A DVD-ROM co-authored by Helen Burgess, an assistant professor of English, has received a favorable review in the international science research journal Nature (March 5, 2009 edition).

The DVD-ROM, Biofutures: Owning Body Parts and Information, examines the issue of owning human tissue and genetic material for research and potential profit. Biofutures uses video, text, interviews, film clips and Web links to explore ownership of human body parts. The discussion centers on themes of law, biology and culture.

The review applauded the approach of exploring the subject through multimedia information sources.

"The authors use their broad backgrounds in science policy, history and English literature to locate the questions of body ownership within the wider fields of social science and bioethics,” the review said.

Burgess worked with co-authors Robert Mitchell, a faculty member in the Duke University English department, and Phillip Thurtle, a faculty member in the University of Washington history department.

"Helen Burgess' recognition in Nature shows the wide-ranging scholarship that takes place in the UMBC Department of English today and our interest in new media," said Jessica Berman, associate professor and department chair.

"This recognition also shows the value of an interdisciplinary approach to such thorny issues as the ownership of body parts and the information derived from genetic material," Berman said.

Burgess is active in the new media research community as editor of the online journal Hyperrhiz: new Media Cultures.

Biofutures is a production of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Chris Swan, assistant professor of geography and environmental systems, was featured in a March 3 entry in the Baltimore Sun's "Bay & Environment" blog.

Swan is one of just a few researchers in the nation studying the environmental impact of salt used to clear roads after winter storms. Sun reporter Tim Wheeler quoted Swan and government officials on the balance between possible harm to Maryland waterways' frogs, zooplankton and insects versus safety for the state's drivers.

Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor of sociology, was quoted in a Feb. 24 Baltimore Sun story on recent controversies about the popular social networking site Facebook's privacy policies.

"It used to be that 'private' was intimate and invisible. But what we have here, on Facebook in particular, is intimate and visible," Tufekci says. "It's a public/private mixture that we've never had, and it's turned all sorts of things upside down."

A noted expert on the neuroscience of laughter has turned his focus to tears. Or more precisely, how digitally removing tears from photos of crying people makes it tough to tell just what emotion is being expressed.

For research recently published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, Robert R. Provine, a professor of psychology at UMBC, gathered hundreds of slides of crying and non-crying people from photo sharing sites like Flickr. With some simple Photoshopping, tears were removed from the shots of crying people. The tear-free images and their teary counterparts were shuffled in with a long sequence of portraits of people with neutral expression and shown to undergraduate volunteers.

When asked to rate the emotions being expressed by the now-tearless faces, the results were startling: faces without tears not only don’t appear very sad, but are seen as displaying awe, concern, contemplation or puzzlement.

“Remarkably, the role of emotional tears as a visual signal has been neglected,” Provine said. “On one level, this confirms that tears signal sadness, but the surprise is that tears confer meaning to neutral faces. In other words, tears are a breakthrough in human emotional signaling.” Only humans produce emotional tears.

"Tears add meaning and nuance to the limited expressive range of the neuromuscular instrument of the human face. Like sobbing and laughing, tears are honest signals, and are hard to fake,” said Provine. “We need to replicate research on human facial expression using tears as a variable. They change everything”

Lacking Photoshop, you can approximate the effect of tear removal by using your finger to block out the tears in any photograph.

Provine’s research focuses on the neuroscience of everyday life, what he calls “sidewalk neuroscience.” He believes that common behaviors can provide startling insights into human nature and how the brain works.

Provine’s latest work on tears, yawning, laughter and many other fascinating but neglected human behaviors will be presented in a book to be published by Harvard University Press.

It’s no surprise to UMBC Professor of American Studies Warren Belasco that food is entering mainstream curricula at American colleges and universities.

A number of academic institutions are using Belasco’s latest book, Food: The Key Concepts (Berg Publishers), as a required text in undergraduate courses examining how food can be viewed in the contexts of history, culture and the environment.

“This book is really an introductory overview of how one would teach food,” Belasco said. “The book is dedicated to students at UMBC because they really shaped it. Students don’t hesitate to tell me what they think.”

Samantha McGarity ’09 recently completed Belasco’s foundation American Studies course on American food.

“We looked at every part of food and consumption: Why do we eat what we eat? How do we eat what we eat? How was the food produced?” McGarity said. “I realized just how much I don't know about the food industry. It forever changed the way I look at what's on my plate.”

In an early chapter, Belasco cites the ordinary act of toasting a slice of white bread to illustrate the comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to food. He suggests that toasted white bread can trigger study of why some cultures value processed white grains more than whole grains, where toast fits in one’s morning ritual and who invented the sandwich.

Belasco spoke recently with the Washington Post about the implementation of food courses at Yale, several University of California campuses and the University of New Hampshire. The report called him “a pioneer” in the discipline.

With more than 25 years of experience as a food scholar, Belasco has served for the past five years as editor of Food, Culture & Society, an international multidisciplinary research journal.

He returns to the UMBC classroom after a 2008-09 sabbatical. He will continue to engage students in food topics that most never envisioned, such as his vision of a “sustainable hamburger” that governments, the food industry and agricultural scientists could develop as a departure from grain-fed, high-fat burgers.

“The basic pattern of a semester is to start with an appreciation of how food creates community and identity. I call this the ‘Oh, wow’ stage,” Belasco said. “From there, we move quickly to the ‘Oh, no’ stage: the problems with meat production, animal rights, environment and the obesity epidemic.”

As students become aware of these challenges, lively conversations emerge.

“The course is never the same two years in a row,” Belasco said.

When UMBC history professor Sandra Herbert first saw the Charles Darwin Archives at Christ’s College, Cambridge as a graduate student, “It was like finding out Shakespeare had left unpublished plays behind,” she said.

To celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth on February 12, Herbert, one of the world’s leading authorities on Darwin, gave a lecture at the Library of Congress on February 18. She discussed her book “Charles Darwin, Geologist,” which explores how geology changed Darwin and how Darwin changed science.

As a distinguished visiting scholar for 2006-07 at Christ’s College in Cambridge, Herbert assisted the university with its plans to celebrate Darwin’s bicentennial and the 150th anniversary of his seminal work “On the Origin of Species.”

Like most students, Herbert, an expert on the history of science, first studied Darwin in high school. “Back then his work was buried in our textbooks,” she said. “I became interested in how evolution affects all things, especially human nature.”

While writing a graduate school paper, she came across one of Darwin’s notebooks. Her curiosity grew, leading to a Ph.D. dissertation and finally a trip to Cambridge to see other Darwin manuscripts.

Along the way she was surprised to find that the naturalist often most associated with biology was actually more of a geologist as a young man. This discovery led to Herbert’s recent book “Charles Darwin, Geologist,” which won the Geological Society of America’s Mary C. Rabbitt Award, the American Historical Association's George L. Mosse Prize and the History of Science Society’s Levinson Prize for Historical Work in the Life Sciences as well as the Albion Book Prize given by the North American Conference on British Studies.

“Sandra is simply one of the world’s leading authorities on Darwin and one of UMBC’s preeminent scholars,” said John Jeffries, Dean of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at UMBC.

When asked her thoughts on Darwin’s lasting legacy and the ongoing challenges to his theories across the globe, Herbert referred to one of her favorite Darwin writings from his 1838 “Notebook B.” In it, Darwin refers to animals as “our fellow brethren” and muses that “we may be all netted together.”

“Darwin is seen as a hero and a villain,” she said. “The reason we react so strongly is because of the profound implications of his work on our understanding of human nature. I agree with his sentiment that we are all netted together. We are closer to animals than we sometimes think.”

Herbert recently retired as director of the program “the Human Context of Science and Technology” and professor of history at UMBC. She is also editor of the “Red Notebook of Charles Darwin” (1979) and “Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836-1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries” (1987).

“Raaarrggh!”

If the bouncing Q-tip had heels, the humongous-eared monster would be hot on them.

“He just hates his job, man,” said Micah Betts ’07, who did the 3-D animation for “Q-Tip Nightmare,” a game where a disgruntled Q-tip tries to flee his waxy fate.

Laughter broke out among a group of bleary-eyed but proud UMBC students, alumni and video game enthusiasts, who had just brainstormed and built several short video games as part of the Global Game Jam, a worldwide, weekend-long sprint of creativity held Friday, January 30 through Sunday, February 1.

The jam was also a labor of love by the two faculty members behind UMBC’s Games, Animation and Interactive Media (GAIM) Program – Neal McDonald from visual arts and Marc Olano of computer science, who guided five teams made up of 15 UMBC students and eight guest participants throughout the process.

“It was 48 hours of frantic activity,” said Olano. “It was exciting to be part of something that involved 53 sites in over 20 countries, with more than 1600 participants creating over 300 games.”

The idea of the jam is to get students interested in gaming careers to learn by doing – serious programming and animation/digital art skills are required even to build a simple game – and have fun doing it.

The GAIM Program brings together teams of students with arts and computer science backgrounds to team up and compete on game designs by the end of their senior year. The end result is a skill set that can lead to a gaming career or have applications in aerospace, architecture, healthcare and many other fields.

“It’s good energy, lots of laughing, but more importantly, learning to do things just like they’re done in the industry,” said McDonald, who teaches several courses on the visual arts side of the program, including Art 380, which covers the history and theory of games from ancient Egypt to modern video games.

The games were required to be less than five minutes long, and somehow express the statement, "as long as we have each other, we will always have problems", as well as one of the adjectives "illusionary", "pointed,” or "persistent.”

“Feather Tether,” a game where two birds tied together try to eat the most bugs and reach outer space, claimed the bulk of the peer-voted awards from the UMBC site, winning best art, best technical contribution, best gameplay, and best expression of the constraints.

To learn more about and play the games produced at UMBC’s Global Game Jam site and across the world, visit http://globalgamejam.org/category/baltimore-md-usa.

Read Catonsville Times coverage of the Global Game Jam here.

Watch video from the Global Game Jam at UMBC below. (Turn speaker volume up for best sound quality)

Photo Caption: Hillol Kargupta’s ideas to help airlines reduce their carbon footprint were honored with an IBM Innovation Award.

Hillol Kargupta logs thousands of frequent flier miles each year to do research, conduct business for a successful, global firm and to visit his family. But it was his quest to make those flights friendlier to the environment that recently won him a highly competitive IBM Innovation Award and a $20,000 grant.

Kargupta, an associate professor of computer science, is an expert on deep data mining in mobile environments. He is also the founder and president of Agnik, a company that pioneered the use of sensor technology to improve efficiency in ground transportation.

Now he’s looking to take his research and business skyward. And when the European Union includes aviation pollution in its ambitious cap-and-trade emissions market system next year, Kargupta hopes his sensors will analyze the data that makes Europe’s skies greener.

“Every second of flight burns about a gallon of fuel.” says Kargupta. Airplanes already have sensors that monitor and adjust fuel/air ratios to yield the best fuel economy, he observes, but analyzing that data for emissions purposes “is a chance to meet a real market need.”

The available information is staggering. New York’s JFK Airport, says Kargupta, produces a continuous stream of about 100 megabytes of data per minute. “Multiply that times all the world’s airports,” he continues, “and it equals a huge amount of data changing rapidly over a large area.”

Kargupta is enthusiastic about the daunting task, however: “It’s just the type of challenge we like at UMBC.”

A former Meyerhoff Scholar's research could help women with breast cancer.

By Lila Guterman
This article courtesty of UMBC Magazine

Talk to Paula Whittington '01, biological sciences, and you might not guess she's a researcher who's getting potentially life-saving results. Modest and soft-spoken, the former Meyerhoff Scholar recently published the findings from experiments that could help thousands of women with breast cancer.

In her research, Whittington has shown that a form of vaccination using DNA can treat breast cancers that are resistant to other drugs. Her research was done on mice, but if the vaccine works similarly in people, it could give hope to women whose cancers either did not shrink when treated, or whose cancers have come back despite initial treatment success.

Whittington did that research at Wayne State University, where she is a student in the M.D./Ph.D. program. She published it along with her co-workers and her advisor, Wei-Zen Wei, in September in the journal Cancer Research. Whittington defended her dissertation in late 2007 and is now finishing her medical degree – which she hopes to complete in 2010.

The joy in discovery is not just in the brainstorming, says Whittington, but in the process of testing and winnowing that accompanies it.

“I like the creative aspect of research, the idea of coming up with something and then testing it to prove it right or wrong. Then it's really cool that you might actually see a benefit in patients,” she says. “Even just the hope of it is really cool.”

Whittington already has impressed other scientists with her persistence and intelligence. “She's a very hard worker,” says Suzanne Ostrand-Rosenberg, a professor of biological science at UMBC. “She just keeps trying and going for things. She's smart and things work out for her.”

Whittington did research as an undergraduate in the laboratory of Angela Brodie, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Maryland Greenebaum Cancer Center. Brodie says that Whittington “had a spark about her” and impressed her by keeping in touch even after finishing her laboratory work.

“Paula has a lively, thinking mind,” agrees her dissertation adviser, Wei. “She has a lot of interesting ideas.”

It was during her work in Wei's laboratory that Whittington decided to take a cancer vaccine that her adviser has been working on since 1996 and see whether it works for tumors that are resistant to other treatments.

The vaccine is simply DNA injected into a muscle. The cells of the organism – mouse or human – then go to work making the protein encoded by the DNA, thereby alerting the immune system to the protein. Since it is the same protein that is overproduced by cancer cells, the organism’s immune system then attacks any cells that have that protein.

About a quarter of breast cancers produce too much of a protein called Her2, which instructs the cancer cells to grow. Tumors that produce Her2 grow and spread more quickly than do other breast cancers, and patients with so-called Her2-positive tumors tend to die sooner.

Their best treatment option is a drug called Herceptin, which shuts down the Her2 protein. But Herceptin works for only a small fraction of Her2-positive tumors – and even those tumors that do shrink sometimes come back after the cancer cells become resistant to the treatment.

So Whittington, Wei, and their co-workers were delighted to discover that a DNA vaccine saved mice that had breast-cancer cells injected into their sides, regardless of whether the cells were resistant to other therapies.

Wei's vaccine has already undergone one small clinical trial, performed by researchers in Sweden, to test its safety. It had no adverse effects, Wei says. “They are planning another trial as we speak.”

But Whittington has moved on – for now – to patient care in medical school. As she learns about internal medicine, surgery, and other specialties, she now ponders her future options.

“There are an infinite number of paths you can take,” she says. “Strictly clinical? Strictly research? Both? Which field?”

Regardless, she's not likely to lose touch with faculty members that have discussed her research with her, mentored her, or taught her. Good at making scientific allies,

Whittington keeps them abreast of her work, even from afar.

“I want them to know how I'm doing and that I'm working really hard,” she says. “As appreciation for them taking the time to invest in me.”