For researchers in the lab of Edward Theriot at The University of Texas at Austin, diatoms (and their snot) are rich objects of biological research. Read the full story at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

It was bad enough when they caused laptop computers to burst into flames, leading to millions of recalled batteries since 2000. Their reputation took another hit in January, when battery fires in two of Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner planes caused airlines to ground their entire 787 fleets.

So why are John Goodenough and Arumugam Manthiram smiling? Despite current setbacks, the two professors at the Cockrell School of Engineering see a bright future for the battered battery. It still stores more energy in less space than any other rechargeable technology. And through the associated Texas Materials Institute, both researchers are hard at work on its next generation.

This story was written by Steve Brooks and it appeared at Texas Enterprise.

Arumugam Manthiram

That’s assuming, of course, that the batteries become less prone to ignite.

As the lightest metal, lithium has long held the promise of lightweight but high-powered batteries. When oil prices jumped in the early 1970s, it attracted researchers like Bell Telephone Laboratories and Exxon. The problem was finding the right materials to partner with it — because the wrong combinations of elements could lead to explosions. Bell and Exxon learned this the hard way. “After they exploded a couple of laboratories,” recalls Goodenough, “they got out of the energy business.”

John Goodenough

While modern lithium batteries are considered stable, they come with several risks. Both external heat and internal short-circuits can cause a cell to overheat. Overcharging releases oxygen, a combustion hazard. To protect against these threats, every battery pack includes what’s essentially a miniature computer, packed with tiny temperature sensors and voltage regulators.

When your cell phone tells you its battery is full, notes Manthiram, it’s actually 50 percent charged – the highest level that’s safe with lithium cobalt oxide.

That’s plenty of juice for small gadgets. But green transportation and renewable energy require bigger batteries. Weaning the world off fossil fuels means storing massive amounts of power, coming out of wind turbines and solar cells and going into electric cars.

The trouble with new and larger batteries, says Manthiram, is that manufacturers have less experience with their hazards and how to control them. Those risks were magnified in the Boeing 787 by linking several large cells together.

“If one cell is shorting inside, then it will cause an explosion of everything,” he explains. “That’s the problem when you have multiple cells.”

The other problem, he says, was that Boeing used the oldest and least stable material: lithium cobalt oxide. Since the 1990s, researchers have devised safer lithium compounds. But each one has tradeoffs, he notes. “We use different materials for different applications. It’s hard to get everything with a single material.”

Goodnenough invented one such compound, with iron, phosphorus, and oxygen. It’s promising for storing power on electric grids, and the Canadian utility Hydro-Quebec has licensed the technology from the University of Texas. But it can’t store a lot of energy in a small space, which makes it impractical for cars.

Some electric cars, like the Chevy Volt, use a different lithium compound. Their batteries, incorporating manganese, can put out a lot of power at once. The tradeoff, so far, is that they have shorter lives.

That means the two professors are still on the quest for a breakthrough battery: the perfect combination of power, storage, life, and cost. With grants from the U.S. Department of Energy, they and their colleagues are testing a new generation of materials:

• Alloys for electrodes that are less prone to short-circuits than graphite.
• Sodium, a more abundant and less-expensive element than lithium.
• Dual-electrolyte batteries, which use both water and non-water solutions to conduct ionic currents inside batteries, opening up more choices for materials.

Will any of these materials prove to be a magic battery bullet? Ask Manthiram in 10 to 20 years, he says. For at least that long, the Texas Materials Institute will keep humming along.

“People are working very, very hard, and who knows when somebody’s going to come up with a brand-new idea that surprises us all?” says Goodnenough. “With the present strategies, it’s a hard stretch. I’m trying to find new strategies.”

In collaboration with Sam Gosling, professor of psychology and author of “Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You,” Graham and her team of student researchers will leave no knickknack unturned as they search for signs of a happy home – or possibly trouble in paradise.

We recently talked with Graham about her preliminary findings. Read on to learn more about her study – and why common household arrangements provide some startling insight into a couple’s relationship status.

Jessica Sinn shares this Q&A from Life and Letters from the College of Liberal Arts.

Briefly describe your current research with couples’ living spaces.

Lindsay Graham, graduate student in psychology, is researching how couples make share space their own.

Surprisingly, very little is known about how couples create a shared space together. How do couples make decisions about the design of their home? Whose stuff goes where? How do they create an environment they both love? These are the sorts of questions Sam Gosling and I are hoping to answer in our latest study looking at the expression of couples’ personalities in their homes.

How do you collect data in, say, a bedroom?

First, we enter the room and take photographs of the space. We take 360-degree photos (to get a feel for the room as a whole), and we take close-range shots of everything so we can see all of the interesting details, like titles of books and CDs, what the photographs look like, etc. Next, our team of coders fill out surveys describing their overall impressions of the space in terms of ambiance (i.e. how cozy, colorful, and decorated it is) and the emotions they feel the space conveys (i.e. romance, relaxation). The coders also systematically document the physical features of the space (i.e. type of flooring, windows, wall colors) and the items (i.e. photographs, flowers, clocks).

We document only the things that are visible—so we never open up closed drawers or cabinets. This whole process takes anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes, depending on how much stuff the couple has in the space.

In addition, we are also interested in the characteristics and behaviors of the homeowners. So the occupants complete a set of surveys about themselves and their partners. The surveys include questions about the type of impression they wish their space portrays to others and the emotions they want to express in it.

What does a “man cave” say about the quality of a couple’s relationship?

This is a question we hope to address. Anecdotal evidence suggests it is important for both couples to have at least some area that they can call their own, but we won’t know for sure until we have some data.

How can something as simple as pictures on a wall give away clues to who we are and what’s important to us?

Each of the items you display in your spaces can potentially broadcast something about your identity, or how you think, feel and act in everyday life. Some items owe their presence to making “identity claims”—that is sending deliberate signals about your values, goals, preferences, etc. to others.

A good example might be a religious person displaying religious icons or an avid sports fan displaying emblems of their favorite teams. Other items in the space are designed to make you feel a certain way, so you might display photos of a beach where you had a great vacation to remind yourself of the happy times you had there, or a memento given to you by a dear relative.

Other items give clues because they reflect your behaviors — so the arrangement of space might be quite different for extraverts who have crafted their living room to afford entertaining others versus spaces belonging to introverts who have designed a space where they can quietly curl up on the couch together and read a book. Each clue is another piece of a puzzle that together reveals a lot about the occupants and the kinds of lives they live.

Although you’re only in the preliminary phase of your fieldwork, have you come across any surprising findings?

We have noticed that photos seem to be quite important in spaces. Couples seem to be all or nothing—meaning that they tend to either have no photos at all or lots of them. We are looking forward to learning about what the presence or absence of photos says about how couples relate to one another.

You also study virtual personalities, particularly among gamers. Do you see a common denominator in how people portray their personalities in their real-life and virtual spaces? Any differences?

We know from our work that people express aspects of themselves and their personalities in the environments they inhabit — whether that be in physical spaces like your home and office, or virtual spaces like your Facebook profile or online gaming environments.

One interesting finding from our work in virtual spaces is that although the expression of personality is present, the impressions are not always valid. Most virtual spaces are “hybrid spaces” — meaning, much of our online social network overlaps with our offline social network (i.e. many of your Facebook friends are people you have actually encountered and interacted with in your offline life).

However, there are certain environments — like the online role-play game World of Warcraft — where you may have no expectation of ever meeting the other people you are interacting with virtually. It seems that in this particular environment, the impressions of others are less accurate and people are more flexible in the ways they express their true personalities.

The new approach could ultimately replace drug treatment, in which patients have to take multiple medications daily to keep the virus in check.

“Providing an infected person with resistant T cells would not eradicate their viral infection,” said Sara Sawyer, assistant professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at The University of Texas at Austin and a co-author of the study. “However, it would provide them with a protected set of T cells that would ward off the immune collapse that typically gives rise to AIDS. It would be an alternative way to manage the disease.”

This story comes from Daniel Oppenheimer in the College of Natural Sciences.

One of the big challenges in treating HIV infection is that the virus is notorious for mutating, so patients must be treated with a cocktail of drugs — known as highly active antiretroviral therapy, or HAART — that hit it at various stages of the replication process. The researchers were able to stay ahead of the virus’s mutations by deploying a HAART-like strategy that relies on genetic manipulation.

Sara Sawyer, assistant professor in molecular genetics and microbiology.

The technique hinges on the fact that the HIV virus typically enters T cells by latching onto one of two surface proteins known as CCR5 and CXCR4. The researchers targeted a section of the DNA of one of these proteins, created a break in the sequence and then pasted in three genes known to confer resistance to HIV.

“This technique of placing several useful genes at a particular site is known as ‘stacking,’ ” said Matthew Porteus, associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford and a pediatric hematologist/oncologist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. “We can use this strategy to make cells that are resistant to both major types of HIV.”

To test the T cells’ protective abilities, the scientists created versions in which they inserted one, two and all three of the genes and then exposed the T cells to HIV.

Though the T cells with the single- and double-gene modifications were somewhat protected against an onslaught of HIV, the triplets were by far the most resistant to infection. These triplet cells had more than 1,200-fold protection against HIV carrying the CCR5 receptor and more than 1,700-fold protection against those with the CXCR4 receptor. The T cells that hadn’t been altered succumbed to infection within 25 days.

Porteus said he views the work as an important step forward in developing a gene therapy for HIV.

“I’m very excited about what’s happened already,” he said. “This is a significant improvement in that first-generation application.”

He said the researchers’ next step is to test the strategy in T cells taken from AIDS patients and then move on to animal testing. He said he hopes to begin clinical trials within three to five years.

Porteus said that though the method is labor-intensive, requiring a tailored approach for each patient, it would save patients from a lifelong dependence on antiretroviral drugs, which have adverse side effects. He said he also hopes to adapt these techniques for use against other diseases, such as sickle cell anemia.

In addition to Sawyer and Porteus, collaborators on the research were Richard Voit, a former Stanford graduate student who is now an M.D./Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center; and Moira McMahon, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral scholar at Stanford who is now at the University of California-San Diego.

Part of his legacy is that fewer babies are born with neural tube defects such as spina bifida and anencephaly because of one of his discoveries.

In 1941 Snell, who died in 2003, and Texas colleague Herschel Mitchell discovered folic acid, a B vitamin needed to make DNA and RNA and that enables red blood cells to carry iron.

Using a steam kettle and filter press in the attic of the chemistry building (now Welch Hall), they processed four tons of spinach to isolate and identify the compound they named after the Latin word for leaf, folium.

Esmond Snell, shown in an undated photo, and his colleagues processed four tons of spinach to concentrate what they called folic acid.

“The immediate goal was to reduce the risk of pregnancies affected by neural tube defects, but it is becoming clear that folic acid fortification is impacting other aspects of health and disease as well,” said Dean Appling, a biochemistry professor at The University of Texas at Austin. “None of this could have been possible without the early work at UT.”

The folic acid discovery is considered one of The University of Texas at Austin’s most significant scientific achievements.

Read about the recent folic acid discovery in Dean Appling’s lab, Lack of Key Enzyme in the Metabolism of Folic Acid Leads to Birth Defects

More discoveries

Snell’s other discoveries include coenzymes of vitamin B6—pyridoxal phosphate and pyridoxamine phosphate—that are needed for proper growth and nervous system functioning.

Snell, who taught and conducted research at the university for 45 years in three stints, also developed microbiological assays using lactic acid bacteria for the identification and isolation of factors essential for animal nutrition/

Esmond Snell, who died in December 2003, was a Nobel Prize-caliber scientist, his associates said.

“Snell was a nutritional biochemist whose work on vitamins and the chemistry of their actions was recognized internationally,” said UC Berkeley’s announcement of his death. “His research was considered by many to be on a par with that of other scientists who received Nobel Prizes in the 1930s and 1940s for their discovery of vitamins A, C, K, B2 (riboflavin) and biotin.”
Snell was nominated for a Nobel Prize several times.

“Had he received one, it certainly would have been justified,” said Jack Kirsch, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at California, in Snell’s obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Snell’s legacy

Appling, who researches folic acid, is another part of Snell’s legacy: he was a student of Snell’s first graduate student, Jesse Rabinowitz. A professor at UC Berkeley, Rabinowitz also did groundbreaking research in folic acid.

“There’s an academic lineage and a research lineage that works its way down through the years and it’s been fun to be a part of that,” Appling said. “I make sure my students don’t forget those connections.”

Appling’s lab researches how folic acid works on the cellular level.

Vitamin hotbed

Young researchers such as Snell working at the Clayton Foundation Biochemical Institute at UT made the school a hotbed of vitamin research.

The director, Roger Williams, had discovered pantothenic acid. Lester Reed, now a professor emeritus who also was the institute’s director, discovered lipoic acid. Another member, William Shive, would extend Snell’s folic acid research by studying its chemistry.

Photos of the institute in a university publication show young men with faces whose features have yet to fill out, their hair either close-cropped or slicked back. They wear short-sleeved white shirts and sit among a phalanx of beakers and test tubes. A photo shows Williams looking properly professorial, wearing a bow tie and a suit. In his hands he holds a lab rat.

Berkeley hired Snell away from Texas in 1956 and made him chairman of the Biochemistry Department, a post he held for six years. He left California in 1976, partly because of the school’s retirement policy. Back at Texas, Snell was named chairman of the Microbiology Department.

Enthusiasm to share

Snell retired as an active faculty member in 1990, but was a professor emeritus until he and his wife moved to Colorado in 2003 to be closer to family members.

He remained active in research and shared his expertise and enthusiasm with younger faculty members.

“I really enjoyed my time interacting with Esmond in his later years just talking over the old days,” said Appling, who came to Texas in 1985. “And he was very excited about the new research going on even though he personally had moved on to other areas of research.”

Snell died in December 2003, six days after the death of his wife of 62 years. He met Mary Terrill when she was a biochemistry student at Texas and they married in March 1941— the year of the folic acid discovery.

Chris Sullivan, associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology.

See video of Sullivan Fighting the Viral Wars, starring toy soldiers and Legos. Seriously.

When it does attack, HSV-1 hedges its bets. It sends out viral particles that only go lytic—start replicating rapidly, destroying cells—when they’re at the surface of our skin, far away from the primary reservoir. The reservoir, meanwhile, stays hidden.

This story was written by Daniel Oppenheimer in the College of Natural Sciences for the college’s website.

So even when we win the battle against the lytic cells, which manifest as cold sores, the war isn’t over. The latent virus remains in its hideout, running silent, waiting for the next opportunity to attack.

That’s where we stand now, in our wars against these viruses. It’s why in times of stress and illness the cold sores come back, for the roughly 60 percent of Americans infected by HSV-1. It’s why HIV can be managed but not eradicated. It’s why Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpes virus (KSHV), which is the virus that Sullivan has been studying most closely, can lay low for decades only to appear at the worst possible time, in the form of nasty tumors, when your immune system is compromised by AIDS or chemotherapy.

To win the war against these viruses in a more decisive fashion, something has to change. Our immune system has to be able to see and recognize these reservoirs of latent virus. Then all the squadrons of white blood cells that have become so good at fighting the viruses in their lytic form should be able to finish the job.

Latency 101

With the help of a $500,000 grant from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Sullivan is working to understand how latent viruses hide from our adaptive immune response, and whether there are any vulnerabilities that might be exploited to make them visible, so that we can kill them all.

“It’s the Holy Grail,” Sullivan says. “We call it ‘purging the latent reservoir.’”
To understand Sullivan’s strategy for finding the Grail, which revolves around small “suicide elements” in the viral genome, it helps to begin with the mechanism these viruses use to hide from our immune systems.

Our adaptive immune system has evolved to see and respond to viruses when they’re dangerous, which is when a lot of their genes are turned on and cranking out proteins.

In their latent state, however, most of their genes are turned off. The genes are still there, of course, but they’re hidden from the machinery in the host cell that makes proteins. The few proteins that are made only enable the virus to replicate and subsist. They don’t do any damage to the host cell, and so don’t trip any alarms.

When KSHV is lytic, for instance, more than 75 genes are turned on. These genes can generate thousands of virus particles in a single cell. During latency, by contrast, only three or four genes are turned on.

For a long time the virology community assumed that that was the end of the story. Very few genes turned on, very few proteins. Recently, however, scientists have discovered that the latency state isn’t quite so stable as was thought. A lot of the genes that are supposed to be turned off are “leaking.” Occasionally their blueprints become visible to the rest of the cell. If that leads to protein expression, as it typically would, that could mean trouble for the virus.

“It’s like a cliff,” says Sullivan. “You don’t sort of fall of a cliff. You either fall or you don’t. If you are a virus and you accidentally make proteins that haven’t evolved to be camouflaged, you alert the immune response, and you get cleared.”

Suicide Prevention

The evidence of these leaks forced virologists to look again at the model. One possibility was that sufficiently few errant proteins were being made that the immune system remained clueless.

What Sullivan has begun to document is a considerably more elegant possibility. The viruses seem to have evolved a back-up plan. They have a way to take care of the leaks, and short circuit the process.

“We call them ‘suicide elements,’” he says.

Suicide elements, which Sullivan and his colleagues have found in KSHV, are small regions on viral mRNAs that are sensitive to whether the virus is in its lytic or latent state. If latent, then the suicide elements shut down the leaks, preventing the production of proteins.

If, however, the virus is lytic, these suicide elements actually flip their function. They help ramp up protein production, which makes the virus all the more nasty when it’s time for it to be nasty.

“We haven’t proven that these elements are necessary to keeping the virus hidden during latency,” says Sullivan. “But what we know for sure is that the viruses have them, and they are capable of cranking down expression. And the only thing that makes sense to me is that somehow this helps with latency, otherwise you are going to slow up your own replication cycle for no good reason.”

Sullivan believes that if he’s right about the purpose of these suicide elements, they could prove the key to a therapy that would purge the latent reservoir.

“What happens in my hypothetical world,” he says, “is you have a drug that disables the suicide elements. So now these protein leaks from the virus aren’t hidden from the immune response any more, and our own immune system can clear the infection.”

So far Sullivan has documented the suicide elements in KSHV and one retrovirus. He believes that they are likely to exist, at a minimum, in the seven other known strains of herpes, and very possibly in HIV. Which means that a treatment for KSHV, of the sort that Sullivan envisions, might be adaptable to those viruses as well. So no more cold sores, but also, more importantly, a true cure for HIV.

“That’s the dream,” he says.

Professors C. Grant Willson and S.V. Sreenivasan received the Inventor of the Year award Thursday (Dec. 6, 2012) for developing a nanolithography process used for manufacturing computer chips, hard drives and other electronic components.

They took their research beyond the laboratory in co-founding Molecular Imprints Inc., an Austin-based company with more than 100 employees.

“I congratulate Professor Sreenivasan and Professor Willson for their momentous contributions to society, the full scope of which we won’t know for many decades to come,” said Bill Powers, president of the university. “I also honor the efforts of all the university’s many inventors. It is never more evident than on occasions like this that what starts here changes the world.”

Sreenivasan

Willson

“This program recognizes and honors them and the researchers and inventors at UT Austin and the great work that they perform in our labs,” he said.

The university received $20.3 million in licensing revenue in 2011-2012, and its researchers received 80 patents, making it one of the largest contributors of technology and innovation in the state.

The technology that Willson, a chemist and engineer, and Sreenivasan, a mechanical engineer, developed is a more cost-effective high-resolution printing technique used to make very high-resolution patterns used in the semiconductor and other industries.

The process could help manufacturers overcome some of the physical barriers involved in reducing the size of circuits in computer chips and other devices.

Besides their extensive research portfolios, Sreenivasan and Willson teach undergraduate and graduate classes.

Willson is a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the College of Natural Sciences and the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering in the Cockrell School of Engineering.

In 2007 Willson, the Rashid Engineering Regents Chair, received the National Medal for Technology and Science from President George W. Bush. He received the SWS Teaching Excellence Award in Chemical Engineering in 2006.

He came to The University of Texas at Austin in 1993 after a 17-year career at IBM Corp., where he was an IBM Fellow. At IBM, Willson managed a large group of researchers who were developing new polymers for microelectronics, and his interest in that continued at the university.

His research focuses on the design and synthesis of functional organic materials, with emphasis on materials for microelectronics. His research group includes graduate and undergraduate students from natural science and engineering.

Sreenivasan is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the Cockrell School and the Eli H. and Ramona Thornton Centennial Fellow in Engineering. In 2010 he received the O’Donnell Award for Technology Innovation conferred by the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas.

Sreenivasan is also the chief technical officer and a member of the board of directors of Molecular Imprints and continues to provide strategic technical and business leadership.

During the past decade, Sreenivasan has mentored graduate research students who have been hired by Molecular Imprints.

“They live underwater,” says Benjamin Walther, assistant professor of marine science in the College of Natural Sciences. “We can’t just follow them from birth to death. You can tag a fish with acoustic or satellite tags when it’s an adult, but typically the young are too small and fragile. So you’re missing that whole big piece of the story. And without that there are a lot of very important ecological questions we can’t answer. That’s where otolith chemistrycomes in.”

By chemically decoding the information embedded in the otoliths—“earstones”—of the southern flounder, Walther is able to discover information, about the secret lives of fish, that would otherwise remain beneath our view.

The population of the southern flounder has been in serious decline for the last two decades, likely as a consequence of the triple whammy of climate change, overfishing and degraded estuarine habitat quality.

“The otolith is like a flight data recorder,” says Walther. “It’s continually recording information from the environment, and we can use that to learn where a fish has been.”

This article was written by Daniel Oppenheimer and was first posted on the College of Natural Sciences’s Texas Science website.

Benjamin Walther

Walther has been able to make use, in particular, of the equipment at the ICP Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) lab in the Jackson School of Geosciences to do his analysis.

“They have all of the instrumentation and lasers to allow us to probe these structures at a fine scale,” he says. “They’ve been great to work with.”

He and his lab catch southern flounder in the waters by their home base at the college’s Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas, Texas. They collect water samples from all of the major rivers and bay systems that are part of the flounders’ habitat. They do controlled experiments to verify that certain elements in the water reliably end up in the otolith. Then they come to Austin, where they analyze the layers of the otoliths from wild fish and compare the ratios of trace elements in them to what’s found in the water samples.

When Walther was a graduate student, he and his colleagues used these techniques to create a detailed chemical map—an isoscape—that matched the traces in the otoliths of American shad to nearly every single river from Quebec down to Florida in which the species spawned.

In Walther’s investigation of the southern flounder, a project funded by the Texas Sea Grant program, the question is when in their life cycle the fish are in freshwater and saltwater environments.

This is information that as a basic scientist he simply wants to know. It’s also the kind of information that may prove useful in helping to sustain a species has been in steep decline for the last two decades, likely as a consequence of the triple whammy of climate change, overfishing and degraded estuarine habitat quality.

“The more we know about where the fish have been, the better we’ll be able to understand the relative impact of different kinds of ecological change,” says Walther, “and the better we may be able to mitigate the harm.”

When Walther began asking the question, the assumption among marine biologists was that there was a single migratory pattern that all the flounder followed. The adults spawned offshore, then went into the estuaries and settled, and then moved into freshwater for some time before they came back out to the estuarine and marine environments.

By analyzing the ratio of barium to calcium in the layers of the flounders’ otoliths, which varies predictably according to salinity, Walther has learned that there is far more variation than was thought. Some individuals follow the stereotypical pattern. Some go into fresh water a lot, throughout their life cycles. About 40 percent never go into fresh water at all.

This variability is important ecologically for a few reasons. It may mean that the southern flounder is more resilient than it would be if it had only one migratory pattern.

“We call it the portfolio effect,” Walther says. “You spread your risk at a population level across different strategies, so if situations change at least a certain segment of your population may remain viable.”

Another reason such variability is meaningful is that, in understanding it, environmentalists and regulators can be more effective in targeting interventions.

“If you want to do spatially explicit management,” Walther says, “you would like to know things like how productive is a given micro-habitat. How connected is it to neighboring habitats? If an area is both productive and connected, if it not only is going to sustain itself but might also provide fish for a neighboring area, then that’s an area you would want to prioritize in terms of protection.”

The larger lesson, for Walther, is that there can be incredible power not just in creating general models of species behavior, but in understanding the ways that individual behavior deviates from that model.

“You want to understand the mean, but also the variation around the mean. I think that has been my guiding principle as a scientist, to characterize the variation.”

The population of the southern flounder has been in serious decline for the last two decades, likely as a consequence of the triple whammy of climate change, overfishing and degraded estuarine habitat quality.

But among Americans over 80 – who represent the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population – half are debilitated with a neurodegenerative disorder. Of this group, 5.4 million now have Alzheimer’s Disease. By year 2050, that number is expected to balloon to 16 million, according to recent data released by the Alzheimer’s Association.

As prevalence numbers steadily climb, the key to combatting the Alzheimer’s epidemic is to focus on diagnosing the disease long before it ravages the brain. And the best place to start is the heart, says Jack C. de la Torre, adjunct professor of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin.

According to de la Torre’s research, the opportune window for diagnosis is middle age, when vascular risk factors, such as Type 2 Diabetes, hypertension and heart disease, are strongly linked with Alzheimer’s.

This story was published on the College of Liberal Arts website. It was written by Jessica Sinn.

Jack de la Torre

De la Torre edited the special November issue of special November issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.

Among the promising breakthrough studies, the special issue features new research by Francisco Gonzalez-Lima, professor of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. The study is the first to demonstrate the memory-enhancing effects of low-level light therapy.

In search of a non-invasive treatment for memory loss, Gonzalez-Lima and a team of researchers tested light-emitting diodes developed by NASA on rats. The results show that certain wavelengths of red to near-infrared light are absorbed by the mitochondria in the brain (mini power plants generating energy for the cells) and facilitate cell respiration and energy production. By re-energizing brain cells in neural networks, the researchers found low-level light therapy has the potential to effectively treat dementia, depression, post-traumatic stress disorders and attention-deficit disorders.

Francisco Gonzalez-Lima

With new treatments to prevent – and possibly reverse – Alzheimer’s on the horizon, now is the time to accelerate global research before the devastating disease claims more victims and cripples the health care system, de la Torre says.

In 2012, Alzheimer’s Disease – the most devastating and widespread manifestation of brain deterioration in old age – is projected to cost the United States an estimated $200 billion, according to data from the Alzheimer’s Association. And by 2050, that number will balloon to $1.1 trillion.

“The time has come to start a plan that will vigorously reduce Alzheimer’s Disease world-wide or we will all surely pay the colossal medical and economic price for the failure to act,” says de la Torre.

He says although this field of research is in its infancy, researchers are making significant progress in curtailing the spread of Alzheimer’s. Recent findings have important implications for primary care physicians, who are the first in the line of defense. By referring patients to specialists, they can manage or treat the symptoms of cognitive dysfunction long before they start experiencing memory loss.

“Reducing Alzheimer’s Disease prevalence by focusing right now on vascular risk factors, even with our limited technology, is not a simple or easy task,” de la Torre says. “But the task must not be delayed because time is running out for millions of people whose destiny with dementia may start sooner rather than later.”

Supernova remnant 0509-67.5 was searched for a left-behind partner star without success. (NASA)

Wheeler lays out his case for supernova parentage in the current issue of The Astrophysical Journal. He explains why he thinks the parents of Type Ia could be a binary star made up of white dwarf star (the burnt-out remnant of a Sun-like star) and a particular type of small star called an “M dwarf.”

In the paper, he explains that current theories for Type Ia parents don’t correctly match up with telescope data on actual supernovae.

Read more in Rebecca Johnson’s article about Wheeler’s new model on the McDonald Observatory website.