenia and autism, Osten worked with TissueVision, a Cambridge, Mass., company, to develop an imaging system called serial two-photon tomography. In the past, scientists would take one to two months to image the entire brain at the same resolution that this technique can now do in a day.

It works by integrating automated images of thin parts of the brain, starting with the top. By looking at which regions of a brain are active, scientists can see how the communication among circuits may be disrupted in disease and can look at what drugs might correct these problems.

“When we got to that point, we realized that we have a really good drug-screening method,” he said. This process can map out how drugs affect different regions of the brain.

Indeed, Osten and MIT professor Sebastian Seung started a company called Certerra, which provides a rapid analysis of brain activity at different times. Based at Cold Spring Harbor, the company employs three people. Osten hopes to increase that to 10 to 15 staff members in the next few years.

Osten works one day a week at that company, named for the “territory of the brain,” while he spends the rest of a work week that often exceeds five days in his lab. Osten said tomography can reveal unexpected benefits of drugs by suggesting ways medicines affect the brain.

Many drugs used for depression were “prescribed for something else,” he said. When patients took them, however, they got better. By seeing the effect of a wide range of remedies, researchers can depend “less on serendipity. They can see the clinical effect.”

The CSHL scientist said that seeing which regions of the brain are active doesn’t necessarily reveal every cellular and molecular detail linked to a specific disorder.

“We focus on the large picture,” he explained.

Peter Seeburg, a professor in the Department of Molecular Neurobiology at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Germany, who has known Osten since 1999, described serial two-photon tomography as a “promising way to determine the brain circuitry. Whether it will allow [researchers] to see differences in schizophrenia or autism is at this point unclear.” He explained that the key to its effectiveness lies in the ability to see how the circuitry determined by tomography differed from “normal” individuals which, he contended, was still a “huge amount of work.”

Seeburg described Osten as a driven scientist with an excellent reputation and an international renown, adding, “He has a passion for medically relevant science and a nose for excellent projects.”

A scientist at CSHL for five years, Osten lives in Huntington with his wife, Julia Kuhl, a fine and graphic artist who works part-time at Cold Spring Harbor. The gallery Frosch & Portmann in New York has exhibited her work, which is available at the website www.juliakuhl.com. This year, she had a solo exhibit at the gallery.

The couple, who also have a residence on the lower East Side, enjoy viewing the countryside on Long Island and in the area from their 1967 butternut-yellow Camaro Convertible.

Osten, who grew up in Czechoslovakia, is pleased with his decision to join Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he feels the collaborations with colleagues in the neuroscience department make it a “pretty spectacular place to work.”

Coming from an international team of researchers out of Japan, physicists confirmed a small, but potentially powerful, quirk in the world of matter. If, as they believe it may, those small details don’t behave in the same way with antimatter, this finding could help explain how tables, chairs, lions and bears all exist.

They are focusing on neutrinos, which are so small that 50 billion of them pass through a finger in a second. Most neutrinos come from the sun, although scientists can produce them in a lab and shoot them underground to a detector miles away. In the case of T2K, scientists sent neutrinos 185 miles from Tokai village along the east coast of Japan to Kamioka, near the west coast of Japan.

Neutrinos come in three types: tau, muon and electron. The scientists shot muon neutrinos across Japan and expected, for the most part, to find tau neutrinos. Confirming with a much higher degree of accuracy a discovery from 2011, scientists found that 5% of those neutrinos became electron neutrinos.

“Nature was kind to us,” said Chang Kee Jung, a co-spokesman for T2K and a physics professor at Stony Brook. The oscillation to electron neutrinos “came out much earlier” than expected. So far, the scientists have only examined about 8% of the data they proposed to generate.

The next step in this long-term project is to collect considerably more data to explore on a larger scale the oscillations between muon and electron neutrinos.

Later, in Japan and elsewhere, scientists plan to conduct the same experiment with antineutrinos, to see if the transformation from one type of antineutrino to another follows the same pattern.

Like the conservation of energy, charge parity suggests the laws of physics would be the same if a particle were swapped for its antiparticle. In 1956, however, this was violated when several scientists showed that some reactions did not occur as often as their mirror images.

Scientists who work with particle physics were buzzing about the recent findings in Japan. “We at BNL are extremely thrilled at the T2K results,” offered Milind Diwan, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, who described Jung as “well recognized as a leader in our community.”

Jung marveled at the predictive ability of the science of physics. “When we observe certain things, we put all our observations and experimental data into mathematical equations,” he said. “Those equations will predict things we haven’t seen. We are almost the only science that has a predictable power using math.”

The Higgs particle, he said, was one such prediction physicists had been seeking for over 40 years. This particle provided something of an explanation for how particles with considerable energy acquired mass.

Jung expects to continue the T2K experiments for another five to 10 years.

At the same time, scientists including Diwan are working to turn the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment into a reality. The LBNE will shoot neutrinos 800 miles from the Fermilab near Chicago to a former gold mine in Lead, S.D. The experiment hopes to begin producing data in 2022.

An adventurer in his earlier years, Jung climbed mountains and went skydiving. In a physics of sports course he teaches at Stony Brook, he shows a video of himself on a tandem skydive in Florida with an instructor.

Jung also takes a close look at former Mets ace R.A. Dickey’s knuckleball, Usain Bolt’s 100-meter dash and the hang time of NBA basketball players.

An avid baseball fan who would choose the Mets over the Yankees because he loves the underdog, Jung considers himself a “hard-core Knicks fan.”

Jung is a resident of Setauket, where he lives with his wife, Vivan Piccone-Jung, who teaches Pilates and does video/film production and Web page design. The couple have three children, Daldeze, who attends Stony Brook, Wainabi, who will matriculate at SUNY New Paltz in the fall and Heoliny, who will be a ninth-grader at Murphy in September.

Jung has a picture in his office and on his website of him standing with the late Maurice Goldhaber, who was the director of BNL in the 1960s. A physicist in the generation immediately after Albert Einstein, Goldhaber visited Jung at his house on a day when it was raining. Standing in similar tan trench coats, the physicists are holding pink and red umbrellas, which they borrowed from Jung’s daughters.

“He’s willing to be silly and I have a similar spirit,” Jung said.

As for his work, Jung recognizes that there is “no guarantee” that scientists will discover CP violation when they look at antineutrinos, although he is “confident” it is there. Still, he doesn’t think he should “bet on this. I lost a few bets by betting on my New York Knicks, so my track record is not perfect.”

Eating and sleeping. Sleeping and eating. They may be linked in more than making it onto the list of life’s necessities.

Among teenagers from 13 to 18 years old, those who slept fewer than seven hours also tended to eat unhealthier foods, according to a recent study. Even further, though, those same sleep-deprived teens were less likely to have eaten a fruit and vegetable in the prior day.

“We are showing that there are patterns that vary by sleep duration,” said Lauren Hale, an associate professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University. The recommendation for teenagers is at least nine hours of sleep, she said.

The information for the study came from a survey conducted on teens in 1996 and was the second wave of a health study. In the questionnaire, teenagers were asked how many times they had eaten at a fast food restaurant in the past week. The study didn’t specifically request information on what they ate.

In this sample, 70% of the teenagers reported less than the recommended hours of sleep. Hale said even more of today’s teenagers are probably in that category as well.

By looking at a collection of data that included over 13,000 teenagers, Hale and her associates could break the information apart to seek answers to other questions, such as whether there were any differences among boys and girls.

“There was a similar pattern for both,” she concluded. “Being a regular short sleeper was associated with increased unhealthy and decreased healthy [food] choices.”

The main benefit to this study, she said, is that the sample size is so large that it allows for generalizability, she said. The data from this study are publicly available, although Hale paid for some restricted data.

“We used the best available data set for answering this question, using nationally representative data,” she said.

Hale, who is a few years older than some of the original teenagers sampled in the study (she graduated from high school in 1994), said there are some elements to this study and analysis that reflect other research.

Hale said she is interested in the determinants and consequences of sleep in the entire population. Adolescence, she continued, is an important period in which teens make their own choices. Some of the decisions teens make can set them on health trajectories that last into adulthood, she said.

Teens “are developing [and] they might not be making the best choices,” of what to eat, she said. “Kids who are sleep deprived are not making decisions that have their long run interests in mind. Maybe not all kids are interested in their long run health: they are interested in short run outcomes, like the pleasure of eating, fitting in with other kids, or [choosing] what’s easy, what’s fast and what’s cheap.”

Additionally, snacking teenagers don’t tend to raid the refrigerator for something healthy at 1 am. They are more likely to choose something gooey and sweet, she said.

Hale cautioned that the data, while compelling, doesn’t claim a causal link. The information correlates insufficient sleep with poor eating habits, but it is possible that the link could go in the other direction: poor eating habits may affect sleep. Poor eating choices and below recommended rest could also be by products of other health-related issues, including depression.

In her next study, she is planning to collect week-long sleep and physical activity data on 1,000 15-year-olds. During that week, she will be asking participants to fill out a diary about their food consumption.

Hale, who joined Stony Brook in 2005, is one of the first founding faculty members of the Program in Public Health at SBU. She is chair of the admissions committee. The Master’s in Public Health program has a class size of around 30.

Hale lives in Northport with her husband, Matt Aibel, a psychotherapist with offices in Manhattan and Stony Brook, and their two-year-old son, Isaac.

She said the couple feel like they “live in a vacation town.” They enjoy the access to water harbors, playgrounds, parks and beaches. They go to the Lewis Oliver Farm in Northport with Isaac.

She said it’s difficult for her, a sleep researcher, to overcome the fact that her son has some bedtime resistance.

As for her work, Hale said teenagers are “naturally staying up later, but they are going to schools that start earlier.”

During a walk in a past autumn, Mikala Egeblad noticed a red leaf on the ground, surrounded by green leaves.

“It was very striking,” she said. “My first thought when I saw that was, ‘if only you could see the first cancer cells, to have them stand out.’”

Egeblad’s observation stems from her research, where the assistant professor at the picturesque not-for-profit Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory dedicates her working hours to studying the tumor microenvironment (the cells and material around a tumor) for pancreatic and breast cancers.

“The cancer cell is not alone,” said Egeblad. “It needs a support network. That comes from the body’s normal cells. The tumor is hijacking [those other cells] to fit its needs. Our idea is to try to take away the support line.”

Originally from Denmark, Egeblad likened her approach to the way the Danish Resistance fought the occupying army from Germany in World War II. Recognizing that they were unlikely to defeat the Germans head on, they disrupted trains and sabotaged factories.

Similarly, Egeblad is exploring ways to prevent tumors from corrupting nearby supporting cells. She wants to block the signals the tumors send out and prevent the microenvironment from receiving those malevolent cellular instructions.

Last year, she helped discover that inhibition of a receiver for chemokines (a chemokine receptor) in the tumor microenvironment makes breast cancer more responsive to chemotherapy.

She has also looked specifically for molecules that are different between normal and hijacked cells in fibroblasts or secreted by fibroblasts. Fibroblasts are cells that help provide a structural framework for tissues by secreting fibers and other substances.

She is collaborating on this research with Scott Powers, another scientist at CSHL. Using fluorescent proteins modified from those expressed by jellyfish, she can also see how fibroblasts and immune cells move around and interact. Seeing how these cells move, or whether they stop, she said, provides insights into what they do.

In cell cultures (i.e., not in live subjects), factors she adds from bacteria can enhance the immune cell’s ability to kill tumor cells. The activated immune cells can kill 90% of the breast or pancreatic cells from advanced tumors. She is focusing on understanding why the last 10% are not killed, because she thinks this is the key to get the method to work in tumors, where it currently is ineffective.

A researcher who wants to see how cancers work, Egeblad co-developed a spinning disk confocal microscopy system in which she can observe live cancers in action in mice.

Egeblad’s collaborators praised her work and her dedication.

Calling Egeblad a “rising star in cancer research with an international reputation,” Andrew Ewald, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins, has worked with the CSHL scientist for over five years.

Egeblad came to scientific research through medicine. She was originally planning to become a doctor. As part of her medical training, she worked in a lab where she explored how things worked in relation to disease.

She decided she wanted to “understand how these diseases are developing” and wanted to try to “find new approaches to stop diseases.”

The fight against cancer is personal for Egeblad, whose grandmothers died from breast cancer and glioblastoma.

Egeblad has “chosen hard problems and understood they’d be difficult to solve,” Ewald said. “She has worked tirelessly and relentlessly to solve them anyway, with a great deal of success.”

Ewald said his collaborator has approached her work with a passion to “improve patient outcomes. The faster we can go, the more people we can help.”

A resident of Cold Spring Harbor, Egeblad lives with her long-term partner and their young daughter. Growing up in northern Copenhagen, she found some similarities to her home landscape. From the coastline of Copenhagen, residents can see Sweden. Standing on the shores of Long Island, she can view Connecticut.

As for her lab, her longer term interest is to understand the communication that goes on between cancer and normal cells.

“I want to know if communications between cancer cells and cells in the microenvironment changes the fate of the cancer cells in the long term,” she suggested. She is particularly interested in whether a tumor relapses years after an apparent cure.

Nature has become a master builder, creating shells that blend an ability to resist wearing away by salt water and predators, with a beauty that the world’s best painters regularly try to emulate.

Scientists like Elaine DiMasi at Brookhaven National Laboratory are working to understand these natural manufacturing processes that may one day play a role in future innovations.

Using the National Synchrotron Light Source at BNL, DiMasi has studied the molecular steps in the so-called biomineralization process. Biomineralization usually hardens or stiffens tissues, although it can have other applications, including some that are detrimental to health, such as kidney stones.

“The question is how much can be mimicked without being an organism,” she said, of understanding and copying the steps that produce some of nature’s most durable material. “There are a lot of people who are well-motivated and funded who are trying to figure out the trick on the chemistry end.”

DiMasi, who earned her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, has put her own research on the back burner as she works on enhancing scientists’ ability to see these steps through the planning and refinement of the NSLS-II. The new light source, which is expected to be completed in 2015, will produce X-rays that are 10,000 times brighter than its predecessor, which was built in 1982.

DiMasi said she has gone through numerous meetings where she participates in discussions about the design optics. She said she’s learning some of the details on the fly and that it’s been “a pleasure to study and learn something new.”

While working on the NSLS-II, DiMasi recently finished co-editing a handbook called “Biomineralization Sourcebook: Characterization of Biominerals and Biomimetic Materials,” which is due out next March.

“That’s a big weight off my shoulders,” she said.

DiMasi said the book’s audience could include nontechnical readers because some of the chapters in the 600-page book include history.

In one chapter, the book examines naturalist drawings that are 100 to 200 years old and compares them to photographs.

Laurie Gower, an associate professor at the University of Florida in the Materials Science and Engineering department, said she originally recruited DiMasi to co-edit the book. DiMasi, however, wound up doing more than half the work, Gower said, because of when the contributors submitted their chapters.

DiMasi is looking forward to future collaborations at the NSLS-II. One of her roles is to understand how the molecules connect in long range order to make a thread or sheath. She said her work can also explore the different chemical compositions in different places in biological materials.

“Our measurements could show what molecular material it was,” she said. “It could show that one place was harder or one place was more or less dense. We could see the chemical composition or crystal structure.”

“There are some inspirations from biomineralization already,” she said. “Bone is constantly broken up and dissolved by cells.” When people exercise, pieces of mineral break down, which “sends a signal to regurgitate new materials.”

A resident of Miller Place, DiMasi said she grew up with “National Geographic” magazines, encyclopedias and a healthy dose of curiosity.

“One time,” she said, “I got into an argument with my dad. He was speculating how the system of the eyeball worked. I went off to check a book and I overheard my dad say, ‘She’s trying to prove me wrong.’ I particularly enjoyed overhearing Mom reply, ‘and she will because you are wrong.’”

A keyboard player, songwriter and arranger, DiMasi is a member of a band called Indulgent Lucie, which mixes pop and reggae combinations. DiMasi, who plays the oboe and English horn, celebrated completing the book by taking an online music class.

Gower said DiMasi, who has a strong reputation in the world of biomineralization, has impressed her with her adventurous spirit.

“She drove across the country” with her dog, Gower said. “She’s very independent.”

As for her work, DiMasi said she’s excited by the constant struggle to understand natural processes.

“It’s one thing to mimic the shell layers of an organic material,” she said. “It’s another to know what is deposited, step by step, when an organism is growing.”