Research Penn State 2010/2011

Research Penn State

Volume 31 2010–11

Chinese Shakespeares Fighting Diabesity Skin of the Planet

Page 16

First Responder After five remarkable years of discovery, the Swift satellite has rewritten the book on gamma-ray bursts.

R e s e a rc h | P e n n S t a t e Volume 31 Number 1 2010–11

30 and Counting Research/Penn State magazine debuted in May 1980, its mast-

Research / Penn State is published

annually by the Office of the Vice President for Research at The Pennsylvania State University. The magazine samples the diversity and drama of Penn State’s $765-milliona-year research program as a public service to inform, entertain, and inspire the University community. Opinions expressed do not reflect the official views of the University. Use of trade names implies no endorsement by Penn State. ©2010 The Pennsylvania State University. For permission to reprint text from Research / Penn State (U.Ed. RES 10-46) contact the editor: phone 814-865-3478; e-mail editor@research.psu.edu. Visit www.rps.psu.edu to learn more.

Publisher: Henry C. Foley, Vice President for Research

Director of Research Communications: Michael Bezilla

Editor: David Pacchioli Associate Editor: Melissa Beattie-Moss Assistant Editor: Sara Brennen Production Manager: Joan Scholton Designer: Larry Krezo This publication is available in alternate media on request.

The Pennsylvania State University is committed to the policy that all persons shall have equal access to programs, facilities, admission, and employment without regard to personal characteristics not related to ability, performance, or qualifications as determined

by University policy or by state or federal authorities. It is the policy of the University to maintain an academic and work environment free of discrimination, including harassment. The Pennsylvania State University prohibits discrimination and harassment against any person becauseof age, ancestry, color, disability or handicap, national origin, race, religious creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or veteran status.

Discrimination or harassment against faculty, staff, or students will not be tolerated at The Pennsylvania State University. Direct all inquiries regarding the nondiscrimination policy to the Affirmative Action Director, The Pennsylvania State University, 201 Willard Building, University Park, PA 16802-2801; Tel 814865-4700/V, 814-863-1150/TTY.

head announcing “the first issue of a new quarterly series on research” intended “to encourage communication between Penn State faculty and the public and to put information in the hands of potential users.” Its coverage of a research program then budgeted at $70 million ran to twenty black-andwhite pages.

As founding editor Harlan Berger told me recently, “The magazine grew out of criticism by the late Ted Eddy, then Penn State’s provost, who reviewed the college-based research compilations we were producing. He found them stodgy and not up to modern standards.” Enlisting his tiny staff, Harlan set out to create something that better reflected the spirit of discovery he witnessed every day, to tell the stories of Penn State research. One of his first moves was to hire a young graduate student named Nancy Marie Brown, who eventually succeeded him and led the way in shaping the publication’s subsequent identity.

I had the privilege of working with both Harlan and Nancy during a period of remarkable growth in the University’s research enterprise and a corresponding rise in its reputation. By the mid-1990s, Penn State had emerged as a research powerhouse—and Research/Penn State as one of the most respected magazines of its kind, winning nineteen national awards for the quality of its writing and for general excellence.

There’s a lot more to cover today. With expenditures topping $765 million, Penn State is consistently ranked among the top dozen research universities in the country. And Research/ Penn State, now in both print and online versions, continues its long-held mission to “sample the diversity and drama of Penn State’s research program as a public service to inform, entertain, and inspire the University community.”

Here at the 30-year mark, let me take the chance to thank you, the members of that community, for your ongoing interest and support. Please don’t hesitate to contact me with comments, complaints, or stories of your own.

David Pacchioli, Editor dap1@psu.edu

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Contents

28

12

16

›

Features

›

Departments

12 Old Man Sha in the Middle Kingdom

2 In Brief

How Shakespeare changed Chinese theatre and vice versa.

10 At Large

16 First Responder

Cover story: After five remarkable years of discovery, the Swift satellite has rewritten the book on the tremendous deep-space explosions known as gamma-ray bursts.

36 From the Archives 37 In Touch with …

38 Off the Shelf 40 Endpaper

22 Diabesity

Penn State researchers take on the manyheaded Hydra of diabetes, obesity, and the resulting serious complications.

28 The Critical Zone

In a tiny wired-up watershed in Penn State’s Stone Valley Forest, researchers from many disciplines work together to fathom the fragile skin of the planet.

34 The Forgotten War

Historian Amy Greenberg says the U.S.– Mexican War set the stage for American imperialism, although few in this country know about it.

On the cover: Artist’s conception of a stellar-mass black hole.

Gamma-ray bursts may signal the births of black holes in the farthest reaches of space.

See story on page 16.

Image courtesy of NASA E/PO, Sonoma State University, Aurore Simonnet

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Research › in Brief

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Broadening the Gene Pool Previous genomic studies have focused on European lineages.

T

Photo by Stephan Schuster

he full range of human genetic variation may never be completely understood. But a

new study of the oldest known human lineage shows fresh outlines of that variety.

I n F ebruar y , an international

R e s e a r c h | Pen n Sta te 2010 –11

team led by scientists at Penn State and the University of New South Wales announced that it had sequenced the personal genomes of five southern African individuals—four Bushmen and one very well-known Bantu, Archbishop Desmond Tutu—in an effort to better understand how genetic differences affect human health. Previous genomic studies have focused almost exclusively on indivi­ duals of European descent.

Using three new technologies that deliver DNA sequences with unprecedented economy and speed, the study identified 1.3 million genetic variants that have never before been observed, its authors say. These variations reveal not only that southern Africans are quite distinct genetically from Europeans, Asians, and western Africans,

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but also that there are striking levels of difference among the Bushmen themselves.

“On average, there are more genetic differences between any two Bushmen in our study than between a European and an Asian,” says Webb Miller, professor of biology and computer science and engineering at Penn State, who performed the comparative analysis for the study.

“The four Bushmen participants are tribal leaders and at least 80 years of age, and the one Bantu participant is in his late seventies,” notes Stephan Schuster, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State and a co-leader of the project. Tutu, because of his Tswana and Nguni ancestry, was considered an ideal representative of most southern Africans.

The participants’ age is a plus, Schuster explains, since the availability of lifelong medical histories will facilitate identification of genetic differences that may have contributed to particular health conditions.

Because their results (published in the February 18 issue of Nature) have been made freely available on the Internet, the scientists expect that southern Africans will be better represented in future studies of how genetic variation influences the effectiveness of drugs—a field known as pharmacogenomics. These genomes, Schuster adds, should enable more accurate identification of diseases caused by rare genetic variants in southern Africans as well as the global human population. —Barbara Kennedy

What birdsong may teach us about speech

Like the Birdies Sing What goes on inside that little bird’s brain? Dezhe Jin really wants to know. By studying

the neural circuits at work when a songbird sings, Jin, an assistant professor of physics in Penn State’s Eberly College of Science, hopes to discover something about how humans learn.

Although human and bird brains are vastly different, he explains, speech and song learning involve similar neural processes. Like human language, birdsong is composed of strings of syllables, the order of which follows a complex and variable pattern. The underlying mechanism, he says, is similar to putting words together to form a sentence.

Using what is already known about avian brain components, Jin designed a computer model of a bird’s neural networks. By testing it against recordings of actual brain activity made with the help of colleague Alexay Kozhevnikov, assistant professor of physics and psychology, he has begun to determine the pathways leading to syllable production and syntax.

Jin’s work shows that each particular syllable is encoded in an area known as the high vocal center.

This “control center” then transmits precisely timed impulses, or spikes, to the downstream neurons that drive syllable production. When an impulse reaches a branch point in the chain, “both branches may sense the signal, but the one that receives a slightly stronger signal will win out and the impulse will progress down that chain,” he notes.

The similarity between these neural networks and their analogue in humans makes them important for understanding the brain circuitry that underlies human speech, Jin argues, and may help in treatment of speech and language disorders.

“We are not only interested in birds,” he confirms.

“Ultimately, we are interested in better understanding ourselves.”—Jennifer Kruk The National Science Foundation supported this work.

aeiou

The Mobile Option

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Looking for low-cost housing in rural Pennsylvania?

A mobile home may be your best alternative.

D

estiny Aman, a Penn State doctoral student in geog­ raphy, and Brenton Yarnal, professor of geography, surveyed mobile home residents in twelve of the state’s rural counties, in areas lacking apartment complexes and other affordable options. About 78 percent of households surveyed earn less than $50,000 annually.

Respondents praised the low cost of their homes, and also voiced complaints about flimsy construction, insufficient space, and the social stigma associated with mobile home living. In sum, however, “residents were overwhelmingly satisfied with their housing choice,” Aman reports. “That points to a real opportunity for housing policy to address issues and improve the quality of life for (these) residents.”

State and federal agencies could offer incentives to encourage people to buy mobile homes and develop mobile home parks, she suggests, in the same way existing programs do for urban apartment complexes. And policymakers could use affordable housing funds to encourage mobile home residents to buy newer models built for energy efficiency and durability.

“Mobile homes have become a very important part of the rural housing landscape,” Aman says.

“By focusing on fixing something people are already largely happy with, you stand a better chance of crafting successful housing policy.”

—Michael Dawson To hear a podcast of this story, visit: www.wpsu.org/radio/single_entry/ LL-2770/stories

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Research › in Brief Targeting self-propagating invaders

The Worm Stops Here

Rail service and farmers are now an important part of the supply chain.

Integrating Ethanol New state and federal mandates requiring 10 percent ethanol in reformulated gasoline will create big challenges for supply chain managers, according to Penn State experts.

Ethanol can be moved by pipeline, but not when it’s mixed with gasoline, explains Evelyn Thomchick, associate professor of supply chain management in the Smeal College of Business. “It must have separate transport and storage until the end of the supply chain when it can be blended.”

Self-propagating worms are malicious programs that spread through computer networks,

stealing or erasing hard-drive data; interfering with preinstalled programs; and slowing—even crashing—home and office computers. “In 2001, the Code Red worms caused $2 billion worth of damage worldwide,” says Yoon-Ho Choi, a postdoctoral Fellow in Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology.

Now Choi and a team of colleagues have created an algorithm that effectively targets the stealthiest and most efficient of these invaders, known as local-scanning worms.

According to Choi, the new algorithm works by estimating the size of the susceptible host population of computers. It then monitors the occurrence of infections within that population and sets a threshold value just below the average number of probing scans necessary to infect a new host. If the scanning worm’s number of scans exceeds this threshold, the algorithm quarantines it, then breaks down the network into many small networks (or cells), isolating the already-infected hosts.

“By applying the containment thresholds, we can block outbreaks early,” says Choi. “Our evaluation showed that this algorithm is better than the state-of-the-art defense.”

R e s e a r c h | Pen n Sta te 2010 –11

—Dustin Grinnel Choi’s collaborators were Peng Liu, associate professor of information sciences and technology; George Kesidis, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and engineering; and Lunquan Li of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Their work was published in the February issue of Computers & Security.

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In practice, that means transport by rail—and that will require new infrastructure. “Since there was not a need for rail access to petroleum storage and distribution facilities before the induction of ethanol, most storage and distribution facilities are located along pipelines, not rail lines,” write Thomchick and co-authors Dawn Russell and Kusumal Ruamsook in a study published in

Transportation Journal.

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Cost-effectively managing the logistics of ethanol, they argue, will call for significant investment in rail service: rail spurs, unloading equipment, and piping. Connecting ethanol production plants, most of which are in the Midwest, with storage and distribution facilities on the East and West Coasts will require building hubs to receive and consolidate shipments.

Current storage tanks, piping, and blending equipment will have to be converted for ethanol use only—or new infrastructure will have to be installed. “A new 25,000-barrel storage tank costs $450,000 and takes fourteen to twenty-four months to build,” the researchers say.

In addition, says Russell, an assistant professor of supply chain management, farmers will need to be consulted: “The farmers understand what the issues are going to be with the agricultural side of ethanol.”

If you’re a logistics manager dealing with petroleum, she says, “I think the biggest takeaway is that rail service and farmers are now an important part of your supply chain.”

—Nicole Yetter

Road building helps spread invasive species.

Routes of Invasion Invasive plants are advancing into Eastern forests at an alarming rate, and their rapid spread is linked to maintenance of forest roads, according to Penn State experts. The findings are especially significant in the face of massive road-building efforts to support greatly expanded natural-gas drilling operations in the Marcellus shale formation.

Pennsylvania’s new alternative energy standard gives power-plant operators an incentive for co-firing biomass with coal.

Biomass to Burn › ›

B

According to David Mortensen, professor of weed ecology in the College of Agricultural Sciences, “Roads can play a profound role in the spread and growth of invasive species by serving as corridors for movement and providing prime habitat for establishment.”

Mortensen, assisted by postdoctoral researcher Emily Rauschert and doctoral candidate Andrea Nord, surveyed the presence and abundance of thirteen invasive plants and found that the most abundant species, Microstegium vimineum (Japanese stiltgrass), is strongly associated with proximity to roads. “It is clear that the rates of spread occurring in forests throughout the study region are aided by management practices such as road grading,” he says.

lending biomass into the coal stream that feeds electricity generation plants could reduce harmful emissions and create a market for renewable fuel, according to a Penn State energy expert.

Japanese stiltgrass seed becomes mixed with dirt and gravel and is carried along as graders push the crushed stone to fill holes and smooth road surfaces, Mortensen explains. The seeds may also be transported by equipment traveling from one road job to another.

Biomass, typically composed of switchgrass and smalldiameter trees, is less dense than coal and has a higher moisture content. As a result, bio­mass tends to generate only about two-thirds as much energy.

“The crushed limestone used to surface many forest roads and to line culverts and drains along those roads is creating ideal conditions for the invasives to spread rapidly,” he adds. “The high alkalinity sediment from the stone, mixed with water running off the roads during storms, eventually spills out into the forests, carrying invasive plant seeds and creating areas for them to grow quickly. The high alkalinity prevents native plants that have become adapted to acidic forest soils from growing, and invasives fill the void.”

Even so, “Several experiments have shown the feasi­ bility of co-firing biomass with coal, including tests at the Shawville power plant in Clearfield County and the Seward power plant in Westmoreland County,” says Daniel Ciolkosz, senior extension associate in agricultural and biological engineering in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences.

Pennsylvania power plant operators have a big incentive for co-firing biomass with coal, Ciolkosz adds. The state’s Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard mandates that 18 percent of Pennsylvania’s electricity be generated from renewable or alternative energy sources by 2021. Because biomass is essentially carbon neutral and free of sulfur and mercury, its use would be especially attractive. “Other coal-burning facilities—such as cement kilns, industrial boilers, and coal-fired heating plants—are good candidates for co-firing as well,” says Ciolkosz.

If the practice catches on, it could create a large market for biomass, Ciolkosz says. Currently, Pennsylvania uses approximately 57 million tons of coal per year. Replacing 5 percent of that fuel with biomass would amount to 4.4 million tons of biomass per year, triple the current rate of biomass use for energy.

Mortensen advocates an integrated approach to slowing the spread of invasive plants, especially into uninvaded or environmentally sensitive areas. Without such intervention, he says, “over the long run they will change the nature of our plant communities by outcompeting native plants.”—Jeff Mulhollem Mortensen’s paper, “Forest Roads Facilitate the Spread of Invasive Plants,” was published in the August 2009 issue of Invasive Plant Science and Management.

A fact sheet with more information for farmers and landowners is available on the Web at: pubs.cas.psu.edu/FreePubs/PDFs/ub044.pdf

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—Jeff Mulhollem

Ironically, he says, crushed limestone is used because its runoff improves the productivity and water chemistry of mountain streams, benefiting wild trout and other aquatic organisms that have suffered from decades of acid rain.

Research › in Brief

L

“Long toes maintain contact with the ground just a little bit longer.”

onger toes and a unique ankle structure provide sprinters with the burst of acceleration that separates them from other runners, according to Penn State biomechanists.

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Winner by a TOE! (and ankle)

“At the start of a sprint, the only way a runner can speed up is through the reaction force that results from the action of leg muscles pushing on the ground,”

explains Stephen Piazza, associate professor of kinesiology in the College of Health and Human Development.

“Long toes provide sprinters the advantage of maintaining maximum contact with the ground just a little bit longer than other runners.”

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Piazza and Sabrina S. M. Lee, a postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University, studied the muscle architecture of the foot and ankle in twelve collegiate sprinters and twelve nonathletes. Piazza says, “What we found was that the lever arms (the distance between the Achilles tendon and the center of the ankle) were about 25 percent shorter in sprinters. This difference might be explained by a trade-off between leverage and muscle force–generating capacity.”

Analyzing the physiological data on a simple computer model, Piazza adds, “We found that when the Achilles tendon lever arm is the shortest and the toes are longest, we get the greatest acceleration.”

The findings, he cautions, do not discount the other physiological components important to sprinting ability, such as body type, cardiovascular physiology, and muscle fiber type. And, he adds, “It is not too farfetched to think that training can help accentuate the shape of the bone. But if sprinters’ skeletal characteristics were shown to be immutable, it would support the coaches’ adage that sprinters are born and not made.”

—Amitabh Avasthi

R e s e a r c h | Pen n Sta te 2010 –11

The findings of Piazza and Lee appeared in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Greatest acceleration occurs when the Achilles tendon lever arm is the shortest and the toes are the longest.

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At Palenque, ancient engineers harnessed the power of water.

Mayan Plumbing Forget your fancy faucet. An ancient water feature found in the Mayan city of Palenque, Mexico, is the earliest known example of engineered water pressure in the New World.

The area of Palenque, in Chiapas, was first occupied about the year A.D. 100 but grew to its largest during the Classic Maya period between A.D. 250 and 600. Underground water features are not unusual there. Because the city was built in a constricted area in a break in an escarpment, the Maya routed streams beneath plazas via aqueducts to make more land available for living.

“They were creating urban space,” says Kirk French, lecturer in anthropology at Penn State, and also at least partially controlling flooding from the approximately ten feet of rain that falls during the six-month rainy season.

French first identified the Piedras Bolas Aqueduct, a spring-fed conduit located on steep terrain, in 1999 during a mapping survey of Palenque. In 2006, he returned with Christopher Duffy, a Penn State professor of civil and environmental engineering, to examine the feature.

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The elevation drops about 20 feet from the entrance of the tunnel to its outlet about 200 feet downhill, the researchers report. In cross section, the width of the conduit decreases from ten square feet near the feeding spring to a half square foot where the water emerges.

The combination of gravity and sudden constriction would have caused the water to flow out of the opening under enough pressure, Duffy estimates, to shoot upward to a height of twenty feet—enough to power a fountain, or to lift water up to the adjacent residential area for use as wastewater disposal.

“Water pressure systems were previously thought to have entered the New World with the arrival of the Spanish,” the researchers wrote in a recent issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. Yet the Piedras Bolas Aqueduct shows that the Maya “had empirical knowledge of closed channel water pressure predating the arrival of Europeans.”

—A’ndrea Elyse Messer The National Science Foundation and the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc., supported this work.

“Water pressure systems were previously thought to have entered the New World with the arrival of the Spanish.”

› › Engineering the Future

Nur Sabrina Wahid, a senior majoring in Biotechnology, won first place in the College of Agricultural Sciences’ 2010 Research Expo for her study of cacao embryogenesis in bioreactors. Wahid (at far left) is pictured with her advisers, Siela Maximova, senior research associate, and Mark Guiltinan, professor of plant molecular biology, examining genetically engineered cacao plants.

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Photo by Steve Williams

Research › in Brief Why did mass extinction hit the Northern Hemisphere harder?

New method for tracking dispersal

Heavy Metal

How Seeds Spread

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an especially severe mass extinction on that continent,” comments Bralower.

But why was the North hit so hard?

Penn State biologist and collaborators

have developed a new method for tracking seed movement and germination that will be useful for studying how plants adjust to global climate change. The technique may also help curtail the spread of invasive plants, according to Tomás Carlo, assistant professor of biology in the Eberly College of Science.

The team’s approach, Carlo says, is based on an isotope tracer method long used to investigate metabolic pathways in cells and to track movement of fluids through soils. He and his team applied solutions of nitrogen-15—a stable, heavy isotope of nitrogen found in urea—to the leaves of several plant and tree species. The plants soaked up the enriched solution and incorporated the nitrogen-15 into their tissues, including the seeds they would later produce.

Once the plant’s seeds had been dispersed by birds, Carlo collected the seeds and seedlings, ground them up, and placed a tiny subsample into a mass spectrometer to measure the amount of nitrogen-15. “We found that all of the seeds and seedlings that came from the plant that we had treated had strong nitrogen-15 signatures,” he reports. The team also found they could track seed dispersal for up to three individuals at a time by spraying parent plants with different concentrations of urea.

“Organisms will have to migrate to cope with climate change,” says Carlo. “So there is interest in estimating patterns of seed dispersal, especially in fragmented and highly altered landscapes.

Our technique could help scientists understand the likelihood that a particular plant species will be successful at shifting its range. It could also help land managers control invasive species.

By understanding how these species spread, we can attempt to prevent them from getting to places where they are predicted to go.”

—Sara LaJeunesse

R e s e a r c h | Pen n Sta te 2010 –11

Carlo’s collaborators were Joshua Tewksbury of the University of Washington and Carlos Martínez del Río of the University of Wyoming. The results of the team’s research (supported by the National Science Foundation) appeared in the December 2009 issue of the journal Ecology.

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Nannoplankton, the tiny shelled creatures that drift through our oceans feeding whales and fish, were almost wiped out when an asteroid rocked the Earth 65 million years ago. In fact, 93 percent of these creatures disappeared, says Timothy Bralower, professor of geosciences at Penn State, and their loss keyed a mass die-off of marine life. Despite extensive study, the exact cause of mortality has remained elusive.

After analyzing nannofossil counts from hundreds of ocean-floor drilling samples taken in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, Bralower and colleagues at Penn State and Florida State may be closer to an answer.

“Southern Hemisphere oceans showed lower extinction rates and a nearly immediate recovery of normal nannoplankton populations,” Bralower and co-authors report in a paper published in Nature Geosciences in February. In the North, by contrast, extinction rates were much higher and nannoplankton diversity remained low for more than 300,000 years.

“This agrees with the fact that North American land plants were hammered and there was

In part, the data suggest, it was the incoming asteroid’s path. From where the fireball hit, on the tip of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, “the oblique, northward impact concentrated ejected particulates in the Northern Hemisphere.” The darkness occasioned by dust and debris likely lasted six months, crippling photosynthesis and shutting down nannoplankton reproduction.

After that, ample sunlight and large amounts of nutrients in the oceans should have allowed even northern populations to bounce back. The reason they didn’t, Bralower and colleagues speculate, is metal poisoning.

On impact, copper, chromium, aluminum, mercury, and lead ejected from the asteroid would have dissolved into seawater at likely lethal levels for plankton, they explain. Iron, zinc, and manganese—normally micronutrients—would have reached harmful levels shortly thereafter. And because nannoplankton are at the base of the food chain, larger organisms would have concentrated the effect. “Toxic levels in the parts per billions could have inhibited recovery,” Bralower says.

“Metal loading is a great potential mechanism,” he notes, but not the final answer. “We still do not really know why some things die out, while others hang on by a shoestring and eventually recover.”—A’ndrea Elyse Messer NASA’s Exobiology Branch supported this research, and the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program provided drilling samples.

The technique was developed to create highly accurate copies of surfaces such as insect eyes or butterfly wings.

› › Coating for Prints CSI fans take note: A new coating process pioneered at Penn State can reveal hard-to-develop fingerprints that other methods can’t pick up.

“As prints dry or age, the common techniques used to develop latent fingerprints, such as dusting or cyanoacrylate (Super Glue) fuming, often fail,” explains Robert Shaler, director of Penn State’s Forensic Science program. Most current techniques rely on the print’s chemistry—the mix of bodily secretions with other chemicals to form a visible or fluorescent product.

Instead, the conformal coating process developed by Shaler and Akhlesh Lakhtakia, the Charles Godfrey Binder Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, takes advantage of the print’s physical properties. It uses a form of physical vapor deposition, a method that allows vaporized materials to condense on a surface, creating a thin film.

The technique was developed to create highly accurate copies of biological templates such as insect eyes or butterfly wings—surfaces that have features on the nanoscale. “It is a very simple process,” says Lakhtakia.

Once the film is deposited, the ridges and valleys of the fingerprint—its topography—show up on the new surface, so analysts can read them using an optical device.

The researchers tested two coating materials: magnesium fluoride and chalcogenide glass. They coated a variety of fingerprints on glass and even on tape, using both pristine prints and prints that had been fumed with Super Glue. In all cases, they report, the results were usable.

While the equipment used to deposit the coating is a laboratory device, they would like to design a portable version that could be taken to a crime scene to produce readable fingerprints on site.

Like all current approaches, this one works only on nonporous surfaces, Shaler says. However, it would allow for retrieval of fingerprints from fragments of incendiary or explosive devices without affecting the ability to analyze the chemicals used in the device.

“We are in the process of redesigning the chamber and looking not just at fingerprints, but at other objects,” adds Lakhtakia. “These would include bullets, cartridges, footprints, bite marks and lip impressions.” He and Shaler have filed for a provisional patent on their application. —A’ndrea Elyse Messer

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At Large › Ornithologist Margaret Brittingham in Lower George’s Valley, near Centre Hall, Pennsylvania Photographer Steve Williams describes the scene:

“We were going out to a farm to take some photographs for a publication Margaret had written, and on the way she asked me to stop.

She had seen a bird, a mockingbird, and she wanted to get out and take a look at it. Margaret always travels with her binoculars and gear, and at those moments her passion for her subject just comes out.

“You can spend a lot of time waiting around for a shot like that—the low-hanging fog, the perfect light. But everything was just right.”

Margaret Brittingham, Ph.D., is professor of wildlife resources in the College of Agricultural Sciences.

Steve Williams is a photographer in the college and editor of Penn State AgScience Magazine.

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“How Shakespeare changed Chinese theatre ...”

Something’s rotten in the state of Jiaobo.

The king has died mysteriously, his brother Kulo-ngam has inherited the throne and married the widowed queen, and Prince Lhamoklodan has gone off the deep end and is contemplating suicide.

Sound familiar?

“... and how Chinese theatre changed Shakespeare.”

By Melissa Beattie-Moss illiam S hakespeare surely could never have envisioned this high-altitude Hamlet, set in the shadow of the Himalayas, with characters draped in snow leopard skins. Yet in 2007, the Bard’s famous prince of Denmark found himself transported to ancient Tibet in Prince of the Himalayas, Shanghai director Sherwood Hu’s film and stage adaptation of Hamlet with a Buddhist twist.

Photo by Scott Johnson

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Not to worry. “To be or not to be” turns out to be relevant in every language, says Alexander C. Y. Huang, author of Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange (Columbia University Press, 2009). Huang, associate professor of comparative

literature at Penn State, makes a strong case for the cross-cultural malleability of Shakespeare’s canonical works over centuries of performance history. Huang’s absorbing and detailed book challenges the traditional view that the world’s preeminent dramatist and England’s national poet belongs primarily to the English-speaking world. What’s more, argues Huang, Shakespeare has had a prominent role in shaping modern and contemporary Chinese theatre—and China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have repaid the favor by bringing their own unique interpretations to the Bard’s timeless tales.

Transforming the Bard hen American anthropologist Laura Bohannon lived among the Nigerian Tiv tribe in the 1950s, she brought along a copy of Hamlet. Sitting with the tribal elders around a fire, she attempted to tell them the tale, believing its archetypes and plot would hold together across cultures. As she recounts in her well-known 1961 essay “Shakespeare in the Bush,” the linguistic and cultural lenses through which the Tiv interpreted Shakespeare’s tragedy brought a completely new meaning to the story. (Hint: Claudius acted honorably while Hamlet was rude and bewitched into madness.) Bohannon’s explanations left the tribe members puzzling over her blindness to the obvious truths in her own people’s legend.

The same lesson about cultural relativity might be applied to the many and varied Shakespeare-inspired productions throughout Asia. These plays and movies are opening our eyes to new possibilities in the texts and changing how we understand Shakespeare, notes Alex Huang, associate professor of comparative literature at Penn State and co-founder and curator of the open-access Shakespeare Performance in Asia video archive.

Adds Huang, “These interpretive and creative works serve as a forum for theatre artists to deal with contemporary questions and are reshaping debates about the relation of East and West in the emerging landscape of global culture.”

R e s e a r c h | Pen n Sta te 2010 –11

Want to experience these movies yourself? Visit our Web site www.rps.psu.edu/huang to watch clips from recent Asian Shakespeare productions, with video commentary by Alex Huang.

Poster art for (left) a 2006 stage production of King Lear, adapted and directed by David Tse Ka-shing for the London-based Yellow Earth Theatre and the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre; and (right) Prince of the Himalayas, Shanghai director Sherwood Hu’s 2007 film and stage adaptation of Hamlet set in ancient Tibet. Courtesy of Alexander Huang 14

“Shakespeare’s work has long been traveling the world, even during his lifetime,” explains Huang.

“Shortly after appearing on London stages, the plays migrated to foreign shores. English comedians toured Europe performing his works, and by 1607 Shakespeare plays were already sailing east.” That September, Hamlet was performed on a makeshift stage aboard the Red Dragon, an East India Company ship anchored off Sierra Leone, with four local chiefs in attendance. The following year it was performed on the island of Socotra, now part of the Republic of Yemen. “From there, Shakespeare’s name and works spread to other parts of Asia,” notes Huang.

Rising in the East

It took until the mid-nineteenth century for Shakespeare’s plays to arrive at the trading ports of China—and it wasn’t until the 1904 publication of Lin Shu’s translation of Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare that a wider Chinese audience became aware of the playwright.

Interestingly, the author’s reputation took hold well before his work. Explains Huang, “In this case, we are looking at the reception history of a famous playwright without the plays. Very few people in China had read Shakespeare or seen the plays performed, and yet the name Shakespeare—or rather Shashibiya or Old Man Sha, as he was called in Mandarin—was on everybody’s lips, especially the intellectuals and officials,” and was used for varying purposes ranging from social reform to conservative agendas.

Many Chinese first learned about the Bard of Avon from encyclopedias written by European missionaries promoting Western culture, and the playwright became an important icon to Chinese reformers advocating for development in their nation. Says Huang, “Something fascinating happened there. Shakespeare had transhistorical appeal.

The educated elite knew he was a Renaissance playwright but somehow he came to represent everything that was modern and progressive to them, and they saw in him a figure who cared for commoners and promoted the ideas of democracy and human rights.”

Each successive era in Chinese history has configured Shakespeare in its own image, Huang emphasizes. From the 1920s through the 1940s, China was concerned with women’s rights, and that’s one reason why The Merchant of Venice was popular then. “This play captured the Chinese imagination not because of the themes of religious tensions or the Jewish question, which were typically excised from the script,” he explains, “but rather because of the appeal of the character of Portia, the beautiful young woman lawyer.” During this era, China was beginning to open the doors of education (including the legal profes

sion) to women, an important turning point in the country’s history. “This movement informed Chinese readings of The Merchant of Venice,” Huang says, adding that Chinese productions of the play are often called The Woman Lawyer.

A silent film with that title debuted in 1927.

Communist Block

When the Communists came to power in 1949, it became difficult—if not outright dangerous—for translators, intellectuals, and theatre artists to stage foreign plays, notes Huang. “However, because Karl Marx cited Shakespeare frequently in his writings, for a period of time Shakespeare’s plays were the only safe Western texts.”

Shakespeare fell from favor during the Cultural Revolution, when he was branded a “bourgeois counterrevolutionary” and his work, along with other foreign works, was almost entirely banned for a decade. In this restrictive political climate, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, approved art was limited to propagandistic texts, posters, and performances, such as the famous “little red book” of Quotations From Chairman Mao and eight “model dramas” with revolutionary themes.

Explains Huang, the few Shakespeare plays that were performed during that era—mostly the comedies—were staged with “an emphasis on apolitical entertainment.”

Chinese actors performed plays such as Much Ado About Nothing with period costumes, wigs, and prosthetic noses.

“Usually artists want their work to feel relevant to audiences, but this was the opposite,” he clarifies. “They denied the existence of any ideological meaning or relevance and thought they were on safer ground by sticking to bright and sunny comedies and a fetishized idea of historical authenticity.”

However, says Huang, quoting anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “The real is as imagined as the imaginary,” and Shakespeare scholars have generally debunked notions of historical authenticity and purity. “We don’t even know exactly how Elizabethan English was pronounced,” Huang notes. Given the unknowns, it can be argued that all productions of Shakespeare—whether in London or Laos—are culturally subjective works of imagination and interpretation.

Across Time and Space

With the fading of the

One genre has emerged as perhaps the most adaptable to a unique Sino-Shakespearean aesthetic: Jingju, or Beijing opera, is a form of traditional Chinese theatre combining music, vocal performance, dance, mime, and acrobatics. Says Huang, “Some of the most fascinating adaptations of Shakespeare have taken place in the rich realm of Chinese opera, which contains more than 300 subgenres, along with subtle role types and masks with beautiful colorful facial patterns.” The Experimental Beijing Opera Troupe took their production of Othello on a successful national tour in the 1980s, and adaptations of this and other Shakespeare tragedies (“which fit Chinese opera better than his comedies,” notes Huang) have become modern classics in China.

Given the Bard’s transformative Technicolor journey spanning centuries and cultures across the globe, can we safely conclude that Shakespeare is universal? “The notion of universality has often come under attack by literary critics,” says Huang, “because it’s politically correct in our age to believe in the local rather than the global.” However, he adds, “We have to understand the notion of universalism in a different way in an era of globalization. A sign of a great work is its openness that allows it to be read across time and space —and that’s the most fascinating aspect of Shakespeare.”

In the immortal words of Old Man Sha, “S hìjiè yi wutái .” Or, “A ll the world ’ s a stage .”

Alexander C. Y. Huang, Ph.D., is associate professor of comparative literature in the College of the Liberal Arts, acyhuang@psu.edu.

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Cultural Revolution and shift to the “open door policy” under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership, the 1980s unleashed a prolific era of pent-up Shakespeare scholarship and performance in China. In 1983, Shakespeare Studies became the first mainland journal dedicated to a non-Chinese writer. The year

1984 saw the birth of the Shakespeare Society of China, and the next year Chinese scholars were published for the first time in the Shakespeare Quarterly, a prestigious academic journal.

In 1986, the renaissance culminated with the Shanghai Shakespeare Festival, thirteen days and twenty-four performances of sixteen Shakespeare plays, some of which were nationally televised. Only two of the productions were in English—one sign that mainland scholars, theatre professionals, and audiences craved distinctly Chinese productions of Shakespeare.

By David Pacchioli

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First Responder

R e s e a r c h | Pen n Sta te 2010 –11

After five remarkable years of discovery the Swift satellite has rewritten the book on the tremendous deep-space explosions known as gamma-ray bursts.

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"They are the mightiest powerhouses in the universe; they burn up as much energy in a few seconds as the sun does in 10 billion years." That's how Peter Mészáros describes gamma-ray bursts.

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hese fleeting astronomical events—blinding flashes from the deepest reaches of space—were first observed in 1967 by U.S. Vela satellites deployed to check for nuclear test ban violations by the Soviet Union.

Yet what came into view as a Cold War artifact long remained a celestial enigma. What could cause these seemingly random explosions?

Just how powerful were they? Were they close to us or far away?

When the Vela data were finally published in 1973, the interest generated among astronomers was immediate. Over the next two decades, thousands of papers were written, proffering hundreds of theories. But the sheer strangeness of these blasts, as well as their transience, made them resistant to study.

Mészáros, director of Penn State’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, became interested in gamma-ray bursts in 1991, when observations from NASA’s Compton Gamma Ray Observatory revealed that these high-energy flashes mapped isotropically—i.e., uniformly— across the sky. The fact that they didn’t appear to be bunched along the plane of our galaxy, Mészáros explains, meant that the bursts had to be either extremely close to Earth or, more likely, very, very distant. If the latter, judging by their relative brightness, they would have to be “stupendously”

energetic, the biggest explosions since the Big Bang. “This,” he remembers, “was the beginning of real understanding.”

During a sabbatical at Cambridge University, Mészáros began working with the wellknown British cosmologist Martin Rees, and the two developed what is still the working model for how such explosions may occur. At the time, Mészáros has written, “gamma-ray bursts were thought to be just that, bursts of gamma rays (that) were largely devoid of any observable traces at any other wavelengths” of the electromagnetic spectrum. Yet in February 1997, he and Rees published a paper arguing that the rapid high-energy bursts should be followed by lingering emissions at longer wavelengths.

Less than three weeks later, their prediction was confirmed when the ItalianDutch satellite BeppoSAX picked up fading X-ray signals coming from a number of gamma-ray events. Unlike the gamma rays themselves, these “afterglows” hung around for hours or days or even weeks, long enough that their distances from Earth could be readily measured.

And they proved indeed to be billions of light years away, at the farthest edges of the cosmos.

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Image: Artist's illustration of a gamma-ray burst occurring in a dusty region of intense star formation.

Courtesy of Sonoma State University, NASA E/PO Aurore Simonnet

The Need for Speed

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November 20, 2004: Swift's launch from Cape Canaveral.

Image courtesy of NASA

R e s e a r c h | Pen n Sta te 2010 –11

“A neutron star is the mass of the sun extremely compressed into a chunk of rock the size of Manhattan. The collision of two objects that dense results in the formation of a new black hole and creates short, powerful bursts of gamma rays that last only a few milliseconds but are a trillion times brighter than our sun.”

he Compton data confirmed that gamma-ray bursts, as John Nousek puts it, “come in two flavors.” So-called long bursts, the type that leave afterglows, last anywhere from two seconds to several minutes, explains Nousek, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State. Short ones tend to burn out in less than a few seconds, some as little as a tenth of a second.

Aided by afterglows, researchers could not only fix the location of long bursts, but also search their host galaxies for the objects that may have caused them. As the evidence mounted, it became clear that most of these bursts were associated with supernovae, the violent death throes of massive young stars thirty times the size of the sun. When such a star comes to the end of its nuclear fuel, astronomers posit, its core collapses to form a black hole. As more stellar material is drawn into the greedy vortex, jets of plasma are ejected from either end of the hole at nearly the speed of light. In rare cases, it seems, these jets emit the intense flash of gamma rays.

“Basically,” says Derek Fox, another Penn State astronomer, “a long-duration gamma-ray burst is a very unusual type of supernova.”

That’s the theory. The shorter bursts, however, didn’t fit the mold. While hugely energetic themselves, they are about ten times less so than long-duration bursts. And their extreme abruptness doesn’t match the time required for a massive star’s demise. What made astronomers particularly uncomfortable, though, was that a short burst was over so fast it couldn’t actually be studied. With existing telescopes it was impossible to react quickly enough to get a bead on the thing before it vanished, so short bursts remained a mystery. “What was needed

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was a rapid-response system that could catch these fleeting events as they were happening,” remembers Nousek. Under NASA’s direction, an international consortium from the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom took on the challenge of designing such a thing, and that’s how the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer was born.

Early Successes

S

wift was conceived as a multi­wavelength observatory; its three tele­scopes would operate in tandem. The Burst Alert Telescope, or BAT, would continuously scan large swaths of sky for unusual flashes in the gamma-ray range. When it picked up a burst, the spacecraft would rotate within seconds to train X-ray and optical telescopes on the event. The emissions at these longer wavelengths, the thinking was, would allow Swift to quickly fix the burst’s position while simultaneously relaying that information to more powerful follow-up telescopes on the ground.

As lead university partner, Penn State was charged with designing and building the X-ray and optical instruments (known as the XRT and UVOT, respectively), and, once Swift was launched, controlling its activity from a Mission Operations Center in State College. A large cadre of Penn State astronomers would be involved, including Nousek at the head of the operations staff, Mészáros as lead scientist, David Burrows to spearhead the XRT, and Pete Roming as chief of the UVOT. Swift was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 20, 2004, and within six months its rapid-response capability had paid off. On May 9, 2005, Swift’s BAT detected a short-duration burst, and the XRT kicked in on cue to pick up its afterglow, the first one ever captured.

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As lead university partner, Penn State was charged with designing and building the X-ray and optical instruments, and controlling Swift’s activity from a Mission Operations Center in State College.

Photo by Fredric Weber

we’re at 150, heading up to 200. Once you start accumulating that type of statistic, you can really start classifying things.”

In fact, Nousek says, “we’ve now moved on into at least second- and possibly thirdgeneration gamma-ray burst astronomy.

As a result of the continuing availability of bursts, a lot of ground-based and even space-based correlative studies have come about. It’s even catalyzed development of new instrumentation.”

Peter Mészáros (left) and Derek Fox

This confirmation of the so-called merger model, Swift’s first big coup, was soon followed by success of another sort.

In September 2005, the satellite detected a powerful explosion at the edge of the visible universe. The unusually long burst—it lasted approximately 500 seconds, more than eight minutes—was determined to have occurred some 12.7 billion light years from Earth, which made it the most distant explosion ever seen. Only one other celestial object—a quasar—had ever been discovered at a greater distance.

“A neutron star is the mass of the sun extremely compressed into a chunk of rock the size of Manhattan,” Fox explained at the time. “The collision of two objects that dense results in the formation of a new black hole and creates short, powerful bursts of gamma rays that last only a few milliseconds but are a trillion times brighter than our sun.” A NASA news conference called it the end of a thirtyfive-year-old mystery.

Targets of Opportunity fter such a start, it’s not surprising that within two years of launch, Swift had accomplished virtually everything its makers had promised. “There have been numerous highlights,” Mészáros acknowledges, “but perhaps the most valuable thing is that it has made possible a sort of production-line measurement of bursts.

Before Swift, we knew the distances and host galaxies of maybe thirty bursts. Now

One such request resulted in a truly serendipitous discovery when Swift chanced to catch a “normal” supernova —not a gamma-ray variant—in the act of exploding. As David Burrows explains, the satellite just happened to have turned its eye onto a particular patch of sky at the precise moment when an ordinary star went kerflooey, something never before witnessed. “The whole thing lasted only about five minutes,” he says. “It was phenomenal luck. But it has given us unique insights into the physics of these explosions.”

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When a second short burst was spotted in early July, Fox led a team that followed up with both ground- and space-based telescopes to fix its distance from Earth and get a bead on its host galaxy. In a set of papers published in the journal Nature, Fox and his co-authors presented their findings, concluding that short bursts were an entirely different animal.

They appeared to result not from the explosions of massive stars, but rather from collisions between two much smaller, denser star remnants—called neutron stars—that were drawn together into a kind of death spiral.

In addition, the last few years have seen a conscious broadening of Swift’s mission.

“After we discovered all the things we said we would,” Nousek explains, “the question became, ‘How do we use Swift when we’re not looking at gamma-ray bursts?’”

Ensconced in its low-Earth orbit, the satellite makes a fresh revolution every ninety-six minutes, during which it can handle four or five targets. “Sometimes there are no gamma-ray bursts visible,” he says. But Swift’s versatility and quickness make it a natural for spotting comets, variable stars, and other transient objects.

“When we advertised these other uses, what we call targets of opportunity, the response was enthusiastic. It’s become so popular that we’re now getting several requests a day.”

Inspired by Swift, Fox, Burrows, Nousek, and Roming have taken the lead in developing a next-generation satellite that will be engineered to detect bursts and their host galaxies at the very infancy of time.

Photo by Fredric Weber

David Burrows (left) and John Nousek

R e s e a r c h | Pen n Sta te 2010 –11

“A gamma ray burst is a very intense light source. As that light shines through the universe, it's like a searchlight cutting through fog.

You see the little clouds of fog that are close to the source and then closer to you, so you get a crosssection of what kinds of materials were present.”

Far Out

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n spring 2009, Swift made news around the world with yet another major find. It began as a routine spotting of a middling, ten-second gamma-ray burst by the satellite’s BAT. After a quick pivot, the XRT picked up an afterglow in X-ray light, “just like hundreds of others that we have seen,” according to Burrows. The UVOT saw nothing in the visual range; again, this wasn’t unusual.

But when follow-ups by infrared telescopes on the ground began reporting that they had seen the fuzzy remnant, says Pete Roming, “we had our first clue that this was a very distant object.”

Soon a team led by Fox, analyzing data from the Gemini North Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, had arrived at a figure of slightly more than 13 billion light-years, a jaw-dropping distance

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whose announcement set off a frenzied race among competing teams of astronomers seeking to confirm it. When the dust finally settled, GRB 090423, as it is known, turned out to be the most distant object that has ever been seen—dramatic evidence of an explosion that occurred just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, during that scarcely imaginable era when stars and galaxies were first forming.

To astronomers, Mészáros explains, a bright object at that distance is above all a time machine. “A gamma-ray burst is a very intense light source,” he says. “As that light shines through the universe, it’s like a searchlight cutting through fog. You see the little clouds of fog that are close to the source and then closer to you, so you get a cross-section of what kinds of materials were present—what kinds of atoms, the abundance of carbon versus hydrogen at different times. You can count how many protogalaxies formed when the universe was 5 percent of its present age, or 10 percent. It’s a very sensitive probe.”

The prospect of reaching back even further toward the Big Bang, suddenly made realistic by Swift’s find, has inspired Fox, Burrows, Nousek, and Roming to take the lead in developing a next-generation satellite called JANUS (Joint Astrophysics Nascent Universe Satellite). If funded, they say, it will feature the same rapid-response capability that has made Swift so valuable. Unlike Swift, however, it will be equipped with a near-infrared telescope, which is ideally suited for detecting bursts and their host galaxies at the very infancy of time.

More Miles to Run his past April, the Swift satellite reached a major milestone.

“By catching 500 gamma-ray bursts ‘on the fly’ and studying them in unprecedented detail,” Burrows was quoted in a press release, “Swift has given us a much deeper understanding of these elusive explosions and their role in shaping our universe.”

To put that achievement into context: Gamma-ray bursts occur somewhere in the sky at a rate of about two a day, and of that steady stream Swift’s BAT pulls in about one in eight for detailed study.

Of all the bursts whose distances have ever been measured, Swift—in orbit just shy of six years—is responsible for 75 percent of them. “Before Swift,” says Nousek simply, “the field was very much data starved.”

Although it has already well outlived its minimum life expectancy as a three-year mission, Nousek is quick to add, Swift is nowhere near being put out to pasture.

It plays a continuing role in efforts to search out the most distant objects in the universe, for one thing. Swift is also actively engaged in the study of things closer at hand, including “normal” supernovae. And, Nousek notes, there remains plenty of interest in using it to probe other targets of opportunity: “Last November, on our fifth anniversary, we held a workshop and 250 people came.”

In coming years, Swift could be uniquely useful in the ongoing search for gravitational waves, those ripples in space-time whose existence Einstein predicted in his general theory of relativity back in 1916, and which finally seems on the verge of

being confirmed. As Burrows explains, the giant gravitational wave detector known as LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), currently undergoing a major upgrade, is expected to soon be sensitive enough to pick up the waves believed to be created by the merging of neutron stars, the same events thought to produce short gamma-ray bursts. If LIGO could pick out a gravitational-wave signal from a burst that Swift has identified, it would prove the existence of gravitational waves once and for all—and confirm the merger model to boot.

That kind of joint discovery, says Mészáros, would herald a convergence in observational technologies that seemed far off even five years ago, when Swift was newly launched. And indeed, over that brief stretch of time, as Nousek puts it, “I think it’s fair to say that the textbook of gamma-ray burst astronomy has been rewritten.”

Artist's rendering of Swift satellite.

Image courtesy of Sonoma State University, NASA E/PO Aurore Simonnet

“I think it's fair to say that the textbook of gammaray burst astronomy has been rewritten.”

Peter Mészáros, Ph.D., is Eberly Family Chair in Astronomy and Astrophysics and professor of physics in the Eberly College of Science, and leader of the Swift theory team, nnp@ psu.edu. John Nousek, Ph.D., is professor of astronomy and astrophysics and Swift’s leader for mission operations, jan2@psu.edu. Derek Fox, Ph.D., is assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics and a member of the Swift team, dbf11@psu.edu. David Burrows, Ph.D., is senior scientist and professor of astronomy and astrophysics and lead scientist for Swift’s X-ray Telescope, dxb15@psu.edu. Peter Roming, Ph.D., former senior research associate in astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and leader of the Swift UV/Optical Telescope, is a staff scientist at the Southwest Research Institute.

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Diabetes Obesity michelle Obama is worried, and she’s not alone. On February 9, 2010, the First Lady kicked off a national initiative called “Let’s Move” that aims to end childhood obesity within a decade. “The truth is we don’t have a moment to Waste,” Mrs. Obama noted, “because a baby born today could be less than a decade away from showing the first signs of high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes, if he or she is obese as a child.”

R e s e a r c h | Pen n Sta te 2010 –11

Obesity and type 2 diabetes are two sides of the same coin, explains Robert Gabbay,

director of the Penn State Hershey Diabetes and Obesity Institute. “Obesity is the single major risk factor for developing the disease, which in turn is a leading cause of heart attack, stroke, blindness, amputation, and kidney disease, as well as death.”

by Melissa Beattie-Moss 22

Photo by Den Reader

Penn State researchers take on the many-headed Hydra of diabetes, obesity, and the resulting serious complications.

Portrait of an Epidemic

The USDA’s 2010 dietary guidelines report calls the obesity epidemic “the single greatest threat to

public health in this century.” In the past thirty years, the prevalence of obesity (defined as being 20 to 40 percent above one’s medically approved weight) has tripled in the United States. In less than a decade, the prevalence of diabetes has nearly doubled to an estimated 24 million people.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), diabetes—specifically type 2, the more preventable kind that accounts for 90 percent of all diagnoses—afflicts at least 8 percent of the national population.

Another 57 million Americans have been diagnosed with prediabetes, a condition indicating higher-than-normal blood glucose levels and an increased risk for diabetes.

What’s more, physicians estimate that another 25 percent of people already have diabetes without knowing it. Many symptoms—such as frequent urination, excessive thirst or hunger, and fatigue—go undiagnosed, greatly increasing the chance for severe complications.

Perhaps most chillingly, the face of type 2 diabetes is getting younger each year. What used to be a disease of our grandparents and parents is becoming a disease of our children, notes Gabbay. Even the names for the disease’s two types reflect this shift. In 1997, “adult-onset diabetes”—a condition where the body still produces insulin but is resistant to its glucose-regulating effects—was renamed type 2 diabetes. “Juvenile diabetes”—the less common condition, marked by an inability to produce insulin—became known as type 1.

Says Gabbay, “As a society, we are just now starting to absorb the extent of this problem. The predictions for children are finally ringing the alarm bells. If we don’t do something, our kids won’t even have the life expectancy we have—and the years they have may not be healthy ones.”

From Molecules to Medicare “At Penn State, we’re trying to meet this crisis head on,” adds Gabbay. “Our researchers are tackling things from the molecular level all the way to public health initiatives, with a shared goal of eradicating obesity and diabetes and helping those with these conditions live better.”

Each spring, more than 160 Penn State-affiliated clinicians and scientists gather for an annual retreat at University Park sponsored by Penn State Milton

S. Hershey Medical Center and multiple colleges, including the College of Medicine. The gathering exists, in part, to give colleagues in disparate divisions a sense of the breadth and depth of diabetes and obesity research taking place under their own institutional umbrella.

“We are always trying to facilitate greater ties between University Park and the College of Medicine,” notes Gabbay. “The clinical, applied, and basic research we do is stronger because it takes places at multiple colleges and campuses. And the links we create among scientists, health care providers, clinics, and hospitals make a difference across central Pennsylvania and beyond.”

It’s Complicated

One of the greatest challenges is how to get patients to make lifestyle changes to avoid the devastating and often preventable complications of diabetes. Obesity, hypertension, cigarettes, alcohol, and processed foods can set a diabetes patient on a crash course for heart disease, stroke, nerve death, kidney disease, and blindness, among other ailments.

“One of our great strengths is in eye research,” Gabbay notes. The Penn State Hershey Diabetic Retinopathy Center (supported by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund) is “one of the world’s largest retinopathy centers for the study of eye disease and diabetes. Many of our investigators started in the lab and are now testing new treatments on patients to prevent blindness.”

Joyce Tombran-Tink, professor of neural and behavioral science, embodies that spirit of discovery. She is the co-discoverer of a promising protein called pigment epithelial derived factor (PEDF), which she describes as “important for its ability to protect nerve cells from dying and prevent blood vessel leakage in the eyes and brain.”

Research based on her discovery could benefit many kinds of neurodegenerative disease, including diabetic retinopathy, which causes about 24,000 new cases of blindness each year.

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“The Real Question is how to reach parents who are reinforcing bad food choices at home.”

Diabetic nephropathy—kidney damage caused by elevated blood sugar levels—is another devastating complication. Often almost symptom-free until its more serious stages, the disease can cause weakness, swelling, insomnia, and confusion—and can ultimately lead to dialysis and even death. Diabetes is the leading cause of end-stage renal disease in the United States, accounting for about 40 percent of new cases.

“Evidence is pointing to diabetic nephropathy being a disorder of the immune system,” says Alaa Awad, assistant professor of nephrology. High blood sugar and high blood pressure can clog the kidney’s waste-cleansing corpuscles. Toxins begin to build up in the bloodstream and the body responds by unleashing macrophages—white blood cells that ingest foreign material and stimulate other immune system cells. Explains Awad, “My research investigates how this immune response can lead to destructive inflammation. My colleagues and I are exploring new ways to prevent or delay progression of renal tissue damage, particularly as it relates to immune cells called macrophages, dendritic cells, and lymphocytes.”

While Awad’s research relates to end-stage disease, Andras Hajnal’s attention is fixed on the root causes of “diabesity” itself. Hajnal, associate professor of neural and behavioral sciences, recently published a study in the Journal of Neurophysiology suggesting that obesity gradually numbs the taste sensation of rats to sweet foods and drives them to consume larger and ever-sweeter meals. Hajnal’s findings could uncover a critical link between taste and body weight, and reveal how being fat preconditions the brain to become hooked on sugary food. “When you have a reduced sensitivity to palatable foods, you tend to consume it in higher amounts,” he says. “It is a vicious circle.”

Junk Food Nation

Leann Birch and Barbara Rolls have spent their careers

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investigating just such vicious circles. Frequent collaborators and co-authors, they are equally frank in their assessment of the problem. “Most of us know what we should be eating, but it doesn’t necessarily affect what we do,” says Birch, director of the Center for Childhood Obesity Research.

Rolls—director of the Laboratory for the Study of Human Ingestive Behavior and author of five books, including The Volumetrics Eating Plan—nods in agreement. “Leann and I are in the midst of a study among preschoolers that looks at how to get vegetables into

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the diet,” she points out. “We know that big portions of calorie-dense foods loaded with fat, sugar, and salt are the main problem. Part of our logic is that if portion size has such a powerful effect on intake, how about using it positively to get these kids to eat more of the foods they should be eating?”

Explains Birch, “We’re trying simple things such as increasing the portion size of veggies at the start of a meal.

Lo and behold, these preschoolers eat more vegetables.

By the same token, for adults, having a big salad at the start of a meal reduces overall calorie intake.”

“The real question,” adds Rolls, “is how to reach parents who are reinforcing bad food choices at home because that’s what they like to eat. We now have two generations of adults who haven’t really cooked. We have to return to a model that values quality over quantity.”

Quality may be an especially hard sell in an era of economic hardship. Americans are clearly falling far short of the USDA’s minimum recommendation of five fruit and vegetable servings per day—and we’re paying the price for our poor nutrition. But it’s not entirely our own fault, Birch and Rolls believe.

“We don’t have to learn to love some tastes,” Birch explains. “Studies show that infants are born with a preference for the sweet taste. What’s more, fat carries a lot of the flavor characteristics of foods. So when children are eating food that is high in sugar, fat, and salt, it’s pushing other things out of the diet that you have to learn to like, such as vegetables.”

When they say “vegetable,” Birch and Rolls are envisioning fresh produce such as carrots, spinach, and green beans. But much to the frustration of nutritionists, the USDA and public schools consider french fries a vegetable. In fact, says Rolls, “New data show that the most commonly consumed ‘vegetable’ among toddlers and preschoolers is french fries.” The same study concluded that 75 percent of preschoolers eat too much saturated fat, and 84 percent take in too much sodium per day.

Finding a Carrot in the Desert

Geography, class, and race play an undeniable part in this epidemic. Studies reveal that fresh produce is least available in the poorest rural and urban communities— dubbed “food deserts”—particularly in African American, Hispanic, and Native American neighborhoods, where obesity and malnutrition often go hand in

Photo by Tamar London

“My colleagues and I are exploring new ways to prevent renal tissue damage.”

Alaa Awad

Joyce Tombran-Tink is the codiscoverer of a protein that could help prevent blindness due to diabetic retinopathy.

“One of our great strengths is our eye research.”

Robert Gabbay

Photo by Fredric Weber

“New data show that the most commonly consumed ‘vegetable’ among toddlers and preschoolers is french fries.”

Danielle Downs leads the Active MOMS study examining the impact of exercise and other health behaviors on pregnant women with gestational diabetes.

Barbara Rolls

“Studies show that infants are born with a preference for sweet taste.”

Leann Birch

“There are kids coming out of places like central Philadelphia who’ve never even seen a banana.” hand. Michelle Obama has zeroed in on these un­der­ served areas, pledging $400 million to help and calling for more grocery stores and farmers markets in these communities.

“There are kids coming out of places like central Philadelphia who’ve never even seen a banana,” says Rolls. “How do we expose people to the huge array and the vast pleasure you can get from eating really good produce? The reality is we don’t have much willpower, and we’re not thinking of our health in the future, or health care costs, or the personal and societal consequences of obesity.

We’re eating for the moment, and going for what tastes good and is cheap and, importantly, what we find readily all around us. Unless we can change that, I think we’re in big trouble.”

She pauses thoughtfully, then adds: “Ultimately we have to convince the food industry to make some changes. I think our only hope is to change the food supply so it becomes the default to go for the healthier food.”

A New Model for Success

There’s good news mixed with the bad, insists Bob Gabbay.

“An interesting strength at Penn State is the window of opportunity we’ve identified to help pregnant women and diabetes prevention.”

For instance, the Active MOMS study—led by Danielle Downs, associate professor of kinesiology, and funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases—examines the impact of exercise and other health behaviors on pregnant women with gestational diabetes.

The interventions help, says Downs. “It appears that the environment the fetus is exposed to during pregnancy plays a big role in whether the baby will eventually develop diabetes. There’s this critical early intervention time during preconception and pregnancy when we can really make a difference.”

In the end, says Bob Gabbay, the hopeful aspect of the ”diabesity” epidemic is the same thing that makes it so frustrating. “Diabetes and obesity are incredibly expensive diseases,” he notes. “Most of the costs are from long-term complications that we can prevent, so there is not only a huge cost, but also a huge opportunity to save money and lives by delivering better care.

a huge change, one-third of children born today will develop diabetes in their lifetimes, a quadrupling of the number of people with diabetes. To simply take care of all those people …” He trails off mid-sentence, then adds emphatically, “We don’t have a health care system that could do that.”

Is it possible to avoid this frightening fate? “Yes, it’s not magic,” says Gabbay. “We know that if you control blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar we can prevent most of the complications of diabetes. But what percentage of people with diabetes in the United States have all three of these controlled? Only about 7 percent. That’s 93 percent who are not well controlled. That speaks to the system really failing us. It’s going to take everyone at all levels—patients, physicians, corporate and government initiatives, and academic research—using all the tools at our disposal in order to correct our course.”

To that end, says Gabbay, “at Penn State we’ve developed a study where we provide an online tutorial about diabetes and then connect people to a social community for support. We are working through the Governor’s Office of Health Care Reform to improve chronic-care delivery.

We are developing a computerized registry to track patient outcomes and prevent people from falling between the cracks.”

Will it be enough? We may not find all the answers, he admits, but we’ve rolled up our sleeves and are hard at work.

And, most important, “we are determined to be part of the solution.”

Robert A. Gabbay, M.D., Ph.D., is professor of medicine in the College of Medicine and director of the Penn State Institute for Diabetes and Obesity and Penn State Hershey Diabetes and Obesity Institute, rag19@psu.edu. Joyce Tombran-Tink, Ph.D., is professor of neural and behavioral sciences, jxt57@psu.edu; Alaa S. Awad, M.D., is assistant professor of medicine and cellular and molecular physiology, asa17@psu.edu; and Andras Hajnal, M.D., Ph.D., is associate professor of neural and behavioral sciences, axh40@psu. edu; all in the College of Medicine. Leann Birch, Ph.D., is professor of human development and family studies and director of the Center for Childhood Obesity Research, llb15@psu.edu; Barbara J. Rolls, Ph.D., is Helen A. Guthrie Chair in Nutrition, professor of nutritional sciences, and director of the Laboratory for the Study of Human Ingestive Behavior, bjr4@psu.edu; and Danielle Symons Downs, Ph.D., is associate professor of kinesiology, dsd11@psu.edu; all in the College of Health and Human Development.

“One in seven health care dollars are already spent taking care of diabetes,” he adds. “Unless we make w w w. r p s . p s u . e d u

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In a tiny, wired-up watershed in Penn State’s Stone Valley Forest, researchers from many disciplines work together to fathom “the fragile skin of the planet.”

By Charles Fergus

Photo by Scott Johnson

April in central Pennsylvania: Against the brilliant blue sky, the new leaves of oak, maple, and beech shine goldgreen. Yellow flowers of cinquefoil and hot-pink blooms of gaywings dot the forest floor. Somewhere higher up in the watershed, a red-bellied woodpecker gives its rattling call.

Susan Brantley, a Penn State geologist, walks along a path beside a step-across stream.

“This is a first-order watershed,” Brantley tells me, “a small catchment carved into shale bedrock.” Hills creased with swales hem in the narrow trickle of water. “The stream doesn’t have a name,” Brantley says. “It usually dries up by late summer. The entire watershed is about twenty acres.”

Near the path, white plastic tubes poke up from the leaf duff like mushrooms. Trees have small numbered aluminum tags tacked to the bark near their bases. On the ground, gray PVC pipes carry electric lines. Small red and yellow and blue and green plastic flags attach to stiff wires poked into the earth.

Diagram images courtesy of Chris Duffy

The critical zone exists all over the earth’s landmass. It has been called “a constantly changing open system,” “a living membrane,” and “the fragile skin of the planet.” Brantley’s colleague and the principal investigator at the Shale Hills CZO, Penn State civil engineering professor Chris Duffy, has described the critical zone as “a single mechanism capable of nurturing life, supporting agriculture, cleansing water, buffering atmospheric gas levels.”

How a Watershed Works

Brantley stops where a tree has fallen, its roots pushing up a hummock of dirt and rock. She picks up a grayishtan shard the size and thickness of a poker chip but with an irregular shape. “Rose Hill shale,” she says. “It’s Silurian, laid down several hundred million years ago, very common up and down the Appalachians. In some ways, it’s a pretty boring rock—it doesn’t have much organic matter, doesn’t have a high content of sulfur or metal other than iron.

“When geologists look at soil, we see rock that’s evolving.

We think about the parent rock: How long did it take to be weathered, transformed into the regolith?” The regolith is

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We are in the Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) in Penn State’s Stone Valley Forest, about ten miles south of University Park. Here, Brantley and more than a dozen other scientists from a host of disciplines are studying the chemical, physical, biological, and geological processes

operating in the critical zone, the region between the top of the vegetative canopy and the subterranean base of unweathered rock.

the layer of loose rock and soil sitting on top of the bedrock. At the Shale Hills CZO, Brantley and her research team of postdoctoral scholars and graduate students are collecting and analyzing soils and sediments, learning which chemical reactions affect soil production.

“When soils scientists look at soil, they see an ecosystem,” Brantley continues. “We all see different things. The way we look at the environment is influenced by our specialized fields— that’s deep within the culture of science, which means it’s fundamental to the way we think about scientific problems.” She looks around at the wired-up watershed, at the colorful flags and the electrical outlets, the gray plastic boxes sitting on stainless-steel posts inside which instruments record data gleaned by probes in soil and trees and groundwater.

Photo by Scott Johnson

forest canopy, they spray-irrigated precise amounts of water to mimic rainfall events. Then they measured how the water in the soil and the stream responded to the added water.

Sopper and Lynch published papers on water supply in the environment, flood control, drought behavior, forest health. Shale Hills became known as the best-monitored watershed study of its era.”

In the 1990s, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) funded Duffy to digitize Sopper’s and Lynch’s data and transfer it from IBM punch cards to contemporary computers. Duffy then built a mathematical model to describe the complex movement of water within the watershed.

“There’s so much going on here. Rain falls, and the water sinks into the ground. Trees and other Susan Brantley examines oak seedlings. plants take up some of the water; the vegetation “Sopper and Lynch did ‘hydrology by experience,’” Duffy says. absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere and releases oxygen and “They observed and recorded empirical relationships. Now, on water vapor. In the regolith, the water dissolves minerals such as the same site, we’re deploying sensor networks that measure calcium and iron. When the water hits the bedrock–regolith many more things: water chemistry, how the watershed interacts interface, it moves downslope and ultimately gets picked up by with the atmosphere above it, how trees affect the cycling of the stream. It flows down to that weir”—she indicates a small water, the weathering and soil formation that are taking place dam made from a notched steel plate, with a red-painted below the surface of the ground.” plywood box built over it—“where we take samples. Then it leaves the watershed.

Duffy and research associate Kevin Dressler (who also coordi“We’re trying to figure out why this watershed looks and works the way it does.” She tosses the piece of shale onto the ground.

“The timescales of these processes are vastly different. Rain events can be measured in hours or days. It can take months for water to move through the soil. For rock to weather and become soil requires tens of thousands of years.

“As scientists, we measure flows, record observations, and develop mathematical models to explain what’s taking place within our areas of specialization. Doing research in a critical zone observatory like the Shale Hills encourages us to share our data, merge our models across disciplines so that they inform one another. Together we’re trying to figure out the processes and multiple feedback loops operating within this system.”

Laying the Groundwork

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In his office on the second floor of Sackett Building, Chris Duffy tells me that Penn State forest hydrologists William Sopper and James Lynch—both now retired—conducted pioneering studies in watershed science in the Shale Hills during the 1960s and ’70s.

“Sopper and Lynch built an irrigation system that could deliver water all over the watershed—they drew the water out of nearby Lake Perez using a couple of 175-horsepower pumps. They installed piezometers to measure groundwater levels and neutron probes to measure the water content of the soil. Beneath the

nates all of the different research activities at the CZO) work toward building larger and more inclusive models “that can better describe the passage of water through the landscape. In time, we want to scale up to models that can be moved and set up in different places and environments.”

Using the Penn State Integrated Hydrologic Modeling System (PIHM), Duffy has determined the age of water within the watershed by measuring isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen at different points in the critical zone—in rain, in water suspended in the soil, in groundwater, in the stream.

“The water in the soil above the water table competes with the groundwater for space,” he explains.

“Rainfall drives the system, along with evaporation and transpiration, when trees release water vapor through their leaves.

“When it rains, the groundwater rises as water seeps down into the soil or moves downslope. The groundwater gobbles up the soil moisture, which is suspended in very small pores. The groundwater also picks up solutes—nutrients, metals, trace elements, inorganic chemicals.

Photos courtesy of Chris Duffy, unless otherwise noted.

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Above photo by Scott Johnson

CZOs (Critical Zone Observatories) “are meant to be meccas that draw scientists together.”

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Photo by Scott Johnson

Chris Duffy (right) at Shale Hills with undergraduate student Shelly Pickett.

Part of a Network • Shale Hills is one of six critical zone observatories funded by the National Science Foundation. The Southern Sierra CZO is in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada range. The Boulder Creek CZO extends from the Continental Divide to the High Plains in Colorado. Additional CZOs have been set up in the Christina River basin in southeastern Pennsylvania and northern Delaware; the Jemez River basin and Santa Catalina Mountains in New Mexico and Arizona; and the Luquillo Mountains in Puerto Rico. • The twenty-acre Shale Hills CZO is the smallest of the six. To broaden the scope of its inquiry, scientists from Penn State and six other institutions have set up smaller satellite research stations on sites underlaid by Rose Hill shale. The sites are located in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Puerto Rico. Penn State geologist Tim White is working with scientists in those regions to study rates of regolith weathering, soil formation, and erosion, and the effects of climate on soil geochemistry and hydrology. —CF

“After a storm ends, the water table starts to drop. The larger pores in the soil drain first, and gradually smaller and smaller pores give up their water, either through draining or to the thirsty roots of plants.

R e s e a r c h | Pen n Sta te 2010 –11

“Different soils have different properties, depending on whether they evolved from porous or nonporous rock; shale, for instance, is less porous than some other rock types. Vegetation and land cover play a role—whether the landscape is dominated by wetlands, buildings, farm fields, trees, grass. These factors affect how water cycles through the landscape.

“Following an extended drought, it can take four or five years of normal rainfall to build up the water table and soil moisture to average levels that benefit plants and sustain rivers. What happens in a wet year, when a lot of rain gets dumped on the land? We’re finding that water moves through the system much more rapidly during wet periods; it may take from a few days to a few weeks to enter the soil and exit the watershed. During dry periods, it may take months.”

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A Mecca for Scientists

In addition to Duffy and Brantley, the Shale Hills CZO has attracted other Penn State researchers.

David Eissenstat, a forest ecologist and woody plant physiologist, has identified and tagged more than 200 canopy trees, charting the distribution of different species and exploring how water availability influences where they grow in the watershed.

Sap-flow sensors embedded in tree trunks record how much water trees use and when they use it. By sampling water from small branches in the trees’ crowns and then reading the water’s isotopic signature, Eissenstat is learning whether the trees are getting their water from deep groundwater sources or from zones higher up in the soil.

Geoscientists Rudy Slingerland and Eric Kirby are exploring how the Shale Hills landscape reflects past climate regimes, especially the last ice age, some 15,000 years ago, when the area was locked in permafrost. Slingerland and Kirby study LIDAR images (high-

resolution, laser-based contour maps) to identify periglacial features, and are modeling how those features affect the erosion, transport, and deposition of sediments. They’re also examining a more modern ground-level feature at Shale Hills: its “moundand-pit topography,” caused by trees toppling during storms so that their roots pull up mounds of soil, a significant factor in erosion and the downslope movement of soils in the watershed.

Kamini Singha, a geophysicist, couples lab and field work in studying the shale-derived soils and regolith. Key to her research are four holes drilled down 17 meters into the bedrock. By analyzing solute samples taken from the boreholes, and using an optical televiewer to visually examine the boreholes’ walls, Singha is exploring the roles that different layers, fractures, and pores play in conducting fluids and dissolved minerals below ground.

Kenneth Davis, a boundary-layer meteorologist, is responsible for a 110-foot-tall tower at the highest point in the watershed.

There, instruments record precipitation, wind speed and direction, and the complicated turbulence that transports water vapor and CO2 out of the critical zone and into the atmosphere. Davis works closely with Duffy in developing the overarching mathematical model that explains the interactions among atmosphere, land surface, and subterranean regions of the CZO. Since 2004, soils scientist Henry Lin has been recording soil water content from the surface down to bedrock at more than 100 sites. He and his research team use X-ray tomography, groundpenetrating radar, and electromagnetic induction to determine the overall thickness of the soil and to detect and model subsurface networks through which water flows. They also study how soils store dissolved organic carbon.

As well as studying the weathering processes that produce soil, geologist Brantley is working with biogeochemist Jason Kaye to investigate how water movement and storage combine with the soil’s texture to affect the rate of soil respiration. Soil respiration is the CO2 flux from soils to the atmosphere; driven by the activities of plant roots and soil microorganisms, it is one of the largest factors in the global carbon cycle. Brantley and Kaye use extensive soil mapping and moisture and temperature monitoring to build models that can predict the effects of climate change on this hidden process.

Brantley says that CZOs are “meant to be meccas that draw scientists together.” Research groups from Princeton, Lehigh University, and several institutions in the United Kingdom have already applied for funding to do research at Shale Hills.

Where Rock Meets Life

Back in the Stone Valley Forest, on that halcyon April day, Susan Brantley leads the way up a steep path that climbs higher into the watershed. Crows call in the offing. A breeze rustles the new leaves overhead.

I ask Brantley about the depth of the soil on the site, which appears to be a fairly typical piece of terrain in the hills of Pennsylvania’s Ridge and Valley region.

“On the ridges, the soil is about 20 centimeters deep—8 inches.

Down along the stream, it’s anywhere from 1 to 3 meters deep.

“The forest on this site probably has been clear-cut two or three times,” she says. The first logging would have removed the large old-growth timber, the socalled virgin forest. In the midto late 1800s, the regrowing trees likely were cut to make charcoal that fueled local iron-smelting furnaces. Almost certainly, those activities contributed to the watershed’s present topography.

“Many scientists believe that humans are now the biggest geological force acting on the planet. Through our activities, we’re constantly moving soil and reshaping the landscape. Soils are crucial for agriculture. Are we in danger of losing or depleting our soils?

At this point, we don’t even know the rates at which soils are forming on different sites and in different environments.

“Up on the ridge, our research suggests that it takes about 7,000 years for rock to weather out of the bedrock, become part of the regolith, gradually move up through the soil—the particles becoming smaller all the time—and finally emerge at the surface.

“We’re looking at acid rain. How does it affect the carbon in the soil? Globally, huge amounts of carbon are locked up in soil.

Will changes such as soil warming, increased soil disturbance, or more acidic precipitation cause a lot of that organic carbon to go up into the atmosphere, drastically raising CO2 levels?

“It is this sort of complex question that we can work toward answering by conducting interdisciplinary research in CZOs. As scientists in the twenty-first century, we have new and better ways of collecting and analyzing data. We have powerful computers to quickly run mathematical models that describe earth processes.

“These are the basic questions that we’re hoping to answer: Why does a given landscape look the way it does? How does it function? How is it likely to change in the future in response to human activities? If we can answer those questions, perhaps we can determine how to protect this part of the earth where rock meets life.”

Susan Brantley, Ph.D., is professor of geosciences in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, brantley@essc.psu.edu. Chris Duffy, Ph.D., is professor of civil engineering in the College of Engineering, cxd11@psu. edu. Brantley and Duffy are principal investigators for the Shale Hills Critical Zone Observatory. Other Penn State researchers currently working at Shale Hills include Kenneth Davis, Kevin Dressler, David Eissenstat, Jason Kaye, Eric Kirby, Henry Lin, Kamini Singha, Rudy Slingerland, and Tim White. w w w. r p s . p s u . e d u

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The Forgotten War

By Gigi Marino Photo by Fredric Weber

Amy Greenberg

According to the book Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, when political advisers sat down with Sarah Palin “to give her a potted history of foreign policy,” they began with the Spanish-American War, which, in fact, was not this country’s first foreign war.

T

he omission of the U.S–Mexican War from the list of U.S. engagements—in popular nonfiction, history books, or Jeopardy! questions— does not surprise historian Amy Greenberg, who seeks to bring this pivotal conflict into the frontal lobe of the American consciousness.

The U.S.–Mexican War of 1846 was a horrific, bloody, sixteen-month battle predicated on greed, expansion, and imperialism, says Greenberg, Penn State professor of American history and women’s studies.

“Though both its justification and consequences are dim to us now,” she says, “this, our first war for empire, decisively broke with our past, shaped our future, and, to this day, affects how we act in the world.”

In a book she is writing on the subject with the support of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, Greenberg points to four key players who initiated, mediated, and ended the war. President James K. Polk rallied for war against Mexico, claiming that our southern neighbors had killed American soldiers on American land.

Senator Henry Clay publicly denounced the war, sparking what Greenberg calls “America’s first national antiwar movement.” Illinois Representative Abraham Lincoln, who admired Clay and also opposed the war, learned invaluable lessons in power and morality. Nicholas Trist was a diplomat who disobeyed an executive order to leave Mexico and instead brokered the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which effectively ended both the war and his diplomatic career.

R e s e a r c h | Pen n Sta te 2010 –11

A Manifest Reason for War The U.S.–Mexican War began in the roiling wake of the Texas Revolution, which had led to the creation of the Republic of Texas in 1836. The Mexican army had been ruthless, creating a decade of hostility leading up to the U.S.–Mexican War. The rage of anti-Mexico sentiments, coupled with the popular belief in manifest destiny and the pro-slavery states’ desire to expand slave-owning territories, produced an incendiary political climate. And James Polk, with a claim of Mexican aggression, provided the flashpoint.

“When President Polk called for volunteers to fight a war against Mexico, even if most Americans didn’t fully believe his Photo illustration featuring The Battle of Cerro Gordo, a lithography by N. Currier, 1847, which depicts the U.S. Army as it overtakes Mexican troops on April 18, 1847. Original image courtesy 34 of the Library of Congress, LC-USZC2-656.

claim that Mexicans had ‘shed American blood on American soil,’ they believed that it was our manifest destiny to expand across the continent,” says Greenberg.

“Powerful business interests in the Northeast were interested in acquiring the ports of California. Pro-slavery voters were looking to expand their territory, but some of the most enthusiastic volunteers had no investment in slavery. Young American men in midwestern states like Illinois turned out in great numbers. They had been raised on tales of Mexican atrocities at the Alamo and Goliad and looked forward to the opportunity to avenge those wrongs by killing some Mexicans.”

Greenberg notes that when the call for volunteers first went out, the U.S. Army was forced to turn away hopeful recruits.

“People thought the war would last for three months,” she says. “The war wasn’t close to being over after the first year.

And those who eagerly signed up in 1846 did not want to go back.” No one imagined that the Mexican soldiers, thought

by Americans to be feeble and inferior, would be as tenacious as they were.

Recovering What Was Never Lost Greenberg, a scholar of pre-Civil War America, first became interested in writing about the U.S.–Mexican War when she was working on a book on manifest destiny. She says she couldn’t find an authoritative text on the subject, despite the numerous collections of primary resources, and decided to write one herself.

“In our own library, there are fifty separate volumes of primary sources—letters or diaries of soldiers from the U.S.–Mexican War,” she says. “You can walk into the stacks at Pattee and find at least forty different firsthand accounts, and yet we know nothing about these experiences.”

Historian Amy Greenberg says the U.S.–Mexican War set the stage for American imperialism, although few in this country know about it.

The stories told by the world’s first embedded correspondents are just one example of the many “firsts” Greenberg attributes to the U.S.–Mexican War. Others include: the first war started with a presidential lie; America’s first foreign conflict; the first war for land, not principle; the highest casualty rate of any American conflict before or since; our first military occupation of a racially and linguistically foreign populace; the first time the reputation of American troops was damaged; and the first time war was turned into entertainment through the publication of thrilling daily narratives starring a cast of heroes.

“You have to remember,” she says, “that newspapers then were like the CNN of today.” Americans of the time were left with brutal images.

Amnesia and More Why do we forget this important chapter of America’s past?

Simply put, claims Greenberg, such a war for empire does not fit into the American narrative. “It was a land grab. There was no principle at stake,” she says. “The United States does not see itself as a country that goes to war and takes from other nations, particularly not from neighboring republics.”

Yet, what this war birthed was a powerful antiwar movement and a future president who found the wisdom, in the shadow of imperialism, to hold a sovereign nation together on principle rather than power.

“Our unjust war of imperial desire shoved us into the most horrible of national

fractures,” says Greenberg, “yet, at the same time, shaped the man who was able to save us.”

At the bitter end of the war, the commander in charge, General Winfield Scott, captured Mexico City and immediately realized that this capture was folly. Mexican snipers picked off his cavalrymen as they attempted to carry the reports of embedded journalists in their saddlebags to the port of Veracruz. The land grab worked best in isolated areas; Scott and diplomat Trist knew this well.

Both believed that prolonging the war would only escalate guerilla fighting. Trist followed his moral compass, and when Polk ordered his return to Washington, he gambled everything to stay and continue negotiating.

“Trist returned from Mexico to face the enduring contempt of Polk,” says Greenberg. “The president might sign his treaty but he would give him no credit for it.

He fired the ‘impudent and unqualified scoundrel’ and withheld his pay.” Yet Trist, unwittingly or not, preserved the sanctity of this nation and set into play a foreign policy that remains with us today, says Greenberg.

“Mexico lost half its territory—about 500,000 square miles. Gone were the provinces of Alta California, Nuevo Mexico, and parts of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Sonora. That land became California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado,” she says. “It was the crowning moment for manifest destiny and fed the dreams of those Americans who believed we should take even more territory from neighboring countries by force—dreams that had their realization in the Spanish– American War.”

Amy Greenberg, Ph.D., is professor of American history and women’s studies in the College of the Liberal Arts. She can be reached at amygreenberg@psu.edu. Her research is supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Philosophical Society, and her book on the U.S.– Mexican War is due out in 2012 from Knopf.

Greenberg’s book, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2005.

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Many of those fifty volumes temporarily reside in Greenberg’s office on the third floor of Weaver Building, where she retells these narratives with the enthusiasm of a war correspondent. “Look at this,” says the lithe and energetic historian. “Here’s the story of an embedded journalist who called himself ‘John of York’ writing for the Philadelphia North American, who started off as a foot soldier, then became an officer. The embedded

journalists’ reports are awesome. They talk openly about atrocities committed by U.S. troops on Mexican civilians, about disease killing the soldiers themselves.

They report actual accounts of these bloody battles that witnessed a large loss of life, with people on both sides dying.”

From the Archives ›

››

Rudolph, meet Paul Penn State research had not extended much beyond agriculture when 30-year-old Paul Schweitzer arrived on campus in 1923. The Hungarian-born mechanical engineer soon made the University one of America’s pioneer academic centers for the study of diesel engines.

Rudolph Diesel had invented the engine that bore his name in 1897, but for many years its weight and other restrictions limited it to marine use and a few industrial applications. Schweitzer, working with other Penn State faculty and graduate students carried out investigations into scavenging, supercharging, and other techniques that led to more powerful and fuel-efficient, lighter-weight engine designs. In the photo below, Schweitzer inspects a fuel-injection pump, a key determinant of a diesel’s efficiency. Research in the Diesel Lab helped to pave the way for widespread use of diesels in cars, trucks, and buses, and a host of other commercial settings that are common today.

Numerous internal-combustion engine manufacturers looked to the lab for advice and information on improving their products.

Schweitzer alone held twenty-three patents. The U.S. Navy was so impressed that during World War II, it partnered with Penn State to teach engineering officers the intricacies of diesel technology.

The Diesel Lab was Penn State’s first technology-based research initiative to win international recognition and served as the nucleus around which a much broader program of engineering research later developed. —Michael Bezilla

R e s e a r c h | Pen n Sta te 2010 –11

Photos courtesy of University Archives, Special Collections Library, Penn State

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In Touch with ... › Hasn’t the use of DNA evidence already changed the public’s perception of the criminal justice system?

MB:

It has forced a lot of people to have second thoughts about the death penalty—it led to a moratorium of the death penalty in Illinois, for example. Nationwide, more than 200 individuals long imprisoned have been exonerated as a result of DNA evidence. Discovering undeniable errors in such cases also has led to improvements in procedures for pretrial investigations and, after trial, reviews of how things went wrong.

DK:

MB: Your book has been acclaimed as the definitive history of the use of DNA evidence.

Is there a historical turning point that made DNA acceptable to the courts?

Actually there were two watershed events. The first was a case known as People v. Castro in a trial court in New York. The defense, with the aid of an astute molecular biologist, showed that what the DNA labs were testifying to was not always an open-and-shut matter—there could be mistakes. Once that happened, the defense bar became better able to raise challenges to DNA evidence, and a number of scientists presented criticisms of the reasoning of the experts for the prosecution—particularly on the probabilities of DNA matches.

DK:

David Kaye Photos by Fredric Weber

David H. Kaye is Distinguished Professor of Law and Weiss Family Faculty Scholar in Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law, and a member of the graduate faculty of the University’s Forensic Science program. He is an internationally recognized legal expert on DNA and other forms of scientific evidence and the author of The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence, released earlier this year by Harvard University Press.

Read David Kaye’s Double Helix Law blog at www. personal.psu.edu/dhk3/blogs/ DoubleHelixLaw

MB: Why should the ordinary citizen be interested in how DNA is used in court?

The public has a vital interest in the criminal justice system. I’ve tried to illuminate the extent to which we can find truth in that system, because the subtleties of DNA evidence are not well understood outside of a small group of people. The popular perception is that DNA speaks the truth—you’re either guilty or you’re innocent; there’s no ambiguity. But DNA is only a tool.

It gives information depending on the nature of the samples and how well the analysis is done. “Garbage in, garbage out” is one concern, and the risk of overstating the implications of the evidence is another.

DK:

MB: Who determines the quality of that analysis? Do lawyers and judges have to be scientists, too?

MB: What lessons does your research about the past use of DNA evidence offer for the future?

Several authors have argued that the scrutiny given DNA evidence should be a model for forensic science generally. I wouldn’t go that far—the courtroom battles over DNA continued far longer than the scientific record warranted, and the adversary nature of the legal system magnified and distorted disagreements among scientists. But the issues that came to the fore in litigation over DNA evidence are central to improving forensic science generally. Last year, a committee of the National Academy of Science—a committee that included Professor Robert Shaler, director of Penn State’s Forensic Science program—issued a congressionally mandated report on the state of forensic science in America. Had the institutional reforms that the committee recommended been in place, there might have been fewer casualties in the “DNA wars.” —Michael Bezilla

DK:

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They don’t have to be scientists, but they do have to know enough to understand what’s going on and to know whether the statements the experts are making are well founded. Lawyers need to translate lab work into a form that a judge or jury can understand. They need to understand more about statistics and probability because these quantitative aspects of science have become significant in cases with scientific testimony. It’s an area that’s been neglected in the law school curriculum. That’s changing, but those law schools that offer even one course in scientific evidence, let alone statistics, are probably still in the minority.

DK:

The event that marked the end of this controversy in the mid1990s was not a case. It was an article titled “DNA Fingerprinting Dispute Laid to Rest,” published in the journal Nature and written by two scientists who had been adversaries in court— one being the chief DNA scientist for the FBI, the other being the main defense scientist in the People v. Castro case. This rapprochement gave the courts more confidence in DNA evidence, and a series of opinions soon reinforced the view that the basic method of calculating probabilities was reasonable.

Off the Shelf ›

Much of what Christians believe today to be the true nature of Christ was decided in the fifth century by religious and state leaders whose heated Council feuds eventually spilled over onto brutal and bloody battlefields. Jesus Wars › › The American movement for women’s rights— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Books

American Woman Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life

by Lori D. Ginzberg (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

R e s e a r c h | Pen n Sta te 2010 –11

“Brilliant, self-righteous, charismatic, self-indulgent, mischievous, intimidating, and charming, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the founding philosopher of the American movement for women’s rights,” writes Lori Ginzberg in her new biography of the nineteenth-century social activist, feminist, and abolitionist. Yet Stanton is far less renowned than her friend and colleague Susan B. Anthony and other feminist leaders.

Ginzberg, professor of history and women’s studies at Penn State, recognizes how much Stanton expanded the promise of American individualism to women, but, like other scholars, takes issue with some of her subject’s methods, arguing that a racist and elitist streak in Stanton’s thinking helped shape an American feminism that implicitly considers white, middle-class women the model of womanhood.

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Still, in addition to the right to vote and liberalization of divorce laws, Stanton fought for co-education, dress reform, and individualism for women, Ginzberg writes, at a time when these rights were considered radical and deeply frightening to many Americans. —Rebekka Coakley Development of Doctrine Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years

nature. Focusing on the Councils of Ephesus in A.D. 431 and Chalcedon in A.D. 451, he offers a detailed examination of the turbulent intersection of religion, politics, and violence.

Jesus Wars, written in an accessible, engaging style, offers not only insight into the evolution of Christianity, but a well-documented analysis of how any religion forms and re-forms itself over time in response to changing social and political pressures.

—Laura Stocker Waldhier

by Philip Jenkins

Freedom’s Facets

(HarperOne)

Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered

For 2,000 years the ideology of Christianity has included the belief that Jesus of Nazareth possessed a nature at once completely human and completely divine. Yet there was a time when this doctrine was on extremely shaky ground, according to noted historian of religion Philip Jenkins.

In his new book, Jenkins, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities at Penn State, describes how fifth-century religious and state leaders feuded in councils and on bloody battlefields over the Church’s position on Christ’s

edited by William A. Blair and Karen Younger (University of North Carolina Press)

Abolition is often understood through the lens of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. However, according to eminent historian Richard Hofstadter, the proclamation itself “has all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.”

What were Lincoln’s true motives for issuing it? What place did he see for Black men and women in the future American society?

Rumors spawned globally can explode onto our domestic political scene and even lead to violence. The Global Grapevine › ›

Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered, a collection of essays by eight distinguished historians, deftly portrays the people and political forces that shaped the emancipation struggle. As a whole, the essays challenge conventional notions and highlight how slaves and freed Black people contributed to their own freedom.

How freedoms are granted and taken away is still a hot-button topic, remind the book’s editors, William A. Blair and Karen Younger, both of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State. “Emancipation remains a fertile subject for exploration,” they write, “because Lincoln’s is not the only story worth telling.” —Sara Brennen The Poets Speak

Making Poems is a welcome new work for all those interested in “not only poetry’s gestation and birth, but also the parenting that follows, the revisions that help move poetry toward independence and finally into the world of publication.”

—Melissa Beattie-Moss

Rooted in Fear The Global Grapevine: Why Rumors of Terrorism, Immigration, and Trade Matter

by Gary Alan Fine and Bill Ellis (Oxford University Press)

The tangled web of fact and fiction swirling in the wake of Arizona’s new immigration law should strike a familiar chord in Pennsylvania, say the authors of a new book about the role of rumors in American culture.

Todd Davis and Erin Murphy—both poets and English professors at Penn State Altoona—invited forty poets to present one finished poem each and deconstruct the creative process behind it.

In The Global Grapevine, Bill Ellis, professor emeritus of English and American studies at Penn State Hazleton, and Gary Alan Fine, a sociologist at Northwestern University, contend that Americans historically have perceived threats to their economy and culture from abroad.

Cable television and the Internet have added a new dimension to how rumors are spawned and spread.

Penn State poets Robin Becker, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, and Julia Spicher Kasdorf are among those represented, along with the editors themselves.

Each brings fresh perspectives to such issues as the use of autobiographical material as catalysts for poems, the importance of strategic line breaks, and the quest to write meaningfully about one’s children’s inner lives.

A hundred and fifty years ago in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region, the authors write, it was the newly arrived Irish who were subject to rumors. In 2006 in the same region, Latino immigrants became the target. Rumors may contain fact and provide comfort in uncertain times, Ellis and Fine note, but they’re also political dynamite and can lead to violence.

Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets

edited by Todd Davis and Erin Murphy (State University of New York Press)

On the Hook Do Fish Feel Pain?

by Victoria Braithwaite (Oxford University Press)

Do fish feel pain? It’s a barbed and difficult question, but for Victoria Braithwaite, a fish biologist at Penn State, the science may be the easy part. Braithwaite was part of a team at Edinburgh University in Scotland that attracted worldwide media attention in 2003 after publishing results of a study that answered in the affirmative.

Here, she describes a decade-long program of research into fish cognition and behavior, and lays out the evidence behind her conclusion.

Yes, fish feel pain, she argues, but where exactly does that leave us?

How should this new knowledge affect our behavior? “Accepting that fish experience pain and suffering does force us to think differently,” Braithwaite writes, “and it will in due course force us to act differently in many spheres,” from recreational angling to commercial fishing to biomedical research. “But what that action should be is for the most part still unclear.” —David Pacchioli

—Michael Bezilla

Accepting that fish experience pain and suffering does force us to think differently.

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Do Fish Feel Pain?

Endpaper ›

Ridge and Valley Photo by Fredric Weber

“My art makes visceral diagrams about how the world works. I want to show the invisible aspects of the natural world at all of its scales. People used to know their location by where they were in relationship to a waterway. Now we know where we are by roadways. As I did research for this piece, and mapped it out across my studio, I came to know the watershed and how the streams connected.”

—Stacy Levy, speaking about her sculpture, Ridge and Valley, commissioned by The Arboretum at Penn State, a new resource for research, teaching, and outreach at the University Park campus. The piece recreates the local Spring Creek watershed in a bluestone terrace, punctuated by three boulder “ridges.” Streams and waterways are depicted in quarter-inchdeep runnels carved into the stone. Ridge and Valley was funded through the generosity of Don Hamer and Marie Bednar.

Research/Penn State

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The Pennsylvania State University

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Evolution of a Scientist . . . . Beth Shapiro MacArthur Fellow and Penn State biologist Beth Shapiro went from majoring in broadcast journalism to studying ancient DNA. See her story—and other research features refreshed weekly—in Research/Penn State online.

Visit us on the Web at rps.psu.edu

Photo by Scott Johnson