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SMU Physicist Explains Significance of Latest Cern Discovery Related to the Higgs Boson

Stephen Sekula says observation of the Higgs particle transforming into bottom quarks confirms the 20th-century recipe for mass

DALLAS (SMU) – Scientists conducting physics experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have announced the discovery of the Higgs boson transforming, as it decays, into subatomic particles called bottom quarks, an observation that confirms that the “Standard Model” of the universe – the 20th century recipe for everything in the known physical world – is still valid.

This new discovery is a big step forward in the quest to understand how the Higgs enables fundamental particles to acquire mass. Many scientists suspect that the Higgs could interact with particles outside the Standard Model, such as dark matter – the unseen matter that does not emit or absorb light, but may make up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe.

After several years of work experiments at both ATLAS and CMS – CERN detectors that use different types of technology to investigate a broad range of physics –have demonstrated that 60 percent of Higgs particles decay in the same way. By finding and mapping the Higgs boson interactions with known particles, scientists can simultaneously probe for new phenomena.

SMU played important roles in the analysis announced by CERN Aug. 28, including:

  • Development of the underlying analysis software framework (Stephen Sekula, SMU associate professor of physics was co-leader of the small group that included SMU graduate student Peilong Wang and post-doctoral researcher Francesco Lo Sterzo, that does this for the larger analysis for 2017-2018)
  • Studying background processes that mimic this Higgs boson decay, reducing measurement uncertainty in the final result.

“The Standard Model is the recipe for everything that surrounds us in the world today.  Sekula explained. “It has been tested to ridiculous precision. People have been trying for 30-40 years to figure out where or if the Standard Model described matter incorrectly. Like any recipe you inherit from a family member, you trust but verify. This might be grandma’s favorite recipe, but do you really need two sticks of butter? This finding shows that the Standard Model is still the best recipe for the Universe as we know it.”

Scientists would have been intrigued if the Standard Model had not survived this test, Sekula said, because failure would have produced new knowledge.

“When we went to the moon, we didn’t know we’d get Mylar and Tang,” Sekula said. “What we’ve achieved getting to this point is we’ve pushed the boundaries of technology in both computing and electronics just to make this observation. Technology as we know it will continue to be revolutionized by fundamental curiosity about why the universe is the way it is.

“As for what we will get from all this experimentation, the honest answer is I don’t know,” Sekula said. “But based on the history of science, it’s going to be amazing.”

About CERN

At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter – the fundamental particles. The particles are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives the physicists clues about how the particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature. Founded in 1954, the CERN laboratory sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.

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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Ancient “Sea Monsters” Reveal How the Ever-Changing Planet Shapes Life, Past and Present

Never-Before-Seen Fossils From Angola Bring a Strange Yet Familiar Ocean Into View

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History will open a new exhibition Nov. 9, 2018 revealing how millions of years ago, large-scale natural forces created the conditions for real-life sea monsters to thrive in the South Atlantic Ocean basin shortly after it formed. “Sea Monsters Unearthed: Life in Angola’s Ancient Seas” will offer visitors the opportunity to dive into Cretaceous Angola’s cool coastal waters, examine the fossils of striking marine reptiles that once lived there and learn about the forces that continue to mold life in the ocean and on land.

Over 134 million years ago, the South Atlantic Ocean basin did not yet exist. Africa and South America were one contiguous landmass on the verge of separating. As the two continents drifted apart, an entirely new marine environment — the South Atlantic — emerged in the vast space created between them. This newly formed ocean basin would soon be colonized by a dizzying array of ferocious predators and an abundance of other lifeforms seizing the opportunity presented by a new ocean habitat.

“Because of our planet’s ever-shifting geology, Angola’s coastal cliffs contain the fossil remains of marine creatures from the prehistoric South Atlantic,” said Kirk Johnson, the Sant Director of the museum. “We are honored by the generosity of the Angolan people for sharing a window into this part of the Earth’s unfolding story with our visitors.”

For the first time, Angolan fossils of colossal Cretaceous marine reptiles will be on public display. Through Projecto PaleoAngola — a collaboration between Angolan, American, Portuguese and Dutch researchers focused on Angola’s rich fossil history — paleontologists excavated and studied these fossils, which were then prepared for the exhibition by a team of scientists and students at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas. The exhibition was made possible by the Sant Ocean Hall Endowment Fund.

“Fossils tell us about the life that once lived on Earth, and how the environments that came before us evolve over time,” said Louis Jacobs, professor emeritus of paleontology at SMU and collaborating curator for the exhibition. “Our planet has been running natural experiments on what shapes environments, and thereby life, for millions of years. If it weren’t for the fossil record, we wouldn’t understand what drives the story of life on our planet.”

The exhibition will immerse visitors in this Cretaceous environment with lively animations and vivid paleoart murals of life beneath the waves — courtesy of natural history artist Karen Carr — that bring to life 11 authentic fossils from Angola’s ancient seas, full-size fossil reconstructions of a mosasaur and an ancient sea turtle, as well as 3-D scanned replicas of mosasaur skulls. Photomurals and video vignettes will transport visitors to field sites along Angola’s modern rugged coast, where Projecto PaleoAngola scientists unearth the fossil remains from this lost world.

A Strange but Familiar Ocean
“Sea Monsters Unearthed” paints the picture of a flourishing ocean environment that in some ways will look strange to modern eyes, yet still bears striking similarities to today’s marine ecosystems.

Peculiar plesiosaurs — massive reptiles with long necks, stout bodies and four large flippers — swam alongside 27-foot-long toothy marine lizards called mosasaurs and more familiar creatures like sea turtles. From surprising mosasaur stomach contents to the one of the oldest known sea turtles found in Africa, fossils and reconstructions of these species will offer visitors a fuller picture of their remarkable life histories and the ecosystems they were a part of.

The exhibition will also explore deeper similarities across the ecology and anatomy of ocean animals then and now. After the marine reptiles that dominated these waters went extinct 66 million years ago, modern marine mammals would not only later replace them as top predators in the world’s ocean, but also converge on many of the same body shapes and survival strategies.

The Forces That Shape Life, Then and Now
This unique period in Earth’s history reveals how key geologic and environmental forces contributed to the early establishment and evolution of life in the South Atlantic. As Africa and South America drifted apart and a new ocean basin formed, trade winds blowing along the new Angolan coastline created the conditions for upwelling, an ocean process that drives the circulation of nutrients from the deep ocean to its surface. These nutrients in turn jump-started the food web that attracted the ferocious marine reptile predators featured throughout the exhibition.

Just as tectonic forces helped create this Cretaceous marine environment, they also shaped the arid coastal cliffs where the fossils are found today. Starting 45,000 years ago, a geologic process called uplift caused Earth’s crust to bulge along Angola’s coast, lifting part of the seafloor out of the water — and along with it, the layers upon layers of fossil-filled rocks where Projecto PaleoAngola scientists work.

Though humans do not operate on a tectonic scale, their actions also have major impacts on ocean life. Humans are now the ocean’s top predators, with one-fifth of the world’s population relying on food from upwelling-based ecosystems. Scientists caution that with such great pressure on modern upwelling-based fisheries, overfishing could change the future of life in the ocean by threatening fish populations, marine ecosystems and even human health. — National Museum of Natural History

About the National Museum of Natural History
The National Museum of Natural History is connecting people everywhere with Earth’s unfolding story. The museum is one of the most visited natural history museums in the world with approximately 7 million annual visitors from the U.S. and around the world. Opened in 1910, the museum is dedicated to maintaining and preserving the world’s most extensive collection of natural history specimens and human artifacts. It is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (closed Dec. 25). Admission is free. For more information, visit the museum on its website and on Facebook and Twitter.

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SAPIENS: Why Aid Remains Out of Reach for Some Rohingya Refugees

Even with the right to health care secured, medical assistance is elusive for urban refugees in India.

The anthropology publication SAPIENS has published an article by SMU doctoral candidate Ashvina Patel.

SAPIENS is an editorially independent publication of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Inc., which is dedicated to popularizing anthropology to a broad audience.

The article, “Why Aid Remains Out of Reach for Some Rohingya Refugees,” published May 17, 2018.

The article resulted from Patel’s 11-month stay in New Delhi, India, in which she interviewed residents of three urban refugee settlements. The purpose was to understand how issues of geopolitics and domestic policy inform various types of human insecurity for refugees.

Patel is currently a visiting student fellow at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre, where she is developing further publications on Rohingya refugee displacement.

She is a doctoral candidate in SMU’s Department of Anthropology. Patel holds an M.A. degree in Cultural Anthropology from SMU and an M.A. in Religion from University of Hawaii, Manoa. As a doctoral student, her research focuses on issues of human insecurity among Rohingya refugees in the context of American resettlement as well as within New Delhi, India as urban refugees. Her research work focuses specifically on defining the subjective experience of human insecurity and how various forms of insecurity are informed by statelessness.

Patel is a student of SMU anthropology professor Caroline Brettell, an internationally recognized immigration expert and Ruth Collins Altshuler Professor and Director of the Interdisciplinary Institute. Brettell is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

A private operating foundation, Wenner-Gren is dedicated to the advancement of anthropology throughout the world. Located in New York City, it is one of the major funding sources for international anthropological research and is actively engaged with the anthropological community through its varied grant, fellowship, networking, conference and symposia programs.

It founded and continues to publish the international journal Current Anthropology, and disseminates the results of its symposia through open-access supplementary issues of this journal. The Foundation works to support all branches of anthropology and closely related disciplines concerned with human biological and cultural origins, development, and variation.

Read the full article.

EXCERPT:

From the field notes
of SMU PhD candidate Ashvina Patel

Ameena (a pseudonym) is a 25-year-old Rohingya refugee in New Delhi, India, who is seven months pregnant with twins. Her face is gaunt. Often there isn’t enough food at home for her family of five. Nestled among other shanty houses, her home is made of bamboo with scrap boards as paneling; a tattered piece of cloth serves as the front door. Recently, the monsoon rains caused her to slip and fall. Now one of the babies in her womb is not moving. She knows she needs to see a doctor, but she cannot afford one.

When Ameena fled acts of genocide perpetrated by her own government of Myanmar in 2012, she and her husband came to New Delhi. They both suffer from debilitating deformities due to polio, and they heard that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office in New Delhi was helping Rohingya refugees. The UNHCR partners with the Indian government to provide free aid to help people obtain an education, a livelihood, and health care.

But as Ameena and others would learn, being offered access to aid isn’t always enough. Barriers to procuring those free resources often leave urban refugees to fend for themselves; many find they have to negotiate a system that inadvertently creates obstacles to reaching that aid.

Having spent 11 months with the Rohingya community in India from 2015 to 2017, I repeatedly saw how aid missed its intended target. As the UNHCR creates solutions to challenges that refugees face, these solutions can also serve as a catalyst for new obstacles or deepen already existing insecurities by creating additional barriers that are financial, linguistic, cultural, or exploitative. The UNHCR does a lot of good, but the organization could do a better job addressing challenges refugees face in accessing the services to which they are permitted.

Read the full article.

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SMU physicist and her students join national laboratories, other universities in high-stakes hunt for elusive dark matter

“One of our major concerns is background particles that can mimic the dark matter signature in our detectors.” — Jodi Cooley

SMU physicist Jodi Cooley is a member of the international scientific team that will use a powerful new tool to understand one of the biggest mysteries of modern physics.

The U.S. Department of Energy has approved funding and start of construction for SuperCDMS SNOLAB, a $34 million experiment designed to detect dark matter.

SuperCDMS will begin operations in the early 2020s to hunt for hypothetical dark matter particles called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs.

“Understanding the nature of dark matter is one of the most important scientific puzzles in particle astrophysics today,” said Cooley, an associate professor of experimental particle physics. “The experiment will have unprecedented sensitivity to dark matter particles that are hypothesized to have very low mass and interact very rarely. So they are extremely challenging to detect. This challenge has required us to develop cutting edge detectors.”

Cooley is one of 111 scientists from 26 institutions in the SuperCDMS collaboration. SMU graduate students on the experiment include Matt Stein (Ph.D. ’18) and Dan Jardin; and also previously Hang Qiu (Ph.D. ’17).

Physicists are searching for dark matter because although it makes up the bulk of the universe it remains a mystery. They theorize that dark matter could be composed of dark matter particles, with WIMPs a top contender for the title.

If dark matter WIMP particles exist, they would barely interact with their environment and fly right through regular matter. However, every so often, they could collide with an atom of our visible world, and dark matter researchers are looking for these rare interactions.

The SuperCDMS experiment will be the world’s most sensitive for detecting the relatively light WIMPs.

Cooley and her students in the SMU Department of Physics have been working with Washington-based Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on the challenge of background control and material selection for the experiment’s WIMP detectors.

Understanding background signals in the experiment is a major challenge for the detection of the faint WIMP signals.

“One of our major concerns is background particles that can mimic the dark matter signature in our detectors,” Cooley said. “As such, the experiment is constructed from radiopure materials that are carefully characterized through a screening and assay before they are selected.”

The SMU research team also has performed simulations of background particles in the detectors.

“Doing this helps inform the design of the experiment shield,” Cooley said. “We want to select the right materials to use in construction of the experiment. For example, materials that are too high in radioactivity will produce background particles that might produce fake dark matter signals in our detectors. We are extremely careful to use materials that block background particles. We also take great care that the material we use to hold the detectors in place — copper — is very radiopure.”

The experiment will be assembled and operated within the existing Canadian laboratory SNOLAB – 6,800 feet underground inside a nickel mine near the city of Sudbury. That’s the deepest underground laboratory in North America.

The experiment’s detectors will be protected from high-energy particles, called cosmic radiation, which can create the unwanted background signals that Cooley’s team wants to prevent.

SuperCDMS SNOLAB will be 50 times more sensitive than predecessor
Scientists know that visible matter in the universe accounts for only 15 percent of all matter. The rest is the mysterious substance called dark matter.

Due to its gravitational pull on regular matter, dark matter is a key driver for the evolution of the universe, affecting the formation of galaxies like our Milky Way. It therefore is fundamental to our very own existence.

The SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment will be at least 50 times more sensitive than its predecessor, exploring WIMP properties that can’t be probed by other experiments.

The search will be done using silicon and germanium crystals, in which the collisions would trigger tiny vibrations. However, to measure the atomic jiggles, the crystals need to be cooled to less than minus 459.6 degrees Fahrenheit — a fraction of a degree above absolute zero temperature.

The ultra-cold conditions give the experiment its name: Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or CDMS. The prefix “Super” indicates an increased sensitivity compared to previous versions of the experiment.

Experiment will measure “fingerprints” left by dark matter
The collisions would also produce pairs of electrons and electron deficiencies that move through the crystals, triggering additional atomic vibrations that amplify the signal from the dark matter collision. The experiment will be able to measure these “fingerprints” left by dark matter with sophisticated superconducting electronics.

Besides Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, two other Department of Energy national labs are involved in the project.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California is managing the construction project. SLAC will provide the experiment’s centerpiece of initially four detector towers, each containing six crystals in the shape of oversized hockey pucks. SLAC built and tested a detector prototype. The first tower could be sent to SNOLAB by the end of 2018.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is working on the experiment’s intricate shielding and cryogenics infrastructure.

“Our experiment will be the world’s most sensitive for relatively light WIMPs,” said Richard Partridge, head of the SuperCDMS group at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, a joint institute of SLAC and Stanford University. “This unparalleled sensitivity will create exciting opportunities to explore new territory in dark matter research.”

Close-knit network of strong partners is crucial to success
Besides SMU, a number of U.S. and Canadian universities also play key roles in the experiment, working on tasks ranging from detector fabrication and testing to data analysis and simulation. The largest international contribution comes from Canada and includes the research infrastructure at SNOLAB.

“We’re fortunate to have a close-knit network of strong collaboration partners, which is crucial for our success,” said Project Director Blas Cabrera from KIPAC. “The same is true for the outstanding support we’re receiving from the funding agencies in the U.S. and Canada.”

Funding is from the DOE Office of Science, $19 million, the National Science Foundation, $12 million, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, $3 million.

SuperCDMS to search for dark matter in entirely new region
“Together we’re now ready to build an experiment that will search for dark matter particles that interact with normal matter in an entirely new region,” said SuperCDMS spokesperson Dan Bauer, Fermilab.

SuperCDMS SNOLAB will be the latest in a series of increasingly sensitive dark matter experiments. The most recent version, located at the Soudan Mine in Minnesota, completed operations in 2015.

”The project has incorporated lessons learned from previous CDMS experiments to significantly improve the experimental infrastructure and detector designs for the experiment,” said SLAC’s Ken Fouts, project manager for SuperCDMS SNOLAB. “The combination of design improvements, the deep location and the infrastructure support provided by SNOLAB will allow the experiment to reach its full potential in the search for low-mass dark matter.” — SLAC National Laboratory; and Margaret Allen, SMU

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WFAA Verify: Is West Texas sinking?

A new research report, from Southern Methodist University and funded by NASA, found a “…large swath of West Texas oil patch is heaving and sinking at alarming rates.”

WFAA-TV Channel 8’s Verify journalist David Schechter covered the phenomenon of the ground sinking at alarming rates in West Texas, according to the research of SMU geophysicists Zhong Lu, professor, Shuler-Foscue Chair, and Jin-Woo Kim research scientist, both in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

The Dedman College researchers are co-authors of a new analysis using satellite radar images that discovered decades of oil production activity in West Texas have destabilized localities in an area of about 4,000 square miles populated by small towns, roadways and a vast network of oil and gas pipelines and storage tanks.

Schechter’s WFAA ABC report, “Verify: Is West Texas sinking?” aired April 18, 2018.

Lu and Kim reported their findings in the Nature publication Scientific Reports, in the article “Association between localized geohazards in West Texas and human activities, recognized by Sentinel-1A/B satellite radar imagery.”

The researchers analyzed satellite radar images that were made public by the European Space Agency, and supplemented that with oil activity data from the Railroad Commission of Texas.

The study is among the first of its kind to identify small-scale deformation signals over a vast region by drawing from big data sets spanning a number of years and then adding supplementary information.

The research is supported by the NASA Earth Surface and Interior Program, and the Shuler-Foscue Endowment at SMU.

An earlier study by the researchers revealed significant ground movement of two giant sinkholes near Wink, Texas. The SMU geophysicists found that the movement suggests the two existing holes are expanding, and new ones are forming as nearby subsidence occurs at an alarming rate.

Watch the WFAA Verify news segment.

EXCERPT:

By David Schechter
WFAA-TV Verify

A new research report, from Southern Methodist University and funded by NASA, found a “…large swath of West Texas oil patch is heaving and sinking at alarming rates.”

To find out if West Texas is sinking, first I’m going to the guy who wrote the report, Dr. Zhong Lu. He’s a geophysicist who studies the earth using satellites.

By shooting a radar beam from space — like a measuring stick — a satellite can calculate elevation changes down to the centimeter. Lu did that over a 4000 square mile area.

“This area is sinking at half meter per year,” Dr. Lu says.

That’s more than a foot-and-a-half. Lu says, that’s alarming because that much change to the earth’s surface might normally take millions of years.

One of the images in his reports shows an area of sinking earth, near Wink, TX from 2011. Five years later, the satellite shows the sunken area had spread almost 240%.

“In this area that you are studying, is oil and gas the cause of the sinking?” I ask.

“Related to the oil and gas activities,” he says.

“Oil and gas activity is causing the sinking in West Texas?” I clarify.

“Yes,” he says.

Watch the WFAA Verify news segment.

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SMU students share their research at SMU Research Day 2018

SMU Research Day 2018 featured posters and abstracts from 160 student entrants who have participated this academic year in faculty-led research, pursued student-led projects, or collaborated on team projects with graduate students and faculty scientists.

SMU strongly encourages undergraduate students to pursue research projects as an important component of their academic careers, while mentored or working alongside SMU graduate students and faculty.

Students attack challenging real-world problems, from understanding the world’s newest particle, the Higgs Boson, or preparing mosasaur fossil bones discovered in Angola, to hunting for new chemical compounds that can fight cancer using SMU’s high performance ManeFrame supercomputer.

A highlight for student researchers is SMU Research Day, organized and sponsored by the Office of Research and Graduate Studies and which was held this year on March 28-29 in the Hughes-Trigg Student Center.

The event gives students the opportunity to foster communication between students in different disciplines, present their work in a professional setting, and share the outstanding research conducted at SMU.

Find out the winners of the poster session from the SMU Office of Graduate Studies.

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The Guardian: Texas sinkholes — oil and gas drilling increases threat, scientists warn

Ground rising and falling in region that has been ‘punctured like a pin cushion’ since the 1940s, new study finds.

The Guardian and other news outlets covered the West Texas sinkhole and ground movement research of SMU geophysicists Zhong Lu, professor, Shuler-Foscue Chair, and Jin-Woo Kim research scientist, both in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences at SMU.

The Dedman College researchers are co-authors of a new analysis using satellite radar images that shows decades of oil production activity in West Texas have destabilized localities in an area of about 4,000 square miles populated by small towns, roadways and a vast network of oil and gas pipelines and storage tanks.

An earlier study by the researchers revealed significant ground movement of two giant sinkholes near Wink, Texas. The SMU geophysicists found that the movement suggests the two existing holes are expanding, and new ones are forming as nearby subsidence occurs at an alarming rate.

The Guardian article by journalist Tom Dart was published March 27, 2018, “Texas sinkholes: oil and gas drilling increases threat, scientists warn.”

Other coverage includes articles by Forbes, Tech Times, Phys.org, Ecowatch, Fox San Antonio, The Dallas Morning News and the Texas Tribune.

Others include EarthSky.org, Live Science, KERA News, San Antonio Express, Houston Chronicle, Science Daily, The Energy Mix, Digital Journal, Homeland Security News Wire and the Science Bulletin.

Lu is world-renowned for leading scientists in InSAR applications, short for a technique called interferometric synthetic aperture radar, to detect surface changes that aren’t visible to the naked eye. Lu is a member of the Science Definition Team for the dedicated U.S. and Indian NASA-ISRO InSAR mission, set for launch in 2020 to study hazards and global environmental change.

InSAR accesses a series of images captured by a read-out radar instrument mounted on the orbiting satellite Sentinel-1A. Sentinel-1A was launched in April 2014 as part of the European Union’s Copernicus program.

Lu and Kim reported their latest findings in the Nature publication Scientific Reports, in the article “Association between localized geohazards in West Texas and human activities, recognized by Sentinel-1A/B satellite radar imagery.”

Lu and Kim reported the earlier findings in the scientific journal Remote Sensing, in the article “Ongoing deformation of sinkholes in Wink, Texas, observed by time-series Sentinel-1A SAR Interferometry.”

The research is supported by the U.S. Geological Survey Land Remote Sensing Program, the NASA Earth Surface & Interior Program, and the Shuler-Foscue Endowment at Southern Methodist University.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Tom Dart
The Guardian

Oil and gas activity is contributing to alarming land movements and a rising threat of sinkholes across a huge swath of west Texas, a new study suggests.

According to geophysicists from Southern Methodist University, the ground is rising and falling in a region that has been “punctured like a pin cushion with oil wells and injection wells since the 1940s”.

There were nearly 297,000 oil wells in Texas as of last month, according to the state regulator. Many are in the Permian Basin, described in a Bloomberg article last September as the “world’s hottest oil patch”.

But the Southern Methodist report warns of unstable land and the threat of sinkholes.

“These hazards represent a danger to residents, roads, railroads, levees, dams, and oil and gas pipelines, as well as potential pollution of ground water,” Zhong Lu, a professor, said in a statement.

Wink – a tiny town 400 miles west of Dallas best known as the childhood home of the singer Roy Orbison – attracted national headlines in 2016 when the same scientists warned that the land between two expanding sinkholes a mile apart was deteriorating, risking the formation of more sinkholes or even the creation of a colossal single hole.

Injection of wastewater and carbon dioxide increases pore pressure in rocks, a likely cause of uplift. Lu told the Guardian that cracks and corrosion from ageing wells may help explain the sinking.

A “subsidence bowl” near one of the Wink sinkholes has sunk at a rate of more than 15.5in a year, probably as a result of water leaks through abandoned wells causing salt layers to dissolve, the report found. Elsewhere, a lake formed after 2003 as a result of sinking ground and rising water.

Read the full story.

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Radar images show large swath of West Texas oil patch is heaving and sinking at alarming rates

Analysis indicates decades of oil production activity have destabilized localities in an area of about 4,000 square miles populated by small towns, roadways and a vast network of oil and gas pipelines and storage tanks

Two giant sinkholes near Wink, Texas, may just be the tip of the iceberg, according to a new study that found alarming rates of new ground movement extending far beyond the infamous sinkholes.

That’s the finding of a geophysical team from Southern Methodist University, Dallas that previously reported the rapid rate at which the sinkholes are expanding and new ones forming.

Now the team has discovered that various locations in large portions of four Texas counties are also sinking and uplifting.

Radar satellite images show significant movement of the ground across localities in a 4000-square-mile area — in one place as much as 40 inches over the past two-and-a-half years, say the geophysicists.

“The ground movement we’re seeing is not normal. The ground doesn’t typically do this without some cause,” said geophysicist Zhong Lu, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences at SMU and a global expert in satellite radar imagery analysis.

“These hazards represent a danger to residents, roads, railroads, levees, dams, and oil and gas pipelines, as well as potential pollution of ground water,” Lu said. “Proactive, continuous detailed monitoring from space is critical to secure the safety of people and property.”

The scientists made the discovery with analysis of medium-resolution (15 feet to 65 feet) radar imagery taken between November 2014 and April 2017. The images cover portions of four oil-patch counties where there’s heavy production of hydrocarbons from the oil-rich West Texas Permian Basin.

The imagery, coupled with oil-well production data from the Railroad Commission of Texas, suggests the area’s unstable ground is associated with decades of oil activity and its effect on rocks below the surface of the earth.

The SMU researchers caution that ground movement may extend beyond what radar observed in the four-county area. The entire region is highly vulnerable to human activity due to its geology — water-soluble salt and limestone formations, and shale formations.

“Our analysis looked at just this 4000-square-mile area,” said study co-author and research scientist Jin-Woo Kim, a research scientist in the SMU Department of Earth Sciences.

“We’re fairly certain that when we look further, and we are, that we’ll find there’s ground movement even beyond that,” Kim said. “This region of Texas has been punctured like a pin cushion with oil wells and injection wells since the 1940s and our findings associate that activity with ground movement.”

Lu, Shuler-Foscue Chair at SMU, and Kim reported their findings in the Nature publication Scientific Reports, in the article “Association between localized geohazards in West Texas and human activities, recognized by Sentinel-1A/B satellite radar imagery.”

The researchers analyzed satellite radar images that were made public by the European Space Agency, and supplemented that with oil activity data from the Railroad Commission of Texas.

The study is among the first of its kind to identify small-scale deformation signals over a vast region by drawing from big data sets spanning a number of years and then adding supplementary information.

The research is supported by the NASA Earth Surface and Interior Program, and the Shuler-Foscue Endowment at SMU.

Imagery captures changes that might otherwise go undetected
The SMU geophysicists focused their analysis on small, localized, rapidly developing hazardous ground movements in portions of Winkler, Ward, Reeves and Pecos counties, an area nearly the size of Connecticut. The study area includes the towns of Pecos, Monahans, Fort Stockton, Imperial, Wink and Kermit.

The images from the European Space Agency are the result of satellite radar interferometry from recently launched open-source orbiting satellites that make radar images freely available to the public.

With interferometric synthetic aperture radar, or InSAR for short, the satellites 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 an accuracy of sub-inches or better, at a spatial resolution of a few yards or better over thousands of miles, say the researchers.

Ground movement associated with oil activity
The SMU researchers found a significant relationship between ground movement and oil activities that include pressurized fluid injection into the region’s geologically unstable rock formations.

Fluid injection includes waste saltwater injection into nearby wells, and carbon dioxide flooding of depleting reservoirs to stimulate oil recovery.

Injected fluids increase the pore pressure in the rocks, and the release of the stress is followed by ground uplift. The researchers found that ground movement coincided with nearby sequences of wastewater injection rates and volume and CO2 injection in nearby wells.

Also related to the ground’s sinking and upheaval are dissolving salt formations due to freshwater leaking into abandoned underground oil facilities, as well as the extraction of oil.

Sinking and uplift detected from Wink to Fort Stockton
As might be expected, the most significant subsidence is about a half-mile east of the huge Wink No. 2 sinkhole, where there are two subsidence bowls, one of which has sunk more than 15.5 inches a year. The rapid sinking is most likely caused by water leaking through abandoned wells into the Salado formation and dissolving salt layers, threatening possible ground collapse.

At two wastewater injection wells 9.3 miles west of Wink and Kermit, the radar detected upheaval of about 2.1 inches that coincided with increases in injection volume. The injection wells extend about 4,921 feet to 5,577 feet deep into a sandstone formation.

In the vicinity of 11 CO2 injection wells nearly seven miles southwest of Monahans, the radar analysis detected surface uplift of more than 1 inch. The wells are about 2,460 feet to 2,657 feet deep. As with wastewater injection, CO2 injection increased pore pressure in the rocks, so when stress was relieved it was followed by uplift of about 1 inch at the surface.

The researchers also looked at an area 4.3 miles southwest of Imperial, where significant subsidence from fresh water flowing through cracked well casings, corroded steel pipes and unplugged abandoned wells has been widely reported.

Water there has leaked into the easily dissolved Salado formation, created voids, and caused the ground to sink and water to rise from the subsurface, including creating Boehmer Lake, which didn’t exist before 2003.

Radar analysis by the SMU team detected rapid subsidence ranging from three-fourths of an inch to nearly 4 inches around active wells, abandoned wells and orphaned wells.

“Movements around the roads and oil facilities to the southwest of Imperial, Texas, should be thoroughly monitored to mitigate potential catastrophes,” the researchers write in the study.

About 5.5 miles south of Pecos, their radar analysis detected more than 1 inch of subsidence near new wells drilled via hydraulic fracturing and in production since early 2015. There have also been six small earthquakes recorded there in recent years, suggesting the deformation of the ground generated accumulated stress and caused existing faults to slip.

“We have seen a surge of seismic activity around Pecos in the last five to six years. Before 2012, earthquakes had not been recorded there. At the same time, our results clearly indicate that ground deformation near Pecos is occurring,” Kim said. “Although earthquakes and surface subsidence could be coincidence, we cannot exclude the possibility that these earthquakes were induced by hydrocarbon production activities.”

Scientists: Boost the network of seismic stations to better detect activity
Kim stated the need for improved earthquake location and detection threshold through an expanded network of seismic stations, along with continuous surface monitoring with the demonstrated radar remote sensing methods.

“This is necessary to learn the cause of recent increased seismic activity,” Kim said. “Our efforts to continuously monitor West Texas with this advanced satellite technique can help sustain safe, ongoing oil production.”

Near real-time monitoring of ground deformation possible in a few years
The satellite radar datasets allowed the SMU geophysicists to detect both two-dimension east-west deformation of the ground, as well as vertical deformation.

Lu, a leading scientist in InSAR applications, is a member of the Science Team for the dedicated U.S. and Indian NASA-ISRO (called NISAR) InSAR mission, set for launch in 2021 to study hazards and global environmental change.

InSAR accesses a series of images captured by a read-out radar instrument mounted on the orbiting satellite Sentinel-1A/B. The satellites orbit 435 miles above the Earth’s surface. Sentinel-1A was launched in 2014 and Sentinel-1B in 2016 as part of the European Union’s Copernicus program.

The Sentinel-1A/B constellation bounces a radar signal off the earth, then records the signal as it bounces back, delivering measurements. The measurements allow geophysicists to determine the distance from the satellite to the ground, revealing how features on the Earth’s surface change over time.

“Near real-time monitoring of ground deformation at high spatial and temporal resolutions is possible in a few years, using multiple satellites such as Sentinel-1A/B, NISAR and others,” said Lu. “This will revolutionize our capability to characterize human-induced and natural hazards, and reduce their damage to humanity, infrastructure and the energy industry.” — Margaret Allen, SMU

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Fox4WARD: Knowing how our partner is feeling

Fox 4 journalist Dan Godwin interviewed family psychologist Chrystyna D. Kouros, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Psychology, about her latest research on couples.

Lead author on the new study, Kouros and her co-author, relationship psychologist Lauren M. Papp at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that couples do poorly when it comes to knowing their partner is sad, lonely or feeling down.

Kouros and Papp reported their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Family Process, in the article “Couples’ Perceptions of Each Other’s Daily Affect: Empathic Accuracy, Assumed Similarity, and Indirect Accuracy.”

Godwin’s segment, “Knowing how our partner is feeling,” aired March 11 on Fox 4’s 10 p.m. Sunday news segment Fox4WARD.

Watch the full segment on Fox 4.

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SMU student to share innovative texting app at SXSW Red Bull Launch Institute

Users earn rewards with the “Just Drive” app designed to prevent distracted driving.

Neha Husein gripped her steering wheel as her car jolted forward, hit from behind on one of Dallas’ busiest and most dangerous freeways. Shaken, but not injured, the high school senior surveyed the significant damage to her car. The cause of the crash? The driver behind her was texting while driving.

The 2014 collision was the SMU junior’s inspiration to develop a solution to stop drivers from texting while driving, a practice that killed 455 Texans and played a role in 109,660 crashes in Texas in 2016. Her smart-phone app, “Just Drive,” awards points to drivers who lock their phones while driving. Those points can then be redeemed for coupons or free food, drinks or merchandise.

Husein is one of six college entrepreneurs selected to participate March 10 in the Red Bull Launch Institute at Austin’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival. She will meet with industry leaders and other entrepreneurs to further develop and amplify her project. The institute is scheduled from 3 to 6:30 p.m. at Palazzo Lavaca, 1614 Lavaca St., Austin.

She’s not being judgmental. Everyone has texted while driving, Husein says.

“We are used to multitasking, and sitting in traffic gets boring,” she says.

But the marketing and human rights major believes positive reinforcement can change behavior. Rewards are motivating to millennials like Husein. According to the Texas Department of Transportation, drivers age 16 to 34 are most likely to text while driving, but Husein is betting the app will appeal to all ages.

“Expecting incentives is a generational thing, but it’s a human thing too,” she says. “People enjoy rewards.”

Husein first presented “Just Drive” at SMU’s October 2017 Big Ideas pitch contest. She won $1,000 for her 90-second pitch and used it to create a wireframe app mock-up. The Big Ideas pitch contest is part of SMU’s Engaged Learning program, a campus wide initiative designed to enhance student learning by connecting a personal passion to academic learning and turning it into a personal project. Faculty mentorship is a key part of the Engaged Learning program.

Husein’s mentor, SMU law professor Keith Robinson, is a specialist in patent, intellectual property and technology law and co-directs the Tsai Center for Law, Science and Innovation in SMU’s Dedman School of Law. He also teaches a class to law students on designing legal apps.

“I like people who show initiative and are willing to bet on themselves,” says Robinson, who meets weekly with Husein to discuss intellectual property issues and trademark application. “Neha has developed an app for a relatable problem, one that can save lives.”

Husein is a Carrollton, Texas, native who grew up with an entrepreneur mindset. She remembers manning a toy cash register alongside her father at his convenience store. He was on hand in February 2018 to see his daughter present her business plan at the second stage of SMU’s Big Ideas competition – and win $5,000 in start-up funds.

“Just Drive is a perfect combination of my interests in human rights and marketing,” Husein says. “It combines business with a philanthropic cause.”

She plans to launch the “Just Drive” app in September, 2018. — Nancy George, SMU

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DACA led to improved educational outcomes, lower teenage birthrate for young immigrant community

SMU professor available to discuss working paper’s analysis of controversial ‘dreamer’ population.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) increased high school graduation rates by 15 percent, reduced teenage birth rates by 45 percent, and led to a 25 percent increase in college enrollment among Hispanic women, according to a working paper co-authored by SMU economist Elira Kuka for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The results have significant bearing for the direction of future immigration policy, the paper concludes.

“Our research shows that when we give undocumented youth a large incentive to invest in education, such as participation in DACA and access to the labor opportunities it opens if they stay in school, they respond to these opportunities,” says Kuka, an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Economics. “Giving immigrants a work permit and relief from deportation makes them more likely to invest in education, work more, and have less (teenage) fertility.”

The study also found that individuals who acquire more schooling work more at the same time, countering the typically held belief that work and school are mutually exclusive, and indicating DACA generated a large boost in productivity.

“You can think about our research in two ways: If you just care about immigration policy, it’s important because we show that DACA really improves these peoples’ lives and the type of immigrant workforce we have in the U.S., which is currently missing from the policy debate about the costs and benefits of the program,” Kuka says. “More generally, our research tells us something about the education choices of low-income Americans. Why don’t they invest in education despite its large wage premium? Do they not respond to incentives or do they lack the right incentives to go to school? Our results suggest the second.”

Co-authors are Na’ama Shenhav, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, and Kevin Shih, an economics professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The working paper, “Do Human Capital Decisions Respond to the Returns to Education? Evidence from DACA,” was released in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“To complete this research, we used data from the American Community Surveys, which is a yearly survey that collects demographic, educational, and employment information for a 1 percent representative sample of the U.S. population,” Kuka explains. “We then identified who in the survey was likely to be a DACA recipient based on nation of origin, when they arrived in the country, and other factors, identified control groups that resembled the likely DACA recipients, then charted outcomes for both groups before and after DACA went into effect. We saw a divergence in trajectories where people eligible for DACA got this big bump in educational attainment, a big drop in fertility, and so on.” — Kenny Ryan, SMU

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New study finds couples do poorly at knowing when their partner is sad or feeling down

Spouses are the primary source of social support to one another, so it’s important to their relationship they stay attuned to each other’s emotions.

How well do couples pick up on one another’s feelings? Pretty well, when the emotion is happiness, says a psychologist at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

But a new study finds that couples do poorly when it comes to knowing their partner is sad, lonely or feeling down.

“We found that when it comes to the normal ebb and flow of daily emotions, couples aren’t picking up on those occasional changes in ‘soft negative’ emotions like sadness or feeling down,” said family psychologist Chrystyna D. Kouros, lead author on the study. “They might be missing important emotional clues.”

Even when a negative mood isn’t related to the relationship, it ultimately can be harmful to a couple, said Kouros, an associate professor in the SMU Department of Psychology. A spouse is usually the primary social supporter for a person.

“Failing to pick up on negative feelings one or two days is not a big deal,” she said. “But if this accumulates, then down the road it could become a problem for the relationship. It’s these missed opportunities to be offering support or talking it out that can compound over time to negatively affect a relationship.”

The finding is consistent with other research that has shown that couples tend to assume their partner feels the same way they are feeling, or thinks the same way they do, Kouros said.

But when it comes to sadness and loneliness, couples need to be on the look-out for tell-tale signs. Some people are better at this process of “empathic accuracy” — picking up on a partner’s emotions — than others.

“With empathic accuracy you’re relying on clues from your partner to figure out their mood,” Kouros said. “Assumed similarity, on the other hand, is when you just assume your partner feels the same way you do. Sometimes you might be right, because the two of you actually do feel the same, but not because you were really in tune with your partner.”

Co-author on the study is relationship psychologist Lauren M. Papp at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Kouros and Papp reported their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Family Process, in the article “Couples’ Perceptions of Each Other’s Daily Affect: Empathic Accuracy, Assumed Similarity, and Indirect Accuracy.”

Couples should assume less about one another, observe more
The problem isn’t one for which couples need to seek therapy, Kouros said. Instead, she advises couples to stop assuming they know what their partner is feeling. Also, pay more attention to your partner, and communicate more.

“I suggest couples put a little more effort into paying attention to their partner — be more mindful and in the moment when you are with your partner,” she said.

She cautions, however, against becoming annoying by constantly asking how the other is feeling, or if something is wrong.

“Obviously you could take it too far,” Kouros said. “If you sense that your partner’s mood is a little different than usual, you can just simply ask how their day was, or maybe you don’t even bring it up, you just say instead ‘Let me pick up dinner tonight’ or ‘I’ll put the kids to bed tonight.’”

Even so, partners shouldn’t assume their spouse is a mind-reader, expecting them to pick up on their emotions. “If there’s something you want to talk about, then communicate that. It’s a two-way street,” she said. “It’s not just your partner’s responsibility.”

Participants were 51 couples who completed daily diaries about their mood and the mood of their partner for seven consecutive nights. The study veers from conventional approaches to the topic, which have relied on interviewing couples in a lab setting about feelings related to conflicts in their relationship.

Kouros and Papp will also present the research findings March 23 at the 2018 biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Human Development. — Margaret Allen, SMU

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The Dallas Morning News: Earthquakes at DFW Airport continued for years after oil and gas wastewater well was shut

“Faults are not like a light switch – you don’t turn off a well and automatically stop triggering earthquakes.” — Heather DeShon, SMU seismologist.

Science journalist Anna Kuchment covered the earthquake research of a team of SMU seismologists led by SMU Associate Professor Heather DeShon and SMU Post-doctoral Researcher Paul Ogwari, who developed a unique method of data analysis that yielded the study results.

Kuchment wrote Earthquakes at DFW Airport continued for years after oil and gas wastewater well was shut for The Dallas Morning News.

The results of the analysis showed that efforts to stop human-caused earthquakes by shutting down wastewater injection wells that serve adjacent oil and gas fields may oversimplify the challenge. The seismologists analyzed a sequence of earthquakes at DFW Airport and found that even though wastewater injection was halted after a year, the earthquakes continued.

The sequence of quakes began in 2008, and wastewater injection was halted in 2009. But earthquakes continued for at least seven more years.

“This tells us that high-volume injection, even if it’s just for a short time, when it’s near a critically stressed fault, can induce long-lasting seismicity,” said Ogwari. The earthquakes may be continuing even now, he said.

The article by Kuchment, “Earthquakes at DFW Airport continued for years after oil and gas wastewater well was shut,” published Feb. 21, 2018.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Anna Kuchment
The Dallas Morning News

Earthquakes beneath DFW International Airport continued for seven years after an oil and gas company shut a nearby wastewater injection well that had been linked to the quakes, according to a new study by scientists at Southern Methodist University.

A wastewater well that continues to operate at the northern end of the airport – and which some area residents have said should be closed — was probably not involved in the events and poses little earthquake hazard, the researchers concluded.

“Faults are not like a light switch – you don’t turn off a well and automatically stop triggering earthquakes,” said Heather DeShon, a seismologist at Southern Methodist University and co-author of the paper, in an email.

The earthquakes at DFW Airport started on Halloween 2008, seven weeks after Chesapeake Energy began injecting wastewater into a well at the southern end of the airport. Scientists at SMU and the University of Texas at Austin investigated the quakes at the time and concluded they were most likely associated with the well.

Though Chesapeake shut its well in August 2009, earthquakes continued through at least the end of 2015. The largest, a 3.4-magnitude event, struck three years after the well was closed.

“It’s very surprising that one year of injection could produce earthquakes running for more than seven years,” said Paul Ogwari, the study’s lead author and a post-doctoral researcher at SMU. The paper was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

While earthquake magnitudes did not decline, Ogwari said, earthquake rates did: More than 80 percent of quakes in the sequence occurred during the first seven months of seismicity.

The DFW quakes are significant, because they mark the start of an unprecedented surge of earthquakes in North Texas and across the middle of the country.

Read the full story.

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Inside Higher Ed: Study Finds Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Increased Educational Attainment

It also cut teen pregnancy.

Journalist Elizabeth Redden with the website Inside Higher Ed covered the research of SMU government policy expert Elira Kuka. Her working paper, “Do Human Capital Decisions Respond to the Returns to Education? Evidence from DACA,” was released in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Kuka, an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Economics, and her colleagues found that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program under fire by the Trump Administration has significantly changed the lives of young people who came to the United States illegally as children.

Kuka’s research focus is on understanding how government policy effects individual behavior and well-being, the extent to which it provides social insurance during times of need, and its effectiveness in alleviation of poverty and inequality.

Her current research topics include the potential benefits of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program, the protective power of the U.S. safety net during recessions and various issues in academic achievement.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Elizabeth Redden
Inside Higher Ed

A new working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research argues that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program had a “significant impact” on the educational and life decisions of undocumented immigrant youth, resulting in a 45 percent decrease in teen birth rates, a 15 percent increase in high school graduation rates and a 20 percent increase in college enrollment rates. The researchers found differential effects by gender, with most of the gains in college enrollment concentrated among women. For men alone, the effect of DACA on college enrollment was not statistically significant.

DACA, which was established by former president Obama in 2012, gave certain undocumented immigrant students who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children temporary protection from deportation and authorization to work in the U.S. DACA recipients have faced uncertainty over their future since September, when President Trump announced plans to end the program after six months.

“Our main conclusion from this paper is that future labor market opportunities or just opportunities in general really matter,” said Elira Kuka, one of the authors of the paper, titled “Do Human Capital Decisions Respond to the Returns to Education? Evidence From DACA,” and an assistant professor of economics at Southern Methodist University.

“People are worried, ‘Why are there some populations that are not going to high school and not investing in education?’” Kuka said. “Maybe the reason is they don’t see improved opportunities — but if they see improved labor outcomes they will actually invest in their education.”

Read the full story.

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Market Watch: Why ‘Dreamers’ are less likely to drop out of high school

New study suggests DACA pushed students to stay in school.

Journalist Jillian Berman with the website Market Watch covered the research of SMU government policy expert Elira Kuka. Kuka’s working paper, “Do Human Capital Decisions Respond to the Returns to Education? Evidence from DACA,” was released in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

An assistant professor in the SMU Department of Economics, Kuka and her colleagues found that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program under fire by the Trump Administration has significantly changed the lives of young people who came to the United States illegally as children.

Kuka’s research focus is on understanding how government policy effects individual behavior and well-being, the extent to which it provides social insurance during times of need, and its effectiveness in alleviation of poverty and inequality.

Her current research topics include the potential benefits of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program, the protective power of the U.S. safety net during recessions and various issues in academic achievement.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Jillian Berman
Market Watch

If students believe they’re education will pay off, they may be more likely to continue with it.

Enacting Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, increased high school graduation rates among undocumented immigrants by 15% and college enrollment rates by 20%. That’s according to a study by economists at Dartmouth College, Southern Methodist University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Monday.

DACA provides work authorization and deferral of deportation for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. In addition to eligibility requirements surrounding the age at which undocumented immigrants came to the U.S., DACA also has an education requirement — that immigrants be in school, completed high school or a GED program (unless they’re a veteran).

“You’ve given them a huge carrot to stay in school,” said Na’ama Shenhav, an economics professor at Dartmouth and one of the authors of the study. The opportunity for protection from deportation allows students to envision a possible return on their education that wasn’t available before. “For a population that previously was experiencing very low incentives to stay in school, this could have substantially re-oriented their perception of opportunities,” Shenhav said.

Read the full story.

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Vox: DACA boosted immigrants’ education, labor force participation, productivity

It also cut teen pregnancy.

Journalist Matthew Yglesias with the website Vox covered the research of SMU government policy expert Elira Kuka. Her working paper, “Do Human Capital Decisions Respond to the Returns to Education? Evidence from DACA,” was released in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Kuka, an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Economics, and her colleagues found that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program under fire by the Trump Administration has significantly changed the lives of young people who came to the United States illegally as children.

Kuka’s research focus is on understanding how government policy effects individual behavior and well-being, the extent to which it provides social insurance during times of need, and its effectiveness in alleviation of poverty and inequality.

Her current research topics include the potential benefits of the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program, the protective power of the U.S. safety net during recessions and various issues in academic achievement.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Matthew Yglesias
Vox

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program changed the lives of young people who came to the United States illegally as children in incredible ways — boosting high school graduation rates and college enrollment, while slashing teen births by a staggering 45 percent.

That’s according to timely new research from Elira Kuka, Na’ama Shenhav, and Kevin Shih that uses the program to study a larger question that’s of interest to economists — when education becomes more available, do people go get more of it? The DACA results suggest that the answer is yes, at least when there’s a clear upside. The program itself, in other words, was a smashing success in terms of bringing people out of the shadows and letting them contribute more to American society.

Oscar Hernandez, a DACA recipient, explained to Vox’s Dara Lind how things changed.

”The discussion in my house was, ‘You don’t get noticed. Because if you do something awesome and great, you might get noticed, and if you do get noticed, they might find out that we’re here undocumented, and if they find we out we could get separated.’ It was never a discussion we had, but that was the unwritten rule for our house. You don’t do bad things, but you also don’t do good things. You stay under the radar, you work, and that’s it.”

DACA changed that. Suddenly, recipients got to experience what US citizens take for granted — that to excel is good.

Canceling DACA almost certainly won’t reduce the overall size of the unauthorized population living in the United States, but it will meaningfully reduce the educational attainment and economic productivity of the undocumented population. That’s bad for the DREAMers, but also America as a whole.

DACA eligibility led to a lot more schooling
One of DACA’s provisions was that to qualify, you had to get a high school degree if you were old enough. That’s an unusual incentive to stay in school, and using a difference-in-differences design to compare the eligible to non-eligible population over time (you can do this because you had to have arrived within a specific time and age window to qualify) they show that DACA-eligibility increased high school graduation rates by 15 percent and brought teen births down by 45 percent.

Read the full story.

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Solving the dark energy mystery: A new sky survey assignment for a 45-year-old telescope

SMU and other members of a scientific consortium prepare for installation of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument to survey the night sky from a mile-high mountain peak in Arizona

As part of a large scientific consortium studying dark energy, SMU physicists are on course to help create the largest 3-D map of the universe ever made.

The map will emerge from data gathered by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) being installed on the Nicholas U. Mayall Telescope atop a mountain in Arizona.

The map could help solve the mystery of dark energy, which is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.

DESI will capture about 10 times more data than a predecessor survey of space using an array of 5,000 swiveling robots. Each robot will be carefully choreographed to point a fiber-optic cable at a preprogrammed sequence of deep-space objects, including millions of galaxies and quasars, which are galaxies that harbor massive, actively feeding black holes.

“DESI will provide the first precise measures of the expansion history of the universe covering approximately the last 10 billion years,” said SMU physicist Robert Kehoe, a professor in the SMU Department of Physics. “This is most of the 13 billion year age of the universe, and it encompasses a critical period in which the universe went from being matter-dominated to dark-energy dominated.”

The universe was expanding, but at a slowing pace, until a few billion years ago, Kehoe said.

“Then the expansion started accelerating,” he said. “The unknown ‘dark energy’ driving that acceleration is now dominating the universe. Seeing this transition clearly will provide a critical test of ideas of what this dark energy is, and how it may tie into theories of gravitation and other fundamental forces.”

The Mayall telescope was originally commissioned 45 years ago to survey the night sky and record observations on glass photographic plates. The telescope is tucked inside a 14-story, 500-ton dome atop a mile-high peak at the National Science Foundation’s Kitt Peak National Observatory – part of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.

SMU researchers have conducted observing with the Mayall. Decommissioning of that telescope allows for building DESI in it’s place, as well as reusing some parts of the telescope and adding major new sytems. As part of DESI, SMU is involved in development of software for operation of the experiment, as well as for data simulation to aid data anlysis.

“We are also involved in studying the ways in which observational effects impact the cosmology measurements DESI is pursuing,” Kehoe said. SMU graduate students Govinda Dhungana and Ryan Staten also work on DESI. A new addition to the SMU DESI team, post-doctoral researcher Sarah Eftekharzadeh, is working on the SMU software and has studied the same kinds of galaxies
DESI will be measuring.

Now the dome is closing on the previous science chapters of the 4-meter Mayall Telescope so that it can prepare for its new role in creating the 3-D map.

The temporary closure sets in motion the largest overhaul in the telescope’s history and sets the stage for the installation of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which will begin a five-year observing run next year.

“This day marks an enormous milestone for us,” said DESI Director Michael Levi of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , which leads the project’s international collaboration. “Now we remove the old equipment and start the yearlong process of putting the new stuff on.”

More than 465 researchers from about 71 institutions are participating in the DESI collaboration.

The entire top end of the telescope, which weighs as much as a school bus and houses the telescope’s secondary mirror and a large digital camera, will be removed and replaced with DESI instruments. A large crane will lift the telescope’s top end through the observing slit in its dome.

Besides providing new insights about the universe’s expansion and large-scale structure, DESI will also help to set limits on theories related to gravity and the formative stages of the universe, and could even provide new mass measurements for a variety of elusive yet abundant subatomic particles called neutrinos.

“One of the primary ways that we learn about the unseen universe is by its subtle effects on the clustering of galaxies,” said DESI collaboration co-spokesperson Daniel Eisenstein of Harvard University. “The new maps from DESI will provide an exquisite new level of sensitivity in our study of cosmology.”

Mayall’s sturdy construction is perfect platform for new 9-ton instrument
The Mayall Telescope has played an important role in many astronomical discoveries, including measurements supporting the discovery of dark energy and establishing the role of dark matter in the universe from measurements of galaxy rotation. Its observations have also been used in determining the scale and structure of the universe. Dark matter and dark energy together are believed to make up about 95 percent of all of the universe’s mass and energy.

It was one of the world’s largest optical telescopes at the time it was built, and because of its sturdy construction it is perfectly suited to carry the new 9-ton instrument.

“We started this project by surveying large telescopes to find one that had a suitable mirror and wouldn’t collapse under the weight of such a massive instrument,” said Berkeley Lab’s David Schlegel, a DESI project scientist.

Arjun Dey, the NOAO project scientist for DESI, explained, “The Mayall was precociously engineered like a battleship and designed with a wide field of view.”

The expansion of the telescope’s field-of-view will allow DESI to map out about one-third of the sky.

DESI will transform the speed of science with automated preprogrammed robots
Brenna Flaugher, a DESI project scientist who leads the astrophysics department at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, said DESI will transform the speed of science at the Mayall Telescope.

“The telescope was designed to carry a person at the top who aimed and steered it, but with DESI it’s all automated,” she said. “Instead of one at a time we can measure the velocities of 5,000 galaxies at a time – we will measure more than 30 million of them in our five-year survey.”

DESI will use an array of 5,000 swiveling robots, each carefully choreographed to point a fiber-optic cable at a preprogrammed sequence of deep-space objects, including millions of galaxies and quasars, which are galaxies that harbor massive, actively feeding black holes.

The fiber-optic cables will carry the light from these objects to 10 spectrographs, which are tools that will measure the properties of this light and help to pinpoint the objects’ distance and the rate at which they are moving away from us. DESI’s observations will provide a deep look into the early universe, up to about 11 billion years ago.

DESI will capture about 10 times more data than a predecessor survey
The cylindrical, fiber-toting robots, which will be embedded in a rounded metal unit called a focal plate, will reposition to capture a new exposure of the sky roughly every 20 minutes. The focal plane assembly, which is now being assembled at Berkeley Lab, is expected to be completed and delivered to Kitt Peak this year.

DESI will scan one-third of the sky and will capture about 10 times more data than a predecessor survey, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). That project relied on a manually rotated sequence of metal plates – with fibers plugged by hand into pre-drilled holes – to target objects.

All of DESI’s six lenses, each about a meter in diameter, are complete. They will be carefully stacked and aligned in a steel support structure and will ultimately ride with the focal plane atop the telescope.

Each of these lenses took shape from large blocks of glass. They have criss-crossed the globe to receive various treatments, including grinding, polishing, and coatings. It took about 3.5 years to produce each of the lenses, which now reside at University College London in the U.K. and will be shipped to the DESI site this spring.

Precise measurements of millions of galaxies will reveal effects of dark energy
The Mayall Telescope has most recently been enlisted in a DESI-supporting sky survey known as the Mayall z-Band Legacy Survey, which is one of four sky surveys that DESI will use to preselect its targeted sky objects. SMU astrophysicists carried out observing duties on that survey, which wrapped up just days ago on Feb. 11, to support the coming DESI scientific results.

Data from these surveys are analyzed at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility. Data from these surveys have been released to the public at http://legacysurvey.org.

“We can see about a billion galaxies in the survey images, which is quite a bit of fun to explore,” Schlegel said. “The DESI instrument will precisely measure millions of those galaxies to see the effects of dark energy.”


Levi noted that there is already a lot of computing work underway at the Berkeley computing center to prepare for the stream of data that will pour out of DESI once it starts up.

“This project is all about generating huge quantities of data,” Levi said. “The data will go directly from the telescope to the Berkeley computing center for processing. We will create hundreds of universes in these computers and see which universe best fits our data.”

Installation of DESI’s components is expected to begin soon and to wrap up in April 2019, with first science observations planned in September 2019.

“Installing DESI on the Mayall will put the telescope at the heart of the next decade of discoveries in cosmology,” said Risa Wechsler, DESI collaboration co-spokesperson and associate professor of physics and astrophysics at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University. “The amazing 3-D map it will measure may solve some of the biggest outstanding questions in cosmology, or surprise us and bring up new ones.” — Berkeley Lab and SMU

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SMU study finds earthquakes continue for years after gas field wastewater injection stops

High rates of injection and large volumes can perturb critically stressed faults, triggering earthquakes years after wastewater wells are shut in.

Efforts to stop human-caused earthquakes by shutting down wastewater injection wells that serve adjacent oil and gas fields may oversimplify the challenge, according to a new study from seismologists at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

The seismologists analyzed a sequence of earthquakes at DFW Airport and found that even though wastewater injection was halted after a year, the earthquakes continued.

The sequence of quakes began in 2008, and wastewater injection was halted in 2009. But earthquakes continued for at least seven more years.

“This tells us that high-volume injection, even if it’s just for a short time, when it’s near a critically stressed fault, can induce long-lasting seismicity,” said SMU seismologist Paul O. Ogwari, who developed a unique method of data analysis that yielded the study results.

The earthquakes may be continuing even now, said Ogwari, whose analysis extended through 2015.

The study’s findings indicate that shutting down injection wells in reaction to earthquakes, as some states such as Oklahoma and Arkansas are doing, may not have the desired effect of immediately stopping further earthquakes, said seismologist Heather DeShon, a co-author on the study and an associate professor in the SMU Earth Sciences Department.

“The DFW earthquake sequence began on Halloween in 2008 — before Oklahoma seismicity rates had notably increased,” said DeShon. “This study revisits what was technically the very first modern induced earthquake sequence in this region and shows that even though the wastewater injector in this case had been shut off very quickly, the injection activity still perturbed the fault, so that generated earthquakes even seven years later.”

That phenomenon is not unheard of. Seismologists saw that type of earthquake response from a rash of human-induced earthquakes in Colorado after wastewater injection during the 1960s at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver. Similarly in that case, injection was started and stopped, but earthquakes continued.

Such a possibility has not been well understood outside scientific circles, said DeShon. She is a member of the SMU seismology team that has studied and published extensively on their scientific findings related to the unusual spate of human-induced earthquakes in North Texas.

“The perception is that if the oil and gas wastewater injectors are leading to this, then you should just shut the injection wells down,” DeShon said. “But Paul’s study shows that there’s a lot to be learned about the physics of the process, and by monitoring continuously for years.”

Ogwari, DeShon and fellow SMU seismologist Matthew J. Hornbach reported the findings in the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research in the article “The Dallas-Fort Worth Airport Earthquake Sequence: Seismicity Beyond Injection Period.”

Known DFW Airport quakes number more than 400
The DFW Airport’s unprecedented earthquake clusters were the first ever documented in the history of the North Texas region’s oil-rich geological system known as the Fort Worth Basin. The quakes are also the first of multiple sequences in the basin tied to large-scale subsurface disposal of waste fluids from oil and gas operations.

The DFW Airport earthquakes began in 2008, as did high-volume wastewater injection of brine. Most of the seismic activity occurred in the first two months after injection began, primarily within .62 miles, or 1 kilometer, from the well. Other clusters then migrated further to the northeast of the well over the next seven years. The quakes were triggered on a pre-existing regional fault that trends 3.7 miles, or 6 kilometers, northeast to southwest.

Ogwari, a post-doctoral researcher in the SMU Roy M. Huffington Earth Sciences Department in Dedman College, analyzed years of existing seismic data from the region to take a deeper look at the DFW Airport sequence, which totaled 412 earthquakes through 2015.

Looking at the data for those quakes, Ogwari discovered that they had continued for at least seven years into 2015 along 80% of the fault, even though injection was stopped after only 11 months in August of 2009.

Rate of quakes declined, but magnitude has never lessened
In another important finding from the study, Ogwari found that the magnitude of the DFW Airport earthquakes didn’t lessen over time, but instead held steady. Magnitude ranged from 0.5 to 3.4, with the largest one occurring three years after injection at the well was stopped.

“What we’ve seen here is that the magnitude is consistent over time within the fault,” Ogwari said. “We expect to see the bigger events during injection or immediately after injection, followed by abrupt decay. But instead we’re seeing the fault continue to produce earthquakes with similar magnitudes that we saw during injection.”

While the rate of earthquakes declined — there were 23 events a month from 2008 to 2009, but only 1 event a month after May 2010 — the magnitude stayed the same. That indicates the fault doesn’t heal completely.

“We don’t know why that is,” Ogwari said. “I think that’s a question that is out there and may need more research.”

More monitoring needed for human-induced quakes
Answering that question, and others, about the complex characteristics and behavior of faults and earthquakes, requires more extensive monitoring than is currently possible given the funding allotted to monitor quakes.

Monitoring the faults involves strategically placed stations that “listen” and record waves of intense energy echoing through the ground, DeShon said.

The Fort Worth Basin includes the Barnett shale, a major gas producing geological formation, atop the deep Ellenberger formation used for wastewater storage, which overlays a granite basement layer. The ancient Airport fault system extends through all units.

Friction prevented the fault from slipping for millions of years, but in 2008 high volumes of injected wastewater disturbed the Airport fault. That caused the fault to slip, releasing stored-up energy in waves. The most powerful waves were “felt” as the earth shaking.

“The detailed physical equations relating wastewater processes to fault processes is still a bit of a question,” DeShon said. “But generally the favored hypothesis is that the injected fluid changes the pressure enough to change the ratio of the downward stress to the horizontal stresses, which allows the fault to slip.”

Earthquakes in North Texas were unheard of until 2008, so when they began to be felt, seismologists scrambled to install monitors. When the quakes died down, the monitoring stations were removed.

“As it stands now, we miss the beginning of the quakes. The monitors are removed when the earthquakes stop being felt,” DeShon said. “But this study tells us that there’s more to it than the ‘felt’ earthquakes. We need to know how the sequences start, and also how they end. If we’re ever going to understand what’s happening, we need the beginning, the middle — and the end. Not just the middle, after they are felt.”

Innovative method tapped for studying earthquake activity
Monitors the SMU team installed at the DFW Airport were removed when seismic activity appeared to have died down in 2009.

Ogwari hypothesized he could look at historical data from distant monitoring stations still in place to extract information and document the history of the DFW Airport earthquakes.

The distant stations are a part of the U.S. permanent network monitored and maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey. The nearest one is 152 miles, 245 kilometers, away.

Earthquake waveforms, like human fingerprints, are unique. Ogwari used the local station monitoring data to train software to identify DFW earthquakes on the distant stations. Ogwari took each earthquake’s digital fingerprint and searched through years of data, cross-correlating waveforms from both the near and regional stations and identified the 412 DFW Airport events.

“The earthquakes are small, less than magnitude three,” DeShon said. “So on the really distant stations it’s like searching for a needle in a haystack, sifting them from all the other tiny earthquakes happening all across the United States.”

Each path is unique for every earthquake, and seismologists record each wave’s movement up and down, north to south, and east to west. From that Ogwari analyzed the evolution of seismicity on the DFW airport fault over space and time. He was able to look at data from the distant monitors and find seismic activity at the airport as recent as 2015.

“Earthquakes occurring close in space usually have a higher degree of similarity,” Ogwari said. “As the separation distance increases the similarity decreases.”

To understand the stress on the fault, the researchers also modeled the location and timing of the pressure in the pores of the rock as the injected water infiltrated.

For the various earthquake clusters, the researchers found that pore pressure increased along the fault at varying rates, depending on how far the clusters were from the injection well, the rate and timing of injection, and hydraulic permeability of the fault.

The analysis showed pore-pressure changes to the fault from the injection well where the earthquakes started in 2008; at the location of the May 2010 quakes along the fault; and at the northern edge of the seismicity.

Will the DFW Airport fault continue to slip and trigger earthquakes?

“We don’t know,” Ogwari said. “We can’t tell how long it will continue. SMU and TexNet, the Texas Seismic Network, continue to monitor both the DFW Airport faults and other faults in the Basin.” — Margaret Allen, SMU

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Study: Cells of three aggressive cancers annihilated by drug-like compounds that reverse chemo failure

Wet-lab experiments confirm the accuracy of an earlier computational discovery that three drug-like compounds successfully penetrate micro-tumors of advanced cancers to aid chemo in destroying the cancer.

Researchers at Southern Methodist University have discovered three drug-like compounds that successfully reverse chemotherapy failure in three of the most commonly aggressive cancers — ovarian, prostate and breast.

The molecules were first discovered computationally via high-performance supercomputing. Now their effectiveness against specific cancers has been confirmed via wet-lab experiments, said biochemistry professors Pia Vogel and John G. Wise, who led the study.

Wise and Vogel report the advancement in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.

The computational discovery was confirmed in the Wise-Vogel labs at SMU after aggressive micro-tumors cultured in the labs were treated with a solution carrying the molecules in combination with a classic chemotherapy drug. The chemotherapy drug by itself was not effective in treating the drug-resistant cancer.

“Nature designs all cells with survival mechanisms, and cancer cells are no exception,” said Vogel, a professor in the SMU Department of Biological Sciences and director of SMU’s Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery. “So it was incredibly gratifying that we were able to identify molecules that can inhibit that mechanism in the cancer cells, thereby bolstering the effectiveness of chemotherapeutic drugs. We saw the drugs penetrate these resistant cancer cells and allow chemotherapy to destroy them. While this is far from being a developed drug that will be available on the market anytime soon, this success in the lab gives us hope for developing new drugs to fight cancer.”

The current battle to defeat cancer is thwarted by chemotherapy failure in advanced cancers. Cancer cells initially treated with chemotherapy drugs ultimately evolve to resist the drugs. That renders chemotherapy ineffective, allowing cancers to grow and spread.

Key to cancer cell resistance are often certain proteins typically found in all cells — cancerous or otherwise — that are outfitted with beneficial mechanisms that pump away toxins to ensure a cell’s continued survival. Nature has set it up that these pumps are prevalent throughout the body, with some areas naturally having more of the pumps than others.

“The cancer cell itself can use all these built-in defenses to protect it from the kinds of things we’re using to try to kill it with,” Wise said.

The most common of these beneficial defense mechanisms is a pump protein, P-glycoprotein or P-gp, as it’s called. Another is one seen in breast and many other cancers, called breast cancer resistance protein, BCRP. In the case of cancer cells on the first round of treatment, these pumps are typically not produced in high levels in the cells, which allows chemotherapy to enter most of the cells in the tumor. This often gives what looks like a good result.

Unfortunately, in the cancer cells that don’t die, the chemotherapeutic often changes the cell, which then adapts to protect itself by aggressively multiplying the production of its defensive pumps.

Upon subsequent rounds of chemo, the P-gp and BCRP pumping mechanisms have proliferated. They effectively resist the chemotherapy, which now is much less successful, or not successful at all.

“if enough of the pumps are present, the cancer isn’t treatable anymore,” said Wise, associate professor in the SMU Department of Biological Sciences. Researchers in the field have searched unsuccessfully for compounds to inhibit the pumps that could be used in the clinic as well.

The molecules that Wise and Vogel discovered stopped the pumps.

“They effectively bring the cancer cells back to a sensitivity as if they’d never seen chemotherapy before,” said Vogel. “And our data indicated the molecules aren’t cancer specific. They can be used to treat all kinds of cancers because they inhibit not just the P-gp pump, but also the breast cancer protein pump.”

To test the compounds, the researchers used amounts of chemotherapeutic that would not kill these multi-drug resistant cancers if the pumps were not blocked.

“We wanted to make sure when using these really aggressive cancers that if we do knock out the pump, that the chemotherapy goes in there and causes the cell to die, so it doesn’t just stop it temporarily,” Wise said. “We spent a fair amount of time proving that point. It turns out that when a cell dies it goes through very predictable morphological changes. The DNA gets chopped up into small pieces, and we can see that, and so the nucleus becomes fragmented, and we can see that. Under the microscope, with proper staining, you can actually see that these highly drug-resistant prostate cancer cells, for example, are dead.”

The Scientific Reports article, “Targeted inhibitors of P-glycoprotein increase chemotherapeutic-induced mortality of multidrug resistant tumor cells,” is available open access at this link.

Other co-authors are SMU Ph.D. doctoral candidate Amila K. Nanayakkara, and Courtney A. Follit and Gang Chen, all in the SMU Department of Biological Sciences; and Noelle S. Williams, Department of Biochemistry, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas.

Getting at the heart of the problem
Unique to the experiment is that the molecules were also tested on three-dimensional micro-tumors. That is a departure from the usual cell-culture experiments, which are a two-dimensional film.

In two-dimensional experiments, every cell is exposed to the chemotherapeutic because the film is just one layer of cells thick. That method ignores one of the key challenges to reversing tumors — how to get drugs into the middle of a tumor, not just on its surface.

“We show that with the help of our inhibitor compounds, we actually make the tumor penetrable to chemotherapeutic,” Vogel said. “We can kill the cells in the middle of the tumor.”

A pathway to personalized medical treatments
Chemotherapy’s harmful side effects on non-cancerous organs is well-known. The discovery of molecules that target a specific pump may mitigate that problem.

A patient’s tumor can be sampled to see which pump is causing the drug resistance. Then the molecule that knocks out that specific pump can be added to the chemotherapy.

“That means you don’t open the door wide to toxins in the central nervous system,” Wise said. “That has some real implications for the future and for personalized medicine. In most of the previous clinical trials, inhibitors have opened the brain up to toxins. From what we can tell so far, our inhibitors do not increase the toxicity of chemotherapeutics in normal cells.”

An audacious discovery
P-gp is present in one form or another in everything that lives.

“It’s in your dog, it’s in your cat, it’s in yeast cells, it’s in bacteria, it’s everywhere,” Wise said. “Why is it everywhere? Because it’s a really wonderful solution to the problem of getting toxins out of a cell. P-gp is a tremendously sophisticated evolutionary solution to that problem. And as with most things in biology that work well, everybody gets it, because if you don’t have it, you didn’t survive.”

Biologists say that P-gp can pump out 95 of 100 chemotherapeutics, indicating it can grab almost any drug and throw it out of a cell.

“So there’s a certain audacity to say that we can use a computer and target one part of this protein — the motor — and totally avoid the part of the protein that has evolved to pump almost anything that looks like a drug out of the cell,” Wise said. “That’s an audacious claim and the findings surprised us.”

In their computational and wet-lab experiments, Wise and Vogel searched for molecules that inhibit ATP hydrolysis — the chemical energy reaction that powers the P-gp pump.

“We targeted the motor of the pump instead of the pump part of the pump because almost all the clinical trial failures in other studies were actually compounds that targeted the pump part of the pump — and they would just slow down the pumping of the chemotherapeutic,” Vogel said. “The time was ripe to do these structural models. We hypothesized that we could completely avoid the pumping mechanism and just target the motor.”

Computational method highly predictive
The wet-lab experiments confirmed the accuracy of the computational findings, Vogel said.

“The predictiveness of the computational methods was really high,” she said. “It completely exceeded my expectations. We had selected certain molecules that were predicted in those computational experiments to interact with the pump in certain ways and not in others, and we could show in our wet-lab experiments that the predictions were spot on.”

Fascinated by the novel approach to the research, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences funded much of the research.

Wise and Vogel tapped the high-performance computing power of SMU’s Maneframe, one of the most powerful academic supercomputers in the nation. Wise sorted through 15 million commercially available drug-like compounds made publically available in digital form from the pharmacology database Zinc at the University of California, San Francisco.

Then, again using ManeFrame, Wise ran the compounds through a computer-generated model of P-gp. The virtual model, designed and built by Wise, is the first computational microscope of its kind to simulate the actual behavior of P-gp in the human body, including interactions with drug-like compounds while taking on different shapes. He reported the dynamic functioning of the model in 2015 in the journal Biochemistry in “Multiple drug transport pathways through human P-glycoprotein.”

Process of elimination finds needle in the haystack
Out of 15 million drug-like compounds that were virtually screened, the researchers found 180,000 that in the computer were predicted to interact strongly with the ATP harvesting power plant part of the pump motor. From those, Wise and Vogel eliminated the ones that interact well with the pump part. Roughly 0.15 percent survived — several hundred.

“So that tells you how promiscuous that binding site is for compounds,” Wise said.

From there, they bought and tested in the lab a number of the remaining molecules.

“It was a process of elimination,” Vogel said. “Of the first 38 we tested, we found four. And because of the computational approach we took, it made failure relatively cheap. This is proof of principle that at least in those cases the compounds behave exactly in the lab as predicted in the computer. Which thrills the heck out of me — I never, ever would have thought that.”

The Vogel and Wise research labs are part of the Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery in SMU’s Dedman College. The center’s mission is a novel multi-disciplinary focus for scientific research targeting medically important problems in human health. — Margaret Allen, SMU

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Female students exposed briefly to charismatic career women are inspired to pursue male-dominated field

Easy, inexpensive experiment briefly sent inspiring female role models into intro to econ classes and sharply increased college female interest in the male-dominated, well-paying field of economics.

A low-budget field experiment to tackle the lack of women in the male-dominated field of economics has been surprisingly effective, says the study’s author, an economist at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

Top female college students were inspired to pursue a major in economics when exposed very briefly to charismatic, successful women in the field, according to SMU economist Danila Serra.

The results suggest that exposing young women to an inspiring female role model succeeds due to the mix of both information and pure inspiration, Serra said.

“The specific women who came and talked to the students were key to the success of the intervention,” she said. “It was a factor of how charismatic and enthusiastic they were about their careers and of how interesting their jobs looked to young women.”

Given the simplicity and low-cost of the intervention, similar experiments could be easily conducted in other male-dominated or female-dominated fields of study to enhance gender diversity.

Serra’s results showed that among female students exposed to the enthusiastic mentors there was a 12-percentage point increase in the percentage of female students enrolling in the upper-level Intermediate Microeconomics course the following year — a 100% increase, or doubling, for that demographic.

Not surprisingly, given that the intervention was targeted to female students, Serra found that the role model visits had no impact on male students.

But astonishingly it had the greatest impact on high-achieving female students.

“If we restrict the analysis to the top female students, the students with a GPA of 3.7 or higher, the impact is remarkable — it is a 26 percentage points increase,” Serra said. “So this intervention was especially impactful on the top female students who perhaps were not thinking about majoring in economics.”

The results were very surprising to Serra, an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Economics in Dedman College who teaches the upper-level class Behavioral and Experimental Economics. Serra’s research relies on laboratory and field experiments, a relatively new methodology in the field of economics. She launched and is co-leader of the Laboratory for Research in Experimental Economics at SMU.

“I didn’t think such limited exposure would have such a large impact,” Serra said. “So this is telling me that one of the reasons we see so few women in certain fields is that these fields have been male-dominated for so long. This implies that it is very difficult for a young woman to come into contact with a woman in the field who has an interesting job in the eyes of young women and is enthusiastic about her major and her work. Young men, on the other hand, have these interactions all the time because there are so many male economics majors out there.”

Co-author on the research is Catherine Porter, associate professor of economics at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, and Serra’s former Ph.D. classmate at the University of Oxford.

“The gender imbalance in economics has been in the news a lot lately, and much of the discussion has been very negative,” said Porter. “This study offers something positive: a cheap way of improving the gender balance. The results can hopefully be used by other schools in order to redress the low numbers of women that major in economics – women have a lot to offer and should consider economics as a subject that is interesting and varied for a career.”

Serra reported the findings, “Gender differences in the choice of major: The importance of female role models,” on Jan. 6 in Philadelphia at the 2018 annual meeting of the Allied Social Sciences Association. Hers is one of many findings on gender and gender differences in economics presented at a session organized by the Committee for the Status of Women in the Economics Profession.

Inspiring the individual is the best tool to recruit and retain
Serra launched the study after SMU was one of 20 U.S. universities randomly chosen by Harvard economics professor Claudia Goldin for the Undergraduate Women in Economics Challenge. The project awarded each university a $12,500 grant to develop a program freely chosen by the universities to test the effectiveness of a deliberate intervention strategy to recruit and retain female majors.

Nationally, there’s only about one woman for every three men majoring in economics. SMU has a large number of economics majors for a school of its size, with 160 a year. The gender imbalance, however, is greater at SMU than the national average, with only one woman to every four men.

Serra developed her intervention based on her own experience as a Ph.D. student at the University of Oxford several years ago.

“I started thinking about role models from my personal experience,” Serra said. “As a student, I had met many female professors in the past, but my own experience taught me that inspiration is not about meeting any female professor — it’s about meeting that one person that has a huge charisma and who is highly inspiring and speaks to you specifically.”

Serra said that’s what she experienced as a graduate researcher when she first met Professor Abigail Barr, who later became her Ph.D. advisor.

“I know for a fact that that is why I decided to do a Ph.D. in economics, because I was greatly inspired by this person, her experiences and her research,” she said. “So I thought it would be interesting to see whether the same could work for a general student population.”

Two inspiring women role models, 15 minutes, four classrooms
Serra asked two of her department’s top undergraduate female economics students to take the lead in choosing the role models.

The students, Tracy Nelson and Emily Towler, sorted through rosters of SMU economics alums and shortlisted 18 men and women that they thought were working in interesting fields – which purposely excluded stereotypical jobs in banking and finance – and then carried out scripted interviews with a subset of who agreed to be interviewed via Skype to get additional information about their career path and to assess their charisma.

The students ultimately found two alumnae, Julie Lutz and Courtney Thompson, to be the most inspiring. Lutz, a 2008 graduate, started her career in management consulting but, shortly after, decided to completely change her career path by going to work for an international NGO in Nicaragua, and then as a director of operations at a toy company based in Honduras. Lutz now works in Operations at a fast-growing candy retail company. Courtney Thompson, class of 1991, has had a stellar career in marketing, becoming the senior director of North American Marketing and Information Technology at a large international communications company, with the unique claim of being not only a female econ major at a time when that was exceedingly rare, but also African American in a white dominated field.

Serra invited each woman to speak during the Spring 2016 semester for 10 to 15 minutes to four Principals of Economics classes that she had randomly selected from a set of 10. The Principles classes are very popular, with about 700 students total from a variety of desired majors, and are typically gender balanced. The imbalance, said Serra, starts the following year with Intermediate Microeconomics, which is a requirement for upper-level economics courses and so is a good indicator of a desire to major in economics.

Serra offered each role model an honorarium for speaking, but each woman declined and indicated they were happy to be back on campus sharing with students. Serra told the speakers nothing of the purpose of the research project, but encouraged each one to explain to the class why they majored in economics and to be very engaging. She directed them to approach the students with the following question in mind: “If you had to convince a student to major in economics, what would you say?”

Thompson, Serra said, during her college days played SMU’s costumed Peruna mascot, and today retains a “bubbly, big personality, that makes her extremely engaging.” In her classroom visits, Thompson described her experience working and being extremely successful in marketing with an economics degree, while being surrounded by business majors. Lutz, being still in her 20s, was very easy for the young women in the classrooms to identify with, and her experience working in the non-profit and in developing countries may have been especially appealing to them.

Young women judge best who will inspire them
Serra believes that a key to the success of the intervention was the fact her two female economics students actively participated in the selection of the role models.

“The most important thing about the project was that I realized I needed current female students to choose the role models,” Serra said. “I’m not that young anymore, so I’m probably not the best person to recognize what is inspiring to young women. I think young female students are in the best position to tell us what is most inspiring to them.”

In November the directors and officers of the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics honored Serra as the inaugural recipient of the $50,000 Vernon L. Smith Ascending Scholar Prize. The Smith Prize is described by the foundation as a “budding genius” award.

For her highly cited corruption research, Serra uses lab experiments to study bribery, governance and accountability, questioning long-standing assumptions. Some of her findings are that corruption declines as perpetrators take into account social costs of their illegal activities, and as victims share information about specific bribery exchanges through online reporting. Serra’s current research agenda also includes experimental work on gender differences in preferences, behaviors and outcomes. — Margaret Allen, SMU

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Exploring the mysteries of the universe: Reality in the Shadows

New knowledge has caused us to reconsider many previous conclusions about what the universe is and how it works.

Despite centuries of scientific advancements, there is much about the universe that remains unknown. New knowledge and discoveries in the last 20 years have challenged previously accepted ideas and theories that were once regarded as scientific truth and have subjected them to increasing scrutiny.

These additions to our knowledge have caused scientists to reconsider many previous conclusions about what the universe is and how it works.

“Reality in the Shadows”” or “What the Heck’s the Higgs?” is a new book that explores the concepts that shape our current understanding of the universe and the frontiers of our knowledge of the cosmos.

The authors — two physicists and an engineer — tell us in a manner that non-scientists can readily follow, why studies have moved to superstring theory/M-theory, ideas about extra dimensions of space, and ideas about new particles in nature to find answers. It also explores why these ideas are far from established as accurate descriptions of reality.

“Our book explains how we know what we know about the universe, what we don’t know, and what we wish we did know,” said co-author Stephen Sekula, an associate professor of Physics at SMU. A physicist, Sekula conducts research into the Higgs Boson at the energy frontier on CERN’s ATLAS Experiment.

The book was initiated by Frank Blitzer, an engineer who participated on national space programs like Apollo and Patriot, several years ago, Sekula said. He was joined by co-author S. James Gates Jr., well known for his work on supersymmetry, supergravity and superstring theory, a few years ago.

“Frank and Jim sought additional input to help complete the book, and serendipitously Frank’s grandson, Ryan, was an SMU undergraduate and Hunt Scholar who helped connect them to me,” Sekula said. “After over an additional year of work, the book was completed.”

The foundations of modern physics rest on ideas that are over 100 years old and battle-tested, Sekula said.

“But nature has offered us new puzzles that have not yet been successfully explained by those ideas,” he added. “Perhaps we don’t yet have the right idea, or perhaps we haven’t searched deep enough into the cosmos. These are exciting times, with opportunities for a new generation of physicists who might crack these puzzles. Our book will help a curious reader to see the way in which knowledge was established, and encourage them to be engaged in solving the new mysteries.”

“Reality in the Shadows,” available through YBK Publishers, describes how humanity came to learn the workings of the universe as groundwork for the science that found the Higgs particle. Now scientists are hunting for the explanations for dark matter and the accelerated expansion of the cosmos, as well as for the many new questions the Higgs Boson itself has raised.

Scientists have recently discovered colliding black holes and neutron stars, that there is more non-luminous matter (dark matter) in the universe than the ordinary stuff of everyday life, and that the universe seems to grow larger each second at a faster and faster rate. Readers will learn how scientists discern such features of the universe and begin to see how to think beyond what is known to what is not yet known.

Throughout the book are descriptions of important developments in theoretical physics that lead the reader to a step-by-step understanding.

Sekula teaches physics and conducts research at ATLAS. He contributed to the measurement of decay modes of the Higgs boson and to the measurement of its spin-parity quantum numbers. Complementary to these efforts, he has worked with colleagues on the ATLAS Experiment to search for additional Higgs bosons in nature, providing intellectual leadership and direct involvement in several searches.

Gates was named 2014 “Scientist of the Year” by the Harvard Foundation. He was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in 2013 and received the 2013 National Medal of Science, the highest recognition given to scientists by the United States.

Gates has been featured on many TV documentary programs on physics, including “The Elegant Universe,” “Einstein’s Big Idea,” “Fabric of the Cosmos” and “The Hunt for the Higgs.” His DVD series, “Superstring Theory: The DNA of Reality,” makes the complexities of unification theory comprehensible.

Blitzer has more than 50 years of experience in engineering, program management, and business development and participated on national space programs, and The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), holding several patents in guidance and control. He has spent more than 20 years in independent research of the subject of the book.

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Daily Planet: Star Wars come to life in SMU chemist’s invention

Long ago, sort of, scenes from Star Wars triggered a child’s imagination, so that today it’s informed one of his research goals as a chemist.

Discover Canada’s science magazine show Daily Planet reported on the research of SMU organic chemist Alex Lippert, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry in SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.

Lippert’s team develops synthetic organic compounds that glow in reaction to certain conditions. He led his lab in developing a new technology that uses photoswitch molecules to craft 3-D light structures — not holograms — that are viewable from 360 degrees. An economical method for shaping light into an infinite number of volumetric objects, the technology will be useful in a variety of fields, from biomedical imaging, education and engineering, to TV, movies, video games and more.

For biomedical imaging, Lippert says the nearest-term application of the technique might be in high-volume pre-clinical animal imaging, but eventually the technique could be applied to provide low-cost internal imaging in the developing world, or less costly imaging in the developed world.

The Daily Planet segment aired Dec. 12, 2017.

Lippert’s lab includes four doctoral students and five undergraduates who assist in his research. He recently received a prestigious National Science Foundation Career Award, expected to total $611,000 over five years, to fund his research into alternative internal imaging techniques.

NSF Career Awards are given to tenure-track faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research in American colleges and universities.

Lippert joined SMU in 2012. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, and Bachelor of Science at the California Institute of Technology.

Watch the full Dec. 12 show.

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SMU economist wins $50,000 “budding genius” prize with highly cited corruption research

Serra questioned long-standing assumptions; found corruption declines as perpetrators take into account social costs of their illegal activities, and as victims share information about specific bribery exchanges through online reporting systems.

Guilt and shame play a role in reducing bribery, according to research by economist Danila Serra, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

As an economist who has studied bribery behavior extensively, Serra has discovered that bribery declines if potentially corrupt agents are made aware of the negative effects of corruption, and when victims can share specific information about bribe demands through online reporting systems.

An assistant professor in the SMU Department of Economics, Serra’s research methodology is unique — relying on lab experiments in which players gain and lose real money. Her work is frequently cited by other researchers studying the field of bribery.

In November the directors and officers of the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics honored Serra as the inaugural recipient of the $50,000 Vernon L. Smith Ascending Scholar Prize. The Smith Prize is described by the foundation as a “budding genius” award.

“Dr. Serra’s accomplishments have marked her as an ascending scholar, teacher, mentor and colleague of exceptional promise,” said a statement from the foundation.

The prize is named for Nobel Laureate Vernon L. Smith, considered the father of experimental economics. It aims to build on his legacy and inspire recipients, early on in their careers, to set the loftiest possible goals for themselves as social-science theorists, practitioners, colleagues, mentors and truth seekers, the foundation said.

Serra’s interest in understanding bribery transformed in 2005 when she became frustrated by measurement problems and the difficulty of finding good data. Her goal was to identify and understand the causes of corruption, and in particular whether non-monetary motivations, social norms and culture play any role in corruption decision-making. During her Ph.D. work at the University of Oxford, economist Abigail Barr exposed Serra to lab experiments, a relatively new methodology for the field of economics.

“I was always interested in corruption. As soon as I discovered the field of experimental economics I decided to design and implement bribery experiments,” Serra said. “I recreate the situation I want to study in a laboratory setting, employing real monetary incentives, which we provide, and with scenarios where the subjects can make corruption decisions that increase their money at the expense of other players. The play is anonymous and they get to bring home the money they earn in the experimental setting.”

Corruption isn’t purely about money
The focus of Serra’s research sharpened further when she began to question the root assumption that guilt and shame don’t play a role in bribery. She found in laboratory experiments that the intrinsic costs of guilt and shame do matter, and that corruption isn’t purely a matter of money.

She found that corruption declines when potentially corrupt agents are made aware of the negative impact of their actions, and when bottom-up anti-corruption mechanisms are in place, such as victims sharing specific information about bribe demands. Serra also found evidence of a significant relationship between corruption and culture.

“In one of my early studies, I employed a sample of international students at the University of Oxford and found among undergraduate students that the level of corruption in their home country predicts their propensity to engage in corruption in my bribery experiment,” she said.

“This is what we’d expect, they have internalized corrupt norms,” Serra said. “But the surprising result is that this wasn’t true for graduate students. We concluded that graduate students do not conform to the prevailing social norms of their home countries and, possibly, they want to distance themselves from such norms.”

Serra’s research has produced 12 papers on bribery and she has edited a book about experimental research on corruption. Her work on corruption has been cited hundreds of times by other researchers in the field. She has also investigated issues related to governance, public service provision and bottom-up accountability in developing countries. More recently, she has embarked on new research exploring gender differences in behaviors and outcomes in a variety of contexts, including students’ choices of major.

Serra launched and is co-leader of the Laboratory for Research in Experimental Economics at SMU’s Economics Department in the Dedman College of Humanities & Sciences.

The Vernon L. Smith Ascending Prize for Serra is a major professional recognition of the profound impact of her pioneering research in the area of experimental public economics and in particular on the understanding of corruption and other forms of rule breaking, said SMU economist Santanu Roy, chair of the SMU Department of Economics and University Distinguished Professor.

“She is one of the most cited economists of her generation,” Roy said. “The prize comes with a $50,000 award which, as far as I know, is the largest amount awarded as a prize for young economists. The fact that Dr. Serra was chosen to receive the inaugural prize named for the father of experimental economics tells us about the high expectations that her peers have about her future research productivity.”

Economics as an empirical discipline
The Smith Prize seeks to inspire early-career scholars to emulate Smith’s joyous zeal for scientific discovery. It may be used flexibly to advance social science in whatever manner a recipient chooses, the foundation said.

The prize is made possible through the Rasmuson Foundation and other contributors.

As a social scientist, Smith was committed to exploring theoretical foundations in economics, social science, and science generally; achievement in the form of quantifiable impacts in transforming economics into an experimental and more empirical discipline; collegiality in funding, mentoring, and collaborating with fellow scholars; and curiosity in looking beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries in search of truth.

“The International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics heartily congratulates Dr. Serra and looks forward to following her career in the years to come,” the statement said. — Margaret Allen, SMU

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Scientific American: Drilling Reawakens Sleeping Faults in Texas, Leads to Earthquakes

For 300 million years faults showed no activity, and then wastewater injections from oil and gas wells came along. Study authors took a different approach in the new work — they hunted for deformed faults below Texas.

Science journalist Anna Kuchment covered the landmark earthquake research of a team of SMU geophysicists led by SMU Associate Professor Beatrice Magnani in the SMU Department of Earth Sciences. Kuchment wrote Drilling Reawakens Sleeping Faults in Texas, Leads to Earthquakes for Scientific American.

The SMU researchers tapped seismic data to analyze earthquakes in Texas over the past decade.

The results of the analysis showed that human activity is causing the earthquakes as a result of movement in faults that have been silent for at least 300 million years, until recent injection of oil and gas wastewater.

The article by Kuchment, “Drilling Reawakens Sleeping Faults in Texas, Leads to Earthquakes,” published Nov. 24, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Anna Kuchment
Scientific American

Since 2008, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and a handful of other states have experienced unprecedented surges of earthquakes. Oklahoma’s rate increased from one or two per year to more than 800. Texas has seen a sixfold spike. Most have been small, but Oklahoma has seen several damaging quakes stronger than magnitude 5. While most scientists agree that the surge has been triggered by the injection of wastewater from oil and gas production into deep wells, some have suggested these quakes are natural, arising from faults in the crust that move on their own every so often. Now researchers have traced 450 million years of fault history in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and learned these faults almost never move. “There hasn’t been activity along these faults for 300 million years,” says Beatrice Magnani, a seismologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and lead author of a paper describing the research, published today in Science Advances. “Geologically, we usually define these faults as dead.”

Magnani and her colleagues argue that these faults would not have produced the recent earthquakes if not for wastewater injection. Pressure from these injections propagates underground and can disturb weak faults. The work is another piece of evidence implicating drilling in the quakes, yet the Texas government has not officially accepted the link to one of its most lucrative industries.

Magnani and her colleagues studied the Texas faults using images of the subsurface similar to ultrasound scans. Known as seismic reflection data, the images are created by equipment that generates sound waves and records the speeds at which the waves bounce off faults and different rock layers deep within the ground. Faults that have produced earthquakes look like vertical cracks in a brick wall, where one side of the wall has sunk down a few inches so the rows of bricks no longer line up. Scientists know the age of each rock layer—each row of bricks–based on previous studies that have used a variety of dating techniques.

Read the full story.

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The Washington Post: Oil and gas industry is causing Texas earthquakes, a ‘landmark’ study suggests

The study authors took a different approach in the new work — they hunted for deformed faults below Texas.

The Washington Post covered the landmark earthquake research of a team of SMU geophysicists led by SMU Associate Professor Beatrice Magnani in the SMU Department of Earth Sciences.

The researchers tapped seismic data to analyze earthquakes in Texas over the past decade.

The results of the analysis showed that human activity is causing the earthquakes as a result of movement in faults that have been silent for at least 300 million years, until recent injection of oil and gas wastewater.

The article by journalist Ben Guarino, “Oil and gas industry is causing Texas earthquakes, a ‘landmark’ study suggests,” published Nov. 24, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Ben Guarino
The Washington Post

An unnatural number of earthquakes hit Texas in the past decade, and the region’s seismic activity is increasing. In 2008, two earthquakes stronger than magnitude 3 struck the state. Eight years later, 12 did.

Natural forces trigger most earthquakes. But humans are causing earthquakes, too, with mining and dam construction the most frequent suspects. There has been a recent increase in natural gas extraction — including fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, but other techniques as well — which produces a lot of wastewater. To get rid of it, the water is injected deep into the ground. When wastewater works its way into dormant faults, the thinking goes, the water’s pressure nudges the ancient cracks. Pent-up tectonic stress releases and the ground shakes.

But for any given earthquake, it is virtually impossible to tell whether humans or nature triggered the quake. There are no known characteristics of a quake, not in magnitude nor in the shape of its seismic waves, that provide hints to its origins.

“It’s been a head-scratching period for scientists,” said Maria Beatrice Magnani, who studies earthquakes at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Along with a team of researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey, Magnani, an author of a new report published Friday in the journal Science Advances, attempted to better identify what has been causing the rash of Texas quakes.

A cluster of earthquakes around a drilling project can, at best, suggest a relationship. “The main approach has been to correlate the location to where there has been human activity,” said Michael Blanpied, a USGS geophysicist and co-author of the new study.

Read the full story.

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SMU seismology research shows North Texas earthquakes occurring on “dead” faults

Study by Beatrice Magnani, USGS and other SMU scientists shows recent seismicity in Fort Worth Basin occurred on faults not active for 300 million years

Recent earthquakes in the Fort Worth Basin — in the rural community of Venus and the Dallas suburb of Irving – occurred on faults that had not been active for at least 300 million years, according to research led by SMU seismologist Beatrice Magnani.

The research supports the assertion that recent North Texas earthquakes were induced, rather than natural – a conclusion entirely independent of previous analyses correlating seismicity to the timing of wastewater injection practices, but that corroborates those earlier findings.

The full study, “Discriminating between natural vs induced seismicity from long-term deformation history of intraplate faults,” was published online Nov. 24, 2017 by the journal Science Advances.

“To our knowledge this is the first study to discriminate natural and induced seismicity using classical structural geology analysis techniques,” said Magnani, associate professor of geophysics in SMU’s Huffington Department of Earth Sciences. Co-authors for the study include Michael L. Blanpied, associate coordinator of the USGS Earthquake Hazard program, and SMU seismologists Heather DeShon and Matthew Hornbach.

The results were drawn from analyzing the history of fault slip (displacement) over the lifetime of the faults. The authors analyzed seismic reflection data, which allow “mapping” of the Earth’s subsurface from reflected, artificially generated seismic waves. Magnani’s team compared data from the North Texas area, where several swarms of felt earthquakes have been occurring since 2008, to data from the Midwestern U.S. region that experienced major earthquakes in 1811 and 1812 in the New Madrid seismic zone.

Frequent small earthquakes are still recorded in the New Madrid seismic zone, which is believed to hold the potential for larger earthquakes in the future.

“These North Texas faults are nothing like the ones in the New Madrid Zone – the faults in the Fort Worth Basin are dead,” Magnani said. “The most likely explanation for them to be active today is because they are being anthropogenically induced to move.”

In the New Madrid seismic zone, the team found that motion along the faults that are currently active has been occurring over many millions of years. This has resulted in fault displacements that grow with increasing age of sedimentary formations.

In the Fort Worth Basin, along faults that are currently seismically active, there is no evidence of prior motion over the past 300 million years.

“The study’s findings suggest that the recent Fort Worth Basin earthquakes, which involve swarms of activity on several faults in the region, have been induced by human activity,” said USGS scientist Blanpied.

The findings further suggest that these North Texas earthquakes are not simply happening somewhat sooner than they would have otherwise on faults continually active over long time periods. Instead, Blanpied said, the study indicates reactivation of long-dormant faults as a consequence of waste fluid injection.

Seismic reflection profiles in the Venus region used for this study were provided by the U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Program.

Seismic reflection profiles for the Irving area are proprietary. Magnani and another team of scientists collected seismic reflection data used for this research during a 2008-2011 project in the northern Mississippi embayment, home to the New Madrid seismic zone. — Kim Cobb, SMU

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Commerce Department selects scientific team to conduct independent abundance estimate of red snapper in Gulf of Mexico

The initiative addresses one of the most pressing issues currently facing U.S. Gulf of Mexico fisheries management, as the iconic red snapper supports one of the most economically valuable finfish fisheries in the Gulf.

An expert team of university and government scientists will determine the abundance of red snapper in the U.S. waters of the Gulf of Mexico, as availability of the fish is vital to the region’s economy.

“Red snapper have great economic value to all the gulf states,” said SMU statistician Lynne Stokes, a member of the team. “Maintaining the health of the species is vitally important, so it’s necessary to ensure species are fished at the right level.”

As an expert in surveys, polls and sampling, Stokes’ role in the project is to help design ways to sample the vast expanse of the gulf efficiently so that good estimates of abundance can be produced.

“The gulf is very diverse, and different sampling methods are needed for different habitats, which makes the sample design problem interesting,” said Stokes, a professor in the SMU Department of Statistical Science. “The cheapest way to collect data about the health of a marine fish species is by asking a sample of anglers about their catch. However, if fish are present in places where anglers are not, other methods are needed. There is some uncertainty about all the places red snapper exist in the gulf, so it is not known if catch-based methods provide accurate estimates of abundance.”

The project will obtain angler-independent data about red snapper abundance by sampling their potential habitat, Stokes said. The team will collect data on red snapper numbers by direct observation of a sample of transects on the sea bottom and structures on the sea floor, using remotely controlled video cameras. Stokes will help determine how extensive the observation must be.

The team of scientists was selected by an expert review panel convened by the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium to conduct the independent study.

“American communities across the Gulf of Mexico depend on their access to, as well as the long term sustainability of, red snapper,” said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. “I look forward to the insights this project will provide as we study and manage this valuable resource.”

Recreational anglers and commercial fishers will play a key role
The research team, made up of 21 scientists from 12 institutions of higher learning, a state agency and a federal agency, was awarded $9.5 million in federal funds for the project through a competitive research grant process. With matching funds from the universities, the project will total $12 million.

“We’ve assembled some of the best red snapper scientists around for this study,” said Greg Stunz, the project leader and a professor at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi. “The team members assembled through this process are ready to address this challenging research question. There are lots of constituents who want an independent abundance estimate that will be anxiously awaiting our findings.”

Recreational anglers and commercial fishers will be invited to play a key role in collecting data by tagging fish, reporting tags and working directly with scientists onboard their vessels.

“The local knowledge fishermen bring to this process is very valuable and meaningfully informs our study,” Stunz said.

Some stakeholder groups have expressed concerns that there are more red snapper in the Gulf than currently accounted for in the stock assessment. The team of scientists on this project will spend two years studying the issue.

In 2016, Congress directed the National Sea Grant College Program and NOAA Fisheries to fund independent red snapper data collections, surveys and assessments, including the use of tagging and advanced sampling technologies. Sea Grant and NOAA Fisheries worked collaboratively to transfer federal funds to Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant to administer the competitive research grant process and manage this independent abundance estimate.

“Today’s announcement is welcome news for all red snapper anglers in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama. “As Chairman of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies, I was proud to author and secure federal funding to address the need for better data, which is a fundamental issue plaguing the fishery. The management of red snapper must be grounded in sound science if we want to provide fair access and more days on the water for our anglers. It is my hope that these independent scientists will be able to accurately determine the abundance of red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico once and for all.”

Project team will determine abundance and distribution of red snapper
The research will be driven largely by university-based scientists with partners from state and federal agencies, Stunz said.

The funding will allow the scientists to carry out an abundance estimate using multiple sampling methods with a focus on advanced technologies and tagging for various habitat types, he said.

“I’m pleased to see that the independent estimate is moving forward and including the expertise of recreational fishermen,” said Rep. John Culberson of Texas. “I will continue to work with Texas fishermen and NOAA to address the inadequate access to red snapper.”

The project team will determine abundance and distribution of red snapper on artificial, natural and unknown bottom habitat across the northern Gulf of Mexico.

As a statistician chosen for the team, SMU’s Stokes is also an expert in non-sampling survey errors, such as errors by interviewers and respondents. She recently conducted research on evaluating the accuracy of contest judges and on improving estimates of marine fishery yields by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Stokes also contributes to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or “Nation’s Report Card,” examining the way schools and students are selected for the large study.

Besides SMU, others on the team include Texas A&M University, University of Florida, University of South Alabama, Louisiana State University, Florida International University, NOAA Fisheries, Auburn University, Mississippi State University, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, College of William and Mary, University of Southern Mississippi, and the University of South Florida. — Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant and Southern Methodist University

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Prehistoric puzzle settled: carbon dioxide link to global warming 22 million years ago

The modern link between high carbon dioxide levels and climate change didn’t appear to hold true for a time interval about 22 million years ago; but now a new study has found the link does indeed exist.

Fossil leaves from Africa have resolved a prehistoric climate puzzle — and also confirm the link between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and global warming.

Research until now has produced a variety of results and conflicting data that have cast doubt on the link between high carbon dioxide levels and climate change for a time interval about 22 million years ago.

But a new study has found the link does indeed exist for that prehistoric time period, say researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

The finding will help scientists understand how recent and future increases in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide may impact the future of our planet, say the SMU researchers.

The discovery comes from new biochemical analyses of fossil leaves from plants that grew on Earth 27 million years ago and 22 million years ago, said geologist Tekie Tesfamichael, lead scientist on the research.

The new analyses confirm research about modern climate — that global temperatures rise and fall with increases and decreases in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere — but in this case even in prehistoric times, according to the SMU-led international research team.

Carbon dioxide is a gas that is normally present in the Earth’s atmosphere, even millions of years ago. It’s dubbed a greenhouse gas because greater concentrations cause the overall temperature of Earth’s atmosphere to rise, as happens in a greenhouse with lots of sunlight.

Recently greenhouse gas increases have caused global warming, which is melting glaciers, sparking extreme weather variability and causing sea levels to rise.

The new SMU discovery that carbon dioxide behaved in the same manner millions of years ago that it does today has significant implications for the future. The finding suggests the pairing of carbon dioxide and global warming that is seen today also holds true for the future if carbon dioxide levels continue to rise as they have been, said Tesfamichael.

“The more we understand about the relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and global temperature in the past, the more we can plan for changes ahead,” said Tesfamichael, an SMU postdoctoral fellow in Earth Sciences.

“Previous work reported a variety of results and conflicting data about carbon dioxide concentrations at the two intervals of time that we studied,” he said. “But tighter control on the age of our fossils helped us to address whether or not atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration corresponded to warming — which itself is independently well-documented in geochemical studies of marine fossils in ocean sediments.”

The researchers reported their findings in Geology, the scientific journal of the Geological Society of America. The article is “Settling the issue of ‘decoupling’ between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature: [CO2]atm reconstructions across the warming Paleogene-Neogene divide.”

Co-authors from the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in Dedman College are professors Bonnie Jacobs, an expert in paleobotany and paleoclimate, and Neil J. Tabor, an expert in sedimentology and sedimentary geochemistry.

Other co-authors are Lauren Michel, Tennessee Technological University; Ellen Currano, University of Wyoming; Mulugeta Feseha, Addis Ababa University; Richard Barclay, Smithsonian Institution; John Kappelman, University of Texas; and Mark Schmitz, Boise State University.

Discovery of rare, well-preserved fossil leaves enables finding
The findings were possible thanks to the rare discovery of two sites with extraordinarily well-preserved fossil leaves of flowering plants from the Ethiopian Highlands of eastern Africa.

Such well-preserved fossil leaves are a rarity, Tesfamichael said.

“Finding two sites with great preservation in the same geographic region from two important time intervals was very fortunate, as this enabled us to address the question we had about the relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and global temperatures,” he said.

Scientists know that variations in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide affect carbon fixation in leaves during photosynthesis. This causes leaves to develop anatomical and physiological changes such as the frequency and size of stomata — the pores on the surface of a leaf through which carbon passes.

Scientists can measure those attributes, among others, in fossil leaves, so that leaf fossils can be used as proxies for Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide history.

The sites producing the leaves for the SMU study were discovered separately in years past, but major fossil collections were produced through field work coordinated by the SMU research team and their co-authors, who have been collaborating on this project for several years.

The work has had funding from the National Science Foundation, The National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration, the SMU Ford Fellowship Program, SMU Research Council, the Institute for the Study of Earth and Man, and the Dallas Paleontological Society Frank Crane Scholarship.

The fossils are housed permanently in the collections at the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa. Institutional and governmental support came from the National Museum of Ethiopia, the Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage, and Addis Ababa University.

Previous studies firmly established a temperature difference
One of the sites dates to the late Oligocene Epoch, and the other to the early Miocene.

Previous studies that measured ocean temperatures from around the world for the two intervals have firmly established a temperature difference on Earth between the two times, with one much warmer than the other. So the SMU study sought to measure the levels of carbon dioxide for the two time periods.

For the SMU analyses, fossil leaves of a single species were collected from the 27 million-year-old late Oligocene site. The leaves had been deposited during prehistoric times in the area of Chilga in northwest Ethiopia most likely at a river bank. The Earth’s climate during the late Oligocene may have been somewhat warmer than today, although glaciers were forming on Antarctica. The SMU study found carbon dioxide levels, on average, around 390 parts per million, about what it is on Earth today.

Fossil leaves of the 22 million-year-old species from the early Miocene were collected from ancient lake deposits, now a rock called shale, from the modern-day Mush Valley in central Ethiopia. The early Miocene climate at that time was warmer than the late Oligocene and likewise the SMU study found higher carbon dioxide levels. Atmospheric carbon dioxide was about 870 parts per million, double what it is on Earth today.

The SMU study confirmed a relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature during the late Oligocene and early Miocene.

Paleoclimate data can help predict our planet’s future climate
While carbon dioxide isn’t the only factor affecting Earth’s climate or global mean temperature, it is widely considered by scientists among the most significant. Much is known about climate change and global warming, but questions still remain.

“One of those is ‘What’s the sensitivity of the Earth’s temperature to carbon dioxide concentration? Is it very sensitive? Is it not so sensitive?’ Estimating temperature and carbon dioxide concentrations for times in the past can help find the answer to that question,” Jacobs said. “There’s a lot of work on paleoclimate in general, but not as much on the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature.”

The finding is an important one.

“The amount of temperature change during this interval is approximately within the range of the temperature change that is estimated from climate models for our next century given a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration since the industrial revolution,” Jacobs said.

With the new model reaffirming the prehistoric relationship, scientists can look now at related questions, said climate change scientist Lauren Michel, who worked on the study as a post-doctoral researcher at SMU.

“Answering questions about the rate of change and which factors changed first, for example, will ultimately give a clearer picture of the Earth’s climate change patterns,” Michel said. “I think it is valuable to understand the relationship of greenhouse gases and climate factors represented in the rock record so we can have a better idea of what we can expect in the future and how we can prepare for that.”

SMU study confirms relationship that previous methods overlooked
Previous studies found little to no correlation between temperature and carbon dioxide for the late Oligocene and early Miocene. That has puzzled paleoclimate researchers for at least a decade.

“We have a good test-case scenario with these well-preserved plants from both time slices, where we know one time slice, with higher levels of carbon dioxide, was a warmer climate globally than the other,” Tesfamichael said.

“It’s been a puzzle as to why the previous methods found no relationship, or an inverse correlation,” he said. “We think it’s for lack of the well-dated proxy — such as our fossil leaves from two precise times in the same region — which deliver a reliable answer. Or, perhaps the models themselves needed improvement.”

Previous studies used methodologies that differed from the SMU study, although all methods (proxies) incorporate some aspects of what is known about living organisms and how they interact with atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Some studies rely on biochemical modeling of the relationship between single-celled marine fossils and atmospheric carbon dioxide, and others rely on the relationship between stomata and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration observed in the living relatives of particular fossil plant species.

“Each method has its assumptions,” said Tesfamichael. “We will see if our results hold up with further studies of this time interval using the same methodology we used.” — Margaret Allen, SMU

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Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center awards first research grants to shape economic, migration policies

Research findings will be presented at the second annual Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center Symposium to be held in Mexico City April 6, 2018.

The Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center at SMU has awarded grants to four scholars from both sides of the border who aim to support the Center’s goal of providing policy-relevant, action-oriented research on the dynamic relationship between Texas and Mexico.

Findings from each of the four projects, selected by the Texas-Mexico Center’s Faculty Advisory Board, will be shared this spring, says Luisa del Rosal, executive director of the Center.

“This is a tremendous benefit to Dedman College, where so many faculty members research and teach about Texas and Mexico,” says SMU Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences Dean Thomas DiPiero. “This will help strengthen the social, economic and cultural ties between the two regions.”

The four projects are:

  • “Migration, Inequality & Public Policies in Mexico and the United States”
    Lead researcher: Colegio de Mexico President Silvia Giorguli, Mexico City
  • “Are Mexican and U.S. Workers Complements or Substitutes?”
    Lead researcher: Raymond Robertson, Helen and Roy Ryu Chair in Economics
    & Government, Texas A&M Bush School of Government & Public Service, College Station
  • “Institutions, Trade and Economic Prosperity: An Examination of the U.S. and Mexican States”
    Lead researcher: Dean Stansel, associate professor, O’Neil Center for Global Markets and Freedom, SMU Cox School of Business
  • “Slowdown in Mexico-U.S. Migration: Why is Texas Different?”
    Lead researcher: Colegio Tlaxcala President Alfredo Cuecuecha, Tlaxcala, Mexico

Grant recipient Stansel said his team will focus on the potential economic damage from a possible new regime of trade restrictions in the U.S.

“By examining the interconnected relationships between trade policy, trade volume and economic prosperity in the U.S. and Mexico,” he said, “we hope to provide insights into the importance of maintaining a system of relatively free trade.”

Research findings will be presented at the second annual Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center Symposium to be held in Mexico City April 6, 2018.

Three dozen applicants applied for the grants, which was “more than we expected for the first year,” says Javier Velez, vice-chair of the Texas-Mexico Center Executive Advisory Board and CEO of Mission Foods’ U.S. headquarters in Dallas.

“It was pleasing for us how much interest there is in effectively promoting and facilitating a better understanding of the relation between Texas and Mexico,” Velez said.

The Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center at SMU is dedicated to improving relations between Texas and Mexico through dialogue and research. It works to encourage greater cross-border integration and cross-sector collaboration in academia, government, non-governmental organizations and business. The Center strives to enhance a political dialogue to reshape the policies that govern the relationship between Texas and Mexico, focusing on five areas: trade and investment, energy, human capital and education, border issues and migration. — Denise Gee, SMU

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The CW33: Dark Matter Day rocks SMU’s campus

The CW33 TV visited SMU on Halloween to get a glimpse of International Dark Matter Day in action on the SMU campus.

The CW33 TV stopped at the SMU campus during the early morning hours of Halloween to interview SMU physics professor Jodi Cooley about the capers afoot in celebration of International Dark Matter Day.

The SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences hosted the Oct. 31, 2017 Dark Matter Day celebration for students, faculty, staff and Dallas-area residents.

As part of the festivities, there were speaking events by scientists in the field of dark matter, including dark matter expert Cooley, to explain the elusive particles that scientists refer to as dark matter.

Then throughout Halloween day, the public was invited to test their skills at finding dark matter — in this case, a series of 26 rocks bearing educational messages related to dark matter, which the Society of Physics Students had painted and hidden around the campus. Lucky finders traded them for prizes from the Physics Department.

“In the spirit of science being a pursuit open to all, we are excited to welcome all members of the SMU family to become dark matter hunters for a day,” said Cooley, whose research is focused on the scientific challenge of detecting dark matter. “Explore your campus in the search for dark matter rocks, just as physicists are exploring the cosmos in the hunt for the nature of dark matter itself.”

Watch the full news segment.

EXCERPT:

By Shardae Neal
The CW33

On Halloween (excuse us) “International Dark Matter Day,” SMU students hosted a public witch hunt to search for the unknown: dark matter.

“What we’re doing is hiding 26 rocks that we have with the help of our society of physic students,” explained SMU Physicist Jodi Cooley.

What exactly is dark matter?

“Think about all the stuff there is in the universe,” Cooley added. “What we can account for makes up only four to five percent of the universe. The rest of it is unknown. Turns out 26% of that unknown stuff is dark matter.”

Watch the full news segment.

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SMU Dark Matter Day celebration culminates in a dark matter rock hunt on Halloween

“In the spirit of science being a pursuit open to all, we are excited to welcome all members of the SMU family to become dark matter hunters for a day.” — SMU physicist Jodi Cooley

This Halloween, people around the world will be celebrating the mysterious cosmic substance that permeates our universe: dark matter.

At SMU, the Department of Physics in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences is hosting a Dark Matter Day celebration, and students, faculty, staff and DFW residents are invited to join in the educational fun with events open to the public.

To kick off the festivities, two speaking events by scientists in the field of dark matter will familiarize participants with the elusive particles that scientists refer to as dark matter. The first talk is oriented toward the general public, while the second is more technical and will appeal to people familiar with one of the STEM areas of science, technology, engineering or mathematics, particularly physics and astrophysics.

Then throughout Halloween day, everyone is invited to test their skills at finding dark matter — in this case, a series of rocks bearing educational messages related to dark matter, which the Society of Physics Students has painted and then hidden around the campus.

Anyone lucky enough to find one of the 26 rocks can present it at the Physics Department office to receive a prize, says SMU physics professor Jodi Cooley, whose research is focused on the scientific challenge of detecting dark matter.

“In the spirit of science being a pursuit open to all, we are excited to welcome all members of the SMU family to become dark matter hunters for a day,” Cooley said. “Explore your campus in the search for dark matter rocks, just as physicists are exploring the cosmos in the hunt for the nature of dark matter itself.”

Anyone who discovers a dark matter rock on the SMU campus is encouraged to grab their phone and snap a selfie with their rock. Tweet and tag your selfie #SMUDarkMatter so that @SMU, @SMUResearch and @SMUPhysics can retweet photos of the lucky finders.

As SMU’s resident dark matter scientist, Cooley is part of the 100-person international SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment, which uses ultra pure materials and highly sensitive custom-built detectors to listen for the passage of dark matter.

SuperCDMS, an acronym for Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, resides at SNOLAB, an existing underground science laboratory in Ontario, Canada. Located deep underground, SNOLAB allows scientists to use the earth as a shield to block out particles that resemble dark matter, making it easier to see the real thing.

The SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment, expected to be operational in 2020, has been designed to go deeper below the surface of the earth than earlier generations of the research.

“Dark matter experiments have been a smashing success — they’ve progressed farther than anyone anticipated. The SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment is quite unique,” Cooley said. “It will allow us to probe models that predict dark matter with the tiniest masses.”

For more on Cooley’s research, go to “Hunt for dark matter takes physicists deep below earth’s surface, where WIMPS can’t hide. — Margaret Allen, SMU

Dark Matter Day events at SMU:

  • Sunday, Oct. 29, 4 p.m., McCord Auditorium — Maruša Bradač, Associate Professor at the University of California at Davis, will give a public lecture on dark matter. A reception will follow the lecture from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. in the Dallas Hall Rotunda with beverages and light snacks. This event is free and open to the public, and is designed to be open to the widest possible audience.
  • Monday, Oct. 30, 4 p.m., Fondren Science Building, Room 158 — SMU Associate Professor Jodi Cooley will present a seminar on the SuperCDMS direct-detection dark matter search experiment. This event is part of the Physics Department Speaker Series. While this event is open to the public, it will be a more technical talk and may appeal more to an audience interested in the STEM areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, especially physics and astrophysics.
  • Tuesday, Oct. 31, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m., SMU Main Campus, Dark Matter Rock Hunt — The SMU Department of Physics has hidden “dark matter rocks” all across the SMU main campus. If you discover one of the dark matter rocks, bring it to the main office of the Physics Department, Fondren Science Building, Room 102, and get a special prize. All SMU students, faculty, staff and community members are welcome to join in the search.
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Prehistoric humans formed complex mating networks to avoid inbreeding

A new study has sequenced the genomes of individuals from an ancient burial site in Russia and discovered that they were, at most, first cousins, indicating that they had developed sexual partnerships beyond their immediate social and family group.

A new study has identified when humans transitioned from simple systems designed to minimize inbreeding to more complex ones suitable for hunter-gatherer societies.

The study findings are reported in the journal Science and demonstrate that, by at least 34,000 years ago, human hunter-gatherer groups had developed sophisticated social and mating networks that minimized inbreeding.

The study examined genetic information from the remains of modern humans who lived during the early part of the Upper Palaeolithic, a period when modern humans from Africa first colonized western Eurasia, eventually displacing the Neanderthals who lived there before.

The results suggest that people deliberately sought partners beyond their immediate family, and that they were probably connected to a wider network of groups from within which mates were chosen, thus avoiding inbreeding.

The research was carried out by an international team of academics, led by the University of Cambridge, U.K., and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The team included SMU archaeologist David J. Meltzer, whose expertise includes the First People in the Americas.

The researchers sequenced the genomes of four individuals from Sunghir, a famous Upper Palaeolithic site in Russia, which was inhabited about 34,000 years ago.

The article, “Ancient genomes show social and reproductive behavior of early Upper Paleolithic foragers,” is published in the Oct. 5, 2017 issue of Science.

Complex mating systems may partly explain modern human survival
Among recent hunter-gatherers, the exchange of mates between groups is embedded into a cultural system of rules, ceremonies and rituals. The symbolism, complexity and time invested in the extraordinarily rich objects and jewellery found in the Sunghir burials, as well as the burials themselves, suggest that these early human societies symbolically marked major events in the life of individuals and their community in ways that foreshadow modern rituals and ceremonies — birth, marriage, death, shared ancestry, shared cultures.

The study’s authors also hint that the early development of more complex mating systems may at least partly explain why modern humans proved successful while other, rival species, such as Neanderthals, did not. More ancient genomic information from both early humans and Neanderthals is needed to test this idea.

The human fossils buried at Sunghir are a unique source of information about early modern human societies of western Eurasia. Sunghir preserves two contemporaneous burials – that of an adult man, and that of two children buried together and which includes the symbolically modified remains of another adult.

To the researchers’ surprise, however, these individuals were not closely related in genetic terms; at the very most, they were second cousins. This is true even for the two children who were buried head-to-head in the same grave.

“What this means is that people in the Upper Palaeolithic, who were living in tiny groups, understood the importance of avoiding inbreeding,” said Eske Willerslev, a professor at St John’s College and the University of Copenhagen, who was senior author on the study. “The data that we have suggest that it was being purposely avoided. This means that they must have developed a system for this purpose. If the small hunter and gathering bands were mixing at random, we would see much greater evidence of inbreeding than we have here.”

Early human societies changed ancestral mating system
The small family bands were likely interconnected within larger networks, facilitating the exchange of peoples between bands in order to maintain diversity, said Martin Sikora, a professor at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen.

Most non-human primate societies are organized around single-sex kin (matrilines or patrilines), where one of the sexes remains resident and the other migrates to another group, thus minimizing inbreeding. At some point, early human societies changed the ancestral mating system into one in which a large number of the individuals that form small resident/foraging units are non-kin, where the relations among units that exchange mating partners are formalized through complex cultural systems.

In at least one Neanderthal case, an individual from the Altai Mountains who died about 50,000 years ago, inbreeding was not avoided, suggesting that the modern human cultural systems that allows to decouple the size of the resident community from the danger of inbreeding was not in place. This leads the researchers to speculate that an early, systematic approach to preventing inbreeding may have helped modern humans to thrive in relation to with other hominins.

This should be treated with caution, however.

“We don’t know why the Altai Neanderthal groups were inbred,” Sikora said. “Maybe they were isolated and that was the only option; or maybe they really did fail to develop a network of connections. We will need more genomic data of diverse Neanderthal populations to be sure.”

Upper Palaeolithic human groups sustained very small group sizes
The researchers were able to sequence the complete genomes of all four individuals found within the two graves at Sunghir. These data were compared with information on both modern and ancient human genomes from across the world.

They found that the four individuals studied were genetically no closer than second cousins, while the adult femur filled with red ochre found in the youngsters’ grave would have belonged to an individual no closer than great-great grandfather of the boys. “This goes against what many would have predicted,” Willerslev said. “I think many researchers had assumed that the people of Sunghir were very closely related, especially the two youngsters from the same grave.”

The people at Sunghir may have been part of a network similar to that of modern day hunter-gatherers, such as Aboriginal Australians and some historical Native American societies. Like their Upper Palaeolithic ancestors, these societies lived in fairly small groups of some 25 people, but they were also connected to a larger community of perhaps 200 people, within which there were rules governing with whom individuals can form partnerships.

“The results from Sunghir show that Upper Palaeolithic human groups could sustain very small group sizes by embedding them in a wide social network of other groups maintained by sophisticated cultural systems,” said Marta Mirazón Lahr, a professor at the University of Cambridge.

Willerslev also highlights a possible link with the unusual sophistication of the ornaments and cultural objects found at Sunghir. Such band-specific cultural expressions may have been used to signal who are “we” versus who are “they,” and thus a means of reinforcing a shared identity built on marriage exchange across foraging units. The number and sophistication of personal ornaments and artefacts found at Sunghir are exceptional even among other modern human burials, and not found among Neanderthals and other hominins.

“The ornamentation is incredible and there is no evidence of anything like that with other hominins,” Willerslev added. “When you put the evidence together, it seems to be telling us about the really big questions: what made these people who they were as a species, and who we are as a result.”

Ancient genomics throw light on aspects of social life
These results show the power of ancient genomics to throw light on aspects of social life among early humans, and pave the way for further studies to explore variation in social and demographic strategies in prehistoric socieities.

“Much of human evolution is about changes in our social and cultural behavior, and the impact this has had on our success as a species. This study takes us a step further toward pinpointing when and why the things that make humans unique evolved,” said Robert Foley, a professor at the University of Cambridge.

Meltzer is Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in the SMU Department of Anthropology in Dedman College. As a scientist who studies how people first came to inhabit North America, Meltzer in 2009 was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in recognition for his achievements in original scientific research. In 2013 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. — University of Cambridge, SMU

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A composite window into human history

Better integration of ancient DNA studies with archaeology promises deeper insights.

DNA testing alone of ancient human remains can’t resolve questions about past societies.

It’s time for geneticists and archaeologists to collaborate more fully in the face of ever greater advancements in ancient DNA research, according to SMU archaeologist David J. Meltzer and his colleagues in a recent article in the scientific journal Science.

The authors write in “A composite window into human history” that over the past decade, DNA testing of ancient human remains has become a valuable tool for studying and understanding past human population histories.

Most notably, for example, is how sequencing of ancient genomes resolved the dispute over our species’ evolutionary relationship with Neanderthals, the authors point out.

Even so, the authors caution that collaboration with archaeologists is key for scientific accuracy as well as navigating ethical implications.

Archaeologists know from the study of artifacts that it isn’t always the case that people who share material culture traits were likewise part of the same biological population.

“One can have similar traits without relatedness, and relatedness without similarity in traits,” say the authors in the article.

At the same time, where there is biological relatedness, cultural relatedness can’t be assumed, nor can language groups indicate that biological populations, material assemblages or even social units are related.

“Geneticists are often keen to use ancient DNA to understand the causes and mechanisms of demographic and cultural change,” the authors write. “But archaeologists long ago abandoned the idea that migrations or encounters between populations are a necessary or sufficient explanation of cultural change.”

The authors make the point that understanding population movements requires broad investigation of many factors, including environmental and social contexts, timing and logistics, how new resources and landscapes were managed, and the transfer of cultural knowledge.

“Hence, it requires evidence for archaeology, paleoecology and other fields to supplement and complement ancient DNA data,” the authors write. “And that entails effective collaboration, one that goes beyond archaeologists serving as passive sample providers.”

Meltzer is Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in the SMU Department of Anthropology in Dedman College. As a scientist who studies how people first came to inhabit North America, Meltzer in 2009 was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in recognition for his achievements in original scientific research. In 2013 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Co-authors on the perspective piece with Meltzer were Niels N. Johannsen, Aarhus University, Denmark; Greger Larson, University of Oxford; and Marc Vader Linden, University College London.

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Sapiens: Why the Famous Folsom Point Isn’t a Smoking Gun

A Folsom spear point was discovered between the ribs of an extinct species of bison — but was it really proof that humans had killed the animal?

The research into the arrival of how and when people first arrived in North America by noted SMU archaeologist David J. Meltzer was covered in the online anthropology magazine Sapiens in a column by Stephen E. Nash, science historian and archaeologist at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

The article, Why the Famous Folsom Point Isn’t a Smoking Gun, published Aug. 29, 2017.

Meltzer, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, conducts original research into the origins, antiquity and adaptations of the first Americans.

Paleoindians colonized the North American continent at the end of the Ice Age. Meltzer focuses on how those hunter-gatherers met the challenges of moving across and adapting to the vast, ecologically diverse landscape of Late Glacial North America during a time of significant climate change.

Meltzer’s archaeology and history research has been supported by grants from the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, The Potts and Sibley Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. In 1996, he received a research endowment from Joseph and Ruth Cramer to establish the Quest Archaeological Research Program at SMU, which will support in perpetuity research on the earliest occupants of North America.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Stephen E. Nash
Sapiens

Remember the iconic Folsom point? The one that I said, in my last post, changed the future of archaeology?

To recap: On August 29, 1927, paleontologists from the Colorado Museum of Natural History (renamed the Denver Museum of Nature & Science in 2000) discovered a stone projectile point embedded in the ribs of an extinct form of bison.

After making that discovery in the field, the researchers left the point sitting where it was and immediately sent out a call to their colleagues to come to northeastern New Mexico to see it for themselves. Within two weeks a number of well-known scientists had visited the site, seen the point in position, and established a scientific consensus: Native Americans lived and hunted in North America during the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago, far earlier than they were previously thought to be here.

It turns out, though, that the story at the Folsom Site was more complicated than researchers initially believed. So what has changed since 1927? The latest part of the story began 20 years ago.

In 1997, David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University who studies “Paleoindians,” the earliest inhabitants of North America, began a three-year project at the Folsom Site to reassess and re-excavate the site using modern tools and techniques—which were not available in the 1920s. His goal was to better understand how, and under what conditions, the Folsom Site formed. Meltzer and his team used now-standard excavation-control techniques to record their findings in three-dimensional space and to determine if any unexcavated areas of the site could be found. In so doing, they hoped to find evidence of the Paleoindian campsite that might have been associated with the main bison-kill and butchering site.

As a result of Meltzer’s research, we now know that the bison-kill event occurred in the fall. How do we know? Bison reproduce, give birth, and grow up on a reasonably predictable annual cycle. Meltzer and his colleagues analyzed dental eruption patterns on excavated bison teeth to determine the season of the kill.

The archaeologists also determined that Folsom hunters were experts at their job, having systematically killed and butchered at least 32 bison at the site.

Read the full story.

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Australian Geographic: Secrets of leaf size revealed

New findings reveal the real reasons behind varying leaf sizes.

Australian Geographic has covered the research of SMU paleobotanist Bonnie F. Jacobs, a professor in SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

Working with a global team of researchers, Jacobs and her colleagues cracked the mystery of leaf size. The research was published Sept. 1, 2017 as a cover story in Science.

The researchers from Australia, the U.K., Canada, Argentina, the United States, Estonia, Spain and China analyzed leaves from more than 7,600 species of plants over the past 20 years, then pooled and analyzed the data with new theory to create a series of equations that can predict the maximum viable leaf size anywhere in the world based on the risk of daytime overheating and night-time freezing.

The researchers will use these findings to create more accurate vegetation models. This will be used by governments to predict how vegetation will change locally and globally under climate change, and to plan for adaptation.

Jacobs contributed an extensive leaf database — research that was funded by a National Science Foundation grant. She analyzed the leaf characteristics of 880 species of modern tropical African plants, which occurred in various combinations among 30 plant communities. Jacobs measured leaves of the plant specimens at the Missouri Botanical Garden Herbarium, one of the largest archives of pressed dried plant specimens from around the world.

Jacobs is one of a handful of the world’s experts on the fossil plants of ancient Africa. As part of a team of paleontologists working there, she hunts plant and animal fossils in Ethiopia’s prolific Mush Valley, as well as elsewhere in Africa.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Karl Gruber
Australian Geographic

You may have learnt at school that leaf size depends on water availability and that they are meant to help plants avoid overheating. But a new study that looked at leaf sizes around the world found that, rather than water availability, it all boils down to temperature, both high and low.

Leaf sizes can vary by as much as 100,000 fold, with some leaves having an area of just 1 mm2 while other can have an area of up to 1 m2. But what is driving these big differences?

“The conventional explanation was that water availability and overheating were the two major limits to leaf size. But the data didn’t fit,” says Ian. “For example the tropics are both wet and hot, and leaves in cooler parts of the world are unlikely to overheat,” explained Ian Wright, from Macquarie University, who led the new study.

A key finding from the study is that for plants all around the world the main factors limiting leaf size are the risk of frosting in cold nights, which can damage leaves, and the risk of overheating during the day.

“Latitude explains 28% of variation leaf size, globally. Warm wet regions are characterised by large-leaved species, warm dry regions and cold regions by smaller-leaved species. These patterns can all be understood in relation to the energy inputs and outputs to leaves, but only if you consider both the daytime (overheating) and night-time (freezing) risks,” Wright says.

Read the full story.

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BBC: Clues to why leaves come in many sizes

The huge variety of leaves in the plant kingdom has long been a source of wonder and fascination.

BBC News has covered the research of SMU paleobotanist Bonnie F. Jacobs, a professor in SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

Working with a global team of researchers, Jacobs and her colleagues cracked the mystery of leaf size. The research was published Sept. 1, 2017 as a cover story in Science.

The researchers from Australia, the U.K., Canada, Argentina, the United States, Estonia, Spain and China analyzed leaves from more than 7,600 species of plants over the past 20 years, then pooled and analyzed the data with new theory to create a series of equations that can predict the maximum viable leaf size anywhere in the world based on the risk of daytime overheating and night-time freezing.

The researchers will use these findings to create more accurate vegetation models. This will be used by governments to predict how vegetation will change locally and globally under climate change, and to plan for adaptation.

Jacobs contributed an extensive leaf database — research that was funded by a National Science Foundation grant. She analyzed the leaf characteristics of 880 species of modern tropical African plants, which occurred in various combinations among 30 plant communities. Jacobs measured leaves of the plant specimens at the Missouri Botanical Garden Herbarium, one of the largest archives of pressed dried plant specimens from around the world.

Jacobs is one of a handful of the world’s experts on the fossil plants of ancient Africa. As part of a team of paleontologists working there, she hunts plant and animal fossils in Ethiopia’s prolific Mush Valley, as well as elsewhere in Africa.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Helen Briggs
BBC News

The leaves of a banana plant, for instance, are about a million times bigger than the leaves of heather.

The conventional wisdom is that leaf size is limited by the balance between how much water is available to a plant and the risk of overheating.

However, a study of more than 7,000 plant species around the world suggests the answer may be more complex.

“A banana leaf is able to be so huge because bananas naturally grow in places that are very hot and very wet,” said Ian Wright of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
“Our work shows that in fact that if there’s enough water in the soil then there’s almost no limit to how large leaves can be.”

He says this is only part of the puzzle of leaf size.

“The other part is about the tendency for larger leaves to freeze at night,” Dr Wright explained.

“And, you put these two ingredients together — the risk of freezing and the risk of overheating — and this helps understand the pattern of leaf sizes you see across the entire world.”

There are hundreds of thousands of plant species on the planet, from tiny alpine plants to massive jungle palms.

Their leaves vary in area from less than 1 square millimetre to greater than 1 square metre.

Large-leaved plants predominate in tropical jungle — something that was noted as early as the 19th Century. Meanwhile, small-leaved plants thrive in arid deserts and at high latitudes.

Some decades ago, scientists realised that variability in leaf size was related to water and temperature. They proposed that the limit to leaf size was set by the risk of overheating.

Thus, when rainfall is high, plants can get away with having larger leaves.
The new research, published in the journal Science, suggests this idea applies only in certain regions of the globe.

“There were some pieces in this puzzle that were clearly missing,” Dr. Wright told BBC News.

Read the full story.

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The mystery of leaf size solved by global team of scientists

A global team of researchers, including SMU paleobotanist Bonnie Jacobs, have cracked the mystery of leaf size. The research was published Sept. 1, 2017 as a cover story in Science.

SMU paleobotanist Bonnie F. Jacobs has contributed research to a major new study that provides scientists with a new tool for understanding both ancient and future climate by looking at the size of plant leaves.

Why is a banana leaf a million times bigger than a common heather leaf? Why are leaves generally much larger in tropical jungles than in temperate forests and deserts? The textbooks say it’s a balance between water availability and overheating.

But it’s not that simple, the researchers found.

The study, published in the Sept. 1, 2017 issue of Science, was led by Associate Professor Ian Wright from Macquarie University, Australia. The study’s findings reveal that in much of the world the key factor limiting the size of a plant’s leaves is the temperature at night and the risk of frost damage to leaves.

Jacobs said the implications of the study are significant for enabling scientists to either predict modern leaf size in the distant future, or to understand the climate for a locality as it may have been in the past.

“This research provides scientists with another tool for predicting future changes in vegetation, given climate change, and for describing ancient climate given fossil leaves,” said Jacobs, a professor in SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in the Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.

“Now we can reliably use this as another way to look at future climate models for a specific location and predict the size of plant leaves,” she said. “Or, if we’re trying to understand what the climate was for a prehistoric site tens of millions of years ago, we can look at the plant fossils discovered in that location and describe what the climate most likely was at that time.”

Wright, Jacobs and 15 colleagues from Australia, the U.K., Canada, Argentina, the United States, Estonia, Spain and China analyzed leaves from more than 7,600 species, then pooled and analyzed the data with new theory to create a series of equations that can predict the maximum viable leaf size anywhere in the world based on the risk of daytime overheating and night-time freezing.

The researchers will use these findings to create more accurate vegetation models. This will be used by governments to predict how vegetation will change locally and globally under climate change, and to plan for adaptation.

Big data solves century-old conundrum
The iconic paintings of Henri Rousseau illustrate that when we think of steamy tropics we expect large leaves. But for scientists it’s been a century-old conundrum: why does leaf size vary with latitude – from very small near the poles to massive leaves in the tropics?

“The conventional explanation was that water availability and overheating were the two major limits to leaf size. But the data didn’t fit,” says Wright. “For example the tropics are both wet and hot, and leaves in cooler parts of the world are unlikely to overheat.”

“Our team worked both ends of the problem – observation and theory,” he says. “We used big data – measurements made on tens of thousands of leaves. By sampling across all continents, climate zones and plant types we were able to show that simple ‘rules’ seemingly operate across the world’s plant species, rules that were not apparent from previous, more limited analyses.”

Jacobs contributed an extensive leaf database she compiled about 20 years ago, funded by a National Science Foundation grant. She analyzed the leaf characteristics of 880 species of modern tropical African plants, which occurred in various combinations among 30 plant communities. Jacobs measured leaves of the plant specimens at the Missouri Botanical Garden Herbarium, one of the largest archives of pressed dried plant specimens from around the world.

She looked at all aspects of leaf shape and climate, ranging from seasonal and annual rainfall and temperature for each locale, as well as leaf shape, size, tip, base, among others. Using statistical analyses to plot the variables, she found the most prominent relationship between leaf shape and climate was that size increases with rainfall amount. Wet sites had species with larger leaves than dry sites.

Her Africa database was added to those of many other scientists who have compiled similar data for other localities around the world.

Threat of night time frost damage determines the size of a leaf
“Using our knowledge of plant function and biophysics we developed a fresh take on ‘leaf energy balance’ theory, and compared our predictions to observed leaf sizes,” Wright says.

“The most surprising result was that over much of the world the maximum size of leaves is set not by the risk of overheating, but rather by the risk of damaging frost at night. Larger leaves have thicker, insulating ‘boundary layers’ of still air that slows their ability to draw heat from their surroundings – heat that is needed to compensate for longwave energy lost to the night-time sky,” says co-author Colin Prentice from Imperial College London, who co-ordinated the mathematical modelling effort.

“International collaborations are making ecology into a predictive science at global scale,” says Emeritus Professor Mark Westoby. “At Macquarie University we’re proud to have led this networking over the past 20 years.” — Margaret Allen, SMU, and Macquarie University

By Ian Wright
Macquarie University

As a plant ecologist, I try to understand variation in plant traits (the physical, chemical and physiological properties of their tissues) and how this variation affects plant function in different ecosystems.

For this study I worked with 16 colleagues from Australia, the UK, Canada, Argentina, the US, Estonia, Spain and China to analyse leaves from more than 7,600 species. We then teamed the data with new theory to create a model that can predict the maximum viable leaf size anywhere in the world, based on the dual risks of daytime overheating and night-time freezing.

These findings will be used to improve global vegetation models, which are used to predict how vegetation will change under climate change, and also to better understand past climates from leaf fossils.

From giants to dwarfs
The world’s plant species vary enormously in the typical size of their leaves; from 1 square millimetre in desert species such as common eutaxia (Eutaxia microphylla), or in common heather (Calluna vulgaris) in Europe, to as much as 1 square metre in tropical species like Musa textilis, the Filipino banana tree.

But what is the physiological or ecological significance of all this variation in leaf size? How does it affect the way that plants “do business”, using leaves as protein-rich factories that trade water (transpiration) for carbon (photosynthesis), powered by energy from the sun?

More than a century ago, early plant ecologists such as Eugenius Warming argued that it was the high rainfall in the tropics that allowed large-leaved species to flourish there.

In the 1960s and ‘70s physicists and physiologists tackled the problem, showing that in mid-summer large leaves are more prone to overheating, requiring higher rates of “transpirational cooling” (a process akin to sweating) to avoid damage. This explained why many desert species have small leaves, and why species growing in cool, shaded understoreys (below the tree canopy) can have large leaves.

But still there were missing pieces to this puzzle. For example, the tropics are both wet and hot, and these theories predicted disadvantages for large-leafed species in hot regions. And, in any case, overheating must surely be unlikely for leaves in many cooler parts of the world.

Our research aimed to find these missing pieces. By collecting samples from all continents, climate zones and plant types, our team found simple “rules” that appear to apply to all of the world’s plant species – rules that were not apparent from previous, more limited analyses.

We found the key factors are day and night temperatures, rainfall and solar radiation (largely determined by distance from the Equator and the amount of cloud cover). The interaction of these factors means that in hot and sunny regions that are also very dry, most species have small leaves, but in hot or sunny regions that receive high rainfall, many species have large leaves. Finally, in very cold regions (e.g. at high elevation, or at high northern latitudes), most species have small leaves.

But the most surprising results emerged from teaming the new theory for leaf size, leaf temperature and water use with the global data analyses, to investigate what sets the maximum size of leaves possible at any point on the globe.

Read the author’s full essay

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Class of 2017: SMU professor named outstanding teacher by UT Regents

Alisa Winkler is an SMU adjunct faculty member and research assistant professor of paleontology in the SMU Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

The University of Texas System has recognized SMU Research Assistant Professor Alisa J. Winkler for extraordinary classroom performance and innovation in undergraduate instruction.

Winkler, who is an SMU adjunct faculty member in the SMU Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, was named to the Class of 2017 for the Regent’s Outstanding Teaching Awards of The University of Texas. It is the Board of Regents’ highest honor. It recognizes faculty for the highest quality of instruction in the classroom, laboratory, field and online.

Winkler earned her Ph.D. in geology from SMU in 1990, specializing in mammalian vertebrate paleontology.

“To be honest, when I was young I never thought about being a teacher. Later in life it just came with the territory of being in academia,” Winkler said. “What I discovered as a teacher, however, is how much I enjoy, learn from, and am inspired by my students. Their passion for knowledge is both a challenge and a stimulus for me to continue learning myself.”

She is an associate professor at U.T. Southwestern Medical Center in the Department of Cell Biology, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

In addition to her teaching commitments and some contributions to the higher education literature, Winkler maintains an active research program in vertebrate paleontology as a research professor in SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.

In recent work, she analyzed research literature for “Fossil Rodents of Africa,” the first comprehensive summary and distribution analysis of Africa’s fossil rodents since 1978, according to SMU professor of geological sciences and vertebrate paleontologist Louis Jacobs, a world-renowned dinosaur expert and president of SMU’s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man.

“Alisa has been recognized for her teaching skills at U.T. Southwestern, but she is also globally recognized for her research on East African fossil mammals, which constrains the age and paleo-environments of human evolution,” Jacobs said. “Working from her research office in the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, and in the field in Kenya and Uganda, she is a great asset to our students and adds depth to our program.”

Winkler received a B.A. in Biology from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville in 1978. She then earned an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1982.

She has been teaching anatomy at U.T. Southwestern since 1990. Winkler is currently co-director of the Human Structure course (anatomy, embryology and radiology) for first year medical students, and director of the Anatomy course for health professions students. Both courses focus on a cadaver-based dissection laboratory, and require extensive administrative, organizational and teaching commitments.

Winkler is the recipient of numerous teaching awards from the medical students, including seven pre-clinical teaching awards and a Katherine Howe Muntz Award for Teaching in Anatomy (2010). The Human Structure course was awarded the best course award for first year courses in 2016. She was awarded an outstanding educator award in health care sciences from the health professions students in 2014.

The Regent’s Outstanding Teacher Award was established in 2008 and is offered annually in recognition of faculty members at the The University of Texas System’s eight academic and six health institutions. With a monetary award of $25,000, the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Awards are among the largest and most competitive in the nation for rewarding outstanding faculty performance.

Faculty members undergo a series of rigorous evaluations by students, peer faculty and external reviewers. The review panels consider a range of activities and criteria in their evaluations of a candidate’s teaching performance, including classroom expertise, curricula quality, innovative course development and student learning outcomes.

Winkler is one of 56 faculty members from across U.T.’s 14 academic and health institutions honored with the award by the Regents Aug. 23 in Austin. — SMU, U.T. System

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Sapiens: Can Medical Anthropology Solve the Diabetes Dilemma?

As the number of sufferers continues to rise, some researchers are moving in new directions to figure out how culture and lifestyle shape disease outcomes.

Sapiens reporter Kate Ruder covered the research of SMU anthropologist Carolyn Smith-Morris, who has studied diabetes among Arizona’s Pima Indians for more than 15 years.

Smith-Morris wrote about what she learned from her research in her 2006 book, “Diabetes Among the Pima: Stories of Survival.”

The Pima have the highest prevalence of diabetes ever recorded, although the disease is alarmingly on the increase throughout the United States. In an effort to understand the rise of the disease, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) from 1965 to 2007 focused on the Pima to carry out the largest continuous study of diabetes in Native Americans. Researchers examined the environmental and genetic triggers of the disorder, management of the disease, and the treatment of thousands of Pimas.

Smith-Morris is a medical anthropologist and associate professor in the SMU Anthropology Department in Dedman College. Her research addresses chronic disease, particularly diabetes, through ethnographic and mixed methodologies. She has conducted ethnographic research among the Gila River (Akimel O’odham) Indian Community of Southern Arizona, Mexicans and Mexican immigrants to the U.S. and veterans with spinal cord injuries.

The Sapiens article, “Can Medical Anthropology Solve the Diabetes Dilemma?” published Aug. 22, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Kate Ruder
Sapiens

Mary (a pseudonym) was 18 years old and halfway through her second pregnancy when anthropologist Carolyn Smith-Morris met her 10 years ago. Mary, a Pima Indian, was living with her boyfriend, brother, parents, and 9-month-old baby in southern Arizona. She had been diagnosed with gestational diabetes during both of her pregnancies, but she didn’t consider herself diabetic because her diabetes had gone away after her first birth. Perhaps her diagnosis was even a mistake, she felt. Mary often missed her prenatal appointments, because she didn’t have a ride to the hospital from her remote home on the reservation. She considered diabetes testing a “personal thing,” so she didn’t discuss it with her family.

As Smith-Morris’ research revealed, Mary’s story was not unique among Pima women. Many had diabetes, but they didn’t understand the risks. These women’s narratives have helped to explain, in part, why diabetes has been so prevalent in this corner of the world. An astonishing half of all adult Pimas have diabetes.

Medical anthropologists like Smith-Morris are helping the biomedical community untangle the social roots of diabetes and understand how and why the disease is exploding in the United States. Smith-Morris, based out of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, has been working on this cause for over 15 years—from a decade spent among the Pimas, to a new study sponsored by Google aiming to prevent diabetes-related blindness. Anthropology, she says, provides the most holistic perspective of this complex problem: “Anthropology seems to me the only discipline that allows you to look both closely at disease … and from the bird’s eye perspective.”

More than 30 million people in the United States are estimated to have diabetes, and it’s on the rise. If trends continue, 1 out of every 3 American adults could have diabetes by 2050, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The condition involves insulin, a hormone that regulates the way the body uses food for energy. In type 1 diabetes, the body stops making insulin entirely; those affected need daily insulin injections to survive. In type 2 diabetes, which accounts for the vast majority of cases, change is more gradual.The body slowly makes less insulin and becomes less sensitive to it over the years. Gestational diabetes, which strikes during pregnancy, can give mothers a dangerous condition called preeclampsia, which is related to high blood pressure and can harm both mothers and babies. Women with gestational diabetes are more than seven times likelier to later develop type 2 diabetes than women who do not have the condition in pregnancy, and their children are at higher risk of obesity and diabetes. If left untreated, diabetes can cause heart disease, kidney failure, foot problems that can lead to amputation, and blindness.

The preventative measures for type 2 and gestational diabetes are seemingly straightforward: eat healthy foods, lose weight, and exercise. Treatment for both can include taking medications. Yet prevention, lifestyle, and treatment cannot entirely solve the problem; family history, ethnicity, and other factors play a critical role in a person’s susceptibility to type 2 and gestational diabetes. Both forms of diabetes continue to plague Americans, particularly certain groups, including Native Americans. “My interest in diabetes grew out of an interest in Indigenous groups,” says Smith-Morris. “I took on diabetes because it was important to them.”

From 1965 to 2007, the Pimas of Arizona were the focus of the largest continuous study of diabetes in Native Americans. Conducted by researchers from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), it examined the environmental and genetic triggers of the disorder, management of the disease, and the treatment of thousands of Pimas. It also documented that they had the highest prevalence of diabetes ever recorded. The pivotal work told researchers much of what they know about diabetes today, including that obesity is a significant risk factor, and that a mother’s diabetes during pregnancy can pass risk along to her children.

The political and economic contributors to the Pima people’s health problems have long been well-known: Their traditional farming practices collapsed during the late 1800s and early 1900s when non-Native settlers upstream diverted essential water resources, contributing to poverty, sedentariness, and a lack of fresh food. Yet Smith-Morris felt something integral was missing from this picture: the Pimas’ stories.

Read the full story.

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A Total Eclipse of the First Day of School

Dedman College, SMU Physics Department host Great American Solar Eclipse 2017 viewing

Thousands of students, faculty and townspeople showed up to campus Monday, Aug. 21 to observe the Great American Solar Eclipse at a viewing hosted by Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences and the SMU Department of Physics.

The festive event coincided with the kick-off of SMU’s Fall Semester and included Solar Eclipse Cookies served while viewing the rare astronomical phenomenon.

The eclipse reached its peak at 1:09 p.m. in Dallas at more than 75% of totality.

“What a great first day of the semester and terrific event to bring everyone together with the help of Dedman College scientists,” said Dedman Dean Thomas DiPiero. “And the eclipse cookies weren’t bad, either.”

Physics faculty provided indirect methods for observing the eclipse, including a telescope with a viewing cone on the steps of historic Dallas Hall, a projection of the eclipse onto a screen into Dallas Hall, and a variety of homemade hand-held devices.

Outside on the steps of Dallas Hall, Associate Professor Stephen Sekula manned his home-built viewing tunnel attached to a telescope for people to indirectly view the eclipse.

“I was overwhelmed by the incredible response of the students, faculty and community,” Sekula said. “The people who flocked to Dallas Hall were energized and engaged. It moved me that they were so interested in — and, in some cases, had their perspective on the universe altered by — a partial eclipse of the sun by the moon.”

A team of Physics Department faculty assembled components to use a mirror to project the eclipse from a telescope on the steps of Dallas Hall into the rotunda onto a screen hanging from the second-floor balcony.

Adjunct Professor John Cotton built the mount for the mirror — with a spare, just in case — and Professor and Department Chairman Ryszard Stroynowski and Sekula arranged the tripod setup and tested the equipment.

Stroynowski also projected an illustration of the Earth, the moon and the sun onto the wall of the rotunda to help people visualize movement and location of those cosmic bodies during the solar eclipse.

Professor Fred Olness handed out cardboard projectors and showed people how to use them to indirectly view the eclipse.

“The turn-out was fantastic,” Olness said. “Many families with children participated, and we distributed cardboard with pinholes so they could project the eclipse onto the sidewalk. It was rewarding that they were enthused by the science.”

Stroynowski, Sekula and others at the viewing event were interviewed by CBS 11 TV journalist Robert Flagg.

Physics Professor Thomas Coan and Guillermo Vasquez, SMU Linux and research computing support specialist, put together a sequence of photos they took during the day from Fondren Science Building.

“The experience of bringing faculty, students and even some out-of-campus community members together by sharing goggles, cameras, and now pictures of one of the great natural events, was extremely gratifying,” Vasquez said.

Sekula said the enthusiastic response from the public is driving plans to prepare for the next event of this kind.

“I’m really excited to share with SMU and Dallas in a total eclipse of the sun on April 8, 2024,” he said.

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Dallas Innovates: SMU, UTA Scientists To Help Unlock Mystery of Neutrinos

A massive particle detector a mile underground is the key to unlocking the secrets of a beam of neutrinos that will be shot beneath the Earth from Chicago to South Dakota.

Reporter Lance Murray with Dallas Innovates reported on the research of biochemistry professors Thomas E. Coan in the SMU Department of Physics.

Coan is one of about 1,000 scientists around the world collaborating on DUNE — a massive particle detector being built a mile underground in South Dakota to unlock the mysteries of neutrino particles.

The research is funded by the by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science in conjunction with CERN and international partners from 30 countries.

SMU is one of more than 100 institutions from around the world building hardware for the massive international experiment that may change our understanding of the universe. Construction will take years and scientists expect to begin taking data in the middle of the next decade, said Coan.

The Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) will house the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. When complete, LBNF/DUNE will be the largest experiment ever built in the United States to study the properties of the mysterious particles called neutrinos.

The Dallas Innovates article, “SMU, UTA Scientists To Help Unlock Mystery of Neutrinos,” published July 28, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Lance Murray
Dallas Innovates

Construction of a huge particle detector in South Dakota could lead to a change in how we understand the universe, and scientists from the University of Texas at Arlington and Southern Methodist University in Dallas will play roles in helping to unlock the mystery of neutrinos.

Ground was broken a mile underground recently at the Sanford Underground Research Facility at the Homestake Gold Mine in Lead, South Dakota for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) that will house the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE).

SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan, and UTA Physics professors Jonathan Asaadi and Jaehoon Yu will be among scientists from more than 100 institutions around the world who will be involved in the experiment.

DUNE will be constructed and operated at the mine site by a group of about 1,000 scientists and engineers from 30 nations.

The Homestake Mine was the location where neutrinos were discovered by Raymond Davis Jr. in 1962. It was the the largest and deepest gold mine in North America until its closure in 2002.

LBNF/DUNE will be the biggest experiment ever built in the U.S. to study the properties of neutrinos, one of the fundamental particles that make up the universe.

“DUNE is designed to investigate a broad swath of the properties of neutrinos, one of the universe’s most abundant but still mysterious electrically neutral particles,” Coan said in the release.

These puzzling particles are similar to electrons, but they have one huge difference — they don’t carry an electrical charge. Neutrinos come in three types: the electron neutrino, the muon, and the tau.

What is the experiment’s goal? Coan said it seeks to understand strange phenomena such as neutrinos changing identities in mid-flight — known as “oscillation” — as well as the behavioral differences between a neutrino and its anti-neutrino sibling.

“A crisp understanding of neutrinos holds promise for understanding why any matter survived annihilation with antimatter from the Big Bang to form the people, planets, and stars we see today,” Coan said in the release. “DUNE is also able to probe whether or not the humble proton, found in all atoms of the universe, is actually unstable and ultimately destined to eventually decay away. It even has sensitivity to understanding how stars explode into supernovae by studying the neutrinos that stream out from them during the explosion.”

Coan also is involved in another massive particle detector in northern Minnesota knows as NOvA, where he is a principal investigator.

Read the full story.

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LiveScience: Newfound dino looks like creepy love child of a turkey and ostrich

A new giant bird-like dinosaur discovered in China has been named for SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, Corythoraptor jacobsi, by the scientists who identified the new oviraptorid.

Live Science Senior Writer Laura Geggel covered the discovery of a new Cretaceous Period dinosaur from China that is named for paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, an SMU professor in SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences.

Jacobs mentored three of the authors on the article. First author on the paper was Junchang Lü, an SMU Ph.D. alum, with co-authors Yuong–Nam Lee and Yoshitsugu Kobayashi, both SMU Ph.D. alums.

The Live Science article, Newfound dino looks like creepy love child of a turkey and ostrich, published July 27, 2017. The dinosaur’s name, Corythoraptor jacobsi, translates to Jacobs’ helmeted thief.

The scientific article “High diversity of the Ganzhou Oviraptorid Fauna increased by a new “cassowary-like” crested species” was published July 27, 2017 in Nature’s online open access mega-journal of primary research Scientific Reports.

Jacobs in 2016 co-authored an analysis of the Cretaceous Period dinosaur Pawpawsaurus based on the first CT scans ever taken of the dinosaur’s skull.

He is president of SMU’s Institute for the Study of Earth and Man.

A world-renowned vertebrate paleontologist, Jacobs in 2012 was honored by the 7,200-member Science Teachers Association of Texas with their prestigious Skoog Cup for his significant contributions to advance quality science education. He joined SMU’s faculty in 1983.

Jacobs is the author of “Quest for the African Dinosaurs: Ancient Roots of the Modern World” (Villard Books and Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000); “Lone Star Dinosaurs” (Texas A&M U. Press, 1999), which is the basis of a Texas dinosaur exhibit at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History; “Cretaceous Airport” (ISEM, 1993); and more than 100 scientific papers and edited volumes.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Laura Geggel
Live Science

The newly identified oviraptorid dinosaur Corythoraptor jacobsi has a cassowary-like head crest, known as a casque.

A Chinese farmer has discovered the remains of a dinosaur that could have passed for the ostrich-like cassowary in its day, sporting the flightless bird’s head crest and long thunder thighs, indicating it could run quickly, just like its modern-day lookalike, a new study finds.

The newfound dinosaur’s 6-inch-tall (15 centimeters) head crest is uncannily similar to the cassowary’s headpiece, known as a casque, the researchers said. In fact, the crests have such similar shapes, the cassowary’s may provide clues about how the dinosaur used its crest more than 66 million years ago, they said.

The findings suggest that the dinosaur, which would have towered at 5.5 feet (1.6 meters), may have had a similar lifestyle to the modern cassowary bird (Casuarius unappendiculatus), which is native to Australia and New Guinea, the study’s lead researcher, Junchang Lü, a professor at the Institute of Geology, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, told Live Science in an email.

Researchers found the oviraptorid — a type of giant, bird-like dinosaur — in Ganzhou, a city in southern China, in 2013. The specimen was in remarkable shape: The paleontologists found an almost complete skeleton, including the skull and lower jaw, which helped them estimate that the creature was likely a young adult, or at least 8 years of age, when it died.

The long-necked and crested dinosaur lived from about 100 million to 66 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period, and likely used its clawed hands to hunt lizards and other small dinosaurs, Lü added.

The research team named the unique beast Corythoraptor jacobsi. Its genus name refers to the raptor’s cassowary-like crest, and the species name honors Louis Jacobs, a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University who mentored three of the study’s researchers.

The researchers think the crest likely served the dinosaur in different ways, they said, including in display, communication and perhaps even as an indication of the dinosaur’s fitness during the mating season.

Read the full story.

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Construction begins on international mega-science neutrino experiment

Groundbreaking held today in South Dakota marks the start of excavation for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, future home to the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment.

SMU is one of more than 100 institutions from around the world building hardware for a massive international experiment — a particle detector — that could change our understanding of the universe.

Construction will take years and scientists expect to begin taking data in the middle of the next decade, said SMU physicist Thomas E. Coan, a professor in the SMU Department of Physics and a researcher on the experiment.

The turning of a shovelful of earth a mile underground marks a new era in particle physics research. The groundbreaking ceremony was held Friday, July 21, 2017 at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, South Dakota.

Dignitaries, scientists and engineers from around the world marked the start of construction of the experiment that could change our understanding of the universe.

The Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility (LBNF) will house the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Called DUNE for short, it will be built and operated by a group of roughly 1,000 scientists and engineers from 30 countries, including Coan.

When complete, LBNF/DUNE will be the largest experiment ever built in the United States to study the properties of mysterious particles called neutrinos. Unlocking the mysteries of these particles could help explain more about how the universe works and why matter exists at all.

“DUNE is designed to investigate a broad swath of the properties of neutrinos, one of the universe’s most abundant but still mysterious electrically neutral particles,” Coan said.

The experiment seeks to understand strange phenomena like neutrinos changing identities — called “oscillation” — in mid-flight and the behavioral differences between a neutrino an its anti-neutrino sibling, Coan said.

“A crisp understanding of neutrinos holds promise for understanding why any matter survived annihilation with antimatter from the Big Bang to form the people, planets and stars we see today,” Coan said. “DUNE is also able to probe whether or not the humble proton, found in all atoms of the universe, is actually unstable and ultimately destined to eventually decay away. It even has sensitivity to undertanding how stars explode into supernovae by studying the neutrinos that stream out from them during the explosion.”

Coan also is a principal investigator on NOvA, another neutrino experiment collaboration of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Laboratory. NOvA, in northern Minnesota, is another massive particle detector designed to observe and measure the behavior of neutrinos.

Similar to NOvA, DUNE will be a neutrino beam from Fermilab that runs to Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota. DUNE’s beam will be more powerful and will take the measurements NOvA is taking to an unprecedented precision, scientists on both experiments have said. Any questions NOvA fails to answer will most certainly be answered by DUNE.

At its peak, construction of LBNF is expected to create almost 2,000 jobs throughout South Dakota and a similar number of jobs in Illinois.

Institutions in dozens of countries will contribute to the construction of DUNE components. The DUNE experiment will attract students and young scientists from around the world, helping to foster the next generation of leaders in the field and to maintain the highly skilled scientific workforce in the United States and worldwide.

Beam of neutrinos will travel 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) through the Earth
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located outside Chicago, will generate a beam of neutrinos and send them 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) through the Earth to Sanford Lab, where a four-story-high, 70,000-ton detector will be built beneath the surface to catch those neutrinos.

Scientists will study the interactions of neutrinos in the detector, looking to better understand the changes these particles undergo as they travel across the country in less than the blink of an eye.

Ever since their discovery 61 years ago, neutrinos have proven to be one of the most surprising subatomic particles, and the fact that they oscillate between three different states is one of their biggest surprises. That discovery began with a solar neutrino experiment led by physicist Ray Davis in the 1960s, performed in the same underground mine that now will house LBNF/DUNE. Davis shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2002 for his experiment.

DUNE scientists will also look for the differences in behavior between neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos, which could give us clues as to why the visible universe is dominated by matter.

DUNE will also watch for neutrinos produced when a star explodes, which could reveal the formation of neutron stars and black holes, and will investigate whether protons live forever or eventually decay, bringing us closer to fulfilling Einstein’s dream of a grand unified theory.

Construction over the next 10 years is funded by DOE with 30 countries
But first, the facility must be built, and that will happen over the next 10 years. Now that the first shovel of earth has been moved, crews will begin to excavate more than 870,000 tons of rock to create the huge underground caverns for the DUNE detector.

Large DUNE prototype detectors are under construction at European research center CERN, a major partner in the project, and the technology refined for those smaller versions will be tested and scaled up when the massive DUNE detectors are built.

This research is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science in conjunction with CERN and international partners from 30 countries.

DUNE collaborators come from institutions in Armenia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Greece, India, Iran, Italy, Japan, Madagascar, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Romania, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom and the United States. — Fermilab, SMU

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Cosmos: Painting with light in three dimensions

A new technique uses photoswitch molecules to create three-dimensional images from pure light.

Australia’s quarterly science magazine Cosmos covered the research of SMU organic chemist Alex Lippert, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry in SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.

Lippert’s team develops synthetic organic compounds that glow in reaction to certain conditions. He led his lab in developing a new technology that uses photoswitch molecules to craft 3-D light structures — not holograms — that are viewable from 360 degrees. The economical method for shaping light into an infinite number of volumetric objects would be useful in a variety of fields, from biomedical imaging, education and engineering, to TV, movies, video games and more.

For biomedical imaging, Lippert says the nearest-term application of the technique might be in high-volume pre-clinical animal imaging, but eventually the technique could be applied to provide low-cost internal imaging in the developing world, or less costly imaging in the developed world.

Cosmos reporter Joel F. Hooper wrote about the new technology in “Painting with light in three dimensions,” which published online July 14, 2017.

Lippert’s lab includes four doctoral students and five undergraduates who assist in his research. He recently received a prestigious National Science Foundation Career Award, expected to total $611,000 over five years, to fund his research into alternative internal imaging techniques.

NSF Career Awards are given to tenure-track faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research in American colleges and universities.

Lippert joined SMU in 2012. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, and Bachelor of Science at the California Institute of Technology.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Joel F. Hooper
Cosmos

Those of us who grew up watching science fiction movies and TV shows imagined our futures to be filled with marvellous gadgets, but we’ve sometimes been disappointed when science fails to deliver. We can’t take a weekend trip to Mars yet, and we’re still waiting for hoverboards that actually hover.

But in the case of 3-D image projection, the technology used by R2D2 in Star Wars is making its way into reality. Using advances in fluorescent molecules that can be switched on by UV light, scientists at Southern Methodist University in Dallas have created a method for producing images and animations by structuring light in 3-dimentions.

The technology uses a solution of fluorescent molecules called rhodamines, which have the potential to emit visible light when they are excited by a light beam of the right wavelength. But these molecules are usually in an inactive state, and must be “switched on” by UV light before they can become emitters. When a UV light or visible light beam alone shines through the solution, the rhodamines to not emit light. But where these two beams intersect, the emitting molecules are both switched on and excited, and can produce a small glowing 3D pixel, known as a voxel.

When a number of voxels are produced at once, using two projectors positioned at 90° to a flask containing a solution of the fluorescent molecules, a 3D image is produced.

“Our idea was to use chemistry and special photoswitch molecules to make a 3D display that delivers a 360-degree view,” says Alexander Lippert, lead author of the study. “It’s not a hologram, it’s really three-dimensionally structured light.”

Read the full story.

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SMU chemist wins prestigious NSF Career Award

Alex Lippert’s research uses chemistry to develop affordable, glowing internal imaging techniques

SMU chemist Alex Lippert has received a prestigious National Science Foundation Career Award, expected to total $611,000 over five years, to fund his research into alternative internal imaging techniques.

NSF Career Awards are given to tenure-track faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research in American colleges and universities.

Lippert, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry in SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, is an organic chemist and adviser to four doctoral students and five undergraduates who assist in his research.

Lippert’s team develops synthetic organic compounds that glow in reaction to certain conditions. For example, when injected into a mouse’s tumor, the compounds luminesce in response to the cancer’s pH and oxygen levels. Place that mouse in a sealed dark box with a sensitive CCD camera that can detect low levels of light, and images can be captured of the light emanating from the mouse’s tumor.

“We are developing chemiluminescent imaging agents, which basically amounts to a specialized type of glow-stick chemistry,” Lippert says. “We can use this method to image the insides of animals, kind of like an MRI, but much cheaper and easier to do.”

Lippert says the nearest-term application of the technique might be in high-volume pre-clinical animal imaging, but eventually the technique could be applied to provide low-cost internal imaging in the developing world, or less costly imaging in the developed world.

But first, there are still a few ways the technique can be improved, and that’s where Lippert says the grant will come in handy.

“In preliminary studies, we needed to directly inject the compound into the tumor to see the chemistry in the tumor,” Lippert says. “One thing that’s funded by this grant is intravenous injection capability, where you inject a test subject and let the agent distribute through the body, then activate it in the tumor to see it light up.”

Another challenge the team will use the grant to explore is making a compound that varies by color instead of glow intensity when reacting to cancer cells. This will make it easier to read images, which can sometimes be buried under several layers of tissue, making the intensity of the glow difficult to interpret.

“We’re applying the method to tumors now, but you could use similar designs for other types of tissues,” Lippert says. “The current compound reacts to oxygen levels and pH, which are important in cancer biology, but also present in other types of biology, so it can be more wide-ranging than just looking at cancer.”

“This grant is really critical to our ability to continue the research going forward,” Lippert adds. “This will support the reagents and supplies, student stipends, and strengthen our collaboration with UT Southwestern Medical Center. Having that funding secure for five years is really nice because we can now focus our attention on the actual science instead of writing grants. It’s a huge step forward in our research progress.”

Lippert joined SMU in 2012. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2009-12, earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 and earned a Bachelor of Science at the California Institute of Technology in 2003.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense…” NSF is the funding source for approximately 24 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America’s colleges and universities. — Kenny Ryan, SMU

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Dallas Innovates: SMU Researchers, Gamers Partner on Cancer Research

Adding the processor power of the network of “Minecraft” gamers could double the amount of computer power devoted to the SMU research project.

Reporter Lance Murray with Dallas Innovates reported on the research of biochemistry professors Pia Vogel and John Wise in the SMU Department of Biological Sciences, and Corey Clark, deputy director of research at SMU Guildhall.

The researchers are leading an SMU assault on cancer in partnership with fans of the popular best-selling video game “Minecraft.”

They are partnering with the world’s vast network of gamers in hopes of discovering a new cancer-fighting drug. Vogel and Wise expect deep inroads in their quest to narrow the search for chemical compounds that improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs.

A boost in computational power by adding crowdsourcing may help the researchers narrow their search.

The Dallas Innovates article, “SMU Researchers, Gamers Partner on Cancer Research,” published June 5, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Lance Murray
Dallas Innovates

Game developers and researchers at SMU are partnering with a worldwide network of gamers who play the popular game in a crowdsourcing effort to beat the disease.

The project is being led by biochemistry professors Pia Vogel and John Wise of the SMU Department of Biological Sciences, and Corey Clark, deputy director of research at SMU Guildhall, the university’s graduate video game development program.

“Crowdsourcing as well as computational power may help us narrow down our search and give us better chances at selecting a drug that will be successful,” Vogel said in a release. “And gamers can take pride in knowing they’ve helped find answers to an important medical problem.”

Vogel and Wise have been utilizing the university’s ManeFrame supercomputer, one of the most powerful academic supercomputers in the country, to sort through millions of compounds that potentially could work in the fight against cancer.

Now, they’re going to try crowdsourced computing.

The researchers believe that the network of gamers will be able to crunch massive amounts of data during routine game play by pooling two weapons — human intuition and the massive computing power of the networked gaming machine processors.

Adding gamers could double processing power
That should more than double the amount of processing power aimed at their research problem.

“If we take a small percentage of the computing power from 25,000 gamers playing our mod we can match ManeFrame’s 120 teraflops of processing power,” said Clark, who is also an adjunct research associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences.

“Integrating with the ‘Minecraft’ community should allow us to double the computing power of [SMU’s] supercomputer.”

The research labs of Vogel and Wise are part of the Center for Drug Discovery, Design, and Delivery in SMU’s Dedman College, whose mission is a multidisciplinary focus for scientific research that targets medically important problems in human health, the release said.

According to SMU, the research is partly funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The researchers narrowed a group of compounds that show potential for alleviating the issue of chemotherapy failure after repeated use.

Using gamers in research has happened before
Using human gamers to enhance data-driven research has been done before with success and is a growing practice.

Vogel cited the video game “Foldit.”

Read the full story.

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Dallas Innovates: SMU Researchers Find West Virginia Geothermal Spots

The heated energy sources were discovered in the Mountain State by examining previously overlooked oil and gas data.

Reporter Amy Wolff Sorter with Dallas Innovates reported on the research of the SMU Geothermal Lab, which has identified in West Virginia what may be the largest geothermal hot spot in the United States.

The Dallas Innovates article, “SMU Researchers Find West Virginia Geothermal Spots,” published May 26, 2017.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Amy Wolff Sorter
Dallas Innovates

The state of West Virginia has been home to coal-driven energy for nearly two centuries. Now, there could be another energy source directly under the Mountain State’s surface discovered by researchers at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The researchers, examining previously overlooked oil and gas data, located several hot patches of earth, some as hot as 392 degrees Fahrenheit. These hot patches are situated roughly three miles under the state’s surface. In fact, scientists believe West Virginia could be sitting on the largest geothermal hot spot in the United States.

Geothermal patches overlooked in data
SMU’s Geothermal Lab Coordinator Maria Richards told the Exponent Telegram in Clarksburg, West Virginia that the hot patches were discovered by studying previously overlooked oil and gas data.

“We were aware that there were hot springs along the faults in West Virginia, and there was a basic understanding that there could be some sort of higher elevated areas, but we had never had the resources to be able to go back out and look at the deeper data until we had this project from Google that allowed us to bring in the oil and gas data,” she said.

The hot-water reservoirs were once considered too deep for inexpensive production.

However, “because of oil and gas drilling and some of the newer technologies in terms of drilling and pumping, some new innovative ways of developing systems, we can now go into places where we can inject water or a fluid that will then bring out that heat,” Richards said.

Geothermal’s appeal is that it is emission-free. It also has a smaller footprint, as energy is generated from underground wells.

Additionally, this particular renewable energy can overlap with other forms of energy, such as coal.

SMU’s Richards said that hot fluid can be used to dry coal, which, in turn, helps it burn more efficiently. The cleaner the coal burns, the less coal is required to produce electricity.

“Rather than having to burn a fossil fuel to generate electricity to create heat, the goal is to use the heat from the earth to create that heat automatically without having to generate electricity,” Richards said.

Read the full story.

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Study solves mystery of how plants use sunlight to tell time via cell protein signaling

Discovery may someday allow farmers to grow crops in climates where they currently won’t grow and allows scientists to make a subtle, targeted mutation to a specific native plant protein

Findings of a new study solve a key mystery about the chemistry of how plants tell time so they can flower and metabolize nutrients.

The process — a subtle chemical event — takes place in the cells of every plant every second of every day.

The new understanding means farmers may someday grow crops under conditions or in climates where they currently can’t grow, said chemist Brian D. Zoltowski, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, who led the study.

“We now understand the chemistry allowing plants to maintain a natural 24-hour rhythm in sync with their environment. This allows us to tune the chemistry, like turning a dimmer switch up or down, to alter the organism’s ability to keep time,” Zoltowski said. “So we can either make the plant’s clock run faster, or make it run slower. By altering these subtle chemical events we might be able to rationally redesign a plant’s photochemistry to allow it to adapt to a new climate.”

Specifically, the researchers figured out the chemical nuts and bolts of how a chemical bond in the protein Zeitlupe forms and breaks in reaction to sunlight, and the rate at which it does so, to understand how proteins in a plant’s cells signal the plant when to bloom, metabolize, store energy and perform other functions.

Zoltowski’s team, with collaborators at the University of Washington and Ohio State University, have made plant strains with specific changes to the way they are able to respond to blue-light.

“With these plants we demonstrate that indeed we can tune how the organisms respond to their environment in an intelligible manner,” Zoltowski said.

Zoltowski and his colleagues made the discovery by mapping the crystal structure of a plant protein whose function is to measure the intensity of sunlight. The protein is able to translate light intensity to a bond formation event that allows the plant to track the time of day and tell the plant when to bloom or metabolize nutrients.

A plant uses visual cues to constantly read every aspect of its environment and retune its physiological functions to adapt accordingly. Some of these cues are monitored by plant proteins that absorb and transmit light signals — called photoreceptors. The research team specifically studied two key photoreceptors, Zeitlupe (Zite-LOO-puh) and FKF-1.

“Plants have a very complex array of photoreceptors absorbing all different wavelengths of light to recognize every aspect of their environment and adapt accordingly,” said Zoltowski, an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Chemistry. “All their cells and tissue types are working in concert with each other.”

The finding was reported in the article “Kinetics of the LOV domain of Zeitlupe determine its circadian function in Arabidopsis” in the journal eLIFE online in advance of print publication.

Co-author and lead author is Ashutosh Pudasaini, a doctoral graduate from the SMU Department of Chemistry who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, Dallas. Other co-authors are Jae Sung Shim, Young Hun Song and Takato Imaizumi, University of Washington, Seattle; Hua Shi and David E. Somers, Ohio State University; and Takatoshi Kiba, RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science, Japan.

The research is funded through a grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health awarded to Zoltowski’s lab.

Nighttime is the right time for plants to grow
“If you live in the Midwest, people say you hear the corn growing at night,” said Zoltowski, who grew up in rural Wisconsin.

“During the day, a plant is storing as much energy as it can by absorbing photons of sunlight, so that during the evening it can do all its metabolism and growth and development. So there’s this separation between day and night.”

Plants measure these day and night oscillations as well as seasonal changes. Knowledge already existed of the initial chemistry, biology and physiology of that process.

In addition, Zoltowski and colleagues published in 2013 the discovery that the amino acids in Zeitlupe — working like a dimmer switch — gradually get more active as daytime turns to evening, thereby managing the 24-hour Circadian rhythm. Additionally, they found that FKF-1 is very different from Zeitlupe. FKF-1 switches on with morning light and measures seasonal changes, otherwise called photoperiodism.

But a knowledge gap remained. It was a mystery how the information is integrated by the organism.

“Ultimately that has to be related to some kind of chemical event occurring, some kind of chemical timekeeper,” Zoltowski said. “So by following that trail we figured out how the chemistry works.”

Dark state and light state snapshots
The problem required a two-pronged approach: Solving the structure of the protein to understand how forming and breaking bonds changes how the organism perceives its environment; and solving the chemistry, specifically the crystal structures of the protein’s dark and light states.

That process yielded a snapshot of the protein in the dark state and a snapshot of the protein in the light state, so the researchers could watch changes in protein structure in response to the bond-forming event.

From there, the researchers made mathematical models 1) that explain how the chemistry of the bond breaking and bond forming event, and the rate at which it occurs, should affect the organism; and 2) that design mutations to the protein that affect how it goes from the dark state to the light state to block that process.

Standard techniques yielded the discovery
The team used a few standard techniques. To get at the chemistry, they deployed ultra-violet visible spectroscopy to measure how efficiently proteins absorb light. They followed differences in the absorption spectrum, seeing what wavelengths are absorbed, to track chemical changes between the dark and the light states.

On the structure side, they crystallized the proteins and collected data at synchrotron sources at Cornell University, then mapped out like a puzzle where all the electrons are located in the crystal. From there they could fit and build — amino acid by amino acid — the protein, yielding a three-dimensional image of where every atom in the protein is located.

“This gives us pictures and snapshots of all those discrete events, where then we can look at how the atoms are moving and changing from one to the other,” Zoltowski said. “That allows us to see the bonds forming, the bonds breaking, and how the rest of the protein changes in response to that.”

Why didn’t we think of that?
The question has been an important one in the field, but challenging technical hurdles thwarted solutions, said Zoltowski. The key for his team was persistence and years of experience.

“This is not an easy protein to work with — it’s difficult to get crystals of these proteins. It requires a protein that is stable enough and will interact in a way that it yields a perfectly ordered crystal. So it’s difficult to do the chemistry and the structures. Researchers have struggled with getting adequate amounts of protein to be able to do these types of characterizations,” he said.

Think of it like a diamond, Zoltowski said, which is a perfectly ordered crystal that is just carbon atoms arranged in a specific way.

“Zeitlupe and FKF-1 have thousands of atoms in each protein, and in order to get a crystal, each molecule of the protein needs to arrange itself with the same type of accuracy and precision as carbon atoms in a diamond. Getting that to occur, where they pack nicely together, is non trivial. And some proteins just are really challenging to work with.”

Zoltowski and his colleagues have been fortunate in having years of experience working with these families of proteins, called the Light-oxygen-voltage-sensing domains, or LOV domains, for short.

“So we’ve developed a lot of skills and techniques over the years that can get over some of the technical hurdles,” he said. “So just from gaining experience over time, we’ve gotten better with working with some very difficult proteins. It makes something that is challenging, much more tractable for our lab.”

Does this apply to all LOV proteins in every plant?
Zeitlupe is a German word that means slow motion. The protein was dubbed Zeitlupe because scientists discovered when they found mutations of this protein previously that it made the Circadian clock run slower. It naturally altered the way the organism perceived time.

“We wanted to understand the proteins well enough that we could selectively alter the chemistry, or selectively alter the structure, to create mutations that would be testable in the organism,” Zoltowski said. “We wanted a predictive model that would tell us that these mutations that affect the kinetics — the rate at which this bond breaks — should do ‘X’ in the organism.”

The team’s new discovery results in hybrid plants — something nature already does and has done for millions of years through the process of evolution so that plants adapt to survive.

“We’re not putting anything into the plant or changing its genetics,” Zoltowski said. “We’re making a very subtle, targeted mutation to a specific protein that already is a native plant protein — and one that we’ve shown in this paper has evolved considerably throughout various different agricultural crops to already do this.”

The discovery gives scientists the ability to rationally interpret environmental information affecting a plant in order to introduce mutations, instead of relying on selective breeding to achieve a targeted mutation to generate phenotypes that potentially allow the plant to grow in a different environment.

What’s next?
The research opens a lot of new doors, including new questions about how these proteins are changing their configuration and how other variables, like oxidative stress, couple with the plant’s global sensory networks to also alter proteins and send multiple signals from the environment.

“What we’ve learned is that you need to pay careful attention to specific parts of the protein because they’re modulating activity selectively in different categories of this family,” Zoltowski said. “If we look at the whole family of these proteins, there are key amino acids that are evolutionarily selected, so they evolve specific modulations of this activity for their own independent niche in the environment. One of the take-homes is there are areas in the protein we need to look at to see how the amino acids are now different.”

Besides the NIH grant, the lab operates with $250,000 from the American Chemical Society’s Herman Frasch Foundation for Chemical Research Grants in Agricultural Chemistry. — Margaret Allen

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Elira Kuka, SMU economics professor, appointed to prestigious national research organization

SMU economics professor wins prestigious appointment to nation’s premier organization for impartial economic research, the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, the nation’s leading nonprofit economic research organization, has appointed SMU Assistant Professor Elira Kuka a faculty research fellow.

Kuka is in the SMU Department of Economics. She will be a fellow in the NBER’s research program on children, a key policy area.

NBER, founded in 1920, is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers and business professionals.

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is the most prestigious and active research organization in economic policy and empirical analysis in the U.S., said University Distinguished Professor Santanu Roy, chair of the SMU Department of Economics. Several Nobel laureates and Chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers (to the White House) have been fellows of the NBER, Roy said.

“To be appointed a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER is a tremendous recognition for a young scholar like Elira Kuka, who is just completing her second year as assistant professor after her Ph.D. It is a major boost to the SMU Economics Department’s research profile and visibility,” Roy said. “Elira’s work on several important public policy issues related to children’s health, unemployment insurance and education have started appearing in the very top journals of the profession. She is on a firm trajectory to be a star in her research field.”

NBER-affiliated researchers study a wide range of topics and they employ many different methods in their work. Key focus areas include developing new statistical measurements, estimating quantitative models of economic behavior and analyzing the effects of public policies while remaining impartial and foregoing recommendations.

Over the years the NBER’s research agenda has encompassed a wide variety of issues that confront our society. Twenty-six Nobel Prize winners in Economics and 13 past chairs of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers have held NBER affiliations.

The more than 1,400 professors of economics and business now teaching at colleges and universities in North America who are NBER researchers are the leading scholars in their fields.

Kuka joined SMU in 2015. She received an undergraduate degree from Wellesley College, Mass., and her Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Davis. Her research focuses on understanding how government policy affects individual behavior and wellbeing, the extent to which it provides social insurance during times of need, and its effectiveness in alleviation of poverty and inequality.

Her current research topics include the potential benefits of the federal Unemployment Insurance program, the protective power of the U.S. safety net during recessions and various issues in academic achievement.

Kuka’s appointment was effective May 1, 2017.

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SMU Guildhall and cancer researchers level up to tap human intuition of video gamers in quest to beat cancer

Massive computational power of online “Minecraft” gaming community bests supercomputers

Video gamers have the power to beat cancer, according to cancer researchers and video game developers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

SMU researchers and game developers are partnering with the world’s vast network of gamers in hopes of discovering a new cancer-fighting drug.

Biochemistry professors Pia Vogel and John Wise in the SMU Department of Biological Sciences, and Corey Clark, deputy director of research at SMU Guildhall, are leading the SMU assault on cancer in partnership with fans of the popular best-selling video game “Minecraft.”

Vogel and Wise expect deep inroads in their quest to narrow the search for chemical compounds that improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs.

“Crowdsourcing as well as computational power may help us narrow down our search and give us better chances at selecting a drug that will be successful,” said Vogel. “And gamers can take pride in knowing they’ve helped find answers to an important medical problem.”

Up to now, Wise and Vogel have tapped the high performance computing power of SMU’s Maneframe, one of the most powerful academic supercomputers in the nation. With ManeFrame, Wise and Vogel have sorted through millions of compounds that have the potential to work. Now, the biochemists say, it’s time to take that research to the next level — crowdsourced computing.

A network of gamers can crunch massive amounts of data during routine gameplay by pairing two powerful weapons: the best of human intuition combined with the massive computing power of networked gaming machine processors.

Taking their research to the gaming community will more than double the amount of machine processing power attacking their research problem.

“With the distributed computing of the actual game clients, we can theoretically have much more computing power than even the supercomputer here at SMU,” said Clark, also adjunct research associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. SMU Guildhall in March was named No. 1 among the Top 25 Top Graduate Schools for Video Game Design by The Princeton Review.

“If we take a small percentage of the computing power from 25,000 gamers playing our mod we can match ManeFrame’s 120 teraflops of processing power,” Clark said. “Integrating with the ‘Minecraft’ community should allow us to double the computing power of that supercomputer.”

Even more importantly, the gaming community adds another important component — human intuition.

Wise believes there’s a lot of brainpower eager to be tapped in the gaming community. And human brains, when tackling a problem or faced with a challenge, can make creative and intuitive leaps that machines can’t.

“What if we learn things that we never would have learned any other way? And even if it doesn’t work it’s still a good idea and the kids will still get their endorphin kicks playing the game,” Wise said. “It also raises awareness of the research. Gamers will be saying ‘Mom don’t tell me to go to bed, I’m doing scientific research.”

The Vogel and Wise research labs are part of the Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery (CD4) in SMU’s Dedman College. The center’s mission is a novel multi-disciplinary focus for scientific research targeting medically important problems in human health. Their research is funded in part by the National Institutes of Health.

The research question in play
Vogel and Wise have narrowed a group of compounds that show promise for alleviating the problem of chemotherapy failure after repeated use. Each one of those compounds has 50 to 100 — or even more — characteristics that contribute to their efficacy.

“Corey’s contribution will hopefully tell us which dozen perhaps of these 100 characteristics are the important ones,” Vogel said. “Right now of those 100 characteristics, we don’t know which ones are good ones. We want to see if there’s a way with what we learn from Corey’s gaming system to then apply what we learn to millions of other compounds to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

James McCormick — a fifth year Ph.D. student in cellular molecular biology who earned his doctoral degree this spring and is a researcher with the Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery — produced the data set for Clark and Guildhall.

Lauren Ammerman, a first-year Ph.D. student in cellular and molecular biology and also working in the Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery, is taking up the computational part of the project.

Machines can learn from human problem solving
Crowdsourcing video gamers to solve real scientific problems is a growing practice.

Machine learning and algorithms by themselves don’t always find the best solution, Clark said. There are already examples of researchers who for years sought answers with machine learning, then switched to actual human gamers.

Gamers take unstructured data and attack it with human problem-solving skills to quickly find an answer.

“So we’re combining both,” Clark said. “We’re going to have both computers and humans trying to find relationships and clustering the data. Each of those human decisions will also be supplied as training input into a deep neural network that is learning the ‘human heuristic’ — the technique and processes humans are using to make their decisions.”

Gamers already have proven they can solve research problems that have stymied scientists, says Vogel. She cites the video game “Foldit” created by the University of Washington specifically to unlock the structure of an AIDS-related enzyme.

Some other Games With A Purpose, as they’re called, have produced similar results. Humans outperform computers when it comes to tasks in the computational process that are particularly suited to the human intellect.

“With ‘Foldit,’ researchers worked on a problem for 15 years using machine learning techniques and were unable to find a solution,” Clark said. “Once they created the game, 57,000 players found a solution in three weeks.”

Modifying the “Minecraft” game and embedding research data inside
Gamers will access the research problem using the version of “Minecraft” they purchased, then install a “mod” or “plugin” — gamer jargon for modifying game code to expand a game’s possibilities — that incorporates SMUs research problem and was developed in accordance with “Minecraft” terms of service. Players will be fully aware of their role in the research, including ultimately leaderboards that show where players rank toward analyzing the data set in the research problem.

SMU is partnering with leaders in the large “Minecraft” modding community to develop a functioning mod by the end of 2017. The game will be heavily tested before release to the public the second quarter of 2018, Clark said.

The SMU “Minecraft” mod will incorporate a data processing and distributed computing platform from game technology company Balanced Media Technology (BMT), McKinney, Texas. BMT’s HEWMEN software platform executes machine-learning algorithms coupled with human guided interactions. It will integrate Wise and Vogel’s research directly into the SMU “Minecraft” mod.

SMU Guildhall will provide the interface enabling modders to develop their own custom game mechanic that visualizes and interacts with the research problem data within the “Minecraft” game environment. Guildhall research is funded in part by Balanced Media Technology.

“We expect to have over 25,000 people continuously online during our testing period,” Clark said. “That should probably double the computing power of the supercomputer here.”

That many players and that much computing power is a massive resource attacking the research problem, Wise said.

“The SMU computational system has 8,000 computer cores. Even if I had all of ManeFrame to myself, that’s still less computing and brainpower than the gaming community,” he said. “Here we’ve got more than 25,000 different brains at once. So even if 24,000 don’t find an answer, there are maybe 1,000 geniuses playing ‘Minecraft’ that may find a solution. This is the most creative thing I’ve heard in a long time.” — Margaret Allen, SMU

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SMU Anthropologist Caroline Brettell Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Brettell is one of 228 leaders in sciences, humanities and the arts in the class of 2017

Noted SMU anthropologist Caroline Brettell joins actress Carol Burnett, musician John Legend, playwright Lynn Nottage, immunologist James Allison and other renowned leaders in various fields as a newly elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The class of 2017 will be inducted at a ceremony on Saturday, Oct. 7 at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Brettell joins 228 new fellows and foreign honorary members — representing the sciences, the humanities and the arts, business, public affairs and the nonprofit sector — as a member of one of the world’s most prestigious honorary societies.

“Caroline Brettell is an internationally recognized leader in the field of migration, and one of Dedman College’s most productive scholars,” said Thomas DiPiero, dean of SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences. “I couldn’t be happier to see her win this well-deserved accolade.”

“I am surprised and deeply honored to receive such a recognition,” said Brettell, Ruth Collins Altshuler Professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of the Interdisciplinary Institute in SMU’s Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences. “It is overwhelming to be in the company of Winston Churchill, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jonas Salk and the ‘mother’ of my own discipline, Margaret Mead. And I am thrilled to have my favorite pianist, André Watts, as a member of my class. I am truly grateful to join such a distinguished and remarkable group of members, past and present.”

Brettell’s research centers on ethnicity, migration and the immigrant experience. Much of her work has focused on the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex as a new immigration gateway city, especially on how immigrants practice citizenship and civic engagement as they meld into existing economic, social and political structures. She has special expertise in cross-cultural perspectives on gender, the challenges specific to women immigrants, how the technology boom affects immigration, and how the U.S.-born children of immigrants construct their identities and a sense of belonging. An immigrant herself, Brettell was born in Canada and became a U.S. citizen in 1993.

She is the author or editor of nearly 20 books, most recently Gender and Migration (2016, Polity Press UK) and Identity and the Second Generation: How Children of Immigrants Find Their Space, co-edited with Faith G. Nibbs, Ph.D. ’11 (2016, Vanderbilt University Press). Her research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wenner Gren Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation, among many others.

An SMU faculty member since 1988, Brettell has held the Dedman Family Distinguished Professorship and served as chair in the Department of Anthropology and as director of Women’s Studies in Dedman College. She served as president of the Faculty Senate and a member of the University’s Board of Trustees in 2001-02, and was dean ad interim of Dedman College from 2006-08. Brettell is a member of the American Anthropological Association, the American Ethnological Society, the Society for Applied Anthropology, the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, and the Society for Urban, National and Transnational Anthropology, among others. She is the fourth SMU faculty member elected to the Academy, joining David Meltzer, Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory in Dedman College (class of 2013); Scurlock University Professor of Human Values Charles Curran (class of 2010); and the late David Weber, formerly Robert and Nancy Dedman Chair in History in Dedman College, (class of 2007).

“It is an honor to welcome this new class of exceptional women and men as part of our distinguished membership,” said Don Randel, chair of the Academy’s Board of Directors. “Their talents and expertise will enrich the life of the Academy and strengthen our capacity to spread knowledge and understanding in service to the nation.”

“In a tradition reaching back to the earliest days of our nation, the honor of election to the American Academy is also a call to service,” said Academy President Jonathan F. Fanton. “Through our projects, publications, and events, the Academy provides members with opportunities to make common cause and produce the useful knowledge for which the Academy’s 1780 charter calls.”

Since its founding in 1780, the Academy has elected leading “thinkers and doers” from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th. The current membership of about 4,900 fellows and 600 foreign honorary members includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners. The Academy’s work is advanced by these elected members, who are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs from around the world.

Members of the Academy’s 2017 class include winners of the Pulitzer Prize and the Wolf Prize; MacArthur Fellows; Fields Medalists; Presidential Medal of Freedom and National Medal of Arts recipients; and Academy Award, Grammy Award, Emmy Award, and Tony Award winners.

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CTNewsJunkie.com: Ignoring Science At Our Own Peril

“A scientific theory is a very well-tested explanation, built from facts, confirmed hypotheses, and inferences.” — SMU physicist Stephen Sekula

An Op-Ed in the online Connecticut news outlet CTNewsJunkie.com tapped the expertise of SMU Associate Professor of Physics Stephen Sekula.

The writer of the piece, High School English teacher Barth Keck at Haddam-Killingworth High School, quoted the comments of Sekula, who spoke to Keck’s media literacy class.

The opinion piece, “Ignoring Science At Our Own Peril,” addressed the issue of science illiteracy. The editorial published April 14, 2017.

Sekula was among the SMU physicists at Geneva-based CERN — seat of the world’s largest collaborative physics experiment — in December 2011 who found hints of the long sought after Higgs boson, dubbed the fundamental “God” particle.

Sekula conducts research at the energy frontier through CERN’s ATLAS Experiment. He co-convened the ATLAS Higgs Subgroup 6: Beyond-the-Standard Model Higgs Physics from 2012-2013. He is involved in the search for additional Higgs bosons. He also is an authority on big data and high-performance computing.

Read the full Op-Ed.

EXCERPT:

By Barth Keck
CTNewsJunkie.com

Last week was a newsworthy week — at least for this high school English teacher.

In a story out of Hartford last Wednesday, the state Board of Education officially eliminated the requirement that standardized test scores be tied to teacher evaluations. The move, while controversial, was a common-sense decision that recognizes the many problems created by evaluations based on standardized tests. A newsworthy development, indeed, for anyone interested in education.

Even so, a more newsworthy event for me occurred on Tuesday when Southern Methodist University professor Stephen Sekula visited English and science classes at his alma mater and my workplace, Haddam-Killingworth High School. Speaking to my students in Media Literacy, Sekula explained in vivid detail how scientists rigorously and deliberately employ the scientific method in their never-ending search for answers. It is with similar vigilance, he explained, that individuals must consider the multitude of messages around them to become truly “media-literate.”

“A scientific theory is a very well-tested explanation, built from facts, confirmed hypotheses, and inferences,” according to the physics professor. “It is more powerful than a fact because it explains facts.”

Unfortunately, said Sekula, the word “theory” is often likened to “opinion” in public dialogue — as in “human-caused climate change is just a theory” — but there’s an essential difference between theory and opinion. Scientists know the difference, of course, but so should all citizens. Thus, a media-literate person sees a red flag whenever someone — a “pseudoscientist” — uses “theory” and “opinion” interchangeably.

“Pseudoscience readily admits opinions and equates that with the idea of scientific theory,” explained Sekula, “requiring no high quality evidence to make explanatory claims about the world.”

And there it was: the explanation for so much happening in the public sphere right now. Fake news, conspiracy theories, science-averse officials appointed to science-dependent federal agencies. Professor Sekula’s message could not be more timely and, therefore, newsworthy.

Read the full Op-Ed.

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Health & Medicine Mind & Brain Researcher news SMU In The News

NPR: A Tiny Spot In Mouse Brains May Explain How Breathing Calms The Mind

SMU psychology professor Alicia Merit was interviewed by NPR as an expert outside source on a new study about calming the mind.

Public radio network NPR interviewed SMU clinical psychologist Alicia Meuret for her expertise on breathing as it relates to fear and anxiety.

The NPR article, “A Tiny Spot In Mouse Brains May Explain How Breathing Calms The Mind,” published March 30, 2017.

Meuret is director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at SMU, with expertise in discussing the differences between fear and anxiety and when each is helpful and adaptive and when they are harmful and interfere with our lives.

An associate professor in the Clinical Psychology Division of the SMU Department of Psychology, Meuret received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Hamburg based on her doctoral work conducted at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University and the Affective Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

Her research program focuses on novel treatment approaches for anxiety and mood disorders, biomarkers in anxiety disorders and chronic disease, fear extinction mechanisms of exposure therapy, and mediators and moderators in individuals with affective dysregulations, including non-suicidal self-injury.

The article “A Tiny Spot In Mouse Brains May Explain How Breathing Calms The Mind,” cites new findings from Meuret’s research, which found patients undergoing exposure therapy for anxiety fared better when sessions were held in the morning when levels of the helpful natural hormone cortisone are higher in the brain.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Jessica Boddy
NPR

Take a deep breath in through your nose, and slowly let it out through your mouth. Do you feel calmer?

Controlled breathing like this can combat anxiety, panic attacks and depression. It’s one reason so many people experience tranquility after meditation or a pranayama yoga class. How exactly the brain associates slow breathing with calmness and quick breathing with nervousness, though, has been a mystery. Now, researchers say they’ve found the link, at least in mice.

The key is a smattering of about 175 neurons in a part of the brain the researchers call the breathing pacemaker, which is a cluster of nearly 3,000 neurons that sit in the brainstem and control autonomic breathing. Through their research is in mice, the researchers found that those 175 neurons are the communication highway between the breathing pacemaker and the part of the brain responsible for attention, arousal and panic. So breathing rate could directly affect feeling calm or anxious, and vice versa.

If that mouse pathway works the same way in humans, it would explain why we get so chilled out after slowing down our breathing. […]

[…] Alicia Meuret, an associate professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University who also wasn’t involved in the study, wasn’t sure if what the authors described as calm mouse behavior could be described as such. “It’s hard to determine what calm behavior is [in mice],” Meuret says. “We can see their behavior, but we don’t know what effect the loss of neurons has on their emotions.”

Banzett echoed that concern, noting the authors inferred emotion because “they equate the increase in grooming behavior with the emotional state of calmness.”

Read the full story.

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Culture, Society & Family Health & Medicine Learning & Education Mind & Brain Researcher news SMU In The News

KERA News: Teens In Low-Income Families Get HPV Vaccine If Parents Persuade Themselves Of Benefits

In the first study of its kind, self-persuasion software on an iPad motivated low-income parents to want to protect their teens against the cancer-causing Human Papillomavirus.

Journalist Justin Martin with KERA public radio news covered the research of SMU psychology professor Austin S. Baldwin, a principal investigator on the research.

KERA’s article, “Teens In Low-Income Families Get HPV Vaccine If Parents Persuade Themselves Of Benefits,” aired April 12, 2017.

The SMU study found that low-income parents will decide to have their teens vaccinated against the sexually transmitted cancer-causing virus if the parents persuade themselves of the protective benefits.

The study’s subjects — almost all moms — were taking their teens and pre-teens to a safety-net pediatric clinic for medical care. It’s the first to look at changing parents’ behavior through self-persuasion using English- and Spanish-language materials.

A very common virus, HPV infects nearly one in four people in the United States, including teens, according to the Centers for Disease Control. HPV infection can cause cervical, vaginal and vulvar cancers in females; penile cancer in males; and anal cancer, back of the throat cancer and genital warts in both genders, the CDC says.

The CDC recommends a series of two shots of the vaccine for 11- to 14-year-olds to build effectiveness in advance of sexual activity. For 15- to 26-year-olds, they are advised to get three doses over the course of eight months, says the CDC.

Currently, about 60% of adolescent girls and 40% of adolescent boys get the first dose of the HPV vaccine. After that, about 20% of each group fail to follow through with the second dose, Baldwin said.

Listen to the KERA radio interview with Justin Martin.

EXCERPT From KERA News:

Guilt, social pressure and even a doctor’s recommendation aren’t enough to motivate low-income families to vaccinate their teenagers for Human Papillomavirus (HPV), according to research from Southern Methodist University.

But a follow-up study from SMU finds that if parents persuade themselves of the benefits of the vaccinations, more teenagers in low-income families receive protection from the sexually transmitted, cancer-causing virus.

Austin Baldwin, a professor of psychology at SMU, led the research.

What the study tells us about poverty: HPV is a sexually transmitted virus that is the primary cause of a variety of cancers. There’s been a vaccine developed in the last 10 years, 12 years that’s now approved. At times, those who are underinsured or uninsured don’t have this same level of access to it. Both here locally as well as nationally [among] folks who are poor, who are uninsured, we see clear disparities across a variety of health outcomes including cancer, including cervical cancer. The HPV vaccine is potentially a very effective means to address some of those health disparities.

How the study was conducted: We recruited parents of adolescents who get their pediatric care at Parkland clinic, and they participated in an iPad app that we developed. It provides them with some basic information about HPV and about the vaccine. It then prompts them with a number of questions to think about why getting the vaccine may be important, and then it prompts them to generate their own reasons for why they would get the vaccine. Most of the parents who had not previously given thought to or were undecided about the vaccine reported that they had decided to get their adolescent vaccinated.

Listen to the KERA radio interview with Justin Martin.

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Events Feature Researcher news Student researchers Videos

SMU Research Day 2017 visitors query SMU students on the details of their research

The best in SMU undergraduate and graduate research work was on full display at Research Day in the Hughes Trigg Student Center.

More than 150 graduate and undergraduate students at SMU presented posters at SMU Research Day 2017 in the Promenade Ballroom of Hughes-Trigg Student Center Ballroom on March 28.

Student researchers discussed their ongoing and completed SMU research and their results with faculty, staff and students who attended the one-day event.

Explaining their research to others is a learning experience for students, said Peter Weyand, Glenn Simmons Professor of Applied Physiology and professor of biomechanics in the Department of Applied Physiology and Wellness in SMU’s Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.

“Research Day is an opportunity for SMU students to show off what they’ve been doing at the grad level and at the undergrad level,” Weyand said, “and that’s really an invaluable experience for them.”

Posters and presentations spanned more than 20 different fields from the Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education & Human Development, the Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences and SMU Guildhall.

“It’s a huge motivation to present your work before people,” said Aparna Viswanath, a graduate student in engineering. Viswanath presented research on “Looking Around Corners,” research into an instrument that converts a scattering surface into computational holographic sensors.

The goal of Research Day is to foster communication about research between students in different disciplines, give students the opportunity to present their work in a professional setting, and to share the outstanding research being conducted at SMU.

The annual event is sponsored by the SMU Office of Research and Graduate Studies.

View highlights of the presentations on Facebook.

Some highlights of the research:

  • Adel Alharbi, a student of Dr. Mitchell Thornton in Lyle School’s Computer Science and Engineering presented research on a novel demographic group prediction mechanism for smart device users based upon the recognition of user gestures.
  • Ashwini Subramanian and Prasanna Rangarajan, students of Dr. Dinesh Rajan, in Lyle School’s Electrical Engineering Department, presented research about accurately measuring the physical dimensions of an object for manufacturing and logistics with an inexpensive software-based Volume Measurement System using the Texas Instruments OPT8241 3D Time-of-Flight camera, which illuminates the scene with a modulated light source, observing the reflected light and translating it to distance.
  • Gang Chen, a student of Dr. Pia Vogel in the Department of Chemistry of Dedman College, presented research on multidrug resistance in cancers associated with proteins including P-glycoprotein and looking for inhibitors of P-gp.
  • Tetiana Hutchison, a student of Dr. Rob Harrod in the Chemistry Department of Dedman College, presented research on inhibitors of mitochondrial damage and oxidative stress related to human T-cell leukemia virus type-1, an aggressive hematological cancer for which there are no effective treatments.
  • Margarita Sala, a student of Dr. David Rosenfield and Dr. Austin Baldwin in the Psychology Department of Dedman College, presented research on how specific post-exercise affective states differ between regular and infrequent exercisers, thereby elucidating the “feeling better” phenomenon.
  • Bernard Kauffman, a Level Design student of Dr. Corey Clark in SMU Guildhall, presented research on building a user interface that allows video game players to analyze vast swaths of scientific data to help researchers find potentially useful compounds for treating cancer.

Browse the Research Day 2017 directory of presentations by department.

See the SMU Graduate Studies Facebook page for images of 2017 Research Day.

See the SMU Anthropology Department photo album of Research Day 2017 poster presentations.

According to the Fall 2016 report on Undergraduate Research, SMU provides opportunities for student research in a full variety of disciplines from the natural sciences and engineering, to social sciences, humanities and the arts. These opportunities permit students to bring their classroom knowledge to practical problems or a professional level in their chosen field of study.
Opportunities offered include both funded and curricular programs
that can be tailored according to student needs:

  • Students may pursue funded research with the assistance of a
    variety of campus research programs. Projects can be supported
    during the academic year or in the summer break, when students
    have the opportunity to focus full-time on research.
  • Students may also enroll in research courses that are offered in
    many departments that permit them to design a unique project,
    or participate in a broader project.
  • Students can take advantage of research opportunities outside
    of their major, or design interdisciplinary projects with their faculty
    mentors. The Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute supports
    such research via the Mayer Scholars.
  • View videos of previous SMU Research Day events:

    See Research Day winners from 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014.

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    Economics & Statistics Feature Researcher news SMU In The News Technology

    Nation’s electric grid — a complex mathematical system — is dramatically changing

    Deregulation of the U.S. electric markets, the emergence of renewable sources of energy and new technologies means there are large risks to the grid.

    Our nation’s electric grid is changing dramatically due to deregulation of electric markets, the introduction of renewable sources of energy such as solar and wind power, and the emergence of new technologies such as the smart grid and electric cars, according to Barry Lee, an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

    “Such changes can lead to large risks in the grid, which are not very well understood,” said Lee, whose research addresses the issue.

    The electric power grid is a complex mathematical system. In fact, some components of the emergent grid (for example, faster than real-time analysis of enormous amounts of collected data) have yet to be mathematically formulated, according to Lee in a report to the National Science Foundation. Collaboration between power grid engineers and mathematicians/statisticians will be beneficial for the design of low-risk, highly resilient systems.

    Lee’s research goal is to mathematically analyze the stability and the effects of stochasticity — randomness created by renewable energy and new technologies — in the emerging power grid.

    “I’m analyzing the mathematical equations governing the power grid, and modifications to them to handle the emerging grid, and developing computational algorithms to permit fast and accurate numerical simulations,” he said.

    Lee collaborates on a grant project at the non-profit Argonne National Laboratory, Multifaceted Mathematics for Complex Energy Systems, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research. Argonne is operated by the University of Chicago for the DOE.

    He and other mathematics researchers presented in February at the University of Wisconsin about the progress they’ve made over the past four years to address the power grid challenge.

    “One of the problems in modeling power grids is the large number of equations that must be solved, and solved almost at real time, to react quickly enough to ameliorate instabilities of the power flow,” said Lee, who co-authored a 2014 DOE IEEE paper On the Configuration of the US Western Interconnection Voltage Stability Boundary.

    To tackle that job, the Department of Energy is drawing on a broad range of research scientists from three Department of Energy labs and numerous universities, including SMU’s Lee.

    His DOE presentation in February focused on model-reduction.

    “The goal is to mathematically analyze and develop mathematical algorithms for solving power grid problems,” Lee said. “The idea is to take these large systems of equations, which model the physics, and reduce them to a much smaller size, for example from 10,000 equations to 500, but to do this in a systematic way in order to retain the physics in the smaller system. I presented a mathematical way to systematically derive these reduced models, based on stability conditions that must be preserved.”

    Collaboration will be beneficial
    Changes in the grid will affect the quality of delivered electric power to the consumer and will pose new risks and alter the resiliency of the power grid system. To understand and mitigate these risks and to strengthen the resiliency, mathematical and statistical techniques will be invaluable, according to National Science Foundation officials. The NSF brought together mathematicians and statisticians in 2015 for a workshop on the challenges to the electric grid.

    Lee co-organized a 2015 NSF workshop and accompanying report on the issue: Risk and Resiliency of the Electric Power Grid: Mathematical and Statistical Challenges.

    “Collaboration between power grid engineers and mathematicians/statisticians will be beneficial for the design of low-risk, highly resilient systems,” Lee and his co-author concluded.

    Lee collaborates with mathematicians, engineers and physicists at the Lawrence Livermore, Pacific Northwest, and Argonne National Laboratories. For the past 15 years he has been affiliated with several Department of Energy national laboratories.

    His research focuses on the mathematical modeling, numerical algorithmic development and scientific computing of large-scale industrial and laboratory applications. The NSF has featured Lee in an article about NSF-funded research on the grid:

    Lee realizes that the power grid of today and the emerging grid of the future will be far different from those in 1965, and with those changes come new vulnerabilities. “One of the biggest vulnerabilities arises from instability of the grid. Moreover, a more recent vulnerability is cybersecurity because the power grid is online,” he said. […]

    […] Lee’s NSF-funded mathematical research develops models that include large systems of equations describing the angles and voltage magnitudes in the flow of electricity. By introducing cutting-edge mathematics and new algorithms to collaborating power engineers, he’s able to help them better prepare for potential surges and system ruptures and maintain a stable power grid.
    Click to read the full NSF article.

    Central to Lee’s research is development of schemes that deliver optimal computational efficiency on serial and large-scale parallel computer platforms. Thus, an essential component of his research is computational linear algebra, particularly scalable multigrid and multilevel methods.

    His current research interests include efficient methods for the Boltzmann transport equation (neutron/photon transport), Maxwell equations (fusion), equations of elasticity (structural designs), general coupled systems of elliptic partial differential equations (multi-physics and uncertainty quantification), and large systems of algebraic-differential equations (electric power grid networks).

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    Culture, Society & Family Feature Health & Medicine Researcher news

    Male versus female college students react differently to helicopter parenting, study finds

    Helicopter parenting reduces the well-being of young women, while the failure to foster independence harms the well-being of young men but not young women.

    Male and female college students react differently to misguided parenting, according to a new study that looked at the impact of helicopter parenting and fostering independence.

    Measuring both helicopter parenting as well as autonomy support — fostering independence — was important for the researchers to study, said family dynamics expert Chrystyna Kouros, an assistant professor of psychology at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and an author on the study.

    “Just because mom and dad aren’t helicopter parents, doesn’t necessarily mean they are supporting their young adult in making his or her own choices,” Kouros said. “The parent may be uninvolved, so we also wanted to know if parents are actually encouraging their student to be independent and make their own choices.”

    The researchers found that young women are negatively affected by helicopter parenting, while young men suffer when parents don’t encourage independence.

    “The sex difference was surprising,” said Kouros, an expert in adolescent depression. “In Western culture in particular, boys are socialized more to be independent, assertive and take charge, while girls are more socialized toward relationships, caring for others, and being expressive and compliant. Our findings showed that a lack of autonomy support — failure to encourage independence — was more problematic for males, but didn’t affect the well-being of females. Conversely, helicopter parenting — parents who are overinvolved — proved problematic for girls, but not boys.”

    The study is unique in measuring the well-being of college students, said Kouros, director of the Family Health and Development Lab at SMU. The tendency in research on parenting has been to focus on the mental health of younger children.

    “When researchers do focus on college students they tend to ask about academic performance, and whether students are engaged in school. But there haven’t been as many studies that look at mental health or well-being in relation to helicopter parenting,” she said.

    Unlike children subjected to psychological control, in which parents try to instill guilt in their child, children of helicopter parents report a very close bond with their parents. Helicopter parents “hover” out of concern for their child, not from malicious intent, she said.

    What helicopter parents don’t realize is that despite their good intentions to help their child, it actually does harm, said Naomi Ekas, a co-author on the study and assistant professor of psychology at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth.

    “They’re not allowing their child to become independent or learn problem-solving on their own, nor to test out and develop effective coping strategies,” Ekas said.

    Young men that reported more autonomy support, measured stronger well-being in the form of less social anxiety and fewer depressive symptoms.

    For young women, helicopter parenting predicted lower psychological well-being. They were less optimistic, felt less satisfaction with accomplishments, and were not looking forward to things with enjoyment, nor feeling hopeful. In contrast, lacking autonomy support wasn’t related to negative outcomes in females.

    “The take-away is we have to adjust our parenting as our kids get older,” said Kouros. “Being involved with our child is really important. But we have to adapt how we are involved as they are growing up, particularly going off to college.”

    The findings were reported in the article “Helicopter Parenting, Autonomy Support, and College Students’ Mental Health and Well-being: The Moderating Role of Sex and Ethnicity,” in the Journal of Child and Family Studies.

    Other co-authors were: Romilyn Kiriaki and Megan Sunderland, SMU Department of Psychology, and Megan M. Pruitt, Texas Christian University. The study was funded by the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health at the University of Texas at Austin.

    Parental involvement can go too far
    Research on child development has consistently found that children are more successful when they have parental involvement and support.

    Now, however, research is finding that parental involvement can go too far. Call it over-parenting, over-controlling parenting or helicopter parenting, but the characteristics are the same: parents offer their child a lot of warmth and support, but in combination with high levels of control and low levels of autonomy and independence.

    For example a parent may dispute their college student’s low grade with a professor or negotiate their young adult’s job offer and salary.

    Previous research in the field has linked helicopter parenting to a student’s poor academic achievement, lower self-esteem and life satisfaction, poor peer relationships, and greater interpersonal dependency.

    “With helicopter parenting you’re impeding children from meeting the developmental goals of being independent and autonomous,” Kouros said. “That lowers their confidence in being able to solve problems on their own. They lose the opportunity to learn how to deal with stressors. Someone who’s used to figuring out daily hassles, however, learns strategies, gets practice and knows problems aren’t the end of the world.”

    In contrast, research in the field links positive outcomes when parents support autonomy and independence by encouraging their young adults to make decisions and solve problems. Autonomy support is related to higher self-esteem and less depression.

    Minimal research into sex differences of young adults
    For the current study, the researchers wanted to see if helicopter parenting and low autonomy support equally affected male and female students.

    Researching potential differences was especially important, the researchers concluded, since studies have found that females are twice as prone as males to develop depression and anxiety.

    Very little research of sex differences has been conducted in emerging adulthood in relation to parenting. What limited research there is suggests that over-controlling or lax parenting increases the risk for maladjustment, particularly for young women.

    The researchers surveyed 118 undergraduate students recruited from two mid-sized private universities in the southwest United States. The majority of students were female, between 18 and 25 years old, primarily white and Hispanic and living on campus.

    Students completed widely accepted measures of helicopter parenting and autonomy support. The questionnaires asked students to rank their agreements or disagreement on a scale for items such as “If I were to receive a low grade that I felt was unfair, my parents would call the professor,” or “My parents encourage me to make my own decisions and take responsibility for the choices I make.”

    To assess mental health and well-being, the students completed an accepted inventory for depression and anxiety symptoms that asked questions about their feelings the past two weeks. Examples include, “I felt depressed,” “I felt self-conscious knowing that others were watching me,” and “I felt hopeful about the future.”

    The study complements a growing body of research about the harmful effects of helicopter parenting for adult children. It also adds to research indicating females are more vulnerable to the negative effects than males.

    “You should love and care for your child, but the way you show it and manifest it has to be developmentally appropriate. Your parenting has to follow where your child is developmentally,” Kouros said. “Being over-involved while your child is in college, that may not be appropriate anymore. That doesn’t mean you disengage. So if a college student wants to call their parent and talk through an issue and problem solve, I think that’s appropriate. But it’s their problem and they should be able to confidently handle it on their own.” — Margaret Allen

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    Culture, Society & Family Economics & Statistics Researcher news SMU In The News

    Quartz: When diverse groups interact, everybody ends up smarter and healthier

    “…although individuals may feel antagonism towards other groups in society, that prejudice is less strong if they interact with these groups in their daily lives.” — Desmet, Gomes and Ortuño-Ortín

    Quartz internet news magazine covered the research of SMU Economics Professor Klaus Desmet and colleagues. The article reported that the new study by Desmet and two other economists found that after examining data from nearly every country in the world, they find that when diverse groups interact, it leads to better outcomes in terms of health, education and public infrastructure.

    “Chalk one up for contact theory,” wrote San Francisco-based reporter Dan Kopf, who covers economics and markets and has a Masters in Economics from the London School of Economics.

    Desmet, who has his degree from Stanford University, is Ruth and Kenneth Altshuler Centennial Interdisciplinary Professor. His research interests include international trade, regional and urban economics, macroeconomics and political economy.

    Desmet’s work is likely to be of profound significance for actual policy makers, according to Santanu Roy, University Distinguished Professor and Chair of the SMU Department of Economics.

    “Klaus Desmet is engaged in truly path breaking research in undestanding the spatial, cultural and genetic dimensions of the global economy and the deep long run determinants of economic change,” said Roy. “Over the last few years, his work has been published in the very top journals in economics such as the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy, a major boost to the reputation and visibility of the SMU economics department.”

    The Quartz article, “When diverse groups interact, everybody ends up smarter and healthier,” published March 24, 2017.

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Dan Kopf
    Quartz

    A striking fact about the tide of nationalism sweeping through the West is that it is strongest in places with the least diversity. Supporters of Donald Trump, and his “America first” policies, generally come from areas of the US least touched by immigration. The parts of the UK that opted to “take back control” by voting for Brexit also clustered in areas with fewer foreign-born residents.

    But as a group of economists note, “although individuals may feel antagonism towards other groups in society, that prejudice is less strong if they interact with these groups in their daily lives.”

    In recently released research (pdf), Klaus Desmet, Joseph Gomes, and Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín go well beyond examining the demographics of Trump and Brexit voters. Their research explores whether contact theory, the belief that increased interaction leads to better relations between groups, or conflict theory, that interaction leads to more prejudice, is a better way to describe the current state of the world. They examined data from nearly every country in the world, and find that when diverse groups interact, it leads to better outcomes in terms of health, education, and public infrastructure. Chalk one up for contact theory.

    A vast body of earlier research has found, however, that ethnic and linguistic diversity tends to reduce spending on public goods. This is usually explained as a preference not to share with people perceived to be different. For example, Sweden’s high government spending versus the US might be down to Sweden’s relative lack of diversity.

    This suggests that diversity is not helpful if groups mainly keep to themselves. To test this assumption, Desmet, Gomes, and Ortuño-Ortín divided the world into a grid of five-square-kilometer cells and estimated the number of people who speak different languages in each. Using this data and country-level estimates of diversity, the researchers calculated two numbers:

    1) Country diversity: The probability that within a country two randomly chosen people speak the same language. A higher score means greater diversity in languages spoken.

    Read the full story.

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    Culture, Society & Family Feature Health & Medicine Learning & Education Researcher news Student researchers

    Self-persuasion iPad app spurs low-income parents to protect teens against cancer-causing hpv

    In the first study of its kind, self-persuasion software on an iPad motivated low-income parents to want to protect their teens against the cancer-causing human papillomavirus

    As health officials struggle to boost the number of teens vaccinated against the deadly human papillomavirus, a new study from Southern Methodist University, Dallas, found that self-persuasion works to bring parents on board.

    Currently public health efforts rely on educational messages and doctor recommendations to persuade parents to vaccinate their adolescents. Self-persuasion as a tool for HPV vaccinations has never been researched until now.

    The SMU study found that low-income parents will decide to have their teens vaccinated against the sexually transmitted cancer-causing virus if the parents persuade themselves of the protective benefits.

    The study’s subjects — almost all moms — were taking their teens and pre-teens to a safety-net pediatric clinic for medical care. It’s the first to look at changing parents’ behavior through self-persuasion using English- and Spanish-language materials.

    “This approach is based on the premise that completing the vaccination series is less likely unless parents internalize the beliefs for themselves, as in ‘I see the value, I see the importance, and because I want to help my child,’” said psychology professor Austin S. Baldwin, a principal investigator on the research.

    Depending on age, the HPV vaccine requires a series of two or three shots over eight months. External pressure might initially spark parents to action. But vaccinations decline sharply after the first dose.

    The new study follows an earlier SMU study that found guilt, social pressure or acting solely upon a doctor’s recommendation was not related to parents’ motivation to vaccinate their kids.

    The new finding is reported in the article “Translating self-persuasion into an adolescent HPV vaccine promotion intervention for parents attending safety-net clinics” in the journal Patient Education and Counseling.

    Both studies are part of a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the National Cancer Institute. Baldwin, associate professor in the SMU Department of Psychology, is co-principal investigator with Jasmin A. Tiro, associate professor in the Department of Clinical Sciences, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas.

    Addressing the HPV problem
    A very common virus, HPV infects nearly one in four people in the United States, including teens, according to the Centers for Disease Control. HPV infection can cause cervical, vaginal and vulvar cancers in females; penile cancer in males; and anal cancer, back of the throat cancer and genital warts in both genders, the CDC says.

    The CDC recommends a series of two shots of the vaccine for 11- to 14-year-olds to build effectiveness in advance of sexual activity. For 15- to 26-year-olds, they are advised to get three doses over the course of eight months, says the CDC.

    Currently, about 60% of adolescent girls and 40% of adolescent boys get the first dose of the HPV vaccine. After that, about 20% of each group fail to follow through with the second dose, Baldwin said.

    The goal set by health authorities is to vaccinate 80% of adolescents to achieve the herd immunity effect of indirect protection when a large portion of the population is protected.

    NCI grant aimed at developing a software app
    The purpose of the National Cancer Institute grant is to develop patient education software for the HPV vaccine that is easily used by low-income parents who may struggle to read and write, and speak only Spanish.

    A body of research in the psychology field has shown that the technique of self-persuasion among well-educated people is successful using written English-language materials. Self-persuasion hasn’t previously been tested among underserved populations in safety-net clinics.

    The premise is that individuals will be more likely to take action because the choice they are making is important to them and they value it.

    In contrast, where motivation is extrinsic, an individual acts out of a sense of others’ expectations or outside pressure.

    Research has found that people are much more likely to maintain a behavior over time — such as quitting smoking, exercising or losing weight — when it’s autonomously motivated. Under those circumstances, they value the choice and consider it important.

    “A provider making a clear recommendation is clearly important,’” said Deanna C. Denman, a co-author on the study and a graduate researcher in SMU’s Psychology Department. “Autonomy over the decision can be facilitated by the doctor, who can confirm to parents that “The decision is yours, and here are the reasons I recommend it.’”

    Doctor’s recommendation matters, but may not be sufficient
    For the SMU study, the researchers educated parents in a waiting room by providing a custom-designed software application running on an iPad tablet.

    The program guided the parents in English or Spanish to scroll through audio prompts that help them think through why HPV vaccination is important. The parents verbalized in their own words why it would be important to them to get their child vaccinated. Inability to read or write wasn’t a barrier.

    Parents in the SMU study were recruited through the Parkland Memorial Hospital’s out-patient pediatric clinics throughout Dallas County. Most of the parents were Hispanic and had a high school education or less. Among 33 parents with unvaccinated adolescents, 27 — 81% — decided they would vaccinate their child after completing the self-persuasion tasks.

    New study builds on prior study results
    In the earlier SMU study, researchers surveyed 223 parents from the safety-net clinics. They completed questionnaires relevant to motivation, intentions and barriers to vaccination.

    The researchers found that autonomous motivation was strongly correlated with intentions, Denman said. As autonomous motivation increased, the greater parents’ intentions to vaccinate. The lower the autonomous motivation, the lower the parents’ intentions to vaccinate, she explained.

    “So they may get the first dose because the doctor says it’s important,” Baldwin said. “But the second and third doses require they come back in a couple months and again in six months. It requires the parent to feel it’s important to their child, and that’s perhaps what’s going to push or motivate them to complete the series. So that’s where, downstream, there’s an important implication.”

    Other co-authors on the study are Margarita Sala, graduate student in the SMU Psychology Department; Emily G. Marks, Simon C. Lee and Celette Skinner, who along with Tiro are at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center in Dallas; L. Aubree Shay, U.T. School of Public Health, San Antonio; Donna Persaud and Sobha Fuller, Parkland Health & Hospital System, Dallas; and Deborah J. Wiebe, University of California-Merced, Merced, Calif.

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    KDFW Fox 4: NASA discovers seven earth-like planets relatively near

    A “major step forward” toward the goal of answering the very big question: Is there life on other worlds?

    DFW Fox 4 TV reporter Steve Eagar expressed “nerd-level” excitement about NASA’s announcement Feb. 22 of the discovery of seven new Earth-like planets. Eagar interviewed SMU professor Robert Kehoe, who leads the SMU astronomy team from the Department of Physics.

    NASA announced that the Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in an area called the habitable zone, where liquid water is most likely to exist on a rocky planet.

    “This is a surprising jump in our ability to understand earth like planets,” Kehoe told Eagar.

    Kehoe and the SMU astronomy team recently reported discovery of a rare star as big — or bigger — than the Earth’s sun that is expanding and contracting in a unique pattern in three different directions.

    The star is one that pulsates and so is characterized by varying brightness over time. It’s situated 7,000 light years away from the Earth in the constellation Pegasus. Called a variable star, this particular star is one of only seven known stars of its kind in our Milky Way galaxy.

    Watch the video interview on Fox 4.

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    Earth & Climate Energy & Matter Researcher news SMU In The News

    Astronomy: High school students identify an ultra-rare star

    This newly-discovered variable is one of only seven of its kind known in our galaxy.

    Science journalist Alison Klesman with the online science news magazine Astronomy covered the discovery of a variable star by SMU professor Robert Kehoe and the astronomy team in the SMU Department of Physics.

    A high school student in an SMU summer astronomy program made the initial discovery upon culling through archived star observation data recorded by the small but powerful ROTSE-I telescope formerly at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

    Other authors on the study were SMU research astronomer Farley Ferrante, a member of the team, Plano Senior High School student Derek Horning, who first discovered the object in the ROTSE-I data, and Eric Guzman, a physics graduate from the University of Texas at Dallas who is entering SMU’s graduate program and who identified the star as pulsating.

    The newest delta Scuti (SKOO-tee) star in our night sky is so rare it’s only one of seven identified by astronomers in the Milky Way. Discovered at SMU, the star — like our sun — is in the throes of stellar evolution, to conclude as a dying ember in millions of years. Until then, the exceptional star pulsates brightly, expanding and contracting from heating and cooling of hydrogen burning at its core.

    The Astronomy article, “High school students identify an ultra-rare star,” published Feb. 15, 2017.

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Alison Klesman
    Astronomy

    The stars shining in the night sky might seem steady and reliable, but in truth, they are constantly changing and evolving. Out of the 100 billion or so stars that inhabit the Milky Way, a little more than 400,900 are classified as variable, meaning they change in brightness over time.

    Of those hundreds of thousands of variables catalogued in our galaxy, however, only seven belong to a class called Triple Mode high amplitude delta Scuti, or HADS(B), stars — and that seventh was just recently discovered by a high school student during a summer astronomy program at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

    The star, roughly the size of our Sun or possibly larger, is about 7,000 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. It currently has only a catalog name: ROTSE1 J232056.45+345150.9. The name comes in part from the telescope used to discover it, the ROTSE-I telescope at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

    While examining data from the telescope taken in September of 2000, Plano Senior High School student Derek Hornung noticed the star’s strange light curve, which shows the star’s brightness over time. A non-variable star’s light curve is simply a straight line, unchanging as the hours, days, and months go by. But a variable star exhibits periodic changes in brightness over the course of hours or days, creating a recognizable repeating pattern. Variable stars are classified by the patterns their light curves make, and named after the first star of each type discovered. Delta Scuti variables are thus named after the star delta Scuti.

    But there’s more to this story, still. The star is not only a delta Scuti variable, of which there are thousands known, but it is also a rare type within the delta Scuti class, a HADS(B) star. HADS(B) stars show asymmetric light curves that change brightness quickly over time. These stars are pulsating in two modes, which means the star is expanding in two directions at once. There are only 114 HADS(B) stars currently known. Rarer still are Triple Mode HADS(B) stars, of which there were only six previously identified in the Milky way. Triple Mode HADS(B) stars pulsate in not two, but three directions at once. For ROTSE1 J232056.45+345150.9, this process repeats itself every 2.5 hours.

    Read the full story.

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    New delta Scuti: Rare pulsating star 7,000 light years away is 1 of only 7 in Milky Way

    A star — as big as or bigger than our sun — in the Pegasus constellation is expanding and contracting in three different directions simultaneously on a scale of once every 2.5 hours, the result of heating and cooling of hydrogen fuel burning 28 million degrees Fahrenheit at its core

    The newest delta Scuti (SKOO-tee) star in our night sky is so rare it’s only one of seven identified by astronomers in the Milky Way. Discovered at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, the star — like our sun — is in the throes of stellar evolution, to conclude as a dying ember in millions of years. Until then, the exceptional star pulsates brightly, expanding and contracting from heating and cooling of hydrogen burning at its core.

    Astronomers are reporting a rare star as big — or bigger — than the Earth’s sun that is expanding and contracting in a unique pattern in three different directions.

    The star is one that pulsates and so is characterized by varying brightness over time. It’s situated 7,000 light years away from the Earth in the constellation Pegasus, said astronomer Farley Ferrante, a member of the team that made the discovery at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

    Called a variable star, this particular star is one of only seven known stars of its kind in our Milky Way galaxy.

    “It was challenging to identify it,” Ferrante said. “This is the first time we’d encountered this rare type.”

    The Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars. But just over 400,900 are catalogued as variable stars. Of those, a mere seven — including the one identified at SMU — are the rare intrinsic variable star called a Triple Mode ‘high amplitude delta Scuti’ (pronounced SKOO-tee) or Triple Mode HADS(B), for short.

    “The discovery of this object helps to flesh out the characteristics of this unique type of variable star. These and further measurements can be used to probe the way the pulsations happen,” said SMU’s Robert Kehoe, a professor in the Department of Physics who leads the SMU astronomy team. “Pulsating stars have also been important to improving our understanding of the expansion of the universe and its origins, which is another exciting piece of this puzzle.”

    The star doesn’t yet have a common name, only an official designation based on the telescope that recorded it and its celestial coordinates. The star can be observed through a telescope, but identifying it was much more complicated.

    A high school student in an SMU summer astronomy program made the initial discovery upon culling through archived star observation data recorded by the small but powerful ROTSE-I telescope formerly at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

    Upon verification, the star was logged into the International Variable Star Index as ROTSE1 J232056.45+345150.9 by the American Association of Variable Star Observers at this link.

    How in the universe was it discovered?
    SMU’s astrophysicists discovered the variable star by analyzing light curve shape, a key identifier of star type. Light curves were created from archived data procured by ROTSE-I during multiple nights in September 2000. The telescope generates images of optical light from electrical signals based on the intensity of the source. Data representing light intensity versus time is plotted on a scale to create the light curves.

    Plano Senior High School student Derek Hornung first discovered the object in the ROTSE-I data and prepared the initial light curves. From the light curves, the astronomers knew they had something special.

    It became even more challenging to determine the specific kind of variable star. Then Eric Guzman, a physics graduate from the University of Texas at Dallas, who is entering SMU’s graduate program, solved the puzzle, identifying the star as pulsating.

    “Light curve patterns are well established, and these standard shapes correspond to different types of stars,” Ferrante said. “In a particular field of the night sky under observation there may have been hundreds or even thousands of stars. So the software we use generates a light curve for each one, for one night. Then — and here’s the human part — we use our brain’s capacity for pattern recognition to find something that looks interesting and that has a variation. This allows the initial variable star candidate to be identified. From there, you look at data from several other nights. We combine all of those into one plot, as well as add data sets from other telescopes, and that’s the evidence for discerning what kind of variable star it is.”

    That was accomplished conclusively during the referee process with the Variable Star Index moderator.

    The work to discover and analyze this rare variable star was carried out in conjunction with analyses by eight other high school students and two other undergraduates working on other variable candidates. The high school students were supported by SMU’s chapter of the Department of Energy/National Science Foundation QuarkNet program.

    Heating and cooling, expanding and contracting
    Of the stars that vary in brightness intrinsically, a large number exhibit amazingly regular oscillations in their brightness which is a sign of some pulsation phenomenon in the star, Ferrante said.

    Pulsation results from expanding and contracting as the star ages and exhausts the hydrogen fuel at its core. As the hydrogen fuel burns hotter, the star expands, then cools, then gravity shrinks it back, and contraction heats it back up.

    “I’m speaking very generally, because there’s a lot of nuance, but there’s this continual struggle between thermal expansion and gravitational contraction,” Ferrante said. “The star oscillates like a spring, but it always overshoots its equilibrium, doing that for many millions of years until it evolves into the next phase, where it burns helium in its core. And if it’s about the size and mass of the sun — then helium fusion and carbon is the end stage. And when helium is used up, we’re left with a dying ember called a white dwarf.”

    Within the pulsating category is a class of stars called delta Scuti, of which there are thousands. They are named for a prototype star whose characteristic features — including short periods of pulsating on the scale of a few hours — are typical of the entire class.

    Within delta Scuti is a subtype of which hundreds have been identified, called high amplitude delta Scuti, or HADS. Their brightness varies to a particularly large degree, registering more than 10 percent difference between their minimum and maximum brightness, indicating larger pulsations.

    Common delta Scuti pulsate along the radius in a uniform contraction like blowing up a balloon. A smaller sub-category are the HADS, which show asymmetrical-like pulsating curves.

    Within HADS, there’s the relatively rare subtype called HADS(B) , of which there are only 114 identified.

    Star evolution — just a matter of time
    A HADS(B) is distinguished by its two modes of oscillation — different parts of the star expanding at different rates in different directions but the ratio of those two periods is always the same.

    For the SMU star, two modes of oscillation weren’t immediately obvious in its light curve.

    “But we knew there was something going on because the light curve didn’t quite match known light curves of other delta Scuti’s and HADS’ objects we had studied. The light curves — when laid on top of each other — presented an asymmetry,” Ferrante said. “Ultimately the HADS(B) we discovered is even more unique than that though — it’s a Triple Mode HADS(B) and there were previously only six identified in the Milky Way. So it has three modes of oscillation, all three with a distinct period, overlapping, and happening simultaneously.”

    So rare, in fact, there’s no name yet for this new category nor a separate registry designation for it. Guzman, the student researcher who analyzed and categorized the object, recalled how the mystery unfolded.

    “When I began the analysis of the object, we had an initial idea of what type it could be,” Guzman said. “My task was to take the data and try to confirm the type by finding a second period that matched a known constant period ratio. After successfully finding the second mode, I noticed a third signal. After checking the results, I discovered the third signal coincided with what is predicted of a third pulsation mode.”

    The SMU Triple Mode HADS(B) oscillates on a scale of 2.5 hours, so it will expand and contract 10 times in one Earth day. It and the other known six HADS(B)’s are in the same general region of the Milky Way galaxy, within a few thousand light years of one another.

    “I’m sure there are more out there,” Ferrante said, “but they’re still rare, a small fraction.”

    Red giant the final phase of star’s evolution
    SMU’s Triple Mode HADS(B) is unstable and further along in its stellar evolution than our sun, which is about middle-aged and whose pulsating variations occur over a much longer period of time. SMU’s Triple Mode HADS(B) core temperature, heated from the burning of hydrogen fuel, is about 15 million Kelvin or 28 million degrees Fahrenheit.

    Someday, millions of years from now, SMU’s Triple Mode HADS(B) will deplete the hydrogen fuel at its core, and expand into a red giant.

    “Our sun might eventually experience this as well,” Ferrante said. “But Earth will be inhospitable long before then. We won’t be here to see it.”

    Funding was through the Texas Space Grant Consortium, an affiliate of NASA; SMU Dedman College. Department of Energy/National Science Foundation QuarkNet program.

    ROTSE-I began operating in late 1997, surveying the sky all night, every clear night of the year for three years. It was decommissioned in 2001 and replaced by ROTSE-III. SMU owns the ROTSE-IIIb telescope at McDonald Observatory, Fort Davis, Texas.

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    Culture, Society & Family Mind & Brain Researcher news

    Two faculty win NEH fellowships to study music and human brain; quest for Kurdish state

    The National Endowment for the Humanities named SMU professors Zachary Wallmark and Sabri Ates as fellowship grant recipients in January — the only two recipients in North Texas for the current funding cycle.

    Wallmark, assistant professor and chair of music history at SMU Meadows School of the Arts, is using music studies, cognitive sciences and original brain imaging experiments to research the nature of our emotional response to music.

    “I am deeply honored to receive this recognition,” Wallmark said. “With the support of the NEH, I hope in my work to help people better understand music’s grip on human emotion and imagination.”

    Ates, associate professor in the Clements Department of History, is drawing on a variety of archival sources from different languages to write Sheikh Abdulqadir Nehri (d. 1925) and the Pursuit of an Independent Kurdistan. In the book, Ates will explore the quest for a Kurdish state between 1880-1925, when the creation of such a state emerged as a distinct possibility and then quickly unraveled.

    “What this grant tells us is that our work has national relevance,” Ates said. “Recognition of SMU’s faculty work by a prestigious institution like NEH further cements SMU’s standing as a research university. With the support of NEH, I hope to answer one of the enduring questions of the contemporary Middle East: The Kurdish statelessness.”

    Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at www.neh.gov.

    This is the first time since 2010 that two awards were granted to SMU faculty members within the same funding cycle. More recently, history professor Alexis McCrossen received the fellowship in 2015 and assistant professor of English Timothy Cassedy earned it in 2014.

    “NEH fellowships are among the most competitive humanities research opportunities in the nation, with a funding rate of approximately seven percent,” said Meadows Dean Sam Holland. “We are delighted that Zach has won this recognition, which is significant for the Meadows Music Division and reflects the growing visibility and stature of SMU on the national research stage.”

    “Recognition from the NEH reinforces that our faculty garner national and international recognition for their research,” said Dedman Dean Thomas DiPiero. “Professor Ates’ work is very timely as the world struggles to determine how best to address our needs for greater intercultural understanding.”

    Wallmark teaches courses in American popular music, including opera history and the psychology of music, and serves as director of Meadows’ new MuSci Lab, an interdisciplinary research group and lab facility dedicated to the scientific study of music. His first book, Timbre and Musical Meaning, is under contract with Oxford University Press. He will be combining his NEH support with a sabbatical from Meadows for a full year of dedicated research and writing time.

    Ates’ research focuses on Ottoman-Iranian relations, Kurdish history, borderlands and the borderland peoples, and the history of sectarianism in the Middle East. His first book Tunalı Hilmi Bey: Osmanlıdan Cumhuriyet’e Bir Aydın, (Istanbul: Iletişim Yayınları, 2009), examines competing projects of Ottoman intellectuals to keep the disparate parts of the Empire together, as well as their responses to the age of nationalism and the birth of the Turkish Republic. Partially based on his award-winning dissertation, his second book, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands: Making a Boundary (Cambridge University Press, 2013) discusses the making of the boundaries that modern states of Iraq, Turkey and Iran share.

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    Nat’l Geographic: One of Earth’s most dangerous supervolcanoes is rumbling

    Italy’s Campi Flegrei may be awakening from a long slumber, scientists warn.

    Vulcanologist James E. Quick, SMU’s associate vice president for research and dean of Graduate Studies, is quoted for his expertise in the magazine National Geographic.

    Quick, a geologist in the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, is quoted in “One of Earth’s most dangerous supervolcanoes is rumbling.” The article was published Dec. 23, 2016.

    An expert in volcano hazards, Quick is an expert in geologic science and volcano risk assessment, particularly the study of magmatic systems. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

    In 2009 Quick led the international scientific team that discovered a 280-million-year-old fossil supervolcano in the Italian Alps. The supervolcano’s magmatic plumbing system is exposed to an unprecedented depth of 25 kilometers, giving scientists new understanding into the phenomenon of explosive supervolcanos.

    Italian geologists in 2010 awarded Quick the Capellini Medal to recognize the discovery. In 2013 an area encompassing the supervolcano won designation as the Sesia-Val Grande Geopark by the UNESCO Global Network of National Geoparks.

    Prior to SMU, Quick served a distinguished 25-year scientific career with the USGS, including as program coordinator for the Volcano Hazards Program.

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Brian Clark Howard
    National Geographic

    A long-quiet yet huge supervolcano that lies under 500,000 people in Italy may be waking up and approaching a “critical state,” scientists report this week in the journal Nature Communications.

    Based on physical measurements and computer modeling, “we propose that magma could be approaching the CDP [critical degassing pressure] at Campi Flegrei, a volcano in the metropolitan area of Naples, one of the most densely inhabited areas in the world, and where accelerating deformation and heating are currently being observed,” wrote the scientists—who are led by Giovanni Chiodini of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics in Rome.

    A sudden release of hot magmatic gasses is possible in the near future, which could trigger a large eruption, the scientists warn. Yet the timing of any possible eruption is unknown and is currently not possible to predict….

    The scars of another supervolcano were recently found in the Sesia Valley in the Italian Alps. That eight-mile-wide caldera likely last erupted 280 million years ago, when it blasted out a thousand times more material than Mount St. Helens spewed during its infamous 1980 eruption. The result was the blocking out of the sun, which led to global cooling.

    “There will be another supervolcano explosion,” scientist James Quick, a geologist at Southern Methodist University in Texas, said in a statement when that volcano was found.
    “We don’t know where, [but] Sesia Valley could help us to predict the next event.”

    Read the full story.

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    APS Physics: Viewpoint — Dark Matter Still at Large

    “No dark matter particles have been observed by two of the world’s most sensitive direct-detection experiments, casting doubt on a favored dark matter model.” — Jodi Cooley

    SMU physicist Jodi Cooley, an associate professor in the Department of Physics, writes in the latest issue of Physical Review Letters about the hunt by physicists worldwide for dark matter — the most elusive and abundant matter in our Universe.

    Cooley is an expert in dark matter and a lead researcher on one of the key dark matter experiments in the world.

    Cooley’s APS Physics article, “Viewpoint: Dark Matter Still at Large,” published Jan. 11, 2017.

    The journal is that of the American Physical Society, a non-profit membership organization advancing knowledge of physics through its research journals, scientific meetings, education, outreach, advocacy and international activities. APS represents more than 53,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world.

    Cooley’s current research interest is to improve our understanding of the universe by deciphering the nature of dark matter. The existence of dark matter was first postulated nearly 80 years ago. However, it wasn’t until the last decade that the revolution in precision cosmology revealed conclusively that about a quarter of our universe consisted of dark matter. Cooley and her colleagues operate sophisticated detectors in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota. These detectors can distinguish between elusive dark matter particles and background particles that mimic dark matter interactions.

    She received a B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics and Physics from the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in 1997. She earned her Masters in 2000 and her Ph.D. in 2003 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for her research searching for neutrinos from diffuse astronomical sources with the AMANDA-II detector. Upon graduation she did postdoctoral studies at both MIT and Stanford University.

    Cooley is a Principal Investigator on the SuperCDMS dark matter experiment and a Principal Investigator for the AARM collaboration, which aims to develop integrative tools for underground science. She has won numerous awards for her research including an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation and the Ralph E. Powe Jr. Faculty Enhancement Award from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities.

    She was named December 2012 Woman Physicist of the Month by the American Physical Societies Committee on the Status of Women and earned a 2012 HOPE (Honoring our Professor’s Excellence) by SMU. In 2015 she received the Rotunda Outstanding Professor Award.

    Read the full article.

    EXCERPT:

    By Jodi Cooley
    Southern Methodist University

    Over 80 years ago astronomers and astrophysicists began to inventory the amount of matter in the Universe. In doing so, they stumbled into an incredible discovery: the motion of stars within galaxies, and of galaxies within galaxy clusters, could not be explained by the gravitational tug of visible matter alone [1]. So to rectify the situation, they suggested the presence of a large amount of invisible, or “dark,” matter. We now know that dark matter makes up 84% of the matter in the Universe [2], but its composition—the type of particle or particles it’s made from—remains a mystery. Researchers have pursued a myriad of theoretical candidates, but none of these “suspects” have been apprehended. The lack of detection has helped better define the parameters, such as masses and interaction strengths, that could characterize the particles. For the most compelling dark matter candidate, WIMPs, the viable parameter space has recently become smaller with the announcement in September 2016 by the PandaX-II Collaboration [3] and now by the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Collaboration [4] that a search for the particles has come up empty.

    Since physicists don’t know what dark matter is, they need a diverse portfolio of instruments and approaches to detect it. One technique is to try to make dark matter in an accelerator, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and then to look for its decay products with a particle detector. A second technique is to use instruments such as the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to observe dark matter interactions in and beyond our Galaxy. This approach is called “indirect detection” because what the telescope actually observes is the particles produced by a collision between dark matter particles. In the same way that forensic scientists rely on physical evidence to reverse-engineer a crime with no witnesses, scientists use the aftermath of these collisions to reconstruct the identities of the initial dark matter particles.

    The third technique, and the one used in both the LUX and PandaX-II experiments, is known as “direct detection.” Here, a detector is constructed on Earth with a massive target to increase the odds of an interaction with the dark matter that exists in our Galaxy. In the case of LUX and PandaX-II, the dark matter particles leave behind traces of light that can be detected with sophisticated sensors. This is akin to having placed cameras at the scene of a crime, capturing the culprit in the act.

    Read the full article.

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    CBS News: The “spanking” debate — views depend on what you call it

    CBS News covered the research of SMU Psychology Professor George W. Holden, an expert in spanking and its adverse impact on child development. Holden is co-author on a new study that found corporal punishment is viewed as more acceptable and effective when it’s referred to as spanking.

    The new study found that parents and nonparents alike feel better about corporal punishment when it’s called spanking rather than hitting or beating.

    Study participants judged identical acts of a child’s misbehavior and the corporal punishment that followed it, but rated the discipline as better or worse simply depending on the verb used to describe it.

    SMU psychologist Alan S. Brown was lead author on the study.

    Holden is a noted expert on parenting, discipline and family violence and a professor in the SMU Department of Psychology.

    He strongly advocates against corporal punishment and cites overwhelming research, including his own, that has demonstrated that spanking is not only ineffective, but also harmful to children, and many times leads to child abuse.

    Holden is a founding member of the U.S. Alliance to End the Hitting of Children, endhittingusa.org.

    Brown is an expert in how people store and retrieve information about the real world, and the manner in which those processes fail us, such as tip of the tongue experience, where one is momentarily stymied in accessing well-stored knowledge.

    He also explores the prevalence of other varieties of spontaneous familiarity, related to déjà vu, and whether there are changes across the age span and how people incorporate other’s life experiences into their own autobiography.

    The CBS News article, “The ‘spanking’ debate: Views depend on what you call it,” published Jan. 5, 2017.

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Mary Brophy Marcus
    CBS News

    Words matter when it comes to how people perceive parents’ actions when they discipline their kids, a new study shows.

    When researchers at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas, asked adults – 481 parents and 191 without kids – to judge a child’s misbehavior and the punishment that followed, the study participants were more accepting of the same violent punishment when it was called a “spank” versus terms like “slap,” “hit” or “beat.”

    In other words, the same form of discipline was considered better or worse depending on the verb used to describe it, study author Dr. George Holden, professor and chair of the department of psychology at SMU, told CBS News.

    “Other people have talked about this issue, so it’s not a novel idea, but no one to date has done an empirical study to show simply by changing the particular verb used to describe a parental act that it does indeed change peoples’ perceptions,” he said.

    Read the full story.

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    CW33: Spanking Sounds OK, Hitting Not So Much, SMU Study Says

    Television station CW33 quoted SMU Psychology Professor Alan S. Brown for his latest research that found corporal punishment is viewed as more acceptable and effective when it’s referred to as spanking.

    Brown’s new study found that parents and nonparents alike feel better about corporal punishment when it’s called spanking rather than hitting or beating.

    Study participants judged identical acts of a child’s misbehavior and the corporal punishment that followed it, but rated the discipline as better or worse simply depending on the verb used to describe it.

    The article, “Spanking Sounds OK, Hitting Not So Much, SMU Study Says,” published Jan. 4, 2017.

    Brown was lead author on the research, conducted with SMU psychologist George W. Holden, a noted expert on parenting, discipline and family violence and a professor in the SMU Department of Psychology.

    Brown’s research primarily involves how people store and retrieve information about the real world, and the manner in which those processes fail us, such as tip of the tongue experience, where one is momentarily stymied in accessing well-stored knowledge.

    He also explores the prevalence of other varieties of spontaneous familiarity, related to déjà vu, and whether there are changes across the age span. Finally, there are several research projects on how people incorporate other’s life experiences into their own autobiography.

    Holden is noted for his expertise on spanking. He strongly advocates against corporal punishment and cites overwhelming research, including his own, that has demonstrated that spanking is not only ineffective, but also harmful to children, and many times leads to child abuse.

    Holden is a founding member of the U.S. Alliance to End the Hitting of Children, endhittingusa.org.

    Read the story at CW33.

    EXCERPT:

    By Eric Gonzales
    The CW33

    So how does the word spanking hit you?

    A new study by Southern Methodist University bets there are no hard feelings when it comes to getting spanked.

    Psychology Professor Alan Brown says the word spank sounds more acceptable to people than saying a kid is getting a slap, a hit or a beating as punishment.

    Even though hitting or slapping as punishment may be the same as a spanking, the professor says spanking sounds less harsh.

    But parents say it may depend on where you’re spanked. “We got our butts spanked, our butts, not out backs, not our legs,” said Renee Hudspeth. “Even if we did get hit on the arm or the leg, it`s because we were trying to run from our parents.”

    The professor says even swatting a kid sounds better than other words for corporal punishment, like beating.

    Of course, some people say it’s never okay to hit a child. But a lot of parents believe spanking isn`t behind them.

    Read the story at CW33.

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    Dallas Innovates: SMU Chemists Find New Way to Break Carbon, Hydrogen Bond

    The discovery could make it cheaper and easier to derive products from petroleum.

    D Magazine’s Dallas Innovates has covered the latest research of SMU chemist Isaac Garcia-Bosch, who discovered a new way to crack the stubborn carbon-hydrogen bond, “Green chemistry: Au naturel catalyst mimics nature to break tenacious carbon-hydrogen bond.”

    The article, “SMU Chemists Find New Way to Break Carbon, Hydrogen Bond,” published Jan. 6, 2017.

    The Dallas Innovates article “SMU Chemists Find New Way to Break Carbon, Hydrogen Bond” notes that the new catalyst for breaking the tough molecular bond between carbon and hydrogen holds the promise of a cleaner, easier and cheaper way to derive products from petroleum.

    An assistant professor, Garcia-Bosch is Harold A. Jeskey Endowed Chair in Chemistry.

    Read the full story.

    EXCERPT:

    By Lance Murray
    Dallas Innovates

    Chemists at Southern Methodist University in Dallas have found a cheaper, cleaner method to break the stubborn molecular bond between carbon and hydrogen, a development that could lead to better ways to derive products from petroleum.

    “Some of the most useful building blocks we have in the world are simple, plentiful hydrocarbons like methane, which we extract from the ground. They can be used as starting materials for complex chemical products such as plastics and pharmaceuticals,” Isaac Garcia-Bosch, Harold A. Jeskey Endowed Chair and assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at SMU, told Eurekalert.org. “But the first step of the process is very, very difficult — breaking that carbon-hydrogen bond. The stronger the bond, the more difficult it is to oxidize.”

    Oxidizing causes the molecule to undergo a reaction that combines with oxygen and breaks the carbon-hydrogen bonds, according to Eurekalert.

    SMU chemists have been working on the project in collaboration with a team from the Johns Hopkins University.

    According to the report, Garcia-Bosch and chemist Maxime A. Siegler, director of the X-Ray Crystallography facility at the Johns Hopkins University, used copper catalysts in conjunction with hydrogen peroxide to create the carbon-oxygen bonds.

    Read the full story.

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    Green chemistry: Au naturel catalyst mimics nature to break tenacious carbon-hydrogen bond

    Chemists discover new way to crack the stubborn carbon-hydrogen bond that could allow industry to make petroleum-derived commercial products easier, cheaper and cleaner

    A new catalyst for breaking the tough molecular bond between carbon and hydrogen holds the promise of a cleaner, easier and cheaper way to derive products from petroleum, says a researcher at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

    “Some of the most useful building blocks we have in the world are simple, plentiful hydrocarbons like methane, which we extract from the ground. They can be used as starting materials for complex chemical products such as plastics and pharmaceuticals,” said Isaac Garcia-Bosch, Harold A. Jeskey Endowed Chair assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at SMU. “But the first step of the process is very, very difficult — breaking that carbon-hydrogen bond. The stronger the bond, the more difficult it is to oxidize.”

    The chemical industry must break the tenacious bond between carbon and hydrogen molecules to synthesize oxidative products such as methanol and phenols. It’s called oxidizing because it causes the molecule to undergo a reaction in which it combines with oxygen, breaking C-H bonds and forming new carbon-oxygen bonds.

    The conventional chemical recipe calls for inefficient and expensive oxidants to break the C-H bond. That process is costly, difficult and leaves behind dirty waste products.

    Chemists at SMU, in collaboration with The Johns Hopkins University, have found a cheaper, cleaner way to crack the stubborn C-H bond.

    Garcia-Bosch and chemist Maxime A. Siegler, director of the X-ray Crystallography Facility at The Johns Hopkins University, used copper catalysts that in combination with hydrogen peroxide (oxygen source) can convert C-H bonds to C-O bonds.

    “This is a very important discovery because it’s the first time it’s been proven that copper can carry out this kind of oxidation outside of nature in an efficient way,” Garcia-Bosch said. “The prep is very simple, so labs anywhere can do it. Copper is relatively cheap compared to other metals such as palladium, gold or silver, and hydrogen peroxide is readily available, relatively cheap and very clean. One of the byproducts of oxidations with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) is water (H2O), which is the cleanest waste product you could have.”

    Additionally, the researchers found the right ligand — a nitrogen-based material that binds to the copper so that the oxidation process can occur with close to perfect efficiency.

    It’s important to have the right ligand, the right amount of hydrogen peroxide, and the right metal in order to oxidize these challenging C-H bonds.

    “We found that combination,” Garcia-Bosch said.

    Chemistry is like a puzzle, where you build new molecules out of other molecules, he said.

    In any one molecule there are many C-H bonds. For example in octanes, such as the ones found in gasoline, there’s a carbon chain of eight carbons with multiple C-H bonds with different chemical properties, Garcia-Bosch said, and from the oxidation of each of the C-H bonds, a different product results.

    Chemists design catalysts that are capable of breaking and forming bonds in order to build complex chemical structures.

    “Catalysts have to be able to select between different C-H bonds and form new carbon-oxygen, carbon-nitrogen or carbon-fluoride bonds, for example,” Garcia-Bosch said. “Biological processes use metals to do this all the time, for example in our bodies when our liver processes a pharmaceutical that we ingest using iron. Minerals such as iron, copper, manganese, calcium and potassium are critical for the natural catalytic process. For example, trees use manganese (photosynthesis) to transform water into the oxygen that we breathe”

    Garcia-Bosch and Siegler reported their findings in the article “Copper-Catalyzed Oxidation of Alkanes with H2O2 under a Fenton-like Regime,” published in the international edition of the journal Angewandte Chemie.

    First time for using copper for C-H oxidation
    In organic chemistry, there aren’t many examples of copper as a catalyst for carbon-hydrogen oxidation. Most examples are based on iron.

    “This is the first time in our field that we’ve used copper to do this C-H oxidation in a very efficient way,” Garcia-Bosch said.

    “Copper is very versatile in nature,” he said. “With small changes in the environment of copper, you can do very diverse chemistry. That’s why we picked it.”

    That environment is the ligand, which gives properties to the copper to spark the chemical reaction when the chemical ingredients are combined in a vial or round bottom flask.

    The researchers discovered that these catalysts — copper in the form of a white salt and the ligand as an oil — can oxidize C-H bonds in a very efficient way in combination with hydrogen peroxide, a reduced form of oxygen that nature uses.

    “You can find hydrogen peroxide anywhere, even at home in your medicine cabinet. So it’s a mild oxidant,” Garcia-Bosch said. “It’s convenient also, because it’s a liquid, rather than, say, a gas, which might require special storage. You mix everything together in a solvent and it reacts. It’s like making a soup, a recipe, then you analyze the result to see what you get.”

    Using a gas chromatography instrument, the Garcia-Bosch and Siegler analyzed the final solution to observe the results of the reaction. That allowed them to quantify the amount of oxidation product that was formed during the reaction.

    Next step — targeting a specific C-H bond
    “We tested this catalytic system for different substrates and we saw that it’s not very selective,” Garcia-Bosch said. “That’s a problem. So if we have molecules that have many different C-H bonds, then it’s going to oxidize all of them in a non-selective manner. In our lab, we would like to find selective catalysts. That’s the next project.”

    Garcia-Bosch holds the Harold A. Jeskey Endowed Chair in Chemistry. The research was funded through The Robert A. Welch Foundation (Grant N-1900).

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    Corporal punishment viewed as more acceptable and effective when referred to as spanking, study finds

    Parents and nonparents alike buffer their views of physical discipline and rate it more common, acceptable and effective when it’s labeled with a more neutral, less violent word

    Parents and nonparents alike feel better about corporal punishment when it’s called ‘spanking’ rather than ‘hitting’ or ‘beating,’ according to a new study by researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

    Study participants judged identical acts of a child’s misbehavior and the corporal punishment that followed it, but rated the discipline as better or worse simply depending on the verb used to describe it.

    Discipline acts referred to as spank and swat were ranked as more effective and acceptable than those referred to as slap, hit or beat.

    The findings of the study indicate that people buffer negative views of corporal punishment by calling it by a more culturally acceptable label, said psychologist Alan Brown, psychology professor at SMU and lead author on the research.

    “Our findings suggest that the way child-discipline is described may alter the action’s implied intensity or physical harm, and its consequences such as emotional upset,” Brown said. “Calling a response to misbehavior a ‘swat’ may imply higher prevalence of that response as well as make it seem more justifiable and valid — even if the actual punishment is the same as an act described more harshly.”

    Participants in the study rated the acts after reading and responding to hypothetical scenarios in which a mom disciplined her misbehaving son. Spank rated