With all the fanfare about Mars rover Curiosity landing safely on the Red Planet on Aug. 6, it’s easy to forget that there’s already a rover on Mars — an older, smaller cousin set to accomplish a feat unprecedented in the history of Solar System exploration.

Raymond E. Arvidson, PhD, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, is playing key roles in both Mars rover missions. 

Since 2004, when NASA landed the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on opposite sides of Mars, Arvidson has served as a Mars Exploration Rover Mission deputy principal investigator for both of these rovers, often manning the controls that operate them on the surface of Mars.

Arvidson also was selected by NASA to be a participating scientist on the Mars Science Laboratory, a mission that landed a rover named Curiosity, on the Mars’ surface early in the morning of Aug. 6 in a complicated maneuver that NASA dubbed “seven minutes of terror.”

Curiosity, which lifted off from Earth on Nov. 26, 2011, is five times larger than Spirit or Opportunity and it carries much more sophisticated analytical equipment. 

For the Curiosity mission, Arvidson plans to use the rover itself as a terramechanics instrument to learn about Martian soils. Terramechanics is the study of soil properties, especially those revealed by driving a vehicle over different terrains. 

In a recent appearance on Fox 2 News, WUSTL'S Ray Arvidson discusses the science behind the new Curiosity rover mission to Mars, as well as longer term goals and challenges for a possible manned mission to Mars. VIEW FOX2 VIDEO.

Although the Spirit rover mission officially ended in May 2011 after it became mired in loose soil and lost power, the Mars rover Opportunity is on track to complete the first extraterrestrial marathon.

A marathon is 26.2 miles. When Opportunity landed on Mars in 2004, NASA’s goal was to have the rover travel a meager 600 meters. However, no one knew what kind of “runner” Opportunity would turn out to be. As of July 2012, Opportunity has traveled almost 22 miles – only 4.2 miles short of a full marathon.

Just getting to the starting line was epic: “This particular marathoner had to fly about 283 million miles across space before being unceremoniously drop-bounced on the Martian surface,” Arvidson says. 

http://youtu.be/DC-rvKjBHfENASA video feature recaps successes on the Spirit and Opportunity rover missions to Mars, including comments from WUSTL's Ray Arvidson.

Opportunity’s prime mission is to search for signs of ancient water. Today, the Red Planet is a bone-dry desert with a breathtakingly thin atmosphere, conditions deadly to almost every known form of life on Earth. Billions of years ago, however, things might have been different. Many researchers believe that Mars was warmer, wetter and friendlier to Martian life. Opportunity’s job is to search for clues to that ancient time.

Like many long-distance runners, Opportunity likes to “take it slow.” On a typical drive day, the rover travels only 50 to 100 meters. This gives the rover time to pause and look for the unknown. It also allows Opportunity to take plenty of photos along the way. Recently, the rover sent home its 100,000th image, a stunning panorama.

Opportunity first uncovered signs of water in deposits near the landing site in Eagle Crater. There were rocks that seemed to have formed in an ancient shallow lake. Over the next four years, Opportunity scavenged ever larger and deeper craters, finding more evidence of wet periods. Indications were, however, that the ancient lake water might have been too acidic for life.

The metallic marathoner soon set its sights on Endeavour Crater – an enormous pit 14 miles wide and hundreds of meters deep. Endeavour’s depth would offer a look farther back into the history of Mars, to a time when the water was possibly less acidic. The marathon route crossing Mars’ Meridiani plain to Endeavor was a daring trek.

Raging dust storms reduced the rover’s solar power so much that Opportunity almost entered the “sleep of death.” Soft, sandy, wind-blown ripples trapped the rover’s wheels, and there was an injury: A failure in Opportunity’s right front steering actuator made running forward tricky. Ever resourceful, the rover ran part of its race backward.

“The course took Opportunity over sedimentary bedrock made of magnesium, iron and calcium sulfate minerals — further indications of water billions of years ago,” Arvidson says.

When the marathoner reached Endeavour Crater in August 2011, things got interesting.

“Endeavor is surrounded by fractured sedimentary rock, and the cracks are filled with gypsum. Gypsum forms when ground water comes up and fills cracks in the ground, depositing hydrated calcium sulfate. This is the best evidence we’ve ever found for liquid water on Mars.”

The gypsum veins likely were formed in conditions more pH-neutral and possibly more hospitable to life: Jackpot!

But this marathoner isn’t done. Opportunity is doing so well that 26.2 miles might not be the finish line after all.

“We have no plans to stop running,” Arvidson says.

# # #

LiHong V. Wang et al./Nature Medicine

Simultaneous photoacoustic (a) and ultrasound (b) images of a rabbit esophagus show the clarity and detail gained by combining the two imaging techniques (c).

The imaging combines two existing forms of medical imaging — photoacoustic and ultrasound — and uses them to generate a combined image that high-contrast, high-resolution image that could help doctors spot tumors more quickly.

“Photoacoustic endoscopy provides deeper penetration than optical endoscopy and more functional contrast than ultrasonic endoscopy,” said Lihong Wang, PhD, principle investigator and corresponding author of a study on the new technology that appeared in Nature Medicine on July 15, and the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor in the department of biomedical engineering in Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis.

Wang collaborated with Qifa Zhou, Ruimin Chen and K. Kirk Shung of USC as well as Joon-Mo Yang, Christopher Favazza, Junjie Yao, Xin Cai, Konstantin Maslov from Washington University.

“This is a first time that we have had small endoscopy with two imaging modalities,” said Qifa Zhou, one of the principal investigators and co-authors of the study, and a professor at the NIH Resource Center for Medical Ultrasonic Transducer Technology at USC Biomedical Engineering.

Currently, doctors routinely employ ultrasound endoscopy to study internal organs. This technique places an ultrasound camera, similar to ones used to create images of fetuses, on a flexible scope that can be inserted internally.

Though these images are typically high-resolution, they are also low-contrast — making a dim image, like a photograph shot in a poorly lit room.

To address the problem, Wang, Zhou and their teams added a photoacoustic imaging device to the ultrasound endoscope. The resulting camera zaps organ tissue with a light. When the light is absorbed by tissue, the tissue gets slightly hotter and expands. That expansion produces a sound pressure wave that the ultrasound device on the endoscope picks up.

“This technology combines the best of both worlds,” said Kirk Shung, director of the NIH Resource Center and a professor of biomedical engineering at USC.

The researchers have tested their new device inside the gastrointestinal tract, producing in vivo images detailed enough to show blood vessels as well as the density of the tissue around them.

“This imaging has fine resolution and high contrast,” said Joon-Mo Yang, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in Wang’s group. With a clearer picture of what’s going on inside the gastrointestinal tract, doctors could potentially spot colon and prostate cancers earlier.

Their research was funded by the National Cancer Institute at National Institutes of Health.

Editor's Note: This release was prepared by the University of Southern California

Debajit Saha, PhD, postdoctoral research associate, and Barani Raman, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, work in the Systems Neuroscience & Neuromorphic Engineering Laboratory, a part of the new Center for Biological Systems Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.

World-class engineers and scientists from Washington University in St. Louis, other research institutions and industry come together Friday, Sept. 7, to focus on new ways to use systems engineering to better understand complex diseases such as cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.

Researchers from the new interdisciplinary Center for Biological Systems Engineering at Washington University will host its inaugural symposium from 8 a.m.-3:45 p.m. in Whitaker Hall, Room 100, on the Danforth Campus. The symposium is sponsored by Lockheed Martin.

The symposium, titled Biological Networks and Cellular Phenotypes, begins with an overview of the new center, which is directed by Rohit V. Pappu, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering.

“The Center for Biological Systems Engineering has been designed to be the research home of network biology and complex diseases at Washington University,” Pappu says. 

“Complex diseases, such as cancers and neurodegenerative disorders, can require integrative approaches to understand how pathways and networks work in synergy and give rise to chronic or catastrophic failures. Such problems don’t readily lend themselves to a single molecular target for which a drug can be developed, but instead require an integrative systems approach. The way we get ahead is by working to take on this systems challenge, rather than shying away from it.”

Faculty from the university’s School of Engineering & Applied Science and School of Medicine will speak at the symposium, as well as world leaders in their fields from the University of Cambridge, Princeton University, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Northwestern University and Lockheed Martin.

Ralph S. Quatrano, PhD, the Spencer T. Olin Professor and dean of the School of Engineering & Applied Science, will provide the vision for the school and the center.

“The Center for Biological Systems Engineering will allow faculty and students from different disciplines to build on their strengths and come together to study the basic sciences of protein structure, models of complex living systems and genetic regulatory networks,” Quatrano says. “We anticipate the work from this center to revolutionize the way human diseases are diagnosed and treated, using the basic tools of systems and computational science. This approach symbolizes the vision for our future, one of ‘convergence’ of disciplines.”

By leveraging systems science approaches to understand and control bimolecular and cellular networks, the researchers in the center will focus on new approaches that will enable a new understanding of how cellular processes and decisions are controlled by structures and dynamics of bimolecular networks.

Over the last year, Pappu has worked closely with leaders of biomedical engineering and pathology and immunology to assemble a group of eight researchers devoted to different areas of biomedical science with the common goal of understanding the essence of biomolecular and cellular networks.

This team was recruited from institutions nationwide. In addition to Pappu, whose research focuses on the biophysics of intrinsically disordered proteomes, members include:

• Mark Anastasio, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering with a research focus on computational and theoretical image science;
• Maxim Artyomov, PhD, assistant professor of pathology and immunology with a research focus on systems immunology;
• Jan Bieschke, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical engineering with a research focus on age-related protein misfolding;
• John Cunningham, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical engineering with a research focus on system analysis and computation;
• Kristen Naegle, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical engineering with a research focus on post-translational modifications in cell signaling networks;
• Barani Raman, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical engineering with a research focus in systems neuroscience and neuromorphic engineering;
• Joshua Swamidass, MD, PhD, assistant professor of pathology and immunology with a research focus in pharmacology informatics.

Lockheed Martin, which is sponsoring the symposium, also has agreed to initiate a pilot program to sponsor the Lockheed Martin CBSE Scholars program. This pilot will support one graduate student this academic year with plans to grow the program in the future, Pappu says.

“Lockheed Martin is extremely proud to sponsor the inaugural symposium and to be teamed with Washington University in St. Louis, one of the nation’s leading academic and research institutions studying Systems Biology,” says Jim Wrightson, vice president for engineering and technology concepts at Lockheed Martin. 

“Systems biology is an exciting and challenging field, and part of a growing trend in the integration of science and technical disciplines to investigate complex problems with new methodologies and technical approaches. We look forward to having an ongoing relationship with Washington University through the Lockheed Martin CBSE Scholars program,” Wrightson says.

The inaugural event is free and open to the public. 

For more information, go to cbse.wustl.edu or contact Lori Parrett at (314) 935-6350.

Lihong Wang, PhD, has received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award to explore novel imaging techniques using light that promise significant improvements in biomedical imaging and light therapy.

Wang

The award will provide Wang with a total budget of $3.8 million over five years.

Wang, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, says his research will explore transporting light into the body’s tissues far beyond the classical penetration limits for high-sensitivity imaging and low-side-effect therapy.

“I am honored to have received this award from among such a competitive group,” Wang says. “This award will allow us the intellectual freedom and resources to develop a brand new technology. If successfully implemented, it would impact many disciplines of biomedicine with applications, including imaging, such as functional brain imaging and reporter gene imaging; sensing (oximetry and glucometry); manipulation (optogenetics and nerve stimulation); and therapy (photodynamic therapy and photothermal therapy).”

A leading researcher on new methods of cancer imaging, Wang has received more than 30 research grants as the principal investigator with a cumulative budget of more than $38 million. His research on non-ionizing biophotonic imaging has been supported by the NIH, National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Defense, The Whitaker Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“I am extremely pleased and proud that Lihong is receiving this award which recognizes his tremendous creativity and innovativeness,” says Frank Yin, MD, PhD, the Stephen F. and Camilla T. Brauer Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering and chair of the department. 

“His pioneering work in developing photoacoustic tomography, along with its many variations and combinations, has spawned a whole new field. The ability to safely image deep into the body with extraordinarily high spatial and temporal resolution — at a fraction of the cost of conventional imaging methods — promises to revolutionize medical imaging in the years to come. I look forward to seeing the many new developments that will arise from his work.”

Wang and his lab founded a type of medical imaging that gives physicians a new look at the body’s internal organs, publishing the first paper on the technique in 2003. 

Called photoacoustic tomography, the technique relies on light and sound to create detailed, color pictures of tumors deep inside the body and may eventually help doctors diagnose cancer earlier than is now possible and to more precisely monitor the effects of cancer treatment — all without the radiation involved in X-rays and CT scans or the expense of MRIs.

Wang, who is affiliated with the Alvin J. Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine, is working with Washington University physicians to evaluate the technology for four uses: identifying the sentinel lymph nodes for breast cancer staging, which may eliminate the need for surgical lymph node biopsies; monitoring early response to chemotherapy; imaging melanomas; and imaging the gastrointestinal tract.

Wang also invented a “guide star” for biomedical imaging that allows scientists to focus light to a controllable position within the body’s tissue. Wang’s guide star is an ultrasound beam that “tags” light that passes through it. 

The technique, called time-reversed ultrasonically encoded (TRUE) optical focusing, allows scientists to focus light to a controllable position within tissue. Wang says TRUE will lead to more effective light imaging, sensing, manipulation and therapy, all of which could benefit medical research, diagnostics and therapeutics.

He has published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles and is a frequent keynote speaker at major conferences and symposia. His Monte Carlo model of photon transport in scattering media has been used worldwide. He serves as the editor-in-chief of a premier journal in biomedical optics. He wrote one of the first textbooks in his field, which won the Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award. 

He received the NIH FIRST and the NSF’s CAREER Award. He also received The Optical Society’s C. E. K. Mees Medal and IEEE’s Technical Achievement Award for seminal contributions to photoacoustic tomography and Monte Carlo modeling of photon transport in biological tissues and for leadership in the international biophotonics community.

The Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE) announced Sept. 7 that Kathryn Miller, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been selected as one of 40 Vision and Change Leadership Fellows. Over the next year, the Vision and Change Leadership Fellows will consider and then recommend models for improving undergraduate life-sciences education.

The PULSE program is a joint initiative of the National Science Foundation (NSF), Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“I’m really excited about bringing a broader audience into the discussion about teaching and and ways to make teaching more effective,” Miller says.

Her own involvement with innovative teaching grew out of her disappointment with traditional lecture classes, she says. “I used to craft my lectures to be wonderful. I’d put all the latest things in them and deliver them enthusiastically and then I’d think, ‘You know what? They’re not getting it.’ 

“Their responses weren’t what I imagined they would be if they really understood the material. And, I thought, ‘There’s got to be a way to get them to get them to learn better.’

“There are better ways, but I didn’t know what they were because I was never taught them. I had to learn them from The Teaching Center, from workshops and from other experiences that I’ve sought out for myself. It doesn’t have to be that hard,” she says, “and it’s now my job to make sure it is easier for others.”

http://youtu.be/4nhrvnOtbp8In this video, Miller talks about the use of technology to engage students and make them more responsible for their own learning. Other videos about innovative teaching techniques can be found at The Teaching Center’s website (http://teachingcenter.wustl.edu/).

In 2006, the NSF initiated a multi-year conversation with the scientific community, with assistance from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. That dialogue, which was co-funded by NIH and HHMI, generated the 2011 report, “Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action.

”

The report recognized that a 21st-century education requires changes to how biology is taught, how academic departments support faculty and how curricular decisions are made.

 To foster this widespread systemic change, NSF, HHMI and NIH launched the PULSE program. Supporting the effort are Knowinnovation Inc. and the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

In May, PULSE announced a national competition to identify Vision and Change Leadership Fellows. The 40 fellows selected from a field of 250 applicants will produce an implementation framework describing strategies for change.

Program organizers stress that they welcome the participation of the breadth of the post-secondary life sciences community.

A list of the Vision and Change Leadership Fellows is available at pulsecommunity.org. The implementation framework also will be available on the PULSE website, where other life scientists may review and enrich it via dialog with the PULSE online colleague community.


Developing new and innovative approaches for the teaching of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) is the primary goal of an interdisciplinary conference to be held Sept. 27-28 at the Charles F. Knight Executive Education & Conference Center at Washington University in St. Louis.

Titled “Integrating Cognitive Science With Innovative Teaching in STEM Disciplines,” the conference is sponsored by the Center for Integrative Research on Cognition, Learning and Education (CIRCLE) and the Provost’s Office at Washington University with funding from the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

This conference aims to bring together educators and researchers from a variety of disciplines, including education, psychology, cognitive science and all STEM fields to stimulate interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration. The primary goal of the conference is to develop and evaluate innovations in STEM pedagogy.

The conference will include presentations on developing and evaluating educational innovations by more than a dozen experts drawn from the cognitive sciences as well as physics, chemistry, biology and engineering. Roundtable sessions will synthesize the current state of knowledge on STEM education, identify issues in need of further research, encourage further development of an evidence-based framework for STEM education, and encourage the integration of ideas and collaborative efforts across disciplines.

McDaniel

The conference registration reached capacity and is closed, but sessions will be recorded and streamed online for those interested in learning more about the conference presentations.

The conference begins at 9 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 27, with opening remarks from the university’s chancellor, Mark S. Wrighton, and a greeting from CIRCLE co-directors Mark McDaniel and Gina Frey.

McDaniel, PhD, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences, studies memory and education as director of the university’s Memory and Complex Learning Laboratory.

Frey, PhD, executive director of The Teaching Center at the university and a professor of the practice in chemistry in Arts & Sciences, investigates the effectiveness of STEM pedagogies, with an emphasis on active-learning methods. 

Frey

More information and a preliminary program agenda are available on the conference website or by contacting Mike Cahill, PhD, a research scientist and project manager at CIRCLE at (314) 935-8809 or cahillmj@wustl.edu.

CIRCLE is designed to provide a bridge between Washington University faculty and researchers in cognitive and learning sciences to facilitate collaborative projects that improve student learning. 

It fosters the implementation of innovations in teaching across the university, including those that apply research from the cognitive and learning sciences; supports research to evaluate the effectiveness of these innovations for enhancing student learning and retention of knowledge; and disseminates the results of these classroom-based evaluations using experimental methods to the Washington University community and beyond.

Current projects include analyzing the effect of learning approaches and active-learning strategies in introductory science courses at Washington University. 

The Learning Approaches in General Chemistry project asks whether a more theory-based or conceptual student learning approach relates to higher performance in introductory chemistry courses at Washington University and six other universities as part of a LUCE consortium grant. 

The Active Physics project investigates the differences between the traditional lecture-based sequence and a more active-learning-based sequence for introductory physics at Washington University. 

CIRCLE also is consulting with faculty in engineering, business and medicine to develop future collaborative projects.

For more information on these projects, visit the CIRCLE website at circle.wustl.edu.

Washington University undergraduate students with great solutions to problems can win $25,000 to take their innovative ideas from concept to their own business.

Teams must be composed of currently enrolled WUSTL undergraduate students, with at least one engineering student and at least one non-engineering student. Teams must produce original work and adhere to competition deadlines.

Faculty and graduate students are not eligible to compete and cannot join teams.

“We believe that there are people who have the ‘E gene,’ but I also think that you can give people that entrepreneurial interest,” says Dennis Mell, professor of practice in electrical engineering and Discovery Competition director. “We want to provide an environment in which people feel safe to play with that.”

Parker Spielman, a fourth-year student earning a combined BS/MS in computer science with a minor in Chinese, has helped to get the competition off the ground through his involvement with Washington University Technology Entrepreneurs (WUTE). More than 40 students came to the introductory meeting.

“With the partnership of the Engineering school and WUTE to make this competition happen, students truly interested in creating will have access not only to funding, but all of the other equally important needs to launch a successful company,” Spielman says. “The larger goal of this competition is to strengthen the connectivity of students, faculty, alumni and St. Louis professionals in the entrepreneurship circle, and this offers far greater reward to students to help pursue their ideas than any amount of funding.”

To be held annually beginning this fall, the competition includes multiple rounds held during the fall and spring semesters. Students will interact with mentors, advisers, judges and other students through several events held during the academic year. Each spring, the winning team or teams will win at least $25,000, provided by alumni donors, to continue developing prototypes leading to new ventures.

Interested teams must register and submit a composition and title of proposal by Oct. 7, and a one- to two-page description of their idea by Nov. 2. Descriptions should include the problem or need and proposed solutions, not a business plan. Finalists will be selected Dec. 14, and the winner(s) will be announced in late April.

For more information and a list of key dates, go to engineering.wustl.edu/discovery, or contact Mell at dennismell@seas.wustl.edu or 935-4876.

For more information or to join WUTE, go to facebook.com/groups/washutech.

If you open any biology textbook to the section on proteins, you will learn that a protein is made up of a sequence of amino acids, that the sequence determines how the chain of amino acids folds into a compact structure, and that the folded protein’s structure determines its function. In other words sequence encodes structure and function derives from structure.

But the textbooks may have to be rewritten. As Rohit Pappu and two colleagues explain in a perspective published Sept. 20 in Science, a large class of proteins doesn’t adhere to the structure-function paradigm. Called intrinsically disordered proteins, these proteins fail fold either in whole or in part and yet they are functional. 

We sat down recently with Pappu, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering and director of the Center for Biological Systems Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis to catch up on the latest science.

​

Washington University

WUSTL engineers working in the Advanced Coal and Energy Research Facility,  designed for the development and testing of new technologies for large-scale combustion applications, with emphasis on reducing pollutant emissions and carbon dioxide capture and utilization.

One of the grants, a one-year, $836,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, funds a project that will evaluate the technical feasibility and improved economics of a unique pressurized system, which uses a staged combustion approach. 

Axelbaum

The grant was part of a $7 million investment by the Department of Energy into projects that advance innovative clean coal technologies. The grants focus on projects that support the development and deployment of Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) by focusing on further improving the efficiency and reducing the costs associated with carbon capture. 

Overall, the awards are part of a more than $5 billion investment strategy by the Obama administration in clean coal technologies and research and development.

Coal generates more than 40 percent of the electricity in the United States and 41 percent worldwide.

Axelbaum, also the Stifel & Quinette Jens Professor of Environmental Engineering Science, directs the Consortium for Clean Coal Utilization (CCCU) and heads the Laboratory for Advanced Combustion and Energy Research, where he studies combustion of fossil and renewable fuels.

“We’re taking an old fuel and applying a new technology,” Axelbaum says. “We propose to burn the coal in stages with pure oxygen and under pressure. While the use of oxygen increases costs, it can be used to prevent emissions from entering the atmosphere. There are other approaches to oxy-combustion for carbon capture and storage, but they are expensive. Our staged, pressurized combustion approach is designed to make it affordable.”

Seed funding for this project came from the CCCU, a center for research in advanced coal and carbon capture technologies. The consortium’s goal is to foster the use of coal as a safe and affordable source of energy, and as a chemical feedstock, with minimal impact on the environment. 

The consortium operates under the umbrella of I-CARES, and the establishment was made possible through financial commitments from Arch Coal, Peabody Energy and Ameren. Funding goes to support a variety of research projects, advanced research facilities in the engineering school and outreach activities relating to the clean utilization of coal.

Axelbaum and his colleagues are performing the research in collaboration with members of the Electric Power Research Institute and in consultation with Burns & McDonnell.

The second grant of nearly $500,000 comes from the State of Wyoming’s Advanced Conversion Technology Research Program, which was created to stimulate research and development in the area of low-emissions and advanced coal technologies. This three-year funding also will support staged oxy-combustion research, specifically atmospheric pressure experiments using Powder River Basin coal at the university’s Advanced Coal and Energy Research Facility (ACERF).

For more information, visit cccu.wustl.edu.

Established in December 2008, the CCCU is a center for research in advanced coal and carbon capture technologies. The consortium’s goal is to foster the utilization of coal as a safe and affordable source of energy, and as a chemical feedstock, with minimal impact on the environment. The consortium operates under the umbrella of I-CARES, and the establishment was made possible through financial commitments from the lead sponsors: Arch Coal, Peabody Energy and Ameren. Funding goes to support a variety of research projects, advanced research facilities in the engineering school and outreach activities relating to the clean utilization of coal.

Olivia Navarro-Farr, PhD, assistant professor of anthropology at the College of Wooster in Ohio, originally began excavating the locale while still a doctoral student of Freidel’s. Continuing to investigate this area this season was of major interest to both she and Freidel because it had been the location of a temple that received much reverence and ritual attention for generations after the fall of the dynasty at El Perú.

Tiffany Knight, PhD, associate professor of biology and director of the Environmental Studies Program in Arts & Sciences, with Leucaena leucocephala in Hawaii. Hawaii is one of the most biologically diverse regions on the planet, home to many endemic species, but this tree is not one of them. Indigenous to Central America, in Hawaii it is an agressively invasive plant that crowds out natives, 800 of which have been listed as endangered. Hawaiians call it koa haole, haole being slang for a foreigner or non-Polynesian resident of Hawaii.

Tiffany Knight sometimes mentions Melicope quadrangularis in presentations about her conservation work. This flowering shrub, which is endemic to Hawaii, was listed as endangered in 1994, 20 years after the Smithsonian Institution first petitioned to have it listed. Unfortunately, that was also two years after it became extinct.

It was a case of too little too late.

Knight, PhD, associate professor of biology and director of the Environmental Studies Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has devoted her career to making sure enough is done on time.

This year, she is on sabbatical in Hawaii working to pull some of its many endangered plant species back from the brink. When she’s not at the desk writing about rare species, she’s in the field trying to figure out whether Hawaii’s most common tree is also in decline.

Most people I know don’t actually see plants except as background greenery. Do you remember when you started to really see them?

Studying sand-dune plants in the Florida panhandle as a 19-year-old undergraduate. That summer, I realized how important plants are to the stability and function of ecosystems because a hurricane swept through and dunes with plant communities that included native grasses with deep roots weathered the storm instead of eroding before it.

I know you’ve studied rare plants in Missouri and California. How did you get to Hawaii?

About once a year I do a weeklong workshop for the Center for Plant Conservation where I teach people from agencies like the National Park Service how to use matrix population models to devise effective management plans for endangered species. Matrix population models allow you to calculate population trajectories based on short-term observations of birth and death rates.

Five years ago, I was asked to do a workshop in Honolulu. I thought, ‘Great! I’d love to go to Honolulu. I haven’t been to Hawaii since my honeymoon.’

Once I got there, I was surprised to see that most of the people in the audience were from the Department of Defense. They have a huge presence in Hawaii. But I didn’t realize how much work they’re doing in plant conservation.

They have a 100,000-acre site on the Big Island called Pohakuloa. The Army says that soldiers who train there are more likely to survive in Afghanistan, so Pohakuloa is very important to them.

Their first priority is training, and they don’t hide that. But the Army doesn’t see any reason why they can’t do really good training and be good stewards of the land they’re using as well.

I’ve been consulting with them for years now, mostly for free, because what they’re working on is so interesting. They are stewards to about 60 species of rare and endangered plants, some of which are found nowhere else.

Is that just accident?

USGS

A Hawaiian kīpuka, an island of greenery in a sea of lava, often harbors rare species.

Army land is actually in better shape than some of the surrounding landscapes. Much of the land surrounding Pohakuloa has been developed for cattle grazing, and grazing is a lot harder on plants than Army training exercises.

Also endangered plants tend to be clustered on kīpukas, which are high spots lava flows later bypassed without covering. So the Army has roped off a lot of  kīpukas and other spots the plants seem to like. They’ve said we’ll save these for conservation; we won’t train there.

Then they focus intense conservation efforts on those locations. They build fences on top of volcanic rock to prevent non-native pigs and goats from harming the plants, and they go to great lengths to remove exotic grasses that outcompete the rare plants and are a fire hazard. 

Nursery-grown Schiedea kaalae being helicoptered in by the Army to establish a second population of this endangered species.

I usually focus on rare species, but now I’m looking at the most common tree in Hawaii. Its scientific name is Metrosideros polymorpha, but its Hawaiian name is Ohia. It’s a beautiful tree that sets bright red flowers, and it’s found on the Hawaiian islands and nowhere else.

On the islands it makes up about 40 percent of the tree biomass, so it’s really common. It’s called polymorpha, which means shape-shifter, because it’s so variable. It can grow almost anywhere, and it looks very different depending on where it’s growing. But it’s the same species all over the place.

This species has great ecological and cultural importance to Hawaii. It may be declining across all six islands, but we aren’t sure yet what is actually happening because the decline may be part of a natural cycle.

I am spending part of my sabbatical doing basic demographic studies on Ohia populations, just trying to figure out whether populations are declining, and, if so, what’s replacing them, and what the consequences of replacement will be for ecosystem health, so, very simple stuff that I hope will set the stage for future research.

When it grows in bogs, the Hawaiian Ohia may mature and flower when it is only a few inches tall. In other habitats, it may grow to towering heights. Not for nothing is it called polymorphic.

You have a young son. Have you ever thought of writing a children’s book about what you do?

My son’s favorite book right now is the classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Perhaps he is showing an early interest in plant-animal interactions.

For now, I am enjoying the books that are out there, but, perhaps, as my son gets older, I will find an empty niche I could help fill and I will write a book.

How skillful are you at remembering faces and names?

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis are inviting the world to take part in an online experiment that will allow participants to see how their individual scores on a face-name memory test compare with those of other test takers.

The test, which can be taken from a computer, smartphone, iPad and other mobile devices, is part of a growing “crowd-sourcing” trend in science, which harnesses the Internet to gather massive amounts of research data while allowing individual study participants to learn a little something about themselves.

To take part, just visit the test website at experiments.wustl.edu.

“It’s a simple test that only takes about 10 minutes to complete,” says research team member David Balota, PhD, professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences. “We’re finding that people really seem to enjoy being tested this way.”

By participating, individuals both contribute to the science of memory and also receive feedback about their own face-name memory performance in comparison with others who have participated. By placing the test online, researchers are hoping to obtain a wealth of data on how a very diverse sampling of the human population performs on a simple memory performance task.

After completion of the test, users will be provided with a rough estimate of their “Face-Name Memory IQ” score, which simply reflects how their score stacks up against others who have taken the test.

Designed to be both fun and informative, the test also is easy to share among friends — users are given the option of clicking an embedded “like” button that will auto-post a reference to the test in the news feed of their Facebook pages.

Development of the online experiment has been a team effort involving faculty, staff and students from the university’s Department of Psychology in Arts & Sciences and the Department of Computer Science & Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

Pyc

Other members of the Washington University research team include Henry L. “Roddy” Roediger III, PhD, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor, and Kathleen B. McDermott, PhD, professor of psychology, both in Arts & Sciences.

The research team is exploring the use of social media and other options to spread word about the experiment in hopes of getting as many people as possible to take the online test.

Balota recently took part in a similar international online experiment that utilized an iPhone app to test how quickly participants could identify whether a string of presented letters represented a real word or some made-up non-word, such as “flirp.”

“The word-recognition study was conducted in seven languages, and, in four months, we collected as much data as a more laboratory-based version took three years to collect in a single language,” Balota says. “At one point, it was the fifth-most downloaded word game app in the Netherlands.”

Just as electronic circuits are made from resistors, capacitors and transistors, biological circuits can be made from genes and regulatory proteins. Engineer Tae Seok Moon's dream is to design modular "genetic parts" that can be used to build logic controllers inside microbes that will program them to make fuel, clean up pollutants, or kill infectious bacteria or cancerous cells.

By force of habit we tend to assume computers are made of silicon, but there is actually no necessary connection between the machine and the material. All that an engineer needs to do to make a computer is to find a way to build logic gates — the elementary building blocks of digital computers — in whatever material is handy.

So logic gates could theoretically be made of pipes of water, channels for billiard balls or even mazes for soldier crabs.

By comparison Tae Seok Moon’s ambition, which is to build logic gates out of genes, seems eminently practical. As a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Christopher Voigt, PhD, a synthetic biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he recently made the largest gene (or genetic) circuit yet reported.

Moon, PhD, now an assistant professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis is the lead author of an article describing the project in the Oct. 7 issue of Nature. Voigt is the senior author.

The tiny circuits constructed from these gene gates and others like them may one day be components of engineered cells that will monitor and respond to their environments.

The number of tasks they could undertake is limited only by evolution and human ingenuity. Janitor bacteria might clean up pollutants, chemical-engineer bacteria pump out biofuels and miniature infection-control bacteria might bustle about killing pathogens.

How to make an AND gate out of genes
The basis of modern computers is the logic gate, a device that makes simple comparisons between the bits, the 1s and 0s, in which computers encode information. Each logic gate has multiple inputs and one output. The output of the gate depends on the inputs and the operation the gate performs.

An AND gate, for example, turns on only if all of its inputs are on. An OR gate turns on if any of its inputs are on.

Suggestively, genes are turned on or off when a transcription factor binds to a region of DNA adjacent to the gene called a promotor.

To make an AND gate out of genes, however, Moon had to find a gene whose activation is controlled by at least two molecules, not one. So only if both molecule 1 AND molecule 2 are present will the gene be turned on and translated into protein.

Such a genetic circuit had been identified in Salmonella typhimurium, the bacterium that causes food poisoning. In this circuit, the transcription factor can bind to the promotor of a gene only if a molecule called a chaperone is present. This meant the genetic circuit could form the basis of a two-input AND gate.

The circuit Moon eventually built consisted of four sensors for four different molecules that fed into three two-input AND gates. If all four molecules were present, all three AND gates turned on and the last one produced a reporter protein that fluoresced red, so that the operation of the circuit could be easily monitored.

In the future, Moon says, a synthetic bacterium with this circuit might sense four different cancer indicators and, in the presence of all four, release a tumor-killing factor.

Crosstalk and timing faults
There are huge differences, of course, between the floppy molecules that embody biological logic gates and the diodes and transistors that embody electronic ones.

Engineers designing biological circuits worry a great deal about crosstalk, or interference. If a circuit is to work properly, the molecules that make up one gate cannot bind to molecules that are part of another gate.

This is much more of a problem in a biological circuit than in an electronic circuit because the interior of a cell is a kind of soup where molecules mingle freely.

To ensure that there wouldn’t be crosstalk among his AND gates, Moon mined parts for his gates from three different strains of bacteria: Shigella flexneri and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, as well as Salmonella.

Although the parts from the three different strains were already quite dissimilar, he made them even more so by subjecting them to error-prone copying cycles and screening the copies for ones that were even less prone to crosstalk (but still functional).

Another problem Moon faced is that biological circuits, unlike electronic ones, don’t have internal clocks that keep the bits moving through the logic gates in lockstep. If signals progress through layers of gates at different speeds, the output of the entire circuit may be wrong, a problem called a timing fault.

Experiments designed to detect such faults in the synthetic circuit showed that they didn’t occur, probably because the chaperones for one layer of logic gates degrades before the transcription factors for the next layer are generated, and this forces a kind of rhythm on the circuit.

Hijacking a bacterium’s controller
“We’re not trying to build a computer out of biological logic gates,” Moon says. “You can’t build a computer this way. Instead we’re trying to make controllers that will allow us to access all the things biological organisms do in simple, programmable ways.”

“I see the cell as a system that consists of a sensor, a controller (the logic circuit), and an actuator,” he says. “This paper covers work on the controller, but eventually the controller’s output will drive an actuator, something that will do work on the cell’s surroundings. “

An synthetic bacterium designed by a friend of Moon’s at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore senses signaling molecules released by the pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. When the molecules reach a high enough concentration, the bacterium generates a toxin and a protein that causes it to burst, releasing the toxin, and killing nearby P. aeruginosa.

“Silicon cannot do that,” Moon says.

C. Mayhew & R. Simmon (NASA/GSFC), NOAA/NGDC, DMSP

One of the iconic images of our time is the Earth at night, as seen here in a composite made by Dept. of Defense meteorological sateillites. The lavish light display that takes place every night is the signature of a technologically advanced but energy spendthrift species that is altering the planet in many ways. At the forefront of research on energy, the environment and sustainability is WUSTL's International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES), which will celebrate the first I-CARES day Oct. 19.

This free event will begin with a reception at 11 a.m. in the Whitaker Hall atrium. Students, staff, faculty and the broader community are invited to share in I-CARES day and its celebration of the programs and partners I-CARES supports.

I-CARES was formed in 2007 to encourage and coordinate collaborative research in the areas of renewable energy, the environment, and sustainability — including biofuels, solar energy and carbon dioxide mitigation.

The purpose of the day is to throw the spotlight on research at Washington University addressing these urgent problems that will shape the future of everyone now living. “It is our hope that our community will come away with a better understanding of the work taking place under the umbrella of I-CARES,” says Dr. Himadri Pakrasi, the Myron and Sonya Glassberg/Albert and Blanche Greensfelder Distinguished University Professor and director of I-CARES.

“We are excited to host presentations from both Peter Raven and T.R. Kidder during I-CARES day. Their talks will provide insight into the effects that human activities are having on our planetary ecosystems today and have had in thedistant past.”

Raven

Kidder

Kidder is a third-generation archeologist whose research examines the effects of prehistoric global climate change on human settlements large river valleys, including the Mississippi river in the U.S. and the Yellow river in China. Kidder is an active participant in the I-CARES Topics for Conversation Climate Change group and also a recipient of an I-CARES research award in 2012.

For more information on this event contact Kate Woerheide, Communications and Outreach Coordinator at I-CARES, 314-935-8093 or woerheidek@wustl.edu

The Washington University Faculty Senate recently adopted a formal open access resolution that places renewed focus on the dissemination of new knowledge and asks WUSTL faculty to seek out publishers that share a vision of broad digital access to scholarly information.

But just how to get scholarly work to all who may wish to access it can be confusing. Publisher agreements vary, as do the open access options that are emerging. Questions abound, including those about peer review, “gold” and “green” open access, and the National Institutes of Health’s new public access policy.

Next week, WUSTL Libraries is offering a series of five sessions to answer these and other questions during national “Open Access Week,” celebrated from Oct. 22 to 28.

The five sessions are:

• “Don’t Sign Your Rights Away: Author’s Rights,” a 30-minute workshop at 12:15 p.m. Monday, Oct. 22, in the library at the Brown School. Social work librarian Lori Siegel will suggest ways to retain rights to freely use one’s work for scholarly, professional and teaching activities.

• “Perspectives on Open Access: Practice, Progress and Pitfalls,” a 90-minute webcast at 3 p.m. Monday, Oct. 22, at the Arc Presentation Room, Level A of Olin Library. The webcast will feature a panel discussion co-sponsored by the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition and the World Bank. The webcast also will be freely available through World Bank’s live portal.

• “How to Make Your Research Open Access (Whether You’re at Harvard or Not),” another webcast, will be offered at 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 23, via a Harvard University site. Open access advocates Peter Suber and Stuart Shieber will headline the session, answering questions and recommending concrete steps for making one’s work openly accessible.

• “Electronic Theses & Dissertations and Open Access” will be at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 23, in the Arc Presentation Room, Level A of Olin Library. Andrew Rouner, director of the digital library, and subject librarian Brian Vetruba will give an overview of the process for submitting an electronic thesis or dissertation at Washington University. They will discuss factors to consider when deciding on open access or restricted access for such work. Pre-registration is requested but not required.

• “NIH Public Access Policy Overview” will close out the week’s events at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 24, in the Arc Presentation Room, Level A of Olin Library. Cathy C. Sarli, scholarly communications specialist at Becker Medical Library, will present on this policy, which requires that NIH-funded investigators and scholars submit the final, peer-reviewed manuscript version of journal articles generated by NIH funding to its PubMed Central site. Pre-registration is requested for this session.

All events are free and open to public. Visit http://libguides.wustl.edu/oa1 or contact librarian Ruth Lewis at rlewis@wustl.edu or 314-935-4819 for more information.

http://youtu.be/50gxyyU0V7UThis artist’s conception of a planetary smashup whose debris was spotted by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope three years ago gives an impression of the carnage that would have been wrought when a similar impact created Earth’s moon. A team at Washington University in St. Louis has uncovered evidence of this impact that scientists have been trying to find for more than 30 years. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

It’s a big claim, but Washington University in St. Louis planetary scientist Frédéric Moynier says his group has discovered evidence that the moon was born in a flaming blaze of glory when a body the size of Mars collided with the early Earth.

The evidence might not seem all that impressive to a nonscientist: a tiny excess of a heavier variant of the element zinc in moon rocks. But the enrichment probably arose because heavier zinc atoms condensed out of the roiling cloud of vaporized rock created by a catastrophic collision faster than lighter zinc atoms, and the remaining vapor escaped before it could condense.

Scientists have been looking for this kind of sorting by mass, called isotopic fractionation, since the Apollo missions first brought moon rocks to Earth in the 1970s. Moynier, PhD, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences — together with PhD student, Randal Paniello, and colleague James Day of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography — are the first to find it.

The moon rocks, geochemists discovered, while otherwise chemically similar to Earth rocks, were woefully short on volatiles (easily evaporated elements). A giant impact explained this depletion, whereas alternative theories for the moon’s origin did not.

But a creation event that allowed volatiles to slip away should also have produced isotopic fractionation. Scientists looked for fractionation but were unable to find it, leaving the impact theory of origin in limbo — neither proved nor disproved — for more than 30 years.

“The magnitude of the fractionation we measured in lunar rocks is 10 times larger than what we see in terrestrial and Martian rocks,” Moynier says, “so it’s an important difference.”

The data, published in the Oct. 18, 2012, issue of Nature, provide the first physical evidence for wholesale vaporization event since the discovery of volatile depletion in moon rocks, Moynier says.

The Giant Impact Theory

J. Day

Cross-polarized, transmitted-light image of a lunar rock reveals its hidden beauty. In broad daylight, the rocks are an unprepossessing, even an ugly, gray.

According to the Giant Impact Theory, proposed in its modern form at a conference in 1975, Earth’s moon was created in an apocalyptic collision between a planetary body called Theia (in Greek mythology the mother of the moon Selene) and the early Earth.

This collision was so powerful it is hard for mere mortals to imagine, but the asteroid theorized to have killed the dinosaurs is thought to have been the size of Manhattan. Theia is thought to have been the size of the planet Mars.

The smashup released so much energy it melted and vaporized Theia and much of the proto-Earth’s mantle. The moon then condensed out of the cloud of rock vapor, some of which also re-accreted to the Earth.

This seemingly outlandish idea gained traction because computer simulations showed a giant collision could have created an Earth-moon system with the right orbital dynamics and because it explained a key characteristic of the moon rocks.

Once geochemists got moon rocks into the lab, they quickly realized that the rocks are depleted in what geochemists call “moderately volatile” elements. They are very poor in sodium, potassium, zinc and lead, Moynier says.

“But if the rocks were depleted in volatiles because they had been vaporized during a giant impact, we should also have seen isotopic fractionation,” he says. (Isotopes are variants of an element that have slightly different masses.)

“When a rock is melted and then evaporated, the light isotopes enter the vapor phase faster than the heavy isotopes, so you end up with a vapor enriched in the light isotopes and a solid residue enriched in the heavier isotopes. If you lose the vapor, the residue will be enriched in the heavy isotopes compared to the starting material,” Moynier says.

The trouble was that scientists who looked for isotopic fractionation couldn’t find it.

Asked how he felt when he saw the first results, Moynier says, “When you find something that is new and that has important ramifications, you want to be sure you haven’t gotten anything wrong.

A very special student

All Washington University students are special, but the first author on the Nature paper is more special than most. In addition to being a PhD candidate in earth and planetary sciences, studying stable isotope cosmochemistry under Frédéric Moynier, PhD, Randal Paniello, MD, is a laryngologist and head and neck surgeon at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, a hospital affiliated with Washington University’s School of Medicine.

In 2003, Paniello restored a 25-year-old’s voice, which had been lost to cancer, by constructing a new larynx out of tissue taken from her arm. It was the first time the surgery has been performed successfully in the United States. In 2005, Paniello relocated a patient’s salivary gland to restore moisture to a tear duct, groundbreaking surgery that has saved or restored the eyesight of several patients. More about Paniello.

“I half expected results like those previously obtained for moderately volatile elements, so when we got something so different, we reproduced everything from scratch to make sure there were no mistakes because some of the procedures in the lab could conceivably fractionate the isotopes.”

He also worried that fractionation could have occurred through localized processes on the moon, such as fire fountaining.

To make sure the effect was global, the team analyzed 20 samples of lunar rocks, including ones from the Apollo 11, 12, 15 and 17 missions — all of which went to different locations on the moon — and one lunar meteorite.

To obtain the samples, which are stored at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Moynier had to convince a committee that controls access to them of the project’s scientific merit.

“What we wanted were the basalts,” Moynier says, “because they’re the ones that came from inside the moon and would be more representative of the moon’s composition.”

But lunar basalts have different chemical compositions, Moynier says, including a wide range of titanium concentrations. Isotopes also can be fractionating during the solidification of minerals from a melt. “The effect should be very, very tiny,” he says, “but to make sure this wasn’t what we were seeing, we analyzed both titanium-rich and titanium-poor basalts, which are at the two extremes of the range of chemical composition on the moon.”

The low- and high-titanium basalts had the same zinc isotopic ratios.

M. Taha Ghouchkanlu

Taken from Esfahan, Iran, this image captures Earthshine, light from Earth illuminating the moon's night side. An observer on the moon looking our way at the same moment would have seen a brilliantly lit, nearly full Earth.

The simplest explanation for these differences is that conditions during or after the formation of the moon led to more extensive volatile loss and isotopic fractionation than was experienced by Earth or Mars.

The isotopic homogeneity of the lunar materials, in turn, suggests that isotopic fractionation resulted from a large-scale process rather than one that operated only locally.

Given these lines of evidence, the most likely large-scale event is wholesale melting during the formation of the moon. The zinc isotopic data therefore supports the theory that a giant impact gave rise to the Earth-moon system.

“The work also has implications for the origin of the Earth,” Moynier points out, “because the origin of the moon was a big part of the origin of the Earth.”

Without the stabilizing influence of the moon, the Earth would probably be a very different sort of place. Planetary scientists think the Earth would spin more rapidly, days would be shorter, weather more violent, and climate more chaotic and extreme. In fact, it might have been such a harsh world, that it would have been unfit for the evolution of our favorite species: us.

Pinkerton, a high-energy Belgian Malinois, is proving to be a critical player in research aimed at preserving both the black-crested gibbon and the Phayre’s leaf monkey, says Joseph Orkin, a graduate student in anthropology now studying the endangered primates for a doctoral dissertation in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Orkin’s research focuses on how the movement and breeding habits of these endangered species are influenced by geographic barriers, such as deforested lowlands and large streams and rivers, found in three mountaintops in China’s Yunnan Province. Both species cling to survival in the donut-shaped remnants of forest that ring the steep mountain sides above valleys and hillsides that have been cleared and terraced to support intensive agriculture.

“The major challenge of working with these primates isn't only that they are reclusive, few, and quick moving, but that they live in steep mountainside forests littered with cliffs, which has made them especially hard to find and difficult to study for previous researchers,” Orkin says.

http://youtu.be/Yh8SnIXvY1c

Orkin enlisted Pinkerton as his research assistant after hearing of other studies that employed scat-sniffing dogs to sniff out data on similarly elusive species ranging from bears to whales. He located his dog through an organization that trains dogs to sniff out bombs, weapons and drugs for the Chinese police, including some of the dogs used at the 2008 Olympic games in Bejing.

Working with Yang Yu Ming, a dog trainer from the Kunming Police Dog Training Base in China, Orkin trained Pinkerton to hunt through the mountain underbrush and to signal whenever he locates the droppings of these particular primate species. With more than 175 scat samples now collected during two years in China, Orkin will use DNA analysis and other tools to identify individual monkeys and gibbons living in the study areas, and to reconstruct their movements and breeding habits, data that could be key to developing plans to assist in their preservation.

“How geographic boundaries interact with primate locomotion and ecology to fragment populations, form new species, and lead to their extinction remains a fundamental question for biological anthropologists,” wrote Orkin as part of his successful proposal for a $20,000 National Science Foundation grant to support his research. Orkin's research has also received major funding from The Leakey Foundation and The Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“Little effort has been made, however, to ascertain precisely how subtle geographic variation actually modifies the underlying population genetic relationships of primates in a changing environment. As human-induced environmental degradation continues to isolate and fragment dwindling populations of primates, it has become critical to understand how innate biological factors influence the ability of primates to disperse through and exchange genes within these variable environments.”

Although the primate species in Orkin’s studies share the same habitat, they have considerably different physical attributes. His research will explore how the different ways that the arm-swinging gibbons and quadrupedal leaf monkeys move through the forest allows them to overcome the obstacles of a degraded, fragmented habitat in their battle for survival.

"Having the opportunity to go to the other side of China isn't something that a lot of Americans and other foreigners are able to see," says Orkin, noting that people in some of the small villages he's visited have told him he's the first foreigner they've seen in 30 years. "Everyone has been very kind -- welcoming me into their homes, allowing me to live together with them."

"To hear the calls of these last few gibbons in the wild," he adds, "has been a wonderful thing."