They’ll win some, they’ll lose some, and it’ll rain, and they’ll have to play some other day.
No, I’m not going to predict anything about the on field action this year as the “boys of summer” take the field this week for the start of the 2023 baseball season.
Instead, I’m going to make some predictions about the action in the stands. After all, the number of people and stories from the stands far exceeds the paltry size of the teams, umpires, grounds crew and everyone else involved with “The Show.” So, without further delay, here are a few predictions for the upcoming season.
Someone will walk into one of the local stadiums and be too awestruck to speak. He may have been to other games, but returning to his favorite stadium and looking at the shimmering green grass, the bright foul lines, and the oversized baseball bag will take his breath away, even if only for a moment and even if no one notices the goose flesh on his arms despite the warm temperature.
Someone will share some of their favorite lines from baseball movies, suggesting that the team is a “bunch of lollygaggers,” or that, in as deep a James Earl Jones voice as they can muster, “the one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.”
During long day games, fans, clad in T-shirts, jerseys or tank tops, will forget sunscreen and will develop a sunburn. For some, that sunburn will be a reminder of the game. For others, it might provide sore or red skin.
Debates that border on arguments will occur in every part of the stadium. Some disagreements will arise over whether the umpire made the right call, while others will reach into history. Who was the best left fielder? Should Pete Rose be in the Hall of Fame?
Fans will celebrate birthdays, waiting for that fleeting moment when their name appears on the screen with best wishes from Joe, Mo, Mary and the rest of the crew.
People will propose marriage. Most will say “yes” and will cover their mouths in astonishment. Some will storm off, throw the ring back, or yell something, leaving others to wonder whether the scene was real or staged.
Some fans will offer unconditional support for their favorite players, urging them on even after they struck out four times. Others will reserve the right to suggest that they could do better or that the player is a “bum.”
Most fans will stand in salute to veterans, as the public address announcer shares details of a person’s service and awards, and his or her family beams nearby, blinking back tears in a strong sun.
Important people will take important calls, making it tough for them to focus on the game. Some of those people will have to leave the game and go back to the office, while others will talk through a document or deal amid a series of ongoing crises.
Awestruck people will realize their fantasy and will catch a foul ball. They will raise the ball as if it were a trophy, giving the strangers around them a chance to applaud. A generous fan will likely hand a ball over to a nearby child, knowing how valuable that souvenir will be for him or her.
Fans will high-five people sitting next to them during a key moment in a big game, sharing their joy with anyone and everyone.
Someone from an earlier generation will shout “Holy Cow” when a player hits a towering home run, sending his friends into fits of laughter.
Someone will believe that the next pitch will alter the course of the game and, perhaps, that person’s world, regardless of the score and the standings. Play Ball!
Tim Malloy (right) with another jumper (Ness) from 2019 reenactment of Normandy.
Tim Malloy in a poppy field after Normandy jump.
Tim Malloy in Kuwait right after 9/11.
Tim Malloy fast-roping down to the roof of a building.
Tim Malloy skydiving off the coast of Long Island in the mid 1990's.
By Daniel Dunaief
Tim Malloy worked behind the scenes at highly visible military operations between 1976 and 2003. The fast twitch Malloy, who grew up in Islip and currently lives in Baiting Hollow, was frequently on high alert with his team of US Air Force Combat Pararescuemen.
Part of an elite group of soldiers with extensive and demanding training, Malloy, who retired as a Chief Master Sergeant, waited 15 miles away aboard a C-130 plane during Space Shuttle launches, prepared to jump into the water to provide assistance to astronauts in the event of an emergency.
In addition to heading into violent and dangerous storms, Malloy traveled to countries including Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq as part of the Air Force’s efforts to protect and retrieve troops.
Malloy and his fellow pararescuemen recognized the dangers of their job. “Every time you get in an airplane, you don’t know if it’s going to come back,” he said. “It’s a humbling feeling.”
A friend from childhood who Malloy convinced to become a pararescueman, David Ruvola suggested that Malloy is the kind of partner in arms other members of the military hope to find.
“When you’re dealing with life and death situations, you want the guy next to you that’s going to put his life on the line for yours,” Ruvola said. “You have to have the mindset of ‘if I lose my life trying to save my brother next to me, guess what, I’m going.’ There’s no question that [Malloy] is that kind of guy.”
Malloy and Ruvola were a part of a unit that supported efforts in Iraq.
During a firefight outside Abu Ghraib prison 20 years ago, a Humvee with several soldiers aboard rolled into a waterway. Without a moment’s hesitation, another soldier, Andrew Baddick, dove into the water to try to rescue the crew. Ruvola, who was a squadron commander during a time when Malloy was a pararescueman, were called to the scene.
The pararescue squad was the only one in the country with scuba tanks, although those tanks didn’t have any air. Ruvola filled them up in a firehouse and sent two helicopters, including Malloy to the scene.
Malloy and his team entered the dirty water, where they traveled hand over hand to find the fallen soldiers, including Baddick. “It took us quite a while, but we recovered the bodies,” Malloy said.
Emotional meeting
About a decade after recovering the soldiers, Malloy was at a camper show in Hershey Park, Pennsylvania, where about 50,000 people attended. He noticed a man wearing a gold star hat, which meant he had lost a family member during a conflict. Malloy expressed his sympathies. When the father told his story, Malloy recognized the details. “I recovered your son’s body,” Malloy told Joseph Baddick, who was Andrew’s father. “I remember the whole thing.”
At lunch that day, Malloy shared details with Baddick about his son. “He didn’t know the nuts and bolts of the whole thing,” Malloy said. “It was, by far, one of the most emotional moments for me in the military.”
Sea rescues
In addition to high profile missions or rescue attempts, Malloy experienced some challenging and high risk efforts that were part of his Air Force responsibilities.
After a Portuguese ship sank, four fisherman were in a life raft designed for three people. Malloy and another rescue man jumped from a helicopter and swam to the raft in frigid waters in the middle of November. Suffering from hypothermia, the fishermen weren’t thinking clearly and had started taking off their clothing.
The Air Force crew raised the fisherman, who had pink skin from the cold, into the helicopter. One of Malloy’s crew got into a sleeping bag with a fisherman to help raise his body heat. In the cold helicopter, the crew administered intravenous fluids they had preheated.
“As the blood was getting back into their body, they started shivering violently,” Malloy said, which was a good sign that they were starting to warm up.
In a separate incident, the appendix of a man aboard a tanker in the middle of the ocean burst. Malloy and another rescuer jumped out of a C-130 in the middle of the night and swam to the ship, where they relied on their training as emergency medical technician at a paramedic level to treat the crew member.
A life changing article
When he was young, Malloy recalled how people stood when the flag went by during Flag Day and Veteran’s Day. He enjoyed the hot dogs and soda he consumed at the American Legion after attending parades.
After he graduated from Islip High School, Malloy wasn’t sure what he’d do with his life. “I ended up reading an article in the Daily News about guys who jumped out of planes and rescued people,” he said. “I mentioned in to my mom and she said, ‘it sounds like it’s right up your alley.’”
The training was more difficult than he thought, especially because, despite being playing lacrosse, basketball and football, he wasn’t much of a swimmer. Even with the Air Force’s effort to weed out people, he didn’t believe quitting was an option.
Sounding like Richard Gere in the movie An Officer and a Gentleman, Malloy said he had “nothing to go back to.” Being surrounded by like-minded men raised Malloy’s game, making him work harder.
His military experience “fit my personality and lifestyle and worked for me,” Malloy said. He joined the Suffolk County Police Department after he retired, where he worked until 2018. The military “taught me how to treat people,” he said. Even some of the people he arrested thanked him for how he interacted with them.
Normandy
After he retired from the police force, Malloy heard about an effort to recreate the 75th anniversary of the Allied Forces’ attack at Normandy. He signed up to jump out of an airplane. The participants had to have 15 recent jumps to qualify, which he did by jumping out of planes in Oklahoma, Florida and Texas. Wearing original combat uniforms and jumping out of a restored airplane from the invasion, Malloy, who was the only New Yorker in the anniversary jump, was on the first plane from which soldiers parachuted into a poppy field in France. French residents came up to him and thanked him for coming.
In the United States, Malloy appreciates the treatment veterans receive from most civilians.“It’s a really good feeling,” he said. “I get treated with a lot of respect.”
This column is generously sponsored by Casper Contracting Inc.
Infinitives appear to be like peanut butter and jelly for me. I don’t want to add bananas, nuts or anything else between the two spreads, because peanut butter and jelly represent a taste combination that agrees with me and my digestive tract.
The combination of the word “to” and a verb belong together, without adverbs, adjectives, nouns or other parts of speech jammed between them. I want to love, to live, to eat, to sleep, to play and to laugh without any additional words attempting to clog up the ideas or to interfere with the narrative flow.
And yet, in modern prose, people increasingly chose to split infinitives, jamming words in between “to” and a verb. For me, that’s like forcing a reader to add a verbal hiccup. Maybe some English — or language arts in modern educational parlance — teacher back in my days at Ward Melville High School shared his or her dislike for split infinitives that makes me want to cringe when reading an otherwise effective sentence.
To make my point, I’d like to consider (yes, this is a column about infinitives so prepare to be amazed) how several important quotes, phrases, book and movie titles might read with a split infinitive. To begin, let’s explore Thomas Jefferson’s words from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self evident.” Those words would falter if he had chosen to write: “We hold these truths to fundamentally be self evident.”
Would you like to consider Shakespeare? Hamlet’s soliloquy in which he ponders whether “to be or not to be” would fall flat if he said, “to kind of be or not to comfortably be.” That not only sounds wrong, but it loses the power of a pithy line about the nature of existence and his willingness to continue to live (yup, two in a row) in a world of treachery.
Let’s pause to consider Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Perhaps an infinitive splitter might want to add an adverb, such as “To Treacherously Kill a Mockingbird” or “To Slanderously Kill a Mockingbird.” Both options struggle to add an unnecessary word.
How about James Bond’s “License to Kill?” Would a split infinitive change that to “License to violently kill?” It’s already a Bond film, so you’re prepared to witness violence. Would you prefer to imagine “License to vengefully kill?” Would that have affected its ability to win at the box office? I tend to doubt that.
Another Bond movie with an infinitive is “No time to die.” An adverb addict might want to convert the title to “No time to literally die.” Well, yeah, Bond films force the titular character to confront death. These days, people are inclined to overuse the word “literally” anyway, as in, “I literally ate all the food on my plate.” I suspect few people would interrupt to ask if you’d figuratively or literally eaten everything.
How about Tina Turner’s song “What’s love got to do with it?” If we split the infinitive, she might sing, “what’s love go to accurately do with it?” Turner doesn’t want to encourage love when she’s enjoying the physical connection. Would “accurately” threaten to trample on the song’s meaning?
The book by Ernest Hemingway, who preferred to use simple prose, would lose some of its resonance if we added anything to the title, “To have and have not.” Borrowing from a vastly overused word that could become “To fully have and have not.”
So, to sum up the idea, to get to the point, to address the important issue, and to make myself clear, I still believe, no matter how acceptable it might be, that splitting infinitives jams an unnecessary word where it doesn’t belong, threatening to dilute its meaning, to alter its trajectory and to cause unnecessary misdirection. Let’s agree to keep infinitives together, giving them room to be, to love and to bask in their original meaning. Now, to return to where I began, I’d like to find some peanut butter and jelly.
Nivea Pereira de Sa Photo by Rodrigo Carvalho da Silva
By Daniel Dunaief
When people are immunocompromised, exposure to what might ordinarily be a harmless fungus can cause significant health problems.
Researchers in the laboratory of Maurizio del Poeta, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, have been looking to create new treatments and develop vaccines against these fungi.
Working with a team of scientists at Stony Brook, research scientist Nivea Pereira de Sa, who joined del Poeta’s lab in 2018 as a postdoctoral researcher, recently published research in the journal mBio about potential anti-fungal drugs that target a key enzyme in the fungus Aspergillus fumigatus.
Without the enzyme, the fungus can’t cause disease and the host defenses have time to eliminate it even if the host is immunodeficient.
Working with Michael Airola, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at SBU, Pereira de Sa started out by trying to find the structure of sterylglucosidase, an enzyme that is a molecular key for the fungus during infection and that aids in its ability to adapt to environmental changes such as low oxygen levels and changes in pH.
Pereira de Sa learned how to do x-ray crystallography from Airola, a process that reveals the structure of compounds.
In an email, Airola described Pereira de Sa as an “expert” in the technique.
Airola called the research “one of the most exciting projects” he’s worked on and hopes the group can translate the results into the clinic. A talented biochemist, Pereira de Sa is also an “expert in so many different scientific areas,” Airola wrote, which he described as “rare.”
Pereira de Sa also determined the structure of the same enzyme for Cryptococcus, another invasive and potentially harmful fungus. The enzymes in both fungi have a high degree of similarity.
Pereira de Sa expressed satisfaction at the application of such work. “Every time I get a crystal structure, it’s so amazing,” she said. “I love doing that.”
Pereira de Sa started screening potential compounds to inhibit sterylglucosidase in Aspergillus,
Del Poeta’s lab coordinated the design and testing of these inhibitors with Iwao Ojima, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Director of the Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery at Stony Brook.
Refining potential drugs
Ojima’s group is synthesizing derivatives of the hits Pereira de Sa found and she will start tests outside a living organism, or in vitro, soon.
Ojima has synthesized several compounds using computer-assisted drug design. He is currently developing several inhibitors that scored high on his computational molecular docking analysis and will synthesize two to three dozen potential small molecules.
Ojima, who partnered with Pereira de Sa in this study, “greatly appreciates her and her seminal contributions to this project,” he wrote in an email. She made critical contributions to the study that ensured its success and Stony Brook is “very fortunate to have her as a leader in this project.”
Ojima plans to identify highly potent inhibitors individually for Aspergillus and Cryptococcus separately, and then will try to find and develop broad spectrum inhibitors based on those compounds.
The need for a treatment has increased dramatically as the number of immunocompromised patients has increased.
Invasive aspergillosis can have mortality rates above 90 percent. The World Health Organization last October released its first ever list of health threatening fungi, which includes Aspergillus.
Pereira de Sa suggested two possible uses for this inhibitor. It could work as a treatment, knocking down the virulence of the fungus or it could contribute to the development of a vaccine.
In strains with a mutated enzyme, a mouse model has full protection against infection.
Getting a vaccine approved through the Food and Drug Administration for immunocompromised individuals might be challenging, she said. Several studies would be needed to confirm its safety.
Del Poeta added that the vaccine his lab has developed is effective alone when heat killed, reducing the threat a live virus with a defective enzyme might pose to an immunocompromised patient. Del Poeta has been developing a vaccine for cryptococcus and aspergillus and is testing it for other fungal infections as well.
‘A beautiful cause’
Del Poeta described Pereira de Sa as a key contributor to his lab, who is methodical, systematic and hard working.
The program she is developing will take years to go to clinical trials, he added.
Del Poeta met Pereira de Sa in 2017, when he visited Brazil and spoke with her mentor, Daniel de Assis Santos, who gave her an enthusiastic reference.
After meeting with her for only five minutes, del Poeta offered her a job.
“I will never forget her face: surprised, joyful, excited and she could not hold back some tears,” del Poeta described.
Del Poeta is thrilled with his choice, as she has gone above and beyond his expectations.
Born and raised in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Pereira de Sa lives in East Setauket with her husband Rodrigo Carvalho da Silva, who is an airplane mechanic.
She enjoys Long Island, particularly during the summer, when she goes hiking, visits parks, kayaks and goes paddle boarding.
Pereira de Sa is encouraged by the progress in her work and is hoping her research contributes to future treatments.
“We are developing tools to help people,” she said. “It’s a beautiful cause I’m fighting for.”
She said the mortality rate from these fungal infections is “very high,” especially because a fungus like Aspergillus is ubiquitous.
“The fungus is present everywhere,” she said. “We are inhaling the spores of it every day.”
The invasive fungal disease starts in the lungs and spreads to the rest of the body, including in the brain, which can cause seizures.
Pereira de Sa recognizes the urgency of developing an effective treatment.
“We need some solutions and we need it now,” she said. “We are not prepared to fight fungal infections” on a large scale.
Generally, we don’t need distractions. We’re distracted enough, what with our electronic devices allowing us to check the weather in Albany during a storm, the latest trends on social media, the minute-to-minute value of our investments, and the world of sports news and scores.
And yet, there are those times when we desperately need a distraction. Our boss, for example, might ask about a project for which we’ve done almost no work and that we promised to work on last week, but that we didn’t get to because we were, well, distracted by other things.
Everyone likely has their own bag of go-to distractions that they turn to in moments when they need to deflect or distract someone just long enough for a meeting to end, a temper tantrum to subside, or an anxiety to abate.
I often start with almost factual information. By getting a sensational and exciting story almost correct, I trigger people to check their own phones to see if they can prove me wrong about some detail that isn’t as important as recognizing some bigger problem, like not getting an assignment done.
This phone check also tends to pull people’s minds into their electronic devices, where they might see text messages that need attention, a picture of their dog that reminds them of an upcoming trip to the vet, or some other big news that will divert their attention away from my almost factual statement and whatever other subject I’m trying to avoid.
Then, there’s always passion. I’m a generally level-headed person who stays calm, even when discussing subjects that are near and dear to me. Dialing up the passion, like changing the decibel level in a soft song with a message, can be distracting and effective. “I can’t believe the spectacular sportsmanship that women’s softball team displayed when they carried the player from the other team around the infield so she could touch all the bases after she fell. I’m so inspired.”
That, of course, also encourages people to dive back into their phones. Most of the time, that is effective unless the phone reminds them of whatever I’m trying to avoid, in which case, I turn to other methods.
Reverently appreciating silence is also an effective method. It’s the slow-down-so-we-can-think moment. Staring off into the distance, putting up a finger as if I’m coming up with some great idea, and then thanking that person for giving me that time can often alter the trajectory of a meeting.
Once the silence ends, I slowly offer an awed appreciation for the value of time and space, an admiration for nature, or anything else that suggests a depth that counterbalances my ineffective presentation.
Poignant anecdotes or even effective and dramatic metaphors, if given the opportunity to share them, can also suggest that I’m capable of deep thoughts, even if I haven’t had any related to the incomplete assignment.
Then, of course, there’s the Socratic method. Someone asks me something about an assignment, and I lean into it, asking a wide range of questions about the assignment, its direction, our target audience, and opportunities to build on it.
The answers to those questions sometimes reveal more about the expectations.
I never pretend to have a stomachache. I know people do that, but I get stomachaches often enough that I wouldn’t even pretend to have one, lest my system decided to oblige me and turn my charade into an afternoon of discomfort.
In a pinch, I metaphorically beat up on myself, suggesting how I could have done better on this and that I am disappointed in the pace at which I’m completing this project. It’s hard to beat up on someone who has already accepted responsibility and is eager to make amends.
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.
India Pagan greets fans after a game in Marburg, Germany. Photo by Stefan Tschersich
India Pagan. Photo by Stefan Tschersich
India Pagan. Photo by Stefan Tschersich
India Pagan. Photo by Stefan Tschersich
India Pagan. Photo by Stefan Tschersich
India Pagan. Photo by Stefan Tschersich
By Daniel Dunaief
Learning a new basketball system was challenging: learning German was even harder.
For India Pagan, who speaks English and Spanish, communicating with her coach and fans in her first experience in professional basketball after graduating with a Master’s from Stony Brook University proved difficult.
Early in the season, playing for BC Pharmaserv in Marburg, Germany, head coach Patrick Unger spoke to her in English, but he’s “translating it in his head in German,” Pagan said. Sometimes, she took what he said the wrong way.
When Unger said something, Pagan recalled that she “took it in a personal way, which make me get in my head,” she said.
After speaking with Unger, she cleared the air, which helped her understand more of what he wanted.
Pagan lived and worked a continent away from her family in New London, Connecticut, who had been regular visitors and supporters during her college playing days as a member of the Seawolves.
Moises Pagan, India’s father, was grateful for the opportunity to connect with his daughter electronically. “Thank God for FaceTime,” he said. “That helped.”
Off the court, Pagan adjusted to life in a different culture while living in an apartment with three teammates. She and her teammates had some of the typical issues that affect college students who move in with strangers when they first start living life apart from their families.
Some of her teammates were more attentive to cleaning their dishes or buying necessities.
One of Pagan’s biggest frustrations was that she likes to sleep late. Some of her teammates would knock on doors and ask for something in the morning.
“One thing I learned is that when I get another roommate, I’m really going to set boundaries” so that she can get the rest she feels she needs, Pagan said.
In addition, Pagan, whose parents grew up in Puerto Rico and who has a strong cultural and national identity tied to the island territory, found it difficult to purchase the kind of foods she knows she enjoys eating.
Pagan’s parents Moises and Carmen sent their daughter a care package filled with spices and packaged foods. The only problem: it took 28 days to arrive. The parcel “sat in Frankfurt for eight days,” Moises Pagan said. He called the post office in the United States, and representatives said they also saw that the package wasn’t moving, but that there was “nothing they could do.” When the food items finally arrived, India brought a teammate who spoke German with her, to translate.
Amid local and global health concerns, Pagan said the team had its share of illnesses. In her first week in Germany, she was sick. “You have to be kidding me,” she recalled thinking. “I’m sick already and we weren’t even playing games.”
Pagan got the first week off. After that, she said, players on her team passed along a few colds, which weren’t Covid but were still unpleasant.
On the court
While Pagan had an opportunity to play and continue to develop her game, the team didn’t make the playoffs and was heading into the final few weeks of the season with a losing record. “We know we’re a good team,” Pagan said. “The majority of games, we lost by a couple of points. We never found our rhythm this season.”
Pagan went from helping lead the Stony Brook women’s basketball team through successful seasons to debuting on a professional team that struggled to put wins together. “Basketball will always be fun, but losing so many games by five points got really frustrating and obviously isn’t for anyone,” she said.
In addition to receiving ongoing and positive support from her parents, India Pagan also remained in touch with Ashley Langford, who coached Pagan during her final year at Stony Brook.
“It’s always great hearing from [Coach Langford],” said Pagan. Langford reminded Pagan that she’s a great player, that she should attack and play her game, and should believe in herself. “Small phrases like that” really helped, Pagan said.
Langford said she tries to remind all first-year professional players that there’s a learning curve and that there will be moments they don’t enjoy. “What I tried to tell India, too, is that it’ll get better and stick with it,” she said.
Langford also highlighted how the officiating is different. Players might get called for travels more or less often in one league. She urged Pagan to dominate, which, the coach said, would make it difficult to take her out of the lineup.
“You’ve got to make him play you,” Langford urged.
Personal growth
Pagan felt she grew as a basketball player and as a person. She described the German style of play as “quicker and more physical.”
When a shot went up, her coach wanted everyone to go for a rebound, rather than sending one or two guards back to protect against a fast break on the other end.
“In some respects, I am a better basketball player,” she explained. “I learned some new moves and learned a lot about my game.”
During the season, Pagan and two of her teammates couldn’t go home for Christmas. They visited with their head coach and his family, which included three children. “I was thankful for the family I got to spend time with over here,” Pagan said. She also visited bigger cities, which were over an hour and a half from where she lived, as often as she could.
When she returns home, Pagan is looking forward to visiting with family, eating crab legs and taking a trip to Dunkin’ Donuts.
She has not decided where she’ll play next year and is exploring various options, including joining a Puerto Rican league.
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.”
I have had one of those weeks where the phrase “It’s a small world after all” applies.
Let’s start with events from over three decades ago, shall we?
I had spent considerable time with Michelle when I was in college, as we both loved biology and studied coenzymes together.
I had met Michelle’s father several times, mostly when a group of us visited her house. Her father, who was a doctor, was a wonderful host.
I had also met Michelle’s father’s partners in his medical practice. We spoke to each other on a first-name basis.
One of his partners and I were in a spacious kitchen as the sun was setting over a nearby hill. The partner asked me my last name.
When I spelled it out, he studied me closely.
“I had a roommate in medical school with exactly the same last name,” he said.
I held my breath.
“His first name was Ivan.”
A small electric shock worked its way through my body.
“That was my father,” I replied.
“Was?” he asked.
My father had died months earlier after an exhausting and painful battle with cancer.
I hadn’t developed “reporter” mode, which is what my children call it when questions leap at rapid fire pace from my brain to my mouth. Instead, I tried to imagine this man and my father as roommates in medical school.
I asked a few questions, for which he had short and not particularly informative answers. Later that night, I called my mom to tell her about the interaction. She said she knew the man and that he and my father were roommates and friends for a short time.
That brings me to story number two. I frequently receive pitch emails from people in the field of public relations. These executives from all over the country and the world — including Japan and Australia — email me with ideas to get their clients into the TBR newspapers.
I can’t always see a direct link between the coverage of stories in a community newspaper on Long Island and ideas that sometimes seem localized to other parts of the planet. When the connection seems tenuous, I don’t always read the emails all that carefully.
Recently, I received one such pitch and, despite not having a strong interest in the subject, read through the entire thing. The public relations executive was suggesting we cover a lecturer, author and authority figure in a particular field.
The first and middle names sounded familiar. When I got to the end of the pitch, where the email shared the person’s background, I realized that this woman and I attended the same college.
In fact, when I saw her picture, I immediately recognized her. She looked remarkably similar to how she looked decades ago —so, kudos to her for an ability to defy the effects of aging and gravity. That, I thought as I looked at her wrinkle-free face, could also be a topic she shares with audiences at conferences.
She not only attended college at the same time and place, but was in the same dorm for three years. In our sophomore year, I was her Secret Santa, which means that I bought small gifts for her and asked friends and roommates to leave them surreptitiously outside her dorm room. It’s a fun gift exchange and improves mental health during exams and amid shorter daylight hours.
One night, I sat at a dinner with my friends, before the “Secret Santa reveal,” suppressing a satisfied smirk as her roommate described what a wonderful Secret Santa her friend had.
Her roommate quoted from the poem I had left her (in my roommate’s considerably more aesthetically pleasing handwriting) with a bottle of bubble bath. Wouldn’t it be funny if the secret to her youthful appearance were bubble baths, which she started using many years ago after getting an inexpensive Secret Santa gift? Probably not.
Either way, it’s a small world where unexpected connections can and do crop up, even in random emails.
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.
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