Zachary Schmoll, senior business administration major with a  concentration in accounting and statistics

Project title: The Impact of Compensation for NCAA Student Athletes on NBA Draft Decisions

Advisers: Barbara Arel and Michael Tomas III

Why this topic? What was your motivation? I chose this topic because I have always been a sports fan. I have been around basketball most of my life, and I particularly love the NCAA. When I noticed that Professor Arel and Professor Tomas had written a paper on NBA draft decisions, I knew that I wanted to expand on that. After a discussion with Professor Arel, we decided that this would be an interesting topic to pursue.

What was your key discovery? Essentially, the most important discovery I made was that if we assume that the players will make the economically rational decision, the NCAA proposal of paying college athletes $2,000 will have virtually no effect on this decision. The players who were going to enter the NBA before will still enter.

Any surprises along the way?  My results are not necessarily surprising because it does make sense that with million-dollar contracts on the table, a few thousand dollars will not make much of a difference. However, I think that the actual moment I ran my final model and discovered these results was the best moment. Even though it was my original hypothesis, it felt good to be able to empirically prove something that nobody has ever taken the time to do before.

Why does this research matter? I believe that this research matters because the NCAA is seriously considering policies regarding compensation right now. I think that people will be wondering what is the best way to keep these athletes in college, and this type of research could provide a new perspective on this problem.

What's next for the project? I think that this project has plenty of potential for future work. I am planning on taking this particular paper and ideally getting it published, but there's plenty of work, particularly psychological, that could be done on this topic in the future. For example, even though $2000 doesn't make any measurable difference in the number of players entering the NBA according to this model, is there any potential way that players will feel more valued by making even an insignificant amount of money and perhaps be more willing to remain in school? The psychological effect of money is certainly important in reality, and I think that would be a great extension of this research.

Sophia Howat, senior studio art major

Project title:
 Memory and Photographs

Adviser:
 William McDowell

Why this topic? I started taking these photographs based on this tension between trust in our memories and evidence outside of that. I found that using photography makes it more visual and concrete. When you take a picture you’re completely constructing a biased view on things despite this strong association we have of photographs as evidence -- you’re editing, you’re sequencing, you’re doing all these things that are contrary to fact. I think that aspect of photography, paired with that aspect of our memories that is potentially false or narrated, is what’s interesting.

What was your motivation?
 I did a project last spring that involved memories and physically manipulating printed photographs to make sculptural objects. That was a starting point. Broadly this interest in memory and reflecting about things I’m sure has to do with finishing college, living in places that are temporary, figuring out what’s next. I think that plays into why I’m photographing home spaces, trying to collect memories and create a narrative. I’m totally editing it. Maybe I’m not moving objects, maybe I am just documenting things around me, but I am choosing what to photograph, editing the sequence as a finished project, editing how the light reads on the paper. In one sense they’re documents of my life -- they’re what I want to see of the space around me. That’s comforting. Maybe it’s the search for something comfortable in this big area of transition.

What was your key discovery? 
I think that no matter how hard I attempt to photograph a particular subject or theme it’s that the photographs are going to speak, that they have wisdom over the photographer sometimes.

Any surprises along the way? In terms of logistics -- issues in the dark room or with film, figuring out this medium that I’m not incredibly comfortable with. I usually scan in my film because I work with color. So the dark room was a new area for me.

Worst moment/best moment? 
Worst -- repeated instances of film not coming out, being black or just not working. There’s this nostalgia with our film -- the feeling that the picture would have been great but it didn’t come through. Those are bummer moments. Best -- getting over the stress of what I’m supposed to be showing with my photographs or what I’m supposed to be and feeling excited about the project, feeling creative and being present with it.

What are the broader implications of the project? Through this project I’ve found other photographers who I’m interested in, I’ve found other visual interests in photography and subject matter and I have this feeling that it’s relevant. It’s a conversation with people. It’s widened my eyes on photography and art theory.

Why does this research matter?
 I think because it makes people stop and look. There’s a description but really it’s this viewer who will engage -- or not engage -- with the photographs. It asks people to stop and be present and think about this physical process (in a darkroom with silver gelatin prints) with this kind of airy feeling behind it. And maybe it’s a comment or question for people to reconsider the photographs they’re taking and to understand what kind of history they are building with their visual archived memories.

What's next for the project?
 Eventually I’m working toward more prints that will become a book.

Sebastian Downs, senior environmental engineering major

Project title: Bridge Scour Monitoring

Advisers: Donna Rizzo, Mandar Dewoolkar

What is your topic? “Scour” is the erosion of streambed sediment; it happens around obstructions in a river because the water is constricted there, creates vortices, and picks up the sediment. You’re left with a hole in the sediment that a bridge is built on. During floods, this destabilizes bridges and it’s the cause of sixty percent of bridge failures spanning waterways.

There are several existing scouring monitoring systems for bridges, but they all have severe limitations. Some are cost prohibitive -- somewhere in the order of $10,000 for a single sensor. Some less expensive sensors are only good for a single use. Physical probing is cheapest, but it doesn’t give you real-time data. Sonar and fathometers are pretty good but they are not capable of getting data in turbid conditions -- which is what you often have in a flood -- the most critical time to measure. So we came up with something that is more robust and cost-effective.

What did you create? We built a scour monitoring sensor -- a buried rod -- with a goal of being so low-cost that a transportation agency or bridge engineer would be able to install a series of them in an array across an area and interpolate that data in order to get a sense of what the hole looks like.

It works with vibration switches and resistors. The sensor gets buried in the sediment next to the bridge pier. All of the switches are still when they’re trapped by the sediment, but then, as the scour erodes the sediment around them, they become exposed to the flow of the water and start to vibrate. From that vibration, the switch is opened, forcing current through the resistor and -- from a wireless transmitter that goes back to a data logger -- we’re able to measure the presence of the current and can identify how many of the switches are exposed to the water.

This allow us to see how far the scour has reached down each rod and, overall, what the hole looks like. Hopefully, once we have the design finalized, it will be less than $100 per rod. The prototype we built has four switches, but we could put in as many as was deemed necessary based on the size of the river and bridge.

What was your key discovery? Figuring out that vibration switches would do the job. And, also that these same switches will detect deposition after a flood event -- because they stop vibrating.

Why does this research matter? A failure of a bridge can take place in a matter of hours. This could help with better bridge design, better preemptive remediation -- not waiting until it is at risk of failure before identifying problems.

Also, the scour after a storm event appears to be less than it is during the actual max scour point because there is deposition from all the suspended solids in the water. So if you wait until after a storm to go out and measure, you might not be measuring the full extent of the structural damage.

What's next for the project? This research is going to continue after I graduate. Ian Anderson, a graduate student, is going to do some scour monitoring around bridges in the area, and if our new system works out, then he’ll be able to construct more and test them in the field by the end of next year.

Stephanie Parente, senior social work major

Project title: Examining the Effectiveness of Services Provided to War Veterans as They Transition Back to Civilian Life

Adviser: Holly-Lynn Busier

Why this topic? What was your motivation? One of my classmates, Brent Reader, is an Iraq/Afghanistan War veteran and sparked my interest in this topic. Hearing his stories and listening to him talk about how difficult his reintegration experience was inspired me to do more research on this topic.

What was your key discovery? It is important to understand the prevalence and progress of mental health issues among returning war veterans. In order to better serve those who have served our country, the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs must take action. There must be an increase in trained mental health professionals working with war veterans in order to accommodate the escalating number of veteran intakes and claims. Improvements must also be made in regards to the mental health screenings and evaluations. Since it can take a significant amount of time for psychological injuries to manifest, veterans should be screened upon their return and continuously rescreened. Veterans must also be encouraged to seek care and obtain treatment. This can be difficult for many veterans due to the stigma attached to mental health issues. Our society must educate its citizens in order to support our veterans.

Best moment? The best moment was reading the feedback from my surveys that I had distributed to veterans in Vermont.

What are the broader implications of the project? Why does this research matter? Currently, there are over 20 million veterans in the US, which makes up seven percent of the entire population. This project emphasizes the need for post-war care improvements in order to better serve the veteran population.

What's next for the project? My goal is to one day work with the veteran population and hopefully have the opportunity to incorporate my research and my knowledge into my future work with veterans.

Jaime Sheahan, master’s candidate in dietetics

Project title: Frialator Annihilator

Adviser: Amy Nickerson

What was your motivation? I had been working at Rutland Regional Medical Center and found it slightly hypocritical when I'd see a cardiologist go through the line at the food court and grab a basket of fries. I'm thinking, “He was just educating a patient about how they need to change their lifestyle.” When you're in a hospital, you think about nurses and doctors as this representative of health, and when they're not practicing what they preach, it's difficult to watch.

I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if we overhauled the food environment (by getting rid of fried foods for three weeks) and see how those nurses and doctors and everyone else in the hospital would react.

What did you discover? It was kind of split 50/50. A lot of people reacted strongly and felt like we shouldn't be telling them what to eat. It's very similar to what we've seen in New York with the soda ban, whether it's the government coming in or hospital administration dictating to people what options are available to them, it's this nanny state mentality, where people respond very negatively.

But on the flip side, the other half of the people were very positive, saying we need to set a positive example, not just for the hospital and visitors, but for the community at large. If you really want fried food, there's a McDonald's down the street, and you can drive there. But we should be looking at more nutritious foods, more sustainable options sourced locally. It wasn't just that they wanted fried foods gone, it was that they wanted to make positive changes.

The thing I learned the most is that the elimination of certain foods can be more readily accepted if you bring in more positive changes.

Worst moment? Some people were very irate, and I was glad I wasn't present in Rutland at the time fried foods were removed. Some very, very strong reactions. I know people like certain foods, but I think it can be easy to forget how emotional it is.

Why does this research matter? Thirty-six percent of U.S. adults are obese. Thirty-three percent are overweight. I think that’s a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Previously, we were looking at it more on an individual level: looking at obesity as a problem with people being lazy or not having self control. Now we're recognizing we have this toxic food environment that needs to be addressed. Even though a hospital setting is a small part of that, it's an example of health and is a place that can send the right message to a community.

What’s next for the project? The hospital hasn’t made the permanent change, but I think it's a step in the right direction to open up that conversation. One thing that did come out of it is a yogurt bar in the morning, which people love. So I'm hoping those types of changes can stick, and they can slowly ease toward a more healthy environment.

Born out of concern for the children under her care and the picture books she was reading them, Franz decided to write her senior thesis on the subject with one primary question in mind: “How do children’s picture books potentially deter or reinforce materialistic values and consumer culture?” She revealed her findings – among the first to focus on the role of children’s literature in shaping material and consumer values – in her 196-page Honors College senior thesis, “Cultivating Little Consumers: How Picture Books Influence Materialism in Children.”

“I read three or four books a night as a babysitter and started noticing how much greed there was in children’s books and became deeply concerned,” says Franz, who is double-minoring in studio arts and green building and community design. “I realized how damaging consumerism is to the environment and tied that to my love of children. This study was an attempt to reconcile the two.”

Franz, who based her results on a content analysis of 30 picture books written between 1998 and 2012 from a list of Caldecott Medal Winners, New York Times bestsellers and librarian recommended books, found that picture books reflect, reinforce, and deter consumerism simultaneously with environmental messages serving as the most frequent way to counter consumerism. In the study, a number of picture books featured excessive amounts of toys, sending pro-consumer messages to children ages zero to six while others contained more outdoor-related themes that Franz says serve as a tool for countering consumerism.

Franz will be among more than 300 students presenting their research at the 2013 Student Research Conference on Tuesday, April 23 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Davis Center.

“The results of this study reveal that picture books have a significant potential to act as both an avenue for becoming consumers and a tool for countering consumerism” says Franz, who has a professional certificate in sustainable business practices from UVM. “In order to help children to become positive, connected, responsible individuals, we must improve the quality and consciousness of the media and their ability to respond to it. Picture books, whose tradition is to inspire imagination and offer refuge, are a fantastic place to start. I know I’ll never read a book the same way again.”   

Coding consumerism

Franz, who cited a study showing a decrease in the number of interactions with the outdoors is resulting in “nature deficit disorder," created a comprehensive and unique coding system that identified 50 indicators across 10 categories representing different ways in which picture books can promote and discourage the consumer socialization of readers. Text and illustrations were coded to measure the occurrence of indicators of consumerism or counter-consumerism across five themes: individual material orientation, interpersonal material orientation, social norms, commercialization and environmental messages.

Some of the 37 pro-consumer indicators included “desire for more stuff,” “material goods as a vehicle for approval/gaining friends” and “focus on objects instead of peers in social setting.” Among the 13 counter-consumer indicators were “self-acceptance,” “sharing,” and “positive orientation to the outdoors/inspiration.” Overall, the average book contained 5.34 indicators of pro and counter-consumerism. The most frequent number of instances among counter-consumer indicators were “outdoor engagement” and “creative/imaginative engagement,” while “standard of living: above average” and “engagement with toys/games” topped the pro-consumer indicators.

The Pete the Cat books, for example, included pro-consumer indicators by showing Pete with a nice car, an expensive guitar, surfboards, and a significant number of toys located in an above-average home. Conversely, “nature immersion” ranked high due to the fact that “outdoor engagement” was found in 76.7 percent of the sample (23 of 30 books), with characters playing on playgrounds, skateboarding, biking or playing in the sand at the beach. Many characters go on walks, while others describe a “more emotional engagement in their natural surroundings” like feeling the wind, smelling the air or imagining riding a bird across the landscape in The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.

“Rachel took on an ambitious capstone research project that required great persistence in the design phase,” says Stephanie Kaza, Franz’s adviser and director of the Environmental Program. “Her thoughtful and meticulous analysis reveals important findings on the specific nature of consumer messages in children’s literature. Perhaps her greatest triumph was sticking it out through the many challenging phases of such a major piece of independent work.”

Putting research into practice

Franz is hoping scholars, parents, caregivers and educators use the information to offset other consumer drivers like television, video games and social media. She also hopes her research, which identifies leverage points for shaping consumerism through more careful selection of children’s picture books, is expanded to include classic books to examine how these values have changed over time.

“Most books, like our lives, have a combination of both messages,” says Franz, who has worked as an executive assistant at a design firm during college. “Parents are the number one source for countering consumerism. I’m hoping this study encourages people to develop critical thinking skills around consumerism and to select books more carefully.”

In October of that year, Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Four decades later, new research shows that the law is working.

Not only has the act “successfully prevented the extirpation of any marine mammal population in the United States in the forty years since it was enacted,” write UVM conservation biologist Joe Roman and his colleagues in a new report, but also, “the current status of many marine mammal populations is considerably better than in 1972.”

Their study, published online on March 22, in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, shows that population trends for most stocks of these animals remain unknown, but of those stocks that are known, many are increasing.

“At a very fundamental level, the MMPA has accomplished what its framers set out to do,” says co-author Andrew Read, professor of marine biology at Duke University, “to protect individual marine mammals from harm as a result of human activities.”

Restored roles

Some marine mammals, like endangered right whales, continue to be in deep trouble, but other populations “particularly seals and sea lions, have recovered to or near their carrying capacity,” the scientists write.

“We have seen remarkable recoveries of some populations of marine mammals, such as gray seals in New England and sea lions and elephant seals along the Pacific coast,” says Read.

“U.S. waters are pretty compromised with lots of ship traffic and ship strikes, big fisheries, pollution, boat noise, “ Joe Roman says. “And yet it’s safer to be a marine mammal in U.S. waters than elsewhere,” he says, due to the Act’s strong protections against commercial and accidental killing — what the law calls “take” — and its aim to maintain sustainable populations of mammals and their ecological roles in oceans.

“It’s important to evaluate such broad legislation,” says Caitlin Campbell ’12, an Environmental Sciences graduate from UVM’s College of Arts & Sciences, and a co-author on the paper.

“A lot of people think that the hard part was getting it passed through Congress, but in reality you have to make sure that big protective measures like this actually are effective,” she says. “This paper shows that this act is doing its job.”

The research team — Campbell; Joe Roman in UVM’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics; Irit Altman from Boston University; Meagan Dunphy-Daly and Andrew Read from Duke University; and Michael Jasny from the Natural Resources Defense Council — gathered hundreds of data sets from around the world, including from NOAA, Canadian agencies, and the IUCN. Their goal was to get an accurate picture of population levels and trends of more than two hundred stocks of marine mammals from the Pantropical Spotted Dolphin to the West Indian Manatee.

The team concluded that for many of these animals there simply aren't enough data. For seventy-one percent of the stocks they identified, they couldn’t say which way the population was heading, up or down. “There isn’t enough research,” Roman says.

But for the ones they could evaluate, they found that nineteen percent of stocks were increasing, while five percent were stable and only five percent were declining.

Another fundamental conclusion of this research: “stopping harvesting these mammals, stop fisheries bycatch, stop killing them — and many populations bounce back,” says Roman. Marine mammals are long-lived “so it’s going to take decades, maybe longer for populations to rebound,” he says, “but it seems the trends are increasing.”

Beyond whale oil

In 1934, trends were definitely not increasing for right whales, when an international treaty banned hunting these nearly extinguished creatures. But other protections lagged, and by the 1960s many whales and other marine mammals — including some dolphins and seals — faced plummeting populations and the risk of extinction.

Yet in the early 1970s, the U.S. Department of Defense resisted legislation to protect whales and other marine mammals: they relied on sperm whale oil for use as a lubricant in submarines and other military engines, Roman’s team writes.

In one curious part of the complex negotiations at the White House, Lee Talbot, a canny scientist working for Richard Nixon, produced an affidavit from the DuPont Corporation stating that they could produce an artificial lubricant that could do the same job as the whale oil. This helped make the Pentagon more receptive toward whale-protecting legislation. In October 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act passed. This victory was also a key step toward the passage of the more forceful (though less ecologically oriented) Endangered Species Act that passed the next year.

Under these two laws, “countless tens of thousands of individual whales, seals, and manatees have been protected from harm since 1972,” the scientists write, “exactly as intended by those who crafted the legislation.”

In 1994, major amendments to the MMPA established a new framework for dealing with interactions between marine mammals and commercial fisheries, “which remains perhaps the most important conservation issue facing these iconic animals," says Andrew Read.

This new framework, relies on “a negotiated rule-making process,” Read says, looking for solutions to the incidental death of mammals in commercial fisheries. One of the strengths of the new process is that it “requires the direct involvement of fishermen, conservationists and scientists in the management process,” Read says.

Still, some deeply depleted species, like right whales, may never recover, and additional threats beyond direct killing remain. The Marine Mammal Protection Act has generally been ineffective in dealing with problems like increasing underwater noise from naval operations and other ships, new diseases, and depleted prey species in fraying food webs. “Existing conservation measures have not protected large whales from fisheries interactions or ship strikes in the northwestern Atlantic,” the team writes.

And this points to a new generation of challenges such as moving shipping lanes in whale feeding territory, slowing speed boats in manatee habitat, changing lobster fishing technologies and other fishing gear modifications, and continuing to improve ecosystem-based fisheries management. “That’s going to be hard and require real political will,” Joe Roman says.

The answers that lie within the pages of Transforming Learning Environments: Strategies to Shape the Next Generation (Emerald Books, 2013) focus on online learning, technology, leadership, curriculum innovation, and English Language Learners to show the challenges facing traditional educational practices and the ways learning environments are responding to the new reality of globalization. Miller, who wrote the introduction and served as editor of the book, sought the opinions of 18 experts, including 10 from UVM, to contribute chapters that she placed into four sections: Leadership Transformations; Thoughtful Cultural Models in a Globally Dynamic World; Implementing Change in the Way We “Think” and “Do” Education; and Technology as an Agent for Transformation.

“The chapters are a spectrum of what is going on in the world of higher education at this critical juncture in our history," Miller says. "If those in higher education are not amenable to change, as imposed by the outside world, they could be rendering themselves obsolete. As John Dewey states, ‘knowledge and habits have to be modified to meet the new conditions,’ so do the authors of the chapters in this volume.”

Preparing the next generation of tech-based teachers

Many of the UVM contributors, including associate professor Cynthia Reyes who wrote a chapter addressing cultural competency using the digital narratives of middle school English language learners, were already teaching the contents of their chapters to UVM students. Reyes writes about a model that utilizes digital narratives to develop cultural competency in teacher education programs and other institutions that struggle with the meaning of the concept. She uses a digital story project she helped conduct at a local middle school as an example, showing the positive effects of students narrating their own stories based on the core values that guide their daily lives. She also challenges readers to think about innovative ways to integrate more student voices and how storytelling can inform pedagogy.

“I care deeply about the notion of safe spaces in the school community for all students, and because of my own experiences as a child of immigrant parents I am also drawn to the school experiences of young adolescent students who have refugee or immigrant narratives and who are English language learners,” says Reyes, who utilizes iMovie technology to create the digital stories, which she says improves literacy, technology, writing, speaking and listening skills. “I wonder about places in the school where they can explore their multicultural and multilingual identities and to do so on their terms. Digital storytelling, as far as I've read in the literature and what I've experienced in collaborative research with other teachers and students, demonstrates that it can be a transformational tool for English language learners as they write about and share their narratives with their peers and adults. The digital tool can also be reaffirming for students who want to become skilled writers of English. It gives them access, in a sense, to explore the English language and that can be a powerful process for teachers to observe.”

Also under the technology section is a chapter by Laurie Gelles, director of technology and communication in CESS, titled “From Pong to PS3: How Video Games Enhance Our Capacity to Learn and Build Community.” Gelles, who recently received her doctorate from UVM’s Educational Leadership and Policy Studies program, focuses on ways technology can help build capacity for learning, in both traditional and non-traditional settings. She teaches about this concept in an undergraduate course titled “Video Games and Learning Theory” that focuses on conducting new research related to multisensory learning environments.

“There has been a huge push to integrate technology into learning environments in order to replicate the way that people most regularly experience and interact with information,” Gelles says. “The real trick is figuring out why we are so drawn to interactive technologies in the first place.”

Her most recent study made use of the video game Guitar Hero II in an attempt to measure the effects of multisensory learning. Following Dewey’s ideas around rich learning environments and making meaning through experience, Gelles explains that technology allows for the simulation of real-life experience and provides people with ways to mimic sensory environments that would otherwise be unavailable.

“Video game designers have figured out how to create sensory-rich environments that don’t overload our cognitive abilities,” she says. “Cognitive load theory talks about the importance of balancing the way that we process information. Taxing one area with too much information can slow the learning process. Our next steps should be applying these types of gamification strategies to our curriculum design and learning environments. By doing this, we can enhance both our capacity to reach our students, and perhaps their capacity to learn.”

Creating global citizens

DeMethra LaSha Bradley, assistant dean for student administration and licensing officer in CESS, offers a chapter under the cultural models section written from the perspective of a student affairs administrator, titled “Incorporating Concepts of Global Citizenry into Student-Centered Academic Advising.” She unpacks the concept of the global citizen with this definition: “Global citizenry consists of awareness, responsibility, the ability to respect and value the difference in others, a willingness to act even when in the minority opinion, and continuous learning to understand the world and all its functions.”

Bradley, who received her Ed.D from UVM in 2009, includes narrative examples from her own professional experiences in higher education and provides concrete ways to incorporate concepts of global citizenry into academic advising. These include knowing the delivery method of academic advising at your institution; listening to your students’ dreams and goals and responding with concepts of global citizenry in mind; using social networking to spread concepts of global citizenry; and casting a wide net to catch any possible cross-campus colleague collaborators.  

“I try to create connections for students beyond the classroom and encourage them in their global citizenry,” says Bradley, “Academic advising is just one of the many facets that institutions can use to meet their global goals. This office is a hub for instilling values to make a difference, and we can’t do that in an increasingly globalized world if we don’t have students who travel the world and understand what being a global citizen really means.”  

Other UVM contributors

Other contributions from UVM faculty and staff include chapters by Penny Bishop, professor of middle level education and director of the Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education, and John Downes, associate director of the Tarrant Institute and doctoral research fellow, titled “Responsive Technologies for Young Adolescents;" Robert Nash, professor in CESS, and Vanessa Eugenio, office/program support, employer relations, and technology specialist, titled “Teaching About Religious and Spiritual Difference in a Global Society;” Maureen Neuwmann, associate professor in CESS, titled “Developing Teacher Leaders to Transform Classrooms, Schools, and Communities;” and Holly Buckland Parker, senior academic services professional in the Center for Teaching and Learning, titled “Learning Starts with Design: Using Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in Higher Education Course Redesign.”

After a previous transfusion, it turns out, Mrs. Vel had developed a potent antibody against some unknown molecule found on the red blood cells of most people in the world—but not found on her own red blood cells.

But what was this molecule? Nobody could find it. A blood mystery began, and, from her case, a new blood type, “Vel-negative,” was described in 1952.

Soon it was discovered that Mrs. Vel was not alone. Though rare, it is estimated now that over 200,000 people in Europe and a similar number in North America are Vel-negative, about 1 in 2,500.

For these people, successive blood transfusions could easily turn to kidney failure and death. So, for sixty years, doctors and researchers have hunted—unsuccessfully—for the underlying cause of this blood type.

But now a team of scientists from the University of Vermont and France has found the missing molecule—a tiny protein called SMIM1—and the mystery is solved.

Reporting in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, UVM’s Bryan Ballif, Lionel Arnaud of the French National Institute of Blood Transfusion, and their colleagues explain how they uncovered the biochemical and genetic basis of Vel-negative blood.

“Our findings promise to provide immediate assistance to health-care professionals should they encounter this rare but vexing blood type,” says Ballif.

The pre-publication results were presented online, March 18, 2013, and the finalized report will be published, as an open-access article, in the next edition of the journal.

(Last year, Ballif and Arnaud identified the proteins responsible for two other rare blood types, Junior and Langeris, moving the global count of understood blood types or systems from 30 to 32. Now, with Vel, the number rises to 33.)

New DNA tests

Before this new research, the only way to determine if someone was Vel-negative or positive was with tests using antibodies made by the few people previously identified as Vel-negative following their rejection of transfused blood. Not surprisingly, these antibodies are vanishingly rare and, therefore, many hospitals and blood banks don’t have the capacity to test for this blood type.

“Vel– blood is one of the most difficult blood types to supply in many countries,” the scientists write, "This is partly due to the rarity of the Vel− blood type, but also to the lack of systematic screening for the Vel−type in blood donors.”

In response, the UVM and Paris researchers developed two fast DNA-based tests for identifying Vel-negative blood and people. These tests can be easily integrated into existing blood testing procedures—and can be completed in a few hours or less.

“It’s usually a crisis when you need a transfusion” says Ballif. “For those rare Vel-negative individuals in need of a blood transfusion, this is a potentially life-saving time frame.”

Protein hunters

To make their discovery, Arnaud and coworkers in Paris used some of the rare Vel-negative antibody to biochemically purify the mystery protein from the surface of human red blood cells. Then they shipped them to Ballif in Vermont.

The little protein didn’t reveal its identity easily. “I had to fish through thousands of proteins,” Ballif says. And several experiments failed to find the culprit because of its unusual biochemistry—and pipsqueak size. But he eventually nabbed it using a high-resolution mass spectrometer funded by the Vermont Genetics Network. And what he found was new to science. “It was only a predicted protein based on the human genome,” says Ballif, but hadn’t yet been observed. It has since been named: Small Integral Membrane Protein 1, or SMIM1.

Next, Arnaud’s team in France tested seventy people known to be Vel-negative. In every case, they found a deletion—a tiny missing chunk of DNA—in the gene that instructs cells on how to manufacture SMIM1. This was the final proof the scientists needed to show that the Vel-negative blood type is caused by a lack of the SMIM1 protein on a patient’s red blood cells.

Your blood

Today, personalized medicine— where doctors treat us based on our unique biological makeup—is a hot trend. “The science of blood transfusion has been attempting personalized medicine since its inception,” Ballif notes, “given that its goal is to personalize a transfusion by making the best match possible between donor and recipient.”

"Identifying and making available rare blood types such as Vel-negative blood brings us closer to a goal of personalized medicine," he says. “Even if you are that rare one person out of 2,500 that is Vel-negative, we now know how to rapidly type your blood and find blood for you—should you need a transfusion.”

Now, a huge study in Science shows that these wild pollinators—including flies, beetles, and butterflies—are more important than domesticated honeybees for boosting crop yields.

"Our surprising result is that native pollinators enhance production of crops, regardless of whether farmers use managed honeybees to augment pollination," notes University of Vermont biologist Taylor Ricketts, one of the study’s co-authors.

Setting fruit

The new study, published online on Feb. 28,  synthesized more than forty experiments from 600 farm fields in twenty countries — including one conducted by Ricketts, director of UVM’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. The key result: in every crop system studied, wild pollinators increased the number of flowers that set fruit, while honeybees did so in only fourteen percent of the crop systems.

"This suggests that honeybees do not — as popularly thought — replace the pollination services that native pollinators provide to crops around the world," Ricketts writes. Instead, pollination work by wild insects increased "fruit set" twice as much as visits from honeybees.

Also, pollination visits by wild insects and honeybees "promoted fruit set independently," the scientists write, so honeybees can supplement, but can’t replace, pollination by wild insects. The study, with fifty authors, looked at major crops — fruits, nuts, and grains — grown on every continent.

"Conserving pollinators and their habitats is therefore an important part of ensuring an adequate crop," Ricketts notes — underlining the limitations on finding domesticated substitutes for the wild species that provide benefits to people.

Wild farms

"Our study shows that losses of wild insects from agricultural landscapes impact not only our natural heritage but also our agricultural harvests," noted the study’s lead author, Lucas A. Garibaldi, from Argentina’s Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. "Long term, productive agricultural systems should include habitat for both honeybees and diverse wild insects."

One of the practices underlying these new findings is the separation of intensive agricultural landscapes from landscapes with greater biodiversity. "Our study shows that this separation can have negative consequences for pollination services," notes Alexandra-Maria Klein, a co-author from Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany—a problem that is "not buffered by honeybee management."

"We urgently need more research that informs but also involves the global and wider society," she says, “to explore novel management designs for agricultural landscapes." For example, farmers may find that restoring patches of more natural and wildlife-friendly land on their farms will increase yields.

Then Berlin — a professor in UVM’s Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences and director of UVM's Center for Sustainable Agriculture — and Limoges — UVM class of 2012 and now a graduate student in dietetics — move on to collect data about the skim milk. Next up: frozen broccoli.

At the other end of the small store, Bill McMaster, a UVM Extension professor, gathers information about bread. Whole-wheat and white? Lowest prices? Brand? Two or three shoppers move through the aisles with blue hand-baskets, looking quizzically at these researchers with clipboards.

“We’re interested in figuring out how to get more healthy, affordable, and regionally produced foods into markets like this one,” says Berlin.

As a first step, they want to know more about the price and supply of eight foods that are for sale here — a “market basket,” they call it, that includes ground beef (lean or not), broccoli (with or without cheese sauce), and peaches (canned with sugar or not). And they want to talk with local people who come to the store — to learn how they get (or fail to get) food now.

Into the desert

Outside, fine snow sweeps out of the spruce-fir woods and down Cross Street, the wide road through town. It’s cold and quiet; just a few people are out, readjusting snowmobiles on their trailer. It doesn’t look like a desert.

Yet, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Island Pond is a kind of desert. A food desert.

Defining a food desert is an inexact science at best, but the basic point is clear: these are communities with many low-income people — and few or no places to buy affordable, healthy food.

In the Ted’s Market parking lot, Island Pond resident Melanie Yasharian holds a small bag of groceries. “I just came in to pick up a couple of items,” she says — and patiently answers questions being asked by Kristyn Achilich — a graduate student in UVM’s new food systems master’s program — about her food buying habits and challenges.

Done with the survey, Yasharian volunteers to tell me her story: how she works hard to feed her two children, ages 2 and 3, now waiting in the car.

“I feel very lucky, “ she says with a broad smile as the wind whips snow and grit over our heads, “we have a large garden, we do a lot of canning, we started a root cellar this year, we freeze a lot, and we raise all our own meat; we don’t buy any meat at the store. We raise chickens, turkeys, and pigs, and my husband is a hunter and so we have venison,” she says.

But it’s not easy. “I do find it hard in town to get a variety of vegetables or fruits,” she says, and, “it’s extremely expensive to eat healthy and to provide your kids with healthy and with a variety.”

Where to shop?

And many of her neighbors probably have a harder time than she does. According to USDA statistics, all of the people who live in and around Island Pond, 1,260 people, have “low access” to food — meaning that a large grocery store is not within easy driving distance. Melanie Yasharian says she drives to St. Johnsbury, 20 miles away, to do some grocery shopping.

Of these 1,260 people, 241 of them, about 20 percent, are low-income. Many have limited transportation to get to the store, which means if they’re going grocery shopping at all, it’s likely to be at Ted’s Market or the other small food store two blocks down, at the other end of the commercial district. Here, Kingdom Market has a large “Welcome Ice Fishermen” sign inside the front entrance.

Kingdom Market sells many of the same foods and brands as Ted’s. And this is not surprising. Both stores are supplied by the same out-of-Vermont distributor.

Heading the other way on Route 114/105 out of Island Pond, it’s not too many miles to Interstate 91, and, from there, south to Boston and global markets beyond. And that’s the route, except in reverse, that much of the food that fills these stores’ shelves traveled.

“We have these two independently owned stores in Island Pond that are a component of our research,” Berlin says, noting that the owners of both stores have been willing partners and supporters of the project. These are the only two grocery stores in all of Essex County, the least populous county in New England, deep in the heart of Vermont’s famed Northeast Kingdom.

Food security

Unlike a spate of recent efforts to simply improve what is available at stores — so-called “healthy retailer” projects — Berlin’s research is far broader and more complex.

Island Pond is one of nine sites, three rural and six urban, throughout the Northeast that are being studied under the leadership of Stephan Goetz, a professor at Penn State. Drawing experts from the USDA and several universities, including UVM’s Linda Berlin and her students, the team’s goal is to enhance what they call “food security” in “underserved” places — often poor, urban neighborhoods — in a new way.

The researchers want to link what have often been seen as separate problems. On the one hand, 12 percent of the population in the Northeast, more than seven million people, are food insecure, according to the USDA. This means they face a challenge getting healthy, affordable food — and all the health problems, like obesity, hunger, and diabetes that are associated with this challenge.

On the other hand, regional farmers are struggling to stay in business, the land base for agriculture in the Northeast continues to decline, and a large percentage of fruits and vegetables eaten here — that can be grown in the Delaware-to-Maine corridor — are transported from farms in the Midwest, California, Mexico, and other parts of the world, using large amounts of fuel.

The researchers want to show that both problems can — and maybe need to be — addressed together. They’re exploring the entire supply chain, from farmer to distributor to retailer to consumer. The plan: build a powerful model of how the whole system works. The hope: enhance the supply and availability of foods grown in the Northeast region.

“Why are there not more regionally produced foods in these stores?” Berlin wonders. “We’re looking for the pressure points,” she says.

“We’re taking a systems approach,” she says. “If your supplier is in Boston, let’s go to the supplier and find out how they decide what to carry.”

“We can tighten the scale of the food system,” says Achilich, to help both low-income consumers on one end and farmers on the other. In an era of climate change and water shortages, the research team is testing the idea that regionally produced food — in place of globally produced foods — can alleviate environmental problems while improving food access and affordability for struggling communities.

This is the end of the second year of a five-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture — and a key first step of building an insightful model of the food system, Berlin says, is listening carefully to the people who are buying the food.

Near the shopping carts at Kingdom Market, Kristyn Achilich is collecting more information with help from life-long Island Pond resident Bill Hawkins. He’s been working with the UVM team, reaching out to his friends and neighbors as they come in and out of the store, explaining the research project. They’ve been listening carefully to Sherman Allen, who came in “to get a few incidentals,” he tells me. He drove to the store from the settlement of West Charleston, eleven miles away.

"I am most grateful to Dr. Grasso for his service to the University of Vermont, both as dean of the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, and as vice president for research and dean of the Graduate College,” said Tom Sullivan, UVM president. “Dom's strong commitment to research and graduate programs has helped to strengthen UVM's research profile across the country, and his interest in the study of complex systems was instrumental in establishing one of our key Spires of Excellence at the university. He is a talented administrator and a distinguished scholar who will play an important leadership role at the University of Delaware. We wish him all the best as he transitions to another outstanding public research university."

"I am excited about accepting this wonderful opportunity at Delaware, and I look forward to getting started,” Grasso said. “But I am certainly going to miss UVM and Vermont. The friends and colleagues I have known here will never be forgotten, and I plan to spend as much time as possible enjoying the people and places I have come to love in Vermont before heading off to the University of Delaware. I am blessed to be leaving one exceptional institution for another, and I am profoundly grateful for all of the opportunities and experiences I have been so fortunate to have had at UVM. Living here has been a very special privilege for my family and for me, and Vermont will always be a cherished part of us."

Grasso came to UVM in 2004 from Smith College, where he was founding director of the Picker Program in Engineering and Technology, as dean of the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. He was named to his current post in 2009.

Read more from the University of Delaware.

Now, new observations by an international team, including University of Vermont astrophysicist Joanna Rankin, make these bizarre stars even more puzzling.

The scientists identified a pulsar that is able to dramatically change the way in which it shines. In just a few seconds, the star can quiet its radio waves while at the same time it makes its X-ray emissions much brighter.

The research “challenges all proposed pulsar emission theories,” the team writes in the Jan. 25 edition of the journal Science and reopens a decades-old debate about how these stars work.

Unexpected X-rays

Like the universe’s most powerful lighthouses, pulsars shine beams of radio waves and other radiation for trillions of miles. As these highly magnetized neutron stars rapidly rotate, a pair of beams sweeps by, appearing as flashes or pulses in telescopes on Earth.

Using a satellite X-ray telescope, coordinated with two radio telescopes on the ground, the team observed a pulsar that was previously known to flip on and off every few hours between strong (or “bright”) radio emissions and weak (or “quiet”) radio emissions.

Monitoring simultaneously in X-rays and radio waves, the team revealed that this pulsar exhibits the same behavior, but in reverse, when observed at X-ray wavelengths.

This is the first time that a switching X-ray emission has been detected from a pulsar.

Flipping between these two extreme states — one dominated by X-ray pulses, the other by a highly organized pattern of radio pulses — “was very surprising,” says Rankin.

“As well as brightening in the X-rays we discovered that the X-ray emission also shows pulses, something not seen when the radio emission is bright,” said Rankin, who spearheaded the radio observations. “This was completely unexpected.”

No current model of pulsars is able to explain this switching behavior. All theories to date suggest that X-ray emissions would follow radio emissions. Instead, the new observations show the opposite. “The basic physics of a pulsar have never been solved,” Rankin says.

Looking for the switch

The research was conceived by a small team then working at the University of Amsterdam, including UVM’s Rankin, who has studied this pulsar, known as PSR B0943+10, for more than a decade; Wim Hermsen from SRON, the Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Utrecht, and the lead author on the new paper; Ben Stappers from the University of Manchester, UK; and Geoff Wright from Sussex University, UK.

These researchers were joined by colleagues from institutions around the world to conduct simultaneous observations with the European Space Agency’s X-ray satellite, XMM-Newton, and two radio telescopes, the Giant Meter Wave Telescope (GMRT) in India and the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) in the Netherlands, to reveal this pulsar’s so-far unique behavior.

“There is a general agreement about the origin of the radio emission from pulsars: it is caused by highly energetic electrons, positrons and ions moving along the field lines of the pulsar's magnetic field,” explains Wim Hermsen.

“How exactly the particles are stripped off the neutron star's surface and accelerated to such high energy, however, is still largely unclear,” he adds.

By studying the emission from the pulsar at different wavelengths, the team’s study had been designed to discover which of various possible physical processes take place in the vicinity of the magnetic poles of pulsars.

Instead of narrowing down the possible mechanisms suggested by theory, however, the results of the team’s observing campaign challenge all existing models for pulsar emission. Few astronomical objects are as baffling as pulsars, and despite nearly fifty years of study, they continue to defy theorists’ best efforts.

Hunting for gravity's wave

And understanding the basic physics of pulsars is important to one of the great science quests of this century: the hunt for gravitational waves.

First predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 these waves ripple through the fabric of space and time, carrying information from the far edges of the universe. Astronomers hope that being able to measure gravitational waves will open a whole new spectrum of energy — gravitational energy — for observing the universe and will reveal cosmological mysteries such as the location of exotic “dark matter.”

But, so far, no one has been able to directly detect these gravitational waves — because they are so tiny.

This is where pulsars may help.

Because of their extreme density and enormous speed, pulsars turn out to be a nearly perfect flywheel, ticking along as the universe’s best clock. The arrival of pulses can be so regular that emissions from a group of pulsars is being studied by NANOGrav — an international consortium of scientists including Rankin — to distinguish the faint signal of passing gravitational waves from all the other noise of the universe.

Disturbances in the arrival time of pulsar pulses — i.e., deviations in the ticking of the clock — will show that a gravitational wave has passed by the Earth.

But pulsars, as this new research makes clear, have strange glitches, mysteries, and disturbances of their own.

“The NANOGrav effort and others are pushing the (pulsar) clock so hard that it is becoming clear that if we don’t understand the clock better,” Rankin says. “it may not work as a tool as well as it could.”

“We need to understand the complexities of pulsars,” Rankin says, “we need to see them as more than just a clock in the sky.”

Erratic star power

Of the more than 2,000 pulsars discovered to date, a number of them have erratic behavior, with emissions that can become weak or disappear in a matter of seconds but then suddenly return minutes or hours later.

B0943+10 is one of these erratic stars. Discovered at Pushchino Radio Astronomical Observatory near Moscow, “this star has two very different personalities,” that were uncovered by Svetlana Suleymanova in the 1980s, says Rankin.

“But we’re still in the dark about what causes this, and other pulsars, to switch modes,” Rankin says. “We just don’t know.”

“But the fact that the pulsar keeps memory of its previous state and goes back to it,” says Hermsen, “suggests that it must be something fundamental."

These new observations “strongly suggest that a temporary ‘hotspot’ appears close to the pulsar’s magnetic pole which switches on and off with the change of state,” says Geoff Wright, one of the team’s astronomers from the University of Sussex.

But the new results also suggest that something in the pulsar's whole magnetosphere is changing suddenly and not just at the poles or other hotspots. “Something is happening globally,” Rankin says, across the whole star.

In order for the radio emission to vary so radically on the short timescales observed, the pulsar's global environment must undergo a very rapid – and reversible – transformation.

“If that is true, it means the entire magnetosphere is alive and connected in very important ways,” Rankin says, allowing a change in the pulsar’s basic mode of shining in about one second, less time than it takes it to spin once on its axis.

“Since the switch between a pulsar's bright and quiet states links phenomena that occur on local and global scales, a thorough understanding of this process could clarify several aspects of pulsar physics,” says Hermsen. “Unfortunately, we have not yet been able to explain it.”

In the second half of 2013, the team plans to repeat the same study for another pulsar, PSR B1822-09, which exhibits similar radio emission properties but with a different geometry.

In the meantime, these observations will keep theoretical astrophysicists busy investigating possible physical mechanisms that could cause the sudden and drastic changes to the pulsar's entire magnetosphere and result in such a curious flip in how they shine.

A small sampling from the most recent publication:

The Energy Costs of Oil Production

Eric Zencey, a fellow with the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, interviewed on Public Radio International's "The World," explains that renewable energy sources are yielding a higher rate of return than oil, asserting that, "the age of oil should be over." Listen to the interview…  

Long Walks, Deep Thoughts

In his essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Robert Manning, professor in the Rubenstein School of Natural Resources, explores the "biomechanical marvel" of bipedalism along with the powerful historical connection between walking and philosophy, scholarship, literature, human rights protests and spirituality, from Aristotle to Martin Luther King. Of John Muir, Manning says, "His walks offered him deep insights into our relationship with the natural world, writing, "'I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out until sundown, for, going out, I found, was really going in.'" The piece is excerpted from his book, Walking Distance: Extraordinary Hikes for Ordinary People. Read the story at Chronicle.com (subscription required)... or contact University Communications.

Multiple Sclerosis Linked to Vitamin D Levels

In a Wall Street Journal interview, Andrew Solomon, M.D., professor of neurology and MS specialist, says "there's mounting evidence" that low vitamin D levels influence the disease. The article covers a recent Swedish study published in the journal Neurology -- Solomon already tells his patients suffering from MS to take 2,000 to 4,000 international units of vitamin D each day. Read the story at WSJ.com...

Researchers at the University of Vermont have been developing technologies that detect disease-causing bacteria in the lung by simply measuring what’s in the breath. The research has potential for creating a fast and easy breath test to detect common infections like tuberculosis.

Traditional tests to diagnose bacterial infections in the lungs can take days or weeks, says Jane Hill, a professor in UVM’s College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences who co-led the new study, “but we can measure breath in one minute."

The new technique profiles volatile organic compounds (VOCs) — gases swirling in the air exhaled from the lungs — to generate a distinctive chemical signature for differing types of infectious bacteria.

Led by UVM graduate student Jiangjiang Zhu, the team successfully distinguished between species of bacteria, as well as strains of the same bacteria, in the lungs of infected laboratory mice.

Their results were presented in the Journal of Breath Research, published online by the Institute of Physics, on January 11, 2013.

Disease detection

Clinicians see breath-testing as an attractive method for diagnosing disease; it’s easy to use, not invasive, and potentially inexpensive. Scientists have already investigated breath-based diagnostics for multiple cancers, asthma, and diabetes.

In this study, the researchers analyzed the VOCs given off by Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus, both of which are common in lung infections associated with pneumonia and other diseases including cystic fibrosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

The scientists first infected mice with the two bacteria and sampled their breath after 24 hours. Then they ionized the samples and sprayed them through a mass spectrometer to analyze the presence and concentrations of various VOCs.

The technique is called secondary electrospray ionization mass spectrometry, or SESI-MS, which is capable of detecting VOCs down to parts-per-trillion.

The UVM team — with members from the School of Engineering, the College of Medicine's Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, and the Vermont Lung Center — found that there was a significant difference between the breath profiles of mice infected with the bacteria and mice that were uninfected. The two different species of bacteria could also be distinguished, as could the two different strains of the P. aeruginosa that were used.

The researchers hypothesize that bacteria in the lungs produce unique VOCs that are not found in regular human breath due to their differing metabolism.

“Bacteria, when they get in your lung, are eating the body as their source of nutrients,” says Hill, “this releases byproducts — a particular suite of volatiles, which are unique to the bacterium. And that’s the basis for this research. Every bacterium has its own set of metabolic enzymes and its own interaction with the host which allows us to distinguish between one bacterium and another during infection.”

And this real-world, real-body aspect of the research is important, since the VOC profile of bacteria grown in laboratory dishes can look dramatically different than those living in host organisms. The new study reported only a 25-34 percent overlap in the VOC profile of the same bacteria strains grown in a lab culture versus when grown in mice.

Next steps

The UVM team—which, in addition to Hill and Zhu, includes pulmonology physician Laurie Leclair, microbiologist Matthew Wargo, and engineering researcher Heather Bean—is moving the laboratory research toward human clinical trials, including an upcoming study in collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital.

“I suspect that we will also be able to distinguish between bacterial, viral and fungal infections of the lung,” Hill says.

The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world’s population carries tuberculosis and that this lung disease causes more than a million deaths each year.

“TB takes about six weeks to diagnose,” says Hill, allowing an infected person to spread it unwittingly. “Faster diagnosis of the disease would allow for faster treatment decisions and would also decrease disease transmission.”

She anticipates a time when patients could visit a physician, breathe into an instrument and know within minutes, “what you’re infected with,” she says, and, perhaps, “whether your antibiotic regime is effective, whether you need different antibiotics, and whether you have more then one bug causing your problem.”

The new research has drawn the attention of international media including the BBC and Scientific American.

This research was supported by the UVM College of Medicine's Institutional Development Award (IDeA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (grant 8 P20 GM103496-07) within the National Institutes of Health; the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation; and NASA EPSCoR.

Portions of this story were written by Michael Bishop, Institute of Physics, michael.bishop@iop.org

He notes Wordsworth, who was said to have walked some 180,000 miles, his study being ‘out of doors,’ his housekeeper was purported to say, and of John Muir: “His walks,” Manning says, “offered him deep insights into our relationship with the natural world, writing, “‘I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out until sundown, for, going out, I found, was really going in.’”

The piece is excerpted from Manning’s new book, written with his wife Martha S. Manning, Walking Distance: Extraordinary Hikes for Ordinary People. Read the story…

But that’s what Mitchell understood from the moment he discovered anthropology. Working on a master’s thesis in philosophy at Columbia University about normal and abnormal human behavior, he wandered into this different discipline. “Wow,” he recalls thinking. “This could entertain me forever.”

“His successful return to the field -- and most certainly not an easy field,” says anthropology professor Robert Gordon, who was hired by Mitchell when he chaired the department, “at his age is, in a word, incredible and speaks to the spirit of the man. He is certainly one of the better fieldworkers of the many that have traversed Melanesia and his theoretical insights are highly pertinent. The fact that Bamboo Fire has been reprinted after such a long interval (it was originally published in 1987) speaks volumes to the quality of his work.”

The call of demons

Among other areas of expertise -- he is an authority on kinship and wrote his doctoral dissertation (with Mead heading the committee) on Jewish kinship in New York City -- Mitchell is interested in therapeutic systems, what a culture views as sick or deviant and the means they undertake to instruct, punish or heal in order to bring an individual into the realm of the acceptable.

In Bamboo Fire Mitchell writes, “It is what we are taught to abhor and fear in others and ourselves that is at the affective core of each culture. But to study what is despised and feared in a culture is also to understand what is honored and desired… people invent ways to remedy the bad, to correct or eradicate what threatens the good life, and to conserve the cherished concepts and customs….”

Mitchell wondered how these systems were playing out in New Guinea, where indigenous beliefs were now countered with the messages of Western missionaries. With a hard-won grant, he packed up with his wife, four-year-old son and three-year old daughter in 1970 in hopes of teasing out answers among the Wape, one of the most complex and challenging tribes in the region. “I took my family into the forest where there are no facilities of any kind, not even a road,” Mitchell says. “There’s no running water, no electricity. You have to invent your life.”

In exchange for the physical and emotional hardships and a complicated mix of frustration and deep affection for the locals, Mitchell was serendipitously rewarded by the discovery that, unlike many tribes that center their religious ceremonies on male-initiation and other rituals, the Wape practiced elaborate and prolonged curing festivals. What he had traveled so far to understand was a central component of the society.

Mitchell writes of the moment that connection crystallized for him. Drawn in by ceremonial drums booming through the night, he headed toward one such festival, the final night, hundreds of people with bodies brightly decorated with paints, powder, leaves and ferns. In the book he recalls images of that moment: “Shimmering and shaking tin towering grandeur, the masks, aflutter with bird-of-paradise feathers and flags of fur, were like Calder mobiles magically gone wild.” Marathon dancing, incessant drumming, hypnotic chanting, all glowing in the fire of bamboo torches.

Demon spirits, present at curing festivals in the form of these elaborate masks incarnated by priests who wore them, were considered both responsible for illness in Wape culture and also to have curing powers. In the absence of elaborate ceremonies, if someone got sick it was believed that a demon or ghost was the cause and an exorcism would be performed. Western culture did intersect -- people with a fever would sometimes get a shot of penicillin from a mission or government “doctor boy,” who, Mitchell says, never got credit if the person got well.

To Mitchell’s dismay -- and a factor in his last return, to see firsthand -- the curing festivals have been vanquished from Wape life. Despite long-failed efforts by Catholic and Christian Brethren missionaries to stop them, charismatic Pentecostals won the Wape over, to an extent. The word to Mitchell is that people still believe illness is the work of demons only now they appeal to God to expel them. It’s a cultural loss as Mitchell sees it -- the masks were true art, the ceremonies the major excitement in the lives of the people.

Many rivers

“It was an exorcism for me to get that experience out,” says Mitchell on writing the book. “I’m getting chills just thinking about leaving, being in that plane, looking down.” He opens with that scene, holding the feeling of equal parts relief and grief. “It’s an awesome experience to spend two years in the bush with none of your supports, your friends, anything of your earlier life. You get the edges knocked off you with challenges you wouldn’t experience in our society. But you go through all these emotional things and when you leave you really come to be very close to a lot of people. Yet it’s an end and you know it will never be the same even if you go back. It’s finished.”

Bamboo Fire includes a letter he wrote to friends in which he jokes that someone should be there studying his family as they cope. That meta-thought supports his later reflections in the book about the limitations of one anthropologist’s perspective on a culture. The view of the Mitchells, if there were one, his view of the Wape, come from one person’s observations. But as he writes, “it is an authentic version of what happened and, therefore, truthful if not the “truth.”

Mitchell borrows a famous quote from the Greek philosopher Heraclites, “no one ever steps into the same river twice.” The waters flow even back in New Guinea, where the people now have cell phones despite few other changes in terms of infrastructure or economic progress. (Mitchell notes the irony that despite the island’s numerous cell towers his iPhone has no reception in his remote Vermont valley.)

And Mitchell headed on a tour to Turkey to avoid November in Vermont, but he’s counting on returning to snow and his passion for downhill skiing. He’s at work on a new writing project on the Lujere people that would be further along if the beautiful summer hadn’t called him out hiking quite so often in his woods near Stowe. And he doesn’t rule out a return to New Guinea.

“Bill's joie de vivre is contagious,” says his former colleague and friend Rob Gordon. "Of all the folks in Vermont who have influenced me and shaped an outlook I can only aspire to, Bill is the person.”

Maybe it’s the joy of their field. Paraphrasing Mitchell at the end of the epilogue, the domain of cultural anthropology is humanity itself. There will always be “those curious ‘others’ -- the anthropologist -- wondering how the people over the next hill live, then going to stay with them to discover how and why they do what they do.” Mitchell saw that spark in Mead even as he visited her in the hospital shortly before she died. He mentioned he was on his way to the annual meeting of anthropologists, and she animated with parting words: “Have fun!”

But if your ants are larger and black and appear from, say, a hole in the wooden sills in your basement, watch out. It may well be Camponotus pennsylvanicus, known to exterminators and dismayed homeowners as the Eastern Carpenter Ant. They subsist on rotting wood. With carpenter ants, pesticides are probably folly. Their nests can be hundreds of yards from the house.

All of this information — and much more about our region’s 130 species of ants — can be found in a new book, A Field Guide to the Ants of New England, co-authored by UVM biologist Nicholas Gotelli.

Ant identification for the people

The book, published by Yale University Press, is the first of its kind for New England. It combines a simple mini-guide (that was successfully tested by fifth graders with cheap hand lenses) — with more advanced keys (that were successfully tested with high school students) for identification work with a microscope, and are suitable for both amateur and professional naturalists.

Separate entries on each species contain color photographs, maps of where the ants are found, blurbs on each ant’s natural history — and spectacular illustrations by Elizabeth Farnsworth pointing out essential details to distinguish species: Is that Formica incerta, the Uncertain Ant? Or, perhaps, Formica dolosa, the Sly Ant? “Propodeal hairs, gastral pubescence, and body size distinguish them,” the guide notes.

Additionally, the book combines traditional branching keys with “a sort of matrix guide that compares related ant species side by side,” says Gotelli, “like a police line-up.” (And, yes, the authors provide straightforward instruction in just what “propodeal hair” is, and the other vocab needed to navigate the keys.)

There are also general chapters on ants in the New England landscape, basics of ant evolution and behavior, how to catch, collect and identify ants — and, at the end, a chapter on ant biogeography, Gotelli’s specialty, that explores the patterns of ant distribution across the landscape over time. “With climate change,” Gotelli say, “this is especially relevant as ant populations will move and change."

Writing the book you need

In the mid-1990s, Nick Gotelli was an experienced ecologist — but a beginning student of ant identification. He and Aaron Ellison — a researcher at the Harvard Forest and the lead author of the new ant guide — were starting a research project about carnivorous plants in northern bogs.

“When we started looking into pitcher plants, the most common prey was ants — so we had to start identifying all these ants that kept showing up in pitcher plant traps,” Gotelli says, “At the time, that was a hard thing to do.”

As Gotelli and Ellison labored to identify the many ants they collected, they found themselves turning to the only comprehensive treatise about the ants of North America, written in 1950 by William Creighton.

“Creighton is useable in some ways, but it’s dense going,” Gotelli says. “It’s not something you’re going to carry with you in the field.”

So Gotelli began to study ant identification himself, getting instruction from Stefan Cover, an ant expert at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, working closely with Ellison and other field scientists, taking a course on ants with famed naturalist E.O. Wilson, and creating his own field-guide-style notes.

“We ended up writing this book because this is the book we wish we had when we started our pitcher plant study,” Gotelli says.

Thank an ant

And the new book is a window into a world of small amazements, showing ants to be far more interesting and important than occasional household pests.

“Here in New England ants are the prime movers and creators of soil — not earthworms,” says Gotelli. They make about an inch of new topsoil every 250 years, Aaron Ellison says, and play a crucial role as one of nature’s diligent garbage collectors.

“Ants eat everything,” Ellison says. “Imagine, we’d be knee-deep in caterpillar carcasses if we didn’t have ants cleaning them up.”

Many of the region’s most spectacular woodland flowers, including trillium, bloodroot, fringed polygala and many violets, also depend on ants. “Ants are like the FedEx of the forest plant world. They carry seeds around, eat the small part that’s rich in protein and fats, and then they store the seeds — and essentially sow them — in the rich soil of their nests,” Ellison says.

Roll that rock

To create the field guide, the four authors — Ellison; Gotelli; Farnsworth, an ecologist at the New England Wild Flower Society; and Gary Alpert, a research associate at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology who took many of the photographs in the book — went on the road with a few students and colleagues for several rounds of what they call “blitz sampling.”

From Nantucket to interior Maine, the research teams would locate a field site, start a stopwatch, and begin flipping over rocks, digging around in rotten logs, and sifting through soil and leaves to collect an ant from every nest they could find.

Farnsworth admits that illustrating the guide — with more than 500 drawings — was her first truly close look at ants. “They used to be just the little critters that marauded my picnic,” she says. “But pick one up and look closely at it, or better yet, put it under a microscope, and you suddenly realize what gorgeous creatures they are.”

Other scientists and students caught wind of the project and began sending the team ants from habitats they’d missed. The authors also scoured every archived ant collection in the region, traveling to museums, universities, and personal collections throughout the Northeast and Canada. They ended up with just shy of 30,000 records of ant species from more than 100 different habitat types.

Fifteen of the ants in the book have not yet been formally named by science, including one species the authors note as the most difficult to track down: “an extremely small and shiny ant living below the sand in only a few habitats in Massachusetts,” according to Alpert.

The right bait

To start your own collection of ants, the book outlines the techniques and tools needed, including a small trowel, hand lens, vials, and, of course, bait. An index card covered with tuna fish works well, says Gotelli. “Or better,” he says “is a special cookie favored by ant biologists around the world. They’re called pecan sandies.”

Though the ants in your collection are likely sterile females, driven by instinct to serve only their secretive queen, and perhaps destined to live only a few days — “they’re more like the leaves of a tree than the tree itself,” Nick Gotelli says — nevertheless, “ants love pecan sandies.”

Portions of this story were reported and written by Clarisse Hart, Harvard Forest, Harvard University.

To understand why — and to also get a glimpse into how Voight’s research might protect privacy in coming decades — try this easy problem:

Multiply the prime numbers 6,451 and 7,307.

What’s a prime number? Fair question; I had to double-check with my son in fifth grade. Recall that prime numbers have the nifty property that they can only be divided evenly by 1 and themselves, like 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, etc. They sprout like weeds along the positive number line and, as Euclid discovered, they seem to go on forever. The largest prime number calculated so far has more than 12 billion digits.

“The prime numbers are a mysterious classical object,” Voight says. “They’re beguiling and deceptively simple.” As one of the nation’s most capable mathematical theorists, Voight doesn’t say this lightly.

Now back to the problem. With your pencil, you’ll get 47,137,457 in a few minutes. Simple. But now reverse the problem. Take this 47,137,457 and give it to some friends. Let them use a basic calculator. Ask them to find the prime factors — the two whole numbers that multiply to get this number. They’ll be at it for hours until they come to 6,451 and 7,307.

Sure, a computer could figure out this puzzle quickly, mostly by raw trial and error. But increase the size of your two prime numbers to something large, in the neighborhood of, say, 200 or 300 digits.

It’s still pretty easy to multiply these two large numbers together. It would only take a moment for a computer. But going in reverse, finding the prime factors that made this large product “would take longer than the lifetime of the universe,” Voight says, “using all the computing resources in the world.”

Easy in, hard out

That one-way street, in essence, is the heart of modern cryptography and online security.

“It is the difficulty of taking a large integer and factoring it into primes that is the basis of the most widely used cryptosystem, RSA, (named for its inventors, Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman),” Voight says.

Of course, there is a lot of complexity, padding, and variation in the application of this approach, but the central idea is this: the product of two or more prime numbers can be built into a so-called “public key” encryption system.

This key can be made available to anyone, like shoppers on a website, who wants to encrypt a message quickly. (People won’t tolerate waiting more than a few seconds on Amazon for their “Buy It Now” message to go through.) But only the people who know the original prime numbers can unlock the message at the other end.

It’s the same basic mathematical tool used by the CIA or your smartphone to take plain words or credit card numbers — and hide them within impregnable codes.

Prime proof

Or, at least today, codes made this way seem impregnable.

Since ancient times, mathematicians have tried and failed to find a solution to integer factorization. Many think it is a fundamental law of mathematics that there are no good shortcuts or fast algorithms to solve this problem.

But, Voight is quick to point out, the absence of success is by no means a rigorous mathematical proof. “When my students come in and say: we’ve thought about this for a long time and this is the best we could come up with,” he says, laughing, “I say: are you sure we can’t do better?”

Somebody might solve this factorization problem tomorrow — discovering a deep pattern — and the systems that protect government secrets and clandestine purchases at Victoria’s Secret would crumble.

“We don’t have any proof yet that these systems are secure,” Voight says. And the possible arrival of unfathomably fast quantum computers might also change the security equation.

Number theory

Voight teaches a course on the mathematics of cryptography. “I love this class,” says his student, sophomore Meraz Mostafa. “Sometimes Voight says something is hard, and that gives me hope. I like that he is still learning.”

But what Voight is learning does not come from being a practicing cryptographer, or from working directly on real-world security systems.

“I’m several steps removed from applied cryptography,” he says. Instead, he is doing basic research that is expanding the mathematical toolbox that could improve current cryptography or give rise to the next generation of systems.

“Number theory is my subject,” says Voight, an assistant professor with appointments in both mathematics and computer science, “and number theory at its heart is the study of prime numbers.”

“The prime numbers conspire against those that try to study them in the sense that they do exhibit remarkable patterns,” Voight says. “When you see them at large, you see patterns begin to arise. But proving that those patterns hold true is very difficult.”

For his insights into some of these patterns, Voight won the prestigious Selfridge Prize in 2010 given out by the Number Theory Foundation; he has received support for his research from the National Security Agency; and, in July of this year, he was the winner of a $400,000 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation, one the government’s highest honors for young scientists.

“John has a rare combination of computational wizardry with deep theoretical insight,” says Matthew Greenberg, a professor at the University of Calgary and Voight’s collaborator.

“Nothing could exist more purely in thought than primes,” Voight says. Indeed, when astronomers are looking for extraterrestrial intelligence they beam out the sequence of prime numbers, he says, “because we know that whatever civilization is out there — they won’t care about the Kardashians — but they will be able to understand the sequence of prime numbers.”

And from this seemingly simple string of numbers, a torrent of theoretical complexity and chaotic practical problems rolls down.

Elliptic curves

One of the difficult areas in number theory where Voight works is on elliptic curves, a strange donut-shaped progeny of the prime numbers. These geometric objects too have been used in cryptography systems, including on some of today’s smartphones.

“We can uses elliptic curves as one of these one-way functions that takes plain text and creates gobbledygook,” Voight says. “Anyone can go that direction, but it’s very hard to undo without some secret information.”

These elliptic curves have the potential to create the same or a higher level of security as other systems, but with smaller keys, reducing the amount of information that needs to be transmitted — a key, practical consideration as computers get faster.

Or, Voight thinks, elliptic curves might be able to rebuff the categorically different speed of not-yet-invented quantum computers that might break other code systems.

Keeping secrets

“For the first time in human history we’re all connected to one node, and those connections are shrinking the world,” Voight says. And privacy “is intrinsically human,” he believes. “So how do you maintain that privacy?” he wonders.

“I don’t think the solution is to have no secrets,” he says, “so we have to have an ability to maintain them.”

“I’m dancing with these mathematical objects,” John Voight says, “that we may need to turn to in the near future to develop secure communication.”