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Energy & Matter Researcher news SMU In The News Student researchers Subfeature

SMU develops efficient methods to simulate how electromagnetic waves interact with devices

DALLAS (SMU) – It takes a tremendous amount of computer simulations to create a device like an MRI scanner that can image your brain by detecting electromagnetic waves propagating through tissue. The tricky part is figuring out how electromagnetic waves will react when they come in contact with the materials in the device.

SMU researchers have developed an algorithm that can be used in a wide range of fields – from biology and astronomy to military applications and telecommunications – to create equipment more efficiently and accurately.

Currently, it can take days or months to do simulations. And because of cost, there is a limit to the number of simulations typically done for these devices. SMU math researchers have revealed a way to do a faster algorithm for these simulations with the help of grants from the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation.

“We can reduce the simulation time from one month to maybe one hour,” said lead researcher Wei Cai, Clements Chair of Applied Mathematics at SMU. “We have made a breakthrough in these algorithms.”

“This work will also help create a virtual laboratory for scientists to simulate and explore quantum dot solar cells, which could produce extremely small, efficient and lightweight solar military equipment,” said Dr. Joseph Myers, Army Research Office mathematical sciences division chief.

Dr. Bo Wang, a postdoctoral researcher at SMU (Southern Methodist University) and Wenzhong Zhang, a graduate student at the university, also contributed to this research. The study was published today by the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing and can be viewed here. 

(From Left) Wei Cai, Dr. Bo Wang and Wenzhong Zhang. Credit: Photo courtesy of SMU (Southern Methodist University), Hillsman S. Jackson

The algorithm could have significant implications in a number of scientific fields.

“Electromagnetic waves exist as radiation of energies from charges and other quantum processes,” Cai explained.

They include things like radio waves, microwaves, light and X-rays. Electromagnetic waves are also the reason you can use a mobile phone to talk to someone in another state and why you can watch TV. In short, they’re everywhere.

An engineer or mathematician would be able to use the algorithm for a device whose job is to pick out a certain electromagnetic wave. For instance, she or he could potentially use it to design a solar light battery that lasts longer and is smaller than currently exists.

“To design a battery that is small in size, you need to optimize the material so that you can get the maximum conversion rate from the light energy to electricity,” Cai said. “An engineer could find that maximum conversion rate by going through simulations faster with this algorithm.”

Or the algorithm could help an engineer design a seismic monitor to predict earthquakes by tracking elastic waves in the earth, Cai noted.

“These are all waves, and our method applies for different kinds of waves,” he said. “There are a wide range of applications with what we have developed.”

Computer simulations map out how materials in a device like semiconductor materials will interact with light, in turn giving a sense of what a particular wave will do when it comes in contact with that device.

The manufacturing of many devices involving light interactions uses a fabrication process by layering material on top of each other in a lab, just like Legos. This is called layered media. Computer simulations then analyze the layered media using mathematical models to see how the material in question is interacting with light.

More Efficient, Less Expensive Way to Solve Helmholtz and Maxwell’s Equations

SMU researchers have found a more efficient and less expensive way to solve Helmholtz and Maxwell’s equations – difficult to solve but essential tools to predict the behavior of waves.

The problem of wave source and material interactions in the layer structure has been a very challenging one for the mathematicians and engineers for the last 30 years.

Professor Weng Cho Chew from Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue, a world leading expert on computational electromagnetics, said the problem “is notoriously difficult.”

Commenting on the work of Cai and his team, Chew said, “Their results show excellent convergence to small errors. I hope that their results will be widely adopted.”

The new algorithm modifies a mathematical method called the fast multipole method, or FMM, which was considered one of the top 10 algorithms in the 20th century.

To test the algorithm, Cai and the other researchers used SMU’s ManeFrame II – which is one of the fastest academic supercomputers in the nation – to run many different simulations.

Several outlets featured the news of the faster algorithm, including Breaking Defense, Primeur Magazine and the Army’s website.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

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Health & Medicine Researcher news SMU In The News Subfeature

Drug oleandrin may be an effective new way to treat HTLV-1 virus, SMU study shows

An estimated 10 to 15 million people are infected with HTLV-1, which is a cousin of HIV

DALLAS (SMU) – A study led by SMU suggests that oleandrin – a drug derived from the Nerium oleander plant – could prevent the HTLV-1 virus from spreading by targeting a stage of the reproduction process that is not currently targeted by existing drugs.

That is significant because there is currently no cure or treatment for the virus – a lesser-known “cousin” of HIV that affects an estimated 10 to 15 million people worldwide.

“Our research findings suggest that oleandrin could possibly limit the transmission and spread of HTLV-1 by targeting a unique stage in the retroviral life cycle,” said Robert Harrod, associate professor and director of Graduate Studies in SMU’s Department of Biological Sciences. Harrod is a co-author of the study, published in the Journal of Antivirals & Antiretrovirals.

The human T-cell leukemia virus type-1, or HTLV-1, is a retrovirus that infects white blood cells known as T-cells and is usually transmitted in a similar manner to HIV-1 through a person’s blood or body fluid. Infected cells present within breast milk can also pass HTLV-1 from mother to infant through breastfeeding.

While HIV-1 kills the infected T-cells, HTLV-1 causes them to divide uncontrollably. This in turn can lead to the development of aggressive leukemia – a cancer of the white blood cells. People infected with HTLV-1 can also develop a progressive neurological disease known as HTLV-1-associated myelopathy/tropical spastic paraparesis (HAM/TSP), a progressive inflammatory disease of the nervous system that can affect one’s ability to walk and may cause serious symptoms leading to coma and even death.

Retrovirus particles copy themselves within infected cells by transcribing their RNA into DNA after entering a cell, a process called the retroviral life cycle. The more virus-infected cells that are produced, the worse symptoms can get for people who are infected with HTLV-1.

The two lead authors, Tetiana Bowley and Lacin Yapindi, are Ph.D graduate students who worked with Harrod in his lab. Aditi Malu, who also worked in Harrod’s lab, graduated from SMU with a PhD in May. Together with collaborator Jagan Sastry at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Dr. Robert Newman at Phoenix Biotechnology, Inc., SMU researchers found that the botanical compound called oleandrin successfully interrupted part of the infection cycle for HTLV-1.

“As has been shown for HIV-1, treatment with oleandrin did not affect the ability of infected cells to produce and release new virus particles. However, the particles that were produced were defective, meaning they contained less envelope glycoprotein on their surface,” Harrod said. “This impaired their ability to form virological synapses for effective cell-to-cell virus transmission.”  

A so-called “envelope,” which forms the outer coat of the HTLV-1 particle and binds to the receptors on the surface of target cells, must be present in order for a virus-infected cell to fuse with the membrane of an uninfected T-cell, allowing the virus to enter the cell and spread the disease. Without it, the HTLV-1 retrovirus can’t successfully be passed to other cells.

“Oleandrin is unique in its ability to block the incorporation of the envelope glycoprotein into mature virus particles as they’re exiting an infected cell,” Harrod said.

The hope is that oleandrin, or a similar drug that targets the same part of the retrovirus infection cycle, could potentially prevent HTLV-1 from causing progressively worse clinical symptoms in people with an immune-driven condition like HAM/TSP where the body’s immune system causes tissue damage due to the misrecognition of replicating virus particles.

“If a drug, such as oleandrin, could prevent the spread of HTLV-1 particles within an infected HAM/TSP patient, it may become possible to dampen the neuroinflammatory response to alleviate the symptoms of disease,” Harrod said.

Harrod called the findings “exciting” because oleandrin targets a different mechanism of fighting the virus – one that hasn’t been the focus of other antiviral drugs that attack specific steps in the retroviral infection cycle. Those drugs, called highly-active antiretroviral therapies or HAART for short, have not been shown to be effective with HTLV-1.

In the study, to demonstrate that purified oleandrin or an N. oleander extract could inhibit the formation of HTLV-1 virological synapses, SMU researchers in Harrod’s lab labeled an HTLV-1-infected virus-producing cell-line with green fluorescent protein (GFP), so these cells could be easily identified by their ‘green’ fluorescence under a microscope. These cells were then placed in the same culture well as healthy T-cells. T-cells that became infected with HTLV-1 were easy to spot because researchers could see a junction between the two cells and then a red fluorescent signal showing up in the newly-infected T-cell.

Phoenix Biotechnology provided the purified oleandrin and Nerium oleander plant extract used in the study.

Dallas Voice covered the news here, as well as D CEO Healthcare and Medical XPress.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Earth & Climate Researcher news SMU In The News Subfeature Technology

Wastewater leak in West Texas revealed by satellite radar imagery and sophisticated modeling

Leakage in Ken Regan field could have contaminated groundwater for livestock and irrigation between 2007 and 2011

DALLAS (SMU) – Geophysicists at SMU say that evidence of leak occurring in a West Texas wastewater disposal well between 2007 and 2011 should raise concerns about the current potential for contaminated groundwater and damage to surrounding infrastructure.

SMU geophysicist Zhong Lu and the rest of his team believe the leak happened at a wastewater disposal well in the Ken Regan field in northern Reeves County, which could have leaked toxic chemicals into the Rustler Aquifer. The same team of geophysicists at SMU has revealed that sinkholes are expanding and forming in West Texas at a startling rate.

a) Coverage of the ALOS PALSAR scenes used (white box). Black line shows the boundary of the Ken Regan field. Dark green line and light green line represent the boundaries of the Rustler Aquifer and Pecos Valley Aquifer in Texas, respectively. Red star represents the epicenter of the earthquake that occurred in May 2018. Blue circle represents the groundwater well for livestock drawing from the Rustler Aquifer in this area. Blue triangles are wells, which provide groundwater leveling records. (b) Vertical deformation (cm/yr) (in the red box in Fig. 1a) estimated from InSAR. Green circles with and without arrows indicate active injection/disposal wells in the Ken Regan field and oil production wells within 1.5 km from the deformation center during the research period, respectively. Purple circle represents the groundwater which provides groundwater quality records. Source: Zhong Lu

Wastewater is a byproduct of oil and gas production. Using a process called horizontal drilling, or “fracking,” companies pump vast quantities of water, sand and chemicals far down into the ground to help extract more natural gas and oil. With that gas and oil, however, come large amounts of wastewater that is injected deep into the earth through disposal wells.

Federal and state oil and gas regulations require wastewater to be disposed of at a deep depth, typically ranging from about 1,000 to 2,000 meters deep in this region, so it does not contaminate groundwater or drinking water. A small number of studies suggest that arsenic, benzene and other toxins potentially found in fracking fluids may pose serious risks to reproductive and development health.

Even though the leak is thought to have happened between 2007 and 2011, the finding is still potentially dangerous, said Weiyu Zheng, a Ph.D. student at SMU (Southern Methodist University) who led the research.

“The Rustler Aquifer, within the zone of the effective injection depth, is only used for irrigation and livestock but not drinking water due to high concentrations of dissolved solids. Wastewater leaked into this aquifer may possibly contaminate the freshwater sources,” Zheng explained.

“If I lived in this area, I would be a bit worried,” said Lu, professor of Shuler-Foscue Chair at SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences and the corresponding researcher of the findings.

He also noted that leaking wastewater can do massive damage to surrounding infrastructure. For example, oil and gas pipelines can be fractured or damaged beneath the surface, and the resulting heaving ground can damage roads and put drivers at risk.     

SMU geophysicists say satellite radar imagery indicates a leak in the nearby disposal well happened because of changes shown to be happening in the nearby Ken Regan field: a large section of ground, five football fields in diameter and about 230 feet from the well, was raised nearly 17 centimeters between 2007 and 2011. In the geology world, this is called an uplift, and it usually happens where parts of the earth have been forced upward by underground pressure.

Lu said the most likely explanation for that uplift is that leakage was happening at the nearby well.

“We suspect that the wastewater was accumulated at a very shallow depth, which is quite dramatically different from what the report data says about that well,” he said.

Only one wastewater disposal well is located in close proximity to the uplifted area of the Ken Regan field. The company that owns it reported the injection of 1,040 meters of wastewater deep into the disposal well in Ken Regan. That well is no longer active.

But a combination of satellite images and models done by SMU show that water was likely escaping at a shallower level than the well was drilled for.

And the study, which was published in the Nature publication Scientific Reports, estimates that about 57 percent of the injected wastewater went to this shallower depth. At that shallower depth, the wastewater–which typically contains salt water and chemicals–could have mixed in with groundwater from the nearby Rustler Aquifer. Drinking water doesn’t come from the Rustler Aquifer, which spans seven counties. But the aquifer does eventually flow into the Pecos River, which is a drinking source.

The scientists made the discovery of the leak after analyzing radar satellite images from January 2007 to March 2011. These images were captured by a read-out radar instrument called Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) mounted on the Advanced Land Observing Satellite, which was run by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

With this technology called interferometric synthetic aperture radar, or InSAR for short, the satellite radar images allow scientists to detect changes that aren’t visible to the naked eye and that might otherwise go undetected. The satellite technology can capture ground deformation with a precision of sub-inches or better, at a spatial resolution of a few yards or better over thousands of miles, say the researchers.

Lu and his team also used data that oil and petroleum companies are required to report to the Railroad Commission of Texas (Texas RRC), as well as sophisticated hydrogeological models that mapped out the distribution and movement of water underground as well as rocks of the Earth’s crust.

“We utilized InSAR to detect the surface uplift and applied poroelastic finite element models to simulate displacement fields. The results indicate that the effective injection depth is much shallower than reported,” Zheng said. “The most reasonable explanation is that the well was experiencing leakage due to casing failures and/or sealing problem(s).”

“One issue is that the steel pipes can degrade as they age and/or wells may be inadequately managed. As a result, wastewater from failed parts can leak out,” said Jin-Woo Kim, research scientist with Lu’s SMU Radar Laboratory and a co-author of this study.

The combination of InSAR imagery and modeling done by SMU gave the scientists a clear picture of how the uplift area in Regan field developed.

Lu, who is world-renowned for leading scientists in using InSAR applications to detect surface changes, said these types of analysis are critical for the future of oil-producing West Texas.

“Our research that exploits remote sensing data and numerical models provides a clue as to understanding the subsurface hydrogeological process responding to the oil and gas activities. This kind of research can further be regarded as an indirect leakage monitoring method to supplement current infrequent leakage detection,” Zheng said.

“It’s very important to sustain the economy of the whole nation. But these operations require some checking to guarantee the operations are environmentally-compliant as well,” Lu said.

Co-author Dr. Syed Tabrez Ali from AIR-Worldwide in Boston also contributed to this study.

This research was sponsored by the NASA Earth Surface and Interior Program and the Schuler-Foscue endowment at SMU.

Previously, Kim and Lu used satellite radar imaging to find that two giant sinkholes near Wink, Texas—two counties over from the Ken Regan uplift—were likely just the tip of the iceberg of ground movement in West Texas. Indeed, they found evidence that large swaths of West Texas oil patch were heaving and sinking at alarming rates. Decades of oil production activities in West Texas appears to have destabilized localities in an area of about 4,000 square miles populated by small towns like Wink, roadways and a vast network of oil and gas pipelines and storage tanks.

Watch the WFAA Verify news segment. You can also hear a report on the study that was broadcast on Austin’s NPR KUT 90.5 below:

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in eight degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

 

 

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Researcher news SMU In The News Subfeature

What’s the effect of climate change on plants?

DALLAS (SMU) – Plants need CO2 to live. But we are emitting way too much for plants to absorb.

Bonnie Jacobs

Bonnie Jacobs, a professor of earth sciences at SMU (Southern Methodist University), made this point and others in a recent interview with “Healthy Living Healthy Planet Radio.” Jacobs, who is a noted expert in paleobotany, was asked to weigh in on what climate change might mean for plants in the near future.

By studying fossil plants, paleobotanists can not only better understand past climates, but they can also get a sense of what future climate change could look like.

Jacobs said the climate change we are seeing – precipitated by higher levels of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, emitted into our atmosphere from cars, power plants that burn fuels – will “definitely have a detrimental effect for some plants.”

In some parts of the world, that will be because drought will become more common as the temperature increases, making it harder for native plants to survive. In other parts of the world, it could be because rains become too heavy for plants to grow.

“Life finds ways to adapt.  And if a species cannot adapt, it will go extinct. This is kind of the natural way of the living world,” Jacobs notes. “The really big problem is that we have over 7.5 billion people on this planet right now, and we are living through a very drastic change because the change is happening so quickly with regard to climate.”

You can hear the interview here.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, communities and the world.

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Mind & Brain Researcher news SMU In The News Subfeature Videos

Is it possible to change your personality? Yes, if you’re willing to do the work involved

DALLAS (SMU) – Want to be more outgoing?  Or less uptight?

In an interview with Fox4ward’s Dan Godwin, SMU psychology professor Nathan Hudson said that it is possible for people to change aspects of their personality.  But it will require some work on your part.

You can view the video here or on Hudson’s website. Forbes and Psychology Today also did a piece on the research.

 

About SMU

SMU is the nationally ranked global research university in the dynamic city of Dallas. SMU’s alumni, faculty and nearly 12,000 students in seven degree-granting schools demonstrate an entrepreneurial spirit as they lead change in their professions, community and the world.