Research

New Padding Innovation Could Revolutionize Helmet Safety

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 06:00:00 +0000

New Padding Innovation Could Revolutionize Helmet Safety Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/16/2024 - 00:00

Daniel Strain

Football players (and anyone else who takes hard hits) may want to breathe a sigh of relief. Engineers at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder and Sandia National Laboratories have been hard at work researching and developing a new design for padding that can withstand powerful impacts.

“If you’re riding your bike and get into a crash, you don’t know if that’s going to be a low-speed impact or a high-speed impact. But regardless, you expect your helmet to perform well,” said Robert MacCurdy, assistant professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder. “We’re trying to develop a geometry that performs well under all of those scenarios.”

The team’s innovations, which can be printed on commercially available 3D printers, could one day wind up in everything from shipping crates to football pads — anything that helps to protect fragile objects from the bumps of life.

“Impact mitigation is something that’s important everywhere,” said MacCurdy. “It’s in highway crash barriers, knee pads and elbow pads, and in packaging equipment.”

Currently, some of the most common types of padding materials are foams, which are filled with tiny holes and channels, such as packing peanuts or stress balls. Foams can absorb a lot of force, but if you squeeze them hard enough, they will compress down into a rigid wad. MacCurdy and his colleagues wanted to develop cushioning that would provide protection, regardless of the force of impact.

The group’s new designs look a bit like the cells in a honeycomb. When you squeeze them, the cells collapse, but always following a careful pattern.

Everyday risks may soon be greatly reduced. The researchers put their designs to the test in labs, reporting that the padding could absorb roughly six times more force than standard foams made out of the same material.

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Photos courtesy Wikipedia and Lawrence Smith

New kinds of padding could make football gear, bike helmets safer than ever.

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Leslie Leinwand & The Science of Getting Things Done

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Leslie Leinwand & The Science of Getting Things Done Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/16/2024 - 00:00

Lisa Marshall

Some might say the cards were stacked against Leslie Leinwand.

At age five, the precocious kindergartner was plucked from her Manhattan home and transplanted to the one-stoplight town of York, South Carolina, after the sudden death of her father, an internal medicine doctor. Her mother remarried a man who told young Leinwand repeatedly that, “girls didn’t need to go to college.” Then, when she was 13, tragedy took her mother and she was sent to live with extended family.

Leinwand persisted, landing at a small college in North Carolina where an astute professor noticed her interest in science and insisted she take a summer organic chemistry course at Cornell University.

“That’s when my somewhat sad story changed,” she recalls, now seated in her spacious office at the glistening, $210-million biotech facility she helped bring to life. “All because I had this fantastic professor.”

Today, Leinwand is a distinguished professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology and the chief scientific officer of the BioFrontiers Institute at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder. She has achieved what many scientists only dream about: turning a seed of scientific inquiry into a multibillion-dollar company that saves lives — more than once.

Leinwand stayed at Cornell and helped pay her way through by working as a fraternity house waitress. She later earned her PhD in genetics from Yale and served on the faculty at Albert Einstein College of Medicine for 15 years before landing in Boulder in 1995.

Throughout this time, one fundamental question drove her research: What genes and proteins are responsible for making the heart function properly, and what causes this complex machine to break down in some people?

“She is very special. When she discovers things in her lab, she doesn’t stop there,” said Nobel laureate and Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry Tom Cech, who has known Leinwand for three decades. “She works tirelessly, doing whatever it takes, to make something happen that will impact patients.”

Healing a big, sick heart

Much of Leinwand’s work has centered on hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), which she describes simply as a “big, sick heart.”

It is the most common genetic heart disease in the United States, impacting roughly one in 500 people, as well as the most common cause of sudden death among athletes — who often don’t know they have it and push their hearts too hard, with lethal results.

HCM first made headlines in 1990 when Hank Gathers, an all-American college basketball star, collapsed and died while on the court during a game at the age of 23. Since then, a long list has followed, including Reggie Lewis of the Boston Celtics, who died on a basketball court shortly after Gathers in 1993.

In patients with HCM, their hearts — the walls thickened by disease — squeeze too hard and don’t fully relax, which burns through energy, leaves them breathless, causes the heart to race and depletes their energy.

HCM gets worse over time — and, until recently, there was no medication to treat it.

Leinwand’s interest in the disease dates back to 1985, when she first began studying a protein called myosin, which converts chemical energy into mechanical energy to move muscles, including the heart. Early on, she suspected that glitches in this ubiquitous protein might contribute to heart troubles and that studying them could ultimately lead to new therapies.

“It was an idea before its time,” she recalls. “We didn’t have the technology back then that we did later.”

First, she and her students had to develop a way to manufacture myosin in the lab so they could study it. That alone took years.

In 1996, Leinwand and other ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ colleagues took what they had learned about myosin and founded Myogen, a startup that developed two novel drugs for treating hypertension, which sold to pharma giant Gilead Sciences for $2.6 billion in 2006.

Ultimately, Leinwand’s team determined that faulty myosin was a key culprit in HCM.

In 2012, she joined Harvard’s Christine and Jonathan Seidman, who study the genetic mechanisms of heart disease, and Stanford biochemist James Spudich, who studies how muscles contract, to create the biomedical company MyoKardia.

MyoKardia developed a drug that attaches to the faulty protein, effectively cranking down the heart’s overactive motor. The drug was tested in clinical trials and mavacamten (brand name Camzyos) was born.

Bristol Myers Squibb bought MyoKardia for $13 billion in 2020 and, in April of 2022, the Food and Drug Administration approved mavacamten as the first and only cardiac myosin inhibitor approved in the United States for treating HCM.

“We had hoped that the best outcome could be that the disease progression was slowed, but what cardiologists are telling us is that they are actually seeing a reversal in some patients,” says Leinwand.

Leinwand is not one to get emotional in public. But she can’t help but choke up a bit when asked how this makes her feel.

“It has been the most amazing thing to hear patients say things like, ‘I can now walk up a flight of steps again. I am no longer bedridden. I can get out of my house.’ It feels great.”

Paying it forward

Leinwand has no plans to retire anytime soon. The BioFrontiers Institute, which she and her colleagues dreamed up in the early 2000s, is now a thriving intellectual melting pot, bringing hundreds of physicists, engineers, biologists, chemists, geneticists and computer scientists from around the world together under one roof to improve human health.

Today, her Python Project, another way-outside-the-box idea she came up with in 2006, persists, enabling undergraduate researchers to study Burmese pythons as a means of better understanding what healthy versus unhealthy heart growth looks like.

Pythons can go 6–12 months without eating and then swallow animals as big as they are in one bite, prompting their heart to balloon 40 percent in just 48 hours. In the python’s case, this growth is healthy, much like a well-trained athlete’s heart that grows larger with conditioning.

By understanding how pythons can grow and reverse a larger healthy heart so quickly, Leinwand and her team hope to someday develop therapies that could help people strengthen or shrink their heart muscle, according to need.

Dedicated to her research, she was undeterred when told that the reptile breeder in Oklahoma City could not ship live pythons to ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ due to interstate shipping guidelines. Instead, every year, her students drive 20 hours roundtrip to buy them and bring them to her lab on campus.

Leinwand continues to mentor students and travel the country giving lectures on leadership, paying forward the gift she got from the professor in North Carolina who encouraged her pursuit of science. She prioritizes her own health too, carving out time to pedal 12 miles each night on her indoor recumbent bicycle while watching cooking shows to inspire the gourmet meals she prepares for friends.

When asked how she gets it all done (a question she hears a lot), she offers this singular piece of advice:

“Pick your battles, and don’t pick battles you cannot win,” says Leinwand. “I know how to get stuff done,” she adds with a modest shrug. “I’m happiest when I’m doing five things at once.”

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Illustration by Sol Cotti

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s Leslie Leinwand helped develop the first drug for an incurable heart disease, sold two companies for billions and founded a thriving biotech institute. She’s just getting started.

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The Mahaffy Cache

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

The Mahaffy Cache Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2024 - 00:00

Christie Sounart

In 2008, landscapers dug two feet into the ground of Patrick Mahaffy’s backyard, located near Chautauqua Park in Boulder. They unearthed 83 stone tools from a packed hole the size of a shoebox. The cache was about 13,000 years old.

The tools — now called the “Mahaffy Cache” — were most likely left by nomadic hunter-gatherers known as Clovis, who lived in North America toward the end of the last ice age. The most distant tools likely originated in the Uinta Mountains in northeast Utah and traveled with groups of people to Boulder, said anthropology professor Douglas Bamforth, who Mahaffy originally invited to inspect the cache. Others were made from stone found between the Uintas and Boulder.

“One of the things that we have not emphasized as much as other aspects of the cache is how distinct it is,” Bamforth said. “It is like many Clovis-age caches in that the stone the tools are made from is from far away, but the diversity of different kinds of tools and artifacts in it is very unusual.”

The cache is one of two Clovis collections to undergo a blood protein analysis on the tools, which determined that hunters used them to butcher Ice Age horses, camels, sheep and bears. The tools include knives, blades and flint scraps.

“My favorite is the large biface made from Tiger chert that looks like a double-bitted ax,” said Bamforth. “I have never, ever seen another artifact like that.”

See the Mahaffy Cache in the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Museum of Natural History.

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Photo by Glenn Asakawa

In 2008, landscapers dug into the ground of Patrick Mahaffy’s backyard in Boulder. They unearthed 83 stone tools that were about 13,000 years old.

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Campus News Briefs: Spring 2024

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Campus News Briefs: Spring 2024 Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2024 - 00:00

Consistent Yoga for Good Health

A ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder study found yoga to be very beneficial to those who practice it — when done regularly. The study, which examined both typical yoga classes and those with only stretching, found the benefits of better emotion regulation, self-control, distress tolerance and mindfulness lasted about a week after either type of class. “One yoga class is not enough to reap long-term health benefits,” ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Institute of Behavioral Science research associate Charleen Gust told The Denver Post. Researchers hope further study will determine how often people must practice to experience benefits.

Study Abroad Hits Record Number

This spring, the number of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ students studying abroad exceeded the record-setting 900 students studying abroad at the onset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. Nearly 1,200 students were enrolled to study abroad this spring, with Western Europe serving as the most popular destination. ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s study abroad program is ranked 15th-largest in the nation

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Economist Tackles English Mystery

From 1761 to 1834 the mortality rate of English people dropped from 28 to 25 per 1,000 people, a statistic that has confused historians due to the population influx around that time. “With people coming into cities to work, you would expect, given the level of sanitation they have, that the big killer is water,” ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder economics professor Fransica Antman told the BBC in December. Antman authored a study linking the change to the rise in tea consumption. In 1784, the tea tax went from 119% to 12.5%, boosting tea consumption. Boiling the water when making tea, Antman explained, killed off the bacteria that was prevalent in drinking water at the time, thus saving lives. In her study, Antman examined the quality of water sources for about 400 parishes in England and determined that the death rate declined even in those parishes with poor water quality due to the high prevalence of tea.

Heard Around Campus

“ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ naturally attracts really outstanding leaders.”

— Stefanie Johnson, director of the Center for Leadership, told the Daily Camera in January after Time magazine and Statista named ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder one of the top 100 best colleges for future leaders.

Digits: 2024 Total Solar Eclipse

4/8

Date of eclipse

11:28 a.m.

Time solar eclipse appears in Boulder

1,500

Children participating in Fiske’s eclipse outreach program

U.S. states will experience total solar eclipse

Fiske Planetarium films related to the total eclipse

7,500

Public and K-12 visitors watched the planetarium’s eclipse films from May 2023 to January 2024

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Photos and illustrations courtesy Pixabay

Solar eclipse, benefits of yoga, historical research on tea and more.

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Should Your Child Take Melatonin?

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Should Your Child Take Melatonin? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2024 - 00:00

Some young children, including preschoolers, routinely take melatonin as a supplement for sleep, with nearly one in five school-aged children and preteens also taking it regularly, according to ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder researchers. The hormone is produced naturally in a person’s pineal gland to signal sleep for the body, but chemically synthesized and animal-derived versions are also readily available in the United States.

This concerns ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder researchers, who conducted a survey of melatonin use published by JAMA Pediatrics in November 2023. They found that use among children has soared since 2017, when only about 1% of parents reported that their children used it. In their paper, the authors note a lack of safety and efficacy data surrounding the products, which are not fully regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

“We are not saying that melatonin is necessarily harmful to children. But much more research needs to be done before we can state with confidence that it is safe for kids to be taking long-term,” said lead author Lauren Hartstein, a postdoctoral fellow in the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Sleep and Development Lab at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder.

In a previous study, researchers at Cambridge Health Alliance analyzed 25 melatonin gummy products and found that 22 contained different amounts of melatonin than indicated on the label, or even contained other unlisted substances such as serotonin.

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ researchers caution that while melatonin can be used as a short-term option for sleep aid under the guidance of a pediatrician, other options may be a better line of treatment for continued use.

To learn more, visit ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Today.

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Illustration by Polly Noakes

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder study says long-term effects and safety of the supplement are unknown.

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Water Purification Through a Straw

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Water Purification Through a Straw Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2024 - 00:00

Allison Nitch

To help alleviate health issues caused by pathogens in water, a team of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder mechanical engineering students collaborated on a senior capstone project last spring to create PureSip, a prototype for a water purification system.

Housed inside a bottle lid, PureSip uses ultraviolet LED technology to purify water through a straw as the user drinks — killing 99.9% of germs and eliminating the need for single-use plastic bottles.

To support product adaptability, the bottle lid can be used with common reusable water bottle brands such as Nalgene and Hydro Flask.

The purification process begins when the spout of the bottle lid is flipped open and can continue purifying for a total of 40 minutes before the batteries need to be recharged. With the assumption a user drinks at a certain pace, the team calculated that amount of time to equal 30 liters of water. On average, this would equate to 60 disposable plastic water bottles.

The PureSip team members — Jack Figueirinhas (MechEngr’23), Jack Isenhart (MechEngr’23), Mackenzie Lamoureux (MechEngr’23), Ella McQuaid (MechEngr’23), Marie Resman (MechEngr’23) and Carlos Yosten (MechEngr’23) — made a point of using lithium-ion polymer batteries because they’re rechargeable, have a long battery life and are more compact than other battery options.

The PureSip team pitched their idea at the 2023 New Venture Challenge, a cross-campus program and competition that gives aspiring entrepreneurs a chance to win money to fund a startup. The product received third place in the climate-focused section.

Lamoureux, PureSip’s product manager, said last spring, “We hope that our product can help reduce plastic pollution, and more particularly help eliminate the need for single-use plastic bottles.”

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Photo courtesy College of Engineering and Applied Science

The student prototype, PureSip, protects digestive health and the environment.

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Can Cloud Seeding Stem the Water Crisis?

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Can Cloud Seeding Stem the Water Crisis? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2024 - 00:00

Christie Sounart

Katja Friedrich is a professor and associate chair in ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences department. She is known for her work in cloud seeding, a process used to generate precipitation from existing clouds. In 2017, she helped conduct the National Science Foundation-funded project SNOWIE (Seeded and Natural Orographic Wintertime Clouds: the Idaho Experiment), which was the first experiment to accurately measure the amount of snowfall caused by cloud seeding.

How do you best describe cloud seeding?

Cloud seeding has been around for almost 100 years as a way to get more rain or precipitation out of a cloud. It was first discovered in a lab at MIT in 1946 that something similar to ice’s crystalline structure, like silver iodide, could be put in supercooled liquid to freeze the drops and create ice. People then applied this method to real clouds to generate precipitation. When we seed wintertime orographic clouds, we target clouds that contain supercooled liquid water, which are tiny water droplets that are too light to fall to the ground. After we seed these clouds with silver iodide, the droplets start to freeze into ice particles. These ice particles continue to grow and collect other droplets and ice particles and eventually form snow that is heavy enough to fall to the ground.

Does it work?

A problem with cloud seeding has always been showing how much more precipitation it can generate. We know it works because it works in the lab. However, we need to get the seeding material to the area that contains high amounts of supercooled liquid. It’s difficult to know where those areas are in a cloud, because we don’t have good measurements of supercooled liquid, and it’s difficult to fly in those areas because of aircraft icing. When we seed clouds, we often have to rely on numerical models which have a certain level of uncertainty. Also, once we seeded the clouds, we don’t really know how much precipitation a cloud would have produced without seeding.

The other problem is that nature can be pretty efficient in producing precipitation, but not always. That’s why with our SNOWIE experiment in 2017 we wanted to gather enough information to run more accurate numerical models. Our idea was that because the models are now accurate enough to reproduce what’s going on in the cloud during cloud seeding, we could then run simulations with and without cloud seeding and see the precipitation produced for both. In SNOWIE, we were also able to show with our seeding line observations the entire chain of events from once we put the silver iodide into the cloud to how much snow we produced. No one had done that before.

The reason we are cloud seeding is because of water scarcity.

How much precipitation can one cloud-seeding event produce?

We showed that you can produce additional snowfall. Based on our study that included seeding during three days, the total amount of water generated by cloud seeding was about the equivalent of the volume of water needed to fill 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools in 20 minutes over an area of about 7,500 square kilometers.

What are some concerns you hear about cloud seeding?

The reason we are cloud seeding is because of water scarcity. It is becoming really important to show that we can produce some precipitation. Cloud seeding is not the holy grail if you think about how to generate water or mitigate droughts. But this is an important part because you can maybe produce additional water. I give this example of Lake Mead. Right now, the water levels are so low that hydropower can’t be run at full capacity. If we could cloud seed and raise the water levels just a little bit higher so we can still generate hydropower, this would have massive effects on large populations.

The downside is putting materials in the atmosphere. Other people say we’re manipulating the weather, which is true. The other argument I say is if you get into your car or are flying on a commercial airplane, you are also manipulating the weather. Every airplane that flies through a cloud of super cold liquid is doing cloud seeding because they’re putting particles in the cloud that can generate snowfall. So people need to be aware that we are manipulating the weather and the climate with everything we are doing.

What is one of the most extreme situations in which you’ve conducted research?

We are manipulating the weather and the climate with everything we are doing.

I have gone out for one hurricane, Hurricane Ike in 2008, when I had just started working at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ. This was one of the most amazing things that I’ve seen in respect to the weather. We were on these bridges and you saw the water coming in and everything was flooding around us, and we were in what felt like a carwash. We even deployed through the eyewall — for one hour it was totally quiet, and you could hear birds flying. Then came another five or six hours of this carwash feeling. The hurricane passed, and within half an hour you could see how the water trails out. And then I saw emergency boats coming in looking for people. … As for tornadoes, I have to say they look better on TV than in real life.

What else are you working on right now?

I’m looking at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s Front Range and other high plateau regions where thunderstorms produce large amounts of hail — so much that we call these hail-accumulating thunderstorms “snowplowable hail.” We built a warning system for the weather service, so they know which thunderstorms are producing a lot of hail that will be dumped on the ground. But also we are trying to understand why that happens and whether there is a way we can forecast it perhaps an hour ahead of time so we can coordinate resources like snow plows, which aren’t always readily available in the summertime.

What do you do outside of work?

When I’m not working, I like to ski. I like to mountain bike. I have two kids, so we are doing a lot of outdoorsy stuff. We like to camp. We like to travel. That’s what we do — things outside.

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Photos by Matt Tyrie

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder's Katja Friedrich is known for her work in cloud seeding, a process used to generate precipitation from existing clouds.

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Secrets from the Grave

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

Secrets from the Grave Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2024 - 00:00

Lisa Marshall

Centuries from now, if an archaeologist were to dig up Sharon DeWitte’s bleached and weathered bones, they’d find a 7-inch stainless steel rod and nine screws buried among them.

These remnants of her childhood bout with scoliosis would not be the only window into the life she led.

Her flaming red hair and the rich tapestry of arm tattoos would be long gone. But the carbon and nitrogen isotopes in her molars would hint at her mostly vegetarian diet. Her stout, calcium-rich foot bones would offer clues that she was a runner. And a bony bump on her right patella, or knee bone, would serve as a legacy of the bad fall she took on a trail one summer.

While imagining one’s remains may seem grisly, DeWitte has been doing it for as long as she can remember.

“Since I was a child I’ve been thinking about what happens to our bodies after we die and what stories people might make up about us based on what they find,” said DeWitte, seated cross-legged in her dark gray office, plaster casts of two human skulls and a femur perched on a shelf near her desk.

A ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder professor of anthropology and a pioneer in the niche field of bioarchaeology, she is now the one crafting those stories.

Through hours spent alone in museum basements, analyzing the fragile bones of those who died centuries ago in pandemics, she offers new insight into why some resist novel viruses and bacteria while others succumb to them. Her work also sheds light on how pathogens, like those during the Black Death, evolve and lend insight into the past lives of individuals, including women, children, the poor and racial minority groups.

“Skeletal evidence can provide us with information about people who aren’t necessarily represented in most historical documents,” said DeWitte, noting that those documents were often written by and about the wealthy and powerful. “I feel honored to be able to share something about people who were likely ignored while they were alive and are not represented in many surviving documents.”

Revisiting the Black Death

When you brush and floss your teeth, you’re actually looking at your own skeleton. ... They are an amazing repository of information about our lives.

In the spring of 2003, as tourists milled through the exhibits nearby, DeWitte pulled boxes containing complete human skeletons off the shelves in the Museum of London storage room. The museum’s famed Centre for Human Bioarchaeology is home to thousands of centuries-old skeletal remains, excavated from burial grounds around the city.

DeWitte was particularly interested in those from Black Death cemeteries, mass graves proactively set aside in London in the mid-14th century as the bubonic plague marched across the European continent.

“They knew it was coming, and they knew it was going to be terrible,” she said.

For months, she gingerly pulled the bones out of sealed plastic packages and placed them one by one onto a padded table to measure and inspect them.

As she explained, leg bone length can hint at someone’s stature and nutrition status, while abnormal bumps indicate injuries or infection. Porous lesions around the eye sockets can be remnants of anemia. Horizontal stripes on the surface of teeth, known as linear enamel hypoplasia, can indicate episodes of disease or malnutrition, and thick plaque can provide hints about a person’s hygiene or socioeconomic status.

“When you brush and floss your teeth, you’re actually looking at your own skeleton,” she said. “They are an amazing repository of information about our lives.”

The humanity of it all was not lost on her. She was brought to tears when she opened a bag containing the tiny bones of an infant, or another in which mother and child appeared to have died together.

“I wondered, ‘What were their last moments like together?’ Every day I would see something so sad,” she recalled.

She stressed that she is careful not to engage in the study of skeletal remains that are held against the wishes of descendant populations.

“I want to be sure the work I am doing never causes harm to living people.”

The Marginalized Hit First and Worst

DeWitte has studied hundreds of skeletons, publishing numerous papers that paint a sometimes surprising picture of the world’s most deadly pandemic. The Black Death did not, according to her research, kill indiscriminately. As with the COVID-19 pandemic, it hit marginalized communities, including the poor and the frail, harder.

“Premodern structural racism,” as the authors call it, may have also played a role in determining who lived or died, suggests a new paper DeWitte and colleagues published in the journal Bioarchaeology International.

For the study, DeWitte and collaborators at the Museum of London and Brandeis University examined the bones of individuals buried in the East Smithfield emergency plague cemetery in the mid-1300s and those in two other London cemeteries that were not plague burial grounds. Using anthropological tools to estimate the population affinity of the deceased, they found significantly higher proportions of people of estimated African affinity in East Smithfield. Through further analysis, they concluded that Black women — who were often subject to misogyny and anti-Blackness and kept as servants in London at the time — were significantly more likely to die of the Black Death than people of white European descent.

“This research shows that there is a deep history of social marginalization shaping health and vulnerability to disease in human populations,” said DeWitte.

Lessons from the Past

In other work, DeWitte collaborated with scientists to extract DNA from the teeth of Black Death victims. They found that the genome of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that killed as many as 50 million people, is not all that different from that of bubonic plague varieties circulating today.

What made it so deadly?

More research is underway to help answer that question, but one possibility, DeWitte said, may have been climate change.

The 14th century marked the end of what some refer to as the Medieval Warm Period, a 400-year span in which relatively warm conditions were the norm and, across the Northern Hemisphere, people were able to broaden and diversify crops.

“As this warm period started to end, population growth outpaced agricultural production, and you had a growing share of resources and money concentrated into the hands of very few people,” she said. “It was a lot like what you see today — climate change increasing social inequality, and then a new disease gets introduced.”

A Brighter Future

Arizona State University anthropologist Jane Buikstra, who coined the term and founded the field of bioarchaeology, said DeWitte’s work resonates in the era of COVID-19.

“Her work speaks to the issue of vulnerability and the fact that people who are disadvantaged, often through no fault of their own, are at special risk for these emerging diseases.”

DeWitte joined ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s Institute for Behavioral Science in 2023 and has plans to expand her work to Northern China, where she will soon embark on a study at a 5,000-year-old site of “catastrophic mortality” — likely a plague.

Despite the seemingly dark nature of her work, she exudes warmth and optimism as she talks about its potential for good.

By identifying the structural inequalities that made certain groups more vulnerable to disease and death in past pandemics, she hopes her work can inspire modern society to tear down those inequalities.

Hopefully, before the next pandemic hits.

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Photo courtesy Sharon DeWitte
Illustration by Paul Blow

By studying human skeletal remains, bioarchaeologist Sharon DeWitte is opening a new window into past pandemics and giving voice to the voiceless.

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The Buzzworthy Bee Research of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s Dr. Sammy

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:00:00 +0000

The Buzzworthy Bee Research of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s Dr. Sammy Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/04/2024 - 00:00

Erika Hanes

Before Samuel Ramsey became the world’s foremost expert on bees — and an assistant professor of ecology, entomology and evolutionary biology at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder — he was just another kid afraid of bugs. But one pivotal trip to the biology section of a local library changed Ramsey’s life forever.

“I was 7,” said Ramsey, known by most as “Dr. Sammy.” “My parents handed me a book on bugs and said, ‘People fear what they don’t understand.’ That was it.”

In opening the book, Ramsey opened a portal to another world, sparking a lifelong passion for all things creepy-crawly. Within the field of entomology, Ramsey quickly narrowed his research to bees, inspired by the many parallels between human and bee behavior.

“Take dancing, for instance,” Ramsey said. “Bees use what’s called a waggle dance to communicate. Every intricate movement and precise gesture provides vital information to the rest of the hive, such as locations for rich sources of nectar or where to build their next hive.”

Ramsey’s contributions to the study of bees have been substantial. His research encompasses various aspects of bee behavior, ecology and evolutionary biology.

One of his greatest research endeavors explores the “bee pandemic” — the mass decline of bee populations around the world — and its potential impact on our daily lives. Beyond the immediate threat to basic food crops, his research underscores the interconnectedness of the global food supply chain and the urgent need for bee conservation.

“The average person isn’t going to know there’s a problem until they see the impact on their wallets and tables,” Ramsey said. “The decline in bee populations impacts coffee, fruit, dairy and so much more. What happens when only the wealthy can afford a latte or limes? What happens when we can only buy certain fruits, nuts or vegetables seasonally? These are very real possibilities if we don’t act soon.”

As a professor, Ramsey has never forgotten his childhood lesson that fear often stems from a lack of understanding, which is why he emphasizes science communication in his classroom. Effective science communication, he argues, is not only vital for teaching but also critical for building public trust.

“If nobody can understand you, it doesn’t matter what your message is,” he said. “Unfortunately, we saw this concept play out during the pandemic — scientists couldn’t connect with the general public, even when the message was about life and death.”

Ramsey’s journey from a child afraid of bugs to an expert researcher and teacher of entomology exemplifies how knowledge can eliminate fear, and transform it into action. In and out of the classroom, Ramsey advocates for policy changes and offers practical steps that anyone can take to contribute to bee welfare.

“Refrain from using pesticides on your lawns,” he said. “Rewild your lawn by planting a garden, even a small one. Vote for representatives who will fund scientific research. You can even rehouse bees by drilling holes in a chunk of wood and placing it near plants.

“Little things can make a big difference.”

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Photo by John T. Consoli/University of Maryland

Assistant professor Samuel Ramsey's research includes bee behavior, ecology and evolutionary biology.

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Spring 2024

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More than a Century of Mountain Research

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 07:00:00 +0000

More than a Century of Mountain Research Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/06/2023 - 00:00

Christie Sounart

A Few Courses:

A Few Courses:

Art and Environment
Forest and Fire Ecology
Field Ornithology
Field Methods in Vegetation Ecology

Research Examples:

Microplastics in Mountain Ecosystems of the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Front Range
Temporal dynamics of plant-pollinator networks
Scaling the consequences of extended summers to arthropod communities at Niwot Ridge
Causes for the hybridization of black-capped and mountain chickadees in areas disturbed by humans
Spectroscopic measurements of chemical composition of organic aerosol particles collected at urban and rural locations

Just over eight miles north of Nederland, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ, and nestled off the Peak to Peak Scenic Byway lies a serene area dotted with tiny cabins, peaceful walking trails and ample forest land. And while the setting is very different from the bustle of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s main campus, the amount of groundbreaking work happening there is the same.

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s Mountain Research Station, located 25 miles from campus, is an interdisciplinary facility associated with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, which serves students and scientists interested in mountain-based study. The scope of projects is wide — ranging from arthropods to microplastics to weather — and as many as 80 people can be studying at the station at once.

“The Mountain Research Station is a place where,for over 100 years, scientists, students and the public have come together to advance our understanding and appreciation for mountains, which are inspiring, formidable and increasingly at risk,” said Scott Taylor, director of the station.

Key Dates:

1920

Mountain Research Station established in its current location

1945

Five professors taught 80 students.

1953

Former director John Marr founded the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), now the oldest institute at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder.

1980

National Science Foundation starts its Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network, which funded the Niwot Ridge LTER.

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ owns 190 acres with an adjacent 1,775 acres of U.S. Forest Service designated research land

Located at 9,500 feet

Other Facts:

short interpretive trails open to the public

25–45

students conducting research, depending on the summer

110

largest amount fed in the dining hall at once

seasonal cabins

students in courses over a year

labs on the property

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Photos courtesy Mountain Research Station and William Bowman (mountains)

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s Mountain Research Station, located 25 miles from campus, serves students and scientists interested in mountain-based study.

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Fall 2023

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