While tourists cruised along the Alaska coastline in June to see whales, sled dogs and glaciers, Carl Safina journeyed by boat through some of the state’s less-traveled regions in search of garbage.

The acclaimed author, ecologist and Stony Brook research professor joined a crew for a project called Gyre. The trip enabled participants to witness the trash that litters the shoreline, threatening wildlife.

The Gyre project, named for the rotating ocean currents, also included artists who collected trash they will use as part of a traveling art exhibition.

“It’s mainly a visibility raising effort,” said Safina, a MacArthur “genius” fellowship recipient. “It’s a way of showing people that, not only is garbage a problem where people live, but it is also a problem where animals live and where people go for natural beauty.”

While the waste in Alaska included consumer items like plastics that he sees near his Amagansett home, it also had more industrial pieces, including commercial fishing and shipping gear.

“There appears to be little concerted effort to find and track down the origin of this stuff,” Safina said. “Is it an accident or is it being dumped? A larger portion of the effort should go towards eliminating the problem.”

The Gyre team removed about four tons of trash.

Still, as he tends to do in his books, which include “Song for the Blue Ocean” and “Eye of the Albatross,” Safina didn’t fixate on the negative during his Alaska trip.

There was less and different trash than he was expecting, he said. The trash also seemed to collect in protected, calmer areas, unable to cling to the faster moving water near more dynamic cliffs.

He reveled in the opportunity to observe a grizzly bear with her three cubs for over an hour. The bear came within 20 yards of the group.

“I have enough experience with wildlife to have a sense that she was completely relaxed,” he said. “I love the proximity of it.”

Safina said the trip didn’t come at a particularly good time for him, because he is researching and writing his latest book, which is about the cognitive experiences of animals.

“This project was important enough to be worth that interruption,” he said.

While Safina has lobbied to protect the environment, helping to pass a United Nations Global Fisheries Treaty, he has transitioned to being more of a writer and witness.

“I was a plaintiff” on lawsuits in the 1990s, he said. “I hope what I do [now] inspires other people to do the kinds of things I was doing.”

Hope is an important part of his passion.

“He points out all the things that are wrong with what we do, but his final take on everything, his final philosophy, is a positive one,” said Jean Naggar, Safina’s literary agent at her eponymous agency.

A co-chair for the steering committee for the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, Safina teaches a course for graduate students.

“He’s a great example of a person who can interweave factual material with an ability to tell memorable stories,” Elizabeth Bass, the director of the center. He is a “very inspirational figure” for his students.

Safina blends science with art, Bass said. A percussionist who worked his way through the State University of New York at Purchase playing drums, Safina mixes an appreciation for nature and the environment with disappointment, frustration and a call to action.

“Not many scientists are comfortable talking about beauty in the way that [he] is,” said Bass.

In a class they teach together, Safina and Bass challenge students to think about their audience, asking them to define gravity in a lecture or by telling a story.

Safina, who hosts a PBS series, “Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina,” lives with his partner Patricia Paladines, who works as a program officer at Centre ValBio, a Stony Brook research facility. An avid fisherman, Safina rarely orders anything from a restaurant if he has to worry about its origin.

“The last time I had clams,” he said, “I dug them myself.”

Naggar, who admires his “lyrical” writing and calls him a “scientist with a heart,” said she has become more careful about restaurant fish, too.

As for his work, Safina said most people look at a bird or a deer and think of those animals as not other than people. “I see them really quite a lot like I see other people.”

People travel to escape from their routines and desk jobs to the world where Christopher Paparo works. He routinely ventures in and around waters on the East End of Long Island that are filled with seal, dolphins, sharks, humpback whales and even an occasional octopus. The naturalist, who was a senior aquarist for the Long Island Aquarium for 13 years, recently got a new job: he is the director of the new $8.5 million Marine Sciences Center in Southampton.

“As a former Long Island University student, it’s amazing to see what’s transpired here,” said Paparo, who was just getting his feet wet in his new post. “What’s being built is amazing.”

The new center provides research facilities for graduate students, undergraduates and scientists, and will open officially in September. Notable guests at the grand opening are expected to include Stony Brook President Samuel Stanley, Senator Ken LaValle (R-Port Jefferson) and Assemblyman Fred Thiele (I-Sag Harbor). The 15,000-square-foot building is the latest resource for the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.

“I’ll be wearing many, many hats,” said Paparo, who is known on the East End as a naturalist and the “Fish Guy” for wide-ranging photos of seals, sea lions, starfish and butterflies, among others, that make Long Island look like a “National Geographic” destination.

One of his first jobs is making sure the seawater system is up and running and maintained properly. He has to prepare tanks for researchers.

“A facility like this will allow us to grow and will make it a more attractive facility for researchers studying from other universities,” he said. “They can come here and work in a field station. It’s a world class facility to do their research.”

At the same time, he will help Lecturer Kurt Bretsch build out the “Semester at Sea” program, which is a three-year-old undergraduate effort. That program offers courses on Long Island marine habitats, which allows students to immerse themselves in the Shinnecock Bay, Atlantic Ocean and Great Peconic Bay. Another course emphasizes the maritime traditions of New York and New England.

Paparo can also accompany any group that needs a naturalist to explain what Long Island waters have and, if they decide to go on a boat ride, to show them what they’re seeing.

He said he’s “pretty flexible” about the kinds of tours he gives. For an ecology course, for example, he might take a group out to Shinnecock Bay, where he would compare the fish they catch by trawling over an eelgrass bed with those that live in a sandbar.

Classes have to pay a fee to cover the cost of the trip. Interested teachers or educators can contact SoMAS to ask about such trips.

The wet room at the Marine Sciences Center has a hallway of glass windows, which will allow visitors to watch researchers conduct their experiments on sea grass, shellfish and fish. The center will house modern molecular, remote detection and bioinformatic technology.

“My goal” as the first director of the new center “is to bring awareness to the community. Let them know what’s in their backyard,” said Paparo.

During trips into the water, he’s been surprised that people are so fascinated with sea horses. “Some people think they are mystical,” Paparo said. “We have a lot of them in the local bays.” Octopi, while not common, also live in the waters off Long Island.

Paparo and his wife Candy, the assistant director of animal training at the Long Island Aquarium, live in Calverton.

Everyone assumes, Paparo said, that animal training and working with marine mammals are glamorous jobs.

“Glamour is a small part of it. People don’t see the hours of cleaning, prepping and scrubbing. There’s a lot of work that goes into it for the 15-minute show.”

Paparo cautioned that those captive well-trained animals also can have a “bad day” and that all animals, even the cute, cuddly ones, can be dangerous.

Years ago, he responded to a call about a grey seal pup stranded on a beach. The woman who asked for help from the rescue program was getting too close. When he arrived and brought the seal back to the water, it bit him, growled and reacted the way he would have expected from an animal that felt threatened.

Still, he said working with and appreciating these animals and their environment is well worth the Friday night pipe fixes that keep the animals in his charge alive and the scars from difficult rescues.

“It’s awesome and very rewarding,” he said. “That’s what keeps us doing it.”

As a part of a monthly lecture series, Paparo is giving a free talk titled “Underwater Journey of Long Island Through the Eyes of a Fishing Biologist” at Duke Lecture Hall at 239 Montauk Highway in Southampton at 7:30 pm on Oct. 4.

Dmitri Kharzeev’s work is hot. Indeed, the liquids he deals with are 100,000 times hotter than the interior of the sun.

Interested in the fundamental properties of matter, Kharzeev, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook and a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, works at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL. There, he studies the so-called quark-gluon plasma. This primordial mixture is the most likely original soup from which life emerged in the moments after the Big Bang.

While Kharzeev looks closely at quarks, he has seen ways to apply his knowledge of chiral particles to an arena where heat can and is a problem: electronics.

When people put laptops on their laps, they can often feel the temperature of their microprocessors rising, making their laptops uncomfortably warm. The reason for this is that the transfer and processing of information in microprocessors generates heat, but the currents dissipate heat.

As it turns out, there are circumstances when the currents carried by chiral particles, like quarks, flow without any dissipation of heat. That is possible in the quark-gluon particles and in chiral materials, he explained.

Chirality is a state of handedness, in which a particle is not symmetrical. Kharzeev describes it as akin to a screw people can drive into a wall by turning its teeth either clockwise or counterclockwise to barrel through a substance.

“Chirality is the projection of angular momentum of a particle into its direction of motion,” he said.

When a quark approaches an impurity, it has to penetrate that barrier to conserve its chirality.

“When a chiral particle approaches a potential barrier, it penetrates it with 100% probability,” he said. “This is really a striking quantum phenomenon.”

Even further, the spin of a chiral particle is its nature, which means that it always moves and rotates. There is no rest state for it, the same way there is no rest state for light, he said.

“If, somehow, we were able to create chiral particles, not only in RHIC, but also in the materials around us, we could construct the next generation of electronic devices and we could solve a very big problem that mankind is facing,” Kharzeev said.

That problem is that the growth of the population of microprocessors, which consume energy, is faster than the growth in the human population.

That’s where graphene and substances like it enter the picture. Made of carbon atoms, the same way graphite and diamond are, graphene has electrons that behave as if they were chiral particles.

Kharzeev is a theoretical physicist. He is actively participating on the theory of chiral currents and that theory, he said, is being applied in chiral materials.

With the invention of graphene, “there is a gold rush,” he explained. “What is interesting for people like me is that the fundamental science and the applications are coming close together. People studying quarks could make research which could have an almost immediate practice application. This is very exciting and gratifying.”

Kharzeev said he got interested in graphene shortly after it was synthesized in the lab. Indeed, graphene has such potential that Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for their groundbreaking work on it.

After reading one of their popular papers, Kharzeev realized “that, in many respects, graphene is similar to the quark-gluon plasma.”

Kharzeev recently received the Humboldt Research Award. The $80,000 award, which will allow him to work with German researchers at Goethe University in Frankfurt, among other places, is issued in Germany for scientific excellence.

“I am absolutely honored to receive this prize,” he said. “This is recognition of the work that we’ve been doing at Stony Brook and BNL for the past few years and I’m very excited for the new opportunities this prize offers.”

Jacobus Verbaarschot, a Stony Brook professor in the same department as Kharzeev who won the Humboldt Award in 2007, said he believes Kharzeev “deserves” the award, which is “good for the department.”

A resident of Port Jefferson, Kharzeev lives with his wife, Irina Sourikova, who is the database administrator of the PHENIX experiment at BNL.

Their older daughter, Maria, is an ICU nurse at the Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston and plans to continue her education in an anesthesia school. Their younger daughter, Julia, is a student at Port Jefferson High School.

As for his research, Kharzeev is excited about the potential to contribute in a practical way to a significant challenge.

“The dissipation of heat now is the really major obstacle for electronics,” he said.

Something called “the blue place” has a role in how people react to the world, to their balance and even to how they feel. While that place is not some metaphysical presence in a distant universe that has turned humans into marionettes, it exists in the brain of each person.

The Latin name for that critically important area is locus ceruleus. The reason it’s called a “blue place” is that it appears blue (not emotionally) inside the brain. From the neurons in that region, people (and other mammals) respond to friends, foes and strangers.

Stephen Shea, an assistant professor at Cold Spring Harbor, wants to know more about this center. By studying mice, he is looking at how the L.C. responds to a variety of situations, tracking what parts are active and in what sequence as mice react to smells, sights, and physical stimuli that can trigger certain behaviors.

When, for example, a mouse smells a fox — one of its natural predators — the L.C. “goes bananas,” Shea said.

While researchers recognize that the L.C. is involved in all these functions, they do not know exactly how it works or what series of signals come together to enable it to function.

“It’s a real mystery how the L.C. is able to perform all these roles and mediate priorities,” Shea said.

The question he and his four-person lab is asking is what is the L.C. doing during these different situations and contexts.

In awake mice, he can monitor the activity of the L.C. as the mouse does everything from feeding and exploring its cage to interacting with other mice with whom it has had some, or no, previous contact.

When mice who haven’t met before come together, they go through a complex series of behaviors that include a “surprise” phase. A male mouse may start a mating dance, where it chases the female. If he’s accepted, that may trigger another combination of activities in the L.C.

“The analysis of the pattern, rhythm and level of activity in time can tell us the broadcast of noradrenaline” a neurotransmitter released by the L.C. “throughout the brain, letting us know what the temporal profile will look like,” he said.

Shea has also conducted experiments in which he has introduced the scent of an unfamiliar mouse while stimulating the L.C. in an anesthetized subject. After the mouse awakes from the anesthetic, he then introduces the other animal that made that unique scent. The mouse reacts to the animal as if it’s already had some contact. Shea suggests that the smell, even when the animal is anesthetized, helps create a memory.

The advantage of creating an artificial memory is that Shea can study each part of the process of memory creation.

The introduction of the smell while under anesthetic is “a simple form of memory, but it’s a form of memory nonetheless,” he suggests.

By understanding how the L.C. functions, Shea hopes to contribute to a wide range of areas, including autism or other disorders where perception and the production of social information is abnormal.

The L.C. can help scientists ask “questions of how an animal is wired up in the brain to perceive social information and interpret it directly through an appropriate behavioral decision or response,” he said.

Shea lives in Northport with his wife Alisa, who works part-time from a home office as a consultant for Truven Health Analytics, and their two school-age sons. He said his family especially enjoys the beach and all the family-friendly activities of the area, including the carnival at the YMCA in Huntington.

A music buff whose favorite artist is Elvis Costello, Shea played the alto saxophone in middle school and high school. Once he reached college, where he became entrenched in the world of academics and science, he had less time for his musical pursuits.

As for his research, Shea said he hopes his work expands the ability to assess problems in neural circuitry and communication behavior in mouse models of human diseases.

Shan He’s friend threw out his mattress and bought a new one. That didn’t solve his problem. A few weeks later, the bedbugs in his Boston bedroom continued to torment him. Eventually, he paid to have a team of cleaners scrub everything, which finally did the trick.

Through his work as a graduate student at Stony Brook, He has helped develop an eco-friendly solution that allows him to use high technology against bedbugs by mimicking one of the world’s most formidable insectivores: the spider.

He has helped develop a nontoxic trap. Creating fibers that are 1/50th the width of a human hair, he fabricated a lattice of threads that stick to the legs of an unsuspecting bedbug. When the bedbugs move, they become stuck to more of the miniature strands, trapping them even further. Immobilized, they can’t get to a food source: namely, blood.

Without food, the bedbugs die in the traps.

“We were approached by FiberTrap,” explained lead researcher Miriam Rafailovich, the co-director of the Program of Chemical and Molecular Engineering at Stony Brook. “They were very much into green solutions for pests. They had some idea about trapping them without chemicals. We realized the best way to do it is to use nanotechnology.”

Rafailovich said the traps could be put behind baseboards or around the legs of furniture.

“It’s like quicksand,” Rafailovich said. “As they soon as they come into the entrance, they can’t turn around. As soon as they hit the fiber, they’re trapped.”

The traps, which are still in development, don’t require any food or bait.

In keeping with the eco-friendly approach to eradicating an infestation of bedbugs, the Stony Brook team is working on making the traps biodegradable, so that users can throw them in landfills or even compost them, Rafailovich said.

“If you put this in a landfill, there isn’t any poison,” Rafailovich said. “You haven’t used any chemicals to kill them. It’s perfectly safe for birds and other scavenging animals to eat them.”

Rafailovich said a team of scientists worked on this project, including He, Ying Liu, a scientist with Stony Brook’s Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center and graduate student Linxi Zhang. The nanotechnology solution was developed at Stony Brook’s Center for Advanced Technology in Sensor Materials, which is funded by NYSTAR as a part of a statewide effort to encourage greater technological and economic collaboration between industry and research centers.

He’s expertise is in electrospinning of the nanofiber. He prepared a solution of a polymer — a man-made substance suspended in a liquid. Then, He put the liquid in a syringe and applied a high voltage to the solution between the syringe and a substrate, which is the surface where he wanted to create the trap.

A graduate student who is originally from Beijing, He described watching the bedbugs become immobilized in the fibers.

“The second the bedbugs got trapped, I was so excited,” he said. “The nanofeature from the bedbug matches the nanofeature from the fiber.”

He, who uses the English name Harry, lives in Stony Brook and has been on Long Island for close to three years. He used to work as an English teacher in China. He also host

-ed a TV show called Outlook English.

Stony Brook’s reputation had reached China because Chen Ning Yang, originally a Chinese citizen, had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1957. Yang joined Stony Brook in 1966 and became the first director of its Institute for Theoretical Physics, which is now known as the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Yang is “very famous in China, which is how I heard of this school,” He said.

A classic guitar player, He has played Spanish guitar for more than 10 years.

He said his work on the bedbug project is particularly rewarding because of the practical component.

“I’ve been working on a lot of projects before, but all these projects are theory-based,” he said. “This is a really useful application. I think it can totally improve people’s lives.”

Rafailovich said this is just the beginning of the work Stony Brook might do to trap insects in an ecologically safe way. These traps might also be used for termites.

“We’re trying to improve it, to make it smaller,” Rafailovich said.

Growing up in Catania, Sicily, Gianluigi De Geronimo caught the bug from his engineer grandfather Giuseppe Nicotra, who was a structural engineer, and his uncle, Luigi Nicotra, who is a doctor with a passion for mechanics and electronics.

Determined to study engineering, De Geronimo took the first of what would become several steps away from the home he knew to pursue his growing passion, traveling to Milan Polytechnic to earn a master’s degree and then a Ph.D. He worked in radiation detection with Emilio Gatti, who came to Brookhaven National Laboratory for one month each year. Gatti recommended De Geronimo to BNL and, after an interview in 1997, the Sicilian engineer moved with his wife Marcella to Long Island, where they have lived ever since.

The moves have proven productive for De Geronimo, who, in April, was named the “Inventor of the Year” at BNL by Battelle, the Ohio-based company that manages BNL in partnership with Stony Brook University.

“I strongly believe that my achievements have been possible not only for my hard work but also for the environment I was blessed with, which includes my BNL colleagues and my family,” he said.

At BNL, De Geronimo designs application-specific integrated circuits for scientific research and tools for national security and medical imaging. He leads the ASIC development team. Some of the ASICs that De Geronimo and his group of five electrical engineers have designed have enabled products like the ProxiScan camera, which can identify prostate cancer in its early stages, as well as the high-resolution, x-ray Maia detector, which can be used to map specific elements in materials and artwork and was used last year to validate the authenticity of Rembrandt’s painting, “Old Man with a Beard.”

The team’s ASIC designs also enabled equipment upgrades for the Atlas detector at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

Other researchers often approach De Geronimo, who is in the instrumentation group at BNL, to develop technology that will further their scientific efforts.

“Usually, scientists come to the instrumentation division and discuss the problem,” he said. “Together, we develop the detector, the sensor, the electronics and all the rest that they might need to do their science. We make our scientists competitive by developing instruments they need.”

In a description of De Geronimo’s work as part of the award ceremony, Battelle wrote that he has helped deploy “over a million transistors on an ASIC consisting of just a few square millimeters of silicon, to bring about transformational changes in radiation detector performance.”

“The challenge we have is to integrate all these functionalities into a small area with a very low power dissipation,” he explained. Each channel generates heat, which creates problems for the sensing process.

He needs to “integrate a large number of channels in a small area with low power,” he said.

De Geronimo said radiation sensors convert radiation into electric charge, which moves toward electrodes generating small currents. The detectors read those currents.

The detectors can operate at room temperature or in environments of minus 200 degrees Celsius. His team helped develop ASICs for the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment, which operates submerged in liquid argon at minus 190 degrees Celsius.

The instrumentation group is also developing instruments for security that can detect sources of dangerous radiation.

He called the BNL radiation detector effort “state of the art,” because of the combination of specialized scientists who have backgrounds in core technologies, including microelectronic engineering and detector science, necessary to create the detector.

De Geronimo teaches a graduate class in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stony Brook called Advanced Design of Low-Noise and Low-Power Analog Circuits.

The BNL scientist said he hopes this course “gives SBU students a [competitive] edge” because “there are very few places in the world” that offer similar courses.

He and his wife, Marcella, an assistant vice president at Krasnoff Quality Management Institute at North Shore-LIJ Health System, live in Syosset with their children Frederico, 13, Francesca, 12, and Giovanni, who will be nine soon.

De Geronimo said he has been especially impressed by the way people react in difficult situations.

“We couldn’t even give blood after 9/11 because the lines were so long,” he said. “People in the United States have a good heart.”

As for his work, De Geronimo said he feels “extremely happy at BNL. That fact that I am succeeding is due to the wonderful collaborations. It’s a very positive environment.”

Before they can look for undiscovered particles that may only exist for an incredibly small amount of time, they have to haul something 3,200 miles that is so sensitive that a slight movement can cause damage.

Starting in the middle of this month, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory are shipping an electromagnet that is 50 feet in diameter from its home in Upton to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. The weight of that electromagnet is about 35,000 pounds — or the equivalent of almost three adult African bull elephants.

The first step, which will occur on June 10 or 11, involves removing the side of a building and securing the ring on a red, octagonal pinwheel with spokes. The structure, which Emmert International built as it manages the major move, looks like an octagonal wagon wheel with long spokes.

Traveling at night, a truck carrying the electromagnet will receive a police escort as it travels at close to five miles per hour from Upton to a barge 10 miles due south of BNL at Smith Point Marina on Bellport Bay. That trip is expected to take one night.

“The trailer has eight pairs of axles, which are all hydraulically self-leveling, so that even if it hits a pothole with one, there are many other tires” to keep the ring balanced, said Chris Polly, a project manager for Fermilab.

The ring is expected to board the barge on June 16, when it will travel around the southern tip of Florida, up the Mississippi River to Illinois. The journey, including a two-night trek from the river to Fermilab, should take about six weeks.

The reason scientists are sending such a sensitive piece of equipment over such a great distance is to explore an area of nature that might expand the world of particle physics. Back in 2001, scientists at BNL found something incredibly small but potentially revolutionary, that they couldn’t explain.

High energy interactions, such as those at the Fermilab accelerator, produce muons, which, like an electron, have negative charge but are 200 times more massive. These muons exist for only 2.2 millionths of a second. However, more than a decade ago, scientists at BNL noticed that these muons gyrated as expected — up to a point.

“We look at how these muons revolve,” said William Morse, resident spokesman for muon g-2 at BNL.

The frequency of the spin axis around a magnetic field differed, albeit in a miniscule way, from what the theory predicted.

The so-called Lande g-factor should have been 2.0023318358. In the BNL experiment, however, that factor was 2.0023318416.

If the experiments found new particles, “It would be a revolution” in physics, said David Hertzog, who was a part of the original experiment in 2001 at BNL and is now a professor at the University of Washington and a spokesman for the muon g-2 effort. “The whole motivation is to figure out what is beyond the standard model.”

The findings could cause a “rewriting of our textbooks and understanding,” Hertzog added.

Scientists suspected they were on to something, but they didn’t have a precise enough measure to know for sure. By moving the electromagnet to Illinois, they are uniting one of the world’s largest superconducting magnets to the powerful accelerators that can provide a customized beam of neutrons.

Once the electromagnet arrives in Illinois, it will start generating data in 2016 and may start producing results as early as 2017 or 2018.

Morse, who was also involved with the landmark study in 2001, said those results have generated over 2,000 references in the scientific literature.

“In my previous experiments, I would have said that 20 or 30 was a lot. We do think this is kind of a unique measurement.”

Morse, who has worked at BNL since 1976, lives in East Patchogue with his wife Sara, a teacher at Bellport Methodist preschool. They have four children: Andrew, a banker; Kathleen, who works in sustainable living; David, a physics grad student; and Rachel, a respiratory therapist. Morse is a fan of the ocean, where he enjoys swimming, fishing and crabbing.

As for the benefit of the muon experiment, Morse said it will gather basic information about the world and can train a future generation of scholars, industry leaders, and researchers.

“After the last experiment at BNL [in 2001], there were quite a number of graduate students. Many of them are off doing interesting things,” Morse said. “One of them is working on developing chambers to scan cargo ships, others are at universities and some are at national labs.”

It’s a nuisance during the summer months, when the weather heats up and bathing suits and shorts come out. Never a distinguishing or welcome sign, it’s the dimpled skin condition known as cellulite.

Researchers at Stony Brook University, however, believe they have come up with a possible injection-based cure. Using the same enzymes they’ve applied with frozen shoulder and Dupuytren’s contracture, a deforming hand condition that limits finger mobility, Marie Badalamente and Alexander Dagum have had some success in treating 10 patients in a first-round study of their injections.

Later this year, they expect to enter the Food and Drug Administration’s so-called Phase 2A trials, where they will continue to test their drug, called Xiaflex. They plan to advertise for study subjects and will likely test their remedy against a placebo (using something harmless as an injection that isn’t known to have any effect on cellulite).

In their first trial, their results showed promise. On average, patients saw a 77 percent reduction in cellulite one day after the injection. After six months, those patients still saw a 76 percent reduction. Side effects included soreness, black-and-blue areas and mild edema.

“This is the first properly controlled clinical trial of an injectable treatment that has a good chance to be FDA-approved,” said Badalamente in an interview.

Cellulite affects about 90 percent of women and 10 percent of men. Women have “more of these thin-strand fibers” in their thighs and buttocks, so the fat “kind of pushes up and through, although like a honeycomb of fibers,” said Badalamente, who is a professor of orthopedics. The result is this classic dimpling appearance in those areas.

“Patients flock to cosmetic plastic surgeons’ offices in search of treatments that may help them,” she said. “It’s very troubling to a women’s sense of herself.”

In a press release, Dr. Dagum, who is the interim chairman of surgery at Stony Brook School of Medicine, added that the “methods to remove cellulite are many, but none yet have been supported in medical literature to be effective or potentially usable as a standard practice.”

Through her work with other problems, like Dupuytren’s contracture and frozen shoulder, Badalamente had used the enzyme mixture in Xiaflex. Badalamente and Edward Wang, an associate professor of Orthopedics, are collaborating on the frozen shoulder treatments.

“The common thread is the presence of a substance called collagen,” Badalamente said. “In Dupuytren’s contracture, there’s an abnormal deposition [of collagen] from the palm to the fingers. There’s a normal collagen capsule around the shoulder. In frozen shoulder, there’s an adhesion of collagen that builds up.”

The enzyme mixture lyses, or dissolves, the collagen in frozen shoulder, freeing the shoulder to return to its normal range of motion. For frozen shoulder, these Phase 2A trials have just been completed. The treatment reduces the need for extended physical therapy or arthroscopy (surgery). Phase 2B trials will begin this summer or fall.

“It was readily apparent to me that this injectable drug, which is a combination of two collagenase enzymes, clearly had other uses in a class of disorders,” she explained. “The light bulb on the top of the head moment was that I knew about the microanatomy of cellulite.”

Although the studies with Xiaflex on cellulite are still in the early stages, the use of the enzyme mixture to treat Dupuytren’s contracture has been effective over a longer period of time. If, for example, it recurs years later, patients can get another injection.

“That might be the same for cellulite,” Badalamente said.

The researchers cautioned that safety always comes first in any new treatment, even with a procedure that has won FDA approval for other uses.

For the Dupuytren’s contracture, the process took about 15 years.

“That one probably took too long,” Badalamente said. “Each indication, as it comes forward, should take much less time.”

Badalamente said she sees firsthand the problems that affect patients.

“In the case of the hand, if you can image this disease affecting both of your hands, [there’s] misery,” she said. “It’s not cancer and it’s not going to kill you, but it’s gong to interfere with your function. If you see that misery and you’re able to potentially think about a therapy that’s less invasive than surgery, there’s nothing better in the world than getting a ‘Thank you’ from the patients.”

The male ensemble of Wood, Evan Teich, Josh Rothberg, Ben Rosenbach, Matthew Michael Urinak, Dennis Setteducati and Paul Velutis along with the females Jamila Sabares-Klemm, Diana Rose Becker, Audra Rizzo, Erin Raquel Garcia and Kate Cherichello all meshed together like the breech of a 16-inch battleship’s gun — another tribute to DiPietropolo.

This season-topper was yet again another exhibition of what the Engeman can mount in its unquestionable adherence to the highest norms of professionalism.

“South Pacific” will run at the Engeman Theater, 250 Main St., Northport through July 14. Call 261-2900 or go to www.engemantheater.com for tickets.

It often looks like an outline of Mickey Mouse’s head, with a large circle and two overlapping or attached smaller circles. Drawn in a chemistry class, the larger circle is oxygen, while the two smaller ears are hydrogen.

In plants that produce their own food through photosynthesis, taking apart the three circles helps them make food, such as sugars. Scientists like Wei-Fu Chen at Brookhaven National Laboratory are imitating nature by breaking apart, or electrolyzing, water, releasing hydrogen that could serve as an alternative to fossil fuels.

“This process mimics how plants convert sunlight and nutrients into sugars,” said Chen.

As the lightest element, hydrogen has the highest gravimetric energy density of any known fuel, which means it produces the highest energy of all the elements.

Scientists can reduce the effort it takes to split water by using a catalyst. While platinum and palladium have fulfilled that role, they are expensive, which makes them less viable long-term options.

Chen suggested twin high school students Shilpa and Shweta Iyer from Comsewogue High School, who were working in his lab, go home and search their kitchen for ingredients that, using much more cost-efficient substances like metal carbide and metal nitride, might become a catalyst alternative. In the presence of molybdenum, soybeans, which are rich in proteins, worked. The 17-year-old Iyer twins recently placed fourth in the chemistry category of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for their efforts (see related story in the Port Times Record and online).

So far, in tests with soybeans, the catalyst has continued to be effective for over 500 hours. The production process, Chen said, is mature for industrial applications, with a projected cost that is “fairly economical” compared to other options. For commercial use, however, tests may need to take at least a year. Chen is searching for collaborators and would like to transfer the technology to an interested commercial partner.

Now that his lab has developed a process that works, Chen said that the next steps involve understanding the chemical mechanism that enables soybeans to act as a catalyst in the electrolysis of water.

“We don’t know why it’s so active,” he explained. “My job is to figure out the mechanism in the solution.”

Chen is able to tap into the considerable resources at BNL, including the National Synchrotron Light Source. By shooting beams of light through the reaction, Chen has found information about the catalytic active center and how the applied voltage changes its electronic state. He plans to study how changes in some of the conditions, such as the temperature or the pH (whether the solution is more of an acid or a base) affect the process.

The NSLS beams can allow scientists to monitor changes that occur in an incredibly short time scale, which makes it possible to track small changes in the reaction.

“By knowing the reaction mechanisms, scientists will be able to predict new effective structures for the water electrolysis and may find new principles in the reaction,” Chen suggested.

Chen explained that developing a hydrogen fuel-based economy remains a challenging task. While he is working hard to develop ways to make hydrogen fuel more available through water electrolysis, other scientists are researching the problem of storing and transporting hydrogen.

“The coming hydrogen age will be based on the completion of production, delivery, storage and utilization,” Chen said.

Chen said some hydrogen-driven cars are already available for purchase.

“There are already some prototype products out there, but the problem is that the cost is too high,” he said. There are fuel cell cars that use hydrogen in California.

Chen lives in Ridge with his wife Chiu-Hui Wang (who uses the American name Chloe). Wang works as an electron microscope specialist in the chemistry department at BNL and at Graphene Laboratories in Calverton.

A native of Kaohsiung City, the second largest city in Taiwan, Chen said he enjoys the natural life and the fresh air on Long Island. He also loves skiing, hiking and photography. He has a blogspot site where he has posted pictures of a fawn foraging in the snow and a negative photo of rainwater on a window. Photography inspired him in 2006, when he viewed a series of photographs of Taipei City in 1957 taken by a member of the U.S. Army, Tom Jones.

As for his work, Chen hopes hydrogen fuel becomes a viable, and affordable, alternative to fossil fuels.

“Considerable work needs to be done before a hydrogen-fueled vehicle becomes an option for us,” he said.

A computational systems biologist, Sergei Maslov recently showed what makes some pieces of computer code critically important to computer systems, the same way certain genes are common and important among bacteria.

“I was working with Linux, which has real similarities with bacteria,” said Maslov, who is a computational biology group leader at the Department of Biosciences at Brookhaven National Laboratory and an external faculty member at Stony Brook. Engineers can “reuse packages created by other engineers, who could be on another continent. It’s a complex interdependency.”

The most frequently used parts are also among the most functionally important ones. Scientists can measure their importance by looking at how many other components depend on them for their operation.

“I was rather shocked by how much is similar” when comparing bacterial genes and computer codes, he said. His results were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As a systems biologist, Maslov typically works with large amounts of data to make sense of patterns.

“The models I create explain the real world around us. I am very interested in complex networks,” he said. “The first challenge is to get data describing those networks.”

Fortunately, he said, the amount of publicly available data has grown enormously over the last two decades. Indeed, in his study, Maslov looked at over 2 million Linux computers and 500 bacterial species.

Maslov is one of four principal investigators in a large Department of Energy-sponsored project called KBase.

The project, which started a year and a half ago, includes researchers from a wide range of institutions. Maslov leads the group of scientists based at BNL, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Yale.

One of the goals of KBase is to provide a “solid platform that supports predictive biology in a framework that does not require users to learn separate systems to formulate and answer questions spanning a variety of topics in systems biology research,” according to the KBase website.

The application of that predictive research includes handling biological problems in energy and the environment.

In addition to his work with KBase, Maslov has looked at stock price fluctuations, Internet connectivity data, World Wide Web pages, hyperlinks and many others.

He is currently analyzing food webs by using data in KBase that describes microbial communities and uses network analysis tools to make sense of microbe-microbe and plant-microbe interactions.

“I view food webs as a network of interacting objects,” he said. “You can study all the individual microbes in a food web very well, but still not understand how they interact.”

He looks at the pattern of connections among species, to determine which species might be more important. Long-term, he said he wants to understand how certain perturbations — or changes — will cascade down food webs.

“We want to understand which perturbations lead to minor changes and which will lead to large-scale systemwide changes,” he said.

Maslov said the biggest lesson he’s learned from studying the patterns in evolution is that “if you want to design software or any other complex system, make it evolvable. Make sure it doesn’t become too rigid.”

Maslov has lived in many towns since he came to Long Island two decades ago, including in Stony Brook, Sound Beach, and Dix Hills. Indeed, when he resided in Dix Hills, he lived in saxophone great John Coltrane’s house, which is now being turned into a museum.

Maslov’s wife Olga Maslova, a costume designer, is working on sets and costumes for an opera in Boston. Maslova left for the first meeting with producers on the day of the marathon, but was on the Long Island ferry during the attack.

The couple lives in Shoreham with their 10-year-old son Leo and their 6-year-old Alexander.

Maslov grew up in Moscow and appreciates the proximity of Long Island to the City.

As for his research, “We allow the people who do experiments on organisms to recommend particular genes they should pay attention to, maybe provide some guidance on how best to optimize a plant to survive in drought or good soil conditions. We organize the data and allow researchers to work with it.