On Thursday, March 16, the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum, 180 Little Neck Road, Centerport will host Michael Mehta Webster, Professor of Practice in Environmental Studies at New York University (NYU), for an evening lecture on global warming and nature’s inherent resilience. The event will take place from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the Museum’s Charles and Helen Reichert Planetarium.
Webster’s lecture will draw heavily from his 2022 book The Rescue Effect: The Key to Saving Life on Earth (Timber Press). In The Rescue Effect, Webster offers cause for optimism in the often-disheartening discourse around anthropogenic climate change. Through a series of compelling animal stories—from tigers in the jungles of India to cichlid fish in the great lakes of Africa and coral reefs in the Caribbean—Webster will highlight how certain species have adapted to a rapidly changing world.
Webster also will explore how other species, like the mountain pygmy possum, are at risk of extinction without substantive but practicable efforts on the part of conservationists, activists, and concerned citizens of our planet.
Webster argues that we have good reason to expect a bright future because almost everywhere we look, we can see evidence of nature rescuing many species from extinction. The Rescue Effect provides a much-needed roadmap to discovering what we can do to make a healthier Earth for future generations of humans and wildlife.
Tickets are $10 per person, free for members at www.vanderbiltmuseum.org.
Victoria Greening at the Grotte Mandrin site in France. Photo by Svenya Drees
By Daniel Dunaief
Last summer, the Anthropology Department at Stony Brook University brought 13 students to the south of France to help gather information from a rich archaeological site called the Grotte Mandrin.
Asa Wong-Gómez at the Grotte Mandrin site in France. Photo by Nicholas Gonzalez
The trip with the Field School through SBU Study Abroad enabled the students to work in the field and gather information from a site that has provided a treasure trove of information about Neanderthals and Homo sapiens from 54,000 years ago.
The students found the trip successful, inspirational and, at times, exhausting.
“I did archeology all summer,” said Asa Wong-Gómez, a senior anthropology major at Stony Brook, who spent time in Kenya before joining the team in France. “It was really cool.”
Wong-Gómez recalled the thrill of finding teeth and stones in the dirt. “The first day, everyone’s first find was super exciting,” he said.
The field expedition, which was the first Stony Brook ran at this site, enabled students to forge connections with each other and with the site’s leaders, including Stony Brook Lecturer Jason Lewis, Ludovic Slimak, cultural anthropologist at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, and Laure Metz, an archaeologist at Aix-Marseille University.
Victoria Greening at the Zooarcheological Training and Research Laboratory. Photo by Nicholas Gonzalez
“Working with everyone so closely for that month definitely builds really strong connections that have lasted since,” said Victoria Greening, who graduated from Stony Brook in the winter and is planning to start a Master’s program in the fall at the University of Oxford.
She appreciated the opportunity to be a part of new discoveries.
“Working with something that’s not in the written records and discovering it yourself was a privileged feeling,” said Greening, who grew up in Yaphank.
A happy grown up
Echoing Gollum from the “Lord of the Rings” series, Slimak would look at something a student found and say, “my precious, this goes in a special bag,” Wong-Gómez recalled.
Slimak reflected the joy he took in discovering compelling finds. “It was amusing, watching a grown adult be so happy,” Wong-Gomez said.
Eva Marsh, who is a senior at Stony Brook in the anthropology department, appreciated the excitement of finding flint. A couple of students, she recalled, also found teeth, including a horse’s tooth. The group discovered a massive core, from which early Homo sapiens would chip off pieces to construct arrows they would shoot from a bow to bring down buffalo or horses.
On the first night gathering at their summer accommodations, Marsh said the group looked up at a star-filled sky.
“There was not a lot of pollution there” or other lights, which was “really amazing,” Marsh said.
Marsh was nervous on her first day, as she didn’t know what to expect. The team played games for the first few nights and discussed why they all signed up for the field experience. Each night at dinner, they discussed the events of the day, Marsh recalled.
Svenya Drees at the Grotte Mandrin site. Photo by Victoria Greening
For Svenya Drees, who grew up in Port Jefferson and is a Master’s Student in Lewis’s lab, the experience was familiar, as she had conducted field work during the summer of 2021. “I knew what to expect,” she said. Still, she found the discovery of pebbles from a distant river intriguing.
“There’s this whole mystery at the site about pebbles that made it into the assemblage,” Drees said. “These rocks were brought there from the local river. I thought that was pretty awesome.”
The theory about the pebbles is that Neanderthals or Homo sapiens, who had lived in the cave at different times, deployed the pebbles to help remove flakes from the rock cores these ancient ancestors used to create weapons.
Some challenges
While the students enjoyed the experience, with many of them planning to continue in their anthropological studies, the summer included some challenges.
The students stayed in a house at the top of a hill. At the same time, the cave was also on a hill. Each morning, they walked down the hill to a car that drove them to the bottom of the Grotte Mandrin site, where they walked about 15 minutes up to the field station. At the end of the day, they had to climb back up to their temporary home.
“After digging holes all day, walking up the hill was not my favorite part,” Wong-Gómez said. Greening suggested that future participants in the program, which will also run this summer, bring sturdy shoes.
The students also sometimes carried heavy containers filled with sand. The physical challenges notwithstanding, most of the students eagerly anticipate future such explorations.
“It’s definitely the right field for me,” said Greening. “Working at Mandrin solidified that for me.”
Wong-Gómez hopes to continue his field work at the University of Florida. The university has accepted him as a PhD student, although he is awaiting word on whether he gets funding.
“When I got the email that I was accepted, it didn’t feel real,” Wong-Gómez said. “I really want to do this.”
A reconstruction by Ludovic Slimak of the arrows Homo sapiens likely used 54,000 years ago in France.
Credit: Ludovic Slimak
By Daniel Dunaief
Have bow and arrow, will travel, even in Eurasia 54,000 years ago.
An archaeological site in the south of France that’s 70 miles from the coastline called Grotte Mandrin not only provided evidence that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals lived in this area around the same time, but also offered proof that early humans used bow and arrows to hunt for prey like bison and wild horses.
Jason Lewis. Photo from SBU
In research published in the journal Science Advances, Jason Lewis, a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University; Ludovic Slimak, cultural anthropologist at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès; and Laure Metz, an archaeologist at Aix-Marseille University, shared an extensive analysis of stone artifacts that demonstrated the use of bows and arrows.
These hunting tools, which inhabitants of the cave could use to pursue herd animals migrating between the Mediterranean region and the plains of Northern Europe, provide the earliest evidence of mechanically propelled projectile technology from Eurasia.
“We looked for diagnostic evidence of a very powerful impact once the stone tip hits something,” said Lewis. “We can see experimentally what type of damage” is produced on the tips of the arrows. The damage to these arrows is in line with everything that modern archers are doing because the tools human ancestors used were so light, Lewis added.
The collaborative effort to study these arrows in labs across two continents involved an extensive analysis of the flaking pattern around the tips of the arrows. The researchers didn’t find any of the organic materials that the early hunters would have used to create the bow.
This technology, which likely took about an hour to make, likely enabled Homo sapiens to bring down prey. Effective hunting from about 10 to 20 yards likely would have required more than one arrow, particularly with the size and strength of the targets.
At an archaeological site in the Middle East, scientists described stone tools around the same time that look similar to the bows and arrows humans in Eurasia used.
“The evolving modern humans were developing and using projectile technology,” Lewis said.
Cultural differences
Lewis, Slimak and Metz showed in a seminal paper last year that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had lived in the same cave, sometimes separated by a year or even a season.
While these two types of humans lived around the same time and in the same place, they didn’t share the same technology or have the type of cultural exchange that would enable Neanderthals, who typically hunted with hand-thrown spears, to use the same hunting tools.
“There’s no evidence of learning exchange,” Lewis said. Neanderthals did not start using the smaller points typical of the arrows or that would have been used as projectiles.
“It doesn’t look like there was a cultural exchange between the two groups,” Lewis said, as the artifacts from the time Neanderthals occupied the cave didn’t include any arrows.
Cultures sometimes develop identities that preclude using technology from other groups. Such cultural differences existed in the Maale and neighboring Tsamai people in Southwestern Ethiopia.
“Even though [bows and arrows] might be logically or objectively advantageous, some cultures suggest that ‘that’s not what we do,’” Lewis said.
Indeed, cultural differences have occurred in other areas that groups haven’t bridged, despite the availability of similar resources and the chance to learn the technology.
At the cave in Grotte Mandrin, researchers found a large collection of stone tools in Layer E of the cave.
The scientists believe the numerous arrows could have been the early equivalent of a munitions dump.
While bows and arrows would have provided a hunting advantage to Homo sapiens, the technology doesn’t explain why the two groups of early humans occupied the cave or dominated the area at different times.
“I doubt it comes down strictly to stone tool technology,” Lewis said. “There’s not a continuous march of occupation and expansion” as the interactions between the two populations were long lasting and complex.
Homo sapiens and Neanderthals moved up into a region and then moved back. This is akin to the way European settlers interacted with Native Americans when ships first crossed the Atlantic.
The Europeans moved into the region, interacted with people who already in the country, returned home, and then, at a later point crossed the ocean again.
Arrow studies
To understand the technology used to create these arrows, Metz and Slimak have spent years studying the way rocks flake off or get damaged in response to contact with animals or objects they hit when shot through the air.
Working for over a decade, Metz has been conducting experimental replication of the effect of use on these stone tools.
Scientists who shoot these stone arrows into carcasses from butcher shops can see the flaking pattern and scratches on the arrows.
Lewis explained that the flaking on the arrow heads could not have been made during the creation of the arrows themselves.
“Only high velocity strikes” could produce such markings, Lewis said.
These kinds of studies combine geology, physics and natural science. Lewis said John Shea, Anthropology Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University, has pioneered the study of such technology during the Pleistocene Ice Ages.
Lewis explained that his primary role is to bring the contextual understanding about how various types of early humans were using the landscape and interacting with the animals.
He also brings the context of work he does in Africa around the same time period as a comparator.
Lewis explained that more research would be forthcoming from this site.
“This is part of a larger modern human ability to conceptualize the world,” Lewis said. Early humans were trying to change their environment to match their needs, with boats, clothing, dwelling structures and other elements of their lives.
Such tool use could reduce hunting time and could enable a greater division of labor, suggesting that “each person didn’t have to do everything” to meet basic needs.
Nature plays a slow game, drawn out over millions of years, of hide and seek. First, spectacular and elaborate creatures lived hunted, reproduced, and avoided predators millions of years ago. After they died in places like Dorset in the United Kingdom, their bodies became preserved in the muddy, shallow marine environment. The sediment was then covered over by rock layers and safely preserved.
Eric Wilberg in Coyote Buttes, Utah in 2018
Fast forward about 185 million years, after waves crashing upon the shore erode those rocks on a beach and expose those fossils.
Indeed, in 2017, in a UNESCO World Heritage site where scientists and fossil hunters and paleontologists like 19th century star Mary Anning made key discoveries, archeology enthusiasts Paul Turner and Lizzie Hingley found the head, backbone and limbs of a creature scientists had imagined, but hadn’t, until then, discovered.
Called a thalattosuchian, which is an ancient sister of modern day crocodile ancestors, this finding extended the timeline of when these coastal marine crocodiles lived.
In late 2019, Dr. Roger Benson, who was then at the University of Oxford, reached out to Pedro Godoy, a postdoctoral researcher at Stony Brook who Benson co-supervised during his PhD, and Eric Wilberg, Assistant Professor at the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University. The team, which included Alan Turner, Professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook, planned to describe and characterize the fossil.
Benson said he had never met Wilberg before but had “read his work on croc evolution and really admired his systematic approach.”
This ancient crocodilian creature, which was about six feet long and was likely either a sub adult or an adult, is the first “thalattosuchian fossil complete enough to definitively identify as a member of the group of rocks older than about 180 million years ago,” Wilberg explained.
Wilberg, Godoy (who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sao Paolo), Turner and Benson (who is currently Macaulay Curator of Dinosaur Paleobiology at the American Museum of Natural History), recently published their study on this fossil in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Godoy said that Wilberg is “an expert in this group of animals and it was great working with him on this.” Godoy added that this was an “important finding, which helps us fill a gap in the evolution of thalattosuchians.”
Benson suggested that this fossil provides a glimpse into the origin of thalattosuchians, indicating that the group originated before this fossil. The particular organism is the first discovered in a new species gathered by the two fossil hunters (see related story on right).
The Thalattosuchian group lived until the Early Cretaceous period, about 130 million years ago. These predators likely fed on fish or cephalopods like ancient octopi or squid.
Recently, another team of scientists discovered a thalattosuchian skull in Morocco, which is about five to 10 million years older than the Turnersuchus Wilberg described.
The discoveries “support our prediction that thalattosuchians evolved millions of years earlier —probably in the late Triassic” around 200 million or more years ago, Wilberg added. His analysis determined that the thalattosuchian lineage diverged from its last common ancestor with crocodile-relatives during the Triassic period.
Wilberg and other researchers will be on the lookout for additional specimens which can add details to the understanding of this species. This specimen was missing most of the front of the skull, all of the hindlimb and pelvis and most of the tail.
Specific features
By examining the spinal column and part of the forelimb, Wilberg explained that this species did not have forelimbs that evolved into flippers, like later descendants in the group. It would have been similar in overall body form to living crocodiles, which means that it likely had similar swimming capabilities.
The specimen included a couple of partial teeth. Like all living crocodiles, it likely continually replaced its teeth throughout its life. Its bite force would have been less than a similar sized modern crocodile. The modern crocodylian skull evolved structural reinforcements to allow it to withstand the massive bite forces it generated.
Thalattosuchians skulls were “not as well reinforced, so they were probably not able to bite as hard,” Wilberg wrote. It seems likely that the “muscles that generate fast bites were large in this group, so they may have evolved for fast bites to capture small-moving prey.”
The Turnersuchus probably lived close to the coast in relatively shallow water. Like living crocodiles, it also likely spent time out of the water to bask in the sun (it was also cold blooded) and lay eggs. The climate of the region when this species lived would have been warmer than the current climate of the United Kingdom.
This creature was likely not an apex predator, with larger hunters like ichthyosaurs, pleiosaurs and probably sharks likely preying on it.
“We don’t have any direct evidence of predation from these groups on thalattosuchians, but it probably happened,” Wilberg added.
This particular fossil, like many other discoveries, has numerous unknowns. The gender of the individual (which scientists often determine by comparing body sizes) is unclear.
This particular find will “continue to be important moving forward in determining how thalattosuchians are related to other fossil crocodiles — every new species discovered is a chance to test existing hypotheses of how they are related to one another” which is important in determining how evolution occurred in the group, Wilberg explained.
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The fossil hunters who lent their names to an ancient crocodile
By Daniel Dunaief
The beaches along the southern shore of the United Kingdom have rich and ancient stories to share.
Lizzie Hingley and Paul Turner. Photo from Lizzie Hingley
Lizzie Hingley and Paul Turner — friends who met on the beach and started working together in 2016 — are eager to gather clues about the past. Fossil hunters at the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Charmouth in the United Kingdom, which is about a three-hour drive southwest from London, Hingley and Turner discovered fragments of an unusual fossil starting in 2017. “Initially, we just saw random bones,” explained Hingley, who finds, prepares and sells some of the fossils on her website. Some fragments appeared to be a jaw in the clay next to an initial stone block containing multiple bones.
Hingley, who lives a ten minute walk from a beach that is also referred to as the Jurassic Coast, said that it’s “very unusual to come across anything with lots of bones in it on the beaches.” She took the find to her workshop, where she used an air abrasive and pneumatic chisel. She noticed it was semi-articulated, which means the bones were arranged in something resembling a natural order.
It took about one and a half years for Hingley and Turner to collect all the pieces of this fossil. Turner found the first main block, Hingley discovered the jaw next to it, Turner uncovered the next two and she found the last piece.
“It was quite difficult to collect as it was coming out of a huge glacial landscape,” said Hingley.It likely fell out of the cliff 50 years earlier and had been traveling to the front of the slip over the years. “This meant that, although we did try to dig for it, the best way to recover it was to wait for nature to uncover it for us,” she added.
Lizzie Hingley holding the ichthyosaur jaw she found when she was eight. Photo by Craig Chivers
Hingley and Turner visited daily to make sure they didn’t miss any pieces. The Charmouth Heritage Centre staff found a few loose vertebrae and reunited them with the rest of the fossil.
Hingley, who is one of about 15 people who regularly search parts of the seven miles of beaches almost daily, wanted to do more than collect this fossil — she wanted to know its history. Through her network, she found Roger Benson, who was a Professor of Paleobiology at the University of Oxford.
“It was great to work with him and see the scans being done,” she said. “He was instrumental” in bringing together a team of researchers who could analyze the finding and put it into historical context.
Indeed, Benson reached out to several researchers at Stony Brook University, including his former postdoctoral researcher Pedro Godoy, Assistant Professor Eric Wilberg and Professor Alan Turner (see related story on left) to gather information.
Close-up of ichthyosaur jaw. Photo by Lizzie Hingley
Their work concluded that this was a new species of marine crocodile. The ancient crocodile relative was named Turnersuchus hingleyae, after the fossil hunters who discovered it.
“It’s wonderful to have my name go down in history,” said Hingley, who also has a gastropod named after her.
Hingley, who is 35, started looking for fossils when she was six in Dorset, first on family holidays and then at every opportunity she could get. Over the years, she has found ichthyosaur skulls, ammonites measuring half a meter across, shark skin and teeth and numerous blocks containing hundreds of ammonites. When she was eight, she found a 20 centimeter ichthyosaur jaw, which is still part of her own collection.
Hingley is thrilled with her job, in which “every day is different and you never know what you are going to find or be working on,” she wrote. “I get to spend a lot of time in nature on the beach; the tide changes the beach every day, too.”
Benson described the beaches where Hingley and Turner search for new fossils as a European “pilgrimage for paleontologists.”
Hingley added that the process of erosion, which reveals fossils hidden in the cliffs along the beach, is something of a double edged sword, revealing fossils and threatening to carry them away.
A storm can decimate a beach and destroy fossils when the tide is too high to collect examples of creatures that lived as many as 185 million years ago. At the same time, erosion along the coast, caused by some of these same storms, reveals new fossils.
Walking along the beach, Hingley explained that it is almost incomprehensible to imagine the time scale separating her from the creatures who died so long ago.
The environment on the Jurassic Coast didn’t change much over those millennia.
“It is odd to think that you are collecting from the sea bed when it’s coming out of the cliff many meters above you,” she wrote. “The distance and time that these fossils have travelled to be found is incredible.”
James Lattimer, distinguished professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University, has been selected as a 2023 Fellow of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).
AAS Fellows are recognized for their contributions to the Society and its overarching mission – advancing the science that informs humanity’s understanding of the universe. For his part, Professor Lattimer has made formative discoveries about the structure and evolution of neutron stars.
Professor Lattimer has collaborated with other scientists to develop pioneering simulations of proto-neutron stars and their neutrino emissions, and he also helped enable the use of high-performance numerical simulations by creating the first open-source equation-of-state code and tables suitable for their application.
Professor Lattimer is the first Stony Brook faculty member selected as an AAS fellow since the inaugural class of 2019. He is also a fellow of the J.S. Guggenheim Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the American Physical Society (APS).
“I am delighted that Jim has been recognized by the recently established AAS fellowship program,”said Chang Kee Jung, PhD, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy.“Jim is an internationally renowned nuclear astrophysicist and has already received the prestigious Hans Bethe Prize given by the APS for truly outstanding work in the areas of astrophysics, nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics, or closely related fields.”
When they can’t stand the heat, bay scallops can’t get out of the proverbial kitchen.
A key commercial shellfish with landings data putting them in the top five fisheries in New York, particularly in the Peconic Bay, bay scallops populations have declined precipitously during a combination of warmer waters and low oxygen.
In a study published in the journal Global Change Biology, Christopher Gobler, Stony Brook University Endowed Chair of Coastal Ecology and Conservation and Stephen Tomasetti, a former Stony Brook graduate student, along with several other researchers, showed through lab and field experiments as well as remote sensing and long-term monitoring data analysis how these environmental changes threaten the survival of bay scallops.
Stephen Tomasetti. Photo by Nancy L. Ford/ Hamilton College
Bay scallops are “quite sensitive to different stressors in the environment,” said Tomasetti, who completed his PhD last spring and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Of the regional shellfish, bay scallops are the most sensitive to environmental stress.
Indeed, since 2019, bay scallops have declined by between 95 and 99 percent amid overall warming temperatures and extended heat waves. These declines have led to the declaration of a federal fishery disaster in the Empire State.
Tomasetti used satellite data to characterize daily summer temperatures from 2003 to 2020, which showed significant warming across most of the bay scallop range from New York to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He monitored four sites with sensors in the water in addition to satellite data during a field deployment with scallops.
At the warmest site, which was in Flanders Bay, New York, the temperature was above the 90th percentile of its long term average during an eight-day period that overlapped with the scallop deployment. The bay scallops in Flanders Bay were “all dead by the end of the heat wave event,” Tomasetti said.
At the same time, low levels of oxygen hurt the bay scallops which, like numerous other shellfish, feed on phytoplankton. Oxygen levels are declining in some of these bays as nitrogen from fertilizers and septic systems enter these waterways. High nitrogen levels encourage the growth of algae. When the algae die, they decay, which uses up oxygen and releases carbon dioxide into the water.
Field and lab studies
In the field, Tomasetti measured the heartbeat of bay scallops in East Harbor, Massachusetts by putting optical infrared sensors on them that took heartbeat readings every 15 minutes for a month.
Stephen Tomasetti conducts field work in East Harbor during the summer of 2020.
When the average daily temperature increased, their average heart rate climbed, which the scientists used as a proxy for their respiration rate. A higher respiration rate meant that the scallop was expending energy more rapidly, potentially leading to reductions of energy reserves.
Additionally, Tomasetti measured how quickly the scallops fed on algae in the lab under warm temperatures and low oxygen.These conditions caused the scallops to stop feeding or to feed slowly. Tomasetti interpreted this as a sign that they were waiting out the stress.
In the lab, bay scallops in the same conditions as the bays from Long Island to Massachusetts had the same reactions.
While a collection of fish and invertebrates feed on bay scallops, the effect of their die off on the food web wasn’t likely severe.
“I think there are other prey items that are likely redundant with scallops that cushion the impact,” Gobler explained in an email.
Solutions
Stephen Tomasetti with his wife Kate Rubenstein in East Harbor during the summer of 2020.
As for solutions, global warming, while an important effort for countries across the planet, requires coordination, cooperation and compliance to reduce greenhouse gases and lower the world’s carbon footprint.
On a more local and immediate scale, people on Long Island can help with the health of the local ecosystem and the shellfish population by reducing and controlling the chemicals that run off into local waters.
Waste management practices that limit nutrients are “super helpful,” Tomasetti said. “Supporting restoration (like the clam sanctuaries across Long Island that are increasing the filtration capacities of bays) is good.”
Gobler is encouraged by county, state and federal official responses to problems such as the decline in bay scallops, including the declaration of a federal disaster.
Long Island experience
A graduate student at Stony Brook for five years, Tomasetti was pleasantly surprised with the environment.
He had lived in New York City, where he taught high school biology for five years, before starting his PhD.
His perception was that Long Island was “a giant suburb” of New York. That perspective changed when he moved to Riverhead and enjoyed the pine forest, among other natural resources.
He and his wife Kate Rubenstein, whom he met while teaching, enjoyed sitting in their backyard and watching wild turkeys walking through their property, while deer grazed on their plant life.
Initially interested in literature at the University of Central Florida, Tomasetti took a biology course that was a prerequisite for another class he wanted to take. After completing these two biology classes, he changed his college and career plans.
Teaching high school brought him into contact with researchers, where he saw science in action and decided to contribute to the field.
At Hamilton College, Tomasetti has started teaching and is putting together his research plan, which will likely involve examining trends in water quality and temperature. He will move to the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in Princess Anne, MD this fall, where he will be an assistant professor in coastal environmental science.
As for his work with bay scallops and other shellfish on Long Island, Tomasetti looked at the dynamics of coastal systems and impacts of extreme events on economically important shellfish in the area.
Tomasetti is not just a scientist; he is also a consumer of shellfish.His favorite is sea scallops, which he eats a host of ways, although he’s particularly fond of the pan seared option.
Braving the bugs, Alistair Rogers (right) and his colleague Stefanie Lasota collect leaf samples in Alaska for analysis. Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt
By Daniel Dunaief
Alistair Rogers lives, thinks and works on opposite extremes.
At the same time that he gathers information from the frigid Arctic, he is also analyzing data from the sweltering tropical forests of Panama and Brazil. He visits both regions annually and, within one eight-day span, saw a Polar Bear in Utqiaġvik (formerly known as Barrow), Alaska and a tarantula in Brazil.
Alistair Rogers. Photo from BNL
That’s not where the extremes end. Rogers is also studying plants at the physiological level to understand how best to represent processes such as photosynthesis, respiration and stomatal conductance in climate models.
The leader of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Science & Technology Group in the Environmental and Climate Sciences Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Rogers recently was honored as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The AAAS has named fellows every year since 1874 to recognize their contributions to the advancement of science. Previous honorees included astronaut and former Johnson Space Center Director Ellen Ochoa, a founding member of the NAACP and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and inventor Thomas Edison.
Lisa Ainsworth, Research Leaders of the Global Change in Photosynthesis Unit for the USDA Research Service, nominated Rogers, who served as a mentor for her when she conducted her PhD research.
“[Rogers] is one of the world’s authorities on understanding how plants respond to atmospheric change and in particular rising carbon dioxide concentration,” Ainsworth said. He’s an experimentalist who “built a bridge to the scientific computational modeling community.”
Ainsworth suggested she would not have the career she developed if it weren’t for the support she received from Rogers.
Rogers, who the Department of Energy recognized as an Outstanding Mentor three times and has been at BNL since 1998, “makes you believe in yourself when you don’t have any reason to do that. He believes in you before you know you should believe in yourself,” Ainsworth said. For his part, Rogers is “delighted to be honored and recognized as a fellow.”
Carbon dioxide sinks
For all the extremes in his work, Rogers has been collecting data from plants to address a range of questions, including how they will react to and affect environmental changes caused by global warming.
Through photosynthesis, plants are responsible for absorbing about a third of the carbon dioxide humans produce through the burning of fossil fuels.
The uptake of carbon dioxide by plants and oceans has limited warming so far to 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial temperatures. Without such carbon dioxide removal by oceans and plants, the temperature would already be 3 degrees warmer.
The models his work informs are trying to understand what will happen to the carbon dioxide subsidy in the future.
“In order to work out how warm it’s going to get, you need to know the carbon dioxide concentration and the climate sensitivity (how much warmer it will get for a given amount of carbon dioxide),” he explained in an email.
Photosynthesis is less efficient at higher temperatures, but is also more efficient amid an increased amount of carbon dioxide. Drier air also reduces the efficiency of the process as plants close their stomata to conserve water, which restricts carbon dioxide supply to their chloroplasts.
The transfer of water from land to the atmosphere most often occurs through stomata, so understanding the way these pores open and close is important in predicting cloud formation and other land-atmosphere interactions.
Ainsworth described how a typical day of field work gathering data could last for 16 hours. She appreciated how Rogers worked and played hard — he is a cyclist and a skier — while keeping the work fun. Indeed, Ainsworth said Rogers, on regular calls with two other professors, blends discussions about grants and work decisions with their first choice for their guesses at the New York Times wordle game.
Leadership roles
In addition to his leadership role at BNL, Rogers is also part of the leadership teams for the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment — Arctic and the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment —Tropics.
Rogers said the Arctic is seeing the biggest increase in temperature relative to anywhere else on the planet faster because of climate feedback. When ice and snow melt, it reveals surfaces that absorb more heat.
The tropics, meanwhile, have been more stable, although the region is expected to experience hotter, drier temperatures in the coming decades as well.
Alistair Rogers. Photo from BNL
The Department of Energy is studying these biomes because they are climatically sensitive, globally important and poorly represented in climate models.
Rogers is working with other scientists at BNL and around the world to understand these processes to feed his data collection and analysis into global models.
Using an analogy for developing these models, Rogers suggested trying to predict the time it would take to get to the airport. A traveler would need to know the distance and the mode of transport — whether she was walking, biking or riding in a car.
A model predicting the travel time would make assumptions about how fast a person could go in a car, while factoring in other data like the weather and traffic density at a particular time to anticipate the speed.
If the traffic model wasn’t sure of the maximum possible speed of a vehicle, the error associated with predicting the arrival time could be large, particularly when considering the difference between traveling in a steamroller or a Lamborghini on empty roads.
Climate models use a similar process. By studying the species of plants, Rogers can tell the models whether the plants are the equivalent of sports cars or steamrollers.
Big picture
The worst case scenario of earlier models is highly unlikely, although the scenario of a drastic reduction in carbon dioxide also hasn’t occurred. The models, however, still suggest that changes in human behavior are critical to protecting the future of the planet against the effects of climate change.
Rogers is encouraged by the declining cost of solar energy and the work developing countries have done to bypass some of the more polluting sources of energy from the industrial revolution. He is also pleased by the commitment from the Department of Energy to look for climate change solutions.
These elements “represent great opportunities for scientists like me” to work on these problems.
Ward Melville High School earned first place in the regional High School Science Bowl on Feb. 3. From left, team members Benjamin Zhang, Anna Xing, Benjamin Proothi, Michael Melikyan, and Rithik Sogal. Photo from BNL
Hunter College Campus Schools team Max Levin, Gabriel Fang, Kieran Torpey, Camille Pimentel, and Andres Fischer placed first in the middle school competition on Feb. 2. Photo from BNL
Middle School Second Place Winners: R.C. Murphy Junior High School — Menghan Tang, Willem Van der Velden, Harry Gao, Kayla Harte and Gabrielle Wong. Photo from BNL
Middle School Third Place Winners: John F. Kennedy Middle School Team 1 — Aiden Karp, Maya Swierupski, Jayden Brun, Chaeten Modgil, and Ryan Perovich. Photo from BNL
Hunter College Campus Schools and Ward Melville High School took the top spots in the Long Island Regional Science Bowl competitions hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory on Feb. 2 and Feb. 3. The fast-paced question-and-answer contest quizzed students on chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, astronomy, and general, earth, and computer science.
Science Bowl alumni Suraj Muralidharan, Stephanie Zhang, and Amanda Chen volunteered at the 2023 competitions.
This year, the regional middle and high school events returned to an in-person, head-to-head tournament at the Laboratory after going virtual for two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. About 80 volunteers including BNL staff, community members, and past Science Bowl participants helped out this year.
“Brookhaven’s Office of Educational Programs was so excited to welcome students back onsite for a full day of competition and science learning,” said Amanda Horn, a Brookhaven Lab educator who coordinated the events. “This competition provides students with a unique opportunity to show off their science skills and knowledge, and learn about the Lab as well as the DOE.”
Hunter College and Ward Melville’s first place wins in the middle school and high school competitions, respectively, secured each team an all-expenses paid trip to compete at DOE’s National Science Bowl finals scheduled for April 27 to May 1 in Washington, D.C.
The DOE created the National Science Bowl in 1991 to encourage students to excel in mathematics and science and to pursue careers in these fields. Approximately 330,000 students have participated in the National Science Bowl® throughout its 32-year history, and it is one of the nation’s largest science competitions.
“The National Science Bowl® is an extraordinary competition that brings together young minds across America through science and technology,” said Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, DOE Office of Science Director, “and I would like to congratulate the Hunter College Campus Middle School and Ward Melville High School teams as they advance to the National Finals! Good luck to you — our future scientists, visionaries, and leaders!”
Middle School Science Bowl Results
First Place: The regional middle school event held on Feb. 2 was open to teams from New York City schools in addition to schools on Long Island. Under the guidance of coaches Jennifer Kasanuki and Christopher Torpey, a team from Hunter College Campus Schools of NYC — Kieran Torpey, Gabriel Fang, Max Levin, Andres Fischer and Camille Pimentel — earned a back-to-back win for their school after being tied halfway through the final round against R.C. Murphy Junior High School of Stony Brook.
“It feels really great,” said Hunter College team captain and eighth grader Kieran Torpey. “We’ve studied really hard for this. I love science and to know a lot of science is really great.”
Second Place: R.C. Murphy Junior High School — Harry Gao, Gabrielle Wong, Menghan Tang, Willem Van der Velden, Kayla Harte (Coaches: Jillian Visser and Emily Chernakoff)
Third Place: John F. Kennedy Middle School Team 1 — Chaeten Modgil, Maya Swierupski, Jayden Brun, Aiden Karp, Ryan Perovich (Coach: Steven Nielsen)
Fourth Place: NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies Team 1 — Ryan Casey, Jonathan Lin, Vince Liao, Kolbi Canell, Daniel Berkovich (Coaches: Faithe Theresa Yates and Eva Deffenbaugh)
High School Science Bowl Results
First Place: Competing against 23 other teams, Ward Melville High School of East Setauket secured their first-place win in a second-round showdown against Great Neck South High School on Feb. 3.
Under the guidance of Coach Philip Medina, team members — Benjamin Proothi, Rithik Sogal, Anna Xing, Benjamin Zhang and Michael Melikyan — went undefeated in their first four round robin matches and reached the double-elimination finals where they faced a team from Great Neck.
Great Neck gave them their first lost, but Ward Melville High School pulled through during the tiebreaker round where they surged ahead with a rally of several questions and bonus points — an intense, yet exciting way to win.
“We didn’t really know exactly what the score was,” said Ben Proothi. “We just felt like we were ahead by a little bit, so we took the chance and ran out the clock.”
“It’s incredible,” said team captain and junior Michael Melikyan. “We’ve always been fighting Great Neck South for a top spot, and they’ve always been taking it. They always have a strong team and incredible people and we’re just happy we finally managed to pull through. We’re very grateful and very proud to be going [to the National Science Bowl].”
This marks the first time in six years Ward Melville High School has qualified for the national tournament. “They’re an amazing group of people. I have no idea how they know this stuff, it’s incredible. They were working so well under pressure. I’m very proud of them,” added Coach Medina.
Second Place: Great Neck South High School — Richard Zhuang, Laura Zhang, Brandon Kim, Eric Pei, Erin Wong (Coaches: James Truglio and Nicole Spinelli)
Third Place: Farmingdale Senior High School — Waseem Ahmad, Ali Ahmad, Madhav Rapelli, Bevis Jiang, Rayan Adamjee, (Coach: Ashley Arroyo)
Fourth Place: Jericho Senior High School — Derek Minn, Natasha Kulviwat, He Xuan, Ashwin Narayanan, Brendan Shek (Coaches: Samantha Sforza and Emily Umile)
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Brookhaven Lab’s Office of Educational Programs (OEP) organized science fun for students throughout both competition days with a STEM Expo, tour, and additional science challenge. Staff and visiting students offered hands-on science demonstrations that included a cloud chamber that revealed electron tracks, sound and light sensitive microcontrollers, tricky engineering attempts, and robotic building blocks.
Science Bowl teams that did not move on to the competitions’ final double elimination rounds had the chance to get an up-close look at the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a DOE Office of Science User Facility for nuclear physics research. STAR, which weighs 1,200 tons and is as large as a house, tracks thousands of particles produced by ion collisions at RHIC to uncover clues about the universe in the moments after the Big Bang.
Teams also competed in a STEM Challenge, racing against the clock and each other to solve science and math puzzles to break several locks on boxes filled with treats. Among participating middle schools, Elmont Memorial High School earned first place, Sayville Middle School took second, and Great Neck South Team 1 placed third.
Long Beach High School completed the STEM Challenge first among participating high schools, followed by General Douglas Macarthur Senior High School, then Lynbrook Senior High School. Long Beach student Sam Adler used the periodic table to crack the code for one of the team’s final locks.
“It was so much fun,” Adler said. “I was so stressed during the competition itself and this was all good fun.”
CSHL Associate Professor Stephen Shea and Postdoc Yunyao Xie in Shea’s lab. Photo from CSHL/2020
By Daniel Dunaief
Good parenting, at least in mice, is its own reward.
No, mice don’t send their offspring to charter schools, drive them to endless soccer and band practices or provide encouragement during periods of extreme self doubt.
What these rodents do, however, protects their young from danger.
When a young mouse wanders, rolls or strays from the nest, it becomes distressed, calling out mostly to its mother, who is the more effective parent, to bring it back to safety.
Responding to these calls, the mother mouse carries the young back to the safety of the nest.
This behavior involves a reward system in a region of the mouse brain called the ventral tegmental area, or VTA. When the mouse effectively retrieves its young, the VTA releases the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is the brain’s way of saying “well done!”
In a paper published in December in the journal Neuron, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Associate Professor Stephen Shea and his postdoctoral researcher Yunyao Xie, who worked in the lab from 2019 to 2021, likened the release of dopamine in this area to a neurological reward for engaging in the kind of behavior that protects their young.
The research “proposes a mechanism that shapes behavior in accordance with that reward,” Shea said. The connection between dopamine in a reward system is an established paradigm.
“There was plenty of smoke there,” he said. “We didn’t pull this out of thin air.”
Indeed, in humans, mothers with postpartum depression have disrupted maternal mood, motivation and caregiving. PPD is linked to dysfunction of the mesolimbic dopamine system, which is a neural circuit that involves the VTA, Xie explained.
“Studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) revealed that the reward brain areas including VTA in healthy mothers have higher response to their own babies’ smiling faces than those in mothers with PPD,” Xie added.
What’s new in this research, however, is that it is “a study of how these signals use mechanisms to shape behavior and social interaction,” Shea said.
How the process works
The feedback loop between dopamine in the VTA and behavior involves a cumulative combination of dopamine interactions.
Dopamine is not at its highest level when the mouse mom is engaging in effective pup retrieval.
“Dopamine is shaping future, not current behavior,” Shea said. “If dopamine was driving the mouse on a current trial, a high dopamine level would be associated with high performance. The trial found the opposite: a low dopamine level was associated with high performance in a given trial, and vice versa.”
Like a skater laying her blades down effortlessly and gracefully across the ice after spending hours exerting energy practicing, the mother mouse engaged in the kind of reinforcement learning that required less dopamine to lead to effective pup saving behavior.
As the performance increases, dopamine diminishes over time, as the reward is “more expected,” reflecting a nuanced dynamic, Shea said.
To test the correlation between dopamine levels in the VTA and behavior, Shea and Xie created an enclosure with two chambers. They put a naive virgin female mouse, which they called surrogates, on one side and played specific sounds behind a door on each side of the chamber. The test mice initially had “no experience in maternal behaviors,” Xie explained.
As these surrogates became more experienced by either observing mothers or practicing on their own, the amplitude of the VTA dopamine signals got smaller.
To provide a control for this experiment, Xie monitored a group of naive virgin female mice who spent less time with pups and had to figure out how to retrieve them on their own under similar neurological monitoring conditions. The dopamine signals in this group stayed elevated over days and their performance in maternal behaviors remained poor.
Through these experiments, Xie and Shea concluded that “there is a negative correlation between the dopamine signals in the VTA and their performance in maternal behaviors,” explained Xie.
‘Mind blowing’ moment
In her experiments, Xie used optogenetic tools that allowed her to inhibit the activity of dopaminergic neurons in the VTA with high temporal precision.
Shea appreciated Xie’s hard work and dedication and suggested the discoveries represent a “lot of her creativity and innovation,” he said.
A native of China, Xie said her grandparents used to have a garden in which they taught her the names and morphologies of different plants during her childhood. She enjoyed drawing these plants.
In graduate school, she became more interested in neuroscience. She recalls how “mind-blowing” it was when she learned about the work by 1963 Nobel laureates Alan Hodgkin, Sir Andrew Fielding Huxley and John Eccles, who established a mathematical model to describe how action potentials in neurons are initiated and propagated.
In the study Xie did with Shea, she found that the dopamine signals in the VTA encoded reward prediction errors in maternal behaviors that was consistent with the mathematical model.
In the bigger picture, Xie is interested in how neural circuits shape behaviors. The neural circuits of most natural behaviors, such as defensive behaviors and maternal behaviors are hard-wired, she added.
Mice can also acquire those behaviors through learning. She is interested in how pup cues are perceived as rewards and subsequently facilitate learning maternal behavior. She found a great fit with Shea’s lab, which focuses on the neural mechanism of maternal behavior.
Xie enjoyed her time at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she could discuss science with colleagues by the bench, at the dining room or at one of the many on site seminars. She also appreciated the opportunity to attend neuroscience seminars with speakers from other schools, which helped expand her horizons and inspire ideas for research.
Next steps
As for the next steps, Shea said he believes there is considerable additional follow up research that could build on these findings. He would like to apply methods that measure the activity in individual neurons. Additionally, with a number of targets for dopamine, he wants to figure out what areas the neurotransmitter reaches and how the signals are used when they get there. More broadly, he suggested that the implications for this research extend to human diseases.
From left, Alea Mills and Xueqin Sun Photo from CSHL
By Daniel Dunaief
People have natural defenses against cancer. Proteins like P53 search for unwelcome and unhealthy developments.
Sometimes, mutations in P53, which is known as the “guardian of the genome,” rob the protein of its tumor fighting ability. In more than seven out of ten cases, the brain tumor glioblastoma, which has a grim prognosis for people who develop it, has an intact P53 protein.
So what happened to P53 and why isn’t it performing its task?
That’s what Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor and Cancer Center member Alea Mills and postdoctoral researcher Xueqin “Sherine” Sun wanted to know.
Starting with the idea that something epigenetic was somehow blocking P53, Sun conducted numerous detailed experiments with the gene editing tool CRISPR-Cas9.
She knocked out parts of the chromatin regulating machinery, which determines whether factors for DNA replication, gene expression, and the repair of DNA damage can access genes and perform their tasks.
The researchers wanted to find “something specific to glioblastoma,” Mills said in an interview. Working with a team of researchers in Mills’s lab, Sun focused on the protein BRD8.
In experiments with mice, Sun and her colleague inhibited this specific protein by destroying the gene that encodes it. That step was enough to stop the tumor from growing and allowed the mouse to live longer.
Mills and Sun published their work in the prestigious journal Nature just before the holidays.
The article generated considerable buzz in the scientific community, where it was in the 99th percentile among those published at the same time in attracting attention and downloads. It also attracted attention on social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.
“We see this as a major discovery, and are not surprised that many others think that the impact is extraordinary,” Mills said. The paper “has the potential of having a significant impact in the future. The work is completely novel.”
While finding a connection between BRD8 and glioblastoma suggests a target for researchers to consider in their search for new glioblastoma treatments, a potential new approach for patients could be a long way off.
“We cannot predict how long it will take to be able to help patients” who have glioblastoma, Mills said.
A promising step
From left, Alea Mills and Xueqin Sun Photo from CSHL
Still, this finding provides a promising step by showing how knocking out the BRD8 protein can enable P53 to gain access to a life threatening tumor.
Sun and Mills said BRD8 and its partners lock down genes that are normally turned on by P53.
“What you inherit from mom and dad is one thing,” said Mills. “How it’s packaged, the epigenetic mechanism that keeps it wrapped up or open, is key in how it’s all carried out within your body.”
By targeting BRD8, Mills and her team opened the chromatin, so P53 could bind and turn on other cancer fighting genes.
After receiving patient samples from Northwell Health, Stanford and the Mayo Clinic, the team studied tissue samples from patients battling glioblastoma. Those patients, they found, had higher concentrations of BRD8 than people without brain cancer.
Researchers and, down the road, pharmaceutical companies and doctors, are careful to make sure removing or reducing the concentration of any protein doesn’t have so-called “off target effects,” which would interfere with normal, healthy processes in cells.
Mills said they tested such actions in the context of neural stem cells in the brain. At this point, removing BRD8 didn’t have any “deleterious consequence,” she said.
Her lab is working to see the effect of reducing or removing the mouse version, also called Brd8, during development by engineering mice that lack this protein.
Future research
An important next step in this research involves searching for and developing viable inhibitors of the BRD8 protein.
For histone readers like BRD8, researchers look for an active domain within the protein. The goal is to interrupt the interface in their interactions with histones.
In creating molecules that can block the action of a protein, researchers often start with the structure of the protein or, more specifically, the active site.
Sun, who is currently applying for jobs to run her own lab after working at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for over eight years, is hoping to purify enough of the protein and determine its structure.
Sun is working on x-ray crystallography, in which she purifies the protein, crystallizes it and then uses x-rays to determine the atomic structure.
Sun described the search for the structure of the protein as an “important direction” in the research. “Once we solve the structure” researchers can focus on drug design, testing and other experiments.
She suggested that the search for a small molecule or compound that might prove effective in inhibiting BRD8 would involve optimizing efficiency and activity.
There is a “long way to go” in that search, Sun added.
She is working to generate a chemical compound in collaboration with other groups.
A long, productive journey
Born and raised in China, Sun has been an active and important contributor to Mills’s lab.
“I’ll miss [Sun] personally as well as in the lab,” Mills said. “She’s been a really good role model and teacher across the Cold Spring Harbor campus and in my lab.”
Mills is “really excited about [Sun’s] future,” she said. “She’ll be really great” at running her own lab.”
For her part, Sun enjoyed her time on Long Island, where she appreciated the natural environment and the supportive culture at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Sun described her time on Long Island as a “very exciting and satisfying journey.”
She is determined to study and understand cancer for a number of reasons.
“I know people who died of cancer,” she said. “It’s a terrible disease and it’s urgent to find more efficient therapeutic strategies to stop cancers and improve human heath.”
Sun is also eager to embrace the opportunity to mentor and inspire other students of science.
“Teaching is very important,” she said. She looks forward to helping students grow as professionals to create the “next generation of scientists.”
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