A few years ago, NASA did a cool series of WPA homage posters on the theme of recently discovered planets, called the Exoplanet Travel Bureau. Looks like they have some others about telescopes.
I have no idea why there seemed to be so much science this week. Maybe it’s always there, and I miss it because I’m teaching labs, but I don’t think so.
Thursday: AI Panels at Guilford College
I’m not much of a tech guy, which made this set of panels refreshing. They were more about the cultural impacts of AI than the technical ones. One of the speakers, Rodney Robertson, CIO of the City of Greensboro, is actually in my Rotary club, so maybe I’ll get a Q&A out of him soon.
Another more famous speaker was in town for the Bryan Series. Walter Parkes wrote War Games, and also worked on Men in Black and A.I. and Minority Report. Then he ran DreamWorks for Steven Spielberg, and then a spin-off that made virtual reality exhibits like the Alien Zoo for Arizona State’s bio department (a project I definitely want to learn more about). Parkes talked in glowing terms about ASU’s “relentless innovation” across pretty much every aspect of higher education, and said the reason his first film, War Games, has had such staying power is because they worked so hard to get the science right.
Friday Morning: STEM Learning Conference at Gaston College
Gaston College is a community college outside of Charlotte, but a slightly unusual one in that they have a grant that funds their first- and second-year students to do undergraduate research. A little web research showed me that this effort feeds into another scholarship program at UNC Charlotte called SPARC4.
The Bio department at UNCG has a similar focus on undergraduate research, with a different NSF grant that does not yet have its own logo.
I was at Gaston talking instead about the slow and sputtery process of rebooting our internships course, which I am currently recruiting for as “departmental and university service.” The university has two campus-wide offices that handle paid and unpaid internships, respectively:
which means two different databases for students to search, in addition to any personal contacts they might have. I’ve spent the fall reaching out to local businesses and nonprofits that aren’t in those national-level commercial databases. I’ll devote a whole post to those efforts at some point.
As during last spring’s NC3ABI meeting, I met a bunch of neat people who are working hard to help students learn science by putting them to work. Some of them I may do Q&As with in the future. A particular highlight was learning about iTree, a set of software tools for assigning monetary value to living trees based on the ecosystem services they provide rather than their value as dead lumber. I’m definitely going to include that in the next version of my Introduction to Permaculture course.
Friday Night: Meteorite Chemistry
I’ve written about Tom English and the G-tech astronomy program multiple times.
Friday night’s talk by Anthony Love from App State was about the chemistry that happens inside meteors out in space, mostly during those moments when collisions have heated them up enough to temporarily melt their ice into liquid water. Liquid water allows all sorts of new minerals to form. New minerals mean new crystal shapes, providing new surfaces and potential catalysts for new kinds of chemical reactions, which may have something to do with the origins of life. The idea is that the heat of planet formation might have destroyed simple organic precursor molecules like amino acids, and that having them delivered to the oceans from space might have started or at least sped up the formation of life on Earth.
I was personally shocked at the sheer number and diversity of the compounds that have been found inside meteors. I think I remember Love’s figure being 1600, but this CNN article says 2300, which is just mind-blowing.
The organic matter in the meteorite was originally once heated to up to 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit while it was still part of its parent asteroid. This actually reduced the diversity of the organic compounds in the meteorite from millions to a couple thousand. But Heck was still stunned by how many organic compounds were still in the meteorite despite the heat-induced changes it experienced.
I wrote about Robert Hazen’s concept of mineral evolution several years ago in a PlotBot column called “Rock Gods” for The Intergalactic Medicine Show. Hazen is also one of the talking heads on PBS’s recent series Ancient Earth, part of NOVA (season 50, y’all!!!!).
Saturday: Nanoscience Student Symposium
This was part of a larger 3-day Nanoimpacts Conference called “Defense Applications and Beyond.” From the website, this looked pretty interesting, especially to the rather large military science fiction community that Baen Books has helped foster here in NC, but I was busy doing other things.
I only went to the Student Symposium on Saturday, which was focused on smaller projects that would fit onto a poster. Lots of water testing, removing toxic metals from water, molecular biology of stem cells (for eventual wound repairs, maybe), organoids, that kind of thing. I collected some e-mails for potential future Q&As. I like talking to people at different stages of their careers, and I think it’s important for kids to remember that everybody starts somewhere.
Wake Forest has jumped on organoids with a Center inside their Institute for Regenerative Medicine. At least they’re fundraising for it, as attested by the many (many) “Make a Gift” buttons on their website.
Saturday: Clouds
My family got very lucky with the 2017 total eclipse. At the time my wife’s parents had a house in the mountains of north Georgia, just across the state line, near a fake Bavarian village. We drove the five hours into the path of totality, and were rewarded with a perfect, textbook eclipse, with cricket songs and everything.
That same day in 2017, Greensboro had probably a thousand people gathered in a parking lot downtown, waiting for the clouds to clear. They were disappointed. This past Saturday’s annular eclipse was likewise a total nothingburger from our Piedmont point of view. The clouds only cleared in late afternoon, after the celestial fireworks were already over.
Two Weeks Later, Leprosy!
Hopping ahead to the more recent past, on Friday the 27th the Bio department at UNCG hosted Xiang-Yang Han from MD Anderson Cancer Center (that strike-through is not a typo; apparently they’re rebranding?), just down the street from my postdoc lab in the Texas Medical Center. Han is a microbiologist who in 2008 discovered a second species of leprosy.
Quick nerd note: Aside from a failed attempt at Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the first fantasy novel I ever read, during 1987’s Governor’s Scholars Program at Centre College, was Stephen R. Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane, the first book in the First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. Thomas Covenant is a leper from our world who finds himself transported to an epic fantasy realm called The Land after a head injury. He spends his time there (and also his “wild magic”) causing chaos, in large part because he’s sure his experiences are not real and therefore nothing matters. Heady stuff to a sheltered teenager, bored with hoeing tobacco on the family farm.
Other books I read there that stayed with me:
The Guns of Avalon (which started my lifelong love of Roger Zelazny’s work)
The Last Unicorn (likewise Peter S. Beagle, though maybe a bit less)
Other books I read there that did not stay with me:
The White Hart by Nancy Springer
one of the many Shannara books by Terry Brooks (which even I, naive as I was at the time, saw as a cheap rip-off of Tolkien; I liked his Magic Kingdom of Landover series a lot more)
???
I will spare you the pictures of lepromatous leprosy, though they would be highly appropriate for Halloween. If you’ve seen the cult of the True Knot death scenes in Doctor Sleep, as I happened to do over the weekend, it looks a lot like that.
Anyway, it was a good talk.
Han spent ten years using gene sequences to reconstruct the split between the two bacterial species and their subsequent spread around the world, mostly inside of us. Leprosy is a human-specific pathogen that has spent millions of years evolving to evade our immune systems, turning off cell surface proteins that might mark it as foreign, upping the production of select glycolipids that suppress immune responses, and actually hiding inside macrophages (making them the original sleeper cells!). It can theoretically infect apes, but in the wild it never does. The only two non-human reservoirs found so far are red squirrels in Britain (first infected over 20,000 years ago, according to Han) and armadillos, which were infected by the Spanish only about 400 years ago.
Apparently, neither bacterium will grow in the lab, or inside healthy rats or mice, so interest in an animal model is high. Han has to work from pathology samples taken from living human patients, sent to him by clinical collaborators around the world, just as people did before incubators.
btw: I really enjoyed The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells mini-series, but I don’t have much confidence in their depiction of Victorian bacteriology.
Also, leprosy spurs rampant liver growth in armadillos?!? Wake Forest, take note!
The two species of leprosy have different progressions, and infection by one, the other, or both may go a long way towards explaining why the clinical expression of Hansen’s disease is so variable.
Have a lovely and leprosy-free Halloween. Read some sweet, sweet fiction.
It’s candy for your brain . . .
I met Jeff Jackson tonight, at an event in Greensboro. I subscribe to his newsletter, where he writes about the inner workings of Congress from a freshman's point of view. As a veteran, he serves on the otherwise hard-to-get Armed Services Committee,
https://armedservices.house.gov/
but also on the Science and Technology Committee.
https://science.house.gov/committee-members
Having been redistricted by his former colleagues in the state legislature, he's now running for Attorney General.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-138307078
I would never tell you how to vote, but check him out. See what you think. And let me know.