From University of Wisconsin Madison: “New research helps explain why the solar wind is hotter than expected”

From University of Wisconsin Madison

April 14, 2020
Sarah Perdue
saperdue@wisc.edu

When a fire extinguisher is opened, the compressed carbon dioxide forms ice crystals around the nozzle, providing a visual example of the physics principle that gases and plasmas cool as they expand. When our sun expels plasma in the form of solar wind, the wind also cools as it expands through space — but not nearly as much as the laws of physics would predict.

In a study published April 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Wisconsin–Madison physicists provide an explanation for the discrepancy in solar wind temperature. Their findings suggest ways to study solar wind phenomena in research labs and learn about solar wind properties in other star systems.

“People have been studying the solar wind since its discovery in 1959, but there are many important properties of this plasma which are still not well understood,” says Stas Boldyrev, professor of physics and lead author of the study. “Initially, researchers thought the solar wind has to cool down very rapidly as it expands from the sun, but satellite measurements show that as it reaches the Earth, its temperature is 10 times larger than expected. So, a fundamental question is: Why doesn’t it cool down?”

The solar wind causes events such auroras, like this one photographed by a U.S. astronaut after docking with the International Space Station. It can also interfere with satellite communications and distort the magnetic field of earth. NASA photo.

Solar plasma is a molten mix of negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions. Because of this charge, solar plasma is influenced by magnetic fields that extend into space, generated underneath the solar surface. As the hot plasma escapes from the sun’s outermost atmosphere, its corona, it flows through space as solar wind. The electrons in the plasma are much lighter particles than the ions, so they move about 40 times faster.

With more negatively charged electrons streaming away, the sun takes on a positive charge. This makes it harder for the electrons to escape the sun’s pull. Some electrons have a lot of energy and keep traveling for infinite distances. Those with less energy can’t escape the sun’s positive charge and are attracted back to the sun. As they do, some of those electrons can be knocked off their tracks ever-so-slightly by collisions with surrounding plasma.

“There is a fundamental dynamical phenomenon that says that particles whose velocity is not well aligned with the magnetic field lines are not able to move into a region of a strong magnetic field,” Boldyrev says. “Such returning electrons are reflected so that they stream away from the sun, but again they cannot escape because of the attractive electric force of the sun. So, their destiny is to bounce back and forth, creating a large population of so-called trapped electrons.”

In an effort to explain the temperature observations in the solar wind, Boldyrev and his colleagues, UW–Madison physics professors Cary Forest and Jan Egedal looked to a related, but distinct, field of plasma physics for a possible explanation.

Around the time scientists discovered solar wind, plasma fusion researchers were thinking of ways to confine plasma. They developed “mirror machines,” or plasma-filled magnetic field lines shaped as tubes with pinched ends, like bottles with open necks on either end.

As charged particles in the plasma travel along the field lines, they reach the bottleneck and the magnetic field lines are pinched. The pinch acts as a mirror, reflecting particles back into the machine.

“But some particles can escape, and when they do, they stream along expanding magnetic field lines outside the bottle. Because the physicists want to keep this plasma very hot, they want to figure out how the temperature of the electrons that escape the bottle declines outside this opening,” Boldyrev says. “It’s very similar to what’s happening in the solar wind that expands away from the sun.”

Boldyrev and colleagues thought they could apply the same theory from the mirror machines to the solar wind, looking at the differences in the trapped particles and those that escape. In mirror machine studies, the physicists found that the very hot electrons escaping the bottle were able to distribute their heat energy slowly to the trapped electrons.

“In the solar wind, the hot electrons stream from the sun to very large distances, losing their energy very slowly and distributing it to the trapped population,” Boldyrev says. “It turns out that our results agree very well with measurements of the temperature profile of the solar wind and they may explain why the electron temperature declines with the distance so slowly,” Boldyrev says.

The accuracy with which mirror machine theory predicts solar wind temperature opens the door for using the machines to study solar wind in laboratory settings.

“Maybe we’ll even find some interesting phenomena in those experiments that space scientists will then try to look for in the solar wind,” Boldyrev says. “It’s always fun when you start doing something new. You don’t know what surprises you’ll get.”

See the full article here .

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In achievement and prestige, the University of Wisconsin–Madison has long been recognized as one of America’s great universities. A public, land-grant institution, UW–Madison offers a complete spectrum of liberal arts studies, professional programs and student activities. Spanning 936 acres along the southern shore of Lake Mendota, the campus is located in the city of Madison.

From University of Wisconsin Madison via Science News: “In a first, physicists re-created the sun’s spiraling solar wind in a lab”

From University of Wisconsin Madison

via

Science News

July 29, 2019
Lisa Grossman

Some of the sun’s fundamental physics have been re-created with plasma inside a vacuum chamber.

SUN IN A BALL This view shows the inside of the Big Red Ball, a 3-meter-wide aluminum sphere at the University of Wisconsin–Madison that can mimic properties of the sun. Carefully applied magnets and electric currents make the plasma spin and send out streams of charged particles, like the solar wind. Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison

Physicists have created mini gusts of solar wind in the lab, with hopes that the charged particle streams can help to resolve some mysteries about our nearest star [Nature Physics].

“We’re not re-creating the sun, because that’s impossible,” says plasma physicist Ethan Peterson of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who reports the new work July 29 in Nature Physics. “But we’re re-creating some of the fundamental physics that happens near the sun.”

The sun spews a constant stream of charged particles, called the solar wind, out into space — though scientists aren’t sure exactly how (SN Online: 8/18/17). As the sun rotates, its magnetic field twists the wind into a helical shape called the Parker spiral, named after solar physicist Eugene Parker, who predicted the existence of the solar wind in 1958.

NASA Parker Solar Probe Plus named to honor Pioneering Physicist Eugene Parker

NASA last year launched its Parker Solar Probe to directly investigate the source of the solar wind (SN: 7/21/18, p. 12). But Peterson and colleagues found a way to mimic the Parker spiral much closer to home.

The team used a 3-meter-wide aluminum vacuum chamber called the Big Red Ball at the Wisconsin Plasma Physics Laboratory to confine a ball of plasma heated to 100,000° Celsius. A magnet in the center of the ball mimics the sun’s magnetic field, and carefully applied electric currents send the plasma spinning and a wind streaming.

There are some unavoidable differences between the Big Red Ball and the sun, including size, gravity and temperature. Even so, the wind organized itself into a clear Parker spiral, as expected. The wind also occasionally ejected little blobs of plasma, each about 10 centimeters across. The sun ejects similar blobs, called plasmoids, but no one is sure why. The Big Red Ball could help provide an answer, Peterson says.

BALLERINA SKIRT The Parker spiral, which has also been described as a “ballerina skirt,” is the shape that the solar wind takes on as the sun rotates, twisting the wind into a helix as seen in a NASA simulation. Scientists mimicked this spiral in plasma in the lab. This video shows a smaller Parker spiral appearing in a ball of hot, spinning plasma inside a vacuum chamber. The bright spiraling structures follow the plasma’s magnetic field.

See the full article here .

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In achievement and prestige, the University of Wisconsin–Madison has long been recognized as one of America’s great universities. A public, land-grant institution, UW–Madison offers a complete spectrum of liberal arts studies, professional programs and student activities. Spanning 936 acres along the southern shore of Lake Mendota, the campus is located in the city of Madison.

From University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Chicago: “University of Wisconsin-Madison joins Chicago Quantum Exchange”

From University of Wisconsin Madison

via

University of Chicago

Feb 28, 2019

Photo by John Zich

UW-Madison adds expertise to hub for research and development of quantum technology.

The Chicago Quantum Exchange, a growing hub for the research and development of quantum technology, is adding the University of Wisconsin–Madison as its newest member.

UW-Madison is joining forces with the University of Chicago, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in developing a national leading collaboration in the rapidly emerging field of quantum information.

The new partnership comes as UW-Madison makes significant investments in quantum science, a field with potential to revolutionize computing, communication, security and more using the powerful capabilities of quantum mechanics.

The federal government is increasingly interested in quantum technologies, launching late last year the National Quantum Initiative, which authorized an investment of more than $1.2 billion in quantum research over the next decade.

“I think quantum science is one of the most exciting areas in physics right now,” said Robert McDermott, a professor of physics at UW–Madison. “Joining the Chicago Quantum Exchange is going to put us in a very strong position in the landscape of academic institutions that are developing quantum technologies throughout the United States.”

The Chicago Quantum Exchange works toward advancing academic, industrial and governmental efforts in the science and engineering of quantum information, with the goal of applying research innovations to develop radically new types of devices, materials and computing techniques.

“Bringing UW-Madison’s expertise in qubits and quantum information to the Chicago Quantum Exchange allows us to strengthen one of the largest quantum research efforts in the U.S. and will help us accelerate scientific developments that can lead toward promising new technologies,” said David Awschalom, director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange, the Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering at UChicago and an Argonne senior scientist.

The Chicago Quantum Exchange’s continued growth enhances the position of the Chicago area, and the Midwest, to attract industry partnerships and government funding, while making it a leader in training the new quantum workforce.

UW–Madison has institutional research expertise in three areas of qubits, which is the basic unit of quantum information rendered as an electronic or optical device. These areas are neutral atom qubits, superconducting qubits and silicon quantum dot qubits—along with quantum sensing research being conducted by faculty such as College of Engineering Assistant Professor Jennifer Choy and Assistant Professor of Physics Shimon Kolkowitz, and condensed matter research being conducted in the Department of Physics by Professors Maxim Vavilov and Robert Joynt, Associate Professor Alex Levchenko and Senior Scientist Lara Faoro.

“We are looking forward to joint research projects within the CQE, which will give our students experience to enhance their education at UW–Madison,” said Mark Eriksson, a professor of physics at UW-Madison. “That collaboration is really important these days because a lot of expertise is needed to attack quantum computing problems from many different directions.”

As the field of quantum information science continues to grow, so will the demand for quantum engineers in industry, government and at universities. The Chicago Quantum Exchange, through its member institutions, offers both undergraduate and graduate students access to world-class expertise and research facilities in quantum science and engineering.

“Developing a next-generation quantum workforce is a huge priority nationally and worldwide,” Eriksson said. “We are training students to have this broad base of expertise that will equip them to make a high impact in this developing field of technology.”

See the full article here .

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One of the world’s premier academic and research institutions, the University of Chicago has driven new ways of thinking since our 1890 founding. Today, UChicago is an intellectual destination that draws inspired scholars to our Hyde Park and international campuses, keeping UChicago at the nexus of ideas that challenge and change the world.

The University of Chicago is an urban research university that has driven new ways of thinking since 1890. Our commitment to free and open inquiry draws inspired scholars to our global campuses, where ideas are born that challenge and change the world.

We empower individuals to challenge conventional thinking in pursuit of original ideas. Students in the College develop critical, analytic, and writing skills in our rigorous, interdisciplinary core curriculum. Through graduate programs, students test their ideas with UChicago scholars, and become the next generation of leaders in academia, industry, nonprofits, and government.

UChicago research has led to such breakthroughs as discovering the link between cancer and genetics, establishing revolutionary theories of economics, and developing tools to produce reliably excellent urban schooling. We generate new insights for the benefit of present and future generations with our national and affiliated laboratories: Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

The University of Chicago is enriched by the city we call home. In partnership with our neighbors, we invest in Chicago’s mid-South Side across such areas as health, education, economic growth, and the arts. Together with our medical center, we are the largest private employer on the South Side.

In all we do, we are driven to dig deeper, push further, and ask bigger questions—and to leverage our knowledge to enrich all human life. Our diverse and creative students and alumni drive innovation, lead international conversations, and make masterpieces. Alumni and faculty, lecturers and postdocs go on to become Nobel laureates, CEOs, university presidents, attorneys general, literary giants, and astronauts.

In achievement and prestige, the University of Wisconsin–Madison has long been recognized as one of America’s great universities. A public, land-grant institution, UW–Madison offers a complete spectrum of liberal arts studies, professional programs and student activities. Spanning 936 acres along the southern shore of Lake Mendota, the campus is located in the city of Madison.

From University of Wisconsin Madison: “Taming turbulence: Seeking to make complex simulations a breeze”

From University of Wisconsin Madison

December 11, 2018
Terry Devitt

An improved model for how shear-flow turbulence changes in different systems will more easily address previously intractable problems for understanding phenomena such as star formation and the dynamics of galaxies without the need for expensive supercomputers. NASA, ESA, The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

For scientists wrestling with problems as diverse as containing superhot plasma in a fusion reactor, improving the accuracy of weather forecasts, or probing the unexplained dynamics of a distant galaxy, turbulence-spawning shear flow is a serious complicating factor.

Put simply, shear flow occurs when two fluids — where fluids are a liquid, a gas or a plasma (the amorphous superhot gas that makes up stars like our sun or that occurs in a fusion device) — pass by one another such as when wind flows over a lake or hot gas jets from a galaxy. The turbulent chaos that occurs as a result of the interacting fluids can be exceedingly difficult to recreate in the numerical models scientists use to describe and understand a wide range of phenomena.

Shear, for instance, is a confounding factor for critical applied problems such as predicting the diffusion of smoke from massive wildfires. Smoke from fires such as those that recently occurred in California can be widely dispersed thousands of miles from the source and contribute to problems of air quality.

“These models are really helpful in understanding systems where the flow is fast,” says Adrian Fraser, a University of Wisconsin–Madison graduate student in physics and the lead author of a study published Monday, Dec. 10, in the journal Physics of Plasmas.

But even using the world’s most powerful supercomputers in a show of brute force, certain phenomena are too complex and dynamic to be reliably recreated in silico.

Scientists have tried to get around the problem by simplifying and parsing their models to look at elements of a system in the hope they can be reassembled to account for the whole. But in doing so, Fraser notes, researchers may have overlooked a common collective effect that not only has an influence on the dynamics of a system, but, according to the new research, seems to be a convenient handle for greatly simplifying the digital recreation of phenomena such as the spread of heat and chemicals in a system — problems that now overwhelm even the most powerful supercomputers.

Using those state-of-the-art supercomputers, Fraser’s team, including UW–Madison physics professors Paul Terry and Ellen Zweibel along with MJ Pueschel of the University of Texas, looked at how turbulence plays out over long periods of time when its motions include a component that normally dies away very quickly. Looking at the system in detail, the researchers observed that this seemingly transient component is amplified over time and exerts greater influence than was known.

“This is the one collective motion that had been assumed not to matter in these systems. We showed that it does matter,” says Fraser. “And by noting that, we were able to dramatically improve existing models for how shear-flow turbulence changes in different systems.”

Most previous studies focused on representing motions with components that do not die away because they are instead directly driven by the shear.

Measuring how heat or dye diffuses in a stationary fluid is straightforward, Fraser explains, but “if the fluid is turbulent it is really difficult to figure out how the dye or heat diffuses from one part of the fluid to another part because of all the complicated motions that occur in turbulence.”

By representing the system with both growing and decaying motions, it is easier to see the whole picture and greatly simplify the system for modeling.

“The end result is a simple model that predicts results that are very consistent with the massive simulations we performed,” says Fraser, noting that previously intractable problems for designing fusion experiments, improving weather models, and understanding astrophysical phenomena such as star formation will be more easily addressed without the need for expensive supercomputers.

Vyacheslav Lukin, program director for Plasma Physics and Accelerator Science at the National Science Foundation, says the new study will help the research community continue to resolve complex plasma physics problems. “Further progress in accurately modeling large-scale plasma systems critically depends on our ability to combine analytical methods with high fidelity direct numerical simulations, and these new results should help us to make another step in that direction.”

Partial support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation under Award No. PHY-1707236, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the Vilas Trust, and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Fusion Energy Sciences, under Award Nos. DE-FG02-89ER53291 and DE-FG02-04ER-54742. Computing resources were provided by the National Science Foundation through XSEDE computing resources, allocation No. TG-PHY130027.

See the full article here .

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In achievement and prestige, the University of Wisconsin–Madison has long been recognized as one of America’s great universities. A public, land-grant institution, UW–Madison offers a complete spectrum of liberal arts studies, professional programs and student activities. Spanning 936 acres along the southern shore of Lake Mendota, the campus is located in the city of Madison.

From University of Wisconsin Madison: “Study suggests buried internet infrastructure at risk as sea levels rise”

From University of Wisconsin Madison

July 16, 2018
Terry Devitt
trdevitt@wisc.edu

CONTACT:
Paul Barford
(608) 262-6609
pb@cs.wisc.edu

Seawater inundation projected for New York City by 2033 and its effect on internet infrastructure. Anything in the blue shaded areas is estimated to be underwater in 15 years. Paul Barford.

Thousands of miles of buried fiber optic cable in densely populated coastal regions of the United States may soon be inundated by rising seas, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Oregon.

The study, presented here today (July 16, 2018) at a meeting of internet network researchers, portrays critical communications infrastructure that could be submerged by rising seas in as soon as 15 years, according to the study’s senior author, Paul Barford, a UW–Madison professor of computer science.

“Most of the damage that’s going to be done in the next 100 years will be done sooner than later,” says Barford, an authority on the “physical internet” — the buried fiber optic cables, data centers, traffic exchanges and termination points that are the nerve centers, arteries and hubs of the vast global information network. “That surprised us. The expectation was that we’d have 50 years to plan for it. We don’t have 50 years.”

The study, conducted with Barford’s former student Ramakrishnan Durairajan, now of the University of Oregon, and Carol Barford, who directs UW–Madison’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, is the first assessment of risk of climate change to the internet. It suggests that by the year 2033 more than 4,000 miles of buried fiber optic conduit will be underwater and more than 1,100 traffic hubs will be surrounded by water. The most susceptible U.S. cities, according to the report, are New York, Miami and Seattle, but the effects would not be confined to those areas and would ripple across the internet, says Barford, potentially disrupting global communications.

The peer-reviewed study combined data from the Internet Atlas, a comprehensive global map of the internet’s physical structure, and projections of sea level incursion from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The study, which only evaluated risk to infrastructure in the United States, was shared today with academic and industry researchers at the Applied Networking Research Workshop, a meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Internet Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

No science paper cited.

See the full article here .

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In achievement and prestige, the University of Wisconsin–Madison has long been recognized as one of America’s great universities. A public, land-grant institution, UW–Madison offers a complete spectrum of liberal arts studies, professional programs and student activities. Spanning 936 acres along the southern shore of Lake Mendota, the campus is located in the city of Madison.

From University of Wisconsin Madison: “Strain game: Leveraging imperfections to create better-behaved quantum dots”

From University of Wisconsin Madison

May 17, 2018
Sam Million-Weaver
perspective@engr.wisc.edu

Postdoctoral scholar Anastasios Pateras adjust an X-Ray instrument used to detect previously unknown defects in quantum dots. Photo credit: Sam Million-Weaver.

Potentially paving the way toward advanced computers, lasers or optical devices, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have revealed new effects in tiny electronic devices called quantum dots.

In their work, published recently in the journal Nano Letters, the researchers developed and applied analysis methods that will help answer other challenging questions for developing electronic materials.

“We can now look at a set of structures that people couldn’t look at before,” says Paul Evans, professor of materials science and engineering at UW-Madison. “In these structures, there are new sets of crucial materials problems that we previously weren’t able to think about solving.”

The structures Evans and colleagues looked at are thousands of times narrower than single sheets of paper, and smaller than the dimensions of individual human cells. In those structures, quantum dots form inside very thin stacks of crystalline materials topped by an asymmetrical arrangement of flat, spindly, fingerlike metallic electrodes. Between the tips of those metallic fingers are small spaces that contain quantum dots.

Creating such precise structures and peering inside those tiny spaces is technically challenging, however, and quantum dots don’t always behave as expected.

Previous work by Evans’ collaborators at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, who created and extensively studied the crystal stack structures, led to suspicions that the quantum dots were different in important ways from what had been designed.

Until now, measuring those differences wasn’t possible.

“Previous imaging approaches and the modeling weren’t allowing people to structurally characterize quantum dot devices at this tiny scale,” says Anastasios Pateras, a postdoctoral scholar in Evans’ group and the paper’s first author.

Pateras and colleagues pioneered a strategy for using beams of very tightly focused X-rays to characterize the quantum dot devices—and that hinged on a new method for interpreting how the X-rays scattered. Using their approach, they observed shifts in the spacing and orientation of atomic layers within the quantum dots.

“Quantum dots need to be close to perfect,” says Evans. “This small deviation from perfection is important.”

The team’s discovery indicates that the process of creating the quantum dots—laying down metallic electrodes atop a lab-grown crystal—distorts the material underneath slightly. This puckering creates strain in the material, leading to small distortions in the quantum dots. Understanding and exploiting this effect could help researchers create better-behaved quantum dots.

“Once you know these quantities, then you can design devices that take into account that structure,” says Evans.

Designs with those small imperfections in mind will be especially important for future devices where many thousands of quantum dots must all work together.

“This is going to be very relevant because, right now, there are multiple sources of decoherence quantum dots,” says Pateras.

The researchers now are developing an algorithm to automatically visualize atomic positions in crystals from X-ray scattering patterns, given that performing the necessary calculations by hand would likely be too time-consuming. Additionally, they are exploring how the techniques could add insight to other hard-to study structures.

The work was supported by the United States Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering (contract no. DE-FG02-04ER46147), the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (grant no. DGE-1256259), and the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NOW). Use of the Center for Nanoscale Materials and the Advanced Photon Source, both Office of Science user facilities, was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences (contract no. DE-AC02-06CH11357). Laboratory characterization at UW–Madison used instrumentation supported by the NSF through the UW–Madison Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (DMR-1121288 and DMR-1720415).

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

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In achievement and prestige, the University of Wisconsin–Madison has long been recognized as one of America’s great universities. A public, land-grant institution, UW–Madison offers a complete spectrum of liberal arts studies, professional programs and student activities. Spanning 936 acres along the southern shore of Lake Mendota, the campus is located in the city of Madison.

From University of Wisconsin Madison: “Prototype camera set for integration into novel gamma-ray telescope”

University of Wisconsin Madison

May 3, 2018
Terry Devitt
trdevitt@wisc.edu

Colin Adams, a UW–Madison physics undergraduate, makes an adjustment to a novel prototype camera that will be used to image the fleeting signatures of gamma rays crashing into molecules of air in the Earth’s atmosphere, creating a shower of diagnostic secondary particles. Credit: Savannah Guthrie.

A unique high-speed camera, designed to capture the fleeting effects of gamma rays crashing into the Earth’s atmosphere, will soon be on its way from the University of Wisconsin–Madison to Arizona’s Mount Hopkins.

A novel gamma ray telescope under construction on Mount Hopkins, Arizona. a large project known as the Cherenkov Telescope Array, composed of hundreds of similar telescopes to be situated in the Canary Islands and Chile. The telescope on Mount Hopkins will be fitted with a prototype high-speed camera, assembled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and capable of taking pictures at a billion frames per second. Credit: Vladimir Vassiliev

There, the prototype camera will be integrated into a new telescope that will demonstrate novel technologies for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), a wide-ranging international effort to construct the world’s most advanced and comprehensive ground-based gamma-ray detector.

“This telescope pushes the technology to a very different regime,” explains Vladimir Vassiliev, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California Los Angeles and the lead scientist for the telescope under construction on Mount Hopkins in southern Arizona. The telescope, he notes, will have unparalleled mirror optics and the camera is designed to capture the fleeting pulses of blue Cherenkov light created when gamma rays crash into molecules of air in Earth’s atmosphere, creating a shower of diagnostic secondary particles.

“We’ll be able to make a movie at a billion frames per second of the particle shower developing in the atmosphere,” says Justin Vandenbroucke, the UW–Madison physics professor co-leading development of the prototype camera under the auspices of the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

American participation in CTA is supported by NSF, but the overarching project is a huge international undertaking and, when completed, will be comprised of more than 100 telescopes sited in the Canary Islands and Chile. It will be the largest ground-based gamma-ray detection observatory in the world. More than 1,400 scientists from 32 countries are involved in the undertaking. The camera and telescope are being funded primarily by NSF, with contributions from participating universities.

With its innovative optics and camera, the new telescope will be operated in concert with an existing array of four single-mirror telescopes that comprise VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System), located at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mount Hopkins.

CfA/VERITAS, a major ground-based gamma-ray observatory with an array of four 12m optical reflectors for gamma-ray astronomy in the GeV – TeV energy range. Located at FLWO in AZ, USA

HESS Cherenkov Telescope Array, located on the Cranz family farm, Göllschau, in Namibia, near the Gamsberg searches for cosmic rays

Camera technology is critical, says Vandenbroucke, who has been working on the design and construction of the 800-pound, golf-cart sized prototype instrument since 2009 when he was a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University.

The camera has finally come together in a basement laboratory in UW–Madison’s Chamberlin Hall, where Vandenbroucke’s group has been busy integrating and testing it. Camera components will be shipped May 7 to Arizona, where the camera will be reassembled, tested and integrated into the new telescope, which is now being fitted with its mirrors.

Sensors and electronic modules that are the heart of a prototype camera being integrated by UW–Madison physicists in support of the Cherenkov Telescope Array. The project is being facilitated by the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center. Credit: Savannah Guthrie.

The challenge for the camera, according to Vandenbroucke, is that the flashes of photons or particles of light that are of interest are incredibly fast. The Cherenkov pulse in an air shower may last only six nanoseconds, yet each pulse enables detection of a gamma-ray a trillion times more energetic than can be seen with the human eye. The pulses occur at random, making telescopes and cameras with wide fields of view essential, says Vassiliev.

The combination of dual-mirror technology and the novel camera is intended to capture the Cherenkov air showers at unprecedented resolution. “This will be the first demonstration of this kind of optics for this kind of telescope,” says Vassiliev. “The payoff will be excellent imaging of Cherenkov air showers.”

The gamma rays of interest to the CTA team span a wide range of energies. The telescope being built by Vassiliev’s team is designed to detect gamma rays in the central energy range. Objects powered by black holes, says Vandenbroucke, are among the likeliest sources of the gamma rays that will be parsed by the new CTA telescope.

Opening a new frontier in the detection and measurement of gamma rays, says Vandenbroucke, will help answer a raft of some of the most fundamental questions about the nature of matter and energy in the universe. “Gamma rays are the linchpin of multi-messenger astronomy,” says the Wisconsin scientist. “They have been essential to identifying the first gravitational wave signal from merging neutron stars and may play a similar role in the search for the sources of high-energy neutrinos.”

See the full article here .

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

In achievement and prestige, the University of Wisconsin–Madison has long been recognized as one of America’s great universities. A public, land-grant institution, UW–Madison offers a complete spectrum of liberal arts studies, professional programs and student activities. Spanning 936 acres along the southern shore of Lake Mendota, the campus is located in the city of Madison.

From U Wisconsin Madison and UCLA: “Oldest fossils ever found show life on Earth began before 3.5 billion years ago”

University of Wisconsin

UCLA

December 18, 2017
Kelly April Tyrrell
ktyrrell2@wisc.edu

Geoscience Professor John Valley, left, and research scientist Kouki Kitajima collaborate in the Wisconsin Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer Lab (WiscSIMS) in Weeks Hall. Photo: Jeff Miller

Researchers at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin–Madison have confirmed that microscopic fossils discovered in a nearly 3.5 billion-year-old piece of rock in Western Australia are the oldest fossils ever found and indeed the earliest direct evidence of life on Earth.

An epoxy mount containing a sliver of a nearly 3.5 billion-year-old rock from the Apex chert deposit in Western Australia is pictured at the Wisconsin Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer Lab (WiscSIMS) in Weeks Hall. Photo: Jeff Miller

The study, published Dec. 18, 2017 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was led by J. William Schopf, professor of paleobiology at UCLA, and John W. Valley, professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The research relied on new technology and scientific expertise developed by researchers in the UW–Madison WiscSIMS Laboratory.

J. William Schopf, U Wisconsin Madison

John Valley, UCLA

An example of one of the microfossils discovered in a sample of rock recovered from the Apex Chert. A new study used sophisticated chemical analysis to confirm the microscopic structures found in the rock are biological. Courtesy of J. William Schopf

The study describes 11 microbial specimens from five separate taxa, linking their morphologies to chemical signatures that are characteristic of life. Some represent now-extinct bacteria and microbes from a domain of life called Archaea, while others are similar to microbial species still found today. The findings also suggest how each may have survived on an oxygen-free planet.

The microfossils — so called because they are not evident to the naked eye — were first described in the journal Science in 1993 by Schopf and his team, which identified them based largely on the fossils’ unique, cylindrical and filamentous shapes. Schopf, director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life, published further supporting evidence of their biological identities in 2002.

He collected the rock in which the fossils were found in 1982 from the Apex chert deposit of Western Australia, one of the few places on the planet where geological evidence of early Earth has been preserved, largely because it has not been subjected to geological processes that would have altered it, like burial and extreme heating due to plate-tectonic activity.

But Schopf’s earlier interpretations have been disputed. Critics argued they are just odd minerals that only look like biological specimens. However, Valley says, the new findings put these doubts to rest; the microfossils are indeed biological.

“I think it’s settled,” he says.

Using a secondary ion mass spectrometer (SIMS) at UW–Madison called IMS 1280 — one of just a handful of such instruments in the world — Valley and his team, including department geoscientists Kouki Kitajima and Michael Spicuzza, were able to separate the carbon composing each fossil into its constituent isotopes and measure their ratios.

Isotopes are different versions of the same chemical element that vary in their masses. Different organic substances — whether in rock, microbe or animal ­— contain characteristic ratios of their stable carbon isotopes.

Using SIMS, Valley’s team was able to tease apart the carbon-12 from the carbon-13 within each fossil and measure the ratio of the two compared to a known carbon isotope standard and a fossil-less section of the rock in which they were found.

“The differences in carbon isotope ratios correlate with their shapes,” Valley says. “If they’re not biological there is no reason for such a correlation. Their C-13-to-C-12 ratios are characteristic of biology and metabolic function.”

Based on this information, the researchers were also able to assign identities and likely physiological behaviors to the fossils locked inside the rock, Valley says. The results show that “these are a primitive, but diverse group of organisms,” says Schopf.

The team identified a complex group of microbes: phototrophic bacteria that would have relied on the sun to produce energy, Archaea that produced methane, and gammaproteobacteria that consumed methane, a gas believed to be an important constituent of Earth’s early atmosphere before oxygen was present.

UW–Madison geoscience researchers on a 2010 field trip to the Apex Chert, a rock formation in western Australia that is among the oldest and best-preserved rock deposits in the world. Courtesy of John Valley

It took Valley’s team nearly 10 years to develop the processes to accurately analyze the microfossils — fossils this old and rare have never been subjected to SIMS analysis before. The study builds on earlier achievements at WiscSIMS to modify the SIMS instrument, to develop protocols for sample preparation and analysis, and to calibrate necessary standards to match as closely as possible the hydrocarbon content to the samples of interest.

In preparation for SIMS analysis, the team needed to painstakingly grind the original sample down as slowly as possible to expose the delicate fossils themselves — all suspended at different levels within the rock and encased in a hard layer of quartz — without actually destroying them. Spicuzza describes making countless trips up and down the stairs in the department as geoscience technician Brian Hess ground and polished each microfossil in the sample, one micrometer at a time.

Each microfossil is about 10 micrometers wide; eight of them could fit along the width of a human hair.

Valley and Schopf are part of the Wisconsin Astrobiology Research Consortium, funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, which exists to study and understand the origins, the future and the nature of life on Earth and throughout the universe.

Studies such as this one, Schopf says, indicate life could be common throughout the universe. But importantly, here on Earth, because several different types of microbes were shown to be already present by 3.5 billion years ago, it tells us that “life had to have begun substantially earlier — nobody knows how much earlier — and confirms it is not difficult for primitive life to form and to evolve into more advanced microorganisms,” says Schopf.

Earlier studies by Valley and his team, dating to 2001, have shown that liquid water oceans existed on Earth as early as 4.3 billion years ago, more than 800 million years before the fossils of the present study would have been alive, and just 250 million years after the Earth formed.

“We have no direct evidence that life existed 4.3 billion years ago but there is no reason why it couldn’t have,” says Valley. “This is something we all would like to find out.”

UW–Madison has a legacy of pushing back the accepted dates of early life on Earth. In 1953, the late Stanley Tyler, a geologist at the university who passed away in 1963 at the age of 57, was the first person to discover microfossils in Precambrian rocks. This pushed the origins of life back more than a billion years, from 540 million to 1.8 billion years ago.

“People are really interested in when life on Earth first emerged,” Valley says. “This study was 10 times more time-consuming and more difficult than I first imagined, but it came to fruition because of many dedicated people who have been excited about this since day one … I think a lot more microfossil analyses will be made on samples of Earth and possibly from other planetary bodies.”

See the full U Wisconsin article here .
See the full uCLA article by Stuart Wolpert here.
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

For nearly 100 years, UCLA has been a pioneer, persevering through impossibility, turning the futile into the attainable.

We doubt the critics, reject the status quo and see opportunity in dissatisfaction. Our campus, faculty and students are driven by optimism. It is not naïve; it is essential. And it has fueled every accomplishment, allowing us to redefine what’s possible, time after time.

This can-do perspective has brought us 12 Nobel Prizes, 12 Rhodes Scholarships, more NCAA titles than any university and more Olympic medals than most nations. Our faculty and alumni helped create the Internet and pioneered reverse osmosis. And more than 100 companies have been created based on technology developed at UCLA.

In achievement and prestige, the University of Wisconsin–Madison has long been recognized as one of America’s great universities. A public, land-grant institution, UW–Madison offers a complete spectrum of liberal arts studies, professional programs and student activities. Spanning 936 acres along the southern shore of Lake Mendota, the campus is located in the city of Madison.

From University of Wisconsin Madison: “To help kids battling a rare disease, scientists forge a genetic link between people and pigs”

University of Wisconsin Madison

December 19, 2017
Kelly April Tyrrell
ktyrrell2@wisc.edu

Mason Konsitzke, 7, plays in his bedroom at home in Stoughton. Photo: Jeff Miller

Mason Konsitzke is 7. He loves food (especially when he can share it with others) and anything military (both of his grandfathers served). He likes to fly kites and play with his 5-year-old sister, Alexandra. But Mason was born with a disease called neurofibromatosis type 1, or NF1, and each day can present new challenges for him and his family.

NF1 is a genetic disease caused by changes, or mutations, to a single gene in the human DNA library. Roughly one out of 3,000 babies born in the United States have the disease. That’s more than three times as many as have cystic fibrosis. Yet few people have ever heard of NF1.

Mutations in the NF1 gene cause defects in the neurofibromin 1 protein, which acts as a tumor suppressor. Children with NF1 can develop painful tumors along their nerve tracts, including their skin and in their eyes. Sometimes this renders them blind. They are often diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, though not all children with NF1 are also autistic, and they are sometimes diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. They may have soft bones that bend and break. They are at a higher risk for cancer. And there is no cure.

It was not a disease Mason’s parents, Charles and Malia Konsitzke, had ever heard of. As a newborn, he was healthy. But when Mason was 6 months old, the couple began to suspect something was wrong. Mason developed coffee-and-cream-colored spots all over his body. His father later learned these were a hallmark of NF1. Mason received a genetic diagnosis of the disorder just before his first birthday.

“We were like deer in the headlights,” Malia says. “We were in shock, wondering, what does this mean for us? What does it mean for Mason?”

At 18 months, Mason began to lose his ability to speak. He was falling over, screaming constantly and deliberately banging his head. That’s when an MRI revealed a tumor called a plexiform neurofibroma in a mesh of nerves in the left side of his face. It was growing fast.

A father turns to science

Charles “Chuck” Konsitzke is the associate director of UW–Madison’s Biotechnology Center, a sort of one-stop shop for scientists in need of DNA sequencing, genome editing and other services.

Upon Mason’s diagnosis he began to delve into published NF1 research. He wanted to know where it was happening, who was doing it and how he might be able to help. He sought opinions from experts, wondering how the field could be improved. Many identified the same bottleneck: the lack of a good research model.

In biology, research models are animals, cells, plants, microbes and other living things that allow scientists to study biological processes and recreate diseases in order to better understand them. Good models yield information relevant to humans, but the right model can sometimes be difficult to find.

Seen through a microscope, a researcher guides a micro-needle (at right) to inject DNA into a pig embryo at UW–Madison’s Biotechnology Center. Photo: Jeff Miller

NF1 is especially complex, affects many systems of the body and touches many areas of scientific inquiry, from cancer research to neurobiology. Chuck began to search for a better model and in 2013, when Mason was 3, he settled on pigs. Pigs are similar to humans in many ways that other common research animals, such as mice and flies, are not. That includes their size, which means drugs and devices that work on humans can also be tested on pigs. They have a robust immune system, which rodents lack. And they’re intelligent, so scientists can study changes to their cognition.

Chuck then went on the hunt for researchers who studied swine.

Braving the risks

Dhanansayan “Dhanu” Shanmuganayagam, a nutrition and animal sciences professor in the UW–Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, has spent most of his career using swine to study human diseases, particularly heart disease. In fact, he and colleagues in the animal sciences department created the Wisconsin Miniature Swine, a pig that, like people, can develop heart disease under the right conditions.

Dhanu’s office was a few blocks from Chuck’s but they’d never met until a few years ago, when they bumped into one another while helping campaign for a new building on campus. They got to know one another and Chuck asked Dhanu whether he had ever heard NF1. He hadn’t. Chuck told him about Mason, about the need for a better model, about the promise that pigs offered to help understand and treat the disease. Would Dhanu join forces to help create that model, Chuck asked.

Dhanu took some time to think about it. He consulted the members of his laboratory. All would be helping to forge this new path. His risks would be their risks. A pig model could fail, leading them all down a blind alley. That kind of outcome can derail a scientist’s entire career.

Dhanu told Chuck he was in.

The risks remain significant, he says, “but I’ve come to terms with it and it’s fine. I’ve been lucky in my career to work on things that have gone to clinic. If it works it’s going to be impactful.”

Meanwhile, Chuck consulted a legal team to ensure he was clear of conflicts of interest, and took steps to ensure his involvement was ethical and not problematic for his staff at the Biotechnology Center.

There aren’t many places in the world where this kind of work – melding basic science with clinical research and a large animal model like swine – is possible. UW–Madison has large biomedical research centers, the capacity for high-powered basic science, and a 1,500-pig research facility called the Swine Research and Teaching Center (SRTC), based in Arlington, a 35-minute drive from campus.

“It’s a brave new frontier, to move into swine,” says David H. Gutmann, a physician and researcher at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, considered one of the foremost NF1 experts in the world. “I’m glad they’re doing this work at UW–Madison because the combination of specialized resources and expertise are found in very few places worldwide.”

Like scissors for genes

Dhanu and Chuck determined the course they wanted to chart included gene editing, using a powerful new tool known as CRISPR, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats.

The genetic technology is reshaping basic biological research. Like a pair of molecular scissors, CRISPR enables scientists to target a stretch of cellular DNA for alteration. They can cut out pieces of DNA or swap out letters in the genome, changing the message it encodes or shutting off genes entirely.

The two set their sights on creating pigs that carry the NF1 mutations they and other researchers are most interested in studying. “But we had to figure out where to start,” says Dhanu. “It’s like learning to fly a space shuttle.”

With Dhanu’s lab manager and lead scientist Jen Meudt at the helm, the team dove in. But the challenges were many.

They had to learn about swine reproduction, about CRISPR and gene editing, how to perform the necessary surgeries on pigs, how to time events so no step of the process failed and ruined all the efforts before it. Again and again, they hit roadblocks.

It took more than a year, but finally, they came up with a plan: The researchers would use artificial insemination to impregnate a female pig carefully primed to produce more eggs than she naturally would. Shortly after fertilization, they would remove the embryos, whisk them to the Biotechnology Center and inject them with a solution containing the gene-editing CRISPR. This would have to be done quickly, while the embryos were still a single cell. When the single cell divided, all the subsequent cells would contain the NF1 mutation. Inject too late and the pig would develop into a mosaic of cells that contain the mutation and those that do not.

Then it would be off to the surrogate mother, a pig chosen to reproductively match the embryo-donating pig. The researchers would perform surgery to implant the CRISPR embryos into her womb. If all went well, months later she would give birth to piglets, at least some of which would carry the desired NF1 mutations.

A few months passed. On November 7, 2016, Chuck and Dhanu were meeting in Madison with a group from the Neurofibromatosis (NF) Network, which supports research and clinical care for NF1. They were sipping coffee when a text came in from Jen: “The mom carrying NF piglets is delivering right now.”

The piglets – eight in all, and four with the NF1 mutation – were a living embodiment of the team’s hard work. They had proved that they could create pigs genetically-engineered to carry the disease. It was an emotional experience for the scientists, involving tears and prayers. They immediately went out to celebrate.

Why are pigs used in research? Learn more

Then they set to work building on that success. One of the four piglets with the mutation was a male. Mason named him Tank. His job is to sire more piglets with the mutation since the changes conferred by CRISPR were designed to be passed on from generation to generation.

The team took the process they’d developed and applied it to other NF1 mutations, including some related to cancer. And they set an even more ambitious goal: precision medicine. A pig personalized for every child with NF1.

With CRISPR, the researchers believe they can take the genetic fingerprint of an individual child’s NF1 mutation and create a pig with that same mutation. They can then test potential medications and treatments and see if they’ll work. Can tumors, like the one that afflicts Mason, be shrunk?

The promise of precision

By the time Mason reached pre-kindergarten, the tumor in his face had grown into his cranial sinus. His parents were told he could lose his sight and his ability to taste.

Surgery wasn’t an option. It was too risky and could leave Mason in even greater pain, permanently. “He’s literally been in pain his whole life,” Malia says.

Then, for reasons doctors couldn’t explain, the tumor stopped progressing. He regained his speech and no longer screamed or struggled to stay upright. His doctors keep a close watch on the tumor with MRI scans. And they continue to work to determine the best medication regimen for the other symptoms that come with his particular variant of NF1. His treatment must be continuously modified. Because of NF1’s unique manifestations, each child is an experiment unto himself.

Pigs develop faster than children do so they offer the possibility of helping predict how NF1 might affect a particular child, enabling parents, doctors, teachers and others to prepare. Earlier intervention for a child who develops autism could lead to better outcomes. Doctors could start working to find drugs to treat tumors before they grow too large.

“Precision medicine is more than matching the right drug to the right gene. With NF1 it’s more complicated and involves searching for the factors that make each individual with NF1 unique,” says Washington University’s David Gutmann. “This is an amazing opportunity to find the risk factors that put an affected child at risk for developing a brain tumor, a bone defect, or another serious complication of NF1.”

Washington University researcher David Gutmann, center, speaks with UW–Madison’s Dhanu Shanmuganayagam, left, and Neha Patel. Photo: Jeff Miller

Dhanu, Chuck and Jen are not doing this work on their own. The team now includes many talented individuals like Biotechnology Center scientists C. Dustin Rubinstein, Kathy Krentz and Michael Sussman, along with Jamie Reichert and his team at the Swine Research and Teaching Center. And there’s now a broader research group, the UW NF1 Translational Research team, that includes Thomas Crenshaw, an animal sciences professor and department chair, and Marc Wolman, a professor of integrative biology.

They have also enlisted the skill and knowledge of Neha Patel, a pediatrician at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health who treats about 150 children with NF1 in Wisconsin and surrounding regions.

Dhanu hopes to make the NF1 pigs accessible to other researchers around the country, charging only what it costs to produce them. And the team plans to use the pigs to help identify metabolic and cellular pathways common to the variety of NF1 mutations, to help target and develop better drugs.

But to accomplish all of this requires funding.

“We’re at a critical moment,” Dhanu says. “We have to turn our successes into funding opportunities.”

The UW NF1 Translational Research team has bootstrapped most of its work so far, relying primarily on funding and donations from the NF Network. Most of that comes from an annual charity golf tournament the Konsitzkes and four other families help organize and run. Called Links for Lauren, the tournament honors Lauren Geier, an 8-year-old girl in Madison with NF1.

Families can play a surprisingly influential role in the fight against rare diseases.“They often provide critical resources and financial support at the earliest stages of a high-risk project, when funding from federal agencies is not possible,” says David Guttman. “Our families, they inspire us because they ask us to do things that are really meaningful and take risks by taking the roads not frequently traveled. Through their involvement they can move the field forward in ways that no one else can.”

Where there’s research, there’s hope

Larry Britzman had no idea there were pigs at UW–Madison that might one day help children like his 12-year-old daughter Mackenzie. He learned that, and much more, in May when he traveled to campus from La Valle, Wisconsin, for a symposium for patients and families.

“I didn’t realize each child is specific,” he says. “I didn’t realize UW has swine research and there aren’t too many facilities in the country researching NF1.”

The NF1 team hopes to host the symposium each year, to invite families to learn more about the science of NF1, to give them a chance to meet researchers and clinicians, and to ask questions and meet other families living with the disease.

“We’ve gone very far in two years because it hasn’t been just about building a model, it’s also been about creating a community around it,” says Dhanu.

The opportunity to work so closely with and on behalf of the people who may ultimately benefit from his work is not something he’d ever experienced. And it’s been profoundly rewarding.

Not long ago, he invited a family whose college-aged daughter has NF1 into his lab. They’d been donors to NF1 causes for years but had never talked to a researcher. “It meant a lot to them and my first thought was: ‘How can we do more of this?’”

He and his lab members now participate in running events like the Madison Half Marathon, often with The NF Team organization, to raise money for NF1 research and to increase awareness. The runners sport neon yellow performance shirts with bold, black lettering. They also participate in the annual charity golf tournament.

“As scientists, we don’t often see the payoff of what we’re working on,” Dhanu says. “It redefines our research priorities and it also aids discovery. The best people to note observations are the people who live with it.”

To him, success can be measured by individuals. “Even if our research just raises awareness and someone gets treated because of what we do, that alone is big,” he says.

Chuck believes the disease is underdiagnosed because very few people are genetically tested for it and most physicians are not familiar with it. So they may diagnose patients with autism or a behavioral disorder and miss the broader picture.

That has frustrated Danielle Wood, a teacher and mother of two who lives in Reedsburg, Wisconsin. Her daughter, Bernadette, is 2 and was diagnosed with NF1 as an infant. Along with springy blonde curls and an arresting smile, Bernadette has a weak abdominal wall, which causes her pain and may require surgery. She wears braces to support her frail ankles.

Danielle, too, has NF1. Her mother had it and so did her grandmother. Though her condition is mild – she simply wears glasses for poor vision caused by a tumor on her optic nerve – deciding whether to have children was hard. Because it is a dominant mutation, Danielle and her husband had at least a 50 percent chance of giving birth to a baby with the disease. Having grown up with NF1, Danielle felt she had a good idea of what to expect. She now sees herself as an advocate for Bernadette.

“While things never move as fast as we want them to, there’s a tremendous amount of exciting progress in this field and where there’s research, there’s hope,” says David Gutmann. UW–Madison is “in a really great position because (it has) young faculty who are excited and a patient community that is challenging them to improve the lives of people with NF1 through research.”

This is what drives Chuck, Dhanu and the rest of the UW NF1 Translational Research team, which is working to establish a NF1 Center for Excellence at UW–Madison. Not only is this possible, David Gutmann says, it is necessary. “There is no established therapy for NF1 and no magic bullet that works for all kids or adults. The challenge for us is to learn more about this disorder so that personalized and effective treatments emerge.”

Moreover, he says, what NF1 teaches researchers will inform their approaches to other conditions. And he’s excited to see what the future holds.

“All of us in the NF field get up every morning and are excited to get to work. What we learn from our colleagues and our families each day brings us one step closer to that better future for children and adults with NF,” he says. “I can imagine getting up every morning and running to work to see what’s happening with those pigs.”

For Mason, the pigs don’t play much of a role in his daily life today. Rather, he relies on regular visits to therapists and other professionals both in and out of school to help him manage his symptoms. He also benefits from the support of his family, from Chuck and Malia to aunts and uncles who have learned all they can about NF1. And the family dog, Donatella, is his packmate, Malia says.

At 7, Mason can still take all that for granted. He can focus on what he loves best, like sharing the tastiest mini pizzas he can make. You should try the pepperoni.

Mason at home with his parents and sister Alexandra, 5. Photo: Jeff Miller

See the full article here .

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

In achievement and prestige, the University of Wisconsin–Madison has long been recognized as one of America’s great universities. A public, land-grant institution, UW–Madison offers a complete spectrum of liberal arts studies, professional programs and student activities. Spanning 936 acres along the southern shore of Lake Mendota, the campus is located in the city of Madison.

From U Wisconsin Madison: “A new approach to combatting bacterial infections: Disrupting their communication”

University of Wisconsin – Madison

June 19, 2017
Will Cushman
perspective@engr.wisc.edu

Collaborators David Lynn and Helen Blackwell, a professor of chemistry at UW-Madison, approach the control of bacterial infections not by blasting them with toxic antibiotics, but instead by inhibiting the ability of bacteria to become infectious in the first place.

We call them “superbugs”—and antibiotic-resistant bacteria are literally an evolving threat. Doomsday prophets and other pessimists foresee a future where superbugs run amok, overwhelming doctors’ efforts to rid once easily treatable bacterial infections. Even optimists recognize the problem of antibiotic resistance as a serious public health threat. That’s why researchers around the world are looking for novel approaches to control bacterial infections, and one promising approach is taking shape in labs at UW-Madison.

Collaborators David Lynn, the Duane H. and Dorothy M. Bluemke professor and Vilas Distinguished Achievement professor in chemical and biological engineering at UW-Madison, and Helen Blackwell, a professor of chemistry at UW-Madison, approach the control of bacterial infections not by blasting them with toxic antibiotics, but instead by inhibiting the ability of bacteria to become infectious in the first place.

Many common species of bacteria, including those that cause dangerous infections, are actually fairly harmless at certain stages in their lifecycle. These bacteria become infectious—or virulent—only when they sense that their numbers have crossed a certain threshold. Once that threshold is crossed, a message travels through the colony, which signals that it’s time to go on the offense and infect their host. This communication process is called quorum sensing, and it’s a potential weak spot for bacteria.

That’s because researchers are beginning to understand the mechanisms behind quorum sensing so well that they’ve been able to produce molecules that inhibit the process. It’s a potential breakthrough not only in preventing new infections, but also in potentially slowing the pace of antibiotic resistance. Quorum sensing inhibitors don’t kill bacteria—they simply render them impotent, allowing a host’s immune system to zap them before they become infectious.

Antibiotic resistance is the product of the selective pressure of toxic drugs that kill most bacteria, leaving behind only those with resistant traits—however, quorum sensing inhibitors don’t kill bacteria and therefore should not create the selective pressure that leads to antibiotic resistance. Blackwell’s lab has successfully produced many different types of quorum sensing inhibitor molecules.

Meanwhile, Lynn’s lab is developing novel methods for delivering these quorum sensing inhibitors to the body. New research published in the journal ACS Infectious Diseases describes their latest approach, using a technique called electrospinning that produces tiny nanofibers that contain the inhibitor molecules. “The technique involves passing a polymer solution through a needle,” says Lynn. “That needle has a large electrical potential, resulting in basically a jet of wildly fluctuating polymer solution from the tip of that needle. The dimensions of that jet just happen to be on the nanoscale.”

The solvent then evaporates and leaves behind fibers with diameters on the order of several hundred nanometers. These fibers, which contain the inhibitor molecules can be collected as non-woven ‘mats’ or coatings on the surfaces of many kinds of materials, including common mesh-like wound dressings.

Perhaps what makes the nanofiber delivery method most exciting is that the nanofibers control the release of the inhibitor molecules as they degrade.

This timed release is a key goal of Lynn’s research as quorum sensing inhibitors aren’t much use if they don’t stick around long. The nanofibers in this current research have controlled release of the inhibitor for about two weeks, but some of Lynn’s other approaches have controlled release up to eight months.

In addition to wound dressing applications, Lynn sees potential for the approach to be used in medical implant devices and both on its own or in concert with conventional antibiotics. He continues to work on other quorum sensing inhibitor delivery methods, and he and Blackwell are teaming up with researchers in the veterinary medicine and microbiology programs at UW-Madison to begin testing in mouse models.

Still, Lynn cautions that it will be some time before quorum sensing inhibitors are part of doctors’ antibacterial armament. “This anti-virulence approach is brand new and there’s a lot of science that still needs to be understood,” Lynn says. “There’s a lot of work to do yet.”

See the full article here .

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

In achievement and prestige, the University of Wisconsin–Madison has long been recognized as one of America’s great universities. A public, land-grant institution, UW–Madison offers a complete spectrum of liberal arts studies, professional programs and student activities. Spanning 936 acres along the southern shore of Lake Mendota, the campus is located in the city of Madison.