UChicago News

Angela Olinto named dean of Physical Sciences Division

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 12:00 -0500

Angela V. Olinto, the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, has been appointed dean of the Division of the Physical Sciences at the University of Chicago.

Olinto is a leading scholar in astroparticle physics and cosmology, focusing on understanding the origin of high-energy cosmic rays, gamma rays and neutrinos. Her appointment as dean is effective July 1.

“Angela brings depth of University experience and scholarly expertise to this leadership role, making her an excellent choice as dean,” wrote President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Daniel Diermeier in announcing her appointment.

Olinto’s research includes important contributions to the physics of quark stars, inflationary theory and cosmic magnetic fields. She currently leads NASA sub-orbital and space missions to discover the origins of high-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos. This includes a NASA-funded balloon mission planned for 2022 that will use an ultra-sensitive telescope to detect cosmic rays and neutrinos coming from deep space.

“I am thrilled and humbled to be appointed to lead this historic and dynamic division, home to visionary scholars who constantly redefine the boundaries of the physical and mathematical sciences. I look forward to collaborating with faculty, students and staff to advance the important work of the division,” Olinto said.

Olinto joined the UChicago faculty in 1996 and served as chair of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics from 2003 to 2006 and from 2012 to 2017. She is the leader of the POEMMA and EUSO space missions and a member of the Pierre Auger Observatory, which are international projects designed to discover the origin of high-energy cosmic rays. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society, was a trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics, and serves on advisory committees for the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and NASA.

Olinto’s awards and honors include the Chaire d'Excellence Award of the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche in 2006, the University’s Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2011, and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring in 2015. Olinto received her undergraduate degree from Pontificia Universidade Catolica in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and her doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Olinto succeeds Edward “Rocky” Kolb, the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics, whose work over the last five years enhanced the division’s historic strengths as a leading center of scientific discovery. Kolb will return to his full-time work on the faculty next month.

The selection of the new dean by Zimmer and Diermeier was informed by the recommendations of an elected faculty committee chaired by Stuart A. Kurtz, professor in the Department of Computer Science.

Changes in Earth’s orbit could explain rise and fall of ancient species

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 16:40 -0500

New research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looks back 450 million years to reveal an important link between changes in our planet’s motion through space, and the extinction and evolution of life on Earth.

A team of researchers, including paleontologist Michael Foote at the University of Chicago, examined the fossils of graptoloids, an extinct type of plankton that floated in ancient oceans. They found evidence that regular changes in the Earth’s orbit and axis of rotation caused significant changes in both the evolution and extinction rates of these creatures.

“This research is very exciting because the relationship between these orbital changes and extinction has never been shown before in truly ancient ecosystems,” said Prof. James Crampton of Victoria University of Wellington, who led the study. “There’s a strong debate in science about the impact on extinction and evolution of environmental change versus interactions between species (such as competition for food). With this study we can provide evidence of the impact of environmental changes on life on Earth.”

As it travels around the sun, Earth’s orbit fluctuates slightly in cycles of tens of thousands to millions of years. These cycles change the axis and tilt toward the sun, which changes the sunlight and climate on Earth. It seems likely this affected evolution on Earth, but the details remain unclear—especially further back than a few hundred thousand years.

But the fossil plankton data was so rich that they could see clear evidence of cycles. Between 9 percent and 16 percent of the variance in plankton species extinctions could be explained by such astronomical cycles, over a span of 60 million years, the study found.

“This kind of cyclicity has been difficult to document in such ancient records—that is, going back hundreds of millions of years rather than hundreds of thousands,” said Foote, a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago and a co-author on the paper.

The analysis was possible due to the extensive fossil graptoloid dataset developed by New Zealand’s GNS Science and the University of California-Riverside, researchers said. It covers the entire globe, and the average resolution in the record is about 40,000 years, rather than the multiple millions that Foote is used to dealing with. “As exciting as this result is, I’m equally excited for the potential for other studies that one could do with the fabulous level of detail in this dataset,” he said.

—Adapted from a release originally posted by Victoria University of Wellington.

Citation: “Pacing of Paleozoic macroevolutionary rates by Milankovitch grand cycles,” Crampton et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 15, 2018. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1714342115

Funding: National Science Foundation

Earth could have supported crust, life earlier than thought

Mon, 04 Jun 2018 16:30 -0500

The early Earth might have been habitable much earlier than thought, according to new research from a group led by University of Chicago scientists.

Counting strontium atoms in rocks from northern Canada, they found evidence that the Earth’s continental crust could have formed hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought. Continental crust is richer in essential minerals than younger volcanic rock, which would have made it significantly friendlier to supporting life.

“Our evidence, which squares with emerging evidence including rocks in western Australia, suggests that the early Earth was capable of forming continental crust within 350 million years of the formation of the solar system,” said Patrick Boehnke, the T.C. Chamberlin Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geophysical Sciences and the first author on the paper. “This alters the classic view, that the crust was hot, dry and hellish for more than half a billion years after it formed.”

One of the open questions in geology is how and when some of the crust—originally all younger volcanic rock—changed into the continental crust we know and love, which is lighter and richer in silica. This task is made harder because the evidence keeps getting melted and reformed over millions of years. One of the few places on Earth where you can find bits of crust from the very earliest epochs of Earth is in tiny flecks of apatite imbedded in younger rocks.

Luckily for scientists, some of these “younger” minerals (still about 3.9 billion years old) are zircons—very hard, weather-resistant minerals somewhat similar to diamonds. “Zircons are a geologist’s favorite because these are the only record of the first three to four hundred million years of Earth. Diamonds aren’t forever—zircons are,” Boehnke said.

Plus, the zircons themselves can be dated. “They’re like labeled time capsules,” said Prof. Andrew Davis, chair of the Department of Geophysical Sciences and a coauthor on the study.

Scientists usually look at the different variants of elements, called isotopes, to tell a story about these rocks. They wanted to use strontium, which offers clues to how much silica was around at the time it formed. The only problem is that these flecks are absolutely tiny—about five microns across, the diameter of a strand of spider silk—and you have to count the strontium atoms one by one.

This was a task for a unique instrument that came online last year: the CHicago Instrument for Laser Ionization, or CHILI. This detector uses lasers that can be tuned to selectively pick out and ionize strontium. When they used CHILI to count strontium isotopes in rocks from Nuvvuagittuq, Canada, they found the isotope ratio suggested plenty of silica was present when it formed.

The CHicago Instrument for Laser Ionization (CHILI) was used to count strontium isotopes in rocks from Nuvvuagittuq, Canada. (Photo by Thomas Stephan)

This is important because the makeup of the crust directly affects the atmosphere, the composition of seawater and nutrients available to any budding life hoping to thrive on planet Earth. It also may imply there were fewer meteorites than thought pummeling the Earth at this time, which would have made it hard for continental crust to form.

“Having continental crust that early changes the picture of early Earth in a number of ways,” said Davis, who is also a professor with the Enrico Fermi Institute. “Now we need a way for the geologic processes that make the continents to happen much faster; you probably need water and magma that’s about 600 degrees Fahrenheit less hot.”

The study is also confluent with a recent paper by Davis and Boehnke’s colleague Nicolas Dauphas, which found evidence for rain falling on continents 2.5 billion years ago, earlier than previously thought.

UChicago Research Prof. Thomas Stephan and postdoctoral scholar Reto Trappitsch (now with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) were also authors on the study, as well as Argonne Distinguished Fellow Mike Pellin with Argonne National Laboratory, who is also a professor (part-time) in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences and the Enrico Fermi Institute.

Other institutions on the study were UCLA and the Berkeley Geochronology Center.

Citation: “Potassic, high-silica Hadean crust.” Boehnke et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 4, 2018. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1720880115

Funding: NASA

Comprehensive care physician model improves care, lowers hospitalization

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 14:40 -0500

Patients who need frequent hospitalization account for a disproportionate amount of health care spending in the United States. In 2012, the University of Chicago Medicine—funded by a Health Care Innovation Award from the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation—began enrolling patients in a clinical trial designed to test an imaginative way to reduce such hospital stays.

The study, featured in the May 20 New York Times Sunday Magazine, was designed to determine whether doctors who focus their practices on the care of patients in and out of the hospital, known as comprehensive care physicians, could improve care while reducing hospitalization for a highly vulnerable set of patients at high risk for being hospitalized.

The core element of the CCP model is that the same physician provides care for patients in the clinic as well as in the hospital. A few CCPs even make house calls. The CCPs also lead a team of nurse practitioners, social workers, care coordinators and other specialists selected for their ability to address the needs of high-risk patients. Each physician carries a panel of approximately 200 patients at a time, serving as their primary care physician during clinic visits and supervising their care whenever they are hospitalized.

From November 2012 to June 2016, 2,000 patients with chronic health problems enrolled in the study. Most came from the South Side of Chicago and most of them had at least one hospital stay in the previous year. All of these patients were covered by Medicare.

The model is built upon 15 years of research by study director David Meltzer, professor of medicine at the University of Chicago and chief of hospital medicine, and colleagues, on the changing medical work force in the United States. The model was designed to provide better care at lower cost. In this pilot study, it was able to improve the continuity of patient care, especially during and after a hospital stay, as well as strengthen the bond between doctor and patient.

Half of the patients in the study were assigned to “standard care.” They connected with a hospital-based primary care physician who saw patients as needed in the clinic, but did not directly take care of them if they were admitted to the hospital. The other half were assigned to one of five CCPs, who saw them during clinic visits and also cared for them in the hospital.

When the study was completed, it was evident that the CCP model was both preferred by patients and economically beneficial in terms of reducing health care utilization.

“Hospitalization rates for CCP patients were 15 to 22 percent lower than for standard care patients,” Meltzer said. CCP patients also reported “a better experience,” he added. They gave their physicians higher ratings on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, a patient satisfaction survey required for all hospitals by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The University’s standard care physicians scored quite well, in the 80th percentile nationally, but the CCP doctors were in the 95th percentile. They also were ranked higher by patients dealing with mental health issues.

“There's a huge literature suggesting that elements of the doctor-patient relationship, including trust, interpersonal relations, communication and knowledge of the patient, are all associated with lower costs and better outcomes,” Meltzer said.

The trial, still underway, enrolls patients who are predicted to spend an average of 10 days a year in the hospital. Many of these patients have chronic diseases. Others are geriatric patients living in residence homes or patients with renal disease requiring regular dialysis treatment.

This program “may improve patient experience and health status while substantially reducing utilization for patients at increased risk for hospitalization,” the study authors conclude. “The CCP model warrants further exploration through efforts to implement it in additional settings and rigorously evaluate its effects on outcomes and costs.”

“Our goal is to understand patients’ needs so that we can give them the most appropriate care,” Meltzer said. “That should be better for them, produce better outcomes and ultimately be less costly for the health care system.”

The next step is an expanded program, the Comprehensive Care, Community & Culture Program, designed to reduce the unmet social needs of economically and socially disadvantaged patients. About 400 people have already enrolled.

Additional authors of the study are John F. Cursio, Andrea Flores, Robert Gibbons, James Zhang, Tom Best, Greg Ruhnke and the Comprehensive Care Research Group.

Less is more when it comes to predicting molecules’ conductivity

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 11:31 -0500

The smaller and smarter that phones and devices become, the greater the need to build smaller circuits. Forward-thinking scientists in the 1970s suggested that circuits could be built using molecules instead of wires, and over the past decades that technology has become reality.

The trouble is, some molecules have particularly complex interactions that make it hard to predict which of them might be good at serving as miniature circuits. But a new paper by two University of Chicago chemists presents an innovative method that cuts computational costs and improves accuracy by calculating interactions between pairs of electrons and extrapolating those to the rest of the molecule.

“Current models tend to overpredict conductance, but our theory outperforms traditional models by as much as one to two orders of magnitude,” said Prof. David Mazziotti, who coauthored the paper, published May 31 in Nature’s Communications Chemistry.

Everything from better computer chips and batteries to greener ways to produce chemicals depends on discovering new kinds of chemistries and materials, and scientists increasingly look to computers to search for new combinations more efficiently. Instead of trying permutations one by one, they can run models that predict the best options.

But it’s a delicate art, because in many cases these calculations can consume computing time alarmingly fast. In molecules with a lot of interacting electrons, “you can very quickly end up with the computation size increasing exponentially with the size of the molecule,” Mazziotti said.

Mazziotti and graduate student Manas Sajjan set out to simplify, creating a method for predicting molecular conductivity that uses the interaction between two electrons to represent all of the interactions. “To take one example, for a particular molecule the traditional method might require computing with 10²⁴ variables, whereas ours has 10⁹ variables—a quadrillion fewer variables,” Sajjan said. That’s the difference between a problem for which you need a supercomputer versus one you can do on a laptop.

This choice allows an unusual but powerful approach. Existing theories for molecular conductivity assign a set number of voltage applied to the molecule to predict a number for the current that could then flow through it. Sajjan and Mazziotti flipped this paradigm on its head. They fixed the current first, and then computed the voltage. This turns out to be much more accurate: When they checked their method with a well-known molecule, they saw it outperformed traditional methods by one-to-two orders of magnitude.

“What’s important is it’s really rigorous. Even with the conduction there’s still a one-to-one mapping with the many-electron system,” Mazziotti said. The process of making sure that the two-electron system still represents the many-electron system is a very challenging problem that’s been around for 50 years, but he said it’s worth the struggle.

“Almost all of the big problems that people are trying to solve involve working with materials that are difficult to explore with traditional methods,” he said. “If we can better predict the conductivity, we can more effectively design better molecules and materials.”

Citation: “Current-constrained density-matrix theory to calculate molecular conductivity with increased accuracy.” Manas Sajjan & David Mazziotti, Nature’s Communications Chemistry, May 31, 2018. DOI: 10.1038/s42004-018-0030-2

Funding: U.S. Army Research Office, National Science Foundation, U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Six entrepreneurs selected to develop innovative technologies at Argonne

Wed, 30 May 2018 16:36 -0500

Earlier this month, six scientists from across the country began a two-year program at Argonne National Laboratory dedicated to build their energy and science technologies into products. They are the second annual cohort for the Chain Reaction Innovations program, which provides an institutional home for the postdoctoral researchers to develop their innovative technologies.

Eighty-three innovators from 26 states applied to earn a spot at Argonne, a Department of Energy national laboratory managed by UChicago. The program provides the innovators an opportunity different from traditional entrepreneurial programs through access to the lab’s scientific expertise, world-class facilities and multi-institutional support.

Such support includes working with the Purdue Foundry at the University of Purdue and the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, which help innovators to understand how to bridge the gap between benchtop ideas and the marketplace. The Polsky Center offers participants guidance on how to develop business strategies and attract investors and commercial partners.

“Argonne National Laboratory, as one of the nation’s leading energy science laboratories, and the University of Chicago, which operates Argonne on behalf of the Department of Energy and is home to the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, are particularly well-positioned to spur energy technology innovation,” said Eric Isaacs, executive vice president for research, innovation and the national laboratories at the University of Chicago. “The new cohort in Chain Reaction Innovations can draw from the expertise of these two institutions, and the city of Chicago’s entrepreneurial ecosystem for startups with a growing investor network and several of the nation’s top engineering schools.”

This cohort’s technologies focus on enhancing energy efficiency or sustainability and overcoming complex scientific challenges to improve quality of life.

Meet a few of our CRI entrepreneurs below or view them all on the CRI website.

Erika Boeing

Erika Boeing is passionate about helping the world become powered by renewable energy. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Accelerate Wind, a company that is working to revolutionize distributed wind energy by drastically lower the cost of small wind turbine technology.

While many buildings use solar panels as an alternative source of energy, few use wind turbines because they are far too expensive. Her company is looking to change this.

“Accelerate Wind uses a systems approach to overall wind turbine design,” she said. “This includes using a flywheel to reduce the required size of the generator and inverter, which reduces their cost. We also have design features which capture and translate high velocity wind currents into energy in a manner that makes the whole system more cost-effective.”

While in the Netherlands on a Fulbright Scholarship, she studied the interactions between how technology affects society and how society determines which technologies are adopted. “This bigger-picture understanding helps me to work on problems while taking into account a wide number of relevant perspectives, which is important for creating a successful business,” she said.

Chad Husko

Chicago native Chad Husko is working on creating a new class of lasers that can be miniaturized and put into photonic integrated circuits to improve performance and reliability.

“As an analogy, our mastery of shrinking electronics allowed us to take those giant 1970s supercomputers and put that into the form factor of a smart phone using integrated electronic circuits,” he said. “Right now, we’re going through a similar revolution of ‘photonics,’ or light-based technologies, and learning how combine the forces of light and electricity.”

Such integrated photonics are already being used in the cloud and in self-driving cars, but “this is just the beginning,” he said. “Plenty of unexpected applications await.”

His team is using Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials to develop the laser devices and its Materials Engineering Research Facility to scale the raw materials required to build the lasers from lab scale to industrial scale.

Veronika Stelmakh

For the next two years, Veronika Stelmakh will work with researchers and engineers at Argonne to further development of a power generator that could help save lives and enable exploration in remote areas.

Stelmakh is co-founder and CEO of Mesodyne, Inc. a company that is developing a thermophotovoltaic portable power generator that would weigh about 75 percent less than the batteries that would normally be required to provide the same amount of energy. This portable power generator would enable new capabilities in technological and human mobility and could be used by dismounted soldiers on the field, mountaineers scaling miles-high summits, emergency responders or even remote sensors that demand round-the-clock power.

Stelmakh, currently a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, will be working with Argonne energy systems section manager Doug Longman, whose expertise in engine combustion research is vital to Stelmakh’s own project.

“Having someone like Doug help us design our microcombustor will greatly advance our work,” she said. “Argonne, CRI in particular, is a perfect fit for us. There are very few programs where you have access to this level of knowledge, facilities and support.”

Meet the rest of the cohort on the CRI website.

New theory finds ‘traffic jams’ in jet stream cause abnormal weather patterns

Thu, 24 May 2018 16:50 -0500

The sky sometimes has its limits, according to new research from two University of Chicago atmospheric scientists.

A study published May 24 in Science offers an explanation for a mysterious and sometimes deadly weather pattern in which the jet stream, the global air currents that circle the Earth, stalls out over a region. Much like highways, the jet stream has a capacity, researchers said, and when it’s exceeded, blockages form that are remarkably similar to traffic jams—and climate forecasters can use the same math to model them both.

The deadly 2003 European heat wave, California’s 2014 drought and the swing of Superstorm Sandy in 2012 that surprised forecasters—all of these were caused by a weather phenomenon known as “blocking,” in which the jet stream meanders, stopping weather systems from moving eastward. Scientists have known about it for decades, almost as long as they’ve known about the jet stream—which was explored in the last century by pioneering University of Chicago meteorologist Carl-Gustaf Rossby, in fact—but no one had a good explanation for why it happens.

A wind map shows a typical blocking pattern in the Pacific, where the winds split and circle around. (Original image by earth.nullschool.net)

“Blocking is notoriously difficult to forecast, in large part because there was no compelling theory about when it forms and why,” said lead author Noboru Nakamura, a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences.

Nakamura and Clare S.Y. Huang, PhD'17, were studying the jet stream, trying to determine a clear set of measurements for blocking in order to better analyze the phenomenon. One of their new metrics was a term that measured the jet stream’s meander. Looking over the math, Nakamura realized that the equation was nearly identical to one devised decades ago by transportation engineers trying to describe traffic jams.

“It turns out the jet stream has a capacity for ‘weather traffic,’ just as highway has traffic capacity, and when it is exceeded, blocking manifests as congestion,” said Huang, who performed the research for her thesis.

Just as car traffic piles up where speed limit is reduced or multiple highways converge, blocking often occurs where the background jet speed slows down due to mountains and coasts.

The result is a simple theory that not only reproduces blocking, but predicts it, said Nakamura, who called making the cross-disciplinary connection “one of the most unexpected, but enlightening moments in my research career—it was a gift from God.”

The explanation may not immediately improve short-term weather forecasting, the researchers said, but it will certainly help predict long-term patterns, including which areas may see more drought or floods.

Their initial results suggest that while climate change probably increases blocking by running the jet stream closer to its capacity, there will be regional differences: for example, the Pacific Ocean may actually see a decrease in blocking over the decades.

“It’s very difficult to forecast anything until you understand why it’s happening, so this mechanistic model should provide a useful guiding principle,” Nakamura said.

And the model, unlike most modern climate science, is expressed in simple math: “This equation captures the essence with a much less complicated system,” Huang said.

Citation: “Atmospheric Blocking as a Traffic Jam in the Jet Stream,” Nakamura and Huang, Science, May 24, 2018. DOI: 10.1126/science.aat0721

Funding: National Science Foundation.

Fossil reveals global exodus of mammals’ near relatives to major continents

Wed, 23 May 2018 14:18 -0500

A nearly 130-million-year-old fossilized skull found in Utah is an Earth-shattering discovery in one respect.

The small fossil is evidence that the super-continental split likely occurred much more recently than scientists had previously thought, and that a group of reptile-like mammals that bridge the reptile and mammal transition experienced an unsuspected burst of evolution across several continents.

“Based on the unlikely discovery of this near-complete fossil cranium, we now recognize a new, cosmopolitan group of early mammal relatives,” said Adam Huttenlocker, lead author of the study and assistant professor of clinical integrative anatomical sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

The study, published May 23 in the journal Nature, updates the understanding of how mammals evolved and dispersed across major continents during the age of dinosaurs. It suggests that the divide of the ancient landmass Pangea continued for about 15 million years later than previously thought and that mammal migration and that of their close relatives continued during the Early Cretaceous, 145 to 101 million years ago.

Paleontologists had once believed that the primitive precursors to mammals were anatomically similar, ecological generalists. “But now we know mammal precursors developed capacities to climb trees, to glide, to burrow into the ground for subterranean life, and to swim,” said Zhe-Xi Luo, senior author of the study and professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago. “With this new study, we also know that they dispersed across from Asia and Europe, into North America, and farther onto major southern continents.”

The study reveals that the early mammal precursors migrated from Asia to Europe, into North America and further onto major southern continents, Luo said.

A new species

Huttenlocker and his collaborators at the Utah Geological Survey and UChicago named the new species Cifelliodon wahkarmoosuch.

Recreation of the Cifelliodon wahkarmoosuch. (Artwork by Jorge A. Gonzalez)

Found in the Cretaceous beds in eastern Utah, the fossil is named in honor of famed paleontologist Richard Cifelli. The species name, “wahkarmoosuch,” means “yellow cat” in the Ute tribe’s language in respect of the area where it was found.

Scientists used high-resolution computed tomography scanners to analyze the skull.

“The skull of Cifelliodon is an extremely rare find in a vast fossil-bearing region of the Western Interior, where the more than 150 species of mammals and reptile-like mammal precursors are represented mostly by isolated teeth and jaws,” said James Kirkland, study co-author in charge of the excavation and a Utah State paleontologist.

With an estimated body weight of up to 2.5 pounds, Cifelliodon would seem small compared to many living mammals, but it was a giant among its Cretaceous contemporaries. A full-grown Cifelliodon was probably about the size of a small hare or pika (small mammal with rounded ears, short limbs and a very small tail).

It had teeth similar to fruit-eating bats and could nip, shear and crush. It might have incorporated plants into its diet.

The newly named species had a relatively small brain and giant “olfactory bulbs” to process sense of smell. The skull had tiny eye sockets, so the animal probably did not have good eyesight or color vision. It possibly was nocturnal and depended on sense of smell to root out food, Huttenlocker said.

CT scan of the skull of Cifelliodon wahkarmoosuch. (Courtesy Huttenlocker et al.)

Supercontinent existed longer than previously thought

Huttenlocker and his colleagues placed Cifelliodon within a group called Haramiyida, an extinct branch of mammal ancestors related to true mammals. The fossil was the first of its particular subgroup—Hahnodontidae—found in North America.

The fossil discovery emphasizes that haramiyidans and some other vertebrate groups existed globally during the Jurassic-Cretaceous transition, meaning the corridors for migration via Pangean landmasses remained intact into the Early Cretaceous.

Most of the Jurassic and Cretaceous fossils of haramiyidans are from the Triassic and Jurassic of Europe, Greenland and Asia. Hahnodontidae was previously known only from the Cretaceous of northern Africa. It is to this group that Huttenlocker argues Cifelliodon belongs, providing evidence of migration routes between the continents that are now separated in northern and southern hemispheres.

“But it’s not just this group of haramiyidans,” Huttenlocker said. “The connection we discovered mirrors others recognized as recently as this year based on similar Cretaceous dinosaur fossils found in Africa and Europe.”

Citation: “Late-surviving stem mammal links the lowermost Cretaceous of North America and Gondwana.” Huttenlocker et al, Nature, May 23, 2018. Doi: 10.1038/s41586-018-0126-y

Land rising above the sea 2.4 billion years ago transformed Earth’s life, climate

Wed, 23 May 2018 12:20 -0500

Chemical signatures in shale rocks, a consolidated form of mud, point to an increased rate in the rise of land above the ocean 2.4 billion years ago—possibly triggering dramatic changes in climate and life.

In a study published in the journal Nature, researchers from six universities, including the University of Chicago, report that shales sampled from around the world contains archival-quality evidence of fleeting, almost imperceptible traces of rainwater that caused weathering of land as old as 3.5 billion years ago.

The exposure of new land to weathering may have set off a series of glacial episodes and atmospheric changes spawned by the Great Oxygenation Event, in which free oxygen filled the air, said University of Oregon geologist Ilya Bindeman, who led the study.

The evidence is from analyses of three oxygen isotopes, particularly the rare but stable oxygen-17, in multiple shale samples from every continent and spanning 3.7 billion years of Earth's history. Shale rocks are formed by the weathering of crust, so "they tell you a lot about the exposure to air, light and precipitation,” Bindeman said.

Notable changes in the ratios of oxygen-17 and 18 with more common oxygen-16 allowed researchers to read the chemical history in the rocks. In doing so, they were able to establish when the pattern of precipitation on continents switched from near-coastal to more inland, reflecting the transport of moisture over vast swaths of emerged lands as the continents rose above seawater and high-mountain ranges and plateaus were created.

“It is mind-boggling to think that we still find a record of something as evanescent as rainwater in rocks as old as 3.5 billion years old,” said co-author Nicolas Dauphas, head of the University of Chicago Origins Laboratory and professor in the Department of Geophysical Sciences and the Enrico Fermi Institute. “There are a number of challenges to applying this oxygen isotope proxy to ancient rocks, but our study shows that there was a clear change in the pattern of precipitation on continents at a time that coincided with the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere approximately 2.4 billion years ago.”

The measurements could help resolve previous arguments whether the emergence of land between 1.1 and 3.5 billion years ago was gradual or stepwise, scientists said. Based on his own previous modeling and other studies, Bindeman said, total landmass on the planet 2.4 billion years ago may have reached about two-thirds of what is observed today.

Chemical weathering on the newly emerged land would have begun to consume carbon dioxide and changed the climate.

“We still need to figure out how everything ties together, but this is a very exciting discovery that opens many avenues of research,” Dauphas said.

—A version of this article was originally published by the University of Oregon

Citation: “Rapid emergence of subaerial landmasses and onset of a modern hydrologic cycle 2.5 billion years ago.” Bindeman et al, Nature, May 23, 2018. Doi: 10.1038/s41586-018-0131-1

Funding: National Science Foundation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, NASA.

More than 1.1 million names installed on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe

Tue, 22 May 2018 16:33 -0500

Throughout its seven-year mission, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will swoop through the Sun’s atmosphere 24 times, getting closer than any spacecraft has gone before. The spacecraft will carry more than scientific instruments on this historic journey, though; it also will hold more than 1.1 million names submitted by the public to go to the Sun.

“Parker Solar Probe is going to revolutionize our understanding of the Sun, the only star we can study up close,” said Nicola Fox, project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. “It’s fitting that as the mission undertakes one of the most extreme journeys of exploration ever tackled by a human-made object, the spacecraft will also carry along the names of so many people who are cheering it on its way.”

In March 2018, the public were invited to send their names to the Sun aboard humanity’s first mission to “touch” a star. A total of 1,137,202 names were submitted online, and a memory card containing the names was installed on the spacecraft on May 18—three months before the scheduled July 31 launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The card was mounted on a plaque bearing a dedication to and a quote from the mission’s namesake, University of Chicago physicist Eugene Parker, who first theorized the existence of the solar wind.

This memory card also carries photos of Parker and a copy of his groundbreaking 1958 scientific paper. Parker proposed a number of concepts about how stars—including our Sun—give off material. He called this cascade of energy and particles the solar wind, a constant outflow of material from the Sun that we now know shapes everything from the habitability of worlds to our solar system’s interaction with the rest of the galaxy.

Parker Solar Probe will explore the Sun’s outer atmosphere and make critical observations to answer decades-old questions about the physics of stars. The resulting data may also improve forecasts of major eruptions on the Sun and subsequent space weather events that impact life on Earth, as well as satellites and astronauts in space.

A plaque mounted on the Parker Solar Probe contains the memory card and the inscription: “The Parker Solar Probe mission is dedicated to Dr. Eugene N. Parker whose profound contributions have revolutionized our understanding of the Sun and solar wind. ‘Let’s see what lies ahead’ Gene Parker, July 2017.” (Photo courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman)

A commemorative reproduction of the plaque bearing an identical memory card—minus the submitted names—was presented to Parker at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in October 2017 by the mission team.

"From the experience of seeing the probe up close, I understand now the difficult task you are undertaking, and I am sure you will succeed,” said Parker after visiting the spacecraft in the clean room.

—This release was adapted from an article originally posted by NASA.

High above mountains of Nepal, detectors study impact of Asian monsoon on climate

Thu, 17 May 2018 16:45 -0500

As rain sheeted down on the roof of an airplane hangar in the mountains of Nepal, a group of researchers watched a small, strangely shaped airplane disappear into the clouds. The plane, laden with custom-built detectors and instruments, was headed for the top of the most powerful, organized weather system in the world: the monsoon over southeast Asia.

“We all had our hearts in our mouths,” said Assoc. Prof. Liz Moyer, a University of Chicago geophysical scientist who studies the atmosphere and the effects of climate change.

The mission had been scheduled with an ambitious goal: to better understand the monsoon structure and its role in the global climate. More than one such mission had already been canceled for weather, customs, regulations or other difficulties. But this one, held together with the hopes of more than 50 scientists, was headed for a different fate.

Accompanied by UChicago graduate and undergraduate students, Moyer was part of a July 2017 international collaboration funded by the European Commission to send a plane over the monsoon for the first time. Their results, which will be discussed this week at a meeting in Italy for the science teams in the project, reveal new details about how pollution and water from near the ground is transported to the stratosphere during the monsoon.

Their questions: How high do the clouds of the monsoon reach? Are they boiling up over into the stratosphere—the second major layer of the Earth’s atmosphere? And to what extent do they carry surface pollution high enough to contribute to ozone destruction? “These seem like simple questions, but no one had ever been to the top of the monsoon before,” Moyer said.

Clouded with mystery

The Asian monsoon is the most massive weather event on the planet, and even apart from the treacherous winds and temperature shifts across altitudes, it makes its own chaos on the ground.

Even getting equipment in had been a struggle for the scientists: They had shipped some of the equipment overseas to India, but trucks struggled to cross flooded roads on the way to Nepal. By go time, not everything had made it—they had to push the plane in and out of the hangar by hand, because that equipment was stalled—but the crucial parts were all there, and they could “MacGyver” the rest of it, Moyer said.

A Russian-made Myasishchev M-55 Geophysica flew to 65,000 feet to study the top of the monsoon. (Courtesy of Moyer lab)

Despite the challenges, the scientists felt the chance for knowledge was too important to pass up. Their work would not only help better understand the monsoon, which affects the livelihoods of billions of people, but also the climate for the entire planet.

“By far the biggest uncertainty in our global climate models today is clouds,” said Moyer. Much of this uncertainty is about lower clouds, but we also don’t know as much as we’d like about cloud formation at the highest altitudes and over the tropics, where the plane was headed. And it’s difficult to study, because clouds at such altitudes are often made up of ice particles invisible to the naked eye. But they may deeply affect the global climate, including storms, the ozone layer and how much heat is reflected from Earth.

Other scientists on the collaboration were studying whether particles from the lower layers of the atmosphere were being pulled up by the powerful winds of the monsoon. If so, pollution from the ground could be traveling into the upper atmosphere, which would affect cloud formation. Moyer’s lab, on the other hand, was tracking water on its journey to the stratosphere.

That led them to the hangar in Nepal. Borrowing a crane, they lifted the 330-pound detector, built over three years in Moyer’s lab, onto the plane. “That was probably the most terrifying two minutes of my life,” said undergraduate Clare Singer, a fourth-year who traveled with Moyer for the mission.

The plane, a Russian-made Myasishchev M-55 Geophysica, is one of just a few in the world suited to fly at that altitude: 65,000 feet into the atmosphere.

Fourth-year Clare Singer helps load the detector onto the plane. (Photo courtesy of Clare Singer)

After its four-and-a-half-hour trip, the plane finally came back into view. It landed, its Russian pilot unconcerned by the perilous trip. The scientists, less unruffled, rushed to download the data.

‘We could see it immediately’

Even without analysis, Moyer said they took one look and immediately knew their first question had been answered.

Their detector was looking for the isotopic makeup of water in the highest altitudes. Certain heavier isotopes would mark water as having recently come from the ocean, pulled up as ice by the powerful forces of the storm. Those signatures were all over the readings.

“We could see it immediately. There was just abundant evidence that the lid of the troposphere had been punctured,” she said. “What remains to be seen is how that influences the highest reaches, closest to the ozone layer. These are the questions we’ll tackle at the meeting in May.”

Buoyed by the results, Moyer recently received a five-year, $5 million National Science Foundation grant to study high-altitude sub-visible cirrus clouds. In conjunction with Princeton, Harvard and the University of Washington, her group will work to better model the formation and evolution of these thin ice clouds in the uppermost reaches of the troposphere, to understand how they may change in the future.

“I am concerned, though,” Moyer said. “Now the students might think you can do one run and always have new science come pouring right out the first time.”

Size-based standards incentivize automakers to increase size of cars, study finds

Tue, 15 May 2018 16:52 -0500

As the Trump administration weighs how to revise fuel economy standards, a new study finds footprint-based rules are less effective and more costly than a flat standard with credit trading.

At the heart of U.S. fuel economy standards currently being evaluated by the Trump administration is one attribute: a vehicle’s “footprint,” measured by the rectangle formed by the four points where a vehicle’s tires touch the ground. The attribute-based footprint standard is used to sort vehicles into bins with different compliance targets, with larger vehicles facing more modest requirements. Some have argued that this system incentivizes automakers to produce bigger vehicles, but there has been little concrete evidence to support this beyond a general trend toward light trucks and SUVs.

But a study in the May edition of The Review of Economics and Statistics evaluates attribute-based regulations, looking specifically at the weight-based standards in Japan. The study finds that the standards did indeed incentivize automakers to increase the weight of their vehicles. And while the weight-based standards are more efficient than a flat standard alone, they are twice as costly as a flat standard accompanied by credit trading.

“As automakers like Ford dramatically boost production of their pickups and SUVs, it’s clear that there is more driving their decisions than consumer preferences alone,” said co-author Koichiro Ito, an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy. “Policy plays a substantial role, as our study indicates.”

Ito and his co-author James Sallee, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, studied Japan’s standards at a time when the government introduced an incentive for vehicles that exceeded their fuel economy target. This policy change—whereby vehicles were judged based on both weight, to be in compliance, and fuel economy, to receive the subsidy—allowed Ito and Sallee to examine how the targeted goal of the policy (i.e. fuel economy) changed relative to the attribute-based scheme (i.e. weight). They compared cars sold in 2008, before the policy change, to those in 2012.

The authors found that the weight-based system incentivized automakers to increase vehicle weight in order to fall into a less stringent compliance category. Ten percent of Japanese vehicles had their weight increased. Among the affected vehicles, the authors estimate that weight rose by 110 kilograms on average.

When comparing this to a flat standard, the flat standard reduced the weight of cars broadly, but cost more to comply. If those who achieve the flat standard are allowed to sell credits to those who do not, this credit trading reduced compliance costs, making the weight-based system twice as costly as the flat standard with credit trading.

“Having a flat standard with compliance trading where automakers can trade credits is the best option, improving fuel economy at a low compliance cost,” Ito said. “The U.S. fuel standards already have this trading scheme in place. Making a switch away from the footprint-based system and toward the most efficient policy option can be within reach.”

—This story first appeared on the EPIC website.

Big Brains podcast explores how world’s largest telescope might glimpse universe’s birth

Mon, 14 May 2018 10:40 -0500

Editor’s note: Big Brains is a new University of Chicago podcast in which some of the pioneering minds on campus discuss their groundbreaking ideas and the stories behind them.

Prof. Wendy Freedman spent much of her career measuring the age of the universe. Now she’s working on a project that may very well give scientists a chance to glimpse into its birth.

Freedman, the John & Marion Sullivan University Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics, works in the field of observational cosmology, measuring the expansion rate of the universe. In 2001, she and a team of scientists found that the universe is around 13.7 billion years old—far more precise than the previous estimate in the 10- to 20-billion-year-old range.

Freedman was the founding leader from 2003 until 2015 of an international consortium of researchers and universities (including UChicago) to build the world’s largest telescope high in the mountains of Chile. The Giant Magellan Telescope will be as tall as the Statue of Liberty when complete, and ten times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope—with the ability to look back at the dawn of the cosmos.

“In our field, the new developments have come with new technology,” Freedman said. “Without exception, from the time that Galileo first turned a telescope to the sky in 1609, every time we’ve built a new capability we’ve made new discoveries, which is why we’re so excited about this.”

The telescope, 80 feet in diameter and weighing more than 20 tons, will be the first of its kind to see fine details like a planet’s atmosphere, which could one day help discover life on other planets. The telescope is expected to be operational starting in 2024.

“If we really were able to show that there’s life on a planet outside of our own solar system, that will be one of the discoveries that will not only be exciting for astronomers but will change human kind’s perspective on our place in the universe,” Freedman said.

On this episode of Big Brains, Freedman discusses her research on measuring the age of the universe, her leadership of the Giant Magellan Telescope and the search for life outside our solar system.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play. New episodes will be available Monday mornings through the Spring Quarter.

In Brinson Lecture, astrophysicist to shed light on the early universe

Fri, 11 May 2018 15:23 -0500

The first billion years after the Big Bang were formative for the universe. But because there was so little light as the earliest stars began to shine, astronomers know very little about this epoch.

On May 17, astrophysicist Richard Ellis will deliver the 10th annual University of Chicago Brinson Lecture, entitled “Let There Be Light: The Observational Quest for the First Galaxies.” His talk will cover what scientists understand about this period and how new telescopes could fill in many of the gaps in their knowledge.

“The motivation is fundamental,” Ellis wrote in the description of the lecture. “The origin of starlight begins the process of chemical evolution, which ultimately leads to our own existence in this remarkable universe.”

The Brinson Lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held at 6 p.m. May 17 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Previous events have covered topics from the search for inhabited planets in other galaxies to underground ice telescopes, and have included decorated scientists from Prof. Wendy Freedman to newly minted Nobel laureate Kip Thorne.

Ellis is a professor of astrophysics at the University College London. The 2011 winner of the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Ellis works primarily in observational cosmology, considering the origin and evolution of galaxies, the evolution of large-scale structures in the universe and the nature and distribution of dark matter. His most recent discoveries relate to searches for the earliest known galaxies, seen when the universe was only a few percent of its present age.

The lecture is co-sponsored by the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with generous support from the Brinson Foundation.

Researchers invent tiny, resealable packets to deliver materials on cue

Wed, 09 May 2018 16:40 -0500

Your body keeps its neurons firing, immune system working and serotonin flowing with a clever bit of engineering: tiny capsules that deliver signaling molecules from place to place in the body.

A team including University of Chicago engineer Juan de Pablo announced last week in Nature Chemistry that they have created a recipe to mimic these capsules. Their tiny, resealable synthetic packets, like Ziploc bags, release their contents on cue—in this case, when exposed to light of a particular wavelength. Such technology could be useful for medicine or other applications, scientists said.

“One could imagine making these to custom-deliver medicine to specific parts of the body, or to release fertilizer or cleanup chemicals in the soil, for example,” said de Pablo, the Liew Family Professor at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering.

The team, which also included researchers from the University of Massachusetts, designed a hollow synthetic packet that is just tens to hundreds of nanometers across—so tiny that thousands could sit side by side in the period at the end of this sentence. Its skin is made up of a double layer of two long molecules called polymers: The outer rind is water-soluble, while the inner layer is a glassy material that forms a rigid wall. The two polymers are linked by a single molecule that responds to light by changing its shape.

When researchers shine light on the packet, the linking molecules change shape, softening the glassy material that sits below and allowing the contents of the packet to slip out. Once the light turns off, the glass solidifies again and the packet is resealed.

The researchers imagine applications such as targeted medical treatments: Fill the packets with medicine, wait until they’re circulating in the body, then shine a light on the specific part of the body and watch the packets release the medicine.

Both parts of the molecule are biocompatible and already used in implants and medical treatments: The outside is polyethylene oxide, a polymer used in cosmetics, toothpaste and medications today; and the interior lining is polylactic acid, which can be derived from corn starch and degrades to lactic acid, a natural compound in the body.

The collaboration is expanding to explore more molecules that could be designed to react to different triggers, such as light, pressure or chemical cues, which could expand the range of potential uses.

“The surprise was this insight that a single light-sensitive layer, measuring less than one nanometer but lying on top of otherwise very long molecules tightly packed onto a thick glass, can create a perturbation in the entire material,” de Pablo said.

A deeper understanding of such mechanisms could provide the foundations for more new materials with useful properties. De Pablo and his collaborators are using sophisticated molecular simulations to decipher those mechanisms, he said.

Citation: “Dynamic actuation of glassy polymersomes through isomerization of a single azobenzene unit at the block copolymer interface.” Moller et al, Nature Chemistry, April 30, 2018. doi: 10.1038/s41557-018-0027-6

Funding: U.S. Army Research Office.

Nationwide program launches to train new generation of quantum engineers

Tue, 08 May 2018 14:46 -0500

In the past decade, quantum technology took a leap out of the realm of science fiction and landed firmly in reality. As companies around the world race toward practical applications, however, they’ll need a new generation of scientists and engineers to fulfill its potential.

Funded by a $1.6 million award from the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago and Harvard University will head a new nationwide graduate student training program for quantum science and engineering.

Called the Quantum Information Science and Engineering Network, the program will group select graduate students with both an academic adviser and one from a leading technology company or national laboratory. Over the course of four years, the “triplets” will each address a pressing research question for both academia and industry.

David Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor in Spintronics and Quantum Information at the University of Chicago, will oversee the program in partnership with Evelyn Hu, the Tarr-Coyne Professor of Applied Physics and of Electrical Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

“Professor Hu and I are extremely excited to help the NSF pioneer a different approach to graduate education and advance the frontiers of quantum science by creating a national workforce of quantum engineers,” Awschalom said. “Students selected for QISE-NET will benefit from the mentorship of both academic and industrial advisers on research topics that will pursue leading-edge science and engineering along with longer-term industrial goals.”

The students will serve as the principal “communicators-in-residence” at both universities and in industry, translating ideas into research results, Awschalom said.

“NSF is pleased to foster this novel approach to educate the future workforce for the needs of quantum engineering, industry and science,” said Anne Kinney, assistant director of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation. “This important project responds to input from industry, research communities and other federal agencies. I look forward to the results of the QISE-NET project and to the mentorship and collaboration framework that it is expected to generate.”

Approximately 20 students will receive four years of funding under the first edition of the program.

Big Brains podcast explores whether scientists can unlock nature’s design secrets

Mon, 07 May 2018 12:00 -0500

Editor’s note: Big Brains is a new University of Chicago podcast in which some of the pioneering minds on campus discuss their groundbreaking ideas and the stories behind them.

From the smallest proteins to entire ecosystems, nature might be the most sophisticated engineer on earth.

Researchers like UChicago molecular biologist Rama Ranganathan are trying to uncover the basic design principles that govern biology and apply them through engineering. He calls the field “evolutionary physics,” and the goal is to unlock the secrets of evolutionary history.

“Evolution has taken millions and millions of years,” Ranganathan said. “How do we reproduce that in the laboratory?”

Ranganathan is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Institute for Molecular Engineering. He joined the University of Chicago in late 2017 to lead the newly formed Center for Physics of Evolution, which brings together researchers from across disciplines to better understand biological systems designed by evolution.

Ranganathan said biology has built “high-performance” systems that can adapt to their environment in ways of which human-designed technology could never dream. He believes there is a unifying theory that can explain the phenomenon and be utilized in bioengineering—from designer medicines based on individual genomes to biofuels driven by the same processes as photosynthesis.

“The problem is: If you start taking apart biological systems, since they are evolved systems, we don’t necessarily understand their design,” Ranganathan said. “The question is: How do you learn the simple rules that are underneath these seemingly very complex systems?”

On this episode of Big Brains, Ranganathan shares his pioneering research on evolutionary physics, and explains why he believes biology is at a similar point today as engineering was two centuries ago during the Industrial Revolution.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play. New episodes will be available Monday mornings through the Spring Quarter.

Zebra finches’ social experiences alter their genomic DNA, changing ability to learn

Fri, 04 May 2018 16:25 -0500

Asst. Prof. Sarah London has long appreciated zebra finches for their unique learning characteristics. The males learn from another male tutor, but their ability to memorize the tutor’s song is restricted to a “critical period,” or CP. This offers a unique opportunity to study how the brain learns, and how brain processes affect whether or not a mentor’s song can be learned, London said.

Previous research has shown that males who had experienced a tutor in their first 65 days of post-hatch life could no longer learn a song after that, but that young males isolated from hearing song during this period were still able to learn a song after day 65. What researchers hadn’t deciphered until now was what preserved or prevented these late learning capabilities.

In a new study, London’s team found the first comprehensive explanation for this in an epigenetic mechanism, a process in the brain by which experience—in this case, tutor experience—can modify structural properties of the genomic DNA. London and her team demonstrate measurable and repeatable epigenetic differences between the brains of zebra finches who receive tutoring, and those that do not.

These epigenetic differences directly relate to levels and patterns of gene expression in the brains of finches that can still learn from a tutor compared to those that can no longer learn song.

London believes the results of this study could have future implications for helping trauma patients to prevent encoding those events into their long-term memory, as well as advancing our understanding of how young children learn, and what can be done to enhance learning capabilities among disadvantaged youth in order to level the playing field of learning among children entering school.

“These results help us understand complex genomes in the context of the everyday learning experience,” London said. “It decouples the actual experience from the genomic process happening in the brain, and this knowledge could be a guide to therapeutics.”

Never too old to learn

The primary goal of London’s lab is to identify the neural properties that promote and limit the ability to learn, and she emphasizes research on zebra finch neural development and learning behaviors to identify these traits.

The team took advantage of the natural CP for mentored song learning to test the hypothesis that tutor experience within the CP alters mechanisms in the brain that control genome function. They hypothesized that this would explain how the tutor experience ends the CP for learning, while isolation from song during the CP extends the age at which juveniles can memorize tutor song.

In the study, coauthored with Somayeh Ahmadiantehrani, a postdoctoral fellow at UChicago; and with Theresa K. Kelly and Adam Blattler from Active Motif, Asst. Prof. London and her team isolated one set of male juvenile finches from male tutors during the CP of song learning, which occurs between 30 and 65 days post-hatch. A second group of juveniles did experience a tutor during the CP.

After day 65, London’s team analyzed the brains of both groups of finches to compare epigenetic landscapes, patterns of gene expression and cellular properties of the brain between males who experienced a tutor and those who had not. The results show that learning a tutor song induces specific epigenetic changes that do not occur in the brains of the isolated males, and vice versa.

Among the findings was the fact that regulatory factors well-studied for their role in learning and memory in juvenile zebra finches and other animals, such as the extracellular-signal-regulated kinase (ERK) pathway, are overrepresented in the set of genes predicted to be more highly expressed in the isolated birds. Because gene expression triggered by experience is necessary for learning and memory, these findings raise the possibility that the gene expression required for tutor song memorization is mechanistically linked to epigenetic processes that control the ability for subsequent tutor experience to trigger gene expression, thus preventing future tutor song memorization after day 65.

Lessons for future research

The tiny songbirds have proven invaluable to London’s research into how animals learn.

“Developmental song learning in zebra finches is one of the most striking examples of a CP for complex learned behavior,” she said. “The learning experience has a profound and long-lasting effect on their neurological cognitive processes.”

Going forward she plans to conduct future experiments testing causal relationships between epigenetic processes, learning and memory, and the extended ability to learn, with the continued goal to advance understanding of how learning is regulated in developing and mature animals.

Citation: “Epigenetic regulation of transcriptional plasticity associated with developmental song learning,” by Theresa K. Kelly, Somayeh Ahmadiantehrani, Adam Blattler, Sarah E. London. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, May 2, 2018. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2018.0160

$35 million in NIH funding launches health research accelerator with UChicago

Fri, 04 May 2018 09:19 -0500

The University of Chicago and UChicago Medicine are part of a new health research accelerator that has launched thanks to nearly $35 million from the National Institutes of Health.

The Institute for Translational Medicine will work to improve people's lives by pursuing research breakthroughs and getting those discoveries into the real world.

“This vital initiative will help drive research and discovery that can greatly and more efficiently benefit the health of our patients and surrounding communities,” said Kenneth Polonsky, dean and executive vice president of medical affairs at the University of Chicago. “We look forward to leveraging these new opportunities, technologies and the robust network of resources now available to our medical and academic communities—as well as to our local community partners—to continue to advance medicine that makes a difference in people’s lives.”

The ITM is a partnership between the University of Chicago and Rush in collaboration with Advocate Health Care, the Illinois Institute of Technology, Loyola University Chicago and NorthShore University HealthSystem that’s fueled by millions of dollars in funding from the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. Over the next five years, the funding will help researchers, the public, government, industry and nonprofits work together to improve the health of Chicagoland residents.

“The ITM supports clinical and translational research in so many ways,” said Julian Solway, dean for Translational Medicine at the University of Chicago and one of the ITM three principal investigators. “We’re thrilled to launch this organized effort and work with such great allies to speed up the innovation pipeline.”

(From left): Susan Cohn, UChicago dean for clinical research; Joshua Jacobs, vice provost for research at Rush; Sara Serritella, ITM director of communications; Gerald Moose Stacy, ITM administrative director; Prof. Eric Beyer, ITM career development core leader; and Julian Solway, UChicago Dean for Translational Medicine, visit the new ITM location at the UChicago campus. (Photo by Alan Klehr)

It currently takes an average of 14 years to get new treatments made and to the public, according to the NIH. The ITM will work to cut down that timeline and turn research findings into uses that can improve human health, ranging from social media messenger tools that are being developed to diagnose and help treat depression from your smartphone to school programs scientifically proven to reduce violence.

Opportunities for UChicago and beyond

The ITM offers faculty and staff from all UChicago schools and departments funding for any form of research that could be applied to improve human health. It also offers specialized facilities, discounted rates, insider connections to local and national collaborators, and other resources.

Students and junior researchers can take advantage of mentoring from world-renowned senior faculty. Free training and educational programming will also be available, ranging from basic research essentials to how to write successful grants taught by former reviewers themselves to science communications training.

The ITM is part of a network of more than 55 hubs across the country supported by NCATS’ Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program, bringing both local and national education, funding, and other opportunities to the UChicago community.

And those opportunities extend beyond campus: nonprofit organizations, South Side neighborhoods and others across Chicagoland will be able to partner with researchers from all six Chicago ITM institutions to build studies, make discoveries and raise awareness about the health areas they care about the most.

“We’re all in this together,” said Susan Cohn, dean for clinical research at the University of Chicago and a principal investigator on the ITM grant. “Everyone is invited to come to the table, share their voice and come up with creative solutions that we’ll help make a reality.”

The ITM will help those solutions live beyond the lab by providing connections to its network of partners that include industry, startup accelerators, venture capital firms, government agencies, patient advocacy groups and others.

One such partner is the Chicago Department of Public Health. The ITM will collaborate to address Chicagoans’ health needs identified in the City’s Healthy Chicago 2.0 report.

“The city of Chicago is very excited about this partnership and how it will directly impact the health needs of our communities,” said CDPH Commissioner Julie Morita. “We’ve put a lot of time and resources into identifying the problems, and this partnership will help address the problems with dynamic solutions. Being part of this team will help us make sure those solutions are backed by science and created with input from both the experts and the residents who are impacted by it.”

Patients and families will also benefit from being at the forefront of medicine so that they can take advantage of breakthroughs as soon as possible.

“Everyone benefits from health research, from finding new cures to finding ways to stay healthier in the first place,” Solway said.

In new book, UChicago historian examines rise of white power movement

Wed, 02 May 2018 13:43 -0500

The alt-right movement in America gained national headlines last fall when a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia turned deadly.

But to UChicago historian Kathleen Belew, the rising tide of white nationalism and white supremacy is far from surprising, but instead part of a long and dark history of white power activism in the United States.

In her new book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, Belew has completed the first complete history of that movement—from its beginnings following the Vietnam War to the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

“What seems new is not new, and I think there is a sense of astonishment that belies the long story of how these groups formed and furthered their actions,” said Belew, assistant professor in the Department of History and the College.

The impetus for the book sprang from Belew’s research on a 1979 anti-Ku Klux Klan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina in which five members of the Communist Workers Party were murdered. A comment by one the killers, who was among a group of Klansmen and neo-Nazis, stuck with her.

“The commentary was, ‘I shot communists in Vietnam. Why wouldn’t I do that here?’ I couldn’t stop thinking about that,” Belew said. “It collapsed peace time and war time, front lines and home fronts, and different kinds of enemies. I looked through the archive generated by this movement, and that was pervasive throughout the materials. The Vietnam War was a major force in uniting this social movement.”

Although hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis trace their roots farther back, the 1970s marked a turning point when these disparate groups rallied under the banner of what Belew labels as “white power.” Belew said that the Vietnam War fomented a group of veterans that felt betrayed by politicians and the government. Previously divergent groups, including neo-Nazis and Klansmen, banded together over a common enemy, and many of the structures and even weapons were taken from army training.

Working with archives at the University of Oregon, the University of Kansas and Brown University, Belew pored over previously classified documents, white power newspapers and documents from the movement—some collected by activists who had infiltrated the movement.

Over the course of her archival research, Belew said her understanding of the movement changed.

“Along the way I thought of it as the ‘racist right,’” Belew said. But in fact, the group actually shared many similarities with radical fringe groups of the 1980s and 1990s on the left, including embracing ideas like midwifery and organic gardening. “The movement isn’t conservative. They are trying to create a world in very violent and apocalyptic terms. All white people in this view would have a united purpose and a united power.”

In the book, and in a recently published op-ed in The New York Times to mark the April 19 anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Belew highlights the fact that these acts of violence, often categorized as machinations of a “lone wolf” terrorist, are in reality the “outgrowth of decades of activism by the white power movement.”

Belew writes in the epilogue that, “Knowledge of the history of white power activism is integral to preventing future acts of violence.” While the news portrays “nonsensical” acts of violence, and popular media paints images of the stereotypical poor, white Southerner, Belew paints a far more expansive portrait that she hopes readers will take away from the book.

“It was across the country,” Belew said of the well-connected network of white power activists composed of men, women and children. “The more we understand the history of the white power movement, the better we can respond to white power violence in the present.”

Most Americans look to research universities for innovation leadership, finds Polsky Center

Wed, 02 May 2018 10:15 -0500

An overwhelming majority of Americans are looking to research universities to be the foremost drivers of innovation at a time of anxiety over global competition, according to a new Innovation Indicator survey from the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago.

The Polsky Innovation Indicator found that 71 percent of Americans believe research universities are a “major force” in driving U.S. innovation, considerably more than the number who said that of large corporations, startup businesses or government. The survey also points to real challenges for global competitiveness, with just one in four people viewing America as the global leader in innovation. That suggests a growing need for universities to provide leadership through field-defining research and applying new knowledge to benefit society.

“Even though innovative ideas continue to flow from American universities and businesses, greater global competition means we need to do even more to maintain our leadership position,” said Steven N. Kaplan, faculty director of the Polsky Center and the Neubauer Family Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “That takes both research funding and energizing people to commercialize that research through discovery and entrepreneurship.”

(Image courtesy of Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation)

The Polsky Innovation Indicator was conducted in April by NORC at the University of Chicago and released to coincide with the UChicago Innovation Fest, which runs May 1 through June 3, celebrating pioneering discovery and entrepreneurial endeavors at the University.

Speaking at a May 2nd event announcing the survey results at the Polsky Exchange, U.S. Senator Dick Durbin agreed that research universities are an important catalyst for American innovation, augmenting the actions of the federal government.

“The federal government can provide an environment for growth, but it’s the next generation of entrepreneurs and innovators around the U.S. who are going to lead us to a successful 21st century,” Durbin said. “UChicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship is creating an environment where they can excel.”

Slipping as innovation leader

The Polsky Innovation Indicator found that 28 percent of people surveyed said they consider the U.S. the world’s leader in innovation, with 29 percent saying the nation is falling behind and 42 percent viewing the U.S. on par with other industrialized countries.

The survey results follow recent reports raising concerns about the U.S.’s global competitiveness in innovation. The 2018 Bloomberg Innovation Index placed the United States out of the top 10 most innovative economies for the first time in the report’s history. The number of new companies in the U.S. has dropped by half since 1980, producing what some economists have labeled a “startup deficit,” slowing productivity and economic growth. In 2016, for the first time, Chinese venture capital fundraising matched U.S. levels—with much of that investment coming from within China’s borders.

Leadership role for universities

As for what fuels innovation in the U.S., 71 percent of respondents said research universities are a driving force for innovation versus 60 percent for large corporations, 53 percent for startups and 47 percent for government. At the same time, more than half of respondents in the Polsky Innovation Indicator considered declines in public and private funding a major barrier to innovation.

“This survey reinforces what the American people see every day—that our research universities have propelled the United States to a global leadership role in innovation and are essential public goods. But without robust and sustained federal research investments, research universities will be unable to help ensure that the U.S. remains at the top, by providing the people, ideas and discoveries that enhance our economy, improve our public health and bolster the national defense,” said Mary Sue Coleman, president of the Association of American Universities.

Despite increased emphasis on commercialization and entrepreneurship at universities, respondents said that academic institutions can still do more to lead U.S. innovation. Sixty-one percent of respondents to the Polsky Innovation Indicator survey said that universities play “about the same role they have always played” in creating the next generation of innovation and only a quarter said that universities are “leading the charge more than ever before.”

“Universities still need to find a more effective way to help innovators move their discoveries into the marketplace. At UChicago, the Polsky Center is providing a distinct engine for advancing innovation,” said Eric Isaacs, Executive Vice President for Research, Innovation and National Laboratories at UChicago, at the Polsky event. “We’re building on our record by putting pieces into place that enable us to open new facilities and launch new ventures dedicated to enriching lives here in our community and across the world.”

The Polsky Innovation Indicator survey was conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago. Interviews for this survey were conducted between April 11 and 16, 2018, with adults age 18 and over representing the 50 states and the District of Columbia. 1,086 panel members completed the survey—975 via the web and 111 via telephone. The overall margin of sampling error is +/- 4.2 percentage points.

The University of Chicago Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation brings the power of ideas in the laboratory, classroom and community to the world. Through education, resources, and programs, the Polsky Center commercializes discoveries, partners with companies, and attracts venture capital. The Polsky Center runs UChicago’s top-ranked business accelerator, the Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge, which has helped launch more than 185 companies worldwide that have gone on to achieve more than $10 billion in value and raised over $600 million in funding. The mission of the Polsky Center is to support students, faculty, alumni, and community members by bridging the gap between knowledge and practice, idea and action, and research and impact. By igniting a spirit of innovation and fostering connections that extend across the University, city, region and world, the Polsky Center enables more ideas to have a meaningful impact on society. Learn more at polsky.uchicago.edu.

NORC at the University of Chicago is an objective, nonpartisan research institution that delivers reliable data and rigorous analysis to guide critical programmatic, business, and policy decisions. Since 1941, NORC has conducted groundbreaking studies, created and applied innovative methods and tools, and advanced principles of scientific integrity and collaboration. Today, government, corporate, and nonprofit clients around the world partner with NORC to transform increasingly complex information into useful knowledge. Learn more at norc.org.

UChicago Medicine begins Level 1 adult trauma care

Tue, 01 May 2018 16:55 -0500

The University of Chicago Medicine began providing adult trauma care on May 1, with the first patient being brought by ambulance at noon, signaling the official activation of its Level 1 Adult Trauma Center.

The beginning of adult trauma services comes as UChicago Medicine is being recognized for high-quality medical care in many areas. In the last two weeks, UChicago Medicine also announced it had earned its 13th sequential “A” rating in patient safety from industry watchdog Leapfrog Group and that it achieved Magnet Recognition status—the gold standard for nursing excellence and high-quality patient care, from the American Nurses Credentialing Center.

“The events of the past seven days are testimony to the tremendous strides UChicago Medicine has made over the past several years to be a stronger academic health system for its community, patients and their families,” said Kenneth S. Polonsky, dean and executive vice president of medical affairs at UChicago. “We thank each and every one of our faculty and staff for their hard work in getting this organization to this point.”

The program adds to UChicago Medicine’s pediatric trauma and burn services, providing the community a comprehensive system of care to treat the full range of trauma injuries in patients of all ages.

“Today represents the culmination of years of advocacy, planning and partnership,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a statement. “I commend the community members, advocates, University of Chicago and their health care partners for working together in a coordinated, collaborative effort to ensure equity in essential medical services and that the highest quality health care is in close reach of every resident of Chicago.”

Since announcing plans to become a Level 1 Adult Trauma Center in December 2015, UChicago Medicine staff have logged thousands of hours preparing to provide care to trauma patients. It has hired additional employees, including 18 experienced trauma professionals from around the country. Interdisciplinary teams have been developing wraparound services to support trauma patients and their families, and newly crafted internal policies and procedures tweak everything from laboratory testing protocols to blood bank operations.

“All three of these achievements are further validation of our efforts to improve quality, safety and service to our patients, faculty and staff collaboration, and employee and community engagement," said Sharon O’Keefe, president of the medical center.

—This story first appeared on the UChicago Medicine website.

Researchers lay out how to control biology with light—without the help of genetics

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 16:00 -0500

Over the past five years, University of Chicago chemist Bozhi Tian has been figuring out how to control biology with light.

A long-term science goal is devices to serve as the interface between researcher and body, both as a way to understand how cells talk among each other and within themselves and, eventually, as a treatment for brain or nervous system disorders by stimulating nerves to fire or limbs to move. Silicon—a versatile, biocompatible material used in both solar panels and surgical implants—is a natural choice.

In a paper published April 30 in Nature Biomedical Engineering, Tian’s team laid out a system of design principles for working with silicon to control biology at three levels—from individual organelles inside cells to tissues to entire limbs. The group has demonstrated each in cells or mice models, including the first time anyone has used light to control behavior without genetic modification.

“We want this to serve as a map, where you can decide which problem you would like to study and immediately find the right material and method to address it,” said Tian, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry.

The scientists’ map lays out best methods to craft silicon devices depending on both the intended task and the scale—ranging from inside a cell to a whole animal.

For example, to affect individual brain cells, silicon can be crafted to respond to light by emitting a tiny ionic current, which encourages neurons to fire. But in order to stimulate limbs, scientists need a system whose signals can travel farther and are stronger—such as a gold-coated silicon material in which light triggers a chemical reaction.

The mechanical properties of the implant are important, too. Say researchers would like to work with a larger piece of the brain, like the cortex, to control motor movement. The brain is a soft, squishy substance, so they’ll need a material that’s similarly soft and flexible, but can bind tightly against the surface. They’d want thin and lacy silicon, say the design principles.

The team favors this method because it doesn’t require genetic modification or a power supply wired in, since the silicon can be fashioned into what are essentially tiny solar panels. (Many other forms of monitoring or interacting with the brain need to have a power supply, and keeping a wire running into a patient is an infection risk.)

Tiny silicon nanowires (in blue), activated by light, trigger activity in neurons. (Courtesy Yuanwen Jiang and Bozhi Tian)

They tested the concept in mice and found they could stimulate limb movements by shining light on brain implants. Previous research tested the concept in neurons.

“We don’t have answers to a number of intrinsic questions about biology, such as whether individual mitochondria communicate remotely through bioelectric signals,” said Yuanwen Jiang, the first author on the paper, then a graduate student at UChicago and now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford. “This set of tools could address such questions as well as pointing the way to potential solutions for nervous system disorders.”

Other UChicago authors were Assoc. Profs. Chin-Tu Chen and Chien-Min Kao, Asst. Prof Xiaoyang, postdoctoral researchers Jaeseok Yi, Yin Fang, Xiang Gao, Jiping Yue, Hsiu-Ming Tsai, Bing Liu and Yin Fang, graduate students Kelliann Koehler, Vishnu Nair, and Edward Sudzilovsky, and undergraduate student George Freyermuth.

Other researchers on the paper hailed from Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Citation: “Rational design of silicon structures for optically controlled multiscale biointerfaces.” Jiang et al, Nature Biomedical Engineering, DOI: 10.1038/s41551-018-0230-1, April 30, 2018.

Funding: National Institutes of Health, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, National Science Foundation, Searle Scholars Foundation, Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Fund for Cancer Research.

LGBTQ young adults experience homelessness at more than twice the rate of their peers

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 15:00 -0500

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer young adults are more than twice as likely to experience homelessness as their non-LGBTQ peers. They are also at greater risk for experiencing high levels of hardship, including higher rates of assault, of exchanging sex for basic needs and of early death. These findings emerged from research by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, which provides new insights to the challenges faced by America’s youth who experience homelessness.

“Our study reveals the vulnerability of LGBTQ youth in our country today. They are at higher risk both before and during their experiences of homelessness,” said Bryan Samuels, executive director of Chapin Hall. “Given the evidence that our young people are in harm’s way, we have an obligation to act to protect them. Fortunately, our findings point to solutions, too.”

This is the second in a series of research briefs on youth experiencing homelessness. A paper published in the Journal of Adolescent Health was the basis for the first brief, which identified high levels of youth homelessness nationwide.

The report is among the first national assessments of the increased risks facing LGBTQ youth. It found:

LGBTQ youth are among the most at-risk sub populations for homelessness. Young adults (18-25) who identify as LGBTQ experienced homelessness at more than twice the rate of their non-LGBTQ peers. Black LGBTQ youth, especially young men, had the highest rates of homelessness.
Among youth experiencing homelessness, LGBTQ youth had twice the rate of early death as other youth. LGBTQ youth also experienced higher levels of adversity, including higher rates of assault and of exchanging sex for basic needs.
Youth made decisions about seeking services based on the reputation of the agency providing the services. Safe and affirming systems and services are important to LGBTQ youth.
The factors that led young LGBTQ people to experience homelessness stem from more than “coming out.” Their families faced broader issues of instability, including poverty, violence, addiction or mental health problems that contributed to their risk for homelessness and adversity.

In addition to revealing critical insights to LGBTQ youth homelessness, the report also details solutions that can help protect LGBTQ youth who are homeless now and that can prevent homelessness in the future. These solutions include:

Provide enhanced training across the provider community, including Medicaid providers, to identify and respond to the trauma and hardship faced by this population.
Engage LGBTQ youth as full partners in strengthening systems and services.
Encourage community organizations and systems working with runaway and homeless youth to institute more sensitive data collection about sexual orientation and gender identity.
Add or revise guidance in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Block Grant on how these resources can better support LGBTQ and minority LGBTQ youth.
Evaluate the most promising programs and interventions to determine their effectiveness for LGBTQ youth. The federal government can take the lead by providing evaluation funding for core interventions.

“One critical insight we’ve gained from this study is that LGBTQ youth won’t use services they don’t trust,” said Matthew Morton, research fellow at Chapin Hall, who oversaw the study. “The reputation of providers matters, and that reputation has to be earned. Safe and affirming systems and services are critical to helping LGBTQ youth. If we don’t take action on this, we run the risk of missing out on the talents, skills and contributions of many LGBTQ youth.”

The first Voices brief on National Estimates found that one in 10 young adults, and one in 30 teens ages 13-17, experienced homelessness over a year. Upcoming briefs will explore findings on other subpopulations of youth experiencing homelessness, including pregnant and parenting youth and rural youth.

Observing Chinese Starbucks patrons reveals what their ancestors farmed, study finds

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 16:06 -0500

A new study analyzing behavior patterns of people across China suggests that the traditional interdependent rice-farming culture of southern China has resulted in today's residents—even city dwellers far removed from farming—being more interdependent and less controlling over their environment compared to their countrymen who hail from the more independent wheat-farming culture of northern China.

The University of Chicago Booth School of Business study was conducted by Thomas Talhelm, assistant professor of behavioral science and William Ladany Faculty Scholar. Talhelm observed 8,964 people sitting in Starbucks cafes in six cities all across China and found that people in cities in southern China were less likely to be sitting alone.

The idea behind the study stems from differences in how crops are farmed. Traditional rice farmers from southern China had to share labor and coordinate irrigation in a way that most northern China wheat farmers did not, thus making them more interdependent and more enmeshed in navigating social relationships, rather than free to act independently.

“I think people in China have long had a sense that northerners behave differently from southerners,” Talhelm said. “This study suggests a reason why—rice farming—and that those differences are surviving into the modern age.”

In a second study, researchers moved chairs together in cafes, so that they were partially blocking the aisles. The study found that people in northern China were more likely to move the chairs out of the way, which is consistent with the findings that people in these individualistic cultures are more likely to try to exert control over the environment. This fits with the everyday reality of wheat farming, in which farmers were more independent from their neighbors than in rice villages.

On the other hand, people in southern China were more likely to adjust themselves to the environment by squeezing through the chairs in these cafes.

Talhelm became interested in studying the cultural differences between southern and northern China when he was living in Guangzhou, which is in the south.

“I noticed little things in people's behavior there (in the south), like people seemed nervous if they accidentally bumped into me in the grocery store. It seemed like people were reserved, focused on avoiding conflict,” he said. “Then I moved up to Beijing and the north, and I quickly saw that being reserved was certainly not part of the Beijing way of conducting oneself.”

Even in China's most modern cities like Beijing and Shanghai, rice-wheat differences in farming patterns live on today in everyday life in terms of different behavior of southern and northern residents, Talhelm concluded. Although many people talk about the urban-rural divide in China, the differences in this study were between China’s largest cities, suggesting that there are important cultural differences in China beyond urban-rural differences.