When it comes to researching proteins, the fundamental molecules of biology, anyway. College of Arts and Science researchers have created the largest human-designed protein contain 242 amino acids, more than doubling the previous record. The super-sized protein, FLR, is a computer model of the protein that creates the amino acid histidine. Associate Professor of Chemistry Jens Meiler and his team used algorithms and 400 processors of the supercomputer at Vanderbilt’s Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education to engineer large proteins with shapes unseen in nature. “This gives us the tools we need to create new, more effective antibodies and other beneficial proteins,” Meiler says.

Senior Justin Menestrina had more than a grade to worry about when he submitted his senior honors project in physics—he was also submitting his research as a paper to the very prestigious journal, Physical Review D.

“It is virtually unheard of for an undergraduate to be a co-author, let alone the lead author of a paper that will appear in Physical Review D,” says David Weintraub, professor of astronomy. Yet Menestrina’s “Dark Radiation from Particle Decays during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis,” co-authored by Professor of Physics Robert Scherrer, was published by the journal recently.

Menestrina studied the effect of particles decaying in the early universe on the production of elements during the first few minutes of the Big Bang. The physics major says that the ability of new technologies to make precise measurements of the radiation left over from the Big Bang has allowed established ideas about the universe to be experimentally tested. His paper attempted to reconcile some surprising discrepancies between what has long been believed about the universe and what the experiments have actually found.

Tepper

Tepper is an associate professor of sociology and associate director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy at Vanderbilt. In his book, Not Here, Not Now, Not That! Protests over Art and Culture in America, he makes the case that art is most relevant when people care enough to fight over it. Tepper did not come by his conclusion idly. He examined more than 800 conflicts across 71 U.S. cities, studying fights over visual art, film, music, theater, history exhibits and books.

In an interview on PBS NewsHour’s “Art Beat,” he noted a correlation between social change and protest. “The argument in the book is that when people feel unsettled by the rate of social change, when the things around them are changing fast—economics, demographics, technology—art becomes something that they fight over as a way to reassert their values, reassert a sense of who their community is and where they fit into their community,” he said. “Art becomes this amazing arena in which people negotiate their differences of opinions around the contours of their expressive lives together.”

A good scrap over art can be good for the community. “I think in the future, going forward, as our cultural world gets noisier, as there are more things to offend more people, that there will be more opportunities for people to work together to figure out which forms of expressions are good representations of our community and which ones we don’t feel we’re ready for or represent us well,” Tepper told PBS.

Touch gloves and come out of your corners fighting.

In the Middle Ages, people who felt disconnected from their own bodies would probably have been subject to exorcism. Today, modern medicine prescribes pills to banish such sensations from patients’ brains. Research led by Sohee Park, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Psychology, sheds new light on this common symptom of schizo-phrenia and suggests that patients may benefit from an alternative type of treatment—dance.

Park, along with doctoral candidate Katharine Thakkar, MA’08, and research analysts Heathman Nichols, BA’10, and Lindsey Gilling McIntosh, BA’11, measured schizophrenics’ deficient sense of body ownership by employing a procedure known as the rubber hand illusion. The researchers placed a rubber hand in front of each subject while hiding one of the subject’s own hands from view. As researchers stroked each hand simultaneously, subjects were asked to estimate the position of their hidden hand using a ruler atop the device hiding it.

Rubber hand illusion

The findings may mean that movement therapy, which trains people to be focused and centered on their own bodies via some forms of yoga and dance, might help some of the more than 2.2 million people diagnosed with the mental disorder. “Exercise is inexpensive and obviously has a broad range of beneficial effects, so if it can also reduce the severity of schizophrenia, it is all to the good,” Park says.

She says that, decades ago, schizophrenics’ weakened body awareness was considered “[one of] the core features of schizophrenia…but in recent years much of the emphasis has been on cognitive functions.” This research, published in Public Library of Science ONE, brings the body back into the mind of the psychological community. It also may offer schizophrenia patients the age-old solution for mind-body disconnection put forth by Lady Gaga in 2008: “just dance.”

Antonis Rokas

Behind slammed doors, most teenagers fervently wish at least once that they could belong to another family. One that was hipper, permissive, richer—somehow more in line with their needs. Turns out a group of fungi—23 genes to be exact—successfully pulled off this swap, switching families millions of years ago. The discovery of this leap by a College of Arts and Science researcher is helping recast Darwin’s lasting metaphor of the tree of life.

In Origin of Species, Charles Darwin diagrammed his theory of the evolutionary process from parent to child, down through generation after generation (now known as vertical gene transfer), resulting in Darwin’s famous tree of life.

But a recent discovery by Antonis Rokas, assistant professor of biological sciences, reveals that Darwin’s sketch may not show the full picture of evolution. Rokas’ current research focuses on how fungi change over generations, leading to better understanding of the evolutionary relationships among living organisms and how diversity has evolved. The Rokas Lab found that millions of years ago, a cluster of 23 genes jumped intact from a strain of mold commonly found on starchy foods to an unrelated strain that lives in dung and specializes in breaking down plant fibers.

He and research associate Jason Slot reported their discovery in the journal Current Biology earlier this year. Their finding came as a major surprise to scientists because there are only a handful of cases in recent evolutionary history where this type of gene transfer between organisms, known as horizontal gene transfer, has been found in complex cells like those in plants, animals and fungi. Rokas’ findings have even made “Sminton,” a science-based Web comic strip that riffs off recent newsworthy scientific publications.

“The fungi are telling us something important about evolution…something we didn’t know,” Rokas says.

The interspecies transfer that Rokas discovered suggests how fungi developed their remarkable metabolic diversity, including the ability to produce highly toxic compounds. It also supports the notion that similar jumping genes played a significant role in fungal evolution. The fungal kingdom currently presents the best place for genomic research because complete genome sequences are already available from more than 100 species.

The research was supported by funds provided by the Searle Scholars Program and the National Science Foundation.

Read more about their research.

As a speaker of English, French, Danish and German (and who reads Swedish, Norwegian, Spanish and Italian), Virginia Scott might be forgiven for thinking it’s easy to become multilingual. On the contrary:  she is dedicated to increasing awareness of how people can learn other languages.

Scott, professor of French and academic director of the new Center for Second Language Studies, delves into the processes involved in learning a second language.

Her research has led her to believe that a learner’s first language may play a significant role in learning a second language. That’s “a bit of a heretical take,” Scott says. Current teaching practice holds that exclusive use of the second language in the classroom is the only way to learn—although any teacher will tell you this approach is difficult in reality. Scott acknowledges that input and interaction in the new language are essential—but she thinks using one’s native language to analyze and understand grammar structures may lead to greater proficiency.

In Scott’s research, students received language problems and were asked to talk aloud in their first language about how they were solving them. Others were asked to do the same, but limited to using their second languages. Scott found that the students required to use the second language had more difficulty solving the problems.

Scott theorized that it is possible to capitalize on what people know and do with their native languages. “Language is a way of interpreting the world,” she says. Her study of dynamic systems theory led her to explore the ways languages interact in the mind of one speaker-hearer. In her book, Double Talk: Deconstructing Monolingualism in Classroom Second Language Learning, she describes how this research compels rethinking current approaches to teaching and learning second languages.

No Tea For GOP

The Signs are There

How Not to Raise a Bully

Children who believe their fathers work too much and don’t spend enough time with them are more likely to develop bullying behavior, according to research by André Christie-Mizell, associate professor of sociology.

Christie-Miszell

Your New TV is So Yesterday

Bryan Ringstrand with liquid crystals

“Our liquid crystals have basic properties that make them suitable for practical applications, but they must be tested for durability, lifetime and similar characteristics before they can be used in commercial products,” Kaszynski says. (Even so, commercial companies have already expressed interest.)

If they pass testing, the new class of liquid crystals could be added to the molecular mixtures used in liquid crystal displays. Their findings—the result of more than five years of work—adds to the scientific body of knowledge about liquid crystals.

The Powerful Prayers of Martin Luther King Jr.

Lewis Baldwin, professor of religious studies at the College of Arts and Science, has been fascinated by Martin Luther King Jr. since his high school days in Camden, Ala. In his fourth book about King, Never to Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther King Jr., Baldwin discusses how prayer and church life shaped King’s identity, thought, vision and sense of mission.

Baldwin explores the ways in which King redefined prayer during the civil rights movement and made it an instrument for social change by combining religion and nonviolent activism with prayer vigils, prayer marches, prayer campaigns and prayer rallies. Through these efforts, King widened his appeal to include not only the traditional black churches, but Catholics, Jews and the nonreligious as well.

You probably know someone who just can’t resist a good deal. Chances are they’re on a first-name basis with their UPS delivery person, have a closet full of unworn clothes, and every gadget under the sun stuffed in their kitchen drawers.

Two College of Arts and Science researchers, David Zald, associate professor of psychology, and Joshua Buckholtz, a Ph.D. candidate, have learned that people who act impulsively—perhaps buying everything they see advertised on television—may have higher-than-normal levels of a chemical called dopamine in their brain.

All healthy brains manufacture dopamine, which has important roles in behavior, cognition, voluntary movement, sleep, mood, attention, working memory, learning and more. Dopamine also affects impulsivity and even the urge to acquire things. In healthy brains, sensors keep dopamine at proper levels. But some people have a specific deficit in the way the brain regulates dopamine. In those brains, the levels increase and rash behavior increases as well.

“You can think of it as very similar to a thermostat,” Buckholtz says. “The brain has a number of different thermostats, which sense the levels of certain brain chemicals and adjust the output of those chemicals accordingly. We show that one particular thermostat-like mechanism—midbrain autoreceptor regulation of striatal dopamine release—is out of whack in people with high levels of trait impulsiveness.”

During their collaboration, Zald and Buckholtz scanned the brains of 32 healthy volunteers with varying levels of impulsivity. Those characterized as more impulsive were given a drug that releases dopamine and their brains were rescanned.

“The people who scored highest on our trait measure of impulsivity had upwards of four times the amount of dopamine released,” Buckholtz says.

Because dopamine is produced in the area of the brain associated with reward, excessive levels can lead to much more destructive behavior than overspending—it can cause a strong craving for stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine. Additionally, people who tend to seek rewards without considering the consequences may not be able to stop their actions.

A certain amount of impulsive behavior is a good thing, and can lead to creativity. However, Buckholtz and Zald hope that their findings will lead to a better understanding of—and better treatment for—certain psychiatric disorders that involve impulsive behavior. One outcome could be more targeted drug therapies that help the brain’s “thermostats” regulate dopamine levels.

Every human body is, even at conservative estimates, made up of trillions upon trillions of cells. Inside those cells is DNA, which serves as the body’s basic operating system—it keeps our hearts pumping, our lungs breathing, cells reproducing and even our hair growing. But DNA can also be damaged—by environmental toxins, radiation and medical treatments like chemotherapy. When that happens, DNA’s own enzymes immediately start the repair process on the cells.

Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Brandt Eichman, along with colleagues from Pennsylvania State University and the University of Pittsburgh, has discovered a new way that those cell enzymes detect and repair damage to DNA. Finding this new DNA repair mechanism could lead to improved treatments for a variety of diseases, including cancer.

“Understanding protein-DNA interactions at the atomic level is important because it provides a clear starting point for designing drugs that enhance or disrupt the interactions in a very specific way,” Eichman says.

This discovery could lead to chemotherapy drugs that attack cancerous cells without harming healthy ones. Another benefit might be fewer of the harmful side effects associated with chemotherapy treatments such as nausea, hair loss and debilitating fatigue.

Arts and Science graduate student Emily H. Rubinson assisted in the project. Detailed findings of Eichman’s research were published in the online journal, Nature. The research was funded by grants from the American Cancer Society, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Rescuing History

Crumbling with age, attacked by insects and at risk from climate and other damage, historic records of Africans in the Americas were at risk of being lost entirely. Professor of History Jane Landers and a team of international scholars set out to digitally preserve the oldest black and Indian records in the hemisphere. Since the Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies project began, materials from Cuba, Brazil and Colombia have been preserved for researchers in digital form. Landers continues to direct the project, with the digital files stored at Vanderbilt’s Jean and Alexander Heard Library.

What if Darwinism and Religion Got Along?

Did life begin in the Garden of Eden, as the Bible says, or in a prehistoric primordial swamp? Can you believe in creation and Darwin? In his new book, Creation and Evolution, Lenn Goodman, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, says the two viewpoints are not mutually exclusive. Fundamentalism—on both ends of the spectrum—can present a misleading point of view, he believes. “Thinking that way can obscure the real biblical message and also distort the deepest insights and richest findings of Darwinian science,” Goodman says.

Trash Talk

Tell the truth—do you recycle plastic water bottles or toss them in the trash? Does your state have a law mandating recycling? Such laws greatly increase recycling, according to a national study by W. Kip Viscusi, University Distinguished Professor of Law, Economics and Management.

“What was really surprising is that recycling laws and bottle deposits have a dramatic impact when they are effective. A person who formerly recycled zero to two bottles out of 10 will jump to recycling 8 to 10 bottles out of 10 when these policies take effect,” Viscusi says.

Watch the next time you are in Target and a child throws a tantrum nearby. The way the parents respond could tell you if they are conservative or liberal. Research by Professor of Political Science Marc Hetherington indicates some people signal their political preferences through their actions, whether or not they mean to—from spanking a child to questioning authority and established ways of doing things.

In the book Authoritarianism & Polarization in American Politics, Marc Hetherington and co-author Jonathan Weiler explore the connection between voting patterns and attitudes toward authority. They discovered that those who possess higher levels of authoritarianism tend to vote conservatively.

“Authoritarians tend to see the world in concrete, black-and-white terms and have a stronger than average need for a sense of order,” Hetherington says. “Those who score lower regarding this cluster of attitudes are more comfortable with viewing the world in ambiguous shades of gray. They are often more tolerant of differing opinions.”

On the other end of the spectrum are liberals who have less regard for authority. In terms of child raising, they de-emphasize discipline and obedience and encourage creativity and questions.

“If partisans can’t even agree on a fundamental issue like the best way to raise kids, you can imagine how tough it might be to reach compromises on some of the most important political issues on the agenda,” he says.

Those divisive issues include gay rights, immigration and support for the war in Iraq.

While most people can be described as either basically liberal or basically conservative, few are wholly in one group or another. Even a staunch conservative like President George W. Bush showed his liberal leaning occasionally—his position on immigration reform reflected the views of someone with a lower amount of authoritarianism.

Polarization is at an all-time high in American politics—and with these fundamental differences between the two sides, coming together might be harder than ever.

If you haven’t looked at a periodic table of the elements since high school chemistry class, you might be surprised to learn that it has changed quite a bit. The discovery of new superheavy elements in the last few years means there are additions to the chart.

One of those new elements, no. 117, was discovered by an international team of scientists, including two from the College of Arts and Science—Joseph H. Hamilton, Landon C. Garland Distinguished Professor of Physics, and Akunuri V. Ramayya, professor of physics. Other groups involved in the discovery are the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia; Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and the Research Institute for Advanced Reactors, Dimitrovgrad, Russia.

Element 117, which now goes by ununseptium (Latin for 117), has the distinction of being the world’s heaviest element and one of the most newsworthy.

“There have been more than 250 articles in newspapers around the world because people just have an interest in the chemical periodic table and the elements,” Hamilton says. “These discoveries broaden our understanding of the basic building blocks of the world around us.”

New superheavy elements may have practical applications in the near future.

“These elements may prove very useful as new compact energy sources because after they decay, they undergo fission,” Hamilton says. “When they undergo fission, they give off an enormous amount of energy and lots of neutrons.”

Another element that undergoes spontaneous fission—Californium 252—is currently used as an energy source in oil well exploration, space probes and the space shuttle. The superheavy elements would give off even more energy.

“Another reason to study these elements is that they may have a different chemistry than is expected,” Hamilton says. “This opens up a new area of study that’s unexplored at the present time and I think that it will capture people’s imaginations to see that there are new chemical behaviors that, in a sense, have been predicted but not seen.”

The name of element 117 is going to change, says Hamilton, who played a key role in the element’s discovery. “I was crucial in getting the group together and in getting the ²⁴⁹Bk target essential for the discovery,” he says modestly. “As a result of that, I’m going to get to name the element. I can’t tell you the name, but it will bring distinction to the region.”

Biblical Epic Eight Years In The Making

Daniel M. Patte isn’t directing a remake of The Ten Commandments, but his new book, The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, is an equally huge undertaking. Patte, professor of religious studies, has spent eight years soliciting and compiling 3,500 entries documenting the beliefs and practices of Christians throughout history. More than 800 scholars from around the world contributed to the book, including 25 from eight departments in the College of Arts and Science. The book is scheduled for publication in August.

The Scarier, The Better

When Claire Sisco King was a little girl, she would sneak out of bed to watch scary movies. Today the assistant professor of communication studies examines the cultural implications of “bad” movies like slasher or disaster films.

“Millions of people love to watch these movies,” King says. “Even films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Night of the Living Dead often get noticed as powerful political allegories.”

Recently, she has studied films such as Poseidon and I Am Legend in relation to rhetoric about the perceived traumas of 9/11. “These films, whether intentionally or not, seem to speak to memories and fantasies and anxieties about a tragedy like September 11,” King notes. Her research will be the focus of an upcoming book tentatively titled Washed in Blood: Sacrifice, Trauma and the Cinema.

If You Must Multitask, Practice, Practice, Practice

René Marois, associate professor of psychology, and Paul E. Dux, former research fellow, discovered that practice makes perfect when it comes to doing two things at once. “We are lousy multitaskers because our brains process each task slowly, creating a bottleneck at the central stage of decision making,” Marois says. When study participants did the same task over time, however, practice enabled their brains to process each task more quickly, the researchers found.

In grade school students are often told that acts could “go on their permanent record”—a mythical file that impacts everything from college admissions to job searches. Today, College of Arts and Science researchers seek to discover if there’s a true kind of permanent record that resides in a person’s white blood cells.

Wikswo

John McLean, assistant professor of chemistry, and John Wikswo, Gordon A. Cain University Professor and director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education, are researching the possibility that white blood cells retain chemical memories of drug and alcohol use. In other words, even if a person has not used cocaine in years, his body may still retain a record of it. Their research is based on the finding that each instance of drug use causes a reaction in the immune system. That reaction creates special bio-molecules that could serve as identifying markers for each exposure.

“In essence, we are hitting these cells with a hammer to hear how they ring and to determine if those that have been exposed to a drug ring differently,” Wikswo says.

The research could have several applications.

• Cancer patients may benefit from improved analysis of biopsy material that could help determine optimal chemotherapy regimes.
• More effective addiction treatment strategies could be developed on a case-by-case basis, thanks to precise details about an individual’s drug use and new information on the biological pathways that control addictive behavior.
• Better drug testing and detection.
• Development of sensors that identify biological warfare agents.

The Arts and Science pair is collaborating on this project with researchers from Cornell, Duke and the National Institute of Drug Abuse. They also have another key partner in the process—a robot scientist. This new class of instrument will run thousands of virtual experiments—and hundreds of actual ones—every day, without human interaction.

A $2.7 million Recovery Act grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse and a $1.5 grant from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency fund the research.

Talisse

You’re wrong. You’re stupid. And your mother dresses you funny.

In his new book, Democracy and Moral Conflict, Robert Talisse, associate professor of philosophy and political science, argues that our nation’s current polarized state is actually a threat to democracy. The book examines the political debate in America today and the lack of civility that sides show to one another.

“If there’s a danger to democracy, it’s the attitude that there’s no reasonable opposition to the view that someone happens to favor,” Talisse says. “If that’s true, democracy has got much larger problems than having made the wrong decisions about wars and energy policy and all that.”

Hot topics such as abortion, gay marriage, gun control and health care reform elicit extreme opinions on either side. One trend that Talisse finds disturbing is the media’s increasingly partisan voice when discussing these issues.

On the conservative side of the spectrum, he cites slogans such as “fair and balanced” used by right-leaning media to describe its reporting—despite reporting that may not be either. On the liberal side, he mentions filmmaker Michael Moore and Moore’s penchant for inflammatory theories that skewer the right.

It’s not just the media. Increasingly, political debates don’t serve as an exchange of reasons and arguments, but as an opportunity for trading insults. Talisse says in his book that they are sophistical contests in which each participant tries to prove the most effective at making his opponent look silly.

That should be of deep concern to all, he says. “The philosophical point is worth punctuating from the very start: If we lose our capacity to argue with each other, especially across deep moral divisions, we will lose our democracy,” he says.

The issues that divide our country are complicated, without black and white definition. That’s one reason Talisse believes civil, spirited debate—even when voices are raised—is essential to our coming together.

“A civil argument is not always calm,” he says. “But when an argument is civil, it’s because it’s aimed at assessing and addressing reasons and arguments and evidence, rather than assassinating people’s characters or trying to shout them down or cast them as unintelligent or not properly rational.”

Dickerson and Hasan

In a world where some items—SUVs, houses, the size of the national debt—seem to be growing at an alarming pace, Arts and Science physicists have their eyes trained on particles so tiny they make atoms look elephantine.

Nanotechnology is the study of these tiny particles—specifically those that meas-ure 100 nanometers. (Before you ask, a nanometer is one billionth of a meter.) Uses for nanotechnology range from innovations in medicine to energy production and electronics.

Assistant Professor of Physics James “Jay” Dickerson heads a team of researchers developing a durable nanoparticle film. Nanoparticle films could be used in semiconductor fabrication, drug delivery systems, and even flexible television and computer displays. The problem is that the film is quite delicate and has been known to disintegrate at the slightest touch.

To combat the delicate nature of the film, scientists use polymers to strengthen them, but this complicates the process and makes the film more expensive.

Now Dickerson and his colleagues have created freestanding nanoparticle film without the additional polymers. The key is the inclusion of a sacrificial layer that is used to initially bind the particles, but is then dissolved. Their findings were published recently in a paper in the journal Chemical Communications.

“Our films are so resilient that we can pick them up with a pair of tweezers and move them around on a surface without tearing,” Dickerson says. “This makes it particularly easy to put them into microelectronic devices, such as computer chips.”

One application for the nanoparticle film might be flexible television screens. These ultrathin, ultraflexible screens could be folded and bent repeatedly without crack-ing or breaking. You could literally carry a television around in your pocket, take it out to watch your favorite show and then fold it up and put it away. Flexible computer screens are in the works as well. Beyond the cool factor is that electronics made with this technology will use less energy.

The paper was coauthored by graduate student Saad A. Hasan and Dustin W. Kavich, PhD’08.

It starts with a tickle in your nose. Maybe a little discomfort at the back of the throat. You try to imagine it’s not there. You hold it in as long as you can and then…ACHOO!

Yep, you have a cold.

But what kind of cold? The symptoms for colds—or respiratory infections—caused by bacteria are nearly identical to those caused by viruses. That leads to the over-prescription of antibiotics, which don’t work for viral infections. In turn, that leads to more antibiotic-resistant strains. Problem is, it’s hard for doctors to tell which respira-tory infection is which.

Until now.

Two Vanderbilt scientists, David Wright, associate professor of chemistry, and Rick Haselton, professor of biomedical engineering, teamed up to develop a respiratory virus detector that can sniff out an infection in its earliest stages. Not only that, the test only takes a few minutes to return and can be performed right in your doctor’s office.

The two wrote about their findings in The Analyst, a journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. They report that their method, which uses DNA hairpins attached to gold filaments, can detect the virus that is one of the leading causes of respiratory infections in infants and young children at much lower levels than current tests. Also, tests being used today require that patient samples be sent to outside laboratories. During busy seasons, results can take a day or more to return. Because respiratory viruses multiply so rapidly, the diagnosis may be too late for antiviral drugs to work.

“Our system could easily be packaged in a disposable device about the size of a ballpoint pen,” Wright says. To perform the test, you simply pull off a cap that exposes a length of gold wire, dip the wire into the sample, pull the wire through the device and put the exposed wire into a fluorescence scanner. If it lights up, the virus is present.

While the research is promising, it won’t be at your doctor’s office any time soon. The researchers are still investigating sample preparation kits and ways to reduce false positives.

Wang

Next time you’re bothered by mosquitoes, try giving them the cold shoulder—literally. Senior Research Associate Guirong Wang will test his theory that mosquitoes are attracted by humans’ warmblooded heat with the help of a $100,000 Grand Challenges Exploration grant awarded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Wang is working to find molecules that interfere with the mosquito’s heat-detection capability. If successful, the research may be in line for further funding from the Gates Foundation. Wang is part of Professor of Biological Sciences Laurence Zwiebel’s team investigating the mosquito’s sense of smell with support from a major grant from the foundation. The project’s ultimate goal is eradicating malaria.

Marshall Eakin, professor of history, will use his recently won Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship to study the formation of Brazilian national identity in the 20th century. “I am looking at Brazilian national identity to see how it is that the peoples of Brazil come to identify with a common set of symbols that are now widely perceived to be essential to Brazilian identity—soccer for example,” he says. Eakin will be in Brazil until August 2010 (with visits back to Nashville) as he researches and writes Becoming Brazilians: The Making of a Nation and a People, 1930–1992.

Edward H. Friedman, Chancellor’s Professor of Spanish and director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, has also been awarded a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship, his in the area of American literature and cultural studies. He’ll research Spanish literature while teaching classes at the University of Madrid on U.S. culture. Friedman says he is especially looking forward to the challenge of reversing his usual practice of teaching Spanish literature to speakers of English.

Only starving artists and songwriters can produce great music, right? Not so, say Jennifer Lena, assistant professor of sociology, and Richard “Pete” Peterson, professor of sociology, emeritus. The American Sociological Review published their findings regarding the development of 20th century music genres in the United States. Their study of more than 60 types of music found that two-thirds originated in an avant-garde genre (a few individuals seeking to make music that is different) and the rest originated as part of a scene (a supportive community) or industry-based genre (created by corporations). Lena and Peterson say the discovery that some new music originated in industry genres was a surprise because conventional wisdom is that record companies cannot produce innovative music.

Telling stories in comic book or graphic novels isn’t new—ancient Romans had their own version in the Tabulae Iliacae—but what scholar David Petrain learns from them is. Petrain, assistant professor of classics, is studying the group of 22 carved stone plaques which date to the early Roman empire and tell the story of the Trojan War in picture and texts. Petrain will use a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities grant to show that the Tabulae actually represent a method by which Rome rewrote and presented history.

Tiny carbon tubes are helping researchers find a way to free Type 1 diabetics from insulin shots. Using nanotechnology, Vanderbilt researchers have been able to continuously monitor the amount of insulin produced by transplanted cells. Type 1, or juvenile, diabetes can be treated by transplanting insulin-producing cells into a patient’s pancreas to replace nonfunctional cells. The team, led by Associate Professor of Chemistry David Cliffel, hopes to use the new microphysiometer and its nanotube-constructed electrode to measure the condition of cells before and after transplant, including the long-term effect of immunosuppressant drugs.  

Holley Bockelmann

Research by Assistant Professor of Astronomy Kelly Holley-Bockelmann indicates that there may be hundreds of nearly impossible-to-spot black holes careening around the galaxy. Because these rogue black holes can’t be directly observed, Holley-Bockelmann’s research simulates their behavior. She uses the supercomputer at Vanderbilt’s Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education (ACCRE) to run simulations to test her theories. 

Her research proposes that the merger of two black holes that are rotating at different speeds (or are different sizes) produces a big kick, pushing the newly merged black hole away in an arbitrary direction at velocities as high as 4,000 kilometers per second. 

“This is much higher than anyone predicted,” the astronomer says. If the roughly 200 globular clusters in the Milky Way have indeed spawned black holes, this means that hundreds of them are probably wandering invisibly around the Milky Way, waiting to engulf the nebulae, stars and planets unfortunate enough to cross their paths.

Fortunately, the existence of a few rogue black holes in the neighborhood does not present a major danger. “These rogue black holes are extremely unlikely to do any damage to us in the lifetime of the universe,” Holley-Bockelmann stresses. “Their danger zone is really tiny, only a few hundred kilometers.”

Holley-Bockelmann said to think of her findings this way: “What I do on a day-to-day basis is try to figure out what the link is between a galaxy and the black hole that lives within it. Does it change the shape of the galaxy in any way? Does it affect the way the galaxy moves and evolves and ultimately dies? My job is to figure out how the black hole and the galaxy communicate with one another.”

Holley-Bockelmann presented the research, which was conducted in collaboration with scientists at Penn State University and the University of Michigan, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

They say that talk is good for the soul. Turns out that it may be the best long-term solution for many cases of depression, as well. Ongoing research by Steve Hollon, professor of psychology, and Richard Shelton, MD, James G. Blakemore Research Professor of Psychiatry at Vanderbilt Medical Center, shows that cognitive behavioral therapy could actually be a solution for depression. 

Currently, the gold standard for treating moderate to severe depression is a combination of medication and psychotherapy. Antidepressant medication generally provides symptom relief, but cognitive therapy seems to have longer lasting results. Cognitive therapy is a form of talk therapy that teaches patients to recognize what triggers their depressions and to develop more effective, positive reactions to those situations.  

While he respects the value of medication, Hollon prefers psychotherapy for depression. “I believe cognitive psychotherapy solves the underlying causes of depression,” he says, and therefore, provides better lasting results. Since more than 32 million Americans are expected to develop depression sometime in their lives, finding effective treatments is essential. The researchers’ groundbreaking work is supported by grants from the National Institute of Health and the National Institute for Mental Health.

Initial research conducted at Vanderbilt and the University of Pennsylvania compared cognitive therapy to antidepressants. Over the 16-week study, patients took slightly longer to respond to the cognitive therapy, but it had an enduring effect on them. Recent follow-up studies show that patients treated with cognitive therapy tended to have fewer instances of relapse than those treated with medication.

From left, Janetopoulos, Wikswo, Seale and Wright.

Who developed the world’s smallest periscope and why? It wasn’t Q for James Bond—a team of Vanderbilt scientists developed tiny mirrored, pyramid-shaped wells the width of a human hair to get high-resolution, 3-D views of cells and other microorganisms. “Not only can we see the tops of cells, we can view their sides as well—something biologists almost never see,” says Chris Janetopoulos, assistant professor of biological sciences. The interdisciplinary team included researchers from the School of Engineering and the Vanderbilt Institute for Integrative Biosystems Research and Education (VIIBRE); biology major Charles Wright, BA’08; Assistant Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering Kevin Seale; and VIIBRE Director John P. Wikswo, Gordon A. Cain University Professor. The mirrored wells are less expensive than current 3-D microscopy methods and the periscope has applications in genetic engineering and metabolic studies.

To find the origins of many Muslim traditions, look to Islamic death and funeral rituals. That’s what Associate Professor of History Leor Halevi says in his recent book, Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society. Halevi researched the relationship between religious laws and social practices and found that many Muslim practices were born in the world of death, including views on modesty, privacy and the ways that men and women interact. “In a nutshell, I take traditions about Muhammad and show their historical relevance to the making of Islam after Muhammad’s death,” Halevi says. Muhammad’s Grave has received several book awards, including the 2008 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society and an American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion.

Republican incumbents whose home districts saw heavy casualties in the Iraq War faced a harder re-election in the 2006 U.S. House elections than Democrats. According to a study by Bruce Oppenheimer, professor of political science, and Christian Grose, assistant professor of political science, for every two Iraq war deaths from Republican-controlled districts, there was a 1 percent increase in the Democratic partisan swing. The study was published in Legislative Studies Quarterly.

How long did it take for the Americas to be populated with people? The theory has been that ancient settlers would have moved quickly down the west coast from Siberia, drawing resources from the ocean. Findings from a team headed by Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Tom Dillehay and reported in Science back that theory, but point intriguingly to the possibility that migration might have been slower than presumed. In examining evidence from Chile’s Monte Verde archeological site located over 50 miles from the coast, the team found coastal artifacts and inland materials. This suggests that the residents of Monte Verde moved between areas. “It takes time to adapt to these inland resources and then come back out to the coast,” Dillehay says. If other early groups followed a similar pattern, then the peopling of the Americas may have been “a much slower and more deliberate process.” 

Harth

The biggest small thing in transportation is Assistant Professor of Chemistry Eva Harth’s creation of a new drug delivery system using nanoparticles.

Teeny, tiny nanoparticles—molecules so small that about 90,000 of them total the width of a human hair—have unusual properties, structure and applications that have great promise for innovation in science and medicine. Harth’s discovery is in the area of one of their most promising applications, their potential to distribute drugs in the body and to enhance drug effectiveness.

Harth developed a specially designed particle called a nanosponge, which can carry large numbers of drug molecules. Then, collaborating with Heidi Hamm, Earl W. Sutherland Jr. Professor of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine, Harth synthesized a molecule with the ability to slip through cell membranes and reach the cell’s nucleus. Harth’s lab established how to attach this transporter to the nanosponge; the transporter then pulled the nanosponge (and its piggyback drug molecules) into cell compartments. Since inner cell compartments are difficult for most drugs to reach, the findings have possibilities for disease treatments.

Harth is already applying her drug delivery system to fighting cancer. Dennis E. Hallahan, Ingram Professor of Cancer Research and professor of cancer biology and biomedical engineering in the School of Medicine, had identified a molecule that targets a surface feature on lung carcinomas. Harth improved the molecule and attached it to her nanoparticle. The two scientists determined that the combination could deliver drugs to the surface of lung tumors. They are now working to adapt the delivery system to carry cisplatinum, a chemotherapy agent used to treat several kinds of cancer but that is highly toxic and has unpleasant side effects. By delivering the anti-cancer agent directly to the cancerous tissues, Harth’s system decreases the adverse effects and increases its potency.

“The people in my lab have tried a number of different drug delivery systems, and Eva’s works the best of those we’ve looked at,” Hallahan says.

Harth’s research is supported by a National Science Foundation grant awarded to her as part of a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, NSF’s most prestigious honor for junior faculty.

Tong and Pearson

New research published in the online journal Current Biology has found that mental imagery—what we see with the “mind’s eye”—directly affects our visual perception.

“We found that imagery leads to a short-term memory trace that can bias future perception,” says Joel Pearson, research associate in the Vanderbilt Department of Psychology and lead author of the study. “This is the first research to definitively show that imagining something changes vision both while you are imagining it and later on.”

To test how imagery affects perception, the researchers had subjects imagine simple patterns of vertical or horizontal stripes. They then presented a green horizontal pattern to one eye and a red vertical pattern to the other to induce what is called binocular rivalry. During binocular rivalry an individual will often alternately perceive each stimulus, with the images appearing to switch back and forth before their eyes. The subjects generally reported they had seen the image they had been imagining, proving the researchers’ hypothesis that imagery would influence the binocular rivalry battle. 

Frank Tong, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study, says “Our results show that even a single instance of imagery can tilt how you see the world one way or another, dramatically, if the conditions are right.”

The new findings offer an objective tool to assess the often-slippery concept of imagination. “We found that the imagery effect, while found in all of our subjects, could differ a lot in strength across subjects. So this might give us a metric to measure the strength of mental imagery in individuals and how that imagery may influence perception,” Tong says.

The findings by Pearson, Tong and co-author Colin Clifford of the University of Sydney may also help settle a longstanding debate in the research community over whether mental imagery is visual—that one imagines something just as one sees it—or more abstract.

“With advances in human brain imaging, we now know that when you imagine something, parts of the visual brain do light up and you see activity there,” Pearson says. “Our work shows that not only are imagery and vision related, but imagery directly influences what we see.”

Internal political struggles are not new to China. Tracy Miller, associate professor of history of art, researched the architecture and art of the Jin Shrines complex (Jinci) of the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127 C.E.) and found that the very structure and religious art of the complex reflected the struggles of competing social and political groups worshiping different deities. Her book, The Divine Nature of Power, reveals how the wall paintings, sculpture, and temple buildings of the sacred site were manipulated over time, presenting differing ideas about divinity, identity and status depending on who was in power.

He’s not a medical doctor and he doesn’t play one on TV, but Glenn Webb, professor of mathematics, has a prescription for reducing the transmission of drug-resistant infections among hospital patients. While hospitals combat the life-threatening problem with hygiene—which is vital—Webb’s mathematical analysis indicates that the solution could be briefer courses of antibiotics. Webb worked with researchers from Harvard University, France’s Université du Havre and the University of Miami, Coral Gables, on a mathematical model that analyzed the problem on two levels: bacterial and human interaction. The results suggest that changing the way antibiotics are prescribed and administered can limit the spread of resistant bacteria.

When kids blow bubbles, it’s usually for fun. But neuroscientist Kenneth Catania discovered that the star-nosed moles he studies blow bubbles as they swim to smell underwater objects. “This came as a total surprise because the common wisdom is that mammals can’t smell underwater,” says the associate professor of biological sciences. 

Catania, who received a $500,000 “genius grant” from the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 2006, studies odd-looking mammals—including the star nosed mole—for clues about the workings of the human brain. 

It’s not just night owls who have trouble being alert in early morning hours. According to new research by Professor Terry L. Page, then-student Susan Decker BS’07, and student Shannon McConnaughey, cockroaches trained in the evening retain knowledge for several days, but are incapable of forming new memories during morning hours. “This is the first example of an insect whose ability to learn is controlled by its biological clock,” says Page, professor of biological sciences.

Studies such as this one seek to gain information on just how the circadian cycle regulates various aspects of learning and memory, and how that may relate to humans.

Photo by Daniel Dubois.

A group of Vanderbilt chemists didn’t set out to make traditional light bulbs obsolete and cut carbon emissions, but that may be what they have done. 

Then-chemistry graduate student Michael Bowers, PhD’07, was working with Associate Professor of Chemistry Sandra Rosenthal when he discovered a new way to make solid-state lights (light-emitting
diodes—LEDs) that produce white light. Use of solid-state lights could halve lighting electricity consumption, cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 258 million metric tons per year. The discovery was published by The Journal of the American Chemical Society and received a Breakthrough Award from Popular Mechanics magazine.

While more expensive than ordinary lights, LEDs can produce about twice as much light per watt as incandescent bulbs. LEDs last up to 50,000 hours or 50 times as long as 60-watt bulbs, and they are very tough and hard to break. Although color LEDs have been used for decades in consumer electronics, the LEDs available today produce a bluish-white light, not quite white enough for general use. Rosenthal’s group discovered that microscopic semiconductor nanocrystals, called quantum dots, can absorb the blue light and emit a warm white light. If the quantum dots can produce white light more efficiently, then quantum-dot coated LEDs could replace light bulbs. 

Eureka Moment

At the time of the discovery, the Rosenthal group was exploring two applications for semiconducting nanocrystals, one for medical use and one for photovoltaic (lighting or solar cell) use. Bowers was working on making small-sized quantum dots. He pumped a solution containing the nanocrystals into a small glass cell and illuminated it with a laser. “I was surprised when a white glow covered the table,” Bowers says. “The quantum dots were supposed to emit blue light, but instead they were giving off a beautiful white glow.”

The discovery has led the Rosenthal group to study this new application. “The exciting thing about this is that it is a nano-nanoscience phenomenon,” Rosenthal says. In larger nanocrystals, the light originates in the center of the crystal. But as the size of the crystal shrinks—becomes even more nano—the light emission region appears to move to the surface of the crystal and broadens out into a full spectrum, producing white light.

Photo by Daniel Dubois.

Pity the brown dwarf. It’s too large to be a planet, but too small to be a star.

Brown dwarfs are smaller and dimmer than true stars. Only in recent years have improvements in telescope technology allowed astronomers to catalog hundreds of faint objects that may be brown dwarfs. Yet to actually determine if a faint object is a brown dwarf, scientists needed a way to estimate their masses, because mass distinguishes stars and starlike objects. 

The discovery of an eclipsing pair of brown dwarfs in the Orion Nebula by a team of astronomers led by Keivan Stassun, assistant professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt, provides the first direct measurement of the mass, size and surface temperature of a brown dwarf. Astronomers can now compare the information on the pair to other possible brown dwarfs.  

While surveying the Orion Nebula, Stassun and his colleagues, University of Wisconsin professor Robert Mathieu and Space Telescope Science Institute astronomer Jeff Valenti, found the brown dwarfs orbiting each other around an axis perpendicular to the line of sight to Earth.

Measuring a Dwarf

Because of their special orientation, the two objects periodically eclipse each other. These eclipses cause regular dips in the brightness of the light coming from their joint image. By precisely timing these occultations, the astronomers determined the orbits of the two objects. This information, along with Newton’s laws of motion, allowed the team to calculate the mass of the two dwarfs.

The astronomers also calculated the size of the dwarfs by measuring the width of the dips in their light curve. By measuring variations in the light spectrum coming from the pair, the astronomers also determined their surface temperatures.

“This binary pair is a Rosetta stone that will help unlock many of the mysteries regarding brown dwarfs,” Stassun says. “We understand how stars form in the crudest sense. But many of the details of the process remain a mystery, particularly the factors that determine what a star will weigh.”

Photo by Daniel Dubois.

If you want someone’s attention fast, look afraid. Vanderbilt researchers confirmed that the brain registers fearful faces more quickly than those showing other emotions. Randolph Blake, Centennial Professor of Psychology; Eunice Yang, doctoral student; and David Zald, associate professor of psychology; co-authored the study, which appeared in the November 2007 issue of Emotion. 

The researchers will next explore how this information influences our behavior. “Since these expressions are being processed without our awareness, do they affect our behavior and our decision making? If so, how?” Yang says. 

You can’t bring a rod and reel in, so why does Vanderbilt have a newly renovated fishery in the Stevenson Center? The fishery is a special genetics facility that is home to the zebra fish, a small tropical fish you might have in your aquarium. Vanderbilt’s fishery for biological research allows researchers to view and study early development in fish embryos through transparent zebra fish eggs. Since 25–50 percent of human pregnancies end in miscarriage of unknown genetic origin, researchers hope that the study of zebra fish eggs may help shed light on human development.

Photo by Neil Brake.