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SCCC Biology Professor Peter Smith demonstrates the Anatomage Table. Photo by Victoria Pendzik, SCCC

It’s the most technologically advanced anatomy visualization system in the world, according to its manufacturer, and Suffolk County Community College’s Selden campus is the only college in New York State to have one. Welcome to teaching and learning in the 21st century.

The Anatomage virtual dissection table is being adopted at leading medical schools and institutions to allow lifelike and never-before-available interaction and visualization of the human body and its systems.

The table — about the size of a hospital bed, with a touchscreen surface — uses three-dimensional imagery from digitally scanned specimens to allow students to perform a lifesize, virtual dissection via touchscreen interface. The table can render limitless views of the human body in flawless detail.

Students can zoom in on or rotate different structures and virtually remove individual organs, according to SCCC Professor of Biology Dr. Peter Smith.

“The table is a remarkable technological tool that provides students with a 360-degree view of anatomical structures and their relationship to one another,” said Smith.

“We can look at the body through three dimensional visualization and all of the body’s structures can be annotated. This is what teaching anatomy in the 21st century is all about,” he added.

“The Anatomage Table is a true 21st century teaching tool. It permits Biology students not only to study Human anatomy, but it is a good addition to general biology classes that include animal anatomy. It includes, in its programming, the possibility of virtual dissection of cats and dogs. The table will help to reduce the use of preserved specimens, a more humane and sustainable approach to the study of vertebrate anatomy,” said Suffolk County Community College Biology Department Chair Dr. Rosa Gambier.

The technology allows students to visualize skeletal tissues, muscles, organs and soft tissue, and further customize the interaction by virtually slicing, layering and segmenting the anatomy. The selections can be rotated or flipped to accommodate any viewpoint.

Work with an actual cadaver requires many chemicals, there needs to be a facility to house them (SCCC was the only community college in New York with a cadaver lab), there is a great deal of regulation in working with cadavers, and there are recurring costs associated with them.

With the Anatomage Table, countless students have the ability to work with a body, enlarge or rotate systems and bisect and remove parts.

“The table,” explained Suffolk County Community College President Dr. Shaun L. McKay, “while advanced, is also a natural extension of what students are familiar with because it functions much like a tablet computer. We are extremely proud to bring this new tool to our college and to our students while fulfilling our mission of incorporating innovative teaching and learning strategies into our classrooms.”

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Tenants of early stage businesses at work in LaunchPad Huntington. File photo by Rohma Abbas

Early stage businesses on the North Shore should set their sights high.

A state program that offers tax breaks, technical aid, legal advice and more is now more accessible to startup businesses, thanks to both Long Island High Technology Incubator in Stony Brook and LaunchPad Huntington.

The Innovation Hot Spot Support Program is a smaller version of the New York State-wide program Start-Up New York, which aims to empower more up-and-coming businesses with the tools they need to prosper. Hot Spot does not offer all of the benefits that Start-Up NY offers, but it is less restrictive and has fewer mandates than the former.

Start-Up New York requirements include a 10-year commitment strictly at an incubator location, and hiring a certain amount of employees.

Hot Spot was created to support companies that are in the early stages of development for the purpose of creating successful businesses in state. In order for a company to get approved for this program, they need to be recommended by a certified Start-Up New York member.

The benefits of being in the Hot Spot program include technical assistance, mentorship, entrepreneurial education, development services and tax breaks.  Phil Rugile, director of LaunchPad Huntington, said that businesses in Hot Spot are eligible for state tax breaks, corporate tax breaks, are free of sales tax, and can receive legal advice for issues like patents.

As of this month, Launchpad is a designated approval site for the Hot Spot program and can now nominate companies to be considered for it, as long as they are tenants of one of LaunchPad’s five locations, according to Rugile.

“We want to help startups,” Rugile said. “I’m excited. This is a good program.”

One of the reasons LaunchPad is now part of the Hot Spot program is because the Long Island High Technology Incubator located at Stony Brook University supports them. It’s required for every Hot Spot to be affiliated and supported by a college, university or research institution.

Long Island High Technology Incubator is a non-profit business that supports early-stage companies much like LaunchPad. In its 16 years of service, it has housed more than 70 companies and is an official Start-Up New York member. Now LaunchPad joins Long Island High Tech in supporting new businesses and recommending them for programs like Hot Spot.

Ann-Marie Scheidt, director of economic development at Long Island High Tech and an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University, said in a phone interview that the council wants to make sure all places they support “represent a innovative family on Long Island that will help startups grow and stay on Long Island.”

She said that LaunchPad exposes new companies to “an enormous range of expert resources that are so valuable for an early-stage business.”

LaunchPad has already successfully nominated a tenant of theirs to join the Hot Spot program — Nomorobo, a company that shields customers from telemarketers and robot callers.

Aaron Foss, founder of Nomorobo, said that LaunchPad wanted any company they nominated to be able to contribute to the community. Ross is also a professor at Molloy College and works with students from Molloy, Stony Brook and Hofstra University to develop their business ideas.

Foss said the financial benefits of the program are fantastic.

“I have about a $50,000 monthly phone bill, with added costs for sales tax,” Foss said in a phone interview. “That’s thousands of dollars I can use elsewhere, to hire employees or spend on advertising.”

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By Elof Carlson

In 2013, South African cave explorers were told of a chamber with what looked like human bones in the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa. The Sotho language uses “naledi” for its word for a star. When a preliminary examination of some of the bones revealed this was a new species of humans, the formal species name naledi was attached to the genus name to give us Homo naledi. 

Over the next two years, three areas within the chamber were excavated, yielding 1,413 bones or bone fragments, 137 isolated teeth, and 53 jawbones with teeth. They belong to 15 different individuals, all of the same species, H. naledi. 

Their brain size is about that of human ancestors who lived two to four million years ago. Their hands and feet are more human-like than ape-like. Their teeth are remarkably human-like. Their torso, shoulders and pelvis, however, are chimpanzee-like. They were small (four to five feet tall) and, most remarkably, they set aside their dead in a special chamber in the cave. Until this find, no other animal but our own species, Homo sapiens, has been known to provide a special resting place for the dead. 

The digging will continue over the next few years, and many more (perhaps dozens) of fossil members of this species will be uncovered and analyzed. It is rare to have human fossils in such abundance. Where these humans fit in the many branched human, ape and monkey family tree will be worked out as these bones are studied by paleontologists and anthropologists in the years to come.

I look forward to the associated findings that will be explored in the cave and in a careful study of the many bones available.

For those who like the scientific description of a human, we are of the order Primates, the suborder Anthropoides, the superfamily Hominoidea, the family Hominidae, the tribe Hominini, the genus Homo and the species sapiens. Replace that last word with naledi and you see how close we are despite being separated, in all likelihood, by some two to four million years.

It has been satisfying to see the many new fossil humans, apes and related ancestors over the four generations I have lived and to reflect on how the ancestral connections are emerging. It is a story that will continue with more surprises as paleontologists continue exploring the places where humans have resided in the distant past.

Pessimists will see the extinction of humans from natural catastrophes, from human neglect of the world we live in or from alien or supernatural invasion. But four million years have passed and yet another connection to that past is revealed. If the average species runs about two million years, our species, Homo sapiens, has a long way to go before it is just a fossil memory.

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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The LaunchPad Huntington STEAM Innovation Conference will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 17. File photo by Rohma Abbas

LaunchPad Huntington is sponsoring a conversation between technology companies, educators and students in the hopes that it will spark creative collaborations and future Long Island-based jobs.

The conference will be both a showcase of emerging technologies and services and an in-depth panel discussion with education and industry leaders working to prepare students and adults for new employment opportunities.

The event, dubbed a STEAM Innovation Conference will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 17, at LaunchPad’s Huntington office from 3:30 to 8 p.m.

Phil Rugile, director of LaunchPad Huntington, said the conference is meant to combine science and the arts, to “merge two different parts of the brain.”

“My hope is to get a conversation started in media, education and business communities,” he said. “We need people to start thinking outside the box.”

The event starts with a 90-minute opening for public school students to browse exhibits set up by technology companies. A solar energy company and a virtual reality company are some of the businesses that will showcase exhibits at the conference.

“The really important question on Long Island is how do we get the students and the employers together,” Rugile said. He said that the skillsets of someone with a great sense of creativity and technology are really needed at a local level.

Originally this conference was designed to target professors and their curricula to produce more innovative thinkers.

Following the exhibits, there will be a networking hour, complete with dinner and music, where businesses and educators are encouraged to bounce ideas off each other.

The final part of the conference is a discussion by a panel of experts. Kenneth White, manager of Office of Educational Programs at Brookhaven National Laboratory, will moderate the talk. Panelists will include Victoria Hong, associate chairperson and assistant professor for the St. Joseph’s College Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Andrew Grefig, director of curriculum and content at Teq and Nancy Richner, museum education director at the Hofstra University Museum.

“We’re constantly losing kids to Brooklyn and New York City,” Rugile said. “Let’s change the conversation. We need to provide opportunities.”

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Northport-East Northport school board members are looking into whether or not the district should buy iPads for trustees to be used at meetings instead of paper agendas. Stock photo

Northport-East Northport school board members earlier this month discussed whether the district should pay for iPads that trustees could use during meetings.

The idea was introduced by board member David Stein as a way to reduce costs of paper. The idea, however, was sharply denounced by the board’s Vice President David Badanes.

“I am really unhappy about any money being spent on board members for iPads,” Badanes said at the Oct. 8 board meeting. “I think it’s outrageous.”

Badanes, who was the lone naysayer, said he doesn’t have a problem with board members bringing their own iPads or electronic devices to meetings — he just doesn’t want the district to pay for them, he said.

According to District Clerk Beth Nystrom, there is currently no district policy that finances electronic devices for members of the school board’s use exclusively. She did say that board members are welcome to use district-owned electronic devices at board meetings, but presently none do.

Other board members said that while it may be fine for Badanes to have his own personal opinion, it’s not something he should hold everyone else to.

“Personal convictions are fine but each person should be given the right to decide,” Trustee Jennifer Thompson said. “It should not impugn the rest of us.”

Trustee Lori McCue said she felt it was unfair to tell board members who wanted to use an electronic device to bring one from home.

“I don’t know if it’s appropriate,” McCue said. “What if you don’t already own one of these devices?”

Stein claimed it’s more cost effective for the board to use electronic devices instead of getting paper agendas and other documents sent to their homes before each meeting.

“We spend nearly $800 worth of paper every year [on each board member],” Stein said. “If individuals want to embrace it, they’re saving $800 in taxpayer money.”

Stein said regular agendas are also not the only documents that are printed for board members every year.

“Based on 24 scheduled meetings per year, and an average of six specially called meetings plus the budget season, which can produce budget documents several times the size of a regular weekly package,” Stein said in an email. “The regular board member could receive anywhere from 22,000 pages during the course of a year.”

According to Nystrom, the cost is quite low to send board members paper agendas to their home annually.

“The approximate cost the district pays per board member to send printed copies of the agenda to their houses before meetings is approximately $35 per year,” Nystrom said in an email.

Board President Andrew Rapiejko encouraged board members to try and find the best way to serve the district.

“Everyone wants to do this job as effectively and efficiently as possible,” Rapiejko said. “They shouldn’t be criticized for trying to get the right tools. If the district can provide this tool, I think it should be discussed.”

Rapiejko also said that it is not for the board’s personal benefit to use these devices. “The district isn’t giving these out to board members,” Rapiejko said. “These are purchased for the district’s use.”

Trustee Regina Pisacani said she has been to other district board meetings where board members using electronic devices.

Rapiejko said the board could resume discussing this topic during budget season.

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By Elof Carlson

Social traits include ethnic or racial identification, religious beliefs, patriotism and class or family status. We recognize that one can be a sports fan and one’s team may be self-chosen the way my father was a Brooklyn Dodger fan, my brother Roland was a New York Giants fan, and I was a Yankee fan. Fan loyalty can be deeply felt, as watching fans at a game often reveals.

We also recognize that children are usually raised in a religion chosen by their parents, which they may later reject or accept. Ethnic identity is more difficult to assess because immigrants frequently keep a lot of the “old country” values and traditions going in their children. But by the time grandchildren or great-grandchildren are born in the United States the melting pot is the norm.

I used to have students in some of my classes prepare genetic pedigrees of their family from grandparents to grandchildren, including uncles and aunts and cousins. What I learned in these exercises was that some Irish married Italians, some Jews married non-Jews, some Catholics married Protestants, some blacks married whites, and it was rare to see three generations in the United States where all members were of one descent (e.g., all Irish or all Methodists).

The farther back one goes in a family’s genealogy, the more these mixtures occur.  This tells me it is not innate to marry one’s own kind. “Birds of a feather may flock together” as a species, but as anyone who has observed dogs will know, any breed of dog can and will breed with other breeds of dogs.

Despite these evidences of cultural mixing and the uncertain religious identification our descendants will have, much of society likes to believe that social traits are inherited. If a family has several generations of physicians, they may believe being a doctor is “bred in the bone” (for those who grew up before World War II) or that it’s in the family DNA (for those who grew up after 1970 when DNA was entering crossword puzzles and rock music — “Hey hey hey hey, it’s DNA that made me that way”).

Most school teachers will experience parents taking credit for their good genes when their children excel in school but the parents may blame the teacher (or the school board) when their children do poorly in their classes. I have never heard a parent say, “It’s my crummy genes that made my child flunk your course.”

The danger of assigning genes to social behavior is that they lead to racist thinking, ethnic stereotyping and beliefs in social class inferiority. The eugenics movement of the first half of the 20th century was filled with these attempts to assign social failure with defective genes (or before the term gene existed to defective protoplasm).

I much prefer evidence based on experimentation or carefully controlled studies. But wishful thinking is easy to do and widely shared, making the world of politics, popular culture and taboo topics seem more real than the science that shatters these illusions.

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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File photo by Elana Glowatz

Skygazers are in for a special treat this weekend — for the first time in 33 years, there will be a supermoon eclipse.

A supermoon occurs when a full moon reaches the point in its orbit that is closest to Earth, known as its perigee, which happens a handful of times a year. The proximity — of about 222,000 miles — makes the moon look brighter, and it appears about 14 percent larger.

The supermoon on Sept. 27 and 28 will coincide with a total lunar eclipse, which occurs when the moon passes through Earth’s shadow, covering its surface in a red tint.

That red tint occurs because of the refraction of light through Earth’s atmosphere on its way to the moon.

According to NASA, a supermoon eclipse is a rare event. It has happened only five times since the beginning of the 20th century — in 1910, 1928, 1946, 1964 and 1982 — and those who miss it this weekend will not have another chance to catch it until 2033.

As a bonus, it will also be a harvest moon, which is the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox on Sept. 23.

On the East Coast, a partial eclipse will begin at 9:07 p.m. on Sept. 27, according to NASA, with the total eclipse beginning at 10:11 p.m. It will last a little more than an hour before returning to a partial eclipse. The full event will end at 12:27 a.m. on Sept. 28.

At the time the partial eclipse begins for New York viewers, the \moon will be about 26 degrees above the horizon, in the east southeast direction. It will gradually move higher and southward in the sky, so that at the time the partial eclipse ends after midnight, the moon will be about 50 degrees above the horizon to the south.

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Passion for music thrives thanks to eSight glasses

Justin Crilly uses the eSight electronic glasses to perform simple tasks like using a computer. Photo by Rachel Siford

By Rachel Siford

Justin Crilly of Smithtown has had an eye-opening experience.

Legally blind 16-year-old Crilly had started using eSights on his eyes and is now able to pursue his passion for music. eSights are electronic glasses that utilize a high-definition camera in the headset to capture a real-time video feed. The headset connects to the processing unit that adjusts every pixel to allow Crilly to see and also houses the battery.

The tech company is fairly new since it launched in 2013.

“When I was first considered legally blind at 3 months old, the doctors said I would never see again,” he said.

Crilly’s mother, Stacy, said she saw an ad for eSight on Facebook and was intrigued. They went to a demo in the city and tried a pair out, and immediately fell in love with them.

“I don’t have to squint walking down the hallway anymore,” he said. “Now I can see when I go to a concert or a movie.”

Justin Crilly sports the eSight glasses, which help him overcome blindness. Photo by Rachel Siford
Justin Crilly sports the eSight glasses, which help him overcome blindness. Photo by Rachel Siford

Crilly’s mother has noticed considerable differences in her son’s behavior since he started wearing the glasses this past March.

“The eSights have increased his independence tremendously,” his mother said. “It makes me less afraid for him to go out into the world.”

She went on to say that it gives him the freedom to do anything he wants, like go away to college when he graduates if he so chooses.

“There was always this worry about how far was he going to make it independently, but now I am elated to know that he can be as independent as anybody else,” Stacy Crilly said. “In a way these glasses freed him from his disability.”

According to his mother, since Justin Crilly was a baby, he always gravitated toward music. He has been looking into music schools for the past several years, excited about where to go to college to pursue a career in music production.

He has been taking music theory and recording at Hauppauge High School for the past year. He is able to plug his eSights directly into the computer, making using the software to make music, at home and at school, much easier. Justin Crilly has taken voice, piano and drum lessons throughout his life and has recently started learning how to DJ at Spin DJ Academy in Hauppauge.

Before he started using eSights, it took Justin Crilly about three hours or more to do homework every night, but now he can knock it out in an hour.

He said he wants to show people that anyone with disabilities can do anything they want.

“I want people to hear my music and think ‘despite that he has a disability, he still made music sound that good,’” Justin Crilly said. “No matter if you have a disability or not, you can do anything with your life.”

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By Elof Carlson

William Bateson (1861-1926) grew up in an academic home and attended Cambridge University where he took an interest in embryology. He went to Johns Hopkins University to learn the new experimental approaches and insights into the cellular events leading to embryo formation. While there, he was inspired by William Keith Brooks who urged him to study heredity if he wanted to contribute to a field in need of scientific rigor.

When he returned to England, Bateson studied variations and identified two types that were unusual. He called one group homeotic changes because they put organs in the wrong place, such as a fly’s leg emerging from an eye. The other group he called meristic variations, which duplicated parts, like a child born with six fingers on each hand and foot. Both meristic and homeotic mutations were considered pathological by most breeders and physicians, but Bateson believed they could be the raw material for new organ systems or more dramatic origins of new species. He published the results of this work in 1894, and it made him regarded as an enemy by British Darwinists who favored all mutational change as gradual and never sudden.

In 1900 Bateson read Mendel’s papers and was immediately won over to his approach. He began studying mutations in plants and animals. He also gave a name (in 1906) to this new field and called it genetics. Bateson used the symbols P1, F1 and F2 for the generations of a cross. He used the terms homozygous and heterozygous for the genotype of the individuals in a cross. He described the mutant and normal states of hereditary units as alleles.

Bateson discovered blending types of inheritance and genetic interaction in which two or more nonallelic genes could jointly affect a trait. He even found (but did not correctly interpret) non-Mendelian recombination of genes. In this he was scooped by Thomas Hunt Morgan and his students. Morgan was also a student of Brooks at Johns Hopkins and, like Bateson, originally skeptical of Darwinian subtle variations as the basis for all of evolution. But Morgan added cytology to his studies and related the hereditary units (called genes after 1909) to the chromosomes on which they resided.

Bateson felt chromosomes had little to do with genetic phenomena. He was wrong and it was not until the 1920s that he grudgingly admitted Morgan’s fly lab had advanced the field of genetics he named.

Bateson’s work led to an explosion of interest in the field of genetics, and, while he was trapped by his views of the time, younger scientists had no difficulty adding genes to chromosomes, mapping them and accounting for the transmission of traits through their behavior during cell division and germ cell production.

In 1910 Bateson was probably the most famous geneticist in the world. By 1920 he was fading, and after his death in 1926, he was largely forgotten to all but historians of science.

That is not uncommon in the history of science. Science changes faster than any individual scientist can change views in a lifetime. Despite the loss of prestige, it is fitting to honor the memory of the person who named the field of genetics and whose battles to make Mendelism its core succeeded over the prevailing views of heredity at the end of the nineteenth century.

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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Teq CEO Damian Scarfo, and President Chris Hickey. Photo from Lisa Hendrickson

There’s been a lot of hubbub about the 21st century classroom, where interactive whiteboards replace chalk, and pencils and pens are subbed out for iPads and Chromebooks. Even our own governor has incentivized such reforms at our schools.

But let’s push pause and ask: Is all this technology helping or hurting? And what benefits are we missing out on in the real world beyond the bright screens?

This week, a Huntington Station company, Teq, announced it had partnered with Canadian company SMART Technologies — yes, the creators of the famous SMART Board that is a staple of today’s classrooms — to be the sole distributor of Smart products for grades K to 12 in New York. That’s a big deal and we applaud Teq’s success. The educational tech company, already projecting sales of $50 million this year, anticipates the partnership will boost its revenues 20 percent.

That’s not just chump change, and it’s a good deal for Long Island’s economy.

Yet how much of our new technologies are really needed for learning and how much are we just advancing for the sake of advancing? It feels like a lot of the new software and hardware is needed only to keep today’s student boredom at bay, as many kids are so used to having tech products in the home that they will not concentrate on paper.

A culture of distraction is one of the greatest setbacks of today’s overly technological society. We understand that it benefits our students to be familiar with today’s gadgets, so they will be prepared for tomorrow’s success. But it also benefits children to know what it feels like to hold a real book in their hands, to solve a difficult math problem using a pencil and loose-leaf notebook, to be able to tell time without a digital display, to play outside instead of staring at their phones.

Today’s kids are being handed iPads not long after retiring baby bottles.

Steve Jobs once told a New York Times reporter that he limited his own children’s tech time at home. Instead of rushing to live in a completely digital world, our educators, parents and political leaders should place importance on carving out some time for a little reality — some quiet time and disconnect to facilitate thinking and creativity.

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