The Art and Science of Innovation: Catmull’s Story

The Art and Science of Innovation: Catmull’s Story


Sep 16, 2024
Above : Edwin Catmull, co-founder of Pixar. | Pixar

Ed Catmull doesn’t have the intense presence one might expect from a man with his resume.

Not only has Catmull [BS’69, physics] won five Academy Awards, he’s also received an ACM A.M. Turing Award — considered the Nobel Prize of computing — has rubbed shoulders with George Lucas and Steve Jobs, co-founded Pixar and co-created the first computer-animated film (and the technology that made it possible).

Catmull is the 2024 winner of The Leonardo Award, an award that seeks to honor individuals who have made “contributions (that) exemplify the blend of art and science,” per The Leonardo.

To receive his Leonardo Award, Catmull returned to Salt Lake City — the very place his impressive career started.

“(Catmull) credits the atmosphere and the work that he did at the University of Utah with some of his early success,” Virginia Pearce, director of the Utah Film Commission, said during Thursday night’s ceremony. “We are so proud about your start in Utah and the deeply grateful for the mark that you’ve made on (the film industry) industry and beyond.”

‘It was amazing’: How the University of Utah shaped Catmull’s career

As a kid, Catmull balanced his interests in both art and science. He never saw the subjects as being inharmonious.

“Growing up, I didn’t know that (science and art) were considered to be not compatible with each other. Nobody told me that,” Catmull said Thursday night at The Leonardo Museum. Animation fascinated him, but there was no college for it. So when he started his Bachelor’s degree at University of Utah, he fell back on science.

“There were no tools for it, for animation, so I switched over into physics when I went to college,” Catmull said. This revelation prompted laughter from the audience — how can the man who co-founded Pixar be a physicist?

Read the full article by Margaret Darby in DeseretNews.

Honoring fallen soldiers: How science is using teeth to bring families closure

Honoring fallen soldiers: How science is using teeth to bring families closure


September 16, 2024
Above: Ben Rivera, a technician in the Bowen Lab, prepares a wisdom tooth for analysis. Credit: Bowen Lab.

More than 80,000 American service members remain missing from previous wars, most from World War II. When remains are found, their age often makes identification difficult—but not impossible.

Even without a name, fingerprints, or facial features, our history leaves indelible marks on us, locked in the atoms of the toughest structures in our bodies: the enamel of our teeth. Subtle differences in tooth chemistry could help determine the identity of fallen soldiers and other human remains—if we can learn to read that history.

Gabe Bowen, the lead researcher for the FIND-EM project, takes a groundwater sample from a well. Credit: Bowen Lab.

Now, a collaboration between geography and dentistry researchers aims to find ways to map a person’s remains to the region where they grew up, based on slight differences in tooth enamel that are determined by the composition of local tap water.

While the researchers’ immediate goal is to help identify fallen soldiers, the project has the potential to strengthen the field of forensic investigation as a whole, according to Gabe Bowen, PhD, professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah and the lead on the project. “The ultimate goal is to produce a resource that will be very broadly useful,” Bowen says. “Cold cases, border crossers, humanitarian crises—any situation where we end up with individuals of unknown identity.”

The molar code:

To match someone’s teeth to where they grew up, the researchers are amassing a database of teeth donated by volunteers nationwide and comparing their enamel composition to groundwater data. They’re using wisdom teeth, which are commonly removed in modern dental care.

“I think it’s beautiful that in the natural progression of people’s treatment, we would be removing these teeth anyway,” says Michael Bingham, clinical research coordinator in the School of Dentistry at the University of Utah. “We can take something that would, in theory, be discarded, and use it to do this beautiful project of reuniting families with their service members’ remains.”

While the researchers need more tooth donors to get a comprehensive map, their results so far are promising.

Read the full article by Sophia Friesen @UofUhealth

Scientists awarded 1U4U Seed Grants

scientists awarded 1U4U Seed Grants


Above: Microbiolites at Bridger Bay on the northwest corner of Antelope Island. Credit: Utah Geological Survey. Biologists Jody Reimer and Michael Werner are part of a 1U4U team that study microbiolites.

Six College of Science faculty members are members of winning teams awarded seed grants of up to $50,000 as part of the 1U4U Seed Grant Program.

Six faculty members in the College of Science are members of winning teams awarded seed grants of up to $50,000 as part of the 1U4U Seed Grant Program.

The program supports cross-campus/cross-disciplinary research teams to solve some of the greatest challenges of our local, national, and global communities. College of Science faculty among the winning teams included Jon Wang, (biology), Colleen Farmer (biology), John Lin (atmospheric sciences), Jody Reimer (biology & mathematics), Michael Werner (biology) and Qilei Zhu (chemistry).

Bonderman Field Station at Rio Mesa (Photo courtesy of Zachary Lundeen)

The theme of the 2024-2025 program was “The Future of Sustainability.” Sustainability is a foundational goal that cuts across multiple intellectual topic areas (e.g., healthcare, water, energy, wildfire, critical minerals, education, food security) and can be interpreted widely.

At the University of Utah, faculty have engaged sustainability across a wide range of domains, including but not limited to environmental, social, communal, health, economic, technical, and legal.

Some of the topics of winning projects include the impact of air quality on elite athletic performance, study of suicide behaviors, and improving health by linking silos.

“It is exciting to fund so many teams working on sustainability projects,” said Dr. Jakob Jensen, associate vice president for research at the U. “The teams are considering sustainability across a wide range of topics from forest management and urban heat islands to physical therapy and mental health. These seed projects will drive significant innovation and impact communities throughout the region.”

Winning teams with College of Science faculty include the following:

Research Team: John Pearson (medicine) & Jonathan Wang (College of Science — biology)
Application Title: Heat and Healing: The Influence of Urban Heat Islands on Postoperative Outcomes

Research Team: Colleen Farmer (College of Science — biology), Ajla Asksamija (Architecture & Planning), Zach Lundeen (Bonderman Field Station), Jorg Rugemer (Architecture & Planning), Atsushi Yamamoto (Architecture & Planning)

Research Team: John Lin (College of Science — atmospheric sciences) & Tanya Halliday (Health)
Application Title: Impact of Air Quality on Elite Athletic Performance:  from Salt Lake to Beyond

Research Team: Jody Reimer (College of Science — biology and mathematics), Brigham Daniels (Law), Beth Parker (Law), Michael Werner (College of Science — biology)
Application Title: Understanding Great Salt Lake microbialite ecology to inform sustainable water management policy

Research Team: Qilei Zhu (College of Science — chemistry) & Tao Gao (Engineering)
Application Title: Ion-Conductive Membrane-Enabled Sustainable Industrial Electrochemical Production

 

For more information about the 1U4U Seed Grants and a complete list of this year's awardees click here.

New tools for peering into cell function.

New tools for peering into cell function


Sep 9, 2024
Above: Ming Hammond, professor of chemistry. PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Titensor, University of Utah

U chemists discover how key contrast agent works, paving the way to create markers needed for correlative microscopy.

Two labs at the University of Utah’s Department of Chemistry joined forces to improve imaging tools that may soon enable scientists to better observe signaling in functioning cells and other molecular-scale processes central to life.

Rodrigo Noriega, assistant professor of chemistry and co-author of the study.

The Noriega and Hammond labs, with complementary expertise in materials chemistry and chemical biology, made critical discoveries announced this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society that could advance this goal. Their joint project was kickstarted through a team development grant from the U College of Science and the 3i Initiative to encourage faculty with different research interests to work together on big-picture problems.

“We’re trying to develop a new kind of imaging method, a way to look into cells and be able to see both their structural features, which are really intricate, while also capturing information about their activity,” said co-author Ming Hammond, a professor of chemistry. "Current methods provide high-resolution details on cellular structure but have a challenging ‘blind spot’ when it comes to function. In this paper, we study a tool that might be applied in electron microscopy to report on structure and function at the same time.”

Biological samples often need “markers,” or molecules that are the source of detectable signals, explained co-author Rodrigo Noriega, an assistant professor of chemistry. A widely used type of markers are flavoproteins which, when photoexcited, trigger a chemical reaction that yields metal-absorbing polymer particles whose high contrast in electron microscopy is easily seen.

Scientists had long assumed that a mechanism involving singlet oxygen generation, a special kind of reactive oxygen species, was at play. However, the U team found that electron transfer between the photoexcited marker and the polymer building blocks is the main contributor to the process.

You can read the full story by Brian Maffly in @TheU.

 

Cool Science Radio: Luisa Whittaker-Brooks

cool science on the Nanoscale


September 6, 2024
Above: Luisa Whittaker-Brooks

Our modern society faces many challenges, two of which being alternative energy sources and low cost electronics for daily use.

Solutions for these issues, and many others, can be found in the materials used in the products we create.

Luisa Whittaker-Brooks, assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Utah is on the leading edge of these technologies and developments.

Whittaker-Brooks' research group at the U focuses on the study and manufacture of ultra-thin electronics materials and nanoscale circuits, while she encourages women and minorities to choose careers in STEM disciplines.

Whittaker-Brooks was awarded the L’Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award for her work and was recently feature on KPCW's Cool Science Radio.

Listen to the podcast here.

 

Ron Perla, 2024 Distinguished Alumnus

Avalanche Escape Artist


September 4, 2024
Above: Ron Perla in the 1960s at a creep gage, built by U Geophysics' Bob Smith and team, ready to be covered with snow on a test slope next to the Alta Avalanche Study Center.

“I out-swam a size three avalanche down a gulley that had been artillery blasted,” reports Ron Perla to Wildsnow, a ski and snow reporting site. “It was my introduction to the post-control release.”

Ron Perla working on slab above Alta village, 1968. Credit: Charles Bradley, Montana State University

Recipient of the 2024 Distinguished Alumni award from the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Perla graduated in 1971 with his PhD from the University of Utah in meteorology. As a snow scientist, he conducted research into avalanches and is well-known for discovering “the thirty-degree threshold,” where slopes of thirty degrees or more are much likelier to cause avalanches.

Perla worked at Alta Ski Resort as a member of the ski patrol and in 1966 became a part-time snow ranger and part-time research assistant at the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) Alta Avalanche Study Center. As a research assistant to Ed LaChapelle, Perla researched slab properties, factors that contribute to an avalanche and rescue methods, among other things.

Early in the morning and during intense storms, snow rangers blast the mountain to reduce the risk of avalanches. Between these times, Ed LaChapelle allowed Perla to take classes at the U. From 1967 to 1971 Perla commuted between Alta and the university. He split his time between snow rangering and his PhD program supervised by Professor Shih-Kung Kao and included classes in meteorology and applied mechanics. These classes are fundamental disciplines for avalanche research.

Perla’s advisor, along with the Department of Meteorology's chair Don Dickson, understood the unique combination of university study and avalanche study. Kao was a world-class specialist in atmospheric dynamics, turbulence and diffusion while Dickson was a highly decorated World War II pilot with hands-on meteorology experience. He helped Perla obtain a research grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and arranged for the donation of an old Alta ski lifts building which was turned into a mountain meteorology lab.

Models of moving avalanches

Perla has also extensively researched snow structure as well as models of moving avalanches. His current research involves quasi-three-dimensional modeling of the internal structure of a moving avalanche, from start to stop and has modeled moving snow in many different ways. His first model (1980) followed the mass-center of moving snow, and in 1984 his model assumed the avalanche as a collection of starting particles. The current model assumes the avalanche consists of snow parcels moving turbulently in three layers.

Ron Perla, U.S. Forest Service, 1968.

Along with his research, Perla has spent a lifetime in the snow. An avid skier and mountaineer, he partnered with Tom Spencer (U alum in mathematics) in 1961 for the first ascent of Emperor Ridge on Mt. Robson, the highest point in the Canadian Rockies. He also established a new route on the north face of the Grand Teton in Wyoming and a first ascent of the popular “Open Book” route on Lone Peak in the Wasatch Mountains.

“In 1967, I was working as a USFS Snow Ranger near the top of Mt. Baldy,” Perla says. “The cornice broke off prematurely, and I fell into a Baldy chute. The cornice blocks triggered a large avalanche. I was tumbled around with no chance of 'swimming,' and somehow I missed all of the rocks. Just before I lost consciousness under the snow, I managed to thrust an arm up to the surface. I was found quickly.”

Collective consciousness

Perla is an honorary member of the American Avalanche Association as well as a member of multiple different snow and ice committees, such as the Snow, Ice, and Permafrost committee for the American Geophysical Union.

After earning his PhD at the U, Perla moved to Fort Collins, Colorado as a research meteorologist for the USFS. In 1974, he moved to Alberta, Canada to work for the National Hydrology Research Institute. He has remained in Alberta since.

Perla is a significant reason why we understand snow science and avalanches and why backcountry education has improved to help keep those who recreate in areas with snowfall — skiers, mountaineers, snowshoers and ice climbers — safe.

“Despite the enormous increase in backcountry use, despite increasing behavior to ski and ride lines we could never imagine in the 1960s, avalanche fatalities are not increasing to match those trends,” Perla says in an interview with Wildsnow. "Surely, associations, centers, websites, and educators, in general, are responding to match those trends. Surely it’s also because today’s risk-takers are increasingly more skillful backcountry skiers, riders, and [,as in Perla's harrowing experience on Mt. Baldly,] escape artists."

He continues, adding that "[e]quipment is improving. ...But there’s something else: call it collective consciousness in the backcountry. An increasing number of backcountry users correlates with increasing observations and tests. Thus, safety can be enhanced by numbers if there is increased communication... ."

You can read Ron Perla's interview with Wildsnow here.

by CJ Siebeneck

How symbiosis helps define evolution

How symbiosis helps define evolution


September 3, 2024
Above: Colin Dale

“We’re looking at how deterministic the process of evolution is,” biologist Colin Dale says. “We’ve leveraged that question in this beautiful system, where we’ve got samples that have evolved under near identical conditions in nature.”

At the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Utah, the Dale Lab, along with U biologists Sarah Bush, Dale Clayton (Clayton/Bush Lab) and Robert Weiss U Human Genetics, in addition to collaborators from the University of Illinois (Kevin Johnson) and Virginia Commonwealth University (Bret Boyd) are exploiting an amazing biological system to study the relative contributions of stochasticity, contingency and determinism to evolution.

They do this using feather-feeding lice and their symbiotic bacteria that play a critical role in supplementing their host’s overly protein-rich diet of feather keratin. Their paper “Stochasticity, determinism, and contingency shape genome evolution of endosymbiotic bacteria” published this summer in Nature Communications.

“Keratin is a protein, and animals can’t live on protein alone,” says Dale. “The bacteria are producing B vitamins that are essential for these lice. Consequently, all feather-feeding lice have bacterial symbionts.”

The Clayton/Bush lab: Bacteriocytes in the abdomen of an adult female Columbicola columbae. Red and green colors show bacterial and louse cells, respectively. The bacteriocytes form conspicuous tissues called ovarial ampullae (oa) that are associated with developing eggs (mature oocytes: mo). Inset shows vertical transmission, with bacterial cells moving from the ovarial ampulla to the posterior pole of an oocyte through follicle cells. Credit: adapted from Fukatsu et al. 2007)

These bacteria are “endosymbiotic” which means they live (obligately) within the cells or bodies of a host animal. Remarkably, these bird lice have been collected from all over the globe, yet they have independently picked up the same species of bacteria to domesticate as vitamin “factories.” Dale recalls a question posed by the famous paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould: If we could see replays of the tape of life, taking place under near-identical conditions, would the process of evolution prove to be repeatable?

“What you have to worry about with Gould’s thought experiment,” Dale states, “is that distinct environmental conditions can induce distinct selection pressures. But since these lice are ectoparasites on birds, they’re buffered against variation in the environment and have no variation in diet. So, it’s one of the best examples of an evolutionary process that has evolved repeatedly under near-identical conditions.”

Symbiotic lifestyle

Mutations are randomly or “stochastically” generated but many do not survive the test of natural selection because they negatively impact fitness. However, upon transitioning to a symbiotic lifestyle, bacteria can withstand the mutational inactivation of many genes because those gene functions are supplanted by genes in their host. In this work, Dale and colleagues found that gene losses in the bacterial symbionts follow a decision tree-like structure that results in the minimization of their gene inventory, through the removal of redundant gene functions. In simple terms, if Gene A and B have redundant functions and the bacteria lose gene A, they are forced to maintain Gene B in order to survive (or vice versa). However, the loss of gene B might then facilitate the loss of genes X, Y and Z because the functions of those genes are uniquely dependent on gene B. Thus, cascading patterns of co-dependent gene loss and retention are initiated as a consequence of distinct stochastic losses in each symbiont genome.

“That’s the beautiful outcome of this paper,” says Dale. “It provides empirical evidence for this long-term trajectory and interplay between stochasticity, contingency and evolutionary determinism.” This has implications for the evolution of mitochondria and chloroplasts, which according to the theory of endosymbiosis, are organelles that used to be independent microbes that became symbiotic with eukaryotic cells in a similar way to these bacteria and the lice.

“Those organelles started off with big gene inventories,” Dale says. “When our cells provided them with an abundance of nutrients, they minimized their functions to retain only those that proved beneficial to their hosts, encompassing photosynthesis in the case of the chloroplast and aerobic energy generation in the case of the mitochondrion.

Notably, these very important traits originated through symbiosis and defined the evolution of plants and animals on Earth.

Cutting-edge of computational biology

The Dale Lab has a substantial focus on computational genomics and data science, catalyzed in large part by a very talented graduate student, Ian James, who obtained his bachelor’s degree in biology from the U and subsequently discovered that he had a talent for computer science.  “Ian is extraordinarily creative,” says Dale. “He starts out with biological questions and crafts complex data analysis pipelines, often using machine learning approaches, to obtain answers from big sets of data, ultimately producing some really psychedelic figures.”

Graduate student Ian James engrossed in “the silicon bubble of computational biology." Credit: courtesy of Colin Dale.

In combination with collaborators in Illinois and Virginia, who also utilize cutting-edge computational techniques to understand the patterns of louse and symbiont evolution, James uses pattern recognition and association rule mining to uncover hidden relationships between variables in large datasets to detect contingency in evolution.

“The resulting approaches are really novel and uncover striking and highly supported patterns” continues Dale. “Such approaches also have great potential for understanding the etiologies of diseases such as cancer, that often arise as a consequence of gene(s) becoming damaged.”

While Dale enjoys being trapped in what he calls “the silicon bubble of computational biology,” he also recognizes that field biologists, including Bush and Clayton, play a critical role in enabling this work to come to fruition. It requires specimens collected from all over the world to provide the genetic material for the cutting-edge data science and analysis. Bush and Clayton, along with many other collaborators, have been collecting and studying bird lice for decades, yielding a gift (to science) that literally keeps on giving.

The system has been used to answer many important questions in the field of evolutionary biology and serves as a model for the understanding of co-evolutionary interactions in biology textbooks. “In this case, in the context of symbiosis, this system is actually really interesting because it’s so boring” quips Dale. “Again, it’s the lack of variation in the underlying biology that makes it an excellent candidate for this type of study. I’ve always paid attention to the aphorism stating that ‘all that glitters is not gold.’ It’s also worth noting that sometimes the gold doesn’t glitter at all.”

by CJ Siebeneck

Is the Past the Key to Our Future Climate?

Is the Past the Key to Our Future Climate?


September 3, 2024
Above: forams under microscopic level

New research from U geologists links rapid climate change 50 million years ago to rising CO2 levels.

At the end of the Paleocene and beginning of the Eocene epochs, between 59 to 51 million years ago, Earth experienced dramatic warming periods, both gradual periods stretching millions of years and sudden warming events known as hyperthermals. Driving this planetary heat-up were massive emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases, but other factors like tectonic activity may have also been at play.

Gabriel Bowen

New research led by University of Utah geoscientists pairs sea surface temperatures with levels of atmospheric COduring this period, showing the two were closely linked. The findings also provide case studies to test carbon cycle feedback mechanisms and sensitivities critical for predicting anthropogenic climate change as we continue pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere on an unprecedented scale in the planet’s history.

“The main reason we are interested in these global carbon release events is because they can provide analogs for future change,” said lead author Dustin Harper, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geology & Geophysics. “We really don’t have a perfect analog event with the exact same background conditions and rate of carbon release.”

But the study published on 26th August'24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, suggests emissions during two ancient “thermal maxima” are similar enough to today’s anthropogenic climate change to help scientists forecast its consequences. The research team analyzed microscopic fossils—recovered in drilling cores taken from an undersea plateau in the Pacific—to characterize surface ocean chemistry at the time the shelled creatures were alive. The findings indicate that as atmospheric levels of COrose, so too did global temperatures.

“We have multiple ways that our planet, that our atmosphere is being influenced by CO2 additions, but in each case, regardless of the source of CO2, we’re seeing similar impacts on the climate system,” said co-author Gabriel Bowen, a U professor of geology & geophysics.

Read the full article by Brian Maffly @TheU.