Research

Hedgehog Signaling

October 14, 2022

Hedgehog Signaling

A cracker jack team of U of U undergrads works with principal investigator Ben Myers to break open a decades-old biological mystery of Hedgehog Signaling.

Corvin Arveseth

Corvin Arveseth, BS’21, can’t remember when he wasn’t fascinated by science and biology. So, when he came to the University of Utah and declared his majors in biology and biochemistry, he knew he wanted hands-on experience in research. “I didn’t know anything [about the] Hedgehog (Hh) signaling [pathway] until I read an advertisement put out by Ben Myers, [principal investigator at Huntsman Cancer Institute, assistant professor of oncological sciences at the University of Utah, and head of the Myers Lab] in a biology department newsletter looking for undergraduate researchers,” he says. “After reading some background information and meeting with Ben about the Hh pathway, I became intrigued with the work being done in his lab.”

The Hh pathway he’s referring to is akin to a master set of instructions for animal development and regeneration. It controls the formation of nearly every organ in the human body. Signaling pathways like Hh serve as molecular “telephone wires” from the cell surface to the nucleus. When cells in our bodies communicate with one another, signals are relayed along these molecular telephone wires, turning on expression of genes involved in growth, differentiation, or in some cases skin and brain cancers.

Corvin Arveseth and Will Steiner

The Hh pathway got its unusual name from decades-old genetic studies in fruit flies, where mutations in critical developmental genes led the flies to take on a bristly hedgehog-like appearance. However, versions of the Hh pathway operate throughout the animal kingdom, controlling development, stem cell biology, and cancer in many different contexts.

But even after many years of effort by labs all over the world, surprisingly little was known about how the Hh pathway actually works at a molecular level. Scientists knew that the signals conveyed by these molecular telephone wires were fundamental to human development and disease, but they didn’t know what the signals were, or how they were transmitted intracellularly. Consequently, health researchers’ ability to control Hh signaling in many diseases including cancer had been limited.

So, this is a story not just about a seemingly intractable research question, which is de rigeur in scientific circles, but how a team of largely undergraduate students in a four-year-old lab worked together under enormous odds to shake loose that answer. Myers says that that it was because of inexperience, not in spite of it, that the undergraduates in his lab were able to make these discoveries. These students’ fresh, undaunted determination to scientific inquiry, combined with a lack of preconceived notions and a willingness to learn, were key factors that enabled their groundbreaking discoveries.

Two papers, both with U undergraduates as first or co-first authors, were the gratifying result. PLOS Biology and Nature.com

 

Ben Myers

“It is a truly remarkable and inspiring collaboration that continues to this day, and I am so proud of how everybody was able to join forces and overcome so many obstacles created by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

 

Mysterious pathways
When Myers first set up his lab at the U in 2018, the key molecule in the Hh pathway that grabbed his attention was SMOOTHENED (SMO), a so-called “transmembrane protein” that spans across the cell membrane from the outside to the interior. SMO was known to be critical for transmitting signals from the cell surface to the nucleus. But what were the five or six steps between receiving the message and turning on gene expression? There was a “major disconnection about how this worked,” says Myers.

Nate Iverson

The twenty-five-year-old mystery was indeed tantalizing. It was “this interesting mystery coupled with the importance of Hh function,” says Arveseth, “in developmental and cancer biology [which] hooked me right away.”

Spearheading the project
Arveseth was the point of the spear for this project begun at the beginning of his sophomore year. But there were many others on the team, all of whom are “both incredibly smart, and also very kind and a lot of fun to work with,” according to Myers.

This includes Nate Iverson, a third year chemistry major with an interest in cellular signaling. “Having HCI in close connection with the University gave me greater access to research possibilities, and I was able to find an opening in the Myers lab studying Hh signal transduction.”

And then there was biology major Isaac Nelson, who worked tirelessly to produce a freezer full of carefully prepared, purified fragments of SMO for biochemical studies, only to hit a brick wall when he and Myers were unable to formulate a good hypothesis to drive an experiment.

Isaac Nelson

“It was only after starting up an international collaboration,” says Myers, “that the critical experiments snapped into view for us.” This led Nelson to send his samples to one of the lab’s new collaborators in Germany, and they used his samples to try an experiment that worked right away. In the midst of a raging pandemic, Nelson’s purified proteins helped to launch a new and entirely unexpected phase of the project, expanding the collaboration to include other scientists around the world.

“It was another scenario,” says Myers, “where everyone worked well together.”

Recent graduate Madison “Madi” Walker, BS’21, with a cell and molecular emphasis, was also part of the team. She is still working in the Myers lab studying another critical aspect of SMO signaling, namely the interaction between SMO and the enzyme G protein-coupled receptor kinase 2. Earlier, former undergraduate Jacob Capener, BS’20, assisted in the work.

Another critical member of the Myers lab team is Will Steiner, BS’21, who is currently collaborating with Arveseth and Nelson to purify SMO in complex with its binding partners in order to work out their atomic structures. He became interested in this area of research after taking the cell biology and biochemistry course at the U. “Biochemistry was particularly compelling and got me excited about the chemical reactions behind human physiology,” he says.

Madison Walker

It starts in the classroom
Rigorous courses were critical in preparing Myers’ undergraduate team for the hands-on research that led to their remarkable findings in the lab. He has nothing but kudos for the U’s curriculum. “Coursework before the lab experience [for undergraduate researchers] was very, very good here. In general, I’ve been lucky to attract motivated and curious students to my lab. They are inspired to push the research forward. They are all up to the challenge. And they have a great esprit de corps. They all work incredibly well together as a team to drive the science forward.”

That kind of correlated teamwork was not necessarily easy to enact under the circumstances. “Fortunately, we were able to finish the last key experiment of the first paper,” says Myers, in March 2020, just before the pandemic started to take hold and shut lab work down. He’s always believed that having undergraduates get a taste of cutting-edge research is important. They “shouldn’t have to work on something trivial… . What’s exciting about science is to push the boundaries.”

And yes, for Myers and the other senior members of his lab, including graduate students Danielle Hedeen and Aram Centeno, lab manager Ju-Fen Zhu, and former lab technician John Happ, “you have to be committed to helping everybody in your lab, even if they’re neophytes.” Clearly it’s been worth it. “And being a little bit of a neophyte is good,” he says, “because you don’t talk yourself out of doing experiments that are simple, unorthodox.”

Will Steiner

Asking the right questions
What Myers is trying to say, and seems to have proven over the course of the past three years and now the publication of two discovery-laden papers, is that their remarkable findings stemmed from the initial naïve view that the SMO protein didn’t fit the mold of other proteins as was previously assumed. He and Arveseth took a guess that SMO might be directly coupled to a critical intracellular signaling molecule called PKA. This was a rather wild idea, since there were few if any examples of transmembrane proteins that directly interacted with PKA. “It was a guess, how it might work, and a couple of months later: big discovery. Our initial guess was on the right track. There was a whole new unexpected thing going on but that made sense.”

Though early on the team suspected what they had discovered was important, “we didn’t know if we had a full explanation of how the system worked. We weren’t sure if it was the main event or an auxiliary event.” In the first paper, published in the journal PLOS Biology last year, they explained that: what they thought they knew, and what they weren’t sure about . . . yet.

But it was only after the pandemic was in full force that the team pivoted to the second exciting phase of the project, expanding to include Susan Taylor’s lab at the University of California, San Diego, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the PKA molecule the Myers team had implicated in their research.

Taylor and her colleagues had a critical insight regarding the SMO-PKA interaction which eventually formed the basis of a second manuscript, recently published in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. “It is a truly remarkable and inspiring collaboration that continues to this day, and I am so proud of how everybody was able to join forces and overcome so many obstacles created by the COVID-19 pandemic,” says Myers. And his team is anticipating that even more exciting discoveries are on the horizon. Eventually, this work may lead to better drugs to treat some of the diseases that result from aberrant Hh signaling, including various skin and brain cancers.

In all, with the resulting two papers, the project turned out to be a “best case scenario that wasn’t planned,” and a lesson of how important it is to keep an open mind, which often leads to big discoveries.

Success is never final, however. And Arveseth, recipient of no less than ten scholarships and awards during his sojourn at the U, is now enrolled in the MD/PhD program at the Washington University in St. Louis, where he will focus on hematology and oncology. His colleagues are also pursuing their academic and research careers full-steam ahead. They, along with their mentor, Ben Myers are a testament to the notion that persistence in knowledge gathering pays off but that it must be paired and even driven by a relentlessly open mind.

The Meyers Lab

Concludes Myers, “To be honest, it comes down to the willingness to try new things and to have the ability to work together as a team. In reality, this would have been way too much for any individual scientist, even a highly trained one, to do alone.” You can follow him and his lab on Twitter @Myers_lab

Find the full study here.

 

by David Pace, first published @ biology.utah.edu.

Ethiopian Abattoirs

October 12, 2022

Ethiopian Abattoirs

Hooded Vulture

The decline of vultures and rise of dogs carries disease risks.

In the yards behind the slaughterhouses—also called abattoirs—of Ethiopia, an ecological shift is unfolding that echoes similar crises the world over. Species with a clear and effective ecological role are in serious decline, and the less-specialized but more aggressive species that have moved in to take their place are not only less effective, but are harmful to their ecosystem which, in this case, includes humans.

This is a story about vultures, feral dogs, rabies—and piles of rotting animal carcasses. Buckle up. But in the end, it’s about the power of conservation to keep ecosystems, even urban ecosystems, in balance, benefitting the people who live there.

“Carrion consumption by vultures is declining, and increasing by most other scavengers, but that increase is not sufficient to make up for the loss of vultures.” says SBS alumnus Evan Buechley, PhD’17, now with The Peregrine Fund, “So there’s a gap there. And what happens with that gap is a bit of an unanswered question, but that’s where the problem lies.”

The study is published in the Journal of Wildlife Management and is funded by the National Science Foundation, the University of Utah, HawkWatch International, The Peregrine Fund and the National Geographic Society.

Vultures are awesome

Worldwide, vultures are perfectly equipped to take care of the unpleasant remnants of death. Rotting carcasses can become hotbeds of disease, overrun by bacteria and insects. But vultures are an efficient clean-up crew. By eating carrion, they remove the carcasses and pass them through a highly acidic digestive system that wipes out disease-causing agents. And a diversity of vultures is better—some species are specialized to tear away hides and skin while others, coming in last, literally gulp down the bones.

 

Evan Buechley

“Carrion consumption by vultures is declining, and increasing by most other scavengers, but that increase is not sufficient enough to make up for the loss of vultures.”

 

But vultures have been in trouble in recent decades. They’re susceptible to poisons in the carrion they eat, whether that’s lead ammunition, the drug diclofenac, or poisons used against predatory animals. And with vultures producing relatively few chicks and taking a relatively long time to mature, it’s harder for them to recover from population declines.

Çağan Şekercioğlu, associate professor in the University of Utah School of Biological Sciences, showed that vultures were the most threatened group of birds (called an ecological guild, when the group uses the same or related resources) in 2004 when he conducted the first known ecological analysis of all bird species while in graduate school.

In 2012, Şekercioğlu accepted Buechley as his first doctoral student at the U. Buechley brought extensive experience working with vultures and condors. He and Şekercioğlu began a project tracking Egyptian vultures in eastern Turkey and the Horn of Africa.

“Evan led this project brilliantly and expanded it to the other vulture species of Ethiopia and the Horn,” Şekercioğlu says. “Despite the many challenges, he also decided to study the scavenger communities of the Addis Ababa abattoirs, to quantify the causes and consequences of vulture declines in the region.”

In 2016, Şekercioğlu and Buechley re-analyzed the ecology of all bird species. “We realized that vultures not only have the fewest species of any avian ecological guild, making them irreplaceable, but since that first analysis in 2004, they had gone downhill faster than any other group,” Şekercioğlu says.

Yes, there are other scavenger species that can take vultures’ place at the carrion table. But the loss of vultures, as we’ll see, can lead to human costs.

A white-backed vulture, a hooded vulture and a thick-billed raven.

Abattoirs’ feathered “employees”

At the abattoirs of Ethiopia, vultures are welcome partners. After butchering animals in clean conditions, the workers move the remnants of the carcasses – hooves, organs and bones, for example, to separate compounds. It’s a . . . unique sensory experience, Buechley says.

“It can be pretty stinky and pretty gross, by any objective measure.”

So abattoirs are grateful for the scavengers, including critically endangered white-backed, Rüppell’s and hooded vultures, that eagerly clean up the pile.

Study co-author Alazar Daka Ruffo, from Addis Ababa University, has interviewed abattoir staff members to see how they feel about the vultures.

“Some abattoir staff say half-jokingly, but not fully, that they see the vultures as employees of the abattoir,” says Buechley, reporting Ruffo’s findings. “They’re serving an important function. There’s intentionality behind the system.”

Other winged scavengers frequent the disposal piles, including crows, ravens, ibises and marabou storks. Four-legged visitors include packs of feral dogs.

“It’s an urban ecology situation where you have the human food supply meeting and really directly interacting with the wildlife food supply of scavengers,” Buechley adds. “It’s just a really complicated, kind of gross but fascinating system.”

With a research team including Rebecca Bishop, Tara Christensen and Şekercioğlu from the U’s School of Biological Sciences, Buechley set out to quantify the amount of carrion consumed by scavengers at six abattoirs in Ethiopia over five years, from 2014 to 2019.

Decline in vultures and rise in rabies

The team noted the types and abundance of scavengers that visited the abattoir buffets, and used this to extrapolate how much they ate. At first, vultures were eating more than half of the carrion in the disposal piles. White-backed, Rüppell’s and hooded vultures together ate an average of around 550 pounds (250 kg) of carrion a day.

But by the end of the five-year study, the number of Rüppell’s and white-backed vultures visiting the abattoir disposal yards decreased by 73%. Hooded vulture visits decreased by 15%. Over the same time, feral dog detections more than doubled.

A committee of hooded vultures.

“Although we can’t say for sure if the decline represents a population crash or if the vultures are being displaced by dogs and moving away from the abattoirs, either way this is really concerning,” says Megan Murgatroyd, Interim Director of International Programs for HawkWatch International.

“We know that the vultures are declining and we know that the feral dogs are increasing, but we don’t know exactly why,” Buechley says, adding that abattoir practices are also changing and that further studies will be needed to draw a cause-and-effect relationship.

Regardless, the vultures can ill afford the loss of abattoirs as a food supply. Rüppell’s, white-backed and hooded vultures are listed as critically endangered. “That’s the highest threat category before going extinct or extinct in the wild,” Buechley says.

The population of Rüppell’s vultures has declined by over 90% over the past three generations (approximately 40 years). White-backed and hooded vultures are doing a little better—but not by much. They’re estimated to have declined by 81% and 83%, respectively, over three generations.

“So it does seem that their disappearance from abattoirs is likely linked to a population crash,” says Murgatroyd. “Vultures need all the help they can get right now, and having to compete with growing dog populations is only making things worse.”

Other scavengers on the rise, including dogs, ibises and corvids (crows and ravens) couldn’t pick up the slack at the abattoirs. By 2019, scavengers were consuming nearly 43,000 pounds (around 20,000 kg) less carrion per year than they were in 2014, back when vultures were more abundant and dogs more scarce.

A chilling consequence of the rise of dogs may be a rise of rabies rates in humans. In the late 1990s, vulture populations in India and Pakistan crashed. Feral dog populations increased to take advantage of the uneaten carrion.

“They’re also disease vectors,” Buechley says, “and they interact really closely with people. And there’s been a link drawn between a big spike in feral dog populations and rabies in India.”

Is the same thing likely to happen in Ethiopia? Scientists haven’t yet drawn a link between vulture loss and rabies rise in that country. But Ethiopia already bears a heavy rabies burden with around 3,000 deaths from the disease per year.

“Unlike a lot of diseases which impact the elderly, rabies disproportionately affects young children, which are the most likely to be bit by rabid dogs,” Buechley says.

Fencing dogs out

The researchers provide a straightforward recommendation to help the situation: Use fences to keep the dogs out. And many abattoirs already have fences in place.

“But a pack of feral dogs is really persistent,” Buechley says. “It’s hard to keep hungry animals away from lots of food.”

An abattoir disposal pile with a kettle of vultures overhead.

The dogs can fight and dig their way through many fences, and maintaining or fortifying them may cut into the abattoirs’ profit margins.

“It’s a matter of weighing how important it is to keep the fences maintained,” Buechley says. “Improvement of these fences could really have a lot of benefits.” Those include potentially reducing the numbers of feral dogs, which reproduce quickly and whose population keeps pace with the available food supply. That in turn could help control rabies in humans and diseases in other animals, such as the critically endangered Ethiopian wolf, which are carried by the feral dogs.

And, counterintuitively, fencing out the abundant dogs could increase the rates of carrion consumption. Without the dogs around to scare off other scavengers, vultures could return in larger numbers to more quickly and efficiently clean up the disposal piles.

“That could lead to less smell, less groundwater contamination, fewer insects like flies that can breed on the carcasses,” Buechley says. “There’s a lot of potential benefits of investing in repairing the fences around abattoirs, which are found throughout Africa and elsewhere worldwide. We encourage abattoirs, local governments and international organizations to consider this when looking for solutions to waste disposal, human health and scavenger conservation.”

The results of the study show that the loss of specialist species from an ecosystem can’t always be compensated for by other species.

“The overarching point is that vultures are super important,” Buechley says. “If they decline, we expect there to be pretty profound ecological consequences and there may be increases in human disease burden. And so we should appreciate vultures and invest in their conservation.”

Find the full study here.

 

by Paul Gabrielsen, first published in @theU.

Utah F.O.R.G.E.

October 5, 2022

Utah F.O.R.G.E.

The Utah FORGE Project

The Frontier Observatory for Geothermal Research

There is something deceptively simple about geothermal energy. The crushing force of gravity compacts the earth to the point where its molten metal center is 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Even thousands of miles out near the surface, the temperature is still hundreds of degrees.

In some places, that heat reaches the surface, either as lava flowing up through volcanic vents, or as steaming water bubbling up in hot springs. In those places, humans have been using geothermal energy since the dawn of time.

But what if we could drill down into the rock and, in essence, create our own hot spring? That is the idea behind “enhanced geothermal systems,” and the most promising such effort in the world is happening in Beaver County.

Called Utah FORGE (Frontier Observatory for Geothermal Research), the site 10 miles north of Milford is little more than a drill pad and a couple of buildings on Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration land. But it is the U.S. Department of Energy’s foremost laboratory for enhanced geothermal research, and the University of Utah is the scientific overseer. Seven years ago, the U of U’s proposal won out in a national competition against three of the DOE’s own national laboratories.

“If you have to pick the best area in the country to build an EGS plant, you’re going to be driven to Milford. DOE recognized that in 2015,” said Joseph N. Moore, a University of Utah Professor with the Department of Geology & Geophysics and the principal investigator for Utah FORGE.

Professor Joseph N. Moore

Among the advantages:

  • It’s in a known area of thermal activity. Nearby is Roosevelt Hot Springs, and a small nearby geothermal plant has been producing electricity for about 30,000 homes for years.
  • It has hundreds of cubic miles hot granite below the surface with no water flowing through it.
  • There is accessible water that can’t be used for drinking or agriculture because it contains too many naturally occurring minerals. But that water can be used for retrieving heat from underground.
  • It has access to transmission lines. Beaver County is home to a growing amount of wind and solar power generation, helping access to consumers.

DOE has invested $50 million in FORGE, and now it’s adding another $44 million in research money. The U of U is soliciting proposals from scientists.

“These new investments at FORGE, the flagship of our EGS research, can help us find the most innovative, cost-effective solutions and accelerate our work toward wide-scale geothermal deployment and support President Biden’s ambitious climate goals,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

The idea is to drill two deep wells more than a mile down into solid granite that registers around 400 degrees. Then cold water is pumped down one well so hot water can be pulled out through the second well. One of those wells has been drilled, and the second is planned for next year.

But if it’s solid rock, how does the water get from one well to the other? The scientists have turned to a technology that transformed the oil and gas industry: hydraulic fracturing, also known as “fracking.” They are pumping water down under extremely high pressures to create or expand small cracks in the rock, and those cracks allow the cold water to flow across the hot rock to the second well. They have completed some hydraulic fracturing from the first well.

Moore is quick to point out that using a fracturing process for geothermal energy does not produce the environmental problems associated with oil and gas fracking, largely because it doesn’t generate dirty wastewater and gases. Further, the oil released in the fracturing can lubricate underground faults, and removing the oil and gas creates gaps, both of which lead to more and larger earthquakes.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm

The fracturing in enhanced geothermal does produce seismic activity that seismologists are monitoring closely, Moore said, but the circumstances are much different. In geothermal fracturing, there is only water, and it can be returned to the ground without contamination. And producing fractures in an isolated piece of granite is less likely to affect faults. The hope, he said, is that once there are enough cracks for sufficient flow from one pipe to the other, it can produce continuous hot water without further fracturing.

And it never runs out. Moore said that even 2% of the available geothermal energy in the United States would be enough the power the nation by itself.

This next round of $44 million in federal funding is about taking that oil and gas process and making it specific to enhanced geothermal. That includes further seismic study, and coming up with the best “proppant” — the material used to keep the fracture open. Oil and gas use fracking sand to keep the cracks open, and the higher temperatures of geothermal make that challenging.

“FORGE is a derisking laboratory,” said Moore, meaning the U of U scientists, funded by the federal government, are doing some heavy lifting to turn the theory of EGS into a practical clean-energy solution. He said drilling wells that deep costs $70,000 a day. They drill 10 to 13 feet per hour, and it takes six hours just to pull out a drill to change the bit, something they do every 50 hours. That early, expensive work makes it easier for private companies to move the technology into a commercially viable business. Moore said all of the research is in the public domain.

Moore said FORGE doesn’t employ many full-time employees in Beaver County at this point, but it has used local contractors for much of the work, and it has filled the county’s hotel rooms for occasional meetings. High school students have also been hired to help with managing core samples from the deep wells.

“They’ve collaborated really well with the town,” said Milford Mayor Nolan Davis. Moore and others have made regular presentations to his city council, and they’ve sponsored contests in the high school to teach students about geothermal energy. People in town, Davis said, are well aware that the world is watching Utah FORGE, and there is hope geothermal energy will become a larger presence if and when commercial development begins. “We hope they can come in and maybe build several small power plants.”

Davis also noted that the power from Beaver County’s solar and wind plants are already contracted to California. “We’d like to get some power we can keep in the county.”

 

by Tim Fitzpatrick, first published @ sltrib.com

Tim Fitzpatrick is The Salt Lake Tribune’s renewable energy reporter, a position funded by a grant from Rocky Mountain Power. The Tribune retains all control over editorial decisions independent of Rocky Mountain Power.

This story is part of The Salt Lake Tribune’s ongoing commitment to identify solutions to Utah’s biggest challenges through the work of the Innovation Lab.

 

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Nuclear Recycling

September 29, 2022

Nuclear Recycling

Spent nuclear fuels pose a major environmental concern. Can they be recycled?

A significant problem with the use of nuclear reactors is what’s left behind — the nuclear waste from spent fuel rods. Where to dispose of this waste has been the source of much controversy.

But instead of just burying the spent fuel rods, what if you could somehow recycle them to be used again? University of Utah researchers will be working with a team from the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to develop an innovative yet simple process of recycling metal fuels for future advanced nuclear reactors. These reactors are designed to be safer than existing reactors, more efficient at producing energy, and cheaper to operate. The team was awarded a three-year, $2.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program for the project.

Michael Simpson

“With current light water-cooled nuclear reactors, you use the fuel for only about five years, then what do you do with it? Where do you dispose it? We currently have no place to put it other than on the site of the nuclear power plant that used it,” says University of Utah Materials Science and Engineering professor Michael Simpson, who will lead the U team supporting the project. “A better idea is to use a physical or chemical process to make the fuel usable in the reactor again.”

According to the Department of Energy, there is currently no permanent repository for spent radioactive fuel rods, so the more than 83,000 metric tons of nuclear waste are stored in more than 75 reactor sites around the U.S. in either steel-lined concrete pools of water or in steel and concrete containers. They will stay there until a consolidated interim storage facility or permanent site is established.

A key step to solving this problem is to demonstrate and commercialize advanced nuclear reactors such as the sodium cooled fast reactor (SFR) that features metallic uranium fuel designed with recycling in mind. Simpson will collaborate with the INL team that originally conceived of the method, which involves a dynamic heat treatment of the spent fuel rods from SFRs. In theory this will cause unrecyclable waste to be separated from the fuel materials that can be used again. Simpson says the remaining waste that needs to be disposed of in this process would be at least an “order of magnitude” less in volume than the original untreated amount. Furthermore, they will be able to utilize the large fraction of fissionable material to produce power that would otherwise be thrown away.

“We reduce the volume of nuclear waste that has to be disposed of, and we get more energy in the long run,” he says.

The U team will develop a computational model of the separation of the different metals in the heating process and collect data from a new furnace system that will be designed and purchased with the funding from the grant to validate the model.

Spent nuclear fuel at the Hanford nuclear site.

Simpson expects the first advanced nuclear reactors that could use this recycling process could go online by the 2030s. Currently, there are 94 commercial nuclear reactors in the U.S. based on light water reactor technology that all told generate nearly 20% of the nation’s total energy each year. Some advanced reactors such as SFRs could use a fuel that is more suitable for recycling, as will be demonstrated in this project.

“This process will help pave the way for sustainable nuclear energy with minimal environmental impact and allow the U.S. to produce more energy while better addressing the global warming issue,” Simpson says. “We want to transition away from coal and natural gas to renewable and nuclear energy for producing electricity. This allows us to continue to use nuclear energy without worrying about this unsolved nuclear waste problem. Instead of just directly disposing it, we can recycle most of it and produce much less nuclear waste.”

The INL/University of Utah project is one of 11 to receive a total of $36 million for research from ARPA-E to increase the deployment and use of nuclear power as a reliable source of clean energy while limiting the amount of waste produced from advanced nuclear reactors.

This project is just the newest collaboration between researchers from the U’s College of Engineering and College of Mines and Earth Sciences with INL scientists who are developing new technologies for nuclear energy, communications, power grids, and more.

Last month, the University of Utah and INL announced a new formal research partnership between both institutions that will explore deeper research collaborations and expand opportunities for students, faculty, and researchers.

 

 

First published @ mse.utah.edu

 

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Visualizing the Infinitesimal

September 29, 2022

Visualizing the Infinitesimal

Even before Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) first put pen to paper to draw the human form in anatomical detail, scientists have illustrated their findings, not only to share information but to find greater footing on the terrain we call biology: the science of life.

These models have taken on new urgency with the advent of cell biology, where subjects are even smaller than cells. “This is an invisible space,” Janet Iwasa, molecular visualization expert and Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at the U, reminds us. “Most molecules are smaller than the wavelength of light. These things are moving at a time scale that is not intuitive. When the study objects are so foreign, you have to rely on creative approaches to describe them.”

For Iwasa, those approaches involve scientifically accurate digital animations which have cracked open an entirely new way of viewing diverse molecular and cellular processes. Information-rich and visually compelling visualizations that capture current understanding is what this classically-trained biologist has made a name for herself with.

Vol 324, Issue 5935

The need for reconsideration of the visual language that renders the invisible became urgent after a 2009 publication in Science of a much-cited article. The seminal paper posited that cellular structures called P granules are liquid droplets, and that they specify the future germline in a developing embryo through controlled dissolution and condensation.  This paper ignited one of the hottest ‘trends’ in cell biology – the study of biological liquid condensates – and earned the lead authors numerous prizes, including, most recently, the prestigious Breakthrough Prize.

For Ofer Rog, Assistant Professor and Mario Capecchi Chair in the School of Biological Sciences, this revelation completely revised the interpretation of his experiments, but also brought with it “whole sets of biological issues.” The existence of crowding in the cell was one of them. No longer could he try to reduce the behavior of the chromosomes he was studying to properties of single molecules that make them up. “Rather,” says Rog, “we had to understand them as collective or ‘emergent’ behavior.”

With this new understanding, Rog felt “stuck” in his teaching and research with an old graphical language which “was really great for depicting things that are best understood as single objects, but not so great to describe how big clusters work together, to describe how molecules interact with each other much more loosely and much more dynamically.” The recognition of the flexibility and dynamics of cellular components led to the impulse to better honor that complexity graphically.

“I started looking at papers, and how uniform they were,” Rog says. “Papers that were clearly written with a lot of careful attention to details, with exquisite experiments and data, were using graphical models that were very simplistic, inadequate to really capture . . . our new understandings about biology. I started wondering, ‘How did people solve this in the past? Who should we talk to?’ It wasn’t super clear. So I went and talked to Janet.”

Powerful Renderings
They say the most dangerous thing one can do is to introduce one person to another. It’s a tongue-in-cheek caution, reminding us how conversations, then collaborations, then innovations start. So it was with Iwasa’s animation expertise which, as part of her Animation Lab at the University of Utah, has already animated many subjects, including the life-cycles of HIV and SARS-CoV-2. Now the lab is pairing its expertise with Rog’s condensate research.

“We have a lot of people, like Ofer,” says Iwasa, “who are educators and who have been using our animations for their courses. Condensate research is so new, compared to other big concepts in biology, that a lot of textbooks don’t even cover it. So, having some visual materials for educators who need an intuitive way to introduce these ideas to students was something we were thinking about.” Iwasa’s team had already interviewed undergraduate instructors to find out how they were teaching about condensates and what kinds of challenges they were facing.

And how were professors like Rog teaching about this new paradigm? Not easily, it turns out. The terrain was daunting. Intrigued, the Animation Lab began collaborating with Rog and other cell biologists to better illustrate condensates. “This new paradigm,” writes Rog and Iwasa of their collaboration, challenges “the 20th century textbook view of cellular compartmentalization.” Condensates, she says, seem to play important roles in cells’ normal functioning and in disease, and, naturally, these concepts are now making their way into undergraduate classrooms.”

Metaphors can be dangerous
Introducing two people is not the only dangerous thing to happen out there. There are implications of and uses for blending digital animation with biology and other sciences: representations–visual or verbal–are essential tools but at the same time impose biases. Because of simplification, “metaphors can be dangerous,” Iwasa concedes. “[P]eople don’t know how far they can carry them on a molecular level.”

The “language” of graphic representations, according to Rog, have tended to focus on single atomized cell components, and also incorporated implicit assumptions taken from our daily lives.

Iwasa agrees. Imagining the molecular space is “unintuitive, since it is unlike the air- and gravity-filled world we live in. What does a molecule experience being inside the cell? It’s just very different and hard to conceive. Some metaphors can be misleading. For example, there are proteins in the cell that move using a walking-like motion. Says Rog, “We walk in air, but when a molecule “walks,’ it’s the equivalent of us walking through Jell-O . . .”

“. . . Or walking in one of those children’s ball pits,” interjects Iwasa. “Except the balls are as big as you are, and you’re constantly bumping into everything, having to push things around.” The constant collisions, the extreme crowding: biologists know about these qualities, but because they don’t often depict that space, “it’s easy to forget and not to consider that, and that influences the types of experiments and the types of models we create.”

Illustrations did occasionally remind biologists of the crowded environment that occupies their objects of study. David Goodsell, a structural biologist and watercolor artist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, is famous for his colorful illustrations of the interior of cells. These paintings are based on state-of-the-art knowledge of what is in the cell–what molecules exist in different sub-cellular compartments and what structures each of them adopts–but also capture the incredible complexity of the cell and, crucially, its crowdedness.

The new science of condensates relies on crowding for the ability of cellular structures to come together and fall apart. Rog, excitedly, returns to the human model and talks about “a thousand objects, like humans, in a crowded subway station, loosely associated” which, nevertheless, remain discrete individuals. How do those individuals behave separately? And how does that behavior change when they function as a collective?

New visual language and recent technological development promise to do a better job of depicting such complexity. Such representations continue to inform scientific discourse, as startling and revealing as 16th Century drawings brought to life through Vesalius’s magisterial bodies-in-motion.

The Workshop
Which leads us to the Re-Imagining a Cellular Space Occupied by Condensates symposium and workshop, borne out of the ready collaboration between Rog and Iwasa. While the Animation Lab’s initial foray into condensates was, in the beginning, educationally focused, that somewhat limited approach may now be at an inflection point.

“When Ofer and I talked,” says Iwasa, “we agreed that the research community had not yet reached any sort of consensus on how best to represent condensates. So our attempts to capture condensates by animation didn’t have a visual language to fall back on.”

Greater consensus may emerge at the symposium & workshop on October 11-13. Unlike the many traditional meetings dedicated to condensates, where scientists present and debate the minute details of their experiments, here scientists will interact with illustrators and other “tool builders,” to discuss the visual language of condensates.

While there is always a risk in illustration (including digital animation) of simplifying things too much and thus restricting future perceptions and scientific understanding, the symposium also pre-supposes that the conversation is essential. In short, the gathering promises to “daylight” how biologists represent a subcellular world in enabling as well as disabling ways, seeking “to build a community that will construct a visual language and new tools that will accurately capture the complexity of molecular condensates.” These representations will help generate experimentally-testable hypotheses, and will lead to the development of new techniques for scientific communication and teaching.

“One of the things that we realized,” says Rog, “is that challenges similar to the one we are facing now, in the condensate field, must have been figured out by other fields in the past, in biology and outside biology.” Symposium participants will include experts from diverse disciplines: about one-third of the participants are biologists, actively engaged in condensate research; one-third will be visualization and computation specialists—like watercolorist David Goodsell mentioned above—but also modeling experts, data visualization specialists, and molecular animators.

The final one-third will come from fields that are not commonly engaged with molecular biology but that have long been thinking about space and ways to represent it. This last group includes software and virtual reality developers and academics in architecture and history.

The symposium will take place at the Crocker Science Center at the University of Utah, on October 11, 2022, 9 AM to 5 PM, and is open to the public. It will be followed by a two-day workshop (by invitation only).

 

By David Pace. First published @ biology.utah.edu

 

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McMinn Chair

September 26, 2022

Trevor James McMinn Chair

Christopher Hacon

Christopher Hacon appointed to McMinn Chair in Mathematics

On July 1, 2022, University of Utah President Taylor Randall appointed Distinguished Professor Christopher Hacon as the Trevor James McMinn Professor in the Department of Mathematics. Hacon held the inaugural McMinn Chair for five years—that term ended last June.

According to the terms of the appointment, this is a five-year appointment. Only one faculty member in the department may hold the appointment of the McMinn Chair at a time—in exceptional cases, the current Professorship holder may be considered for reappointment after a review has been conducted pursuant to the university’s policies and procedures for professorship holders.

Davar Khoshnevisan Chair of the Dept of Mathematics

“Distinguished Professor Hacon's work has been groundbreaking, and he is recognized internationally as a mathematical scientist of the highest caliber, whose work has motivated and impacted the next generation of brilliant algebraic geometers.”

 

Born in England and raised in Italy, Hacon arrived at the U as a postdoctoral scholar in 1998 and came back as a professor in 2002. He is particularly interested in objects that exist in more than three dimensions. He and his colleagues have applied studies of these objects to extend the “minimal model program”—a foundational principle of algebraic geometry—into higher dimensions. The American Mathematical Society has lauded their work as “a watershed in algebraic geometry.”

He has been honored with prestigious awards such as his 2019 Election to The Royal Society of London, the 2018 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, the 2016 EH Moore Research Article Prize, the 2015 Distinguished Scholarly and Creative Research Award from the University of Utah, the 2011 Antonio Feltrinelli Prize in Mathematics Mechanics and Applications, the 2009 Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Algebra and the 2007 Clay Research Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

first published @ math.utah.edu

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Related Posts

Planetarium Internship

September 23, 2022

Evans & Sutherland Internship

Keegan Benfield, Christian Norseth, Ethan Lamé, and Carson Brown.

U students create new presentations during planetarium internship.

This past summer Keegan Benfield, Ethan Lamé, and Christian Norseth, in the U’s Department of Physics & Astronomy, participated in an internship program at Evans & Sutherland, a Cosm company.

Cosm/E&S, considered the world’s first computer graphics company, has developed advanced computer graphics technologies for more than five decades.

Their technology developed Digistar 7, the world’s leading digital planetarium system, with full-dome programs and production services, giant screen films formatted for full-dome theaters, premium-quality projection domes, and theater design services.

The Physics Department had an opportunity to chat with the students about the internship.

Cyri Dixon

How did you learn about the internship?

  • Benfield - senior: physics, mechanical engineering
    I learned about it through an email from my U of U physics advisor, Cyri Dixon, the day before the internship closed. The email introduced me to Cosm. I was excited and applied right away.
  • Lamé - senior: physics
    I first heard about the internship with Cosm from Cyri Dixon. It sounded interesting, so I thought I might as well apply.
  • Norseth - graduate 2021: physics
    My advisor, Dan Wik, told me about the internship during one of our meetings.

What problem were you trying to solve at Cosm/E&S?

Ethan Lamé

  • Lamé
    We were given the task of creating shows using their software, Digistar.  We each picked a topic to research, and then we used Digistar to program the show as if it were to be shown to a planetarium audience.
  • Norseth
    My understanding is that Cosm/E&S put a lot of effort into adding accurate astronomical data and surveys into their planetarium software, and they wanted a way to show planetariums how to use the data.
  • Benfield
    The astrophysics interns were assigned two projects: designing two presentations on astrological objects and compiling a research paper that complemented the productions. The goal was to demonstrate the Digistar 7 system capabilities.

How did you go about developing a solution?

Christian Norseth

  • Norseth
    I selected two topics and researched them. I chose Extrasolar Systems and Stellar Formation Regions. We had a general outline of what kind of information we should include in our 5-10-minute planetarium show. I compiled a lot of information and then wrote out a “storyboard” with each element I wanted to include. I then designed the show in Digistar by writing automated scripts in the Digistar Command Language that controlled where you were in space and other visual elements on the dome. We could test our shows out on a projector dome that you would have in a planetarium.
  • Benfield
    During the first week, we were instructed on how to use the Digistar 7 systems and were given a general tour of the company facilities, including their three domes. We learned the operations and usage of the medium dome so that we could test our presentations. We used the remaining nine weeks to research, develop code, and collaborate on the shows.
  • Lamé
    After the first week of training using the Digistar software, we all jumped into using the scripting language to code our own movements and animations. After I did some research on my topic, I created a sort of story that I wanted to tell the audience, and then used the Digistar code to show the audience exactly what I wanted to show them.

Did you collaborate while still working on your own projects?

Keegan Benfield

  • Lamé
    We each worked on different topics throughout the internship, but we still helped each other. There are a lot of functionalities that the Digistar software has that we found through experimentation on our own topics, so if one of us had a question on how to do something, the others would often have an answer.
  • Benfield
    Each astrophysics intern selected their own two topics to investigate and research on their own time. However, we regularly met at the offices to discuss our code, receive help in coding, and peer review each presentation. We could easily rely upon each other when a problem occurred. Due to the variety of options that the Digistar 7 systems offered, each intern developed a unique method of generating various celestial objects so that each of our presentations were different.
  • Norseth
    We all worked on our own shows individually, but we helped each other figure things out. We would help each other with framing certain information or give suggestions on how to create an element in our shows.

Tell us about your daily routine.

    Evans & Sutherland - Digistar 7

  • Benfield
    My work day usually started around 9 a.m. and ended at 3 p.m. The day was broken up into sections depending on the number of meetings I had that day. For the days with fewer meetings, I spent my time in the computer lab or medium dome, developing my presentations and aiding or receiving coding aid from other interns. We also reviewed each other’s content in the dome. On days with multiple meetings, I spent my time preparing and conducting a little bit of coding.When I wasn’t at Cosm’s facilities, I was at the Marriott Library, conducting online research or scouring the library for research books.Each intern was assigned a Cosm buddy—an older company member. I met bi-weekly with my buddy to discuss any problems and to review my and practice my presentations.We did have internship week, where all of the interns traveled to the facilities here in Utah. We had multiple activities, ranging from an airplane competition, designing a Cosm event, and having dinner and a movie in the large dome. We also received tips about hiring and using LinkedIn as a networking tool.
  • Norseth
    Every week I’d come into the office on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday and get to work in a shared computer space. If I needed to test any content on the dome, I’d export my scripts and head down to the bottom floor where I could use the projector dome.
  • Lamé
    Typically, I would arrive just before 9 a.m. and jump into working on whatever work I had from the previous day. There were occasionally meetings during the day that we were able to join from our laptops, but for the most part, we stayed in the computer lab, working on our shows. Most people were there most days, so I was rarely the only one in the room. Often, we would go to a planetarium projection dome in the office and play our shows to see how the movements/animations worked and fix any bugs that popped up. I would often be doing research on the internet while working on these projects to make sure that the information I had was correct and to search for more engaging stories to tell.

Future plans?

Daniel Wik

  • Norseth
    I’m hoping to attend graduate school in astrophysics. This is my second year applying, but I should have a published paper under my belt this time. After my Ph.D., I’m not sure what I’ll do, probably try to become a professor or conduct some kind of astronomy-related research.
  • Lamé
    I’m planning to apply to some graduate school programs in astrophysics, and maybe even an engineering program or two. I’d love to dive deeper into a related field in grad school and once I know that I enjoy working with that skill set, eventually move into an industry job.
  • Benfield
    I love learning and developing skills that are desirable for my career path. I want to enter the field of defense contractors or work at a national lab. I also plan on continuing my education by earning a master’s or a Ph.D. in engineering, computer science, and physics. Eventually, I want to start my own company based on some inventions that I have semi-planned out.

 

 

About the internship

Melinda Orms

According to Melinda, Orms, Product Manager at Cosm, the Astrophysics Internship program with the University of Utah, Department of Physics & Astronomy, began after Dr. Anil Seth, Associate Professor, reached out to Cosm in the spring of 2022. Cosm invited Seth and his colleagues to visit the company’s Experience Center. During the visit, faculty had a tour of the system and its capabilities. Cosm talked about its desire to collaborate and the idea to have interns from the U Astrophysics program first surfaced.

“Our summer internship registration period had just ended here at Cosm, said Orms. “However, Karen Klamczynski, our training director, and I wrote up a plan for the Astrophysics Internship program, and we were able to get special approval to move forward at a very late date. Because a significant amount of training was involved, we required four interns in order to launch the program. We sent the information to Daniel Wik, Assistant Professor in the U’s Astrophysics program. We gave him a deadline of a few days to secure candidates for the program. I don’t know how, but he did it, but we ended up with six applicants and filled our four positions.”

The company-wide internship had 13 participants, located in Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and New York. They filled positions in many areas of the company, including technical writing, business development, design, and sales, etc.

Digistar is the world’s most advanced planetarium system, and Cosm’s customers teach science and astronomy in facilities all around the world. The company wanted to make it easier for their customers to present topics that utilize the wealth of astronomical data that is pulled into Digistar.

“We had Ethan, Christian, and Keegan take an abbreviated training course to learn how to use our system,” said Orms. “They selected and researched topics. For each topic, they created Digistar visualizations (5-10-minute shows) and supporting information and materials. Their projects were shown to our customers from all around the world. What they created will be made available to our customers for use in their planetariums. We finished the internship with an evening in the dome where they presented their lessons to friends and family and some of their professors.”

Cosm plans to continue and, hopefully, expand, its Astrophysics Internship program with the U’s Department of Physics & Astronomy. The company is looking forward to selecting more interns in January and are discussing plans for hosting a lecture in the dome.

 

by Michele Swaner , first published @ physics.utah.edu.

Toxic Dust Hot Spots

September 21, 2022

Toxic Dust Hot Spots

Kevin Perry

Where is Great Salt Lake's toxic dust most likely to originate?

Professor Kevin Perry believes there are many "trigger points" that indicate when there is something wrong with the Great Salt Lake.

For instance, anyone who has come to the lake for recreation has recently found an inability to launch watercraft as the lake levels continue to reach all-time lows. Struggles for the vital brine shrimp industry and a possible collapse of the lake's base food chain are other alarms on the horizon, says Perry, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Utah.

Toxic dust from the drying lakebed ultimately became one of the first alarms that captivated researchers, though. The Great Salt Lake contains arsenic and other metals that are naturally occurring, while some researchers say could even be human-caused. And as the lake shrinks, it has exposed some 800 square miles of exposed lakebed, equivalent to the entire surface area of Maui.

Researchers are starting to identify places around the dried-up lake that are most likely to produce dust that is ultimately carried into Utah communities, Perry says. He pinpoints Farmington Bay in Davis County, Bear River Bay near Brigham City and Ogden, and the lake's northwest boundary in a remote part of Box Elder County as the three largest dust "hot spots."

Fragile eroding surface crust - Kevin Perry

These three locations have the highest potential of sourcing dust all over northern Utah for years to come unless there's a dramatic turnaround in the lake levels, Perry explained Tuesday evening in a presentation about dust concerns to the Utah Legislature's bipartisan Clean Air Caucus.

But before rushing into a panic, Perry told lawmakers there is still so much more research needed to fully understand the dust carried out of the dried Great Salt Lake, including if and how much of a role it plays in long-term health concerns.

Dust Hot Spots
There are certain spots within the 800 square miles of exposed lakebed with a higher potential to produce dust that is carried into Utah communities during storms. While winds typically impact areas east of the lake, like Wasatch Front communities, weather patterns can blow the dust into areas all over northern Utah.

"Everybody along the Wasatch Front (and Tooele Valley) is impacted at certain times," Perry said after Tuesday's meeting.

Perry's research over the years has focused on identifying the frequency that dust is exposed in the atmosphere and also the concentration levels of dust in the air that Utahns breathe to understand public health impacts. It's helped him figure out the areas where dust is more likely to be picked up.

Soil with higher amounts of erodible material like silt and clay are more likely to be picked up into the air. Farmington Bay, Bear River Bay and the "extreme" northwest quadrant of the lake have the highest levels of silt and clay of any exposed lakebeds, where the materials make up at least 10% of the soil samples. Most of it arrives from the lake's tributaries like the Jordan, Bear and Weber rivers.

Map of Dust Hot Spots - Kevin Perry

They are the same areas where the lake's surface crust is vulnerable. Perry explains that only about 9% of the lakebed is actively producing dust because three-fourths of the lake is currently protected by a crust, such as the natural salt pan that protects the lakebed from breaking.

The dust coming from the remaining quarter either doesn't have crust or the crust is considered erodible. Human activity from illegal motor vehicle riding on the exposed lakebed is one reason for this crust breaking, and dust can blow freely in the wind once the surface erodes.

Again, Farmington and Bear River bays emerge as hot spots, as well as Gilbert and Gunnison bays on the western corners of the lake. And while most of the lakebed is protected now, the amount of protection decreases every year it is exposed because of how fragile the crust is, Perry adds.

The Air Quality Threat
This dust is a problem just because of its ability to raise particulate matter levels, something Utahns are accustomed to hearing about from wildfires and during winter inversions that threaten Utah's air quality. But Perry cautions it is too early to know what the true human impact of the dust will be.

The lakebed contains levels of arsenic, lanthanum, lithium, zirconium, copper and other metals above the Environmental Protection Agency's residential and industrial standards. Of those, arsenic, which can increase the risk of a few diseases when there is chronic exposure, has the highest levels compared to EPA standards, according to Perry.

However, it is not very clear how much of it people are actually breathing in during a wind event. The dose levels, a calculation of concentration, frequency and bioavailability, are needed to fully understand the true human risk associated.

This data is collected by the Utah Division of Air Quality but Perry says it hasn't been analyzed to this point because of the cost: $27,500 per site annually. Until that is available, researchers don't really know any component in the dose level equation, including how many days of the year dust ends up in surrounding communities or if some communities have disparities compared to others.

This is why Perry emphasizes that what is in the dust should be considered a "potential concern." He likens this uncertainty to driving on an unfamiliar mountain road in the dark. Motorists are more likely to slow down and focus on the road ahead of them when they perceive a risk of driving off the roadway.

The same idea applies to the science of the Great Salt Lake.

"What we've done here is identify a risk," Perry says. "The risk is exposure to (the) heavy metal arsenic, and so what we need to do is step back and try and understand the significance of that risk. ... We need to do more research, we need to take more measurements but we need to be vigilant because there is a threat out there. We need to determine if that threat will be realized or not."

Representative Ray Ward

This is not a problem that might happen in the future, the lake is three-fourths of the way gone today and we really, really need to have a sustained focus on it over a longer period of time to make sure we put enough water into it.  - Rep. Ray Ward, R-Bountiful

 

Rep. Ray Ward, R-Bountiful, a member of the Clean Air Caucus, said after the meeting that the presentation didn't immediately spark any new bill ideas for the future; however, he said, it emphasizes the need for new state appropriations, which may include the cost of analyzing the air quality data for Great Salt Lake dust.

The Easiest Solution
But how does Utah avoid this potential concern? The easiest solution is refilling the lake, though, that's still a daunting task considering all the upstream water diversions that take water out of the lake and that Utah is in the middle of a two-decade-long megadrought. This says everything about how challenging it is to mitigate dust once a lakebed is exposed.

There are dozens of global examples of what can go wrong when a lake dries out but Owens Lake in California is the one that Perry pointed lawmakers to on Tuesday. The lake began to dry up when Los Angeles officials began diverting the lake's water sources into the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

This is not a problem that might happen in the future, the lake is three-fourths of the way gone today and we really, really need to have a sustained focus on it over a longer period of time to ... make sure we put enough water into it.  - Rep. Ray Ward, R-Bountiful

California leaders have since spent over $2 billion trying to mitigate the health concerns associated with the dried lake dust. They eventually determined the only feasible solution was to refill the lake, Perry explains.

This solution could take a long time to solve Utah's problems, though. Of the Great Salt Lake's four major concern areas, Perry considers Farmington Bay as the easiest to mitigate simply because it requires the least amount of water to help cover the surface area. The lake needs to gain about 10 feet of water to mitigate dust concerns in the bay, but that could take decades to happen, barring an unforeseen shift in trends.

"Which means that we're going to be plagued by dust coming off the Great Salt Lake not just for a few years but likely for decades," he said.

That said, he's more optimistic about this solution now than just three years ago. He's seen Utahns show more interest in reducing water waste and state leaders take larger steps toward water conservation compared to the past. Tuesday's meeting featured four experts explaining ways to improve water quantity and air quality around the lake.

Ward agrees that the state is going to need to more than just refill the lake once to resolve the lake's issue. The Utah Legislature directed $40 million toward getting more water to the lake in this year's legislative session. More money and projects are needed to ensure water is flowing to the Great Salt Lake, Ward acknowledges.

But it's time and money worth spending given the known and potential risks Utah faces as the lake dries up.

"The big picture is we're in trouble with the lake right now," he said. "This is not a problem that might happen in the future, the lake is three-fourths of the way gone today and we really, really need to have a sustained focus on it over a longer period of time to ... make sure we put enough water into it."

 

by Carter Williams, first published @ KSL.com.

NDSEG Fellowship

September 21, 2022

NDSEG Fellowship

Aria Ballance

 

National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.

Aria Ballance is a third-year graduate student who was selected for the 2022 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. Sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Reserve Office, and the Office of Naval Research, it is a highly competitive fellowship with over 3,000 applicants and only 50 awardees.

Aria’s research is focused on evaluating crescent shaped nanostructures as a tunable platform for vibrational circular dichroism (VCD). The proposal she wrote for NDSEG involved using the nanocrescents she fabricates to optimize the detection of chiral molecules. “Ultimately, the chiral detection will be used to identify the presence of life outside of our solar system.”

In fact, Aria credits Star Trek with her love of science and her decision to become a chemist. She credits her PI Dr. Jennifer Shumaker-Parry with supporting and guiding her through her graduate career. When not in the lab she loves to backpack, she paints in watercolors, she loves rock climbing, goes white water kayaking, and enjoys skiing and swing dancing.

 

first published @ chem.utah.edu

 

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Armentrout Interview

September 21, 2022

Peter B. Armentrout

Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry

An Appreciation for, and an Interview with, Professor Peter B. Armentrout.

Peter B. Armentrout the Henry Eyring Presidential Endowed Chair of Chemistry at the University of Utah is the 2021 recipient of the John B. Fenn Award for Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry.

List of contributions from the following research groups: Ryan Julian, Scott McLuckey, Kit Bowen, R. Graham Cooks, Dave Clemmer, Air Force Research Laboratory, Mathias Schaefer, Joost Bakker, Diethard Bohme, Peter Armentrout, Konrad Koszinowski, Jana Roithová, Mary Rodgers, and Richard O’Hair.

It is a pleasure to introduce a special focus of the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry to celebrate the accomplishments of Prof. Peter B. Armentrout, Henry Eyring Presidential Endowed Chair of Chemistry, University of Utah, on the occasion of his receiving the 2021 ASMS John B. Fenn Award for a Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry. The award recognizes Peter’s development of (1) robust experimental and statistical techniques for the determination of accurate thermochemistry via the guided ion beam method, which has provided insights into the thermochemistry, kinetics, and dynamics of simple and complex chemical reactions, and (2) a suite of software programs for statistically modeling the energy dependence of product formation. As a consequence of these developments, nearly 2500 distinct bond energies have been measured during his career. These fundamental measurements have impact in many fields, including catalysis, biochemistry, surface chemistry, organometallic chemistry, and plasma chemistry.

This issue contains a total of 14 papers around the theme of “Thermodynamics, Kinetics and Mechanisms in Gas-Phase Ion Chemistry”. We thank all of the authors and reviewers for helping this issue come to fruition.

Although Peter’s achievements have been documented in other editorials (1−4) and he has written a short autobiography, (5) here we asked Peter some questions on issues that have intrigued us (note: this interview is a COVID19 “timecapsule” as it was carried out in mid-2021 during the height of lockdowns and travel bans):

Question 1: Many of us were inspired to pursue science by our high school teachers. In your autobiography, (5) you mentioned that you had excellent chemistry and physics teachers at Oakwood High School, Dayton, OH. Did they help ignite a spark, or were you already doing experiments at home before then?

PBA answer: You know I was never one to really do experiments at home. I had a home chemistry set (with lots of dangerous chemicals that people would be horrified to give to kids these days), but I mainly mixed them up to generate goo and never followed the recipes given. However, I was always interested in how things worked and knew I would be a scientist shortly after I gave up the prospect of being a professional pony express rider (in the fifth grade or so).

Question 2: I enjoyed reading about your early research with the late Rob Dunbar (Case Western Reserve University) and with Jack Beauchamp (Caltech). (5) Since then, you have had a wonderfully productive career. What is your favorite piece of work that you have been involved in?

PBA answer: It is not often you get a call out of nowhere asking if you can do an experiment, but Al Viggiano did just that several years back. Turns out the Metal Oxide Space Cloud (MOSC) group at the Air Force Research Laboratory was interested in samarium chemistry. They needed to know the bond energy of SmO+ with more precision and accuracy than was available in the literature. I told him we would try to measure this if they bought us the samarium sample, which turned out to cost $200. Apparently, Al went to the MOSC group and said I would do the research but it would cost 200. They hesitated until they learned he did not mean $200K. We successfully measured the SmO+ bond energy, (6) which enabled them to understand an ongoing atmospheric test. Subsequently, this has led to grants that enable us to continue studying the oxidation of lanthanides, including revisiting the Sm system. I’m not sure that many scientists would have thought that understanding simple gas-phase diatomic molecules better is still an important avenue for research.

Armentrout in the lab.

Question 3: What is the role of a mentor in science? Who mentored you and what has been your style of mentoring?

PBA answer: The enterprise of chemistry is a complex and detailed world, with lots of places where you can go astray. The role of a mentor is to alert a student of chemistry about some of the realities of getting things done and provide guidance. My mentors were Jack Beauchamp, Rob Dunbar, and John Fackler (inorganic chemist at Case and then Texas A&M). Like them, I tell my students that they work with me, not for me. I’m largely a hands-off mentor who provides advice and direction but willingly become hands-on when the situation needs it. I try to make sure my students not only learn to take good data and analyze it but also to present it clearly in both written and oral venues. My door (these days, my email box) is always open.

Question 4: What are the challenges for young scientists?

PBA answer: There are so many. I’m not sure the challenges have changed over the years, but I do think they have intensified. Funding, life–work balance, just dealing with students and people, they all need work to make happen. One could imagine that finding a new scientific niche that you can be the expert in has become harder because all the “easy” targets have already been taken. This belief neglects the fact that new techniques and new technologies provide new opportunities, but that does not make them any easier to identify. When I started out, I realized that if only I could understand and control things better, then I really ought to be able to measure thresholds of reactions and learn not only some thermochemistry but also something about the dynamics and mechanisms of reactions. I identified radio frequency (rf) manipulations as a means to improve the technology considerably and that led to the very first guided ion beam tandem mass spectrometer that my group built at UC Berkeley. In subsequent years, we have also thought hard about how to interpret the kinetic energy dependence of reactions that has enabled us to make a lot of progress along those lines over the years, but there is a lot we still do not know or understand as well as we might.

Question 5: What is the future of peer-review publishing? How are you personally coping with the ever-increasing number of scientific articles?

PBA answer: Honestly, I’m not sure I am successfully coping at all. The only saving grace is that you can almost instantaneously search the literature for relevant articles through the Internet. I still remember having to go to the library and search Chemical Abstracts in order to search the literature. An Internet search does not always find every relevant article, but it always finds more than you really want.

Question 6: 2020 was a rather strange and challenging year. This is reflected in the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary was not able to decide on a single “word of the year”. What is your “word of the year” to describe 2020 and why?

PBA answer: Interesting question. My short answer also involves multiple words: pandemic, virtual, remote. If I had to pick one, it would be remote. The last year has kept us apart in ways we never conceived of and yet brought us together (often using technology) in ways that have expanded the way we will go forward. It is been an interesting process but one that will hopefully provide benefits in the future.

Question 7: Mary Rodgers’ recounting anticipating brutal questions from the holy trinity of gas-phase ion chemists (Jack Beauchamp, Mike Bowers, and Peter Armentrout) at the 1993 Lake Arrowhead Conference resonated with me. (2) I too was warned that you guys had exquisite “BS” detectors. Thus, it was with trepidation that when John Bowie fell ill I presented his talk at the eighth Asilomar Conference on Mass Spectrometry in 1990. (7) That was the first time that I met you, Jack, and Mike and other leading gas-phase ion chemists. I learned a lot but was also impressed by the spirit of the questions, which were aimed at getting the most out of the science. I also felt that this community was welcoming and that there was a sense of fun. Given that COVID19 has curtailed travel and many conferences have been canceled or rescheduled, what are your thoughts about the future of conferences? Are face-to-face conferences still important?

PBA answer: The triumvirate did indeed have a well-deserved reputation, but you are spot on with regard to the intent of those questions. I’ve been to a few virtual conferences in the past year. They accomplish a fair bit of what is needed to communicate science to your peers. They reduce our carbon footprint and can enable many more people to attend than might otherwise be able to afford it. However, the personal interactions, the bump-into-you-in-the-hall moments, the scribbles on a napkin, are missing from virtual conferences. The ability to share a drink and dine with friends and speculate together provides real opportunities to advance science. The time away from your routine at home can be mind expanding. Face-to-face conferences remain relevant and needed.

Question 8: If you had a time machine, which scientist(s) from history would you like to meet? What would you ask them?

PBA answer: Leonardo da Vinci. I’ve always thought he was the epitome of the Renaissance man, doing both art and science that was well ahead of its time. In that regard, I think most people do not appreciate how much art and inspiration there is in doing good science. I would ask him where he derived his inspiration and why he ever thought man could fly.

Question 9: Much of your work focuses on thermodynamics, with the 2013 tribute (4) mentioning over 2000 distinct bond energies measured. What is the motivation for your intense interest, perhaps even obsession, with this aspect of chemistry?

PBA answer: I have always valued the quantitative aspects of chemistry. I can recall early in my graduate career an interaction with the late Ben Freiser, then also a graduate student with Jack Beauchamp, where he took one of the pieces of thermochemistry I had recently measured and proceeded to break it down a number of different ways. Thermodynamics has an eternal quality to it: a good measurement will be valuable to many future generations. Thermodynamics is predictive; it can definitively tell you whether a reaction is possible or not. A recent example is a study that generated a fair bit of interest because it claimed to observe catalytic conversion of methane to ethene on gold dimer cations at temperatures as low as 200 K. The problem is that this reaction is endothermic by over 200 kJ/mol, which means it is impossible to catalyze at thermal energies. Collaborators and I investigated a number of alternative explanations for the observations. (8)

 

First published at ASMS.org

 

This article references 8 other publications.

  1. 1

    Bierbaum, V. M. Focus on ion thermochemistry in honor of Peter B. Armentrout, recipient of the 2001 Biemann Medal. J. Am. Soc. Mass Spectrom. 2002, 13 (5), 417– 418,  DOI: 10.1016/S1044-0305(02)00377-X

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    Rodgers, M. T.; Clemmer, D. E. An appreciation. Int. J. Mass Spectrom. 2012, 330–332, 2– 3,  DOI: 10.1016/j.ijms.2012.11.003

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    Rodgers, M. T.; Clemmer, D. E. A Celebration of the Scientific and Personal Contributions of Peter B. Armentrout, Int. J. Mass Spectrom. 2012, 330–332, 4– 5,  DOI: 10.1016/j.ijms.2012.11.004

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    Ervin, K. M.; Rodgers, M. T. 2140 Bond Energies and Counting: A Tribute to Peter B. Armentrout. J. Phys. Chem. A 2013, 117 (6), 967– 969,  DOI: 10.1021/jp401080r

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    Cox, R. M.; Kim, J.; Armentrout, P. B.; Bartlett, J.; VanGundy, R. A.; Heaven, M. C.; Ard, S. G.; Melko, J. J.; Shuman, N. S.; Viggiano, A. A. Evaluation of the exothermicity of the chemi-ionization reaction Sm + O– → SmO+ + e–. J. Chem. Phys. 2015, 142, 134307,  DOI: 10.1063/1.4916396

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    Shuman, N. S.; Ard, S. G.; Sweeny, B. C.; Pan, H.; Viggiano, A. A.; Keyes, N. R.; Guo, H.; Owen, C. J.; Armentrout, P. B. Au2+ cannot catalyze conversion of methane to ethene at low temperature. Catal. Sci. Technol. 2019, 9, 2767– 2780,  DOI: 10.1039/C9CY00523D

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