For most of history, humans rose with the sun and slept when it set. Enter Thomas Edison, and with a flick of a switch, night became day, enabling us to work, play and post cat and kid photos on Facebook into the wee hours.

However, according to a new study led by a Johns Hopkins biologist, this typical 21^st- century scenario comes at a serious cost: When people routinely burn the midnight oil, they risk suffering depression and learning issues, and not only because of lack of sleep. The culprit could also be exposure to bright light at night from lamps, computers and even iPads.

Samer Hattar

“Basically, what we found is that chronic exposure to bright light – even the kind of light you experience in your own living room at home or in the workplace at night if you are a shift worker – elevates levels of a certain stress hormone in the body, which results in depression and lowers cognitive function,” said Samer Hattar, a biology professor in the Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

Published in the November 14 Advance Online Publication (AOP) of the journal Nature, the study results conducted on mice demonstrate how special cells in the eye (called intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells or ipRGCs) are activated by bright light, affecting the brain’s center for mood, memory and learning.

But the study involved mice, so why are we talking about humans? Hattar offers some insight:

“Mice and humans are actually very much alike in many ways, and one is that they have these ipRGCs in their eyes, which affect them the same way,” he said. “In addition, in this study, we make reference to previous studies on humans, which show that light does, indeed, impact the human brain’s limbic system. And the same pathways are in place in mice.”

The scientists knew that shorter days in the winter cause some people to develop a form of depression known as “Seasonal Affective Disorder,” and that some patients with this mood disorder benefit from “light therapy,” which is simple, regular exposure to bright light.

Hattar’s team, led by graduate students Tara LeGates and Cara Altimus, posited that mice would react the same way, and tested their theory by exposing laboratory rodents to a cycle consisting of 3.5 hours of light and then 3.5 hours of darkness. Previous studies using this cycle showed that it did not disrupt the mice’s sleep cycles, but Hattar’s team found that it did cause the animals to develop depression like behaviors.

“Of course, you can’t ask mice how they feel, but we did see an increase in depression-like behaviors, including a lack of interest in sugar or pleasure seeking, and the study mice moved around far less during some of the tests we did,” he said. “They also clearly did not learn as quickly, or remember tasks as well. They were not as interested in novel objects as were mice on a regular light-darkness cycle schedule.”

The animals also had increased levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, which has been linked in numerous previous studies with learning issues. Treatment with Prozac, a commonly prescribed  anti-depressant, mitigated the symptoms, restoring the mice to their previous healthy moods and levels of learning, and bolstering the case that their learning issues were caused by depression.

According to Hattar, the results indicate that humans should be wary of the kind of prolonged, regular exposure to bright light at night that is routine in most of our lives, because it may be having a negative effect on our mood and ability to learn.

“I’m not saying we have to sit in complete darkness at night, but I do recommend that we should switch on fewer lamps, and stick to less intense light bulbs: Basically, only use what you need to see. That won’t likely be enough to activate those ipRGCs that affect mood,” he advises.

This study was supported by a grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

A copy of the paper is available. Contact Lisa DeNike at Lde@jhu.edu or 443-287-9960.

For more information about Hattar and his lab:

http://www.bio.jhu.edu/Faculty/Hattar/

http://neuroscience.jhu.edu/SamerHattar.php

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

Chia-Ling Chien, the Jacob L. Hain Professor of Physics and the Director of the Material Research Science and Engineering Center at The Johns Hopkins University, is a winner of the first-ever Asian Union of Magnetic Societies Award, recognizing his “seminal contribution to magnetic materials, nanostructures, magnetoelectronic phenomena and devices.”

Chien’s current research interests include fabrication of nanostructured materials and their structural, electronic, magnetic, and superconducting properties; highly spin polarized materials, spin-transfer torque effects, and magnetoelectronics.

“I have been very fortunate working with talented people.  Johns Hopkins allows me to do the research of my liking and pays me.  Occasionally, I even receive an award.  One can hardly ask for anything better,” said Chien.

Chia-Ling Chien

The Asian Union of Magnetics Societies (AUMS) was established in January 2009 to promote research, education, and application development in magnetism, magnetic materials, and magnetic devices. As part of his prize, Chien has been invited to speak at next year’s International Conference of the Asian Union of Magnetic Societies, held this year in Japan in early October.

Chien received his bachelors in physics from Tunghai University (Taiwan), and his master’s and Ph.D.s from Carnegie-Mellon University. Chien has published more than 400 papers in refereed journals and holds several patents. He is a fellow of The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is one of the most cited scientists, with more than 15,000 citations with an H-index of 61.  (The “h-index” is an index that measures the impact and productivity of a scientist published work by virtue of how often it is cited by other scientists in other publications.) He is a fellow of the American Physical Society. He is also Honorary Professor at Nanjing University, Lanzhou University, and Fudan University in China. He is the 2004 recipient of the David Adler Award of the American Physical Society.  He is the 2005 Distinguished Lecturer of the Magnetics Society of IEEE.

“Prof. Chien is a world leader in the study of the physics of magnetic nanostructures,” said  Daniel Reich, chairman of the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “This prize is a fitting tribute for his many years of important contributions to this field.”

Also honored this year by the AUMS was Kazuhiro Ouchi, professor emeritus at Japan’s Akita Industrial Technology Center.

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

Andrew Watson, a Royal Society research professor who studies the carbon cycle and its connection climate change, will give the George S. Benton Endowed Lecture in Meteorology and Fluid Dynamics at The Johns Hopkins University at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 25 in Olin Hall 305 on the university’s Homewood campus. The title of the lecture is “Earth Revolutions: Lessons for our future from the Earth’s deep past” and is free and open to the public.

A professor from the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom, Watson will discuss how – at least twice in the Earth’s history – planet-altering organisms have caused incidents of catastrophic global climate change, and how humans today have the power not to repeat history.

“The good news is, learning from these past events, we can see how we could support our large population and high standard of living indefinitely within the Earth’s resources,” Watson says. “This can be achieved without doing irreparable damage to the rest of the biosphere. The energy and materials are available to do this, but only if they are managed very differently from the way we are currently using them.”

The George S. Benton Endowed Lecture in Meteorology and Fluid Dynamics is named after a former dean of the faculty at Johns Hopkins’ Zanvyl Krieger School of the Arts and Sciences. Benton also was a member of the Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

For directions to the Homewood campus, go here:

http://webapps.jhu.edu/jhuniverse/information_about_hopkins/campuses/homewood_campus/

A campus parking map is available here:

http://www.parking.jhu.edu/images/JHU_Homewood_Parking_Map_070828_1.pdf

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

Johns Hopkins University chemist Tyrel McQueen has been awarded a 2012 David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering.

The fellowship is one of 16 awarded each year nationwide, and bestows unrestricted funds of $875,000 (over a five-year period) to unusually creative young faculty members in science and engineering.

McQueen will use the award to continue his work toward discovering, designing and controlling materials with exotic electronic states of matter, with applications ranging from fundamental science to solving energy problems.

“I am delighted and honored to receive this award from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation,” said McQueen, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “I’m excited to see generous support for new materials synthesis and solid state chemistry, and the flexibility offered by these unrestricted funds will be invaluable to my research team as we pursue exotic new quantum phenomena in electronic materials.”

Tyrel McQueen

Katherine Newman, dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at the Johns Hopkins, considers the recognition well deserved.

“The Krieger School is enormously proud of the accomplishments of Professor McQueen and we look forward eagerly to the discoveries he will provide in the years to come,” she said. “I have had the personal pleasure of hearing him lecture undergraduates on his work and he conveys the kind of excitement that we want budding scientists to hear. We are grateful to the Packard Foundation for recognizing this rising star.”

McQueen, who is also an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins, earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Harvey Mudd College in 2004, a master’s degree from Princeton University in 2006 and a Ph.D. in chemistry and materials from Princeton in 2009. Later that year, he became a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before coming to The Johns Hopkins University as an assistant professor of chemistry. He is a member of Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Quantum Matter, which is funded by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the US Department of Energy.

“This is tremendous news and we are all very excited for Tyrel and proud of his accomplishments,” said Gerald Meyer, chairman of the Department of Chemistry at The Johns Hopkins University Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “The Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering support the nation’s most gifted and talented young professors in developing and expanding their research in science and engineering. To my knowledge, this is the first time that a faculty member in our department has ever received this prestigious fellowship. The funding will enable Tyrel and his research group to explore creative high risk experiments. It will be exciting to see what fascinating new science emerges from this fellowship.”

McQueen is a member of the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society and Sigma-Xi Scientific Research Society. Previous honors include a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2004-2009) and the 2012 Lange Lectureship for Outstanding Accomplishments in Materials Research from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation established its fellowships in 1988 to cultivate future scientific leaders.

For more information about McQueen, go here:

http://occamy.chemistry.jhu.edu/group/boss-cv.php

To learn more about the Packard Foundation and its fellowships, go here:

http://www.packard.org/what-we-fund/conservation-and-science/packard-fellowships-for-science-and-engineering/

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

Supported by a five-year $7.4 million National Science Foundation grant, experts at The Johns Hopkins University are partnering with teachers and administrators in Baltimore City Public Schools on a program to enhance teaching and learning in science, technology, engineering and math in city elementary schools by making STEM a community affair.

The program, called STEM Achievement in Baltimore Elementary Schools – SABES for short — not only will benefit more than 1,600 students in grades three through five in nine city elementary schools, but could also become a national model for science, technology, engineering and math education.

“With this partnership, Johns Hopkins welcomes another opportunity to build on our collaborations with Baltimore City Public Schools to enhance the opportunities for students to excel in science, technology, engineering and mathematics education,” said Ronald J. Daniels, president of the university. “At Johns Hopkins, we are deeply committed to working with our partners in the Baltimore community to galvanize our many strengths and resources to serve city’s children and neighborhoods.”

The project will engage more than 40 city STEM teachers working with students in the communities of Greater Homewood, Lower Park Heights and Highlandtown/Greektown. Also involved will be parents, after-school care providers, local business people, community groups and experts from Johns Hopkins, the Maryland Science Center and the National Aquarium.

The program will provide high-quality professional development supported by Johns Hopkins engineering faculty for teachers. It will also include curricular enhancements and training to enable after-school program providers to augment STEM education by involving children in activities that have resonance in their communities. For instance, students studying the environment in class might work after school on clean water remediation or other projects that will impact their own neighborhoods.

“Our aim is that this partnership will build excitement around science, technology, engineering and mathematics in our communities and empower children and families to engage their world through these activities,” said Michael Falk, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Johns Hopkins’ Whiting School of Engineering, and principal investigator for SABES. “Our hope is that this model could eventually be extended to other school systems around the country to foster STEM educational achievement among all students, including those of different ethnicities, language proficiencies and income levels.”

Katya Denisova, science content liaison for the Baltimore schools and a co-PI on the grant, sees the partnership as a tremendous opportunity for all involved – but especially for city school students.

“SABES is a very exciting project for the entire community of Baltimore City, from the teachers to the families and neighborhoods involved. But foremost, this is a big day for our students,” she said. “We see this as a fantastic opportunity to build a bridge for Baltimore City Public School students to the knowledge and expertise that will enable them to be successful in the 21^st century.”

Twice a year, the students will take part in STEM recognition events, where they will be able to present their works to stakeholders in the community, including teachers, parents and others. Teachers, too, will benefit from the community, collaborative approach by visiting each others’ classroom and meeting to devise and discuss best classroom practices, forming their own STEM “learning communities.”

During the grant’s first year, a team of planners will come together to outline the program in detail, and to get all community stakeholders involved. Over the next four years, all nine elementary schools will be brought on board, eventually reaching the targeted 1,600 students.

According to Falk, it’s vitally important to engage today’s elementary-age students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics learning at a high level in order to prepare them for the demands of the 21^st century job market.

“Nationally, we know that the jobs being created are jobs that require high amounts of skill with respect to science and mathematics,” Falk said. “By engaging students early, we hope that they are prepared to meet that need and participate in the modern workforce fully.”

Supporting partners include Greater Homewood Community Corp., Park Heights Renaissance, Inc., Southeast Community Development Corp., Greektown Community Development Corp., Education Based Latino Outreach and Child First Authority.

Use this link to view a video describing the Johns Hopkins-Baltimore City Public Schools partnership:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENXExkxe0NU

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

A Johns Hopkins biologist has been selected by the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences (PULSE) as one its new Vision and Change Leadership Fellows, a group charged with spending a year identifying and recommending ways to improve undergraduate life sciences education.

Joel Schildbach, a biology professor and director of undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, is one of 40 faculty members selected from 250 applicants from 24 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands by PULSE, a joint initiative of the National Science Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the National Institutes of Health.

“It’s an honor to be selected and in the company of some of the real leaders of this nationwide effort to enhance undergraduate biology education.  I am especially pleased by what I see as an endorsement by PULSE of our ongoing efforts to improve how we educate Hopkins undergraduates,” said Schildbach.

Joel Schildbach

Schildbach is on the faculty steering committee for The Gateway Sciences Initiative, a yearlong university wide effort to promote wider adoption of successful teaching techniques already in use and to encourage the development of innovative new approaches to learning at Johns Hopkins. In addition, he is director of the BioREU summer undergraduate research program, a National Science Foundation-funded 10-week summer program designed to provide an intensive, mentored research experience for undergraduates, especially those attending institutions with limited research opportunities.

Judith Verbeke of the NSF said the fellows represent “a diverse group of extremely capable faculty” chosen for their experience in catalyzing reform in undergraduate biology education.

The fellows hail from research universities, liberal arts colleges, comprehensive/regional universities and two-year colleges.

A list of the Vision and Change Leadership Fellows is available at www.pulsecommunity.org.

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

The Gruber Foundation announced today that the 2012 Cosmology Prize will be awarded to Johns Hopkins University professor Charles L. Bennett and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) space mission science team that he led.

Bennett and the WMAP team are being recognized by the foundation for their transformative study of an ancient light dating back to the infant universe. So precise and accurate are the WMAP results that they form the foundation of the Standard Cosmological Model.

Bennett and the 26 member team will share the $500,000 prize. A gold medal will be presented to Bennett at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Beijing on August 21, and he will deliver a lecture on the 22nd.

“It is tremendously exciting to be recognized with the Gruber Cosmology Prize,” said Bennett, Alumni Centennial Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Gilman Scholar in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “I have been very fortunate to work with the talented and fine people of the WMAP team, and I am particularly delighted that our entire science team has been honored with this prestigious award.”

Charles L. Bennett Photo by Will Kirk/Homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

Under Bennett’s direction, the WMAP mission determined with unprecedented precision the age, shape (WMAP nailed down the curvature of space to within 0.6% of conventional Euclidean geometry), composition and history of the universe from the first-ever, exquisitely detailed full-sky “baby picture” of the universe, dating from when it was only 378,000 years old – 13.75 billion years ago. Using this picture, the team determined that the universe consists of 72.8 percent dark energy, 22.7 percent dark matter and 4.6 percent atoms. The team also concluded that the first stars formed when the universe was only about 400 million years old. The WMAP data substantiated key predictions of the cosmic inflation paradigm that describes the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second of the universe, while at the same time ruling out some specific implementations of the theory. WMAP data also place limits on the mass of the neutrino (an elementary particle with no electrical charge and travels at almost the speed of light), and provide evidence for primordial helium, consistent with big bang theory predictions.

“Chuck Bennett and the WMAP team put the ‘precision’ in the new field of precision cosmology, and set the ‘standard’ for the Standard Cosmological Model,” said fellow Johns Hopkins astrophysicist Adam Riess, who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in astrophysics, as well as the Gruber Prize in 2007, for his finding that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

The annual Gruber Cosmology Prize recognizes “fundamental advances in our understanding of the universe,” according to the foundation’s website. The Cosmology Prize is co-sponsored by the International Astronomical Union and aims to acknowledge and encourage further exploration.

This is the second time that Bennett has been honored by the Gruber Foundation. In 2006, the Prize was awarded to NASA’s John Mather and the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) team, of which Bennett was a member. The WMAP team honored this year includes Johns Hopkins associate research scientists David Larson and Janet Weiland. Throughout his career Bennett has made significant contributions to the knowledge of cosmology through pioneering measurements of the cosmic background radiation, the oldest light in the universe and a remnant of the hot, young universe. For this research, Bennett has received many previous accolades, including the 2010 Shaw Prize, the 2009 Comstock Prize in Physics, the 2006 Harvey Prize, the 2005 Draper Medal, the 1992 and 2004 NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Award,  the 2003 NASA Outstanding Leadership Award.

More about Bennett:

http://cosmos.pha.jhu.edu/bennett/

More about the Gruber Foundation:

http://www.gruberprizes.org/

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

FROM: Lisa DeNike/443-845-3148 (cell) and 443-287-9960 (office) or Lde@jhu.edu

RE: Johns Hopkins hosts a viewing of the transit of Venus

WHEN: beginning at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, June 5

WHERE: Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy, 3799 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, 21218

In the late afternoon and early evening of Tuesday, June 5, a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle will unfold in the heavens: Venus will slowly travel across the face of the Sun.

This phenomenon happens only once every 130 years, so the Maryland Space Grant Observatory and Johns Hopkins University are inviting star gazers of every experience level to an event that not only will allow them to view the transit, but also to learn more about it.

At 5 p.m., Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist Adam Riess, professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University, and Peter McCullough, associate astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, will each give a short talk in Schafler Auditorium about the importance of transits in cosmology and astronomy.

From 6 p.m. until sunset, observers can watch the transit unfold in one of several ways. The Space Grant Observatory’s telescope will be open, and will project the transit onto paper to protect viewers’ eyes. In addition, several personal, smaller telescopes also will be set up on the roof of the Bloomberg Center for people’s use. Finally, as the astronomical event unfolds, it will be projected onto a screen in the Schafler Auditorium during a live feed from Hawaii.

All events will be held in the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy on the Homewood campus.

For directions to the Homewood campus and a map, go here:

http://webapps.jhu.edu/jhuniverse/information_about_hopkins/visitor_information/

For more information about the Maryland Space Grant Consortium and Observatory, go here:

http://md.spacegrant.org/index.php?page=maryland-space-grant-observatory

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases are available at the same address.

A study led by a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist and published in the May 10 issue of the journal Neuron suggests a potential new therapeutic approach for improving memory and interrupting disease progression in patients with a form of cognitive impairment that often leads to full-blown Alzheimer’s disease.

The focus of the study was “excess brain activity” commonly associated with conditions that cause mild cognitive decline and memory loss, and are linked to an increased risk of Alzheimer’s. Previously, it had been thought that this neural hyperactivity in the hippocampus was the brain’s attempt to compensate for a weakness in forming new memories. Instead, the team found that this excess activity is contributing to conditions such as amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), in which patients’ memories are worse than would be expected in healthy people the same age.

“In the case of aMCI, it has been suggested that the increased hippocampal activation may serve a beneficial function by recruiting additional neural ‘resources’ to compensate for those that are lost,” explains lead author Michela Gallagher, the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “However, animal studies have raised the alternative view that this excess activation may be contributing to memory impairment.”

To test how a reduction in that hippocampal activity would affect human patients with aMCI,

Michela Gallagher photo by Will Kirk/Homewood Photography

Gallagher’s team administered a low dose of a drug clinically used to treat epilepsy. The goal was to reduce the test subjects’ activity to levels that were similar to those of healthy, age-matched subjects in a control group. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging both to determine the levels of excess activity, and the reduction of it by way of the drug.

Gallagher and her team found that those subjects who had been treated with an effective dose of the drug did better on a memory task, pointing to the therapeutic potential of reducing this excess activation of the hippocampus in patients with aMCI. These findings in human patients with aMCI are the first to clinically demonstrate that over activity in the hippocampus has no benefit for cognition, and are consistent with Gallagher’s research in an animal model of memory loss: aged rodents.

The findings may have broad clinical implications because increased hippocampal activation occurs not only in patients with aMCI, but also in other conditions of risk, such as familial Alzheimer’s Disease (AD).

Research in mouse models of familial AD conducted at the Gladstone Institutes of San Francisco has identified mechanisms of the brain that contribute to abnormal excitatory brain activity, as reported in a paper published in the April 27 issue of the journal Cell. In addition, the results of other studies in mice using the same drug used in aMCI patients were presented at last year’s International Congress on Alzheimer’s Disease in Paris, showing both improved memory performance and neuronal function in the hippocampus.

“From both a scientific and clinical perspective, I am thrilled about the consistency of findings obtained in aMCI patients and related animal models,” said Lennart Mucke, director of the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease and professor of neurology and neuroscience at the University of California San Francisco.

According to Gallagher, the elevated hippocampal activity observed in conditions that precede AD may be one of the underlying mechanisms contributing to neurodegeneration and memory loss. Studies have found that if patients with aMCI are followed for a number of years, those with the greatest excess activation have the greatest further decline in memory, and are more likely to receive a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s over the next four to six years.

“Apart from a direct role in memory impairment, there is concern that elevated activity in vulnerable neural networks could be causing additional damage and possibly promoting the widespread disease-related degeneration that underlies cognitive decline and the conversion to Alzheimer’s Disease,” says Gallagher. “Therefore, reducing the elevated activity in the hippocampus may help to restore memory and protect the brain. It will require a carefully monitored, lengthier clinical trial to determine if that is the case.”

The team that conducted the Johns Hopkins study included Arnold Bakker, Greg Krauss, Marilyn Albert, Carolyn Speck, Lauren Jones, Michael Yassa, Amy Shelton and Susan Bassett. The team also included Craig Stark of the University of California at Irvine.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Gallagher is the founder of, and a member of the scientific board of, AgeneBio, a biotechnology company focused on developing treatments for diseases that have an impact on memory, such as amnestic mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease. The company is headquartered in Indianapolis. Gallagher owns AgeneBio stock, which is subject to certain restrictions under Johns Hopkins policy. She is entitled to shares of any royalties received by the university on sales of products related to her inventorship of intellectual property. The terms of these arrangements are managed by the university in accordance with its conflict-of-interest policies.

More information about Gallagher:

http://pbs.jhu.edu/research/gallagher/facultyinfo/

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

]]> http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/05/10/reducing-brain-activity-improves-memory-after-cognitive-decline-johns-hopkins-team-finds/feed/ 0 http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/05/07/exhibit-and-website-highlight-the-vital-role-of-blacks-at-johns-hopkins/ http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/05/07/exhibit-and-website-highlight-the-vital-role-of-blacks-at-johns-hopkins/#comments Mon, 07 May 2012 13:12:43 +0000 Tracey Reeves http://releases.jhu.edu/?p=6607 May 7, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT:  Lisa De Nike
(443)-287-9960 (office)
(443) 845-3148 (cell)
Lde@jhu.edu

An exhibit designed to recognize and publicize the crucial role that black students, faculty and staff have played in the rich history of The Johns Hopkins University has opened on the Homewood campus in Charles Village and will circulate among the various Johns Hopkins campuses through fall.

Called “The Indispensable Role of Blacks at Johns Hopkins,” the freestanding display and set of window decals pay tribute to 50 people, past and present, whose professional and personal achievements have brought honor to the institution. Through compelling and inspiring personal stories and photographs, the exhibit highlights how the history of these illustrious individuals – separately and as a group – is inextricably entwined with that of Johns Hopkins.

“This exhibit represents just one way to emphasize the wonderful, vibrant diversity of this community – now and throughout our history,” said Ronald L. Daniels, president of The Johns Hopkins University.

Co-sponsored by Daniels, Johns Hopkins External Affairs and Development and the Johns Hopkins University Black Faculty and Staff Association, the exhibit is supported by a website which includes brief narratives of the individuals spotlighted in the exhibit.

Included are, among others, Vivien Thomas, the surgical technician who in the 1940s developed the procedures used to treat so-called “blue baby” syndrome; Benjamin Carson, the pioneering neurosurgeon and a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient; Percy A. Pierre, the first black student to earn a doctorate in electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins (1967); and Minnie Hargow, an employee of Johns Hopkins for more than 60 years who started work in the campus cafeteria in 1947 and was assistant to the president when she retired in 2007.

The exhibit is on display this month in buildings across the Homewood campus, including in Mason Hall and at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library. On June 15, it will move to the Glass Pavilion as part of the BFSA’s Juneteenth celebration. From June 17 to the 30, it will travel to the Anne and Mike Armstrong Medical Education Building on the East Baltimore medical campus. Later this summer, the Applied Physics Lab near Laurel and the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. will host it. And in the fall, students, faculty, staff and visitors to The School of Nursing, The Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and the Bloomberg School of Public Health will have a chance to enjoy it. (Please consult the website for details as to exact location and date.)

“My hope is that this exhibit will show the indispensable role that blacks have had at Johns Hopkins in every way and every form, from custodial staff to trustees, physicians and attorneys,” said Debbie Savage, IT manager in the Office of Student Technology Services at Homewood and a BFSA member.

Savage says that the website will grow over time as the inspiring stories of more people are added. (Additions to the collection will be considered each spring, she said.)

For more information, visit: http://bfsa.jhu.edu/exhibit/.

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]]> http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/05/07/exhibit-and-website-highlight-the-vital-role-of-blacks-at-johns-hopkins/feed/ 0 http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/05/02/team-led-by-jhu-astrophysicist-catches-black-hole-red-handed-in-stellar-homicide/ http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/05/02/team-led-by-jhu-astrophysicist-catches-black-hole-red-handed-in-stellar-homicide/#comments Wed, 02 May 2012 17:03:20 +0000 Tracey Reeves http://releases.jhu.edu/?p=6535 May 2, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JOHNS HOPKINS MEDIA CONTACT:  Lisa DeNike
(443)-287-9960 (office)
(443) 845-3148 (cell)
Lde@jhu.edu

SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INSTITUTE CONTACT:
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Villard@stsci.edu

Team Led By JHU Astrophysicist Catches Black Hole Red-Handed in Stellar Homicide

Astronomers have gathered the most direct evidence yet of a supermassive black hole shredding a star that wandered too close.

Supermassive black holes, weighing millions to billions times more than the Sun, lurk in the centers of most galaxies. These hefty monsters lay quietly until an unsuspecting victim, such as a star, wanders close enough to get ripped apart by their powerful gravitational clutches.

Astronomers have spotted these stellar homicides before, but this is the first time they can identify the victim. Using a slew of ground- and space-based telescopes, a team of astronomers led by Suvi Gezari of The Johns Hopkins University has identified the victim as a star rich in helium gas. The star resides in a galaxy 2.7 billion light-years away.

Her team’s results will appear in the May 3 online edition of the journal Nature.

“When the star is ripped apart by the gravitational forces of the black hole, some part of the star’s remains falls into the black hole, while the rest is ejected at high speeds. We are seeing the glow from the stellar gas falling into the black hole over time,” said Gezari, an associate research scientist in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “We’re also witnessing the spectral signature of the ejected gas, which we find to be mostly helium. It is like we are gathering evidence from a crime scene.

Because there is very little hydrogen and mostly helium in the gas we detect from the carnage, we know that the slaughtered star had to have been the helium-rich core of a stripped star.”

This observation yields insights about the harsh environment around black holes and the types of stars swirling around them.

This is not the first time the unlucky star had a brush with the behemoth black hole. Gezari and her team think the star’s hydrogen-filled envelope surrounding the core was lifted off a long time ago by the same black hole. The star may have been near the end of its life. After consuming most of its hydrogen fuel, it had probably ballooned in size, becoming a red giant. The astronomers think the bloated star was looping around the black hole in a highly elliptical orbit, similar to a comet’s elongated orbit around the Sun. On one of its close approaches, the star was stripped of its puffed-up atmosphere by the black hole’s powerful gravity. The stellar remains continued its journey around the center, until it ventured even closer to the black hole to face its ultimate demise and was completely disrupted.

Astronomers have predicted that stripped stars circle the central black hole of our Milky Way galaxy, Gezari pointed out. These close encounters, however, are rare, occurring roughly every 100,000 years. To find this one event, Gezari’s team monitored hundreds of thousands of galaxies in ultraviolet light with the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), a space-based observatory, and in visible light with the Pan-STARRS1 telescope on Mount Haleakala, Hawaii.

Pan-STARRS, short for Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, scans the entire night sky for all kinds of transient phenomena, including supernovae. The team was looking for a bright flare in ultraviolet light from the nucleus of a galaxy with a previously dormant black hole.

They found one in June 2010, which was spotted with both telescopes. Both telescopes continued to monitor the flare as it reached peak brightness a month later, and then slowly began to fade over the next 12 months. The brightening event was similar to that of a supernova, but the rise to the peak was much slower, taking nearly one and a half months.

“The longer the event lasted, the more excited we got, since we realized that this is either a very unusual supernova or an entirely different type of event, such as a star being ripped apart by a black hole,” said team member Armin Rest of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.

By measuring the increase in brightness, the astronomers calculated the black hole’s mass at roughly 3 million suns, which equals the weight of our Milky Way’s black hole.

Spectroscopic observations with the MMT Observatory on Mount Hopkins in Arizona showed that the black hole was swallowing lots of helium. Spectroscopy divides light into its rainbow colors, which yields an object’s characteristics, such as its temperature and gaseous makeup.

“The glowing helium was a tracer for an extraordinarily hot accretion event,” Gezari said. “So that set off an alarm for us. And, the fact that no hydrogen was found set off a big alarm that this was not typical gas. You can’t find gas like that lying around near the center of a galaxy. It’s processed gas that has to have come from a stellar core. There’s nothing about this event that could be easily explained by any other phenomenon.”

The observed speed of the gas also linked the material to a black hole’s gravitational pull. MMT measurements revealed that the gas was moving at more than 20 million miles an hour (over 32 million kilometers an hour). However, measurements of the speed of gas in the interstellar medium reveal velocities of only about 224,000 miles an hour (360,000 kilometers an hour).

“The place we also see these kinds of velocities are in supernova explosions,” Rest said. “But the fact that it is still shining in ultraviolet light is incompatible with any supernova we know.”

To completely rule out the possibility of an active nucleus flaring up in the galaxy, the team used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the hot gas. Chandra showed that the characteristics of the gas didn’t match those from an active galactic nucleus.

“This is the first time where we have so many pieces of evidence, and now we can put them all together to weigh the perpetrator (the black hole) and determine the identity of the unlucky star that fell victim to it,” Gezari said. “These observations also give us clues on what evidence to look for in the future to find this type of event.”

More about Gezari:

http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~suvi/gezari_suvi.html

The Space Telescope Science Institute:

http://www.stsci.edu/portal/

For images, video and more information about this study, visit:

http://hubblesite.org/news/2012/18

For graphics and information about the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/galex

and

http://www.galex.caltech.edu

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

]]> http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/05/02/team-led-by-jhu-astrophysicist-catches-black-hole-red-handed-in-stellar-homicide/feed/ 0 http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/03/30/johns-hopkins-first-in-rd-expenditures-for-32nd-year/ http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/03/30/johns-hopkins-first-in-rd-expenditures-for-32nd-year/#comments Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:55:36 +0000 Tracey Reeves http://releases.jhu.edu/?p=6270 March 30, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT:  Lisa De Nike
443-287-9960
Lde@jhu.edu

The Johns Hopkins University performed $2 billion in medical, science and engineering research in fiscal 2010, making it the leading U.S. academic institution in total research and development spending for the 32nd year in a row, according to a new National Science Foundation ranking.

The university also once again ranked first on the NSF’s separate list of federally funded research and development, spending $1.73 billion in FY2010 on research supported by NSF, NASA, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.

In FY2002, Johns Hopkins became the first university to reach the $1 billion mark on either list, recording $1.14 billion in total research and $1.023 billion in federally sponsored research that year.

The University of Michigan ranked second in R&D spending in FY2010 at $1.18 billion, as well as third in federally financed R&D at $747 million.

At Johns Hopkins, research and development money is underwriting the cost of investigations into everything from the microscopic world of stem cells and strategies to reduce deaths from malaria worldwide to how a mysterious force called “dark energy” is fueling the expanding universe’s acceleration.

Johns Hopkins research is also supported by funding from private sources and from return on investment from past discoveries. In fiscal 2010, Johns Hopkins earned $13.1 million from more than 600 licenses and their associated patents.

“Johns Hopkins is proud of the work our investigators do every day. Through their research Johns Hopkins is leading the way in uncovering the new knowledge and breakthroughs that transform our lives,” said Lloyd B. Minor, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Johns Hopkins.

Johns Hopkins has led the NSF’s research expenditure ranking each year since 1979, when the agency’s methodology changed to include spending by the university’s Applied Physics Laboratory in the totals. Behind the University of Michigan on the FY2010 total research expenditure list is the University of Wisconsin, Madison, at $1.029 billion, followed by the University of Washington at $1.023 billion. Completing the top five, with $987 million, is Duke University.

The total funding ranking includes research support from not only federal agencies, but also from foundations, corporations and other sources.

The NSF info brief is available online here:

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf12313/

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

]]> http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/03/30/johns-hopkins-first-in-rd-expenditures-for-32nd-year/feed/ 0 http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/03/05/johns-hopkins-mathematicians-honored-with-simons-fellowships/ http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/03/05/johns-hopkins-mathematicians-honored-with-simons-fellowships/#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:05:46 +0000 Tracey Reeves http://releases.jhu.edu/?p=6068 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
OFFICE OF COMMUNICATIONS
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March 5, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT:  Lisa De Nike
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Lde@jhu.edu

Two Johns Hopkins University mathematicians each have been awarded the very competitive Simons Fellowship in Mathematics, which provides scholars with the opportunity to spend a semester away from classroom and administrative duties in order to pursue their research interests.

Christopher Sogge and Joel Spruck, both professors in the Department of Mathematics in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, are among just 50 mathematicians in North America to receive this highly competitive, honorific fellowship.

“I’m thrilled that I’ll have free time and resources,” said Sogge, who will use this occasion to

Christopher Sogge

strengthen academic partnerships with his academic peers in the People’s Republic of China. “I welcome the opportunity to further develop these ties and to collaborate with them. I’ll also use the fellowship to help me finish writing a book on ‘Eigenfunctions of the Laplacian.’ This field of geometric analysis and harmonic analysis has been a main focus of mine throughout my career.”

Spruck will travel to Barcelona and Montreal, where he too will collaborate with his field’s leading experts.

“We will work on problems of common interest involving the interplay of elliptic partial differential equations and Riemannian geometry,” Spruck said. “My last sabbatical of this nature was in 1999 and was a delightful and invigorating experience. I look forward to the opportunities that the Simons Fellowship will bring.”

Joel Spruck

Simons Fellows are chosen based on research accomplishment in the five years prior to application and the potential scientific impact of the fellowship. The New York City-based Simons Foundation is a private foundation whose mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences. It funds a variety of grants, fellowships, and projects.

During their sabbaticals, half of each professor’s salary will be paid by Johns Hopkins and half by the Simons Foundation. The foundation also pays up to an additional $10,000 for expenses related to the fellowship.

“These fellowships are very prestigious on their own, and it is doubly remarkable for one department to have two of them in the same year,” said William Minicozzi, chair of the department of mathematics at Johns Hopkins.

Sogge and Spruck both have previously been awarded the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships; Sogge in 2005 and Spruck in 1999.

Johns Hopkins University Department of Mathematics:

http://www.mathematics.jhu.edu/new/

Christopher Sogge:

http://mathnt.mat.jhu.edu/sogge/Christopher_D._Sogge.html

Joel Spruck:

http://www.math.jhu.edu/~js/index.html

For more information about the Simons Foundation, go here:

https://simonsfoundation.org/funding-guidelines/current-funding-opportunities/collaboration-grants-for-mathematicians

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

]]> http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/03/05/johns-hopkins-mathematicians-honored-with-simons-fellowships/feed/ 0 http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/02/28/johns-hopkins-university-offers-new-minor-in-space-science-and-engineering/ http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/02/28/johns-hopkins-university-offers-new-minor-in-space-science-and-engineering/#comments Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:39:44 +0000 Tracey Reeves http://releases.jhu.edu/?p=6044 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
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21231

February 28, 2012
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Students dreaming of careers searching for life on other planets or monitoring global climate change remotely from satellites will be interested in a new interdisciplinary minor being offered at The Johns Hopkins University.

Accessed through the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Whiting School of Engineering, the new space science and engineering minor is designed to prepare students to enter careers in the aerospace industry or professional laboratories, or to enter graduate programs.

“What we’re offering here is a carefully planned, customized series of courses that allow students to shape a program to fit their own needs and interests and gives them experience working in the kind of multidisciplinary teams that are typical in space science and engineering fields,” said Charles L. Bennett, Alumni Centennial Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Johns Hopkins Gilman Scholar, one of the program’s two co-directors.

Recently approved by the Homewood Academic Council, the new minor also requires students to work in a space-related internship of some kind (say, at the university’s Applied Physics Laboratory or the nearby Space Telescope Science Institute), which helps them get real-world experience and to develop valuable contacts in the field, according to Joseph Katz, William F. Ward Sr. Distinguished Professor in the Whiting School of Engineering, the other co-director.

“Students here at Johns Hopkins have always been interested in space and aerospace and have been doing these kinds of things for quite some time, and this minor course of study is a way to formalize and recognize that and help more students take advantage of it,” Katz said.

Open to all students in the Whiting School of Engineering and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, the

Jessica Noviello is Student No. 1 in a space science and engineering minor co-directed by Joseph Katz, left, and Charles L. Bennett. In the case is a model of NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe spacecraft, a mission for which Bennett serves as principal investigator. Photo by Will Kirk/homewoodphoto.jhu.edu

minor requires each student to submit to an adviser a proposal and a course plan that includes five classes of their choice in engineering, physics and astronomy along with an internship, all under the umbrella of an intellectual “theme” that makes sense for their interests and objective. Courses that are requirements for the student’s major may not count toward this new minor.

According to Bennett, this “intellectual theme” can comprise any number of interests, from the design of space missions for remote observations of the Earth and planets to the search for life on other planets. (In fact, the minor’s student handbook, available online at physics-astronomy.jhu.edu/acad/ugrad/minor_ss_eng, includes a long list of suggested programs.)

“The idea is for the students to come to us with their custom-designed program. Then we can sit down and together ensure that their program will get them where they want to go,” Bennett said.

The minor’s keystone course, which every student must take, is Introduction to Space Science and Technology. Taught last fall by H. Warren Moos and Stephen Murray, both research professors in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy, this is the course that convinced sophomore Jessica Noviello, the first undergraduate approved for the minor, that the new space science and engineering minor was designed for her—or, rather, that she wanted to design the minor to suit her own needs.

“Being part of that class made me decide I wanted to learn more. I just became so curious and had too many questions I needed to answer, and the minor will help me do that. I often joke that I’m like a 5-year-old at heart: Dinosaurs and space are my two passions, and now I am living the dream,” said the 19-year-old Noviello, a double major in physics and astronomy and Earth and planetary sciences.

Moos, who led the faculty committee that designed the minor, said, “The goal we sought was to encourage students to utilize the rich educational resources of the university in an interdisciplinary program that would help prepare them for careers in space science and technology. It is exciting to see the first students take advantage of this new minor.”

Katz said he is not surprised that there is “considerable interest” in the minor.

“This is just the beginning, and yes, it will take time for students to hear about the new course of study,” he said, “but space exploration is a very exciting career, and the students know it. This is a great opportunity for our students. Johns Hopkins has always had a very strong presence in medicine, but there also has always been enormous activity in space, and we are now formalizing it and making our presence in it known. That’s a good thing.”

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Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/ Information on automatic E-mail delivery of science and medical news releases is available at the same address.

]]> http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/02/28/johns-hopkins-university-offers-new-minor-in-space-science-and-engineering/feed/ 0 http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/02/21/sheridan-libraries-announce-completion-of-afro-american-newspaper-digital-archive-project/ http://releases.jhu.edu/2012/02/21/sheridan-libraries-announce-completion-of-afro-american-newspaper-digital-archive-project/#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:41:40 +0000 Tracey Reeves http://releases.jhu.edu/?p=5961 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
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February 21, 2011
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MEDIA CONTACT: Brian Shields
410-516-8337
bshields@jhu.edu

The Sheridan Libraries’ Center for Educational Resources (CER) announced today the launch of an online database (http://morgue.afro.com/AfroArchon/) describing the archival materials held by the Afro American Newspaper. The three-year project, administered jointly by CER and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences’ Center for Africana Studies, was funded with a $476,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“The Afro holds an amazing collection of historical documents and images related to 20th century African American history,” said Moira Hinderer, who served as the project manager and is a lecturer in the university’s Center for Africana Studies. “The partnership between the Afro and Johns Hopkins makes these materials more accessible to scholars, students, and the public. With historic photographs of everything from Tuskegee Airmen to civil rights protests to local weddings and graduations, the database has something for everyone interested in history.”

Founded in 1892, the Afro has been a source for local, national, and international news for 120 years. During that time, the Afro preserved a large amount of historical materials, including more than one million photographs of African American life in Baltimore and beyond.

“This newly digitized access provides a wonderful window to an amazing resource base that will significantly enrich our knowledge and understanding—not only of our local Baltimore history but also the history of our nation and the wider world,” said Franklin W. Knight, Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History and Director of the Center for Africana Studies.

Mellon Foundation funding supported the work of organizing and describing the archives of the Afro. Over the course of this project, researchers and interns—including students from Johns Hopkins University, Morgan State University, and the University of Maryland—uncovered more than 2,000 boxes of materials filled with photographs, newspaper clippings, and correspondence. The newspaper’s morgue contains more than 150,000 subject files with clippings, images, and correspondence dating back to the 1920s.

“This project provides a wonderful model for collaboration among organizations that each, in its own way, is committed to preserving and making accessible a record of the past. It has been a special honor for us at Johns Hopkins to help make better known the remarkable history and achievements of our neighbor, the Afro Newspaper. We are all very much looking forward to the next phase of this endeavor,” said Winston Tabb, Sheridan Dean of University Libraries and Museums.

With the completion of this project, the Afro and Johns Hopkins are now beginning a new project designed to create online exhibits of the most interesting materials from the archives. As with the earlier effort, this initiative will involve collaboration among staff from the Afro’s archives, Sheridan Libraries, and student interns from Johns Hopkins and other area colleges.

A celebration to mark the launch of the online database will be held on Wednesday, Feb. 22 at 5:00 pm in the Gilman Hall atrium on Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood campus.

The Sheridan Libraries encompass the Brody Learning Commons, the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, the Albert D. Hutzler Reading Room in Gilman Hall, the John Work Garrett Library at Evergreen Museum & Library, the George Peabody Library at Mt. Vernon Place, and the DC Regional Libraries. Together these collections provide the major research library resources for Johns Hopkins University. The mission of the Sheridan Libraries is to advance research and teaching by providing information resources, instruction, and services. The libraries were rededicated in 1998 to reflect the extraordinary generosity of Mr. and Mrs. R. Champlin Sheridan.

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