CLOSE
Tags Posts tagged with "Power of 3"

Power of 3

by -
0 747
Lucas Cheadle with two pieces of artwork in his office, from left by Porferio Tirador 'Gopher' Armstrong, a Cheyenne-Caddo native from Oklahoma and Oklahoma Kiowa artist Robert Redbird. Photo by Austin Ferro

By Daniel Dunaief

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Assistant Professor Lucas Cheadle knows a thing or two about under represented groups in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

Of Chickasaw, Choctaw and Cherokee lineage, Cheadle, who was born in Ada, Oklahoma, was recently named one of 31 inaugural Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) Freeman Hrabowski scholars.

Lucas Cheadle. Photo by Steve Ryan/ AP Images for HHMI

The first scholars in this highly competitive and unique program, which drew 1,036 applicants, will receive funding that will last at least five years and could get as much as $8.6 million each for their promising early research and for supporting diversity, equity and inclusion in their labs.

“This is the first time a program of this type and magnitude has been attempted,” said HHMI Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer Leslie Vosshall. The scholars are “doing things that set them in the top one percent in creativity and boldness and we are certain we are going to have really healthy, inclusive, diverse labs.”

Vosshall said the scholars, which include scientists from 22 institutions, including Columbia, Harvard, Duke, Cornell, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hit it “out of the park” in their science and diversity efforts.

HHMI, which has committed $1.5 billion for Freeman Hrabowski Scholars, will award about 30 of these select scholarships every other year for the next 10 years, supporting promising scientists who can serve as mentors for under represented groups while also creating a network of researchers who can provide advice and collaborations.

The first group of scientists to receive this support is “diverse in such a way that it reflects the U.S. population,” Vosshall said.

The program is named after Freeman Hrabowski, who was born in Birmingham, Alabama and was president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, from 1992 to 2022. Hrabowski, who was arrested during the civil rights movement, created a tutoring center in math and science for African Americans in high school and college and helped create the Meyerhoff Scholars Program.

Cheadle was celebrating the December holidays in Oklahoma when he learned he was a semifinalist, which was “really surprising and exciting,” he recalled. Becoming an HHMI scholar is “amazing” and “very validating,” he said.

Bruce Stillman, President and CEO of CSHL, suggested that HHMI recognition is “a prestigious achievement” and, in a email, wrote that he was “pleased that [Cheadle] was included in the list of remarkable scientists.”

Stillman predicted that Cheadle’s passion about increasing diversity in science would have a “major influence” on CSHL.”

Scientific questions

Cheadle appreciates how HHMI funds the scientist, not individual projects. With this unrestricted funding, which includes full salary and benefits and a research budget of about $2 million over the first five years and eligibility to participate in HHMI capital equipment purchasing programs, Cheadle and other scholars can pursue higher-risk, higher-reward projects.

“If I have a crazy idea tomorrow, I can do that with this with funding,” Cheadle explained.

Cheadle, who joined CSHL in August of 2020, studies the way the immune system shapes brain development, plasticity and function. He also seeks to understand how inflammatory signals that disrupt neural circuit maturation affect various disorders, such as autism.

Last September, Cheadle and his lab, which currently includes six postdoctoral researchers, two PhD students, one master’s student, a lab manager and two technicians, published a paper in Nature Neuroscience that showed how oligodendrocyte precursor cells, or OPCs, help shape the brain during early development.

Previously, scientists believed OPCs produced cells that surrounded and supported neurons. Cheadle’s recent work shows that they can play other roles in the brain as well, which are also likely instrumental in neural circuit construction and function.

When young mice raised in the dark received their first exposure to light, these OPCs engulfed visual processing circuits in the brain, which suggested that they helped regulated connections associated with experience.

With this new position and funding, Cheadle also plans to explore the interaction between the development of nerves in the periphery of the brain and different organs in the body, as well as how immune cells sculpt nerve connectivity.

He is not only studying this development for normal, healthy mice, but is also exploring how these interactions could explain why inflammation has arisen as such an important player in neurodevelopmental dysfunction.

Stillman explained that Cheadle’s work will “have broad implications.”

A talented, balanced team

Cheadle is committed to creating a balanced team of researchers from a variety of backgrounds.

“As principal investigators,” Cheadle said, “we have to actively work to have a diverse lab.”

He has posted advertisements on women’s college forums to garner more applications from women and under represented groups. He has also adopted a mentorship philosophy that focuses on inclusivity. 

Cheadle explained that he hopes to be adaptable to the way other people work. Through weekly lab meetings, mentorship arrangements and reciprocal interactions, he hopes to provide common ground for each aspiring scientist.

He recognizes that such goals take extra effort, but he feels the benefits outweigh the costs.

During annual events, Cheadle also leans in to the cultural diversity and differences of his staff. He hosts a pre-Thanksgiving pot luck dinner, where everybody brings a food item that’s important and close to them. 

Last year, he made pashofa out of cracked corn that his stepmom sent him from the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma. Pashofa is a traditional meat and corn Chickasaw dish. Other lab members brought tropical beverages common in Brazil.

In terms of diversity in science, Cheadle believes such efforts take years to establish. Through an approach that encourages people from different backgrounds to succeed in his lab, Cheadle hopes to share his thoughts and experiences with other researchers.

Cheadle last summer hosted a Chickasaw student on campus to do research. He is working with the Chickasaw Nation to expand that relationship.

As for the Freeman Hrabowski scholars, Vosshall said all HHMI wants to do is “allow everybody to do science.-

—————————————————————————————

HHMI Chief Scientific Officer Vosshall celebrates benefits of diversity in science

By Daniel Dunaief

It’s not one or the other. She believes in both at the same time. For Leslie Vosshall, Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, science and diversity are stronger when research goals and equity work together.

Leslie Vosshall. Photo by Frank Veronsky

That’s the mission of the new and unique HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholars program. HHMI this week named 31 inaugural scholars as a part of an effort designed to support promising scientists who provide opportunities to mentor historically under represented groups in research.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Assistant Professor Lucas Cheadle was among the 31 scientists who became HHMI scholars (see related story above), enabling him to receive financial support for the next five years and up to $8.6 million for the next decade.

In an interview, Vosshall said the “special sauce of this group” of scientists who distinguished themselves from among the 1,036 who applied was that they excel as researchers and as supporters of diversity. Bringing in people who may not have had opportunities as scientific researchers not only helps their careers but also enables researchers to take creative approaches to research questions.

“When you bring in people from the ‘out group’ who have been historically excluded, they have an energy of getting into the playing field,” she said. That innovation can translate into successful risk taking.

As an example, Vosshall cited Carolyn Bertozzi, a chemist at Stanford University who shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for helping to develop the field of bioorthogonal chemistry, which involves a set of reactions in which scientists study molecules and their interactions in living things without interfering with natural processes.

Her lab developed the methods in the late 1990’s to answer questions about the role of sugars in biology, to solve practical problems and to develop better tests for infectious diseases. “This scrappy band of women chemists tried this crazy stuff” which provided “massive innovations in chemical biology,” Vosshall said. Mainstream science often solidifies into a groove in which the same thing happens repeatedly. “Innovation comes from the edges,” she added.

In her own to hire staff in her lab, Vosshall has taken an active approach to find candidates from under served communities. “People who have pulled themselves up have worked so hard to get to where they are,” she said. “It’s important to dig deeper to find talent everywhere.”

Keeping away from the off-ramp

The number of under represented groups in science has improved over the last few decades. Indeed, when Vosshall joined Rockefeller University, where she is the Robin Chemers Neustein Professor, she couldn’t count 10 women faculty. Now, 23 years later, that number has doubled.

The number of people in under represented groups in graduate programs has increased. The problem, Vosshall said, is that they “take the off-ramp” from academic science” because they don’t always feel “welcome in the labs.” Supporting diversity will keep people in academic science, who can and will make important discoveries in basic and translational science.

As a part of the Freeman Hrabowski program, HHMI plans to survey people who were trainees in these labs to ask about their mentoring experience. By tracking how developing scientists are doing, HHMI hopes to create a blueprint for building diversity.

HHMI has hired a consultant who will analyze the data, comparing the results for the results and career trajectories. The research institute will publish a paper on the outcome of the first cohort. Researchers in this first group will not only receive money, but will also have an opportunity to interact with each other to share ideas.

New approach

When Vosshall earned her PhD, she considered an alternative career. She bought a training book for the Legal Scholastic Aptitude Test and considered applying to law school, as she was “fed up with how I was treated and fed up with science”

Nonetheless, Vosshall, who built a successful scientific career in which she conducts research into olfactory cues disease-bearing insects like mosquitoes seek when searching for humans, remained in the field.

To be sure, Vosshall and HHMI aren’t advocating for principal investigators to hire only people from under represented groups. The promising part of this scholarship is that HHMI found it difficult to get the final number down to 31, which “makes me optimistic that the [scientific and mentorship] talent is out there,” she said. Over the next decade, HHMI plans to name about 30 Freeman Hrabowski scholars every other year. If each lab provides research opportunities across different levels, this will help create a more diverse workforce in science, which, she said, benefits both prospective researchers and science.

 

by -
0 483
James Rossie conducting field work at Lake Turkana. Photo by Susanne Cote

By Daniel Dunaief

Dead men might not tell tales but fossilized apes and the soil around them may change a narrative. That’s what happened recently when a large collaboration of researchers gathered clues from an ape fossil in Moroto, Uganda that lived 21 million years ago and from a detailed analysis of the soil.

James Rossie in his lab. Photo by Emily Goble

 

Scientists have long thought apes started climbing upright, which is an important evolutionary step, all those years ago to reach fruit in a habitat dense with trees. Recent evidence from two publications in the journal Science, however, suggest that the habitat included grassland and woodlands.

James Rossie, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University, studied the teeth of the fossil, called Morotopithecus, to determine what this ancient ape ate.

“The important thing about the teeth of Morotopithecus is a shift towards folivory” or leaf eating, Rossie said. “The surface of the molars were elongated with well-developed crests” which indicate that this primate consumed leaves rather than fruit.

By contrast, molars of animals that eat fruit are more rounded. Additionally, carbon isotope dating of the enamel suggest that they fed on water-stressed plants. This discovery and analysis changes not only the narrative of this particular ape species, but also of the evolutionary progression and habitat of primates.

A rendering of ancient apes foraging in trees. Image courtesy of Corbin Rainbolt

This analysis indicated that apes lived in areas of open woodlands, where there were patches of trees separated by stretches of grassland about 10 million years earlier than scientists originally believed. During the miocene period, they would have had to evade predators such as Simbakubwa, an extinct carnivore that was larger than a lion.

“It was very unexpected that an ape with upright, versatile climbing abilities was living in a seasonal woodland with open, grassy patches, rather than in a closed tropical forest,” said Laura MacLatchy, a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and the leader on the study.

“The findings have transformed what we thought we knew about early apes, and the origins for where, when and why they navigate through the trees and on the ground in multiple different ways,” Robin Bernstein, Program Director for Biological Anthropology at the National Science Foundation, said in a statement. “The effort outlines a new framework for future studies regarding ape evolutionary origins.”

The fossils Rossie and his colleagues examined including the lower part of a face, the palate, upper teeth, a couple of vertebrae, the lower jaw, and a complete femur. It’s unclear if these fossils came from one individual or from a collection of apes. With considerable wear and tear on the teeth of the upper jaw, the owner of those bones was an adult, Rossie said.

The mandible of an ancient ape with the left molar enlargement inset. Photo by Laura MacLatchy

By studying the bones as puzzle pieces that fill in a narrative, researchers concluded that the smaller, thick femur, or thigh, bone helped the ape climb quickly and effectively up the trunks of trees.

The longer legs of a human push us away from trees, making it harder to climb, while the shorter, sturdy legs of an ape enable it to get closer to the trunk and reach lower branches quickly. 

Apes that fed on leaves would likely have had larger bodies to accommodate the need for a longer digestive tract. A heavier animal that navigated through trees would run the risk of falling to the ground if their weight caused a branch to break.

By climbing upright, apes could distribute their weight more evenly over several branches, enabling them to maneuver through the trees to the leaves while reducing the strain they put on any one branch.

In a second paper published together as a part of this analysis, soil researchers studied the environment at Moroto and at several other sites of similar age across eastern Africa.  These soil scientists determined that the early habitat included forests and grasslands.

Cooperative work

Rossie believes the work of numerous scientists over a long period of time not only represents a paradigm shift in thinking about ape evolution and the environment in Africa, but also in the way scientists across a wide range of expertise collaborate.

James Rossie conducting field work at Lake Turkana. Photo by Susanne Cote

The researchers who trained Rossie and his colleagues were more competitive and guarded, he said. They didn’t share information with each other about their findings and wanted other researchers to learn about their findings through journal publications.

“We decided to take a different strategy” about a dozen years ago, he said. “It occurred to us that these separate silo attempts to reconstruct these environments were incompatible, with different methods and strategies. We couldn’t put it together into a coherent picture.”

By working together with the same methods, the scientists had comparable data and developed a coherent picture. Such broad collaborations across a range of fields required a “bit of a leap of faith,” he added. The scientists knew and trusted each other.

Indeed, Rossie and MacLatchy have known each other since the early 2000s when MacLatchy first asked Rossie to study other fossils.

Bringing numerous researchers across a range of expertise was a “game theory experiment,” Rossie added. Researchers could have published smaller papers about each site more quickly, but chose to combine them into the more meaningful synthesis.

MacLatchy suggested that the work on this project that involved sharing data across multiple sites, as well as joining forces in a range of expertise, makes it possible to reconstruct habitats with much greater detail.

“We are also able to obtain a regional perspective, which is not possible if interpretations are based on individual fossil sites,” she said. “I’d like to think this kind of collaboration will become standard.”

A resident of Centerport, Rossie is a hockey fan and is pulling for the Islanders.

He enjoys studying teeth because a single tooth can provide considerable information about an animal’s place among other species and about its strategies for getting and processing food.

His professional studies have come full circle. As a college junior at St. Lawrence University, he attended a field school run by Harvard University and the National Museum of Kenya at Lake Turkana. Almost every moment of that experience made him more eager to pursue paleontology as a career.

“As fate would have it, my field project is now centered on an area on the west side of Lake Turkana that I first visited back in 1995,” he explained.

The Turkana Basin Institute serves as his home base during the field season and he is grateful for their ongoing logistical support.

As for future work, Rossie is studying the fossils of at least four different species of apes in Lake Turkana in Kenya.

by -
0 1840
Michael French in front of a mobile radar antenna.

By Daniel Dunaief

Michael French

 

When he was in elementary school in Hamden, Connecticut, Michael French was several miles away from an event that would shape his life. A tornado touched down, causing extensive damage, knocking out power lines and injuring 40 people. The violent storm was traumatizing, causing him to hide in the closet during routine summer storms.

By the time French attended college at Cornell University, these powerful and potentially devastating storms had become an “interest and fascination,” he said, leading him to major in atmospheric sciences.

After graduating from college, he received an offer from Professor Howard Bluestein at the University of Oklahoma (OU) for a master’s program. A consultant for the movie Twister starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, Bluestein was one of the first to put a weather radar on the back of a truck to collect data in severe storms and tornadoes. French also earned his PhD at OU.

These days, French, who is an Associate Professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, spends parts of his time traveling to places in the southeast in trucks with unique and emerging instrumentation, typically Doppler weather radar, gathering data about severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.

French has seen about 25 tornadoes. The closest he’s come to these violent storms is about a kilometer away, which occurred in 2004. When he’s conducting research, he is more concerned about lightning, which frequently occurs around thunderstorms that produce tornadoes.

When he’s collecting data, French has to get out of the truck to stow the antenna among other tasks. “Automatically, that means you’re in danger,” French said. “There’s nothing you can do about it, except try to minimize your time” outside. Two or three times when he was earning his PhD, lightning struck within a quarter of a mile of his location.

Better sampling

In his research, French described himself as a “pure observationalist.”

A main theme of his research is whether the nationwide network of fixed-site radar can be used by forecasters to predict whether a thunderstorm will produce a tornado and, if it does, how likely it is to be a significant or violent storm. 

French is also interested in exploring what leads to tornado dissipation and whether forecasters can use radar analysis to make dissipation predictions.

Looking at time scales of 30 seconds or fewer, he studies how tornadoes evolve, including how they tilt, how their intensity changes with height, and their motion. He can estimate these characteristics with phased-array radar technology, in which the beam of the radar is steered electronically.

Scientists like French can tap into archived data from a network of 160 radars stationed throughout the country. He would like to use information from the past 10 to 15 years to analyze hundreds of supercell thunderstorms to find commonalities among those that produce tornadoes and those that don’t.

“Ideally, in the future, such information, to the extent it exists, can be leveraged by forecasters to better assess the likelihood of a storm producing a tornado,” French explained.

Many of his ideas for research projects come from reading the results of papers from colleagues who use computer models to simulate storms and tornadoes. In a model, the scientists can control conditions like temperature and humidity. French thinks about ways to verify the findings using observational data.

Funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, French participates in the Propagation, Evolution and Rotation in Linear Storms field experiment (called PERiLS). 

Running from February through May in the southeast, the experiment studies tornadoes within a different type of storm, referred to as squall lines. The tornadoes that form in these storms persist or form overnight, often hitting while people are sleeping and are unprepared to protect themselves.

He is working with Stony Brook Professor Pavlos Kollias in using mobile phased array radar to collect data over short time scales of these squall lines when they’re producing tornadoes.

In areas where people live in mobile homes, these squall line tornadoes can lift the home, damaging homes and threatening the lives of people as they sleep.

Exciting findings

French uses a radar called dual polarization, which provides information about the size, shape, orientation and type of precipitation. He is interested in whether this technology can identify differences in storms to predict the formation of tornadoes.

In dual polarization, there are a few signatures of storms that hold some promise of differentiating between those that produce tornadoes and those that don’t.

Working with an algorithm to identify the ZDR column, which is a proxy for the size of the updraft, developed by Darrel Kingfield at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, French analyzed 200 supercell storms and found that the ZDR column was larger in storms that produce stronger tornadoes and was smaller or nonexistent in storms that did not.

Forecasters don’t have a way yet to automate the size of the ZDR column in real time.

In an email, Bluestein suggested that French’s studies, including on how tornadoes dissipate, can “contribute to improved short term forecasting.”

Bluestein, who has seen over 100 tornadoes, also suggested that two papers from French that related drop size distributions estimated from polarimetric radar data in supercells were “original and rather novel. This work has implications for estimating the intensity of pools of cool air in storms, which can be related to tornado formation.”

Dinner table conversations

A resident of Stony Brook, French lives with his wife Jennifer, who is a hydrometeorologist at Vieux & Co. The couple met when they were at the University of Oklahoma. 

French said his wife, who storm chased when she was in Oklahoma, knows the safety measures he uses to mitigate the risks. 

While French studies these storms because of their destructive power and the need to understand more about how and where they will form, he also has an appreciation for them.

At a distance, when these storms aren’t impacting people and when he can’t hear the roar of the wind, French describes tornadoes as a “wonder of nature” that have an “aesthetic element to them that is really astounding.”

As for his childhood concern about these storms, French feels that he “ultimately channeled [his fear] in a positive way.”

by -
0 639
H. Andrew Schwartz Photo from SBU

By Daniel Dunaief

Ideally, doctors would like to know about health threats or dangers such as diseases or chronic conditions before they threaten a person’s quality of life or expected lifespan.

On a larger scale, politicians and planners would also like to gauge how people are doing, looking for markers or signs that something may be threatening the health or safety of a community.  

Researchers in computer science at Stony Brook University have been designing artificial intelligence programs that explore the language used in social media posts as gauges of mental health.

Recently, lead author Matthew Matero, a PhD student in Computer Science at Stony Brook; senior author H. Andrew Schwartz, Associate Professor in Computer Science at Stony Brook; National Institute on Drug Abuse data scientist Salvatore Giorgi; Lyle H. Ungar, Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania; and Brenda Curtis, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania published a study in the journal Nature Digital Medicine in which they used the language in social media posts to predict community rates of opioid-related deaths in the next year.

By looking at changes in language from 2011 to 2017 in 357 counties, Schwartz and his colleagues built a model named TrOP (Transformer for Opioid Prediction) with a high degree of accuracy in predicting the community rates of opioid deaths in the following year.

“This is the first time we’ve forecast what’s going to happen next year,” Schwartz said. The model is “much stronger than other information that’s available” such as income, unemployment, education rates, housing, and demographics.

To be sure, Schwartz cautioned that this artificial intelligence model, which uses some of the same underlying techniques as the oft-discussed chatGPT in coming up with a model of ordered data, would still need further testing before planners or politicians could use it to mitigate the opioid crisis.

“We hope to see [this model] replicated in newer years of data before we would want to go to policy makers with it,” he said.

Schwartz also suggested that this research, which looked at the overall language use in a community, wasn’t focused on finding characteristics of individuals at risk, but, rather at the overall opioid death risks to a community.

Schwartz used the self-reported location in Twitter profiles to look at representation of a community.

The data from the model, which required at least 100 active accounts each with at least 30 posts, have proven remarkably effective in their predictions and hold out the potential not only of encouraging enforcement or remediation to help communities, but also of indicating what programs are reducing mortality. Their model forecast the death rates of those communities with about a 3 percent error.

Both directions

Schwartz explained that the program effectively predicted positive and negative changes in opioid deaths.

On the positive side, Schwartz said language that reflected a reduction in opioid mortality included references to future social events, vacation, travel and discussions about the future.

Looking forward to travel can be a “signal of prosperity and having adventures in life,” Schwartz said. Talking about tomorrow was also predictive. Such positive signals could also reflect on community programs designed to counteract the effect of the opioid epidemic, offering a way of predicting how effective different efforts might be in helping various communities.

On the negative side, language patterns that preceded increases in opioid deaths included mentions of despair and boredom.

Within community changes

Other drug and opioid-related studies have involved characterizing what distinguishes people from different backgrounds, such as educational and income levels.

Language use varies in different communities, as words like “great” and phrases like “isn’t that special” can be regional and context specific.

To control for these differences, Schwartz, Matero and Giorgi created an artificial intelligence program that made no assumptions about what language was associated with increases or decreases. It tested whether the AI model could find language that predicted the future reliably, by testing against data the model had never seen before.

By monitoring social media in these specific locales over time, the researchers can search for language changes within the community. 

Scientists can explore the word and phrases communities used relative to the ones used by those same communities in the past.

“We don’t make any assumptions about what words mean” in a local context, Schwartz said. He can control for language differences among communities by focusing on language differences within a community.

Schwartz recognized that fine refinements to the model in various communities could enhance the predictive ability of the program.

“If we could fully account for differences in cultural, ethnic and other variables about a community, we should be able to increase the ability to predict what’s going to happen next year,” he said.

With its dependence on online language data, the model was less effective in communities where the number of social media posts is lower. “We had the largest error in communities with the lowest rates of posting,” Schwartz explained. On the opposite side, “we were the most accurate in communities with the highest amounts” of postings or data.

Broader considerations

While parents, teachers and others sometimes urge friends and their children to limit their time on social media because of concerns about its effects on people, a potential positive is that these postings might offer general data about a community’s mental health. The study didn’t delve into individual level solutions, but these scientists and others have work that suggests this is possible.

As for his future work, Schwartz said he planned to use this technique and paradigm in other contexts. He is focusing on using artificial intelligence for a better understanding of mental health.

“We hope to take this method and apply it to other outcomes, such as depression rates, alcohol use disorder rates,” post traumatic stress disorder and other conditions, Schwartz said. “A big part of the direction in my lab is trying to focus on creating AI methods that focus on time based predictions.”

by -
0 750
Johanna Mitra was part of the rescue team to save the endangered greater bamboo lemur.

By Daniel Dunaief

Johanna Mitra traveled a long way from her childhood home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to join an effort to save the critically endangered greater bamboo lemur.

A graduate of Stony Brook University, Mitra took a class led by Distinguished Professor Patricia Wright that set her on a memorable and extraordinary course.

Mitra “came up to me after class and asked if she could help” with her research and with conservation, Wright recalled.

Johanna Mitra was part of the rescue team to save the endangered greater bamboo lemur.

Mitra started by cataloging photos for about three months twice a week. Wright saw that Mitra had been writing blogs for an environmental nonprofit and had asked Mitra if she’d like to apply for the opening as the Communications Officer at Centre ValBio, a research station Wright created in Madagascar.

“The next thing I knew, a couple of months [and an undergraduate degree in Ecosystems and Human Impact] later, I was packing a bag to go to Madagascar!” Mitra explained in an email.

Mitra sent her parents, Nilo and Ursula Mitra, a group photo where it was “fairly evident that she was the youngest person and only woman,” Nilo Mitra said in an interview.

The Mitra parents felt reassured that the research station had been around for decades and that a large number of foreign researchers use the site, which gave her parents confidence that the team would be able to deal with any safety or health issues that arose during the translocation.

Still, that didn’t completely allay Nilo Mitra’s concerns when he learned about the crocodiles that lived in some of the rivers his daughter would cross.

After watching nature shows, Mitra’s father cautioned her not to stand too close to the shore. While she was away, he also wished he had told her not to go too close to the reeds, as crocodiles hide there before attacking.

Mitra’s trip didn’t involve any hair raising interactions with crocodiles. In fact, she felt disappointed because she “would have liked to see one – from a safe distance,” she said.

Mitra and the translocation team encountered individual zebus, which are a type of cow with a lump behind its head that makes it look like it’s wearing shoulder pads.

Mitra “could sense hesitation and tentativeness in the group when we were hiking” as the group gave the animal, which can be aggressive in defending its turf, a wide berth.

During the two-day trip to translocate the lemurs, Mitra rode in a car, truck, and canoe. When the roads, which were severely damaged by the raging waters and 80 mile per hour winds of Cyclone Freddy, were impossible to navigate, she and the team traversed difficult terrain on foot.

She hiked along rolling hills that “looked very beautiful but were degraded,” Mitra said. She walked up and down hills that had deep patches of mud.

The team also crossed streams, walked through rice paddies and fields and climbed steep, rocky slopes.

Johanna Mitra on a trip to NYC. Photo by Nilo Mitra

Fortunately for Mitra, the group hired porters to carry the equipment and her backpack. She only had responsibility for maneuvering herself and a camera bag. 

During the hike, she was concerned about getting a camera she had borrowed to document the journey wet, particularly when she was traveling in a canoe that sat low in the water.

When she waded through streams, she hoisted the camera on her shoulder or near her head.

Back home in Manhattan, her parents watched three videos about Madagascar, studied local roads and tried to track their daughter’s whereabouts.

When her journey started, they were able to track her phone for about 90 minutes, until the signal “vanished off the face of the Earth,” her father said.

After several days, her mother called Wright to ask if she’d heard anything. Wright assured her that the crew was fine and they had completed their mission of trying to bring back enough greater bamboo lemurs to increase the population from the current number of about 1,000.

“We are extraordinarily proud” of the work she did to get the job and to help in this conservation effort, her father said.

As for the experience, Mitra expressed awe at the opportunity.

“The whole thing felt unreal,” Mitra said. “I felt like I was a part of something incredibly meaningful.” The expedition “made it clear that a lot goes into saving species, but it’s worth it,” she concluded, despite the few rapid heart beats from her proud, concerned and supportive parents.

by -
0 600

 

1 of 5
Greater bamboo lemurs wait in cages at Centre ValBio before being released into a large quarantine enclosure inside the Ranomafana National Park. Photo by Johanna Mitra
Members of Centre ValBio transfer 10 greater bamboo lemurs.
Members of Centre ValBio transfer 10 greater bamboo lemurs.
Members of Centre ValBio transfer 10 greater bamboo lemurs.
A greater bamboo lemur feeds on bamboo. Photo by Johanna Mitra

By Daniel Dunaief

Patricia Wright
Photo by Sam Levitan, Sam Levitan Photography

Patricia Wright isn’t getting much sleep these days.

Distinguished Professor in Anthropology at Stony Brook University, Wright recently orchestrated the translocation of 10 critically endangered greater bamboo lemurs to Ranomafana National Park, a park in Madagascar that she helped create and which has been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The conservation effort, which Wright had been working on since 2014, is designed to lower the risk that this particular lemur, which weighs about six pounds and has grey brown fur and white ear tufts, will go extinct.

Short on bamboo, which, as their name suggests, is their primary food source, greater bamboo lemurs, which are down to as few as 1,000 individuals, have been eating manioc and raiding farmer’s rice paddies. The people who farm these crops have hunted the greater bamboo lemur and used slingshots to hurl stones at them. 

The lemurs “think the rice is perfectly great,” said Wright. Some of the Malagasy people have injured or killed these lemurs. Two of the translocated lemurs have eye injuries.

Wright, who is teaching at Stony Brook this spring, applied for permits from a number of government officials to get the effort approved. 

From Stony Brook, she has been managing the care of these lemurs, often long after she might otherwise be asleep. During an acclimation period, the lemurs live, eat and interact in a large cage near the research station Centre ValBio and will be released into the wild within the next few weeks.

“I’m up every night texting,” Wright said. “When anything comes up, I give my advice.”

She said the process of watching these lemurs from afar is akin to those early days of parenting.

“You drift off, sleep for a couple of hours then you have to wake up and answer this or that problem,” said Wright, whose work with lemurs has won her numerous awards, including the Indianapolis Zoo Prize. 

Bamboo chefs

Wright has considerable help in working with and protecting the greater bamboo lemurs. While the rare lemurs are guests at Centre ValBio (CVB), about a dozen people are working with them each day, with five people going out daily to collect bamboo to feed them.

When the lemurs first arrived, they fought at night. The caretakers discovered that these primates were searching for food. By providing more bamboo, the staff at CVB ended the evening conflicts.

Johanna Mitra, a recent Stony Brook University graduate and the Communications Officer at CVB, attended the capture of these lemurs and has had the opportunity to observe them interacting in the cage.

She watched as an adult lemur sat facing two juveniles. The adult pulled up the bamboo shoot and the three of them took turns gnawing on it. After eating for about half an hour, the juveniles cuddled with the adult females.

Collaboration efforts

In addition to relying on her past experience working with primates at Duke University in the 1980’s and 1990’s, Wright collaborated with Dr. Mónica Ramírez, IUCN Species Survival Commission-Specialist, who is an expert in the relocation of woolly monkeys in Colombia.

Ramírez urged Wright to transport the monkeys in separate cages to reduce stress and overcrowding during the journey. Ramírez also wanted to ensure that the monkeys could see and hear each other. She recommended constant monitoring during transport. Stress could reduce how much food they ate.

Despite the lengthy journey, the lemurs traveled comfortably and ate along the way. Ramírez said that translocations can and often are emotionally taxing for conservationists.

“When I started working with translocations, it was so difficult for me to maintain calm because there are many factors that one cannot control, mainly after the release,” she explained.  “We do our best to guarantee the welfare of the individuals and the people involved.”

Bigger picture

In addition to the satisfaction of preventing a species on the brink of elimination from disappearing, Wright suggested that saving these lemurs could have numerous benefits. For one thing, these lemurs eat large quantities of bamboo, which contains cyanide. Such bamboo would be toxic to human systems. Learning how these animals tolerate and remove such a dangerous element could prove helpful.

Guides in Madagascar involved with the bio-tourism effort also appealed to Wright to save this species, which has unusual vocalizations that vary according to their circumstance. “It’s an important tourist attraction,” Wright said.

Questions on release

When Wright and her team release these translocated lemurs back into the wild, they recognize the enormous number of unknowns.

Predators such as fossa (pronounced “foo sah), hawks and eagles hunt lemurs. Fossa, which is a relative of the mongoose, hunt cooperatively.

Wright hopes the translocated lemurs “understand what a predator is” and take steps to stay alive.

Even before the release of these lemurs, Ranomafana National Park is home to one adult female greater bamboo lemur named Simone, who joined a social group with the golden bamboo lemur, which is half her size.

Wright doesn’t know how Simone, who grooms golden bamboo lemurs but doesn’t receive grooming from them in return, will react to her own species. “What happens when she finds out her own species are in the neighborhood?” Wright asked. “It’s going to be very exciting.”

She might encourage her new lemur family to attack or might ditch her adopted social group for the well-traveled members of her own species.

Ramirez suggested that recruiting and educating the public in conservation would increase the likelihood of its success.

“Involving the community in the project is essential to guarantee the security of both the people and the animals,” she said.

by -
0 497
Kyle Swentowsky in front of the maize fields at CSHL’s Upland Farm preserve. Photo courtesy of CSHL

By Daniel Dunaief

Farmers typically plant the sweet corn that fills Long Islander’s table some time between late April and June, with flavorful yellow kernels ready to eat about eight weeks later.

But what if corn, which is planted and harvested on a typical annual crop schedule, were perennial? What if farmers could plant a type of corn that might have deeper roots, would become dormant in the winter and then grew back the next year?

Kyle Swentowsky, holding corn on the north fork of Long Island.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory postdoctoral researcher Kyle Swentowsky, working in the lab of  Professor Dave Jackson, is interested in the genetics of perennial grasses, which includes maize, wheat, rice, barley, sorghum and others. He uses maize as a model.

Extending the work he did as part of his PhD research at the University of Georgia, Swentowsky, who arrived at CSHL in July of 2021, is searching for the genes that cause the major differences between annual and perennial grasses.

Kelly Dawe, who was Swentowsky’s PhD advisor, described him as “passionate” “diligent” and “thoughtful.” Dawe explained that perennials have been beneficial in the farming of other crops. Perennial rice has enabled farmers to save 58.1 percent on labor costs and 49.2 percent on input costs with each regrowth cycle, Dawe explained, adding, “The rice work is much farther along, but could have a similar impact on corn.”

Aside from producing crops over several years without requiring replanting, perennial corn also has several other advantages. Perennials, which have deeper roots, can grow in soil conditions that might not be favorable for annual crops, which can help stabilize the soil and expand the range of farmable land.

Recently, people have also considered how scientists or farmers might take some of the sub-properties of perennials and apply them to annual crops without converting them to perennials. Some annuals with perennial traits might stay green for longer, which means they could continue the process of photosynthesis well after annuals typically stop.

A complex challenge

Scientists have been trying to make perennial corn for about 50 years. The perennial process is not as simple as other plant traits.

“We don’t understand all the underlying sub properties of being perennial,” Swentowsky said. “It’s very complicated and involves a lot of regions in the genome. My work aims to get at some of these sub traits and genomic loci that are involved in this process.”

In his work, Swentowsky is interested in the sub traits that the major genes control. He expects that a reliable perennial corn wouldn’t make the annual variety obsolete. Even after researchers develop an effective perennial corn, farmers may still cultivate it as an annual in some environments.

In the bigger picture, Swentowsky, like other plant researchers at CSHL and elsewhere around the world, recognizes the challenge of feeding a population that will continue to increase while climate change threatens the amount of arable land.

Plant breeders need to continue to come up with ways to increase crop yield to boost food production, he suggested. While some people have considered dedicating resources to back up plans like astro-botany — or growing crops in space — Swentowsky suggested this was challenging and urged ongoing efforts to produce more food on Earth.

Impressed with the way Matt Damon’s character in the movie The Martian farms potatoes on the Red Planet, Swentowsky suggested that such an agricultural effort would be challenging on a large scale in part because of the extreme temperature variations.

As for work on Earth, perennial corn may also remove more carbon dioxide from the air, reducing the presence of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

Swentowsky cautioned that the idea of carbon farming is still relatively new and researchers don’t know what would make a good carbon farming plant yet. At this point, his work has involved breeding and back crossing corn plants. Once he develops a better idea of what genes are involved in the perennial life cycle, he will consider taking a trans-genetic approach or use the gene editing tool Crispr to test the effects of the involved genes.

Swentowsky expects that several genetic changes may be necessary to develop a perennial plant. He and others have mapped the master regulators of perenniality to three major genes. He believes it’s likely that dozens or even hundreds of other genes scattered throughout the genome play a small role influencing perennial sub-traits.

California roots

A current resident of Long Beach, Swentowsky grew up in Sacramento, California. He earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of California at Santa Barbara. After six years, he was “tired of perfect weather,” he laughed. He would sweat through football games in January, when it was 80 degrees amid a cloudless sky.

As an undergraduate, he took a plant development course and appreciated the elegant way scientists tested plants. His two favorite scientists are Gregor Mendel, whose pioneering pea work led to the field of modern genetics, and Barbara McClintock, a former CSHL scientist whose Nobel Prize winning research on corn led to an understanding of transposable elements, or jumping genes in which genes change position on a chromosome. 

Outside of the lab, Swentowsky enjoys traveling, including camping and backpacking, spending time on the beach, attending reggae, alternative, classic rock, hip hop and electric concerts and going to breweries. During the winter, his favorite beers are stout and porter. In warmer weather, he imbibes sour IPA.

Swentowsky doesn’t just study corn: he also enjoys eating it. One of his favorites is elote, or Mexican street corn. He grills the corn on a barbecue, covers it with mayonnaise and cotija cheese and sprinkles lyme or chili powder on it.

Swentowsky, who is funded through the summer of 2025 at CSHL, appreciates the opportunity to contribute to work that could support future farming efforts. He hopes that studying perenniality in corn could have future applications.

by -
0 554
Ogochukwu Enekwizu with a suite of instruments at Brookhaven National Laboratory to make and study soot-seeded clouds. Photo courtesy of BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

Combining forces to form a three-part team, they strive to understand processes that are as visually stunning and inspirational as they are complex and elusive.

Clouds, which are so important to weather and climate, are challenging to understand and predict, as numerous processes affect properties at a range of scales.

A team from Brookhaven National Laboratory has provided the atmospheric sciences community with a host of information that advances an understanding of clouds.

In the atmospheric sciences community, “we typically talk about the three legs of a stool: modeling/ theory; field measurements; and targeted laboratory studies,” explained Arthur Sedlacek, Chemist in the Environmental and Climate Science Department.

Sedlacek conducts field experiments by collecting air samples from clouds in a range of locations such as flying through wildfire plumes.

In the beginning of 2021, BNL added postdoctoral researcher Ogochukwu Enekwizu to bolster another leg of that stool. Enekwizu conducts the kind of laboratory studies that provide important feedback and data for the work of Sedlacek and cloud modelers like Nicole Riemer, Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.

Enekwizu studies how soot aerosols from wildfires influence the lifetime and formation of clouds. She’s also investigating how soot-cloud interactions affect the absorption and scattering of light by soot particles.

Wildfires provide kindling for the climate, as fires release warming agents that contribute to increases in global temperatures which result in more wildfires. By determining how these smaller scale processes in soot affect clouds, Enekwizu can reduce the so-called error bars or level of uncertainty in the models other scientists create and that rely on the data she develops.

Enekwizu’s collaborators appreciate her contribution. As a modeler, Riemer suggested that Enekwizu’s work provided key information.

“While the microscale processes of soot restructure are incredibly complicated, [Enekwizu] was able to boil it down to a few simple parameters,” Riemer explained. “This makes it feasible to implement this process in a model like ours, which look at aerosol populations, not just a few individual particles. From there, we can come up with ways to implement this knowledge into climate models, which are still much more simplified than the model that we are developing.”

Sedlacek, who is her supervisor, suggested that Enekwizu’s work is “now on the cusp of answering important questions of how aerosols interact with clouds.” He descried her set up as “truly unique” and expects her results to inform the community about wildfire aerosol-cloud interactions and will offer guidance on other necessary field measurements.

In broader research terms, wildfires can be important for the ecosystem, as they remove decaying material, clear out underbrush, release nutrients back into the soil and aid the germination of seedlings

The increasing frequency, duration and intensity of these fires has been important to the scientific community. The general public has become increasingly aware of its importance as well, Enekwizu said.

Collaborations

Recruited to BNL by Sedlacek and Atmospheric Scientist Ernie Lewis, Enekwizu is considering collaborations with other researchers at BNL.

She has started speaking with scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials about exploring soot microstructure in a planned joint collaboration with her New Jersey Institute of Technology PhD advisor Dr. Alexie Khakizov. For this effort, Enekwizu has been in discussions with Dmitri Zakharov, who is in charge of the environmental transmission electron microscope at the CFN.

She hopes to take samples and introduces forces under a controlled environment in the transmission electron microscope to see how that affects the structure of soot in fine detail.

Looking at the news with one wildfire event after another, Enekwizu feels compelled to conduct research in the lab and share data amid “a heightened sense of urgency to get this work done” and to share it with the world at large.

Scientific origins

Born in the southeastern part of Nigeria in Enugu and raised in Enugu, Lagos and Abuja, Enekwizu developed an interest in science at 13. She enjoyed classes in a range of sciences and said chemistry was her favorite.

“I knew I was not going to go into medicine because I was squeamish,” she said.

Chemical engineering fascinated her and also appeared to offer career opportunities.

During a chemical engineering internship, she worked at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation where she learned about flaring practices. It inspired her final year project on biogas as a renewable energy source and sparked her curiosity on the fate of pollutants and particulate matter that arise from legal and illegal flaring activities. 

In flaring, companies burn off excess gas to control pressure variations, increasing the safety of the operation at the expense of burning a potential resource.

When Enekwizu was at NJIT, Lewis, who is a longtime collaborator with Sedlacek, reached out to Khakizov to inquire about someone with a background in carbonaceous aerosols. After interviewing with Lewis, Sedlacek and others, Enekwizu received the job offer and began working in January of 2021.

A resident of Ridge, Enekwizu, who goes by the name “Ogo,” enjoys festivals and events around Long Island. She also appreciates the area’s ubiquitous beaches and has delighted in strawberry picking.

She hopes to explore Montauk later this spring or summer.

Mentoring

Enekwizu is passionate about mentoring students, particularly those who might be under represented in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine.

She served as a graduate student mentor for Divyjot Singh, who was an undergrad at NJIT. Enekwizu taught Singh, who had grown up in Bhopal, India and had only been in the United States for six months when they met, “how to come up with research questions, how to develop hypotheses, how to write a proposal, how to make good presentations for conferences and everything in between,” he explained in an email.

While working with her, Singh found his passion for research and decided to pursue a PhD. 

Enekwizu is also passionate about supporting young women in science. She suggested that young black girls sometimes feel intimidated by STEM classes and careers. She urges a hands on approach to teaching and hopes to be a role model.

“If young girls see people like me thrive in STEM, they’ll be encouraged not to give up,” she said. “That is a huge win, in my opinion.”

by -
0 781
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.

by -
0 1314
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. 

 

Prev1...91011...38Next Page 10 of 38
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

©