The BrainSTEMSTEM at Mamaroneck High School Vol. 1: Spring 2015

Community Scientist Profile

This Season in STEM

Original Science Research Review

What If Book Review

Space X

New SpeciesDiscovered

Editorial Board

The Editorial Board publishes the BrainSTEM, a peer-reviewed science publication featuring articles written by Mamaroneck High School students.

Editor-in-ChiEf

Max Schechter

Board of authors & Editors

Michael AlbertCaroline AroninNatalie Spangle

Zach NaginKevin ShenSiri Nadler

Julia SteinbergZachary Susswein

Dr. Elena Filippova

Maria MacArdleGabe Tugendstein

Asher SorianoGrace WhittemoreEmily McCarthyLauren ChapeyTessa Garces

Veronica Berger Eri Kawakami

tEaChEr advisor

Guido Garbarino

We Would like to thank:Superintendent Robert Shaps

Principal Elizabeth ClainAssistant Principal Mario Washington

Assistant Principal Michael-Joseph Mercanti-Anthony Assistant Principal Stephen Frasene

Cover Illustration by Grace Whittemore

The BrainSTEMat Mamaroneck High School

This Season in STEM

Book Review: What If?

Original Science Research Review:Michael Albert

3 of Jupiter’s Moons Transit:A Rare Occurrence

Teacher Spotlight: Dr. Filippova

A New Class of Antibiotics

Why Gavity Keeps Me Grounded:What Science Means to Me

Original Science Research Review:Caroline Aronin

New Species Discovered

Community Scientist Profile:Dr. Salafia

Space X

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Photograph by Harrison Eisberg

Photograph by Wade Steely

Science: After years of clinical trials, researchers have finally implemented the next potential breakthrough in diabetes treatment into human patients. Currently, insulin pumps or injections are the main vehicles of insulin dis-tribution to diabetes patients, but even these technologies require intensive monitoring and can be quite a hassle. In Australia, a 4-year-old boy with diabetes became the first patient to be given an artificial, internal pancreas equipped with new algorithms that can both detect and prevent hypoglycemia. This is very significant because it can stop hypoglycemia attacks from happening, especially at night while the patient is sleeping. In young children, parents are forced to monitor blood-glucose levels multiple times every night, which can not only be a hassle, but also a hazard to both the children and the parents. This new device is implanted and serves two purposes: uses computer algo-rithms to detect attacks, and internally injects the neces-sary quantity of insulin. At time of publishing, one child and one adult had been fitted with this device. It is available commercially for the hefty sum of $10,000.

Technology: Almost everyone has used, or is familiar with the breakthrough on-demand black car service app Uber. However, when one hails an uber cab he is met by a cordial driver piloting a regular car. That might be about to change. Uber’s CEO has expressed great interest in autonomous vehicles that may replace its human drivers in the near future. Uber has just un-veiled a laboratory in Pittsburgh that will team up with Carnegie Mellon’s prestigious computer science depart-ment and conduct state-of-the-art research in a brand new research facility. For many years now, Google has been a pioneer in the field of autonomous vehicle re-search, but they now have a great competitor close on their tails. The incentive behind Uber’s research and development is to bring down the cost of an Uber cab by eliminating the driver. While this facility is brand new and has not produced anything to date, it is a very com-pelling lead and will likely be in the headlines in the near future. 4

Written by Michael AlbertIllustrated by Eri Kawakami

S T E MThis Season in

Engineering: What kid has never answered “invisibility” as the superpower they wish they could have? Well, good news for most of the population: we may be one step closer to achieving this. Research-ers from the University of Arizona have developed synthetic material that is able to bend light waves around objects, successfully causing a sort of invis-ibility. The practical applications range way beyond looking cool in front of your friends. The research is geared towards developing synthetic materials that would create more effective microscopes, or poten-tial shields that could conceal military aircraft. The technology behind all of this is due to a property not found in nature called “negative refraction.” This property allows the synthetic “metamaterials” to bend light waves in ways that are not natural, in turn, producing a hole of invisibility around an object. While this Air Force funded research is still far from implementation into the real world, the data does not lie and the future is promising for all of you super-hero wannabes.

Math: What do math and cancer have in common? One might think nothing at all, but they’d be wrong. In a recent experiment, researchers at The University of Kansas School of Medicine have developed a complex algorithm that uses math to more effectively predict when bladder cancer will relapse in patients. This algorithm, part of a group called nomograms, was rated on an index scale determined by the efficacy of the model. The scale, which is similar to a percent rating, goes from 0.5 to 1, with 0.5 being as effective as a coin toss and 1 being always accurate. This specific nomogram utilized biomarkers, which is a novel approach, yet it still scored among the most effective models developed so far. Previous models have scored about a .67 without biomarkers, while this new algorithm scored a .65 with biomarkers. This is very promising because it further shows that relapse is not totally random, and can be predicted through some microscopic factors. This original algorithm is also promising because of the use of biomarkers. Researchers hope that the successes can be incorporated, along with those of the prior models, to develop future nomograms with an even better index measurement.

5Image Courtesy of wikispaces.com/math

Written by Siri Naddler

Book Review: What If?

Ever wondered how fast you could drive over a speed bump and still live? How long a nuclear submarine could last in orbit? What would happen to the Earth if the sun suddenly switched off?

NASA roboticist, math whiz, and comic enthusiast Randall Munroe provides the an-swers to these quirky hypothetical questions and dozens more in his new book, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypotheti-cal Questions. Munroe uses his love of math, science, technology, and comics to give accu-rate answers to absurd questions.

In 2006, Munroe left his full time job as an independent contracting roboticist for NASA to pursue online comic creating full time on his website, what-if.xkcd.com. The site became wildly successful and is based solely on questions submitted by readers.

About half of the eccentric questions found in Munroe’s book are replicated from Munroe’s renowned web comics, but many are fresh to public eyes. These questions cover a wide variety of topics; Munroe con-ducts computer simulations, consults nuclear reactor operators, and much more to answer the obscure questions.

Each chapter of the book tackles one hypothetical scenario. The answers Munroe calculates can be dark, although for the most part they are humorous and witty. But above all, they are scientifically accurate.

In one free fall question originally published on the web comic, Alex Lahey asks “From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?” Munroe starts out his four page answer by saying, “I hope you like your steaks Pittsburgh Rare. And you may need to defrost it after you pick it up.” He then uses Cold War-era research papers on interconti-nental ballistic missiles, various cookbooks, and vertical motion laws to conclude that the steak would either land uncooked on the inside, exploded into chunks, or charred but still raw.

Munroe has created a whimsical coffee table book that will enthrall geeks, adults, kids, and just about anyone with curios-ity, imagination, and a scientific hankering for answering the unanswerable. Read one chapter at a time, or all in one setting; these pages are a refreshing take that will trans-port you to a different world.

Image Courtesy of farmhack.net

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Original Science Research Review:Validation of the inhibitory effect on BCL6 by BPI using RT-PCR

Michael Albert

Abstract Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a highly lethal cancer of the blood and bone system. AML is characterized by its malignant white blood cells (WBCs). However, in a rare subset of patients, mutated hematopoietic stem cells have been found—characterized by CD34+/CD38- cells. As chemotherapy and other treatments are becoming increasingly effective at both elimi-nating the WBCs and preventing relapse, the potential treatments for patients possessing leuke-mia stem cells (LSCs) are widely unknown and ineffective. As with all healthy stem cells, LSCs retain their dormant cell cycle status for a prolonged period of time, and their superior chemo-resistance. Additionally, their tendency to home inside the bone marrow coupled with their immense similarity to benign hematopoietic stem cells make LSCs a very elusive and challenging target for eradication. For those reasons, the prognosis of a patient with LSCs is significantly worse than that of an AML patient with only blast cells. Nonetheless, treatments are being developed that target cell-survival pathways, with the hope that inhibition of certain pathways will lead to apoptosis. In this study, B-Cell Lymphoma 6 (BCL6)—a protein encoded by the BCL6 gene—is inhibited in an attempt to stop functions necessary for transcription and cell survival. BPI, a drug that is a BCL6-inhibitor, will be used to treat TUR cells (an AML cell line), and gene amplification will subsequently be analyzed using RT-PCR. Real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) and Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) have been used to ana-lyze gene expression through quantitative results.

Cancer is defined as uncontrollable replication and growth of cells. When a spontaneous and random mutation occurs during cell replication, the result can cause the first cancer cell to be produced. Under the umbrella of cancer is leukemia, which is a cancer that develops in the bone marrow and is distributed throughout a patient’s circulatory system. This is dangerous because, as opposed to solid-tumor cancers such as breast cancer or brain cancer, leukemia can-not be removed simply by surgery or targeted radiation. However, various effective drugs have been produced that have proven themselves effective at eradicating the disease and keeping a patient from having a relapse (a return of the disease usually sparked by cells not killed through chemotherapy). While treatments have become increasingly effective, in some patients a subset of malignant stem cells have been found. These cells are essentially normal stem cells that have undergone the same spontaneous mutation as typical cancer cells. However, since they are stem cells, they possess the unique abilities of benign cells, which make them much harder to get rid of. This study will evaluate the result of drug-induced inhibition of various survival protein pathways in the cancer stem cells.

Laypersons Summary

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Friday, January 23rd, 2015 – an uncommon astronomical event occurred: three of Jupiter’s four moons (in order from smallest to greatest distance from Jupiter – Io, Eu-ropa, Ganymede, and Callisto) passed over the gas giant so that their shadows were ob-servable from Earth. These large moons are sometimes known as “Galilean moons,” as they were discovered by famed astronomer Galileo Gelilei almost exactly 405 years ago. Each moon is very fascinating and extremely unique. For example, although the surface of Io is remarkably cold (about -130 degrees Celcius), it is also the only object in the solar system, excluding Earth, where we have seen active volcanoes (which can reach 1,650 degrees Celcius). Europa is covered with ice miles thick, but because of the way it stretches and compresses as it revolves around Jupiter, it heats up (much like the way we kneed clay to make it warmer and more malleable), which leads us to believe that somewhere deep below the surface, some of that ice has melted and turned into oceans. Ganymede is exceptionally large (its radius is almost half that of Earth!), and is actually visible to the naked eye. Callisto, the outermost moon, has more craters than any other object in the solar system, and its surface is estimated to be the oldest geological land-scape in our solar system (it hasn’t seen any activity for 4 billion years! Because of this, some refer to it as a “dead” world).

The revolutions of Io, Europa, and Ganymede around Jupiter are not, in fact, in-dependent from one another, but rather are held in a very specific pattern: the orbital times of these three moons are in a ratio of 1:2:4. This enables Io and Europa to often cross over Jupiter at the same time, but also causes Ganymede to be farther away when this event occurs. Callisto does not follow this pattern, and was the first moon to tran-sit over Jupiter on the 23rd at around 10 p.m., EST. All three moons could be seen over Jupiter for just four minutes, starting at around 2:08 a.m. A triple transit has occurred twice in the past 15 years, but will not occur again until 2032.

3 of Jupiter’s Moons Transit A Rare Occurrence

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Written by Natalie Spangle

Illustration by Grace Whittemore

Teacher Spotlight: Dr. Filippova

Dr. Filippova teaches Regents Physics and AP Physics to Juniors. After earning a PhD in Mathematics and Physics from Moscow University in Russia, Dr. Filippova conducted research in Physics at a number of universities. Eleven years ago she decided to change her career and become a teacher. Dr. Filippova has worked at MHS for nine years, and loves it. In addition to a multitude of physics toys, smiling students characterize her classroom.

Question 1: What is your scientific background? What research have you done?

“My specialty is laser physics, which I have used for different purposes. In my early years when I was working on my PhD thesis, I used very powerful green and blue lasers that could transmit signals for many meters and excite fluorescent radiation of organic mol-ecules in seawater. I was a part of the group that developed laser remote sensing methods to detect oil spills and other dangerous pollutants in seawater. It was a great environmental application of lasers, and I was lucky to participate in several expeditions on the Black Sea.In my later years, I worked with the group of biologists from Brookhaven National Lab (BNL, located on Long Island) and used very precise lasers to work with DNA molecules. Like any organic material, DNA molecules could produce a feedback signal when illu-minated by a laser with the appropriate wavelength. The intensity of the signal could be connected to the size of DNA molecule. The long-term goal of this research was very inter-esting; BNL has a Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider that produces heavy ionizing radiation inside the ring (the outside environment is very well protected and shielded). We exposed DNA samples to deadly radiation and used a laser-based single-molecule sizing system to determine the size of the broken DNA pieces. Such research is very important for many reasons, including human safety during very long space missions, such as to Mars, where astronauts get exposed to all kinds of radiation. Of course, our work was only a small part of a long NASA research program, but it helped me grow as a laser physicist and I learned a lot about the biological applications of physics and lasers in particular. In general, I think in the future, applied physics will be mostly working with biology, medicine and environ-mental science.”

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Written by Dr. Elena Filippova and Max Schechter

Question 2: When did you first become interested in science?

“In High school it became very obvious that I have no talents in the humanities. I was an obedient student and tried to keep up with all subjects, but it was always much easier for me to solve 100 math problems than to read 100 pages of textbook or write a 100 page essay. I liked math and science equally, and I was seriously debating between the two sub-jects. Physics won, because I like making things with my hands. I chose Experimental Physics (the opposite of Theoretical Physics) because you can play with physics “toys” and equipment, put them together and see the results in action.”

Question 3: What’s your favorite thing about MHS?

“Our school is great for many reasons, but most of all I like the people at our school; people of all ages, kids and adults. Every morning I go to work and I am very excited that I will see my friends, colleagues, and my students.”

Question 4: What do you love about teaching physics?

“I love that while teaching physics, I get to play with toys. I also like that by teaching phys-ics, and science in general, we get to teach kids problem solving skills. We teach not only what to think, but also how to think, to be successful.

Question 5: Do you have any unusual/not scientific hobbies?

“All my hobbies are not science related. After a challenging and noisy day at school, I like to spend some time in silence. It could be just reading a book, weeding my small vegetable garden, or knitting, beading, or sewing. When I am tired of silence and feel recharged, I like doing more active projects, such as cooking or baking with my daughters.”

Question 6: What advice do you have for any aspiring scientists?

“The best thing about science that always keeps me going is that you always have some-thing new to learn. Nature is so smart; it always keeps us on our toes. The more we want to learn, the more we realize that it is impossible to know everything, and that is okay. If you are curious, if you like the sense of discovery, if you love to see the results of your research, science is for you. Be patient, work hard, and have fun with it.”

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Evolution is what has brought us here, but it is also what might be our downfall. Evo-lution selects only the fittest to reproduce, meaning organisms with inferior traits die out. However, when it comes to diseases, that means the bacteria with the most resistance to anti-biotics have the most ability to reproduce. This eventually leads to bacteria that are resistant to our very strongest antibiotics and are essentially untreatable. Our research establishments are racing against bacterial evolution to develop new anti-biotics that will be able to treat the new, extremely dangerous antibiotic-resistant strains. The more we use antibiotics, the more bacteria evolve to resist those same antibiotics, and the harder it is to develop an antibiotic to which bacteria are not immune. Furthermore, an esti-mated 2 million people a year are infected with these advanced bacteria and around 23,000 people die from them, according to the New York Times. Fortunately, a new, stronger drug is now being tested and seems to have a lot of potential. The drug is called Teixobactin, and it was very effective in curing major diseases in mice. Unfortunately, it has yet to be deemed safe for use in humans. In fact, it is still about 2 years away from human trials according to Kim Lewis, the senior author of the article and director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University in Boston. While Teixobactin still has a long way to go to reach the market, it has shown great promise so far. It has so far been able to avoid many of the pitfalls that most tested antibiotics face. One type of new antibiotics are “broad spectrum,” which means they target many dif-ferent forms of bacteria, including the beneficial forms that exist in a normal, healthy micro-biome. The negative effects of a broad spectrum antibiotic can be so severe, that it essential-ly makes it unusable because the side effects are worse than the disease it is treating. On the other hand, narrow spectrum antibiotics only target a very specific strain of bacteria, usually only harming the target pathogen. However, they are hard to find, and bac-teria can evolve against them relatively quickly. Teixobactin is special because it has been found to treat many harmful bacterial infections and diseases while having little to no side effect in studies so far. While there have only been mouse studies so far, they have been ex-tremely promising. Teixobactin works in a unique way that greatly impedes bacterial evolution. This will make it more effective over a longer time because there will be fewer resistant forms of bac-teria that it will be unable to treat. It retards antibiotic resistance by stopping the growth of the cell wall. In order for the cell wall to grow, lipids (fatty acids) must be able to stack up. This is why it is so unlikely for the bacteria to develop a resistance to Teixobactin, and even if resistance does occur, it will take the bacteria a long time to build a sufficient one. Many scientists are backing this drug, saying that it has potential and is an “ingenious” discovery.

A New Class of AntibioticsWritten by Asher Soriano

Why Gravity Keeps Me Grounded: What Science Means to Me

In eighth grade, I learned about black holes. The ghosts of some of the most massive stars to ever exist, black holes are inescapable. Near the edge of a black hole, known as the “event horizon,” time slows to an eventual stop. The gravitational force that a black hole possesses is so powerful that even light cannot escape it. For an anxiety-ridden thirteen-year-old girl, this was a lot to take in. I would go home after school, describing to my parents how I was certain I knew how I was going to die—by black hole. I was positive I was going to be “spaghettified,” an actual scientific term refer-ring to the act of being ripped in half over and over due to an intense gravitational force, until all of your little parts are infinitely small. I was never really raised with something to believe in. I have no religious background, and I don’t even think I ever believed in the tooth fairy. In eighth grade, I found something to believe in -- black holes. Though they terrified me, I was in awe that something so amaz-ing and powerful had been (theologically) proved to exist. As my education continued, my faith in science expanded, but more importantly, the lens through which I viewed the world around me was ever-changing. Biology taught me the value of living things. I don’t kill bugs anymore. Yes, they may look a little different—or “creepy” or whatever—but it works for them. It has literally taken them millions of years of natural selection to possess the optimal physical form for survival. Biology taught me that things work out eventually; you just have to be patient. When life on Earth began as tiny aquatic, single-celled bacteria, some of the bacteria mutated, thus gain-ing a small pigment spot that was sensitive to light. Bacteria with this mutation had a much greater chance of survival than the bacteria without, because being able to sense light al-lowed the organisms to avoid the harmful UV rays that the sun was emitting. This was the beginning of the eye as we know it today. It took millions and millions of years, but eventu-ally, the eye was perfected. Essentially, fish could see in super HD. As our ancestors began to develop more and more, they got to the point where it was time to explore the land. So, the brave (and probably really weird-looking) amphibian-type creature hoisted itself up on the shore, only to discover that the world was really trippy. Allow me to explain. You know how when you’re using a straw to drink a glass of wa-ter, and you get on eye level with the glass and it looks like the straw is cut in half where it

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Written by Natalie Spangle

exits the water? Well, that little illusion is due to the fact that light bends differently in water than it does on land. The eye that Mother Nature had spent so long masterfully crafting for our fish brethren was now almost completely obsolete. These eyes were designed for water, so looking through them on land made everything look very wavy and confusing. All hope may have seemed lost, but nature just picked up from there, continuing the evolution of “The Eye 2.0 – Land Edition.” Sure, it took another couple million years or so, but look where we are now. In truth, our eyes are not as high-functioning as some of the ancient fish of the past, but they’re still not too shabby. Natural selection isn’t rushed. It is patient, it takes its time, and this beautiful law of nature has created all of the modern species of living things on this Earth – and you’ve got to admit, it’s done a pretty swell job. Chemistry showed me that the world works in a calculated chaos. Trillions upon tril-lions of atoms are constantly swarming around us, but it’s exactly that disorder that creates the elements that create everything else. Chemistry taught me that there’s always something more—something smaller and something bigger. Example: Humans are comprised of cells. Cells are comprised of organelles. Organ-elles are comprised molecules, and molecules of elements. Elements are comprised of atoms. Atoms are comprised of protons, neutrons, and electrons. You could keep going forever. There’s always something making up something else, and the closer you look at things, the harder it is to tell them apart. Because we’re all just molecules who never stop moving—miniscule, vibrating particles, constantly producing the gentle hum of the universe. We are all connected in this way, by this microscopic yet utterly necessary motion and I think that’s beautiful. Physics taught me that everything has a consequence. For every action, there is a reac-tion, but its magnitude and direction may not always be so easily predicted. You must perse-

13Illustration by Grace Whittemore

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vere, because it takes a lot of effort for things to end up exactly the way you want them to. Every little action you do has a consequence, and sometimes those ripples turn into waves. For a physicist, rounding a decimal when you shouldn’t have can lead to mass destruction, just as staying at a party for an extra minute can lead to meeting someone who you could not have imagined living without. My physics teacher, Mr. Schmidt, once told me, “There’s no partial credit in life.” The next day, NASA attempted to launch an unmanned rocket, but a technical malfunction caused them to self-destruct the space vehicle before something worse happened. When I watched the grainy video of the explosion that evening, I couldn’t help but wonder what tiny mistake could have possibly caused that. An incorrect sign change? Or perhaps some-one copying down a “4” that looked more like a “9”? Not every situation may be as dire as a rocket launch, but this is a great example of how hard it can be to make a bunch of tiny actions add up to one harmonious reaction. There are just so many factors to think about – and it can all be a bit overwhelming at times. In physics, you have to think about the force of friction, the parallel force of gravity, the perpendicular force of gravity, initial velocity, final velocity, acceleration, distance, time, what unit you’re working in, and even if you did all of that correctly, you still probably rounded wrong. One day, when I was stressing out over a physics problem even more than usual, Mr. Schmidt pointed to a poster that was hanging on his wall, which illustrated the size of every planet in our solar system. “Sometimes, when you’re having a bad day,” He said, “You’ve just got to try and remember what you are to the universe.” That’s all he said. I looked at the poster – at the tiny blue dot labeled EARTH. It’s a humbling experience, to take a step back like that; to for once let yourself feel the force of gravity tying you to the ground – to feel your true size. Because who cares about a tiny human when there are nebulas, constellations, galaxies – black holes. It’s a miracle that the right chemicals, swimming around in a tar pit, connected in such a way that, on this little blue dot, life could form, that we could exist; that you could be reading this right now.It’s kind of amazing how little we know about everything. We haven’t even explored all that much of our own planet yet, much less our own sky. I like that. Because it’s no fun when all there is is certainty. It’s nice to look up at the shining graveyard of the night sky, not really knowing which stars are dead, which are alive, which are about to explode, and most impor-tantly, when can I expect the next black hole to come and spaghettify me?

Original Science Research Review: Cloning T-Cell Receptors for Glioblastoma Binding

Caroline Aronin

Abstract

Glioblastomas are among the most deadly of adult brain tumors. Scientists have begun to experiment with genetic alteration of T-cells and cloning of T-cells (and their re-ceptors) and immunization against the tumor. This project is an offshoot of a larger effort to observe the effect of glioblastoma development on T-cell representation. This smaller-scale project aimed to discover principle T-cell receptor sequences and clone each using bacterial plasmids for protein expression. Seven amino acid sequences were chosen (each coding for a different receptor) with the help of an original computer-code and each was cloned and then sampled 6 times for the sake of accuracy. 4/7 amino acid sequences were successfully cloned. This analysis was obtained through the BLAST computer sequencing software and Expasy computer translating software. Since there was only about a 23.8% success rate among our 42 clone trials, it can be concluded that future trials using the bacterial plasmids must be done. The receptor sequences that did clone will be used in the larger research effort to evaluate which sites the tumor cells bind to.

Glioblastoma and Immunology For the past two summers, I have worked at Columbia University Medical Center in NYC, full-time as part of the Original Science Research elective. It has been an incredible experience working in the Bartoli Brain Tumor Research Laboratory under the mentorship of Dr. Jennifer Sims and the supervision of Dr. Jeffery Bruce. The scientists in this lab are trying to untangle the mysteries of one of the most deadly and most common adult primary brain tumors plaguing the world today. About 13,000 Americans die of malignant brain tumors every year. Even with treatment, the average prognosis for a glioblastoma (GBM) is 14.6 months post-diagnosis. Under 10% of patients survive more than five years. The standard treatment options for GBM are radiation, surgical resection and very high dose chemotherapy. The chemotherapy dosages must be high enough to bypass the Blood Brain Barrier to have an effect on the tumor. This is part of what dis-tinguishes this tumor from other cancers. In addition, surgery and radiation are rarely effective in preventing recurrence. The tumor will almost always return. GBMs are highly heterogeneous at the cellular level and often difficult to resect because of unclear margins. Another aspect, which makes glioblastomas such an enigma to the medical community, is their immunosuppressive quality. This means that when a patient gets the tumor, their immune sys-

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tem will become depleted. Their immune cells (one variation being T-cells) will become ineffec-tive in protecting the body from the tumor. This is one of the main reasons why glioblastomas display such rapid growth and are so deadly. Scientists have begun to experiment with genetic alteration of T-cells, cloning T-cells (and their receptors) and immunization against the tumor. Essentially, they are trying to develop a tumor vaccine. This vaccine would boost a patient’s im-munity to more naturally fight the cancer. My project is an offshoot of a larger effort to observe the effect of glioblastoma develop-ment on T-cell (immune) response. My smaller-scale project aimed to discover T-cell receptor sequences, which are likely to bind to a tumor cell. After this, the goal became to clone each sequence using bacterial plasmids for protein expression. A T-cell has a receptor constructed of two protein chains (alpha and beta chains). This receptor determines what it binds to and which antigen it helps to eradicate as a functioning part of the immune system. Protein chains come from amino acids, which come from DNA sequences. At this molecular level, using a computer code that I wrote with my mentor, seven amino acid sequences were chosen (each coding for a different receptor). We then wanted to make replicas of each sequence so it would be possible, in the future, to see which receptors bonded best to tumor cells. To accomplish this, the sequences were implanted into bacterial plasmids (bacterial DNA) and as the bacteria replicates in colo-nies; the hope was that the sequences we implanted would clone as well.For many reasons, creating a brain tumor vaccine is a massive undertaking. Though, if it is ac-complished, the vaccine could become an effective, targeted treatment for GBM and extend what is now a dismal prognosis. But first, it is important to define the body’s immune reaction to glio-blastoma. My project is part of this effort.

A Human Glioblastoma

PCR of amino acid sequences

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New Species Discovered

Keesingia gigasThis new species of box jellyfish was discovered off the northwest coast of Western Australia in 2013 by jellyfish expert Lisa-Ann Gershwin. Be-longing to the family of Irukandji jellyfish, K. gi-gas is unusual because it can grow to the length of a human arm, while most of its relatives are fairly small in size. A sting from this jelly can cause “Irukandji syndrome,” a potentially fatal condition characterized by severe pain, sweat-ing, difficulty breathing, vomiting, and nausea.

Author’s Take: A giant jelly with a deadly sting? That’s really dangerous, and also really cool!

OlinguitoThis species, Bassaricyon neblina, was dis-covered in 2013 by Kristofer Helgen from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural His-tory. Found in the forests of the Andes Moun-tains in Colombia and Ecuador, this creature is the first carnivorous mammal discovered in the Western Hemisphere in over 30 years, eating insects as well as fruits and nectar. Its body from head to rump averages around 14 inches long, and its tail is the same length!

Author’s Take: This mammal is one really cool tree dweller! Living in the cloud forests of the Andes? Awesome!

Journal: Gershwin, Lisa-Ann. 2014. Two new species of box jellies (Cnidaria: Cubozoa: Carybdeida) from the central coast of Western Australia, both presumed to cause Irukandji syndrome. Records of the Western Australian Museum 29 (1): 10-19.

Journal: Kristofer M. Helgen, Miguel Pinto, Roland Kays, Lauren Helgen, Mirian Tsuchiya, Aleta Quinn, Don Wilson, Jesus Maldonado. Taxonomic revision of the olingos (Bassaricyon), with description of a new species, the Olinguito. ZooKeys, 2013; 324: 1 DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.324.5827

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Written by Kevin ShenIllustrated by Grace Whittemore

This tree species, also known as Kaweesak’s Dragon Tree, is found in the forests of Thailand and Burma and was discovered by Dr. Paul Wilkin and his team in 2013. D. kaweesakii can grow up to 12 meters (39 feet) in height and diameter, and has distinctive sword-shaped leaves along with white-and-orange flowers. The tree is popular in Thailand as it is associated with good luck and prosperity.

Author’s Take: A tree with leaves shaped like swords? This plant can pack a punch!

Journal:Paul Wilkin, Piyakaset Suksathan, Kaweesak Keeratikiat, Peter van Welzen, Justyna Wiland-Szymanska. A new species from Thailand and Burma, Dracaena kaweesakii Wilkin & Suksathan (Asparagaceae subfamily Nolinoi-deae). PhytoKeys, 2013; 26: 101 DOI: 10.3897/phytokeys.26.5335

Dracaena kaweesakii

This plant species is quite unusual – it “eats” metal! Discovered on Luzon Island in the Philippines in 2014, Rinorea Niccolifera lives in nickel-rich soil, and can absorb nickel from the soil in extremely high concentrations – up to 18,000 parts per mil-lion! Scientists hope to use these kinds of species for technologies such as “phytoremediation,” suck-ing heavy metals out of contaminated sites, and “phytomining,” growing plants to harvest metals out of metal-rich soil.

Author’s Take: Wouldn’t it be so cool to eat chunks of nickel? Well, that’s not really what happens, but this plant is still pretty sweet.

Rinorea NiccoliferaJournal: Fernando, E. S., Quimado, M. O., & Doronila, A. I. (2014). Rinorea niccolifera(Violaceae), a new, nickel-hyperaccumulating spe-cies from Luzon Island, Philippines. PhytoKeys, (37), 1–13. doi:10.3897/phytokeys.37.7136

This bizarre, mushroom-shaped animal species has proven to be quite the enigma for scientists, hence its scientific name. Dendrogramma enigmatica was first identified in 2014 from samples collected in 1986 from deep waters off the coast of South Australia, but researchers haven’t been able to place this species into an existing phylum. These organisms contain a thick layer of gelatinous material between the outer skin layer and the inner stomach, and scientists believe that D. enigmatica is related to many extinct Pre-Cambrian life forms that lived over 600 million years ago, representing one of the earliest branches of life.

Author’s Take: These animals are so mysterious… it’s like tak-ing a look into our past. Plus, the pattern almost looks like a brain.

Dendrogramma enigmatica Journal: Jean Just, Reinhardt Møbjerg Kristensen, Jørgen Olesen. Dendrogramma, New Genus, with Two New Non-Bilaterian Species from the Marine Bathyal of Southeastern Australia (Animalia, Metazoa incertae sedis) – with Similarities to Some Medusoids from the Precambrian Ediacara. PLoS ONE, 2014; 9 (9): e102976 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0102976

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Right in our backyard of Larchmont, New York sits Dr. Caroline Salafia’s tall green house and flourishing front yard coated in snow, yet inside is not only a lovely larchmont home, but the fully functioning office of Placental Analytics. This particular Larchmont resident, Dr. Salafia, has an undeniable passion for embryology. After a two-week embryol-ogy elective during her time at Duke Medical School, she fell in love with the field. She ex-plains, “We all start off like a flat sheet of paper. This sheet of cells develops into our spine, our brain, our mouth, and our heart. The way that we end up in the order that we are is we simply fold top to bottom, side by side, and our belly button is the intersection of those two planes. I just found that amazing.” After a brief period at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, Dr. Salafia came back to the east coast and began working in labs which pioneered research into viral infections during pregnancy. Dr. Salafia is very fond of her past mentors. “I am very lucky,” she mentions, “that when I asked them how things work, they didn’t tell me how things work. They told me that this is how we think things work but you ought to check it to make sure its right.” Dr. Salafia currently conducts research on the prenatal origins of developmental dis-abilities. She specifically studies phenolkeytanoria and other inheritable causes of mental retardation. Studying these diseases in newborns is pivotal because such conditions can be treated if diagnosed very early in a patient’s life. In addition to laboratory research, Dr. Salafia assists and consults parents. “What I do for parents in real time is help them un-derstand what happens before delivery: why the baby has died, why the baby is too small, or why the baby is sick in the newborn period. From a research point of view, however, I answer the questions: if we get out and we’re born, do we all have the same 52 cards in our deck? A lot of the work that we’re doing here is about how variations that may be related to stressors before we are born may change our thresholds and physiological set points so that when we’re presented with stressors in life some of us may not ‘be even.’” Dr. Salafia and her team stain and analyze over 6,000 placentas each year in order to study how variations in placental shape and vein composition can identify an increased risk for certain condi-tions in a newborn. Dr. Salafia sums up her career, “my patients help me feel like I’m useful in real time, and by adding them up into an understanding that transcends the individual, my research, and I feel that the two things work very well together.”

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Community Scientist Profile:Dr. Salafia

Written by Maria MacArdle, Zach Nagin, and Max Schechter

Question 1: What’s your favorite thing about living and working in Larchmont?

“There are very, very interesting people in Larchmont. I was introduced to my friend and collaborator Terri because she was my next-door neighbor. Larchmont is also a place where people like to come. It’s a place where our colleagues in London, France, and Italy, don’t mind coming through. In addition, I have to live near a place where there are lots of babies being born. If I were to live and work in a low population area, then I’d be like a boat with-out oars. Larchmont is a great place to meet interesting people and many people from dif-ferent parts of the world come through here.”

Question 2: Why do you like working with high schoolers and kids from the OSR program?

“I’ve always liked working with high school students, and to be completely honest there are times when I have really preferred a bright and interested high school or college kid to a medical school student or a resident. That’s because sometimes medical students and resi-dents think that they’re so smart that they can multitask, and may end up doing a crummy job at something that they think is simple, such as data entry. I would rather have some-body who actually cares, and many times high school students are not necessarily sure that they’re all that goddamn smart yet. So they’re willing to listen, and they care about what they’re doing. High school kids can be very receptive, and I like to provide the opportunity; it’s a chance to change somebody’s life.”

Question 3: Where else do you work?

“In addition to Larchmont, I work in Staten Island, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. In Staten Island I have a placental modulation laboratory. That’s where our lab equipment is. At the New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, Queens Hospital in Jamaica Queens, and the Bronx Lebanon Hospital I mentor the Obstetrics in Pediatrics Residents. Residency training programs require you to have a research goal, formulate it into a hypothesis, and actually collect data and analyze the data and try to answer the hypothesis. I help them formulate their hypothesis in a way that we can collect data in their environment that can either answer the question that they’re interested in, or maybe to answer a question that’s related to their question.”

Question 4: What do you like about working from home?

“ My kids are juniors. Until I quit my job at Columbia I used to leave at five AM and I’d get home at six pm, and I worked on weekends and that was that. So I wasn’t around. I quit my job and went back to graduate school when they were still in Murray.

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And it’s a nice thing having a number of bosses, nobody knows exactly where you are. So I was there (Murray). I was there at a concert, I was there at a show. I presented to the kids. I brought in pig hearts to the hommocks, grossed everybody out, people got green. But you know, I was there. And that’s it. And my office on the second floor, I have a micro-scope and a computer and lots of toys and I can log into the hospital system. And my son’s bedroom was there and my daughters bedroom was there and lately they sleep until two or three in the afternoon. But at least I was there. Yeah, to be there.”

Question 5: What advice do you have for young scientists?

“One: Don’t make your high school and college a recapitulation of graduate school; there were people in medical school who basically had taken the first two years of the medical school curriculum as undergraduates. They’ve taken organic. They’ve taken biochemistry.They’ve taken genetics, and they took it again. What kept me going, and what allows me to be creative, is not necessarily the fact that I could get a good score on a biology test; it’s be-cause I can see how things are, things that look different to some people, I can understand how they might actually have a relationship. And I can explain something to somebody who is a physicist who works with integral science. We work with people who are model-ing the physics of lung function. The lung is the same as the placenta -- the baby gets oxy-gen. Be creative. Use your educational time as the unique time in your life it is where you can learn anything you want and just explore and develop your creativity it will help you in times of stress. You need an anchor. You need something that makes you know that there is meaning, because there are going to be times where you’re really tired and it’s very, very difficult. Don’t have tunnel vision; don’t feel that there is a very very narrow path. It might be straight but it’s not narrow. There’s many ways you can get to the goal of being a scien-tist. But, live you life, you know, live your life and enjoy all of the ability to take classes and learn things because you are never going to be able to sit there and learn them really at many other points in your life.”

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Space X

There isn’t much sexy about science. It’s famously, and proudly, a field made up of people who beg to have their success and intellect speak louder than their words. Scientific jargon is often sleep-inducing; scientific journals: dense and wordy; and maybe the biggest celebrity in the game right now is a curly-haired thirty-year old with a fortune made in algorithms and a name - Zuck-erberg - straight out of a sitcom. In fact, I might just argue that there are only two things that the general public is inherently interested in when it comes to science: inventing, and space.

Think about it, no five-year old is dreaming of a life in computational physics or biochemical engineering. Kids, and most of the rest of the country, dream of a view of Earth from the surface of Mars or creating a time machine to win the lottery. We read about Neil Armstrong hopping around the moon and the Wright Brothers making flying machines and we want to be like them. Unfortu-nately, it doesn’t appear that there are a lot of “them” out there anymore. Yes, there are scientific discoveries being made every day; many fields are advancing exponentially faster than even five or ten years ago. But where have the celebrities gone? When last has a country made plans to stake a claim on our solar system? Sure, it may not be too practical to try to replicate that aforementioned progress from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but science is looking for something that can really draw the people in. I think this quote from last year’s Interstellar, as cheesy as it is and despite the film being set in the future, somewhat defines how a lot of people now feel about the excitement they once felt about science.

“We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

But all hope for sexy science is not gone. And a modern day resurgence is being led by a surprisingly charismatic (or overzealous) South African named Elon Musk who gained fame from, among other things, a company named after of all people one of the great inventing minds whose knack for ingenuity Musk seems to share -- Tesla. Musk is an “entrepreneur, engineer, inventor, and investor” according to his Wikipedia page. Paypal, solar power provider SolarCity, and the previ-ously mentioned Tesla Motors all owe their creation or founding to the 43-year old Musk. He’s a bit polarizing in his persona, but one thing’s undeniable: from nitty-gritty engineering to big picture innovation, he’s the type of guy who could really usher in a new era of “sexy science.”

So we got the inventor part down. Now all we need is the space part and we’re set. For that, we look at Musk’s project which began in 2002 and has a name as irrefutably awesome as its goals -- SpaceX. The main idea for SpaceX was one which not just anyone could understand, but one which everyone was naturally interested in: a hope to reduce space travel costs to the point of consumer service and, one day, a vacation spot on Mars. On December 8th, 2010, SpaceX became the first private company to send a rocket into, and return a rocket from, orbit. In 2011, Musk said

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Written by Gabe Tugendstein

reaching Mars was within one to two decades’ reach. In 2012, it became the first private company to send a rocket to the ISS. By 2014, SpaceX’s experiments in reusable rockets had led to the development of one which could fly 1000 meters. In the last five years, the advances in space travel being made by SpaceX in the five years preceding it started to really pay off in tangible, incredible ways. But according to the information being thrown around by Musk and the SpaceX team in an announcement this Janu-ary, the next five years may make all that was done 2010 - 2015 pale in comparison.

The Delta Heavy, set to lift off later this year, is the next step beyond the Delta 9 which made that historic flight in 2010. It can take over 117,000 pounds into orbit, the most since Saturn V in 1973, and will be the most power-ful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two. Taking the Delta 9’s patented engine design to new levels, the Delta Heavy can pro-duce over 20,000 kilo-newtons (kN) of thrust in a vacuum from its three cores of nine engines each, and in a way such that even multiple engine failures will not have to render a mis-sion incomplete. And that’s not to mention the puny 800kN produced by another engine in the second stage of the rocket. As stated before, early tests have shown promise for reusable rockets in the Delta and Grasshopper families. The Dragon family of spacecrafts, meant to do the transporting of people and cargo, can carry 3,000 pounds into and out of space and is set to

start manned flight testing in 2-3 years with help from NASA.

We don’t know what the future will hold, and maybe this is just another eccentric billionaire who thinks he’s invincible until he loses all of his money trying to achieve unattainable goals. But at this point, even if we’re skeptical or even outwardly doubtful of SpaceX’s potential to succeed, we at least have to admit that it has added a level of inter-est and intrigue that science hasn’t seen in a while. By no means have we solved all the problems present in our own planet, but I don’t know if I’ve been more childishly excited for an invention or discovery as I am for the ones happening over at SpaceX. I don’t know if I would even want to go to Mars if it became a possibility, but the potential to make such a thing realistic thrills me. That’s what making science “sexy” really is, the idea that science isn’t stuff which is up to the scientists to figure out, and instead that science is fascinating and something that we all want to get more involved in like a good book. I’ll finish off with another Interstellar quote, if for no other rea-son than the film’s success in making science look completely awe-inspiring.

“Perhaps we’ve just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we’ve barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments can-not be behind us, because our destiny lies above us.”

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A look inside the crew section of the Dragon, where humans will be seated for testing in 2-3 years in preparation for potential future flights into Space and possibly Mars

Image Courtesy of space.stackexchange.com

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MAY 16, 2015 11AM - 6PMHOMMOCKS MIDDLE SCHOOL - LARCHMONT, NY

www.lmstemalliance.org

Drones, Soft Circuits, and 3D Printing Demos!

Volunteers and Exhibitors Needed!