CLOSE
Tags Posts tagged with "Daniel Dunaief"

Daniel Dunaief

by -
0 518
Donald Triplett. Photo from Wikimedia Commons/ Ylevental, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

At a recent national meeting of experts in his field, Matthew Lerner said the gathering paused to toast the remarkable life of Donald Triplett.

Born and raised in Forest, Mississippi, Triplett died on Thursday, June 15 at the age of 89, after a full life in which his family, his community and a medical and research field around him learned about a condition he helped various communities understand.

Triplett was different from other children growing up, and in 1943, after his parents brought him to psychiatrist Dr. Leo Kanner, he became “Case 1” for a new diagnosis called autism.

“Everything we know about autism started with what was learned from Donald,” said Lerner, associate professor in Clinical Psychology at the Stony Brook Neurosciences Institute. “I’m still confident the field would have found its way to autism,” but the interaction between Triplett and Kanner helped establish some of the parameters that define a condition that researchers estimate affects about one in 36 children today.

As with people who have other diagnoses, the reaction people have to those with autism varies.

“There are two broad threads in the history of how we’ve understood, studied and treated autism since the 1940s,” said Lerner.

In one, people consider it a lifetime disability, in which the diagnosis is limiting and stigmatizing.

In the second, people see autism as a different way of being, in which individuals have an opportunity to develop a meaningful and happy life, as was the case with Triplett.

“The idea of autism as being so different and so impairing was the prototype,” Lerner said. Triplett’s life “didn’t follow that trajectory at all. He had a life filled with community in which he felt supported and accepted.”

This second model of autism, Lerner added, is achievable in “far more cases than we may have historically assumed.”

Triplett, who worked at the Bank of Forest for 65 years and traveled the world, had unusual cognitive abilities that set him apart from neurotypical people. He could multiply two three-digit numbers rapidly without a calculator. He also could look at the side of a building and could indicate the number of bricks without counting them one by one. He had perfect pitch.

As he was growing up, he didn’t interact socially in typical ways for children his age. His parents institutionalized him for a year, where he became withdrawn and disinterested. When they brought him back to their home, he became more engaged, earning a high school and bachelor’s degree in French from Millsaps College.

“He may have been the first, but he was far, far, far from the only autistic person who ended up exceeding the horizons set for him when he was young,” Lerner said.

Lerner believed people in the autistic community, like Triplett, have something to teach others about challenging circumstances.

“Kids are going to get where they are going at their own pace,” Lerner said. Being patient and kind and taking time to meet people where they are as individuals can help people grow. Lerner suggested that “we need to be okay with the idea that what that person is going to be is themselves and the best thing we can do is create a space” for that development to occur.

People will develop when they don’t feel like they are failing because people around them are setting expectations that don’t match them or are underestimating what they can do, he added.

“It’s important to feel validated and valued” through life, Lerner said.

Parents of children from a wide range of abilities sometimes hear what their offspring will never do.

People are frequently “proven wrong” by that child in that family, he added.

As for Triplett, Lerner encouraged people to watch the movie ’In a Different Key” about the person later known as Case 1.”

by -
0 747
Above, a photo of Turkana taken from a single engine plane shows the Koobi Fora spit and Lake Turkana alongside a time map. Photo from Bob Raynolds

By Daniel Dunaief

In a wide-ranging interview, Louise Leakey, Director of Public Education and Outreach for the Turkana Basin Institute and a Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University shared her thoughts on numerous topics in the field of paleontology.

Louise Leakey at the Richard Leakey Memorial Conference on June 5. Photo by John Griffin/SBU

Leakey, who earned her PhD at the University College London, suggested that the process of finding fossils hasn’t changed that much, although other options beyond scouring a landscape for fragments of the world’s former occupants may be forthcoming.

“It may very well change if we can implement machine learning with high resolution imagery, using drones,” she said. “That’s one of the things we’re looking at the moment.”

What’s really changed, however, is the accuracy field scientists have in marking where, and, importantly, when new discoveries originated, she said.

Geologists like Bob Raynolds, Research Associate at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, have created time maps that indicate the approximate age of sediments around a fossil in some select areas of the Turkana Basin.

These maps “can be uploaded onto an iPad app for use in the field that shows you in real time where you are on the geological map,” Leakey explained. “This is a game changer for field work in the basin.”

A time map created by Bob Raynolds in collaboration with Geologic Data Systems, a Littleton, Colorado company.

The maps represent the work of many people, Raynolds explained.  Originally, teams of Master’s students used air photographs, tracing paper and ink to make a map. These students spent many weeks walking systematically on the ground and tracing the patterns on the photos.

The rugged and isolated nature of the ground in Northern Kenya makes the work done on foot difficult, Raynolds explained.

The original maps, which were made in the 1970’s, took months to make and were presented as paper copies in unpublished Master’s theses. After numerous enhancements, Raynolds, working with companies including Geologic Data Systems in Littleton, Colorado, created time maps.

The internal GPS on an iPhone enables a blue dot to indicate a person’s location on the map.

“I have worked on the maps to make a new set of derived products that are maps of the age of the rocks,” said Raynolds who created these time maps earlier this year. “The resolution of the time maps is 100,000 years” which is an “astonishingly detailed resolution for us who are accustomed to million year packages of time.”

The maps cover the entire Turkana Basin at various scales, Raynolds added.

More broadly, Bernard Wood, University Professor of Human Origins in the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleontology at George Washington University and the first speaker at a recent Stony Brook University conference to honor Richard Leakey, explained that dating fossils has become increasingly accurate.

The first dates of fossils in the KBS Tuff, which is an ash layer in the Koobi Fora Formation east of Lake Turkana, was estimated within 260,000 years of a specific date. Using improved methods, a study published this year has reduced that range to 600 years.

Publishing pace

In the meantime, the pace of publishing has slowed considerably.

“There’s so much more material” that can serve as a frame of reference for new discoveries, Leakey said. “The rate of publication is frustratingly slow for some of these specimens.” This contrasts dramatically with the experience of Leakey’s father Richard.

When the elder Leakey submitted his letters or paper to the prestigious journal Nature, the late editor John Maddox never sent them out for review. “[Maddox] explained that he couldn’t see the point, because they concerned fossils so recently discovered” that few had seen them, Wood explained in his presentation.

Louise Leakey also differed from Richard in earning her bachelor’s degree and PhD, while her father dropped out of high school and never received any additional formal education.

Wood suggested that, next to marrying Meave, the elder Leakey described leaving school as one of the best decisions he’d ever made.

For his daughter, though, Leakey “encouraged me to go and do that,” Louise Leakey said. The education helped “in terms of being able to be [principal investigator] on grant applications,” she said.

Leakey suggested it was a “real privilege to be able to spend time” earning her PhD. She also found that the educational experience gave her the opportunity to “stand on my own two feet” in her research.

Like her father, Louise Leakey is concerned about conservation and declining biodiversity. When she was younger, she saw areas that were teeming with wildlife. On a recent three-hour drive, she only saw a golden jackal and a dik-dik, which is a type of small antelope, compared with the much wider variety of creatures she would have seen decades ago, such as Grévy’s zebra, Burchell zebra, lesser kudu, ostriches, warthogs, topi, gerenuk, oryx and, possibly lions and cheetah. 

She attributes this decline to hunting as some have exterminated these species as result of competition for grazing areas and hunting the animals for meat. Record droughts are also threatening their survival.

Leakey is working with the next generation to get “kids to care about nature” so they can “think about what they’re doing and the real impact it has.”

In addition to preserving biodiversity, Leakey remains passionate about studying the past, which could help the current and future generations tackle climate change. “We might be able to learn lessons” from those who survived during such challenging conditions, she said.

Leakey is able to maintain her involvement and commitment to numerous efforts by working with talented collaborators.

“If you don’t have teams to really hold it together, you can’t do any of it,” she said.

by -
0 521
White great pyrenese dog walking along path

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

I want to talk about dog poop.

I don’t intend to describe it, compare notes, or ponder the meaning of bending over after our dogs relieve themselves to take their excrement and dump it in our garbage cans or, perhaps, to ship it to Mars so Matt Damon will have fertilizer for a crop of potatoes.

It’s the whole picking up of the steaming logs that I’d like to address.

You see, the other day, my son and I took our 95-pound dog for a walk. Yes, bigger dogs make larger and, often, smellier poops. I know because I’ve walked smaller dogs recently and am amazed at the delicate little pebbles they gingerly push out of their smaller digestive systems.

So, there we were, the three of us, on our happy stroll, with my dog smelling everything and nothing and my son and I talking about, shocker, sports!

My dog did his thing. At that point, I reflexively leaped into action, opening a small plastic bag that I turned inside out so I didn’t have to come into contact with, you know, it.

I bagged it up, the way I always do, tied the bag twice, as is also a part of the routine, and gently lay the bag near a tree, preparing, as I have for the last five years, to retrieve the bag on my return trip.

That’s when a bald, angry, younger man honked at me from his car and threw out his hands in a frustrated “are-you-kidding-me-right-now” pose.

I shrugged and kept walking because other people’s anger, particularly when I don’t feel responsible for it, isn’t about me.

But the gentleman didn’t leave well enough alone. He circled around and found my son, my dog and me, rolled down his angry window and demanded to know if I was planning to pick up the poop.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “I’ve been walking him for five years, and I pick it up every time.”

My son seemed more than a bit amused.

“Are you the dog poop police?” he asked.

“Yes,” the man in the pickup truck replied without a touch of irony.

“Can I see your badge?” my son asked.

This was heading in the wrong direction.

“I hate it when people leave their dog’s poop all over the neighborhood,” the gentleman, who was coming across as anything but gentle, said. “Are you sure you’re going to pick it up?”

“Yes,” I said. “I always do.”

“Do people leave poop everywhere?” my son asked.

“Yes, they do,” the man said.

The stare down lasted another few minutes. Why, I thought later, would I bother to bag up his poop as if it were a holiday present if I intended to leave it? Wouldn’t I continue walking, ignoring the doggy remains of his dinner?

The man drove off. No, he didn’t spin his tires. When I picked up the bag, I looked around to see if he was hiding, waiting to catch me in a dog-faced lie.

Alas, despite the numerous pickup trucks that sped by, none looked like his truck or had his scowl leaning out of the window.

We sure are an angry and confrontational society these days, aren’t we? This man took time out of his day to confront me about a bag of poop.

I guess the good news is that he’s protecting us from dog poop scofflaws. The sad part, however, is that he figured I was prepared to bag it up and leave it behind. He didn’t know me and quickly assumed the worst.

I wonder if he feels the same level of concern for, say, the wrappers people toss out of their car windows. Does he knock on car doors to ask people sitting with their engines on to turn them off so they don’t pollute the air?

Now, that’s an idea that makes sense to me. Then again, the dog poop patrol probably made sense to him. If my dog had any idea what was happening, he’d have quite a tale to share with his canine companions.

by -
0 521
Ali Khosronejad in front of the Santa Maria Cathedral, which is considered the first modern cathedral in Madrid.

By Daniel Dunaief

An approaching weather front brings heavy rains and a storm surge, threatening to inundate homes and businesses with dangerous water and potentially undermining critical infrastructure like bridges.

Once officials figure out the amount of water that will affect an area, they can either send out inspectors to survey the exact damage or they can use models that take time to process and analyze the likely damage.

Ali Khosronejad

Ali Khosronejad, Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Stony Brook University, hopes to use artificial intelligence to change that.

Khosronejad recently received $550,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for four years to create a high-fidelity model using artificial intelligence that will predict the flood impact on infrastructure.

The funds, which will be available starting on June 20, will support two PhD students who will work to provide an artificial intelligence-based program that can work on a single laptop at a “fraction of the cost of more advanced modeling approaches,” Khosronejad said during an interview in Madrid, Spain, where he is on sabbatical leave under a Fulbright U.S Senior Scholar Award. He is doing his Fulbright research at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

Stony Brook University will also provide some funding for these students, which will help defray the cost of expenses related to traveling and attending conferences and publishing papers.

In the past, Stony Brook has been “quite generous when it comes to supporting graduate students working on federally funded projects,” Khosronejad explained and he hopes that continues with this research.

Khosronejad and his students will work with about 50 different flooding and terrain scenarios, which will cover about 95 percent of extreme flooding. These 50 possibilities will cover a range of waterways, infrastructure, topography, and coastal areas. The researchers will feed data into their high fidelity supercomputing cluster simulations to train artificial intelligence to assess the likely damage from a flood.

As they build the model, Khosronejad explained that they will collect data from floods, feed them into the computer and test how well the computer predicts the kind of flooding that has can cause damage or threaten the stability of structures like bridges. Over the next four years, the team will collect data from the Departments of Transportation in California, Minnesota and New York.

Nearly six years ago, his team attempted to use algorithms available in ChatGPT for some of his AI development. Those algorithms, however, didn’t predict flood flow prediction. He tried to develop new algorithms based on convolutional neural networks. Working with CNN, he attempted to improve its capabilities by including some physics-based constraints.

“We are very enthusiastic about this,” Khosronejad said. “We do think that this opportunity can help us to open up the use of AI for other applications in fluid mechanics” in fields such as renewable energy, contaminant transport predictions in urban areas and biological flow predictions, among others.

Planners working with groups such as the California Department of Transportation could use such a program to emphasize which infrastructure might be endangered.

This analysis could highlight effective mitigation strategies. Artificial intelligence can “provide [planners and strategists] with a tool that is not that expensive, can run on a single laptop, can reproduce lots of scenarios with flooding, to figure out which infrastructure is really in danger,” Khosronejad said.

Specifically, this tool could evaluate the impact of extreme floods on bridge foundations. Floods can remove soil from around the foundation of a bridge, which can cause it to collapse. Civil engineers can strengthen bridge foundations and mitigate the effect of future floods by using riprap, which is a layer of large stones.

This kind of program can reduce the reliance on surveying after a flood, which is expensive and sometimes “logistically impossible and unsafe” to monitor areas like the foundations of bridges, Khosronejad said. He plans to build into the AI program an awareness of the changing climate, so that predictions using it in three or five years can provide an accurate reflection of future conditions.

“Floods are getting more and more extreme” he said. “We realize that floods we feed into the program during training will be different” from the ones that will cause damage in subsequent years.

Floods that had a return period of every 100 years are now happening much more frequently. In one or two decades, such a flood might occur every 10 years.

Adding updated data can allow practitioners to make adjustments to the AI program a decade down the road, he suggested. He and his team will add data every year, which will create a more versatile model.

What it can’t do

While the AI programs will predict the damage to infrastructure from floods, they will not address storm or flood predictions.

“Those are different models, based on the movement of clouds” and other variables, Khosronejad said. “This doesn’t do that: if you give the program a range of flood magnitudes, it will tell you what will happen.”

High fidelity models currently exist that can do what Khosronejad is proposing, although those models require hundreds of CPUs to run for five months. Khosronejad has developed his own in house high fidelity model that is capable of making similar predictions. He has tested it to examine various infrastructures and used it to study various flooding events. These models are expensive, which is why he’s trying to replace them with AI to reduce the cost while maintaining fidelity.

AI, on the other hand, can run on a single CPU and may be able to provide the same result, which will allow people to plan ahead before it happens. The NSF approved the single principal investigator concept two months ago.

Khosronejad has worked with Fotis Sotiropoulos, former Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook and current Provost at Virginia Commonwealth University, on this and other projects.

The two have bi-weekly discussions over the weekend to discuss various projects.

Sotiropoulos was “very happy” when Khosronejad told him he received the funds. Although he’s not a part of the project, Sotiropoulos will “provide inputs.”

Sotiropoulos has “deep insights” into fluid mechanics. “When you have him on your side, it always pays off,” Khosronejad said.

by -
0 438
Allison McComiskey, chair of the Environmental & Climate Sciences Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

The wildfires last week in Quebec, Canada, that brought an orange haze, smoke and record pollution to New York were not only disconcerting, but also were something of a reality check.

These raging fires occurred earlier than normal and, with a so-called cut-off low in Maine acting like a bumper in a pinball game driving the smoke down along the eastern seaboard, created hazardous air quality conditions from New York through Virginia.

“There’s a real concern about this intensity, the size of the fire, happening this early in the season,” said Allison McComiskey, chair of the Environmental & Climate Sciences Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory. “Typically, wildfire season starts later in the summer and extends through the fall. If we’re going to be having wildfires of this size this early in the season and it continues, [there will be] much more of an impact on people in terms of air quality, health, and well being.”

Dry conditions caused by climate change intensified the severity of these fires, making them more difficult to extinguish and increasing the amount of particulates that can cause lung and other health problems thrown into the air.

“Wildfire season is getting longer,” said Dr. Mahdieh Danesh Yazdi, an air pollution expert and environmental epidemiologist from Stony Brook’s University’s program in Public Health. These fires are “spread because we have drier conditions, the vegetation is dry, we have droughts. Those require long-term solutions of trying to tackle climate change on a fundamental level.”

The intensity of the smoke and the cancelation of events like the Yankees and Phillies games has raised awareness of the downwind dangers from wildfires.

“This is like our Hurricane Sandy from an air quality perspective,” said Brian Colle, division head in Atmospheric Sciences at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University. 

Scientists urged a multi-level approach to tackle a wildfire problem that they believe will become increasingly dangerous for human health.

Forest management, including controlled burns, would reduce the available fuel for fires started by natural causes such as lightning.

“Forest management may be one approach,” said Dr. Danesh Yazdi. That alone, however, won’t solve the threat from wildfires amid higher temperatures and more frequent droughts, she added.

McComiskey added that researchers are “certain” that wildfires are going to increase in the future due to climate change and suggested that these events ratchet up the need for getting better predictive models about what these fires will mean for human health and the climate.

The heavy smoke that descended on New York, which some health officials described as creating conditions for those who spent hours outdoors that are akin to smoking several cigarettes, is “a wake up call that we need policies” to deal with the conditions that create these fires, McComiskey said.

The increase by a “fraction of a degree in temperature is really not the point,” McComiskey added. “We need to decarbonize our economy and we need to move toward addressing the bigger causes of climate change.”

A wildfire occurring earlier in the year with smoke filled with particulates could raise awareness and attention to the dangers from such events.

“Having this kind of thing happen in the East Coast through New York and [Washington] DC, as opposed to where we typically think of bad wildfire happening out west, in Washington State and the Rocky Mountains, might help in terms of the awareness and urgency to take some action,” McComiskey added.

by -
0 1069
Speakers at the “Africa: The Human Cradle" International Conference paying Tribute to Richard E. Leakey” on June 5. Photo by John Griffin/Stony Brook University

By Daniel Dunaief

Combative, loyal, determined, consequential, energetic and courageous. These are just a few of the many traits paleoanthropologists and others shared to describe the late Richard Leakey at the “Africa: The Human Cradle” memorial conference at Stony Brook University this week.

The founder of the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya, Leakey, who partnered with SBU and received 34 grants from National Geographic over the course of his decades in science, was a part of nearly every presentation and discussion on the first day of the week-long event which closes tomorrow, June 9.

From left, Stony Brook University President Maurie McInnis with Louise Leakey on June 5. Photo by John Griffin/Stony Brook University

Held at the Charles B. Wang Center on the main campus, the conference brought together luminaries in the field who interlaced stories about their science in Africa with anecdotes — many of them humorous — about Leakey. Marilyn and Jim Simons, whose Simons Foundation announced last week that it was donating $500 million to the university, attended the entire slate of speakers on the first day.

Leakey was “one of the most important paleoanthropologists of our time,” Maurie McInnis, President of Stony Brook, said in opening remarks. His impact “can be felt across our campus and across the world.”

In an interview, former Stony Brook President Shirley Kenney, who helped bring Leakey to the university, suggested that he “put us into the elite of that whole research field.”

Leakey stubbornly entered his parents Mary and Louis’s chosen fields when he dropped out of high school, eager to make discoveries on his own and to contribute to his native Kenya.

In 1968, during a meeting at the National Geographic headquarters, Leakey “lobbied the committee to divert funding from his father’s money” to his own research, Jill Tiefenthaler, National Geographic CEO, said during her presentation.

‘Sitting on a knife edge’

Like Leakey, however, these scientists looked deep into the past to understand the lives of early humans, our distant ancestors and other organisms while looking for lessons that might help with the present and the future.

Dino Martins, Chief Executive Officer of the Turkana Basin Institute and Lecturer in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, suggested that Leakey was driven by a sense of “childlike wonder” and a need to know “where we are, where we’re coming from and where we’re going.”

Leakey suggested that the extremely hot climate in Kenya was a potential model to understand how ancestral humans survived in hotter conditions, which are becoming increasingly prevalent amid global warming.

“There are many parallels in the past” in terms of extreme environments, Louise Leakey, director of public education and outreach for the Turkana Basin Institute and Richard and Meave Leakey’s daughter, said in an interview. “We’re sitting on this knife edge of really dramatic change now.” 

In addition to encouraging science in Africa, Leakey also believed in engaging with students and researchers from a range of backgrounds and experiences. He wanted to ensure that people from every continent had an opportunity to join the ranks of scientists.

When presenting his research on Homo naledi, an extinct human with a brain a third the size of modern humans from South Africa who created burial sites and left behind etchings on a cave wall, Lee Berger, National Geographic Explorer in Residence, explained that he wished Leakey “had seen this and I think he would have been really angry with me.”

Words from a devoted daughter

In the final presentation of the first day, Louise Leakey shared memories of her upbringing and her father.

Among many pictures of her father and his discoveries over the years, Louise shared one in which she highlighted a pipe in the corner of the photo.  She believed her father “rarely smoked it” but liked to pose with it in photos.

Louise Leakey speaks at the memorial conference for her father on June 5. Photo by John Griffin/Stony Brook University

Louise Leakey recalled how one of her father’s partners, Kamoya Kimeu, proved a valuable partner in the search for fossils. When Kimeu died soon after Richard Leakey, Kimeu’s daughter Jennifer reached out to Louise to raise money for his funeral.

Louise Leakey has since learned that Jennifer never saw her father searching for fossils in the field. Rather, she learned all about his exploits when her mother read his letters each night to her before she went to bed.

A second generation of the two families is working together, as Jennifer has joined Louise in some of her fossil hunting work. The two daughters are also creating a comic strip, in many languages, that depicts the two of them hunting for fossils.

Leakey believes Jennifer Kimeu will serve as an inspiration to other Kenyans.

On the east side of Lake Turkana, Leakey and her team recently discovered the new head of a fossil. Before his death, her father said it was “time you found new skull.” Richard Leakey was right.

by -
0 438
Turkana Basin Institute: Richard Leakey All photos downloaded with permission from: www.flickr.com Username: turkanabasin Password: knmwt15000

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

What’s possible?

We can spend time criticizing each other, becoming nattering nabobs of negativity, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said. We can also rue our lot in life or feel an overwhelming sense of dread about problems we can’t solve or conflicts we haven’t resolved.

Or …

Or we can get out and create a remarkable life.

That’s what happened with famed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey.

Okay, so maybe he had a few advantages, like the fact that his parents Mary and Louis Leakey were already successful in the field and, unlike those of us who grew up on Mud Road near Gelinas Junior High School, he spent his formative years near and around fossils.

I recall digging in the back corner of my yard when I was young, convinced that I would pull up a dinosaur bone or reveal some incredible secret someone had hidden among the prickers and weeds. Yeah, no such luck.

And yet, the life of the late Richard Leakey offers exciting hope and opportunities for inspiration.

He didn’t graduate from high school, but he was successful and world-renowned.

Leakey’s life is “awe-inspiring,” demonstrating the “ability of one person to literally transform the world and leave it a better place,” Lee Berger, National Geographic Explorer in Residence, said in an interview.

National Geographic Society CEO Jill Tiefenthaler described the impact Leakey had on his home country of Kenya as “amazing” and the impact on the field as “remarkable,” particularly because he did it in a non-traditional way.

In an interview, Tiefenthaler credited the “army” of people who supported him with helping him achieve his goals.

“How do you move and get people to move with you?” Tiefenthaler said. “He was this person who saw talent. It wasn’t just about him. He would see [someone] and say ‘you’re going to do this’ and they did.”

Next generation

As for how to get the next generation to believe in themselves and to participate in the scientific process, National Geographic’s Berger and Tiefenthaler shared their vision.

Ensuring transparency in the process helps people trust the science.

“People are with us when we find those fossils, they watch us, we make sure there’s open access when they come out,” said Berger, who considered Leakey a friend and mentor. “Your child can print these things out and they can check.”

For National Geographic, which funded Leakey for decades, the goal is to “try to give people information and let them draw their own conclusions,” Tiefenthaler added.

The next generation of scientists has access to a large educational program through National Geographic, she added.

“I spent my career in higher education,” said Tiefenthaler, who was the president of Colorado College for nine years before becoming the first woman to lead National Geographic in its 135-year history. “We have got to meet them where they are: they are probably not reading the paper magazine with small, dense print.”

National Geographic is on social media and TikTok.

“We are focusing on issues they care about,” Tiefenthaler said. “We know this generation is very concerned about climate change and biodiversity loss.”

Tiefenthaler “loves how much they care about the work we do at National Geographic [Society]. They’re a little mad at [this generation] because of the predicament that we’ve left the world in for them. We made the mess and there are fewer resources to fix things.”

Still, she believes there are leaders and actors among the younger generation who will follow in Leakey’s footsteps and have an important and positive impact on the world.

“We have a generation that’s going to make major progress on this planet,” she said.

by -
0 2188
1 of 7
National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Lee Berger and leader of the excavation expedition, inside the Rising Star cave in South Africa where fossil elements belonging to H. naledi, a new species of human relative, were discovered. The find was announced by the University of the Witwatersrand, the National Geographic Society and the South African National Research Foundation and published in the journal eLife. Photo by Robert Clark/National Geographic
Where: Rising Star, formed within Dolomitic Limestone Lee Berger, the leader of the excavation expedition, inside the Rising Star cave, watches a monitor in the command center. Photo by Robert Clark/National Geographic
Discovered on July 28th, 2022. This picture shows an image of Panel B in the Hill Antechamber exhibiting numerous engravings and etchings on the ancient dolomitic wall. The panel shows repeated etchings likely done over a considerable period. The etchings include geometric figures such as squares, ladders, triangles, crosses, and X’s. Image from Berger et al. (2023b).
Discovered on July 28th, 2022. This picture shows an image of Panel B in the Hill Antechamber exhibiting numerous engravings and etchings on the ancient dolomitic wall. The panel shows repeated etchings likely done over a considerable period. The etchings include geometric figures such as squares, ladders, triangles, crosses, and X’s. Image from Berger et al. (2023b).
A closeup of the non-geometric image from the Hill Antechamber burial chamber that is found at the top of Panel B as described in Berger et al (2023b). Note the upside-down cross shaped etching to the left of the carving as well as other etchings to the right and below. The material discoloring the surface has not as yet been analyzed but appears to be secondarily applied to the surface in order to highlight the image in low light. Image from Berger et al., 2023.
An image of the Panel A crosshatch engraving in the passage between the Hill Antechamber burial chamber and the Dinaledi Burial Chamber from Berger et al (2023a). The image is taken using a polarizing filter to highlight the various non-natural etchings on the surface. The roughly horizontal wavy lines at the bottom of the image which are crossed by the engravings is a fossil algal stromatolite found in the native dolomitic rock. Earlier etchings can be seen behind the crosshatch, possibly having been obscured by covering the surface with cave dirt as described in the scientific papers. Image from Berger et al., 2023.
A close up of the base of the Panel A crosshatch engraving in the passage between the Hill Antechamber burial chamber and the Dinaledi Burial Chamber described in Berger et al (2023a). The roughly horizontal wavy lines at the bottom of the image which are crossed by the engravings is a fossil algal stromatolite found in the native dolomitic rock and clearly illustrate the non-natural origin of the more prominent etchings as they cross the fossil. Image from Berger et al., 2023.
Breaking news from the Richard Leakey Memorial Conference

By Daniel Dunaief

A species of archaic humans is defying conventional wisdom about what it means to be human.

Lee Berger, National Geographic Explorer in Residence and paleoanthropologist.

Homo naledi, which were discovered in a cave about 25 miles away from Johannesburg, South Africa, had brains that were about a third the size of ours. That, previous research suggested, likely limited their ability to engage in a range of activities, like burying their dead or creating symbols.

Wrong and wrong.

In an expedition through narrow caves that required him to lose 55 pounds just to get to the site, Lee Berger, National Geographic Explorer in Residence and Lead of the Rising Star program, along with a team of other scientists, studied the remains of these humans that lived over 236,000 years ago. The bones they studied and, in some cases excavated, were buried deep in the Rising Star Cave.

Along the wall of a cave, the researchers also found symbols, including crossed lines and swirls.

“Big brains don’t explain what we thought they explain,” Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and National Geographic Explorer and On-Site Biocultural Specialist, said during a press briefing announcing the discoveries. This research “takes humans off the pedestal.”

The research, which was shared at the Richard Leakey Memorial Conference at Stony Brook University on June 5, is published in the journal eLife.

Berger wanted to share his latest findings with the conference, particularly given the important role Leakey played in his career.

Berger had known Leakey for 34 years. When they met, Leakey, who was his “idol,” directed Berger to follow his dream of searching for fossils in South Africa. Leakey and Berger remained close throughout the decades.

“I owe him my entry into this field,” said Berger.

Indeed, Berger feels that Leakey was, “in some ways, responsible for the discovery” about the burials and cave drawings of Homo naledi. “I’m very personally indebted” to Leakey.

Extraordinary effort

While scientists don’t know what the lines in the dolomitic limestone walls signified, they believe Homo naledi, whose name in Sotho language means “star,” made those marks. 

Natural processes over the course of over 200,000 years wouldn’t have left such a distinctive pattern. In addition, the depth of the markings, which would have taken considerable effort and a tool to create, indicate a concerted and sustained physical effort.

The dolomite is about half as hard as a diamond, which would have taken an “extreme amount” of work, Berger said. Several of the lines suggest multiple efforts to make carvings. “These are engravings that are not done in one sitting,” he said.

During the press briefing, Berger indicated that other species of early humans didn’t leave any evidence of entering the same cave. “There’s no evidence of humans” other than the scientists who published the paper “that entered the cave,” he said.

At this point, researchers, who are trying to minimize any disturbance in the cave, haven’t pinpointed an exact date for the symbols.

“In time, we’ll likely be able to date” the symbols, said Berger. The researchers arrived at the approximate date and linked the symbols to Homo naledi through association and context, he explained.

Homo naledi are the only humans who left any evidence of their presence in the cave.

Moments after discovery, Lee Berger holds a photographic scale next to a hashtag, or crosshatched engraving in the passage between the Hill Antechamber burial chamber and the Dinaledi Burial Chamber known as Panel A. Photo by Mathabela Tsikoane, Courtesy Lee Berger and the National Geographic Society.

Researchers described the arduous process of descending through narrow passageways to arrive at the burial site, which Berger discovered in 2013.

The site is extraordinarily difficult for modern humans to navigate. In addition to losing weight to get through small openings, Berger tore his rotator cuff climbing out of the site last July. He is still recovering, but said losing weight and even sustaining an injury was worth the effort.

While modern scientists use headlamps and battery-powered lights to record their discoveries, earlier humans would have had to carry some form of portable fire with them to bring their dead to their burial sites and to make carvings in the walls.

“How they’re making that fire and the exact mechanism of transport, I think, will be established over the next several years as we study all the occurrences of it,” Berger said.

“For us to say something clearly, definitely, strongly, again as [Berger] has said, we need to go back and excavate some more and check out more areas that we might have missed because clearly we walked straight past this,” said Keneiloe Molopyane, National Geographic Explorer and Lead Excavator of Dragon’s Back Expedition.

New perspectives

As far as a DNA analysis, the team hasn’t yet found anything they can test in the fossils. They are planning to test the sediment.

The researchers have left large amounts of evidence in place, which includes multiple other burials that haven’t been excavated. Berger suggested that the images and information from this site “provide as robust evidence for burial and graves as for practically any grave ever published for humans or otherwise.” Researchers examining this information will realize that “more works needs to be done.” As for what that entails, one of the plans is to bring additional technology and specialists into the area.

Homo naledi “intensely altered this space across kilometers of underground cave systems, and I think that deserves not just the involvement of our team, but the involvement of every scientist around the world who can participate, and perhaps technologists and other people who have ideas about how/ what we do,” Berger added.

As for the implications of this research, the scientists suggested that the discovery and the analysis will continue to alter the perspectives of researchers and students of human history.

“All of us who write textbooks or major articles about this probably have to go back and shift what we said about big brains, meaning, complex meaning-making behavior, or the kind of complex experiences of grief, social community, that’s associated with mortuary and funerary practices,” Fuentes said. “It makes us think about human evolution really in a new way, and puts us back closer to a starting point, and showing again that we know a lot less than we thought we did.”

 

by -
0 537
Chengfeng Yang Photo by Zhishan Wang

By Daniel Dunaief

This is part two of a two-part series.

As Erin Brockovich (the real life version and the one played by Julia Roberts in the eponymous movie) discovered, some metals, such as hexavalent chromium can cause cancer in humans.

Chengfeng Yang and Zishan Wang

Environmental exposure to a range of chemicals, such as hexavalent chromium, benzo(a)pyrene, arsenic, and others, individually and in combination, can lead to health problems, including cancer.

In March, Stony Brook University hired Chengfeng Yang and Zhishan Wang, a husband and wife team to join the Cancer Center and the Pathology Departments from Case Western Reserve University.

The duo, who have their own labs and share equipment, resources and sometimes researchers, are seeking to understand the epigenetic effect exposure to chemicals has on the body. Yang focuses primarily on hexavalent chromium, while Wang works on the mechanism of mixed exposures.

Last week, the TBR News Media highlighted the work of Wang. This week, we feature the work of Yang.

————————————–

When he was young, Chengfeng Yang was using a knife to make a toy for his younger brother. He slipped, cutting his finger so dramatically that he almost lost it. Doctors saved his finger, impressing him with their heroic talent and inspiring him to follow in their footsteps.

Indeed, Yang, who earned an MD and a PhD from Tongji Medical University, is focused not only on answering questions related to cancer, which claimed the life of his mother and other relatives, but also in searching for ways to develop new treatments.

A Professor in the Department of Pathology at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University and a member of the Stony Brook Cancer Center, Yang has his sights set on combatting cancer.

“Our research always has a significant clinical element,” said Yang. “This is related to our medical background.”

He is interested in studying the mechanism of cancer initiation and progression and would like to develop new strategies for treatment.

Yang and his wife Zhishan Wang recently joined the university from Case Western after a career that included research posts at the University of Pennsylvania, Michigan State University, and the University of Kentucky.

The tandem, who share lab resources and whose research staffs collaborate but also work independently, are focused specifically on the ways exposures to carcinogens in the environment cause epigenetic changes that lead to cancer.

Specifically, Yang is studying how hexavalent chromium, a metal commonly found in the environment in welding, electroplating and even on the double yellow lines in the middle of roads, triggers cancer. It is also commonly used as a pigment to stain animal leather products.

Yang is focused mainly on how long cancer develops after exposure to hexavalent chromium.

People can become exposed to hexavalent chromium, which is also known as chromium 6, through contaminated drinking water, cigarette smoking, car emissions, living near superfund sites and through occupational exposure.

Yang has made important findings in the epigenetic effect of metal exposure. His studies showed that chronic low-level chromium six exposure changed long non-coding RNA expression levels, which contributed to carcinogenesis. Moreover, his studies also showed that chronic low level exposure increased methylation, in which a CH3 group is added to RNA, which also contributed significantly to chromium 6 carcinogenesis.

“It is now clear that metal carcinogens not only modify DNA, but also modify RNA,” Yang explained. Metal carcinogen modification of RNAs is an “exciting and new mechanism” for understanding metal carcinogenesis.

By studying modifications in RNA, researchers may be able to find a biomarker for the disease before cancer develops.

Yang is trying to find some specific epigenetic changes that might occur in response to different pollutants.

Stony Brook attraction

Yang was impressed with the dedication of Stony Brook Pathology Chair Ken Shroyer, whom he described as a “really great physician scientist. His passion in research and leadership in supporting research” helped distinguish Stony Brook, Yang said.

Yang is confident that Stony Brook has the resources he and Wang need to be successful, including core facilities and collaborative opportunities. “This is a very great opportunity for us, with strong support at the university level,” he said.“We plan to be here and stay forever.”

Yang is in the process of setting up his lab, which includes purchasing new equipment and actively recruiting scientists to join his effort.

“We need to reestablish our team,” he said. “Right now, we are trying to finish our current research project.”

He hopes to get new funding for the university in the next two to three years as well. After he establishes his lab at Stony Brook, Yang also plans to seek out collaborative opportunities at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which is “very strong in RNA biology,” he added.

A return home

Returning to the Empire State brings Yang full circle, back to where his research experience in the United States started. About 23 years ago, his first professional position in the United States was at New York University.

Outside of work, Yang likes to hike and jog. He is looking forward to going to some of Long Island’s many beaches.

He and Wang live in an apartment in South Setauket and are hoping to buy a house in the area. The couple discusses science regularly, including during their jogs.

Working in the same area provides a “huge opportunity” for personal and professional growth, he said.

Yang suggested that his wife usually spends more time training new personnel and solving lab members’ technical issues. He spends more time in the lab with general administrative management and support. Wang has “much stronger molecular biology skills than I have,” Yang explained in an email, whereas he has a solid background in toxicology.

Growing up, Yang said he had an aptitude in math and had dreamed of becoming a software engineer. When he applied to college, he received admission to medical school, which changed his original career path.

Once he started running his own experiments as a researcher, he felt he wanted to improve human health.“Once humans develop disease, in many cases, it’s very expensive to treat and [help] people recover,” he said. “Prevention could be a more cost effective way to improve health.”

by -
0 332
Photo from SBU

By Daniel Dunaief

From June 5 to 9, Stony Brook University will host a conference titled “Africa: The Human Cradle: An International Conference Paying Tribute to Richard E. Leakey” at the Charles B. Wang Center, 100 Nicolls Road, Stony Brook.

The University, which has 15 speakers among the 40 scientists delivering lectures, will celebrate the achievements of famed and late scientist and conservationist Richard Leakey and will bring together researchers from all over the world to celebrate the research in Africa that has revealed important information about early human history.

Stony Brook will host the conference in connection with the Turkana Basin Institute, which Leakey founded and is located in his native Kenya. The National Geographic Society, which provided financial support for Leakey’s seminal research for decades, is serving as a partner for the gathering.

Scientists from seven countries will discuss the latest developments in fossil research, archaeological and paleoecological records, as well as advances in geology, geochronology and genomic research.

Leakey inspired scores of scientists and made important discoveries that helped highlight Kenya’s central role in the narrative of human evolution. He died in early January 2022 at the age of 77.

Lawrence Martin, Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook and Director of the Turkana Basin Institute, organized the meeting, along with Professor Frederick Grine. Stony Brook President Maurie McInnis and Jill Tiefenthaler, CEO of the National Geographic Society will provide opening remarks.

Martin, who called Leakey a “close friend” and a “mentor,” said the idea for the conference started in the days after Leakey’s death. The Stony Brook president “wanted Stony Brook to be the place that celebrates Richard Leakey as a scientist” and to recognize his “impact on the world.”

Organizers for the conference, which involved nine months of planning, wanted to focus on the “human story in Africa as it’s emerged” since Leakey’s ground breaking research, Martin explained. He expects the conference will involve an emotional outpouring, reflecting the personal and scientific impact Leakey had on so many other researchers and anticipates the meeting will be “state of the art” and will “pull things together in a way that’s never been done before.”

Leakey, who made his first major hominin discovery in 1964 at Lake Natron in Tanzania, worked with Stony Brook University for 20 years. SBU will share a National Geographic video tribute to Leakey on June 5 that will include pictures of his parents Louis and Mary Leakey, who made important fossil discoveries and were involved in numerous important scientific projects, through the last few years of Leakey’s life. 

Scientific talks

Martin suggested that the multi-disciplinary nature of the power-packed line up reflected Richard Leakey’s scientific views and bigger picture understanding of discoveries across a range of fields.

Leakey didn’t see geology, biology, paleobiology and other fields as separate, Martin explained. He saw all those disciplines as different sources of how humans adapted and evolved, which reflects the “integrated view” the conference is “looking to encourage.”

Richard Leakey examines fossils at the Turkana Basin Institute

Bernard Wood, Professor in the Department of Anthropology at George Washington University, joined Leakey on his first expedition to Lake Turkana. Wood will deliver the first talk, on June 5 at 2:15 p.m. He will focus on how Leakey inspired many scientists from a range of disciplines, with his intellectual curiosity leading to numerous research projects.

Lee Berger, explorer and scientist with the National Geographic Society, will deliver a talk on June 5 at 3:50 pm that will discuss recent discoveries of human origins. Martin said Berger’s talk would be “global news” and will likely be “covered all over the world.”

The first day will conclude with a free public lecture at 5 p.m. in the Staller Center’s Recital Hall by Richard Leakey’s daughter Louise, who will provide an overview of the discoveries and expeditions of the Koobi Fora Research Project in the Turkana Basin.

While Louise Leakey’s talk is free, attendees need to pre-register. The cost to attend the entire conference is $100.

Carrie Mongle, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University, will be giving a talk on June 7 at 1:15 pm. She plans to attend all of the talks, as she sees this as an “incredible opportunity to see some of the world’s top paleoanthropologists come together and present the latest research in the field.”

In her lecture, Mongle will present new data related to the reconstruction of the hominin family tree.

“One of Richard’s scientific legacies is the extraordinary number of hominin fossils he was able to add to our collective understanding of human evolution,” she said. “Phylogenetic inference is a critical step in figuring out how all of these fossils come together to form the human family tree.”

On June 6 at 2:15 p.m., SBU Assistant Professor Marine Frouin will give a talk about the contribution of luminescence dating to the chronology of Pleistocene deposits in Turkana. Frouin uses luminescence dating techniques to study human evolution.

Turkana Basin Institute: Richard Leakey
All photos downloaded with permission from:
www.flickr.com
Username: turkanabasin
Password: knmwt15000

On June 7 at 9 a.m., Stony Brook Associate Professor Sonia Harmand, who worked closely in her career with Leakey and whose family developed a close relationship with the late researcher and conservationist, will describe research in the early Stone Age. Harmand and Directrice de Recherche Emerite at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Hélène Roche will discuss evidence in light of biological and environmental changes in East Africa and will present future research directions.

Also on June 7at 2:40 p.m., Jason E. Lewis, lecturer at Stony Brook, will discuss the implications of a new Early Pliocene hominin mandible from Ileret, Kenya on the origins of Australopithecus.

Stony Brook Associate Professor Krishna Veeramah, will conclude the talks on June 7 at 4:10 p.m. with a discussion of how the analysis of modern and ancient DNA has helped understand African prehistory.

Martin, who will wrap up the talks on June 9 at 12:20 p.m., said he thinks Leakey would appreciate what people say and how much impact he had on the field.

“He was quite a self-effacing person,” Martin said. “He wouldn’t have liked too much fuss about him.” He would, however, have appreciated that people recognized that he made “significant contributions in the area of the human evolutionary story,” among so many others fields.

For a full schedule of events and lectures, visit www.stonybrook.edu/richard-leakey/

Prev1...232425...85Next Page 24 of 85
TBR News Media is your local news and entertainment website.
We provide you with the latest breaking news and information for your community.
Contact us: [email protected]

Most Viewed

©