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.”

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.