CLOSE
Tags Posts tagged with "Daniel Dunaief"

Daniel Dunaief

by -
0 982
Stock photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

Next week, I invite you to the virtual and completely imaginary People’s National Convention, or PNC. It’s not a Democratic Convention or a Republican Convention. It’s just a fake gathering, virtually and invisibly, in which real people can stop worrying about partisan politics and enjoy the chance to live
each day.

Now, this PNC won’t nominate any one person, because, let’s face it, no singular person is capable of succeeding with the challenges that face our nation in this extraordinarily challenging year.

We’ll keep the speeches to a minimum because we don’t think people listen to most of what others say at these things anyway. Our first speaker will come up with a mask and will start by rolling her large and expressive eyes. She’ll try to convey, without using her mouth or her cheeks, which will be hidden behind her mask, a wide range of emotions. In fact, we might have a “guess-her-expression” game and the person who wins will receive absolutely nothing in the mail.

After that, we’ll launch into a rage presentation. Our speaker will bark, growl, throw himself around the room and urge you, with his arm motions, to get off your sofa and join him. He’ll work his way up to a fevered snarl and then he’ll bang his fists so hard against the TV set that he’ll shatter the screen. You’ll see the cracks on the TV, but don’t worry, the cracks and the blood — we won’t use real blood — are all on the PNC end. Your TV is fine. At the end of his speech, he’ll take a 2020 sign, or one of those 2020 New Year’s glasses with the holes for the eyes in the zeroes, put them on the floor and stomp on them.

After our rage speaker, we’ll have a fear speaker. He, too, won’t use words. He’ll move from left to right, then right to left and then, you guessed it, left to right again, on your screen, afraid of something over his shoulder. He might see a shadow. He’ll be frightened because, as the other conventions suggested, we must feel the need to fear something. He’ll run towards the letters PNC and will smile with relief, knowing that the PNC will protect him.

To offset this potentially overwhelming programming, we’ll offer a counterbalance of kids and pets accompanied by light-hearted music on a harpsichord. We call this portion of the programming the “Awwwww” segment. We’ll show images of toddlers laughing, baby bunnies hopping around a flower-strewn meadow and dolphins cutting in and out of the surface of the water.

We’ll have the icon room, where you can stand up, or not, as you see fit when you see the images. We’ll start with the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, where the ancestors of so many modern Americans arrived. We’ll add the Grand Canyon, the California coastline, Yellowstone National Park and Niagara Falls.

Then, we’ll have people trip and fall and try to juggle cell phones ineffectively. When the phones land, their screens, which might or might not have images of familiar faces, will crack. Will the entire segment be funny? Not necessarily. No one is always funny, but they promise to try because laughter might be our best medicine.

We’ll have a few actual speakers who use words, who tell inspirational stories about triumph over impossible odds. We’ll talk about people who were told many times that they couldn’t do something, until they went out and did it.

At the conclusion of the PNC, we’ll celebrate our friends and neighbors and the people who enhance every day and we’ll promise each other we’ll be better to them, and to ourselves.

by -
0 2006
Joel Hurowitz before the PIXL launch at the end of July. Photo by Tanya Hurowitz

By Daniel Dunaief

For six years, Joel Hurowitz worked as Deputy Principal Investigator on a team to build an instrument they would send to another planet.

Joel Hurowitz

An Assistant Professor of Geosciences at Stony Brook University, Hurowitz and the team led by Abigail Allwood at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory created an instrument that would search for evidence of life that is likely long ago extinct on Mars.

The team designed a 10-pound machine (which will weigh less than four pounds in Mars’s lower gravity environment) that is about the size of a square lunchbox and houses x-ray equipment that can search along the surface of rocks for life that may have existed as long as three to four billion years ago.

Mars’s surface environment became less hospitable to life starting around three billion years ago, when the planet lost most of its atmosphere, causing the surface to dry out and become extremely cold. Surface life at this point likely became extinct.

Called the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, or PIXL, the instrument was one of seven that lifted off at the end of July as part of a Mars 2020 mission. The Perseverance rover will land at the Jezero Crater on the Red Planet on February 18th, 2021.

After all that work, Hurowitz had planned to watch the launch with his family in Florida, but the pandemic derailed that plan.

“I got to watch the launch with my family,” Hurowitz said. He was on two zoom conferences, one with the Mars 2020 team and the other with members of the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook. “It was a really special experience” and was the “best teleconference of the last six months,” he said.

As the rocket makes its 35.8 million mile journey to Mars, the JPL team will turn on the PIXL to monitor it, run health checks and do routine heating of the components to make sure it is operating. After the rocket lands, the rover will go through a commissioning period. Numerous subsystems need to be checked out, explained Hurowitz.

The first test for the PIXL will be to analyze a calibration target the researchers sent to Mars, to make sure the measurements coincide with the same data they collected numerous times on Earth. This ensures that the instrument is “working the way we want it to. That’ll happen in the first 40 sols.”

A sol is a day on Mars, which is slightly longer by about 40 minutes than a day on Earth.

Once it passes its calibration test, the PIXL can start collecting data. Hurowitz described the instrument as “incredibly autonomous.” It sits at the end of the rover’s arm. When the scientists find a rock they want to explore, the PIXL moves an inch away from the surface of the rock and opens its dust cover. The scientists take pictures with a camera and a set of laser beams. These beams help determine whether the PIXL is an optimal distance from the rock. If it isn’t, the instrument manipulates itself, using struts that allow it to extend or retract away from the rock.

Once PIXL gets in the right position, it fires an X-ray beam into the rock. The beam is about the diameter of a human hair. The x-ray that hits the rock is like wind going through chimes. Rather than make a familiar sound, the elements in the rock emit a specific x-ray signal as the atoms return to their ground state. Putting together the signals from the rock enables Hurowitz and the PIXL crew to determine its chemistry.

Even though the rocks are likely a combination of numerous elements, they “separate themselves cleanly in our spectra,” Hurowitz said. The SBU Geosciences expert expects the elements in the rocks to have different proportions than on Earth. Mars, for example, has more iron than sodium. A granite rock on Earth would likely have considerable sodium and some potassium, with a little iron.

Hurowitz and the PIXL team will be looking for rocks that may have evidence of prokaryotic organisms that are Mars’s versions of similar species found in undisturbed areas of Western Australia, where researchers discovered ancient fossilized life.

The rocks in Australia contain the oldest accepted fossilized forms of life, which are about 3.5 billion years old and are considered the best analogues for what the PIXL team might find on Mars.

In Australia, which is where Allwood grew up, scientists discovered microbial mats, which are single-celled organisms that build up, one layer after another, into a colony. These mats worked together to build up towards the sunlight, which fuels their metabolism. They use raw chemicals in the environment like dissolved sulfur, iron and manganese.

The Martian mats, if they find them, likely had to adapt to considerably different conditions than on Earth. The Martian environment may not have had large oceans or river systems and craters filled with lakes.

The scientists won’t be able to look for an individual microbe, but rather for indirect signals, such as laminated structures that formed in ways that are unique to microbial communities.

Hurowitz, Allwood and the PIXL team are looking for clues from an unusual lamination in the rock that they would likely associate with a microbial mat. By looking closely at the lamination, they may be able to develop hypotheses about whether a mat was taking chemicals out and depositing it to make a mineralized home for itself.

If they find rocks of interest, the rover’s drill will collect a sample and hermetically seal it in a tube.

A future mission to Mars, planned for 2026, could retrieve some of these samples, which, when they return, could confirm the presence of life on Mars. PIXL will continue to operate as long as the filament in the x-ray tube lasts, which should be between 1,300 and 1,400 uses.

Allwood, who shared an office with Hurowitz when they worked together at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said she approached him when she started assembling a team.

Finding life on Mars would answer a question that has intrigued those on Earth for thousands of years, Allwood said. Such Martian life would indicate that “we’re not alone. There was life and it was next door,” she said.

by -
0 1436
METRO photo
Daniel Dunaief

By Daniel Dunaief

My mother often describes family rituals in her columns, whether they are the way we play baseball, the way we argue (remember the pancakes on my then teenage brother’s cantankerous head?) or the way we celebrate victories and help each other rise off the mat after defeats.

Ever the driven optimist, my mother can turn the most lemony lemons into something much more palatable, often, as Julie Andrews did in “My Favorite Things” with a spoonful, or two, of sugar.

It would be easy this week to lament the fact that, for the first time in decades, my family can’t see my mother on her birthday because of the danger from bringing the virus to her home. We recognize that so many people are enduring so much more challenging disruptions to their routines and that we are fortunate to have each other and can share the events of the week with her
through Zoom.

So, instead of being disappointed by the distance, I will share ways in which my mother, who will celebrate this birthday with my brothers and not me, my wife and our children, has cast a long shadow, all the way to our doorstep.

Well, for starters, my children and I can be, and often are, serious when the moment demands. And yet, a part of us can’t help imagining uproariously funny images or interruptions to a somber and important speech at just the wrong moment. I’m sure part of what was so familiar about my wife’s similarly mischievous nature comes from recognizing the moment when one of us feels compelled to answer a rhetorical question or to laugh during a silence.

My mother also has a keen ear for the words people choose to use or that immortalize them, much the way my children and I do. Of the many Winston Churchill quotes, she has, on occasion, shared this one: “I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”

I suppose that one isn’t too surprising, given her appreciation for animals which likely comes from her father, who grew up lactose intolerant on a dairy farm. Hmm, maybe that’s where she gets her sense
of humor?

Moving along, my family revels in our senses. We smell something wonderful, like baking cookies or the scent of new flowers in the spring, and we take a moment to appreciate the gift of the scent and our senses, which enable us to perceive and process it.

My mother also has a spectacular appreciation for nature. A sudden dark sky isn’t cause for concern or disappointment, but is a chance to appreciate the variety of weather that makes the coldest day warmer and the warmest day cooler.

Now, given the times in which we live, I see my mother in both of our children as they handle the ever-changing rules and realities of a world that hasn’t yet conquered the virus. Our daughter could rue the inequities that are robbing her of a “normal” college education. Instead, she and her resilient friends are staying in touch, supporting each other, and looking forward, as my mother would, to the day when they can return to a campus they might have otherwise taken for granted.

As for our son, despite his dedication and passion for baseball, which is a rite of passage each spring, he kept his head up and took time to train on his own, waiting for the moment when he could return, stronger and faster, to his field of dreams.

We can’t wait to sing to you this year, mom, and to let you know that, even though we haven’t traveled to see each other, we are enjoying the echoes of your joie de vivre in the halls of our home.

by -
0 2300
DNALC Assistant Director Amanda McBrien teaches a live session. Photo by Chun-hua Yang, DNALC

By Daniel Dunaief

Two letters defined the DNA Learning Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory over the last several months: re, as in rethink, reimagine, reinvent, recreate, and redevelop. They also start the word reagent, which are chemicals involved in experiments.

The 32-year-old Learning Center, which teaches students from fifth grade through undergraduates, as well as teachers from elementary school to college faculty, shared lessons and information from a distance.

At the Learning Center, students typically benefit from equipment they may not have in their schools. That has also extended to summer camps. “Our camps are built on this experiential learning,” said Amanda McBrien, an Assistant Director at the Learning Center.

DNALC Educator Dr. Cristina Fernandez-Marco, teaches a Genome Science Virtual Class. Photo by Sue Lauter, DNALC

While that part of the teaching experience is missing, the center adapted to the remote model, shifting to a video based lessons and demonstrations. Indeed, campers this year could choose between a live-streamed and an on-demand versions.

Dave Micklos, the founder of the Learning Center, was pleased with his staff’s all-out response to the crisis.

“The volume of new videos that we posted on YouTube was more than any other science center or natural history museum that we looked up,” Micklos said. “It takes a lot of effort to post content if you’re doing it in a rigorous way.” During the first few months of the lockdown, the Learning Center was posting about three or four new videos each day, with most of them produced from staff members’ homes.

As for the camps, the Learning Center sent reagents, which are safe and easy to use, to the homes of students, who performed labs alongside instructors. In some camps, students isolated DNA from their own cells, plant or animal cells and returned the genetic samples to the lab. They can watch the processing use the DNA data for explorations of biodiversity, ancestry and detecting genetically modified organisms.

The Learning Center has been running six different labs this summer.

The virtual camps allowed the Learning Center to find a “silver lining from a bad situation” in which students couldn’t come to the site, McBrien said. The Learning Center developed hands-on programs that they sent throughout the country.

McBrien said the instructors watched each other’s live videos, often providing support and positive feedback. Some people even watched from much greater distances. “We had a few regulars who were hysterical,” McBrien said. “One guy from Germany, his name is Frank, he was in all the chats. He loved everything we did” and encouraged the teachers to add more scientific lessons for adults.

McBrien praised the team who helped “redevelop a few protocols” so high-level camps could enable students to interact with instructors from home.

A DNA Barcoding Virtual Camp featuring DNA Learning Center Educator Dr. Sharon Pepenella, with her virtual class. Over Pepenella’s shoulder is a picture of Nobel Prize winners Francis Crick and James Watson. Photo by Sue Lauter, DNALC.

Using the right camera angles and the equipment at the lab, the instructors could demonstrate techniques and explain concepts in the same way they would in a live classroom setting. To keep the interest of the campers, instructors added polls, quizzes and contests. Some classes included leader boards, in which students could see who answered the most questions correctly.

This summer, Micklos and Bruce Nash, who is an Assistant Director at the Learning Center, are running a citizen science project, in which teams from around the country are trying to identify ants genetically throughout the United States.

Using a small kit, one reagent and no additional equipment, contributing members of the public, whom the Learning Center dubs “Citizen Scientists,” are isolating DNA from about 500 of the 800 to 900 species of ants.

In one of the higher level classes called metabarcoding or environmental DNA research, teachers collected microbes in a sample swabbed from their nose, their knees, tap water, and water collected from lakes.

The Learning Center supports this effort for high school research through Barcode Long Island, which is a partnership with the Hudson River Park to study fish in the Hudson. High school interns and the public help with sampling and molecular biology.

“Much like barcoding, we aim to democratize metabarcoding,” Nash explained in an email. A metabarcoding workshop that ended recently had participants in Nigeria, Canada, Antigua and distant parts of the United States, with applicants from Asia.

After teaching college faculty on bar coding, Micklos surveyed the teachers to gauge their preference for future courses, assuming in-person meetings will be possible before too long.

When asked if they would like in-person instruction only, a hybrid model, or classes that are exclusively virtual, none of the teachers preferred to have the course exclusively in person. “People are beginning to realize it is more time efficient to do things virtually,” Micklos said.

Nash added that the preference for remote learning predated the pandemic.

Micklos appreciates the Learning Center’s educational contribution. “To pull these things off with basically people talking to each other via computer, to me, is pretty amazing,” he said.

Around four out of 10 students who enter college who have an interest in pursuing careers in science continue on their scientific path. That number, however, increases to six out of 10, when the students have a compelling lab class during their freshman year, Micklos said.

Lab efforts such as at the Learning Center may help steady those numbers, particularly during the disruption caused by the pandemic.

The longer-term goal at the Learning Center, Micklos said, is to democratize molecular biology with educational programs that can be done in the Congo, the Amazon or in other areas.

As for the fall, the leadership at the center plans to remain nimble.

The Learning Center is planning Virtual Lab field trips and will also continue to offer “Endless Summer” camp programs for kids and parents looking for science enrichment.

The Center also hopes to send instructors for in-person demonstrations at schools, where they can host small groups of student on site.

“We are supporting as many people as possible through our grant-funded programs and our (virtual) versions of camps and field trips,” Nash said. “These will be adapted to support schools and others to progressively improve them through the fall, with the hope of reaching all those we would normally reach.”

by -
0 1231
A tree fell on a mail truck on Old Post Road in Setauket during Tropical Storm Isaias. Photo by John Broven

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

Timing is everything. Just ask the people who bought large blocks of tickets to sporting events and then tried to resell them in the year with empty stadiums or, perhaps, PSEG last Tuesday.

The New Jersey-based utility was supposed to be the savior of Long Island power, bringing corporate muscle, know how and technology to a region that had suffered in 1985 from outages that lasted weeks from Hurricane Gloria and dislocations and gas shortages during Superstorm Sandy.

But then, Tropical Storm Isaias had other ideas. The storm came through Long Island last Tuesday and, within hours, the communications system went down at PSEG, making it difficult for residents to know whether their efforts to report outages, downed trees, and dangling power lines were effective.

The storm caused about 420,000 people to lose power. That is particularly problematic at a time when some residents are still working from home. It also disrupts the angst-ridden end-of-summer period as parents and students prepare for a school year filled with questions about an uncertain future.

Hardened by all the difficulties of an impossible year, some residents chalked it up to the mess that is 2020, hoping that the change in the calendar will allow everyone to return to a normal in which we can hug friends, shake hands, visit extended family and lean in at a crowded restaurant to hear what someone said. If the vaccine Russia rushed to the market for the virus proves effective without serious side effects, maybe that hope will become a reality.

Just before Isaias hit, however, PSEG must have frustrated the entity in control of the disruptions during this haywire year. You see, the company sent out a postcard.

Now, postcards are nice, particularly when you get one from someone vacationing in an exotic location. You might appreciate the magnificent scenery, even if the card makes you wonder why your friend didn’t take you along instead of spending 42 cents to make you jealous of her wonderful life.

But, no, this wasn’t that kind of postcard. This was the kind of message that helps build a brand, that makes you feel as if you’ve landed somewhere between the familiar rhythm of a safe Brady Bunch household and the high-tech, happy future of the Jetsons.

The card, which arrived hours before Isaias in mail trucks that would have had trouble delivering them the next day, had a picture of a man in sunglasses on a power truck, wearing a yellow hard hat with blue skies and intact branches behind him.

The message offered GOOD NEWS! Of course they used all caps and an exclamation point. Then, the card continued, UPGRADES COMPLETED! How nice and promising, right? The postcard went on to suggest, “PSEG Long Island recently finished work to ensure that you and your neighbors will continue to receive safe and reliable electric service for years to come.” The words safe, reliable and years to come were in orange, as if they were highlighting the parts you needed to read closely, emphasizing their comforting professionalism and reassuring skill set.

The last paragraph read, “After careful inspection, we replaced and upgraded equipment that strengthens the infrastructure to better withstand storms and extreme temperatures.” The highlighted words were replaced, upgraded, and strengthens the infrastructure.

The tag line, after thanking customers for their patience, was, “Just one more way PSEG Long Island is working for you.”

Hmm, now, that postcard might have slipped, unnoticed, into the trash bin. But, that’s not what happened here. The postcard and storm arrived the same day and, despite the reassurance that the company had the infrastructure to better withstand storms, it seems that the storm, and maybe 2020, had other plans.

by -
0 1882
Klaus Mueller (third from left) with Akai Kaeru co-founder Eric Papenhausen (right) and interns Shenghui Cheng (second from left), on whose PhD thesis the software was based and Darius Coelho, who earned his PhD in Mueller’s lab. Photo courtesy of Akai Kaeru

By Daniel Dunaief

About 40 percent of the counties in the United States are at high risk for COVID-19 and related death rates, according to a new computer program created by Stony Brook University Computer Science Professor Klaus Mueller.

Putting together data from the over 3,000 counties throughout the United States, Mueller used a computer program he created with a start up company he co-founded, called Akai Kaeru LLC, to search for counties that present factors that would put them at greater risk for an increase in COVID-19 deaths.

Analyzing data from 500 factors, the scientists found that death rates increased in communities with a combination of traits that are catalytic for the spread and fatality rate of the virus. These include sparsely populated counties with a poor and aging population; counties with sleep-deprived, low-educated, low-insured residents; and wealthy counties with high home ownership and increasing housing debt, among other factors.

Many of the counties are in the southern United States. In June, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia had the highest density of high-risk counties at a coverage of 80 to 90 percent.

Mueller said he considered this approach in late April. When the data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came online, the group did its first test run on May 10th, which ended on June 10th.

When he looked at the June 10th mortality rates throughout the country, he was amazed at how effectively the patterns based on the conditions from the computer algorithm predicted increases.

To be sure, not all of the counties that fit one or more of these sets of conditions had high death rates in May, but others that were similar had. The preconditions existed, but the spark to cause those deaths hadn’t occurred, Mueller said.

“In June, some of these so far untouched counties caught the virus and they flared up like a tinderbox,” Mueller explained in an email. “This phenomenon continued in July for other counties that had escaped it so far but had the critical condition sets.”

In June, some of the counties that had characteristics that made them vulnerable caught the virus, Mueller explained.

Mueller anticipates a rapid increase in August in counties in Florida and Texas, in which the virus has spread and the conditions for increased mortality are prevalent.

“There are counties in these states that from the socio-economic perspective look a lot like those that already experienced great tragedy,” he wrote.

Mueller explained that people in many counties think they’re not at risk even if their neighbors are. The danger, however, comes from a spark, such as a visit by someone carrying the virus, that increases the infection, hospital and mortality rates.

Indeed, in wealthy counties where residents are stretched thin by the costs needed to maintain their homes, the incidence of illness and death is also higher. In part, that reflects how some of the people in these communities cut corners in terms of health insurance.

Mueller said Akai Kaeru, which means “red frog” in Japanese, is working on a dashboard that will be accessible from a web browser where users can click on a map of counties and see the risk and the patterns that define it. The staff at Akai Kaeru, which includes three principals and four interns, have virtual team meetings each weekday at 11 am. The dashboard they create can help residents see the other counties that share similar characteristics. Users can also compare the death rate in these counties to the average death rate in the United States.

While the observations of trends linking characteristics of a county with COVID-related health challenges could be useful for county and state planners, Mueller acknowledged that these observations are “just a start. Now, you know where to look, which is way better than before.”

The data could be useful for policy and law makers as well as for actuaries at life insurance companies.

Mueller believes this artificial intelligence tool acts like a magnet that pulls out the proverbial needle from the data haystack.  Local leaders can use the dashboard to see the critical conditions for their counties. They can try to find solutions to remove those conditions.

Demonstrating how the health care system in similar areas became overwhelmed can increase compliance with social distancing and mask-wearing guidelines.

Mueller added that the predictions from the model are only as good as the data he used to analyze trends across the country. He and his team aren’t making these observations or collecting this information themselves.

He said some counties have a lower likelihood than the average of developing a wider contagion. While the entire state doesn’t have the same lower probability of the disease spreading, areas like Montana and Indiana have fewer of the variables that typically combine to create conditions that favor the spread of the virus.

Mueller suggests that the risks from COVID-19 are tied to compliance with policies that reduce the spread of the disease and to the development of a vaccine.

Despite the high infection rate through April and May and the deaths during those unprecedented months, Suffolk County isn’t at the same level of risk as some regions in the south. “Suffolk is much better than those counties in the South and even Westchester, Rockland and adjacent counties in Connecticut and New Jersey,” Mueller said. “But it is not without risk.”

Prior to developing a program to analyze epidemiological trends with COVID, Mueller worked with medical visualization, which included the three-dimensional data of human parts that were generated through computed tomography, or CT.

In his work, the Computer Science professor seeks to find ways to communicate high-dimensional data to the lay population. He has routinely worked on clustering and has partnered with Pacific Northwest, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and health care companies.

Mueller has been at Stony Brook University since 1999. He earned his PhD from Ohio State University. Originally from Germany, he has done considerable work online, including teaching.

He and his wife Akiko, who works on marketing for his company, have an eight-year-old daughter named Nico.

Readers interested in learning more about his research with COVID can find information at the following link: https://akaikaeru.com/covid-19-1.

by -
0 1106
METRO photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

We will undoubtedly run into times in the next few weeks and months when our kids can’t stay in school. Yes, sure, I understand how and why people want their children in school. Most of the time, they can and will learn more in a conventional classroom setting than they will sitting in their beds in a collared shirt with pajama bottoms, texting friends all over the country with their phones while they pretend to be taking notes.

I also understand the need for schools to provide a structured schedule for each day, offering parents a chance to finish assignments for their jobs, pay bills without a well-intentioned child turning the checks into a coloring pad, or have a few moments when they don’t need to clean up the mess on another floor.

And yet, we aren’t that much further along than we were in March, when schools closed for the first time, in protecting the health of teachers, students, and everyone else who enters or lives with someone in an academic setting.

Sure, the hospitals may have better treatments than they did when they didn’t know about the likely progression of the disease, but there is no cure and most of us don’t have any immunity.

So, given that we’re not likely to do much traveling and our kids are likely to spend some time at home, we can and should develop Plans B, C and D.

Plan B could be a fallback into the kinds of learning our children did in March, when school administrators and teachers tried to educate our children with modified, distance-based lesson plans. Certainly, schools have spent considerable time preparing for either a blended version of in-class and remote learning or an all-remote experience.

Those lessons and the material covered will hopefully be thorough enough to match what they would have learned in the customary in-person setting.

Plan C, however, may involve some supplemental educating and, perhaps, education-driven day care, depending on the age of our children. Where can we find that? In every community, children of all ages may be home. For older teenagers, this may be an opportunity to provide guidance to younger counterparts whom they might drive by on their way to school, soccer practice or a group gathering.

Parents of younger children may want to connect with parents of high school children, either directly or through their schools. After all, these high school students are much closer to learning modern math than parents who may be decades from the same material that was taught in a different way in an earlier era.

Through a voluntary and distance-based teens-to-tots tutoring, younger students can find mentors, tutors and friends in teenagers who can, perhaps earlier than they anticipated, give back to the communities that supported them.

With more time on their hands because so many extracurriculars might be canceled, these teenagers can become an important resource in an educational system, supplementing what the younger students learn in class.

A neighbor recently told me about a family exchange he and his brother managed. His 20-something son became frustrated living and working at home, while his brother’s 20-something daughter shared the same sentiment. He sent his son to live with his brother, while he hosted his niece. The change of scenery has proven healthy for everyone, giving them all a chance to exhale amid the uncertainty.

Disruptions over the next several months to a year seem inevitable. If we come up with creative ways to plan for them, we might contribute to our communities and enjoy the time while we wait for the viral all-clear signal.

by -
0 1070
METRO photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

Like it or not, ready or not, we will be starting August at the end of this week. That means many students and faculty will be returning to college, for those schools that are welcoming students back to campus and for however long those young learners will be allowed to remain there.

So, what should be on the shopping list?

Well, for starters, the kids will need masks and abundant quantities of hand sanitizer. Sure, colleges are promising to have some of each scattered around the facilities students will have to take turns using, but, to the extent we can find and afford it, we should include these health care items on our packing list.

They’ll probably need their own thermometers, just so they can respond, at a moment’s notice, to the question of how they are feeling and whether they’ve had any fever. In fact, they should carry the thermometer to every class.

Of course, this often isn’t sufficient in the age of COVID-19, in large part because so many people, particularly those who are our children’s age, don’t have a fever even if they are carriers and potential super-spreaders of the virus.

They’ll also need plenty of cleaning supplies because they may prefer to clean their rooms and common spaces like bathrooms themselves or because schools may be reluctant to send other people into their suite or hallway bathrooms.

We might want to add a laminated card that includes critical phone numbers and addresses. If they are far enough from home, they might need a safe place to stay in case they have to vacate campus immediately, like an antiseptic barn or a never-used cabin in the woods. They also might need to know the name and phone number of a local doctor or a doctor from home who can talk them through any medical challenges through telemedicine. Waiting at university health services, urgent care facilities, or hospitals may create undo stress and raise exposure to the virus.

Now, how many weeks or months of clothing to pack has become a matter of opinion. Some people, like my daughter, are listening to their school suggestion and are planning to pack for a total of three weeks. In that case, one or even one-and-a half suitcases may be sufficient.

Okay, what else? Well, they’ll need electronics and chargers, so they can do most of their work from their dorm room or a pre-reserved room in a library or any other space students can reserve that is cleaned in between study sessions.

Given that the gym, where they might go to run or lift weights, is likely on restricted hours or is only available for school athletes, they might also want to bring a few light weights, just to get some exercise in the room.

Even though they may only be there for three weeks, they’ll need plenty of air freshener and bug spray. If these students and their roommates spend most if not all of their time in their rooms, they may eat most, if not all, of their meals in this small space. Unless they take regular, exercise-inducing trips to remove their trash, the leftovers will likely start to smell within a few days, particularly in hotter rooms that don’t have air conditioners.

These students will also need cameras and plenty of memory in their electronic devices. If they only get three weeks or less of time on campus, they’re probably going to want to document as much as possible of their campus life, before they do all of their learning remotely.

Oh, and they might need a few notebooks, pencils and pens. Then again, if they do everything online, those antiquated items might be unnecessary in a year of unknowns.

by -
0 1357
Stock photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

Here we are, July 23 and it’s time to Play Ball!

The Yankees and the defending World Series champion Washington Nationals are returning to the field. The old familiar rules are still in place, with a few COVID-19 related exceptions, including air fists and air elbows.

So, as professional athletes prepared to return this week to some of America’s favorite activities, I conducted a non-scientific poll, reaching out to a range of people to ask a few sports questions.

Before I get to the responses, it occurs to me to make a suggestion to the many teams preparing to fill empty stadiums with cardboard cutouts. Why not reach out to young, budding artists to get them to send cutouts that the teams could put in the seats? In a baseball game, if a cutout gets hit with a foul ball, the stadium crew could sanitize the ball, put it in a case and ship it to the lucky fan whose cutout was hit.

Anyway, here are the survey results.

For starters, Marie will “probably watch more sports. Not because I want to. But because my husband and children will be clamoring for any available TVs in the house. I hear them say that they would watch chess if it was televised,” she explained in an email.

She suspects watching the game may not be as much fun without fans in the stands.

Although she’s been told she’s a “negative Nelly,” Marie doesn’t think either the seasons or the school year will finish.

Jane, who is more of a sports fan, says she and her family are “so starved for competition and sports on TV and in person” that they’ll likely “binge watch sports” and, when they can attend, will go as much as possible.
They are college sports fans, so they’ve discussed the possibility of football Saturdays without football. She anticipates numerous shortened seasons.

Paula, a good friend whose passion for the Yankees is as deep as her husband’s dedication to the Red Sox, expects the household to have as much sports as before, which means they will have a game on every night whenever anyone is playing. Their sports enthusiasm connects them with their college-aged son. They have been watching exhibition baseball games. They expect baseball may get through the season, particularly with large enough rosters. She isn’t optimistic about hockey, basketball or football.

A New England fan, Luke will probably watch more of the Patriots and Tampa Bay football teams, because of his interest in Tom Brady and Cam Newton. His daughters are more concerned about their own leagues than the pros. He thinks the NBA might make it 20 games and the NFL about 10.

Robert calls his Phillies’ watching a “family ritual,” and he looks forward to spending time together cheering on the team. Last year, his family splurged for expensive seats near the infield for the first time and were looking forward to repeating that this summer. They also love watching the Olympics, which will have to wait until next year.

His family hasn’t discussed the return of sports, which may reflect a phase of “acceptance given all the suffering going on in the world.” Still he anticipates “huddling together on the family room couch” to watch the Phillies. With strong testing programs and without fans or crowds, he anticipates that the shortened season will conclude, even if case numbers rise.

Finally, Jenn, who doesn’t watch any sports, caught a few moments of the Yankees-Mets game at Citi Field, which she continues to refer to as Shea. She observed that there is “something so viscerally communal about sports it seems so sad and empty without the community” of fans. Some of those fans, however, will be coming together in person and at a distance, to cheer on their teams.

by -
0 1465
John Inglis. Photo courtesy of CSHL

By Daniel Dunaief

In the post COVID-19 world, the pace of science and, in particular, scientific publishing has changed, giving researchers a sense of urgency to share information that might lead to preventions, treatments and cures.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has produced two preprint research services, bioRxiv and MedRxiv, that complement the longer peer-reviewed path to publication.

After numerous scientists restructured their labs to contribute to the growing body of knowledge and information about COVID-19, these researchers turned to preprint services to share the results of their work and the evolution of their thoughts on how to defeat the virus.

“It’s absolutely unprecedented for scientists to drop what they are doing and switch their focus to something completely new to aid society and mankind in general,” said John Inglis, the co-founder of bioRxiv and one of the members of joint management group for medRxiv.

MedRxiv, which started in June of 2019, helped provide the scientific community with an outlet for their health science research, with the caveat that the results haven’t received a thorough peer review, as they might in the New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, or other periodicals.

The number of preprint research papers has climbed dramatically this year, as scientists race to get their results from the bench to the server. The number of papers in bioRxiv increased to 88,268 in June from 71,458 in January. The increase at the newer medRxiv is much more dramatic, climbing from 953 in January to 7,541 in June.

The number of pandemic related papers on medRxiv and bioRxiv in total is 6,458, with 5,133 on medRxiv and 1,325 on bioRxiv.

Pandemic-related papers account for close to 70 percent of the new research published on medRxiv since January 1st, while the percentage of virus-related papers on bioRxiv is 6.2%, in large part because bioRxiv includes numerous other subject areas, including ecology, bioinformatics, plant biology and zoology.

The world has taken notice of all these papers, with page views peaking in April for medRxiv to almost 11 million for the month.

While the papers aren’t peer reviewed, the managers of these sites urge readers to remain cautious in their interpretation and use of these findings, while the scientific community continues to duplicate any encouraging or compelling results.

“We remind people all the time that these are preprints,” Inglis said, as the site has numerous reminders about the early nature of the findings. “They are preliminary reports and should not guide clinical practice or be reported as established information. That’s a battle we’re still fighting.”

The peer review process has also picked up some speed, as journals, inundated with potential game-changing material, have been accelerating the process of reading and reviewing papers. The median time between posting an article on bioRxiv and publication in a journal before the pandemic was nine months. Some papers in medRxiv have been published in journal in as few as 35 days.

For medRxiv, the screening process requires an ethics statement, a funding statement, and any potential conflicts of interest. These requirements are “all far more familiar in medical publishing than in scientific publishing,” said Inglis.

At bioRxiv, which recently introduced a competing interest statement as well for authors, freelancers and a group of Principal Investigators look at everything before it posts, to make sure it’s science and that it’s not dangerous. The screeners turn the manuscripts back to the team if they have any concerns.

“We felt, early in the pandemic, that it was necessary to make sure we have people with expertise in outbreak science,” Inglis explained. “We brought on volunteers.”

According to Inglis, the percentage of manuscripts that scientists submit, but that bioRxiv doesn’t publish, is between 5 and 10 percent, while that figure is closer to 20 to 25 percent for medRxiv.

Inglis said numerous scientists have done some modeling based on public data, but that the preprints don’t accept those papers unless they contain additional research.

The preprint management team was “worried about the indiscriminate use of these models to guide public policy,” he said.

Additionally, the team excluded manuscripts that might be dangerous to human health or human-health related behavior. They didn’t want people to rush out and take something that, theoretically, might help, but that hasn’t received sufficient testing. A treatment might block a receptor, but also have significant side effects.

Inglis said the team of people who work at the preprints, which includes five full-time preprint-platform dedicated staff members and seven other CSHL staff with other responsibilities, including the founders, tech developers and production staff, worked seven days a week, with long working days to meet the increased need and demand.

People working on this effort “are not doing it because they are getting rich or handsomely acknowledged.” An arduous job with thousands of papers, the staff are working out of a “sense of purpose and mission,” Inglis explained.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and CSHL provide financial support for these preprints. The research community has shared their appreciation for these preprints and CSHL generously acknowledges the work of the staff.

Inglis and Richard Sever co-founded bioRxiv. MedRxiv is managed by Sever and Inglis in collaboration with Professors Harlan Krumholz and Joe Ross from Yale and Dr. Theo Bloom and Claire Rawlinson from BMJ, which was originally called the British Medical Journal.

Inglis said numerous papers have become game-changers in the battle against the virus, including a study from two weeks ago in the United Kingdom on dexamethasone, a steroid that was proven effective in severe cases of COVID-19. Indeed, just recently, a Bethesda hospital became the first in the nation to use the steroid to combat the virus.

The team working in preprints at CSHL appreciates the opportunity to contribute to the public health crisis.

Inglis is pleased with how the community trusted the preprints with their work, while numerous members of the community helped screen manuscripts and provide advice about how to react to the needs of the pandemic.

Prev1...565758...88Next Page 57 of 88
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

©